Star Force: Phase #1-5
Author: Aer-Ki Jyr
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Anthology containing: Star Force: Earth Evacuation Star Force: Endless Crusade Star Force: The Admiral Star Force: Ice Queen Star Force: Uriti Strike
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

Earth Evacuation

1

April 17, 3602

Solar System

Earth

“I got it!”

Jenn Stuzi ran out of the second bedroom in their quarters with a relieved smile on her face when her roommate held up the box for her inspection. The Verratriss logo was emblazoned on it, identifying that it was legitimately from the exclusive Bsidd clothing artists.

“How?” she asked as they both sat down on their couch and began opening the box.

“New stock just arrived from outsystem today. Luckily they had one our size,” Sarah Stuzi explained as she pulled out the chain link dress that seemed to defy the color spectrum and held it up for her sister to see. “It cost 432 credits, but I think it’s worth it.”

“How did you get 432?” Jenn asked, not taking her eyes off the glittering dress that had just the right mixture of material and holes to make it a semi-revealing jaw dropper…but one with cooling circuitry that would wick away body heat and keep you from sweating no matter how warm the room got, which was perfect for the party they were less than two hours away from.

“What do you mean how? I had 437 in my account. We are splitting, right?”

“For this? Hell yes.”

“You get it tonight, no arguing,” Sarah said, referencing the fact that the two girls, despite not being biologically related, were practically the same body size and they’d gotten in the habit of sharing their clothing so they could buy more of it…and not that generic stuff that Star Force made available freely. That was good for down time and workouts, but not for parties when you wanted to stand out. Fortunately the two girls’ shared wardrobe included many specialty pieces that non-workers would never be able to afford, but this was by far the most expensive piece they’d added to date.

“Agreed,” Jenn said, still looking over the slim, body hugging garment that went from neckline down to mid calve. “It’s still cleanser compatible, right?”

“Of course. All Verratriss is cleanser safe. No special fields required. That’s part of why it’s so damn expensive. Don’t just sit here, get ready!”

“Right,” Jenn said, standing up in a hurry and taking off to their shower room to get her body thoroughly spotless before she put on the dress that was guaranteed to show it off.

Sarah let her go but kept the dress, marveling at it once again as she considered how many days of work it had cost them. Both girls had jobs, which in a Star Force city wasn’t required, but in order to afford luxuries you either had to go into some form of Star Force service to earn credit stipends or you could work for private organizations and get paid in lump sums. The downside to that was once the credits ran out you wouldn’t be getting anymore and the stipends were good forever, but both Sarah and Jenn had decided after they graduated from the maturia that they didn’t want to play the waiting game, so they’d put together a plan that had served them well for the past 73 years.

Sarah stood up and walked over to a wall mirror, holding up the dress in front of her trim and youthful body. She was fitter now than when she’d graduated from the maturia at age 24 and had been working hard to stay that way. So had Jenn, for they’d both made a pact not to let either one of them lose their self-sufficiency as many other people did.

Not the higher ups in Star Force, for the leaders of their interstellar empire were over a thousand years old, but for the common civilians that didn’t embrace nearly round the clock training and didn’t have access to the ambrosia that gave them an almost magical boost in performance, it was easy to just kick back and relax now that the basic maturia program was over. Everyone in Star Force had been born into it, and even Sarah’s two children had gone there as well.

She didn’t know their names or where they were now, but Jenn had 6 and kept in loose contact with the 2nd one. The first hadn’t wanted contact, so none was ever made, and that’s the way it’d been with Sarah’s parents. When the time had come for her to learn who they were it had to be a choice that both she and them made, and her parents, whoever they were, hadn’t wanted to have contact so the records had been purged at her birth. Her name had been assigned to her and all of her 99 brothers and sisters in her maturia class, so there was no trace of a connection to her biological parents unless they wished there to be one.

When it came time for Sarah to choose she’d belatedly agreed with her mystery parents. It was better to just let her children find their own way as she had, for there was no real need for a bond there. She’d helped two new people come into the galaxy and that’s what she’d intended to do, not wanting there to be a longer commitment than the 9 months for each it’d taken for the pregnancies.

Jenn was a bit different. She’d opted for her identity to be revealed to the first two children when the time came. The first one hadn’t wanted contact, so she had no idea where he was. The second one did choose, and that girl was known as Ariel Neesham, now 42 years old and living in another star system entirely. Jenn kept in contact with her every now and then, sending messages back and forth, but it was more of a polite relationship. Without having spent any real time together two people couldn’t get close, but she and Sarah had spent every day of the first 23 years of their life together along with the rest of their 98 brothers and sisters.

The bonds between them were still strong, even though most had moved to other parts of Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System. Only 18 of them had left for other parts of the empire, but Sarah and Jenn always kept track of where they were and how they were doing. They were their family and always would be, but their children weren’t, which was why she assumed Star Force didn’t mandate identities be known to either parent or child.

When Jenn had her 3rd she opted not to reveal herself and had continued that practice for the next 3 and probably would for more going into the future. Sarah was done with giving birth, figuring she’d done her part and then some with 2, but Jenn figured things a little differently. Every guy she hooked up with she wanted to have a kid by, and so long as she didn’t start getting ‘crabby’ she’d still have that option going forward.

Unfortunately some of their brothers and sisters were getting ‘crabby’ despite their continual urgings to fight it, with the term referring to when a person’s body went into a stagnant, decaying trend. Star Force medics tried to fight it as much as they could, but if you didn’t train and didn’t really master your own body there wasn’t anything they could do in the long run. Some people had the medtechs revitalize their bodies with a regenerator…another magic piece of technology that healed all the damage done to you. People would go in crabby and come out looking young again, but there was a cost.

The regenerator caused your body to grow new tissue hyper fast, like in seconds, but that new tissue wasn’t as strong as the rest of your body. That was why when someone got hurt they really didn’t want to use the regenerator if they didn’t have to, because it’d weaken them. Over time and with proper training they’d regain their strength, and if the injury was bad enough it was definitely worth it. The regenerators could even bring people back to life if they hadn’t been dead for too long, but as the maturia handlers had drilled into their brains during basic, if you didn’t train then you would eventually grow crabby and no matter how many regenerator treatments you had you would still eventually die, because your body would get so weak one day your heart or lungs would just break from the stress of nothing more than standing up out of a chair.

If you got that weak Star Force wouldn’t give up on you. They’d revive you if possible then tell you the exact amount of microtraining needed to start pulling yourself back from the brink, for no matter how bad off you were there was always a route to recover by, even if it was a monumental task. The more crabby you got the harder it became to recover, but they’d told Sarah so many times now that she could never forget…the key was to stay ahead and train when you were strong, for the weaker you got the harder it was to make a comeback.

The sad thing was a lot of people didn’t even want to try, so despite the fact that Humans and every other race within Star Force could theoretically live forever a lot of people didn’t. They just gave up trying and slowly decayed into crabbiness. When that happened to the girls they lost their ability to have children, and Jenn was using that as kind of a measuring stick to make sure she didn’t start to get crabby without realizing it.

For Sarah she had other ways to keep herself on track, and both girls had agreed long ago to never let the other quit and this new dress they’d gotten would definitely help with that, for there was enough skin showing through it that if you were out of shape you wouldn’t dare wear it.

Actually, that was pretty much the way both of them lived their lives. The quarters they were in were level 5, meaning they had to pay 550 credits per year to have the upgrade, which was technically Jenn’s. Everyone in Star Force had a level 1 quarters assigned to them permanently that cost no credits. If you wanted to veg out after graduating from the maturia you could, doing nothing at all and slowly getting crabby. That’s not the way Jenn and Sarah wanted it, so they’d both gotten jobs and were earning enough credits to share this much larger living space while Sarah’s level 1 quarters were still technically assigned to her elsewhere in the city, but she never used them.

They split the payments between them and that had allowed them to get a level 3 quarters soon after Sarah graduated. Jenn had passed her graduation trials a year before, and that year spent apart had been the hardest on her. Actually leaving the maturia had been hard on everyone, for going from 99 brothers and sisters with you day in and day out down to 1 was not a pleasant transition. How Jenn had handled going without anyone for a year was something Sarah didn’t care to ever experience, but many people did. Sticking together after graduation was actually rare for this many years given how big Star Force was and how many options there were out there.

Earth alone had 337 billion people on it and Sol had upwards of trillion with all the planets and moons combined. Add in all the other star systems and Star Force’s total population was measured in the quadrillions. Knowing that, it was shocking that anyone could keep track of each other in that mass of people, but maturia classmates still did. They just didn’t tend to live right next door to each other, though there were a few others known to share quarters, classmates or not, to get access to higher level units with more space and luxuries by sharing the upgrade bill.

Some even cohabitated with their romantic partners, but that wasn’t for Sarah and Jenn. They both liked their men, but liked them best when they were around part of the time, not 24/7. If you spent that much time with someone you’d either lose some of the fireworks or even grow to despise them. Sarah definitely liked her boyfriends on a date-only basis, though Jenn was a little more possessive than that, but not enough to break up their sisterly pact no matter who she hooked up with.

There wasn’t even the slimmest of chances that would never happen, and even the ex-Commando she had somehow snared wasn’t going to come between the two of them.

That was the reason for the party, actually. Jenn and Brad had been together on enough short term relationship runs that they now qualified for the maximum 5 year extension. It wasn’t mandatory, for they could choose another 6 month, year, or 2 year if they wanted, but today they were going to seal for the next 5 years…which was risky. The two of them got along good, very good actually, but Brad was a completely different type of person, being a 432 year old former Commando that had fought for over 200 years in the lizard war.

And to be perfectly honest, he was out of Jenn’s league. Sarah would never discourage her from going after him, and more power to her for actually getting his attention, but if this 5 year seal went bad they’d either have to stick it out or break it, and while the Star Force relationship network didn’t have any penalties for broken relationships there would be a mark put on someone’s file so that anyone interested in them in the future would be aware that there might be an issue with commitments.

That was why Sarah would never seal with someone for longer than 6 months. In fact most of her seals were for only a single month and sex-only. There was a lot of variation in the types of seals you could get, but the idea of having a guy that couldn’t even kiss someone else without violating the seal seemed stupid to her. There was no way she could ever police that, so what was the point? Her sealing meant she wouldn’t have sex with anyone else during that seal period and that was easy enough to honor. But the kinds with no romantic contact with others and the cohabitation seals were just stupid in her opinion.

Nothing was ever permanent within Star Force, but 5 years was a long time and she’d had many discussions with Jenn about this. It didn’t make sense to Sarah, but if Jenn could get an ex-Commando and seal him in for 5 years she wasn’t going to argue that point. She just didn’t want Jenn to get stuck in a null relationship where both didn’t interact but had to wait out their seals until they expired.

But whatever. Jenn and Brad were making it work and today they were going to officially sanction the 5 year seal at the party. It was Jenn’s decision, and Sarah certainly didn’t mind having Brad hanging around. How Jenn had got him she still couldn’t fathom.

“Dress!” Jenn said, walking out of the shower room naked but fully dry.

“Rock it, girl,” Sarah said, handing it off as her sister zipped by to the room they’d transformed into a huge walk-in closet where they held their hard earned specialty clothing. When Jenn came out later they switched and both got ready in a hurry, then headed out of their quarters into the public corridor outside. Jenn in her new eye popping dress and Sarah in a pair of shorts and tube top that were similar to Star Force issue but with enough alterations and adornments for people to be able to spot the difference.

It was questionable as to who was showing more skin, inch for inch, but as they walked through the residential section and then took a lift car down and into the very active undercity all eyes were on Jenn. Sarah felt a little underdressed and underappreciated, but that was ok. She’d get the dress later and today was all about Jenn.

They went on a small parade through a couple shopping sections then an entertainment complex before coming to the train station that would take them over the channel and into Britain where most of their friends lived. Not their brothers and sisters, but the people they’d come to know and associate with after graduation, including Brad whose quarters were also on that side of the channel.

Fortunately the train was fast as always and the two girls were quickly taken across in clear cars that gave them a good view of the water while everyone else had a good view of Jenn with Sarah suppressing a smile.

That dress was worth every damn credit.

6 hours later…

Jenn, Sarah, and Brad all came back to the sisters’ quarters afterward with the newly sealed pair locking themselves in Jenn’s bedroom. As per protocol, when either one of them brought guys in for sex the other girl would head out, so Sarah got changed into less eye catching clothing but still not Star Force garb. Rather, she put on her dainty Sharpcorp uniform and headed off to find another liftcar that took her the other way through the mainland colony to where she worked at a candy company.

She’d been there for 23 years and had worked her way up to one of the receptionists at their largest store in Europe…a position that required she look as delicious as the candy that, in order to compete against Star Force, had to be the best available to get people to actually spend credits on it. Their #1 seller was a choco sugar stick that arguably was the best in the empire and in addition to the 2.3 credits per day that she got paid, Sarah also occasionally got a free supply of the sugar sticks, each of which normally cost between .05 and .25 credits.

Sarah came back with four of them and tossed the two foot long bundle to Brad who was sitting on the couch with Jenn under his arm watching the vid screen.

“Don’t get fat on me,” she said with a smile as he opened one and started nibbling on the end, alternating bites with Jenn. Sarah walked around behind them and pulled off her shoes, dropping them, her socks, then the rest of her clothes on the floor in a trail that left her naked a few steps before she got to the shower room.

Brad didn’t turn around, his and Jenn’s attention still on the vid screen, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She and Jenn had agreed long ago that this was their quarters and they weren’t going to act any differently than normal if they had guests. In the case of Brad that just meant he occasionally got to see two naked women for the price of one.

That wasn’t a big deal, having grown up with 48 brothers that had seen her naked quite a bit, so Sarah didn’t even think about it after a long 4 hour shift. Her job wasn’t overly difficult most days, but it was non-stop interaction with customers seeing how popular a brand she worked for. Personally, Sarah and Jenn would rather save their credits for more clothes and other permanent things, but some people just really liked the novelty foods.

Problem was, most of them didn’t do the training that required the higher calories and the Archons didn’t visit the store that often, though when they did she was always surprised by how they could chomp the sugar sticks and other products that normal people had to nibble on to avoid getting a sugar overload. Even Brad couldn’t take very big bites, but then again he wasn’t doing the kind of insane training anymore that he’d told them Commandos did on a daily basis and that the Archons easily exceeded.

Sarah was submerged up to her waist in the vertical shower tube as it slowly filled with water streaming down over her blonde hair in the beginnings of what would be a long, relaxing soak when the alarm sounded. That shocked her more than being seen naked ever could and Sarah jerked in reflex, bouncing her arm off the clear, circular tube. She grabbed her wrist and rubbed it as the unfamiliar alarm continued to blare.

It didn’t stop, so Sarah pulled herself out of the tube and skipped the dryer, walking out of the shower room dripping wet and looking at Brad and Jenn as she moved over to their wardrobe room.

“What is that?” she demanded before disappearing inside and quickly pulling on some clothes.

“Brad?” Jenn asked, but the Commando was blankly staring at the ceiling as if he could look up and see the sky through it.

“Hey,” she repeated, poking him in the ribs to get his attention. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Yes,” he said in an even, dark tone that both girls picked up on.

“Well?” Sarah asked, pulling on a shirt as she walked back into the main room.

“I can’t say.”

“What do you mean you can’t say?” Jenn demanded as the news program on the vid screen altered to a ‘Breaking News’ alert.

“Reports of the alarm you are hearing are coming in from all across the planet,” the reporter said with a confused look on her face, “but with it has come an information packet that we’re only now dissecting…”

“Change to the official channel,” Brad said, with Jenn grabbing the remote and tuning the livefeed to the Star Force news that didn’t cover the more interesting social and entertainment stuff, but their reporter wore a trim, standard Star Force personnel relations uniform and did not have a confused look on his face.

“…bad day. Something we have been dreading since the inception of Star Force has finally happened. Moments ago we received word of an invasion force entering our territory. At present we believe their intended target is Earth.”

2

“What!” Jenn and Sarah yelled in tandem, but Brad didn’t say a word. The ex-Commando was just staring at the vid screen and ignoring them both.

“Brad!” Jenn said, walking in front of him and snapping her fingers so he’d look at her. “Do you know what this is?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“It’s classified. I’m sorry, but I can’t say anything.”

“You knew they were coming?” Sarah asked, her jaw dropping.

“No. I didn’t know…”

“If they do come here,” the reporter continued, “follow protocols and evacuation orders. We will guide everyone when needed. Do not randomly try to flee or you will end up creating more problems. We’ve been preparing for this day for more than a millennia. There is a plan in place. Until you receive evacuation orders continue about your normal daily activities. It will be days before they can arrive here and there is nothing for you to do before then except learn about our enemy. They are known as the V’kit’no’sat, and they were the previous inhabitants of Earth over 100,000 years ago.”

“Information packets are being released to bring everyone in Star Force up to date with what our leaders have known since before the empire began, but I will go through the basics that you need to understand. This information was not released previously because we have had no contact with the V’kit’no’sat and it was possible that they would never return. Also, the people who needed to prepare for if they did have known and have been working to defend us, but the sad truth is that we are at a disadvantage. The V’kit’no’sat are still far stronger than us, but I will repeat, there is a plan in place.”

“As for who the V’kit’no’sat are and how they once owned the Earth, well that is simple. Earth was once a colony of theirs that was abandoned, but they apparently left behind a few of their servant/slaves when they departed. They were known as Zen’zat and possessed incredible powers, so much so that they were forbidden from reproducing so that they could never pass those powers on to their offspring. Only Zen’zat who proved themselves to the V’kit’no’sat were granted the powers.”

“Those Zen’zat left behind to die on Earth defied this command, and while we do not know their identities, we know who their offspring are. We are their offspring. Humanity is their offspring, and the powers they had are now possessed by the Archons.”

“As shocking as that is to many of you, that is not the primary issue. The penalty for Zen’zat reproducing is death, both for themselves and all their offspring…and that means the V’kit’no’sat are coming here to kill every single Human in existence and probably all those we have had contact with, meaning they are here to destroy all of Star Force. As to who they are, you already know. You just don’t realize you do. They were here before, and remains of the rebellion that forced them to abandon this colony have been found long ago.”

“Who are the V’kit’no’sat? Put simply, they’re the Dinosaurs…and they are both far more powerful and far smarter than Humans. They control most of the galaxy in near the core, and Earth is on the very edge of their monstrous empire. Now it looks like they’re coming back and it’s time for you to know your enemy that is soon to be entering this system.”

“Is this for real?” Sarah asked, looking at Jenn. “The Dinosaurs?”

“If this wasn’t on the Star Force network I’d think it was a joke,” she said, shrugging.

“It’s no joke,” Brad said seriously. “They are the Dinosaurs, and they are more powerful than you can imagine. Now that word is getting out my silence is no longer necessary,” he said, looking at Jenn and then Sarah. “Have a seat and I’ll explain.”

Both girls went straight to the couch and plopped down, eager to hear what the hell this was all about as Brad began pacing back and forth in front of them.

“There’s too much history to go through, so I’ll make this as simple as I can. I don’t know everything, and not all Commandos knew. I was assigned to tasks that made my knowledge necessary, but I know there are many things that they did not trust me to know. What I can tell you is this. The V’kit’no’sat are a conglomeration of different races, 193 of them, that we call the Dinosaurs. Not all of those lived on Earth, but they all had Human servants called Zen’zat that were selected out of massive populations of Ter’nat. Both are Human, but the Ter’nat have no powers. They are kept as breeding stock on isolated planets where the best of them are picked to become Zen’zat and given the powers that come with that promotion.”

“They are then assigned to serve a race and spend the rest of their lives doing so. It is from information that we recovered on Earth that we built Star Force. Self-sufficiency isn’t something we invented. The V’kit’no’sat can also live forever, and many of them have. Some of them are over a million years old.”

“Bull shit,” Sarah said, not believing a word of it.

“I wish, but it’s true. And over such a long time even a little bit of training improvement will build up to insane power levels. We are badly outmatched, and until now the only thing that kept us alive is the fact that they didn’t know we existed. Now that they do they’ll come and keep coming until we’re all dead.”

“What are trailblazers going to do?” Jenn asked, referencing the highest level military leaders in Star Force.

“What they’ve been building the military for since the beginning. They’re going to fight and take as many of the bastards with us as possible.”

“You’re saying we’re all going to die?”

“I wouldn’t count on that. We know we’re going to lose, but there are evacuation plans in place to run us out towards the Rim where the V’kit’no’sat have no presence. I don’t know the details, but the idea is to fight and hold them long enough to evacuate people out. When they give the word, we go and we don’t look back. I’ll stay with you both, but I have no idea when that will be. We can’t evacuate the system very fast, so our troops are going to have to hold them off for a while.”

“And if they can’t?” Jenn asked, her voice straining a bit. “We get stomped on or eaten?”

“No. They won’t eat you. They’ll shoot you or pick you up with their telekinesis and rip your arms, legs, and head off, but they won’t eat you.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Sarah asked.

“I wasn’t joking. When I was told I was shown video of them doing it to others to underscore the point of them being vicious and unforgiving. We can’t negotiate and we can’t surrender. Fighting is our only option.”

“But we can’t win?” Jenn repeated.

“Not unless something has changed since I got out.”

The two girls exchanged glances as Brad reached over and switched off the vid screen, quieting the room to a deathly stillness.

“What is this?” Sarah finally said.

“The truth,” the ex-Commando said firmly. “You didn’t need to know before so you weren’t told.”

“Dinosaurs?” Jenn repeated, still not believing it. “With telekinesis?”

“And a lot more. They can also read minds, but not Humans’ unless they touch you. It’s an immunity given to Zen’zat that the other races in Star Force won’t have. If they get close enough, they can even take control of their minds.”

“No,” Sarah said shaking her head.

“I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. We have some armor to block that ability so our troops won’t start shooting each other, but if they get close enough to you they could make you jump off a building or other stuff to kill you. And if they get close enough for their telekinesis to work, they can reach inside your body and crush your internal organs, killing you instantly. That’s why the military has to keep them away from the civilians.”

“Oh shit,” Jenn whispered, cradling her head in her hands. “Shit, shit, shit..”

“This has to be wrong,” Sarah said, almost yelling. “There is no way…”

“Stop!” Brad said firmly, getting both of them to snap out of their current thoughts and look up at him. “This is real, this is happening, and we have to work the problem. You may not be Commandos but you’ve had combat and evacuation training in the maturia. Remember back to that. What good does panic do?”

“None to you,” Jenn said slowly, repeating from memory those lessons drilled into her mind long ago, “but it helps your enemy greatly.”

“So don’t panic. There is an evacuation plan in place. The best chance we have of living is to stick with the plan. The Archons have been working on this their entire lives. There is no way we can do better than them, so we stay put, follow orders, and work the problem as it presents itself. There’s a fight to be had here before they can ever set foot on Earth, and it’ll be at least a few days before they can get here no matter how fast their gravity drives are. We have a little time to prepare.”

“What do you want us to do?” Jenn asked as Sarah was still locked up in stunned silence.

“Follow normal routines until otherwise instructed. Get the panic out of you today so that when they do get here the shock doesn’t paralyze you. That’s probably why they’re telling us now instead of waiting for them to show up in orbit.”

“Why the alarm then?”

“Those of us who know who the V’kit’no’sat are know that alarm, and the moment it sounded they started running off to do the things necessary to prepare. It wasn’t meant for you.”

“Why aren’t you running off then?” Sarah finally spoke.

“I’m not a Commando anymore. You may think I’m fit, but I’m a lot slower and weaker than I used to be. I haven’t been doing enough training even if I wanted to fight. The most I can do now is stay with you two. I’ve got a stinger pistol in my quarters. It won’t do much good against the V’kit’no’sat, but if people around here forget their training and start to panic it’ll be useful. Security is going to have much bigger problems to deal with, so I’ll make sure you two stay safe from whatever nonsense may break out here. Hopefully it won’t, but this is something none of you have faced before.”

“And you have?”

“I’ve seen war, but on the level of what’s coming our way? No. Not even close.”

3

June 11, 3602

Solar System

Earth

Sarah got off work after a very dead shift. No one was interested in shopping while an invasion of the star system was ongoing, but she and pretty much everyone else was still going about their daily activities as instructed then rushing off to somewhere they could watch the news vids.

So far Earth hadn’t been attacked, but there had been major battles elsewhere in the Solar System. The big defense satellites had been moved in near the star to ambush the Dinosaurs when they arrived, but it hadn’t been enough to stop them. Star Force had destroyed some of their ships there, but then the huge enemy fleet went through and systematically busted up all of the satellites using their biggest ship that was near 200 miles wide.

All of their ships were huge, dwarfing Star Force’s much smaller fleet, but Star Force had many more ships that ended up looking like bees stinging the bear that was coming to steal their honey. In this case that honey was Earth, which she’d been told held the most aggressive defenses of any planet in the system. Maybe that was why they hadn’t…

Sarah stopped walking as she heard a roar from a cupola off the promenade she was walking through. There was a large crowd there and not many people walking about, so Sarah headed over and took a look at the huge hologram in the center that showed the ongoing battles wherever they were being fought…except this time it was showing Earth with what looked like the entire Dinosaur fleet in orbit.

“Oh shit,” she whispered as she turned and ran down the promenade, keeping up the pace all the way back to her quarters where she found Jenn and Brad camped out on the couch watching the news feeds.

“They’re here,” Jenn told her as Sarah sat down with them.

“Where are we supposed to go? What are we supposed to do?”

“They haven’t said yet.”

“So we just wait until they’re on top of us?”

“Relax,” Brad urged. “The V’kit’no’sat aren’t thinking about us right now. They’ve got to get through the planetary shields first, and our fleet along with them. They tried with their big ship from range but it wasn’t enough. We’ve got a lot of…there,” he said as the fighting really ticked up as they came in low over the planet and huge glowing beams of energy shot up from the surface and hit the Dinosaur ships in orbit as they simultaneously fought against the tens of thousands of Star Force vessels moving in to confront them.

“What are they…” Brad said, ignoring the girls and trying to figure out what was going on, then he realized what they were up to. “They’re concentrating fire on the shield to create a breach. It means our ships basically have a free shot at them right now because they’re focusing most of their firepower on the planet.”

“Where?” Sarah asked.

“Over Antarctica.”

“Why there?”

“Clan headquarters and a lot of other valuable stuff, but your guess is as good as mine,” Brad said offhand.

“Just be glad they’re not shooting at Europe,” Jenn added. “Are they going to get through?”

“Probably, but I have no idea how strong our shields are and that big ship is firing a superweapon. I can’t remember the name, but it’s something too advanced for us to build and too big for their other ships to carry it…”

“Whoa!” Jenn yelled as a huge explosion ripped apart a building in Antarctica as the shield began to fail and spots opened up letting bits of weaponsfire through. One moment the building was there, then a second later the top half of it was gone and a hurricane of dust and debris mushroomed out to cover the impact site.

“They’re starting to break through. Once they get a clean shot they’ll target the shield generators and open up a permanent hole. This is bad.”

“Are the people down there evacuating?” Sarah asked.

“I hope so. I assume so,” he corrected. “When they saw where the shield was being attacked they probably evacuated the area underneath immediately.”

“That was only minutes ago.”

“Which is why if we’re told to move, we go instantly,” he said firmly. “No bags, just out the door to wherever they send us. Stay with me when it happens.”

“You can count on that,” Sarah confirmed as the three of them continued to watch the battle unfold.

As Brad had predicted, the shield generators got hit once big enough gaps in the protective energy layers covering the entire planet allowed pinpoint accurate attacks from the Dinosaur fleet to target them. Each generator had backup shields covering it, but those only delayed the inevitable. The generators nearest the attack zone eventually were destroyed and a vulnerable dot on the map opened up, allowing the enemy fleet to shoot all kinds of things on the planet’s surface, but oddly they didn’t target much, for once the hole was opened they turned their attention to the Star Force fleet that had essentially been punching them in the gut the entire time.

When they did it became an unfair fight, and even with the weaponsfire coming from the big surface-based guns it was clear that Star Force was losing and the closest of those guns were getting picked off through the hole in the shields, creating a safer route down to the surface for the group of ships that broke off from the main fleet and dove into the atmosphere heading for the hole.

“They’re landing ground troops,” Brad said, pointing to the tiny markers indicating the massive ships, but displayed along with everything else in the combined two fleets they still looked small.

Jenn grabbed Brad’s hand and squeezed it hard, but was still watching the battle intently as the main camera angles shifted to a different part of Antarctica as a massive explosion rocked the surface far away from the hole in the shields.

“What the hell?” Sarah asked. “Who’s shooting over there?”

Brad didn’t have time to answer before a huge beam of orange light reached up from the surface and hit the largest of the Dinosaur ships as additional explosions continued to detonate around its origin point.

“Brad?” Jenn asked as the beam fired again and again, but it was unlike anything else Star Force had attacking from the surface.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.

“Is that another superweapon?” Sarah asked. “It’s the same color.”

“It’s bigger,” Jenn said, poking Brad to get his attention.

“I think you’re right,” the ex-Commando lazily said, for his eyes were locked on the vid screen as the Dinosaur fleet suddenly started moving erratically around the edges but were locked still in the center as the big gun continued to shoot the huge egg-shaped ship that was using its own superweapon to vaporize the smaller Star Force vessels with single hits.

But then other weird energy weapons began firing up from the same location, and as the dust and debris settled around that part of Antarctica the camera began to make out a massive, flat-topped pyramid underneath that Brad had never seen before…and for good reason, because there had been a city on top of it that had just been blown apart to reveal it.

“V’kit’no’sat weapons,” Brad said in awe. “Has to be.”

“What?”

“Earth used to be theirs. They must have left something behind and we hid it this whole time. That’s why they went to Antarctica first. I was never told we had a superweapon.”

“You mean that green/black thing is…”

“A V’kit’no’sat building. Maybe a battlefort or something.”

“Are we winning now?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know. They’re just standing there taking the shots and…oh crap, it was a trap. They didn’t know it was there. Damn, you guys are good.”

“What?” Jenn demanded.

“The trailblazers. They hid that superweapon underneath the city, I’d bet you anything. And look at their fleet. They’re not moving an inch in the center. We have some ships that can freeze your engines with an IDF. That means they can’t move. They’re pinned there and getting hammered.”

“So we’re going to kill them?”

“We are killing them, but if they can kill our interdictors they can get free and run.”

“Running is still good if it takes them away from here,” Sarah said as the hopeless battle now looked to have taken on a whole new aspect. They saw the shields on the biggest Dinosaur ship go down and its hull start to take hits, but eventually it was able to move off and escape the range of the superweapon on Earth, though many of their other ships didn’t and when they left they left running with the Star Force fleet chasing after them.

Jenn and Sarah felt like cheering, but they were both too unsure of what was going on to take that emotional step.

“Brad?”

“They still got troops on the ground, but not a lot. I think we just won round one.”

“Round one?”

“If that was a trap they won’t be able to do it again, and now that the V’kit’no’sat know where the superweapon is they won’t attack Antarctica again from overhead. They’ll hit Earth elsewhere and move over land to take it out, but that means they’ll have to punch a different hole in the planetary shields and I don’t think they have enough ships left to do that. They’ll have to wait for reinforcements.”

“Wait, what reinforcements?” Sarah asked. “I thought that was all of them?”

“They have an empire that spans half the galaxy. More will come. You can count on that.”

“But not today?” Jenn asked, with Sarah’s expression mirroring the sentiment.

“No, looks like we bought ourselves some time.”

“To do what? You said they’re still coming and we can’t beat them. Can that superweapon do other things?”

Brad looked at Sarah and sadly shook his head. “We hurt them, but given how big their empire is it’ll only be a scratch.”

“So what now?” Jenn asked.

“Now we wait for the evacuation order.”

“But we just won!”

“We won ourselves some time, and if I know the trailblazers they won’t waste it. Right now they’ve got ships to hunt down and troops on the ground to deal with, and I wouldn’t want to be them with our warships overhead.”

“What?”

“Military stuff. Those V’kit’no’sat ground troops are going to die soon, but there might be some hard fighting to take them out. Even if there is it won’t affect us up here. They’ll be confined to that region of Antarctica.”

“When do we leave?” Jenn asked, pain in her eyes at the thought of what lay ahead of them.

“When they tell us to, but right now there’s still enemy ships up there that need removed. After they’re gone I expect the evacuation plans to kick in. When that will mean us I have no idea. It’s a big planet and we’ve only got so many ships.”

“Ok, but until then?” Sarah asked.

“Same routine until told otherwise.”

“Even after all this?” she said, standing up and pointing to the vid screen.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, like do something.”

“Trust in the plan and wait for orders. This has been a long time in coming. The trailblazers will get most of us out if we do as they say.”

“Most?” Jenn asked, standing up next to Sarah and glaring at him.

“It’s a big planet,” he repeated, “and the V’kit’no’sat ships are very fast. They’ll be back with more.”

“And we’re just supposed to sit here and wait?”

“Better than being in Antarctica,” Jenn pointed out, but she was feeling the same way.

“Well there’s that,” Sarah agreed. “Poor bastards. They got shot by our own weapons.”

“No,” Brad said firmly. “We wouldn’t do that.”

“Didn’t you see that city go ‘poof’ when the superweapon fired?”

“Didn’t you see it not fire immediately when the enemy arrived overhead? They were probably waiting until everyone evacuated from the blast zone. We don’t kill our own,” Brad said angrily. “You should know that even if you aren’t in the military.”

Jenn put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder before she could snap back at him. “Easy.”

Sarah glared at her for a moment then flushed her seething emotions out with a shake of her head as she closed her eyes.

“Sorry. You’re right.”

“Better,” Brad said, also standing with them. “We’ve known this would be coming for a long time and I promise you there is a plan in place even if I don’t know the details. We wait until we get word, then we follow instructions. The military will give us cover as we evacuate. I know that much.”

“Why didn’t they tell us this was coming?” Jenn demanded.

“To avoid this reaction and a lot of pointless worry. Come on, let’s get out of here and do something. Europe is safe for the rest of today, I can promise you that.”

“Do what?” Sarah asked.

“Anything. Spend some credits, run some miles, whatever. This is going to be the new normal and it’s better to process it while doing something else. Standing still and endlessly worrying will get you twisted up into a paranoid mess.”

Jenn grabbed Sarah’s hand and gave it a good squeeze. “He’s right. We need some air.”

“I feel sick.”

“Me too, which is why we need some air.”

“How long before they can come back?” Sarah asked the ex-Commando.

“If they’re nearby, weeks. If not it’ll be months. Space is big and it takes time to travel across it, even for the V’kit’no’sat.”

“Weeks? Fine then, let’s do something, because I think my head is about to explode.”

“You’ll adjust,” Brad promised. “A lot of people are in shock right now.”

“Where out there is it safe to run to?” Jenn asked. “The Nexus?”

“I was never told that, but it’s a big galaxy.”

“So we run and hide or die?”

“I…don’t…know,” Brad said slowly. “Trust the Archons, they’ll know what to do. They always have, and they just got us our first victory.”

“With a trick,” she pointed out.

“A win is a win and we’re still standing here worrying. Start walking and we’ll figure this out on the go. Right now we need activity.”

“Fine,” Jenn agreed reluctantly. “Let’s go.”

“Come on,” Brad said, grabbing each one of them by a hand. “I’ll look after you both, I promise.”

The official evacuation order didn’t come down for another 3 days, but there were lots of housekeeping instructions and explanations prior to it that gave some people work to do, but both Sarah and Jenn no longer had jobs to occupy their time. Most of the private corporations were closing shop, now that luxury items were pointless when you couldn’t take them with you. Only the Star Force-operated shops remained open, and even those weren’t seeing a lot of activity.

The entertainment districts were the reverse, for people were flooding into them in order to take their mind off their worries or to spend up their remaining credits while they had a use for them on anything that could distract their attention away from the impending doom. That didn’t change when the evacuation order came down, because most of the people on Earth weren’t going anywhere…at least not right away.

“What the hell!” Jenn yelled at Brad when he came back to their quarters after finishing a workout.

“What?” he asked, seeing that Sarah was nowhere around.

“That’s what,” she said, jabbing a finger at the vid screen and the enormous evacuation ships that had arrived out of nowhere. Each was more than 400 miles long and could hold an insane amount of people, but as had been noted there were only 18 of the ships here at present to assist the ‘smaller’ normal vessels with evacuation out of the system, meaning they had a lot of round trips to make wherever they were going.

Brad watched the news feed for a minute, seeing that it wasn’t a Star Force channel, and the reporter was quite angry that the first ‘people’ that Project Galactica, as the superships were called, was going to evacuate were the various animal races held in Earth’s sanctuaries.

“What’s the problem?” Brad asked mockingly, though he was slightly peeved at her problem with it.

“My problem? Humans should be going first. Cats and dogs and cows last.”

“The weakest and least able to defend themselves go first,” Brad corrected.

“Even if some Humans die later because there’s not enough time to evacuate everyone?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “We don’t betray anyone.”

“They’re dogs, Brad, dogs!”

“And they deserve to live too. They are our responsibility and we’re not going to leave them here to die.”

“What if we’re the ones that get left!”

“The military are going to be the last ones out. We’ll go before them.”

“I can’t believe you! Star Force having the sanctuaries is a waste of resources anyway, but to put the animals above Humans is just wrong!”

“If we’re going to die,” Brad said, his anger turning his tone cold rather than bombastic, “then we die with honor. We don’t trade lives, barter lives, or betray lives. We try to save everyone, regardless of whether or not we succeed. Those least able to defend themselves and those most valuable go first. We are neither, so we wait our turn.”

“How can you be so cold about this? People are going to die!”

“Stress brings out true colors. I’m sorry to say I keep forgetting how little training the maturia actually gives you.”

“Meaning what?”

“You’re panicking.”

“No, this isn’t panic. It’s anger. The animals don’t matter when Human lives are in jeopardy.”

“You need to stop watching this trash,” Brad said, changing the channel to the official Star Force news vid.

“It’s not trash, it’s the truth. Why are you siding with Star Force?”

“I am Star Force, and so are you.”

“I’m a civilian, and so are you. We don’t have to think like they do.”

“Their thinking is the only reason we’re still alive right now. They know what they’re doing.”

“Like hell they do. Animals first? What kind of bull shit is that!”

“Stop calling them animals. All races have different attributes. Humans aren’t the smartest, you know.”

“That’s debatable.”

“Just because someone is less capable doesn’t meant they don’t have an equal right to live.”

“I’m not saying we should start killing them and eating their bodies. I’m saying that if we have to pick and choose who lives Humans should come first.”

“And what about the Bsidd, Calavari, Kiritas, Irondel…you think Humans should come before them?”

“They can all talk, Brad.”

“So can some dogs.”

“Barely, but that’s not the point. They’re not on our level.”

“That is why they need more protection, not less.”

Jenn put her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. “I can’t believe we are having this conversation.”

“Neither can I, because it’s a moot point. The decision has been made and we don’t get a say. The trailblazers and Monarchs are in control, and despite what those rag news vids say, they do know what they’re doing.”

“Well maybe they shouldn’t be.”

“Now you are talking crazy. Snap out of it, please. I’d like Jenn back.”

“This is Jenn you’re talking with.”

“No, it’s some panicked crazy person ready to throw everyone else to the monsters to save herself. You’re better than that.”

“If it comes down to a matter of picking and choosing…”

“You have combat training. All Humans have combat training from the maturia. The races in the sanctuaries do not. We can’t even warn them about what’s coming because they won’t understand. We have to get them out of here first along with the younglings.”

“The younglings I can understand,” she said, referring to those Humans still in the maturia whether they be infants all the way up to young adults.

“Well then you’re only half crazy,” he said as the news vid suddenly switched over to a camera shot from in near the star. It was showing one of the incoming jumppoints for interstellar traffic as dozens of huge Star Force jumpships were arriving, but they were of slightly different design. There were already several hundred gathered near the jumppoint, each of which carried more of the drone warships that Star Force remotely piloted to keep their naval combat losses restricted to equipment rather than people.

But these ships didn’t have Humans on them, for they had come from another part of the empire in response to the distress calls sent out from Earth.

“What now?” Jenn asked, seeing his concern.

“Doing the right thing may not always seem the best thing to do when you’re in a panic, but it does have its advantages. If Star Force put Humans first, then we never would have rescued and annexed the Bsidd…and look who’s showing up to help provide us cover while we evacuate.”

“Why wouldn’t they come? They take orders from the Archons like everyone else.”

“There are plenty of Bsidd worlds out there that the V’kit’no’sat are likely to hit later. Why should they waste ships here defending Humans when they could save them to defend other Bsidd?”

“We’re all Star Force, so why would that matter?”

“Exactly. We’re all Star Force, right down to the refugees we take in from across the galaxy and the races too primitive to care for themselves that we support in the sanctuaries. We live as one, we fight as one, and if necessary we die as one. Nobody gets betrayed, nobody gets left behind, nobody gets discarded. You and I will wait our turn. The sanctuaries get emptied first and the Bsidd are coming to help make sure we all get out alive.”

4

July 3, 3604

Solar System

Earth

Two years. It had been two years since the Dinosaurs…correction, since the V’kit’no’sat attacked and had not returned to Earth. They’d been sighted elsewhere, looking, scouting, but not fighting. Some people suggested that they might not return, that the defeat they’d suffered at the hands of Star Force had scared them off, but no Star Force officials had ever said that and Jenn and Sarah, while hoping that it was true, had Brad telling them all along that they’d be back, and now they were.

They came back with 20 times as many ships as before, but were met with an even larger Star Force defense fleet drawn from across the empire to oppose them. There were more than just the Human and Bsidd ships. The Protovic were here, and the Calavari, and the Trinx, and even more subfactions of Star Force all under the combined command of 13 out of the 100 trailblazers. Having even 1 in a system was rare, though this was Earth and Sarah had heard of when there were 2 stationed here or a few more temporarily came back for a meeting or something, but 13 was unheard of.

There was no ambush of the incoming ships like before, and after several scouts arrived and fled, the V’kit’no’sat came in on a very obscure jumpline so they could secure a foothold in the system to deliver their full fleet. After an initial fight there the enemy had driven straight to Earth, ignoring all the other planets and space stations. They had one target and one target only, and it looked like there was nothing that was going to stand in their way.

And with them came not one, but two giant ships that the girls now knew were called Mach’nel and were very rare in the V’kit’no’sat fleet. Both contained superweapons, but neither attacked Antarctica. Instead they pushed in and fought the Star Force fleet over South America where the planetary defenses, combined with the fleet in orbit, made the V’kit’no’sat pay a very heavy price to get through the planetary shields, including damaging one Mach’nel so bad it had to withdraw from the system, but they couldn’t stop them from breaching the shields and landing troops on the ground.

Sarah and Jenn were with Brad in their quarters when the breakthrough came, and they watched as the huge V’kit’no’sat ships descended through the atmosphere and parked over cities in Brazil and pounded them into oblivion even as the Star Force fleet fired into the ships from above and below. Evacuation orders had gone out for the affected areas as soon as the planetary shields over top of them had begun taking hits, but according to the reports it hadn’t been soon enough and a lot of people were getting caught in the orbital bombardment.

As horrifying as that was, it didn’t last. Once it was clear that the people underneath them couldn’t be protected the Star Force fleet went crazy and started sending ships down to surface level and fighting the enemy warships just above the building tops. The sky was blocked out with their masses but it was lit up with the bright flashes of weaponsfire worse than any thunderstorm. Piece of ships fell when blasted apart, then entire hulls came crashing down on top of the remaining people in the cities and the V’kit’no’sat troops, killing both.

Faced with that untenable situation, the V’kit’no’sat ships gained more elevation, rising up back above the atmosphere while firing down on the Star Force ships beneath them so they couldn’t target their ground troops. That lifted the fight high enough that nearby planetary defense batteries could shoot over the curve of the planet and punish the ships that had been below their firing arcs. When that happened they had to pull back even further, leaving six different zones of devastation across Brazil as the warships retreated to a height where the planetary defenses couldn’t target them.

Without that help the Star Force fleet pulled back into defensive positions, trying to run some of their ships down to the surface to shoot the ground troops but the V’kit’no’sat wouldn’t allow that. Each time they tried the warships came back down and forced a fight just above the atmosphere until a standoff occurred with both fleets essentially agreeing to leave the surface alone, though many smaller craft from both sides were dropping down into the atmosphere or flying across it.

“They’re sending troops and we are too,” Brad said, wrapping an arm around Jenn as she cried silent tears. “Their ships are going to stay in orbit unless ours come down again. They’re going to try to take out the remaining shield generators and defensive guns on the ground now.”

“How long until they get here?” Sarah asked.

“A long time. We’ve got a lot of troops standing by and if they try to take out the rest of the planetary defenses with their warships they’ll get whittled down so far that what’s left of our fleet will be able to finish them off. The danger is on the ground now, so that’s where we’re going to hold them and it’s going to be a long, grinding fight.”

“Can the galactica ships still get to us?” Jenn asked.

“I’m not sure. Probably.”

“When are we going to go, Brad?” Sarah asked.

“They won’t bring down dropships near the fighting. They’ll pull us up in the safest area and move people overland to there. Europe and Asia are probably the safest places to do that now.”

“But when will we leave?” she repeated, knowing that approximately a third of the planet’s population was already gone. For all the hopefulness that the V’kit’no’sat wouldn’t come back, thankfully Star Force hadn’t delayed the evacuation. There had been ships running round the clock, many taking people to the nearest star system and dumping them off there while the galactica ships took their passengers much further away, but people weren’t just evacuating from Earth. They were evacuating from Mars, Pluto, Sedna, Krillin, Frodo, and all the other planets in the Solar System.

“As soon as we can,” Brad promised, “but I don’t think anyone knows when that will be.”

“What do we do now?” Jenn asked. “Just wait and watch as they get closer?”

“There’s going to be plenty to watch.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do to help?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t think so. If there is they’ll say so.”

“I need some air,” Jenn said, getting up and heading for the door.

“I’ll go with you,” Sarah offered, hopping to her feet and following her sister out while Brad remained sitting. He let them go, then used the interactive controls on the news feed to watch what was happening on the ground in Brazil. He’d fought in a lot of battles during the lizard war, but that enemy was nothing like the V’kit’no’sat. They were little and easy to kill, but used swarm techniques that made them very dangerous. This enemy was far worse and operated in a completely opposite manner. Most of the V’kit’no’sat were the equivalent of walking tanks, and even now he could see some moving around in their battle armor.

He could also see Star Force mechs being dropped off nearby and gathering to fight them as aerial craft gave them cover. Brad wondered where the V’kit’no’sat air cover was, but didn’t see any for a long time until some of the ‘skeets’ that Star Force used as their primary fighter craft ducked into the rubble and flew around some mile high pieces of dead V’kit’no’sat ship that had fell to the surface and crushed buildings underneath. The skeets flew in and around them, only to be jumped by winged fliers that Brad knew were called I’rar’et, but most of Earth knew them simply as Pterodactyls from movie legend.

They also had armor on, and were firing while chasing the skeets away from what they were obviously claiming as their territory, giving their own ground troops aerial cover. The only difference was they weren’t flying craft, but living beings inside armor, and according to the old records made public, that’s how the entire V’kit’no’sat army operated. They had no vehicles, save for the Zen’zat and a few smaller Dinosaur races, and that was an entirely different type of combat that Brad wasn’t sure how was going to go down, but the trailblazers had been preparing for this for a long time so a part of him was eager to see what happened.

What he didn’t see were Commandos, Human or otherwise, heading out towards the enemy troops. It took a while, but eventually he started to see a few Commando units in the field helping pull people out of rubble and guarding the evacuation routes for people in the nearby area. They were getting them out of there as fast as possible, but it looked like they were already getting hit.

Neither Brad nor the reporters could tell where they were coming from, but individual Zen’zat were popping up everywhere and shooting whatever Humans they could find on sight…then running off and disappearing into buildings or rubble as Commandos went after them, though most were trying to establish defensive perimeters so the civilians would have a safe place to run to.

The dull white armor of the Commandos were everywhere now, but the dark green/black of the Zen’zat were very hard to see and they were moving so fast the civilians never stood a chance. They were here to slaughter them, and for as many as the Commandos saved there were far more that they couldn’t.

Brad gripped the armrest on the couch as he watched, and without realizing it he dug his thumb all the way through the shell and into the padding underneath. Part of him wanted to be out there doing something, but he hadn’t fought or even combat trained for a long time.

And there was no way he was going to leave Jenn and Sarah alone. Looking after them was enough of a mission to suit him for now, but seeing his fellow Commandos out there and him sitting on this stupid couch watching didn’t feel right…but then again, nothing about this invasion felt right.

Brad kept watching for a long time, then the girls came back and he realized 5 hours had gone by. It had felt like half an hour, then as he pulled his hand back he noticed the hole in the couch and how he had been the cause of it. Balling his fist, he stood up stiff and walked past the girls.

“Where are you going?” Jenn asked.

“To find something to punch. I’ll be back.”

“Better be.”

He paused at the door, turning back and looking at them both. “Whether we get out of here alive or get caught and killed, I’ll be right beside you. I promise.”

“Not very reassuring, but I’ll take it.”

“There’s no reassuring now. The planet is in a fight for its life,” he said, then walked out and headed for the nearest gymnasium.

Three weeks later and the V’kit’no’sat were still bottled up in Brazil. Star Force had brought in so many ground troops that no matter how many mechs they destroyed the invaders couldn’t get outside of their landing zones…but Star Force couldn’t get into them either, and for every Triceratops or Stegosaurus that they killed more were being rushed down from orbit with skeets and other aerial craft from Star Force fighting against Pterodactyls and some other V’kit’no’sat flying Dinosaurs. They weren’t going to let them land troops for free, and whenever they tried to bring more down another massive aerial battle broke out with mixed results. Star Force was killing units in the air, but they weren’t getting all of them and that reinforcement was enough to maintain the V’kit’no’sat foothold on the planet.

Meanwhile the fleets in orbit were in a staring contest. The V’kit’no’sat held defensive formation just outside the range of the planetary defenses but close enough for them to intervene if the Star Force warships tried to go after the ground troops. Without that cover the warships would smoke the ground targets and they knew it, so they couldn’t leave.

But at the same time those warships could go after other ships in the system, so the Star Force fleet was essentially standing guard around them in a containment measure while the rest of the Solar System continued to evacuate. The big galactica ships weren’t coming to Earth anymore, rather evacuating people off the other worlds while those on Earth were being taken from planet to planet in smaller craft.

By the time the V’kit’no’sat broke out into nearby Bolivia their reinforcements arrived. There weren’t many enemy ships coming into the system, but they were primarily troops ships and the V’kit’no’sat warships already present made sure they got to the surface after a rough fight in near the star. After that Star Force didn’t try to hit the ships again, instead pulling back into defensive alignments to protect the ongoing evacuation while the aerial forces tried to knock down as many as they could as enemy drop pods continued descending through the atmosphere almost round the clock.

Some that they did shoot down saw ground troops crawling out afterward, for the armor they wore had both resistances to weaponsfire along with energy shields…not to mention regenerators of their own built into it. So even when you killed one they didn’t always stay dead.

It was clear that Star Force wasn’t going to win this fight, but they were doing a remarkable job of slowing it down, so much so that they were still contained to South America when dropships came in to Jenn and Sarah’s city. There were no more individual evacuations now, with everyone nearby getting on and filling up every seat they could. The sisters didn’t make the first group and had to wait another two weeks as the city’s population quickly thinned out, but more people were also being brought in from other areas on the planet so when another group of dropships were due in Jenn, Sarah, and Brad each packed a single duffle with a few clothes and some prepackaged foodstuffs, not even filling the bags up halfway, and camped out at the spaceport along with a lot of other people waiting in line.

They were there for two days, but thankfully everyone was well behaved. Had the fighting got this far that might have changed, but Brad never had need to draw his stinger pistol even once. Everyone seemed to be falling back on their maturia training that surprisingly resurfaced very fast when needed, with everyone staying orderly as more and more dropships came in and people were loaded up.

When their turn came all three of them got onboard the same craft and sat down next to each other with Brad in the middle as they carried their duffles on their laps because the floors were also being used to seat people, squeezing in as many as they could without getting desperate about it. Then the boarding ramp pulled up and the hatch closed as they departed the spaceport and took to the air, heading up to orbit well away from the V’kit’no’sat fleet.

Star Force warships were everywhere, standing by to defend the tiny craft if needed as they moved out to a jumpline and cranked their engines up as high as they could. Normally they weren’t used for planet to planet travel, but everything available had been stretched to its operational limits and the dropships did have the capability, so another flock of them took off and headed out towards Mars.

It took nearly a day to get there, but Jenn was more than willing to suffer the discomfort in order to get away from Earth.

5

September 6, 3604

Solar System

Mars

Living on Mars wasn’t much different than on Earth, save for the fact that you couldn’t go outdoors, but in truth a lot of Earth’s cities were self-contained anyway and Jenn often would go weeks without tasting the outside air. With less of it here and mostly carbon dioxide, you couldn’t survive outside without a filtration mask.

Over the centuries there had been some terraforming that had gotten the atmospheric pressure up high enough that you wouldn’t explode when you walked outside, but the efforts here had been more experimentation than anything. They’d never taken it all the way because Star Force had gotten used to building on dead planets and moons throughout the star system and abandoned terraforming save for select situations, preferring instead to just build enclosed facilities so the habitability of a planet really didn’t matter.

Mars had about a third of the gravity Earth did, but Jenn still felt normal gravity walking around the very crowded city where she’d been given temporary quarters. They were tiny level 1s, but at least there were enough for everyone. So many people had been pulled out of the Solar System already that there was a lot of openings to fill, though Jenn, Sarah, and Brad had volunteered to share the same quarters in order to make room for more people being brought over from Earth as the fighting there was still ongoing.

So far Mars hadn’t been hit, and with their fully intact planetary shields and defensive guns the V’kit’no’sat would have to pay another heavy price to establish a foothold here like they did on Earth, but everyone knew it would be coming eventually. Right now they were preoccupied with taking the primary planet in the system and having a hell of a fight on their hands, so Jenn was glad to be on Mars now though she and the others were still waiting for their evacuation from the system entirely.

There wasn’t much to do here, so everyone was training and filling what jobs they could. Most were industrial and everyone who had skills that could be used were working their asses off to make more warships to replace those that were lost and continuing to be lost, though the facilities on Mars were small compared to elsewhere in the system. There were so many shipyards here that they should have been primary targets, and they were during the first attack years back, but most had been preserved and were even now pumping out replacement drone bricks for the control ships to deploy and use up, gradually diminishing the number of enemy ships here.

But the V’kit’no’sat were also getting reinforcements periodically with everyone knowing by now that the system would fall, but the more warships they produced the slower that fall would be and the more people could be evacuated, so whoever had industrial or mining skills had volunteered even if they weren’t Star Force employees…but everyone else had nothing to do. Some private companies were still functioning and servicing the people here, but many more had already been moved out in part, leaving a lot of workers behind that likewise were doing little more than waiting for their ticket out.

The training facilities were packed, as had been the norm, for with people reverting back to their maturia habits they fell into old rhythms while also working out their frustration of being stuck here with nothing to do but boredly wait.

Jenn was no exception and was heading back from some sparring work as she and others practiced very old skills in the vain hope of being better able to defend themselves if, or rather when this city was attacked. The stronger she and others got the better, but most people knew it wouldn’t make any difference if what they were seeing on Earth made its way over here.

When Jenn got back to their quarters she found the other two were gone…which wasn’t surprising. If they stayed in here too long it quickly got claustrophobic, for the quarters had been built as the minimum for one person, not three, though they weren’t the only people doubling up to make room.

Taking advantage of the peace and quiet, Jenn stripped down and retreated into their shower and submerged herself in the vertical tube, pressing her forehead against the clear glass as she triggered the rain droplets to start falling from the ceiling.

If Jenn didn’t have her training she didn’t think she would have kept it together this long, and even now she was barely hanging on to her sanity. The constant pressure of impending doom was getting to her and a lot of other people here, and though they were trying to give each other their space and make this work, tensions were high and occasional fights were breaking out. Some days Jenn thought she wanted to jump into the middle of one, but so far hadn’t been caught up in any of the non-training fights.

That was another reason why people were sparring a lot. It was constructive and let them beat each other’s frustrated nerves out, but it wasn’t enough for Jenn. If they didn’t get out of here soon she was pretty sure she was going to lose it.

She’d tried not watching the battle reports coming in from Earth, but a part of her couldn’t just ignore what was happening to the people back there. Plus she wanted to know when the damn Dinosaurs were coming here, and as long as they were still on Earth that gave her mind a little breathing room, but as soon as they decided to come out to Mars she was sure that the people trapped here were going to explode before the V’kit’no’sat even got through the planetary shields.

Jenn knew it wasn’t Star Force’s fault, for the reports of evacuation ships coming and going were constant. People were being moved out rapidly, but Sol was the capitol system of the Star Force empire and heavily populated. You couldn’t just pick everyone up and head out unless you had a ship the size of a planet, and even then you’d have to make multiple trips to get everyone across the system evacuated.

But fortunately that size of population also worked against the enemy, for conquering all of those cities and planets was going to take a lot of time unless the fleet was destroyed. If that happened the V’kit’no’sat could just park overhead and blast everything to bits without ever having to land ground troops…and that thought scared the crap out of her. She wished she could help with the building of new ships but that was outside her skillset, leaving her helpless to do anything other than train and worry.

A light knocking on the shower tube jolted her awake as she opened her eyes and twisted her head towards the sound, seeing Brad standing outside.

“Room for two in there?”

Jenn sighed. “Not today. I need some privacy.”

“Take your time,” Brad said with a knowing smile. “I’m here when you want me.”

Jenn tipped her head back against the curved wall and tried to think of nothing other than the raindrops on her head and sliding down her neck to the waterline, but Brad being back was making that harder even though he was out of sight.

Two months later…

“Brad!” Sarah yelled from the tiny living room in their quarters.

“What?” he asked, sleepily coming out of the other room where he and Jenn shared a bed, with Sarah camping out in a sleeping sleeve on the floor that was currently rolled up and stuffed into the corner.

“What’s happening?” she demanded, pointing at the vid screen on the wall near the door.

Brad looked at it and frowned, then his eyes widened in realization.

“They’re going at it.”

“Meaning what?”

“Our fleet is going after theirs. We got a lot more ships from somewhere and we’re pushing the offensive. If we can take them out they won’t be able to cover their ground troops.”

“So they could shoot them from the sky?”

“Yeah, but that big Mach’nel isn’t going to be easy to take down. Damn, it’s messing our ships up,” he said as the carnage of its superweapon plus the thousands of others around its hull were tearing up the huge, yet gnat-like drone fleet that seemed more interested in going after the other ‘small’ V’kit’no’sat ships. In fact, they weren’t attacking the Mach’nel at all.

“They’re stuck,” Brad said, pounding a fist on the wall excitedly. “They can’t retreat or we pound their guys on the surface. They have to fight here.”

“We’re losing so many ships,” Sarah said, seeing the counter continually decreasing like a game score. At least there were no people onboard those drone ships.

“It’s worth it,” Brad said, seeing the enemy hull damage. Their ships were so large they couldn’t be destroyed quickly, but several already had their shields down as the swarm of drones was totally engulfing them. There was nowhere they could run to without ramming into Star Force ships, but as they watched the V’kit’no’sat formation pulled in tighter and to one side of the Mach’nel, forcing the gnat swarm to face it directly on one side…which it didn’t do. They broke off their attack and swung around to double up against the ships on the other side.

The V’kit’no’sat adapted again, spreading out around the Mach’nel and getting in close to it at specific points to leave conduits open for it to fire through. If the drones tried to surround them again they’d have to move into those channels and get blown away.

But that didn’t happen either, for the drones avoided those channels and instead began weaving their way in between the V’kit’no’sat ships all the way up to the Mach’nel, but stopped just short. They kept at least one enemy hull between them and the massive ship and slugged it out with the rest of their fleet, daring the Mach’nel to fire its superweapon.

It didn’t, for shooting straight through a drone would hit the V’kit’no’sat ship behind it. Brad watching with glee as it stopped firing for over a minute, then managed a clean shot near to but missing one of their own. A few more precise shots opened up for them, but the repetitive beatdown that it had been putting on the drones earlier had been reduced down to manageable carnage.

“I think they might actually do it,” the ex-Commando said, mentally rooting them on.

“Can they really kill the big one?”

“They’re not trying to. They’re going for the rest.”

“What’s going on?” Jenn asked, coming out of the back room and bumping into the door jamb half asleep.

“We’re attacking the Dinosaur fleet,” Sarah said, not looking back at her.

“What? Why now?”

“Something changed, I don’t know what,” Brad said, “but they’re going at it hard.”

The three of them sat/stood around and watched the fighting for the next two hours, barely moving the entire time, up until the remains of the Star Force fleet suddenly broke off and retreated, leaving the Mach’nel and a scattering of other ships still intact.

“Did we lose?” Sarah asked.

“I’m not sure,” Brad said, looking through the statistics that were available on a side option. He walked over to the wall and used the menu to sift through what he wanted to see, frowning the whole time.

“It’s moving,” Jenn said as the big Mach’nel suddenly left the rest of its ships and headed in closer to Earth. The Star Force fleet immediately responded, heading back towards it as the superweapon opened up and fired down onto the planet. It didn’t hit shields, rather aiming for a recently exposed section of cityscape whose shield generator had been taken down by ground troops a few days ago.

The giant orange beam vaporized buildings on impact, kicking up a huge circular wave of destruction that expanded outward, soon followed by another a few dozen miles away. More followed as the Star Force fleet engaged the Mach’nel alone and started heavily pounding on its shields. Without the rest of the V’kit’no’sat ships, who had started drifting farther away, the Mach’nel was in a mismatch but it was so tough that it could take a lot of shots to the shields before they fell, during which they ravaged a select portion of the exposed planet’s surface.

Then when they tried to leave they were stuck in place by numerous interdictors creating an IDF field that nullified the Mach’nel’s engines. It then targeted them and killed a lot more drones up until it broke itself free and retreated back to where the other ships were, having its shields completely stripped away and a few weapons batteries damaged, but the armor on it was a rare type and incredibly hard to punch through…meaning it had only gotten scratched in the exchange for the damage done to the surface.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Jenn said, covering her mouth.

“I hope those cities were evacuated,” Sarah added.

The battle reports suddenly highlighted something in a replay, showing a small spot on the Machn’nel that had taken major damage. They showed several drone warships ramming it after a heavy barrage…then even more destroying themselves in an almost vain attempt to damage the Mach’nel, for its armor was even resistant to their collisions. They were doing damage, but the first few didn’t even punch through the outer shell and the others simply disappeared inside the hull, being swallowed up by its insane mass and resulting in no visible explosions that one would expect.

“They got it?” Sarah asked, listening to the reporter say just that.

“Yeah they did,” Brad confirmed with a satisfied smile. “A trade for the damage to the cities. Their superweapon is out of commission. They won’t be able to fire outside of our planetary defense guns’ range again without it.”

“Still…” Jenn said, not sure if the tradeoff was worth it after seeing the damage done to the cities.

“That just bought us a lot more time. We can’t kill their fleet with that Mach’nel there, but it’ll take a while for them to repair the damage. Hopefully a long time.”

“They can fix that?” Sarah asked incredulous.

“The files said they have factories inside that can make about anything, and the majority of the weapon is buried beneath the hull. They probably just broke the outer part.”

“How long?” Jenn asked.

“That’s miles of damage, so it won’t be quick.”

“What now?”

“Maintain the standoff and keep evacuating, I’d guess. Maybe the trailblazers have another plan, but I’m pretty sure that came off better for us than the V’kit’no’sat.”

“If there were people down there…”

“Those nearest the battlelines would have been the first ones evacuated to other parts of Earth. You know that.”

“I hope so. What about the troops?”

Brad’s face soured. “We probably lost some, but most would still be under the protection of the planetary shield unless they were in combat. The V’kit’no’sat won’t have fired on their own troops, but odds are we at least had some scouts down there…if not more.”

“I want out of here so bad,” Jenn said, closing her eyes.

“We all do,” Sarah echoed. “Every hour that goes by more get out. Our time is coming.”

That time didn’t come for another year, and by then the V’kit’no’sat had taken over or destroyed most of South America along with huge sections of the ocean colonies on either side. A month prior to the ships coming to Mars the swimming Dinosaurs had pushed all the way up to the Antarctica coastline where they established a foothold for the land troops to follow. A massive fight had occurred to get them that little bit of land and they had to pay a high price to take and keep it, but as of the first dropship landing in their Martian city the V’kit’no’sat were working their way out from the coastline in the long march towards the site of the Star Force-operated V’kit’no’sat pyramid that held their superweapon.

The trio rode up on another jam-packed dropship, but this time the journey was what the dropships were meant for…going up above the atmosphere and transferring their passengers to a larger ship. This one was a starship along with many others, most of which were civilian models, but the one they were taken to was a Star Force cargo ship and upon landing in one of the gigantic hangar bays they were hurried down and off the ramp with the dropship immediately taking off again, headed back down to Mars.

The same was true for hundreds of others coming and going from the hangar bay as the evacuees were herded into a series of huge doors that led further inside the ship…to the cargo bays. Their size dwarfed the hangars, with the trio walking into a room that was more than a mile high up to the ceiling and filled with portable housing modules stacked into crate mountains.

“Wow,” Sarah said, taking it all in.

“Stay together,” Brad urged as they and others were being waved forward into processing lines where they’d get their quarters assignments for the duration of the journey…which would only end up being a little more than a day after several spent loading people up. They headed in to the sun and used its massive gravity well to give their engines the push needed to travel between stars, then launched themselves off on the jumpline towards the Epsilon Eridani System, a mere 10.5 lightyears away, and the second most developed star system in the empire.

It was also a Human system, but one with an ally present and living in a gas giant. The Hycre were a very odd type of alien lifeform and not a part of Star Force, but they had been the only reason Star Force had survived when the lizard war began and even though the Human-led empire had quickly surpassed them, they still remained close allies and shared a bit of this system.

The rest of it was all Star Force and heavily industrialized. There were plenty of shipyards here churning out more drone warships along with a huge population that they were apparently going to be added to. Jenn especially had hoped they’d be going further away, but as of now there were no V’kit’no’sat in the system and a huge defense fleet waiting here for whenever they eventually came.

Breathing room at last, but there were still a whole lot of people back in the Sol that had to be evacuated…and if they came here, where would everyone go if the V’kit’no’sat followed?

Even Brad didn’t know that, but for the moment they were safely away from the war and that was what mattered most…though it wouldn’t last.

6

December 21, 3604

Epsilon Eridani System

Arrakis

As big as the Epsilon Eridani System was, it was able to handle the incoming evacuees with ease, though Duke Avril also had a head start in preparing to handle more while Sol had waited to get hit by the V’kit’no’sat again. When Jenn, Sarah, and Brad arrived in the system they were sent to a processing facility and then onto a small starship that took them out to the distant desert planet of Arrakis.

Aptly named for scifi lore, it was a huge desert world, but a cold one. It wasn’t completely colonized, with vast tracks of barren wilderness still visible from orbit, but slightly less now than of a few years ago given the massive expansion of pre-fabricated city structures. They were being built quickly, cheaply, but were solid and effective as all Star Force infrastructure was. They weren’t flashy, but when the evacuees got there the inside was almost like a normal city, just a lot more blan without all the ostentation that habitation for centuries often resulted in.

All three were given separate quarters, but arranged to have them side by side with one another. There were plenty to go around so they didn’t have to double up, but they were all level 1 quarters in order to pack as many into the quick built cities as possible. Jenn and Sarah still chose to share one though, with Brad giving them badly needed breathing room by staying in his. The other was left vacant but still assigned to Jenn, and it didn’t look like it was going to be needed by anyone else anytime soon.

Evacuees were coming in regularly to add to the population, but this was just one of many locations throughout the system that were specifically built to handle them. That said, there was a multitude of quarters spread across multiple planets that could also absorb people, so right now there was no population crunch going on, but it wasn’t until a few days ago that they learned more systems aside from Sol were being evacuated here.

There were no other attacks yet, for the V’kit’no’sat were still putting all their ships into their ongoing attack on Earth, but smaller Star Force systems along the enemy’s route to get to Earth were being slowly redirected here, prompting an ongoing discussion.

“Another group just came in,” Brad said as he walked into the girls’ quarters and found both watching the vid screen, Jenn perched on a stool and Sarah in a cushy single chair. “This time from Metti.”

“Metti now?” Sarah said with a sign. “Are they expecting every system to fall?”

“I think that’s the idea,” Brad said, leaning against the wall.

“Did you talk to any of them?” Jenn asked.

“Yeah I did. They don’t know much either, but they’re glad to be here. The defenses in Metti are pathetic compared to what Avril has built up.”

“Didn’t stop them in Sol, and that’s our capitol. You really think we can hold out here?”

“You’re forgetting all the ships we’re killing. They’ll have to bring more in to hit us here, a lot more. Then it’ll cost them huge again to take Epsilon Eridani and every other system they hit. Unless they keep bringing in constant reinforcements their own success will doom them. They’re going to run out of ships so long as we keep hammering them everywhere they go.”

“Think they’ll finish off Earth first?” Sarah wondered.

“I don’t know, but there’s a lot more in Sol than Earth for them to hack their way through.”

“So you think they’ll move us again?” Jenn asked.

“Not for a while. Most ships are probably pulling people out of Sol. When they’re freed up, yeah, I think they’ll move us again.”

“Plus everyone else already here? That’ll take even longer.”

“And where do we go?” Sarah added. “Where’s safe that we can flee to?”

“Away from the fighting. Make them keep hammering through system after system until they lose their appetite for it. Maybe force a stalemate. Their empire is huge and they could kill us all if they wanted, but how high a price are they willing to pay to do it? Maybe if we just slow them down enough, hurt them enough, they’ll be satisfied with taking Earth back and not make a serious attempt to take any more systems.”

“Star Force said they’re going to try and kill us all,” Sarah reminded him.

“I have no doubt they want to, but do they have enough ships to do it with.”

“You mean are they willing to send that many of their people to die to do it,” Jenn corrected. “Their ships have Dinosaurs on them, right?”

“Yes. Usually they’re so big they don’t get destroyed, but we can kill them and they know it now. How important is destroying us to them really? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows for sure, but I can promise you the Archons are going to make it very hard for them to finish the job and we’ve got such a large empire it will take them more than a century to do it if they really want to. And they’ll be losing ships and ground troops all the way. If they try to do it with just their navy our planetary defenses will eat them alive. They have to use the same penetrate and spread strategy, and that takes time. A lot of time.”

“Time for us to keep moving?” Sarah said, seeing the Star Force strategy there. “Has this been planned all along?”

“I would assume so. The trailblazers knew the threat, and if some Commandos knew, then all the Archons did. This war has been in the planning since the beginning by us. It’s the V’kit’no’sat that are new to it, and I get the feeling they’re not used to dealing with this much resistance.”

“Did you find a job,” Jenn asked, “or did that guy just want to talk?”

“I got a job, and if you’re willing I can use both of you.”

“Anything,” Sarah said, totally bored of just training and sitting, despite their freedom of movement to other parts of Arrakis. Playing tourist got old quick enough, and both she and Jenn wanted something constructive to do.”

“A lot of people want additional weapons and hand to hand training, but the upper level maturias are overloaded. That Critel is part of a private organization looking to fill the gap for a pittance of credits. They’re looking to make a profit but they know better than to try and gut people when maturia training is free, and they’ve just given me command of another training unit they’re starting up. I get to choose a staff, and you’re my first two picks if you want.”

“Yes,” both of them said in unison.

“Good. When’s the last time you two ate?”

“A few hours ago,” Jenn said.

“Let’s swing by the cafeteria then we’ll get to work.”

“Today?”

“There’s high demand and the quicker we can get our unit set up the better.”

“How many people?”

“1800, and we need as many staff as necessary to handle that number. I’ve been given a 100 credit a day stipend for the staff to split up as I deem necessary. I’ve opted not to take any myself, but I want both of you to.”

“Wow,” Sarah said, wide eyed. “How many staff are you going to get for that?”

“Don’t know. We’ve got recruiting to do and a long list of volunteers to sort through.”

“I’ll bet,” Jenn said, knowing that other evacuees were just as bored and frustrated as them. “Thanks.”

Brad waved off the appreciation with a flick of his hand. “Save it. You two aren’t trained beyond the basic maturia, so you’re going to have to learn as I teach you and then make sure the rest of the staff carry out my orders exactly. This is going to be about repetition and skill, and you two I need to insure the repetition while I’m handling the instruction.”

“Repetition I’m well familiar with,” Jenn said with a nod.

“Need a receptionist?” Sarah floated. “I’ve got more experience with handling people than she does.”

“That’s what I was thinking, but it’s going to be about the same thing. You’re going to handle the non-Humans.”

“I can do that,” she said, having dealt with mostly Humans but also a lot of other races visiting Earth.

“Let’s go, we’ll talk over the details as we eat.”

Jenn and Sarah raised their arms up and fist bumped, glad to finally have something to do, then hopped up out of their chairs and followed Brad out of the tiny set of quarters where they’d be spending little time going forward other than sleeping. The need for training was exploding in Epsilon Eridani more than they even realized, and their Critel owners were interested in creating as intense a program as possible, knowing that their customers all had their basic training during their maturia years so there wouldn’t be a big issue with integration.

And even a tenth or a twentieth of a credit per day fee would add up to a lot when you ended up with thousands of training units spread across rented facilities throughout the system. Profit was always a motive, but gathering profit while doing something beneficial for the empire was a double win, for Star Force had the most economic opportunities in this region of the galaxy by far, with many races beyond their borders having established ties specifically to get access to the Star Force markets.

Over the following months more people kept coming in from Sol and other places along with delayed but detailed news reports on the conquest of Earth. Star Force was making them pay for every mile they took all the way up to the Antarctic pyramid, then they stopped their advance and began fanning out into adjacent areas and slowly destroying all the cities nearby without getting within weapons range.

They did make the mistake of getting within shield range, for even once that section of the planetary defense shields were down the pyramid threw up its own V’kit’no’sat designed shield over a large section of Antarctica at extremely low altitude, nearly touching building tops in some cases. That made it hard for the Pterodactyls and other fliers, along with the Zen’zat gunships and their own small fighter craft, to move about and made the mechs all the more dangerous to them for the flyers couldn’t gain altitude to escape, confined to flying along the ground else they hit and bounce off the underside of the flat shield wall.

However, Star Force aerial craft were being given gaps in the shield that they could race through almost at will. The temporary doorways allowed them to escape pursuit over top the very thin barrier as well as fly across enemy troop formation below and drop down behind them. As a result, huge concentrations of aerial craft had gathered over Antarctica and were assisting ground troops in a very hard fought defense even before the enemy got within weapons range of the pyramid.

It was a far higher concentration of troops than Brad had seen to date, and he thought that was probably due to the fact that the shield would protect them from any run in from the V’kit’no’sat warships in orbit…and maybe even their superweapon if they’d gotten it working again. If they had they hadn’t shown it, but then again he had no idea how strong the pyramid shield was, though by the actions of the Star Force military it seemed they had confidence in it.

Heavy fighting was the daily staple in the news reports and he made time to review them each day, but the ample time he had previously was gone now. Busy as he was organizing his training unit, he spent 12 hours a day with them and another 2 for his personal training, leaving him 10 hours for sleeping and everything else, though not straight. His 12 hours were broken up into pieces, leaving him a maximum of 6 hours straight for sleeping.

The actual day cycle of the planet was 28 hours, but since everyone was indoors they kept to the Earth standard 24 hour day. If the exterior of the planet had been habitable to the point where people actually went outside they would have adjusted to it, but between the cold and thinner than comfortable atmosphere, the desert was treated almost as if it was vacuum, meaning almost everything that mattered happened indoors where people never had to even taste the outside air for the length of their entire lives if they so wished.

Despite the hectic schedule Brad made sure to keep up with what was happening on Earth, and after a long, hard fight to close on the pyramid he saw something that completely baffled his mind. The Dinosaurs were big enough already, but special units began showing up that had them truly monstrous in size, some of which massed more than 20 times normal and towered over the standard Star Force mechs.

Most of what the news reports were identifying as ‘Ultras’ were long-necked Dinosaurs, but none were Brontosaurus. They looked similar, but were actually different races. Others ultras were races that were likewise large, quadruped, and could carry a lot of equipment. All of the ultras had on full body armor head to tail, but they had additional machinery on them making them look very different from the nimble ground troops that Star Force had grown accustomed to fighting by now.

What all that equipment ended up being were shield generators, and when the V’kit’no’sat finally moved within weapons range of the pyramid the ultras led the way in a mad charge across the ruined crater where the surprise attack on the V’kit’no’sat fleet had blown apart the cityscape on top of the pyramid. That slowed their approach, but they had so many Dinosaurs assembled into four different assault lines, one each for the sides of the pyramid, that even when the ultras’ extra shields fell prior to them reaching the green/black stone the columns of enemy troops could not be stopped.

Nearby mechs and aerial craft punished them, but they barely even bothered to shoot back for the greatest threat were the point defense weapons in the pyramid that the V’kit’no’sat themselves had designed and built long ago. They knew they were going to have to take losses just to get up to the pyramid, so they weren’t going to waste time being slowed down by the Star Force mechs…not even the bigger ones that tried to block their path and which the ultras simply bashed aside with huge telekinetic fields.

Some were actually lifted off their feet and torn apart by the invisible energy fields, making it abundantly clear that the tightly packed V’kit’no’sat formation was far more deadly than expected. Brad finally realized that they were also combining their telekinetic power and lifting/tearing the same targets simultaneously, meaning any mechs within range were getting squashed like tin cans…except for certain types that seemed impervious to the invisible assaults.

The ex-Commando hadn’t known the mechs had countermeasures like that, but it made sense. His old armor had carried the same, though the idea of a person being powerful enough to tear apart a mech was more than he ever expected…but then again, those ultras were so big that whatever part of their bodies produced the telekinetic fields had to be more massive as well, and where psionics were concerned size of tissue did matter.

The charge to the pyramid happened fast compared to the fighting that had preceded it, for if Star Force had been able to delay their approach then the pyramid defenses would have killed every single one of the Dinosaurs and he assumed they knew it too, for they were fully determined to get to the lowest of the visible stair step tiers, after which they were still not safe, but some weapons now could not target them due to the angle of attack.

Others could and the carnage up close was gruesome despite the shields and armor all the V’kit’no’sat wore as they attacked the weapons batteries themselves, trying to take them out rather than shooting the armor of the pyramid. Brad saw misses hit it and do no damage, simply being absorbed by the stone.

One by one the weapons in certain areas of the miles wide pyramid were eliminated and the surviving V’kit’no’sat now had blind spots to hide within. Most of the ultras made it into those areas, though heavily wounded. A few others weren’t so lucky, being killed and blown to bits by the nearly pointblank defensive fire that was so effective there was no chance of them being revived later.

But while there were blind spots on the perimeter so long as the V’kit’no’sat held close to the pyramid, the mechs outside could move around as much as they liked shooting the wounded V’kit’no’sat where they could and hammering the others as the enemy ranks continued to thin. Wave after wave of aircraft flew in through holes in the overhead shield while the V’kit’no’sat fliers had never come within range, knowing they would be shot down so fast over the pyramid as to be useless, so right now Star Force also had air superiority and were doing everything they could to kill the Dinosaurs that were holding in the best defensive formation they could and with the ultras’ shield generators that were still functioning recharging and dropping defensive walls all the way to the ground that the mechs were hard pressed to punch through on their own.

Brad couldn’t watch it all straight through, for there wasn’t time, so he kept checking in occasionally over the following days as a hole was bored through the super hard armor exterior that was cited as being the same material as used on the enemy’s giant Mach’nel warships. As soon as the breach was large enough, pods on some of the ultras and others opened up and the Zen’zat inside came out, diving through the hole and getting inside the pyramid before the cutting resumed in order to get the breach large enough for the bigger races to enter.

7

February 3, 3605

Epsilon Eridani System

Arrakis

“Brad,” Jenn said when he walked into her quarters, “it’s starting.”

He turned to look at the vid screen and listened for a moment while reading the substories, but it didn’t take long to get the gist of what she was referring to. Earth wasn’t even conquered yet, but the V’kit’no’sat were already moving out to hit other systems. Not in any full blown invasions, but enough to disrupt traffic and hunt down any unescorted ships, evacuation or otherwise, that chose to come out from the protected planets.

“It’s a blockade. They’re trying to isolate the nearby systems.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“If they try to come into this system they’re going to get their asses kicked, but some of the others don’t have large enough fleets to do the same. They’re going to try to force a naval fight beyond planetary defenses, and if we don’t take the bait they’re going to sit at the stars and poach incoming traffic. It means we fight them on their terms or the blockade shuts down commerce.”

“And the evacuation…”

“The trailblazers won’t let that happen.”

“What are they going to do? The V’kit’no’sat keep bringing in more ships.”

“So do we, and we’ll start moving in armed convoys if necessary. Their ships are faster than ours, so unless we get a big head start they’ll run us down, but if we travel with warships they’ll have to fight on the run and that gets tricky. I’m not a naval officer, but I know standing and slugging it out is how you do the most damage. If you keep making microjumps, you’re in and out of targeting range constantly. It’s a different type of game that I’m not familiar with.”

“This is a game to you?”

“Commando slang, don’t read into it.”

“Hard not to. What if we were on one of those evacuation ships in the ‘game’ you’re saying is about to be played?”

“The trailblazers are good at winning games,” he reminded Jenn. “They’re not going to send convoys with only a chance of getting through. I’d feel fairly safe.”

“You’re alone in that.”

“Where’s Sarah?”

“She left an hour ago, not sure where. Think she might have herself a boyfriend.”

“About time.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning you’ve got me and she doesn’t. Not in all aspects, anyway.”

“About that, are you…” she began, but his attention was caught by a news update…one stating that the pyramid on Earth had finally fell to the Dinosaurs and that the remaining Star Force troops were evacuating beyond its weapons range, though reports indicated that they’d sabotaged everything internally that they could, so they expected them to be able to run without getting shot in the back.

“Damn it,” Brad said, shaking his head. “They did well to hold out that long, but there goes our superweapon and the strongest battlefort in the empire.”

“Did you expect them to hold out?”

“That was our best chance of anywhere on Earth, now the rest of the fight is going to be constant delaying withdrawals trying to bleed as many V’kit’no’sat troops as they can. It needs done, but that’s not a fun way to fight. You know you’re going to lose and are just trying to hold everything together so you don’t lose super bad.”

“Glad you got out when you did?”

“Yes and no. I’m glad I’m not fighting there now, but a part of me disagrees with that and probably always will.”

“Once a Commando, always a Commando?”

“You don’t fight as many battles as I have and just turn it off. Those skills, instincts, and experiences are still a part of me. I can’t unlearn it, nor would I want to, but fighting these V’kit’no’sat has to be a whole lot harder than the lizards and I can only imagine what that’s like,” he said, visibly grimacing. “And getting your ass kicked isn’t a nice way to learn.”

“How long do you think Earth has left?”

“If it keeps going like it is, years, but if they bring in a lot more ground troops that number gets cut down considerably. Then there’s all the other planets in Sol. It’s not going to completely fall for a long time so long as they have naval support. If that dries up then everyone there is going to die, civilian and warrior alike.”

“It’s all about naval, isn’t it?”

“Didn’t they teach you that in the maturia?” Brad wondered, having been born long before she did and not knowing what might have changed over the years.

“Yes, but it never really sunk in until lately how bad they have us outmatched. If we run out of drones it becomes a slaughter?”

“A delayed slaughter for planets with heavy defenses, but without naval cover there’s no way to evacuate anyone and once the enemy sizes up your capabilities it’s just a matter of waiting for the necessary troop levels to arrive and overwhelm you. Without the ability to change your forces’ status, defensive positions get predictably whittled down.”

“Is there anything that we can do? I mean Star Force, not you and me.”

“Keep the game changing and not let them know what we have. Make them either come in with overwhelming numbers, the kind of which they haven’t shown in their reinforcement streams, or risk picking a fight with unknown foes that they might end up losing. If they have enough to do the former its game over. If they risk a closer margin of victory then we have a chance to rack up some more wins, but the attrition is going to eat away at both sides. We’ve got the Kiritak, Bsidd, and Paladin feeding us resources in an impressive way, but I can’t even imagine what industrial machine the V’kit’no’sat have operating back in their territory.”

“What’s a Paladin?”

“The blue lizards on our side.”

“Blue? I thought they were all green.”

“The ones we breed are blue, the ones that were captured are green. Beyond that I don’t know much, aside from the fact that they can churn out supplies almost as fast as the Kiritak.”

“If you say so. I never paid attention to the logistics of the empire.”

“I’m not an administrator either, but when it involves getting more weapons and ships a warrior likes to know where they’re coming from.”

“Do you think the lizards will start hitting us again? I mean, after the Dinosaurs weaken us.”

“Are we going to have to fight two wars? It’s possible, but we’re so beyond the lizards now that even weakened they wouldn’t be very effective and the border hasn’t seen any activity in a long time.”

“I heard a rumor a few days ago that the reason we didn’t chase the lizards further coreward was because we were afraid of finding the V’kit’no’sat. Do you think some ship went too far and gave us away?”

“That was the reason we didn’t push further in, but it’s not like we didn’t have plenty of lizard systems rimward to take. Even when we had an advantage that fighting was nasty. The jerks didn’t know the meaning of the word surrender. Rumor has it the trailblazers had to teach it to a mastermind before it finally saw the light in time to avoid getting killed.”

“What?”

“A lizard General, more or less, changed sides and brought his army over with him. That’s why we have lizards in Star Force now. All the rest this side of the border died fighting despite us offering them a surrender option each and every time we fought. I never once encountered or heard of one who accepted. They always fought to the death and I don’t expect the V’kit’no’sat to be any different…except that they’re the ones winning and we’re losing.”

“Is surrender an option for us?” she asked tenderly, then shrugged in apology. “Not that I’m suggesting it.”

“We don’t have permission to live according to their rules. We’re offspring of Zen’zat. Have you not figured out what that means yet?”

“You’re saying that even if we surrendered to them they’d still kill us? Every last one?”

“Yep.”

“That makes no sense. Why hold us accountable for what someone else did if we were willing to do whatever they wanted us to do now? Why fight and lose more of their ships if a surrender was offered? Are you sure they wouldn’t at least consider it?”

“As a ruse, maybe. But we have to die.”

“And our dying is more important than their troops living?”

“I don’t know how they think, but you’ve seen the images of what they did on the Ribbon?” he asked, referring to a giant space station orbiting Titan that was invaded during the first attack on the Solar System before they tried to go after Earth.

“Everyone saw that,” she said, referring to the dismemberments and other gruesome forms of assassination they used against the civilians they caught.

“Don’t expect any different treatment if you tried to surrender. They want us all dead.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Did they make any demands when they got here? Did they demand that we submit to them, turn over our weapons, yadda, yadda, yadda?”

“I didn’t hear about any of that on the news.”

“Because it didn’t happen. They’re here as exterminators and we are not their equals. We are illegitimate offspring that have to be exterminated. It isn’t very complicated. We simply aren’t allowed to exist and they’re here to remedy the error.”

Jenn put her head in her hands. “There has to be some way. Something more than this constant fighting and evacuation.”

“Dying.”

“You’re doing a wonderful job of cheering me up.”

“I wasn’t trying. You’re usually upbeat enough that you bounce back on your own whenever you get stressed out.”

“Do I? Doesn’t feel like it.”

“One of the things that attracted me to you,” he said, glancing back at the vid screen and seeing close ups of the various V’kit’no’sat races surrounding the pyramid with multiple smaller ships landed on the stair step tiers and flocks of Pterodactyls flying overhead almost as if they were gloating that they’d just taken it back.

“What’s the long term play here, Brad? We just keep running…you and I?”

“And Sarah,” he added.

“That’s not what I mean. Are we going to be evacuees forever?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Does Star Force still need younglings?”

Brad looked at her closely, trying to judge her emotions from subtle cues that he’d learn to pick up on long before she’d ever been born.

“You mean should we be creating more population when we’re having trouble evacuating everyone we have now. You want to start living rather than running.”

“Exactly. I don’t mind the small quarters and temporary structures, but are we here to move on again or are we here for keeps?”

“I don’t think anything is at ‘keeps’ stage right now, but I don’t think they’ll be coming here until they finish in Sol and that will take years.”

“So am I wrong to want to add another to the ranks or would that actually hurt Star Force, meaning someone would have to be left behind that otherwise could get out?”

“Have you asked?”

“Asked?” she said, frowning. “Asked who?”

“Star Force,” he said, walking over a couple steps and started to touch the vid screen, altering the settings into an interactive terminal. “They have active lists to request such things, and the state of reproduction is always one of them.”

“The what?”

“Hold on a sec and I’ll show you,” he said, sifting through the depth of the Star Force information net, but fortunately he knew what to look for. “Here we go. Epsilon Eridani reproduction quotas…and quotas for Arrakis.”

“There are quotas?” Jenn said, standing up and walking beside him so she could see for herself.

“Recommendations. If we’re overpopulated it’s to let people know to stop getting knocked up, and vice versa when we need more population. Right now we’re…wait, that can’t be right. It’s saying we’re level 5 green, both for the system and the planet.”

“Green meaning?”

“Green means more population desired, yellow means our trend is neutral, and red means we’re overpopulated and the babymakers need to take a chill pill,” he said, throwing a side glance at her. “Green 5 is as high as it goes, but that makes no sense with all the extra population being crowded in here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Checking population statistics,” he said, digging into other databases and finding what he expected. “Continued increase in population for the star system, now at 157% of pre-invasion levels. Damn that’s a lot of people,” he said, seeing the 2.7 trillion mark that also included the Hycre planet, but its population was estimated at only 4 billion.

“So why do we need more?”

“I don’t know, but this isn’t a mistake. They’re wanting as many infants as possible.”

“Do you think we’re going to be here at least another year?”

“I think that’s a safe bet, but I wouldn’t say for sure. The V’kit’no’sat are determining a lot by how many ships they decide to send.”

“All things considered, do you expect us to be here a year from now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you expect the V’kit’no’sat to be here a year from now?”

“No.”

“Then would you mind assisting me with this? My roommate is no help,” she said with a coy smile.

“How much help do you need?” he said, with his eyes tracing her outline from head to toe and back again.

“Let’s play it safe and make a week of it. Think you can handle that?”

“Once a day?”

“I’ve had some trouble in the past, and repetition seems to be the key.”

“As you wish,” he said, tugging her by the waist towards the exterior door, “but my place so Sarah doesn’t cut in. I don’t think I have enough stamina for both of you.”

Jenn lightly jabbed him in the abdomen, then he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her out of the tiny set of quarters and over to his where they started the process of adding another Human to the Star Force population.

8

November 7, 3605

Epsilon Eridani System

Arrakis

“Ugh, what’s taking her so long?” Sarah complained to Brad as they both sat outside the room where Jenn was giving birth.

“How long does it normally take?”

“For her, annoyingly quick. I’m the one that spent hours in labor.”

“Not doing that again?” Brad guessed.

“Twice was enough, thank you. My part in maintaining the population. Two per female is a neutral growth rate.”

“Is that why you did it?”

“Honestly, the first time was an accident…or to be honest more like carelessness. The second time was intentional, but neither had anything to do with the population. I’m just trying to make conversation so this goes faster.”

“We’re sitting here talking. Jenn’s the one that has all the difficulty.”

“Doesn’t feel like it. This is taking forev…” she said as the door suddenly opened and a medtech stepped out, waving a hand.

“All clear, you can come in now.”

“Finally!” Sarah half yelled, storming in faster than Brad and getting to Jenn’s side as soon as possible. She sat down on a stool next to the thin medtable on top of which Jenn was laying and put a hand on her shoulder, waking her up. “Hey, you ok?”

“I’ve been better. Stupid baby was huge, but I got him out. Commando genes I guess.”

“I’d apologize for that,” Brad said, grabbing another stool and perching next to Sarah as he looked across to the far side where there was a smooth pod in which the baby was now cradled with all manner of nurturing technology within, “but we don’t get any genetic alteration. Tired or sore?”

“Tired. They had to use a regenerator to fix some stretch damage he busted up on the way out, so there’s no more pain, but I’m tired as hell.”

“Number 7,” Sarah said, looking at the baby inside the clear bubble top as it squirmed around a bit. “Was it worth it?”

“Ask me tomorrow.”

“How long before you can leave?” Brad asked.

“I’m already cleaned up, but they said I can stay as long as I need to recover my strength. The little guy goes in an hour though, so if you want to have a chat with him…”

“There’s nothing I could say that he’d understand,” Brad said, standing up and walking over to the pod where the new Human was receiving a mix of atmospheric and patch nutrients to ease his transition into the galaxy now that he was off Jenn’s life support. “No hair?”

“Some do, some don’t. It’ll grow later,” she said with a yawn. “Hard to believe we started out this way, isn’t it?”

“My earliest memories are from age 4.”

“I don’t remember anything prior to 6.”

“I do,” Sarah differed. “I remember some of the first obstacle courses. The kind we get at 2.”

“You remember being 2?” Brad asked.

“Not much, but a little.”

“A question,” Brad said, looking in the direction of one of two medtechs across the large room sitting at a work station.

“Shoot,” she said, looking at him.

“Do you know why the reproduction quotas are green 5?”

“Because we’re emptying the maturias. All the older younglings are already evacuated and the staff that handles them are either being sent with them or soon will be. There are a couple of Galactica-class ships set up to operate as mobile maturias for the transit, so when they come in and pick up some of the infants we have more slots available. No reason not to use them as long as the system is secure, which is why there’s a population boom request posted. We’re expected to lose a lot of people in this war, so the more we can get started in the maturias now the better.”

“How long before he goes?” Brad said, pointing to his son.

“I don’t know. Priority is going to the older ones, but I think about 40% of the infants have already been taken, hence the open slots. As many people as we have here, they can’t keep up with the demand.”

“Are they trying?” Sarah wondered.

“Oh yeah. Birth rates have skyrocketed. We’re quite busy.”

“Just Humans or everyone else?”

“I don’t know about other systems, but we’re mostly Human here. Second highest are Bsidd, and they don’t reproduce.”

“What do you mean they don’t reproduce?” Jenn asked.

“They have queens that lay eggs. Most of the Bsidd you see can’t reproduce.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I did,” Sarah said, raising an eyebrow at Jenn.

“How many eggs?”

“They’re tiny, so thousands, even millions if they want to work at it. They develop outside their body for the most part, which is why they can reproduce so much faster than Humans.”

“So not fair,” Jenn said, leaning her head back against the pillow.

“Kiritas are similar, but with bigger eggs, except they don’t have queens. Their entire population can reproduce, which was a major problem before they joined Star Force. Most people don’t realize it, but overpopulation can kill civilizations. The quota recommendations are one tool to help control that.”

“Star Force rescued the Kiritas, didn’t they?” Sarah asked, trying to remember back to obscure maturia information given to them. All of it and more was available on the public databases, but one had to actively look for it there and she’d never had an interest in the subject matter before.

“The story goes that the Kiritas sought out Star Force and asked for their help in exchange for whatever they wanted. Their homeworld was dying of overpopulation, everyone was starving and whole sections of Kirit had broken down into anarchy. It was a very ugly situation that took a long time to remedy, because back then Star Force was tiny. Today we’d squash a problem like that in a year tops.”

“Brad, can I bother you for a lift back to my quarters. My legs are trash right now.”

“You can rest here as long as you like,” the medtech repeated.

“I know, but this little guy and me are heading different ways and there’s no reason to hold either of us up. Brad?”

“Happy to,” he said, getting close enough to her that she could wrap her arms around his neck, then he reached underneath her body and picked her up easily as she nearly melted in his grasp with her head resting against his neck. He could feel her fatigue and knew from personal experience that even the slightest regenerator use left one feeling drained if it wasn’t attached to a supply unit, for it would cannibalize tiny bits of tissue from the rest of your body to repair the damaged areas.

“If that’s what you want,” the medtech said, getting up and walking over to them. “Thanks for bringing him this far. We’ll see him on safely from here. Do you want him to…”

“No identification,” Jenn said, knowing what he was about to ask. “Keep it anonymous.”

“Very well. You’ll be able to change your mind over the next month if you wish and there will be an easy link to your comm profile. After that the birth record will autodelete.”

“Not my first time,” Jenn said sleepily. “Let’s go, Brad. I’m trusting you not to drop me.”

“Not a chance,” he said, nodding at the medtech as he carried her out of the room and intended to take her all the way back to their quarters in such a manner, despite that being better than a 30 minute journey as Sarah lagged behind a bit.

“How bad was it for her?” she asked after they were out of sight.

“Bad enough we almost had to intervene. A quarter of an inch less and we would have.”

“Do you know why the baby was so big?”

“For sure, no, but it was probably a laggy birth switch. There are a lot of parameters the body uses to determine the time, and if some of those are suppressed they have to have the pressure on them build up until the body can’t ignore them, and the longer the time goes on the bigger the baby gets.”

“What would you have done if it was bigger?”

The medtech cringed. “Cut it a bigger opening to get him out.”

Sarah bit her hand, not liking that idea one bit. “Ouch.”

“She wouldn’t have felt it, but that kind of thing is always rough on the body.”

“Ya think?” she said, walking away then belatedly turning her head back. “Thanks.”

“Make sure she eats plenty the next 24 hours.”

“I will.”

Four days later and Jenn still wasn’t back to normal, but the fatigue had diminished enough for her to do some light running…which then replaced it with another type of fatigue, but she knew that sitting on her ass for weeks would be a bad idea and the sooner she got to doing at least a little training the faster she would recover. The regenerator worked wonders, but it couldn’t give you fitness, only rebuild missing parts. It was up to her to strengthen those parts and get her mojo back, and while she expected to have plenty of time to work on that now that she’d temporarily quit her job for the latter stages of her pregnancy, fate conspired to throw another wrinkle into her life.

“What is this about?” she asked when Sarah showed her the comm message they’d both received.

“An evacuation ship is taking everyone from this city further away from the fighting…if we want to leave. If not we’ll be relocated to Corneria individually,” she said, referencing the most developed planet in the system. “I guess they want to clear out this area so they can house more people coming in from Earth.”

“Why not just use the ship to go get them?” she said, frowning as she read through the message.

“I…actually that’s a good question. Maybe it’s a ship they don’t want getting that close to the fighting?”

“Or maybe Epsilon Eridani is getting too full to take anyone else. If it was, they’d have to send people further away and that would mean ships couldn’t make as many trips.”

“Damn, you’re probably right. So they drop them off here because it’s closest, then…”

“Then they are expecting this system to fall eventually.”

“Do we go or stay?” Sarah asked.

“Is Brad on the list?”

“I assume so. It said the entire city.”

“If he is, then we go. If not, I’m staying with him.”

“And me with you. They don’t say where the ship is going though.”

“Does it matter? The further away from the damn Dinosaurs the better. How long before we have to decide?”

“9 hours and 43 minutes.”

“Shit. I’ve got to find Brad. Why the hell didn’t they give us more warning?” she said, running out their quarters’ door as her legs protested mildly, but Jenn ignored them as she hurried to get to the makeshift training center where she knew he’d be.

13 hours later the three of them were boarding a dropship with their standard one duffle each containing clothes and a few personal items, but this time they’d been instructed to take extra clothing. That had been odd, for Star Force always had enough to go around no matter what planet they were on and that little request worried Sarah more than it did Jenn.

When they got onboard the ship they suddenly realized why, seeing that the crew of the cargo ship were mostly Kiritas and the same prefab habitat buildings were set up in the massive bays like they’d ridden in to get here from Earth, but this trip was going to take far longer as they realized their destination was not a single system over. Rather, they were being taken all the way across Star Force territory to the Rim Region where Director Davis had been busy expanding the empire into newly acquired areas when the invasion began.

He hadn’t returned as far as Sarah knew, and Brad had said he probably wouldn’t. The highest ranking Monarch wasn’t one to go to the battlefront, but rather to call the shots from behind the scenes and keep producing as many warships and supplies as possible to supply the trailblazers, for they were the ones going to be leading this war. Davis might have been the one to create Star Force long ago, but he wasn’t the military mastermind that the Archons were.

But organizing evacuations was right in his sweetspot, so the fact that they were being hauled all the way out there reassured Sarah more than anything. Had they been moved to another system nearby it would have been an improvement, but it also would have suggested that they would have to keep getting bumped over and over again as the war progressed and the V’kit’no’sat hit more systems. That would put them in a growing disadvantage as the evacuation population grew and grew until they’d no longer have enough ships to move everyone out.

But if they started moving some of them all the way to the end of the line that would ease that burden, and after talking with a lot of other people onboard the cargo ship it was the mutual consensus that Davis, or whatever Monarch was calling the shots for their ship, was playing the long game here by getting them fully away from the fighting to where they could reintegrate into the empire rather than being perpetual guests.

It took weeks to get out of the Human Core Region and through Bsidd territory, then even more time to get to what was known as Grid Point Stargate. Sarah had seen pictures of it before, but when they actually arrived and saw it displayed in all its glory very few onboard the cargo ship could keep from being wide eyed.

The system they arrived at was empty save for a few defense stations and patrols, but the cargo ship had made a very slow jump away from it to a point nearby that had its own gravity field equivalent to that of a planet…but it wasn’t a planet. The cargo ship braked its momentum against the gravity field produced from the mass of the Grid Point itself, and that fact blew Sarah’s mind away.

It wasn’t a sphere, but rather a thick column that had two large discs on either end and pointed the same direction…away from the nearby star system and off into deep space.

And each of those discs were over 11,000 miles in diameter, with the entire construct measuring over 30,000 miles long.

“How did anyone ever build that?” Jenn asked as they watched a vid screen from inside their temporary quarters, for they wouldn’t be getting off here, merely passing through.

“A little each day for a very long time,” Brad said, marveling at it as well, “but this isn’t Star Force’s work. We acquired it from The Nexus.”

“I know, but how in the world did they build it?” she asked, referencing the much larger civilization rimward of Star Force territory whom they were loose allies with. Not enough for them to come help fight the V’kit’no’sat, but enough to have integrated a portion of their economies and travel lanes. In fact, some of the members of The Nexus had left and joined Star Force, which is what had given Davis the new Rim Region to begin with. That exchange had left relations a bit frosty, but apparently not too much because the Star Force Director had managed to negotiate the transfer of one of their Grid Points all the way out here to more fully link Star Force territory with The Nexus.

That was where this giant space station had come from, taken from a Nexus member race and transported out here the slow way, but now that it was set up and linked in it provided a rapid transit ‘highway’ out to Grid Point Annsa, which was now also Star Force property and had come with the annexation of the H’kar, whose territory marked the inner border of the new Star Force Rim Region.

Grid Point Annsa then linked to others, with the line traveling out of Star Force territory and into the huge network of magnetic drive slingshots that connected The Nexus civilization. Years of travel by gravity drive hopping from one system to another were reduced down to months or even weeks in some cases, binding the huge alliance together and now giving them access to Star Force territory, with the flow of commerce apparently not having been affected by the invasion of Earth, for the ‘smaller’ space stations surrounding the construct were cities in and of themselves, making this location essentially its own system with a population in the hundreds of billions.

Their cargo ship had to wait in line for more than a week before a carrier ship was available, then the 24 mile long cargo ship flew inside the 278 mile long carrier and docked along with many other vessels, all of whom had to pay hefty fees for the lift, but it was still more economical than traveling the slow way and generated a huge amount of revenue for the Grid Point, but since Star Force owned this particular carrier their ships got to ride for free, though they still had to be booked.

When the carrier was full of evacuation ships, a few civilian ones, and a pair of Albos warships, it moved over in front of one of the giant discs and aligned itself perfectly inside the massive magnetic field the construct produced even as another ship shot in to an insanely fast deceleration against the other disc, braking against its field the same way the outgoing carrier was about to propel itself using the magnetic drives the craft were built with.

Stars also produced magnetic fields, which offered far more pushing power than gravity fields, but stars had fields that were constantly in flux and should you try an interstellar jump on them you’d end up careening off course and being doomed to drift through the galaxy until you ran out of supplies or luck had it for you to come within proximity of another star and manage to snag hold of it. Given the vastness of space that probability was low, meaning that no one in their right mind would try a mag jump off a star, thus the technology wasn’t used.

But the Grid Point constructs created stable magnetic fields, allowing them to be used for jumps and why special carrier ships had to be built with the mag drives that allowed their outgoing carrier to accelerate so fast that the Grid Point disappeared in the blink of an eye…then they were coasting through space far faster than even most black hole gravity jumps would allow and heading across the vastness of Star Force territory towards the H’kar and the Rim Region, somewhere in which they’d be making a new home.

9

March 19, 3606

Uyit System (Rim Region)

Orrpwer (Tolsoi capitol)

Sarah and Jenn were in their shared quarters when a comm prompt sounded. It was a small tone that left a blinking light in the corner of the vid screen so they’d find it later if they weren’t there at the time. Sarah got up off her stool and touched the light, bringing up the text messages to read, for both she and Jenn had received what looked like duplicate notices from Star Force.

“What is it?”

“Moving again,” Sarah said with a frown, for they’d assumed this was the end of the line and had mentally started to adjust to living here with the planet full of monkeys…or at least that’s what the Tolsoi looked like to her. They were a more recent addition to Star Force and native to the Rim Region, having had a huge civilization of their own that had since been incorporated into the empire by their choice, unlike several others that had been misbehaving and got absorbed rather than annihilated when Star Force intervened and kicked their asses.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jenn said, bolting up out of her chair and over to the vid screen.

“Wait, it says this one is special. Undisclosed location.”

“Meaning what?”

“It says we’re welcome to stay on Tolsoi or we can join a select group of evacuees and travel to a planet off the Star Force maps. One the V’kit’no’sat also don’t know exists,” Sarah read with an eyebrow rising at the next caveat, “but it’ll be a one way trip, because they can’t have people coming back and spreading word about where it is.”

Jenn bit her lip as she and her sister locked eyes.

“That’s about as safe as we can get,” Sarah finally floated. “They can’t kill us if they can’t find us.”

“Yeah. That does sound pretty good, but if they’re worried about the V’kit’no’sat getting to us all the way out here that doesn’t given me a lot of confidence.”

“If we go it’ll probably open up more room here for other people from the warzone.”

“Makes sense. Does it say how many people can go?”

Sarah scanned through the short message again. “Nope.”

“I wonder if Brad got an invite.”

“We came in together, so probably. It says we have two months to decide, so no rush.”

“I wonder where this planet is. Probably further rimward. It’s gotta be built already or they wouldn’t be taking people, right?”

“I would think so. If it’s a work in progress they wouldn’t want us. They’d want construction people.”

“What do you think?” Jenn asked.

“If Brad’s going, then yeah. Let’s disappear and start over.”

“Even if it’s a little rough?”

“Star Force builds fast.”

“Yeah we do. But now I’m worried they won’t ask Brad to go.”

“Why?”

“If they’re getting people without combat skills out first.”

“Hmmn,” Sarah said, thinking that over. “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

“He’s probably training right now.”

“We can interrupt him for this.”

“You interrupt him, I’ll watch,” Jenn said, half joking.

“Ok I will,” she said, walking out of their quarters.

Jenn cringed, then reluctantly followed her. Brad had told her that Commandos really hated being interrupted during training.

They found him in one of the nearby gymnasiums, but rather than running or calisthenics drills, Brad was in a sparring match with a Tolsoi and both were using long swords held at the midsection. They didn’t have any cutting edges to them, just rounded sticks more or less, by the two were going at it at a speed Jenn had never seen Brad move before. The Tolsoi stood shorter than the Human, coming up to about his shoulders, but he was bouncing around so much it was hard to tell as they crossed swords and occasionally threw in a shoulder or knee ram, knocking each other around as the monkey-like race proved to have greater agility…and especially jumping power.

Several times the girls saw him somersault over top of Brad’s head, but after he’d done it several times the Human caught him midair with a sword strike that batted the Tolsoi down to the ground with a chest hit.

But Brad didn’t stop there, he immediately attacked him again as his opponent tried to roll away, but a couple more hits pinned him down enough for a heavy Human foot to land on his fury tail.

The Tolsoi shrieked, but couldn’t move from his pinned position as Brad’s rounded sword tip came down and hovered over his head…then he stepped off his tail and the two got some space, apparently with their sparring match concluded as many more Tolsoi were looking at the pair from around the ring.

Brad noticed the girls in the distance, for there were very few Humans in here, and waved them over. Jenn poked Sarah in the back of the ribs so she’d walk first, then followed half hiding behind her all the way up to the former Commando.

“Would you like a try at me?” he scoffed, looking at Sarah.

“Ah, no. That’s not a good idea.”

“How about two on one?” Brad said deadpan, though Jenn could tell he was actually joking.

“You mad?”

“No,” he told her, waving Jenn out from behind Sarah. “I just got finished instructed Vardolon on how he needs to keep his tail tucked when he’s on the ground. It helps them with balance on their feet, but if someone can get a hold of it they’re in a bad position, which is why their combat armor has the option of locking it down.”

“We lose agility that way,” the Tolsoi said with a peculiar accent, but still recognizable English that was the Star Force standard language that all races in the empire learned, save for the few that didn’t have the necessary vocal chords to speak it, though they had mechanical translation devices to overcome that disadvantage. “We need to move with our tails free.”

“Then you have to learn to protect them,” Brad insisted.

“So the Archons have told us, but there are few Humans out here to train with and no Tolsoi would grab another’s tail so callously. It hurts too much.”

“Better I lightly hurt you so you can learn before someone less caring really yanks on it.”

“Remind me to thank you after the pain subsides,” the monkey-like fighter said, with Brad’s hand lightly pushing him away with a brush of the shoulders.

“You’re welcome in advance. Now, before I find my next victim, what did you two need?”

“We got a message about another evacuation,” Sarah said plainly. “We wanted to know if you did.”

“Not that I’m aware. An evacuation to where? I thought this was the end of the line.”

“It just arrived by comm,” Jenn explained. “We both got it at the same time and it’s a request more than an order. It says we’ll be taken to an unmapped planet but won’t be able to come back.”

“A planet not on the Star Force maps,” Sarah corrected. “So the Dinosaurs won’t know where to look.”

“Interesting,” Brad said with a frown. “A one way trip?”

“Seems like it. We’ve got a couple months to decide, but we wanted to run it by you. If you’re not going we’re not.”

“You said the message just came in?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll check when I get back, but that’s pretty much a no brainer. If the Archons have a planet off the grid for evacuees to get to, that’s where you need to go.”

“We?” Jenn asked, not liking his wording there.

“Depends whether or not I got the invite.”

“We’re not going without you.”

“I’ll be back in two hours. Can we hold this discussion until then?”

“Yeah,” Sarah said with a casual wave of her hand. “Get back to your sparring. Jenn was impressed.”

Jenn gave her an annoyed look, but didn’t disagree.

“Alright, clear the ring. Who’s next?” Brad asked, turning his attention back to the Tolsoi.

The one he’d just been fighting with passed his sword to the next to go, then whispered the words, “Keep your tail tucked.”

Sarah and Jenn backed up enough to give them room, then watched for a few more minutes that ended up turning into the full two hours. They’d never seen Brad spar like this and were thoroughly intrigued all the way up until they finally finished, with him getting knocked down a few times at the end due to fatigue, but it was clear that he was far better suited to this than the Tolsoi.

“You’re drenched,” Jenn said, keeping a few feet away from his sweat soaked clothes.

“So I am. You impressed yet?” he asked Sarah, who smiled with a little blush showing.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Come on. I’ll get cleaned up and we can get something to eat, then we can discuss whatever this is going to be.”

An hour later they were sitting in the cafeteria on a 4-person table with one chair left empty as they talked. Brad had also received the invite, for which Jenn was very relieved. They speculated as to where they were going and who would be there, but ultimately they had no information nor did anyone else they discussed the matter with over the next two months. After that they had another 3 week wait until their ship arrived and was declared, with them realizing that they were going to be transported on one of the Galactica-class starships that could hold over 140 million people each.

There was only one in orbit and it had just arrived two days ago, with dropships heading up to it immediately as they began the long loading process a few dozen people at a time in most cases, though some larger transports were also being used that could take several hundred, but getting the ship full wasn’t something that would happen overnight. The fact that there wasn’t any unloading suggested that the last occupants had stayed at the mystery planet, possibly having been taken from elsewhere because this was the first time anyone had seen a Galactica in orbit as far as they could determine by talking with others and perusing the communal information boards.

The starship dwarfed everything else in orbit, even the giant Sentinel-class defense platforms that had caused the V’kit’no’sat so much damage when they’d attacked Sol…save for the fact that the Mach’nel’s superweapon had eventually destroyed most of them due to its greater range. If their regular ships showed up all the way out here the Sentinels were going to be hard for them take down, for they were just as big as the V’kit’no’sat ships, only without internal living space. They were drones as well, with no one onboard and controlled remotely, making them pound for pound more deadly and a major obstacle to be removed by any invading enemy…and Star Force had many out here, just none as powerful as the Dinosaurs.

When the trio got to the boarding area they had to wait for several hours before they got to check-in, which was a wide area with multiple terminals that led to the dropships a few hundred meters in the distance that were constantly landing, loading, and taking off again in rapid succession in order to fill the giant starship as fast as possible.

Sarah walked out a few steps ahead of Brad and Jenn and got to the desk-like terminal first, then gave the attendant there all their names as Brad slowed to a stop and let the girls get a step ahead of him.

“I’m sorry, I’ve only got the two of you listed,” the attendant said with a frown. “Jenn and Sarah Stuzi. There’s no Brad Minnen at all on our lists, regardless of birthdate.”

The two girls spun around and looked at him horrified as he set his duffle down on the ground and walked up to them, giving the attendant an apologetic look.

“That’s right, there’s not. I turned down the invite.”

“What the hell?” Jenn said angrily, glaring at him only slightly more harsh than Sarah was.

“You wouldn’t have gone without me.”

“I’m not going without you,” she said firmly, picking up her duffle but Brad grabbed it and held her in place.

“You are going. Both of you. Wherever this ship is headed you’ll be safe there because no one knows where it is and no one can come back to tell anyone about it. It’s where you need to be.”

“So do you,” Jenn said defiantly.

“Come over here, both of you,” he said, dragging Jenn and his duffle away from the attendant so she could process the next people in line.

“What in the galaxy are you thinking?” Jenn said, lowering her voice a bit, but anyone nearby could still hear and she didn’t care if they did. She just wanted to avoid outright yelling and was a hair away from that as it was.

“This is where we go our separate ways, Jenn. I didn’t tell you earlier because you might have stayed with me. If you did I would have looked out for you, but by getting on that dropship I’ll have succeeded in keeping you safe. You’ll be out of harm’s way and that’s what matters. Both of you,” he said, glancing at Sarah. “You’ve been family the past few years and I have no regrets, but your future lies on that mystery planet. Mine does not.”

“And why not?”

“Because if I go there I can’t come back, and when I heard that I realized I had never wanted to run. Part of me was always wanting to get in the fight, but I had you two to look after so that took priority. I’m accomplishing that mission here and now, and you can hate me for it if you want, but once you get on that dropship you’ll be safe…so you’re getting on, now.”

“That’s my decision,” Jenn said, a tear forming in her left eye.

“And it’s my decision what I do as well. I’m not staying in the Rim Region. I’m going back.”

Sarah covered her mouth in shock, but Jenn simply sagged and started crying. Part of her had always suspected, but she’d never really given it much thought.

“I love you,” he said sincerely, “but you won’t be seeing me again regardless of what happens. You two,” he said, looking at Sarah, “take care of each other and survive this. I don’t know what the future holds for Star Force, but I’m a warrior and I belong in the fight. I never really was a civilian. In retrospect I just needed a long vacation, the last bit of which you’ve made very rejuvenating. I thank you for that.”

“Our 5 years aren’t up,” she said, almost pleading.

“I’ll accept responsibility for that and sever the seal. There’s no reason for you to wait up on me. I won’t be coming to wherever you’re going, so I want you to get on that dropship and start thinking ahead while remembering us as a good few years and an important part of your life, because that’s what it is for me. It would have lasted longer except for the V’kit’no’sat, but such things we can’t control. I’m glad to have known you…both…but we have to part ways here and now and I’d like to do that without fighting. You’ve been good for me, Jenn, but I have to do this and where I’m going you can’t follow. So be safe, please, for yourself and Sarah, but also so I don’t have to worry about you.”

“Damn you,” she said in a whisper, lightly punching him in his tight chest. “Why do you have to be so…”

“Heroic,” Sarah finished for her.

“Yeah…that. She always told me you were too good for me.”

“Wrong,” Brad corrected. “I chose you for a reason.”

“And that reason doesn’t still exist?”

“The part of my life that you fit into is coming to an end. You are still worthy. Don’t let her or any other twit convince you otherwise.”

“Hey,” Sarah mildly objected.

“You really have to do this, don’t you?”

“It’s who I am, Jenn.”

“I know,” she said, leaning her forehead against his neck. “I know.”

Brad hugged her warmly, then looked down at her thin, flowing hair. “I’ll always love you, but don’t tie your heart to me. I’m letting you go so you will be safe and free to live. Let me go too and make this a beginning rather than an end.”

“But you’re so hot…” she said sadly, and in that moment he knew that she’d be alright.

“You’re not bad yourself,” he said, pulling her face up and kissing her one last time. “Stay in shape.”

“Count on it,” she said, summoning up the courage to let him go, because she knew there was no way to hold him here and he deserved better than to have her try. “Thanks for the memories.”

“I never told you this, but after the lizard war a part of me was tore up inside from all the gore. It never really healed until I found you. Now I’m whole again. Thank you for that and the memories.”

“She may hate me for this now, but she’ll get over it,” Sarah said, walking up to Brad. “I have to at least once.”

Sarah grabbed and kissed him long and hard, then backed away glad that he hadn’t stopped her.

“Grab your duffles and get going. Start your future in the next few steps with no regrets. Our time was temporary, but you two should always stick together. Don’t change that now or ever. I envy you that.”

“Survive,” Jenn told him as she and Sarah turned and walked back over to the attendant, with the people in line letting them cut back in.

Brad stood in place, watching them quickly get processed and cleared for departure, and to their credit they didn’t turn back. They did as he had asked, moving forward rather than clinging to the past, though he did just long enough to see them walk up the boarding ramp into the dropship and then waited for it to seal up and lift off. Only then did he let Jenn go in mind as well.

“I’ll try to survive,” he whispered where no one else could hear, “but that isn’t the top priority. Keeping you and everyone else like you alive is.”

Brad picked up his duffle and walked back the way he’d come, then headed off through the city, not back to his quarters, and after a few hours arrived at a Star Force recruitment station staffed primarily by Tolsoi, but that didn’t matter. They were all part of the same empire and this station functioned the same as all the rest no matter what planet they were on.

He walked up to another attendant with his duffle slung over his shoulder and looked down at the smaller monkey.

“Hello, Human. What can I do for you today?”

“My name is Brad Minnen, birthdate July, 3170,” he said as the attendant immediately started typing in his information to look up his file. “I’m a former Commando and I’m here to reenlist…”

10

February 9, 3607

Shangri-La System (Cygnus Arm)

Inner Zone

It had taken nearly a year to get here, but Sarah and Jenn had finally arrived at their destination system. They didn’t know where it was exactly, for all they were told was that it was out in the Cygnus Arm of the galaxy and on the far side of The Nexus. That meant they were near to the edge of the galaxy and off the maps of even the biggest races and alliances. No one knew for sure what was out here, and that meant they were effectively lost in the wilderness and virtually impossible to find by the V’kit’no’sat or others so long as no trail was left for them to follow.

Not telling even those coming into the system where they were was probably one of those safety protocols, though if they weren’t allowed to leave Jenn wondered why. Maybe a few people would travel back, but she knew that she and Sarah wouldn’t be on that short list. This was going to be their new home, and as the holographic map of the system manifested itself coming out of the arrival jump nearly everyone on the ship watching at various displays had their breath catch in their throats.

The girls were in a commons area along with a few hundred others watching a huge display that shifted from the single dot of the white star they had braked upon and expanded out into a full system map. The dot became slightly larger as the tracking lines from nearby stars disappeared and the planets popped up…all 306 of them, not counting moons.

Sarah’s jaw dropped. “What the hell…”

“Oh my,” Jenn said, starting to see all the little icons for cities, space stations, and ships. The planets weren’t full, not by a long shot, but there were cities sprinkled here and there across what looked like most of them, and with the moons included that put the count of ‘worlds’ at over 2,000 in this single system. “This is freaking huge. You could fit the entire population of Sol in here ten times over.”

“Getting them here is the problem,” a person standing next to Jenn added. “A few hundred million at a time doesn’t cut it.”

“At least we have a safe place to go,” Sarah pointed out. “All of us.”

The Human shook his head. “Not the entire Star Force population. The empire is too big.”

“The Humans though,” Jenn added.

“Do you really think the Dinosaurs will only go after the Humans?”

“Probably not,” she said with a frown as the ship’s route popped up on the map, indicating which planet they were heading to…which in this case was technically a moon of a gas giant, but it was slightly bigger than Earth and a third of it was covered in water. The name tag was highlighted, showing everyone what was apparently going to be their new home, or at least their departure point.

“Minbar,” Sarah said. “Sound familiar?”

“Nope.”

“Star Force has a habit of naming stuff off legends.”

“Really?” Jenn asked, glancing at her. “I never knew that.”

“Where did you think Corneria came from?”

“Corn I suppose.”

“No. Some guy told me it came from an old video game. Minbar probably comes from something else too.”

“Huh. Have to look that up when we get back to our quarters. I figure we’re going to be waiting on a dropship for weeks before we can get off.”

“Yeah, probably,” Sarah said as the ship made its way around stellar orbit to get to the jumpline for the gas giant that held Minbar in its orbit far away from the star. “I can’t believe there are so many planets. I wonder how long they had to look to find this place.”

“I’m surprised no one else found it. This is an empire in a single system.”

“You’re right. I wonder if there aren’t any neighboring races out here.”

“Good question. Someone could give us away if there were.”

“That’s a long way to send a message, but yeah, they could.”

“The Archons know what they’re doing,” someone else said as they passed by, with several other people filing away from the crowd to get on with other things.

“Even if they don’t,” another person added, “it’ll take the V’kit’no’sat forever to get out here, and they’ve got a lot of closer targets to worry about.”

“Yeah,” Jenn said, frowning. “And a lot of troops slowing them down.”

Sarah grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “I miss him too.”

“Itching for another kiss?”

“You’re seriously never going to let that go, are you?” Sarah complained.

“Nope,” Jenn said, tugged Sarah a little closer to the giant map as people were leaving.

“It was just one kiss!”

“He was still mine.”

“Fine, do you want to kiss my boyfriend?”

“You don’t have one.”

“When I get one?”

“Only if he’s as hot as Brad.”

Sarah sighed. “So you’re never going to get off my back?”

“Hey, you got the kiss. This is the payment for it.”

“Still worth it,” Sarah admitted as they looked up from underneath the edge of the map at all the glowing little spheres sitting on tiny looping lines that indicated their orbits. “Do you think they’ll let us pick…later I mean?”

“Maybe. There’s a lot of options. You just wanna chill for a while or find a job?”

“Don’t know how many there will be here.”

“There will probably be Star Force jobs.”

Sarah wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like working for stipends.”

“Might not be a bad idea for a few years until this place fills up some more.”

“You think it will? That’s a long haul we just made.”

“Maybe more than a few years then. Those stipends are nice after you’ve earned them.”

“I’m not that patient, and I really want a bigger set of quarters again. Bigger than the Star Force upgrades,” she added, for when you worked for them you got an automatic upgrade while you were employed.

“Would you mind if I did?”

Sarah glanced at her. “Depends if I could float us both. But even if I did, we’re not going to be able to rebuild our wardrobe very fast.”

“I don’t think they’re going to be shipping in specialty items.”

“Damn, you’re right. We’re going to have to do some hunting. Someone here has to be making custom clothing.”

“It’ll be nice to settle down again. Hopefully somewhere with an atmosphere we can breathe. I’d like to go outside again and get some real sun.”

“Just go and get your skin tone changed. The medbays on the ship will do it.”

“That’s cheating.”

“Why you want to roast yourself and fight uneven tan lines I will never understand,” Sarah said, looking up at the planets again. “I’d rather spend my time on just relaxing. You can’t do that when you’re worried about light angles.”

“You got me there. Hey, we’re insystem now.”

“Yeah, so?”

“The database should be updating, right?”

“Yeah, it should be. We can access everything here.”

“Let’s go find how many clothing retailers there are and how much they’re charging.”

Sarah cringed. “Probably expensive as hell.”

“Time to find out what we’ve got to work with.”

“Yeah,” she said, glancing up at the map one more time. “We gotta start somewhere. Future and onward.”

“Future and onward,” Jenn repeated as the two turned and worked their way out of the crowd and back to their quarters so they could start getting acquainted with their new home system.

Two months later…

As it turned out, Minbar was a jewel of a world. The gravity was slightly higher than Earth’s, so when you went outdoors your body felt it a touch for a few steps then it all blurred together. The atmosphere also had more oxygen, so you felt invigorated when you went outside the standardized interior environment and that had spawned a lot of outside development.

Right now Sarah was off working a temporary job for Star Force that actually paid straight credits in lieu of the civilian economy that was almost nonexistent here, while Jenn was on an off day from her job in a startup company that some of the previous evacuees had created. It was a custom clothing company that she’d sought out to inquire about potential purchases and after talking with her for a few minutes she straight up got offered a job.

It was a lot of irregular work, but there was a very big market with people who had credits but little to spend them on. She had a chance to get very rich long term here, but right now her pay was nonexistent as company profits were being reinvested into more equipment to expand the business. Sarah wasn’t patient enough for that, which was why she’d decided to take a ‘credits now’ job while telling Jenn that she was relying on her to rake in the big numbers later.

They had acquired a decent-sized set of quarters, but it was taking almost all of what Sarah was making to cover the rent. Both of them agreed it was worth it as they got their normal lifestyle, absent now for years, back in line with what it had once been…and to be honest, this planet was actually a little better than Earth had been and a whole lot less crowded.

Right now Jenn was floating along the shore of one of planet’s oceans inside the protected perimeter that had energy shields allowing water to pass through but nothing harder, meaning she didn’t have to worry about critters biting her or floating off too far from shore in her personal inflatable panel that she was laying out on and soaking up the sun…which was a little less intense this far out compared to Earth.

That meant it took longer to tan, but as Sarah had suggested Jenn wasn’t caring at the moment. Just relaxing as the gentle wind rocked her with tiny waves that were very therapeutic after a long workload yesterday. Her body was holding up find, but it was her mind that needed relief and this ocean swim park was just what she needed.

Jenn was able to float wherever she wanted for more than a kilometer out into the shallow waters, with the one safety feature required being the bracelet that she wore. It functioned as an emergency transmitter, flotation device, and short term oxygen backup if needed, given that this was water and drowning was easy if you were taken off guard and knocked underneath the surface.

If her wristband registered a medical emergency nearby medtechs and rescue crews would be here within a minute, which was another reason she could just relax and enjoy the natural environment of the planet as her mind wandered in and out of oblivion. One thing that was on and off her mind was the date, for today was the last day of her seal with Brad that she’d never bothered to cancel. His offer to do so with full responsibility had come through on the evacuation ship but Jenn hadn’t accepted, choosing to let it expire on its own and holding onto him that last little bit so he didn’t have a bad mark on his record.

She doubted that he would be getting involved with someone again if he was going back to fight, but if he survived and someday ended up in a place where away from the war, even if just for a vacation, Jenn didn’t want his relationship with her to come back to haunt him in the least. Running out the seal was partly out of respect for him and for herself, for she’d committed to five years and she was going to honor that regardless of current circumstances.

Those 5 years ended while she was on the water, with her wristband set to alert her when the moment passed. She was half asleep in a sun-induced stupor when the chime sounded, but she still recognized it for what it was and said one final goodbye to Brad. From here on out he was no longer a part of her life, but she wished him well wherever he was, keeping her and everyone else safe along with the rest of the military.

Letting go such thoughts, for news coming from the rest of Star Force territory was few and far between making Shangri-La almost like an island insulated from the rest of the galaxy, Jenn fully embraced her new life here by letting go her connections to Brad, Earth, and everything else in her past. She didn’t want to forget them, but as such things were no longer relevant they were tucked back into a storage compartment in her mind just in case they became relevant later, much like her days in the maturia had been.

None of it was relevant now and Jenn was relieved to finally put the last bit behind her. She didn’t intend looking for a boyfriend anytime soon, but it was good to have her vision set firmly ahead in her life. Right now she was blissfully soaking up sun and contently happy, and both she and Sarah were building towards the future. Already this planet had become home with the journey out here felling like a distant memory, and as Jenn resettled into her drifting haze on the ocean she relished in the golden age that was Star Force, safely encapsulated here in the wilds of space while the war continued to escalate elsewhere.

When she eventually woke to a mild sunburn, Jenn rolled off the panel and dunked herself in the warm water, shaking herself fully away and choosing to swim back to shore rather than paddling. She felt alive, invigorated, and hopeful. She was single now and her future full of opportunity, with Jenn intent on running into it aggressively now that her moment of reflection and rest was over.

When she got to the shore she jogged up the soft ramp that kept her wet, naked body clear of the beach sand as she got back to her wall locker and retrieved her clothes, which she put back on after a quick stint underneath a drying array that wicked the water off her body with a series of energy shields.

Then she passed through a door back into the interior of the city with the normal oxygen content and mildly cool air as she headed to the nearest cafeteria to get something to eat before spending the rest of her day in an entertainment complex that helped to finish clearing her mind and recharging her creativity for the following day when she got back to work helping her new startup company get established. She was getting to design some of the clothing that would be setting fashion trends across Minbar and perhaps the entire star system for centuries to come as more and more people were evacuated out here and the local population continued to grow, and it wasn’t a task she was taking lightly.

Jenn wouldn’t be helping with that population growth, now fully committed to the huge opportunity before her and making it profitable enough to be able to support her and her sister, after which she was going to make sure to make a spot in the company for Sarah. They were a team and intended to stay that way forever, and being able to work together would make their lives just that much better as they both inched their way forward into an unknown and bright future.

On that same day back in the Solar System, Brad and his Commando unit were dropping down to the surface of Venus through the dense, toxic atmosphere to the cities beneath that were currently under V’kit’no’sat attack. Like on Earth, the enemy was pushing from region to region going for the shield generators so they could expose the planet to their warfleet in orbit, and the longer Star Force could hold them here the more time they’d have to evacuate the outer planets.

Brad wasn’t thinking about Jenn now, only his fellow Commandos and their mission. He was a warrior and now that his fitness level had returned to adequate levels this was his time to fight, and despite the fact that he might not live through this there wasn’t another place in the galaxy where he wanted to be.

The fight against the Dinosaurs was here and now, and he wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines and watch anymore.

www.aerkijyr.com

Endless Crusade

1

May 13, 3638

Titamin System (Voku Firewall territory)

Shamash

Ra-jor dropped from the shield square he was standing on inside the Voku transport and immediately went into freefall, using his flight harness to slow his descent as he and his 15 brothers were thrown into a losing fight. His feet hit tree branches after a few seconds, tripping him up as his forward momentum caused him to roll while the transport accelerated hard above them to escape the Skarron fighter swarms hounding it. Voku attack shards operating off a control spire countered them, but there were so many enemy craft in the air no one was safe, hence the not so gentle drop-off of Ra-jor’s elite phalanx as what was left of the planet was evacuating as fast as possible.

Between the impacts with the plants and his flight harness, the Voku eventually broke their fall and landed on the dry, dusty ground beneath the yellow leaves that obscured the sky. Almost as soon as they touched down they were on the run, and it only took 18 seconds before they encountered the first of the Aronsic ground troops assaulting the last holdout on the planet.

Ra-jor didn’t fire when he saw them, rather maintaining his forward left position in their 4x4 formation. He wore various pieces of equipment over his black body suit, maintaining his agility without having armor on and relying on sturdy energy shields for protection, but given a situation like this his phalanx needed extra defense. Thus he and 7 others were carrying physical shields, his over his left shoulder and extending almost all the way to the ground. It was heavy but necessary, leaving the other 8 Voku free to fire while he and the rest of the shield bearers protected the unit.

Those free to fire did so without hesitation, mowing down the small, but thick creatures with shots from their forearm weaponry and a few larger blasts as they worked their way out of the trees onto the plains around the besieged city where there were tens of thousands of the Aronsic attacking in the other direction.

They were accompanied by many Skarrons, mostly scattered amongst their ground troops as commanders, as several walkers fired from range on the city buildings while the Voku fought a desperate fight to hold out long enough to evacuate those left on the planet. This wasn’t a civilian world, rather a formerly uninhabited one that the Voku had colonized along the border in addition to others taken from the Skarrons prior to the Crusade. They formed the Firewall territory that was taking the hit from the Skarrons and delaying the assault on the Voku’s original worlds.

That meant everyone here were combat troops or logistics personnel, and they were all fighting hard to buy time and slow the seemingly unstoppable Skarron advance, for no matter how many the Voku killed ten times that should show up and keep pushing through the losses. They’d already taken the entire planet save for this last refuge, having to blast through extremely strong deflector shields to do it, and right now the only thing saving the remaining Voku was the massive conglomerate overhead.

And not just overhead, it was literally blocking out all of the sky save for a sliver of horizon, and it wasn’t even in atmosphere. It was the largest Ra-jor had ever seen, and there was an even larger Skarron fleet beyond the umbrella-shaped ship that was cradling the evacuation craft all the while fighting an insane naval battle with most of its weaponry moved to the outward curve.

But beneath it, with the city’s shield generators already destroyed, was the last bit of ‘safe space’ left, except that was a bad name for it. There was a ground and aerial war taking place here of epic proportions and his phalanx had just been dropped on an apparent suicide mission along with numerous others spread at intervals as they counterattacked the Aronsic swarms from behind…with their only avenue of escape being to fight through them to the evacuation transports in the center of the city.

It was a mission that he and the others hadn’t hesitated to take, for they were here to kill Skarrons and their servant Aronsic to delay their advance into true Voku territory as long as they could. They’d been fighting the Skarrons for the past 18 years in heavy combat, and lesser so before as they created the Firewall in preparation for the Crusade that could be seen coming across the stars. It was here to fight the Li’vorkrachnika, but as long as 90% of the Skarron Empire’s military was in one region, they were going to clean house on all their enemies, including the Voku.

As bad as this was, and as numerous and powerful that the Fourth Crusade was proving to be, even the Skarrons weren’t touching Star Force and their fight against the V’kit’no’sat. That battle was beyond even their arrogance and the Skarrons were staying out of it, but everything else on their to-do list in this part of the galaxy was now getting a dose of overkill.

Ra-jor continued to hold his physical shield steady over his left shoulder as the phalanx ran out into the open, shooting their way into the masses until they were literally surrounded by the short infantry that was less than half their 8 foot height. Being that tall they drew fire from hundreds of the Aronsic simultaneously, but the heavy energy shield being produced by Ra-jor’s physical shield in conjunction with the other 7 gave them as much protection as a ground transport so long as they stayed within the necessary range.

And they did, bouncing around a bit as Aronsic passed through the energy shield like it didn’t exist. Ra-jor punched and kicked as many as he shot with his free hand when they got between him and his fellow Voku, for they were spaced far enough apart to allow hand to hand combat without running into each other as they plowed through the inferior Aronsic along with other similar phalanxes nearby, but Ra-jor couldn’t see much of them.

His focus was on his unit and what was ahead, with several of the Skarrons moving towards them. They were even bigger than the Voku, standing taller but massing far more. They were heavy quadrupeds with four insect-like arms arching off their back and capped with heavy weapons that began to track their way.

The lead of this phalanx, Bi-tor, altered their carnage direction towards the nearest one, with all 16 Voku running up on it and splitting up. The huge shield covering them all ended and Ra-jor was free to move more. He switched his shield from ‘emitting’ mode to ‘encapsulation,’ making him almost impervious to incoming damage as it enhanced his own personal shields exponentially.

With that protection he ran towards the Skarron’s front right leg and grabbed hold of it, pinning his right forearm against the yellowish flesh firing into it nonstop as he clung to it. Likewise the other Voku took similar positions around the exposed legs, for this Skarron was not an elite and fully armored, but its flesh was thick and resistant to weaponsfire on its own…yet the Voku weaponry was too advanced. The Skarron was damaged greatly even before two of the fighters in the phalanx jumped up on top of its flat back and shot down between the shoulder joints where the thing’s brain was, for it had no head, only a mouth and eyes inset into the thick torso.

Within a matter of seconds the phalanx had killed and overran it, reforming on the other side with Ra-jor switching his shield back to ‘emitting’ mode and covering his brethren who had their own shields now diminished from the Aronsic shots continuing to come in from all directions. There were so many blue plasma blasts coming towards them the neon flashes overwhelmed the sea of grey muscle, but for the moment the phalanx was alright, for their shield generators were far more advanced than the enemy weaponry.

The Voku continued to punch, kick, and blast a path through the sea of infantry at rapid pace, heading for the closest of the buildings ahead that was already overrun, but before they got there one of the smaller walkers to the far right turned its spherical blue mass and fired on another phalanx. Ra-jor’s brothers split up and went evasive, reforming soon thereafter and continuing forward, but that salvo seemed to get the attention of the other walkers ahead as some of them turned around and started to come out from between the Voku buildings to target the phalanxes.

They didn’t seem to care that they were killing their own infantry with almost every shot, for the Voku were up to their knees with the little Aronsic that were literally jumping over each other to try and tackle the larger aliens, but the Voku were so strong they could flick them off with ease. Many were killed by the blows, but others were literally vaporized by the heavy plasma coming from the walkers. It was blue in color, unlike the white and green the Voku had fought against in the past. Each Skarron region/faction had its own coloration, and no less than 12 of them had shown up in Voku territory thus far.

But their equipment was all the same, despite the color changes, so the Voku knew what they were up against and even as the phalanxes were grouping, dispersing, and grouping again trying to mitigate the ranged walker damage, several Voku fighters zipped in and fired on the nearest one. They shot it enough to get the shields down, then several dark drops were deposited on it…with Ra-jor realizing there were other Voku physically assaulting the mechanized assault craft.

That was even more reckless than what the phalanxes were doing, but at this point there was no good way to fight this enemy. The Voku were hopelessly outnumbered, and if they didn’t delay their advance long enough the landing zones would be overrun and everyone left on the planet would die. So really it didn’t matter where they died, so long as they fought well enough to buy some more time for the others to get out.

Ra-jor didn’t know if he’d make it or not, but he and the other Voku were so incensed at what was happening they truly didn’t care. There were enemies all around them and their mission was to destroy as much of them as they could as a diversion, and that’s exactly what they were doing leaving a trail of dead Aronsic and a few Skarrons behind them while getting some help from the enemy walkers that were killing far more Aronsic than they were Voku.

But Voku were going down, and Ra-jor’s phalanx lost one directly next to him when they had to split. His shields were already down, then a direct hit from the thick blue plasma hit him in the head, burning it off completely in an explosion of superheated body parts that knocked Ra-jor to the side. There was nothing left of Bo-sec to go back for, so he and the others kept moving on until Ti-sov got hit in the leg, with it being blown off below the knee and him dropping to the ground in a roll that had him come up in a stranglehold on an Aronsic that he used to snap its neck.

Ra-jor turned around even as Ti-sov told the others to keep going, but he wasn’t going to listen. The Phalanx moved on, as they should, but Ra-jor wasn’t going to leave Ti-sov. They’d been fighting together for hundreds of years, and if they were going to die in this Crusade then they’d go down together as well, so Ra-jor shot the Aronsic nearest him then dove on top while reconfiguring his physical shield to emit a binary barrier that would cover both of them.

“Leave!” Ti-sov yelled as he continued to shoot and punch from his position on the ground despite the intense pain.

“Why?” Ra-jor asked almost calmly as both of them were fighting so fast and hard it was almost comical with them batting Aronsic out of the air as they jumped at them while having a conversation. “This way I help you kill more before you go down.”

“You fool,” Ti-sov said, using both forearms as Ra-jor shielded for him to shoot, then while standing behind him he took a shot from the nearest walker. His enhanced shield protected them, but it drained it heavily and he knew they couldn’t take very many more of those despite the Voku’s tech advantage.

“Get out of here!”

“Not happening!” Ra-jor said as he saw out of the corner of his eyepiece the walker suddenly fall to the Voku ‘tics’ tearing into it and finally getting inside to kill the crew, so at least they didn’t have that one hammering them. “Skarron on the left!”

“Throw me!”

Ra-jor didn’t argue, leaning over and picking up his fellow warrior by the arm and swinging him halfway around a circle before launching him over the enemy infantry. The jump harness on the Voku helped, launching him up and over a wall of Aronsic to the topside of the Skarron that batted him out of the air with one of its massive arms.

Ti-sov wasn’t defeated that easily, grabbing hold of the arm as it hit him and not letting go. He was flung back and forth, but before the Skarron could remove him the weapon gauntlet on that arm was destroyed by Ti-sov’s forearm gauntlets, and in the distraction Ra-jor pulled an enhanced jump over the Aronsic and got just in front of the Skarron, landing on one of the wide infantry heads and jumping again up on top of the Skarron’s back where he grabbed Ti-sov’s arm and pulled him down there as well, with both of them firing into the hard back skin until the brute went down.

The two of them stayed on top of it, forcing the Aronsic to climb up to get to them, and that was where they held their final defiant battle. Their shields eventually succumbed to the little infantry’s weapons, with no walkers or aerial craft bothering to intervene. When their shields went down the two Voku fought hand to hand until the plasma stings added up and the Aronsic climbed over their dead to get to and finish off both of them…but only after the Voku pair took out over 2,000 of the pathetic enemy infantry.

Bi-tor and 6 of their phalanx did manage to fight their way through the enemy army back to the failing Voku defense line, hopping over the barricades and adding to the defenses as the last few evac transports landed and transformed, opening up into huge chambers that made them look like inflated balls that then lifted off again with as many troops inside as possible.

Bi-tor got into the second to last one, having to kick Aronsic out the door as it closed, then the bloated transport ascended under fighter attack up through the atmosphere and into the void beneath the cover of the massive conglomerate. There were a few weapons batteries on this side that swatted away the fighters that got through to chase them, then the transport was the in the clear and moved through space until it got to the underside of the giant umbrella as it too began to transform.

The far edges began to pull in as the last transports and the Voku fighters were making their way up from the atmosphere, with the weaponry on the outside of those edges rolling under so they could fire on the planet. A curtain of energy fell all around them in a giant ring that was slowly collapsing on the evac site, blasting into the Skarron forces below and deleting them from existence…but along with that pullback of the edge of the conglomerate came the Skarron navy, and they were even more numerous than their ground forces.

Their large and clumsy ships tried to scoot around the edges and get underneath the conglomerate, punching through the waterfall of energy to come through partly damaged, but they were too far away to catch the transports that slipped inside various cavities in the conglomerate and were now ‘safe’ within the hangar bays…so long as the conglomerate didn’t get destroyed.

Bi-tor and the others exited quickly with the help of melting walls as they stood on the floor of the transport that was now the floor of the hangar. He ran off it and further into the massive ship as it continued to transform, with him having to stop twice as he received holographic warnings to hold position while corridors ahead were shifted around him as the giant umbrella slowly became an lengthy orb that was fighting its way through the Skarron fleet on its way to a jump point away from the planet that the enemy did not want them to access.

In the end they couldn’t stop them, with the Voku killing and physically pushing through the enemy ships and sacrificing the outer layers of the conglomerate to get in the clear, then they made the microjump out to the star and from there left the system that was now fully in Skarron hands.

The damaged parts of the conglomerate rotated as it reformed during the jump, then the ship split into 18 different pieces during the coast phase, with each decelerating on their own at the next system. From there they split up, with Bi-tor riding on one piece to another Firewall system under assault and the surviving Voku troops from Shamash being flung back down into a surface fight that had not progressed as far. The Voku still held more than half of Viioran, but the Skarrons had just as many troops here as they had on Shamash, meaning there were plenty for Bi-tor to kill.

And kill he would, along with the rest of his brothers, until they were dead or the enemy ran out of troops.

And no one knew which eventuality would occur first.

2

May 30, 3638

Bavrenti System (Voku Regional Capitol)

Hakibi

“Titamin has fallen, along with Sokuzu and Varetiv,” Renimar Noru-sar said, summarizing the reports as they came up in hologram for Cal-com and his small oracle staff to see. “Six new assaults have begun and 28 worlds are set to fall within two weeks. At this rate, the Skarrons are likely to penetrate the Firewall in no more than two years.”

“Less, I fear,” the Dafchor said, staring at the holographic pinpoints on the starmap of the buffer zone they’d created on the orders of the Elders, and which was the only thing right now protecting his people’s territory from the Skarron Crusade…but for how long?

“We have to disrupt the flow,” Noru-sar repeated. “We can’t stop these numbers if they’re allowed to arrive and the navigational blocks will not be enough. We have to hit them before they get here.”

“All our vessels are tied up in defensive operations. Where would you pull this raiding force from?”

“Everywhere else. It is pointless to guard against other threats when one of this magnitude is before us. Strip the defenses elsewhere and assemble as large a fleet as we can, then pick an appropriate spot in their supply lines and hit it. At the minimum it would delay their arrival, and if we could get them chasing us through their backwater it could prove far more helpful than fighting them directly.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“But you won’t give the order?”

“The only mass of ships that can realistically help are those we have in the Orica Region, and they’re tasked with an Elder mandate.”

“One that has been fulfilled, as far as I have been informed. If they are no longer needed…”

“They may be,” Cal-com said firmly. “The Elders have stated that we are not to get involved in the V’kit’no’sat war against Star Force, but if the reports are accurate and they have also started to target Star Force associates then the protectorates may be in eventual danger, not to mention our own worlds out there. Would you remove their defenses so lithely?”

“Given the situation, yes,” Noru-sar said bluntly. “We have one confirmed opponent and one possible. We have to fight reality and not stay our hand for a potential future that might not come to pass. And if it does, we cannot defeat the V’kit’no’sat. But we may be able to blunt this Crusade long enough to reinforce our worlds enough to prevent the slaughter you know is coming. We are superior to the Skarrons in every way, but with their numbers they negate that strength. We must have more ships and we cannot build them fast enough. They have to come from the Orica fleet. I can see no other way. The Crusade will be on our doorstep soon. If a recall is ordered it must be now in order for the fleet to have time to reach us.”

“Your calculations are not wrong. If that option is necessary, it must be now,” Cal-com said, falling silent as he continued to look at the hologram via his green, crystal-like eyepiece that covered his three small natural eyes and gave him incredibly enhanced vision while also preventing him from being blinded in combat via foreign objects, liquids, or gases.

“Let me fight this from the rear,” the Renimar pleaded. “I can do far more damage from there than trying to hold worlds we have no chance of retaining. Let me choose where we fight and die, not the Skarrons.”

“You believe this is our last stand?”

“The Elders have prepared us well, otherwise we would not have kept them away from our homes so long, but the Crusade is coming for them. We will soon be at the tipping point.”

“You underestimate our empire.”

“I do not underestimate that most of our forces are in the Firewall. Most of our buildup has been there too, and while I admit the legacy defenses are more formidable, if the Skarrons keep coming in these numbers they will overrun us. We must disrupt their movements from the rear. I can see no other hope short of their numbers being bled out, and with the losses the Li’vorkrachnika suffered from the V’kit’no’sat, they will not be doing as much damage as we had hoped.”

“A pity they abandoned that war in favor of Star Force. I would have liked to see them wiped out quickly, but I know the Li’vorkrachnika will not be conquered by the Skarrons so easily and they will fight to the last soldier without surrender.”

“But the Skarrons can divert more towards us because of the areas that the V’kit’no’sat cleared out. And the more resistance we throw up the more they will send.”

“Which makes your suggestion even more perilous.”

“I cannot control their actions, only my own, and this is the best way for me to kill or distract them away from our worlds while we continue to build. Right now the pace of combat is too high. We need to slow this down so we can begin to replace our conglomerate losses.”

“A luxury I do not think we will have.”

“Then we continue as we have been?”

“I know we cannot. I am continually searching for another alternative.”

“If you have not found one by now I doubt one exists. Let me do this, Cal-com. If we are to fall, let it not be because we hesitated. Let us die taking as many of them with us as possible.”

“To do what you suggest will require the abandoning of an Elder edict. I cannot do that.”

“Shall I ask them myself?” Noru-sar challenged, drawing a glare from Cal-com. “We are all going to die if we don’t get more ships here. We have them in Orica. This is our last play unless the Elders know something we don’t, and they might, but if we have to fight this on our own this is our only course of action. I suspect you know that, but if you don’t want to risk defying them then I will. I will take my course of action directly to…”

“No,” Cal-com said flatly. “That is my task. I have been waiting for word from them as to what to do next. Their silence has suggested that the solution was before me to find, but you are correct. A change must occur. If they wish us to defend here to our extinction then we will, but it needs to be a direct order from them, not an inference. If I leave now there will be enough time.”

“Shall I come with you?”

“No. This war is my responsibility, but when in transit I will have to leave oversight to another…”

“Which is why you haven’t gone before?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then go. I will maintain the Firewall as best we can. You can’t win it here. Not without something drastic changing.”

“You have command,” Cal-com said evenly, then unceremoniously turned and walked out of the oracle. He not only left the command center, but the planet entirely, boarding a transport and taking it up to a courier ship that then spirited him across the stars back to the Szequat System, their capitol that contained their homeworld of Nergthen and the secret Elder Lair.

Due to his position as absolute ruler of the Voku, the Dafchor was able to give himself permission to enter and did so wasting the minimum of time before he was alone in the audience chamber. There he did wait, for many minutes, before the Elder showed itself.

Paul had told him their true name was Zak’de’ron, but they’d never said as much to the Voku. They were simply known as the Elders and were responsible for Cal-com’s entire civilization. They’d taken his ancestors under their protection long ago and had groomed them through the millennia before mysteriously growing quiet. The Voku had followed their last orders and the wealth of knowledge given to them during their absence, never forsaking their mysterious benefactors, and had been rewarded for their loyalty upon their return with enhancements for their entire civilization.

But even those had not been enough to blunt the Skarron Crusade at its outset, and the recent years had seen system after system plucked from the Firewall despite the Voku’s huge technological advantage. Hopefully the Elder would have beneficial counsel to offer, for Cal-com did not know what more to do at this point.

“Speak,” the long, slender red-scaled Dragon said, watching the Dafchor closely as it walked forward then laterally, spinning around to lay down on a cushioned pedestal while keeping its head oriented on the smaller Voku.

“I require counsel.”

“The enemy losses speak otherwise. You have acquitted yourself well, Dafchor.”

“Yet it is not enough. They will break through our Firewall soon and there is only one course of action that could possibly stall them, but doing so would violate an order to protect the races in the Orica Region.”

“You wish to withdraw the fleet there to fight the Skarrons?”

“I do not wish it, but it is the last option we have as far as I can determine.”

“Now do you see why I instructed you not to aid Star Force?”

“I do not like standing by and watching an ally fall without aiding them, but if you are referring to the fact that we cannot stop the V’kit’no’sat, I do understand now.”

“Marginally. Their strength is beyond your comprehension, but you may have to fight them eventually.”

“You believe they will attack the Orica Region?”

“It is likely. Star Force is a taint they wish to remove all traces of, and after they achieve more success with them they may hunt down all their allies. The Orica Region may be in jeopardy, and possibly our other servants…though that is unlikely. You are to prepare for that eventuality in case it should come to pass. Organize a relocation safely away from both the V’kit’no’sat and the Skarrons and have such preparations standing by.”

“And what of the Skarrons?”

“The races tasked to your defense are secure for the time being and that will not change in the near future. Keep minimal protection in their systems, but you are free to recall all others as you deem necessary to combat the Skarrons…but be warned. If and when the V’kit’no’sat assault the Orica Region, you are not to aid Star Force in battle, even if they come to your defense. You may fight alongside them in your own systems, but do not waste resources assisting them elsewhere. We may lose the entire region or we may hold onto part of it. The V’kit’no’sat ego will determine the outcome, and you are not to provoke them unnecessarily. Defend yourself if they attack, but know that you will not win any more than fleeting battles. If they attack, fight an organized withdrawal, from the entire region if necessary, but do not waste your people trying to save Star Force. That is beyond your ability to accomplish.”

“If we are able to survive the Skarron Crusade and the V’kit’no’sat follow us back here, what are your orders?”

“If they choose to assault you here, all restrictions are rescinded and you may act as you wish as your race is destroyed. Stand and fight or flee, it will be your choice. I do not think they will come this far unless we give them reason to, thus the only combat against them in the Orica Region must be defensive.”

“I understand.”

“But you do not like it?”

“I do not, but I will obey.”

“Do you think another outcome would occur if you fought alongside Star Force?”

“No. But it feels dishonorable to abandon them in the time of their greatest need. Were they not pre-occupied they would be assisting us in battle against the Skarrons.”

“And you are not pre-occupied at present?”

“Very much so, but your orders are for a tactical reason and my instincts do not like the idea of standing by and doing nothing. Better to die honorably than betray an allegiance.”

“Yet you see the strategic necessity of it. It appears I chose well the first Dafchor of the Voku. You are free to explain the situation to your Star Force allies, to assuage your distaste. They are strategically savvy and will most likely concur.”

Cal-com bowed his head slightly. “Thank you for that.”

“Arrgh,” the Dragon huffed, standing up and walking off the platform as he circled around Cal-com. “I do not like sitting by when a fight is before us. These V’kit’no’sat are our enemy, and I wish to rip their throats out on sight, but we cannot. We have not the strength yet to face them, so I share your distaste with the current situation, but prudence is necessary even if it betrays our innate sense of loyalty.”

“They are your enemy?”

“There is no need for feigned ignorance, for I can see your thoughts. You have learned much from Paul concerning our past. The V’kit’no’sat were once like you, our servants, but much more advanced. We treated them with more respect and autonomy, forming a great alliance that we led but did not completely command. We created it to repel the Hadarak and were successful in doing so until the V’kit’no’sat races betrayed us. They thought themselves our equal and resented our superiority. They betrayed and eventually destroyed us,” the Elder said with considerable fire in his voice.

“Why then are you still here?”

“Many contingency plans were enacted to preserve our race. The deepest of which was myself and others being secured in egg form with a single protector locked in stasis. We were to disappear from existence for such a long time that the V’kit’no’sat would think they were successful. If our other contingency plans succeeded we would be awoken by them…but we were not. The V’kit’no’sat proved to be far more cagey than even we had anticipated. They destroyed all our other efforts at rebuilding, leaving only one survivor and the eggs.”

“Were you conscious in your egg?” Cal-com wondered.

“Partially. My development was stalled by stasis, during which I slept, but I retain a few memories. What do you remember of yours?”

“Nothing.”

“No? I can see something in your mind,” the Elder said, provoking the memory in Cal-com to the surface.

The Dafchor flashed back to his own ‘birth,’ walking out of a tube not unlike the Voku slept in. He was fully grown, as were all Voku at their outset, having developed from genetic material to full status unlike most races in the galaxy that existed for a period of time as infants. Even the Elder was growing larger with the years, as far as Cal-com could determine from the few sporadic visits to the Lair he’d been honored enough to make.

“It is familiar, but I do not understand it,” he said honestly as the memory floated in his mind.

“You are developed in eggs of our own making. Mine was natural. You are fully grown when the hatching procedure occurs, we are not. Your race has been remade into a superior form to mirror our own. You used to have genders and gave birth in much the way the Humans do, but you are no longer hindered by such things. Your egg state is similar to my own, as are your genetic memories…except mine give me knowledge from before I hatched. I remember the civilization that we lost, but one that I never witnessed with my own eyes. I can feel the loss, and it fuels my anger at the V’kit’no’sat. If we can hold our vengeance for later, so will you, Dafchor.”

“As you wish. If we survive this, will we be fighting them in the future?”

“They must be destroyed. How that will be accomplished is uncertain. We have much to rebuild before we can reveal ourselves. Until then, we must be wise and pick the necessary fights. Aiding Star Force now would not be wise, so we cannot, though I am personally pleased by their defiance.”

“Can they survive?”

“Unlikely, but the arrogance of the V’kit’no’sat may allow them to limp on longer than expected.”

“Their withdrawal of troops?”

“Yes. As you know they sent two invasions. The first was stopped, so a much larger force was sent to reclaim Terraxis…what Star Force refers to as the Solar System. Now that they have it, much of those forces were sent back to the empire while leaving a smaller force behind to continue the purging of the broken heretics. They are accomplishing their task, but not as fast as expected. If that delay continues it is to Star Force’s benefit, but their destruction is fated. All it will take is one order to send enough ships to wipe them out, and they won’t require the numbers the Skarrons are using, but they have them if needed.”

“What’s happening to Star Force is what would happen to you if you were revealed?”

“Hmmph,” the Dragon said with disgust. “No. They would send everything they had after us. When we reveal ourselves we must be in a superior position, else we will be destroyed. I trust you understand the importance of the information you have?”

“I am beginning to.”

“You need to know, thus I am allowing it. Star Force is doomed, but their persistence will be interesting to watch. We cannot aid them else we will be destroyed along with them. And while the Voku might wish to go down in a honorable fight alongside them, we have more important uses for you going forward.”

The Dragon stopped pacing and instead headed back to the private chambers adjacent to the audience chamber, arching his neck back and turning his head halfway around as he walked.

“Pull the fleet from Orica and fight the Skarrons with your full might. There is no guarantee of your survival, but Renimar Noru-sar is correct. Send him with our leave to cause as much havoc as possible while you try to preserve what you can of your territory. You will not save it all, so your mission is to save enough of it to remain viable. Keep your eye on the future while you fight the present. Defeat will be your companion in the coming days, but true victory lies in ultimate survival.”

And with that the Elder walked out of view and Cal-com was left standing in place as he tried to wrap his mind around everything that had just been revealed to him.

Defeat. The Voku were going to lose. They were not going to be able to hold the Firewall. So victory must come in a different path…

It didn’t take long for the Dafchor to see his mistake, with him turning and walking quickly out of the Lair. When he got outside he broke into a run, heading for his homeworld’s command center where he got busy issuing orders, including the recall of the Orica fleet, in addition to a lot more unpleasant business.

The Voku were going to lose this war…so he had to play a different game, and was mentally kicking himself for not seeing it sooner. Dying with honor might be the impulsive thing to do, but winning the long game was more important if he could weather what was to come.

Paul was in a similar position, facing defeat after defeat as Star Force began to retreat. Was he playing the long game as well?

Cal-com hoped he was, but he didn’t doubt the Elder’s words. If the V’kit’no’sat wanted Star Force destroyed it would be, and the only hope the Voku had of surviving was to avoid their wrath. If they couldn’t, surviving the Skarrons wouldn’t matter. The empire that had defeated the Elders was one that could not be confronted with any hope of victory…so his focus must be on the Skarrons, impossible as that situation seemed. If the Elder thought there was a way to win the long game then he would find it.

He had to, otherwise the Voku would have to run to the rim and hope the Skarrons didn’t follow, but if that happened there wouldn’t be enough left of them to truly matter.

Or is that what was ahead for the Voku that the Elder had hinted at?

No. Even if it was, Cal-com wasn’t going to let it come to that. He had the enhanced knowledge that the Elders had given him and no other Voku. He would find a way to preserve at least a piece of their territory…even if at the cost of their other worlds.

Grim work was ahead of him, but it was his task and his alone. Others would fight and die, but he had to ensure their deaths were not in vain. The ultimate victory was his responsibility, and he felt the loss of time upon him. He should have consulted the Elder far sooner, but he couldn’t change the past. The future was within his grasp, and he had to start molding it into a loss that would birth a bitter victory.

And that was something the other Voku were not going to understand…but they would obey and it was up to Cal-com to see them through this. At least those that would survive. Most would not, no matter what he did, and he began to steel himself to that fact.

Was this what the Elders felt when they were annihilated? If so, they would know what needed to be done and he had to rely on their judgement and trust in him. They had made him a Dafchor and given him to the Voku to fight this war. He was their weapon in it, and the only hope the Voku had.

Resigned to his fate, Cal-com dove head first into the task and began prepping the other Voku on the homeworld for what had to be done. He’d shoulder as much of the burden as he could. The rest, he hoped, they’d be able to withstand, for he was asking a lot of them.

The Voku were about to be tested in a way they never had before, and it was time to see if they were worth the investment the Elders had made in them.

3

March 30, 3639

Itris System (Star Force Expanded Region)

Stellar Orbit

Renimar Noru-sar was waiting in a courier ship drifting in null space to avoid the traffic in the system. The war between Star Force and the V’kit’no’sat had not reached the Expanded Region yet, and was unlikely to for some time, for it was sparsely populated and little more than a spiderweb of trade routes sprinkled with Star Force worlds that connected between the ADZ and down to the Voku border. Commerce here was basically unaltered since the war began, with a multitude of non-Star Force vessels coming into the system to trade with their empire.

Itris was one of the primary routes for Voku ships traveling to and from the Orica Region, and Noru-sar was waiting here to meet the fleet that was returning to fight the Skarrons. He’d been waiting four weeks already and was beginning to wonder if something had happened when the first Voku conglomerates began to decelerate against the larger of two central stars.

“Finally,” he said to himself as he was summoned to the oracle and observed from there, getting a list of incoming ships soon thereafter and choosing the one he wanted for his flagship. Most were identical in current shape and could be reconfigured as needed or split up into smaller ships, but there was battle damage evident on some coming through that drew his eyes immediately, with a comm to the first senior commander to arrive following shortly thereafter.

“What has happened? I’m seeing battle damage,” Noru-sar asked.

“The V’kit’no’sat.”

“They’re assaulting our worlds?” Noru-sar asked, aghast.

“Not that I am aware. One of our convoys passed across one of theirs in transit. They fired on us immediately and we had to fight long enough to cover our escape. They did considerable damage and we lost several conglomerates.”

“They targeted you immediately?”

“Yes. We did not get close to them, but apparently being in the same star system at the same time was sufficient provocation.”

“What system?”

“Dotoper. It’s uninhabited and they emerged on a different jumppoint as our ships were transitioning through. They hit us. We did not engage, though I personally wasn’t there. The fleet didn’t fully form up until Sarvin, and we’re coming through now as one force. It’ll take several days to get us all through even with the tight spacing. We didn’t want to risk a longer line that the V’kit’no’sat might run into again.”

“Then we’ll get moving immediately. Once I’m onboard my flagship we’ll be departing via Oloson.”

“Will you be at the head or waiting for the others?”

“I will follow. You can remain at the lead.”

“What is our ultimate destination?”

“Beyond the Firewall. We’re hitting the Skarrons where they don’t expect us.”

“We’re invading them?”

“We’re going after their convoys, not their worlds. We have to diminish the numbers attacking our territory.”

“We’re eager for a fight. Especially against ships that are inferior. Those V’kit’no’sat are damn near impossible to destroy.”

“Did we do any damage to them?”

“Scratched two of them. They’re too fast despite their size and chose when to engage and when to flee.”

“I intend to do the same thing to the Skarrons. Have your damaged ships jettison compromised sections here. Our traders can retrieve it. We won’t be passing through a friendly system before we go into battle.”

“Very well. Do you wish us to wait in Oloson?”

“No. We don’t have days to waste. I’m sending you navigation data now. I’ll catch up to the lead before we hit Gvarston. From there we go hunting Skarron convoys wherever we can find them.”

“What speed?”

“As fast as we can without losing ships. The Firewall is nearly breached. We don’t have much time left.”

“Then I’ll depart immediately, with your permission, Renimar.”

“Granted,” he said, ending the comm as his courier ship came closer to one conglomerate in particular that wasn’t moving in conjunction with the others. It was holding position until he got there, then when he boarded the courier ship left to head back to Voku territory.

Noru-sar pulled two more conglomerates out of the flow as they passed through the system, melding them with his as the ships transformed and merged into one another, creating a much larger one with particular commanders he wished to travel with. When the last of the ships came through and Noru-sar was satisfied that the V’kit’no’sat were not trailing them, he ordered his flagship to depart several hours after the end of the convoy. He’d make up time during the stellar transitions and coast phases, pushing his conglomerate a little harder than the rest as he skipped up the long line of ships stretching across two or three star systems at a time as they gradually progressed back towards the war his people were fighting for their lives.

He’d seen a break from the fighting, being out of contact for months as he traveled and waited, and it’d given him a badly needed fresh perspective. The war was wearing on everyone, even those not actively involved in the combat, and bringing in fresh troops was going to be an advantage if they could give the others a break…unfortunately that wasn’t going to happen. The only relief Noru-sar could provide was to diminish the number of enemies they were fighting.

Whether or not he could make a dent in the Crusade numbers was the question of the moment. This had been his suggestion and the Elders had approved it. With Cal-com’s blessing he was being sent to do what needed to be done with no restricting orders, meaning this was all on him.

But Noru-sar wouldn’t have had it any other way. Now it was just him and the Skarrons, and he was going to make them pay a very heavy price to destroy his home.

3 months later…

With the Renimar’s flagship back in the lead, the Orica Fleet dove into a random system beyond the Firewall, having skirted around the edge of Voku territory as they headed for one of the major Skarron convoy routes, stumbling onto another one with a thick line of Skarron warships and transports creeping around the single star in a huge arc as they transitioned from their entry jumppoint to their exit on the far side of the star.

They were stretched out, as was Noru-sar’s fleet. The enemy was not blockading this system or in any semblance of fighting formation. They were simply traveling as efficiently as possible, for pooling in a system and waiting for the end of the line to arrive before the first ships left only wasted time. He had no way of knowing how large this Skarron fleet was or how much of it had already passed through the system, but that didn’t matter now. They were both here, and while he only had a few conglomerates emerging at the moment, he wasn’t going to wait for the Skarrons to see them and start grouping up.

“Battle protocol,” he ordered calmly, with his crew reacting without any hysterics despite their eagerness to get into the fight and the number of ships visible on passive sensors. It would be a few minutes at least before the Skarrons saw them, so the Voku had to act quickly. “Engo formations and immediate dispatch. First assembled on us. Set course once in sync. We’re going in first.”

That pleased the crew, for while Voku Renimars were renowned for their strategic brilliance they usually operated out of positions of safety. For Noru-sar to order his own conglomerate first into battle signaled that he had no doubts as to the outcome…but it also signaled the need for speed, with 8 other conglomerates splitting apart into smaller pieces and forming interceptors. Those interceptors were passed additional gravity drives, leaving the other transforming pieces a bit slower, but carrying more firepower.

The modular nature of Voku ship technology was something that Noru-sar was well acquainted with, but it was still an impressive sight to see as his fleet literally reformed into what was needed for this operation. Even his flagship dispensed several pieces, reducing its size, as it formed the core of an Engo formation, which was essentially one powerful vessel that could pound anything into rubble operating in concert with faster ships that would move out and wound their opposition.

The ‘pounder’ would follow shortly and finish them off, meaning Noru-sar did not expect a full fleet battle in the coming hour or so. The Skarrons were the prey here and they would probably run. If not the Voku could change their conglomerates to better suit a slugging match, but the Renimar didn’t want ships escaping. He was here to prevent as many as possible from reaching the Firewall, and the interceptors could chase down and kill many of them before they got out even if they headed for multiple jumppoints around the system.

He dispatched other Engo formations towards the entry jumppoint and the exit jumppoint while he headed straight towards the closest of the enemy ships, accelerating so fast the sensor signals bouncing off them from the Skarrons wouldn’t reach the enemy until a few seconds before the Voku actually arrived. That required heavy use of already depleted gravity drive capacitors, but every second he could scrape off their response time would diminish the clustering of the enemy ships…which he saw began to happen just before the Voku arrived within weapons range, decelerating heavily as they arced to the left to match the pace of the Skarrons as they were transitioning laterally across the glowing blue orb of the star.

The long range Skarron weaponry couldn’t respond as soon as the Voku’s could, for they outranged the enemy and loosed everything they had as soon as possible, getting in the first few weapon strikes before the ranges closed down quickly as the Skarron ships had a choice to make…fight or try to run. They chose the former, turning into the attacking Voku and slugging it out with disastrous consequences. The Voku ships were so superior they trashed the Skarrons easily, but the strategy was clear, as it had been throughout this war.

It didn’t matter how many Skarrons died so long as they did a little bit of damage. The other Skarrons would add a bit more, then more and more as they died until the Voku eventually fell. It was how a Crusade worked even against superior opponents and was a trap that Noru-sar could not fall into. He issued orders for all his ships to individually retreat when their shields fell below 18% strength.

There would be fights in the future, he knew, where they’d have to slug it out taking armor damage, but today was not that day. He needed clean kills with no losses over the coming hours, and he was not going to risk any attrition beyond energy loss when he had the advantage.

However, that wasn’t true at this moment. The Skarrons had far more ships already in the system than he did, and rather than run all those near the exiting jumpline turned and headed for the nearest Voku conglomerates they could find.

Good, he thought silently. We’re already cutting the reinforcement flow to the Firewall. They want battle so bad they’re going to engage us on sight everywhere. If they’re that zealous I can manipulate them to great effect…I just can’t get caught out.

The Renimar adjusted his orders, pulling back his other Engo formations and using them as bait to get the Skarrons to chase them away from the exiting jumppoint and to distract those coming into the system from grouping up with the others into a massive fleet ball that the Skarrons effectively used. He needed to keep them stretched out as his own ships arrived, but to do that he needed more navigational options that his drained capacitors currently allowed him.

So he began ordering the ships fresh out of their incoming jumps to swing wide and lazily glide into various positions, then use what recharged energy they had to execute maneuvers the Skarrons couldn’t match and hit them on the run all along their convoy string while Noru-sar headed up the concentration of conglomerates that were facing the swell of Skarron ships as they gradually grouped together.

He had his ships reform into Hatar, which were essentially flat circles that had all their weaponry and shields on one side facing the enemy. It was risky if the Skarrons could circle around behind them, but it was the best way to knock down a group of enemies that intended to slug it out, and as more globular conglomerates arrived they appeared to flatten out as if hitting an invisible window alongside the others Hatars.

The Renimar kept a few interceptors and others patrolling the backside of the formation as the wall of what looked like flat flowers extended in all directions, creating a mass of Skarron wreckage ahead of them that the Voku kept pushing back towards the star via tractor beams, clearing the firing lines as new Skarron ships were maneuvering around the dead hulks to pour their plasma and heavy lachars into the Voku ships along with several rail gun rounds.

Their weaponry was inferior, but grouped together in large amounts it was still dangerous and with the rail guns rounds thrown in the Voku couldn’t adjust their shields to energy repulsion only. For what limited technology the Skarrons had, they made good use of it…but so did he, having his ships at the incoming jumpline push Skarron debris into the arrival lane and get some free kills from the collisions.

He had no way of knowing how many ships were still on the way, but already the killcount was rising fast and not one of his ships had seen so much as a hull scratch. As the Skarrons grouped up that was going to be harder to avoid, but he was a Renimar and his naval skill was tailored to just this sort of situation. The fate of his fleet was in his hands, and he had to choose how hard to push, when, and where.

The Skarrons wouldn’t get to decide where the battles took place anymore. Not with this fleet. He would keep them moving from system to system and hitting them in an unpredictable fashion while the Skarrons got to choose the planets they wanted to hit and the Voku had to defend where the enemy chose.

Hopefully wherever these Skarron ships were meant to go would be able to hold out longer now. Noru-sar didn’t know where that was, nor ever would. He was fully in ship hunting mode with the Firewall being a distant memory.

This was where the war was going to exist for him…at least as long as he had supplies to last. He’d have to cycle back to rendezvous with cargo transports eventually, but for now he was fully loaded and outfitted for battle, meaning the space lanes were for him to poach and the Skarrons to defend.

And he intended to keep his massive fleet together as one unit capable of running over any opposition they faced. If the Skarrons retasked fleets to hunt him down, that would serve his purpose even more so by buying time for the rest of the Voku. In order to do that he had to become the biggest nuisance possible, and he was glad he was off to an early start here. Voku scouts hadn’t identified this convoy route before, and he wondered how many more were out there unknown to them.

Hopefully a lot, because he didn’t want to waste time traveling through empty systems. His fleet was here to fight, and they would hopefully be busy as close to nonstop as possible going forward.

4

May 4, 3646

Poxtrov System (Voku territory)

Poxtreen

Bi-tor woke inside a null tube, returning to consciousness after the bare minimum rest required as the battle for the planet continued to rage on. There were so many Skarron troops in play that they could literally attack around the clock for month after month…partly because they were losing troops so fast, but the Voku weren’t. Warriors like Bi-tor had to sleep eventually, so he’d been cycled back into ‘safe’ territory again and forced himself into the rest ward along with many others, only now to be awoken and headed back to the fighting.

He pulled on his clothing and eyepiece, eating and attending to other personal needs quickly before he boarded an aerial transport that took him out to a firebase near the fighting. There he mounted himself in a level 1 Stranom, interfacing his mind with the bipedal mech and marching it out and through the streets of the Voku world. A lot of the population had already been evacuated, but this was not a Firewall world. That barrier had been breached in multiple locations, with Poxtrov having been the first, and the fight here was now already 4 months long.

A third of the planet remained, and the Voku were fighting a slow retreat as the Skarrons threw so many walkers at them that they literally littered the landscape over the ‘conquered’ territory. From the sheer number of the hulks large enough to be seen from orbit, you’d think the Voku were winning…which they were. Every battle they would win, but the attrition and unending enemy reinforcements were allowing them to march their way across the planet and would eventually drive the Voku survivors off at great cost to themselves.

Bi-tor’s interfaced mind had him feeling the Stranom’s movements as his own, but before they got to the nearest fighting he could see one of the Skarron’s largest walkers on the horizon. It was far taller than the Stranom and was comprised of multiple orb-like sections chained together in a long train suspended on many spindly legs that allowed it to walk over top many of the shorter Voku buildings as it rained plasma down on everything beneath and around it.

To combat that, another Stranom nearby rendezvoused with Bi-tor and the two Voku mechs paused slightly as others ran by. They touched one another and the machines began to melt, combining their masses and forming a single larger Stranom with the other pilot coming into view in the cockpit beside Bi-tor with their minds partly meeting one another. They couldn’t sense what each person was thinking, but they could talk to one another without doing so vocally. They split duties, with Bi-tor retaining the Stranom’s motion while the other Voku warrior handled some of the weapons and navigation.

Having someone else watching your back while you moved and fought was an advantage, but that wasn’t why they’d formed up. They needed the extra shields and armor, for when they finally got up underneath the massive Skarron walker they could see other smaller versions moving alongside it…all of which fired on them and the other Stranoms.

Bi-tor moved his Voku-style mech forward, blocking for another smaller Stranom behind them as they ran towards one of the legs, firing on it and trying to melt through a single spot, but while the legs looked spindly and easily snapable from a distance they were in fact quite large. Thicker than a level 1 Stranom, with the Voku weaponsfire only chipping away at the sturdy leg material until Bi-tor got up to point blank range and began melting away a great deal more as he grabbed hold of it and held on as it moved, dragging the Stranom along with it.

Some of the underside turrets shot down on him but the other Stranoms kept the surrounding walkers busy long enough for him to finally burn through enough that the next step snapped the leg off…but the massive walker didn’t go down, for it had many other legs to redistribute its weight to.

Or rather it had, for there were other combined Stranoms going after more legs, and soon the massive walker stopped moving forward as it tried to fight off the anklebiters. When it couldn’t, the segments began to split apart, allowing those with enough legs to walk off on their own and leaving the damaged sections to fall to the ground where they were easy to destroy if the Voku wanted to stick around and pound them.

They didn’t. Just taking them to the ground was enough, with Bi-tor leaving the giant target behind and moving on to other moving ones even as its weaponry continued to fire on them. If they could just hold the Skarrons in place it would be a win, but the enemy was constantly rolling forward, albeit slowly at times, meaning this downed walker was going to be out of firing range of the Voku as their side continued to press forward…their success taking it out of the fight until it could get repaired, and so far in this Crusade the Voku hadn’t witnessed any repair work being done during combat. They simply left their damaged and dying troops behind as they pressed the attack, making it clear they felt everything and everyone was expendable.

Unfortunately, that tactic was a winning one for them…at least as long as their two slave races didn’t turn on them.

There was zero evidence of that even being considered. However the Skarrons worked their hold over the Aronsic and Jenipars, their loyalty was holding and they were throwing themselves at the Voku and dying by the billions to take Bi-tor’s worlds, and he hated them for it. This wasn’t true combat, this was sloppy, inferior opponents that should not be winning. Their insane numbers were allowing them victories and, damn it all, the Voku couldn’t stop them. At least not yet, and there was no way of knowing how many more were coming.

Could they hold this fighting retreat from world to world until they ran out of troops? Unlikely, but there was no way to know how many more were out there. The Voku scouts had reported so many approaching fleets that they couldn’t begin to count them all, and even with the Orica Fleet returning and trying to shoot down as many as they could before they could get to Voku worlds there were still far too many getting through. They had delayed the Firewall breach by an additional 2 years, but now the Skarrons were into the homeland and the combat was even messier in cityscapes that had not been fully designed for fighting.

That was making moving the Stranom from point to point more difficult while the Skarrons were flooding any and all approaches. He was having to stomp through Aronsic as he tried to pull back to another group of Stranoms, even kicking some elite Skarrons in their gleaming armor as they tried to tackle his legs and take the Voku mech down. Fortunately the Stranoms were far more agile than the enemy walkers, but his fell to the ground twice before he fought his way back up to a standing position with Aronsic pouring off the back as they stupidly jumped on his shields trying to use their pathetic mass to hold the Stranom down, but they couldn’t hold on when Bi-tor altered the energy barrier into ‘slick’ form.

His copilot fired a few shots into them, but there were too many to worry about and Bi-tor was just trying to get them back from the horde…which he was able to do a few minutes later, seeing several Voku infantry units firing from range from the buildings and trying to thin the infinite numbers before they too pulled back.

Bi-tor wanted to help them, but he knew the walkers were his responsibility and when he arrived at the waypoint he got a signal from a higher ranking Voku to combine again, with three level 2s coming together with 7 level 1s to form a massive Stranom that stood taller than most of the Skarron walkers, but still was shorter than their largest worm-like machines.

But the weaponry from all the Stranoms was now combined into the arms, with several specialized components that they carried forming 3 complete Stuvjo beam cannons. All three went into the chest, with Bi-tor being given firing control over one of them.

Suddenly he was able to focus on one thing only as he no longer had to drive the Stranom, and he pointed the firing reticle at one of the Skarron’s mid level walkers and let loose a stream of green/orange energy that punched right through the enemy shields and blasted into the armor that was very useful against plasma, but not the more advanced Voku weaponry.

Meanwhile the super Stranom was being targeted by so many walkers firing white plasma that it looked like they were in the middle of a snowstorm. They couldn’t take that much incoming firepower continuously, but for now the draining shields were holding and allowing Bi-tor and others to do a massive amount of damage to dozens of walkers in their forward firing arc as they tried to circle around and surround them as the infantry flow finally caught up and swelled like a thin layer of water around the Stranom’s feet. The stupid Aronisc were even firing on it with their pathetic weapons, but every shot would drain the shields a touch, meaning even the infantry getting stomped on were diminishing the amount of time the super Stranom could hold this position.

Bi-tor didn’t pay much attention to the other weapons aiming down and killing that infantry en mass, for his focus was on the bigger prey his Stuvjo was meant for, but eventually he saw the Stranom turn and began retreating, with his beam cannon shifting from the front torso to the back, allowing him to cover their retreat as they passed through buildings that had once been Voku homes…now reduced to a battlefield with the enemy overrunning them and the walkers punching their thin legs right down through roofs as they walked over or on top of them to get to better firing shots against the giant mech.

But it wasn’t the only one. As they retreated, Bi-tor saw two other giant Stranoms of similar but not identical size acting as stand-in turrets along with several proper ones built into the city structure. Beyond them was another holding line, and one that wasn’t going to fall so quickly.

Bi-tor knew it would eventually, but for now it was going to provide cover for his Stranom as it deconstructed from the massive one, with all the smaller versions breaking apart and running behind the defense lines. His was carrying damaged components and shields that were at less than 7%, but all his weapons were intact and he could use them again if he had a chance to recharge his shields.

That meant he had to pull back while others fought and needed at least a good 12 minutes to get his shields back up fully. Then he’d cycle back to the fighting covering for others as the Voku tried to drag out this battle as long as possible, for the more of their own units and troops they lost, the faster the conquest of the planet would progress…and that would mean the next assault against another system would also come sooner, so every hour they could delay them here was shielding another world.

And the other worlds were constructing additional defenses as fast as they could, but it never seemed to be enough to hold one against this unending stream of Skarrons and their loyal slaves.

Another massive Skarron fleet was passing through a system 4 jumps away from the now broken Firewall. Their ships followed a line from one jumppoint 142 degrees around the central star to the outgoing one, sharing limited information back and forth during the mundane travel until the ships at the outgoing jumppoint suddenly fell silent. No messages came from them and no shared sensors were being relayed until ships further back in the line began to see with their passive sensors the carnage occurring at the outgoing jumppoint.

Battle was evident, but they could not identify the ships attacking them. They were not a match for any ships in their extensive database, but it was clear that they were an extremely advanced race for the Skarron warships were exploding on what looked like single hits, though without active sensors it was hard to be sure. Those were being jammed, and soon that jamming extended further back through the line with the Skarron computer systems suddenly freezing up.

When that happened small ships appeared nearby and fired on them, swinging in and out of the giant Skarron vessels in comparison as they damaged but did not completely destroy them. Rather they were targeting specific points on their hulls that contained communications equipment before the Skarron computers reset and their shields came back up.

Like pilot fish proceeding the sharks, the individual Zak’de’ron free flew through space in nothing but their personal armor ahead of their nest-like vessels that were killing the Skarron ships so fast they never knew what had hit them. Between the sensor jamming and computer hacking, most of them couldn’t even see their attackers unless they looked out an open hangar bay and saw with their own eyes.

The few that did saw coils wrapped around each other, some that moved as the ships transformed slightly to bring different weapons to bear or to take the little fliers back onboard. They were firing cutting beams and pulse weapons, the latter of which would hit solid hull and burn through only to explode within, killing most of the smaller Skarron ships in a single blow once the shields were down.

And those shields were being taken down rapidly by the beam weapons that preceded the knockout blows with such a terrible efficiency that it was almost a beautiful thing to behold. But those few that did, didn’t live to share their vision of that terrible beauty, nor could they transmit what they had seen as the Dragons kept the outgoing jumppoint clogged with dead ships and guardian vessels to insure not a single ship got through as they worked their way back down the line all the way to the entry jumppoint.

The few ships that tried to flee to other jumppoints were intercepted, and with no means of interstellar communication other than by courier, as long as the Dragons kept them here no word would get out that they existed, and they had thousands of free flying Zak’de’ron working to ensure that as the warships progressed all the way up the line then sat at the incoming jumppoint and took out the Skarron ships still entering the system one at a time.

Those vessels literally never knew what hit them, save for the few survivors in the pieces that the warships moved to the side and the free flying Dragons finished off after dragging the chunks of ships out of the jumppoint to give the fleet clear firing lines. The survivors on those ships were ended soon thereafter, with the Zak’de’ron fleet staying put until the last of this convoy came through 18 days later.

When the outflow stopped, the Zak’de’ron ships recovered their free flying brethren then disappeared from view, hiding behind cloaking fields and making their way out of the system by other routes and leaving behind such a massive debris field that no one would even bother trying to clean it up for millennia to come. It would be labeled on various races’ navigational databases as a hindrance akin to an asteroid field and let drift in place, with no one knowing who had caused such massive damage nor caring so long as they didn’t show up again.

And with so many Skarron fleets about and combat happening in hundreds of locations, the destruction of 458,283 ships would eventually be lost in the enormity of the Crusade, preserving the anonymity of the Zak’de’ron as they ‘quietly’ tried to relieve some of the pressure on Voku territory without their knowledge.

5

August 14, 3646

Poxtrov System (Voku territory)

Poxtreen

Bi-tor and 28 other Voku were racing across an open paved plain between two cities, slashing and blasting apart the Aronsic there as they worked their way back towards an enemy landing zone even as a fierce aerial fight was taking place above them and dropping destroyed craft down onto the infantry below. The Voku were not affected, so few in number and agile enough to avoid the crashes, but the Aronsic were so numerous there was literally no place for them to run aside from jumping on top of one another, which didn’t get them far.

The Voku were tired, very tired, but today was different. They were counterattacking rather than fighting a withering retreat. There wasn’t much of the planet left, and the other two in the system had already fallen, but the long string of Skarron reinforcements that had been coming into the system had suddenly ended. At first they thought it was just a pause, but 5 days had passed with no new entries.

The fleet in orbit was beyond huge, but the Voku were constantly diminishing their numbers and losing few of their own save for the desperate battles to protect the surface when another shield generator fell. So long as more Skarron reinforcements were arriving to replace the losses it literally didn’t matter how hard the Voku fought…but if there was even a short pause the scales would begin to tip, and they already were in orbit.

Patches of orbit track were now back on Voku hands, one of which was overtop where Bi-tor was now. Previously they couldn’t have gone this far out because they were no longer under the protective overhang of the planetary shields and from past experience they knew the enemy warships would have no qualms about firing on their own troops if they were able to quickly eliminate Voku units with the same weaponsfire. Mathematically they were correct, for the Voku were so superior they’d end up killing more Skarrons in the long run if they weren’t taken out with orbital bombardment, but that was a cold way to fight and it was clear the Skarrons didn’t care about anything other than winning.

But now was different, for the Voku had naval cover above them that was fighting to keep the enemy fleet from coming in, and their cover wouldn’t be firing down on the Skarron troops while they were holding position. That meant the ground warfare was on its own now, for however brief a period it would be, and the Voku were more than eager to fight an ‘even’ fight, even though they were still horribly outnumbered. It felt even, if only for the fact that there was a slim chance of victory.

Bi-tor’s group had pushed far ahead of where the walkers and Stranoms were fighting, and just ahead was a very active landing zone where fresh troops were being brought down from orbit, albeit having to fly overland a long distance to undercut the Voku fleet far overhead that was arrayed to defend against the outlying fleet with very few weapon batteries left to point down. Once the Skarrons had figured that out they’d continued to reinforce the ground troops en mass, but with so many in play they had to organize carefully and keep certain landing zones clear with the Aronsic the Voku were fighting their way through being forced to move away to allow more to debark the transports.

If those transports could be destroyed on the ground, then this LZ would be obstructed and more troops couldn’t be landed here inside the portable shield generators that were essentially creating tall semi-clear walls around the transports so Voku aerial fighters couldn’t fire into their open holds when the Aronsic were coming out. There were also some anti-air batteries actively firing up through portal shields that would close over top when the transports were on the ground.

All of it was makeshift, but what was ahead of Bi-tor had been designed and honed through battle to a very robust design, though the landing field itself was miles wide, meaning the defensive measures were for large scale attack and there were many overlapping shields that held open walkways for the Aronsic to pour out of…making for an easy route in if the Voku could get there.

Fighting through a sea of Aronsic was commonplace now, and with the phalanx’s additional shielding his unit and others were making progress while more aerial fighters from both sides were falling from the beehive of activity above them. One bounced onto the top shield of the landing zone and slid off it, crunching a group of Aronsic that happened to be shuffling past below, then that top shield opened up and one of the half mile long transports lifted up into the sky with a heavy escort of fighters, making room for another to come down only a few minutes later. The top shield was lowered physically, allowing it to pass through while energy weapon fire would not, then the topside shield reformed completely and the new transport began to unload even more Aronsic.

There were no Skarrons visible in the fields of troops around the LZ, but there were some inside the perimeter guarding/organizing the troop debarkments, including the setup of some more anti-air turrets that were being placed on the outside by Jenipars so the shields wouldn’t have to momentarily lower to allow them to fire through. Whether those were additional units or replacements Bi-tor didn’t know, but it looked like this site was getting more and more fortified as the Skarron advance stalled. Normally they just rushed ahead, but now that the Voku were able to put up more resistance without having to worry about orbital bombardment the Skarrons were adjusting their strategy.

That meant this LZ had to be neutralized now, before it got any beefier, and it looked like the Voku aerial craft were doing little more than keeping the Skarrons from strafing the phalanxes. Bi-tor didn’t know how much longer they’d last, and it was quite possible that they were going to get caught out here and die, which was why he and the others didn’t kill the Aronsic any more than they had to. Speed was required, so they fought a path through and over the dead ones they were shooting down ahead of them, all the way up to the base of the shields that reached all the way to the paved ground.

Another fighter, this one Skarron, slid down and almost hit the phalanx, splintering into pieces that flew everywhere killing dozens of Aronsic. One shard deflected off of Bi-tor’s phalanx shield, but it held firm and only bounced him into the Voku off his left shoulder as they turned and ran along the wall shield to the right, meaning their left flank was no longer taking fire from the tiny plasma pistols the Aronsic were carrying.

The Voku followed the perimeter until they came to one of the outflows that quickly jammed with dead bodies as they fought their way in. More Aronsic climbed over them and down the rising mountain as the Voku fought hard to move mere steps forward as they were protected on the left and right by the shield walls. Behind them Aronsic were circling back to attack them, but it was those ahead that were the worst threat as several explosions ripped through them, one of which buried Bi-tor under a pile of enemy bodies.

He was pinned for a moment, then he managed to kick and wiggle himself partially free, enough at least to get his legs under him and push his way back to the surface where a friendly black arm reached down and helped pull him up…then another grabbed him and both Voku launched him forward like a slingshot using a combination of muscle and flight harness. Bi-tor flew up and over the mass of enemies, falling on the far side and literally rolling down the backside of the mound, crashing through those climbing up and bouncing off the dead they were trampling until he hit the paved ground on the other side with a wash of plasma shots hitting him.

His personal shields held, but his physical shield was lost on the far side with the other Voku. That meant his protection was low, and he knew from past experience that the best place to be was as close to the Aronsic as possible…so he could use their bodies to block ranged shots.

Bi-tor kicked one so hard it flew into the air like an ugly ball, then he slid down onto a knee in the gap, shooting those around him while trying to diminish his height advantage on them, making his silhouette smaller while spinning on his ankles and fighting those around him at more or less their eye level until he got a comm from his unit. His physical shield then flew out over the pile as well, and Bi-tor leapt up into the air to grab it before it hit the ground.

As soon as he did so its enhanced shields covered his body, with him cracking the neck of one Aronsic on landing as he took a much more aggressive posture, making himself a moving turret and plowing through the flow of Aronsic coming off the transports. He did the best he could to disrupt and slow their approach in the somewhat narrow gap between the huge shields.

He was fighting so hard and fast he lost track of time, but eventually the other Voku were able to work their way up to him and the phalanx reformed on the other side of the massive pile of dead, though another one was starting to form around him. Before they could get bogged down in it they pushed through the gap and the interior shield ended, opening up the landing zone before them.

They immediately took off to the left, traveling on the other side of that shield on the open pavement…which was a huge relief after having walked/fought over Aronsic bodies for more than the past half hour to get here.

Getting up to running speed, the slower Aronsic couldn’t keep up as they chased the Voku inward and the outflows from the transports redirected to come after them, but the head start was too much and the phalanx was on one of the anti-air turrets before the Skarron elites could get to them. The regular Skarron troops there were augmented with Aronsic gunners, but neither offered much resistance as the Voku targeted the machinery rather than those operating it, for they’d be replaced within seconds while the turret itself could not be.

After trashing it they moved on to another and another before finally getting to one of the transports and having to weather some of its anti-personnel weaponry as the Aronsic tried to tackle and hold the Voku down to give them better shots. It didn’t work well, but then two aerial fighters came through the topside shield and hovered nearby, firing point blank into the Aronsic that were trying to slow the Voku down.

That hurt, and two Voku were lost after a few seconds of concentrated firing, but they didn’t just sit there and take it. A pair of Dwio orbs flew back and hit one of the Skarron fighters, dropping it to the ground while Bi-tor ran at and jumped up to the other, which apparently thought it was too high for that attack.

Bi-tor grabbed unshielded underside using his adhesive gloves and crawled around the fighter as it began to get more elevation. When he got to an engine vent that helped cool the Skarron’s inefficient anti-grav he fired into it with his forearm weaponry, resulting in the fighter tipping over and flying with only one side elevated, but it still continued to gain height, nearly all the way up to the topside shield, before he managed to take out the other cooling unit.

The fighter dropped slightly, then the emergency override kicked in and had the anti-grav running hot…both of them…and the fighter leveled off as it flew up through the shield.

Bi-tor jumped off immediately, falling back through the energy shield before it switched to physical, and used his flight harness to drift him over on top of the transport as one of its batteries shot him twice. He landed on the hull and raced over to it, punching through the slim armor casing and denting the weapon so badly it ceased to function as he heard a massive explosion overhead.

He glanced back to see the fighter in bits and pieces flying everywhere as a result of the anti-grav overloading. That’s what happened when they weren’t properly cooled, and the pilot had been so anxious to get him off the craft that he’d pushed it too hard in escape when he should have floated down to the surface.

Voku craft wouldn’t explode like that, but Skarron technology, especially their anti-grav, was designed for maximum output in combat and had few safety protocols, which was why he wasn’t going to attempt the same sabotage to the transport beneath him.

Bi-tor didn’t try to get back to the phalanx, for he was already at their intended destination. Rather he ran across the unshielded hull until he found a topside hatch that he blasted his way through and entered the ship, finding a wall of Aronsic and a Skarron amongst them waiting for him.

The wall of plasma hurt his shields, but he pushed through it fast enough to get into melee range and went to work on them. The Aronsic were easy to kill, but one of the claws on the end of the Skarron’s arms got him on the shoulder and pinned him in place long enough that the Aronsic peppered him with enough shots to get through his shields. He felt plasma burns on his chest, but thankfully his body suit absorbed most of the damage as the impact points puffed in little explosions.

Bi-tor twisted free of the death grip before another claw could come around and enhance the hold, then he dove underneath the Skarron rather than going on top of it, making the Aronsic shoot between the thick, elephant-like legs. They weren’t so reckless when shooting at their superior, but Bi-tor was still without shields and he needed a moment to recharge.

Thankfully the Skarron did as he expected, bending its legs and dropping its underside down on top of him. Bi-tor was pinned between the heavy Skarron and the deck plates with the enemy’s body caving in enough that the Aronsic couldn’t shoot underneath. Bi-tor was next to helpless underneath, but the Skarron couldn’t crush him. It wasn’t painless, but Voku physiology was too tough to be overcome by even Skarron mass. Had this one been a bit bigger then it might have been a different story, but Bi-tor played dead and didn’t move or fire as he was pinned beneath it, all the time letting his shield generators recharge.

The Skarron bounced up and down a few times, trying to increase the damage, then it finally stood up so the Aronsic could shoot what was left of the Voku…at which point Bi-tor turned his shields back on and scurried out from under the Skarron. He ignored it and went for the Aronsic instead, taking out the threat of their little pistols while the Skarron had none of its own.

It didn’t take long until this part of the ship was neutralized and only the Skarron remained. It tried to fight hand to hand, but Bi-tor was too fast and delivered plenty of shots onto its back at just the right point, taking it down as the rest of his phalanx finally boarded the ship from below.

He helped them clean out the upper levels where the crew resided even as the main hold was emptied of the fresh troops, but this transport was not going to take off again. The Voku made sure of that as they sabotaged key systems without triggering explosive overloads. They didn’t want the ship destroyed, but rather sitting here and taking up a landing slot that the Skarrons couldn’t use.

Even if they chose to blast it the pieces would still be here in the way, so the functionality of this LZ was already diminished no matter how the Skarrons reacted, but that wasn’t enough. They needed to take it out entirely, so they proceeded to move on to other weapon turrets around the LZ and eventually to the other transports that kept stupidly landing and offloading more troops, some of which other arriving phalanxes just slaughtered as they came out of the holds.

Eventually there was a captured and sabotaged transport at each of the slots, making mass transit to and from the LZ impossible…which was good, for the aerial division soon thereafter gave a warning that it wasn’t going to be able to hold air cover much longer.

Their task done, Bi-tor and the others regrouped and blew up one of the shield generator walls, taking it down and rushing out across somewhat exposed ground before they came to the Aronsic swarms again. They were moving gradually towards distant targets, but it was more like a holding area where they were all corralled and stretched for tens of miles in every direction.

With their air cover about to disappear one way or another, Bi-tor knew their only route of escape was back across that sea of enemies, so with their task done they focused on survival and with the help of another phalanx they fought through them losing a few more Voku on the way.

Bi-tor was one that made it back to the front where there was more traditional combat taking place, but more than a third of the others did not. Desperate times called for desperate attacks, and they’d denied the Skarrons attacking nearby their LZ, meaning the reinforcements would have to walk even greater distance to get here so long as the Voku air cover could keep enough pressure on the enemy transports. If not, they could just set down wherever they wanted.

Bi-tor couldn’t control any of that, he could only do his part and for now the navy was holding their line overhead and the Stranoms were keeping this front line adequately contained. That was the most he could hope for now, so as he and the other surviving phalanx members were met and escorted back to a ‘safe’ zone he held himself together despite the burns on his chest. He didn’t realize until he finally sat down how badly injured he was, not to mention how close to passing out his fatigue was making him.

He’d barely lived through that, and many others hadn’t, but the Voku were winning small victories and as he looked to the sky and the mass of warships above, he wondered just how long this badly fought for stalemate would last. He didn’t expect much, but this was the first time he’d ever seen a stall in Skarron reinforcements in any of the campaigns he’d fought during this Crusade. He knew better than to hope for more, but he couldn’t help it right now. He was near the breaking point and even the slightest bit of relief was too much to ignore.

He and others had to slow the Skarrons as much as possible. The rest of his race was counting on it, otherwise they’d have a free run through the most heavily populated Voku worlds. The Skarrons hadn’t gotten to them yet. Not even close. But every world that fell invited another invasion closer to those densely populated zones that could never be fully evacuated in time.

The fate of their race rested in his and the other defenders’ hands…and right now they needed every small bit of good luck they could get, with the clear naval skies in stellar orbit being the best gift they could have hoped for.

The only question was, how long was it going to last?

6

July 2, 3654

Bavrenti System (Voku Regional Capitol)

Hakibi

Cal-com walked down the hallway out from the oracle, leaving it and his command staff behind. They’d continue to deal with information and movements on the overall warfront, but the Skarrons were here, at Bavrenti, and Cal-com wasn’t going to evacuate ahead of the others. They were going to defend the regional capitol, which was the second strongest system hit by the Skarrons to date, and not just in the Crusade.

The Skarrons had attacked Bavrenti before, back when they were pushing out through the galaxy in far lesser numbers and before the Voku had received their civilization-wide upgrade. Even then they’d never taken it, and if it was finally going to fall to them Cal-com was going to personally kill as many of the bastards as he could before having to retreat.

He knew others wanted him to leave early, but with some 12 billion Voku in this system that were going to be fighting and dying for lack of evac ships, he wasn’t going to leave them until necessary. They were his clone brothers, and where one stood all would. That was the Voku way, so as the naval battle around the star continued to escalate beyond holding and the first large globs of the Skarron fleet moved into orbit overhead and began pounding on the planetary shields, he strode evenly and purposefully through the cityscape, not running, not panicking, as others moved about at a more furious pace making preparations.

He knew the shields wouldn’t breach for hours more, perhaps days, but when they did the Skarrons would come down through the foothold and begin the massive ground campaign to take the planet. Had the original defense fleet been here the Skarrons would have been fighting for weeks just to get to planetary orbit, but that fleet had been pared down greatly over the years with conglomerates sent to fight where the war was. Some had been retained to this system, but not enough.

Had Cal-com not sent those ships earlier the Skarron advancement would have been here by now, so they were well spent in the strategic sense, but for this system it was a sad consequence of having to defend other systems that this one was so weak…navally speaking. As far as the ground defenses went, they had not been diminished save for the number of warriors, and those had been transferring back from the defeats on other worlds, so the ground fight was going to be fully staffed.

Cal-com already knew where the foothold would be, for the Skarrons were only attacking one point on the planetary shields, and the Voku army was repositioning to fight at that location…or rather around it, for they didn’t want to get hit by the weaponsfire when it did finally penetrate. Evacuations of those under the affected area were already underway and the pace of attack seemed to give adequate time if the Voku moved quickly, but Cal-com wasn’t concerning himself with it now. Others could handle those tasks adequately well and he intended to apply his skills in a more personal manner.

His singular march across the cityscape ended at a military base where tens of thousands of Stranom were waiting for their pilots. They were condensed down into approximate squares until activated, and many already were as they began leaving to head towards what would be the warfront in coming days, and while many would be flown out to it, it made more sense for others to simply walk and leave the transports to help the civilian evacuation.

Cal-com walked up to an inert cube and used the controls on his left gauntlet to activate it, with the cube morphing into a bipedal approximation similar to his own body but with significant size alterations in various areas. A doorway appeared on the left leg and Cal-com entered, climbing stairs that melted behind him, resealing the leg as he climbed into the cockpit and sat in the control chair. He could fight standing or in any other configuration he wished, for the cockpit was also morphable, but the march out to the front was going to take a while so he decided to sit.

His Stranom walked out of the grid it was in and moved towards a communal area where others were combining for the trip out, with him signaling many others to him. They walked up to and melted into his own, with the single Stranom growing larger and larger, to epic proportions, until it was taller than many of the surrounding buildings. Some 83 level 1 Stranom eventually fused together, but none of the other pieces had pilots. Cal-com had ordered them to him remotely, meaning he was the sole occupant in the towering machine.

Before combat began he’d pick up additional pilots, but right now he was going to move this monster on his own, with a single step moving it far faster than the smaller ones. Some buildings he actually stepped over as he began to prepare himself for the type of personal battle that he’d not taken part in for many centuries.

But his memories were fresh, as were his skills, and he had no trouble walking his enormous Stranom off towards the horizon as others could be seen making the same journey ahead and behind him as the weaponsfire from orbit was just barely visible in the night sky to the far northeast even from his elevated viewpoint. The Skarrons wanted to hit the primary city on the capitol world, but it held the strongest shield generator segment, so they were hitting the one adjacent to it. That meant it wasn’t too far away and as he continued the nearly silent march of the giant machines he kept watch what was happening in orbit and the carnage occurring at the Skarron’s entry jumppoint as his defense fleet tried to whittle down their numbers as they came in, but there was no way they could stop them all.

18 days later…

Cal-com’s giant Stranom, aflame in multiple locations, punched straight down into the back of a massive Skarron walker, breaking through the yellow armor plates and sinking the hand all the way down into the interior as the weaponry on his Stranom was being fired in all directions by the other pilots inside it with him. He, however, was the one handling the movements of the Stranom, and the Dafchor used the new handhold to rip the entire spherical section off the Skarron ‘train.’

They actually auto disconnected when it was yanked off the ground, splitting the walker in half with both sections skittering around to new locations as Cal-com lifted the damaged segment up over the Stranom’s head, then threw it across the battlefield to where it knocked down four smaller walkers like bowling pins…all of which appeared to be in slow motion due to the massive size of the mechanical combatants in play.

Further to the west there was another massive Stranom fighting hundreds of Skarron walkers with more walking up behind them from landing zones out in the open where the enemy warships could provide covering fire. Right now the fighting was occurring under the farthest edge of the primary defense shield, but beyond that the Stranoms couldn’t go or they’d be blown apart in short order.

That allowed the Skarrons to organize their massive walker formations with a sea of Aronsic and Skarron infantry supporting them. From his point of view, Cal-com felt like the largest person on the battlefield, slow but very, very powerful, yet even this Stranom’s shields were already down over most parts of its mechanical body and the weak plasma weapons of the Skarrons were adding up as the overall size had to shrink each time a chunk of it was damaged. That meant Cal-com’s Stranom would keep fighting for a very long time, but get weaker with each height demotion.

But with the reductions would come additional speed, though right now he didn’t need it. He was able to physically do more damage to the enemy walkers by slow punches and kicks than the weaponry was doing, which was why he and others were fighting in this melded fashion while other smaller Stranom were fighting around his feet.

Unfortunately they were all trampling the Voku buildings that were now evacuated…or at least he hoped. If someone was left down there they couldn’t be saved now, for many of his Stranom’s steps were crunching rooftops in order to get into position to hit the walkers that were doing less damage with their spindly legs making pinhole damage points beneath them.

The destruction couldn’t be helped, but he had to make sure to avoid the infantry locations or he’d accidentally kill his own troops. The enemy didn’t seem to care, for they were rushing Aronsic right under the Stranom’s feet and making the Voku infantry circle around behind the massive machines and away from their flanking positions. It was a chaotic battlefield, but the Voku were masters of warfare compared to this sloppy and dishonorable Skarron army that didn’t care for the fate of its own troops.

Cal-com ran his Stranom three steps forward and turned his right side into a slightly smaller walker, ramming it and essentially tackling it to the ground as many of its tiny legs snapped from the stress overload. He rotated his shoulders and whacked his other arm into the top of one section elbow first and crunched it right through the shields that could not stand up to that much sheer mass.

Before Cal-com could get his Stranom standing again the light went out…literally. It was as if the star in the sky had simply shut off. By the time his machine was standing and firing off shots like a turret, he realized it was the planetary shields. For some reason they’d switched to opaque and were not letting light nor sensor beams pass through. In the distance it was still bright over the enemy landing zones where there were no shields, but for some reason the Voku sensors nearby that could look up through that gap were not functioning.

Cal-com took a quick break from the fighting, letting a subordinate handle the movements as he tried to figure out what was going on. He hadn’t ordered any such action, nor did it make any strategic sense, blinding themselves like this, unless they needed to hide something from the Skarrons in orbit. The Dafchor made some quick inquires but found that no one knew what had triggered the change in the shields, nor could they undo it.

Their links to the navy were also down, so they had no knowledge of what was going on above them until Cal-com started to see parts of Skarron warships falling through the gap and down onto their landing zones by the dozens. A strange sensation began to creep over him, then his suspicion was confirmed as his mind exploded with the voice of an Elder.

Silence must be maintained, but we are here. We cannot remain to be seen, and the blindness will be lifted shortly, but their numbers will be thinned. Make use of it. This is still your fight to be won or lost.

When the voice ended new information was evident in his mind, and suddenly he could see several other attacks the Elders were making against the Skarrons across the interstellar warzone. They were helping the Voku, but no one could know it else word could get back to the V’kit’no’sat, so they couldn’t fight directly. If this system was to be saved it had to be the Voku that held off the enemy. The Elders could wipe them all out, but there would be too many eyes to see, so they were doing the next best thing and aiding where they could.

Cal-com realized the knife-edge they were walking. There were billions of eyes here, and even if you could blind the technological ones it was possible word would slip through from person to person, and all it would take was one report making its way across the stars to imperil the Elders.

They were risking much to aid the Voku, and the enormity of that sacrifice brought tears to his eyes that had to be vented out the bottom side of his crystal eyepiece. The Elders were not just overlords assisting with guidance and technology from afar. They were willing to fight alongside the Voku in battle, risking possible exposure, in order to give them a chance to survive.

Cal-com immediately took back motion control on the Stranom and kicked over a small walker before stepping on it and running towards another bigger one even as a piece of his left arm fell off and a shimmer traveled over the entire Stranom as it shrunk to reappropriate necessary components.

What withering his spirit had taken over the years of constant losses was now gone. The Elders were with them, though he couldn’t tell anyone of it, but it reinforced to him that this war was survivable and that the Voku were important enough to the Elders for them to take a personal hand in the fighting.

Even though the Stranom couldn’t move any faster given its mechanical limitations, Cal-com’s energy level was buoyed and his pace of combat increased as he pushed into the encroaching Skarron ranks and did massive amounts of damage until his Stranom was so diminished in size that there were too many pilots for it to carry without an additional bulge on the chest.

Eventually he had to retreat, with other Stranom covering the withdraw of his now tiny and fat one as the Skarrons continued to pepper the almost weaponless frame as it ran back through the more or less intact buildings to a rally point where additional Stranoms were waiting in cube mode. Most of what Cal-com had left was the interior workings of the original Stranom, and those parts weren’t meant to be in such a dense and small cluster.

Because of that he and the other pilots had to evacuate the ugly mass that was left, then they ran over to the cubes and boarded them, reforming into a larger Stranom but not the full size of what they’d had before. Some of the pilots moved off in level 1 or 2 versions to reinforce weak areas that were of greater priority, but even before Cal-com had moved his new super Stranom off a kilometer a sea of Aronsic surged beneath his feet heading for the depot.

Every weapon on the Stranom fired down on the street, but Cal-com went the extra distance of taking a knee and using the lower right leg as a barrier that crushed some beneath it and forced those on the other side to stop moving and work their way around. He knew there were too many to stop, but he needed to delay their getting to the deactivated Stranom who had no pilots.

After a few minutes he knew it was futile, so he went back to the deactivated cubes and turned them all on, summoning them into his super Stranom and increasing its size beyond all design limits. It was larger than any ever used in battle, and for good reason. It moved so slowly it was little more than a mobile turret, but that was enough to get the Stranom cubes out of harm’s way as what looked to be plasma fire from all the walkers arrayed before them angled up to hit the monster Stranom.

Cal-com was so high up now that he couldn’t use the buildings for cover, meaning he was taking more damage than the Stranom would have if it had been in multiple pieces lower to the ground. That meant this was actually to the Skarron’s advantage, but he had to get the extra cubes away from the Aronsic or they’d lose them entirely.

At the moment there were no more Skarron reinforcements coming into the landing zone, so he decided to make a dangerous gambit. Rather than taking the reserve Stranoms backward out of the fight and depositing them in relative safety, he took his skeleton crew of pilots inside with him and split up the monster Stranom into 6 versions approximately the same size of what he’d been fighting in previously before battle damage had shrunk it.

That meant there were less pilots to man all the weapons, but they’d trained to multi-task and he knew they could be stretched this way if needed. Besides, it was the physical blows that were doing the most damage to the walkers, and with six of them he could most definitely punch through the Skarron lines and get to their landing zones…assuming the warships overhead that were raining down through the shield gap were indeed all disabled or driven off.

He couldn’t know that for certain, but if he could get even partway into that LZ he could wreck so much of the Skarrons’ organization that they wouldn’t be able to mount an assault for days while they tried to clean up the mess. The Skarrons were counting on their rear flank being protected by the warships, and the Elders may have just exposed that weakness now. Cal-com couldn’t know for sure, but the raining chunks of warship were as good a sign as any.

“Follow me, brothers. We push through to the interior now and let tomorrow fend for itself. Let nothing slow you down,” he said to those in his Stranom and the other 5 super ones nearest him while everyone else was fighting just to try and hold position against the waves of walkers. Hopefully he’d be able to take pressure off them, and without knowing how long this reprieve from the warships would last, or even what was occurring in orbit, he knew he had to act swiftly.

To that end he launched his Stranom off at the fastest run it could manage, brushing by two Skarron walkers as he punched them aside and his pilots fired the weaponry at pointblank range as they passed. He could feel their moment of opportunity and wanted to waste no time, even as he ran head on into fresh walkers that had not a lick of battle damage on them and which were reforming their lines to block his path…including one of their largest turning sideways so that it made for a long wall before him that Cal-com shoulder rammed, then punched his way through, breaking the walker in half and opening up a gap that the others followed him through enroute to the back lines where they intended to swing around and attack the walker waves after taking out the massive transport ships that were constantly ferrying them down from orbit.

Except that some of those ships were already damaged from the falling orbital debris, and the further he got out into the enemy the more he could see up through the hole in the planetary shields. He knew, somehow, that his vision of it was not being blocked as everyone else’s was, and the sensors sending information directly into his brain allowed him a glimpse of the Elders’ ships far up in orbit slaughtering the Skarron fleet that had poked the hole in the planetary shields in the first place.

That sight, along with the fact that they were letting him see it, humbled him greatly…along with reinforcing the wisdom and righteousness of their cause. The Elders were the true masters of the galaxy and the Voku were important to them, for what reason Cal-com didn’t know, but his part in the here and now was clear.

The Voku had to survive, and if the Elders had come in person to make sure that happened, Cal-com was going to make certain he did everything he possibly could to make ensure his race survived, both for their sake and for the future purpose the Elders had for them, whatever it may be.

7

Gahmorn Ley-yen was onboard a conglomerate near the entry jumppoint the Skarrons were using to arrive in the Bavrenti System, fighting yet another losing battle as there were too many ships coming through to deal with. Originally they’d been able to stop all those coming through here, but the first wave into Voku systems saw multiple jumplines used so they couldn’t blockade them. Over the course of 2 days no less than 7 different jumplines had Skarron ships arriving, and those that arrived elsewhere eventually transitioned over to this primary jumppoint in order to defend it.

Now all the Skarron reinforcements were coming through here and only here, an unending spigot of ships that kept replacing whatever the Voku destroyed. The key was to stop that spigot, but there were too many ships in the system and the best that the fleet admiral could do was to disrupt the jumppoint and force the Skarrons to bunch up on each other. That gave him some additional kill opportunities, but it wasn’t enough. That said, given this insane war, the Voku needed every advantage they could get, so while there were a lot of Skarron warships over the capitol planet he was out here trying to reduce the inflow and take some pressure off them…but it felt like he was failing miserably.

The actual ship counts would attest otherwise, but at this point it did not matter. So long as the stream of reinforcements continued the system would eventually fall. It was how the Skarron Crusade operated and why it was so dangerous. It was hurting that empire greatly, but if you eliminated all your enemies then it didn’t matter how little of a fleet you had left because there would be no one around to exploit your weakness. The Skarrons were going all in here and many other locations beyond Voku territory, and they were not going to be deterred by losses, no matter how costly, when their great war machine continued to push forward conquering every world they attacked without exception.

The Voku hadn’t been able to hold a single one, despite a few temporary reprieves. When the tendrils of the Skarron fleet reached out to you they came in waves, but if you held out against the waves they eventually turned into an unending stream of ships traveling from far, far away and stacking up in a line that stretched across the stars. It was an awe-inspiring and terrifying way of fighting a war, and so far the Voku didn’t have an answer for it. Ley-yen was going to stay put here and do his duty, reducing the ship count as much as he could, but he doubted…

Everything onboard his ship suddenly cut out, with his sensor displays going blank beyond the immediate ships they were targeting. The Gahmorn didn’t know what was happening, nor did anyone else, then a series of priority orders from the Dafchor came through in a very odd way, but Ley-yen wasn’t going to question it. What he did question was why his sensors were not fully operational.

“Why do we have systems failure?”

“I don’t know,” one of his Oracle staff reported. “But it does seem to be acting in conjunction with our new orders. Our targets are coming through clearly,” the Voku said as a slew of new ships coming through the jumppoint were highlighted…ships that the Voku fleet could not get to without taking massive casualties.

“If this is what the Dafchor thinks is best, then so be it, but there is no reason to blind us. How can he even do that?”

“Unknown, but all other systems appear to be functioning normally.”

“If we are going to our deaths, why be distracted by other matters?” another Voku floated.

Ley-yen’s eyes blinked suspiciously beneath his crystal where no one else could see. “Perhaps. If we survive this I’ll ask him about it, but for the moment we have our orders. Take us to the mouth of the jumppoint in Zarkdex configuration…,” he said, cutting off suddenly. “What is he thinking?”

More clarification of the orders had come through, indicating an approach route that would not get them to the mouth as quickly as possible. It had them going straight through the bulk of the enemy fleet rather than skirting around the edges and flanking the deceleration lane. Ley-yen would have rather tried to brave the incoming side of that lane than go straight into that maw of ships, but he admitted that he could eventually get his fleet through…or at least part of it.

Maybe that was what was required, but he couldn’t even see the status of the planet now. It was all blocked out, and that made this situation even more odd. Dangerously odd, but there was no time to contact the Dafchor. The comm lag was too great, so he either had to follow the orders, amend them, or disobey. He badly wanted to amend them, but without knowing what was going on he could not.

Maybe that was why he was being blinded, but that wasn’t how the Dafchor typically operated. Never, in fact, so whatever was going on had to be something…well, the Gahmorn didn’t know, nor had he any plausible theories, and that left only one choice before him.

Trust Cal-com or refuse the order.

“If we go to our deaths, let’s make them count,” he told his Oracle crew as he confirmed the orders. “Proceed.”

Ley-yen breathed slowly as his fleet reformed, literally, with multiple conglomerates coming together to form larger ones with the purpose of being able to withstand greater firepower while concentrating their own. The crews were moved to more interior locations expecting massive hull damage, with each Zarkdex conglomerate moving in close formation with the others and firing at the targets ahead of them even as the flanking Skarron ships were hidden by the sensor blind.

Revised targeting data came through from Cal-com. Was he out here with them? Did the Skarrons somehow have a link into the Voku data net and the Dafchor didn’t want them to know of his presence? None of this made sense, but as the first Skarron ships in the thickest of the enemy fleet began to blow apart and the conglomerates pushed their way through the debris the Gahmorn noticed something odd. The flanks of his formation were not tanking damage…or rather not much. The Skarrons should have been swarming all around them, closing in from behind and firing from all directions.

The damage indicators only noted limited shield impacts from the sides and nothing from behind. Something was happening out there that the sensor blinds were meant to hide, and whatever it was, was saving his fleet from certain death and getting them to the mouth of the jumppoint where the newest arriving Skarron ships were coming in blind and decelerating along a pre-determined route.

When the conglomerates eventually got there they began targeting the incoming ships one at a time, with enough firepower to snuff them out within seconds as they also fought those nearby, but the sensor blind extended and they could no longer fire at what they could not see. Part of Ley-yen almost ordered his people to start firing manually into the sensor blind, for not being able to see the enemy when they were around your neck was infuriating, but the damage indicators were dropping sharply, so he clenched his fists silently and let it ride as his fleet sat in oblivion save for the tiny slice of space visible ahead of them that had the incoming Skarron ships that didn’t stand a chance arriving at a rate of one every few seconds.

This is what it had been like initially, but then the Skarrons had been bringing in ships on other jumplines where the Voku were not camped out. The Gahmorn had no idea how Cal-com was taking the heat off of his fleet, but if this was to stand then the inflow of Skarron ships were going to be completely neutralized so long as he didn’t lose too many conglomerates. The Skarrons were getting some shots off before they exploded, but it was the rest of their massive fleet that should have been pounding the Voku into crumbs right now that concerned him.

Where were they? And why was this damn sensor blind in place so he couldn’t see them?

Ley-yen didn’t have any answers, but whatever the case was they were ambushing the incoming Skarrons and killing every single ship that came through. That ended up lasting for hours upon hours before the sensor blind suddenly dropped without warning and the Gahmorn almost fell to the floor in shock.

They were gone. All of them. Across the entire system. The entire Skarron fleet that had the Voku in a death grip was gone…or rather reduced to long tracks of rubble that were visible on sensors, but the Voku ships that had done this were not. There was the fleet in orbit of Hakibi, with the smaller worlds of Tadin and Vok without any fleet presence at all. Their planetary shields were almost gone, reduced to a few scattered regions while the main planet was faring much better…except there were no longer enemy bombardment fleets above any of them.

“Gahmorn?”

“I do not know,” he said humbly. “Thanks be to the Elders, but I do not know how this happened. Are there any further orders?”

“No. Nothing.”

Ley-yen looked at the fully functional battle display, seeing the Skarron ships incoming and his own conglomerates handling them. The workload wasn’t too much and the Skarron ships weren’t stacking up. So long as he could continue killing them this fast then…

“We can hold them off indefinitely,” he said whisper quiet, but the entire Oracle was noiseless, so they all heard him. “The Skarrons have no interstellar communications. They rely on couriers…are there any Skarron ships moving out there?”

“Negative. There’s nothing left.”

“If they don’t know, then they’ll keep sending in ships expecting the jumppoint to be secure…”

“How long before a courier is overdue to report and they send someone to investigate?” the primary navigator asked.

“I have no idea how they’re set up, but if these routes are predetermined they may just be sending ships down them blindly with the leading elements organized. Those already reported back that the system was secure, otherwise the other jumplines would still be sending in ships.”

“If they don’t know…” one of the crew said, realizing the full impact.

“Let me make this painfully clear,” Ley-yen said, raising his voice significantly. “I do not know how Cal-com managed this, but our task is clear. We have this jumpline secure and we must maintain a pace of carnage sufficient to keep those ships from grouping up. If we can do that we can hold this system indefinitely. If we fall behind they swell and we slowly return to the situation we were in. We must hold this position with all our might. I want status reports on every damaged system and anticipated failures and weapons depletion. Anything that could reduce our kill power, I want to know ahead of it happening. We cannot waste this.”

“We have a surplus so long as their ship stacking doesn’t intensify.”

“We need enough additional vessels to cover that contingency. Send a message to Cal-com asking for more if he can spare them. There may be debris to police, but if there truly are no more Skarrons left here then…”

The Gahmorn dropped silent as he exchanged glances with his crew. None of them knew how to take this. They were as good as dead one moment, then the entire system just upended itself and returned to Voku hands. Nothing his race had could have done that much damage, and the Gahmorn was at a loss for words, but he and his crew knew well they couldn’t waste this opportunity, for the Crusade was still on in full force with more ships continually coming.

But so long as they were coming through this one jumppoint and only this jumppoint…

“We will get our answers later. For now we have an ambush point to hold. They cannot pass this point again, and if we have to die to secure it, it will be worth our lives,” he said, looking at the near perfect positioning and wall of death they were laying down on the individual ships as they came in and the drifting debris that was passing through the Voku fleet and being moved aside slightly by tractor beams to lessen the impacts on their shields, for the enemy ships were being destroyed before they could come to a full stop and saving the Voku the task of having to pull them out of their firing lines.

“But I will not tolerate any more of us dying if unnecessary. There can be no mistakes. Query every section and every crew member. I need readiness data now,” he said, reaching a hand into the main hologram and using his palm to form a wall between his fleet and the specs of incoming ships decelerating from interstellar jump speed. “We have to hold this line. Hakibi may yet be saved if we can.”

8

November 5, 3655

Bavrenti System (Voku Regional Capitol)

Hakibi

The ambush point had held for 11 months straight, with a never ending stream of Skarron ships coming through and being destroyed immediately, but Cal-com knew it was going to come to an end once the first scout ships started entering on other jumplines and fleeing immediately. The Elders hadn’t stopped them, and the Dafchor assumed they’d left the system or had done all they were going to here. He truly had no way of knowing where they were unless they let him know, but the sensor blind on the Voku ships and planet had long since gone, so he assumed the Elders were too.

They’d given this system an extra year, and that in turn had delayed assaults on other Voku worlds, but this one was once again in peril as additional reinforcement lines started to divert, meaning the Voku had to defend multiple jumppoints simultaneously.

Cal-com had expected that, and his fleet had held off 6 incoming streams before sporadic clumps of fleets began appearing at random locations and fleeing elsewhere in the system before the Voku could get to them. Those fleets eventually grouped up and hit one of the blockades, doing enough damage to allow some of the incoming ships to survive, and from there things snowballed in the Skarrons’ favor.

Rather than defend the planet, Cal-com had chosen to keep 98% of his ships at the jumppoints killing as many Skarrons as they could while they were vulnerable, for some of the jumppoints were still holding and the other Skarrons were ignoring the deaths of their brothers so long as they were tying up Voku ships there. Mathematically Cal-com knew he had to maintain that, even as the planet was subjected to another massive ground invasion after the free Skarron ships had punched right through the weak shield that had been built to cover the hole from the first invasion.

The rest of the planetary defense shield was up and running normally, with the Skarrons not having enough ships to even try taking down another section…not that they would. The ground assault was by far their best option, and Cal-com was trying to knock down as many of their transports as he could with the Voku aerial fighters that were almost impossible for their warships to target from above as they flew into the descending transports and fought directly over the landing zone while small teams of Voku moved across ground on virtual suicide missions to knock down the defense batteries and shield generators that the Skarrons were trying to set up again.

Send too much out and the Skarrons would fire on their own troops to destroy them, so Cal-com had to send too few troops to avoid that bombardment. They knew what they were being asked to do and didn’t hesitate, but he hated not being able to use his fleet to cover them…though if he did, there’d be so many more warships coming through the jumppoints that it would be counterproductive. He either had to fight them over the planet or as they came out of their jumps, the latter of which gave him a huge killcount advantage.

And this wasn’t the only system under attack. 13 more had fallen while the regional capitol held and another 28 had come under new attack, with Cal-com organizing them from afar so long as communications held up. The relays the Voku used were not on any planet, and so far the Skarrons hadn’t bothered to go after them. They seemed focused on overrunning the planets and cleaning up the smaller stuff later, so at least Cal-com wasn’t isolated here, but the situation everywhere was grim despite the invaluable assistance from the Elders.

The Skarrons couldn’t keep up this loss of ships and troops forever, but Cal-com didn’t know how many more were still coming. Maybe the Elders did and they’d tipped the scales enough for the Voku to survive. He hoped that was the case, but they hadn’t said anything to him of Skarron fleet numbers and he couldn’t assume anything. All he could do was hold on as long as possible, making the Skarrons bleed for every system they overran, and play this out the hard way…for as many decades or even centuries that this might last.

3 months later…

Bi-tor was in a sleep cycle between the never-ending fights that had become his life when the pause happened. He woke to find that the incoming stream of warships had stopped, giving the Voku in the heavily populated Viskhe System a temporary relief…or at least it would once they burnt through the ground troops and ships already here, which were many. Pauses in this Crusade were few and far between, and Bi-tor was very grateful to see that this system was getting one.

Of the four planets, two had more than half their surface conquered by the Skarrons with the other two holding out better, but with sizeable chunks of enemy territory within them. Bi-tor was on Niivan, one of the former, and knew that they had a long fight ahead of them, but without more reinforcements to bring in they now had a fighting chance to delay the destruction and evac more people out of the system.

They were already crunched here, with many Voku having to sleep outside of tubes and foodstuff supplies thinning. What they had went to the warriors, for they couldn’t afford to be fighting at anything less than prime condition. If they were even more would die, so the civilians that hadn’t been evacuated in previous years were trying to stay out of the way and wait for a chance to either leave or do something to help, with many of them assigned to construction duties that amounted to little more than moving rubble around to form makeshift barricades and funnels to direct the Aronsic swarms into traps when they progressed into new areas.

So Bi-tor went back to the fight, trying to make the most of this naval reprieve on the ground, knowing the payoff would come in the following weeks or months as the Voku warships were whittling down the huge enemy fleet without having to position at the jumppoints. If they didn’t use everything they had now to engage the Skarrons that were here the enemy might win anyway…and if more started showing up soon then this system was sure to fall, like all the others. Right now getting as many people out and delaying future system invasions was the mission, and all the Voku warriors knew that. It was ingrained into their very existence now, with more and more of them falling to accomplish that ultimate goal.

Bi-tor and the others here were very acquainted with how to fight this Crusade, but every now and then they’d find themselves facing too many and not able to pull back fast enough. Other times someone would make a self-sacrificing move to buy more time for the rest of them, but if they fought smartly and their naval cover didn’t completely evaporate they’d lose territory and equipment but few lives…though the high population levels in this system were forcing them to hold positions longer than they’d like, meaning Bi-tor was pushing close to his own death far too often to try to shield the civilians that were bunching up with few places to run.

Several of the Voku he’d been fighting alongside for years had fallen in the past 2 months and he knew his time might be coming soon, so as the days passed he kept an eye on the sky and the empty jumppoints, wondering how long it would be before the next enemy convoy began to arrive, for when it did he was almost certain he’d go down fighting here, for there was no way he was going to turn and run and leave the civilians to fight this army on their own.

So day by day he fought and waited for the head of that convoy to arrive, seeing the additional ground troops being landed eventually dry up, but the Skarron advance didn’t stall or wither. They kept pushing hard, as if they expected more to come, but they didn’t arrive soon enough and the planet of Ichio was the first to rid itself of the Skarron army even before the naval battles were over.

When that happened the troops there were immediately transferred over to the other three worlds, with Bi-tor’s group getting badly needed reinforcements, but few Stranoms. Most of the fighting now was hand to hand, with the aerial fighters and remaining Stranoms not even paying attention to the infantry horde and focusing entirely on the enemy walkers that still outnumbered them.

Bi-tor was actually engaging the smaller walkers in infantry units, taking down their shields with massed fire then jumping up onto them and clawing their way inside while Aronsic and infantry Skarrons tried to peel them off…but still no reinforcement convoy arrived and slowly the enemy advance stalled to a grinding halt that lasted about a week.

When the collapse came it came fast, and the Skarrons overwhelming numbers broke and the Voku began picking them apart with flanking attacks without going crazy. They knew they had an advantage now, but they weren’t going to get people killed with unnecessary haste. Bi-tor and the others were barely able to contain their rage, now having a chance to actually win a fight, but they held back just enough for prudence sake as they hunted down and killed every enemy unit on the planet…but still no new convoy came.

It wasn’t until the naval battles were also over did they finally get word from Renimar Noru-sar’s fleet out ambushing the numerous convoys on their way to their territory. When the news arrived Bi-tor was out on a debris patrol looking for enemy stragglers. He stopped running and looked to the sky, feeling true relief for the first time in memory. Eventually he took a knee, not losing focus on his surroundings, as he breathed slowly, soaking in the moment.

The Orica fleet was reporting that the Skarron reinforcements were not destroyed or exhausted…but rather they were diverting elsewhere. Some were actually turning around and heading back the way they came by parallel tracks, jumping through systems neighboring the lines they were using to get to Voku territory. Where they were going was still unknown, but they were no longer reinforcing their units fighting the Voku…and were leaving those already engaged in combat to die fighting.

“We live,” he said to no one in particular, then looked up at the sunny sky that saw only a few specs of Voku warships in orbit. “Was the fight too bitter for you? Did you tire of losing so many? Or is there another method to your madness? Someone worth killing more than us?”

Bi-tor stood back up, knowing he still had work to do here and it would unacceptable to die to a lone Aronsic hiding in the rubble because he wasn’t paying attention…or to lose someone else for the same reason.

“How badly did we hurt you? How badly did you hurt us?” he wondered, not knowing the state of the empire save for some basic update maps. How many Voku had actually died he didn’t know, but the number would be painful when he eventually found out.

A prompt on his forearm gauntlet caught his attention and he activated his comm.

“Speak.”

“We have deployment orders,” Sor-vak said. “We’re leaving the planet.”

“To go where?”

“I do not know the system, but word is we’re assembling an invasion force to take back the worlds the Skarrons took from us. I don’t know about the Firewall, but our original ones are not going to be left in their hands.”

“How well defended are they?”

“Not very. I am told their strength was centered on their fleets passing through them. Now without those ship flows they have little to defend themselves with…but they do have extensive industry under construction to supply the Crusade. The longer we wait to strike them the stronger those worlds will grow.”

“Are we expecting to find any of our people there?”

“No,” Sor-vak said regretfully. “This is a hunting campaign. We are going to eradicate them all. No surrenders accepted if they stay and fight.”

“Nor should there be. How soon do we depart?”

“The fleet is leaving in 3 hours. If you don’t get here in time you won’t be coming on the first wave. For some that is best…”

“I will be there.”

“How is your arm?”

“Adequate. I am more than ready to take the fight to them.”

“And we won’t have people to protect this time. I’m looking forward to it as well. Get to the landing zone now if you want to come. Not sure what our equipment situation is, but the orders are coming swift and the Gahmorn says this first wave is a strike force. No understrength units allowed.”

“Thank you,” he said, knowing his arm could take a few more weeks recovery, and that Sor-vak knew that as well.

“We’ll still be outnumbered, and I’d rather have you with me than not. So hurry. Everyone is scrambling.”

“On my way,” Bi-tor said, seeing the location coordinates transmitted along with the audio message and taking off at a run. He was going to have to move fast in order to get there in time, and the ache just below his left shoulder with every arm swing wasn’t going to delay him. This unwinnable war had just flipped, and while others needed to rest and recover he did not.

Exhausted he was, but he’d learned to fight that way long ago and the trip across the stars would allow him and the others to rest enough. When they got to wherever they were going they’d be ready. He just hoped they’d managed to scrape up enough Stranom and other heavy equipment for a proper invasion…but even if they hadn’t, he was ready and willing to fight, with infantry only if necessary, to reclaim their worlds. Without a stream of reinforcements they could take their time, hit where they liked, and win a battle of attrition against any Skarron army, no matter how large.

And without having civilians to defend, they could always choose their battlefields. That alone was enough to send him running across the rubble fields at a frenzy, for despite the relief in him that the war was over, part of him wasn’t content to just let it go. At least not until the Voku had a string of victories to end on and all their systems back…if not a few more for good measure, but that was for the Dafchor to decide. For Bi-tor, all he wanted was in the fight…and some long overdue payback.

9

May 8, 3656

Szequat System (Voku Capitol)

Nergthen

Cal-com entered the Elder’s Lair and stood in the audience chamber waiting for the red dragon to gradually appear from behind a low wall.

“What do you require of me?” he asked as the Elder climbed up onto the soft pedestal and laid down with his head arching up on his long neck higher than the Dafchor stood.

“You have done well, and you will continue to reclaim the systems that were lost…including those in the Firewall and as many beyond as you desire, but do not overreach as you rebuild. Your task is to increase your strength and defenses here while returning as many ships to the Orica Region as prudent. If the V’kit’no’sat strike you there, you must have the strength to delay their victory long enough to evacuate your wards.”

“What of the Skarrons?”

“Their Crusade will trouble you no further, but guard their border wherever you set it and let the losses they suffered be remembered with an iron will evident in absolute dominance. The only reason you do not take those systems is because you choose to not do so. Become a rock so firm that no one will dare oppose you again. Much can be gained from this Crusade in the minds of potential opposition beyond the Skarrons, but only if you are firm now and dictate the future. You cannot afford to be lax while salving your wounds.”

“Understood.”

“As to your lingering question of the Skarrons,” he said, reading the Voku’s mind, “they are too busy to bother with you again. Their core worlds have been invaded, and the Crusade is returning to fight in the systems they left vulnerable in order to mass the numbers they brought here.”

“The V’kit’no’sat?” Cal-com wondered.

“No, but they are indirectly involved. Prior to the invasion of Star Force, the V’kit’no’sat had launched a small taskforce to exterminate the Li’vorkrachnika after they stupidly assaulted one of their outposts and had enough success to draw their death mark. The events at Star Force’s capitol prompted internal divisions within the V’kit’no’sat to explode into a low scale civil war. There is little fighting, but suspicions run high and the forces sent to destroy the Li’vorkrachnika have been recalled. Rather than rally their forces to fight against the Crusade, the Li’vorkrachnika have taken a much more intelligent strategy.”

The Elder produced a holographic map of the warfront between the Skarrons and Li’vorkrachnika, with Voku territory as it was now a small adjunct, testifying to how large a military the Skarrons actually had to accommodate a Crusade across so much contested territory…but it was the far off Skarron territories, of which the Voku did not have full maps, that Cal-com could see now held Li’vorkrachnika markers.

“They do not care for losing systems if it aids their long term goals, and as they did in their war against Star Force, they have abandoned their most valuable worlds to hopeless battles while they send their forces elsewhere. In this case, they have attacked and now have claimed the Skarron capitol and many of their most heavily populated systems, including strikes against their major shipyards. The Li’vorkrachnika are cutting the heart out of the Skarron empire and the Crusade is returning as fast as possible, but the damage has been done…and the Li’vorkrachnika are sparing their own valuable worlds by forcing this retreat. The Skarrons have been outwitted, and even with the damage the V’kit’no’sat did to them, the Li’vorkrachnika are in a slightly superior position.”

“Can they defeat the Skarrons?”

“Difficult to say, for such a war under these circumstances will take millennia to unfold. When the Crusade ships return they will overrun the Li’vorkrachnika, but whether they will fight to hold or push to scorch I do not know. Regardless, the Crusade has been blunted and the Skarrons’ most precious possessions are destroyed. The mass of their empire will sustain them, but the growth rate of the Li’vorkrachnika is superior. Whoever is the ultimate victor in this contest does not matter, for both sides will be so preoccupied with survival that they will be of no threat to you. Voku territory is now safe from both the Skarrons and the Li’vorkrachnika.”

“Until the victor regrows,” Cal-com added.

“By that time the Voku will be so dominant that you will be able to destroy them if necessary…unless the V’kit’no’sat are involved, which is why you cannot aid Star Force. I know you want to, but there is too much at stake and it is a fight that cannot be won.”

“How badly are the V’kit’no’sat divided?”

“Not enough to matter for Star Force. Even a fraction of their overall fleet will be enough to destroy them. If that should change I will give you leave to intervene, but it will not. They are far too powerful.”

“Will their civil war escalate?”

“They will not self-destruct. What is occurring is an internal realignment. Whatever losses they suffer will be rebuilt with time, and even if their war against Star Force is delayed it will not be enough to save them. So far their invasion fleet has not been recalled and their destruction continues, though Star Force is causing more damage than they anticipated.”

“They are very good at that, and while I do not mean to sound disobedient, can you tell me…”

“If you did aid them, how much would it tip the scales? The problem is not in how many ships they send…but in the fact that they can increase that number at will. They will send as many as needed to accomplish the mission, and even if the Voku aided Star Force that would not change. If more V’kit’no’sat vessels were needed to counter your alliance, they would simply send more. Their strength of technology, numbers, and experience is something you cannot contend with, and hopefully will not, but you must prepare if the Orica Region comes under punitive attack.”

“And you still believe that they will not come here?”

“Unless you give them reason to, I do not believe they will bother. If you were to be too successful against them in combat they might take greater interest, which is why you are only to fight if needed to defend your territory long enough to evacuate…and those evacuations must occur quickly. The longer you fight with them the more attention you will gain. They expect people to flee or die, and if you do fight you will suffer heavy losses unless you outnumber them.”

“If it comes to that, how do you suggest we engage them?”

“Numbers. Punitive raids are low priority and usually executed with a single vessel. Have enough ships on site and they will either delay until later or take affront and summon more. With Star Force being their priority target, they will delay…during which you will evacuate. When they return and find you gone, it will not be a challenge to them. That is why you must evacuate everyone if a single system is attacked. If that does not happen, you must hold your territory and ensure that you are not drawn into battle.”

“You said the Li’vorkrachnika received a death mark for attacking a single system?”

“Yes. The V’kit’no’sat are not to be challenged and control many other races through fear. They have the fleet to back up any threat, but there are so many systems in the galaxy that they cannot deal with them all simultaneously. Thus they choose those most notable. You must not become notable.”

“Will they return to finish the Li’vorkrachnika?”

“If they have abandoned the death mark, they will not reinstate it unless there is another incident. They have much higher priorities to deal with currently.”

“Why does Star Force rate so high that they could come after us for simply being associated with them? Why would we rate higher than the Li’vorkrachnika?”

“They are afraid of Star Force. Not because of their strength, but what they represent. They exist because of a violation of V’kit’no’sat rules and possess knowledge and technology from the V’kit’no’sat themselves. They fear what they might grow into given time, and they also fear those who secretly gave Star Force what they could not otherwise acquire on their own.”

“I thought Star Force began with Zen’zat being abandoned. Are not those who abandoned them seen at fault?”

“It is much more important than that. Information was left behind in the ruins of Terraxis and Star Force was able to unlock it. That is worthy of an unyielding death mark on its own, but Zen’zat are forbidden to reproduce, with a death mark that cannot be rescinded. No rogue populations are allowed. The Li’vorkrachnika are minor compared to the heresy inherent in Star Force’s mere existence. Any race that has benefited from Star Force technology or knowledge is thus tainted by the heresy and must be purged. No unsanctioned technology or knowledge must be allowed to escape the V’kit’no’sat, so the closer ties you have to Star Force the greater attention you will receive from the V’kit’no’sat.”

“We have not shared technology.”

“That is why I do not think they will pursue you to extinction. But if you are in their way, or merely nearby, they may swat you down simply for your association with the heretics.”

“I know the V’kit’no’sat are vastly stronger than the Skarrons, but in terms of fleet numbers, how do they compare?”

“V’kit’no’sat vessels are much larger than those the Skarrons use, but in terms of tonnage the V’kit’no’sat have more.”

That sent a chill down Cal-com’s spine. After the endless losses to the Skarrons the Voku had just suffered due to their numbers, he couldn’t imagine facing so many superior opponents.

“It is hopeless,” the Elder said, sensing the necessary realization within the Dafchor. “Which is why you must not engage. Star Force has to face this alone.”

“And it is equally hopeless for them?”

“No. They have technology and power beyond yours. That gives them a small fighting chance and they’ve already proven capable of taking advantage of opportunities and securing victories against the V’kit’no’sat, but they do not have the strength to sustain such things. Their empire will fall. It is simply a matter of time.”

“And if they run?”

“They will be hunted by pursuit that will never relent, but it is possible that some might escape to the rim of the galaxy where they have no presence. They will not be an ally of the Voku for much longer.”

“Thank you for your assistance and guidance. It is badly needed.”

“You are crossing paths with forces beyond you that you cannot fully understand. We have elevated you to a strength you did not attain on your own in order to speed your ascension. As such we have a responsibility to guide you until such a time that you do understand.”

“What do you envision us becoming?”

“Each race must find their own path. We are exploring your potential. The ultimate path has not been concluded.”

“Will we fight the V’kit’no’sat alongside you one day?”

“If so, it will be so far into the future to be worthless discussing now. Put that notion out of your mind. They are a force you must fear and withdraw from. That is your only chance for survival. We cannot intervene with them. Their technology is too advanced to hide ourselves from.”

“How many know of what you did?”

“Only you. Let others speculate as they wish, but we must remain an enigma. Even within the Voku. Tell your Renimars that you know what occurred, but the Elders have forbidden you to discuss the matter. That should satisfy their confusion, if not their curiosity.”

“Thank you for revealing it to me.”

“You need to know, for in the coming ages you will be playing an important role. For now, strengthen the Voku and replenish your losses while guarding against future ones. The time will come when more is needed from your race, and you will be personally guiding them forward at our direction, but for now there is another investment into the future that we wish to begin to make. I require volunteers from the most accomplished warriors, not so many as to weaken you as you reclaim territory, but several thousand that wish to serve us directly. They will most likely never see their race again, and I will not accept any who are not fully committed, thus they must be volunteers.”

“May I ask what they are volunteering for?”

“No. They cannot know. Tell them it is personal service, and that they will be living amongst us. Beyond that you must keep to yourself, but I can tell you that we see great potential in the Voku, similar to another in the past that did not turn out to our expectations. We need to develop, assess, and enhance you over the course of time, and we will begin now. The volunteers will disappear from Voku society, and you will not inquire after them. They will fully be our responsibility and no longer under your command.”

“How many do you wish me to select?”

“Ask as many as you feel are worthy and we will choose from among them, but make it clear that we value the further development of the Voku empire as an equally important priority. We will not siphon the strength from you, and any Voku with ties to the empire should stay there. We only want individuals who are comfortable with a complete break. From those volunteers we will choose based on criteria unknown to you, so do not let a pass be seen as a mark of shame. This is an alternative path, but one that must be fully embraced and cannot be commanded.”

“I will be painfully clear in the distinction,” Cal-com said, getting a weird feeling that the Elder picked up on.

“Your insight does you credit, Dafchor. The Voku are our hope to replace the Zen’zat, and what I have seen during this Crusade bodes well. You are already far superior to the Ter’nat. How far we can elevate you from here is a question we seek to answer.”

“How did the Zen’zat fail?”

“You already suspect the answer.”

“Then why not quietly save some of the Archons as Star Force falls?”

“When their empire is destroyed, where will we get more?”

“Then we are…”

“More than incubators. The Voku Empire is an important asset that we intend to use. You are not mere breeding stock, and that is the basic theory of your potential superiority to the Zen’zat.”

“You do us great honor. I hope we are able to live up to expectations.”

“There is only one way to know for sure, thus I require volunteers for blind service.”

“You shall have them.”

8 months later…

Bi-tor was fighting in the Sitoza System and helping to reclaim the two planets there from Skarron occupation when the order came through, pulling him off the planet via courier ship that took him three jumps to a small Voku convoy where he was deposited along with hundreds of others who had likewise been chosen for service to the Elders.

It was an insane honor even without knowing the particulars, and Bi-tor had already seen enough Skarron ass kicking to satisfy him. The empire was reclaiming what had been lost and the enemy couldn’t put up much resistance without their Crusade fleet that was now long gone, fleeing back to their own worlds where the Li’vorkrachnika had mounted a surprise attack. The Dafchor had assured the Voku that the Skarrons would not be returning, and Bi-tor knew that his fellow warriors were more than a match for the garrison forces they were fighting now.

What the Elders wanted from him he did not know, but he was fully ready to jump into the void to serve them and cutting all ties with the empire didn’t scare him. The Voku served the Elders, and direct service to them was a logical extension of that. The empire didn’t need him, but apparently the Elders did. He could not think why that would be, but he was here and waiting with the others onboard ship when they were summoned to a hangar bay that was open to space.

832 of them were assembled and left there as the ship’s crew left, sealing the doors behind them without a word. Bi-tor held position and waited for several minutes, then a tunnel appeared outside the hangar in space and pushed through the atmospheric shield. It appeared to connect to nothing, but the inside of the tunnel was solid and a voice inside his mind told him to board.

The others moved with him, apparently having gotten the same mental order, and when he stepped onto the deck plates in the tunnel he could feel the presence of the Elders. The technology was alien yet somehow familiar, transforming when the last of them walked onboard to seal up behind them and shrink down to nothing, leaving the Voku standing inside what was apparently an invisible ship far wider than even the hangar doors had been.

Suddenly a wall opened up and Bi-tor could see what he knew to be one of the Elders, though the Voku had never seen an image of one before. Rumors abounded, but what they truly were had never been confirmed. How he knew this was one and not another servant Bi-tor couldn’t say, but when the dragon expanded its wings to full height then rose up into the air without even flapping them he could feel the presence of a very powerful mind connecting with his own.

The yellow dragon hovered there for a long time before finally speaking, and not one of the Voku spoke to ask questions or interrupt. They all respectfully waited, then a flush of new knowledge flowed into their minds answering many questions before the Elder finally spoke.

“Welcome, Voku. Each of you have served us well in the war against the Skarrons, but what we require of you now is another matter entirely. You are here to train and ascend to a level no Voku has ever attained. We require personal servants who are trustworthy warriors capable of working alongside us while also going on solo missions across the galaxy as needed. You are not fit to do that as you are now, but we see potential in you. The coming years will cultivate that potential, but you must use your accumulated skills to press to develop it.”

“It will not occur naturally nor easily, and we will make biological alterations in accordance with your development. What your final form will be even we cannot see, but we cannot advance you beyond your worth. You must prove the worth of your race, and the more worth you display the greater powers we can bestow upon you…thus you will control how useful of servants you become, and you have been chosen from amongst the volunteers because we have seen in you a relentlessness that will be required here.”

“But do not be mistaken. You are already our servants, and if you do not ascend to the heights we hope you are capable of, you will not be turned away. You are valuable as you are now and we will make use of your skills, but our overriding command to you is to aspire for more and never stop improving. What we discover working with you we will use to better train others that will follow. You will be the trailblazers that we learn the most from, which is why we must have your total and unyielding effort. Ascension is amongst the hardest challenges in the universe, and we require those who embrace challenge. Service to us cannot be sufficient for you. You must strive for more, but that is an internal quest only you can pursue, so make of it what you will.”

“As of now, you are no longer Voku,” the Elder said, summoning a pedestal out of the floor that had Voku-style eye pieces laid out on top of it, except these were not green…rather they were a deep red. “Replace your augments.”

Bi-tor and the others walked up to the pedestal, with him removing the green crystal technology that covered his three small eyes. The natural light was a little disconcerting, but not painful. The enhanced vision was gone, but he felt like he was losing a great deal more as he set the green piece down and picked up one of the red ones. He slid the two pylons on the inside of it into the slots between his eyes, linking the new technology to the old implants and immediately gaining access to a plethora of new sensory capabilities that came with the knowledge of how to use them.

“You are now Bo’ja,” the Elder said once the last of them had made the replacement. “What that name comes to mean over the coming millennia is entirely up to you and what you become. Begin.”

Bi-tor needed no further explanation. He knew they were onboard a ship that was taking them to a Zak’de’ron Hive, and there they would be given training as well as tasks to perform, but until they arrived the ‘Elders’ required data on the new Bo’ja, and that meant various forms of mental and physical testing, the first of which was hand to hand combat against holographic opponents.

Bi-tor didn’t receive any additional orders, for they were already loaded into his mind via the implant. He moved through the ship, knowing the location of every corridor and chamber in this configuration and the others it was capable of morphing into, and ended up in one of the observational areas where holographic Skarrons and Aronsic appeared.

Fighting them was engrained into his very core at this point, so he slipped back into a familiar combat mode and began fighting them as the difficulty level gradually rose, knowing that there were many sensors watching him from beyond while the implant monitored various things internally…but that wasn’t for him to worry about. He was to focus on fighting in order to get the necessary data the Zak’de’ron needed, and that’s what he intended to give them.

He didn’t know what they were looking for, but he had his orders and that was more than enough for him. What Bo’ja meant was a hollow term at this point, but he knew they were meant to be a replacement for a previous servant of the Zak’de’ron that had betrayed them. The Zen’zat had not lived up to their potential, and even those who had stayed loyal to the Zak’de’ron when they were all but wiped out had not fulfilled their promise. The Zak’de’ron were grooming the Voku to potentially achieve what the other bipeds never did, and Bi-tor knew this endeavor would be measured in the thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands.

It was strange, for as he punched and kicked holographic Aronsic aside, he was realizing for the first time who the Elders actually were and how they’d been betrayed by the V’kit’no’sat. Bi-tor knew it like an old fact tucked away into a corner of his mind, not something now being revealed to him.

He didn’t let it distract him, but his purpose here was now crystal clear.

The V’kit’no’sat had betrayed the Zak’de’ron, and their Zen’zat along with them. Rather than rebuilding their own loyal Zen’zat, the Zak’de’ron were wiping the slate clean and starting over, with the Bo’ja intended to replace and hopefully rise to a level the Zen’zat never did. That, more than anything, was what would drive Bi-tor forward over the coming centuries. His mission was to serve and ascend, so to become a more powerful servant and ally of the Zak’de’ron.

It was an honor beyond all reckoning, and both he and the other Bo’ja onboard the ship immediately and fully devoted themselves to the path laid out before them.

The Zen’zat may have betrayed the Zak’de’ron, but there was zero chance that the Bo’ja ever would. How strong they would become Bi-tor and the others didn’t know, but they’d be reliable and fight to the last for the Zak’de’ron without question.

And from the current state of the galaxy, the ‘Elders’ were going to need a massive army to begin to set things right. The Bo’ja weren’t the only elevated servants they had, and there would be many others onboard the Hive when they arrived, but there was a special purpose awaiting the Bo’ja…if they could prove themselves worthy and attain it.

10

June 3, 3679

Unnamed System (Li’vorkrachnika territory)

Unnamed Planet (Subsurface city)

An obscure wall panel covered in the shadow of several large columns suddenly burst into illumination that was a combination of green and orange…the orange from the molten material being cut by a green spike that slowly traced an approximate circle along with a mirror image twin, eventually cutting out a wall plug that was pulled back from view as the molten slag dulled and hardened without any of the Templar denizens taking notice.

There were hundreds in the nearby area and millions within the city buried deep beneath an uninhabited planet that was wreathed in a toxic atmosphere and covered with icy glaciers that were marred by acid rivers. It was located in a ‘pass through’ system, one that saw a lot of Li’vorkrachnika traffic transitioning around the pair of stars at system center, but none coming this far out…save for when they confirmed that the system was clear of any other trespassers. Then and only then would an occasion ship make its way out to the planet to deliver supplies or exchange personnel.

The ships that continually passed through the system would transmit data packets, but no return signals ever came. The Templar city was meant to be invisible to the galaxy, with the majority of all decision making being taken care of by the Templars sent out sporadically to direct the empire while the masterminds ran it.

If changes were needed, another Templar would be sent out and then spread the necessary information, for there was no backtracking to this system and the other handful of ultra secret worlds unknown to any mastermind, and they had to remain absolutely secure to protect the Li’vorkrachnika’s true leaders as they birthed, instructed, and trained the ever expanding Templars to keep up with both the expansion of their empire and the suicides of those caught in the wrong system at the wrong time…for they were instructed to wholly destroy themselves before they could be located, let alone captured.

Secrecy was the lifeblood of the Templar, yet none of them had detected the unauthorized landing on their planet, nor the tunnel dug down and around their clever defenses all the way to the outer hull of their subsurface sanctuary. They also didn’t see those who did so walking through the shadows, for the Templar minds were being distracted by telepathy beyond their reckoning.

The interlopers moved throughout the Templar city until they came to the area reserved for those that led the Templars…known only as the Sovereigns to the few privileged enough to ever hear the word. They were of the same basic proportions as the Templars, with enlarged heads on a simple biped frame, but the Sovereigns had entered their second stage of development that saw them grow in height by a factor of 6, making them literally giants walking amongst the smaller version of themselves.

The Sovereigns were those that produced Templars through biological birth, unlike the genetic replication that the rest of Li’vorkrachnika society operated on, but unlike most races in the galaxy, the Sovereigns were asexual and capable of triggering a reproductive cycle on their own. Their lifespan was limited to only a few thousand years, but their offspring contained their genetic memory, enabling their leadership to continue on in perpetuity and avoid any internal wrangling. The Templar and Sovereigns operated as if they were cells in one massive brain that guided the Li’vorkrachnika forward, with no personal ambitions or internecine.

They were one, and kept apart from everything else in the galaxy in order to preserve their clarity and anonymity as they attacked races superior to their own. The swarm of bodies that was the Li’vorkrachnika’s greatest strength would become meaningless if the Templars were discovered and eliminated, thus the necessity of hidden worlds was the linchpin upon which their civilization relied.

Never before had one been discovered, let alone breached, until now.

There were only four interlopers, but they made their way into the Sovereign-reserved inner sanctum of the Templar city, literally walking within meters of the giants and not being noticed until they chose to be. They knew there would be a virulent reaction, so they remained calm and stationary as they emerged before a pair of Sovereigns that were near to giving birth and cradling their massive weight inside flotation tanks, for when they birthed they would release dozens of tiny Templars at once that were currently inhabiting a pouch along their backs just above their tails.

“Remain calm,” one of the interlopers said as he seemed to appear out of haze, with the others using their telepathy to subdue the reactive emotions as much as possible, but they failed. As soon as the intruder was known both Sovereigns went crazy, screaming with such hatred and fear that those three chambers away could hear through the walls.

Other Templar arrived within seconds…but they saw nothing. The interloper concealed himself again, walking to a wall and staying there while telepathically distracting all those that entered from seeing him, then he continued to talk, but only using his telepathy so they could not backtrack the sound of his words to his location.

We are not here to fight, so calm yourselves, he said in the Li’vorkrachnika’s native language. If we wanted you dead, you already would be. On the contrary, we are here to negotiate a mutually advantageous deal.

The Li’vorkrachnika didn’t listen, instead scurrying around looking for the invaders as more arrived, bringing with them the familiar combat forms that were stationed on the edges of the city to fight in case they were attacked from the exterior. In such a case they were not expected to win, but rather to buy time for the Templars and Sovereigns to escape if possible, but if not, then to buy them time to kill and disintegrate themselves to the point where nothing was recoverable.

The interlopers suspected this, but their telepathy was not capable of reading minds to the degree necessary to withdraw information…only to implant what they wanted, which in this case was false images that concealed the four.

It took many hours and a great deal of patience before the Sovereigns finally decided to talk to the invisible intruders rather than panicking and searching everywhere. Understandable considering they had never laid eyes on another race before, as well as the fact that they knew their discovery would lead to their doom.

But these Li’vorkrachnika were intelligent, and given enough time to take stock of the situation and think, they finally decided to entertain the negotiation that was being floated.

“Who are you?” a Sovereign finally asked, partially shielded behind a wall of troops that didn’t even rise to its waist, making for very ineffective blockers.

We are potential allies here to discuss the future of your race.

“Where are you hiding?”

We are here, and will reveal ourselves if you will not attack us. Your seclusion has made you recklessly reactive, but we will wait as long as needed until you come to your senses. You are fighting a war against the Skarrons that may well be your downfall even if you are victorious, and it would truly be a shame for a race with such potential to face that end merely due to hasty reaction.

“Reveal yourself,” the Sovereign demanded, and not one in the floatation tanks. This one was fully capable of fighting and stood looking down at the ground where all its troops were spread around the chamber.

If I do so and you attack me you will pay a price, but we will not hold your entire race responsible. Look before you, the interloper said as the telepathic trickery ended and his black, scaly body was revealed standing perfectly still looking up at the Sovereign.

Whether it was a conscious choice or instinctive reaction, the Li’vorkrachnika troops didn’t stand still. They attacked him immediately, firing weaponry that soaked into his body while doing limited surface damage…then the intruder leapt off the ground and landed on the chest of the Sovereign, delivering a massive electrical charge that took the much larger alien to its knees.

Then the intruder disappeared again, but not before two standard variant Li’vorkrachnika were bisected by green flashes that left the cuts on their bodies cauterized as they wriggled around on the floor in their death throes.

We will try this again and again until you come to your senses. We are here to negotiate, but we are fully capable of killing you all if necessary. If we have to do that it would truly be a shame, for you were very difficult to locate.

“Who are you?” another Sovereign asked as the one that had been attacked stayed on one knee with his chest blackened and smoking from the electrical damage.

We are ancient, our name unknown to you, but we have knowledge far beyond your understanding and that of your enemies, some of which are impediments to our future goals. If we can come to an agreement, we will fight them by proxy through you. Our anonymity is necessary until we can garner a sufficient powerbase to reassert ourselves publically. You understand this concept intuitively, and we must remain hidden from those that could defeat us until we have weakened them so far to no longer remain a danger. The primary threat is one you are familiar with and lucky to have survived. “We too are an enemy of the V’kit’no’sat,” he said aloud as he reappeared in a slightly different position.

“Wait,” the Sovereign ordered, with the minions and Templars obeying immediately, though a pair of plasma shots did hit the intruder before they could be called off.

The craggy black skin absorbed it and the interloper didn’t attack, merely looking up at the Sovereign with a slight smile on its ugly face. “Better.”

“What strength do you offer that can stand against the V’kit’no’sat?”

“You have survived because they are distracted with higher priorities. You cannot stand against them, and even with our assistance you cannot defeat them directly. Our immediate help will strengthen you in your fight against the Skarrons, and if you are able to survive and prosper, there will be a chance to strike back and destroy the V’kit’no’sat in the extreme long term. We have other associates and methods that will weaken them. We wish you to become strong enough that, while pursuing your own goals, will be able to fight and kill a portion of the V’kit’no’sat empire once they are sufficiently diminished…along with other threats to us that you have not encountered yet, but will if your expansion continues.”

“What proof of this strength do you offer?”

“We found you, didn’t we?” the interloper scoffed. “But from your point of view I would be wondering the same. We are not frauds, and will over time offer all the proof necessary. We, in particular, have an immense knowledge of biotechnology that could aid you greatly in creating…better subordinates,” he said, looking at the minions that were still training weapons on him. “Also, you still using plasma weapons is insulting.”

“They are easier to produce in large numbers,” the Sovereign argued.

“And you expected no combat here, so you saved your upgraded weapons for those that needed them most. Your production facilities must truly be diminished.”

“Sacrifices must be made to ensure victory.”

“And the V’kit’no’sat did far more damage to your infrastructure than you have let the Skarrons know. Had they pushed a bit further they would have broken through your ring of strength and found the mass of systems that you have all but stripped of their defenses. Your strategy was brilliant and caused them to turn back at precisely the right moment, suffering the travel delays yet a second time while you attack their infrastructure strongholds. They will never know how close they came to breaking you, and with our help you will be able to rebuild your strength fast enough to finish the Skarrons before they can gut your empire on the effort.”

“You wish us to have a subservient role?”

“We respect your sovereignty, despite your inferiority, and only ask that you respect our wishes with regards to targets while you continue to expand. It would do no good for you to attack our other associates, for we would have to choose between you and the conflict would diminish us all. If you stay away from those we designate as off limits, we trust that your own goals will run parallel to our own. You will not let the V’kit’no’sat escape your wrath after what they have done, but you don’t have the power to stand against even a small portion of them now. With our help, in time, you will.”

“Assuming you are speaking the truth, what are your goals?”

“To reassume our dominance over the galaxy,” the intruder said lithely.

“And when did you hold this dominance? We know nothing of you.”

“Few do, for we are truly ancient. We were forced into exile by…unforeseen events. We are taking great care in our return and are choosing our associates wisely. We believe you would be a valuable ally in our long term goals, and in the meantime we can assist you with the Skarrons.”

“And if the V’kit’no’sat return?”

“We cannot save you in that eventuality, and would highly recommend that you do not attack them again until you are in a position to win. We can provide you information about them that will instill how powerful they are and why such a battle is hopeless as of now.”

“How do you plan to defeat them in this preferred future? What strength do you have to oppose them?”

“Such things we keep to ourself, but the strength we are offering to you is that of knowledge, technology, and limited guidance. We know much of the other powers in the galaxy. Those that are ripe for the taking and those that are beyond you. Your current method is to engage in order to evaluate, but with the V’kit’no’sat that nearly spelled your doom. Once you finish the conquest of the Skarrons we can offer intelligence of those beyond.”

The Sovereign stepped forward, moving through the minions until he took a knee in front of the intruder and looked directly into the glowing eyes as the severed minions finally stopped twitching and died.

“If your boasts can be confirmed, we will entertain negotiations suitable to our own prosperity.”

“We seek mutually beneficial arrangements, for strengthening you will strengthen us and weaken our common enemies.”

“And what is the name of our potential ally?”

The interloper lazily raised a hand and the other three stepped out of their telepathic shadows into view behind him.

“We are called the Chixzon, and while that name is unknown to you, you have encountered our previous work before. I believe you know them as the Hamoriti.”

“Explain.”

“We created them. And had it not been for a chemical flaw that allowed them to be sedated, the V’kit’no’sat would never have risen to power. We would still dominate the galaxy, but rest assured, we are not relying on the Hamoriti. They are a failed past that has lingered to this day.”

“Star Force now contains and commands them.”

“Only because we have not revealed ourselves. If we call to them, they will respond and follow our orders. They were a menace to you only because we were not here to give them direction.”

“You claim the power to control them?”

“Yes, but they are not part of our plans going forward. The weakness in them still remains and is unfixable.”

“And you have such strength that you can dismiss their power so easily?”

“Wisdom is our power. It allowed us to create the Hamoriti, and it can allow us to enhance your race as well…on terms of your choosing. We are not looking for servants, merely associates with overlapping future goals.”

“You claim a great deal.”

“We have a great deal to offer, but there is no rush. Your war with the Skarrons will take centuries to wage. We can prove our strength to you before you make a final decision.”

“And if we refuse?”

“We would not have revealed ourselves to you unless we were certain that you would benefit from the arrangement. We are not reckless and choose our associates well. You want what we have to offer. Your previous association with the Trinx is known to us. We offer a much larger advancement and ask nothing more than the ability to designate targets that are off limits to you. The rest of the galaxy will be yours to conquer while we advance our own agendas separate from and parallel to yours.”

“And if we still refuse?”

“Then we will look for other associates…such as the Skarrons. We came to you first because we see the vast potential your race has, along with your appetite for conquest. Ambition is a trait that is highly underrated.”

The Sovereign stood, dwarfing the Chixzon, and crossed its arms over its chest.

“Then reveal all of your hidden troops and let us begin proper negotiations.”

“There are only four of us on this planet. Our ship will remain hidden from the prying eyes of those passing through this system other than Li’vorkrachnika.”

“You risked much bringing only four here, little one.”

The Chixzon raised his two armatures above his head and ignited the glowing green tips.

“No…we did not. We do not take risks. Four of us are sufficient to kill all of you, but as I have said, that is not our aim. We would much rather become allies and turn our combined power against the V’kit’no’sat…and others.”

www.aerkijyr.com

The Admiral

Prologue

January 29, 2045

Solar System

Earth

“So we have to work with different people?” Jason-025 asked.

“Yeah, but they didn’t say how many or how often,” Paul-024 confirmed.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked as they walked back through Atlantis’s city corridors after the Tandem Challenges brief they’d just gotten in the amphitheatre from Head Trainer Wilson.

“We work together on everything then pair up with others where we suck?”

“And go for the top tandem pair,” Jason finished. “That will help protect our team score, but if we pair with non-team members…”

“They didn’t say we had to.”

“When it comes to swimming, I’m not sticking with you for my high score buddy.”

Paul frowned. “Yeah, you have a point. But we’ll still have to do the swimming challenges together for our pairing points.”

“And then do them with someone to boost our individual ones…and it’s our individual ones that get added to the team scores. So if we find someone outside the team that we work with well, it’ll help the team score more than trying to hold out on people.”

“Probably right about that, but we are doing most of these together, right?”

“We’re doing all of them together,” Jason said confidently. “Then we’ll review where we’re weak and pick other partners. We might learn something from them that we can use to bump up our sucky scores. We get to try run these challenges an unlimited amount of times.”

“They did say it was a 2 month estimate. I wonder why it’s not a firm deadline.”

“Probably because we’re getting close to the end of training. Which do you want to hit first?”

Paul chewed lightly on his lip for a moment as they turned a corner and headed back to the areas reserved for the trainees and kept off limits to the rest of the Atlantis population.

“Let’s save the naval ones for last and start with the running. I think they implied there was some coordination skills to be learned before we can get good at any of this. You and I probably have an advantage already, but let’s hammer one of them and see what improvements we can make there…”

“And apply it to the harder ones later. We don’t want to learn this while swimming.”

“No,” Paul agreed, being one of the weakest swimmers amongst the 100 trainees. “We need to be in sync before going there.”

“And you’re so far ahead in naval I couldn’t keep up,” Jason agreed. “Running it is then.”

“Let’s hurry. Looks like some of the others are already pairing up. I think we have a race for points going on already.”

“Let them try,” Jason whispered as two more A-7 trainees jogged past them in the corridor enroute to somewhere in a hurry. “We’re the dynamic duo and they know it.”

“You got that right,” Paul said, fist bumping his co-team leader and best friend. “Now let’s go prove it for points.”

1557 years later…

Paul came back to his quarters onboard his flagship Excalibur after a semi-hard 20 mile run on the ship’s halo track, allowing himself to run straight with no turns for maximum speed and consistency as he maintained a 4:30 mile pace. Before that he’d been doing a variety of training drills in the Archon sanctum as he impatiently waited out the many weeks of transit between the Rim Region and the ADZ.

He’d been in Vedran territory where Clan Saber was heavily focused on integrating that race into Star Force and securing the surrounding region, with great success thus far, when he’d got word that the V’kit’no’sat had been detected in Star Force territory and headed towards Sol. Immediately he and many other trailblazers across the Rim region gathered up a significant portion of their fleets and began heading back, but the journey was not fast. The galaxy was larger than large, and even Star Force’s little corner of it was huge. Messages traveled faster than ships via relays, meaning updates were only available when Paul’s fleet stopped in star systems for navigation redirects.

So during the interstellar jumps there was no new information, and while Paul had been doing his running workout the Excalibur had braked against a giant star, bringing it out of its faster than lightspeed jump and allowing the ship and following fleet to transition around stellar orbit until they got to the outgoing jumppoint for the next leg of their journey back home. It had to be on a perfectly straight line between stars, meaning there was only one line of trajectory a ship could jump from, pushing on the star’s gravity with anti-grav tech that greatly increased the effect, slingshoting the vessel out from it at many times the speed of light and letting it coast all the way to the next star where it would brake again and repeat the process until they got back to the heavily populated region of the Star Force empire known as the ADZ…in the center of which was Sol, the home system that contained Earth.

Paul knew that was the V’kit’no’sat’s target, for it had originally been their possession…a colony in their galaxy-spanning empire long forgotten with a few of their advanced slaves left behind during a major rebellion. The outer regions of the V’kit’no’sat empire had been abandoned, with Earth never seeing them again, but according to the records and information recovered in a buried pyramid in Antarctica, Paul and the others knew that if the V’kit’no’sat ever found out they existed they would be back to kill them all.

For Humans were the descendants of those left behind slaves…slaves given awesome powers under the condition that they never reproduce. Whatever had happened long ago had been lost to history, but those Zen’zat slaves had reproduced and had their powers go dormant in their offspring. Paul and the other elite Archons within the empire had found a way to unlock theirs, making them more powerful that most races in the galaxy…but not compared to the V’kit’no’sat. They were a massive empire comprised of 193 races and the Zen’zat that served all of them.

Many of those races were known to Earth as the Dinosaurs, with the true history of the planet and those skeletons found being far different from what anyone had ever imagined it to be.

Star Force wasn’t ready for them…not that they ever would be. Paul knew they couldn’t win, so the plan was to fight, stall, and withdrawal as they began evacuating Earth and every other planet and system in the war zone, eventually pulling all the way back to the Rim Region if needed while Star Force continued to work to advance their technology and skill level to the point where they could pull even with the V’kit’no’sat…but even then they’d be horribly outnumbered, so right now this war was simply one of survival and delaying the annihilation of the Human race and every other race that had allied with them to form the Star Force empire.

And Paul needed to be there. He, along with Liam and Roger, were the best naval commanders Star Force had…which was why he’d been out in the Rim Region where most of the hard fighting was as Star Force worked to wrangle an unruly region of the galaxy into some semblance of order in the wake of the withdrawal of The Nexus…a huge and power alliance of races further out into the Rim. Not as powerful as the V’kit’no’sat but still far larger and stronger than Star Force.

But they had their own problems and were hemorrhaging territory, having worked out a mutually beneficial agreement with Director Davis that had Star Force absorbing member races of The Nexus that were being abandoned as their territory shrank down to what they thought they could maintain hold of. That left Paul and the other trailblazers with new races to absorb into their own empire and a whole wealth of territory surrounding them that were being ravaged and exploited now that The Nexus had withdrawn and every pirate, privateer, and opportunistic race for thousands of lightyears knew it.

But now that didn’t matter. The V’kit’no’sat had come and the lesser fighting in the Rim Region would be left to subordinates. Paul had to get back to the heavy fighting that was breaking out in Sol and that he knew would expand elsewhere as the Dinosaurs came back to annihilate those they decreed did not have the right to exist. No race within the V’kit’no’sat could leave or have independent splinter colonies, but with Zen’zat it was worse because they were not a race, rather individuals enhanced from the Ter’nat slave race and sworn to oaths to serve the V’kit’no’sat…which included their abandonment of reproduction, punishable by death to both the Zen’zat who violated their oaths and any of their illegitimate offspring.

Paul was one of those illegitimate offspring, along with every other Human in the galaxy, and now their final doom had come and he and the other trailblazers…the original class in the A-7 program that had later become known as the Archons…were the only hope for survival that Humans and their empire had to survive. How long they stayed alive was going to be determined by how many ships the V’kit’no’sat sent and how well Paul and the others fought, but first he had to actually get there.

When Paul got back to his quarters after his run he sat his sweaty body down in the chair of his comm terminal and checked for new data, knowing they’d passed through another system but had not wanting to interrupt his workouts to check immediately. He couldn’t do anything other than send messages back, and right now that was worthless. He was a spectator until his fleet got back and could join the fight, but he still wanted to keep up with what was going on so when he did get back he could hit the ground running and do the maximum damage possible to the giant ships the V’kit’no’sat fought with.

The information packet that the Excalibur had picked up did have updated battle information, but it also had several messages for him, including two from other trailblazers. One from Andy-082 and one from Jason, with Paul pulling up Jason’s message first.

It appeared as a small hologram above the control board on the comm terminal, with Paul hitting a slide lever and increasing the size up to half a meter tall where his best friend and fellow 2 was standing in a typical pure white Archon uniform, but without his normal blonde hair.

“Andy had a good idea, citing that since our Clans were formed to fight the V’kit’no’sat he was going to alter his hair color to match until we defeat them. He’s gone with Teemo orange over green and a few of the others are following his lead. I’m going with chrome rather than white, and while it’s a little odd to look at in the mirror I suppose I’ll get used to it. Guess this is what I put you through with that bet, only this is serious. We’re going to have to be at our best every day from here on out and that may still not be enough…but if we’re not we’re sure to fail, so my chrome hair is going to be my reminder. Not that we really need one, but if we get so punch drunk later that we don’t know up from down it might come in handy. Anyway, what do you think? I can go white if I want, but thought chrome would be a little more distinctive.”

The message ended there, and knowing that there were still considerable time lags in communications across the empire he figured Andy’s message had reached Jason first and Paul was only now getting both at the same time, collected and held at the recent relay until ships passed through to pick up the backlog of messages and data.

“You’re right, that’s a good idea,” Paul said to his empty quarters as he stood up and headed out before checking on the rest of the updates. He headed straight to one of the Excalibur’s medbays and got the attention of a medtech there.

“Need an alteration,” Paul said, walking across the spacious room to the cage-like chamber situated alongside the far wall.

“Sure,” the medtech said, having altered the genetics of crewmembers on a regular basis for inkless tattoos or fingernail colors. Even deactivating hair follicles to shape beards or eliminate shaving altogether. “What do you want?”

“Change my hair to Saber blue,” the trailblazer said, walking inside the cage and pulling the armature closed before putting his hands on the cold sphere in front of him that would connect him to the machinery.

“Eyebrows?”

“Yes.”

“Just a second,” the tech said, finding the exact color match for Paul’s Clan Saber, which only had one identifying color. Jason’s Clan Sangheili designated colors were white and chrome, based off Halo lore from centuries long, long ago. Paul’s color of blue was actually a light blue, and based off the original lightsaber color from Star Wars…another bit of lore from long ago back before almost all of the current Human population had been born. Each trailblazer had been able to name and configure their own Clan as they wished, with most of them citing reference to cool things from the distant past.

Paul’s hands went slightly numb, glued to the sphere while the nanotechnology sent little snakes of material through his body that were likewise numbed, causing him no pain as they altered his genetic code ever so slightly regarding his hair color…then they made the physical changes to his existing hair rather than waiting for it go grow out naturally, with his short black cut shifting to almost neon blue over the course of a few seconds, after which his hands unnumbed and the process was over.

“All done,” the medtech said, stepping over and unnecessarily pulling up the armature for Paul. “Going back to the blue…I like it. Why’d you change back? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“War colors,” Paul said calmly yet firmly. “Trailblazers are going with Clan colors until the V’kit’no’sat are destroyed…or we are.”

1

August 8, 4812

Orlero System (Devastation Zone)

Stellar Orbit

Paul was standing in the command nexus on the bridge of the Excalibur, concealed behind a wall in the dedicated alcove that gave him visual separation from the crew while leaving the entrance behind him open. He could hear what was being said if he focused on it, but right now his mind was more in the computer than anything else as he guided the massive battle still ongoing in the Orlero System.

It had begun on the planet Tauntaun when the hidden Star Force base there had been discovered and attacked, with the survivors fleeing through escape tunnels bored into the thick ice on the small, frozen world. Even now other Archons were attempting to get as many of them out alive, but so long as the V’kit’no’sat held the captured base that was a tricky rescue to pull off.

But right now rescuing those people wasn’t Paul’s job. Fighting the largest V’kit’no’sat fleet to enter the Devastation Zone in years was, and this battle was already days long. He couldn’t stay in the command nexus continually and he knew it, having fought battles larger than this against the lizards, but they were not the V’kit’no’sat’s equal. That experience helped Paul pace himself, taking breaks and letting others lead the constant naval fighting as ships from both sides sought out one another in strategic maneuvers looking for an advantage…for neither side was stupid enough to just plow into one another as many rookies would have.

No, with this type of naval combat it was easy to turn and run, and it seemed that neither side wanted to do that here. Paul certainly didn’t, for he and the other trailblazers running the war against the V’kit’no’sat along the front and in the Devastation Zone were eager to get the enemy in a position to clobber them without having to backtrack to a planetary stronghold. Fighting ships was bad enough, but going up against planetary shields and anti-orbital weaponry was more than just unpleasant. It required a sacrifice of ships who had to sit and take fire while the shields were gradually weakened.

The V’kit’no’sat had to face the same scenario when they assaulted a fully developed Star Force planet, like those that currently made up the front on the rimward edge of the Devastation Zone. Had Tauntaun been heavily fortified they wouldn’t have been able to take it so easy, but it had only a small outpost on it hidden underneath the ice…and even that was enough of a threat to prompt the V’kit’no’sat to land a ground assault force outside the boundaries of its shield rather than slug it out with the anti-orbital weaponry and lose some of their ships in the process.

But now that had all changed with the arrival of more ships from both sides…numbering in the thousands. V’kit’no’sat ships were larger than Star Force ones, primarily because they carried living crews and most Star Force warships were drones flown remotely by pilots in nearby control ships. The drones were tiny in comparison to the V’kit’no’sat vessels, but they had the advantage of not requiring internal living quarters or life support. They were 100% weapons and Star Force fielded them in swarms to take on the massive V’kit’no’sat ships, some of which were 36 miles long. Those Kafcha were the largest the enemy empire fielded in regular combat, and there were hundreds of them here already mixed in with a massive V’kit’no’sat fleet made up of ships from about a third of their member races.

Those races were what Earth had once mistakenly referred to as the Dinosaurs, but some were not, for while Earth was a long abandoned colony of the V’kit’no’sat not all of their 193 member races had lived there…but the main land dwelling players had. The T-rex, the Brontosaurus, the Stegosaurus, and the Triceratops…whose actual names were the Era’tran, the Oso’lon, the Hjar’at, and the Brat’mar. There were other major land powers previously unknown to Earth, but the majority of the other powerhouse races were aquatic or aerial, with the swimming J’gar being just as strong as the Oso’lon and forming the two primary races within the V’kit’no’sat…not counting the third founder that was no longer around.

The Zak’de’ron had been more powerful than the Oso’lon and J’gar combined, but had fallen when the entire V’kit’no’sat empire turned on them long, long ago. Paul knew of them from the historical records found in the pyramid discovered in Antarctica, as well as from the restricted files that they had been given access to by a living Zak’de’ron. The only one to have survived the war that the V’kit’no’sat did not realize still existed. One of Paul’s peers named Kara had helped the Dragon when he came out of a long period in stasis. Weakened and vulnerable from the hibernation, she had earned a bit of favor from ‘Puff’ in the form of a trinket and had negotiated an exchange of information that had seen the Dragon quietly come to Earth and unlock the pyramid with his priority codes, then disappear into the galaxy never to be seen again.

But Star Force had heard of him and the eggs that he’d been protecting. The Zak’de’ron were working their own agenda, and through an ally of Star Force’s called the Voku, Paul had been able to assemble bits of information about their activities, for the Voku were one of their servant races from long ago that had recently received new guidance from them. The fact that Puff had let Star Force retain knowledge of his existence was a large measure of trust that Paul and the others had not betrayed, keeping the V’kit’no’sat in the dark about the Dragons’ existence even though they had not bothered to help Star Force when the war started and Paul’s empire started to get chopped up planet by planet against an unyielding tide of assaults into their heaviest populated region known as the ADZ.

The ADZ was gone now and had become a piece of the Devastation Zone, with Sol at its center. Only Earth the V’kit’no’sat had chosen to populate, reclaiming their lost colony and using it as the forward base of operations for the continuing annihilation crusade against Star Force. Every other world in the Devastation Zone had been conquered and cleansed, leaving nothing but ruined landscape and scar marks on worlds that had once housed billions, if not trillions of people on each.

And the V’kit’no’sat kept those worlds bare, patrolling the Devastation Zone looking for Star Force or any of their allies while periodically taking more worlds off the front from them and pushing the line back further and further as Paul and his people kept fighting a gradual retreat while evacuating the people under assault…but they didn’t save everyone, and the long list of casualties in this war could have been lessened greatly if only the Zak’de’ron had helped buy them some more time, but they hadn’t. They had never promised to be allies, and when it came to fighting the V’kit’no’sat they were clearly not going to get involved in a mismatch…for as much as the Dinosaur empire hated Star Force, if they got even a whiff of the Zak’de’ron still living they’d throw the full might of their empire against them, fearing the insane power they wielded might one day regrow their civilization to the level where it could threaten them again.

And that was the irony of it all. The V’kit’no’sat were methodically wiping out Star Force with only a tiny fraction of their empire’s fleet. Meaning that no matter how hard Paul and the others fought, they could always bring in more to counter any victory they obtained.

Except they couldn’t do it instantly. Travel times across the galaxy were not forgiving, and to get ships out to the Devastation Zone from the inner core of the galaxy where the V’kit’no’sat empire existed took at least a month, if not several, depending on where they would come from. Meaning those Paul was fighting right now were essentially on their own for the immediate future save for any other fleets already enroute or repositioning from nearby.

That’s why Paul wanted to engage them here, but he needed to do it in a way that wouldn’t scare them off and in a way to get his people trapped on Tauntaun out alive.

But for the V’kit’no’sat they didn’t seem too interested in the survivors save for those ships stationed at Tauntaun. The bulk of their fleet was elsewhere in the star system fighting Paul’s ships, as if they were as interested in getting this naval vs naval fight as he was…which told him that they had more reinforcements on the way, for right now he was kicking their ass in a limited sense. Trading losses at a rate of approximately 5 to 3, though Paul’s losses didn’t involve crew, only unmanned drones.

The V’kit’no’sat losses didn’t always mean a ship was destroyed, for Paul could knock chunks out of them equal in size to his drones and they’d keep fighting as if they hadn’t been touched. They were just that big and powerful, but attrition would wear them down eventually so long as Paul’s command ship and the other control ships in the system didn’t get caught…and the V’kit’no’sat were always trying to flank the drone fleets and hit them in the rear.

But space was big and Paul’s ships were just as fast as the V’kit’no’sat’s, and whenever the enemy got too close the control ships would run. That would interfere with the drone fleet’s operation, but other control ships nearby could take over for them or they could leave the fleet on auto-targeting protocols if need be. Those weren’t nearly as effective as having a person sighting each weapon and rotating shields for maximum coverage, but it gave the control ships the windows they needed to run and reposition elsewhere to stay out of the fight…though right now Paul was taking his command ship into the brawl, for he’d just gotten an opportunity he hadn’t been counting on.

Another Star Force fleet had just began to arrive in the system, coming out of their interstellar jumps two and three ships at a time in a long convoy that bore Morgan-063’s fleet tag. She had a fleet nearly the size of his, meaning the V’kit’no’sat were going to be outnumbered within a few hours.

Would they stick around to fight or flee in face of the mismatch? Paul didn’t know, but if they had more reinforcements of their own coming they might stick around. If not, he needed to hurt them as badly as possible here and now, which was why he was taking his command ship in off the periphery of the fighting and joining a tendril of drone ships, most of which were less than a fifth the width of the Excalibur’s giant donut-shaped hull, as the black rectangles clustered around the grey with blue striped flagship and waded into an outcropping of Era’tran ships.

The V’kit’no’sat responded immediately, seeing an opportunity to strike the command ship, but Paul didn’t pull back. Instead he forced his fleet group head on into the larger ships and used the impressive weaponry on the Excalibur to add to the little stings from the drones, drawing fire away from them and thus increasing their longevity as the mass of both fleets that were further off and spectating suddenly began to collapse towards each other.

Linked into the battlemap network, Paul could feel every ship in the fleet and, if needed, remote control every gun, shield generator, engine, and system on those ships, but he could not do it simultaneously. He could fly 10 ships by himself with ease, but there were so many here that he couldn’t do so effectively, meaning he had to pick and choose where he inserted his mind while trusting in the other Archons’ and naval officers’ skill and judgment to handle the tasks required while he directed the overall battle.

With a single thought he put target beacons on specific points where shields were weakening on the Era’tran ships, told which of his own vessels to attack and which to reposition, and tweaked the Excalibur’s shields to 57% power forward. Every moment that continued had his Sav-enhanced mind working at lightspeed to control as much of the battle as possible, but it was never enough. Fleet combat was truly a group fight, and the rest of the crew in the fleet had gotten used to supporting Paul, knowing that he’d find ways to fight the V’kit’no’sat that the enemy hadn’t even thought of, with his nickname of ‘The Admiral’ being given to him long ago due to his instinctive ability to feel his way through naval combat…not to mention the fact that he had been personally responsible for the development and design of most of Star Force’s weapons and ships, though in truth it had been more of a group effort than most accredited him for.

Paul and the other trailblazers hadn’t learned from the V’kit’no’sat records when Star Force began. That knowledge had been withheld from them, making them learn and develop Star Force’s own combat identity from scratch. Later on they’d been given access so they could advance and make ready for the inevitable war to come, but the way Star Force fought is the way the trailblazers had come up with on their own. They hadn’t learned from anyone else, rather figuring out things as they went and building the empire’s military piece by piece into what it was today.

Now recruits would learn from their example and the multitude of training scenarios and programs they’d created over the centuries…but they had never had that luxury. They’d always been the ones leading the way and having to discover things for themselves that others would then use to better the empire. That meant Paul and the other ‘trailblazers’ had to be better than the rest, with a knack to think outside the box that was proving to be continually annoying to the V’kit’no’sat, but they too adapted well and whatever Paul would come up with they would soon counter, but not soon enough today to stop the beatdown about to happen.

Paul knew he was baiting them, and he knew they knew it, which was why the beatdown wasn’t going to happen here. Even as the fighting around his ship intensified as the V’kit’no’sat did indeed try to focus on his ship…but not to an extent that would leave them overextended…Paul had the bulk of his fleet behind him move en mass. Blinking out on fast accelerating ‘jumps’ laterally that caused a mushrooming effect on the battlemap, then they raced even faster when they got on a straight line trajectory out from the star and pushed hallway around the V’kit’no’sat’s extended fleet blob that was unengaged in the current fighting.

Paul’s ships braked hard then dove down into their midst, hitting a buzz saw of incoming fire that knocked out many drones within a few seconds, but he pressed through the losses until the V’kit’no’sat fleet was essentially cut in half with both sides hammering the drones in the gap and Paul was losing them fast.

But these were huge ships, for even his smallest drones were nearly half a mile long, and destroying them all took time…and Paul had no problem with ordering them to ram the V’kit’no’sat ships, for there was no crew onboard them, which added even more damage and chaos to the fighting that seemed completely calm and controlled in Paul’s mind’s eye as he stood in the command nexus with a hand on the control sphere and numerous holograms surrounding him, but he mostly saw what was happening through the fleet’s sensors that were tied directly into his mind, making the mass of ships an extension of himself as he guided them through a level of teamwork fighting that few others could understand even with weeks of post battle analysis.

To Paul it was instinctual, and an instinct that had been honed to near perfection over centuries of warfare against lesser races prior to the V’kit’no’sat War, then enhanced even further by the impossible challenge of fighting the empire of Dinosaurs, for they were even more intelligent than Humans, for the most part, meaning he was having to contend against legendary minds in the opposing fleet that gave him little margin for success even in the most beneficial of engagements.

But with Morgan’s fleet coming in and his call for her ships to redirect to his position immediately after arrival, he knew how many vessels she had while the V’kit’no’sat did not, making this engagement a bit of a question mark for them as he pressed into more and more combat…far more than they were comfortable with as his command ship started taking hull damage.

Paul turned it around and started to flee back through his lines as the V’kit’no’sat would expect, with the Era’tran ships he’d attacked chasing him. They above all other races seemed to hate the Star Force control ships, as if they were a carrot on the end of the stick that they could just never quite reach. He pulled them after him as Paul signaled the surrounding drones to move in and block their path, with many of the ships simply ramming through them trying to get to Paul who couldn’t make an emergency jump out through so many of his own ships.

Except he could and the V’kit’no’sat knew that, meaning they were either being really stupid today or just proud enough that they wanted to drive him off. Either way he was drawing this bit of the V’kit’no’sat fleet out as the formation of ships in front of the Excalibur suddenly shifted in unison, making a path for him to jump out that he took, getting his command ship out of weapons range.

But two Era’tran ships followed him through that gap, meaning his ship had to run and keep running as they pursued, but he wasn’t worried. Unless they were a lot faster he could run indefinitely so long as he didn’t lose engine power, but the V’kit’no’sat knew that if his ship was running then the control signals going out from it would be distorted and he would lose his magical effect on the fleet, so each second they had him on the move was a victory for them as the Star Force fleet became a little less organized…though not much, for the other Archons and naval commanders were both skilled and experienced, but against opponents that could very well be over a million years old, the difference in command influence was immediately evident.

But not for long. A few seconds after Paul jumped out the orders he’d been crafting beforehand went into effect with a massive fleet repositioning that split off the Era’tran segment and isolated them, meaning they couldn’t escape and the rest of the huge V’kit’no’sat fleet couldn’t get to them. Paul was losing drones so fast elsewhere it didn’t seem worth the sacrifice, but when his fleet turned and pounded the Era’tran ships they were forced to fight and die over the next few hours with Morgan’s ships arriving to replace some of what Paul was losing.

In the end he wiped out all of the 74 Era’tran ships in that little cut off group, including two Kafcha, so that when you compared the losses ton for ton, Star Force had won out by a factor of 4 to 1, and before the V’kit’no’sat could really make Paul pay for the maneuver enough of Morgan’s ships got to his position to force the V’kit’no’sat to pull out of the very costly fight as Paul tried to isolate more subgroups with the incoming flow of drone warships.

That was a feint, because Paul really didn’t want to continue the fight, but he could have if needed and the V’kit’no’sat saw the threat, with them transition into a fighting retreat that pulled them back across a few hundred thousand miles of space to a slightly higher stellar orbit where their new fleet configuration could have turned the tables on Paul if he’d pursued…but he hadn’t. Not more than a few skirmishing tendrils to hit wounded ships lagging behind the others and to give the V’kit’no’sat a good kick in the butt as the two fleet groups got some breathing room between them again.

But that recent throwdown had gone in Star Force’s favor, with Paul sending our recovery teams for the debris on the battlefield that they now owned…as well as hunter teams for V’kit’no’sat survivors. Paul wasn’t going to try to risk boarding any of their ships and taking captives, not that they would have accepted surrender anyway, so he located every bit of intact ship left drifting and had them targeted by the surrounding fleet, pulverizing the debris to the point where no more mental signatures detected.

Paul wasn’t going to risk his people saving the enemy, especially when he really didn’t have anywhere to put captives, but he wasn’t going to let the V’kit’no’sat recover them to fight another day and he wasn’t going to let them freeze or suffocate. He’d give them the small respect of a quick death from weaponsfire rather than a lingering end, but no more. Paul had to catch a quick respite before major combat broke out again, even as his subordinates were organizing strafing attacks on the edge of the V’kit’no’sat fleet’s skirmisher line.

For in system battles of this size, you’d be sure to lose no matter how many ships you had if your crew became fatigued to the point of sloppiness…and Paul was the main weapon Star Force had in this fight, even with Morgan’s inclusion. Her naval skills weren’t his equal, but they were solid and experienced enough for him to turn temporary command over to her and leave the bridge for a crash nap of a couple of hours…maybe less if the V’kit’no’sat made a major move before then, but he figured they wouldn’t.

In fact, he expected them to have a reinforcement fleet on the way themselves and to hold tight until it arrived.

And when it did, he needed to be clearheaded enough to face whatever they had coming in.

2

October 4, 4812

Orlero System (Devastation Zone)

Stellar Orbit

After two months of fighting the V’kit’no’sat finally broke, with Paul maintaining his disciplined endurance as fleet leader in what looked like an infinite timespan, but no one aside from him knew how tired he truly was. Morgan was just as fatigued, as were most of the senior Archons and fleet officers, but the V’kit’no’sat were finally pulling back towards the star in order to jump out of the system along with the first segments of their fleet that had already left.

Others would have let them go, but not Paul. He knew that in times of fatigue and transition lay the largest opportunities, so he assumed the command nexus again, breaking a short nap he’d been on when the en mass retreat began, knowing that he had to be in the lead or risk disaster. Right now the V’kit’no’sat still outnumbered the Star Force fleet, ton for ton, but the combat trend was with the Human-led empire. Paul had proven himself superior to the V’kit’no’sat fleet commander, whoever it was, but he also knew that this retreat could quickly be turned into an offensive, so he linked into the battlemap systems again and melded his mind with the fleet, getting them moving in a myriad of split transitions across the star system.

The V’kit’no’sat couldn’t jump out quickly and they knew it, hence they were leaving via 3 different jumplines that would result in 3 different destinations. That also meant they could get their ships out of the system 3 times as fast while still being close enough to one another for mutual defense in low stellar orbit…and they were very low, baking in the stellar radiation of the star so much that it was licking away their shields.

If Paul sent his ships down that low the same would be true, giving the V’kit’no’sat a small advantage due to their larger size and stronger shields. Each of his drones were tiny in comparison and had less internal volume for shield area. That wasn’t a major shift in the playing field, but it was a factor that Paul wasn’t going to overlook and he guessed it might be the V’kit’no’sat trying to discourage pursuit. Based on the enemy fleet movements it felt like they’d had enough, but Paul never assumed such things and constantly asked himself what he could do in their situation…and if they held the jumppoint in low to the star and Paul came in after them in shifts they could do a lot of damage before he could get all his ships in position.

So he wasn’t rushing, but rather sending the now significantly smaller Star Force fleet in groups on varied trajectories…some out of the way…that would bring them all together at the closest of the three jumppoints while his ships already in stellar orbit he had pull back and hit the opposite one with light, harassing attacks to make sure the V’kit’no’sat ships stayed split and made them defend both sides.

At the same time he dispatched his Mak’ri into a separate fleet of their own, then had them engage their stealth fields and head off on a long, roundabout trek that would bring them in over the middle jumpline to cause more havoc, but the biggest hammer Paul was going to drop was on the closest jumppoint in the hopes of doing damage as they retreated, with them being the most vulnerable near the end when they had fewer ships remaining insystem.

Paul brought his command ship up into the swarm of drones, as did Morgan and the others in the fleet while the Warship-class jumpships kept their distance while controlling most of the drones and giving detail to Paul’s general orders. If the V’kit’no’sat wanted to counterattack to go after the command ships he’d let them…then slaughter those that remained as he backdoored their jumppoints and cut off their easiest route of escape.

He didn’t think that would happen, so he was bringing the command ships with their heavy weaponry into the fight to do more damage as well as soak up hits with their shields that would otherwise kill the drones, preserving more of his fleet while continuing to knock down chunks of the enemy.

Still, their decision to retreat was odd. After Morgan had arrived the V’kit’no’sat had gotten three more large reinforcement fleets and 17 smaller groups to add to their numbers. Either there were no more coming or they didn’t want to lose the amount of ships necessary to finish off the Star Force fleet…or maybe they were worried about Paul getting more reinforcements. The base on Tauntaun had already been recaptured by other Archons after the V’kit’no’sat trashed most of it on exit, and about half of the survivors in the ice fields had made it out, meaning technically there was nothing here to keep the V’kit’no’sat engaged.

But engage they had for weeks after the base had returned to Star Force hands…though now it was worthless. It had been a hidden outpost, and now that it was exposed there was no refurbishing it and Star Force couldn’t keep this many ships here permanently, else the V’kit’no’sat would strike at the front worlds in their absence.

Paul wondered if that was happening now, with this being a massive diversion, but no word had come through the hidden relay network yet, though interstellar communications still had a considerable lag effect that stretched out into weeks when going from one end of Star Force comm territory to the other…assuming the relays weren’t hit and eliminated, breaking the comm lines and blacking out entire regions.

And the V’kit’no’sat were good at finding them, with Paul doing a lot of replacement relay drops in previous years to keep the grid operational, else the only way they’d be able to get reports between star systems would be to send courier ships back and forth. Paul was still getting periodic updates through the hidden relay in this system, so the connection back to the front hadn’t been cut as of yet, but there was some reason the V’kit’no’sat had played here as long as they had above and beyond the base assault on Tauntaun.

Paul had to consider all options and keep a look out for things he couldn’t predict, but nothing radical happened over the following two days as heavy combat ensued to protect the jumplines, at the end of which the remaining V’kit’no’sat ships had to go evasive and scatter across the system. Paul sent the Ma’kri after them, for the knife-like ships were specifically designed for intercept and disable missions, but he doubted many of the fleeing vessels would be caught as they ran for other jumplines at various altitudes. Right now even a slow jump out of the system was preferable to staying here and getting run down.

Once the three major jumplines were secured Paul relinquished command to others to handle the chasing as most of his fleet stood down from combat and began recovery operations on their own debris while finishing off what remains of the enemy were still around. It was work that Paul wasn’t needed for, so he disconnected from the command nexus and turned around, stumbling half a step as his legs were stiffer than he’d realized.

A half empty container of water that sat on the floor nearby flew up into Paul’s hand and he sucked down the rest before telekinetically flying it back down, then he walked out the short alcove and onto the bridge with small steps. He hadn’t slept the past two days, with crew bringing him food and water where he was, and right now his mind was so fried that he had to focus just to walk. As powerful as he was, being a Goku-level Archon and arguably one of the strongest and fastest Humans in the galaxy, he was so out of it right now a strong elbow to his gut would take him down and he knew it.

Fortunately there were no enemies here. His crew were beyond trustworthy and looking a bit ragged themselves. He would have checked on them with his telepathy but right now his head was urging him insistently to shut down and go into recovery mode and he wasn’t going to argue with it at this point.

“The ship is yours,” he told Admiral Baeren. “Well done, everyone. I have to crash now.”

“Paul,” Baeren said, standing up from his command chair and facing him. “That was the most impressive display of naval skill I’ve ever seen. Given their strength and numbers we should not have won that fight. It’s truly an honor serving onboard your flagship,” the Protovic said, throwing a seldom used salute.

Paul nodded his thanks, then other bridge crew members also stood with the rest soon following. They all saluted…something that in Star Force was not standard protocol…and Paul pushed past the ache in his head to telepathically scan some of them. Most of them were Human, with the built in Ikrid blocks that prevented him from reading their minds, but he could still sense a bit of surface emotion that suggested they were genuinely in awe of what just happened…in addition to being fatigued.

The few that weren’t Human he could read, with him realizing that they saw this as an impressive moment in Star Force history…but to him it was just a major battle that he’d lost himself in, working every second as hard as he could to gain as much advantage as possible and to diminish their losses, which had been huge in terms of machinery. However, no control ship had been lost, meaning the only ships that had been destroyed were unmanned.

That was a feat worth remembering, but there had been casualties when control ships had been damaged. Twenty six people had died of wounds too great to be healed, and those 26 stood out in Paul’s mind as a failure and always would, but he wasn’t going to linger on it. His job was to take action and do what he could, not feel guilty about the losses and waste time with pointless recriminations. He’d never be ok with the losses, but he’d learned long ago to just label them as failures and move on…else the carnage of this war would overwhelm him, and if that happened far more would die without his skill and knowledge being applied in the most effective way and at the most effective times.

Which meant he needed to rest now before they were potentially thrown into combat again, with that being the foremost priority on his mind, but he took note of the crew’s awe and dismay in what had occurred and allowed himself a moment to reflect. He’d been involved in so many large scale battles against the V’kit’no’sat that he treated this no differently, but in retrospect it had been different in that there wasn’t a planet that they had to defend. It was just one fleet versus the other in a throwdown…and one that Star Force had been outnumbered in.

And they’d won…or had they? He got the feeling the V’kit’no’sat may have gotten what they needed out of it, if not what they wanted.

“A group effort, to be sure,” Paul announced honestly. “I can only control so many systems simultaneously. We kicked ass today. Never forget that…and don’t forget we still have V’kit’no’sat in the system. Kill what you can, cleanse the debris, and recover as much of ours as possible. We need to be out of here in a few days tops.”

“We’ll take care of it, Archon,” Baenen confirmed. “Get some sleep.”

Paul saluted back with a sloppy smile. “As ordered.”

The crew relaxed and went back to work and Paul slowly walked off the bridge, heading through the ship that had taken a fair amount of hull damage, but the 7 mile wide Melee-class command ship had a lot of internal mass between the fighting and the crew, leaving the center plug of habitation in the giant jelly donut-shaped ship pristine as he walked to a nearby lift and headed back to his quarters.

When he got there he was about to walk into a quick shower when a comm prompt lit up on his terminal that sat just past the foot of his bed nestled up against the wall.

Paul frowned and telekinetically pressed the accept button from across the room, wondering what was so important to interrupt him, but as the hologram appeared he saw it wasn’t from the bridge, but rather another ship in the fleet.

“Hey, Paul,” Morgan greeted tiredly. “You look like crap.”

“Better than I’m feeling then. I haven’t slept since the pullout began.”

“Worried they had something up their sleeve?”

“Yeah. I’m glad we had a chance to chew them up, but this battle made no sense.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about before you crashed. I’m not seeing any signs of a diversion, but I think they got beat here worse than they expected.”

“I got that impression too.”

“I think they were here after you,” she said bluntly.

Paul frowned. “Me?”

“Look back through the replays later, but they showed a little more tenacity trying to get at the Excalibur than they did the Star Saber. More than usual, anyway.”

“They’re always trying to get us,” he argued. “And I was baiting them a bit.”

“I noticed. Still, they were going harder at you.”

“I’ll check later. I’m fried right now.”

“Not just yet,” she warned. “Sit down.”

Paul did as suggested, feeling a wave of relief as soon as he did with his eyes rolling once as he refocused on the full body hologram of his long time peer/rival for top Archon rank, though both of them had fallen behind Rio-058 just prior to the start of the war and that hadn’t changed with him devoting more time to training and digging out the tier 4 psionics buried in the dream tests that he’d first discovered. To date they’d uncovered 6, with Rio reporting that he was sniffing at a 7th, but no one knew for sure how many of them the Zak’de’ron had hidden within the Zen’zat genetic code that they’d inherited from the V’kit’no’sat, for the Dragons hadn’t even told their own empire how many were in there. Rather they waited until individuals of merit unlocked them on their own…and there had been a lot that Star Force had found that the V’kit’no’sat had never stumbled across.

Part of that was due to the fact that the Archons had found a way to share psionics after one of them had unlocked one and triggered the flash growth of new psionic tissue in their bodies, but another part was the way Star Force handled their ranking system. Training was key to everything, even more than within the V’kit’no’sat, and the trailblazers had worked long and hard to meet and surpass the standards of Zen’zat equal to them in age. Somewhere in all of that they’d found a knack for unlocking the hidden genetic gems, and Rio had dived into that challenge more than anyone else once his proclivity for the elusive dream tests was discovered.

Ever since then Paul and Morgan had to take a back seat in the rankings, and while they wanted Rio to get as powerful as possible, they both resented his success a bit. Had it not been for the war taking so much of their time and effort, they’d have buried themselves in training as well…but that wasn’t an option now, and so long as they both kept improving the strength and skills that was sufficient. Losing levels was not, and juggling their schedules between fighting and training was not always easy, such as today. Paul hadn’t gotten a really good workout in for weeks and his body was going to pay a price for that, but he’d make up for it later during travel or other downtime, for they weren’t fighting this scale of battles everyday out here. Quite the reverse, actually, with both empires usually chasing each other around in a game of cat and mouse rather than going in for outright slug fests aside from when the V’kit’no’sat assaulted another Star Force planet.

Which was why this battle was appearing so odd to both trailblazers.

“What did I miss?”

“I took a nap the past 2 days, you didn’t, so I’m not laying blame,” she said honestly. “Just look at this.”

A map appeared beneath her holographic feet and she pointed with her toes to several locations. “See it?”

“When did those come in?”

“About 8 minutes ago.”

Paul sighed. “So they are coming in heavy.”

“And I think they wanted to draw you out and hammer your fleet, at the minimum. I think we surprised them with how many reinforcements we were able to draw in…not to mention our effective kill rate. Even I was beating them this time.”

“You’ve been taking lessons from me,” Paul joked, rubbing his eyes as he looked back at the map with fleet movements picked up by quiet scouts they had spread across the Devastation Zone. There were major enemy fleets arriving from the core of the galaxy in odd locations, as if they wanted to sneak them in rather than sending them directly to Sol, with Paul assuming there were more in play than what had been discovered to date.

“The Preserve?”

“I know they want it bad, but strategically it gains them nothing.”

“Unless they’re still worried about us using the Uriti offensively.”

“No,” Paul said, shaking his head and immediately regretting it as his vision swooned. He really needed to sleep. “This is a numbers game. They’re not going to bleed ships there while we have inhabited systems to hit. They’ll save the Preserve for last until we start to use it.”

“That was my gut feeling too. So where are they going?”

“Lots of possibilities. They haven’t taken a system in decades, and based off of this,” he said, pointing beneath her glowing feet, “I think they’re going for more than a few.”

“Any idea how they found Tauntaun?”

“No, and that still bugs me. Our other bases could be at risk, which is why we have to spread our fleets again. It doesn’t take this strength level to wipe them off the map.”

“If it was me I’d have hit them all at once if I knew where they were,” Morgan pointed out.

“Same here…and see how much of a response it drew. Could be a security slip on only Tauntaun, but I still need to know what it is.”

“Nothing from the survivors?”

“No…and they’ve been debriefed thoroughly.”

“What about the evac ships?”

“We got three out. They might know something more, but I’m not hopeful. Anything obvious they would have reported before the base fell.”

“Any suggestions beyond warning them?” she asked, referring to the other hidden bases spread throughout the Devastation Zone that serviced the scouts and other sneaking units moving about like mice that the V’kit’no’sat were continually trying to track down and squash, protecting their conquered territory that they intended to keep barren and nearly lifeless save for their growing colony on Earth, which Paul rarely got updates on, given how well defended it was. Getting even a probe into the system and out again was problematic, but it was clear they’d set up more than a forward base there. They’d reintegrated it back into their empire just as before, adding insult to injury as if taking it and the entire ADZ wasn’t bad enough.

“Nothing comes to mind. Maybe after I sleep. How long you staying up?”

“A few more hours then I’m crashing too. You did well, Paul. Glad you’re on our side.”

“Ditto, Morgan. You took a load off when you arrived.”

“I’m surprised no one else got here.”

“Probably didn’t expect it to last long enough to be worth the trip…that or they had trouble to deal with elsewhere.”

“We need a rotation. Both our fleets are wrecked now.”

“I know. We’ll deal with that after we clean up here. Let’s hope those other V’kit’no’sat groups take their time.”

“I’m sure Kara is poking at them. Might be why they’re so hesitant.”

“Hesitant?”

“Just a gut feeling. They should have stayed around and fought here longer. Felt to me like they were playing a safety margin.”

“You might be right, but I’m so dopey I can’t confirm 2+2=4 at the moment. Can I sleep now?”

“Sure. I’m used to outworking you,” she said with a smirk. “And since Riona isn’t here…” Morgan added, blowing him a sarcastic kiss. “Night, night.”

Her hologram cut off before he could respond beyond the frown on his face. Archons didn’t date, but Riona had been labeled as his girlfriend long ago and a lot of the trailblazers continually teased him about it. She was second gen and almost as strong as them, and one of the few non trailblazers that he was as close with, due in part to the time they’d spent together figuring out the bioshield psionic, given the fact that they’d developed it before everyone else did. The two of them had trained, experimented, floundered around until they’d basically written the book on the psionic for others to learn from, but she still wasn’t a trailblazer.

And that, more than anything, is why they felt like teasing him...but also because there was a shred of truth in it. Archons didn’t date because there was a disadvantage in it, combat wise, and they were too good to tolerate anything slowing them down, but Riona and him had a little bit of a connection beyond the others.

Though to be honest, Paul and all of the 12 trailblazer girls also had a ‘little connection’ that was just a part of their inter-badass relationships. They considered each other to be brothers and sisters, but they were also all godly fit and attractive, and the trailblazers were too smart to delude themselves by pretending otherwise.

But Riona wasn’t a trailblazer, so she got the ‘girlfriend’ label and it’d stuck seeing how Paul cringed a little every time he heard it…and he doubted that was going to change, because every time someone said ‘girlfriend’ it was also a slight insult, for those who delved into romance were inferior…

And the trailblazers lived, breathed, and bled superiority. They had to, otherwise they’d never be good enough to toe the line against the V’kit’no’sat, and it’d taken every ounce of naval skill Paul had to pull off this mutually damaging victory.

Though as he’d stated before, it was a team effort. And if he didn’t have an insanely skilled peer and highly trained empire backing him, this fight would have ended in a slaughter rather than a slim victory.

Paul didn’t stay angry at Morgan. He didn’t have the energy too. On impulse he decided to skip the shower and go straight into a regenerative crash…which amounted to him standing up out of his chair, walking a couple steps, then falling face down on the bed where he got to work repairing his frazzled mind. Workouts would follow later, but for now he needed sleep…and lots of it.

3

October 16, 4812

Orlero System (Devastation Zone)

Debris Field

Paul dove off the platform, falling extra fast through the air until he hit the water hands first and shot underneath, pinching his nose closed telekinetically so the water wouldn’t shoot up it. He twisted underneath and angled towards the glowing underwater marker beacons as he kicked to increase his angular speed. He was swimming for time in the ‘heavy water’ course that was entirely submerged with only a few emergency air pockets in case he needed them, but popping his face up into one would disqualify the Archon.

Not many could use this course in its entirety without a breath mask, but as Archons ranked up through their ability levels they got additional psionics. The lowest rank was Adept, which had no powers as those just out of basic training learned to use ambrosia and train to fight in the Trials, gaining experience and power in their physical abilities to ground them before they ever got their first psionic.

Acolyte level was attained after passing through the 99 ability levels of adept, each of which was attained through skills tests, and the transition came with the unlocking of the 7 basic psionics that all Zen’zat defaultly possessed and were lying dormant within Humans. In those 7 came telekinesis and telepathy, known as Lachka and Ikrid, which gave acolytes a huge advantage over adepts and the rest of the Star Force empire…as well as most of the galaxy…despite the fact that they could barely lift a marble in the beginning. Their strength level would increase with training, but size of tissue in their brain was a limiting factor…and the V’kit’no’sat races were much larger, meaning that a novice telekinetic there could lift far more, so the Archons had to be far better than their arch nemesis just to pull even.

And that was why most ground combat against the larger V’kit’no’sat races was fought in mechs and not hand to hand.

Zen’zat, however, Archons did fight…but Zen’zat had growth enhancements that put them in the 7-8 foot range. Star Force had a counterpart to them, known as Knights, which were just as large, but they did not have psionics. Why Star Force didn’t just copy the Zen’zat was a lingering question for outsiders, but within the Archon ranks it was well known.

Speed was more important than strength in most combat scenarios, and with the Zen’zat’s larger bulk came a slight speed penalty that many overcame with additional training, making them faster than Archon adepts and acolytes…which was why those two lowest ranking Archons were not put into the field.

The next level up were Archon Rangers, but they didn’t receive any additional psionics unless they unlocked them on their own through a process known as ‘ascensions’ where they met the genetic prerequisites the V’kit’no’sat had created to judge one’s worth. If such a benchmark occurred a wave of physical and mental stress would wash over an individual that they then had to control. If they couldn’t it would go away and the moment would be lost…or if it came in combat the individual could pass on it because they were in an bad situation…but if they successfully held onto it a flash growth of new psionic tissue would occur within seconds, painfully so, but they would have their upgrade without any medical treatment required.

That was how the trailblazers had unlocked their psionics beyond the basic 7, and after stumbling onto a workaround via the Twins, they learned a mental process were one individual could mimic the state of another and cause their own ascension to trigger. Archon protocol held that a higher ranking individual could share a psionic with a lower ranking one if they deemed them worthy, but that sharing ability required an Ikrid level equal to about a mid level ranger to accomplish.

Such early ‘gifting’ was rare, but it did happen. After another 99 ranger levels were met, one would gain the rank of Striker and continue to improve on their skills, both physical and psionic, until they passed through another 99 levels and transitioned to Padawan rank. When that happened they were paired with a higher level Archon for an apprenticeship of sorts, much like the Jedi Master/Apprentice relationship that the rank was named after, during which they would go through training and field missions as the ‘master’ would gradually share all their tier 2 psionics with the padawan.

That took time, for there were a total of 27 of them, and it was up to the ‘master’ to determine what order they gave them and when, but during the process they also unlocked…either through sharing or medical intervention…the Battlemeld ability.

It worked as a sharing between 2 or more individuals of their senses and thoughts, essentially linking their minds together so they could work together more efficiently, fighting in close quarters without bumping into one another because they felt where each other’s bodies were and how they were going to move before they did.

It was a powerful psionic hidden in the depths of the Zen’zat code that even the V’kit’no’sat Zen’zat had not discovered. The Zak’de’ron had put it there without telling the other races, along with many other psionics that their own personal branch of Zen’zat did unlock and use during the civil war that destroyed the founding race…but irony had it that they believed that the Zak’de’ron had given their personal Zen’zat extra psionics, not realizing that they were buried in the genetic code of all Zen’zat and those that served the rest of the dinosaur empire simply hadn’t worked hard or long enough to awaken them.

Star Force, knowing the threat they faced before the V’kit’no’sat had returned to Earth, had ample motivation to work their asses off along with a little information the Zak’de’ron had implanted in Kara to guide them in finding these hidden psionics, with the battlemeld being the most impressive. Padawans were paired with another so they both could practice the battlemeld psionics, of which there were 19, all of which Star Force had discovered and unlocked.

That meant the padawan rank was full of discovery and becoming acquainted with new abilities, which was why they got through their 99 skill levels they became a Mage, signifying that they had this plethora of almost magical abilities and knew how to use them. Usually it would be a mage paired with a padawan so they could continue to learn the battlemeld and increase the skill level of their psionics while adding only one new one…that being Sav.

It was a tier 3 ability and one that was rare within the V’kit’no’sat Zen’zat, but not unheard of. It upped the processing ability of one’s mind, allowing you to think faster and multitask at much higher volume. This essentially upgraded a lot of the other psionics the Archon already possessed, so this rank was spent incorporating Sav into what was previously learned and gaining a bit of mastery in the long catalog of abilities one had recently gained as a padawan.

At this point, if the Archon was moving along quickly, they’d be improving one level per year, meaning each Archon rank signified about 100 years. That put mages at 500 years old, more or less, and each individual’s progression varied. Archon ranks were determined by their weakest of 5 military division skills, those being Commando, Mech, Aerial, Naval, and Aquatics. Paul’s least favorite was aquatics, because swimming had always given him trouble, but with some help from an Elarioni friend named Ariel he’d managed to become a fairly good swimmer, though his best skillset of the 5 was clearly naval…and by naval, that meant space navy, not water navy, which was designated as ‘aquatics,’ though there was some skill overlap there.

Paul had progressed through all those Archon ranks at or better than the average 1 year/1 level speed, but he had a disadvantage because he and the other trailblazers were having to write the training manuals for them as they went, while those coming up in later generations of Archons had their example and workout notes to learn from…but they still never caught up to the trailblazers, and the trailblazers were keen to make sure they never did, adding yet another small reason for them to continue hammering themselves in the infinite training that had become Archon culture.

The rest of Star Force was also obsessed with training, because it was the only way one would advance and obtain the point of ‘self-sufficiency’ where the body healed at least as much as it was damaged, meaning a person didn’t grow old. If they did and then obtained self-sufficiency at a decent level they’d actually de-age, as had occurred with the Star Force Director Davis, though a lot of credit for that went to Head Trainer Wilson, who valued the creator of Star Force enough to continually pester and drag him through workouts until he got to the self-sufficiency point, for the businessman had originally not been keen on doing workouts.

Now, after a couple millennia, Davis and learned and grown so much that he’d actually gone through Archon basic training and joined their ranks. That was something that had genuinely surprised Paul, for Davis hadn’t told them about it until he’d succeeded, but it made for a good example for others to follow. No matter how damaged your body was, there was a way to recover and regenerate what was lost so long as you were willing to put in the work necessary and had the guidance needed.

Star Force made a point of providing that guidance so even the most naïve of individuals had a starting point to work from if they chose. All children, which Star Force had come to call ‘younglings,’ were trained from birth in how to obtain self-sufficiency and most did, but one had to keep training to maintain it or it would gradually be lost…and therein some people lost their way, but Star Force gave them every opportunity make a comeback and a large chunk of the empire’s population wasn’t growing old as a result.

But that challenge, while impressive in its own right, was just entry level for the Archons. Self-sufficiency was so basic for them they didn’t even think about it, and their healing rates were so high by the time they reached mage that they could stop training altogether and not lose their self-sufficiency for years…but that would never happen, for training was ingrained into them by this point. The only question was how much, how hard, and how fast…with the trailblazers typically outworking everyone else by at least a small margin.

Once an Archon got through the 499 mage levels required to master all the psionics, they became a Titan, gaining the oh so powerful Jumat psionic, then another 499 levels later they became a ViLord and received the other 6 tier 3 psionics…which were the big ones as far as the V’kit’no’sat knew. Also they gained a little outward marker whenever they obtained a tier 3, including Sav, where their irises changed color to a grey with sparkling specs. It had been programed to be able to identify the more advanced Zen’zat at a glance, but within Star Force it denoted the difference between an Archon and Zen’zat, for everyone mage level and above had those eyes…including the psionics that went with them, and all of them by ViLord level, which no Zen’zat in V’kit’no’sat history had ever obtained, other than the Zak’de’ron Zen’zat, whom records of were sparse and incomplete.

But the Zak’de’ron had put even more powerful psionics deep into the Zen’zat code, these buried behind a much different test to unlock, one that occurred within the dream state. Star Force had accessed these, but did not know for certain how many of them there were. To date they’d uncovered 6, one of which was biological gravity drives similar to what allowed starships to fly between stars. That meant Paul could actually fly, but this current training challenge required him to swim using his muscles and he wasn’t about to cheat, for it was designed to make him stronger and he’d only be punishing himself if he did.

When an Archon got past ViLord’s 499 levels they became a Frieza, which was when all the tier 4 psionics that had been discovered were given to them. Most Zen’zat had between 7 and 12 psionics, depending on what they had unlocked through ascensions beyond the basic 7, but currently a newly minted Frieza had 67 and the psionic tissue that came with them all. Paul’s body was packed with it, almost to the point of not being able to handle anymore, but the Zak’de’ron had done their programming well and besides a rare few unintended consequences regarding the order in which the psionics were attained, everything fit perfectly within his body, though he was a bit heavier because of it.

That didn’t visibly slow him down as he swam at decent speed for a Goku, which was lightning fast compared to the lesser Archons. After one passed through the 499 Frieza levels one became a Trunks, then a Piccolo, and not too long ago the trailblazers had created the Goku rank as they began to work their way out of the Piccolo levels, creating harder and harder training requirements to stay ahead of their current skills. About a third of the trailblazers had reached Goku 1, with Paul currently at Goku 18 while Rio was all the way up to Goku 117. Morgan was at Goku 29 and it annoyed Paul that she’d pulled 11 levels ahead of him, but it was what it was. This war wasn’t kind to their training schedule, and fighting the damn Dinos always came first.

But when they weren’t, and as of right now the fleet was finishing recovering their debris and what bits of V’kit’no’sat ships they wanted, Paul and the others were training hard to make up the time lost and push themselves to new heights, both to compete against the others and to increase their power level so they could become more lethal on the battlefield…for while Paul had far more psionics than any Zen’zat in recorded history, he wasn’t stronger than them all. Some had lived hundreds of thousands of years and were faster, stronger, and more experienced than him. With his psionics he could fight them and maybe win, but the longevity that self-sufficiency allowed was a major advantage for very old civilizations…and unfortunately Star Force was relatively new at not even 3 millennia old yet.

The V’kit’no’sat empire was millions of years old, and when Paul ever came across one of the really powerful Zen’zat he needed to be ready…as well as if he had to tackle one of their dinosaur races, many of which he couldn’t even scratch despite his superhuman state.

And at the end of the day, it didn’t matter how physically powerful you were if there was a warship overhead bombarding a planet, which was why naval skill was more important than everything else in this war…but Paul needed to be as powerful as he could in all 5 divisions, because when the aquatic combat came he couldn’t afford to get caught off guard. And Humans were already at a huge disadvantage to the races that actually lived in the water. Fortunately Star Force had a few of those, but aquatic combat against the V’kit’no’sat was where the enemy held the greatest advantage.

It didn’t happen often, but Star Force had a lot of catching up to do and Paul was surrounded by reminders of how inferior he was. The galaxy was so vast and diverse there was no way to dominate it all, so Paul simply focused on improving his skills and facing the challenges that presented themselves…as well as reminding himself that there was no such thing as ‘too much power.’

So Paul continued to swim and swim underwater, drawing on his tier 3 psionic called Lovo’nek that allowed him to breathe oxygen through his skin. There wasn’t that much in the water, so he had to hold back his effort enough to match, but at least he didn’t have to worry about drowning anymore. He could even let his lungs be flooded with water and he wouldn’t die…but that was not pleasant and not what they were designed for, but it was nice to have a backup just in case he got knocked unconscious.

Paul swam through glowing rings, around and through currents, and through moving obstacles all the while fighting against 3x standard gravity that kept trying to pull him to the bottom of the pool given his muscular build that was less than buoyant. He could have cheated and used his Yen’mer to counter it, but that would be pointless so he strained to swim upwards slightly at all times and pull through the thicker water that the gravity compression created.

After 36 minutes he pulled himself out after making several laps, sucking in a breath of air and replenishing the slight lack he’d been tolerating over the last stretch as he ‘sprinted.’ His arms were burning a bit, as they normally did after hard swimming, which was a good sign. Too much burn and he’d damage himself, leaving Paul stiff and sore later, but a little meant he was pushing his skills and his body would adapt and grow stronger for it.

And on top of that, he’d made the course in his 4th best time, meaning the stagnation from his recent lull in training had been burned off and he was back in the groove…swimming wise, anyway.

Paul crawled up out of the pool and stood up, using his telekinesis to wring the water out of his hair and push it off his naked body. Most Archons wore minimal suits when swimming, but Paul had picked up the habit of going in nude because it left him at a slight disadvantage and he wanted his swimming skill to be firmly entrenched…not dependent on clothing and slightly diminished if he ever was forced into the water without them.

The swimming races typically didn’t wear clothing either, so he’d picked up the habit too. When he walked past a few other Archons in the swimming section of the Archon sanctum onboard the Excalibur they didn’t stare. The girl Archons held their gaze a couple seconds longer than the guys, for they didn’t often see him naked, but nudity amongst the Archons was a non-issue. Within Star Force as a whole it wasn’t taboo either, though the more out of shape one got the more they clung to their clothes.

Archons were fitter than fit and not obsessed with sex, so walking around naked was normal when there was a reason to do so.

Paul headed to a nearby equipment room and got dressed in a pair of shorts and a tight T-shirt along with running shoes and headed for a two hour long run before calling his training for the morning over and heading up to the bridge after a shower. Later he’d get something to eat and a quick nap before starting his afternoon workout session in the mech simulator, but for now he wanted to check on the status of the fleet.

“How we doing?” he asked when he got to the bridge.

“We’re about 20 minutes out unless you want to try harvesting a few more.”

Paul frowned. “I’d like to and we haven’t seen even a peek into this system, but I have bad feeling that something is up. Once the sensors are in place go ahead and get the fleet moving.”

“Where to?”

“Toad then Veercom,” he said, referencing nearby system names. “After that the others can break off and return to previous assignments, but I want to keep us all together save for Morgan until then.”

“Backside watch?”

Paul nodded, with the Admiral’s recommendation being spot on. There was no way to make sure that there weren’t V’kit’no’sat spies still in the system, whether they be a stealth ship or probe hanging far off. If the entire fleet left through a jump they’d have to follow before seeing where they went and give the Star Force fleet a chance to find them coming out of a jump. But also allowing the breakoff parts of the combined fleet to go first would mean their ultimate destination would be hidden from spies, whereas if they left from here they’d know which jumplines they left on and could coordinate with other V’kit’no’sat ships to track them down or maybe lay a trap.

Paul wasn’t so sloppy to allow that, so they were all going out the same way and he was going to slam the door shut before they split up. Morgan, however, had the remains of her fleet going elsewhere and from a look at the bridge hologram he could see that she was already repositioning some of them towards a different exiting jumpline.

“Carry on and jump at will,” Paul said, leaving the fleet in Baenen’s capable hands as he often did outside of combat, for an Archon’s time was best spent on training in all 5 disciplines while naval officers only focused on one division, making them specialists, and even handling mundane ship duties fell into that category.

So Paul left him to it as he headed over to the command nexus and shot Morgan a quick holocom before she left, then he headed to one of the ship’s cafeterias and ate an Archon-level amount of food, for no matter how strong or fast he got, he never required less of it and greater expenditures of energy required more fuel. He just had to make sure he didn’t eat too much at once and have that affect his next workout, which was why he was going to hit the mech simulator after a nap, for that didn’t require physical movement when he was plugged into the neural interface.

That allowed Paul to load up now, taking two trays full of carb and sugar-heavy foods along with several bottles of supplement-laced drinks, then he sat down at a table along with other members of the crew with much smaller food loads on their trays…but that again was normal, for they were used to the peculiarities of the elite Archons, including their habit of responding to questions telepathically so they didn’t take time away from shoving food in their mouths and delay themselves from getting back to their insane training schedules.

4

October 24, 4812

Veercom System (Devastation Zone)

Itat

Half of Paul’s fleet had already entered the system before he sent off the message ping, having it emitted in a spherical burst from the Excalibur so not to give away the location of the Star Force outpost in the system. Almost 2 hours later he got a return message that was little more than a blip of data that translated into an ‘all clear’ go ahead for rendezvous.

Paul immediately transferred off his flagship and onto a Ma’kri, with it engaging its stealth field and taking him out to one of six gas giants in the system. There were a handful of uninhabited moons there, two of which used to hold Star Force colonies back when this was part of the Alliance Defense Zone, though the specificity of that name was quickly lost after the lizards had been pushed back and the refuge that Star Force had created for allies fleeing that enemy empire transformed into a center of activity and commerce, becoming a term for the approximate region that held the most heavily industrialized and inhabited systems within Star Force.

Now it was scorched, barren territory thanks to the V’kit’no’sat, and those non-Star Force races that had inhabited a scattering of systems inside the ADZ hadn’t been spared. Anyone with even a hint of connection to Star Force had been targeted, with Paul and others buying them critical time to evacuate to the Rim Region and beyond along with Star Force…but not all of them had made it out, with the V’kit’no’sat leaving a long trail of corpses across the ADZ that had long since turned to dust.

But not all the denizens were gone. One longtime ally of Star Force that had never petitioned to join the empire had been targeted as well, but they had a way to hide from the V’kit’no’sat that Star Force did not. They hadn’t originally been in this system, but had quietly moved in after the two moon colonies were destroyed as part of Project Evanescence.

It was a dangerous Star Force program that Steve-004 had put together when the Hycre had come and begged to help fight the V’kit’no’sat. They didn’t want to join Star Force and relocated most of their population out of the ADZ along with everyone else, but they did want to contribute a large number of volunteers to join Star Force for this specific purpose. They did not want to abandon their homeland, which was now the Devastation Zone, and wanted to stay here in at least some form and help with reconnaissance and anything else they could that did not involve direct combat.

So while Star Force had established outposts throughout the Devastation Zone, most of which had been built before the V’kit’no’sat even invaded, the Evanescence Hycre were given Star Force technology and training and operated under a strict agreement that they wouldn’t share the empire’s secrets with their own civilization, for while the Hycre were one of the closest allies that Star Force had and they’d shared a lot of technology with them previously, it was nothing compared to the inheritance Star Force had taken from the V’kit’no’sat and they weren’t going to share that treasure trove with anyone. If a race wanted to be advanced to their level then they had the option of joining Star Force under Star Force’s terms, but since the Hycre weren’t comfortable with that there had to be some firm barriers between the two that both civilizations maintained with mutual respect.

But to operate in the Devastation Zone was something so dangerous that you couldn’t go in with an inferior tech level, so Project Evanescence had been born and quietly dropped behind enemy lines into this system and many others…but not on the moons. The Hycre were literally floating gas bags that couldn’t inhabit the same room as Humans, for they required sulfur dioxide gas to breath and temperatures and pressures that no Human, nor most of the races in Star Force, could survive.

Temperatures and pressures that were common within gas giants, where the Hycre had always made their home and intermixed with Star Force territory, for the two did not need to compete over the same worlds. Even Epsilon Eridani, the second largest and heavily industrialized system in Star Force prior to the fall, had been shared with the Hycre who inhabited a gas giant there. It was a sign of great trust and respect, and the friendship that had began when Star Force was infantile and in jeopardy of dying to a paltry invasion by the lizards had not been forgotten over the centuries that followed. The Hycre had saved Star Force then, and when the V’kit’no’sat invaded the trailblazers made certain to get the Hycre out. A debt repaid, now that Star Force had outgrown the Hycre by leaps and bounds.

The Hycre didn’t like that, for they wanted to help contribute in at least some small way, and Project Evanescence had them establishing an outpost in two of the gas giants here that weren’t very hospitable to them…similar to snowbound terrain for Humans that required them to live indoors where normally the Hycre could free float through the gas giants’ multiple levels of dense atmosphere like aerial fish. But while it wasn’t ideal, it was habitable in both planets and they established very deep and shielded outposts down near the liquid cores of the otherwise gas planets.

The V’kit’no’sat had destroyed such colonies elsewhere in the ADZ, meaning the Hycre weren’t safe here, but those purging measures had been difficult for the V’kit’no’sat to undertake. Persistent as they were, they’d gone and deleted them all, but finding new inhabitants was not something that was going to happen by accident. Only intentional deep scans of the planets would pick up the new residents, so as long as the Hycre played turtle they wouldn’t get noticed, and Paul was happy to see they were still safe here after the security breach at Tauntaun.

The Ma’kri came into a low polar orbit around the planet but didn’t stay there. It made a lazy slingshot trajectory around it and headed out to do a patrol sweep of all the gas giants, scanning heavily for any signs of V’kit’no’sat presence as a distraction as Paul walked across an open hangar bay facing down to the planet, exposing the interior to view as the rest of the ship appeared like a solid black dot against the starry backdrop of space.

Halfway across the bay, when he got past all the parked dropships and other assorted craft, the fully armored Archon took off running for a few steps then leaned forward, dropping to his belly a meter off the deck and staying there as he used his Yen’mer to levitate in the artificial gravity and increase speed, shooting him out of the hangar and into space with the Ma’kri fully disappearing behind him and the black blob moving off further around orbit as Paul fell…increasing his speed again as he pulled on the gravity of the planet and enhanced it, sucking himself down lower and lower as he also counteracted the orbital momentum, slowing his sideways speed so that when he did finally hit the wisps of the upper atmosphere of the green gas giant his shields didn’t ignite with a wash of friction flame.

Instead the sensor resistant blue/orange armor sank like a missile down through progressively thicker and thicker layers until Paul was forced to slow down. When he reached a certain altitude he began transmitting a homing beacon in a cone, forcing the signal down and not up. A little less than an hour later he sensed the minds in the Hycre ship before his armor’s sensors picked them up, for the soupy atmosphere was so thick it was reducing his limited sensor range down to only a few hundred meters.

But this wasn’t the first time he’d visited a gas giant in his armor, and while he had no navigational references down here he could sense which way the gravity was coming from, hence finding his way back to space again was always easy. To find the Hycre base, however, he had to rely on them to come to him.

When they got close Paul stopped transmitting his beacon and reached into their minds directly, a form of communication that even a Zen’zat couldn’t pick up if they’d been a kilometer off. He could have used his armor’s comm system, but when one was in ultra deep cover it was best to err on the side of caution, so he arranged for an open airlock that he flew himself inside, then it sealed and he waited as the interior changed its gaseous composition as well as heated up, with Paul safe inside his armor with adequate oxygen thanks to the recycling technology in the pack he wore that stripped the carbon off the carbon dioxide he was exhaling and gave him an unlimited amount of oxygen for missions like this that had him overextended into hostile environments.

Once the interior airlock opened Paul flew through the thick interior gases past some of the crew that free floated with a series of tentacles that they used for arms, but they primarily moved around via internal gas bladders and orifices that operated like small jet engines. They had no eyes, mouth, ears, or any other external features save for a single, long, plume-like fin on the top of their spherical bodies that had prompted Star Force to nickname them the ‘Mohawks,’ and that designator had persisted to this day, though they rarely called them that in person.

Paul communicated with them telepathically, and if he had wanted he could have even taken over control of their bodies and made them do whatever he wanted. That was the power that Ikrid gave the V’kit’no’sat over the other races in the galaxy, and aside from Humans, who were descendants of Zen’zat that shared their immunity to Ikrid influence, all the races of Star Force had to wear psionic resistant armor when fighting the enemy, else they’d automatically lose, being forced to turn their own weapons against each other.

Paul had that power too, but there was no need to use it on the Hycre and they’d come to trust the Archons despite being totally helpless against them. They were longtime allies and those Hycre here had specifically asked to join Star Force for this reason, so there was no distrust or fear when Paul arrived…rather the opposite. The presence of an Archon, let alone a trailblazer, was a blessing, for they could fight the V’kit’no’sat head-on where everyone else could not…and in the case of Zen’zat, the Archons were actually superior for their long list of psionics that the enemy infantry had not individually earned.

That was another reason why they hated Star Force so much, because they were ‘cheating’ with regards to the psionics, but there was no way to stop them aside from killing them, and so far they hadn’t managed to get them all and hadn’t yet been able to touch a trailblazer. All 100, or 101 if you counted Kara, were still alive and a continual menace to them, but down here in the gas giant Zen’zat were not an issue. They were useless in the thick gaseous atmosphere with no surface to move around on. Just a lake of liquefied gas at the lower altitudes and a bit of solidified core due to the extreme pressures here.

Paul and even the Hycre didn’t go that deep except in ships, which was where their hardest to get to base was…but if a Tar’vem’jic was fired from orbit it could still hit them that deep, or at least stir up the material so much to do subsequent damage, thus this Evanescence outpost had to remain secret, for ‘hard to get to’ didn’t matter to the V’kit’no’sat. Any Star Force presence in the Devastation Zone they took as a personal affront and would not let it pass even if it took them years to eradicate.

As Paul moved through the ship he had brief conversations with many of the crew, most of whom thanked him for coming, until he came to a special section that had a Human atmosphere inside. He passed through the energy field separating the two then closed the heavy doors over it before risking retracting his helmet and breathing the first non-recycled air in 4 hours.

He blew out a heavy breath, keeping the rest of his armor on a moment longer as he made sure everything was secure in the cubical chamber that had a second rectangular chamber on the end that held Human restroom/shower/sleeping facilities, for all the Evanescence ships were designed with at least one small pocket so they could receive visitors or pick up survivors immediately. If they needed more room they could reconfigure other sections, but that would take time and some scenarios had little to spare.

You didn’t want someone dying inside an Star Force ship because it had the wrong atmosphere and you didn’t have enough time to switch it out, so prudence had this little bit of refuge built for the Archons and others, with one of the side walls being totally transparent and allowing him to look out into the hot sulfur dioxide where many Hycre floated, waiting to talk to him.

WELCOME ARCHON, the translation programing in the room said, for the language the Hycre used was wholly incompatible with Human vocal chords, and vice versa. Paul had gotten good enough with mental translations over the centuries that he didn’t need the computer intervention, but it was more accurate and had been designed with terminology that he didn’t know the Hycre equivalents of. Usually he’d just find the meaning in their minds, viewing snippets of memory if necessary, but that got tedious and using the computer to translate was just more efficient.

“Hello, Tar’vo. We have a problem.”

WHAT IS IT?

“Our base on Tauntaun was discovered. We do not know how yet, and we’ve reviewed everything on our end. We can’t find a slipup.”

AND YOU FEAR WE MAY BE IN JEOPARDY?

“It’s impossible to say without knowing how the breach occurred. How are you set for supplies?”

WE ARE NEARLY SELF-SUFFICIENT NOW. ALL WE LACK ARE ENHANCEMENTS. OUR EXISTENCE IS NOT THREATED BY LOGISTICS.

“And what of your personal self-sufficiency?”

IT IS DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN IN THESE CONDITIONS. WE CANNOT TRAIN OUTSIDE FOR SUFFICIENT PERIODS OF TIME AND INTERIOR WORKOUTS ARE PROBLEMATIC. WE ARE BUILDING ADDITIONAL FACILITIES. CURRENTLY WE ARE MANAGING ADEQUATE MAINTENANCE. THAT WILL ONLY INCREASE WHEN MORE INFRASTRUCTURE COMES ONLINE.

“Good,” Paul said with a nod, glancing at the slightly different body sizes and colorations of the Hycre. They used to all look alike to him, but now he could tell a few differences even without his telepathy giving him additional insights, but judging their fitness level at a glance was a skill he still hadn’t mastered. Humans were easy to ballpark, but other races had their own physical cues, some of which were damn hard to read, Hycre included. “Report.”

THREE PATROLS NOTED. IDENTICAL SEARCH PATTERN OF THE MOONS. WE BELIEVE THEY ARE DOING PERIODIC SWEEPS EXPECTING STAR FORCE TO RETURN. WE FIND THAT ODD CONSIDERING THEY ARE STILL ATTACKING AND EXPANDING THE BORDER. IT SUGGESTS A LEVEL OF FEAR THAT DOES NOT BEFIT THEM.

“I agree. If we established a full blown colony it’d be easy to spot and eliminate before it got too large to handle. They are being overly persistent. What were the period lengths?”

3 MONTHS 6 DAYS AND 8 MONTHS 2 DAYS.

“Not a fixed circuit then. How long ago was the last?

1 MONTH 18 DAYS.

“What type of ship?”

SINGLE KAEPER CLASS VESSEL ON EACH OCCASION.

“Any stellar activity?”

OUR SENSING CAPABILITIES ARE LIMITED. WE HAVE NOT RECORDED ANY OBVIOUS MOVEMENT UNTIL YOUR FLEET’S ARRIVAL. WE DID NOT DETECT THE KAEPER UNTIL THEY REACHED PLANETARY ORBIT AND BEGAN SCANNING. THEY OPERATED WITH STEALTH.

“Full cloak?”

YES AND NO. TWO OCCASIONS SAW SHIPS WITH SENSOR DAMPENING TECHNOLOGY. THE MIDDLE OF THE THREE OCCASIONS SAW A SHIP WITH A CLOAKING FIELD. IT HAD TO LOWER TO THOROUGLY SCAN.

“They probably don’t want us to know they’re looking unless they find something.”

COULD SUCH A VESSEL HAVE EXPOSED TAUNTAUN?

“No. Our own stealth tech would require an active pulse from them to locate and no one got sloppy on approaches. I don’t have an answer yet.”

THANK YOU FOR THE WARNING.

“My fleet is passing through, so our backside jumppoint is blocked from pursuit. I have to be back onboard the Ma’kri before the last ship comes through just in case they are being bold enough to follow,” Paul said, using the mental interface in his helmetless armor to query the Hycre’s computer and execute a data dump. “Uploading updates.”

RECEIVED, the Hycre confirmed, with Paul noticing twitches in those that saw the recent battle data pop up as they talked amongst themselves for a moment. DO YOU WISH TO REPLENISH DRONES?

“Yes. How many do you have available?”

36 CRUISERS 18 CORVETTES.

“I’ll take them all.”

HOW DO YOU WISH TO EXECUTE THE TRANSFER?

Paul thought about that for a moment. There was no safe way to do it if someone was watching and he was hesitant about using their traditional methods after Tauntaun, but there was no point around the fact that his fleet would be increasing its ship count unless he brought a jumpship down into the gas giant and loaded up there, but that maneuver would be easy to see and give away the location of the base…unless it was cloaked, but even then one of the jumpships in stellar orbit would go missing for hours.

Paul wanted to be safe, but he wasn’t going to get paranoid. That would be a victory for the V’kit’no’sat without them even having to fire a single shot, and Paul wanted as many replacements for his lost drones as he could get, even if this group would only scratch at the total he’d lost, which was upwards of half a million of the smaller ships. But out in the Devastation Zone getting replacements was not easy and he needed his fleet as strong as possible for whatever the V’kit’no’sat’s next move was…which he felt would be sooner rather than later.

“Same procedure. I’ll transfer the coordinates personally.”

DO YOU WISH A FULL STATUS REPORT NOW OR A DATAFILE TO TAKE WITH YOU?

“Now. I won’t be able to ask questions later and I’ve got a few hours. Take me through what you’ve accomplished and I’ll see if I can tweak it a little.”

5

When Paul flew back up to orbit he waited, visible as a tiny blip on sensors for anyone looking close enough, as a blob of signal nothingness moved to intercept him. Most ships’ sensors couldn’t see it, and only the more advanced ones with special programming could use the backlight from the green gas giant to spot the pseudo-black shape that seemed to pull the surrounding light in around it. If not for the minds onboard Paul would only have noticed the stars going out as it approached, then a rectangle of light lit up as one of the hangar doors opened as it quickly approached.

Paul flew backwards, picking up speed to match as he angled in enough to hit a capture field just outside. Like a giant mitt it caught the trailblazer and accelerated him up to speed gently as the Ma’kri continued in its orbit, knowing that if any V’kit’no’sat ships or probes were here they wouldn’t see it deviate from its previous course. Paul’s tiny armored silhouette would have been easier to spot, but he had minimal sensor dampening capabilities that would hide him from anything but a full intensity scan. Hopefully that meant his little trip down hadn’t been noticed, but he wasn’t exactly invisible.

When the capture field matched his speed to the ship it pulled him inside and the hangar disappeared again as the Ma’kri continued its orbit that it wouldn’t break for another 18 minutes, then it would head back to one of the moons, give it another full scan, then travel to stellar orbit where the bulk of the fleet was. Parts of it were already reconfiguring into smaller fleet groups that were heading off in multiple directions, but most of those hadn’t fully assembled yet at their outgoing jumppoints.

The bulk of the fleet was still Paul’s and would be maintaining its grouping as they left, but the smaller reinforcements were going back where they came and the sooner the better. Having everyone grouped together was advantageous in some circumstances, but it left other areas open to attacks in the absence of backup and the Devastation Zone was tricky enough to get around as it was. Star Force couldn’t keep a full comm relay network up and running, so they had to pick and choose systems and try to hide the relays from the V’kit’no’sat. This system had none, as did many others, so if there was a call for help elsewhere coming in right now Paul wouldn’t know about it, so he needed to get the smaller fleet groups back out there immediately to cover for that possibility.

When the Ma’kri dropped its sensor field it was back in stellar orbit and Paul took a dropship across the gap to his command ship, sending the order before he got there for all 18 of his specialized Warship-class jumpships to engage their stealth fields, with them dropping off the battlemap as if they didn’t exist.

Normally the jumpships did not carry the stealth fields, and these had to cannibalize parts of their interior structure to accommodate it, meaning they could carry less drones than the other vessels, but these were necessary to visit the Hycre worlds in private, so as Paul got back onboard the Excalibur and oversaw the continuing fleet reconfiguration the specially modified jumpships, each more than 20 miles long and looking like slightly modified cylinders, traveled out to the gas giant and slowly settled down into the upper atmosphere until their sensor defying blobs disappeared beneath it.

They dropped low enough for the gasses to provide them cover then lowered the underside of the field, allowing the waiting Hycre below to see them, who then sent the smaller rectangular drones up from the depths and into the open docking slots after they released the packets of salvage they’d collected. Those sunk down through the planet’s layers until Hycre ships intercepted and caught them, preventing them from going so low they’d lose them in the liquid layer where they were currently mining a partially submerged moon that had been sucked down into the planet long ago.

It was actually sticking out above the liquid layer on one side of the planet, making the center of gravity slightly askew, but from the exterior the planet looked like a perfect sphere as the gasses surrounded everything at the center. That broken and swallowed up moon as the reason Star Force had put the Hycre here. If it wasn’t then the planet wouldn’t be able to produce new drones, for getting the necessary raw materials would require combing the liquid and solid layers of the planet and mining smaller bits of debris. The Hycre had done so long ago in their history, finding the bits and pieces necessary to build their first habitats and then starships that had allowed them to visit the inhospitable rocky worlds where they found the treasure troves of raw materials that their gas giants lacked.

The swallowed up moon gave them a fair amount to work with, but the salvage was far richer and there was no need to haul it halfway across the Devastation Zone in the bellies of the mostly empty warships to find a place to make use of it. The jumpships themselves were capable of making repairs and deconstructing a little of it, but not the mass amounts that Paul had ordered picked up. He gave the Hycre a lot of the salvage, at least as far as their current infrastructure was concerned, with only one of the Warship-class jumpships keeping its bays open for the 54 new drones to fly up into and dock.

All the jumpships reactivated their full stealth fields and eased up back into orbit, knowing that someone taking a close look would see the little null spots while they were above the green orb, but once they got away from it and back into deep space there was nothing but a few pinpricks of starlight to give them away as they returned to the fleet then popped back up on the battlemap before the last of the fleet arrived insystem.

If any V’kit’no’sat ship was following them it’d come later, with Paul’s interaction with the Hycre now over. Hopefully that would keep them secret and safe, but there was no way of knowing for sure if there was a hidden probe somewhere here. They’d purposefully neglected putting a hidden comm relay in the system to avoid scrutiny and so far the Hycre had gone unnoticed despite these occasional visits, but the discovery Tauntaun still bugged Paul to no end.

It took two more jumps before Paul’s now smaller fleet came across a system with a comm relay, which was the first chance for him to get a glimpse of what was going on elsewhere in the Devastation Zone. The lag of relays sending pulses between systems and then passing them on was always frustrating, but it provided so much information that it was an invaluable tool…which was why the V’kit’no’sat made a point of hunting down and destroying the relays whenever and wherever they could.

And another one had gone offline on the other side of Earth, far away from Paul’s current location but the approaching ship had been detected and the information on it had been transmitted before the relay went down, then trickled across the grid to every other relay that then stored the information into a growing packet that ships would eventually pick up. Each packet had a timestamp on the data so ships could get records going as far back as necessary without having to query the relays to dump everything they contained each and every time.

The Excalibur and every other ship in the fleet got updates, which the trailblazer immediately reviewed at lightning speed as his mind was plugged into the command nexus and browsing through all the minutia looking for…

Paul stopped his browsing when he came across the report from some of the damaged jumpships he’d detached to get repairs. They’d picked up survivors from one of the evacuation ships that Paul thought he’d gotten away safely, but apparently the V’kit’no’sat had a ship outside the system that was faster and had run them to ground. He read the report from Tyrenk-1482995, the only surviving Archon from the ship, concerning the deaths of all but two others when a Kat’vo vessel had been taken out within the atmosphere of a jungle world via a very clever ramming maneuver.

The surviving crew members of both ships had fought it out on the surface with the Archon narrowly prevailing while losing almost all of those crew that he was trying to protect. Paul’s gut clenched a bit, knowing what that sort of situation would feel like, and noted the occurrence of a spontaneous psionic development in another surviving Human…but that wasn’t what had got his primary attention.

In the Archon’s report the last of the Kat’vo had died trying to destroy components onboard their crashed ship. That should not have happened, because the V’kit’no’sat knew that Star Force already had copies of their standard technology. Whatever was onboard that Kaeper-class vessel had to be something new, but the remains of that vessel were in such a state of disarray the recovery team that had picked up the Archon and survivors didn’t know what it was, though they’d had taken onboard all the relevant pieces.

There was no further word about it, but Paul knew where they were going and he needed to know what that ship contained, for it had been a scout vessel trailing Morgan’s fleet that she hadn’t noticed and could be involved in how Tauntaun was discovered. Paul had no hard proof of that, but his gut told him this was important so he diverted his fleet to the temporary location of the Ghostblade mobile shipyard at maximum jump speed.

Hopefully the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t picked up on this loss yet, but if and when they came across the ship wreckage and investigated they’d know…but until they did Paul had a window of opportunity he intended to stretch out as far as possible.

To that end he split off a chunk of his fleet to go to the Chawik System and hold stellar orbit, discouraging the V’kit’no’sat from taking a look at the wreckage…or perhaps even finding it…for as long as possible. If Tyrenk hadn’t made that desperate and brilliant ramming maneuver to disable the Kaeper Star Force would not have had this opportunity, as the V’kit’no’sat knew they’d outmatched the evacuation ship and it should have made for an easy kill. Their hatred of Star Force probably had caused them to chase when they should have kept to the shadows, and if this slip-up of theirs did give Star Force an insight into some new technology of theirs Paul needed to take advantage of it quickly.

When he finally arrived in the Harver System he was glad to see that the Ghostblade fleet hadn’t left yet, still hidden amongst a far-out asteroid belt as they worked to repair some of the ships he’d sent. The others had already left, but after a quick comm to Ghostblade he found out that the salvage was still here and their techs were already working on it…and were thoroughly stumped.

Paul hopped on a dropship and flew over to the massive, spindly construct that was 349 miles wide. Most of the interior space was empty, looking like a spider with legs everywhere that cradled ships they were working on, but it still dwarfed everything in Paul’s fleet and would outmass them by far when it curled up into travel mode when the Ghostblade fleet left the system. For now they were still harvesting resources from the asteroid belt as the nomad-like Clan moved around the Devastation Zone and areas beyond it and Star Force territory, hiding out and performing odd missions that allowed them to stay off the V’kit’no’sat’s radar for the most part, though they did have a long list of enemy ship kills to their credit, though all of them were from pirate-like ambush attacks rather than straight up fleet versus fleet combat.

Paul’s tiny dropship was lost in the size of the shipyard as it landed in one of the ‘thin’ spider legs that was itself miles wide, dropping the trailblazer off with several Ghostblade Archons waiting to meet him.

ViLord Todi-1001934 was the ranking Archon here and he had a couple of Titans with him, all three of which were in uniform with only the colored stripe down the outside of their arms and legs denoting their rank on the otherwise pure white Archon garb. Paul was dressed the same, not wearing any armor, except his rank was high enough that it required two stripes, one orange and one blue, denoting his Goku-level that far surpassed the three Archons before him.

“Some type of sensor,” Todi said before Paul had a chance to speak, “but we don’t have a clue how it works yet. The Viks did a good job smashing it, but we’re also guessing it works on some level of physics we’re not familiar with.”

Paul raised a blue eyebrow. “Sensor? You’re sure?”

“Fairly,” Todi said as the four Archons began walking together across the hangar. “We’ve identified an emitter and receiver, but how they function is speculative. They have some type of material that is not atomic and above our tech level. We’re doing what we can, but I think you’re going to have to take this to the top tier techs. There’s nothing like this even mentioned in the pyramid database. We’ve even checked the non-V’kit’no’sat entries.”

“Damn it,” Paul whisper swore. “They found Tauntaun, and maybe with this. We need to know what its range is or every facility we have could be at risk.”

“Can’t hide from what we can’t see, I know. Wish we had better results for you, but we haven’t had a lot of time to work on the…unfamiliar aspects.”

“What can you rule out?”

“Everything we already know. It doesn’t match up against any simulations, but without functioning components we’re extremely limited as far as testing goes. The Kat’vo did a good job in pulverizing it, but they did leave a few intact chunks that our techs are scratching their heads over.”

“Including your master tech?”

“She’s been on it day and night, but recommends we get this to Vreemont or even Tennisonne ASAP.”

“Tennisonne is too far away. We’ve got major V’kit’no’sat fleet movement and I need an answer yesterday,” he said as the four of them walked into a lift. Todi input the destination coordinates and they started traveling at great speed throughout the tunnels in the shipyard to get where they needed to go.

“Talk to Raena then. All I know is the key components are crystal based and it’s not atomic crystal.”

“Sub-atomic lattice?”

“There’s something in it that we can’t identify, but there are a large amount of grid-locked lotos. Beyond that don’t ask me.”

“Lotos,” Paul said, letting his mind drift in thought as the box-like lift car traveled through the ‘spider leg’ and towards the main body of the shipyard.

Lotos were a tier 2 particle slightly larger than an electron that bonded with select solari. In their individual state they would lightly pool around each other, making them basically useless particles. Their only known use was in combination with solari to form basic building block compounds. He didn’t even know how to grid lock lotos, but while he had acquired a fairly good understanding of physics he’d never tested out as a tech, only worked with Star Force’s best to develop several key pieces of equipment.

He wished Tennisonne was close, for he was the best there was at figuring out new things, but Vreemont was far closer…except he didn’t know exactly where. Ghostblade fleets were split up and roaming constantly, with very few knowing where they actually were.

“What’s the fastest way to get this to Vreemont?”

“Better question is how to get Vreemont here. There’s a lot of debris that we have the tools to analyze that a courier ship wouldn’t…if you’re interested in maximizing time.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No. We’ll have to call him in.”

“Do you know where he was last?”

“We can probably narrow it down. Thinking of a rendezvous?”

“Yes. Start prepping to move.”

“The shipyard? We’ve got too many berths filled to move.”

“Leave behind what you can’t carry. This takes precedence.”

“You think it’s that important?”

“I do.”

Todi exchanged glances and a telepathic conversion with one of the Titans, then the lift stopped early and the junior Archon got off, leaving the three remaining to continue on towards where the debris was being analyzed.

“It’ll be a few hours at minimum unless you want us to get sloppy?”

“Don’t waste anything, but we need to find out what they can do before we lose another base.”

“Tauntaun?”

“Hopefully…or they’ve got two new pieces of tech in the field.”

Todi grimaced. “I see your point.”

“We can confirm one point,” the other Titan with them added.

“And that is?” Paul asked her.

“How the functioning…call it a sensor package…works regarding range. We have the data from the intercept.”

“Conclusions?”

“A beam we can’t see, with maybe a slightly greater range than our own. I don’t think it’s too much farther, or the scout ship would have kept a greater distance while tracking Morgan’s fleet.”

“A beam we can’t see?”

“That’s me guessing, but if the physics are something new I think that would be the worst case scenario.”

“Full sensor beams and we couldn’t track them. Yeah, that’d be bad, but the Kaeper was using conventional sensors too.”

“Overlap to conceal during engagement?”

“Possible,” Todi agreed, “but speculation until we can get some solid data.”

“Or a beam that can pass through stealth fields so they can stay hidden while tracking,” Paul added. “There are many unpleasant possibilities if they’re working with a new level of physics.”

“So much for their lazy tech progression.”

“They respond to threats,” Paul reminded the ViLord. “The harder they’re pushed the more they adapt and grow. This may be a sign that we’re fighting them a little too evenly for their egos to take.”

“So the more we win the more dangerous they get?”

“Pretty much,” Paul agreed. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Very. We could be at risk from this too?”

“If they can follow unseen…” Paul said, confirming the obvious problem with Ghostblade keeping hidden.

“Any chance this new tech is an enhanced stealth system?” the Titan asked.

“You said no a moment ago,” Paul reminded him.

“Then we have a way to find them.”

“Mine the jumppoints with active sensor buoys?”

“Even if they have cloaking devices they can’t handle the stellar radiation at braking speeds. Add our own sensor bursts and we can find these ships…assuming this one wasn’t a prototype.”

“I doubt we’re that lucky,” Todi added.

“It’s a thought,” Paul agreed, “but if they also have probes in place it won’t catch those. We need to know they can do. Until then we’re going to be vulnerable.”

“They could run us out of the Devastation Zone entirely?”

“You might be right, but they’ll have to know where to look and they felt like hitting Tauntaun first. Something else is going on beyond just a new toy.”

“Or they would have waited for a longer list of targets to hit simultaneously,” Todi added. “They’re testing us.”

“Or distracting. Either way they’ve got a lot of hammers heading this way.”

“What do you need from us?” the Titan asked. “Meaning Ghostblade.”

“Lay low until we figure this out. No more raids and keep movement to a minimum. If there’s already been damage done, we need to minimize it.”

“Wonderful,” Todi groaned. “Are we looking at another wave of border losses?”

Paul looked directly at him, grey sparkling eyes to grey sparkling eyes. “Depends how many ships they end up sending, but this new toy doesn’t help them assault worlds unless we’re way off on the speculation. They’ll have to hit us hard and I think they’re going to try soon, but we’re not on our heels anymore. They’ll have to up their efforts a lot to put us back there. Let’s hope we’re not that popular yet.”

“The ass kicking you just laid on them might change their perspective,” Todi cautioned.

“We’ll see,” Paul said as the lift doors finally opened. “Either way, we fight whatever comes and evacuate if needed. Same old same old.”

“Except they might be shutting down our ability to hit them in their territory,” the Titan said as the three walked out at a decent clip.

“Not if we can figure out what we’ve got…and we’re a lot better at playing catchup than they are.”

“Meaning that if they find out we’ve got it they’ll come for us? Is that why we’re moving?” Todi asked.

“No…just a side benefit,” Paul said, already having considered that possibility.

6

Paul and his fleet stuck around until the Ghostblade shipyard and assembled fleet was ready to leave, just in case they had been followed here. He didn’t want a follow up assault hitting them before they had a chance to figure out what this new tech the V’kit’no’sat had created was. The possibility of that was low, but easily avoided by delaying their departure.

When the Ghostblade fleet finally did jump out, Paul sent a third of his Warship-class jumpships with them after reshuffling the drone count a bit to give them a few extra. That left the remaining 2/3rds with Paul, most of which were well below 50% with the extra carry capacity partially filled with salvaged debris.

Still, Paul had a fleet that no roaming V’kit’no’sat battlegroup…let alone a scout…would tangle with, but he needed to get his ships refurbished and back into patrol rotation before the next big hit came. If it occurred now he wouldn’t have the firepower needed to repulse it, and having to wait on others to get to wherever the hit came down would take time. If it happened near his fleet he needed to be ready, so he had Admiral Baeren set course rimward from their position in the galaxy while angling spinward.

Paul still thought of it as ‘northwest’ in mind’s eye, but his fleet couldn’t head straight in any direction he liked. They had to bounce from star to star, so the course they laid in had them traveling between dozens of systems in a zigzaggy line using the larger stars that allowed greater transit speeds. Black holes offered the quickest routes, but there were none available from his current position. On the galaxy map they’d acquired from the V’kit’no’sat there were many such routes, but each required a black hole on the either end, for when you accelerated super fast you also had to have a large gravity well to brake against…else you’d plow right into the star and die instantly.

So fast travel throughout the galaxy had trade routes moving through standard jumplanes to connect from one black hole link to another. There were some in the Devastation Zone, but they were always patrolled and essentially shut down by the V’kit’no’sat. Star Force could run through them, given their engine speed and size of the black hole systems, but the once massive amount of traffic that flowed through was now gone, leaving them empty and barren…just like the rest of the Devastation Zone…and it seemed the V’kit’no’sat wanted to keep it that way until they finally finished off annihilating Star Force.

They’d done so much damage to the Human-led empire it seemed incalculable…but Paul knew exactly what had been done, where, and how. He also knew that Star Force was a lot bigger rimward now than it had been before, and they were a long way from being defeated. Each day Paul and the others held the line, the planets on Star Force’s side digging in deeper, building more anti-orbital batteries, stronger shield generators, additional Sentinel-class defense platforms and other impediments to the beatdown the V’kit’no’sat were trying to continue exacting on Star Force.

They were winning. There was no denying that. But Star Force was bleeding the V’kit’no’sat heavily for each victory they racked up and he and others had guessed that they had chosen to stop the constant assaults until they could assemble a larger attack force, hence the lull in major activity in recent years. If that was true then the hammer blow was coming now and Paul didn’t like leading a damaged and heavily weakened fleet. He wasn’t the only trailblazer out here and didn’t have even a tenth of the ships roaming about and contesting with the V’kit’no’sat assigned to him, but the Devastation Zone was so large now that they were by necessity spread out, and if the enemy could spot the holes in their positioning they could hit and take a system before Paul could get his fleet back up to full strength.

Which was why Paul was starting to think the assault on Tauntaun had been fought the way it was just for that reason. Paul wanted a chance to grind down the V’kit’no’sat and they had wanted to grind him down…meaning they wanted combat to diminish Star Force’s number of chess pieces on the board so when they made their move Paul and others would have less in position to reinforce wherever they hit.

That was why Paul wasn’t personally escorting the Ghostblade fleet and getting answers as soon as possible. If and when they discovered anything he’d get the information belatedly through the relay grid…assuming it was still active. If the V’kit’no’sat could find the base on Tauntaun then they might also be able to find the relays and start plucking them en mass…which would black out Star Force’s ability to communicate with each other across the Devastation Zone and leave the front blind to any incoming assault force.

There were many small outposts within the DZ that he could get replacement ships from, but few with sufficient numbers to replace what he’d lost. Actually there was only one place he could go without returning to the front and stealing ships away from some system’s defense fleet. A place the V’kit’no’sat could not go…or rather wouldn’t after having suffered defeat after defeat in such horrific numbers that Star Force owned a piece of territory that the V’kit’no’sat had given up on taking.

Or at least they’d given up on taking it prior to erasing the rest of Star Force, for hitting the front was far easier in comparison than hitting the Uriti Preserve. Though in truth it wasn’t Star Force territory, but rather a group of star systems where Star Force kept some very powerful allies and looked after them…and those allies were the reason why the V’kit’no’sat would not go anywhere near those systems now.

It took nearly 5 weeks to get to the Preserve, with them entering via the Willy System, one of 34 system in the Uriti Preserve. As soon as they came out of their jump they were met by a fleet of Star Force ships with many others present…but no Uriti. There were some sedas nearby as well, but further off in the system there were 3 inhabited planets. That hadn’t originally been the plan for the Preserve, for the Uriti could destroy them if they so much as sneezed, but over the centuries the relationship between the Uriti and their handlers had become so reliable that Star Force was now comfortable building permanent structures in the Preserve…and daring the V’kit’no’sat to come get them.

A quick look at the battlemap data for this system told Paul that the Uriti were not here at present, and he knew they rotated through the 34 systems randomly. In the past they had traveled in one group, but even after the V’kit’no’sat hit Earth and this long and costly war dragged on more Uriti were being collected from their hidden slumber and brought here by powerful allies whose only interaction with Star Force was due to the Uriti.

They all had a vested interest in seeing them contained, for they were so powerful that a war long ago, even before the V’kit’no’sat existed, saw them roaming the galaxy destroying systems singlehandedly. They were an altered form of Hadarak that plagued the central core of the galaxy and which the V’kit’no’sat had been formed to fight and contain…but the Uriti were different. Bioengineered to be weapons of even greater power, the race whose twisted genius spawned them used the Uriti to extort the outer rim into submission.

A massive alliance from across the galaxy rose to oppose them, but the Uriti were too powerful to be destroyed and a means to sedate them was the key to the downfall of their creators. The sedated Uriti were then taken into protective custody and hidden away in vaults across the galaxy where robotic custodians maintained their sedation, for even without their masters giving them orders they would roam and destroy randomly, thus the containment had to be maintained at all costs.

One of those Uriti had accidentally been released in The Nexus’s territory, and they were completely unable to destroy or contain it, having to fight and lose numerous battles just to keep it from spreading its minions across the galaxy once again. Star Force came to their rescue, bringing the impossible knowledge of how to command the Uriti as their original masters did…and ended that Uriti’s rampage with a simple order.

Star Force had then learned from the The Nexus that they were guarding other sedated and hidden Uriti, which had prompted Star Force to create the Uriti Preserve and to bring them all out of stasis…but The Nexus only knew the location of a few. When word of the Uriti being released spread across the galaxy, or rather to those looking for that information, new and powerful races arrived at the Preserve to investigate the situation. They were near to destroying Star Force to deny them control of the Uriti, but doing so would send the Uriti on an uncontrolled rampage again and they knew it.

That scenario had them try to steal the information of how to communicate with the Uriti, but other races helped them maintain security and eventually Star Force became trusted enough for the other races, some from the other side of the galaxy, to uncover and transport the sleeping Uriti to the Preserve…thus removing the threat of them waking up and going on a rampage in their territory. That meant Star Force was continually gaining more, and to date had acquired 73 of the 118 originally created.

Two of those had been confirmed destroyed during the ancient war when the Uriti creators hadn’t yet perfected their massive bioweapons. That left 116 apparently hidden within the galaxy just waiting to be woke up, so it was to everyone’s benefit that they be found and transported to the Preserve where they would be awakened with the other Uriti nearby to explain things to them in addition to having a Uriti wrangler there to communicate directly with them.

Those Wranglers, all powerful Archons, wore a special gauntlet that allowed them to interface their own telepathy to communicate with the massive creatures without frying their own brains from the enormous telepathic presence of the Uriti, as well as doing so in the proper way that they would respond to orders. That ‘way’ was a closely guarded secret, and the Wranglers were among the most non-visible Archons in the galaxy as they were always in danger of outside influences trying to get access to them and steal their secrets…for a single Uriti under your command was worth more than all the warfleets of most of the races in the galaxy…not including the V’kit’no’sat. They could kill Hadarak and had come close to killing the Uriti in past battles, but with Star Force’s help and the addition of many highly advanced fleets from across the galaxy, there was no way the V’kit’no’sat were going to come in here and destroy the Uriti.

More than that, these races did not want Star Force being destroyed and the Uriti running free again…or worse, the V’kit’no’sat or someone else taking the reins of control from them. Star Force had gradually proven their trustworthiness…to some. Many of the races with a presence in the Preserve were here to observe because they did not trust Star Force, but many did and were committed to keeping the V’kit’no’sat out and the Uriti here, and regardless of the V’kit’no’sat’s stubbornness they had finally figured out that they should stop trying and dying…for now.

Paul knew they’d be back later, for there was no way they were going to allow the Uriti to exist, let alone in anyone else’s control, but they didn’t have the ships necessary to dent the Preserve deployed out here yet. And if they did, it would be much easier to hammer the rest of Star Force first. Why the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t sent their full might out here was a lingering question, though Paul knew they had to keep a lot of forces along the Hadarak border to fight and contain them, else the Hadarak would push out from the core and unleash their own version of galactic domination.

So when Paul’s fleet came out at the jumppoint and did not find any Uriti, they did find many of those allied races here along with a guardian Star Force fleet even larger than Paul’s, with the waiting fleets ready to hit any enemies coming in immediately and then buying enough time for one of the Uriti herds to arrive. They moved very slowly between star systems, but Star Force had built carriers for them to be used in emergency situations, so even if the V’kit’no’sat hit a system in the Preserve where the Uriti currently were not, they could get here eventually and lay down the hammer…assuming the defending races didn’t already cut them to shreds.

There were some here, including the Knights of Quenar, whose technology was beyond Star Force’s understanding. Were they superior to Star Force was a lingering question, with no one knowing for sure, but they had damaged the V’kit’no’sat enough in previous battles to be a match for them, making their dominance a distinct possibility.

But Paul didn’t see any of their ships here…nor would he. They operated with what appeared to be perfect cloaking devices, so they were probably patrolling the system somewhere nearby, for they put up with NO interference in the Preserve. Star Force actually had to intervene in some cases where a random ship would accidentally enter and they went after it, but the relationship between Star Force and the KOQ had been ironed out in the past and they now worked well together…while keeping a respectful distance. They were allies with regards to the Uriti and nothing more, and both sides knew it.

Paul’s fleet moved past the defenders as they made way for his ships as they arrived in convoy and headed around stellar orbit to another jumpline. While there were a lot of ships here, including some massive shipyards continually being expanded in the colonies, this was not where he was going to get reinforcements from. That would be two systems over, so Paul’s fleet passed through the Willy System and jumped again to the Degar System. From there they moved deeper into the Preserve and arrived at a partially nebula-encased star that limited the jumplines in and out.

It was the Jurassic System and the favorite playground of the Uriti due to its five stars that had carved out vast tracks in the nebula and were continuing to suck up bits of it with each rotation around the gigantic pair in the center. In addition there were a handful of unremarkable planets that now contained highly developed Star Force cities, but it was the level of infrastructure in orbit around them that was amazing.

With this essentially being a safe haven against the V’kit’no’sat there was a little bit of everything here, including discarded wrecks of ships from non-Star Force races that had fled the now destroyed ADZ through this location. Gone were the refugees, long since moved out to the rim, but their damaged hulks still floated in graveyard orbits where salvage teams were occasionally picking over them for useful components while the bulk of the industry here was stellar mining and the total consumption of one of the planets.

Right now it looked like a giant piece of cheese that rats had gotten into, with huge craters where material had been excavated. Paul knew it wasn’t Uriti damage, so to speak, but large sections of it contained the Uriti’s minions who were handling part of the deconstruction, for the gigantic space-living creatures had the ability to spawn robot-like biological creations of tiny size to do their bidding, and those, when en mass, were just as dangerous to the galaxy as the Uriti themselves were.

Star Force’s allies hadn’t been thrilled when the Wranglers started to experiment with using them, but now they were heavily involved in the defense of the Preserve and on the world designated ‘Lego’ as they helped to pull it apart piece by piece, some of which went to the Uriti as food.

When Paul arrived in the system he saw that they were here too, or at least 13 of them were…all but two of which were currently bathing inside the stars. The two that were sitting in orbit around one of the outer stars were Zelda and Bahamut, with Bahamut being one of the earliest ones to join the Preserve and had taken on a dominant role within their curious social behavior. It was currently the defacto leader of this herd, though they rotated them around so they all had access to each other eventually.

Bahamut, like all of the Uriti, had its own unique shape with thick, giant wings, a long neck/snout, and stubby tail tip. It had no eyes, ears, or other surface features, looking more like the hull of a warship than any living being in the galaxy. It saw through sensors of its own, with the wings not actually used for flight. It moved on its own biological gravity drives similar to what Paul’s body had, allowing it to grip and push off of gravity wells…and the bigger the better, which was why the Uriti and Hadarak really liked black holes, though there were none in the Preserve, but the stars at the center of this system were nearly large enough to become one, altering their light output to eerie levels.

It would have been a ‘dim’ system without the other three stars in higher orbits, as the emissions from the center two stars were slowed greatly by the gravity before they could escape it, but for the Uriti and Paul’s ships the gravity wasn’t an issue, for the stronger it became the more power his engines had. So long as he didn’t come in contact with any of the stellar matter, high mass stars and black holes weren’t something to fear other than the sensor distortions that occurred around them.

The tracking markers for the Uriti within the stars were theoretical, for they couldn’t actually track them that deep with the signal distortion, and had they been normal sized stars it would have been difficult too despite their size. Bahamut had been 24 miles long and 38 wide, wing tip to wing tip, when they’d acquired him in the Preserve, but now he was over 50 miles wide and continuing to grow so long as he kept receiving ample amounts of nutrients and the training that Star Force was so well known for.

The other Uriti were a mix of those smaller and larger, with the biggest being the aptly named ‘Godzilla’ that was shaped like a tri-blade with a radius of 72 miles and a thickness of each ‘blade’ at 23 miles near the midsection that blossomed out into an approximate sphere a few miles wider. Godzilla wasn’t in this system at the moment, but with the largest V’kit’no’sat line warship being 36 miles in diameter, the Uriti having armor superior to even Yeg’gor, coupled with a regeneration rate that was crazy fast, the V’kit’no’sat were outmatched and outmassed even without the offensive weaponry that the Uriti creators had added to their already formidable Hadarak origins.

“Hello fellas,” Paul said from the command nexus as he got updates on their status through the battlemap, in addition to everything else in the system, including the pool of waiting drone warships stacked lazily in a holding orbit around the smallest of the planets…over a million of them currently unassigned to any ship or system defense force. That number may have seemed like a lot, and on its face it was, but if on average each Warship-class jumpship carried 100 drones, then then a million would fit into 10,000 jumpships…and Paul’s fleet that was still jumping in contained 7,382 of those ships, though of various models and makes.

Rarely were jumpships lost, but the drones were fired off like ammunition against the V’kit’no’sat and required replacement. This system was the endpoint of a major resupply route across the Devastation Zone from the rim, coming from systems far beyond the front that were doing nothing but producing more drones for the war effort, many of which were coming from the Paladin, with some of their carrier ships still in the system ostensibly having brought more of the drones in recently.

Rushing them across the DZ was something that the V’kit’no’sat were always trying to stop, so the route in constantly changed, but when they got to the Preserve they were safe and allowed to pool here for fleets like Paul’s to pick up replacements from, and the trailblazer was happy to see that there was enough to top off all of his ships here, though he’d be taking a lot of them for himself and a third of his original fleet was still out with Ghostblade and underequipped.

But they’d have to make do for now and already had enough to protect a moving target. It was the planets that couldn’t move that would need huge fleets for reinforcement, and the sooner Paul got all his warships reloaded with new drones and he got back into the patrol rotation the better, for his spidey sense was tingling and he knew in his gut the V’kit’no’sat would be hitting somewhere else soon…if not already.

7

February 23, 4813

Orica System (Devastation Zone)

Orica A

Jason-025’s fleet began coming out of their deceleration jump against the larger of the two stars at the center of the trinary system, with his command ship Sanguine Blade near the head of the line. He expected combat immediately, but was relieved when the battlemap showed small groupings of Paul’s fleet guarding the door, so to speak, and keeping the V’kit’no’sat away from his chosen jumppoint.

There were many into the Orica System, including some at the far out Orica B star that orbited the pair in the center, but the red giant Orica A held the most gravity and Jason’s fleet had made top speed to get here when an alert came through the relay network. His fleet had been stationed in wait some 182 lightyears away…a distance that used to be unbelievably vast for Star Force. It still was, for space hadn’t shrunk, but the ever increasing engine speeds as the Human-led empire gradually caught up to the pinnacle of V’kit’no’sat tech had that ‘vast’ distance reduced down to only 11 days travel time thanks to a few larger stars nearby that Jason had diverted through.

That actually upped the distance traveled to 218 lightyears, but since his fleet was able to push off faster thanks to the higher gravity making their engines more powerful, the travel time had been less than a straighter route. A perfectly straight route was impossible, for a 182 lightyear jump was something that the navigational computers couldn’t aim well enough to hit, and even with a little tugging on distant gravity wells during transit your ‘hit or miss’ opportunity was still 99.99% determined by your initial slingshot out of the departure system.

Star Force navigational computers might have been able to pull it off without any planets in the system and an open corridor through space, but that was still iffy at this point and not worth the risk. Plus a direct route to Orica would have ran Jason’s fleet through a nebula, which would have killed them shortly after impact as the friction at greater than lightspeed would have ate away at the shields then tore through the armored hulls before finally sandblasting the entire ship into nothing but fast-moving debris that would come out the far side and maybe get to Orica eventually, though most would fly askew and be lost in deep space from all the tiny collisions with the nebula material.

So Jason had to take a roundabout approach anyway, and in this case an even longer one came out the faster, getting him to Orica not too late as both Paul and Flynn-046 were here with their fleets defending another outpost that the V’kit’no’sat had discovered and attacked…but one that was still in Star Force hands despite a huge ground battle taking place on one of the 93 formerly inhabited planetoids named Varooshser. Formerly inhabited by the Nestafar when this was their capitol system, then left untouched when the Voku claimed the system and rebuild many of the other planets before the V’kit’no’sat attacked and kicked them out of the Devastation Zone long into the war.

Originally the Voku had stayed out of the war on the order of their Elders, which Star Force knew as the Zak’de’ron. Paul was close friends with Cal’com, the leader of the Voku, and he’d told Jason that once the first V’kit’no’sat attack had occurred he desperately wanted to help Star Force fight. That said, he had received new orders to fight the V’kit’no’sat here while an organized retreat from what became the Devastation Zone was enacted for all Voku territory along with the other races they were tasked to protect…and once the Voku had been driven out the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t pursued them any further.

Cal’com wanted to still help Star Force but couldn’t without disobeying orders…something he’d never do, Paul had said, and if it kept the V’kit’no’sat away from the mass of Voku territory then so be it. Cal’com had also confided in Paul that if their home territories along the edge of the Devastation Zone were hit then he would be free to fight…and probably die…along with Star Force, but the Zak’de’ron had been wise in advising him so, for the V’kit’no’sat had left them alone after getting them out of the way.

The Orica System was one of the riches prizes in the Devastation Zone and a spot that one would think Star Force would have to be stupid to try and put a base in…but that was part of the genius of it, hidden beneath the debris from the Nestafar war and essentially in plain sight, geographically speaking. To date the V’kit’no’sat had never noticed their stealthed comings and goings, but now they were here and hammering the base that was quite a bit larger than what was on Tauntaun, and it seemed like they wanted it pretty bad.

As Jason got caught up via the battlemap data, his Sav-enhanced mind ran through everything that had happened previously as his fleet came out of its jumppoint and pooled there, waiting for orders. He only had 3,488 jumpships with him…small compared to Paul’s fleet and many of the other trailblazers, but still a massive fighting force when all the drones deployed. He was currently at 89% capacity and was going to unload here until he saw the naval situation.

The V’kit’no’sat had them outnumbered, but not by too much and Jason’s addition was going to tip the scales in Star Force’s favor…but this stank with the scent of trickery. They were being presented with a battle to fight, that they had to fight, with a strong but not too strong opponent that would force them to cut and run without a costly fight.

Cost. That’s what the V’kit’no’sat wanted. They were bleeding Star Force intentionally, and while these kind of battles were what Jason and the others had been wanting to get into, the fact that the V’kit’no’sat were fielding enough ships here and at least two other places since Tauntaun told Jason that these were just setup actions for something else later…either that or their intelligence was really bad concerning how many fleets Star Force had in the Devastation Zone.

Or maybe that was the point of these attacks, to draw them out so they could count. If that was the case he hoped they were impressed, because the fleet of 13,822 V’kit’no’sat ships were either going to have to slug this out or run…and with 3 stars in the system there was little chance of either side getting pinned here with so many available jumppoints to run through. A part of Jason hoped they’d stay, but it’d also worry him if they did, for the V’kit’no’sat never did anything without purpose and the base on Varooshser certainly wasn’t worth this effort.

Eventually Jason got a message from Paul, who was far beyond realtime comm range, saying that he wanted Jason’s entire fleet to move to Nestarraffa and set up in a defensive blockade against orbital bombardment.

Jason raised an eyebrow as he stood in the command nexus onboard his flagship. Nestarraffa was the old capitol of the Nestafar as well as the Voku capitol in this region. It’d been completely cleansed of Nestafar infrastructure and now had a savaged landscape of broken Voku buildings and large sandy plains built from rubble dust. Star Force had nothing on the planet as far as Jason knew, and the battlemap wasn’t indicating anything new.

But Jason knew Paul’s tendencies and had a feeling what this might be about, but regardless he was going to trust him, especially since he’d been in this system fighting for the past 8 days and Jason had just got here. Flynn had gotten here 6 days ago and aside from a little smiley faced text message saying ‘Hello, Ez’ he didn’t offer any tactical solutions or requests, merely taking a split second to make fun of Jason while he was busy harassing the backside of the V’kit’no’sat fleet that was entirely focused on Varooshser.

They had a huge swath of middle orbit claimed over the base location, but Paul’s fleet was hanging in low orbit and along with the minimal planetary defenses was keeping the V’kit’no’sat back, but they’d landed troops on the other side of the planet and had worked their way around overland with large mobile shield domes to temporarily protect them against any potential bombardment from Paul while their fleet swept in and forced a naval fight.

Right now that wasn’t happening, with both sides staring them down and the planetary defense shield over the base sitting just below Paul’s drone fleet with the jumpships almost touching it as they levitated in the upper atmosphere behind the drones, ready to dip down underneath the energy shields if they were targeted…but where they could assist with long range weaponsfire when needed.

That told Jason that Paul was doing everything he could just to hold that position and cover the base, and with a quick review of the battle timeline he saw that the V’kit’no’sat were again coming into the system in waves, just like Star Force was, and the base had been able to hold out long enough for Paul to get here, with a fiery exchange earlier that told Jason why the V’kit’no’sat were not trying to brute force their way to the base.

They were going to try to take it out via the ground rather than face those Ardent beams coming from the surface. There were only 18 of them, but each was bigger than anything the V’kit’no’sat had in their fleet. If they could be taken down from the ground it would save many warships…but there was one flaw to this strategy and that was Paul’s fleet. If the V’kit’no’sat army got to the base they’d be right under them, and all it would take would be a quick dropping of the base defense shields and the armies would go ‘poof’ under that combined firepower no matter what mobile shield units they had with them.

The V’kit’no’sat were going to have to remove Paul’s fleet and Jason figured Paul knew it, which was why he was stubbornly holding that spot. Now he was sending Jason’s fleet off to another planet entirely with no one to fight there that he could see.

Jason waited for the rest of his ships to arrive, then had them all jump out in quick succession taking different routes to Nestarraffa so they didn’t have to wait as long in line. Some of his ships went halfway across the system in the wrong direction before bouncing back off another planet or star so they’d arrive all over planetary orbit rather than in one spot, getting his fleet into position much faster despite the extra distance.

Something Jason had learned a long time ago was that when you were a navigational officer in the fleet, the most direct route was usually not the fastest, and if you couldn’t think outside the box then you’d be replaced pretty fast by someone who could, and with over 150 different gravity wells in the system a ship had thousands of jumplines to pick from, including slingshot maneuvers that arced your coast trajectory.

Jason was very glad Star Force had the superior gravity drives in their ships, else the V’kit’no’sat could have danced around them indefinitely, but now it was finally a fair fight.

When the last of his jumpships arrived in Nestarraffa orbit and got into position, Jason ordered them to release their drones and form the clouds of tiny defensive points around the jumpships and command ships as they protected a third of the planet beneath them and began making dropship runs en mass down to the surface…with empty cargo holds both ways.

Paul saw Jason’s fleet arrive and reposition to Nestarraffa as he’d requested while his front-most drones were firing long range shots against the V’kit’no’sat ships poking his own lines in arrogant fashion, for they were entering the firing range of the planetary defenses but doing so with Paul’s ships blocking for them. Paul kept realigning his forces to open up a gap but 4 out of 5 times the V’kit’no’sat ship would successfully reposition and block the firing line, with the few times they didn’t make it not being enough to do anything more than suck away a lot of shield energy as they moved off laterally or pulled back up to middle orbit with the rest of their fleet to recharge.

They wanted to get at him and his command ship sitting at the bottom of the well of ships that looked like a mushroom cloud coming up from the surface base and sitting on a wide dish that was the planetary defense shield spreading out for several hundred miles in radius. His fleet took up a lot of space even when packed in closely together, but whenever Paul slid his ships out further towards the edge of the shield the V’kit’no’sat would attack and drive them back…with Paul not having enough ships to force his way up into their midst. He needed them low and in range of the planetary defenses, but they weren’t coming down here anymore after the butt kicking they’d received earlier.

That said, chunks of dead ships were littering the already trashed planet around the base where Paul’s fleet had pushed them to keep them off the shields as they fell down from orbit. Now they made for a ring of mountains that the approaching enemy army was going to have to navigate around or through, slowing them down a bit more before they got close to the base, but Paul had a feeling the V’kit’no’sat were going to make a move before that happened. There was no way they were going to let them fight right under Paul’s parked fleet no matter how fast they thought their own fleet could move to assist.

That meant Paul had a roundabout idea of how much time he had, for the V’kit’no’sat ground forces were heavily outnumbering those from the base and what Paul and Flynn had added, and he was hoping to disrupt whatever plan there was or at least make the V’kit’no’sat a little off guard with Jason’s fleet…and right on cue he saw a few dozen ships leave the enemy formation and head for Nestarraffa. Not enough to fight with, but enough to pull some heavy scans of the planet and fight off skirmishers as they made a pass or two.

They were probably wondering how they’d missed another base there, for right now Jason was doing a good impression of evacuating the surface…or delivering reinforcements, but that wouldn’t make sense given that Star Force knew they couldn’t hold bases in the Devastation Zone that were known to the V’kit’no’sat.

Or at least not yet, save for the Uriti Preserve and Grid Point Stargate. Those were the two big holdouts, while bases such as this one were clandestine only and now that it had been exposed it would have to be evacuated win or lose this fight.

Unless Star Force was going to make a stand. Paul knew that was stupid in the long run, for the V’kit’no’sat would just rally their forces and come here with more than Star Force could handle. Granted, this was already a huge attack force, but Paul knew it was to fight their opposing naval fleet and the base on the surface was just the bait to get them to do it. There were plenty of heavily defended planets with defense shields that circled the entire globe on the front for the V’kit’no’sat to assault, and they would sooner or later, and probably win, so trying to hold such a small base on the coreward side of the DZ was just stupid if you didn’t have people to get out.

But right now they did, and from the V’kit’no’sat’s perspective it looked like they had two bases to withdraw troops from. The question was, were they going to let Jason evacuate Nestarraffa unchallenged? It was a feint, for there was nothing there, but they didn’t know that yet and the scanning ships they’d sent out got intercepted by Jason’s own skirmishers far from the planet, keeping them out of prime sensor range while they still got enough of a scan to determine the location on the surface the dropships were coming and going from…along with the cavernous entrances they were disappearing into.

A closer look would have seen them landing, waiting, and taking back off again with no movement of people or cargo on or off save for a few defensive mechs guarding the landing sites, but the V’kit’no’sat didn’t get close enough to see that and after more than two days of waiting they finally detached some 1,302 ships and sent them off towards Nestaraffa.

That was going to be a tough fight, for Jason would still have the advantage, but not too long after Paul got the sensor updates from system’s center, seeing another V’kit’no’sat fleet entering near one of his ship clusters.

The trailblazer frowned, for there was no way the V’kit’no’sat could have known about them arriving before he did. That told Paul this departure was either coincidence or proof that the arrival of the reinforcement fleets was not random, but rather predetermined by a scripted schedule and the fleet overtop Paul knew when they’d be arriving before they got here.

That meant Jason’s group was probably going to be caught fighting as a diversion while the reinforcements raced to augment their numbers and delay the evacuation of Nestarraffa.

“Flynn, I think this is the best chance we’re going to get,” Paul said via the audio-only comm.

“They still have an advantage,” his peer pointed out. “We’re going to cancel at best.”

“I think we can do a little better than that…but not much. If you have any suggestions, now is the time.”

“Unfortunately I think you’re right. This is the best hand we’ve got. Let’s play it…” he said as the V’kit’no’sat fleet above them began moved en mass away from Paul’s position and spreading out like an expanding ring.

“They’re heading to ground,” Paul said a few seconds before their altitude started to dip and bring them towards the planet’s surface outside the range of the base’s defensive batteries.

“And going to escort their troops up to the front door,” Flynn all but growled as he saw Paul’s fleet break apart too…with several ships racing just above the atmosphere at maximum speed. “What are you doing?”

“Get our troops back under the shield. I’m going to be too busy to keep watch,” he said, already sending out hundreds of orders with mere thoughts as his jumpships likewise moved from their holding position and raced up into higher orbit through the donut hole in the enemy formation as it continued to spread out.

Paul responded with a lot of battlemap data, but Flynn’s mind handled it with ease as he saw what Paul planned to do as the V’kit’no’sat wanted to force them to fight at both planets rather than pool their resources at one. He also saw the fastest of Paul’s ships get out to the enemy ground troops just before their own ships did and lay into them with the naval weapons, the first of which were blocked by the dome-like defense shields the ground units carried with them, but after a few dozen seconds the overlapping naval fire added up and broke through even as the drones got hit from above by the descending fleet.

Flynn saw Paul dive several kamikaze through the V’kit’no’sat ranks, literally plowing the ground with them on it until their huge ships got overtop them and dropped dampening shields in front, stopping the last of the ramming attacks and protecting what was left of their ground troops with their own shields like an invisible curtain dropping all the way down to the ground save for the last few meters.

“Nice get.”

“Take ‘em when I can,” Paul said as the V’kit’no’sat fleet continued to drop almost all the way to the ground and cluster their hulls together so much they almost touched in various groups around the circular perimeter as Paul’s ships went to higher altitude but still within range of the surface. The V’kit’no’sat now had the low position and Paul the high…but if they could get up to the shield and run their troops beneath it, they could push their ships over top them as a buffer and assault the base directly, punishing Star Force heavily if they even dropped the shields for a moment to bombard the troops.

The Ardent batteries could depress pretty far, and there was no way for the miles wide V’kit’no’sat ships to get under their firing line, but this way they couldn’t get hit by all of them at once, but rather one or two from each angle, and that would mean the survivability of their ships would extend considerably.

The one major disadvantage they had was if one of their blocker ships went down it would fall on whatever was beneath it, which was why you saw their largest Kafcha-class vessels taking position over the densest clusters of troops.

“This is going to be fun,” Flynn said sarcastically as he readied his mix of mainline, Clan, and H’kar fleet to drop down over top the shield at almost kissing range and keep the enemy warships from moving in directly over the base while Paul went higher and hit the enemy from above where he could without getting wasted from their overlapping firepower.

“We can always surrender,” Paul offered dryly.

“Nah, Morgan would beat the crap out of us if we did. Let’s get to it.”

“Already am,” Paul said as both trailblazers dropped silent to focus their full mental power on the fleet movements that were getting more difficult by the moment as the exchange of fire amped up exponentially.

8

February 28, 4813

Orica System (Devastation Zone)

Varooshser

Paul sat in the passenger hold of a dropship as it transitioned down through the atmosphere over the battlefield below. Ship hulks were everywhere, having impacted the surfaced and caused so many earthquakes and craters that the mantle of the planet had been breached with the fracture cracks and multiple locations had magma plumes oozing up to the surface. Two of them were actually geysers throwing molten material up into the night and giving some illumination to the otherwise deep dark with all 3 stars and the gas giant on the far side of the planet.

The V’kit’no’sat fleets had withdrawn over a day ago, with both sides suffering heavy losses. They had succeeded in getting some of the ground troops up to and inside the base, but not enough to take it. Though it was a statistical anomaly, for the base was going to have to be evacuated now that its location was known, this was the first time in history that Star Force had beaten back a planetary assault and come out victorious.

Paul had gotten a good sleep in after 4 days straight of activity. He’d been able to do it thanks to his tier 2 psionic Inas that allowed him to get by on less sleep and recover faster when he did get the chance, but the only thing that had truly gotten him through the previous 4 days was the fact that it was a fully mental endeavor and that there had been breaks in the fighting sufficient enough for him to let his people handle most of the maneuvers. He hadn’t left, but the strain on his mind was not as great and he’d stuck it out all the way up until they’d left before grabbing some badly needed sleep.

But now he was needed on the surface, for the fighting down there wasn’t complete yet. The base was in Star Force hands and the enemy ground troops that had survived had been evacuated in the final pullout, but with all the crashed ships there were surviving V’kit’no’sat that had to be found and dealt with.

Had this been the reverse situation Paul never would have left them behind. The fleet compositions has been essentially even when the V’kit’no’sat pulled out, perhaps fearing the growing attrition curve, so it wasn’t like they had to leave at that moment. In fact, if both fleets had stayed then they would have probably canceled each other out with Star Force prevailing but only maintaining about 5% of the ships they had come into the fight with.

That was a guess, but one that Paul had worked through as the V’kit’no’sat fled. Typically they stuck at a target until they had it or until it was obvious that there was no way to win. Them running from an even fight was not normal, and Paul’s gut told him this was yet another attempt to draw Star Force into battle and reduce their numbers. If the V’kit’no’sat were finally ready to devote more of their massive empire to this fight then attrition would be on their side…despite the massive blow to their ego it must have been. But at the end of the day the V’kit’no’sat cared about one thing above all else, and that was winning…even if they had to bleed themselves dry to accomplish it.

Normally they didn’t. Aside from the Hadarak and a few enemies of the distant past, the V’kit’no’sat usually annihilated their opposition without losing a single person. Their ships were so big it was almost impossible for a lesser opponent to take one down, and even severely damaged they could still keep fighting or flee and use regenerators on any injured crew. The fact that they were trading massive ship losses…that did contain crew…to take down Star Force’s drone fleet and get at their surface bases was alarming. Not unusual, because they’d fought like this in previous centuries, but never on this level without a planet for them to claim.

Varooshser was a junk world and worthless, because the V’kit’no’sat didn’t care about colonizing any of the territory they took from Star Force aside from Earth. They just wanted it annihilated, so a pristine Star Force planet with full planetary shields and billions of people was a prize for them to take and smash, but a junk world with a single base wasn’t worth it.

No, the objective here had to be the fleets and reducing them for another strike, or series of strikes, to come later when Paul and the other DZ fleet commanders would have less to respond with. Take their large fleets out of the equation and the V’kit’no’sat could better estimate how much in the way of forces they would need to take a given planet and do so without it being an even fight. It was when they didn’t know how many forces were in pay that Star Force stood a chance and could come in with superior numbers, but not if those reinforcements weren’t around to pull on.

Replacements would be coming in from beyond the front, but not fast enough to replenish what was lost here. Paul really wished he knew how many ships the V’kit’no’sat had in the Devastation Zone, but that was knowledge that he was going to have to work without, for even while most of the V’kit’no’sat ships operated without stealth mechanisms and boldly went wherever they wanted, there were so many star systems that it was impossible to watch all of them without a surveillance and relay network…which was why V’kit’no’sat kept blowing up whatever comm infrastructure they could find, keeping Star Force and anyone else dark as to the full extent of their movements.

The Devastation Zone didn’t have firm boundaries except along the Star Force border, but if you measured by where the V’kit’no’sat had hit and the stars in between, the DZ contained a whopping 3.02 million star systems. Not all of them had planets, but that was still a very big playground to operate on and the V’kit’no’sat were adamant to keep Star Force and its allies out of it while not bothering to care about anyone else. Some races, like the Gnar, had been attacked because of their association with Star Force but only as far as orbital bombardment. The V’kit’no’sat had laid waste to their planets without bothering to land a single drop pod, then ignored the survivors even as they rebuilt so long as they didn’t get in their way.

And that was the same for everyone in the DZ. Everyone had gotten hit who had even the slightest connection to Star Force or was strong enough to potentially assist them. They didn’t want anyone of consequence on their turf…and yet they’d just turned and ran, leaving this base intact.

Something was definitely going on and Paul had a number of ideas what it could be, but no way to narrow them down as he headed towards the surface along with a number of other Archons from his command ship as they went to help the ground teams hunt down and eliminate the remaining V’kit’no’sat, many of whom had grouped together and were fighting an effective counterattack against the base, knowing that if they stayed anywhere else they’d get picked off from the warships overhead.

But Paul wasn’t doing that. Yes, they were enemies that were trying to kill them and wouldn’t think twice about doing it again if he let them go, but since Star Force was going to evacuate the base anyway he didn’t bother trying to hunt down the survivors and just let them hide out amongst the ship debris so long as they weren’t near any of his people or operating intact weapons batteries on the ship remnants. Those had already been taken out over the past day, but you never knew if you missed one or not until it opened fire.

But as Paul dropped down to the base no enemy fire tracked his dropship. The area surrounding it was clean save for the troops working their way underground through the catacombs in the junk fields the base had been built within. There were many access points, most of which were too small for the larger V’kit’no’sat races to move through, but not all. Star Force had mechs out in them fighting the survivors as they tried to make one last effort to damage something of Star Force before they were killed.

When his dropship landed in an innocuous spot within the surface debris he felt a familiar presence nearby. Soon after he got off the dropship along with the other Archons they took a hidden lift down into the upper levels of the base where Jason was waiting for him along with some more Archons and a lot of Knights.

“You all with them,” Jason told those that had come down with Paul as he motioned with his finger and sent a telepathic ping for the other trailblazer to come with him. The pair ran off through a separate corridor and left the others behind with Jason in the lead and Paul a step behind him, both wearing their blue/orange Archon armor complete with a full exoskeleton of weaponry in lieu of the traditional packs and weapon racks, for where they were going they were going to need the bigger guns that could lay down burst damage rather than worrying about a longer grinding campaign over the course of days.

The two ran in silence, for there was nothing to talk about and they knew each other well enough that Paul didn’t even need telepathy to read Jason’s movements all the way up to another base exit that was underground, evident when the smooth, sculpted corridors were replaced with random junk and a plethora of defense turrets and shield generators marking the entrance along with 20 or so defenders.

The two trailblazers blew right by them and made their way out into the subsurface forest of junk using their Pefbar to see in what quickly became almost near dark save for periodic yellow/orange orbs of light that Star Force had placed here previously to give some navigational aid. Paul and Jason didn’t need them to see nearby, nor did the V’kit’no’sat who also had Pefbar, but it was nice to be able to use your eyes a little bit and not have them completely unprepared for the flashes of weaponsfire that would follow.

It was still jarring as they came across a group of four Zen’zat that mindlessly engaged the two Archons…though traditionally that would have been to their advantage. Each of the four was over 7 foot tall and had the muscle mass to match, all encased within black/green armor that looked like moving stone and had weapon ports on the wrists so they could shoot with their hands empty, though one of the four also had an additional hand cannon that would do considerably more damage.

So at first glance it looked like the two Archons were going to get mowed down, and on purpose Jason shot out the nearest lights, dropping them into pure dark with only their Pefbar to see by…thus hiding the Star Force armor color before the Zen’zat could see it and realize they were about to be horribly outmatched.

When they came into firing range the Zen’zat opened up with their Dre’mo’don forearm cannons, spraying green orbs against the Archons’ shields with a few misses. Paul and Jason ignored them, knowing they could take a few before they got into trouble, and split directions. Paul went right and Jason went left as they reached out and activated their Pa’no’semak…otherwise known as ‘Battlemeld,’ linking their minds together and giving them access to 19 additional psionics that only worked in conjunction with one or more others.

When they were linked they activated their Lew, creating an invisible conduit of energy that stretched between the two of them with their intent being to drag it through the Zen’zat who, as far as Star Force was aware, still had not discovered the Battlemeld psionics within their own genome…meaning they had no idea what was coming.

When the energy hit the first one it passed through his shields and armor, doing no damage but when it came into contact with his mind the direct contact bypassed the Ikrid blocks both the Zen’zat and Humans had, giving Paul and Jason a momentary access to their minds. It wasn’t something interactive, meaning they couldn’t look into his memories or talk to him through it. Rather the trailblazers had programmed a specific Ikrid ‘message’ that anyone who hit the energy ribbon would get…in this case the command to fall asleep.

When it hit it didn’t fully succeed, for the Zen’zat minds were too strong, but it did partially register in the first all the way to the fourth, causing two of them to drop to a knee before they started to realized something was wrong, but that was more than enough time for Paul and Jason to circle around behind them and punch two in the back, firing their tiny Bra’hem cannons that drew power from their exoskeleton and released from the palm of their hands. The green beams nearly got through the shields on the Zen’zat before they realized what was going on, then the other two both threw telekinetic slaps at the Archons that would have been sufficient to knock them off their feet, but thanks to them expecting the counterattack and their Pefbar, they could see the wave of energy a split second before it landed.

They both pulsed their Rentar, melting the Lachka attack as it touched them, then they responded with individual Jumat blasts that knocked those two Zen’zat on their asses, giving the Archons a moment to deal with the other two shield-weakened ones. Jason went hand to hand with his while Paul threw another Jumat blast into the other and knocked him into a wall of debris, then kicked up into him as he fell…punting him high and to the side with a burst of his Yetu psionic that made his leg move a lot faster than normal.

The Zen’zat flew through the air and almost hit another, but he deftly dodged and fired on Paul…who yanked him forward with his own telekinetic attack enough to off balance the Zen’zat so he couldn’t evade when the trailblazer fired another lethal green beam into his chest plate. That set the recharge timer on that hand, meaning that both of Paul’s weapons were not able to fire save for weakened charges, for they were designed for large bursts and not rapid fire.

But the Zen’zat’s shields were now down and Paul punched into him, getting a very good parry from the Zen’zat that caused him to exchange several blows, delaying his next attack long enough that the other Zen’zat got up and fired on him, draining his shields even more until Paul dragged the big body in front of him and punched repeatedly into his midsection, hearing the armor crack a little before blowing him away with linked Jumat blast thanks to Jason’s help. Their Jumatran ability allowed them to combine their Jumat and enhance it enough that the 320 pound Zen’zat was tossed through the air like a toy back into his brethren.

Paul then had his right gauntlet recharged and fired at one of Jason’s targets, with the pair changing off and on over the following minute as they wore down the Zen’zat defenses and eventually made the kills without having to do anything too fancy. After that they moved on, linking into the battlemap and getting direction from the base commander on where the greatest level of threat activity was.

They diverted there, fighting a few more skirmishes along the way against Zen’zat and some larger Kar’ka, but eventually they ended up coming alongside one of their own mechs, Thor-class, that was holding position just beyond a narrow passage in the debris.

“They’re on the other side,” the mechwarrior said to Jason and Paul via comm as they approached. “They can’t get through without giving me a clean shot, but I can’t get to them either…and there are two of them.”

“Keep this side clear and watch our back. We’ll handle them.”

“Both?”

“Both,” Jason confirmed as the trailblazers pulsed their Yetu again and sprinted through the gap faster than either of them could naturally run…directly into a large cave-like chamber with a pair of Brat’mar standing inside flank to flank but facing different directions. There was another entrance on the other side that also had Star Force troops and a couple of mechs there that couldn’t get in either. The Triceratopses were pinned and going to fight to the bitter end, whether that be waiting for a precision shot from a warship coring down through the surface to get to them or killing as many ground troops as they could here before they eventually succumbed.

Paul and Jason weren’t going to risk anyone else pushing through those kill zones and just missed a large blue cannon beam that shot through the gap coming from the clear horns on the otherwise fully armored Brat’mar. Had that hit them it would have eaten away all their shields and most of their armor, which made it an effective anti-mech weapon and a huge danger to any Star Force unit to come in here…and it wasn’t even technological, but a biological weapon built into the Brat’mar biology same as the Zen’zat psionics.

The technological weapons on the flanks of the silver-armored Brat’mar were far more accurate and started bathing the two Archons in a myriad of hits that sucked huge chunks of their shield energy away with each hit, making their attack seem almost stupid…but to an Archon this was a worthy challenge, and one that the pair of trailblazers was going to have to fight hard to overcome.

So they didn’t hold back, using their mental array of psionics to go after the nearest Brat’mar’s mind while keeping its body between them and the other. With no Ikrid block, the Brat’mar only had the sheer strength of its huge mind to ward off their attacks, and when the amount of psionic tissue a person had came into play, having a much larger brain was a big advantage…and with each Brat’mar’s head weighing more than Paul, there was no way they would have been able to resist the telekinetic hold it tried to put on them…which would then lead to a cannon shot directly into their faces and that would be game over.

But the Rentar psionic was a lifesaver and allowed them to move freely no matter how many attempts both Brat’mar made to grab them, and while the pair dodged around a bit they messed with the Brat’mar’s mind so much it could barely fire a shot from its armor’s many anti-personnel cannons. That gave the trailblazers the longevity they needed, else they would have been eaten up far too fast as they fired their Bra’hem beams into the easy to hit right flank of the Brat’mar as the other tried to circle around its tail and get into firing position.

A few shots from it did hit them, but the trailblazers dove underneath the head of the other, ironically using it as cover as they continued the assault on its mind, firing off numerous Saven and Jini mental flash bombs, the latter of which actually chained and hit the other Brat’mar too, but required a lengthy charging period. And while even the combined mental power of the two trailblazers was inferior to this Brat’mar, meaning they could never win a fight of wills, they used their Orren to delicately sidestep its mental strongholds and land some crippling blows coming in through the ‘backdoor’ so to speak.

That continued for over ten minutes, with the dance ensuing while one Brat’mar tried to get at them and the other was barely able to do more than stumble around shooting almost blindly at numerous phantom Archons implanted into its mind every time a Lew conduit passed through its head as Jason would jump over its neck and drag the invisible energy conduit down through it, but he would usually take a hit or two from the anti-personnel Dre’mo’dons on the armor that shot little green orbs at them. Bigger than what the Zen’zat fired, but of the same design.

The battle dragged on and on, with the Star Force troops on both entrances told to stay out of it and just keep the Brat’mar from escaping or getting reinforcements as the fight continued to play out in the makeshift rubble arena with the shields on the first Brat’mar finally going down…but it still had its thick armor in play, though Jason and Paul weren’t going to bother with it. Rather they switched their Bra’hem energy into a secondary weapon on their exoskeleton that fired concentrated pink orbs at a rate of about 1 every second and a half into the exposed horns that still hadn’t armored over due to the mental disruptions the Archons kept the Brat’mar under, for it couldn’t fire its main cannon with them covered and had to retract and extend the armor when needed.

The pink stun energy soaked into the horns and down into the Brat’mar’s head, but not enough to knock it out immediately so the Archon’s kept dancing around, avoiding the other and pumping more shots into the horns until they finally did armor over, but that didn’t stop the stun effect. V’kit’no’sat armor didn’t dampened stun energy by design, so a lot of it soaked through whereas Star Force armor made one immune to all but an overload of it. The V’kit’no’sat did that so they could fight each other when necessary and take an individual down without killing them, and they had never changed their armor design since the war against Star Force started. It was ego on their part, not wanting to alter it, and in situations like this it made the long fight a little less tedious as the Archons pounded away at the Brat’mar while they were still working it over with repetitive psionic attacks.

Those had more effect as the Brat’mar got loopy from the stuns, eventually causing it to fall to the ground. That made it a lot less tall and the other one started shooting over it, meaning the Archons had to do more dodging and get in a lot closer to the fallen enemy as they continued to pound it with stun energy until they were sure it was out of the fight.

That left the other one, and as soon as they turned their psionics against it they hardly had to dodge at all, for it could barely land a shot even with auto-targeting, for the trailblazers would just dip behind the other Brat’mar and take cover while sending their psionics directly through its body. That dampened some of them, but it was enough to give them opportunities to snipe with their Bra’hem until its shields fell, then they took it down with stun energy too, leaving the pair of Brat’mar with almost pristine armor, save for the damage done in previous battles on this planet that had brought them up to this location.

“Kill shots?” one of the mechwarriors asked, offering to save the Archons a lot of time gradually burning through the armor.

“No,” Jason said firmly. “We’re taking these two prisoner.”

“For what purpose?” the mechwarrior asked, not arguing but knowing that in almost all circumstances Star Force did not take the V’kit’no’sat prisoner because they were too dangerous even when confined. Any other race and Star Force would take prisoners whenever possible, but these bastards never gave them the luxury without the risk of losing more people in the process.

“We’re not taking them with us and we’re evacuating the base anyway,” Paul answered, still battlemeld linked with Jason and the two of them thinking for one another…though they often did that even when not using the psionic.

“If that’s the way you want it, but why not take them out while we got the chance before they fight us again later?” the pilot of the Ravager-class mech walking in from the other entrance asked.

“Because we’re not them, and I don’t like having to fight their way all the time. We have the advantage here, so we’re sparing them…besides, it’s not like they don’t have a bazillion more Brat’mar to send our way.”

“How long do you want us to look after them?”

“Keep one mech here, the rest of you leave.”

“Corvi?”

“Got it,” the Thor pilot said, coming in and pointing the two arms of his mech down at the Brat’mar just in case. “You want more stun blasts if they wake up?”

“Yes,” Jason confirmed. “Keep them down until we come back, then we’ll worry about their armor.”

“Fine with me. You two are better than a mech in close confines like this anyway. Happy hunting,” she offered, moving the metallic feet around to get in a better position to cover both sleeping quadrupeds.

“We’ll be back,” Paul promised as the trailblazers ran in tandem following the Ravager out the far side. “Keep them alive.”

“As you wish.”

“Love you too,” Jason added, then ran out of the chamber before the perplexed mechwarrior could figure out where that came from.

Corvi frowned, then while monitoring the biostats on the Brat’mar, brought up a database that the Regulars…meaning non-Archon…mechwarriors had created long ago to keep track of the not so rare usage of old and obsolete pop culture references that the trailblazers and senior Archons used. She input the last thing she’d said, then was almost surprised to see a correlation pop up.

Princess Bride, (movie) 1987

‘As you wish’ phrase synonymous with ‘I love you.’

“Cheeky,” she said, realizing that per that obscure movie she’d just told him she loved him. Corvi wondered what it would be like to be able to have such a knowledge of past centuries to be able to make jokes that no one else would get.

Well, the Regulars had taken up the challenge and this was yet one more that the trailblazers had failed to get by them…but there was no way of knowing how many the elder Archons successfully pulled without them realizing it.

9

March 1, 4813

Orica System (Devastation Zone)

Varooshser

As the evacuation of the base continued with Flynn staying in orbit to oversee naval operations, Jason and Paul moved around the perimeter helping fight off the surviving V’kit’no’sat that were bent on committing suicide while hopefully taking some Star Force troops with them. The two trailblazers made sure that didn’t happen, deploying themselves to the most challenging fights while ordering everyone else to be cautious, hold position, and stall until they could get there.

While both Archons were fully capable of wielding mechs and using their psionics from the cockpits, the debris field was so irregular that there were a lot of places the giant walking machines could not go so the pair decided to stay on foot even when fighting alongside other mechs. Some might call that reckless, dangerous, and stupid…but the skill level of the trailblazers was so high they could do such things and make it work, not to mention that when battlemeld linked Paul and Jason operated as if one person in two bodies, allowing them to move and fight without getting in each other’s way and throwing down some impressive physical combos that seemed to defy reality.

Most of their fights were against V’kit’no’sat charging ahead, which they were happy to either kill or drive off, leaving the two stunned Brat’mar as the largest of the few that got themselves cornered and unable to retreat, then stunned into unconsciousness on the trailblazers’ orders. Paul and Jason were both tired of the constant killing, and letting these few live and those that ran away go was a breath of fresh air to battle weary minds.

As for those that were stunned, they were removed of their armor…which was not an easy process…and then had their minds evaluated for any valuable intelligence. They left the two Brat’mar for last, then recruited the highest ranking Archons on the planet to join them in a circle of 18 standing around the sleeping giants with a pair of mechs standing by just in case they needed to be stunned again.

Thankfully Star Force mechs were equipped with the secondary stun weapons as standard equipment, otherwise they would have had to use infantry weapons and keep shooting them regularly to deliver the necessary doses to keep these two powerful minds subdued…and when the Archons linked together in one massive battlemeld and entered the mind of the first Brat’mar it reflexively stirred, prompting a pink orb that hit and slightly deformed before soaking into the Triceratops’ right flank. The mech that fired it didn’t send another, but stood ready just in case.

The stun effect made the Archons’ mental connection to the Brat’mar harder, as if they were having to push their way through a fog, but with their combined power and skills they didn’t have too much trouble accessing their target’s memories while suffering through a mild headache that would only increase as they continued to hold the 18 person mindmeld. The more individuals included in it the more stress there was, but the Archons had learned how to minimize the senses shared between them, essentially putting blinders on some aspects that made them vulnerable…which was why there was another ring of Commandos and Knights standing alongside them to make sure they didn’t get attacked and blindsided while in this meditative mode.

Paul could feel and ‘see’ the other Archons as if they were a part of his own body, and all of them were linked into the mind of the Brat’mar, segmenting it like grid markings on a map as they charted out unknown territory looking for anything new and, in particular, the reason for the V’kit’no’sat attack on this base.

After more than half an hour of searching they didn’t find much. This one only knew that a base had been discovered and must be removed from the ‘cleansed area’ that the V’kit’no’sat called the Devastation Zone. They apparently deemed it ‘clean’ so long as there were no advanced civilizations there, not caring about the lowly scum that had moved in or the remains of Star Force’s associates after they’d blasted them into rubble. In fact, this one knew of many indigenous populations that were of no consequence…but they were being monitored to look for Star Force activity, as well as being used as bait to ferret out Archon scouts who might try to hide in them or make contact once again.

Paul had suspected as much but had never had confirmation, for this was the first time he or any of the others had gotten access to a Brat’mar’s mind. They didn’t typically go anywhere they didn’t win, while Zen’zat were out and about everywhere. Star Force had caught and interrogated many of them, but they were usually just low level servants who knew nothing. Brat’mar were different, but even this one didn’t have any high level knowledge about this current invasion.

The Archons released the battlemeld and their link to the Brat’mar, taking a break and recharging their strength for a few minutes before trying the other. Its mind was just as strong, if not a touch stronger, but they used their combined power and skills to work their way into its memories, finding that it did not want to be here.

That was rare, for the V’kit’no’sat had a hatred for Star Force that almost compelled them to destroy everything of the ‘heretic’ civilization on sight, but this Brat’mar resented being assigned to the ground attack knowing that it was for nothing. Apparently the V’kit’no’sat did not expect to take the base, and if they had they were told to not overrun it, but to take their advance slow and leave the Star Force troops with possession of a piece of it as long as could be maintained.

This Brat’mar didn’t like that one bit, wanting to hit Star Force as strong as possible and annihilate the base that they’d arrogantly placed on their turf, but he had followed orders up until the pullout effort left him behind. After that he’d chosen to die fighting full on, prompting a run in towards the base where he knew there would be enemies to fight rather than to wait and hope an overhead warship didn’t kill him with orbital bombardment.

But it was the reason for the ineffective assault order that got Paul’s attention, for it was designed to keep besieged Star Force personnel on the planet long enough to draw in the Star Force fleets where the V’kit’no’sat could fight and destroy as many of their ships as possible in what this one considered ‘sloppy’ combat. They were deliberately not fighting battles where they had the advantage, knowing that Star Force would just run, so they had to give them something more appetizing to hit.

The bottom line was they needed to diminish the Star Force fleet strength for an upcoming operation…meaning this attack and the others were just a setup. The hammer blow hadn’t fallen yet, and unfortunately this Brat’mar didn’t know where or what it would be.

When the Archons finished Paul and Jason dismissed the others and had a Neo-class mech collapse one entrance in the chamber to force the Brat’mar to go back the other way when they eventually woke with an implanted memory from Jason telling them to leave and they’d be allowed to live until the V’kit’no’sat eventually came to pick them up. He also told them that once Star Force left the base would be theirs and foodstuffs would be left behind for their use…as well a bit of gloating concerning the fact that Star Force was leaving them alive despite them not deserving it.

Once the chamber was sealed on the near side, Jason and Paul leapt up onto the nearby mechs and rode on their shoulders as they pumped a lot more stun shots into the Brat’mar to keep them unconscious for hours, then they took the long route back to base riding like ticks stuck to the metal-ish walkers via grip points in their armor and safely underneath the thick mech shields.

“Best guess?” Jason asked on a private comm to Paul.

“Three options. The Preserve…”

“Which is suicide for them.”

“…the grid point, or punching a breach into the front and sweeping up another chunk of territory.”

“If they’re trying to reduce fleet strength, I’d bet it’s not for a single assault. They don’t want us to be able to reinforce as much, which means splitting our focus.”

“Agreed.”

“Should we temporarily evacuate some of our bases so we don’t have to fight them?”

“We have no way of knowing which ones have been compromised…and the V’kit’no’sat are losing a lot of ships too.”

“That seems to be in line with their plan.”

“That worries me,” Paul admitted. “They don’t throw away their lives for distractions and losing fleets of this size should be a huge blow to their ego.”

“Unless it’s part of a plan to really kick our teeth in. That would salve their ego.”

“I think they’re tired of being stalled out and are devoting a lot more of their coreward strength to us. The question is how much.”

“Wish we knew who was commanding them,” Jason said, referencing the change in command the Brat’mar interrogation had yielded without a name. “If he’s old enough we might have a file on him.”

“The fact that these troops didn’t know his name suggests a shadowy change we’re not meant to know about.”

“Think Doro’mas got punished?”

“Hard to say. He took over a hundred systems from us. I think they’re rotating commanders in to see how effective they are.”

“We’re training fodder?”

“Since they can’t kill us quickly, I’d say that’s possible. Maybe they don’t realize how much we’ve got left.”

“I don’t buy it. The harder we fight the more attention we get. They don’t like rivals.”

“They haven’t taken us serious enough to really hit us hard. Maybe the attrition has finally added up.”

“That doesn’t explain the change of command unless they’re blaming Doro’mas for not doing more with what he had.”

“Still no Rit’ko’sor. Why are they holding them back?” Paul asked, knowing from interrogations in previous centuries that the rebellious race had survived the war that saw Earth abandoned and had rejoined the V’kit’no’sat. The Brat’mar knew of them too, but not one of the tiny bipeds had shown up to fight Star Force as of yet, and their ship hulls were easily identifiable, as were those of every other V’kit’no’sat race, all of which had their own unique designs.

“Maybe they don’t trust them not to switch sides again.”

“Their population should have recovered enough by now. I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t another big war happening elsewhere in the galaxy.”

“If the Hadarak had broken out again these guys probably would have heard about it. Same goes for anything else big going on…unless they’re being kept in the dark on purpose suspecting that we might interrogate them?”

“Could be either, but it’s clear they don’t want the name of the commander known.”

“So how do you want to play this?”

“We need to get eyes on as many of their fleets as possible, even if they know we’re watching. We need a heads up before a system gets hit.”

“By ‘heads up’ you mean multiple jumps away?”

“Yeah,” Paul confirmed, knowing that meant thousands of scout ships to cover the plethora of star systems within even two jump range of an inhabited system. “And I’d bet they’ve got skirmishers out hunting scout ships to keep us from doing just that.”

“Tyrenk’s evac ship?”

“Not unless they were following standard orders to hit everything they came across. That Kaeper was following Morgan.”

“We really need more Sonics,” Jason said, referring to the ultra fast scout ships Star Force had constructed that were little more than engines, sensors, and living quarters in order to give them a speed advantage over the V’kit’no’sat. They were so limited in size that Humans weren’t able to crew them, with Star Force having to rely on the Irondel and other ‘tiny’ races within Star Force to man them with sufficient training facilities to keep them from deteriorating…and when one was chipmunk sized that didn’t take much hull space.

“There are ways to get around them,” Paul reminded him, “but yeah, I wish we had more now too. I don’t think the V’kit’no’sat are going to wait for us to build a decent detection grid.”

“So we try to think like them and go find their mega fleets personally?”

Paul smiled. “Maybe not personally, but I think we do need to start guessing and hope we get lucky,” he said as the mech he was on knocked him upright as it suddenly stepped on something explosive.

The next thing Paul knew dozens of Zen’zat were popping up in mind’s eye, apparently having been concealed within a psionic dampening ‘tent’ of some sort, and now rushing the pair of mechs in ambush.

“Are they serious?” Jason said as he detached from the shoulder and jumped down to the ground.

“I don’t feel like asking,” Paul said, extending a battlemeld link to Jason as they and the mechs began firing on the Zen’zat who were scattering like ants and shooting the larger machines with hundreds of tiny blasts that would add up in time, but there was nowhere they could go and hide that the two smaller trailblazers couldn’t follow.

Paul circled around his mech, which was now limping on a partially broken foot, and dove into a group of Zen’zat, taking several hits on his shields as he dropped an Ubven field on 7 of them, then almost comically walked out the far side as they were frozen in place and the mech fired down on them once he’d cleared.

All too easy, Paul thought, sensing Jason’s displeasure.

You’re quoting Vader now? How Sith of you.

Shut up, the trailblazer thought as the duo went after and quickly disabled the ambushing Zen’zat to give the mechs more easy kills.

10

April 15, 4813

Poro System (Devastation Zone)

Ghostblade Fleet

Vreemont sat in a control nexus, mentally interfaced with the research ship’s computer and the active scanners that were set up around every bit of recovered debris from the new V’kit’no’sat technology. He’d been working on this for weeks without much success, admiring the recent addition the enemy had made to their tech arsenal. It wasn’t the first since this war began, but almost everything the V’kit’no’sat had created Star Force had the blueprints for thanks to the pyramid database recovered on Earth prior to its being lost. Multiple copies had been made and transported rimward long before that, so the precious data that had been allowing Star Force to advance so rapidly had not been lost along with the planet.

Vreemont had been studying it virtually all his life, and now trying to figure out something else the V’kit’no’sat had made without the blueprints was quite the challenge. They’d been right to bring it to him, for he was a level 12 tech, an ‘Ultra’ Mastertech as most people referred to them, though that modifier wasn’t official. There were only 183 level 12 techs in Star Force, spread over a variety of fields, and he was the only one that dared to go into the Devastation Zone.

But he was quite at home in the Ghostblade fleet he had helped to build, and with them constantly moving about he was, in some ways, safer than sitting on a border planet. He was also traveling in one of their largest task forces…some 1,329 ships in total. That was large compared to the numbers they normally moved about in, for they needed to stay scattered and not draw attention to themselves, but Kara didn’t want to take any chances with him or the research ship, let alone the few other vital craft traveling along with him, one of which was a Star Forge-class stellar mining station that was getting them the necessary solari without having to rely on the rest of Star Force to supply it to them.

Planting that station in extreme low orbit of a star was not an easy or fast process, and it left the station vulnerable to attack, so there were plenty of warships accompanying this fleet to be able to fight off the scouts and hunter groups the V’kit’no’sat had roaming the Devastation Zone. Right now the Star Forge was packed up and waiting alongside the factory ships as the mining ones he’d helped design were chewing through an asteroid field and picking up some more critical resources to help sustain and grow Kara’s Clan fleet.

But right now this research project was occupying Vreemont’s every waking thought. Something critical was eluding him, and even with his Sav-enhanced mind he hadn’t figured it out. All the ‘Ultra’ Mastertechs had been given the psionic otherwise reserved for advanced Archons because it gave them additional brain power, both for multitasking and analysis, but what couldn’t be genetically crafted was curiosity or improvisation. Those were traits of a person’s core, which was why Vreemont had made level 12 and so many others hadn’t. He had a knack for seeing patterns and figuring out how things worked, but at the moment he was stumped.

It was a sensor, he knew that now, but how it functioned made no sense. Something was being emitted that he couldn’t trace. Power was being consumed and atomic alterations made, but the power wasn’t being accounted for. It couldn’t just disappear into nothingness. It had to be absorbed or emitted, either as light, heat, or various other forms of energy…but he could find nothing. His sensors couldn’t pick up a damn thing and he knew the interaction had to be occurring on such a microscopic level that his sensing technology was missing it.

One could only magnify so small, then the photons or other particles being used to bounce off the target suddenly became the size of the target and you lost all ability to see it. Work at such a level then had to be deduction based, which was frustrating. You had data on side effects but not the actual happenings, basically meaning you had to figure out what was going on inside a black hole as far as scientific research was concerned…and that’s where it required a keen intellect to creatively imagine what could be happening, and then to make the connections.

Vreemont had kept running through mental simulations nonstop, even when he wasn’t connected with the scientific equipment, for all it would take was a single success and the number of failed tries didn’t matter. This was a matter of persistence combined with equal portions of insight and luck.

And today his luck came through.

He’d always known the key was what was locking the lotos together, and every scan he’d performed, direct and indirect, had come up with the same conclusion…there was a force there, but no visible particle emitting it.

But now it had just hit him. There might not be a source, but rather a reflector. For there was an external element in play beyond the components in most situations, that being gravity.

Would the V’kit’no’sat have built a sensor that only worked in the presence of a gravity field? And if they did, what range would it have? Gravity technically had no range, for like light it spread out the farther and farther it traveled. Did that mean a sensor would get weaker and weaker or would there be a prerequisite amount?

The lotos. They were being peeled away from the main crystal when power was applied, but another part of the device appeared to be reintegrating them back into the crystalline lattice…or rather a second one. There were multiples within the device, and he wasn’t talking about just the fragments recovered. What if one function required the unlocking, and in that process something was produced or absorbed he was unaware of? Then there was a reverse process to recharge whatever was being set loose.

That would account for the power mystery, if gravity indeed was being used as an additional source of charge. A magnetic field could be another possibility, but he’d ruled that out as being too limited. Most planets had a magnetic field, but it was usually so low as to not matter and a sensor that only worked around planets and in near stars wouldn’t be terribly useful for tracking ships in motion.

“Captain Doornan,” Vreemont asked via the comm. “I need a favor.”

“Name it,” the Kiritas said, appearing in holo in front of the Mastertech.

“I need this ship in close to the star and the artificial gravity turned off.”

The kangaroo-like alien blinked twice. “For the entire ship?”

“No, just in a select area. I need the retrieved components exposed to the natural gravity of the star.”

“It’ll take a few hours.”

“I know, but I think I’m onto something and I need to test my theory.”

“Gladly then. We’ll head there now.”

“Thank you,” Vreemont said as he ended the comm and the research ship began moving, though he couldn’t feel it. An inertial dampening field protected him from that and the gravity fields, though technically they still pulled on the field and everything in it, making it feel like there was no gravity effect the same way a ship in orbit felt like it was floating. All parts of it were being pulled on equally, thus there was no feeling of compression like you’d have on the surface when the gravity was squeezing you against it. On the ship an artificial gravity field was generated within the IDF to the level they liked, and Vreemont suspected that was nowhere near powerful enough for what he needed.

As promised it took a few hours to get from the asteroid field back in close to the star, then when the ship hit the proper position it allowed itself to begin falling towards the star so the components that were soon to be unprotected wouldn’t crash and crush on the floor against the engine strain.

That meant Vreemont had a limited amount of time before the ship had to alter course or ram into the star, but the captured and reassembled V’kit’no’sat components began working in a limited fashion, with the loose lotos suddenly beginning to lock together when power was applied to the device…but they hadn’t previously when he tried, meaning that the gravity field of the star was necessary.

But that shouldn’t have mattered, for the strength of the artificial gravity was plenty high. There had to be a collection mechanism to draw more of it to the ship within the device.

“Captain, are we experiencing any navigational anomalies?”

“We were just looking at that. The angular direction of the star has changed according to the gravity drives. Not much, but it’s off .4%.”

Vreemont smiled. “That’s my fault, Captain. This device is probably sucking the gravimetric particles towards it like a fat kid in a candy shop.”

“What?”

“My apologies. It’s an old expression. Somehow this device is pulling the gravimetric particles into it, thus altering the trajectory of those nearby that still miss.”

“I didn’t think we had any technology that could do that,” the Kiritas noted curiously. “That could mess with ship jumps, could it not?”

“In theory yes, but I suspect you’d need a much larger device and it’d only nudge one slightly off course. Approaches would be an inconvenience only. Outgoing jumps could be skewed but automatic correction devices would null it out. No, this is something else entirely.”

“Do you know what we’ve got?”

“I’m starting to get an idea. I think this sensor has to have a gravitational recharge.”

“Any idea what kind of beam it uses?”

“Not yet, but I’m getting close. I can feel it.”

“You’ve got another 36 minutes before we have to climb again. Will us reestablishing the artificial gravity cause anything more than an inconvenience?”

“I don’t know. Give me a heads up before you do so I can shut down the device just in case. We don’t want it broken any more than it is now.”

“Understood.”

Vreemont ended the conversation so he could apply his full attention to the problem. He was close, damn close, but he was missing just one piece of information.

What exactly were the locked lotos emitting?

11

May 16, 4813

Termunisef System (H’kar Region, Star Force territory)

Tavai

Paul stood suspended in an energy field as he was mentally linked into a mech training simulator, but rather than piloting the single craft he was handling 11 simultaneously. All but his were drone models, and he was running his 2 accompanying stars of mechs in a very active challenge that kept him pressed to his limits. He’d controlled far more units navally in real combat before, but this was different in that he wasn’t just directing the mechs, he was using his own mental balance programs instead of those in the machines themselves…meaning he had to feel each and every step they took, every arm lift, every torso twist.

And Paul had to do that to navigate the uneven terrain fast enough to stay ahead of the horde of minibots pursuing him while fighting enemies in front, to the sides, above, and below in the form of aerial craft, infantry, heavy infantry, opposing mechs, burrower bots, and goo spitters. This was a challenge that he’d tried some 387 times to pass and failed, and while Paul was best at the Naval and Commando divisions, his Archon rank was measured by his weakest category…which currently was Mechs thanks to this persistent nuisance of a challenge.

His aquatics weren’t much better, but that was only from his point of view. Compared to the rest of Star Force his aquatic and mech skills were superior to almost everyone else’s, and the challenges to advance further were tailored to capitalize on that point, making this and those beyond virtually impossible to beat. Paul knew the key was to keep fighting while advancing, but the computerized opponents were designed to prevent that at all times.

But it was just a program, not live opponents. In real life the computer enemies were probably harder, save for when you met the unexpected or the extremely skilled. The challenge programming had accounted for the former with a high degree of randomization, so even while Paul knew exactly what the computer would do, he had a list of options rather than certainties, making each attempt a different kind of failure…and today was no different. Eventually his two stars plus one, while all surviving, got slowed down enough that the minibot swarms caught up to them and then it was all over.

It took several minutes of fighting and dying before it became official, but there was no way his mechs could survive hundreds of thousands of the dog-like machines nibbling away at them and slowing them even further with varied means of technological ‘glue’ such as gravity mines and trip lines. When the challenge was finally lost Paul took a few long breaths then triggered the energy field release, dropping him back to his own feet as his senses fully returned to his body from the disconcerting 11-way split his head had been locked into.

Paul left the mech training chamber and headed for the nearby track in the planetary sanctum, needing an easy run as a transition before another hard challenge…this one aerial…to give his mind a break. When he got there he pretty much had the halo track to himself, jogging up the ramp-like entrance and turning left as he ran on the ‘wall’ that had its own artificial gravity. He disappeared into the tunnel that looped around for a stretch of 5 miles with multiple entrances, but there just weren’t that many Archons around here, which was understandable.

Tavai was a H’kar planet well in from the front that was both a mining and logistics stronghold, with almost as many Kiritak as H’kar…but very few Archons. The sanctum was built to match others across Star Force territory and was the exclusive training grounds of the Archons while the mass of other personnel had their own facilities. Paul could use theirs whenever he liked, but only the sanctums had the necessary high level equipment to accommodate a trailblazer. His command ship had a smaller version than what planets had, and as long as the Excalibur was parked in orbit he was going to take advantage of the extras available here.

A lot of those extras were group training courses for which a lone individual had no use, but there were unique, non-testing courses that his ship didn’t have and sometimes one needed to train just to improve rather than focusing on a challenge requirement, but at the moment Paul was still clawing his way up the ranks in all 5 divisions, but would be stuck at Goku 18 until he got past that mech challenge. In the past he would have kept hammering it over and over until he got it, but he’d learned to bounce around from discipline to discipline rather than get stuck in a rut. He’d be back to it tomorrow, but for today he was going to work other areas while his new fleet began to assemble.

What was left of his original fleet had been cannibalized and sent off to reinforce others as they stayed in the Devastation Zone fighting off V’kit’no’sat attacks on a total of 13 different hidden bases. Comm lag had eventually reported them all in, though there still could be some happening now that Paul wouldn’t know about for a week or two now that he was out of the Devastation Zone but still close enough to stay in the loop. Only the Excalibur remained under his command, with his mass of Warship-class jumpships having been reassigned or, for the empty ones, sent further back into Star Force territory for repair work and to pick up new drone complements rather than wasting shipping resources to move them all out here.

As it was, Paul was going to be out of the fight for a while even though he could have pulled rank and took possession of his own repurposed fleet by combining others, but in truth this was a better location to respond to any front incursion that occurred rather than being stuck on the other side of the DZ if and when it happened…and Paul was convinced it was going to happen soon, for the V’kit’no’sat were chewing up their fleets and expending huge numbers of their own ships to do it. That signaled to him that they were creating a moment of opportunity to strike from, for he didn’t think they’d sent enough ships to continue this pace of attrition. If they had, he knew they wouldn’t be patient and just run them up to the front and hammer away. They were being strategic here to set up a hammer blow they weren’t convinced would work without the roaming fleets having been neutralized…as Paul’s now was.

Sara’s too, along with Greg’s. Three of the 19 trailblazers out wandering the Devastation Zone were now sidelined due to lack of drones, though most of their jumpships still remained. Not quite as useless as old fashioned aircraft carriers back in the pre-Star Force days, the Warship-class jumpships could definitely fight on their own, but without a drone fleet to carry and disperse, they would have to slug it out with V’kit’no’sat ships sometimes larger than them…and that would endanger the crew inside. Star Force didn’t fight that way except as a last ditch action, so no one was going to send a fleet of empty jumpships into combat and waste them in a fight the V’kit’no’sat would very much like to see.

So he and the others would have to wait until more drones came in from the ever growing production facilities here and rimward. There were over 7,000 star systems in ‘safe’ territory that were producing drones for the DZ fleets, whether in small numbers or great, in addition to other systems providing the drones for the lesser wars being fought elsewhere, for as many highly developed systems the V’kit’no’sat took from Star Force, the Human-led empire was expanding out to 10 others rimward.

They weren’t conquering them, rather moving into uninhabited areas or annexing other races that petitioned for membership. Conditions were bad out there, bad enough that there was a long list of races and civilizations that wanted help, allegiance, or membership…too many for them to get to in the wake of The Nexus’s collapse. That mammoth civilization was still around, but its primary weakness had been claiming territory it couldn’t control, for they’d sprinkled a few of their own worlds amongst the other masses while claiming dominion over them…so when those few sprinkles fell to enemies, vast tracks of territory were now open to the predation of others.

Before the V’kit’no’sat war had begun the situation with The Nexus had been deteriorating but not nearly this bad, and even then there had been a steady stream of refugees leaving it to come into Star Force. Now that number had increased exponentially, despite the fact that they were told of the V’kit’no’sat threat gobbling up the coreward side of the empire…but that was a long way away and the need of these people was in the here and now, so Director Davis and the other trailblazers were out there adding to and stabilizing those newly acquired regions while making plans to push even further out and collect more of the scraps the dying Nexus left behind.

Current that massive civilization still held their major systems, but they were now reduced to a skeleton of what they once were. The threat of their intervention was now almost nonexistent, and that bluff in the past had been what held their limited control over the vast regions they controlled in the Perseus and Cygnus galactic arms. Now it was gone and the territories they’d held sway over but did not directly own were in revolt and there was little The Nexus races could do about it other than to bunker down and try to protect what they still had.

Star Force had, to date, annexed 38 former Nexus races on the coreward edge of that civilization’s territory, with another 13 having requested membership but were too far away to include yet. There were some Star Force fleets out there trying to help them survive, but the fact was that Star Force wasn’t going to make the same mistake The Nexus did and leapfrog over entire regions and hope that they didn’t become a cancer from within.

And what Davis was accomplishing out there was nothing short of truly amazing…but he could never do enough, for the continuing collapse of The Nexus was killing so many people, even entire races in some places, as formerly suppressed threats reared their ugly heads and went on a rampage. Others faced logistical nightmares as the former economy of The Nexus that had sustained them pulled back out of their territories, leaving them stranded and trying to find enough foodstuffs just to keep their people alive.

It was a nightmare that Star Force was chipping away at…and those races like the Tolsoi and H’kar that had been the first members to switch over were now solidly defended and exporting Star Force drone warships to other factions, adding to the industrial muscle of the empire as it fought to replace the losses from the old ADZ that the V’kit’no’sat had eliminated long, long ago.

Paul had helped a member race called the Vedran switch over and stabilize, but once the V’kit’no’sat had returned he’d come straight back and let others guide the Vedran. This was the fight he was meant for and where he was needed the most, but Star Force’s ultimate survival was going to depend on the expansion efforts and how many replacement drones they could produce…for this was primarily a naval war, and if Paul could hold the black sky he could defend worlds like this one without the V’kit’no’sat ever landing a single Zen’zat on the surface.

But the reverse was also true, and too much naval power by the enemy meant they could obliterate a world like this without even landing a single Zen’zat on it. The V’kit’no’sat were still better than them, but commanders like Paul, Roger, and Liam made up the difference and then some, but they couldn’t wish away bad numbers, and right now the fleet strength in the DZ was getting lower and lower. Soon it would be so low that when the V’kit’no’sat chose a target to smash on the front they’d get it…assuming they had enough ships left to mount the assault…because Star Force wouldn’t have much in the way of huge reinforcement fleets to send, though the surrounding systems would chip in.

And that would further weaken those systems to assault. The DZ roaming fleets were the backup to hold the front, and so long as they were out and moving and the V’kit’no’sat didn’t know exactly where they were Star Force had an advantage, for if the V’kit’no’sat launched an attack they wouldn’t know how many ships they actually needed, and could in fact be outnumbered if one or more of the mega fleets arrived to join the fight.

But eliminate those fleets and the combat math became a lot more simple for the attackers.

There were Defender fleets roaming Star Force territory to make sure the V’kit’no’sat didn’t dash past the border and hit worlds further in or skirt around the edges and get into the far rim areas where Star Force was weaker. But if those fleets had to come out to the front then a lot more people would be left vulnerable further back. It was up to the roaming fleets and the trailblazers commanding them to protect the front, and right now they didn’t have enough naval toys left to do it.

And Paul knew the V’kit’no’sat weren’t going to give them a breather so they could make more…which was why he knew the hammer blow was coming soon. He just hoped he could be back in the fight when it began with more than the Excalibur and the few dozen fully loaded jumpships assembled in a parking orbit further out that he would be commandeering once those numbers began to pool from resources that otherwise would have been flowing to the Uriti Preserve.

There was no point in sending them all the way out there when the need was here, and both Sara and Greg had pointedly told Paul that he got first dibs on the new ships and had appropriately assigned themselves to system defense in two of the strongest positions on the front where the V’kit’no’sat ego might demand they hit first…unless they were being less bold and hitting at the weakest areas. If they were that would mean either a change in strategy or the loss of more ships in combat with the roaming fleets than they had anticipated. Either way, Paul was all but sure they were going to take at least one more system, but his gut said dozens or this whole poaching expedition within the DZ wouldn’t be worth it to them.

But he was wrong. Dead wrong. And word came through the haphazard relay grid across the DZ that the V’kit’no’sat had gone for one of the two biggest prizes and hit Grid Point Stargate’s guardian system, Tarric 3. Shortly thereafter, while Paul was mentally kicking himself for being stuck on the sidelines, he got word that they’d lost the system and had to retreat back to the Grid Point that was located nearby and essentially formed its own star system…but one that had to move through Tarric 3 to access other star systems, for the gravity field generated by the huge construct wasn’t enough to allow travel anywhere else using gravity drives save for the guardian system.

Over the following weeks the V’kit’no’sat did not press in to the Grid Point itself, and Paul knew they wouldn’t. They knew what kind of defenses it had, and no matter how inviting a target all that infrastructure around the construct was…let alone the magnetic jump platform itself…he didn’t think them so foolish to try and get it at, for it would cost them as many ships as taking down a Hadarak and they’d have to come in a few at a time on a very slow approach.

No, that Grid Point was secure and was going to stay secure save for some off the wall strategy that Paul couldn’t predict, but it was almost pointless. The V’kit’no’sat hadn’t just driven Star Force from Tarric 3. They’d claimed possession of the empty system and were now blockading the Grid Point, meaning that any ships that came through the mag jump had nowhere to go except back the way they came.

And now Star Force couldn’t hop halfway across the Devastation Zone then move out from Tarric 3. They’d have to take the long, slow route that would give the V’kit’no’sat a lot more control over the region and make roaming fleets operating anti-spinward of the old ADZ very far from help if they got into trouble.

Losing Tarric 3 was a major gut punch, but less than a month later light probing actions started to pop up along the front systems. Small groupings of V’kit’no’sat ships would enter on obscure jumplines and try to hit some vulnerable Star Force ships before fleeing. They would pop in and pop out, not just in the front systems but those in the DZ that connected to them, as if in some giant shell game concealing what their true target was.

Paul knew it was more than that. They were trying to provoke a response as much as to dictate Star Force’s fleet and civilian movements…with a massive exodus of non-essential personnel beginning to be transported off those worlds in anticipation of a strike.

The Termunisef System was 3 jumps away from the front. Two if you wanted to stretch a bit with an extra powerful gravity drive on a scout ship. So if an attack was going to come nearby Paul could get there, but the front itself stretched some 2,000+ lightyears in width and was 1,000+ lightyears in height. That was a huge wall to monitor, let alone defend, and the V’kit’no’sat knew it. Now, with ships moving everywhere, it was going to make it much harder for Star Force to try and guess where the next hit was going to be.

Paul was starting to feel a major shift coming in favor of the V’kit’no’sat when he got some badly needed good news from the DZ. It came in the form of a message from Vreemont telling him that they’d discovered the function and application of the recovered technology from the Kaeper crash on Darlek.

Paul read it quickly but carefully, scrolling through the detailed text explanation even as the Mastertech’s hologram explained the basic points verbally.

“The system we have patched together is only partially functional, but it has been enough to determine that it is a sensor package extremely limited in scope that functions off a form of energy that we do not even have a name for, let alone the ability to detect. It is produced in the decay of bonded lonos and travels at a rate of 17.3 lightspeed…however, reception is negated by IDF and blurred by artificial gravity fields.”

“Also, the sensor must be recharged in a heavy gravity field. It draws gravimetric particles to it, warping the gravity field flow slightly as it gathers them, enabling the relocking of the lonos. In this way they save an expendable charge. The unlocking causes more than a reverse procedure, and the energy produced…which I’m tentatively calling ‘Ghostbane’… is sent omni-directional. For this reason the sensor is located as close to the hull as possible to give maximum exposure assuming the IDF and artificial gravity are not shut down shipwide for use.”

“You can figure out the tactical value of that for yourself, but the key is that the Ghostbane ignores matter entirely. It only seems to interact with substances that alter gravity. Particularly the cores of gravity drives and the emitters in AG devices.”

Paul stopped listening right there as the implications became clear. This new tech didn’t function like a normal sensor. It hunted for one thing and one thing only, and was a pain in the ass to use from the sound of it. But every ship in the fleet used gravity drives, so even if this Ghostbane energy couldn’t see the hulls or crew onboard it could ping for the location of the drives…and where surface bases were concerned that did not have gravity drives, they did have artificial gravity normalizing the planet’s gravity to Star Force standards within the bases.

Paul needed to send out a message for the fleets and bases in the DZ, but first he listened to and read through the rest of the data. The Devastation Zone was huge and the V’kit’no’sat finding every single base in it was doubtful unless they had a lot of time to search. He got the feeling that they either followed ships to the bases that had been attacked or they’d been systematically scanning systems with stealth vessels until they had comprised the list they’d hit to draw Star Force out. If the other bases had yet to be discovered they could be salvaged by turning off the artificial gravity, for the notes that Vreemont sent said that even a minimally charged gravity drive on standby was sufficient to produce a reflective ping, and the same was true for an AG field generator.

They’d have to be powered off entirely and have even standby power physically disabled. That wasn’t an option for ships that had to move, but the bases could be kept hidden if they didn’t use any AG devices, either in the infrastructure or in the form of vehicles.

That wouldn’t work for all bases, because low gravity really sucked the strength out of people, but bases with higher than normal gravity could remain and the others temporarily abandoned until some way to camouflage them was created. So far Vreemont couldn’t even guess at that, but Paul had the answer he needed…as well as understanding why the V’kit’no’sat had tried to smash the technology rather than let it fall into enemy hands.

Vreemont’s notes said there was enough that Star Force should be able to start experimenting with creating their own version of the sensor in coming years, and if that was put into play then they’d be able to find V’kit’no’sat stealth ships…and maybe even the KOQ ones.

Damn…he really wanted to try that option out even though they were tentative allies, but the implications and saving grace of this discovery were rolling through his mind, with the saving grace being that the hidden comm relays didn’t have gravity drives, for they were positioned so far out in star systems that they didn’t have to worry about moving.

That meant they were invisible to this kind of sensor, meaning the V’kit’no’sat weren’t going to wipe the DZ clean of them. That was a huge relief, but every stealth ship Paul had was going to be picked up by hidden V’kit’no’sat observation posts, and if they had their own relay network in place the fleet commanders were going to have to work a lot harder to move around without being spotted…especially when they didn’t know if they were being spotted or not, but getting an alert detector built was high on Vreemont’s wish list, so at least a ship could tell when they were being scanned and from what direction the scan was coming from.

It would take months at the minimum to get even a fraction of their ships equipped with that if they had the technology right now, but at least the countdown clock had started ticking, for this message hadn’t just gone to Paul. It was traveling throughout Star Force territory and techs across the empire would begin working on all possible applications.

Paul sent a quick thank you to Tyrenk, the Archon who had been quick witted enough to save what pieces the V’kit’no’sat had been trying to further smash, then the trailblazer began communicating new orders and suggestions to the defense fleets, system defenders, and roaming DZ fleets. Now that they knew what they were up against they could fight it, but for now the V’kit’no’sat still held a serious advantage over them.

Time. Star Force needed time to catch up on this, but Paul doubted they were going to get too much of it. Hopefully the V’kit’no’sat still didn’t know they’d gotten their hands on a Ghostbane sensor…

Paul sent one more message back to Vreemont, officially sanctioning that name, then recorded a hologram for Davis going over the strategic and tactical implications of this new world of warfare the V’kit’no’sat had been the first to break into.

12

July 12, 4813

Jennizeren System (Star Force Front)

Ennvor

The Jennizeren System had once been on the back edge of the Occupation Zone, taken from the lizards during the conquest of their rimward territories between the ADZ and H’kar territory, then built up into a decent sized colony on three of the 6 planets. But when the V’kit’no’sat war began and people started flooding out of the ADZ many ended up here, far from the fighting, and the Monarch in charge, Baron Tovren, had put anyone of sufficient skill to use here, incentivizing many to stay and avoid moving on to the Rim Region.

He knew the V’kit’no’sat would eventually fight their way out here, and while he had no illusions about being able to fight them off when Sol and Epsilon Eridani couldn’t, he had always intended to make them bleed for it. Because of his efforts begun over a thousand years ago, Jennizeren was a point further into the Devastation Zone along the front, with weaker systems having been hit while the Baron’s system was avoided.

That wasn’t going to last, and he’d known in recent decades that his system’s time was soon to be up. He’d prepared well, and had used the valuable resources within his system to build a larger than average system defense fleet, but today was the first day it had ever been used en mass, with his fleets congregating around low stellar orbit as the enemy fleet began pouring in along one of the many incoming jumplines.

Tovren didn’t control the fighting. Rather he sat back and watched as the Archons handled that. His job now was to assist them as he could and organize the evacuation efforts. Already people had been moved out all along the front, and he’d been reducing the number of outright civilians for years, making this planet and the other 5 essentially prepped battlefields to fight on, but now, seeing this day finally come, he was worried. People were going to die here in the coming days, no matter how well the evacuation went, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it.

Tovren was now a Count, having been promoted two centuries back, but that didn’t give him any special powers that Baron did not. He’d been quietly given a number of psionics when he became a Monarch, including Sav, but his job was to handle logistics and planning…things done prior to a battle, or things done to support those in battle on far off systems. Now the war had arrived at his little island in the ocean of space and he was at least happy to see several V’kit’no’sat ships blow up soon after entry as the assembled system defense drones combined their firepower and literally annihilated the Kafcha-class vessels.

But their mass was so high and it took so much firepower that the death of those ships allowed many more to arrive behind them, soon billowing to such numbers that a retreat was ordered. Stellar orbit was forfeited to the V’kit’no’sat while the fleet was going to pull back and force a fight in range of the planetary defenses where they’d be the most effective in killing enemy ships. If they stayed in deep space and fought it’d be to the V’kit’no’sat’s advantage, but now the evacuation ships were going to have to wait for an opening and escort, for the enemy ships were sending out small groups to all the major jumplines and effectively blockading the system.

But there they stayed, for days leading into weeks. Their fleet size was large, but even the Count could tell that it was light for what it would take to conquer this system. They could do it with what they had, but Star Force would make them bleed heavily for it and any reinforcement coming in from other systems would tip the scales in their favor.

Tovren knew help would come, and the V’kit’no’sat must have known that too, so what were they waiting for? Every day that passed meant reinforcements would be closer and with the relay network intact the Archons would know which jumplines to use coming in and which ones were blocked. The V’kit’no’sat couldn’t poach all of them with enough ships to make a dent, and there were some very long range jumps on unlikely jumplines that could be used to get the first group of ships in cleanly.

It made no sense to Tovren, but there they stayed, almost waiting for the system defense drones and the limited number of warships that controlled them from afar to get frustrated and bring the fight to them…but that wasn’t going to happen, so there was a stalemate and staring match going on, making Count Tovren wonder what in the hell were the V’kit’no’sat playing at.

Paul watched on Tavai via the relay network as the V’kit’no’sat invaded 6 different front systems with a large number of ships, but didn’t go any further than combat in stellar orbit. They assaulted no planet, but blockaded the systems as best they could, though they couldn’t keep all ships in or out. Several smaller fleet groups had gotten in and increased the defensive ship count, as well as some escorted evacuation ships taking more people out, but the normal traffic flow had been shut down in these 6 systems that were spread out across the central third of the front.

They weren’t close to each other, meaning any of the roaming fleets would have to choose where to go. If/when they got there they’d thump the V’kit’no’sat fleets, for they weren’t large enough to tackle them and the system defenders, but Paul knew there had to be more enemy fleets lurking nearby…the question was where?

He had access to limited sensors in many of the systems beyond the border, and if a large fleet passed through them he’d see it. So he could eliminate those systems, lag assumed, but that still left a lot of other pathways they could be using to get to the front. He also didn’t know where the roaming fleets were, exactly, just their last known check-in points. He also had information from Tarric 3, confirming that the huge blockading fleet was still there, meaning these ships had come from somewhere else.

Already there were over 230,000 V’kit’no’sat ships identified in the Devastation Zone at different locations. Many of the high profile wars the V’kit’no’sat had fought in the past had used less than that, and prior to this new invasion the highest number known was 78,000. When grouped together they were literally unstoppable, but Star Force had been getting better and better at trimming their numbers, and with thousands of star systems left for the V’kit’no’sat to conquer the attrition had gradually added up and the rim regions had begun to produce more and more drones, making this almost a fair fight.

Apparently the V’kit’no’sat did not like that, so they’d devoted a slight larger fraction of their empire’s forces to this purge of the rogue Zen’zat, as they’d labeled it. And to be fair, they’d purged a lot of them and their worlds to date, but the time it had taken them to do the damage they had was their Achilles heel. Had they devoted 230,000 initially Star Force would probably have been annihilated by now, but Paul and others had been continually upgrading the drones and the Star Force navy in general, which the V’kit’no’sat had recently been schooled about.

That said, it looked like the V’kit’no’sat were getting exactly what they wanted. Grid Point Stargate was now neutralized and Paul’s own fleet was destroyed/disbanded. In a way that was actually advantageous, because he could remain in constant contact with the relay grid here and see what was going on better than bouncing around unlinked systems in the DZ, but not having him in these fights was going to be a disadvantage. As soon as he figured out where he needed to go he was going to board the Excalibur and head there…but where that would be still eluded him.

It might not actually be any of the 6 systems currently besieged, with these being a big distraction that could then be turned into an assault if Star Force sent ships elsewhere. At least the V’kit’no’sat were not so overconfident to just charge into whatever system they wanted assuming they could take it. Losses inflicted on them must have finally taught them a lesson…or maybe this was the work of their new commander.

Whoever was calling the shots, they had Paul guessing up until the first hammer blow came. A few months later a full fledged assault came on the far ‘left’ side of the front, then another on the opposite side with the 6 besieged systems remaining as they were with those fleets ready to act whenever they decided to push the attack into the planets.

Paul didn’t leave. He could tell they were stretching Star Force out, and his gut suspected that a major assault was going to push into more than just one system and he needed to be there soon after it happened, not stuck a couple months away out on the wings.

But where was it coming…

Then it hit Paul. This wasn’t a push for a single system, nor even a group of them. The V’kit’no’sat were attacking in a way to erode Star Force’s defenses along the entire front. Drawing them into battle and bleeding them of ships the same way they had done in the Devastation Zone.

Paul knew they had far more than 230,000 in play, now confirmed to be up to 311,000 based on ship identifiers that the V’kit’no’sat had never bothered to fake. When not hiding they broadcast who they were, with ship and racial IDs, and sometimes even who the commander was and what ship they were on, daring Star Force to come after them personally. The V’kit’no’sat were ego incarnate…but they were not stupid, and whoever was running this part of their purging efforts wasn’t going for a chunk of the front.

They were trying to cripple the entire front, followed by a massive wave of attacks…if Paul was right…that would sweep up hundreds, if not a thousand systems before Star Force could bleed the V’kit’no’sat into another stalemate. The key was always the fleets. Take them away and the systems were a known quantity that scouts could size up. Bring in an overwhelming force and you could take them with a minimum of losses, one by one.

And Paul knew that was exactly what the V’kit’no’sat were going to try. Whatever had changed in their empire had finally got them taking Star Force seriously and they were going to drive them completely out of the Orion Arm.

After that they wouldn’t let them go. They’d pursue them until every Star Force world was obliterated, and with all those systems gone Paul and the others wouldn’t be getting so many replacement drones and the attrition curve would snowball in the V’kit’no’sat’s advantage. Star Force had a few centuries left, maybe a millennia a most, then they’d be reduced to a handful of secret systems that couldn’t hold all the evacuees…not that there would be many left with multiple assaults happening everywhere and too few ships to move everyone.

The V’kit’no’sat had sized them up well this time, and they were accepting an unseemly number of losses to accomplish it. It appeared they had finally had enough of this war and were sending what they deemed necessary to quash it, and in doing so acknowledging how dangerous Star Force really was.

They weren’t fighting against an inferior anymore. They were fighting them as if they were a worthy opponent…and an opponent that they could now track with impunity thanks to the Ghostbane sensor.

That gave them more data on how many ships Star Force had in the DZ, making Paul wonder just how many scout ships they had out there equipped with that sensor. The fog of war had lifted a bit for them and now they sensed an opportunity. Had Paul and the other trailblazers not been the strategic masterminds they were Star Force would have been destroyed long ago, but now it seemed they were finally about to get overwhelmed and the rolling tide of losses not seen since the beginning of the war was going to resume in a gradual wave of destruction that would consume all who didn’t turn and run for the deep rim as fast as they could, then lose themselves in the wilds where the V’kit’no’sat would never find them.

Paul knew it with certainty now. There were a lot more V’kit’no’sat ships on the way, and rather than waste them to eliminate the Grid Point or attack the Preserve, they were going for the mass of weaker targets that were the industrial strength of the empire…but they weren’t going to get them. Paul still had two tricks up his sleeve, and he appropriately sent two message out now, for it would take time to assemble them all.

He didn’t know if it would be enough, but at the very least the V’kit’no’sat were going to get a worthy fight…and if they did end up winning it, they were going to have to earn it the hard way.

12 days later…

One of Paul’s messages made its way across the Devastation Zone to a Ghostblade fleet, one of many that were in the DZ and ranging far beyond into systems that had no Star Force or V’kit’no’sat presence doing their nomad thing and staying away from everyone as they sought out unclaimed resources. Harvesting them and moving on, they grew their fleets and assaulted a few V’kit’no’sat ships when they had the chance.

Kara’s fleet was in the Devastation Zone, for she didn’t want to get too far away from the action, but she only had a few hundred ships with her. Not a battlegroup but another of the civilian/warship combos that most Ghostblade fleet groups were comprised of. She was onboard her flagship, the Yi, which was a modified Melee-class command ship rebuilt in Ghostblade fashion. It’s design was unique, for nowhere else in her widespread fleets was there another, and Kara spent 99% of her time onboard the vessel bouncing from system to system organizing her Clan from afar and camping out in the onboard sanctum working her way towards Goku rank, for which she was only 3 levels away.

When the message came in from Paul it was relayed from a Ghostblade scout ship sitting next to a stationary relay and sipping off the data it collected, then the specially designed scout ship transmitted the data in a burst to the systems where it knew others would be, essentially creating a link to wherever Kara’s command ship was. The scout ships didn’t have a lot of range, definitely not what the relays had that could send signals in excess of 43 lightyears, but put enough of them in a string knowing where Kara was and was going to go, and she had her data link into the grid while maintaining her clandestine roaming status.

That meant Paul’s message got to her right away, but it wasn’t a hologram. Rather it was a simple text message containing only 4 words.

The beacons are lit.

A chill ran through her the moment she saw them, having waited for this day since her Clan was founded in secret so the V’kit’no’sat would not know of its existence even if they penetrated Star Force computer systems on captured worlds, for there was no record of Ghostblade anywhere. It was the Clan that did not exist…until now.

Kara bolted from the terminal in her quarters where she read the message and ran through the ship straight to the bridge.

“Everyone listen up!” she yelled unnecessarily, for the crew of some 128 individuals there were almost whisper quiet already, but the adoptive trailblazer was so pumped with adrenaline they all noticed immediately by the tone of her voice. “We’re being recalled. All of us. I don’t know what’s happened, but Paul just signaled for us to come out of the shadows. Issue immediate recall orders and get couriers moving ASAP. Bring them to the rally points and tell them to move at maximum speed. The front is already under assault, and if I’m right it’s about to get a lot hotter and we’re going to be needed.”

“Geez,” her ship Captain said under his breath, with the Bsidd standing well taller than her on its spindly, insect-like frame. “If he’s calling us in it must really be bad. He let the ADZ fall and still didn’t activate us.”

“And it was the right call to make,” Kara said firmly. “Otherwise we would never have grown as large as we have. Everyone get moving. Now!”

8 days later…

Paul’s second message wasn’t meant for the Devastation Zone, but rather headed rimward past the original Rim Region and into some of the more lawless areas that Star Force had been working to build up the infrastructure in and wrangle into new annexes of their empire. It wasn’t the rimward front, but somewhere in between where the message landed on a planet named by Paul himself.

It was on Csilla that the message found its recipient, a planet of enormous size and a gravity of 3.2g mitigated down to the Star Force norm of 1.0g in the cities that covered nearly all of its hot surface. Originally it had been uninhabited and barren, but now it was a Paladin world and home to the original mastermind that Paul had turned to the Star Force side long ago.

Aptly named Thrawn by the trailblazer, the 7 foot tall lizard was unique in that his body was a mix of the original green scales and the Paladin blue, for he hadn’t been born Paladin as almost all others had. There were still a few originals left, but they’d made the full conversion to the Paladin genome, having pure blue skin in addition to other minor internal alterations.

The trailblazer Paul had given Thrawn a unique honor of the binary coloration in addition to a peculiarity in his eyes. They now glowed red, like a Protovic’s, but when asked why Paul has simply said nostalgia. In later years Thrawn and his superior intellect succeeded in digging through Human records and identifying his fictitious namesake who also had red glowing eyes and whose homeworld was Csilla.

One might have saw those references as an insult, but Thrawn knew it was just the opposite. To be named for one of the legends that the trailblazers idolized was an enormous honor, especially amongst the Li’vorkrachnika, for Thrawn hadn’t even been given a name in that civilization. None of the ‘lizards,’ as Star Force had called them, had anything more than an identification number, for they weren’t expected to survive long enough to need one. Even masterminds like Thrawn had been bred to fulfill a specific purpose and were deemed disposable so long as their deaths benefited their civilization.

Thrawn had learned everything he needed through genetic memory, literally being born ready to lead trillions of Li’vorkrachnika into battle much like the legendary Thrawn had. Thrawn was smart, cunning, curious, but also cruel. The Li’vorkrachnika were worse, and he kept that part of the legend as a reminder as well, for it had taken centuries for Paul to instill in him the necessity of compassion and the reasoning why even the simplest of personnel were not expendable.

Years of combat experience told him otherwise, for the Li’vorkrachnika had grown a massive empire based on expendable personnel applications and had never faced a true challenge until they attacked Star Force. They had almost beaten them, but Star Force’s growth rate was so astounding that they actually surpassed the Li’vorkrachnika even as they were losing, then turned the invasion backwards against them and succeeded in conquering all of their original territory.

The Li’vorkrachnika had emigrated coreward during those losses where Star Force would not go, but Thrawn had been captured and interrogated by Paul as he fought to hurt Star Force as much as possible before he died, covering for the Templars as they ran and let trillions to perish.

But that’s how the Li’vorkrachnika lived and died, serving their civilization and the Templars who led it. Now Thrawn knew otherwise, for Paul had taught him much, even overcoming his genetic memories and tendencies. Now he was Paladin, through and through, and those that were left to die while the Templars ran were mostly destroyed, but not all. Star Force, with his help, had converted many over to their side and they eventually were transformed into Paladin…but no matter how much Thrawn wanted to treat the Paladin as expendable Paul and the others wouldn’t have it, with many arguments over even the simplest application as the trailblazers gradually opened his eyes to the truth.

Now Thrawn fought as they did, preserving his troops as long as possible, but when battles turned bad and Star Force was defending locations they couldn’t abandon without leaving people to die…that was combat that Thrawn knew more about than anyone in Star Force, including the trailblazers. No one wanted to fight like that, but as the mastermind of war that he’d been bred to be he knew that one did not always have a choice in the fights they faced. And the Li’vorkrachnika, for all their flaws, knew how to turn losing situations into victories using ugly tactics.

For the longest time Paul had told Thrawn he wasn’t ready to face the V’kit’no’sat, and that his skills were better put to use out here against enemies inferior to Star Force but needing to be fought just the same. For centuries Thrawn had been fighting and helping Star Force grow its empire while the trailblazers and others fought the largest, toughest enemy ever seen. It felt wrong not to be in that fight, but over time as Thrawn had analyzed the battle records he realized Paul had been right. The Li’vorkrachnika methods were insufficient against an enemy such as the V’kit’no’sat, and only Star Force, born of V’kit’no’sat legacy, could stand toe to toe with them and survive.

So Thrawn continued his assigned missions leading segments of the Paladin while other Viceroys, which were the upgraded version of the original ‘masterminds,’ worked with Archons to grow massive numbers of combat troops on location where needed, taking a single Paladin ship to a remote world and using it a like a seed to produce armies of workers and troops with full genetic knowledge, forgoing the typical Star Force maturia phase of growth and putting Thrawn’s kin directly into field work.

That was the purpose of the Paladin, and because of it they were very useful against equal or lesser opponents. Even superior ones so long as they didn’t greatly outscale them. But the weakness in the Paladin was their lack of expertise, with individuals living for thousands of years having skills far superior to the genetic memory of Paladin just coming into existence.

That meant the Paladin were ill suited to fighting the V’kit’no’sat, which was why Thrawn was genuinely surprised at Paul’s holographic message.

“We are at a turning point,” the blue haired Human that Thrawn had the utmost respect for said calmly. “The V’kit’no’sat are finally taking us seriously and mounting a widescale assault that I believe is designed to trim away our fleets so they can assault systems without reinforcement, overwhelming them and minimizing their own losses as they sweep up hundreds of systems before attrition ends them. If they receive additional reinforcements they could push the assault to our total eradication.”

“If we are going to fight this, we must counter their numbers initially to bleed them further and reduce our own losses. I can only be in one system at a time, and this fight looks like it’s going to be very widespread. The V’kit’no’sat have a new commander, identity unknown, and he’s playing this very different than in the past. Less ego, more intelligence, and far more dangerous.”

“We have to hold the front more or less where it is, or our industrial strength will be weakened to the point of diminishing returns. I don’t like giving this order, because I know what it will mean, but we have to go all in without abandoning the far rim. You wanted a chance to fight the V’kit’no’sat, and now you have it. We have to fight sloppy, but without going to the darkside. I trust you know the difference, and now and I need your intellect and your race. All of them. Now. We have to push back against this as hard as possible and make them fear us to the point of uncertainty.”

“But be warned. They have a new weapon. A sensor that is undetectable and can locate gravity drives and artificial gravity generators. It’s how they’re finding our bases in the Devastation Zone, and with this new technology they are emboldened. They believe they know approximately how many ships we have and how many it will take to break us. I don’t believe they know about you, and it’s time to make your presence known…en mass.”

“A lot of us are going to die in the coming days, and I do not like bringing the Paladin in to join us, but we either fight this together or we risk being conquered entirely in the coming centuries. And you know well that the V’kit’no’sat do not take prisoners. I also know that you want to be here, so come and give the V’kit’no’sat reason to fear the Paladin. Use these waypoints,” Paul said, with holographic map locations popping up beneath his full body image. “The rest you can work out for yourself, old friend.”

“Old friend,” Thrawn repeated in English, a language that he had refused to learn for a long time. “You do me more honor with those two words than I deserve, but perhaps after the coming fight I will be worthy of them.”

“We will come,” he told the now static hologram. “You will not have to face their might alone. And if we should fall, you will not have to die alone. The Paladin are with you and forthcoming,” Thrawn said unnecessarily as he stood up from his meditative pose, tail spinning around behind him as he walked quickly towards the door of his private chambers and into the control center a hallway down.

“It is time,” he told the other blue scaled lizards. “The trailblazers have called for our aid, and we shall respond in full force. We go to war against the V’kit’no’sat,” he said, seeing the gleam of anticipation and danger that was still encoded into their genome. Li’vorkrachnika never wanted to run and hide, and neither did Paladin. They were ready to go even before he said the words, so he added the only bit of importance necessary before they snapped into tasks genetically mapped into their minds before birth.

“It’s time to earn our position in the empire with their blood.”

13

October 1, 4813

Karthus System (Star Force territory)

Requiem

In some 113 lightyears from the front, Requiem was a world that was not expecting to be engaged in battle, but one that had been designed specifically to fight the war when it got here. There was almost no industry on the planet save for foodstuffs and small scale replacement parts, ammunition, and other maintenance necessities.

There were no shipyards, no heavy mining, and no wall to wall cities covering the planet. Rather there were clusters of inhabitation spread out in strategic locations with long stretches of grassy plains, high mountains, and a variety of other terrain absent oceans. A few lakes were the only visible bodies of water from orbit where 2,943 Sentinel-class defense stations guarded the world that was slightly larger than Earth and the only inhabited planet in the system.

The others were small, rocky, and barren with a scattering of mining facilities and outposts used to service Requiem, but they were expendable and built as such, with the primary planet being the stick in the mud for when the V’kit’no’sat ever got this far out.

Information on Requiem was available to the public, so it was quite to the surprise of Duke Barrington when he received word that a massive V’kit’no’sat fleet had pushed past the front, bypassing the numerous systems in easy striking range, and were apparently headed for this region of space.

Barrington watched over the following days as the intelligence reports on the enemy movements brought them closer and closer to Requiem, then he got the final report from an uninhabited system with an observation post that the V’kit’no’sat had exited on a jumpline directly for the Karthus System, with the signal traveling faster than the ships and giving him approximately a 14 hour head start.

The Duke wasn’t sure if they were going to attack or try to just transition through to another location farther in, but he definitely wasn’t going to let them pass through cleanly. 14 hours wasn’t much given the size of the system, but it would be enough time to get the Wall of Pain erected.

“Darren, looks like they’re coming here,” Krevin-11895 said via holo from across the planet where he had been training.

“You sure? They could be headed through.”

The Trunks-level Archon shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re bypassing a lot of targets and are going to have the defender fleets on their ass before long. They’re blowing their element of surprise to push this far in, and I don’t think they’re coming here for any reason other than to hit us where we’re strong.”

“I know that’s a shitload of ships, but are they stupid? They have to know we built this system specifically to fight and be a spur in their side if they tried to push past us.”

“You’re missing the point,” the Archon said seriously. “That’s why I think they’re coming. They don’t want the weaker systems first. They already took Tarric-3 and have distraction blockades running up and down the front. They could take any of those systems but haven’t. They’re coming here for a bigger challenge, then they’ll sweep up the other systems in the aftermath.”

“Why fight us where we’re strongest? That makes no sense.”

“V’kit’no’sat ego…and if they pull it off, they’re essentially in the driver’s seat.”

“How do we stand?”

“I already ordered the Wall of Pain erected. They’re going to regret not scouting first.”

“They’ve probably accessed our information grid to some extent and know there’s nothing here to worry about on entry,” the Duke said with a smirk. “Good thing we kept it off the official records.”

“It won’t be enough. We need the Defender fleets. With at least two of them here I think we’ve got an even fight, and if we can delay them long on the ground to get more here we can maintain the system.”

“So why are they coming?”

“I don’t know. This is definitely a hammer fleet, but bringing it here is risky for them. Expect some surprises. They’re not that reckless.”

“If you need anything, just ask. Otherwise I’m a spectator here,” the Duke said regretfully.

“Knowing you, you’ll find something to do.”

“Not going to insist I leave before they get here?”

“Why? You’d just refuse citing you want to see the fireworks go off.”

Barrington smiled. “You know me well. I’m going to have to work on a better personality mask. Dukes are supposed to be unreadable.”

“Ikrid,” Krevin reminded him jokingly. “You don’t really think I bump into you because I’m clumsy, do you?”

“Are we ready for this?” Barrington asked seriously.

“Better us than some other system, but I don’t know. I can guarantee we’re going to do damage.”

“Damage it is then. Get to work and stop wasting time informing me. I know how to monitor the feeds.”

Krevin gave him a mock, two fingered salute, then cut the comm feed leaving the Duke to sigh in private. This was it then. He didn’t doubt the Archon’s read on the enemy. If he said they wanted to pick a fight with Requiem, then that’s what they were going to get.

As for what Barrington would be doing, he wasn’t going to be completely useless. There were emergency logistics to oversee that needed to be handled so the Archons didn’t have to. The Duke had subordinates to handle that, but he was going to personally make sure everything was going smoothly before the hammer fell and this fight turned into organized chaos when they finally made the surface and turned this into the ground war that Requiem was designed to be.

In middle orbit around the giant white star, far enough away from the major traffic lines to avoid close scrutiny, thousands of stealthed warehouses suddenly popped up on the battlemap and began to spew out drone spacecraft…but these weren’t warships. They were minelayers dragging huge cargo canisters behind them like ants carrying bits of wood and leaves far too big for their tiny frames to handle.

But carry them they did, coming from all around the circular orbit and heading for the jumpline the V’kit’no’sat were reported to be entering upon. Already a signal had been sent back to the Vesper System to halt any incoming traffic, and the last reported incoming ship on that jumpline was due to arrive in 2 hours. That gave most of the minelayers time to get in position and ready for when the civilian transport came through, braking against the star amongst the swarm of ships sitting just off the jumpline that began to move instantly as the newcomer was given a specific course to follow in order to get out of their way as they began to disperse tiny orbs with even tinier gravity drives meant to keep them in place rather than floating sideways in stellar orbit or falling inward due to the star’s gravity well.

Each mine was one of several varieties, with the most exotic of them being IDF field generators that would cause havoc with the braking abilities of the incoming ships. There weren’t enough of them to set up a proper slip’n’slide, but they would insure higher impact velocities against the mines than otherwise.

And for the mines, some were comprised of tiny granules charged with various types of shield draining energy that would be enhanced by the collision speeds. Others were solid matter as dense as possible that the ships would run into, further draining shields to the point of breaking as they hit wave after wave of the mines that were lined up off the jumpline as well. When the first of the V’kit’no’sat ships came in and began to plow the road for the others the mines would start to move like conveyor belts into the traffic path, replacing the field as it was destroyed and keeping the forthcoming debris from further taking out more mines.

The Duke and Archon had planned this out carefully long ago, and they wanted to maximize as much damage as they could out of the limited number of mines they had in the outer region of the jumpline. Down low near the star where the enemy ships would come out of their braking maneuvers late thanks to the IDF, there was another cluster of mines spread out further to catch ships that might get wise to the trap and move slightly off the jumpline to avoid them.

Sitting nearby those were also a pair of Sentinels  with more repositioning from other jumplines to reinforce them, so there would be some considerable firepower waiting for the damaged ships to drop into their firing lines…assuming they didn’t overshoot and ram into the star itself.

How many Sentinels they could get there within 14 hours was in question. The easy math said 38, with another 6 on the verge of making it in time to do at least some damage. But whether to send them or have them reposition along with the others into a deeper defensive grid around Requiem was in question, and Barrington saw that Krevin sent 4 to the jumpline and the other two back towards the planet on the slow microjumps the massive weapons platforms were capable of.

Each of the Sentinels was between 70 and 90 miles tall, making them huge targets while the fleet of system defense drones measured at the largest only 6 miles long. But in the face of what was coming only the Sentinels looked big enough to prove any deterrent, with even the ‘large’ system defense drones being far smaller than the V’kit’no’sat ships that had been designed to fight Hadarak…against which they were the small ones.

In addition to the larger system defense drones came the regular ones that could be carried by the jumpships to other locations, and there were almost a million of them here. Tiny in comparison, their use would come as bees with almost microscopic stings, but when used in swarm mode those stings would add up to major damage while the V’kit’no’sat focused on the Sentinels…and if they didn’t and instead tried to swat the bees, the Sentinels would rip them a new one.

Which was why coming to Requiem was a bad idea for the V’kit’no’sat. If they wanted the biggest challenge they could get within 600 lightyears, then this was definitely the place they wanted to go…and they’d suffer massive losses because of it, making the Duke continue to wonder why they would want to strike here first as one of the roaming Defender fleets began entry 9 hours prior to the expected V’kit’no’sat arrival.

It was led by a high ranking second gen Archon, Nathan-937, and brought with it some 6,397 jumpships. As they began their long sequenced entry Barrington felt a little better, for there was another half million drones coming into play with more on the way. Seena-1933’s Defender fleet was reported to already have jumped for Karthus and should be here within 4 hours, bringing with it 5,229 jumpships and two more Defender fleets heading this way but still several days off.

If the V’kit’no’sat were going to hit the planet hard, they were going to have to do it quickly…but the Duke didn’t want to lose the Defender fleets in the process. That would open up other areas to easier attack, which was why he hoped the Wall of Pain lived up to its name. After that they’d fight in planetary orbit then scatter the fleet when the planetary shields went down. He knew he was going to lose all the Sentinels, but that was what they were for and only good for defending this system. They couldn’t move to others, so they were going to sit within range of the planetary defense guns and make the V’kit’no’sat come to them and pay a very heavy price to poke a hole down to the surface.

Then if/when they broke through all that and got the main planetary shields down over the target region, each city would still be covered by its own secondary shield, meaning the V’kit’no’sat were going to have to continue to brave the anti-orbital fire or land troops in the open areas between cities and try to take them out over lane. If it came to that point the system defense fleet and the Defender fleets, or what would be left of them, would withdraw and switch to harassing attacks, letting the surface war play out as intended rather than standing their ground and canceling out against the V’kit’no’sat.

That was the plan, at least. Barrington was fairly confident in it until the V’kit’no’sat fleet began to arrive and hit the minefield. Some of the larger ships blasted all the way through in a vivid pyrotechnics display to hit the star without shields. The smaller ships managed to decelerate in time as they sent warning signals back to the others in line…but jamming mines were scattering those signals so they couldn’t warn them, keeping the first waves of incoming V’kit’no’sat ships blind to what was happening.

They died quickly, either to the mines, the star, or the few sentinels sitting in pristine placement to finish them off. Even the few Kafchas that came through early didn’t last long, but then something happened. Barrington didn’t know what, but mines started going off on their own in a large swath that ended with a destroyed stealth field and a deceleration into the upper reaches of the star. It didn’t dive in so far as to lose visibility, and the shields were still up so no hull damage occurred, not that it truly would have mattered against the Yeg’gor armor it carried.

The pit of Barrington’s stomached dropped out as he realized the horror of what he was seeing. Somehow the V’kit’no’sat had smuggled a stealthed Mach’nel along with their fleet past the front, and only now the collisions with the mines were revealing it.

A Mach’nel. A fucking Mach’nel. Kafcha were 36 mile wide monsters, but Mach’nel made them look like pushovers at 120 miles wide and covered with thick shields and even thicker specialized armor that literally drank in energy weapons. They were superweapons, carrying Tar’vem’jic, and they hadn’t been seen in Star Force territory since the assault on Earth.

Now the V’kit’no’sat coming here made sense. They weren’t outgunned, not in the least, and they were going to use this Mach’nel coupled with the massive support fleet to punch out the toughest spot of resistance in this region.

The Karthus System was about to fall. The only question was how many of these bastards could Star Force take with them.

While Barrington was considering that a pair of Knights came up from behind in the control center he operated, looking down at him from their 7 foot height.

“Apologies, Duke, but we have orders to personally escort you out of the system. Krevin says you’re too valuable to lose, and you’re coming with us willingly or over our shoulder. No argument.”

The Duke gritted his teeth, not wanting to budge from this spot, but the Archon apparently knew that too, for this was no light threat. The Knights would carry him out if they had to.

Barrington looked around at his senior staff, seeing many of them nodding their agreement. They wanted him to go, even though they’d stay until the last minute evacs, putting up as much of a fight as the Requiem could. The Duke kept looking at their faces until a hard, armored hand laid on his shoulder gently, silently reinforcing the Knights’ demand.

“Since I have no choice, I won’t waste time,” he said, looking up at the Knights as he began walking for the door, both hating and loving Krevin for doing this…but mostly hate right now, for this was the Duke’s fight as much as his.

14

October 15, 4813

Termunisef System (H’kar Region, Star Force territory)

Tavai

Paul was still on Tavai waiting for more of his jumpships to return, kicking himself for not being in the fight yet as the presence of a Mach’nel was revealed and the six systems with V’kit’no’sat blockades got reinforcements and turned into full blown invasions…along with 4 other systems that simultaneously were invaded within the space of 2 days. The V’kit’no’sat had planned this to keep the Star Force fleets spread out and having to pick where to go to help, virtually insuring that some of the systems would fall.

The amount of ships the V’kit’no’sat were deploying was insane, but it was the presence of the Mach’nel that confirmed for Paul that they were finally being taken seriously. From bits of intel captured over the years, it seemed the V’kit’no’sat were so incensed, as well as scared, they’d sent not one, but three Mach’nel to Earth in the initial invasion over two waves. The first Star Force paid a heavy price to wound and then capture, then two more were sent…something virtually unheard of in V’kit’no’sat history…and they succeeded in kicking the crap out of Star Force and taking the Sol System before they were withdrawn and the invasion continued with conventional fleets.

Paul thought that was a scoff at the threat level of Star Force, which it was, but it also had to do with a growing civil war within the V’kit’no’sat that had long since been settled. Then they had to fight off a Hadarak invasion, with both occurrences requiring all of the 384 Mach’nel the V’kit’no’sat had built…minus the one Star Force had taken. None had been seen since the initial attack on Sol, but Paul knew that eventually they’d send one back against them if Star Force could hold out long enough.

And blast it all, he had to be sitting and waiting for more ships while it was all going down!

The V’kit’no’sat had played this well, and even if he did have a fleet available Paul wouldn’t be going to the Karthus System. It was too far away and there were two other trailblazers closer, Kerrie-057 and Liam-090, with Liam having come back from the far rim warzones when the activity in the DZ started to pick up. Luck had it he was close to Karthus and heading there, so Paul didn’t need to go. Rather he needed to get into the fight at one of the other invasion points.

First off he checked to see if Spaceball One had been activated, and once the response came back through the relay grid it confirmed it already was, with Olivia-051 having beat him to it. She was bringing it out to meet her fleet on the way to Karthus, but it was going to be a couple weeks before she could get there.

Paul was going to keep tabs, but that fight wasn’t going to be his to make. He wasn’t going to wait much longer, taking what fraction of a fleet he had, currently at 938 jumpships, to reinforce someone, but the question was where to go to maximize the defensive effort.

Two days later he made a decision based off the laggy battle reports and headed up to the Excalibur, leaving with his much smaller fleet headed for the Jennizeren System.

17 days later…

When the Excalibur entered the system and linked up with the local comm grid the battlemap immediately confirmed what he had feared. Scores of V’kit’no’sat ships dominated stellar orbit with more camping out over Ennvor, Tardon, and Zulu…3 of the 6 planets in the system, and each of the three had a section of their planetary shields breached and enemy troops on the ground.

What was left of the Star Force fleet was elsewhere, staying alive and in position to return and assist if the V’kit’no’sat tried to take down another section of shield from space, adding their firepower to the anti-orbital batteries. The V’kit’no’sat knew that and weren’t going to risk losing even more warships when their ground troops could push overland and take down both the shield generators and planetary weaponry at far less cost.

But they also had to stay in orbit to cover the ground troops, otherwise the Star Force fleet could zip in and bombard them into oblivion with ease. That meant Paul had those three fleet segments grounded there, at least in part, with another huge mass of ships right in front of him that were swooping to clog up the jumppoint with resistance.

That wasn’t going to work, for Paul had the element of surprise and enough jumpships here already to spew a cloud of drones that would protect the other jumpships coming in. Paul kept the Excalibur with them and engaged in direct combat to pump up their firepower until more of his fleet was able to arrive and unpack as he took command of all military assets within the system with a single thought.

The surviving system defense fleet was his, the Defender fleet that had arrived prior to Paul was now his, as was all the units on the ground and the planetary defenses on all 6 worlds. He sent orders out to all of them in the matter of a few seconds with the signals then traveling across the void of space with a lag of 12 to 98 minutes, for all the planets were not sitting side by side in a line.

Paul was still heavily outnumbered, but cracking planets open was not an easy thing. The V’kit’no’sat were going to be here for months at the minimum, and Paul was going to be a constant annoyance that entire time.

But now was not the right time to fight, so he held the jumppoint and slugged it out as much as necessary to get all his ships into the system, then he retreated away from the star and left the larger V’kit’no’sat fleet there unhappy that he didn’t stay and trade against bad odds. Rather his fleet splintered like flower petals and split up, with Paul taking one of those petals over to Ennvor and hailing the Kafcha arrogantly marked as their flagship.

“Attention idiots,” Paul said, imitating Rocket Raccoon as best he could in V’kit’no’sat. “I see you’ve sent yet another Era’tran commander against me. I thought you would have learned your lesson by now, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you didn’t expect me to be here, in which case I’m giving you this one time, exclusive only, chance of packing up your bags and leaving before I tear you a new one. Generous, I know, but what can I say? I’m feeling overly sentimental this morning.”

The response came immediately, as Paul had hoped, with the image of a maroon-skinned Era’tran with silver tattoos down the left side of his entire body staring back at him.

“Paul-024. Based on your reputation I would have assumed you would bring with you a larger fleet?” the huge T-rex said, heavy with scorn.

“It got broken, so I’m running a little light.”

“I am sorry I cannot offer you the same bargain. These worlds will be ours, and hopefully your corpse as well. You have fought well for a heretic, but if you press us here it will be your end.”

“Is that concern I’m sensing…” Paul continued as he ran through the V’kit’no’sat database from before the fall of Earth to see if he could identify this bastard, “…or caution?”

“You are heavily outnumbered, yet you do have a penchant for strategic ingenuity. It’s a pity my own Zen’zat are not so creative, but there are limits to what a commander can do without the necessary ships…and unless you have more on the way, you are impudent here.”

“Pfff…” Paul said, making a noise of disbelief. “You’re in our territory. Of course there are more ships comings. Did your egg get cracked before you hatched?”

“It’s just a matter of time before your worlds fall. For your sake, your ships had better arrive soon…if you have enough to spare.”

“Simultaneous assaults have their advantages…Rovo’kor,” Paul said, finally finding a name. “And their weaknesses.”

“So you have heard of me?”

“Just now,” Paul said honestly. “Your record is…sketchy. I can probably lure you into a trap by swinging my control ships close. Dumb Era’tran are always trying for them, and I don’t see anything to suggest you’re otherwise.”

“You know very little of the V’kit’no’sat if you think us dumb. We possess something called Sav that few others can even comprehend.”

“As do I,” Paul reminded him, pointing at his sparkling grey Mvor eye alteration.

“This I know, which is why it is a fair fight…compensating for your lack of ships. I shall score our efforts afterwards to determine who has accomplished more, though the overall outcome is fixed. If you believe otherwise, feel free to prove your dominance with deeds rather than words.”

The Era’tran cut the comm one smartass comment sooner than Paul was going to, but he’d accomplished his purpose. For whatever reason, the intelligent Era’tran had always been pushovers for Paul. Not so much for the other trailblazers, and no one knew for sure why Paul was different against them other than his methods seemed to piss them off to no end. That little conversation set the stage for what the Era’tran expected to happen, so now all Paul had to do was exceed it and he’d succeed in getting under his thick red skin.

If naval combat occurred freestyle, with ships determining their own targets and movements, they could do a lot of damage but would get picked apart by a coordinated fleet even half their size. Warships had to move like a school of fish, and how that school moved and cycled within itself was determined by the race and commander within the V’kit’no’sat. Era’tran were smart and aggressive, and arguably one of the harder opponents to face within the enemy empire, but this fleet was made up of more than just Era’tran. There were 34 different races here, including a few Oso’lon ships. They were the toughest, in that they were a mix of aggressive and patient, and they too had the Sav psionic that increased their intelligence.

The fact that an Era’tran was commanding this fleet instead of an Oso’lon said that Rovo’kor was very experienced. What record of him Paul had access to was over 100,000 years old, but even then his name was notable enough to be included in the V’kit’no’sat battle acumen, with a full skills profile detailing a blunt, but not sloppy tactician that was well suited to coming in with a numerical advantage and making the most of it. He wasn’t inclined to waste ships or time, finding that perfect balance between the two that left the mission accomplished and the assault force intact, though diminished. Rovo’kor wasn’t one to shirk from losses when necessary, and the fact that he was assaulting 3 planets simultaneously attested to his professional impatience.

He knew the longer he was here the more Star Force ships would dribble in from other systems, so he was pressing as hard as he thought he could without overreaching. There were 6 planets in this system and he wasn’t going after all of them. According to battlemap records he hadn’t even sent a ship into orbit over the other three yet, and from the number of troops on the ground it appeared he had plenty to assault 3 planets at once.

He wasn’t overly cautious and he wasn’t overly aggressive, but he definitely tilted towards aggression and if he was a telltale Era’tran he would go more that way when his dominance was brought into question.

But this wasn’t a good situation for Paul. He was outmassed 7 to 1 in terms of ships, and the anti-orbital weaponry only came into play if Rovo’kor was stupid enough to fight him over it. He’d have to in order to break through the other 3 planetary shields and establish footholds there, but for these planets Paul doubted he would be able to entice him inward unless he could endanger the ground troops…some of which were already under intact segments of the planetary shield and working their way through urban combat.

Paul could run his ships down just above shield level and try to target those exposed, but from the positioning of Rovo’kor’s fleet he could tell the Era’tran was anticipating that tactic and had interceptor groups just nudging out from the center of his formation that could drop directly into the conduit down to the surface, taking some hits before they got low enough to skim the surface and cover the ground troops long enough for a costly fight to break out between both sides that would result in an expansion of the foothold zone to the point where ships could come and go without getting hit from adjacent regions.

Rovo’kor hadn’t pushed it that far because he was hoping to accomplish the same expansion with his ground troops. Paul could force that fight, but it wouldn’t be enough. He needed to get the V’kit’no’sat over an intact section of the planet with full offensive firepower…and he really didn’t expect that to happen.

That meant he had to nibble away on the fringes, which wouldn’t accomplish much very fast, but if the V’kit’no’sat chased he could always run down to just above the planetary shields were they would not go, meaning he had safe haven to work out of for the simple reason they didn’t want to force that costly fight unless needed to establish a foothold.

This was a double-edged sword that Paul was smart enough to use to his advantage, and the multiple ‘flower petals’ were already heading out to start nipping away at the planetary defense fleets and the stellar orbit partial blockade they had set up. Those would take longer to run to safety, so Paul expected more activity there, but the fleet over Ennvor held the flagship and a slightly higher number of ships, meaning it was going to be the toughest nut to crack and Paul knew they’d be interested in taking him out now that they knew which ship he was on, for Paul wasn’t hiding the Excalibur’s identifiers either.

That was by design, not recklessness, for the more they focused on him the longer his drones would last, and his command ship was a lot more durable…but not expendable. That was the trick and the narrow line he had made an art out of walking, and it largely depended on what the enemy could do and what Paul expected them to do.

So while the ship count mattered, Paul was working this fight into a commander vs commander one, requiring Paul to win a 7 to 1 ratio just to pull even, but with a lot of tiny fights whose winability was even. A full frontal assault and slug fest would ultimately be determined by the ship count unless this Era’tran was overly stupid.

Paul wasn’t going to assume that, so he got to work with a few prickling runs against the outermost ships in Rovo’kor’s fleet, seeing how he would respond…which was to stand their ground and essential become turrets. That was something Paul could exploit, and with a few thoughts he sent out modifications to his fleet groups’ movements, beginning the naval chess match that had to be won before any help could be given to the surface…for Paul had no troop ships with him to land on the other side of the planet. Just a naval force that needed orbital bombardment capability.

And right now Rovo’kor’s fleet was blocking him from that.

Paul’s face altered slightly as he shifted into full immersion mode, his mind more in the computer than his own senses, and he began the long and tedious process of probing, learning, and countering this Era’tran and his multi-racial fleet, each segment of which micromanaged differently, but ultimately worked flawlessly under their commander’s strategy.

A pity that. Had they been less unified Paul could have exploited the cracks, but the V’kit’no’sat empire was too good. If they hadn’t been, the Devastation Zone never would have been expanded as far as it had and their empire wouldn’t span half the galaxy.

But they did have their psychological blind spots, as did Paul, but Star Force had learned more from the massive losses than the V’kit’no’sat had the victories, and whenever Paul encountered a weakness in himself or his fleet he wanted to find it, chart it, and eliminate it. The V’kit’no’sat preferred to deny blind spots until they were thrown in their face, and hopefully this Era’tran still had a few. If not, this counterattack was going to take a lot of time to make any progress at, and the three planets under assault were on the clock.

It didn’t look good, but it was workable and Paul set himself to a more aggressive attack schedule, for he could sleep whenever he wanted by pulling his ships back between probing strikes. The combat would occur when he said, not when the V’kit’no’sat dictated.

So not fearing having to spend days straight in the command nexus he let himself fight freely, finding the lack of ships to also be an advantage as far as his mental strength as concerned. Less for him to fight with made it easier to concentrate, making for yet another double-edged sword that was going to cut the V’kit’no’sat so long as Paul didn’t make a mistake.

15

November 3, 4813

Karthus System (Star Force territory)

Requiem

Olivia rode in the command nexus just off the bridge as her command ship Yippie Ki Yay came out of its jump into the besieged Karthus System, glad to pick up some battlemap signals, telling her there was at least something left to defend…but the major damage had already been done, and even as there were V’kit’no’sat warships waiting at the jumppoint and her ship began to light up with weapon impacts her Sav-enhanced mind saw the condition on Requiem.

The fight in planetary orbit was over, with large bands of debris fields marking where the fight had gone down. Both V’kit’no’sat and Star Force ship rubble drifted there, some on escaping orbital tracks, with a huge breach in the planetary defense shields exposing a chunk of the planet’s surface. Several cities were now dark, with battlemap information detailing their fall, but some 83% of the planet was still in Star Force hands while a massive V’kit’no’sat army prowled the surface.

But not so large as it had once been. Requiem’s unique defense item had already been triggered days ago, with the empty plains that stretched between cities now nothing but destroyed ground…but it hadn’t been the V’kit’no’sat’s doing, rather a network of hidden explosives deep enough underground to be missed by all but a tight scan, yet shallow enough to catch the ground troops on the surface in a nova-like explosion.

It was a one time trick, for Oliva could see other pieces of the planet where the troops had not been blasted with precision strikes to take out the buried weapons, but at least that had delayed the troops’ progression, and the initial explosion where they were had killed or weakened over 120,000 of them as the ground under their feet literally threw them up into the overhead defense shield they were fighting underneath.

Those that survived had Star Force aerial craft on them in moments with a counterattack on the ground shortly thereafter, but the ‘R’ attack wasn’t going to be of use elsewhere aside from buying time.

Right now the Mach’nel was sitting back in high orbit and out of firing range of its Tar’vem’jic. It was good to see it wasn’t sitting a bit lower and firing into the still existing planetary shields, but from battlemap data she could see why. The shield strength was superior to the weaponsfire, meaning it couldn’t get through without help from the fleet, and their weapons’ range wasn’t greater than that of the planetary defenses. If Requiem’s shields had been less robust and their recharge rate was less than the Tar’vem’jic, then the Mach’nel could have sat above them and chipped away at it for weeks until they finally got a breach…but not here. The primary shields were too strong, so despite the fact that the entire defense fleet save the jumpships were destroyed, the planet itself was too big a threat for the V’kit’no’sat to close in on, hence the ground assault.

The surviving jumpships…which were most of them with a few key absences…were holding position on the far side of the planet in a high orbit under Liam’s command. She knew that he had them in that position to allow them to run quickly if needed, and Olivia could see that some of them were taking in dropships from the surface, evacing key personnel as the number of cities was being reduced and those remaining filled up with survivors from the others. Liam would be packing in as many people as he could, and at the moment the V’kit’no’sat were letting him do it.

Olivia knew they’d be hard pressed to actually catch the jumpships, but why let them evacuate?

Then she got it. They wanted witnesses to survive and report back what happened here. How the V’kit’no’sat had come in with their massive fleet centered on a Mach’nel and blown away one of the most heavily defended planets in Star Force territory. That was typical V’kit’no’sat methodology. Prove dominance and not care about the scraps that got away, though by the number of dead ship hulls in orbit they’d paid a very heavy price to get through the planetary shields.

The fleet they still had was nothing to take lightly, even without the Mach’nel, and right now it was split between protecting their key chess piece and blockading the jumplines. Thankfully Oliva had come in first in line, with her heavy command ship taking the hits as several jumpships came out behind here and began deploying drones. There were so many jumplines into Karthus that the V’kit’no’sat had decided to place ships over most of the main ones, splitting up their numbers enough that they didn’t have the teeth needed to really hurt her, though the Yippie Ki Yay’s shields were getting dangerously low by the time one of the jumpships moved out in front to help absorb the incoming fire while responding in kind.

More V’kit’no’sat ships repositioned towards the jumppoint, but they were far too late. With nothing more than weakened shields to show for it, Olivia won her fleet a foothold in stellar orbit and the few dozen V’kit’no’sat ships there had to back off or be quickly outnumbered. The first real fight broke out a couple hours later as they rallied their forces and tried to hammer away at her lines, but her foothold was too strong and she had Liam’s help, meaning they couldn’t get through to the ships coming in and ambush them.

The group with the Mach’nel didn’t respond, holding position over the planet, which told Olivia that the stellar defense portion of the enemy fleet was going to retreat after they’d done what they thought was decent damage, and she did what she could to make that sooner rather than later as more and more drones were released to her mental command. Olivia shifted as many simple duties, like aiming a particular weapon or maneuvering to a waypoint, to the crews on the controlling jumpships and those on her command ship as she split the overall controlling duties with her fellow trailblazer. She wasn’t as good as Liam, but Naval was her second best division out of the 5 that made up an Archon’s rank, and her Clan McClane ships were used to her fighting style, with them pushing back hard against the V’kit’no’sat immediately while Liam pulled off a lesser amount of drones for his existing jumpships to command as he came out to meet them while the rest of his jumpships continued to evac the far side of the planet.

Olivia always had her Clan ships up front while moving in convoy, so if there was resistance at a jumppoint they’d be with her for that fight, but most of her current Defender fleet was not made up of Clan troops. McClane formed a solid, but small core around which was a conglomeration of fleets from multiple factions. Calavari made up the largest section, with Axius and Bsidd following that, and smaller amounts of Mainline, Scionate, Tolsoi, and Australian ships. All were Star Force and worked together seamlessly in the battlemap system under her direction, but Clan troops were the best and most of them were in the Devastation Zone.

But she was a trailblazer, and when her mind melded with the fleet it took on new meaning and everyone knew it, having no fear coming into this system with her, despite going up against a Mach’nel. Fortunately it wasn’t waiting for them at the jumppoint, but Olivia had something at the back of her entry convoy that was going to get its attention immediately.

So with increasing numbers of ships at her disposal and Liam beginning to poke in odd places, Oliva fought out from their foothold around the jumppoint and eventually triggered the retreat that had the bulk of the stellar orbit blockade fleet surviving and regrouping with the main force around the Mach’nel as the rest of Olivia’s fleet came in. Apparently they were going to wait for Star Force to come to them while the ground war continued under their careful naval watch…as well as to throw some orbital bombardment down when the next section of planetary shield was disabled on the surface, which was something a low powered Tar’vem’jic blast was perfect for because of its range.

And while Olivia’s fleet continued to spew out of the jumppoint that indeed happened, with the shield generators being taken by the ground troops and deactivated, then the Tar’vem’jic casually shot the anti-orbital batteries that were now exposed along with a few select locations that didn’t endanger their own troops on the ground as they moved on towards the next location with the Star Force army fighting like hell to keep them back.

But the V’kit’no’sat had brought a huge army with them, far more than their ships normally carried, and as Oliva took stock of their fleet she saw several specialized troops ships. They certainly weren’t skimping on the numbers, and as a result Requiem was falling in rather quick fashion, attesting to the level of firepower the V’kit’no’sat were dropping to the surface in the form of armored dinosaurs, several of which were their Ultra varieties, standing taller than some buildings and lethal enough to scare King Kong if the mythical monkey were here.

Requiem was taking a beating, and this was clearly a fight the V’kit’no’sat had to win and win convincingly. Others would see an unstoppable force, but she saw a bit of panic. The V’kit’no’sat had to regain dominance, and this assault, more than the others across the front, was intended to illicit that. This was the lynchpin on the entire invasion, and Olivia really wished she could see their faces when a huge contact came out of the jumppoint.

It was 122 miles in diameter and egg-shaped, colored a pure gleaming white, with Olivia ordering it to reposition in such a way that it betrayed its engine strength…making it clear to those watching that it was not a seda, but a starship. And based on the excessive amount of weaponry covering it, it wasn’t a transport or support ship, but a full blown warship.

And a warship that was slightly bigger than the J’gar Mach’nel that Star Force had captured, but the exact same shape. That had been on purpose, to make it look like it was the same ship rebuilt slightly larger to cover the Yeg’gor armor with an additional layer of Star Force design.

But that was just a ruse, for that captured Mach’nel wasn’t here. Kamenor was safely tucked away far from here, spirited away from Earth after the first attack in what looked like a spider web of Cradle-class transport ships to give it the engine power that Star Force had torn out of it during its capture. They’d got it moved before the V’kit’no’sat returned and kept it hidden from them the entire time…and hopefully now they thought that Star Force had rebuilt it and was going to use it to counter the Brat’mar Mach’nel.

The captured J’gar one was egg-shaped, but Brat’mar ships were discs and this one was no exception, though thicker than normal. It looked like a stack of coins but massed almost exactly the same as every other Mach’nel. The V’kit’no’sat liked parity, allowing each race to design their own vessels but keeping them to the same basic parameters regarding speed, armor, and weaponry.

And if Star Force had a Mach’nel to use, this fight was going to take on a whole new dynamic.

The V’kit’no’sat knew that too, with them immediately breaking from orbit. They couldn’t fight this new Mach’nel over the planet, so they had to meet it in deep space and Olivia got her fleet moving slowly so they wouldn’t fight at the jumppoint, with the last of her ships still coming through.

She was outgunned, and even with Liam’s help she knew they couldn’t win this fight, at least not in terms of ships. She was here to get the Mach’nel, and Spaceball One was another trick Star Force had kept up its sleeve. It’d been developed as a counter to Mach’nel, but the surprise of it was going to be half the trick, and once the V’kit’no’sat learned what it truly was they wouldn’t be caught off guard again.

But taking out a Mach’nel was worth it. Olivia just hoped they’d fall for it.

Spaceball One wasn’t a fake. Its weapons were real, its shields were real, its engines were real, and it was by far the most kill power Oliva had in her fleet…which was why the V’kit’no’sat were going to go straight for it. On top of its obvious power, the V’kit’no’sat ego was not going to react well to the ‘heretics’ having a Mach’nel, even if it was rebuilt. Many races in the V’kit’no’sat were not permitted more than 1, and even the Oso’lon only had a handful. They were insanely hard to build, which was why Star Force had never tried to construct one of their own. There were two major problems, the first being the Yeg’gor armor.

Star Force had the blueprints for it, but had never bothered to produce any. The elaborate process needed to create it just wasn’t worth it when you knew you were going to lose. The Yeg’gor was meant to be a fortification enhancement you put on ships or worlds you did not intend to lose, and even if Star Force had a pyramid defense station of their own on a planet, it would fall just like the one they’d inherited on Earth, so the most economical means Star Force had of defense was to create strong armor that could be mass produced, whereas the Yeg’gor could not.

The second problem was the Tar’vem’jic. The weapon on the captured Mach’nel had been junked during combat, but they’d tried to put it back together over the years and barely succeeded. The components in it were so rare that they were harder to produce than the Yeg’gor, and had Star Force not had the pieces to start with they never would have bothered. Tar’vem’jic were a luxury of an empire with ample time and resources to construct, but useless in a war of attrition. That was why V’kit’no’sat ships didn’t have them, save for the Mach’nel, and not even the most fortified Star Force planets had one.

Star Force was pursuing other technology beyond what the V’kit’no’sat had to achieve that range, so they weren’t forgoing the inherent advantage, but rather needing something more industry-friendly.

But as far as the V’kit’no’sat knew, Spaceball One had one, for a decoy had been produced with an appropriate aperture on the hull, though it could not fire anything more than a huge plasma beam…which in itself was dangerous, but would hopefully encourage the V’kit’no’sat to pursue when they saw that Star Force hadn’t had the technology to replace the one they’d broken.

When the two fleets met up the drone swarm ignored the opposing Mach’nel, not that they could get to it in any large numbers. As expected the V’kit’no’sat were being very careful with this one, despite it being the largest and hardest ship to kill. The fact that they’d lost one to Star Force was a sting to their ego that had probably never worn off, and if it had it just got reanimated as Olivia formed a wedge of drones around Spaceball One to help protect it from the concentrated firepower of the V’kit’no’sat fleet as the two massive ships got closer and closer together.

A break in the V’kit’no’sat formation allowed a Tar’vem’jic shot to get through, vaporizing the drones in between and then slamming into Spaceball One’s shields…which held. Star Force had built this ship with the strongest shields possible, layer after layer of them and in multiple varieties. It was going to survive to get to the Mach’nel and then some. Hopefully without the V’kit’no’sat chickening out.

When the Star Force response came, it saw the massive plasma stream passing through a gap formed in the drone wall and hit a Kafcha, taking down its shields and cooking the upper side of its hull that the drone swarm then jumped on…but that seemed to only embolden the V’kit’no’sat as they focused more attention on getting to Spaceball One as Olivia’s drones had a temporary advantage, shooting at targets that weren’t firing back in some cases, as they targeted Spaceball One almost exclusively.

The two giant Mach’nel closed on one another, with the Tar’vem’jic finally getting through after half a dozen shots, but per the design only a tiny section of the shield fell and allowed the beam to core into the armor…that it melted like tissue paper. That should have been a warning to the V’kit’no’sat, unless they thought they hit a hole in the Yeg’gor beneath it, but they kept attacking with a vengeance until the two ships were within a few hundred miles of one another and their backing fleets were mixed together in a giant hurricane of combat.

But what the V’kit’no’sat did not know was that Spaceball One was not a Mach’nel, as well as the fact that it had been built as one massive drone. No one was onboard it and Oliva was personally flying it from the safety of her command ship as the real Mach’nel got into range and she activated the huge IDF generators that created an engine crippling field in front of Spaceball One.

That field caught many V’kit’no’sat ships, keeping them on the trajectories they’d been on without being able to divert. Oliva had drones make the most of that as the Mach’nel was fully enclosed and drifting forward on its momentum as it continued to fire it’s weaponry, including the Tar’vem’jic, that poked yet another hole in the massive craft.

“Alright bastards, let’s see you deal with this,” she said, causing Spaceball One to transform. It looked like a Voku conglomerate changing shape, but the technology was actually V’kit’no’sat based and very similar to the way their personal armor flowed over their bodies and reformed at will, except that the tiny pieces were dozens of meters wide and redundant, meaning that what the V’kit’no’sat were blowing up were not critical as the entire egg-like mass melted and reached out with tendrils of pure white material that appeared to tie the disc-shaped Mach’nel in place, though in reality it was the IDF field that covered everything except the back portion of Spaceball One, so the Star Force trapship could still maneuver while its tendrils were inside the field.

The transformation continued with the V’kit’no’sat ships abandoning the fight with the drones almost entirely as they fired on the white mass that was quickly covering the Mach’nel even as it shot holes through it with the Tar’vem’jic. Oliva poured half her drones into protecting it and the other half she released to Liam to use, taking easy shots at the V’kit’no’sat ships as the Mach’nel was completely covered. When that happened the remaining material that held the ‘engines’ of Spaceball One melted as well, pulling into the rest of the covered ‘coin’ and spreading out, shrinking its IDF down to the exact shape of the Mach’nel now captured inside it while leaving the entirety of Spaceball One with access to the system’s gravity field.

Oliva poured the drones into a wedge ahead of it, fighting a hole that the massive ship now moved through with its pinned captive shooting its brilliant orange Tar’vem’jic helplessly. It could kill the piece of ship above it, but with the rest so close it couldn’t aim and soon that hole got as big as it could while others smaller ones began to open up over top of other weaponry, but the ship had no center, no bridge, no engine core, and even if it lost half its mass it could still accomplish its purpose.

It took a lot of effort to fight their way clear of the V’kit’no’sat fleet, and Oliva was losing a lot of drones in the process, but with some ramming and a high degree of skill, Spaceball One broke free and made a microjump towards the star as Oliva broke off combat. Her drones ran away like scared bees in every direction as her command ship and jumpships kept their distance while staying close enough to decrease signal lag. She gave Liam control over everything else and focused exclusively on flying the trapship with its Mach’nel prey inside.

The rest of the V’kit’no’sat fleet didn’t chase them, instead pursuing the captured Mach’nel towards the star…but Spaceball One didn’t stop there and, while slowing, continued down into the star’s upper layers as it used its extensive shielding to produce a different type useless in combat but similar to those used by the Star Forge to protect against the intense stellar radiation that could actually use it to fuel the shields, strengthening them against the constant stings from the ship captured inside as it changed in shape again, thickening in strands that stretched between the largest weaponry and leaving massive holes over them that the star began to eat into, slowing diminishing the Mach’nel’s shield strength as Spaceball One’s protection got stronger and stronger as it fed off the star.

“Attention V’kit’no’sat fleet,” Oliva said, sending an open comm to all of their ships, not sure how well the reception would be in the Mach’nel, so she had Spaceball One operate as a relay to boost her transmission signal as it sunk a little deeper into the star while the other ships shot down into it and made a few weak hits against it, disrupting its absorption shields momentarily.

“Our ship is equipped to survive the star, your Mach’nel is not. You have fallen into our trap and now I am waiting to negotiate terms for your surrender. While the Mach’nel will survive for quite a while thanks to its defenses, it will not survive indefinitely. If you do not come to terms we will let it sit and cook in the star until everyone onboard is dead, but that is not our goal. You are not getting the Mach’nel back, but we are willing to negotiate for the lives of the crew. I await your response.”

Olivia mentally summoned a chair to form underneath her feat in the command nexus, with her leaning back to sit in it as it rose, then she put her feet up on the control board and crossed her hands behind her head around her red/green/white ponytail and waited with a smirk on her face, although she was well aware of the ground combat continuing on Requiem and the fact that Star Force was losing, but she’d just compromised the most important asset in their arsenal.

And to be honest, she wasn’t sure how they were going to respond, but at the minimum they were going to lose the Mach’nel, and probably their commander with it unless they were willing to negotiate. And while their fleet was here they weren’t adding to the ground fight with orbital bombardment, so all things being said she was in a good position, but unless they relented she and Liam were still going to lose Requiem.

Olivia updated her status and sent it out via relay so other fleets moving about would know their status, then did something trailblazers did not like doing…waiting. She got a quick ‘good job’ message from Liam then he was off to planetary orbit to help organize the ground defenses and evacuation efforts while she continued to hold personal control over Spaceball One.

“Admiral, you mind getting me something to drink. I’m a little thirsty.”

“Gladly, Olivia,” the Protovic said on the other side of the wall, his eyes gleaming from more than his bioluminosity. “What would you like?”

16

November 4, 4813

Jennizeren System (Star Force Front)

Ennvor

It was the second day since Paul had gotten here and he was already getting the Era’tran to dance to his tune…the problem was they had a significant ship advantage and that ruled out most of his combat options. He had to preserve his own ships enough to protect the 3 planets that hadn’t been breached yet, so any large cancelation battles had to be avoided.

But Paul was still working the problem, bit by bit whittling away at the edges of the V’kit’no’sat fleets surrounding the three contested planets. News from the ground was bad, with the V’kit’no’sat steamrolling across the planet due to the high concentration of troops they’d devoted to the assaults. More than in the past, and all the tricks Star Force had learned to slow and kill them were not being given time to play out. It was like the V’kit’no’sat had finally upped their game and viewed Star Force as a worthy opponent, and the displays of dominance associated with using a small number of troops to destroy a larger, inferior group were now shelved.

They were interested in winning, plain and simple, and had brought enough troops to do it on the ground so long as their fleets got them a foothold. That meant these three planets were lost, or would be unless something changed, but there were three more planets that could be saved and a lot of people on the others to evacuate.

Paul wasn’t able to do the latter for more than a few daring runs, due to the V’kit’no’sat being very prudent with hunting down ascending ships. Paul couldn’t get more than a fraction of the evac ships from the surface out, but the V’kit’no’sat had to spread in order to prevent it and that gave Paul some greater openings. He was picking off some of their smaller ships and wounding the larger ones, but he needed a lot more time than the planets had. The V’kit’no’sat weren’t interested in taking and holding any region of the planets, and Ennvor was the worst. They were slashing and burning specific locations and bypassing even a lot of the anti-ground weaponry as if they were in a hurry.

Normally the V’kit’no’sat took great care to kill every ‘heretic’ in their path, but not this time. They were probably going to take the planet as fast as possible then bombard the hell out of it afterwards. The thing of it was, using this technique on the ground was meaning they had to run or fly past fixed emplacements that were causing their ground troops a lot of damage.

It felt like they were on the clock, but there was no way they could know about the reinforcements Paul had called. No, his gut told him this was something else…and he had a distinct sense that the assaults that had occurred so far were just the opening act. The one possibility that he did not want to entertain was that there was a second wave of ships coming across the Devastation Zone, but the more he watched how this Rovo’kor handled his fleet and the troops on the ground…assuming he was overseeing them as well, as most naval commanders did…it suggested a need for speed overriding the preservation of his units.

If this was going to be a long campaign moving from system to system they needed to go slower and lose less personnel and equipment. If they feared Paul’s reinforcements coming and they were trying to work fast, that would imply fear rather than prudence and the V’kit’no’sat did not fight that way under circumstances of their own choosing. They had picked these assaults carefully, so if it wasn’t fear it either meant stupidity…which he ruled out immediately…or the availability of replacements.

The V’kit’no’sat were in a rush and Paul was having to fight in a way to lengthen the timetable…not a good situation for him, but it was what it was and every ship he destroyed was one less they could use later even if these worlds fell. Actually Paul and the others had gotten used to this type of warfare and had an unbelievable amount of experience in it as the ADZ and surrounding regions were methodically trashed, but now their weaponry, shields, and most important their industry was about on par with the V’kit’no’sat had previously sent their way.

The time they’d bought had paid off, but now it seemed like the V’kit’no’sat were not going to let them reap the rewards of it and actually hold off a planetary assault.

Others would have been disheartened, or disillusioned, and wanted to run away and hide but Paul and the other trailblazers were not. This was where they belonged, and so long as Paul had a ship to use and an opportunity to do damage he was going to throw himself into play and see how this worked out. Star Force might not have any planetary victories against the V’kit’no’sat, but they did have naval ones, and that was enough to keep Paul from getting mentally depressed. What he was doing was having an effect, and that’s all he needed.

People and planets dying weren’t going to throw off his focus as they once had. He’d learned how to numb it out temporarily as he became the task at hand, saving the impact for later when he had a break to process it all…but he was better at that too now, so even as the situation continued to get worse he was effectively immune to morale issues and his fleet keyed off of him, which was a small part of why they were racking up ship tonnage kills faster than the enemy fleet...and the enemy commander knew it.

There had been no further conversations between Paul and Rovo’kor, but he could tell from the fleet movements that he was getting frustrated. Gone were the confident formations that Paul had been picking apart, with the V’kit’no’sat moving into mobile but defensive clusters designed to prevent evac ships from getting away but with sufficient strength to survive an ambush from Paul’s larger fleet groups. The trailblazer wasn’t allowing a head to head, but if Rovo’kor had wanted that he’d have to leave the backside of the planet open to evacuation.

That meant Paul was getting numerical advantage, tonnage wise, in some of these engagements and was trading a few drones kamikaze style to secure ship kills…all the while taking the periodic advantage to run an evac ship up from the surface.

But the people on the surface fleeing regions where the shield generators had gone down were bunching up and going to make easy targets later if he couldn’t get more out. So far the V’kit’no’sat fleet was still staying away from orbital bombardment range to avoid the anti-orbital guns that the ground troops were curiously bypassing. They had their own shields and would hold up to a small amount of counter fire, but against a fleet even a fraction of this size they’d fall one by one in short order.

Paul would have taken them out by now, but he had a glimmer as to why Rovo’kor was not. Why take damage to your ships now when all you had to do was blockade the planet? Then when all the shields had been removed and the inhabitants had nowhere to flee he could switch from blockade to bombardment and take them all out within an hour or so.

But the kicker was, why do it now when you could do it faster with more ships later?

Paul was getting the distinct impression that this assault force was to strip the planets of defenses, not to eradicate the population, as if that would fall to someone else later. And that was why he was keeping a close eye on the movements in the Devastation Zone that were trackable by Star Force and had requested scout ships be sent to specific systems not on the relay grid, guessing as to where additional mega fleets would be passing through so they could get more of a warning as to what was coming.

A day and a half had passed since Spaceball One had sunk into the outer levels of the star in the Karthus System, but no other major naval combat had taken place. Liam had, for the most part, kept her ships away intentionally while waiting this out, all the while the ground invasion was pressing onward. Olivia’s fleet couldn’t do anything to help them right now, and the Mach’nel was going to fall long before Requiem did. Already its shields were down and the star was eating through the Yeg’gor armor with a few breaches that were voraciously digging into the interior.

Oliva could watch in detail thanks to the sensors onboard Spaceball One as the crew evacuated the outer levels and probably were sealing off sections of the ship to delay the burn effect as it crept inward like slow moving goo on the Archon’s displays as walls, beams, and circuity literally melted under the intense heat and radiation, but the ship was so huge it took time to work its way in through the tiny holes. As soon as the rest of the Yeg’gor failed that process would increase in speed, which apparently the commander finally decided to acknowledge as the trailblazer got a comm from the Mach’nel.

When she accepted it the view of half a dozen Brat’mar appeared with one in the middle walking forward to dominate the screen. Its two massive clear horns sprouting out from the head were not aglow as they usually were in battle. Rather, this Triceratops looked very subdued, as did the others around him.

“It appears your snare is not going to exhaust its strength as we had hoped,” the Brat’mar said slowly. “We are dead and we know it. What terms do you think we would accept? Your illegitimate empire has been put under a death mark and we will not stop until you are destroyed. This Mach’nel’s loss will not change that, nor can it be used to barter your survival.”

“I’m not talking about our survival, I’m talking about yours,” Olivia said amicably. “I am willing to let you live.”

“In exchange for what? We will not let you possess this ship.”

“I don’t want it. I want a temporary ceasefire on the planet while you evacuate. Our ‘snare,’ as you put it, can create a shield column up to the surface of the star through which small craft can move safely. I doubt you have enough onboard to evacuate everyone, so drop pods from your fleet will have to descend to pick up the rest of you. In exchange for sparing your crew and giving you safe passage to evacuate, you will reciprocate by temporarily stopping all assaults on the planet.”

“You seek to delay your demise by days?”

“It’s worth it to me in exchange for letting you go.”

“And give you an empty ship to claim?”

“Come now, Brat’mar. Do not think I’m stupid. You can easily sabotage it before you leave.”

“And you can move it, sabotaged or not.”

“My ships will be nowhere near it during the evacuation, and once my snare comes out of the star it will be vulnerable to your fleet. There is no way I’m maintaining possession of the Mach’nel.”

“Unless you extend your shields to cover it and wait us out inside the star.”

“To what end when you claim the star system? You do plan on doing that, don’t you?”

“We will not devote a fleet to wait here indefinitely.”

“And you won’t have to. In exchange for my not holding onto the Mach’nel and playing the waiting game, you will give the planet an additional week once its destruction is confirmed.”

“Confirmed how?”

“You will sabotage all gravity drives and we will hold it inside the star until sufficiently damaged, at which point we will release it to fall further in and my snare will leave visibly empty. You will have confirmation that we do not possess it and I will have my week.”

“And you think our lives are worth a Mach’nel?”

“You are losing the Mach’nel regardless. And are your lives worth less than 8 or 9 days delay in this invasion? I want the time and those are my terms. You can accept them or stay there and die. I give you the choice you would not give us, but do not think I am naïve. This is a courtesy I am extending and I want those days in exchange. You may take as much time as you think you have to consider your answer before your hangar bays are consumed and your evacuation becomes much more complicated.”

The Brat’mar stared her down for several long seconds, but the mental calculations were quite simple. They were dead unless they did this deal, and simply delaying the invasion was a small price to pay to save the large and highly experienced crew, not to mention the fleet commander who stepped forward to speak. He was also a Brat’mar, but one the analysis computer instantly identified by the tattoos on his face.

“Your proposal is accepted. Combat on the surface will temporarily halt when confirmation of a secure conduit to the Mach’nel is made.”

“Dorchav,” Olivia said, raising an eyebrow.

“Are you reconsidering your terms?” the ancient V’kit’no’sat asked quizzically.

“Perhaps I should, but the offer stands.”

“You will get your days, but once they end I will exterminate the planetary population and any ships you send against us.”

“I figured that much.”

“Strategically my death would be more valuable than a temporary delay.”

“Are you really arguing for me to kill you? Dumb Brat’mar, dumb.”

“Your terms are accepted, but I would ask to know why?”

“Because true warriors do not destroy the helpless…and we are better than you.”

“Had you not captured this vessel I would have argued otherwise. Better or not, you don’t have the ships to stop us.”

“Death before dishonor. We’ll go down fighting and we won’t become the bastards you are,” Olivia said, sending the appropriate commands to Spaceball One with a thought. “Your conduit is forming. Combat on the planet must be confirmed to have stopped in all cases, or I’ll collapse the shield with your transports in it.”

“Agreed,” the very revered enemy commander said, looking to his left as he sent out his own set of orders. “We need a direct comm line. My ships won’t trust a relay through you.”

“It will be there in moments,” she said as the areas eating into the Mach’nel suddenly went silent. They were still aglow, but from residual heat and plasma as the shields expanded to cover the whole ship and the bits of star still inside quickly snuffed themselves out. Oliva checked to see if the Mach’nel was firing on the now covering shields, but they were not. It would be stupid if they were and most of the ships weaponry was already destroyed, but she wondered nonetheless.

After the ship was secure and still burning a bit internally, a section of shield continued to extend out like a straw away from Spaceball One and reached all the way up to the surface of the star and then some, splaying out like a flower and blocking/absorbing the radiation and heat giving the V’kit’no’sat fleet a target to shoot for…metaphorically speaking.

“Your comms should connect now.”

“Our drop pods will assemble nearby until we get confirmation,” Dorchav said as already there were small craft popping out from the overhead fleet that was high enough to avoid getting cooked from prolonged exposure, but the drop pods were going to have to go lower to get to the flower petal entrance. “There will be some amount of lag beyond the comm limitations.”

“No passage will be allowed either way until we get it.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ll contact you when my people confirm it,” Olivia said, cutting the comm and leaving the command nexus during the wait, walking out on the bridge and heading for the far door as she picked up an earpiece. “I’ll be back. Keep me appraised of any change and be ready to collapse the conduit at a moment’s notice…but wait for my command.”

“Going for a workout?” Admiral Dentiv asked.

“No, to pee,” she said with a smirk as she left the bridge, wanting to be back in the command nexus for the entirety of the evacuation just in case the V’kit’no’sat tried to pull something.

17

Olivia watched as a steady flow of drop pods from the Mach’nel passed through the safe zone Spaceball One was maintaining while more held position above it waiting for entry. The V’kit’no’sat weren’t playing games with this and had so many of the small transport craft in play that Olivia got the impression that they either wanted to get the Mach’nel evacuated as fast as possible to reduce the possibility of betrayal, or that they wanted the stand down on the planet to last as few minutes as possible.

So far they were holding up their end of the agreement, with their ground troops holding their positions but no longer attacking Star Force positions. Liam had given orders to take massive reorganization efforts on Requiem that the V’kit’no’sat had to be hating as they watched, for they were going to make their resumed attacks more difficult. It was also allowing time for evac ships to leave the surface, and Liam made sure to get them all out prior to the evacuation of the Mach’nel while Oliva had leverage to use.

There weren’t enough ships to get the entire population of the planet out, and such efforts would require those ships and more coming back to pick up subsequent loads, but that little wrinkle to the ceasefire deal helped take a big load off the population crunch in the still intact cities.

That said, the planet was still going to lose the gradual fight if she couldn’t get reinforcements down to them…and with the massive size of this V’kit’no’sat fleet, even minus the Mach’nel, that wasn’t going to happen in any significant numbers. She didn’t have any troops ships with her or she’d have sent them down during the ceasefire, but her Defense fleet wasn’t going to waste ground troops sitting in ships when they could be doing proper training on planets. If she could break the V’kit’no’sat fleet she could call troops in from the surrounding systems in short order, but that wasn’t going to happen even with Liam’s help.

The Mach’nel had already done its damage in the initial assault and the remaining V’kit’no’sat fleet was much larger than it otherwise would have been after bombarding the planetary defenses. Too large for her fleet to do more than scratch at, but the major victory had been achieved and the Mach’nel was soon to be destroyed…with her wondering what kind of sabotage they’d actually made to it prior to them leaving and signaling that it was now empty.

Status reports from the planet indicated no new attacks, so at the moment at least the V’kit’no’sat were holding to their word. Would she get her week? Olivia didn’t know, but she was going to make good on her deal to destroy rather than try to keep the Mach’nel. Taking it out of play was too important, and trying to hold onto it would only give them a chance of recapture.

To put an end to that she ordered Spaceball One to reopen the holes in the shield while protecting itself, allowing the star’s destructive power to further eat into the massive ship as Spaceball One began to sink deeper into the star in order to accelerate the process while still maintaining the IDF field that was draining more and more energy as it now had to accommodate the stellar material within it.

The pressure didn’t relent, for it translated through the field. The gravitational crunching did not, so there was a pushback that kept less pressure internally but still enough to continue the burning through deck after deck as Olivia watched each and every gravity drive within the Mach’nel eventually get consumed, including those at the center.

It took over a day to get to that point, and there was no Yeg’gor armor remaining on the shell. The Mach’nel looked like a rapidly shrinking snowball as it melted away into floating slag inside the IDF field cradled within a holey Spaceball One.

When she was convinced, Olivia ordered it released and the mass began to sink lower in the star…but slowly. A lot of the materials weren’t that heavy, with the weight of each atom determining what level in the star it ended up despite the gooey nature of the highly pressurized gas and plasma. The chunks would eventually reach the liquid and solid core of the star, but there was no need to wait around for that. On her command Spaceball One pulled down into an orb, pushing out the stellar material with its shields and then reforming into a long needle as it pushed further into the star and disappeared from V’kit’no’sat sensors.

Olivia sent a message along with the final sensor telemetry to Dorchav, waiting to see if he’d honor the agreement now that Olivia no longer had any leverage. As for Spaceball One, she had it moving under stealth protocols to another section of the star where it was going to come out at high speed and run for its life so the V’kit’no’sat fleet couldn’t exact revenge upon it. Much of it had already been destroyed, but Olivia wasn’t going to waste it even if Star Force had a few others waiting in storage.

To her mild surprise there was a reply comm coming with a request for a private line to Olivia. She took it under such protocol and saw a holo of Dorchav alone appear.

“You honored your part of the deal, and you will have your week. After that, if you remain here, you will die.”

“You almost sound disappointed by that?”

“While I do not possess Sav, I am superior to you. But in my expansive experience I have never encountered an opponent to try this tactic against a Mach’nel. Now that I have suffered from it, I realize it might be put to better use elsewhere.”

“The Hadarak?” Olivia guessed.

“Indeed. They are far more dangerous than a Mach’nel and actually prefer a star’s interior to open space, but the ability to move them where we wish is something I must admit to never having considered. Nor has anyone else in the V’kit’no’sat, to my knowledge. It’s a pity you and your herd were born into a line of treasonous Zen’zat and not a Ter’nat colony.”

“Perhaps there is your answer. You don’t let Zen’zat reproduce at all.”

“My information says Archons do not either?”

Olivia bobbed her head, conceding the point. “True, but that’s a matter of effectiveness and containing our psionics. We don’t kill violators.”

“And what do you do with your illegitimate Archon offspring?”

“There’s never been any from the Archons. But individuals who acquire psionics without permission are either conscripted into service or have the psionics deactivated.”

“Some cannot be deactivated.”

“We haven’t had to deal with those. However, we don’t have telekinesis in our population. You do, as far as my information goes. Why do you tolerate everyone having it and yet are so scared of the Zen’zat reproducing?”

“They are servants given powers the rest of us do not have, or at least the potential to acquire them. Each individual must earn them. That is the only way such a conglomeration of power is allowed in a single race.”

“Oh? I thought it was because the Zen’zat were tiny?”

“Less psionic tissue is a limiting factor, but there are Zen’zat that can kill Brat’mar in single combat. They are lethal in ways that we cannot permit to accidentally exist.”

“Believe me, I know,” Olivia said, smiling. “I’m pretty sure I could handle a Brat’mar, though I haven’t had the chance to try.”

“You are an abomination that was never meant to exist.”

“Or are we what the Zen’zat had the potential to become but never developed into?”

“I am curious about that. You have ample motivation in survival, but there must be more than that. How have you progressed so far in so few years?”

“We don’t kill people who step out of line. Rather we reward those who are effective and leave the others to civilian life.”

“As do we, for the most part.”

“Zen’zat serve you. You never let them have anything for themselves. Maybe your example has held them back?”

“They are bipeds, we are quadrupeds. If they are keying off of us then they are stupid.”

“Did you train them to be otherwise?”

“Stupidity is something that is meant to remain in the Ter’nat. Zen’zat should be better than that.”

“Yet you are in control.”

“Why are you smaller? Your Knights are proper Zen’zat size, but you are not. That means you have even less psionic tissue.”

“We do well enough.”

“But why?”

“Why haven’t you all gone Ultra?”

“But you are so much smaller than us. What advantage is there in going even smaller? Our enemies do not outsize us.”

“You have Ari’tat. Why not enlarge them to your size?”

“They are not built for it. We enhanced the Zen’zat without compromising their physiology. You can attain their size without negative side effects. You must know this from our records you obtained from Terraxis. So why?”

“Most of our enemies are not your size, and agility and speed are more important.”

“More important than psionic tissue?”

“We compensate for lack of tissue with skill. We may have less, but per mass it’s stronger.”

“You put yourself in a compromised position versus Zen’zat.”

“And you put Zen’zat in a compromised position by withholding psionics from them. Why not let them have all of them in order to fight us?”

“We do not alter our empire to fight our enemies. We adapt, but we do not alter. It would unbalance other areas and we would end up a nightmare of contradictions. Our psionic allotment is carefully constructed for longevity and stability. True dominance is not fleeting.”

“Battles are.”

“Which is why our psionics are closely guarded and rogue Zen’zat must be destroyed. We cannot let our enemies possess such strength.”

“Oops,” Oliva said, using the V’kit’no’sat equivalent. “Maybe you should have negotiated rather than attacked Terraxis straight off.”

“Perhaps so, but none of you are permitted to live. What negotiation could there have been other than the circumstances of your demise?”

“Good men don’t need rules. Your adherence to code is a weakness.”

“We have destroyed most of your empire,” the Brat’mar said, citing density of civilization rather than points on the map, for Star Force now had more of the latter than the day the war began. “It has cost us more than we imagined, but the end result will be the same and the losses are a stark reminder of why we cannot let rogue populations exist with our genomes. Where do you see our weakness?”

“You made us an automatic enemy. And after all you have done, we are not going to be forgiving.”

“You will be dead, so it does not matter.”

“You’d better hope so. Still haven’t taken the Uriti Preserve yet. What’s the holdup?”

Dorchav visibly altered while not quite growling, but it was obvious even to Olivia’s eyes that the mere mention of that failure annoyed him.

“Hide there if you wish, but we will return and finish off that bastion of strength after we eliminate the rest of your civilization. The bastardized Hadarak will be hard to kill, but we will eventually succeed.”

“You just lost the second Mach’nel in your history to us…or was there another to someone else I’m not aware of?”

“Mach’nel have been destroyed, but never captured. You are unique in that.”

“And you are overconfident.”

“The vast swath of planets in what you call the Devastation Zone is evidence to the contrary.”

“So is the burning hulk of your Mach’nel sinking in the star.”

“You are a worthy opponent, but we will still prevail. Our empire is too large and too strong to fall, and we will not coexist.”

“And we will not lay down and die.”

“I give you a measure of respect for that, but it will not stay my wrath. When the ceasefire ends, this system falls.”

“Ingrate,” Olivia quipped.

“Sparing me was a strategic mistake, but I do thank you for it.”

“Do you know how we got the Uriti to ally with us?”

“No, and I am deeply curious as to how you control them.”

“We don’t control them. We talked to them when everyone else decreed they had to be destroyed. Your empire is darkside, and that gives you some advantages. But Star Force is lightside, and that gives us some different advantages. Making allies is one of them. Instead of befriending us you’re trying to kill us and losing so many ships in the process that could have been preserved simply by talking.”

“Your existence is forbidden.”

“And that darkside decree keeps a firm hold on your populations and discourages competition…but when something slips through the cracks it becomes a weakness.”

“Your translation must be off. Your terms of ‘darkside’ and ‘lightside’ are not used properly.”

“You simply are unfamiliar with them. There is more to the universe than dominance. Some things are wrong, many things are neutral, and other things are good. I don’t think you understand good, which we refer to as ‘lightside’. The V’kit’no’sat are a mix of neutral and darkside, meaning you do bad things. You gain some advantages from those bad things, but the darkside is inherently self-destructive…and death marks are a tell-tale sign of it.”

“And you claim to have strengths unknown to us?”

“Yes. The Uriti are a prime example of it. If you ever figure out why, then you and I may no longer be enemies.”

“I thought we were beyond forgiving?”

“Your empire is.”

“But I am not? Do you favor me for some reason?”

“There is a truth to the universe, and those that can see it are inherently allies. You are ignorant, but have enough skills to suggest that you are not delusional. If you ever come to know and understand the lightside you will either be a virulent enemy or an ally. There can be no neutrality once your eyes are opened…and the delusional make sure they never see what they feel on the periphery.”

“I will consider your words, if for no other reason than the victory you have achieved here.”

“And I will apologize if I end up killing you later. You seem less fanatical than the other V’kit’no’sat. You’ll at least talk to a ‘heretic.’”

“You are no heretic. You were simply born into an illegitimate line. And I do pity that, but the death mark remains and I do not have the authority to suspend it. Only Itaru does.”

“Might want to have a talk with them about that before they send another Mach’nel our way.”

“I doubt they will after this debacle.”

“Why the change after so many years?”

“A shift in strategy.”

“By your new campaign commander?”

“Yes. And that identity will remain a secret.”

“Is he going to get into trouble for losing the Mach’nel?”

“Far less than I will.”

“Are they going to kill you?”

“No, they will not. I am too valuable and your new technology was unpredictable.”

“Just us thinking logically rather than relying on legacy.”

“A rebuke?”

“I’m a trailblazer. I have no one’s example to follow. I have to chart our path forward where you look to others that came before you. Expect the unexpected with us. We’re not using the V’kit’no’sat playbook.”

“So noted,” Dorchav said as his fleet’s sensors picked up the Star Force snareship racing out from the star in a different position too fast for his fleet to intercept. “Keep your ship as a trophy. You most likely will not see another victory of this magnitude going forward amongst your string of defeats.”

“Trophy? I’m going to use it to shoot you guys,” Olivia said with a sarcastic wave as she cut the comm while keeping a close mental eye on Spaceball One’s progress. That conversation had been more revealing than she’d expected, but she wasn’t stupid enough to believe that Brat’mar was going to cut them any slack. If he didn’t violate the agreement and attack early, then that would be the only payback in exchange for saving his life and Olivia wasn’t assuming even that much as she resumed part of the control duties for her fleet and got them moving around the system but keeping their distance from the V’kit’no’sat.

When the fighting started again she was going to peel off what enemy ships she could, but Dorchav was right about one thing. Requiem was going to fall and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop it.

18

January 13, 4814

Jennizeren System (Star Force Front)

Zulu

Two months had passed and Paul was still nowhere close to winning the fight for the Jennizeren System. Three of the 6 planets remained intact, but the three under assault were in bad condition. None of them had fallen completely, but the orbital bombardment of sections where the planetary shield had fallen continued and Paul was helpless to stop it.

But he was making gains, in the form of ship losses. He’d destroyed in small attacks 13% of the enemy fleet, or rather what remained after they had assaulted Ennvor, Tardon, and Zulu. They’d lost 16% of their fleet and saw damage equal to another 11% spread over ships still in the fight during those shield breaching attacks. That didn’t sound like egregious losses, but they were considering the original 7,449 ships the V’kit’no’sat had brought into the system.

Over 7,000 ships ranging in size from 2.5 miles up through 36 miles wide. Other locations were getting hit with more, especially Karthus, and reinforcements had to go there. Paul had picked up a few dozen more jumpships that had come in from odd places, but he knew this fight was going to mostly occur with what he had here already, and right now he had to get the enemy ship count low enough that when they hit the other three planets the anti-orbital batteries would massacre them.

Assuming there weren’t more coming for the V’kit’no’sat, which Paul wasn’t. If there were then he’d fight this battle as best he could, but right now he had to face the situation before him and the fact that the V’kit’no’sat were already beginning eradication bombardment on Zulu before the entire planet had even been conquered was making him angry.

Angrier than normal, anyway, for watching people die was never something Paul could tolerate. Most Star Force personnel were moving ahead of the fight, but not all were making it out and those fighting the V’kit’no’sat directly on the ground were getting hit hard and not every fallen mech or aerial craft had their pilots survive. On top of that Zen’zat were moving out ahead of the larger V’kit’no’sat and probing everywhere with assassination and sabotage missions.

And Paul couldn’t get to them. He needed his warships in the atmosphere pounding the enemy ground troops, but even the smaller fleet over Zulu had him blocked and he’d been chipping away at it for the past 6 days. Already some additional ships had been sent over from the other two planets to reinforce this enemy fleet, keeping Paul stuck with skirmish work only while the planet continued to get hammered.

What was worse was the fact that Paul could take them. The fleet over Zulu anyway. He could full on attack that fleet and basically cancel them out, losing all his ships while taking out theirs. But then the other two fleets would own the system and the three intact planets would have only their shields and anti-orbital weapons to defend themselves with, which were substantial, but having a mobile fleet that could backdoor any bombarding fleet made the required number of ships to penetrate the shields much, much higher.

So Paul had to play the long game, preserving most of his ships while making kills and some trades against the V’kit’no’sat that were advantageous, as word came through the relay grid from one of the scouts on the far side of the Devastation Zone. Another large V’kit’no’sat fleet had been seen passing through a system and heading this way. That meant another month, maybe two before they got to the front, and Paul doubted it was the only one coming.

But he had his own reinforcements coming, some of which should be here within the month, which meant the gains or losses made within the next few weeks would set the stage for the main event forthcoming, and Paul needed to make sure the three intact planets stayed intact until then…but at the rate the V’kit’no’sat were conquering Zulu and the others they might finish early. The ground troops had to hold the shield generators long enough, so Paul made a bad choice.

His fleet was spread out around the planet, forcing the V’kit’no’sat fleet to equally spread so Paul couldn’t run help down or evac ships out, and was constantly in motion probing with light attacks and withdrawing until he had a mismatch that he pounced on. But now was different, and as he mentally sent out orders the ship movements visibly changed and the V’kit’no’sat were fast to react as he launched a massive assault in 11 different locations.

He didn’t use his entire fleet, and as those 11 battles started to show significant damage to the V’kit’no’sat ships the others in blockade formation rushed out of position to aid them…which was the point. As the carnage increased Paul sent 9 smaller groups in on flanking attacks, all of which was to obscure the single small group that accelerated hard towards the planet and entered the atmosphere so fast they lit on fire, draining their shields heavily, but they needed the speed as some of the V’kit’no’sat ships attacked from range and moved to intercept them.

But they didn’t make it. Some of the drones had their shields breached, then the friction with the atmosphere burnt away at their hull armor, but it was the additional weaponsfire that downed more than half of them before they hit the intact shields below that Paul had briefly lowered just long enough for the intact drones to pass through. It was then reformed just before the falling pieces of the destroyed ones hit, crushing against the energy shield and splattering like metallic water balloons as visible ripples formed in the otherwise clear shield.

The energy necessary to repel the ramming debris wasn’t near enough to overstress them, and the subsequent weaponsfire from the ships above were absorbed as the V’kit’no’sat ships turned and ran back up to higher orbit as 8 of them were hit by anti-orbital fire from the ground batteries, for Paul had made the run down over an intact section of the planet. A section that typically had V’kit’no’sat ships very high up to intercept his skirmishers before they could get low enough to get an assist from the planet’s weaponry.

The massive battles that were now underway had pulled enough ships out of position for Paul to get 12 intact drones and 5 damaged ones through and under the planetary shields, with him immediately recalling the rest of his fleet up to higher orbit. They had to disengage before he lost too many of them, but already he had the ships underneath the shield skimming the surface as they headed towards the shield generators closest to the fighting.

He needed more than that down there, and higher up, because he couldn’t get good firing lines past buildings when the drones were so low and pinned there because of the planetary shields, which he had raised 3 more miles to assist, but still the firing had to be lateral unless you were right over the targets and the drones couldn’t go out beyond the shield coverage or they’d get pounded by the V’kit’no’sat fleet.

To make matters worse the edges of the planetary shields had to be tilted down enough to keep V’kit’no’sat warships from getting underneath them as well, so the places where the fighting was the heaviest had an even lower ceiling, but the troops on the ground would welcome the corvettes and destroyers he’d slipped down, for as big and dangerous as the V’kit’no’sat ground troops were, even an Era’tran was small and vulnerable compared to a warship.

But Paul knew massed fire could take them down, and all three planets had multiple Ultras with them that were currently withdrawing from the front lines, knowing they’d be the easiest targets for the warships. In fact the ground combat was shifting immediately and relieving the hardest hit areas, but Paul knew they were merely shifting their attack from a full force mode to a more subtle multipronged attack with smaller units that the warships could not target when they were inside or below buildings.

The larger V’kit’no’sat were pulling back within range of their own mobile batteries, for they no longer sent down troops without the ability to defend themselves against low riding warships…at least a few of them anyway, which meant Paul couldn’t race his drones out after them without risking damage or losing one or two of them.

What he’d just done was slow down the V’kit’no’sat and maybe stop them in a few locations, but the warships couldn’t stop an army of Zen’zat from moving through the cityscape. They had to have troops on the ground to do that, but Paul could do some things to make their movement harder.

Evacuation alarms sounded around several key locations on Paul’s order, with holographic markers leading the people in those areas out as Paul selected buildings around the shield generators and the undercity beneath them as targets. When they were clear he fired on them, destroying part of the Star Force city all the way down to the bedrock over the next few hours of continuous pointblank bombardment so his limited ground troops would have less approaches to defend, for beneath all the surface buildings and streets was another world entirely, and one that the warships couldn’t assist.

The ‘undercity’ existed in most Star force infrastructure purposely to give denizens cover against aerial attack, but being outnumbered like this it gave the enemy a movement advantage even when blast doors were sealed off, for the V’kit’no’sat could cut their way through with time. Now they’d have piles of rubble hundreds of meters wide to dig through…and if they were detected to be trying Paul could fire on those locations again, making them a death zone if the enemy crept into them.

No, now they would have to go through specific approaches, for Paul had left many so his own troops didn’t get cornered, and kept a drone over top of each shield generator to shoot down aerial attack, for there were plenty of I’rar’et and other V’kit’no’sat fliers in the skies. They were all wearing armor with weaponry included, making them a match for Star Force’s own aerial craft, but they had a movement advantage while Star Force had a firepower and shields advantage…for most of the mass of the V’kit’no’sat fliers was made up of their bodies, with the skeets and other Star Force fighters being made up mostly of equipment with smaller pilots.

And there were several Urik’kadel units still in play, with their pilots being smaller than Humans. Approximately rabbit-sized, the Urik’kadel were on average better pilots than most other races and were able to fly superior craft due to their smaller cockpit size that allowed for more equipment in identical aerial craft frames.

Typically Star Force would win aerial fights, for the V’kit’no’sat air divisions were not so dominant in equal numbers, but they had not come with equal numbers here, and even a small numerical advantage combined with their agility was a death knell for the V’kit’no’sat’s aerial opponents. Anti-air weaponry and especially a warship changed that, but they were a big asset to the enemy none the less, including the handful of Les’i’kron that were essentially aerial battleships when it came to fliers…but they would be easy pickings for a corvette even if it didn’t have fast tracking anti-air batteries.

As Paul’s ships in orbit ran, he stayed mentally linked with those on the surface as he coordinated with the ground troops while turning over part of the soon to resume harassing attacks in orbit to other Archons. He’d keep an eye on it and intervene when necessary, but they could handle a lot of the same tasks with equal skill, freeing him up while he now had an active part to play in the ground warfare.

But it had come at a cost. He’d lost 823 drones while the V’kit’no’sat had lost 13 full ships and saw significant damage to 182 more. Paul hadn’t stuck around long enough to take them out, because forcing that fight was going to cost him even more, but some of that damage they would be able to repair and the lost shields would now regenerate where his dead drones would not. In addition he had another 1048 drones with hull damage, 83 of which were so bad they had to be recalled to the controlling Warship-class jumpships for docking and repair, but Paul knew they would be permanently out of the fight without a visit to a shipyard.

And the only shipyards in the system were the orbital ones that had been destroyed or surface yards that were not accessible due to the V’kit’no’sat blockades…and even if they were, it would be weeks to repair these. More likely they’d have to be disassembled and the useful parts repurposed to repair others, and a little bit of that could be accomplished on the jumpships even when they were in motion thanks to the IDF fields cradling the partially exposed docking section on the rear/underside of the elongated jumpships that somewhat resembled old school submarines, but with angular, hard faces and little ornamentation. They also didn’t have a conning tower, for the bridge and most critical areas were at the center and as far from weapons damage as possible.

As Paul’s damaged drones limped back to their motherships, he kept reorganizing the ground defenses now that they had close-in warships support, but only a few hours in he got an alert ping from the ships he’d left roaming stellar orbit and playing with the few V’kit’no’sat ships that were also there. A seldom-used jumpline was showing activity, and one coming from the rim. No identification signals were showing and no updates had come through the relay grid, so this had to be bad news and the V’kit’no’sat must have circled around through systems that should have had detection systems set up. The fact that they could get here through Star Force territory meant they’d somehow gotten scouts in that had sabotaged…

That train of thought ended when the first detected mass decelerated, with Paul seeing it on a time delay due to the signal lag. He raised an eyebrow when he saw it was a Paladin jumpship, larger than the ones he commanded by more than double, and it wasn’t alone. Several more came behind it, ended up at 37 in total, all with identification beacons disabled until the last of them had arrived, then they lit up with identifiers and Paul could see exactly who it was.

A message from Viceroy Hannibal came through immediately thereafter, explaining that the rest of the Paladin were assembling at various waypoints so they could come in force, but Supreme Viceroy Thrawn had wanted him to come ahead with whatever he could to assist Paul immediately.

That wasn’t what Paul had told him to do, because only in large numbers would the Paladin stand a chance against the V’kit’no’sat, but he was glad Hannibal was here now. It wasn’t a large addition to his fleet, but it was significant and the Paladin jumpships carried far more drones. That had been Thrawn’s decision when they built this design, and they had more engine power insystem than standard Star Force jumpships did…but at a cost. They were slow when full, meaning they couldn’t outrun the V’kit’no’sat or move about through enemy territory prior to a battle without getting run down.

They had to stand and fight, with the drones anyway, which was a big reason why they’d never been used in the Devastation Zone, but Paul saw the jumpships immediately spilling out their drones in a mad rush, making them light enough to move around as necessary and not get caught.

Their positioning was ok, as was the lack of arrival warning. Hannibal indicated that they’d instructed the relay grid not to transmit their location, which was why Paul hadn’t known they were coming…and couldn’t instruct them to go elsewhere. But if the V’kit’no’sat did have a hack somewhere, unlikely as that was, this small Paladin fleet was unknown to them.

It wasn’t enough new ships for Paul to take on the enemy fleets here as he would have liked, but it did give him more to work with and he could put more pressure on Rovo’kor with the fleet of all heavy cruisers. The Paladin didn’t use multiple versions of drones, with their .78 mile long version being standard and shaped like a ‘+’ when viewed from the end. It was essentially two standard Star Force mainline drones, each of which was brick shaped, overlapped on one another. Not the most efficient shape, but they stacked against each other in the carrier bay and created niches on the surface to hide weapons batteries in.

That was an advantage and disadvantage, for while the enemy couldn’t pluck the weapons off the drones from as many directions, they couldn’t fire in as many directions from the same battery either. Many factions within Star Force had their own shape drones, but they all worked off the same rules. No crew, all remote controlled, and all carried within jumpships that housed the remote pilots.

The Paladin version, while not different sizes, did carry different weaponry. Some were shield ships, with almost no weaponry and extra generators to make themselves harder to kill and so they could create parasol-like barriers to protect others. Some were heavily armored, making them damage sponges, while others were heavily packed with lots of smaller weapons. Still some had a single main weapon that required a long recharge period…but could deliver a massive strike in one hit.

The Paladin had access to the same weapon tech as the rest of Star Force, but Thrawn, Hannibal, and the other old leaders that were born to the Li’vorkrachnika and not the Paladin had old habits from numerous battles against Star Force, and Paul had chosen to let them do their own thing, for sometimes it took an old enemy to see your true weaknesses and strengths. Plus their navy had to fit them, not Paul, and as long as it worked within Star Force parameters they could tailor it as they liked.

Paul and the other 2s, who were responsible for developing the Paladin, knew that Thrawn and the other original masterminds would not tolerate inefficiency. For them winning was everything, so they weren’t going to create bad designs, and while they had a lot to learn initially about Star Force methods when viewed from within, Paul had no doubts about their effectiveness now. They weren’t Clan level, but they were solid and now that they were plugged into the battlemap system with a trailblazer in control, they would be all the more effective.

“Welcome to the party, old friend,” Paul sent back as the Paladin fleet was still on its way to his position. “You were supposed to wait, but I’m glad you didn’t. We’ve got a mess here and probably more V’kit’no’sat reinforcements on the way. We have to hold the 3 intact planets while not abandoning the others, which means we can’t lose a lot of ships. I want a fresh assessment of the battlefield, so review the battlemap data and get back to me when you’ve finished.”

“Do not underestimate these bastards, Hannibal, but they are beatable. And expect them to test your jumpships. They haven’t chased them before and they may check for a weakness. Don’t get caught napping.”

19

February 4, 4814

Karthus System (Star Force territory)

Requiem

Nathan-937 sat perched on a wall, clinging to it with the grip points built into his Archon armor as he waited with his Kgat psionic shielding his mind from view. He was still visible to the naked eye and Pefbar, but where Ikrid was concerned he did not exist and it was how V’kit’no’sat looked for enemies from medium range.

Knowing this, the Piccolo-level Archon was waiting and watching with his eyes and passive sensors within an intact section of the cityscape around one of the shield generators. He’d originally come into the system at the head of a naval fleet, but during the fighting over the planet he’d lost most of his ships alongside the Sentinel defense platforms that had formerly ringed the planet. They’d all moved to blunt the V’kit’no’sat attack and keep the planetary shields up as long as possible, but the enemy had chosen to hit them straight on at high cost to both sides.

Afterwards Nathan knew the V’kit’no’sat would not try the same thing to get the other shield generators down, and had transferred himself to the surface before Liam had the remainder of the system defense fleet run and then begin hit and run attacks, else they be wiped out entirely…which they had been before Olivia arrived, but they’d exacted far more damage on the exterior of the enemy fleet than getting themselves pinned in low orbit and target practice for a Mach’nel.

Nathan had been right to get to the surface while he could, and now numerous V’kit’no’sat armies were hitting the various cities on the planet and hammering through their insane defenses, but it was the V’kit’no’sat infiltration teams that had been exploiting any crack in the defense lines and slipping through…where they then disappeared until the appropriate moment.

So Nathan was clinging to the wall spiderman-like and waiting where he had a decent vantage point. He couldn’t sense with his own Ikrid while Kgat was active, but he needed to spot them before they spotted him, otherwise they wouldn’t come close enough. The nearest fighting was 18 miles away, but the second gen Archon had a gut feeling that this was the time they would hit the shield generator while most of the troops were up ahead and trying to slow the V’kit’no’sat advance that was pounding this way.

If they couldn’t be stopped they’d run over the shield generator and take it down, exposing another chunk of the planet to orbital bombardment, hence the frantic defense, but that would be seen as an opportunity to sneak a sabotage team in and get the shield generator early despite the point defenses it had in place.

The V’kit’no’sat had done this twice already in other locations, one for an anti-orbital gun and the other for a smaller city-sized shield generator. Nathan could be wasting his time here, but he thought the V’kit’no’sat were getting impatient despite the fast speed of conquest.

Fast for Star Force, anyway, but for the dominant V’kit’no’sat they were probably getting sick of the constant effort and losses. Nathan couldn’t fight the larger V’kit’no’sat races head on or he’d get killed outside a mech, and they had plenty of good mechwarriors to man their limited number of war machines…meaning the place he could do the most good while Olivia and Liam were in system heading up the naval fight was right here, lurking in the shadows and hunting roaming Zen’zat teams.

Others would have felt bad sitting while others were fighting and dying, but Nathan knew better. This planet was falling, and the most good he could do was stall the eventual fall of the final shield generator, for once it was down they were all dead. The one he was guarding now wasn’t the last, but they were like a row of dominoes and continually going down to this invasion, so if he could protect this one even an additional hour it would delay the fall of the final one and be worth more than him duking it out with Brat’mar and Wass’mat in a mech.

Nathan had been waiting here for 3 hours already, moving around a little bit but staying in the northwest region where he guessed an assault force would come through. The main blockage was in the undercity, with a lot of makeshift defenses down there in addition to the original ones because you couldn’t fit a mech in most of those tunnels. It would be hand to hand and the best place for Zen’zat to try and push through.

But they knew that too, which was why Nathan felt they were going to try to go over the surface building to building during the night when they’d be harder to visually spot. Sensors wouldn’t care, but if they were wearing stealth suits…

Then he saw one. Or rather a shadow cross from a window high up on a skyscraper to the building on the far side of the wide street. It was a jump, for there was a slight curve to the trajectory, and to Nathan it looked like little more than the lights on the far side winking out, for he could see nothing but a disturbance in the nighttime cityscape that had remained unmoving for the past 43 minutes that he’d been in this perch.

Then there was another, and another, with Nathan checking the battlemap and seeing nothing on the city sensors, but when he brought up the view of cameras he saw the same dark blots jumping across, already up to more than a dozen, and he knew they were null fields that absorbed all sensor signals, light, and anything else sent their way. That meant there would be no return signals for sensors to see, but properly attuned sensors would notice the lack of normal returns off the far buildings.

The city sensors weren’t set up that way aboveground, for they were designed for aircraft that didn’t make a habit of hiding…and that’s probably why the V’kit’no’sat were crossing high, for the sensors on ground level were configured to check for anomalies when the streets were clear, as they were now.

Nathan jumped off the wall, deactivating the grip pads so he didn’t stick there awkwardly, but unlike the Zen’zat he didn’t fall. Instead he continued to ascend, flying using the Yen’mer psionic that no known Zen’zat had ever achieved, let alone knew was in their own genome. It’d been put there by the Zak’de’ron when they led the V’kit’no’sat, but when they betrayed the dragons and killed them all they lost that knowledge. With the help of a single Zak’de’ron survivor that Star Force discovered they’d indirectly gained such knowledge, giving Nathan a big advantage…with him being grateful that this team of Zen’zat couldn’t fly, otherwise they would have been much more difficult to track.

What they could do was float, for their armor had limited gravity drives enough to enhance their jumps and save them from falling from extreme heights. That was how they were jumping from building to building, and they had their own grip pads that allowed them to climb and cling as he had. But right now they were in a specific building and still coming across the gap, with it being a facility that housed ground troops. Normally it would have been a very bad place to go…but right now all the troops were out fighting and the building was nearly empty save for a few techs.

Nathan thought the Zen’zat would pass them by to avoid detection, in addition to the fact that it was the shield generator they needed down. Once it was and the lesser city shield was taken down later, those techs and everyone else could be taken out with naval guns, so what was the point of stopping and killing people that would be as good as dead anyway if they completed their mission?

Nathan didn’t have anyone nearby to call for help, and he certainly wasn’t going to pull troops off the defense of the shield generator and create a breach for another Zen’zat team to sneak through. No, he was on his own, and he hoped these Zen’zat weren’t too advanced. Even with his plethora of psionics he was not guaranteed victory, and many he had encountered already on this planet were physically stronger than him, meaning close in hand to hand fighting was out when they could potentially get him in a stranglehold. He was going to have to hit hard and run, but he could do this…assuming there weren’t too many and not too many badasses. If more than one of them had Jumat then he’d have trouble, but Jumat was rare and he didn’t know if these Zen’zat were sent because they were expendable or because they were that good.

He was going to find out soon, flying straight to the building and entering via the roof, then running down flights of stairs as he killed his Kgat and stretched out with his own Ikrid, immediately getting hits on the Zen’zat. He used a light probe, one that only experts would be able to pick up on, and right now hopefully the Zen’zat were too busy running and staying stealthy to notice, for he didn’t feel any Ikrid probes coming from them.

But there was a problem. Already there were 34 of them in this building with more jumping across. Nathan didn’t risk that powerful of an Ikrid probe to see into the far building, but this was too many for him to take on directly. Fortunately they were strung out, so he decided to hit them in the middle, forcing them to split or turn around to engage him.

He got their approximate positions in his memory then engaged his Kgat again along with his Da’nu that would negate their ability to see him in their Pefbar fields. They could see the null space within them, but they couldn’t see him specifically, so when he came into the hallway they were passing through he was able to get close before they realized what he was.

As soon as they saw his green/purple Archon armor they visibly twitched, recognizing the threat, and as they shot him with their forearm mounted Dre’mo’don orbs he sprinted and ran headfirst into the chest of one of the 8 foot tall monsters. He stood just a little over 6 feet tall, but when he hit the shadow that the null field made them look like, he accelerated and flew through it, using his head as a battering ram, and knocked the 380 pound Zen’zat back down the hallway onto his back.

Nathan flipped over midair, then pummeled the Zen’zat with a Jumat blast so hard he heard the floor crack underneath him. In that moment he pulled a death stick out of the rack on his back as the Zen’zat appeared in view with its shields replacing the null field, but not fast enough. Nathan kept a waterspout of Jumat energy flowing from his left hand that disrupted the shields from fully forming as he jabbed the short cylinder down into the chest armor of the Zen’zat with him beginning to take shots from two more Zen’zat further down the hall that abandoned their camouflage.

When the death stick released its ultra condensed Ta’lin’yi blast, it burnt through the Zen’zat’s armor almost completely, then Nathan let the single shot weapon go and pressed his own forearm weapon into the gap as it started to refill, drawing material from elsewhere on the Zen’zat’s body but Nathan was too fast, pumping several shots into the damaged area and down into the flesh even as a fist came around knocking him off.

Nathan stuck midair, flying back a meter and grabbing the wounded Zen’zat by the wrist, then twisting around and throwing him like a rag doll down the hallway towards the others coming his way. So far those ahead hadn’t turned around, so he only had to face opponents coming from the rear, and as he threw his barricade ahead of him, blocking a few Dre’mo’don shots in the process, he flew himself into the body and pushed it further, running over the two Zen’zat on the other side before letting them all drop as he flew on down to the fourth coming into the hallway.

He pulsed his Rentar as he felt telekinetic pulls on him, with the energy field melting them away and allowing him to fly freely as he released multiple mind-interfering psionics while dancing about, barely setting foot to ground as he delivered more death sticks into his opponents and followed up enough to wound six of them before more began to pile up and throw so much firepower his way he had to back off.

The death sticks were useful, but you couldn’t carry too many of them with you. They were good for doing quick damage, but now he was going to have to take these guys down the hard way, which meant grinding down their shields and armor, for his Jumat disrupted shields rather than stripping them away. Still, it was an advantage he had over them, for he had yet to receive a Jumat blast directed at him as he circled around through another hallway and came back at them from behind, though they saw him coming with their Pefbar that allowed them to see through walls.

See through, but not shoot through, so Nathan’s shields recovered a bit by the time he got back to them, flying so fast he hit the far wall when he pushed through two Zen’zat, bouncing to the left to get back to the injured ones…over top of which he released an Ubven field, sealing everything in a thick telekinetic field that did not allow movement. But that same Ubven allowed him a Rentar-like immunity that let him cut through and neutralize the field wherever it hit his body.

He got to the wounded ones, pinned in place helpless and unable to move more than an inch or two with great effort as Dre’mo’don blasts came towards him and hit the field. The particle part of their cocktail stuck there glowing as the energy part flashed on through without hindrance, hitting his shields with less effect as the mass of glowing green particles pounded in the edge of the field.

Then one of the Zen’zat got up, telling Nathan that one had Rentar, but the Archon was still able to get to and kill two of the wounded Zen’zat before the field fell. He sent a Jumat blast into the one with Rentar that was rushing him, knocking him back as Nathan flew off in the direction of the Zen’zat at the head of the line that still weren’t showing up. Right now he couldn’t worry about them, but sent out a signal via the battlemap marking his location and the presence of the Zen’zat, then he got back to running and fighting.

Unfortunately the two Zen’zat he killed and left lying on the hallway floor didn’t stay dead. The regenerators, known as Kich’a’kat, built into their armor repaired and revived their bodies, bringing them back to life as their armor thinned to supply material to cover the breaches. Weakened but still deadly, the Zen’zat got back to their feet and followed the others as they worked together to track and fight the elite Archon as he would not let them get to their objective.

They had to keep moving, for fighting him was pointless, so they kept working forward as best they could while suffering these attacks, hoping to rack up enough damage to his shields and armor to scare him off before he wore them down so much that the next mind blinding attack would leave more dead and less to fight with…all the while giving Star Force time to summon reinforcements to their location.

20

April 19, 4814

Jennizeren System (Star Force Front)

Zulu

Paul had been overusing his planetside drones, now having only 3 corvettes remaining with the others now crashed into the surface and scattered in bits after taking so much fire from the V’kit’no’sat ground troops, but he’d had no choice. He had to take the pressure off of the Star Force troops and hold the line as much as possible, even as that line was constantly moving in the wrong direction.

And to make matters worse, Tardon was down to only two planetary shield generators left. All the Star Force survivors from that world were there, clustered underneath that protection in an Alamo situation. If those shield generators fell, they’d be annihilated from orbit and at the moment Paul had no way to get them out with the blockade currently in place.

But Star Force had learned long ago how to prepare for situations like this, and even now evacuees that couldn’t go up to orbit were going down…deep down underground to magma ships and even mobile cities that could slowly move through the molten core. Such things did not exist on any planetary blueprint and across the Devastation Zone many such sanctuaries had ridden out planetary bombardment and resurfaced again at specially developed docking points on the underside of the crust where they then dug new passages up to the surface when rescue teams arrived and signaled them long after the planet had been left for dead.

But there were too many people left and they couldn’t all just disappear at once, meaning some had to hold the line to buy time for the others…and Paul couldn’t help them. He’d reduced the size of the V’kit’no’sat fleet up until a group of their reinforcements arrived. It wasn’t a massive number, but an additional 723 ships jumped into the system and added an extra layer to each of the three planetary assaults taking place. Zulu was in the best shape, but once Tardon was finished those ships would probably be rejoining the other two fleets.

When that happened Paul’s job would get even harder, but other systems had it far worse. The second wave of V’kit’no’sat reinforcements was beyond anything he had imagined with a total of half a million additional ships, mostly of smaller size, and they’d come in 78 fleets working their way across the Devastation Zone by different routes, most of which Star Force hadn’t seen coming.

And they were now assaulting 59 different systems, all of which were getting hammered. For that reason Paul had signaled for no additional reinforcements for Jennizeren, for he was fairly confident that even with the 700+ reinforcements the V’kit’no’sat had received that he could hold onto the 3 untouched planets. If he could do that it would be a major victory, and the more fleets he could send elsewhere to fight the better.

Right now the Paladin were massing at the varied waypoints with a few of their fleets already enroute to the battlefields that were spread all along the front, but it would be another month or two before they all got into play, meaning that the additional Defender fleets that had been rotated up from deeper in Star Force territory had to help the system defense ships hold planetary defenses as long as possible, but already updates were coming through the relay network indicating breaches and footholds established on worlds with overwhelming numbers of V’kit’no’sat ground troops pouring down to the surface.

That meant the clock was ticking on those worlds, and even with the Paladin coming Paul knew they were in for at best an even fight. He’d do his part here, and even with so many losses on three planets the other three needed to be held onto. If even one was maintained Star Force would keep the system, for the V’kit’no’sat were not inhabiting the worlds they were attacking. They were razing them and moving on, with no system to date not having fallen to their assaults save for Orica, but they’d had to abandon it afterwards anyway. If Paul could hold at least one world here it would be a historic stop…but for how long?

Even if he could pull this system fight into a minor victory there were plenty of other V’kit’no’sat fleets out there that could rotate over and pound it flat, and right now he was questioning the wisdom of his orders to Kara. He could really use her Clan right now on the front, but he’d sent them on a bolder mission that should have been going down about now. He was blind to it, for it was happening on the other side of the Devastation Zone and even if a full relay grid had been in place it would have been over a week’s worth of signal delay.

He didn’t know where Kara and her Clan were right now, but he knew they wouldn’t be coming here. This fight was his with the ships and ground troops insystem, and he was very glad to have the few Paladin with him that had come early.

Still, if he didn’t play this right he’d lose all 6 planets and the system, but right now Tardon and Zulu were his main concerns while Ennvor was falling just as fast, but it more cityscape and defenses to take down. Paul couldn’t help anyone else right now, but he did need to find a way to help the remaining defenders on Tardon, but there was no way to get an evacuation ship down to them…but he might be able to screen for some to get out from the planet’s surface.

Problem was it would be a percent victory, for if 5 took off he might be able to protect 3. He didn’t like those odds, but it was better than waiting and watching people die, so he began to coordinate another costly strike to try and get some people out, for if they were going to go down fighting, they were all going to go down fighting. Star Force didn’t leave people behind, and Paul would rather see their entire civilization fall than to betray even a single member of it.

As he was planning the raid he got pings for incoming ships on a jumpline from rimward, but again without any forewarning from the relay grid. That could mean more Paladin violating orders…which he kind of hoped they’d done…but he was glad enough when it turned out to not be any more V’kit’no’sat. Rather it was non-Star Force ships from three races…the Gfatt, the Meintre, and the Albos. All were major members of The Nexus and 3 of the 12 races that had planets in the secure region around Grid Point Stargate that were now cut off from the rest of their civilization.

Tardon didn’t have a lot of time remaining, but the ships emerging were powerful. Their technology was a bit different than Star Force’s, and in general inferior, but they had some strengths that Paul’s ships did not and were at least in the same league as Star Force…not to mention bigger. They were manned by crews, which Paul always cringed at, but they could survive a slugging match that the drones could not.

The Excalibur turned over command of the surface drones on Zulu to another jumpship then made a microjump away from the planet and back to the central star so Paul could converse with the new arrivals in real time, getting an incoming three-way holocom from the commanders of the incoming fleets.

“Our apologies for not announcing our arrival,” the Gfatt said, with its two huge arms hanging limp over the ground as it hovered in an antigrav harness with its one leg/tail draping on the ground below. “We were concerned about a potential hack of your relay telemetry and received permission to pass through your territory without record.”

“No harm done,” Paul assured him, his expression still grave. “Why are you here?”

“We are not traveling to Grid Point Stargate,” the Gfatt assured him. “We recognize that without Star Force’s assistance The Nexus’s collapse will continue even if the V’kit’no’sat choose to ignore us. Your situation is more dire than we realized when we departed, but that makes our arrival all the more important.”

WE ARE HERE TO FIGHT, the Albos said, clicking its insectoid mandibles together aggressively over its mouth as the computer translated its words into English, for it did not have the vocal capability to make the necessary sounds for the Star Force language.

“We know we will lose many…” the Meintre said, anticipating Paul’s objection. The bulky, six legged mass had a huge head with 4 tentacle-like trunks underneath, looking like an alien elephant, but its race been a firm supporter of Star Force ever since The Nexus had taken away their own Grid Point to give Star Force one. Others would have held resentment to the recipient, but Star Force had always dealt with them fairly where The Nexus had not. “…but we stand to lose more if we do not fight. We are offering 22,000 ships to your personal command, if you will accept us."

Paul blanched. That was an enormous amount of ships. “Where are you pulling them from?”

“System defenses across our territory have been reduced. Not enough to encourage invasion, but it does weaken us. Losing Star Force will weaken the rim and we will suffer from additional predation, thus we must stand with you now. We trust you to use our ships wisely, and ask that you do not hold us back if you do accept us. We are here to fight, not to survive. We mean to ensure your survival and know you will put us to the most effective use.”

Paul swallowed hard, but the Gfatt spoke before he could.

“We bring 34,000 ships and to your personal command.”

WE BRING 17,000 VESSELS, The Albos added. TO KILL V’KIT’NO’SAT.

Paul took a deep breath. He’d thought they meant 22,000 ships in total. This was 73,000 ships, all of which were in excess of 4 miles long, with some upwards of 30.

Paul looked at each hologram in turn, saying nothing, then he finally sighed as he lowered his head.

“I do not like fighting this way, and I wish you’d converted your fleets over to drones long ago, but if you are willing to aid us now I will not turn you away. We need all the help we can get.”

“We are volunteering to fight under your direct command, not with others,” the Gfatt reiterated. “We wish to be a unified fleet for you to counter the greatest threats from the enemy.”

“We do not distrust your other commanders,” the Meintre added, “but we know you are a naval magician that will lead us through even the worst fights with beneficial outcomes. We ask that we be allowed to help you rid this system of the invaders, then have you lead us wherever else is needed as a unified fleet.”

“Terms accepted,” Paul said firmly. “And we will not forget this.”

IT WILL TAKE SEVERAL DAYS FOR ALL SHIPS TO ARRIVE.

“One of the planets here doesn’t have days. Do you have our battlemap interlink protocols?”

“Yes, but they are code locked,” the Gfatt reminded him.

Paul’s eyeline froze as he reached into the comm system and connected to the alien ships, gaining access and finding the Star Force programming given to them when the V’kit’no’sat neared the Grid Point and the systems they had there. To date those systems were still standing, and aside from some small skirmishes the V’kit’no’sat had ignored them, but the need to fight combined battles had prompted the comm interlink programming to be developed, though to date it had never been used.

“It’s unlocked now. Grant me access and I’ll make use of the ships arriving immediately.”

WE ARE YOURS TO COMMAND. DEATH TO YOUR ENEMIES.

“That’s the general idea,” Paul confirmed as their ship IDs were added to the Star Force battlemap and he could feel every weapon and capability they had, with him being able to send them orders, right down to their individual gunners, with a mere thought just like he would his own ships. “Usually they’re too dangerous to take prisoner, and unless I give specific orders to do so, attempt no captures. Shoot to kill.”

“By your command, Archon,” the Gfatt said, pounding a giant hand against its ape-like chest before it disappeared along with the other two holograms, for these commanders were here to fight, not talk, and they could now see through the Star Force battlemap system the situation on all 6 planets and how dire the situation was on Tardon.

Paul could also see their identities, and was glad that all three commanders were war veterans. On top of that they were upper tier commanders, though not their ultimate best. There were wars being fought in The Nexus that required them, but they hadn’t sent newbs expecting them to die. They’d sent skilled individuals who had seen and survived many battles…and Paul intended to keep them alive, along with as many of their ships as possible by combining them with his drone fleets and using the larger ships to soak up damage while the drones protected them from killing hits long enough for them to retreat.

That was the idea, but this kind of combined combat had never been attempted against the V’kit’no’sat. Fortunately Paul was among the best at improvising, and he was going to have to write the book on The Nexus vs. V’kit’no’sat naval combat in the coming hours as he fought to live up to his reputation, for these fleets were coming here to be under his personal command, and that wasn’t lost on him.

Nor was the fact that if he could pull out the victory here, he’d been free to go drop the hammer elsewhere.

One thing at a time. Tardon first, and hopefully before the final shield generator fell…which meant they had to move fast, and The Nexus’s convoy spacing was large. That meant it was going to take even longer for them to arrive as a few ships dripped out of the jumpline every 20 seconds or so.

On the surface of Tardon a group of Bsidd soldiers were hunkered inside a well-fortified cupola with four big anti-mech guns on top. They were in the lower portion, ready to defend the cupola against Zen’zat attack or any other small-scale assault meant to take it out so the cupola couldn’t target the larger V’kit’no’sat races and punch down their shields with a few shots.

The Bsidd were insectoid, standing taller than Humans and massing very little in comparison. Their bodies looked like a twisted mess of tree branches with more open space between them than body parts. They had numerous mandible/arms and could move about walking on them in any orientation, even upside if they wanted, with their equally holey heads usually riding up top.

Their armor covered most of the holes in their bodies, with those empty spaces filled with equipment that gave them the strongest shield generators of any infantry within Star Force. If the Zen’zat came they wouldn’t be able to take down the Bsidd quickly, and they had multiple weapons held pinched between mandibles or attached onto the ends of them, including some plasma swords they could ignite if it came to hand to hand combat.

The Zen’zat were not here yet, but the enemy was getting close and the cupola had fired off a few long range shots, none that hit, at the very edge of visibility within the broken cityscape ahead. The Bsidd were watching the sensors and waiting for reports from scouts they had out there when all their comm systems opened up on a channel from the Star Force warships in the system.

A very rare sound came through it, but it was one every Bsidd warrior knew as a battle song. Archons often used them to let troops know help was coming, and as the Bsidd’s attention went to the battlemap and saw the scores of ships jumping into planetary orbit over Tardon as the ‘Imperial March’ blared through their helmets.

The Bsidd exchanged looks with one another, and would have smiled widely had their faces been capable of that. There were Nexus ships along with the Star Force ones, and Archon Paul was bringing them into assault positions overtop the V’kit’no’sat fleet…and he never played that battle song unless there was a beatdown coming for the bad guys.

There were no orders for these Bsidd to do anything yet, but as they waited with weapons gripped and a surge of hope flowing through them they began humming along with the battle song, ready to start giving some payback to these V’kit’no’sat bastards as soon as they were given the word to do so.

21

May 4, 4814

Solar System (V’kit’no’sat territory)

Stellar Orbit

Kara stood in the command nexus onboard the Yi, her mind casually linked into the battlemap system as she undid the ponytail on the back of her head. She didn’t use her hands, rather her telekinesis, as she pulled off the small tie and laid it on the edge of the bank of controls in front of her while her hands were resting gently on the control sphere to maximize the telepathic interlink efficiency. She could do it remotely, but when going into battle you wanted every advantage possible and a direct physical link to the system avoided a microscopic bit of lag that only someone with a Sav-enhanced mind would even notice.

Her purple/white hair draped down around her ears, not quite touching her shoulders as Kara felt it brush against the back of her neck. Most Archons had short hair, but a few like her had kept it moderately long. Inside armor it didn’t really matter, but without that protection the long hair made for a good handhold that you didn’t want to give your opponent. It also made sleeping on a pillow a bit odd, but she tolerated the minor inefficiencies there because it fit her style and now it helped to calm her mind a bit further as the multi-colored hair smoothed out and settled around her mind as her command ship got a return signal from the scout ship a few minutes ahead of the fleet.

It signaled the jumppoint was clear, so there was no need to alter their arrival mathematics and Kara came out at the head of nearly every warship Clan Ghostblade possessed. They were packed tight, meaning the staggering between them during the jump was dangerously close, but with no anomalies at the exit point the advanced gravity drives and control systems braked them precisely enough to accommodate for their different masses and put them within a few kilometers of where they were supposed to be, with the ships maintaining a little momentum after they ‘stopped’ so they could clear the jump point and not have a traffic pileup that could be disastrous.

But Kara’s Clan had the most experience jumping from system to system, for that was how they lived, and she was pleased to see no hiccups as the first hundred or so jumpships came through and stretched out into a ribbon behind her as she returned to Star Force’s home system for the first time since it had fallen. A few other missions had been sent here, mostly for scouting purposes, and the data she had on the V’kit’no’sat infrastructure here was getting updated from the passive signal bounces from insystem sensors and the star itself, showing her that the shipyard had grown greatly, along with several new constructs beyond Earth.

The V’kit’no’sat called it Terrax and the system Terraxis, but unless she was having a chat with one of the bastards she wasn’t going to use their terminology. To her and Star Force it was the Solar System, or ‘Sol’ for short, and Earth. The V’kit’no’sat hadn’t even bothered to name the other planets, for they’d never inhabited them, and now was no different with the only habitation showing being on the blue/green planet itself.

When the V’kit’no’sat had finally conquered the planet they had bombarded it relentlessly until it was a cratered, charred mess, and even the seafloor had suffered similar treatment…but no longer. The vast tracks of wilderness had returned and the remnants of the continent-wide Star Force cities were gone, wiped clean by the reconstruction efforts. Now there was nothing but alien forests and alien cities, less than what Star Force had built, but far more than the last scouting run a few hundred years ago.

Getting in and out of the system wasn’t easy for a scout ship, but this time it didn’t matter because Kara was bringing a warfleet with her and the stellar patrols that were moving to intercept the odd jumpline soon saw they were outnumbered and held off, not retreating but not closing to weapons range as the system defense fleet was rallied.

There were no defensive platforms in stellar orbit, and there were few elsewhere in the system, but Earth did have full planetary shields and a rebuilt planetary defense station that Kara knew as ‘the pyramid’ from since her inception into the Archon ranks of Star Force so long ago. She wasn’t taking her fleet anywhere near that monster, but it only covered a portion of the planet and many of the V’kit’no’sat facilities built here were in various orbits and not on the surface.

As her fleet began to send out its own active sensor pings, for they weren’t trying to hide and could make use of the more powerful sensors, she began to get a ship count for the defense fleet…and saw it was pathetically low. Only 739 vessels unless there were more on the other side of the star, and she sent several groups of ships out to find out, with them pushing both orbital directions until sensor scans could see all the way around.

“Well well,” she commented to herself as a stellar mining platform popped up on the battlemap in low orbit on the far side of the star. “You have been busy.”

It was still in operation, sucking several strands of glowing material out from the giant orb and into processing factories that sifted out the valuable material and sent the rest back down the gravity well, with the main purpose being to harvest solari. They were rare particles that primarily existed in stars and were denied to most of the races in the galaxy because they didn’t have the ability to harvest them.

Those solari were a big reason why the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force had such advanced technology, for they allowed them to make things others could not, and it was a mark of an advanced civilization to mine in such a way. The Nexus did as well, but the V’kit’no’sat had never had stellar mining facilities in this system even way back when they owned it the first time.

That told Kara they were trying to localize the supply chain a bit. There was no way Sol could produce the attacking fleets going after the Star Force front…not even the fleets that had been patrolling the DZ…but what they could do was service them, and the shipyards here needed solari to produce replacement equipment to handle battle damage. They’d been shipping it in from the rest of their empire before, but now it looked like they needed a lot more going forward.

That was a bad sign, because it meant they were planning for a long, grueling campaign. A quick win and withdrawal would see those ships returning to the empire, but if they were going to come here for repair work then that suggested they wanted to keep constant pressure on Star Force until they cracked.

And in addition to the stellar mining platform there were huge warehouse facilities in null orbit between Venus and Earth. There were two defense stations with them along with a handful of ships, transport models that were probably offloading rather than picking up.

It was a supply depot, and the previous shipyard in Earth orbit now had two twins in orbit around Mars and Ganymede. The second one was a moon in orbit of Jupiter that used to hold extensive Star Force colonies on the airless surface, but now it was showing a lot of V’kit’no’sat infrastructure there…but not habitats. It was thin, like a spider web of sites that Kara recognized as mining and fabrication infrastructure that were probably feeding key components to the shipyard in orbit.

The same went for Mars, with more limited stuff visible on the surface, but from this range Kara couldn’t get good information on what exactly it was. The huge habitats that the V’kit’no’sat used were definitely not there, at least not in normal format, but they were covering Earth in shotgun fashion. The workers must have been commuting, and with their insystem ship technology that meant an hour or two at most for the furthest planets, though right now it was unclear whether or not they had any assets all the way out there.

Kara had several more fleet groups zip out to do flybys of the various planets as her ship pool continued to grow near the jumppoint…enough that the V’kit’no’sat defense fleet didn’t engage them…and as the 101st trailblazer watched her battlemap update with new targets for her to hit she was getting a very good vibe. They had enough defenses to fend off any native races to the area and then some. They even had enough ships here to discourage an attack from Star Force, but without their fleets in the DZ being available to track and intercept hers, they’d essentially left their backdoor open while hitting the front.

Even the massive fleet guarding the Tarric 3 System couldn’t be recalled fast enough to get here within the week…and that was if they even knew. There was no known Urrtren relay grid set up by the V’kit’no’sat that connected the two, and it was out of range for a direct signal, so they’d have to operate off of couriers unless they had another trick up their sleeve.

But even assume they knew this moment that Star Force was here, or had gotten warning about their approach earlier despite Kara’s best efforts to move through irregular systems. She was going to have a head start and there was nothing here she couldn’t hit aside from Antarctica. Everything else was in play, and the V’kit’no’sat had built up a lot in relatively little time in addition to the shipyards.

There were literally thousands of stations sprinkled over the system and hundreds of large ships, not counting the tens of thousands of smaller transports, most of which were visible heading for Earth where they would be ducking down under the protection of the planetary shield.

“Run you bastards,” she said as her jumpship count continued to climb. “You’ve made an art out of razing our systems. Now let’s see how you fight when you’re outnumbered and can’t retreat.”

Kara moved the Yi further out from the jumppoint and summoned a large group of ships to her, then began a lazy move towards the stellar mining platform with the V’kit’no’sat fleet racing ahead of her to get there and into defensive positions.

“Alright. You want to evacuate it, go ahead, but in a little over two hours it’s going to be junk along with any of you that stick around to defend it,” she said with a humorless grin. Kara knew some of what was happening back on the Star Force front, minus the huge second wave, and knew that a lot of Star Force people were dying under their attack. She wasn’t going to go darkside here, but she wasn’t going to show any compassion either.

This was Star Force’s system, taken from them in a bloody mini-war of its own 15 centuries ago, and that meant that every V’kit’no’sat here was part of the invasion campaign. This wasn’t Star Force going into their territory and hitting their people who were minding their own business. Everyone here was a fair target, and anyone who didn’t run from Kara’s guns was going to be destroyed by them.

The V’kit’no’sat had messed up royally unless they had a huge fleet hidden out behind Saturn or elsewhere, but Kara soon confirmed that they did not as her scouts reported back. As far as they knew all of Star Force’s roaming fleets in the Devastation Zone were back at the front fighting to defend it, but they apparently had never realized there was another one out here.

They’d had plenty of hints, for Kara had been ambushing small groups of V’kit’no’sat ships for centuries, but the Ghostblade fleet had never before in its history been fully assembled. Even now the partial or non-warships were not here, safely still roaming the vast tracks of stars in the galaxy and harvesting resources to build more ships like these.

Ships that no Star Force shipyard had born, and thus no record of their existence had ever been recorded. They were literally a ghost fleet, and they were more than a match for the defenses the V’kit’no’sat had arrogantly left here while sending the majority of their ships on the attack.

“Alright people,” Kara said, activating the fleetwide comm, “let’s not get sloppy. We’re winning this and winning it big, but don’t underestimate them or we’ll come out of this with less ships than we should. I don’t know how close their nearest reinforcements are, so let’s take this methodically quick and wreck as much of this system as we can while staying the hell away from the pyramid’s firing range. Assume the Tar’vem’jic has been rebuilt and it’s off limits. If we wanted it we’d go overland, but we’re not sticking around that long. We kick them in the balls then get the hell out of here and back to the front. People are dying out there and we have to make this worth it.”

“If you haven’t noticed, they’ve been busy building a lot of new toys for us to smash, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. Stay sharp, stay focused, and we’ll own them. Get sloppy and I’ll send you on a one way ticket to Shangri-la. You unnecessarily break my ships and you’re sitting out the rest of the war…and you know how much I love to accessorize,” she said sarcastically, looking down at the huge diamond-like jewel imbedded into her left wrist. The Zak’de’ron had put it there against her will, but they’d actually done her a favor. It was still the most advanced piece of technology that Star Force possessed, but not so much as it used to be.

She wondered if they were watching now, or what they’d think when they saw the results of this raid. Hopefully they’d consider her a worthy investment.

“Let’s get this done,” she said, pulling up a an old battle song and sending it out across all the ships with every pilot and crewmember hearing the bit of lyrics that said ‘YOU’LL NEVER KILL THE LIGHT INSIDE ME’ knowing exactly what it meant for Star Force.

After all the V’kit’no’sat had done to them they were still here and had not lost their way…and now it was time for some badly needed payback.

22

August 29, 4814

Karthus System (Star Force territory)

Requiem

Nathan sprinted hard on the outskirts of the fallen city as the orbital bombardment started to come down. Most of the Star Force troops had already been evacuated out by a variety of means, most of which were underground, but he’d been covering their withdrawal along with others when the V’kit’no’sat started to pull out. He’d fallen back immediately, but the precision weaponry on the V’kit’no’sat ships…which weren’t even in atmosphere…began striking specific buildings now that the redundant shield generators had been taken down.

There was no reason for the ground troops to keep fighting, so the enemy was pulling back and firing in clear areas even before the city was empty of V’kit’no’sat troops. The entrance Nathan had been heading to got hit, leaving him nowhere safe to go except on the heels of the enemy where their ships would not shoot, so the Archon had ran as fast as he could leaving other Star Force troops to scatter wherever they thought they could go, but he knew there was no getting away from the firepower coming down.

He hated leaving them behind, for there were over 200 Bsidd with him, but there was nothing he could do other than tell them to scatter and hope someone survived. There were only a few entrances to the subsurface tunnels and no more on this side of the city, so he ran and ran, moving through intact buildings that were going to be annihilated within minutes, if not seconds.

But as long as they stood the sensors on them still worked, giving him access to the battlemap that marked the evac zones the V’kit’no’sat were heading to. He deliberately avoided them, heading for a section of the city edge that held a huge, thick barrier that the enemy had to fight through. Unfortunately there was no breach in this area, so as soon as he got up to it he jumped then flew along it, hoping to go unnoticed as he skimmed a few inches away all the way up to the top where there were still smoking defense turrets that had been taken out earlier.

The wall itself was over 50 meters thick and it took too long for Nathan to get across it…then he dropped along the wall on the other side instead of flying straight out. That wasted time as the rolling thunder behind him got closer, but if he was going to have a chance of surviving he had to stay down and hope no one saw him. If he just flew a straight line out through the sky the I’rar’et would get him for sure, so as soon as he hit the ground he took a few steps then ran/flew across the narrow intact section of grassy plains and into the tortured landscape left in the aftermath of the planet-wide ambush explosions that had killed so many V’kit’no’sat.

Now they were low hills of jagged debris, most of it being bedrock covered with dirt, grass, and ash. If he stayed low it would hide him from the V’kit’no’sat evac point to the south where drop pods were assembling and the troops were returning to, but one Ardent beam hit the wall behind him and traced along it, using a lower power mode that allowed it to be almost continuous. It blew out the wall in both directions as if taking an orbital eraser to it, creating a blast wave that traveled from north to south and hit Nathan after scrawling past his position.

Luckily his armor took the brunt of it, but he was accelerated so fast by the impact that he lost his reference points, even with Pefbar active, and went tumbling along with the debris until he landed somewhere unable to move and with damage indicators flashing in his helmet telling him his shields were gone and there were multiple breach points on the back of his legs, the pain from which he could already feel.

He didn’t struggle, holding still and playing dead as he used his Kgat to shield his mind. Hopefully any V’kit’no’sat that might have seen him would think he was gone and they’d have no reason to bombard outside the city. So he just needed to lay low and hope no one would notice him, wherever he was.

He used his Pefbar to look around and discovered that he was in a bank of mud along with several chunks of wall upside down…and completely buried. There was at least 2 meters of debris over top of his feet and he was going to have to do something about that before his oxygen ran out.

But at least he was still alive. And he doubted any of his Bsidd had made it to safety within the city unless they happened to be in a lucky position underneath some debris while the bombardment continued to fall. Even as his legs hurt he tried to check the battlemap, but it either wasn’t functioning or his armor’s receptors had been damaged. A quick check confirmed the latter, meaning he was cut off from the rest of Star Force.

But maybe that was a good thing right now. He made sure to shut down his locator, just in case it was somewhat functional, then turned his attention to his body. Using his Pefbar and Haemra, he discovered shards of debris in his legs. Some of it was broken armor, other pieces were probably from the wall but it was hard to determine. Unable to numb himself as he would have someone else he was working on, he used his Lachka to slowly pull the pieces of debris back through their entry points and nearly bit his tongue in the process.

He clamped down on his teeth to make sure that didn’t happen as he flinched several more times as he dragged the fragments out, flash healing key bits of flesh as he tried to minimize his blood loss. Thankfully the thicker armor on his back and head had held up and the debris didn’t penetrate, but it was stuck into his armor on some places making him look like a porcupine, though no one could see him buried under all the dirt…unless a V’kit’no’sat came by looking with Pefbar or sensors. He needed to hide himself from Pefbar as well, but he had to use it now to see inside his own legs as he was fully encased in the dirt.

If he didn’t have psionics he’d have been in a world of trouble, but might have been able to dig himself out by sheer muscle strength. Fortunately Nathan had other options, but right now his injuries took precedence and he was focusing on getting his legs clear of debris before he even bothered with the ringing in his head from the concussion he’d suffered.

The healing didn’t go as fast as he’d liked. His Haemra and his passive Uzti took what would have been weeks of healing and compressed it down into a few minutes, but he was already partially exhausted from the hours of fighting beforehand and every drop of blood he lost was going to make him weaker still.

He didn’t have any supplies with him, for they were fighting on home turf and his pack was empty save for a few ammo packets. Healing required material for new tissue to be formed that he was pulling out of his bloodstream and other parts of his body. Nathan could do that a lot, but not forever without killing himself in the process. Fortunately these injuries, while bad, didn’t take a lot of material to heal and neither did his head, but the weakness in his body would only increase until he got food and water in him to replace what he’d lost.

Right now he’d just have to make do, and as the skin on his legs healed over he abandoned the last bit of healing and focused on his telekinesis as he compressed the dirt above him in select places to create two small tubes all the way up to the surface. Thankfully the dirt wasn’t too hard and he got his breathing ties up and operating, with him using telekinetic plates to pull air down one tube and shoot it up the other as he pushed out a small chamber around his buried helmet’s filter plate as his armor’s oxygen backup began to replenish.

Or at least that was the plan, but after a few minutes Nathan saw it wasn’t happening. Damage, he assumed, that wasn’t showing up on diagnostics…for the diagnostic equipment was probably damaged as well. He must have taken a harder hit than he thought to get his armor messed up that badly, but as long as he had his air tubes he didn’t need to worry about suffocating.

Getting shot was the foremost worry on his mind, but he had no knowledge of what was happening outside other than the range of his Pefbar bubble that showed only the edge of a blast crater that he was buried in. He couldn’t see the wall or city, or rather what was left of it, but the constant rumbles he could feel through the ground every time weaponsfire hit and exploded something.

The sound was nearly constant, and he knew they were chewing up the city in a way that would destroy everything. Erasing it from existence like they had across the Devastation Zone. There were only two more cities left on the planet that were still standing, and they were several hundreds of miles away and not an option for him to get to very fast. He had to wait until the nearby V’kit’no’sat troops left and the bombardment stopped…the latter of which he could at least feel.

Until then he had to play dead. After that…if he made it through the following hours…he was just going to have to make it up as he went, for he had no idea how he was going to get out of this one.

23

August 30, 4814

Antelin System

Havi

Paul’s fleet had grown substantially after chasing the V’kit’no’sat out of the Jennizeren System, picking up another smaller Defender fleet that was coming in off the rim as they followed the enemy fleet through several jumps trying to pick off ships. Paul had hoped the V’kit’no’sat would try and stage an ambush, having his ships come in shallow to the jumppoint so they could hopefully catch them out, but for some reason they were not in a sparring mood and straight running away since they became heavily outgunned with the arrival of The Nexus fleet.

That was atypical, but not unexpected as Paul guessed there was a lot more going on with this invasion than had occurred previously. With the thousands of planets that had been destroyed to make up the Devastation Zone the V’kit’no’sat had used upfront tactics almost the entire time, counting on their tech and size advantage to methodically chip away at Star Force territory while still having inferior numbers.

Now that they were fielding so many more ships than in the past one would expect them to do the same thing only more forcefully so…but that wasn’t what was happening. Whoever this new commander was didn’t have an ego to prove and was fighting in a way that suggested guile and superior intelligence. He wasn’t underestimating Star Force, but he was expecting to win and have them dance to his tune. Paul could feel it, but didn’t quite have enough of a sense of what was going on to be able to anticipate the next move.

The fleet he was following kept running, with Paul having to veer off and head towards the nearest invaded system. He couldn’t waste time in transit while other planets were falling, so when he arrived in the Antelin System he came in hard, attacking with the first few ships out of the jumppoint along with what was left of the system defense fleet. That made the V’kit’no’sat feel they had an advantage and they accepted the combat, meeting just beyond the second of two inhabited planets while splitting their fleet and leaving some to cover the ground assault on Tabo.

The V’kit’no’sat fleet had moved over the second planet before even a third of Tabo had fallen, but they’d done it to keep the Star Force fleet there and not helping the other world…for if they did, the V’kit’no’sat would easily have enough firepower to poke a hole in Havi’s shields and start the second invasion early.

This was a system that had been hit fresh by the second wave, meaning there was no roaming fleet here to help and Antelin was at a serious disadvantage. Both planets had considerable planetary shields, but nowhere near as strong as Requiem had. Star Force defense policy had all systems gradually upgrading and adding additional shield generators, but a planet was so huge that getting a very thick defense covering all of it was not as easy as it sounded around every inhabited world.

That was why Paul was a bit surprised they went after the Karthus System, for it required a lot more ships than they’d sent to Antelin to pound through the shield to get a ground assault started. They’d sent far less ships here, but they were still more than needed. The V’kit’no’sat had done their recon work well, and Paul wondered exactly where they had gotten their information from. Was it from stealth ships navigating into Star Force territory using the Ghostbane sensor to avoid contact or had they actually hacked the relay network?

There were other options as well, possibly getting information out of others who had passed through Star Force territory, but figuring out shield strength was not as easy as counting shield generators, and a lot of them were not visible from the surface for that very purpose.

Whatever their methods, they’d brought the right sized fleets to every system that Paul had seen battle data on, but right now, after some heavy but necessary losses by Star Force to keep the V’kit’no’sat here, Paul kept bringing in more drone fleets and gradually surrounded the V’kit’no’sat who thought they were still going to win.

Then the higher massed Nexus ships started to come out of the jumppoint and head straight over to the planet, with the flow of combat shifting as Paul didn’t fight as ravenous an attack as first impressions might have looked. He had his drones cycling very fast, moving in and hitting the enemy but not sticking around very long to get hammered themselves before pulling back so they could recharge shields again and repeat.

Damage was being done to both sides, but it was a stalling game cleverly disguised as Paul got his support drones into position and began grabbing vessels with IDF traps and dampening shield walls to limit the V’kit’no’sat’s movements on the outer edge of the sphere-like formation they were fighting in that forced the Star Force fleet to stretch around it. That meant Paul’s firepower wasn’t concentrated at any significant point, and given the numbers it made the V’kit’no’sat very hard to kill…until The Nexus’s reinforcements began to scale out of control over the following hours. Then it became a death trap that Paul was not going to let them get out of.

It took a long time until the V’kit’no’sat finally realized they’d been duped, for the convoy coming in through the jumppoint still had not ended and the pace of battle was still chewing up ships but not as much as Star Force could have been doing if they’d pressed harder. The V’kit’no’sat commander realized what was coming and his fleet formation changed drastically as it tried to push through a specific spot, taking what losses they needed in order to bully their way through and get into positions where they could make emergency microjumps without ramming into Star Force ships.

Paul was in the command nexus on the Excalibur with his mind pressed to the limit trying to arrange his fleet to deny them jumplines out of the fight, but since they could move in any direction that was difficult, but the support variety of drones had been built to help with this by being able to cover areas far larger than their hulls. The dampener ships deployed shield walls that didn’t stop energy, but would slow physical objects passing through, including enemy ships. With additional firepower standing by, V’kit’no’sat ships got stuck there long enough to get hammered by coordinated fire, plugging up what looked like an escape route with broken ship debris that was only mounting…both from the enemy and Star Force vessels.

Other support ships created zones where gravity drives would not function, but they didn’t actually slow ships. They’d coast right through if they had started moving prior to hitting the field, but if a support ship could drop an IDF over an entire ship when it was sitting still, then it wasn’t going anywhere. If the field only covered part of the ship, the gravity drives within that piece wouldn’t work while the others would, allowing a ship to pull out at lesser speed until they cleared the field.

That was why Paul was having to overlap the IDF fields to fully ensnare some of the ships…and then protect those support ships as the V’kit’no’sat began targeting them first.

All the while more Nexus ships were coming in and adding to the fight, some of which were just as large as the V’kit’no’sat warships. Paul needed to keep them alive regardless of what the Gfatt, Albos, and Meintre had said, so he was using his drones in some kamikaze missions to relieve pressure on them when they began to soak up too much damage, for the V’kit’no’sat seemed to respond to their size and focus their attention on them when they couldn’t find escape routes from the battle.

Eventually some of the V’kit’no’sat vessels managed to escape, but after 22 hours of fighting 96% of their ships were destroyed. Had Paul not engaged them early and waited for his full fleet to gather they would have seen a fight they couldn’t have won and ran like the fleet in Jennizeren, off to fight another day or reinforce another invasion.

But not this fleet. Paul had lost a lot of ships, a good number of them from The Nexus, but over a third of his drones had been destroyed in order to bait and pin the V’kit’no’sat here, but it was worth it to keep that fleet from fleeing…and now the invasion on Tabo had no naval support, for those vessels had joined in the main battle, attacking from the exterior to try and free those pinned inside, and most of them were destroyed in the effort.

Paul had the escapees pursued until they fled the system, leaving the V’kit’no’sat ground troops abandoned yet still gaining ground on the surface. With Star Force in control of the intact shield generators and able to drop them at will, the enemy was going to be open to orbital bombardment and the mobile shields the V’kit’no’sat had couldn’t stand up to the firepower a fleet even a hundredth the size of this one could rain down upon them.

“Attention all V’kit’no’sat forces on Tabo,” Paul said, speaking V’kit’no’sat and transmitting on all their usual frequencies. “Your fleet is destroyed and the surviving ships are being run out of the system. You are getting no reinforcements and my naval guns are going to soon erase you from existence. I am giving you the option of surrender, but not additional time to consider it that you can use to continue to kill more of my people on the ground. If you want to live, disengage and signal your intentions. Silence will mean your imminent deaths.”

Even as he sent the message Paul had his drone fleet moving into position to bombard the sectors where there were enemy troops…but some of them he couldn’t hit because of the Star Force infrastructure they were currently inhabiting. He was going to have to take a lot of his drones down to surface level and shoot from within a few kilometers, and with such a delicate operation he wasn’t going to trust The Nexus ships with that, despite how well they’d fought. The efficiency level wasn’t there, but they were new to using the Star Force battlemap system and he had no complaints for their performance.

But shooting at his own planet was something he was not going to take risks with, so while The Nexus fleet was sent to chase down enemy ships, police debris, and hunt for survivors, he personally handled all the orbital targeting of key areas while letting other naval officers handle the more straightforward bombardment of V’kit’no’sat landing zones and other major groupings where there were no Star Force personnel or key infrastructure.

And as expected, there were no comms discussing terms for surrender. Not a one, in fact, as the ground combat increased. That told Paul they knew they were going to die and wanted to do as much damage as they could…as well as the fact that there were no known relief fleets coming, otherwise they would have tried to stall for time.

So be it then. If they didn’t want to surrender or disengage, then he was going to kill them. Had they been anyone other than the V’kit’no’sat he might have tried to take some prisoner, but with battles across the front and the dangers that they posed with their psionics even when captured, Paul wasn’t going to waste time on them if they weren’t going to willingly comply. He made that known to all his people as well, both in orbit and on the ground, then brought the Excalibur down into the atmosphere along with the drones and added its massive firepower to the extermination efforts along with its shields, which Paul reconfigured to drop down to the surface like giant walls to help protect and herd the V’kit’no’sat where needed.

It was gruesome work, but after the slaughter required during the lizard war Paul knew better than to delay even a minute, for it could mean some more Star Force personnel on the ground would die when they didn’t have to…and as for the mass slaughter he was beginning to unleash, the trailblazer knew he didn’t have any other good options. He’d given the V’kit’no’sat a chance to live and they’d revoked it, just as the lizards had, and he’d been through the mental analysis of such situations so many times before it didn’t take him more than a couple seconds to figure out what had to be done here.

To others that might look like he was bloodthirsty, but anyone who knew Paul’s history would have argued to the contrary. He would have fought all wars with stun weapons if possible, but when your enemy didn’t let you fight that way you either had to take extra burden on yourself to make it happen or fight in ways you’d prefer not to. The V’kit’no’sat were too dangerous to take the burden on his people, which would mean more would die trying to capture them, and if Paul had to choose between the lives of the enemy who would not surrender and the lives of his own people, that was an easy choice.

But it still bothered Paul and always would. Shooting people who couldn’t defend themselves, even if they were refusing to surrender, just didn’t feel right. Protecting his people on the surface did, and as long as the V’kit’no’sat were actively attacking them he had no regrets about smoking them as fast as possible.

It was the ones that weren’t currently fighting but not surrendering that he didn’t like killing, so he kept repeating the offer of surrender that went unanswered save for a few ‘fuck you’s from the ones that felt like insulting the ships they couldn’t shoot. But Paul didn’t have time to play games with more systems under attack and him not being able to leave here until the ground troop threat was neutralized.

And he wasn’t going to let these troops buy time for other fleets with their lives. They either surrendered or were killed as quickly as possible. That’s the way this war had to be fought when Star Force didn’t have an advantage. Mercy was a luxury of the dominant, and when the V’kit’no’sat were out to kill every last person in Star Force and actively attacking them…then their empire deserved what they got.

It was the individuals within the V’kit’no’sat that Paul worried about, which was why he continued offering surrender throughout the slaughter until the very end…with not one of the bastards taking the offer as they lashed out at anything they could find around them in one final act of defiance before they were all destroyed.

24

September 1, 4814

Karthus System (Star Force territory)

Requiem

It’d been three days since the bombardment had stopped. Three days since Nathan had dug himself out of his supposed grave to find a smoking, rubble-strewn landscape that had recently been the city he’d fought to defend. Three days since the V’kit’no’sat had gone and moved on to the other few remaining targets on the planet, and now Nathan was running towards one of them as he saw the distant flashes of light every time he came up over the edge of a crater in the wastelands that Star Force had created when they used the subsurface explosives.

Up and down and he ran, carrying with him in his broken pack a scattering of foodstuffs and two bottles of water that he had remaining from the bits of salvage he’d found in the city that had been spared underneath slabs of building that hadn’t vaporized. He’d spent most of the first day looking around, trying to find what he could whether it be supplies, survivors, or a way down to the tunnels beneath the city.

He hadn’t found any of the latter two, and while he was out of ambrosia he’d filled his stomach enough to otherwise replenish his body and fully heal his injuries…but there was nothing left for him to do other than search for more buried supplies, and those couldn’t last him indefinitely. If he was going to die here he’d prefer to go down fighting, so Nathan had chosen to spend the last two days running across the fucked up terrain towards the nearest intact city, which he was about 8 miles away from now.

The V’kit’no’sat were assaulting it from the north and west, with him coming in from the east and allowing him a straight shot run towards it. That at least meant he didn’t have to circle around and waste more time, for the longer he was out here the more time the enemy had to notice him and scratch him off the list of the living with a quick aerial strike. His armor was designed to be resistive to sensors, but it wasn’t invisible and now it was broken. Every step he ran caused a screech of rubbing parts across his back underneath the makeshift pack he’d cobbled back together, and there was no way the sensor stealthing there could be fully effective.

Little bits of body heat would be leeching out, and the pack itself was no longer whole. It wouldn’t pick up as much notice as him, but anything moving tended to get noticed quicker and he had no choice but to run as fast as he could in and out of the craters to cross the landscape in time to get to the fight before this city fell.

Nathan was exhausted after so much running, but he rarely stopped for more than a few minutes to eat and drink. He need to get to the city wall and signal them to let him in. If he couldn’t do that he’d just be stranded out here to die, for he didn’t expect the V’kit’no’sat to finish with this planet and leave before he starved to death. One thing about Archons that was a slight negative was their food requirements. Their metabolisms were so high it would take a while to adjust them downward into a survival mode, and Nathan could have done it with the half burnt supplies he’d found, but then it would be a waiting game with no sure hope of rescue.

And it wasn’t like he had a lot of body fat on him to sustain himself either, so it was either take a gamble and wait it out or take another gamble and try to get to the nearest city and back into the fight. That meant running for hours upon hours over unforgiving terrain, but that was something he could fight. Time he couldn’t, so for the Piccolo-level Archon there wasn’t really anything to think about.

His new tissue in his legs slowed him down considerably. While fully healed they just weren’t as strong before but the powered setting in his armor was at still functional and he was using that to help him climb up the crater walls whenever he encountered them, though most of the time the jagged pieces of bedrock were too steep, sticking up out of the ground like crude statues that he had to run around. He hated having to detour away from his direct line, but if he flew he’d be too easy to spot.

Nathan half wanted to anyway, but with I’rar’et and Keeva visible in the sky he knew they’d be on his ass in a moment if he went even a few meters off the ground and he had to pick routes that kept him as low as possible even when on foot. Several times he had to stop and take cover until they drifted on elsewhere, but at least they were easy to see in the sky as moving dots beneath the unmoving ones that were the miles-wide warships far overhead in orbit.

It was late morning now, with a hazy blue to the air that didn’t quite cover their presence. They were easy to miss if you didn’t pay attention, but Nathan could see them even without magnification and make out some of their racial alignments. The Brat’mar were the easiest, for their ships were giant discs, and the Era’tran had a unique tuning fork shape that he was also able to distinguish from a distance, but others were less noticeable at this range. Nathan knew there were Nax ships up there, but their bent H-shape could easily be mistaken for others and at this point it really didn’t matter. They all had the firepower to snuff him out of existence had he not been underneath the city shield by now.

It was invisible, for it wasn’t being attacked at the moment, but the V’kit’no’sat fliers were underneath it and he hoped the warship sensors wouldn’t pick him up because of it. That or maybe they just weren’t looking all the way out here, but all it would take would be one word and an I’rar’et would swoop down and strafe his position as many times as necessary to get him…and he had precious little to fight with.

Tired as he was, he was still making decent speed and knew the moment of truth was almost on him. Could he get to the city wall and beneath their halo of defenses on the intact side or would he get spotted first? He knew he could take off flying and try to race there, but he wasn’t sure how much strength he had in him. Running was still far easier than flying, and while his Yen’mer tissue hadn’t been taxed over the past 3 days he’d been shaky even levitating up a few meters while searching the rubble. That impact he’d suffered during the bombardment had hurt him in ways that weren’t easily flash healed and he needed sleep…but time he didn’t have, so he was running on a fried brain and a body that desperately needed rest.

If he needed to fly he would, but the closer he could get on foot increased his chances of making it to the wall that he knew would still be manned and had anti-air defenses. The fliers weren’t getting close to it and keeping to the attack zones on the other side for the most part while swinging around wide in patrol loops. It was those loops that had been troublesome, but now the bulk of the city was starting to…

Without his battlemap sensor telemetry Nathan almost didn’t notice, but the sky above him began to subtly change as the enemy ships that had been parked far above unmoving were beginning to reposition, making him wonder if he was too late and they were going to begin bombardment of the city. His fatigued mind took a moment to process that out, for they didn’t need to reposition to do that. They’d been in bombardment position the entire time, so Nathan stopped alongside a bit of cover and looked up, triggering the magnification on his helmet that thankfully still worked.

The dots in the sky got much larger, but only when he got to maximum zoom did he notice the flashes of light around the edges of the V’kit’no’sat fleet and the scattering of tiny dots so thick that they looked like clouds from which the lightning was coming from.

“Drones?” he said aloud, looking for sign of the control ships. Unless they’d gotten reinforcements poking a fight with that mega fleet was suicide, but over the following seconds as Nathan scanned the sky and made out what he could minus his missing battlemap data he finally spotted one of the jumpships. It was tiny, but he could tell by the shape that it wasn’t Mainline, and by the blue coloration that only one faction had painted on their hull he confirmed it.

Most jumpships were grey/black, regardless of faction, but if he was right then these were the largest regular jumpships that Star Force fielded and Nathan looked around trying to find another. It was hard with just the magnification of his helmet, but eventually he found several more that were just elongated dots until the swarm of drones got company as one of the jumpships moved directly into the combat zone and opened fire.

“What the hell?” he said, seeing clearly that it was a Paladin jumpship. They’d never fought the V’kit’no’sat before and this Captain must have lost his mind, for the enemy ships immediately redirected their attacks towards it. The 32 mile long mass absorbed the weaponsfire, but it was no match for the V’kit’no’sat warships. They didn’t have internal space devoted to carrying drones, meaning their massive bulk was all fighting ship with very little room for cargo, and while a Paladin jumpship could survive a while it was not suited for this type of fight.

But then Nathan saw more enter…a lot more. First three, then another two, then five more. They were all coming in with the drones in what had to be a desperation move. Nathan didn’t know how many Paladin had arrived, but if they were fighting like this then something was really wrong.

Nathan looked back towards the city, seeing the fighting there continuing as if nothing was happening in orbit. He bit his lip, thinking, as he gave his body some badly needed rest. He could make for the wall or wait here. If Star Force was attacking then there must be a plan…and if there was a plan he really didn’t want to get killed running the last few miles up to the wall. And to be honest, how much fighting could he do once he got inside in his present condition?

Some, he knew, for he could just sit still and use a few of his psionics to help out or get a new suit of armor and guide other troops from afar. He ached to get back into the fight in some way, shape, or form, but prudence told him to sit tight and see what happened in orbit…and he really wanted to know what the hell Liam and Olivia were up to, assuming the Paladin didn’t go rogue. That was more likely than them choosing to send jumpships into close combat, but to be honest nothing made sense right now and his head wasn’t in the best shape either.

Nathan slumped back against a mound of dirt, sinking in a few inches before it stabilized his weight as his fatigue suddenly hit him. He was worse off than he’d thought, and if he tried to get to the city now he knew he could make it unopposed, but even a tiny Ari’tat with good aim could kill him in his weakened state.

“Easy boy. You’ve survived this far. Don’t blow it now,” he said, reaching back and untying the makeshift strap on his pack and reaching in to get some water. He’d take half an hour at least then reevaluate. Until then he needed fuel and some rest as he watched the skies for V’kit’no’sat aerial assets and tried to gleam what sort of madness was going on in orbit.

25

Thrawn sat in a personal chamber, his tail draped over a floor ‘nub’ seat designed for Paladin physiology as the dark of the room was interrupted only by a series of small lights on a control board in front of him. It was tiny, for the chamber was mostly used for holograms, but at the moment Thrawn was seeing through the mental link he had with the ship. He didn’t have telepathy like the Archons or Protovic did, but Star Force technology had advanced so far that all mechwarriors now controlled their war machines using mental controls and even naval fleet remote pilots used them at least in part.

Here, he was linked into the Paladin fleet command, not guiding individual ships but sitting back and intervening when necessary. Mostly he was observing, trying to read the V’kit’no’sat and learn how they fought. He’d studied their attacks ever since the initial assault on Earth, but those were always past actions played out by other people. Now he had a chance to alter the way his fleet fought in order to provoke reactions, which was the best way to learn an opponent.

But he didn’t have one opponent here, he had 18 different V’kit’no’sat races out there and they all fought a little different. Their overall fleet coordination was very good, but there were differing tendencies in how they moved and focused on targets. It had taken three days to get all his ships insystem and Liam had finally given him leave to attack while he and Olivia held back and looked for an opportunity to get some drones down to the surface and help the last survivors there.

The V’kit’no’sat were not obliging, and as the Paladin fleet ran head on into their thickest formation the other ships blockading the planet held firm, not giving them an opening to exploit. That meant Thrawn needed to do something, but what? His drone swarms were doing a lot of damage as they engaged the outer levels of the V’kit’no’sat fleet, but the larger ships kept cycling back before they could be destroyed and Thrawn couldn’t send his drones deeper without them getting hammered from all sides.

His glowing red eyes got brighter as his eye ridges raised curiously. He knew that he couldn’t fight as well as the Archons using their methods, and that his greatest power lie in taking what they’d learned and combining it with his own experience…meaning he wasn’t always going to act like them.

And one thing they never did was let their jumpships take a beating outside of emergency circumstances.

Thrawn saw the continuing advance of the ground forces towards the final two cities, now inside both defense walls with ample reinforcements marching in to replace whatever troops were lost. They were going to fall if something didn’t happen soon, and when that happened the last planetary shield segments would come down and the surface would be fully exposed.

That could be described as an emergency situation, enough anyway for the V’kit’no’sat to hopefully buy the gambit he’d just concocted.

His orders were sent out quickly, with his fleet groups not yet close enough to engage reshaping as they gave cover with their mass so the V’kit’no’sat sensors couldn’t see what was happening deep within as dropships began to be exchanged between jumpships as they evacuated some of them. Thrawn couldn’t let the V’kit’no’sat know that, so he made sure to keep the drone swarms so thick that no sensor beam could get even a snippet of vision within, then he gradually reformed the fleet in a way to not advertise that something had occurred within.

That thickest grouping of his fleet slammed into the V’kit’no’sat lines with the abandoned jumpships now being flown by remote pilots on other jumpships. The heavy weaponry on them was being brought directly into play, and the massive vessels dug deep into the V’kit’no’sat lines soaking up so much firepower many of the drones were ignored entirely.

That allowed Thrawn’s Paladin pilots to pursue the weakened V’kit’no’sat ships that were cycling backward and make the kills, for as he expected, the enemy was focusing on the jumpships with a ferocity born of impatience. Over a thousand years of war and they’d rarely ever gotten a shot at a jumpship, with the number of actual losses countable on his fingers as far as fleet combat was concerned. Now he was giving them 22 of them here, with another 8 around the perimeter of the planet going in with more drone fleets.

It was those 8 that he was most interested in, expecting to lose all 30 eventually but it was a calculated loss. The amount of weaponsfire needed to kill them would spare so many drones that it would be worth it, but it was those 8 that he was gambling on the most…and the V’kit’no’sat didn’t disappoint. Their desire for the jumpships saw the blockading ships split, and while not leaving any section of orbit unguarded they did thin their numbers so they could concentrate on the smaller fleets that looked to be trying to punch a hole through their lines.

Thrawn knew he didn’t need to say anything to the trailblazers, and about 9 minutes later he saw their ships move in a microjump so fast it surprised him. They hard braked the last bits of their momentum in the atmosphere itself, popping into fireballs as they engaged the blockading ships from pointblank range while getting a few additional ships all the way through to the planet’s surface.

Their advantage didn’t last long, for huge sections of the main fleet broke off to go after them, but it didn’t matter. Several drones made it beneath the planetary shields and immediately went to assist the ground combat. Thrawn knew that would cause the shield generators to hold up longer, but if they didn’t remove this fleet it wouldn’t matter. The naval fight must be won, and he’d brought so many ships with him Thrawn knew the Paladin could do it, but there were no guarantees.

So many decisions had to be made that they could still lose, and lose badly, but there were two trailblazers in the system so Thrawn had no worries. If he failed they would take command of his ships, but for now they were letting him retain full command of his fleet.

He was grateful for that, needing this test of himself and the Paladin against the fiercest opponents the galaxy had ever known. Thrawn had been bred for exactly this type of combat, then trained by Star Force in their unique tactics, and it was time to put his hybrid battle philosophy to the ultimate test.

But things were happening so fast it was hard to keep up. The reactions to the jumpship battlepoints were fascinating and intense, with each race responding a bit differently. The Brat’mar held position in their lines while moving laterally to block their path rather than engage, but all the others went straight towards the Paladin vessels that were larger than most of their own. Never mind they weren’t that well armed, compared to the V’kit’no’sat at least. It was as if the size attracted them, and that was a datapoint that Thrawn jumped on immediately.

He had the drones move in patterns to not so much damage the V’kit’no’sat as to protect the jumpships, and he saw the enemy appropriately ignore them aside from when they needed to blast their way through. That’s what he wanted, for there were other drones that he sent out to hit the flanks of those obsessed ships, but not in fixed positions. He kept them moving like schools of fish and depositing fire on multiple vessels as they flew in and around the enemy’s larger warships.

The drones received some return fire, but most of the enemy’s weaponry was pointed towards the huge targets and the walls of drones surrounding them almost as an extra set of shields while making gaps for the jumpships’ own weaponry to shoot through.

“You were right,” Thrawn said to the air, though he was directing the comments towards Paul. “They are egotistical. Their own physical size has biased them…as have the Hadarak. They need to be the larger and see the drones as inconsequential. Give them only drones to fight and it is the swarm they oppose, but give them bigger targets and they are fixated upon them.”

Thrawn’s reptilian nose sniffed with displeasure. He’d expected more, but knew well that the V’kit’no’sat were notorious for adapting to defeats. After today they may learn from their mistake, so he needed to exploit it now while he had the chance and hope they didn’t learn within minutes as a true naval commander would.

Thrawn kept the unfocused attacks up until the shield strength of the V’kit’no’sat ships were so low that they had to withdraw and allow reserve ships up into the firing positions, but the roaming drones went with them and that’s when all hell broke loose. The coordinated wall of death the V’kit’no’sat fleet was formed into was broken, and the navigational agility of the smaller vessels allowed them to spin and swirl around like river flows through the enemy fleet that was now targeting them.

But Thrawn had them swirl back to the front lines where the ships were still fixated on his jumpships as they lost shields and began to take armor damage. He selected a slew of targets and had the river flows converge on them, seeing the damage output of all the drones suddenly combine and crack one Dak’bri in half. The 18 mile wide ‘battlecruiser’ had its remaining shields almost totally forward, unable to even them out without exposing itself to the fervent attack from the front…and it wasn’t the only one.

The enemy ships nearest the front line were also not in a position to fight hard, for a lot of them were the shieldless vessels that were in retreat and their replacements were being held up by other drone river tendrils as Thrawn ordered more up, flooding the forward section of the V’kit’no’sat fleet and sending it into disarray. There were so many drones moving in and about the V’kit’no’sat ships they could not move without running into them, severely limiting their ability to support one another.

Their mass was high though, and their armor thick, both of which helped them survive the hammering for longer than any other vessel would, but amongst the river flows were specialized drones with negation shields meant to nullify dampening shields. One would fly into an enemy ship, hit the deployed shields used to prevent ramming, and emit a pulse that would eat away part of it. Thrawn had them firing themselves into the side of selected vessels like arrows, then when there was a breach in the shield other drones would go kamikaze into their hulls.

They didn’t have a lot of room to get up to speed, but it was enough to do damage and when there were large breaches exposed Thrawn had other drones with explosives moved forward through the flows, looking to be exactly the same shape and make as the others, then when they rammed the ships they popped with such force that they literally deleted part of the V’kit’no’sat vessels.

It was a tactic that Star Force had not used before, but the trailblazers knew that Thrawn had been developing it. They’d let him work on it in private, saving it for the Paladin to use someday, and he was glad because otherwise the V’kit’no’sat would have found a defense against it. Thrawn already had, and he’d been working to get around those defenses, playing a strategic game against himself for centuries as he guessed what the ultimate enemy would do.

One of those guesses proved true, for the damaged ships moved and pushed their way through the drones, taking damage enroute to each other where they rotated around and pushed their most damaged areas together, then combined their shields and essentially became one massive ship, allowing them to fight longer and harder now that their wounds were concealed.

It was an improvisation that the V’kit’no’sat had made instantly, confirming to Thrawn their adaptational ability. That he actually approved of, preferring to face his bane at full strength rather than relying on guile and surprise. He’d use those, naturally, but this was the enemy he’d been expecting to fight and even as the wounded ships clumped together other intact ships pushed up from the rear, some sacrificing the outer edges of their hulls to plow a path through the drones for others to follow…then they did it again.

They went straight for the jumpships, pushing right up near them then turning back before they were destroyed as the following ships took their place and went into pointblank combat with the Paladin drones swarming around them to block shots and deliver their own. His remote pilots actually linked many of the drones on top of each other, forming an actual wall with even stronger combined shields that they floated down over a huge hole in one jumpship, then the V’kit’no’sat Na’shor closest to them rammed the wall, pushing it into the jumpship and smashing it between the two thicker hulls.

That drew another eye ridge raise from Thrawn. There had been no need for that. No time sensitive attack that required the wall removed that instant. No immediate threat that couldn’t be better disposed of with a small amount of patience. Rather, that Voro’nam ship looked to have gotten frustrated. Either at the wall itself or the fact that they were being held back from getting at the jumpship.

And it wasn’t the only one. Others were taking similar aggressive actions to get at the jumpships when the Paladin threw up blocks around them, and Thrawn could sense a bit of desperation. The V’kit’no’sat had been delivered their prime targets and weren’t able to finish them off like they’d expected…and they weren’t running. The jumpships were staying put and slugging it out, making them perfect targets to make actual kills against the living controllers rather than…

Of course. Living crews. The V’kit’no’sat wanted to take the fight to the people arrayed against them, not their machines. Thrawn could see the pattern now, stretching back through all the years of war, and realized he’d dismissed it because it was too much of a newb’s reaction. The threat of the weapons were what was important, and the fact that Star Force didn’t sacrifice crews meant the drones would fight harder than manned ships…placing on them a higher priority to take out before the Archons did something clever.

Thrawn had been assuming the V’kit’no’sat would be as intelligent as himself, if not more so, but they were not interested in defeating the Archons’ weapons. They wanted the living kills, and for the first time in his life he was disgusted with them. Not for all the atrocities they’d committed in the past, for they were hard pressed to do anything worse than what the Li’vorkrachnika had done. No, he was disgusted by their impudence. They were acting like inferiors.

It was at that point he realized he had more experience than them. It was an absurd thought, for their commanders had probably lived hundreds of thousands of years, if not more than a million in some cases, but in all that time how much experience did they have losing? Thrawn had plenty as the Li’vorkrachnika were beaten by the Archons over and over and over again, and then even more so in training simulations once he’d joined Star Force. Thrawn had learned from battle itself, both real and in training. What did the V’kit’no’sat learn from?

The lessons of the past and wars in which they were heavily favored…save for the Hadarak. There they had a completely different mindset fighting them, but it was like they forgot those losses and assumed all enemies would fall to them, especially with a fleet of the magnitude that the V’kit’no’sat had brought here.

And now that they were losing, if only a small amount this early into the fight, they were getting frustrated and overreaching to compensate. The overreach was effective, for the jumpships being rammed were taking damage and being exposed more, but the V’kit’no’sat were taking more damage than they would have if they’d taken a more patient approach.

And in a massive fleet battle like this, attrition rates were the key to victory or loss…and right now the V’kit’no’sat attrition rate was sky high.

Thrawn intended to keep it that way, probing and provoking them as the trailblazers’ fleet fought its way back up into middle orbit and retreated. They’d gotten the relief down to the surface at the cost of many of their own ships, but it had been worth it. The ground troops had to be assisted, for the longer they held out the more V’kit’no’sat opponents would be killed, so that was an investment in the future. What the V’kit’no’sat were doing now was just stupid…unless they had a plan in play that was beyond Thrawn.

He didn’t discount that. He’d always be on guard for duplicity and guile, for he’d learned the hard way from the Archons how even a little overconfidence could wreck you and they held the V’kit’no’sat navy in high esteem. They hated them, but they respected them for what they were capable of in battle and Thrawn would do no less. He’d keep part of his mind looking for that other angle that they were playing while he continued to exploit what looked like their frustration getting the better of them.

Meanwhile the trailblazers’ fleet, a fraction of the size that Thrawn’s was, watched on as bystanders…but necessary ones. If the blockading ships left their positions to reinforce the bulk of their fleet, then they could run right down to the surface with all their ships and blast away at the enemy ground troops. Without competition in the skies the planetary shields could be dropped and Star Force bombardment could begin, but while those enemy ships were there they didn’t dare try that, else a few well-placed shots could take out key facilities or even the defending troops.

But Thrawn also liked that they were letting him fight this on his own, and he intended to prove the extent of his skills with the trailblazers watching. It wasn’t Paul, but two of his kin who had very high naval rankings and could commend or criticize his actions where few others could. He’d been on the sidelines for this entire war and now was his chance. He was the Supreme Viceroy of the Paladin, and it was time they made their mark on this war and took some of the pressure off of those who had held the diminishing front for so long.

He and the Paladin were ready, with Liam and Olivia giving him a chance to prove it while providing a necessary deterrent to the blockaders. Trailblazers were notorious for multitasking…this was no surprise to Thrawn…but the fact that they hadn’t assumed overall fleet command did, and he knew it was personal.

This was his chance to prove himself…either for the better or the worse…while Paul and others fought their own battles in other systems. This was team warfare, no one could be everywhere at once, and he needed to be part of that team. Every fiber of his being cried out for it, and both Paul and these two trailblazers were giving him the greatest threat he’d ever known to fight against.

And he loved them for it.

26

Nathan watched the fighting, both in orbit and on the ground, for several hours before the strike began. When it did there was a gap in the shields above to let the drones through and a few shots came with them, one of which hit less than 50 meters from his position.

The superheated thunderclap of air came a split second before the tidal wave of vaporized debris hit him and sent him tumbling across the ground…but thankfully it wasn’t too large of an Ardent blast and aside from getting his bell rung he wasn’t injured. He’d had his face towards the impact, so the exposed sections on the back of his legs were spared from the shock wave and debris, though in the tumbling his newly regrown skin got scraped off and bloody again.

Nathan scrambled behind the nearest cover and made like a statue, looking for anyone that might have seen him while he amped the regeneration of his skin a second time. The planetary defense shield was back up with the last few shots at the descending drones hitting it and being absorbed, so he didn’t need to worry about another bombardment shot unless it came from his own ships.

He was too far away from the ground troops to worry about that, and as he watched the drones slide through the sky shooting at the I’rar’et and downing several with good shots of their larger weaponry while their anti-air batteries peppered certain zones with a sprinkle of small Dre’mo’don blasts or sent out ring-like Ichod pulses to catch the fliers while the main weapons began shooting the surface and driving back the V’kit’no’sat in several sectors.

But they weren’t unopposed, getting hit by a bath of return fire from the surface that began to reduce their shield strength as the enemy ground troops desperately needed to neutralize the drones, with their aerial assets swinging wide to circle around and get at the few drones that had come down damaged and were currently shieldless.

Nathan hugged the dirt wall with his back pressed up against it as several flocks of them flew near and over his position enroute to those attacks, then he had a window of opportunity. He stood up, finding his head still ringing from the tumble he took, but he wasn’t waiting. The Archon took off running towards the city wall while watching the sky, happy that the enemy was too busy with the new threat to notice him down here, but all it would take would be an overhead warship glimpsing him and sending word.

Hopefully the Paladin had them too busy for that, and with each mile he ran he felt his luck running out. So close now, but he was totally exposed as he hit the smooth area around the city where there had been no explosives and one of the I’rar’et finally took notice, swinging around from the south and heading his way.

“Shit,” Nathan said, knowing there was no turning back now. He turned on his beacon, not knowing if it was working or not, and headed for the wall that had no door in it as he leaned forward and flew over ground to gain more speed. The I’rar’et was far faster and swooped in towards him, firing from range and missing save for one hit that Nathan absorbed using his bioshields, otherwise it would have hit his left shoulder.

But the anti-air defenses on the wall opened up then and turned the I’rar’et back, with it not wanting to take that much damage to eliminate Nathan. Had he known who Nathan was the Pterodactyl might have thought otherwise, but after a few more seconds the Archon angled upward and flew over the wall safely, landing on the other side of one of the top turrets and kneeling there as his back was now covered and he could see what was taking place inside the…

“Wonderful,” Nathan said, seeing huge tracks of the cityscape now junked. Buildings were literally toppled and moved into advantageous positions for the V’kit’no’sat as the entire northeast quarter was filled with smoke and explosions. It looked like they were building an impromptu Alamo as the drones poured down further destruction, ironically, into their own buildings to get at them.

With his comm and battlemap down Nathan couldn’t get any updates on what was actually happening there, and he was just glad to be back in what was still Star Force territory with an intact planetary shield over his head, but he was too weak to do much to help and he knew it. The flight in had left him breathing heavily and his body aching where the tiny anti-grav nodules were spread out.

Fortunately someone was paying good attention and a dropship headed his way from the opposite side of the city, eventually flying up to the wall and spinning around as it lowered its rear ramp. Nathan jumped across the small gap and got inside where a pair of Commandos were waiting.

“Thank you,” Nathan said earnestly as he clapped one of them on the shoulder.

“You’re hurt,” the other said, seeing the backside of his armor.

“I’ll live, but I’m too exhausted to be much help right now. I need ambrosia, food, and a quick nap before I can get back in the fight.”

“Who are you?” the first Commando asked, seeing the Piccolo coloration of his armor but unable to get any ID tag from the battlemap.

“Nathan-937.”

“We thought you were dead.”

“Close. I lost my battlemap connection. What’s the situation?”

“We’ve got a huge relief fleet from the Paladin. They managed to cover for some drones to come down, and they’re helping, but we’re still losing ground.”

“How far from the shield generator?”

“Three, maybe four miles.”

“Get me there. If it falls we’re all screwed.”

“Pilot?”

“I heard,” a Kiritas voice said from the cockpit. “On the way now.”

2 weeks later…

The two Arc Knights jumped off the edge of the roof, falling down more than 50 meters and using their Lachka to create ‘crash bags’ that slowed them just enough they didn’t hurt themselves when they hit the city streets on Voran, then took off sprinting to the left after the Zen’zat with a target tag on them within the battlemap.

The pair couldn’t see them yet, but one more turn and the 13 Zen’zat came into view, one of which knocked a leg out from under one of the Arc Knights with a telekinetic slap, then a wall of Dre’mo’don shots came their way, pounding their shields as they scrambled backwards…but it had been just enough of a distraction that a Frieza-level Archon dropped down from the sky into their midst and blew them all off their feet with a Jumat blast so strong it even threw the Arc Knights back a bit as it ricocheted around the corner.

They immediately turned around, intent on helping their team leader with the kills and made two tackles when they got back into view, wrestling with the Zen’zat their own size and delaying them long enough as the Death Mistress herself broke V’kit’no’sat armor with single blows while disabling the Zen’zat with her mental psionics in a way that no other Frieza could hope to do.

The two Arc Knights fought hand to hand, buying time rather than trying to make kills and let her do most of the work as they took a few hits to their armor after their shields went down, but the Zen’zat didn’t survive long enough to rough them up too much. Soon there were 13 corpses on the ground with the trio putting additional shots into them to make sure the Kich’a’kat in their armor didn’t revive them.

“Back,” Ginsi-500289 ordered, giving them a waypoint a few blocks over in the Star Force city that had held up against V’kit’no’sat attack for 2 straight months. Others on the planet had fallen, but Ginsi had been moving back and forth with her advanced combat team holding key shield generators and blunting the V’kit’no’sat advance. At present they owned only a third of the planet and were making meager gains on the ground while the naval fight had already been lost.

The Lothcat System had been hit in the second wave of V’kit’no’sat attacks with no roaming fleets available for backup and had only a single planet with decent defenses, but not enough to stop the enemy from punching through then withdrawing as their armies attempted to do the rest of the damage. Ginsi had been coming back from the rim and enroute to another battlefield when Lothcat had been invaded and decided to reinforce them here with her two jumpships and one troopship that she and her unit operated out of.

They were amongst the most badass Commandos in Star Force. Some were Regular Commandos, Arc Commandos, Knights, Arc Knights, and more Archons…with all of her kin ranked higher than her, save for her specialty. Archon ranks were based on the lowest score of the 5 divisions of the military, but where most Archons trained evenly in all disciplines Ginsi did not. She didn’t completely ignore the other four, but most of her training was focused on the Commando skillset, and in that subcategory she was the highest ranking Archon in the empire.

Her physical skills were so advanced that her Frieza armor had to be custom made with kinetic armor. It wasn’t as strong against energy weapons, but was better suited against physical impacts. She had to have it now, for she’d been cracking her own armor on some body blows delivered to others and needed the extra rigidity because when an Archon went up against larger opponents, firepower was always an issue. Ginsi needed to use her own body as a weapon and be able to conserve her energy ammo…which she didn’t even bother to use on the Zen’zat they’d just killed until the final death shots.

Right now the Arc Knights were moving to a rally point while she summoned others to another location, rotating her supports in and out to keep them fresh and their shields full while she bounced from point to point within the city where needed to assist the army of Star Force ground troops holding up the insane numbers the V’kit’no’sat had deployed. They shouldn’t have held out this long, but Ginsi had personally taken down everything from Kar’ka to Era’tran with a little help…but she was going to need a lot for the Oso’lon ahead.

There were three of them, two of which mechs were sparring with while another was pressing further into the city towards a high-up tower turret that was pouring fire into fights more than a mile away. She could see that he was going to solo it from below, where it couldn’t defend itself well, and if he took it down it would take a lot of pressure off his buddies further back.

With the other two Oso’lon fighting and mostly winning against three stars of mechs there was nothing to stand in the way of this mass of brilliant green battle armor aside from static defenses and some infantry that she was already signaling to back off, for they’d be easily kills for the quadruped juggernaut. The old, old references to the Brontosaurs in Human lore didn’t do them justice. They were the most dangerous of all races on the land and had the most psionics, including Jumat, which could wreck small buildings in a single blast.

“Are you sure about this?” an Arc Commando that she’d summoned asked over the comm.

“Stick to the plan and you’ll be ok,” she assured him.

“I’m worried about you.”

“First time for everything,” she said, flying up to the top of a building and running across its roof. Even though she hadn’t qualified for all the psionics based on her Archon rank in previous centuries they’d been given to her anyway and now she was going to need those well-honed and developed skills to try and slow this monster down.

Ginsi hesitated at the edge of the roof, seeing the Oso’lon coming down the street and soon to be beneath her moving in a lumbering run that made for good speed. She assumed he saw her, but to make certain she used her Wequay psionic, sending out a telepathic signal that immediately pulled the attention of whoever it landed on. Lesser minds would be fixated upon it, ignoring all else, but to the powerful Oso’lon it only got its attention on her as she jumped off the roof and dove towards it as her shields were hit with a shot from its armor’s turret weaponry.

Ginsi took the shot, seeing her shields drop 22% from the heavy firepower that a V’kit’no’sat this size could carry in its gigantic armor. Someone smaller than a Zen’zat like her didn’t stand a chance against an Oso’lon and the V’kit’no’sat knew it, expecting to bat her away with a Jumat blast after shooting her a few times, but Ginsi released her own Jumat blast ahead in a focused cone to mostly nullify the bit of the huge Jumat wave that hit her, bouncing her up a little but not enough to keep her from getting on the Oso’lon’s back.

She released her own Saven before the Oso’lon could, momentarily jamming its mind with white noise as she skated on the energy shields covering the armor between turret positions to avoid getting shot…save for the one on the back of the neck. That sent beam after beam of Chi’parat energy into her, but she managed to dodge a few that hit and drained a bit of the Oso’lon’s own shields.

Ginsi was taking too many hits, but she needed to draw attention away from the street below as the Arc Commando and 18 others from her unit swarmed nearby and fired rocket launcher-like shoulder weapons at its legs, then ran like hell before they could get swatted away as the detonations produced physical clouds that hardened into concrete-like masses that clung to the four limbs of the Oso’lon but weighed almost nothing.

Ginsi could see it hesitate, wondering what the hell those things were even while shooting at her, then on a command sent from her helmet the four shackles pulled together, essentially bonding to one another on touch and becoming 4-way handcuffs that tripped the Oso’lon up enough that it leaned forward and face planted as Ginsi ran up and jumped off its neck, dropping an Ubven on its head along with another Saven flash as she ran off and behind a building.

The Oso’lon negated the Ubven after a second, pulling through it using its own immunity because it had the same psionic as it got on its front knees and reached its head around so it could look directly at the front cuffs, then using the high powered weaponry on its cranium plates blasted away, freeing itself completely after 20 seconds, then it stood back up and continued to head towards the turret tower as the lower defense weapons at the base began firing on it.

The Oso’lon’s shields held up easily, and it fired back…a Uit streamer that deposited a cloying energy matrix over the base of the turret that, after a moment of contact, exploded so hard Ginsi bounced into the sidewall as the earthquake knocked her feet out from under her. That single attack took out the anti-mech defenses on this side of the turret base, then the big guns up top stopped shooting far and ratcheted down as much as they could, pumping one good shot into the gap between buildings where the Oso’lon passed before it was too far under to shoot again.

That shot hurt, for it was a bloon launcher and Ginsi knew it was loaded with shield-piercing energy…which was when she took her next chance. The Goku-level 398 Commando signaled her supports to attack again, this time with damaging weapons, and as they fired at the legs she scrambled up a wall and jumped off it, landing on the shields covering the Oso’lon’s tail while taking another armor turret shot to the face as she released as much Jumat energy as she could.

With the draining done to the shields by the turret tower they were weakened, and the little shots by her unit added a bit more damage with the energy reserves over the tail flowing forward to fill in other areas. That didn’t leave the tail exposed, but it did make the energy barrier weaker and Jumat was also a shield piercer. Ginsi didn’t have much of a window to work with, so she pressed into it as hard as she could and was relieved to feel her hands pass through and touch the armor below.

“I’m on!” she yelled over the comm, seeing the shield reform around her wrists and essentially lock her in place. She also felt an Ubven fall over her…then the tail whipped to the left and smashed into a building.

Ginsi negated the field enough for her to move and used her Jumat to weaken the shield so she could climb around the tail just enough to avoid the hit as she fired both wrist-mounted Bra’hems that drew power out of the pack on her back. Tiny spots in the armor melted, but not enough to get through before the Oso’lon rolled over on its side and Ginsi had to jump off or get smashed into the ground…but not before leaving a little device behind that emitted its own Lachka jammer so the Oso’lon couldn’t pry it off.

The power cell in the ‘tag’ wouldn’t last long, and on its own it couldn’t do much, for it was a special variety built specifically for her to use on Oso’lon. She’d never had the chance, but it had worked on an Era’tran that also had Jumat. Most of them didn’t have it, so he had to have been one of their elite troops. All Oso’lon had Jumat, and without it being able to telekinetically rip the foreign device off there were only two options. Roll over and try to rub it off, or the quick option was to summon a Jumat blast in the tiny gap between device and armor and blow it off.

Oso’lon used Jumat their entire lives, so she wasn’t surprised when it took that delicate approach, for the emission line had to be very fine…and like a typical Oso’lon they didn’t use small amounts of Jumat. This one summoned a wall about five meters wide beneath the 3 inch device, intent on ripping it off with such ferocity the annoying Human wouldn’t dare try and put another on it.

The force was so great the tag disintegrated…but the Jumat energy reacted with the otherwise benign components and turned it into a bomb. And a bomb that detonated with no shields, for the Jumat couldn’t be released with them up. The Oso’lon had to momentarily drop them over that spot, which was another reason to use excess Jumat to knock any physical objects away that might try to slip in at that moment.

So the explosion, fueled by the intensity of the Oso’lon’s own Jumat, punched a hole a meter wide in the armor with a few inch-wide spots in the crater that had gone all the way through and hit flesh.

That was when Ginsi flew back and dove towards the weakness as the Oso’lons shields flashed back up, blocking her as she took a few more shots, the last of which fully dropped her own shields that she was going to have to lower anyway as she covered herself in Jumat energy and tried to push through as the Oso’lon flicked its hind quarters side to side to try and shake her.

At that moment her team attacked again, firing at the legs along with a pair of Arc Commandos coming out behind and firing at Ginsi. They hit her with a deployable shield, with the sticky goo landing on her back and emitting a shot lived defense as her hands were already in the crater. Her gloves withdrew as she also covered herself with Rentar, making her immune to a telekinetic attack as she touched her bare fingertips into the bleeding wounds.

Ginsi knew she didn’t have long, so she threw a Saven then activated her own Kgat, isolating her mind from any exterior counterattack as she physically connected her mind to the Oso’lon’s nervous system…allowing her mind to fight against the much larger one directly.

From her team’s point of view the Oso’lon suddenly became punch drunk, still shooting at them but with less accuracy and stumbling steps as Ginsi grappled with it internally. They didn’t wait for a signal from her and came out of their cover, using their own limited psionics and the heavy weaponry they carried to do what damage they could while the Oso’lon was in a weakened state…

27

September 27, 4814

Lothcat System (Star Force territory)

Voran

Paul’s fleet had arrived 4 days ago, having picked up a massive group of Paladin ships along the way from Antelin. Part of the Defender fleet he’d claimed he’d left in that system to make sure no V’kit’no’sat ships doubled back and gave them trouble, for while the system invasions had been going on there had been relays in uninhabited systems going dark, creating zones through which the V’kit’no’sat could move undetected. Star Force had deployed scouts to those areas, but even if they found something they’d have to run to the nearest system with a comm relay to transmit, increasing the lag times involved.

Unfortunately the relays in Star Force territory were constantly transmitting and easy to find…though not easy to get to so far out on the peripheries of those systems. The V’kit’no’sat were making the effort, and more often than not would show up without warning near the relays before destroying them. That told Paul that there was a high number of stealth vessels in play inside their own territory, and he really wished they’d gotten more Guardian-class relays built along the front.

Those were much larger and had the amount of weaponry equal to a Sentinel defense station. The guns were automated and would shoot at anything that approached without clearance codes, meaning a single V’kit’no’sat ship wouldn’t have been enough to destroy one. A few Guardians were sprinkled along the front, but Star Force didn’t have the luxury of ‘wasting’ so many resources when drone production was the highest priority.

Right now that meant so long as the V’kit’no’sat could get out to the relays they could kill them with even the smallest of warships…and with no roaming fleets available to intercept them they could move about plucking them from the starmap without resistance. Normally the location would have been a problem, for any ship making the long trek out to a relay would effectively be pinned there with only one way back into the system. It was a long road out and a long road back without a gravity well at the destination point, meaning that the relay could detect the approaching ship and send for help.

But with all available ships fighting at the invasion points and most V’kit’no’sat ships too much for a Ma’kri to handle, they were getting away with it for the most part. A few ships had been turned away by the Ma’kri that roamed the front under their own stealth systems, but with each week that passed Paul could see more and more empty systems on the map that he was getting no data from.

And there was no way he was going to leave Antelin with only a handful of ships, for a savvy commander would sweep in after he’d left and hit the system again. The Paladin support more than made up for the piece of the Defender fleet he left behind, so despite the losses his fleet had suffered he actually came into Lothcat with more strength than he’d left with.

The naval battle had been a rout, and the V’kit’no’sat had engaged his fleet as it came into the system, probably knowing what was coming and trying to delay it as much as possible as some of the ground troops were evacuated, but they couldn’t get them all out. Paul thought about letting them go, but he didn’t want those troops dropping on another planet and outnumbering the defenders there so he sent subgroups of his fleet out to intercept or drive them off, stranding over a million V’kit’no’sat on Voran where they continued to fight even as the remains of their fleet fled the planet on any jumpline they could access.

Many of their ships did not make it out, for Paul wasn’t feeling generous and knowing he had to make every kill here he could when he had the advantage. Surrender options went out even as his ships were chasing, but the V’kit’no’sat didn’t even respond to insult them. They just ran, having done considerable damage to the planet but not nearly as much as they should have. They’d had over 2 months on the ground and more than half the shield generators were still intact.

That hadn’t happened on any other planet so far in this invasion campaign, and Paul quickly figured out why as his fleet bombarded the planet and he along with a lot of other Archons in his fleet went down to relieve the very battle fatigued troops that had successfully defended the planet for so long. Had they only fought well the entire planet would have been exposed and bombarded weeks ago, and Paul couldn’t overstate that fact enough as he met with members of the ground team…who had no idea what was going on elsewhere.

They thought they were losing, and technically they were as the V’kit’no’sat inched forward, but compared to everywhere else where the overwhelming number of enemy troops were steamrolling across planets to pluck their defenses and let the fleet do the majority of the destruction, Voran had held their ground and made them fight extremely hard for even the smallest of gains.

The planetary defenders still couldn’t comprehend that, for the wounds and fatigue were still too new and the fact that they’d lost more than a third of the planet did not reinforce victory, rather the opposite, but coming from a trailblazer the praise was not ignored and as some of those troops got rest breaks they began to digest what had happened here and had a chance to look through battlemap data from other systems, beginning to see the magnitude of what they’d accomplished.

But not all of them. The most active of them all was not right, so said her own unit, and as Paul finished up his own part in the cleanup and was getting ready to leave with his fleet to head elsewhere he had a few hours to spare, so he headed across the planet until he found where Ginsi was still in the field. When he got to her she was high in the sky, floating above an area that was seeing a few remaining V’kit’no’sat still active as teams of mechs hunted them down.

He’d expected her to be on the ground, but it looked like she was keeping an eye out from above and ready to swoop down and help with any problems…though Paul could tell that wasn’t true, at least not in full as he got closer, flying up in his blue/orange Goku armor until he floated side by side with her purple/white Frieza armor that was barely intact, with him seeing several breaches that revealed smooth skin beneath.

“Hello, Paul,” she said amicably. “You have no idea how glad we are that you showed up.”

“We’re about to pull out, but we’re leaving some ships behind just in case. How are you doing?”

“Alive. A lot of our people aren’t.”

“Have you checked the other invasions?”

“A little. We’re getting hammered everywhere, aren’t we?”

“We’re pushing back now thanks to the Paladin, and some of The Nexus races came to help.”

“I saw that.”

“Did you see how fast the V’kit’no’sat were conquering other planets?”

“Not really.”

“Voran would have been completely destroyed by now. You held them back far better than any other world.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Damage done, I know,” Paul said, understanding that part. “But the part you saved is significant. They hit you hard here and you defied them in a way that’s never been done before.”

“Olivia taking a Mach’nel was bigger.”

“Sneak attack and significant. This was grinding fighting and you were a big reason why the planet held out. I heard your kill count was over 18,000.”

“I have no idea,” she said, still looking at the ground as she talked from behind her helmet.

“This was probably the toughest battle you’ve ever fought, but not by much. You’ve had to grind your way through losing efforts with far less help than you had here. Something else is bothering you beyond the losses. What is it?”

Ginsi was quiet for a moment, then finally looked at Paul. “He broke my legs.”

“Who?”

“The Oso’lon we killed. My unit, I mean. Just a bunch of Humans and no mech or aerial support. I got a tag on him then dove into the breach when he took the bait. Got my fingers in his body and fought him inside his head enough for the rest of my team to take him down.”

“Is that why your armor looks so bad?”

“Different set. That one got trashed more than this.”

“How did your legs get broke?”

“My Rentar slipped. Not on my torso or my head, thankfully, but his mind was so powerful that the coverage on my legs dipped for just a moment. He responded so fast and with such force my legs felt like twigs. He didn’t even damage my armor, just reached inside and snapped both of them. I don’t know how I held my focus after that, against his mental pressure, the pain, and the fire from his neck turret. Somehow I did long enough for my unit to do enough damage, but I should have been dead.”

“Bad, but that’s not the first time you’ve been wounded.”

“I pushed it too far, Paul. I shouldn’t have survived that.”

“And Morgan shouldn’t have survived that Nestafar gravity trap long before you were born…but she did. Even if she doesn’t remember how she summoned the strength to do it, and so did you.”

“I think I tried to do too much, and now I’m worried that I’m going to be hesitant. That’s not me, Paul,” she said, retracting her helmet so he could see her face, with him doing the same.

“Give it enough time and you’ll recalibrate. Right now you’re still rattled. You haven’t gotten a good sleep in yet, have you?”

“Bits and pieces,” she said, a tear streaking down the left side of her face.

“That’s not what’s gut punching you,” Paul guessed. “What else happened?”

Ginsi sighed, then retracted the armor over her left hand. It looked tiny, betraying the strength in it, and she reached it out towards him meekly.

“Tell me what I could have done differently,” she said, now fully crying.

Paul retracted his own armor, his hand no bigger than hers, and wrapped his fingers gently through Ginsi’s, making the flesh contact required for him to bypass the Ikrid block and let him look around in her mind.

She pointed him to where he needed to go, then let him feel through her memories of the Oso’lon takedown. Ginsi watched him, her powerful mind holding back her natural reaction to push him out, while giving him a few pointers here and there. She could have sent him the memories telepathically, but she needed an answer and that required Paul be able to look where he wanted and see things that she might have missed…but the underlying problem became obvious as events played out at super speed thanks to his Sav.

She’d been mentally linked to the Oso’lon when it died, her interfering with its mind just enough to make it fight sloppily. It had fought back against her, with Ginsi losing but holding on long enough to do her job. She could feel some of its thoughts, and since both her and the Oso’lon also had Sav their mental battle had encompassed what felt like hours despite it being only a few minutes.

Ginsi had felt what the Oso’lon was thinking, including its death. It went from confident to surprised to panicked as it became apparent that it was going to die. It was unpleasant to feel, but Paul now saw what was bothering Ginsi. This Oso’lon hadn’t been a monster. It had been given a mission that it felt was essential to the stability of the galaxy, and more importantly for this planetary invasion. The V’kit’no’sat were stalled and losing so many troops that something had to change, so this Oso’lon and a few others had tried something rash and nearly pulled it off.

It was something just like Ginsi or Paul would have done, not something to murder civilians but an objective to open up this planet to the purging orbital bombardment similar to what Star Force had to do during the lizard war. Star Force had offered them surrender and they didn’t take it…which was a huge difference to the V’kit’no’sat who decreed all the rogue Zen’zat must die regardless…but they’d had to kill so many lizards that it had gotten to Paul several times, especially when he had to do it personally rather than from orbit.

There were many parallels between the two, but Star Force had been in the right and the V’kit’no’sat were definitely in the wrong…except this Oso’lon didn’t think so. For whatever reason he saw the Terraxis abominations as a threat. An unregulated mess that couldn’t be accommodated, knowing that no Zen’zat would wish to be turned back into a Ter’nat, and that if Star Force was offered a surrender they would refuse on that reason alone. Not to mention that some things like Sav couldn’t be reversed. Those that had it would have to be killed, otherwise the balance within the galaxy would be wrecked.

To this Oso’lon balance was insanely important, for without it the V’kit’no’sat would tear themselves apart as they almost had during Mak’to’ran’s rise to rule. Mak’to’ran had restored the balance that had been slowly eroding over the millennia, saving the V’kit’no’sat and the galaxy, for without the V’kit’no’sat to hold balance everything would devolve into chaos.

Star Force, despite its success, was deemed as unsustainable and a threat to the V’kit’no’sat. No race was allowed to exist outside the V’kit’no’sat, yet these Zen’zat were and they were not following the rules. Their psionics were not earned, and they possessed technology that Zen’zat were never meant to field unless in the service of another race.

The underlying reason that Zen’zat were not allowed to reproduce was not a feeble one, and the threat of disruptions if it did happen was not something the V’kit’no’sat took lightly. This Oso’lon felt that the mere existence of these abominations was chaos incarnate and had to be eliminated similar to the way Star Force had to eliminate the lizards. He thought he was doing the right thing and was fighting hard to accomplish it, and when he was dying Ginsi had felt his despair. He’d been doing everything he was supposed to do, but the chaos was winning.

He felt like a victim, not a murderer, and had died fighting bravely with no malice towards Star Force above and beyond the fact that they were killing him. To the Oso’lon they were no different than the mindless horde of the lizards…only lizards given technology they hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve, and that were far too dangerous with it to be allowed to live.

The Oso’lon thought he was protecting the galaxy, and Ginsi could feel beyond his reasoning that he was a good person…and she’d killed him.

“Evil fights evil,” she said as Paul continued to look through her mind. “Evil fights good. Good fights evil…but good doesn’t fight good. What could I have done differently? I’ve been over this in my mind so many times and I can’t find a flaw. I can’t find a mistake I made. Please tell me what I did wrong.”

Paul took a long moment to gather his thoughts, going through this in his mind many times before he squeezed her hand tighter and looked her in the eye.

“They invaded us. We didn’t invade them. They chose this fight, and forced you to defend the planet. You didn’t have a choice but to fight back and you didn’t have the stun weapons necessary to disable the Oso’lon…and even if you did troops would have to be devoted to guarding it and keeping it down. If you kept him alive it meant Star Force personnel elsewhere would die.”

“But he wasn’t an enemy. He should have been an ally. I should have rescued him.”

“You didn’t have the power to without leaving someone else in jeopardy.”

“It doesn’t feel right, Paul.”

“It’s not right, but he forced it upon you. It takes one to fight, but two to make peace. He wasn’t interested in peace.”

“He was attacking a building, not us when we ambushed him.”

“And without that building his buddies would have killed a lot more people, along with him. You didn’t kill him in a moment of atrocity, so it feels worse, but…”

“He was a good person, Paul. I can’t get past that. I should have done something different.”

“Could you have captured him?”

“Not without letting him take the turret first…but it’s just a building. We can build another in a week.”

“They forced this fight on us,” Paul reiterated. “If we invaded their territory there would be lots of tactics that we would not use because some of the people on the receiving end might not deserve it, but every V’kit’no’sat here came to kill us.”

“He didn’t deserve it,” Ginsi said, and Paul knew she was firm on that…and he couldn’t rightly disagree.

“So what, you let yourself die so he could live?”

“Of course not, but when he broke my legs it was like I wasn’t a person to him. I was just a gnat he should have been able to swat away but couldn’t. He didn’t see me as a good person, just a force of nature that had to be destroyed and that doing so he was doing the right thing.”

“But he wasn’t doing the right thing, and he didn’t stop when he sensed your mind.”

“He didn’t have a choice! We were killing him.”

“And vice versa.”

“We kill people for doing that, Paul.”

“Ah…” he said, getting a glimpse of what else was bothering her. “And when he broke your legs, you saw yourself on the reverse side.”

“I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. I was committed and I had to see it through. If it had been just me I might have tried to run, but my unit was right there around his feet and if I didn’t keep messing with his mind…”

“So you blinded yourself to get through the moment.”

“I didn’t know what to do so I held course…and I’m wondering if he wasn’t doing the same thing.”

“You can’t control others, so let’s focus on you. You want to know what mistake you made that led you to kill a good person?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“I need to know, like it or not.”

“You’re not omniscient. You can only play the circumstances that are presented to you. In the moment you were so overtaxed you couldn’t do anything else, so you held course as he was in your head trying to mess with you. You put yourself in a compromised position based on the assumption that he was the enemy that needed to be stopped and the only way to stop him was to kill him. Then you get hit with a revelation you didn’t expect and were ill prepared to deal with because you had gone all in to make the kill. You couldn’t find a solution then and you can’t find one now, so you stayed the course and you’re worried that such willful blindness is a problem.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Not when it’s necessary.”

“Define ‘necessary.’”

“When people will die if you hesitate. If you can’t find another way, you continue with what you were doing.”

“Even if it’s wrong?”

“No, but what options did you have?”

“None. But that doesn’t make it right. He was one of the good guys.”

“Deluded into doing something wrong. We have to make sure we are not deluded, that’s our responsibility, but against an opponent this strong we don’t have the luxury of helping them survive their delusions when they push us to the breaking point. We have to fight to survive first, then help others.”

“We killed him. We didn’t give him a chance to run away.”

“Would he?”

“Yes, he would have.”

“And then what? Would he have left the planet or continued to fight after repairing his armor?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if having access to my mind would have affected him the same way.”

“Then there’s your problem. You don’t know if he would continue to be a threat or not. If he would have had a change of heart you should have let him go. If he wasn’t going to, then killing him before he could kill more of us was the right call. There’s no way for you to know.”

“I feel like I should have at least given him the chance. I feel like the monster now.”

“If they were weaker we could err on the side of caution…”

“But their strength demands we don’t take chances or we get ourselves killed, I know…I know.”

“Still doesn’t feel right, does it?” he said, letting go of her hand.

“I feel duped into becoming the enemy and I don’t know how to deal with this. I can’t just ignore it.”

“Can’t ignore it and can’t solve it, so you’re stuck in a cycling rut.”

“You been there?”

“Yeah, and it’s not pretty.”

“How did you get out of it?”

“Time and some good counsel.”

“Like you’re doing now?”

“Trying to. But you killed a good person. That’s never going to feel right and you can’t undo it. But unless you identify the mistake you can’t call a Mulligan and shake it off, so you keep endlessly looking for a mistake that isn’t there.”

“If there is no mistake then how did it happen?”

“The mistake was his, and it put you in a situation that never should have existed. He attacked good people.”

“And they killed him. We have to find a way to spare the good ones, Paul. I don’t know how, but we have to. If there’s one of them, there have got to be others.”

“We are not taking prisoners to mentally check, because we are not going to kill prisoners when they turn out to be baddies.”

“I know, but we have to do something.”

Paul put a hand on her shoulder, skin against armor, and nodded slowly. “Alright, alright. I’ve had a few more centuries than you to work through this, and I’ve developed a few tricks to work around the darkside trap you got ensnared in.”

“Such as?”

“There’s some V’kit’no’sat ship salvage up there we can use. Whatever resistance is still left on the planet we’ll capture rather than kill, then after interrogation we’ll put them on the salvage and tow it to Sol if we have to. We’re not keeping prisoners, but we can send them back.”

“To fight us again later?”

“We’re now dominant in this system, so we have the option of mercy, even if they don’t deserve it. We’ve done it before, and sent a message with them. Hopefully the V’kit’no’sat don’t think it’s a trap and kill them on the spot…but at least they’ll have a chance this way.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And to make sure no one gets killed trying to capture them, you’re getting another set of armor and go with me to personally handle this.”

“I don’t have another set. This is my last one.”

“Then don’t punch as hard. You won’t need to anyway if we’re using stun weapons.”

“Point,” she conceded. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t screw up as far as I can see, but when we do we have to get ourselves back in the right and shake off what happened. We don’t forget nor condone. We learn and move on until such a time that we find a Tardis and can actually do something about the past,” he said, sending out a mental order through the battlemap to stop eradication missions and switch to reconnaissance until properly equipped capture teams could be assembled. It would be harder, but they had time and the Excalibur didn’t have to be the first ship out in the system exit convoy that he was not going to delay. Plus he wanted to take Ginsi with him once this planet was secure and put her to use in the next place they ended up at, which at this point looked to be the Davmes System.

Epilogue

April 5, 4815

Terraxis System (V’kit’no’sat territory)

Terrax

Dorchav arrived in planetary orbit in a small Ti’mat, having returned from the fighting now that his fleet had been disbanded and reforged with other surviving fleets as they were pushed back from the systems they were assigned to destroy. Some had finished their tasks and moved on to secondary ones, but Dorchav had been forced out of the Karthus System before the last few bits of Star Force civilization were eradicated.

He’d held onto orbit, fighting head on the massive reinforcements that had come out of nowhere until he’d been able to evacuate his ground troops just shy of completing their task. Had he not they would have been slaughtered, for he couldn’t hold the system with the ship counts arrayed against him. Had he still had a Mach’nel it would have been a fair fight, but by plucking that key asset from him Star Force had managed to retain the planet…though there wasn’t much left of it.

Still it was another defeat, and here he was returning to V’kit’no’sat territory in shame while the other fleet commanders continued to hit what systems they could, but Star Force was quickly regaining control despite the losses they’d suffered.

When Dorchav left the Ti’mat the ship departed immediately, for it wasn’t assigned to him other than for the transport back to Terrax. Where Dorchav would go next wasn’t determined, and he may have to wait on the planet for months before finding a ship to head back to Iguar on, for he knew his fellow Brat’mar would want answers for why their Mach’nel had been lost. He would, if he was in their place, but first he had to report to the campaign commander.

It wasn’t until he was on the way down to the planet that he noticed the damage to Terrax. Entire cities were missing and in their place ruins with construction crews combing over and devouring them. His view from the drop pod quickly rotated around the planet to the southern hemisphere where it began its landing sequence over the green and untouched southern continent.

It was pristine, with the planetary defense station at the center of a reshaped landscape. Star Force had it buried beneath their own city originally and the planet was so far gone that it was covered in ice. Once the proper owners had reclaimed it they’d built the climate managing stations that had been destroyed during the Rit’ko’sor rebellion and returned Terrax to its warm, humid, natural state. Gone were the offensive polar ice caps and the primary continent was now filling with infrastructure again.

But it was the infrastructure elsewhere that concerned Dorchav. He’d been in his private quarters for the entire trip and had not received any news reports, but something had happened here. He didn’t question the Zen’zat piloting the drop pod, rather waiting until they landed and he stepped out into the planetary air in view of a small honor guard of Voro’nam waiting for him.

“Dorchav,” one of them said respectively. “We are to escort you to Zyrnox.”

“What has happened here?” the Brat’mar asked as the drop pod sat on one of the flat tiers of the pyramid-shaped defense station with its black/green Yeg’gor armor beneath them. “I saw damage elsewhere on the planet.”

“You weren’t told?” one of the Pachycephalosauruses asked in surprise.

“I have not been. What happened?”

“The rogue Zen’zat raided the system and destroyed everything not within range of this defense station.”

Dorchav’s eyes narrowed angrily. “How?”

“Our defense fleet was thinned to a few hundred vessels. They arrived with tens of thousands of their carrier ships. We were horribly outmatched.”

“The shipyards?”

“Gone. All orbital facilities were destroyed. Please come with us. You can better discuss the matter with Zyrnox.”

Dorchav huffed with increased displeasure, but it wasn’t directed at the Voro’nam. “Lead on.”

The dome-headed bipeds turned and led him inside the defense station then down through the various levels until they came to the area reserved for the legendary Voro’nam commander. His accomplishments dated back to the Zak’de’ron war where he had several notable victories that had propelled him to a prominent position in the fight against the Hadarak that had followed. Him being assigned to this campaign along with Dorchav and other veterans by Mak’to’ran himself was a sign that the V’kit’no’sat were going to tolerate the remains of the rogue Zen’zat no longer…and it galled Dorchav to have to personally answer for his failure regarding the Mach’nel and his incomplete destruction of Requiem.

The honor guard stopped outside a closed door, saying nothing, and the Brat’mar assumed he was meant to go in. He searched for the telepathic node in the frame and toggled it, peeling the door open to reveal a modest command deck with four individuals inside.

Dorchav knew this was going to be unpleasant, but he wasn’t going to hide his shame. He had lost a Mach’nel and there was no getting around that, and because of it the invasion had been hampered considerably.

Two of the others were also Voro’nam, but the fourth was a Rit’ko’sor, tiny in comparison, but his presence here was unusual. Their race was still undersized in population, and what help they’d been to the empire during their rebuilding had been focused on the Hadarak where they had ample experience. None, as far as Dorchav knew, had been assigned to the Terraxis campaign, nor did he recognize this Rit’ko’sor, but he did recognize the other Voro’nam. Both were senior commanders, one of which he had assumed was still on the Star Force front heading up the ground campaign in the Camille System.

“Dorchav,” Zyrnox greeted him neutrally as the door resealed behind him. “Come forward and join us. We have much to discuss.”

“I have failed,” the Brat’mar said bluntly. “What more is there to discuss?”

“You lost a Mach’nel, and that will be attached to your reputation for the remainder of your life, but the data returned to me shows no fault on your part. I too thought they had rebuilt Kamenor, and had that been the case your positioning was correct. To allow the fleet to engage another Mach’nel while Dimu sat back would have been folly.”

“It is still a loss that I bear, and had it not occurred the destruction of Requiem would be complete.”

“Why did the Archon spare you?” the Rit’ko’sor asked.

“And you are?” Dorchav demanded.

“Sess’met,” the Rit’ko’sor answered simply, for that name was one that Dorchav recognized vaguely. He was one of the senior commanders tasked with keeping their race alive within Hadarak territory, but not the most senior.

“She sparred me to gain time for her troops on the ground and to evacuate some of her people from the planet. I found such a delay unimportant, thus I made the bargain.”

“Odd that it was offered,” Zyrnox said, “but I agree. You and your crew were far more valuable. The Archon erred.”

“So I told her at the time,” Dorchav growled.

“You are not the only one to be spared,” Sess’met noted. “There haven’t been many, but Star Force has returned other people to us previously and on multiple occasions during this renewed invasion.”

“In exchange for what?”

“They sent a message,” Zyrnox explained. “Several, actually, and nothing of consequence. It’s their way of gloating over victories that they never should have achieved.”

“Did I not warn you?” Sess’met asked, looking up at Zyrnox.

“You did, but even you were wrong about their numbers,” the Voro’nam mildly shot back. “Fortunately we incorporated contingency plans.”

“May I ask what?” Dorchav wondered.

The campaign commander glanced at one of the other Voro’nam.

“While you were fighting we had several smaller fleets hunting down comm relays so we could blind the rogue Zen’zat…”

“Star Force,” the Rit’ko’sor corrected, reiterating an ongoing dispute between the advisor and the command staff.”

“The vermin,” the Voro’nam said, choosing a third option, “now have uninhabited regions of their territory that are disconnected from their comm net. Within them we have established three separate footholds where we are constructing defenses.”

“What fleets?” Dorchav asked darkly.

“The bulk of this system’s defenses,” Zyrnox admitted. “It was a gamble that we lost.”

“What specifically happened? I did not view a report on the way in.”

“A fleet of Star Force vessels arrived en mass,” the Rit’ko’sor said with a sneer. “Ships that have never before been seen bearing this marking…”

A hologram appeared showing an inverted sword swathed in purple and white coloration and backed by a sphere.

“Correction,” Zyrnox interjected. “It has been seen before, but only on a few rare occasions.”

“It is unfamiliar to me,” Dorchav noted. “Where have these ships been seen before?”

“During shipping raids. Twice escort warships have been attacked never to be seen again, but the transports they were guarding escaped with incomplete battle reports that showed Star Force vessels with this symbol. I am assuming that other missing ships may have fallen prey to them, but never during the fall of their worlds has the fleet that hit us been seen. Why, we are unclear. There is no data from our spies concerning this symbol, and the technology used matches their ‘mainline’ fleet.”

“So they had a phantom fleet standing by for the right moment?” Dorchav wondered.

“And when we compromised the defenses here,” Sess’met added, “they took advantage of our lack of caution.”

“This makes no sense,” Dorchav said before Zyrnox could respond. “These Archons do not let people die when they can save them. Holding back a fleet that could be used to repel our attacks makes no sense. Their sense of ethics would forbid it.”

“Perhaps they are more duplicitous than you give them credit for,” the Rit’ko’sor countered.

“We knew of the Paladin,” he countered, not about to be lectured by this little imp no matter what shame he bore for losing Dimu. “We did not know of their numbers, but we did know they were engaged in fights further rimward. How did we not know of another faction large enough to raid Terraxis? How many ships did we have left to defend it?”

“814 warships,” the other Voro’nam supplied.

“And how many did this phantom fleet bring?”

“103,622 of their jumpships, all appearing to be fully loaded.”

Dorchav fell silent, long enough for Zyrnox to nod approvingly. “You and I have both been surprised by unexpected strategy.”

“How could they hide that many ships…why would they hide that many ships? Even if we lost everything in this system aside from the planetary defense station I do not see the value in it. Have they also hit the Grid Point?”

“No, and we have an Urrtren relay link established there now. We received a test signal from the new Bocharak System two days ago as well, meaning we will be receiving regular updates from the front…”

“Assuming Star Force doesn’t hit our relays,” the Rit’ko’sor amended.

“And we will have links to the other two established shortly,” the other Voro’nam continued, ignoring the ‘advisor.’ “We are going to hold all three even if we have to withdraw all fleets to them.”

“Are additional ships coming?” Dorchav asked, looking to the campaign commander.

“No. Not as we now require. Regular reinforcements will be sent, but they will not replace the losses we have suffered, nor will suffer if we press forward as planned…thus we are not. We have done considerable damage to 39 worlds, 16 of which were completely cleansed, and we cost them far more ships than we lost. The Mach’nel, however, is a significant victory for them,” he said, looking down at the Rit’ko’sor. “And as has been pointed out, if Star Force can hide fleets of this magnitude from us, and have the patience to wait until the right moment to use them, they could still be holding onto a rebuilt Kamenor to deploy against us later. The ruse they used implied that they thought we suspected them of having it, and they would be fools to have disassembled it, but so far we have not seen any Yeg’gor production from them.”

“We assume they have the knowledge at this point,” the other Voro’nam said while the third remained silent. “The fact that we have not seen any may suggest that they are using whatever production they have to repair the Mach’nel.”

“Even if they did not,” Dorchav added. “Conventional armor placed over the exposed areas in excessive amounts will suffice. That is what I assumed they did with the fraud, covering the entire ship and shielding it from sensors so we could not identify and target where the damaged areas were.”

“Possible,” Zyrnox agreed. “And so far they have not used their altered Hadarak against us save for defensive operations, but they are rumored to have been designed specifically for system assault.”

“Do we still have scouts watching for their departure?”

“Yes. Those have not been compromised, and I am well aware that Terraxis would be the primary location for such a strike, but I did not expect them to use convention fleets that we did not have reconnaissance on. The raids on their hidden bases were meant to draw any such fleets out. The one that hit here is an annoying mystery, and one that I want you to personally uncover.”

Dorchav’s head raised. “I am remaining?”

“You are too valuable to send back, and after such a loss you will be uniquely motivated to look for deception where others would not. Your shame will always keep you on guard, and as we have been instructed, we have to take Star Force far more seriously than even I predicted.”

The Rit’ko’sor knew he was being referred to, for he’d worked long and hard with Zyrnox on planning this invasion, but even he hadn’t expected this much resistance.

“We have been blunted and embarrassed, but the gains we made are significant,” he added, addressing Dorchav. “Terraxis is no longer our most forward colony. We have three to draw their attention away from here, though the loss of our shipyards is going to be a problem. We were expecting to use them to repair damage from the recent battles. Now we will have an addition two to three months travel time one way for those vessels to get to the necessary repair yards. We will have to bide our time or attrition rates will eat us alive, but we have gained ground and we are going to expand upon it. We simply have to be more savvy than our enemy, and the contingency plans we built in have prepared for this unexpected turn of events.”

“What else has been done that I am unaware of?”

“While we will not be getting many additional warships, we are going to be receiving immense cyclical cargo fleets that will allow us to construct our three new colonies in short order. Those must be protected at all costs, and if they are, and we pull back and bide our time while construction occurs, we will be able to base off of those systems for deeper incursions against targets of our choosing, for they have too many to defend. It is simply a matter of drawing them away from our true targets and quickly getting to them. We cannot do so from here.”

“If we had overwhelmed them as anticipated,” Zyrnox continued, “we would still be establishing one new colony to further our supply chain. Unfortunately they are not in retreat, which will make this campaign even harder. We have a worthy fight on our hands, rogue Zen’zat or not, and I am preparing myself for further surprises. We will suffer them and take worlds through the losses. Eventually they will be unable to build replacement ships as fast as we can destroy them.”

“But it takes much more from us to penetrate their planetary defenses,” Dorchav argued. “If we cannot gain regional naval superiority we will kill ourselves on that attrition without the Mach’nel.”

“Agreed, which is why its loss is so significant, but this invasion is still viable. I will not ask for a replacement Mach’nel, for I know the request will be rejected despite the irregular circumstances regarding the loss of yours. We have made gains along with the losses, but make no mistake that this is our fight to win or lose and we have the bulk of the fleet available to us. How we use it will determine whether or not we are superior. If we are not, then we deserve to be replaced with someone who is…and if this group cannot find victory here, I question whether any within the empire can without devoting our full might to snuff out the remains of this foe.”

“Which would be wise,” the Rit’ko’sor added, “while the Hadarak are in remission.”

“We have already been given an unprecedented number of vessels,” Zyrnox reminded him. “And the incoming supplies will enable us to build what we need. Replacing the shipyards is simply going to take time.”

“Time that Star Force will have as well.”

“We will not remain idle, but we will continue to be cautious,” he said with both threat and acceptance in his voice. “And the one who believe he knows warfare better than the rest of us will be given the chance to prove it.”

Sess’met’s head poked upward. “How so?”

“Dorchav will oversee the convoy protection and search for this phantom fleet. You…I am giving battlefield status and command of the fleets operating out of the Medforjet System.”

“A regional commander?”

“Yes, and I will give you considerable lenience within my overall orders so you can probe the enemy as you like. I will suffer no more of your counsel. Do as you recommend or fail. Time to prove your worth.”

The Rit’ko’sor snorted once merrily. “Itaru will not be thrilled to hear that.”

“They will not know unless you succeed. If you fail I will bear the responsibility. I am trusting your assertions are based more in knowledge than ego.”

“Was I wrong about Star Force?”

“You were not.”

“Then trust without worry. They will be a difficult opponent, but compared to the Hadarak they are nothing.”

“Your transport is waiting. Dorchav will take over your duties here. Now go, and do not make a fool of me.”

“You will not be disappointed,” the Rit’ko’sor said, lazily running in the annoying hopping motion of the smaller races as he left the command deck.

“I am grateful for your faith in me,” Dorchav said when he had left and the doors resealed.

“I am not angry with you,” Zyrnox said, almost growling. “I am angry with those assigned this extermination before us. They have failed and allowed this heresy to grow to this point. Their territory has been savaged, but they have grown stronger and bolder because we did not act strongly or quickly enough.”

“The Hadarak played a role in that.”

“A role, but not the primary one. Mak’to’ran should have snuffed these rogue Zen’zat out long ago rather than assign lethargic fools that continually underestimate them.”

“I am one of those fools.”

“You have provided me a valuable lesson. This is not an enemy to fight with singular strengths. They are to be fought by the masses, ship to ship, planet by planet, and ground into dust. We trusted too much in the Mach’nel and they found a way to neutralize it. We must decentralize in order to defeat them.”

“Hence the three new colonies?”

“They will not be the only ones. If and when we can push further we will establish more. Our territory must extend rimward in order to defeat our enemy. We cannot arrogantly hold to old habits. We must adapt, and so we will. You will organize your new fleet from here, and they will be largely made up of damaged vessels. Do not call for the supply convoys until you are confident you can protect them. What we have on site will be sufficient for now. The additions will only spur development further.”

“We need Urrtren surveillance along the resupply routes or we could be sending them into a trap if that phantom fleet is still out there. Have they been seen since?”

“No. They have not reinforced those currently fighting.”

“Then we must build a proper detection net. We cannot use scouts alone.”

“I agree, but it will take time and I will leave you to it,” the Voro’nam said, motioning with his head towards an empty platform.

Dorchav spun and walked towards it, stepping up on the padded surface and placing his feet on the few silver metallic spots that gave him a physical connection to the computer systems. With a thought he brought up a wealth of data in holographic form as well as direct input into his mind, allowing him to see in detail the raid on this system and everything else that had worked its way back from the front.

He wasn’t returning in shame as he had assumed. He’d been given another task and another chance…but not just because of Zyrnox. It was because of Olivia-051. A Zen’zat abomination that should not even exist. She’d given him a second chance and here he was using it to help kill her and all of her kin.

Something about that didn’t sit right with Dorchav. He should be dead now, and it felt like everything he did from this point on he didn’t deserve, but he had a task and he wasn’t going to fail it…but he also wasn’t going to assume victory. Zyrnox was right. He would forever be on guard now, taking nothing for granted as he began designing his convoy security protocols.

Every ship that was going to pass through the Devastation Zone was going to be vulnerable to assault, and his goal was to not lose a single one. He didn’t know how Star Force was going to respond, so he had to plan ahead and try to think like them…or rather think about what could be done that was not expected.

It was not an easy task, but it was his now and he was going to have to adapt and grow stronger in order to acquit it…otherwise the devious Archons would find a way to best him again.

And that could not be tolerated.

"Imperial March"

"Kill the light"

www.aerkijyr.com

Ice Queen

1

October 19, 4826

Medforjet System (V’kit’no’sat territory on Star Force warfront)

Tivonmenk

Ronoken steadily ran through the V’kit’no’sat city on the colony world, watching the skies above him for sign of weapon strikes. A Star Force fleet was raiding the system, but it looked like they were not yet attacking the planet directly. As it was, only a partial defense shield was raised over the inhabited areas, but they were not attacking it nor even attempting a landing beyond its range. The V’kit’no’sat defense fleet was heavily engaged in combat, but not nearly as much as it would have liked, and Ronoken doubted the fighting would find its way down to him today.

No, the reason he was running was because he had received a summons to the command deck of the outpost and he had been on the far outskirts of the colony. The summons had come before the raid, and while others were being called into defensive positions his orders had not changed, so he continued at a decent pace so not to waste time while looking above with the enhanced vision his armor availed him.

Once again Star Force was striking at the V’kit’no’sat forward colony. They owned the system, having laid claim to six uninhabited worlds here that Star Force had passed over, but had been within their region of influence during the massive multipronged assault a decade ago. The enemy had lost many systems and in the chaos the V’kit’no’sat had claimed three right under their nose, subsequently building them up with a steady stream of supplies being sent out from the core, but Star Force had not let them build in comfort.

Small raids had been hampering their convoys, making them take extra defensive measures and drawing more ships away from the V’kit’no’sat harassing attacks up and down the Star Force border. Both sides in this war were poking at each other, with this current attack once again going after the orbital shipyards. It looked like they’d done some more damage, but the mass of construction infrastructure was still mostly intact. They couldn’t get to it in sufficient numbers without dragging themselves into a fight they could not win, so they’d been using guile and misdirection to get sniping shots at it and other bits of V’kit’no’sat property and ships within the system.

They’d soon be chased out again, assuming nothing else developed. There were too many V’kit’no’sat warships in the system for Star Force to take it…unless they were willing to open themselves up to a counterassault elsewhere. The Rit’ko’sor Sess’met, who was in charge of this region of the warfront, was playing an intricate game with the enemy and Star Force was obliging. Each were trying to find weaknesses to exploit in the other and Star Force had far more systems to defend. Right now the V’kit’no’sat had 3 beyond Terraxis, but the problem was all of them were new and none had even close to a full planetary shield.

Virtually all of Star Force’s worlds were heavily dug in, with full planetary shields that had multiple layers and many redundancies. Hammering through all of them was doable, but costly. Too costly for Sess’met, who had lost far less ships than the other 5 regional commanders on the front, but the Rit’ko’sor had yet to take another Star Force planet. All the others had, but even Ronoken could see that the V’kit’no’sat fleet could not sustain these constant exchanges unless more reinforcements were coming…and by his count, very few new warships were arriving in the convoys. Most were cargo ships that left as soon as they’d deposited their valuable loads, the most recent of which had put the final touches on the outpost here.

It was the smallest version the V’kit’no’sat made, a small pyramid barely large enough to hold a herd of Oso’lon, but it was covered with Yeg’gor armor and a very small Tar’vem’jic. Its kill power was less than conventional Var’ko, whose needle thin beams could breach event the heaviest of shields with their pinpoint deposit of energy. The Tar’vem’jic here, having been test fired only recently, produced a beam equally as thin and less damaging, for it was not as compact…crazy as that sounded. Var’ko were very dense per their design but far less expensive to produce than Tar’vem’jic.

As it was, the V’kit’no’sat had to import the exotic weapon components from the heart of their empire, for they didn’t have the production facilities here or even on Terraxis. Other than the symbolic nature of a Tar’vem’jic, which was significant, the tactical advantage was the range, which far surpassed the Var’ko and anything that Star Force had. That meant the outpost could poke beyond the enemy’s firing range and own orbit above them. Something badly needed in an infantile system such as this.

The other two colonies had not been granted such an outpost, and it was seen as a reward for Sess’met’s efforts…as well as underscoring that this was going to be a very long campaign and that patience would better suit the V’kit’no’sat than brashness. Holding their footholds was more important than taking worlds at this point.

That was the word going through the Zen’zat here, with Ronoken being the third highest ranked in this campaign and the highest assigned to this colony and Sess’met’s assault region…which included the Medforjet System and a large swath of Star Force territory along their border. The three regional commanders that did not have defensive duties were typically in the field leading their fleets in action against the enemy, but Sess’met chose to remain here to conduct his strategic war against Star Force, and it was he who had sent the summons to Ronoken.

By the time the Zen’zat got to the command deck the raiders had been driven off and he could see damage statistics floating in hologram. It wasn’t much, but with these repetitive attacks even the slightest setbacks added up…and that was the exact same strategy the V’kit’no’sat were employing against Star Force, only doing so far more effectively, making this raid more annoying than anything else.

Sess’met wasn’t visible on the command deck, which was full of individuals from 9 different races plus a lot of Zen’zat attendants buzzing around. Most weren’t warriors, and one that was an analyst telepathically signaled to him with a mental pointer towards a nearby chamber.

Ronoken sent an acceptance ping back and went where directed, finding the Rit’ko’sor inside what was psionically shielded walls, for he couldn’t detect his presence until he walked through the threshold of the door that folded closed behind him, combining multiple shards down into a single solid lump of synthetic rock.

“Persistent, aren’t they?” Sess’met said in his low, but melodic voice that was typical of his race. “I only wish others in our empire had such strategic sense. These Archons are truly a threat, and one we must squash before they grow any more powerful. Tell me why.”

“Their unearned use of psionics is abhorrent.”

“Abhorrent? Elaborate.”

“It is an unbalance. Zen’zat of equal skill I could easily defeat, but Archons of that level can evade with perpetuity. Ubven is too much of an advantage.”

“Are you more upset that they have not earned it, or the fact that no Zen’zat ever has?”

Ronoken looked down slightly into the Rit’ko’sor’s green eyes. “I do not understand why we were never told it existed.”

“Those who are worthy will uncover it.”

“Even Ironnsey never did,” Ronoken pointed out, citing the legendary Zen’zat from before the Les’i’kron culling.

“Because he wasn’t worthy.”

“How can he and the other masters not be worthy?”

“Because they did not trigger the ascensions as the Archons did.”

“They cheated.”

“Did they?”

“I was told all of them get the psionics.”

“But how do they get them?”

“They share through some bastardized Ikrid link.”

“So our intelligence has said. I admit, that may not be fully true, or could even be disinformation granted for our sake, but for the moment assume it is as rumored to be. How can they share what none of them have attained? At least one must have triggered the ascension in order to then share it with the others. If that is true, then there is at least one Archon that did what Ironnsey and the others of your kin never have…and that is why they are so dangerous. They are young and accomplishing what you have not.”

“They cannot be. It must be through technological intervention.”

“Possible. How many Archons have you personally killed?”

“26 solo kills, and I have had a hand in at least 12 others.”

“At least?”

“Their armor is difficult to distinguish from their Commandos at times.”

“And their Knights? How many have you killed?”

“I have not kept count.”

“How were you able to kill their Archons?”

“Their bodies are physically weak, like young Zen’zat.”

“Lachka kills?”

“No. They also possess Rentar.”

“And their Knights?”

“Very few possess psionics.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“I do not know. Their divisions make no sense.”

Sess’met shoot his head back and forth three times, staring at the ground as he did so. “So little you understand. So little you all understand. This is why they are dangerous. They do not confine themselves to doing what they are told. Why have no Zen’zat achieved Ubven? Because they were not looking for it. Even now that it has been revealed to exist, none of you can earn it. You are regimented, and against strategists you are easy to defeat. If not for our numbers Star Force would have won this war long ago.”

“Your words border on treason. I assume you have some rationale for them?”

“Thinking is not treason. I know treason. I committed it long ago. This is not treason. This is me adapting to a dangerous threat that, if allowed to persist, will grow ever more powerful. We must reduce their empire faster than they can expand rimward…but that is not why I have called you here. Zyrnox has assigned me a task far beyond the war zone, and I require your skills.”

“Tell me.”

“These Archons think beyond what Zen’zat do. They have smaller size than their Knights, which are equivalent to you yet have no psionics. Why? Because they are specializing. They do not intend to fight you strength for strength. They know there are Zen’zat far stronger and older than they are, thus they have taken a different path. One of evasion, guile, and superiority. Not one of ego. Reducing their size, or rather maintaining their reduced size, limits their already limited psionic tissue further. No Zen’zat would want that, so you must stop thinking of them as Zen’zat.”

“Then what does an Archon want?”

“The Archons are meant to lead, Zen’zat are meant to serve. Their Commandos and Knights serve, but in their empire only a few have psionics. Those few have more than you or I, but most of their empire does not. They have built psionic dampeners into their armor to negate most of the effects, allowing lesser personnel to combat you.”

“I kill them far too easy. Why not give them psionics to at least slow us down?”

“As I said, they have charted a separate path. One that I do not fully comprehend, but they are not mad. They are savvy, and your mission is to illuminate another facet of that intelligence. There is a world deep within their borders that we have little information on. It is forbidden to the public and only has limited travel, but rumor says that there are unusual Human forms on it. Zyrnox believes they may be experimenting with their form in order to combat their genetic deficiencies.”

“What deficiencies?”

“Zen’zat are forbidden from reproducing. It is not simply a rule, but the way you are designed. The upgrades are not meant to be passed on, so it is highly likely that there are deficiencies and even malfunctions occurring within the Humans. Their size is an indicator of this. Yours has come from growth enhancements. Those enhancements were apparently not passed on to their offspring. Their Knights are a remedy for this, but they have not made the transition for their entire race. We believe they are still experimenting and have not found a final solution.”

“Reconnaissance then?”

“Partially. You will accompany an infiltration team, but they will have a separate mission from yours. You are to operate alone, kill and sabotage what you can without hindering yourself. You must remain alive and return to me with the information, so do not overestimate your abilities or underestimate theirs. Be cautious and conservative, and probe this mystery world for its secrets while the others cause more havoc. I want them to be wary of our interference anywhere in their empire, but I do not want you caught.”

“How will we infiltrate their world?”

“A new class of scout ship has the ability to defeat their sensors and deposit you on the planet. Their shields should not be up constantly, so you will drop in, conduct your mission, then return without drawing major attention.”

“Is there something specific I am to look for?”

“Your psionics were never meant to be a reproductive legacy. The Humans have not passed on those they have activated, and we believe they may be attempting to do so now. Investigate possible subdivisions within their race created for research purposes. Subdivisions we have not yet encountered. Above that, use your instincts and explore. We cannot get a war fleet that far without encountering resistance, so your only defense will be stealth. Do not squander it. I am sending you because I know you can handle small scale combat if needed. Do not let it escalate beyond that.”

“You want tissue samples?”

“I want as much information as you can give me however you are capable of providing it. Star Force has already proved it can make more of Zen’zat genetics than our empire has. We should not let them explore beyond and further imbalance that which was carefully crafted long ago.”

“I will investigate this heresy gladly. Will this other team be under my command? Will we travel together or parallel?”

“They are meant to draw resources away from the front. Either by sabotaging production or by forcing more security to be diverted to the distant planets in their territory. They are yours to command, but I want you doing your exploring solo. That will necessitate comm silence once you are on the ground. As for your transport, you will be traveling to the surface in multiple gunships. I do not want to risk stranding you by using only one.”

“How small a team?”

“I will let you determine that. Choose from whom you like, but they are not to be elite. Only capable.”

“They are meant to return?”

“They are, if they can withhold their bloodlust. I need indirect damage.”

“I understand. I will choose wisely and abide by this edict. Information you will have, along with what small disruptions I can personally make.”

“Good. The scout ship is ready and waiting in hangar 18, crew aboard. Leave at your convenience.”

“I will not take long assembling a team, but how thorough an investigation of this world do you wish?”

“Time is of no importance. Genetic development takes millennia. I simply wish to know what it is they are doing…or attempting to do.”

“I will requisition ample supplies then. Do I also have leave for personal stealth gear?”

“Of course. You will not be able to evade them without it.”

“Did Zyrnox give you a deadline to meet?”

“No…and he has granted me discretion in how I obtain the information. I have chosen you. Please prove my choice to be wise.”

“It is. I will not fail,” he said, taking a brief knee. “By your leave, Commander?”

“Proceed,” Sess’met said, with the Zen’zat rising and making haste to leave the chamber and begin his mission. Zen’zat weren’t the best when it came to deep scouting missions, but Ronoken was not an average Zen’zat. He was one of their elite, and smart enough to use caution when caution was required. And if he did succeed in this mission, Sess’met intended to use him in a similar role elsewhere. Grooming Zen’zat was a tedious task, and this mission, important in and of itself, would make for good field training.

Tiparen like Ronoken were rare, being the fourth level of 6 within Zen’zat skill hierarchy, but they weren’t irreplaceable. Sess’met favored his return, but if he proved to be inferior then he’d simply send another and another until one succeeded, even if he had to reach down into the Tamrenor ranks to find more recruits.

Teaching the antiquated V’kit’no’sat empire how to fight in new ways was a tedious task, especially since the Rit’ko’sor had gotten used to doing everything on their own without any Zen’zat, but if he was going to successfully help Zyrnox wipe out this infestation of heretics he was going to have to rely on them and their hapless masters…for he wasn’t going to get so much as a single Rit’ko’sor ship out here in support.

A pity that, but it was what it was, and the Rit’ko’sor needed this victory to increase their standing in the empire…which was almost as low as it had been before the rebellion, but they were on the rise and Mak’to’ran had made it clear there was a path for racial ascension if they proved themselves worthy.

Sess’met just wished he didn’t have to deal with all these other inferior races in order to prove it.

Ronoken assembled his team quickly, gathering 18 other Zen’zat, all level 2 Zardaku that could easily handle the Star Force regular troops and would be an even match for most of their Archons in single combat…but he chose individuals with high evasion and stealth skills and had them onboard a modified Kaeper-class vessel. The hull was covered in obvious paneling that told him it contained a cloaking device and was ill suited for battle, but so far as he knew even their best cloaking device had enough of a detection window for Star Force to see at close range or high intensity sensor scans.

It wasn’t until he was onboard and enroute to the system’s central star did he get the answer from the Ari’tat crew as to why this ship was different. The cloaking system had not been upgraded, and while absorbing almost all signals would send false images out to mimic light and other emissions passing through their position so they wouldn’t register as a dark spot when backlit by a star or planet.

This was a big upgrade to the basic null field technology, but it wasn’t perfect. A careful look could detect discrepancies and previous attempts at fooling Star Force had been mostly unsuccessful with regard to insertions anywhere near a luminous source, including planetary reflectivity.

The difference here was that the cloaking field did not have to leave a bandwidth to navigate through. This Kaeper would be traveling totally blind, making it even harder to detect by the enemy. They could still use their gravity drive to detect where planets and stars were and avoid them, but they couldn’t see anything else and might very well ram another ship…except that this scout vessel had a new sensor in it that would allow them to detect the position of other gravity drives, as well as artificial gravity fields.

That meant the Kaeper could fly blind and avoid the Star Force infrastructure at the same time. Atmospheric insertion would still be tricky, but even a simply probe the size of Ronoken’s finger floating on anti-grav could be detected and avoided. What the name of the new sensor was he wasn’t allowed to know, but the Ari’tat assured him that it had proven successful multiple times in recent history and had only come into existence within the past 30 or so years…a product of new V’kit’no’sat research.

Meaning it was technology that Star Force did not have blueprints of…and that was key to their insertion into the Tauriel System weeks later when they exited their jump blind to everything but a field of dots that had replaced their sensor board.

The big two were the stars at system center, with another large one further out that was the blue/white giant in this trinary system. Around it were smaller ones for the inhabited planets, but the bright pinpricks were the return signals for the enemy ships and stations.

It took a long time for the system scan to return, with the gravity fields being picked up immediately but the new sensor contacts coming later. Using those positions the Ari’tat pilots kept the fully cloaked Kaeper far from them, taking a long, laborious path through the middle of nowhere to get to their destination planet.

There they avoided orbital stations and starships, dropships coming up and down through the atmosphere, and anything else with a gravity drive. The Kaeper couldn’t see what was what, and it really didn’t matter. Wherever there was a dot there was danger, so they steered clear of it after taking a tiny peek out through the cloak at range to make sure the planetary shields were not raised.

They weren’t, and there was no cause for them to be sucking up enormous amounts of power when not under battle conditions. With the door confirmed open they fully shut the cloak against all known signal forms and proceeded in towards the planet, dodging the mystery signals and eventually encountering resistance from the atmosphere.

They slowed immediately, coming to a full stop so not to create turbulence that could be spotted. There they released the stealth gunships, giving them their last bit of sensor telemetry. Remembering the locations of the Star Force infrastructure, the gunships took turns leaving so not to hit each other and moved down to the planet’s surface, not knowing exactly where it was until a Pefbar cone from the pilot finally picked it up. Nestling down along it, the gunships slowly peeled back a layer on the cloak so they could see where they were and what was outside.

Ronoken’s was in rocky terrain with sporadic trees and no sign of Star Force infrastructure or people. The gunship waited patiently for more than a day to make sure they had made it to ground undetected, then it repositioned to a nearby location at a crawl, nudging itself down next to a sheer cliff where no one would be passing through. There it dropped off Ronoken, with him wearing a cloaking field of his own and looking up into the sky through the invisible ship. There was a tiny hint of distortion betraying its presence, but had he not know what he was looking at he could easily have missed it.

Soon the distortion moved and he lost track of the ship as it headed off towards the equatorial region where most of the Star Force infrastructure was. He’d decided to drop off here and explore the small settlements nearby…if 150 miles counted as ‘nearby,’ but he wanted to take no chances. His team had his orders and his blessing to carry them out in a way they saw fit, but their gunships would drop them off then find a nice cozy place to park and wait for the pre-arranged pickup windows, for no comm traffic would work when the cloaking fields were fully up, and even if they could their signals could be detected by Star Force.

They had to be ghosts here…and vengeful ones at that. But first Ronoken needed to find out what was on this planet before he started to kill anything, and that was going to take some time.

A lot of time, in fact, so he set off across the landscape navigating by only his Pefbar to make his cloaking field work more efficiently as he headed towards one of the odd cities they’d picked up further to the south. They didn’t match the normal Star Force design, but then again the gunship couldn’t do a scan to know for sure. All they had was a basic image and outline on the horizon, plus the new sensor pings from that location that showed a fair amount of anti-grav devices clustered in a haphazard fashion.

Ronoken didn’t know what they were, but he intended to find out cautiously. Kills didn’t matter on this mission if they got him caught, and Sess’met had trusted him with getting and returning the necessary information. With no time limit on his return he decided to take this very slow, knowing that soon there would be activity along the equatorial belt to draw Star Force’s attention while he quietly slipped in and started to dig up whatever he could on the rumored genetic research heresies taking place here.

If he had to run across half the planet to find them he would, and he had plenty of time. This war wasn’t going to be ending anytime soon, and this mission came from the campaign commander himself. That meant it was of the utmost importance and Ronoken had no intentions of letting Zyrnox, Sess’met, or the empire down due to reckless haste. Patience would prevail here, so he set his mind to that mode and started off, not knowing where he would end up, but knowing the first place he was going to start looking for heretics.

2

February 9, 4827

Tauriel System (Seon Region)

Eoxion

Jessica Avril sat with her bare left leg hanging over the armrest on her ice-like thrown as she sat on it mentally flipping through holograms via the advanced mental interface that all Monarchs now had access to thanks to their Ikrid psionic. The chill of the room tickled her skin from head to toe as she sat naked and exposed…a trick she’d learned long ago to help break mental blocks, and she was full force into one right now.

The throne chamber was empty, and despite the encircling, majestic windows no one could see inside. This was the Duke’s personal version of an office as well as a conference room, patterned off of fantasy lore that she was fond of, but it was also her private sanctum where she did most of her creative work.

And that’s what her responsibilities were…creation. It was joked that the Monarchs were the gods of creation while the Archons were the gods of destruction, and while there was some truth in that, it did the Archons a disservice. They had built quite a lot of the Star Force empire, but their responsibilities didn’t lie solely there as hers did. So when they hit a mental roadblock they could always switch gears and go blow something up, whereas she couldn’t afford to waste such time outside her duties.

Jessica had her own physical training where she could blow off steam, but unlike the military she didn’t spend more than 40 minutes on it per day and her morning session was already over. That left the rest of the day with administerial duties that her immediate subordinates were handling while she focused on big picture issues…though right now she was browsing through the smaller details, essentially looking over their virtual shoulders as she was stuck on her own work.

In past years, when she got really brain locked, Jessica had taken a walk up in the mountains visible outside the windows of her command ‘castle,’ on top of which her royal chambers were located. She’d walked out amongst the snow and rock and then disrobed, letting the frozen air of the southern pole soak into her and reset her mind all the while using her Rensiek to avoid actually freezing. One time she’d walked over 30 miles before inspiration had hit her, and she really did need to get away from everything for a while, there just wasn’t time.

She controlled far more than this planet, on which she’d placed her own personal ‘capitol’ in her assigned territory, and had a total of 18 systems under her care. There were lesser Monarchs in some of them, but the overall interaction of their economies was her responsibility…as was their defense, supply lines, trade routes, resource acquirement, resource allocation, infrastructure development, shipyards, commerce markets, etc. The responsibilities of a Monarch were virtually without end, and much of what she was doing out here far beyond the warfront was work that she could do in her sleep because she’d already done it many times before.

She’d been the Duke of Epsilon Eridani for more than 3 centuries before it finally fell to the V’kit’no’sat, and before that she’d been the Marquis of Clan Stark under the de facto tutelage of trailblazer Will-052. Both assignments had been stepping into the shoes of another Monarch that had moved on to another task, but the growth rate of the Clans had taught her much about improvising, for Will had been relentless in his pursuit of expansion and advancements, and the other Marquises who she’d been in regular contact with had said the same of their trailblazers.

But her assignment now wasn’t carrying on what someone else had started. After Epsilon Eridani had fallen she’d been reassigned to another system far from the ADZ where she’d temporarily helped facilitate the massive evacuation exodus that had occurred.

After that Director Davis had given her this more important assignment all the way out in the Seon Region. It was deep into the territory that had once belonged to The Nexus, and when Jessica had first taken up residence on this uninhabited world it had been on the back border. Not so anymore, for Star Force had pressed rimward much farther by now and Seon Region itself was moving towards dead center within what was now their territory, with Grid Point Seon being the namesake and central transit hub with 7 different routes out to other Grid Points.

Jessica didn’t have control over them all, and Seon itself was not hers, but she did have Grid Point Natam and shared access to Grid Point Soti, which was a main trading hub for the Zezdi…and they were the source of her current mental block.

She had 4 different full races under her stewardship, 3 of which were single system entities and all wards…which was the lowest of 4 tiers within Star Force regarding the size and responsibilities of pieces of the empire.

A Ward was a race or civilization that was taken into Star Force as a guest, with few or no responsibilities. Star Force was taking care of them and in exchange the ward was giving up all sovereignty and joining the empire under Star Force’s terms. The three that Jessica had were in bad shape initially, one of which was near starvation and had to have years of foodstuff supply convoys coming in from other Monarchs to sustain them enough to even begin rebuilding.

Not that they had done much. She’d had a Kiritak crew come in and build new habitats for them, including bioharvest facilities that her trainers eventually taught the Vadi to operate themselves. They were a mix between refugees and younglings and even today still required a great deal of handholding, which was accomplished by others she’d recruited into colonies built on their worlds. Those colonies were not part of the wards, but rather classified as Axius save for one standalone Kiritak colony she’d maintained.

They were what kept her 3 wards…the Vadi, the Onoskat, and the Wenat…alive and functioning, as well as giving her a few exports to the rest of her small fiefdom that was composed of the multi-system race known as the Zezdi. They were not a ward, but rather a sub-faction, which was the third tier of civilization within Star Force.

The second tier was known as Beacon, with the civilizations in it being more responsible for themselves but not able to stand alone. Rather they were groomed to contribute via specialties, with the Beacon faction being a combination of hundreds of these races that supported each other and made up for their respective weaknesses.

A Sub-faction had no weaknesses. Sure, they might have areas they weren’t that great at, but they could stand on their own without having to have imports in order to survive. They had to have a military that could help defend beyond their own borders and have a robust enough internal economy and infrastructure to stand on its own if the rest of Star Force suddenly disappeared.

The highest level was a Faction, and they were the pillars on which the empire was built. Mainline was the original, and was the name for the bulk of Humanity. The Calavari, Bsidd, Kiritas, H’kar, and 19 others held that lofty position. Canderous, populated entirely by Humans, was technically a sub-faction, but Jessica wished she had even a fraction of their strength. The Zezdi were far inferior, and in some ways even less powerful that some of the larger wards.

The problem with them was that they hadn’t started out as a ward or a member of Beacon. They were one of the original members of The Nexus that had essentially been abandoned during the collapse of this region and Star Force hadn’t been able to get to them in time. They’d suffered over 70% population losses and had their territory chopped in half before more than a few Archon-led warships were able to assist them.

Jessica had been brought in as soon as the situation was stabilized and no longer a warzone, and while she’d been able to bring them back from the brink of collapse she’d had to use their own methods for most of it. Transitioning them over to Star Force technology and methods was a headache, and despite the hard earned progress she’d dragged them through to this point they had to make a big change and she didn’t know how in the world she was going to make it happen.

She’d been weening them off their previous culture slowly, but there was an impasse that had formed. They reproduced via a process known as Atroki, which had their younglings literally attached to their bodies as they grew on the exterior…and they were conscious in the latter stages, carried around observing and learning, even talking, prior to reaching semi-adult status and finally disconnecting.

That made the traditional Star Force maturia a moot point and Jessica had been using modified versions of the Zezdi’s current nurturing system to inject some Star Force mojo into their society, but it wasn’t enough. They had to get over this hurdle to take on bigger challenges ahead, and she still wasn’t sure how to go about it. Medtechs had told her it was theoretically possible to make alterations to their biology so they would be released earlier, or more complicated and bold changes to have them develop within eggs or even biotech surrogates.

All of that would have to developed, tested, and refined…and she wasn’t sure if that was the way to go. If it was she needed to get started now, because altering their population was a long term process, for the new births would be the foundation for the future of their race while current ‘holdovers’ would only be used as transitional population. She’d give them a chance to convert to whatever form the Zezdi ended up in, but her and other Monarchs’ experience said that few would want to.

That meant the future would be built on younglings that didn’t exist yet, and she needed to get a baseline establish on which to build, otherwise everything she was doing now was just more temporary crap. Jessica desperately wanted to jettison their former culture and infrastructure…the latter of which she was already working hard on…but until she could deal with this reproductive issue there was a long list of things she could not do and it was driving her nuts.

Their development was her responsibility, and it was one that she knew she couldn’t fail at…and not just because the Zezdi were depending on her. That was the primary reason, of course, but guiding the redesign of annexed civilizations used to be an Archon thing. The factions within Star Force had been fashioned by the trailblazers, but with the increasing number of races in the empire that task was falling more and more to the Monarchs while the trailblazers were focused mostly on defending against the V’kit’no’sat on the coreward front and fighting/expanding on the rimward one against lots of smaller, but still dangerous enemies.

As it was, there were now 372 races at sub-faction level or above and well over 2,000 races, all of which she couldn’t name from memory, that were at least ward status. The full number of different races, when including Axius and the individuals there, was beyond 12,000 and rising with every year as more refugees found their way across the stars to their empire or the empire expanded out to them.

But there were even more races within Star Force territory that were not aligned with them. They were neighbors, in essence, and more or less under Star Force’s protection. There were two within Jessica’s region that she had to look after…not on a managing front, but in the way of keeping other races from beyond coming in and attacking them. Other than that, there was no contact with her neighbors, though many others more advanced traded with Star Force all the time, and some of the produce from the Tauriel System was being put on the public markets that those neighbors accessed.

The Tauriel System was not a part of the Zezdi, thankfully, but a fresh colony built by Jessica that was considered Mainline but had a lot of cross play with the Kiritak, who were providing the bulk crews for the shipyards and mines as the Human population gradually increased, both from local births and immigration.

That Mainline colony was her other responsibility, and the key piece of her assignment that Davis had chosen her for. On this planet the colony was built up across the desert terrain of the equator, but beyond that they were forbidden from traveling save from her southern polar city. Everywhere else on the planet was a research project that she was babysitting for Davis and the Trailblazers. She chimed in on it where appropriate, but her primary task was to watch for problems and keep everyone else away from the denizens. They needed isolation, and she was to provide it, but she kept close personal ties with them and a pinging hologram suddenly broke her mental funk as it reminded her of the Ascension ceremony she need to attend.

The Duke sighed. “Oh well, I’m not making any headway here,” she said, swinging her left leg off the fake-ice armrest and letting her bare foot smack the hard crystalline floor with a tiny ‘plop’ of soft flesh as she dismissed the array of holograms with a simple thought.

Jessica sat there for a moment, closing her eyes and running through a meditative cleansing routine…forcing all thoughts out of her head for a few seconds then stabilizing the blankness on a single thought as her brain returned to her surroundings, letting go of whatever had been consuming her and almost forcing herself to forget it.

She glanced down at her naked body, and in particular her soft breasts that were clean and clear of any markings. Her entire body was, in fact, whereas many others chose to adorn themselves with genetic tattoos or altered colorations. She’d experimented with different skin and hair colors during her life, but it hadn’t lasted long. She’d found she preferred her natural pale skin and blonde hair, keeping it simple and pure like the ice fields beyond the windows.

Jessica actually stood out in that regard, for ‘normal’ had almost become rare. Jessica could get any part of her altered with a simple stop to a med bay, and if she went to the equator of this world and walked the public areas she could see people with checkered squares of skin covering them from head to toe, girls with fully pink skin and sparkles instead of freckles, or even people with pitch black coloration that made them look like walking shadows. Others had glowing eyes or fingernails, let alone the vast amount of tattoos, text or otherwise, that were programmed into their genetic code and grow from within rather than applied externally.

Normal now stood out, either as a choice or a fact of laziness. Those people who chose to do nothing more than lounge around for their lives after graduating from a maturia didn’t have access to the genetic alterations. Those had to be earned or purchased, but it wasn’t expensive and most people got some alteration done as soon as they could as a mark of status. The limitations were imposed so the medtechs weren’t swamped with people wanting to change colors or tattoos every other hour, and if people did even a few years of work for Star Force they could get a limited amount of alterations done per month indefinitely, meaning that almost everyone had something, even if it was just a few dots here or there.

Staring down at her thin and mildly fit body Jessica wondered if she should make some admirer’s day and hop into bed with him…but no. She didn’t need her head any more muddied than it was now, and the Archons were right in avoiding such things. Jessica hadn’t indulged in decades, but her current predicament was making her consider doing a lot of stupid ideas…including going over to the window and banging her head on it until she came up with something new.

Tempting as that was, she knew she just had to keep working the problem until an epiphany hit her and maybe a change of venue would help. The Ascension ceremony was taking place at Lake Nessi…so named by Trailblazer Page-071 who’d been helping with Project Legolas…and Jessica figured she was one of a rare few who actually got the joke of it.

Times changed, and her job as Monarch was to make sure those changes were beneficial for the empire, and more specifically the Zezdi, but remembering the root cause for the name ‘Lake Nessi’ made her feel lonely. Few peers she had left from back then, most of whom were now out in the galaxy as Monarchs or Archons wielding powers that kept them separated from one another.

Jessica reached back and grabbed the collar of the cape she was sitting on, triggering it to reach up and wrap around her body, transforming into one of her many elegant ‘Ice Queen’ wardrobes that covered her slender form from toe to neck. A thinner cape remained and flowed through the air as she rose and walked across the large chamber, her shoes clicking on the crystal floor as she looked at the ring on the middle finger of her right hand. The little white thing was more than jewelry, but she’d had it fashioned for more than just security. It was also a reminder.

“To bear a ring of power,” she whispered as she approached the ice-like door that stood twice her height on the far side of the royal chamber, “is to be alone.”

Alone amongst a sea of people…that was the Monarch way, for a guide had to keep their eyes ahead, not behind, otherwise those following them would be lost. And with your gaze fixed ahead, you could see no one behind you, leaving your mind fixed on the upcoming challenges and dangers, hoping you could navigate them before they could engager those under your care.

Jessica touched the door and it responded, pulling back against her fingers as if she had glued them to it. On the other side was more traditional Star Force architecture, but still with a fantasy bent woven into it.

“Ready my skiff,” she told a waiting guard/pilot.

“What destination?”

“Lake Nessi,” the Duke answered without breaking step. “I need to be there in three hours.”

3

The outside of the ice-smooth command center opened up near the peak but just below the royal chambers, exposing an internal hangar bay with a boat-like craft slowly creeping out. On it stood Jessica and her pilot, protected beneath a clear energy shield that would stop both wind and weaponsfire, but otherwise they were standing in open air inside a short rim railing on the Duke’s personal skiff.

It accelerated quickly, cutting through the air with its pointed bow while gaining enough height to get over the surrounding mountains as they headed north…though technically any direction was north from the southern pole…as they headed across terrain that would eventually thaw to reveal huge plains outlines by a multitude of rivers, most of which flowed north into a huge lake that circled half the planet.

That was Lake Nessi, their destination, and while a total of 11,429 miles long, at its thickest it was only 112 wide. Beyond it the terrain transitioned into forests that eventually bled off into sand seas. Those eventually tapered off near the equator, leaving nothing but hard baked, dry rocky ground that was more or less uninhabitable if you wanted to live outdoors. That was where the Mainline colony was, living inside of cities much as they would on a totally airless world, though Eoxion was quite the reverse. It boasted an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s and a gravity of 1.2 that tugged on Jessica now that they were outside her castle.

Technically it was the anti-grav in the skiff that was holding her feet to the deck plates inside the IDF that kept her from feeling the acceleration and turns, but the skiff was programmed to mimic the gravity effect on it, so now it was in the heavier natural environment and adjusting accordingly. The Duke stood for a long time, watching the terrain pass below them as they zipped across hundreds of miles of it before the ice fields finally disappeared.

Eventually Jessica sat on a padded bench as she watched the uninterrupted ‘natural’ environment around her. Civilization was the enemy of nature, but ‘natural’ had several definitions. One was organic, and the planet fit mostly into that category with the select bits of infrastructure contained to organized areas. Another definition was survival of the fittest, which was totally darkside. People being born into situations where they had to kill and eat each other was abhorrent, and civilization fought against that by producing surplus food stores that didn’t come from other people’s body parts.

If you were born into a civilization you didn’t have to kill to eat and survive, but true civilization didn’t just pick out a corner of the galaxy and huddle there while others were suffering from ‘nature’. Of the many native races to this planet, most no longer had to kill to eat because Star Force also fed them. Seeds for the birds, grown and laid out across long fields were occasionally visible to Jessica on the plains, though they didn’t fly over any of them directly.

They did fly by many flocks of differing varieties, not worried about hitting them at speed because of the deflection shields that would gently push them out of the way rather than kill them on impact…but the native birds were usually good about giving them room and the skiff passed by without incident all the way up to the edge of Lake Nessi.

It was easy to spot, for the bank had no trees along this side, only grasses. Some of them grew as tall as trees now that they’d been modified, but the lake was so big even they could not hide it on the horizon for long.

The light of three suns made the reflections on the calm surface a kaleidoscope of flashes that soon surrounded the skiff as they moved out over the water at some 450 meters of altitude as they curved to the right and began to follow the lake. Jessica looked down, seeing from above some of the subsurface habitats on the lake floor, for the water was so clear that when you got an angle that didn’t have reflected sunlight you could see almost all the way down.

It got quite deep farther out, but in the shallows the clusters of habitats were easily visible but not common. Most of the lake was just…lake, but every now and then she’d see another village much like where they were headed. Had they been late they would have flown a direct line, but so long as they had some extra time she liked to take more of a tour over these areas that she rarely set foot in but was tasked to take care of.

Eventually, after traveling over a 1,000 miles of lake, the skiff came upon a city that was first below the water, with many subsurface habitat buildings appearing below Jessica, but they eventually transitioned into a large cluster that rose high into the air and had bridges out to both sides of the lake on one of the thinnest portions of it, barely 8 miles wide.

This functioned as one of their embassies, of sorts, for Project Legolas had different factions that lived mostly separate from one another, but for some occasions they needed to interact and rare cities such as this one were built for those activities.

Ascension ceremonies were rare, occurring once every 2 years if there was any cause to have them. Today there were not one, but 5 individuals ascending and Jessica had made it a point long ago to always be there where it happened and make a personal connection with the altered Humans born into this world rather than choosing to immigrate.

Davis had explained to her long ago that the basic maturia system was based off of taking chaos and turning it into a semblance of order…but that such things carried with them inherent disadvantages and eventually Star Force would have to find another way. Not an abandonment of the maturias, but a change none the less. Project Legolas was the Director’s primary research experiment into that distant future, and even he had said he didn’t know what would come of it.

The idea was to venture forth and troubleshoot as you went, but that required a population closed off from the rest of the empire without making them prisoners. There was an out for them, if they wished, and a few of them had taken it even though it meant a removal of their psionic birthright.

Jessica’s pilot brought the skiff in to a landing pedestal on the top of the cloud-like puffy architecture as a few fliers approached and gave them an unnecessary escort. They waved at the Duke and she waved and smiled back, seeing the four Sky Elves’ clothes whipping in the wind as they paced the skiff. Her own hair wasn’t moving a bit under the energy screen, but they had no such protection, marking them as first tier and unascended…which was why they were having trouble keeping pace with the skiff, but as it slowed they caught back up and followed them down like attentive children until they came near the proper honor guard.

They shooed themselves off before the others could and the skiff proceeded the last few hundred meters by itself before it landed amongst columns of four different breeds of Elf, three of which were standing on the landing deck, while the Sky Elves were hovering using their Yen’mer psionic in a perfect ring around the landing area.

On the ground were the three Clans/breeds that could not fly, but who each had their own special attributes, and each had an individual here for the ascension. The Sky Elves did not, but since they had enclaves spread across the planet they were always here as witnesses when there was an ascension ceremony while the other breeds were not.

There were 8 in total, with those here today being the Fire Elves, Water Elves, and Wood Elves. The others not present were the Ice Elves, Sand Elves, Earth Elves, and Stone Elves, but this location was open to all of them while technically being in Water Elf territory. There was no rivalry or competition between them, but they did keep to themselves as Davis had originally intended, allowing for 8 different tracks of genetic development as Star Force studied the passage of psionics and other traits from generation to generation.

Zen’zat had never been intended to reproduce, and their genetic code…which was inherited by Humans including Jessica…was not tailored to improvement. Her own psionics had laid dormant within her until awoken rather than being refined by her ancestors one generation after another as the V’kit’no’sat races did.

The Archons, Arc Knights, and Arc Commandos also reflected this, not being allowed to reproduce and transfer active genetics to offspring that were never designed to inherit them. What problems Humanity had had when it first began were lost to time, but Davis had said his best medtechs theorized a lot of problems that had eventually led Humanity to its former state…which was essentially broken Zen’zat. Minor modifications had been made to Star Force over the years to plug some of the holes, but the idea of an entire population with psionics and those psionics being tuned over the generations was something new to Star Force…and dangerous, which was why Project Legolas was being conducted in secret and away from everyone else.

All the Elves before Jessica as she stepped off the skiff were born with telepathy strong enough to communicate with their mothers while still being in the womb. Almost all V’kit’no’sat reproduced via eggs, but the few that did not did not have their younglings with telepathy activated until a later stage of development. Many of the egg layers did and could communicate in a limited fashion with them before they hatched.

Davis hadn’t known what would happen if unborn Human babies had their minds linked to their mothers in such a fashion, for no Human or Zen’zat had ever been born with it. They’d all developed with a ‘silent’ mind then gained the telepathy later while many V’kit’no’sat races did not. They could hear and feel the others while they developed, and the dynamics of that sort of civilization was something superior to Star Force and inexplicable even with their access to the descriptions in the old pyramid database. Humans didn’t have enough common experience to understand, and even the most powerful Archons in telepathy still couldn’t make sense out of everything denoted.

While Jessica had never given birth herself, she’d been told by others that did that the Elves’ births were much easier because they could coordinate with their babies when the time came for their removal. A downside was the fact that the mother needed to stay with the infant for a great deal of time afterward to lessen the transitional discomfort, for after having another’s mind with you constantly for all of your life, taking it away was very disruptive.

Human younglings were taken from their mothers at birth without incident, as were most other races. What Jessica had learned from the Elves was also partly responsible for her predicament with the Zezdi, for she didn’t know if separating them early would be beneficial or not given the efficiency she’d seen in the Elves.

Their maturias were different as a result, but eventually the younglings did get separated from their mothers after joining a Quenya, which was equivalent to a maturia class but much more important. Because their Ikrid blocks had been removed from their genetics, they could share thoughts much more easily and had no automatic defense to another’s mind in their own. As a result a Quenya tended to learn as one rather than each individual progressing at their own rate.

Individuality had to be taught to them later, rather than teamwork having to be taught to individuals within maturias. It was completely backwards to everything Star Force had been constructed on, which was why Davis needed data to work with regarding how they developed in isolation. Jessica was one of only a handful of people permitted to interact with them, and while she did have an Ikrid block, her own telepathy allowed her to communicate with them on their level.

The Elves had a bad habit of not using their voice and communicating only telepathically. That was efficient in a lot of cases, but not when it came to them never developing their voices properly. Because of that, Jessica always made a point of using both her telepathy and voice when she visited them, and today was no exception.

She linked minds with the two Elves that stepped forward and exchanged warm greetings, then spoke when she got within a meter of them.

“It is good to be back, my friends. I hear you have 3 this time?”

“Indeed,” Timan, a Water Elf said with his long blue hair bracketing his pale face. “It is a good sign of progress. All three stand ready.”

“Then let’s not keep them waiting. They’ve worked hard for this day.”

“That they have,” Jorcha, a Fire Elf agreed as he summoned a spark in the slit of his right palm. It briefly grew in intensity until it formed a small orb of orange fire that Jessica raised her own hand to meet. Using her Rensiek so not to get burned, she pulled the heat into her body until the fireball extinguished, then sent it through her arm, across her chest, and up to her other hand that she pressed against Jorcha’s. She couldn’t produce the plasma that a Fire Elf greeting required, but she was able to return to the heat to his flesh, completing the amended ritual with a touching of their foreheads.

Her blond hair brushed up against his red for a moment, then they pulled back apart and began walking through the assembled ranks to the entrance to the city beneath them. The other Elves, apart from Jorcha and Timan, held perfectly still out of respect until she stepped down the first of the stairs and moved out of sight…with her sending a brief telepathic ‘thank you’ to them all, relating her feelings of gratitude and honor in a way that words alone never could.

“It is good to see our Queen once again,” Timan said as they continued down the wide and gently curving staircase.

“She prefers Duke,” the Fire Elf corrected him, “but I concur. You are welcome to mingle with us beyond ceremonies alone.”

“Your Duke Queen has duties to attend to…many duties,” she said regretfully.

“Is there anything we can be of help with?”

“Not today, Timan,” she said affectionately as she looked into his blue eyes…or rather the iris was blue, an alteration that had been made during his own ascension ceremony a long time ago. All Elves were born with brown eyes and brown hair along with limited psionics unique to their breed, but it was the ascensions that increased their power greatly. There were two ascensions for each, but to date no Elf had made it to the third level, for they had their own evaluation system designed by the trailblazers…and it was damn hard.

They continued to talk as they descended, with every Elf they passed stopping and looking at Jessica. Some simply stared, others bowed politely, but all were well aware of her presence before they laid eyes on her, for they could sense a non-Elf approaching and her closed off mind stood out like a beacon amongst the telepathic bee hive she was now within.

Eventually Jessica was led to a modest chamber in which there were about 300 people. All were Elves save for a single Archon Mage. He was one of only three on the planet tasked with helping them train, and she knew he stayed out of their way as much as possible, letting the Elves figure things out for themselves while making sure to nudge them in the right direction. The Archon was here to learn from them as much as they from him, and had she not been available he would have oversaw the Ascension ceremony…but there was no way she was going to miss this short of a V’kit’no’sat attack.

The three breeds of Elf were grouped separately, their clothes similar but with distinct variances between Clan and individual preference. The three ready for Ascension were waiting with them, but nude. Two were male, one female, and aside from the points on their ears they appeared to be fully Human, though naturally hairless…save for eyebrows and head hair. Jessica was the same, but by choice and medical intervention. Elves were born this way, and not a one of them had so much as a whisker of facial or body hair.

All three had long brown hair and brown eyes, but Jessica could tell the Fire Elf because of the slits on his palms. It was a tier 4 psionic only a few elites Archons had called Choratrik, but all Fire Elves were born with it as a natural part of their bodies along with a passive Rensiek that made it impossible for them to be burnt even when asleep…save for insane temperatures. Jessica had to concentrate to activate hers, but it gave her the ability to interact with them and she was thankful for that…and jealous of the Sky Elves, for if she wanted to fly she had to find a skiff or a flight pack. Yen’mer wasn’t a psionic given to the Monarchs, and though she’d never voiced her complaint there were many times when she wanted to ask Davis ‘Why the hell not?’

Jessica left Timan and Jorcha near the entrance and proceeded to walk out into the center of the chamber where there was a short pedestal in the center of an artificial pond. When she approached the edge a bridge formed out of nowhere, barely half a foot wide, and she walked across it carefully to get to the pedestal where she mentally summoned a control dais to raise out of the floor before her feet.

It was pure white, as was everything else in the chamber and looking like it was chiseled from pure snow so hard as if it were stone, but the air temp was not cold like her royal chambers had been. Here things were warm, but not terribly so, and all the white infrastructure was illuminated with a slight inner glow that banished the possibility of any shadow from forming.

Jessica hit a few buttons and three stairwells rose up out of the water and connected to the edge along the side where each of the three nude Elves were standing.

“Those who have proved themselves worthy…step forward and claim your inheritance.”

4

The three Elves stepped forward, each to their own set of stairs, and slowly walked down into the water. The Fire Elf and Wood Elf held their breath as they dipped under, but the Water Elf had no need as she had the tier 3 psionic Lovo’nek that allowed her and all Water Elves to absorb oxygen through their skin, both in the air and in water. She had all the time in the world beneath the water, but the other two were on the clock as they followed the stairs all the way down to the base of the pool where there was a glowing statue.

The Fire Elf’s statue was red, the Water Elf’s blue, the Wood Elf’s green and when they reached out and laid a hand on them the water suddenly became black in a masking field. The moment of transformation was a private one save for the Duke, who was both triggering and monitoring it through her mental link to the medical computer system.

To the assembled Elves the three beneath the water had disappeared from their telepathy as well, for an Ikrid jamming field had been laid over the pool. Those beneath it were cut off from all around them, seeing nothing, feeling nothing of their kin or the Duke, but their statue reached out to them with a telepathic impulse once they made contact with it, giving them instructions for the last brief test of their worthiness.

The Fire Elf held his hand against the outstretched palm of the statue, pressing flesh against synthetic stone, and sent a stream of plasma into it. Small bubbles of steam leapt out from the cracks around his hand and traveled to the surface, but nearly all of the heat was transferred to the statue itself. When a sufficient amount was reached the Fire Elf suddenly went numb, his plasma attack ending and his palm orifice closing on its own. In fact his entire body went numb as the unseen Kich’a’kat tendrils within the statue wormed their way inside his body on a microscopic level and began altering both genetics and the tissue to match.

The same was true of the Water Elf, who spread both arms wide to match her statue and pushed the water around her in a fierce current using her enhanced Lachka that even the Archons did not possess. It had been tailored specifically to aid in swimming and other forms of water manipulation and she used it now to push enough current up and through the statue as her fingers were intertwined with its own that rendered her numb as well.

The Wood Elf stepped into his statue, who had one hand raise before it at an angle. He push his head against that hand while placing his own against the statue’s head, connecting his telepathy to it by touch in wake of the jamming otherwise inhibiting that ability. In mind’s eye there was a massive weight that rose in response to the telepathic pressure placed on it, and once he raised it high enough he too went numb before his lungs started to ache too much from holding his breath.

The Kich’a’kat didn’t take long to do its work, but supplied additional oxygen along with new tissue components so the alterations didn’t sap the Elves’ strength as their ear points elongated slightly, their hair changed color along with their irises, their Ikrid tissue doubled in size, and they gained the psionic Kex that would enhance their agility to almost dance-like levels.

The blackness concealing the water didn’t abate, then almost in unison three glowing heads of hair rose from it. One red, one blue, and one green. The luminosity faded as they came out of the water but the color remained, and the formerly nude Elves were now fully clothed in body-tight ranger garb, each tailored to their Clan’s attributes and colors.

Jessica stepped down from her control podium and across the main floor with the three Elves turning to follow her over to an adjacent chamber that held many weapons, but there were three waiting on ceremonial pedestals for the newly minted rangers. The Duke walked amongst them while the Elves stayed a respectful distance back, then she picked up a short but wide dagger.

“Water flows and constrains,” she said, citing the ceremonial words, “both protecting and inhibiting. Those who guard must move and engage in close range, thus you need a weapon tailored for such an environment. The River Dagger moves as quickly as the current flows and can be just as lethal. It is your birthright and responsibility, Sanfen. Wield it wisely.”

Jessica used her standard Lachka that these Elves did not have and floated the foot-long dagger through the air to the blue haired Elf. Sanfen grasped it carefully and the Duke could sense she was both honored and a bit amazed by the levitation. The Water Elves’ Lachka only worked on water and a few other liquids, but could not be blocked by Pefbar jammers.

When the Elf grasped the weapon she was able to telepathically connect with it, causing the silvery blade to glow blue and its many functions became available to her mind.

“Fire destroys or cleanses, and great wisdom must be applied in its use. Great power and responsibility come with the sacred oath…and great peril to those who break it. You have proved your ability to discern when and how to use your limited power…now you will be granted a counter to Fire Elves’ greatest weakness.”

Jessica floated a long pitch black rod off the center pedestal and took it in her own hand before her telekinetic strength failed and she dropped it.

“Your ability to control fire is nearly limitless, but your ability to produce it is restricted to the amount of fuel your body carries. The Pyre Staff will allow you to recharge your biological levels almost instantaneously, granting you far greater longevity than you possess on your own. It is your strength and weakness in battle…do not let yourself be separated from it,” she said, tossing it over to the red-headed Elf.

Jariil caught it in hand, and when he did it lit up with a script-like decoration that glowed subtly red against the black, then increased in illumination when not only the Elf’s body, but his mind connected to it.

“The Wood is home, brother, and stranger. It cannot exist on its own and requires periodic direction and defense. The ranger is both caretaker and guardian, and while the Wood itself has great power imbued in it, it is not always enough. You must be willing and able to fight beyond it on your strength alone when needed, or alongside it when great peril threatens,” Jessica recited as she floated a bow and quiver that was almost too heavy for her across to the Wood Elf.

“Distance is your ally, but not always yours to command. The Grove Bow will grant this when the Wood does not. Use it sparingly, for your arrows are not infinite in battle.”

Lein grasped each in different hands. Both glowed faintly with green script, but it did not overwhelm the brown textures that looked like they had been grown from the trees themselves, though were in fact purely technological.

“Mastery of your weapons will come with time and training, but they are now yours to make use of with wisdom, compassion, and vengeance as necessary. Before you rejoin the others a time of solitude is required for you to acclimate to your new responsibilities. Elves fight as one, but rangers must be equally able to operate alone on the frontier…so it is there you must go to hone your skills and truly discover yourselves. There is strength in unity, but also a weakness if that unity is relied upon too heavily.”

“When one is first an individual there is no threat in it, but you have lived in each other’s minds since you were born. You have learned to operate on your own…now you must become comfortable with it,” the Duke said, snapping her fingers with a hidden door opening on the far side of the weapons chamber. “You will see your Clans later, for now you must go. I will accompany you on the first part of your journey and bid you farewell from the frontier.”

Jessica, closely monitoring each of their minds, sensed hesitation in all three. They’d expected to rejoin the groups they’d come here with, and this was part of the reason why the details of the Ascension ceremony were kept a secret by those who had taken part in it before…and it was a secret that these three would keep as well once they eventually returned to their Clans.

“Come,” she said, taking on a less formal tone now that the ritualistic recitement was ended. “I wish to speak with you all enroute, and I only have a few hours to do so. Bring your weapons and follow me.”

The three Elves did as instructed, following her through the doorway that melted away back into solid wall once they’d passed through it.

“Thank you for the personal escort, my Queen,” Lein said as he dropped off the edge of the pod-like speeder she’d been piloting to the three different locations the newly minted rangers were being deposited at, with the Wood Elf being the last of the three.

“So few of you have made ranger that I like to get to know each of you by face and name,” she said, walking to the rim edge and looking down at him from a couple meters up.

“It is appreciated,” he said, looking at the sparse trees around him and the grassy plain beyond where the frontier began.

“You’re worried about what you’re going to find out there?”

“No…I’m worried about facing it alone. I’ve gone out with others before, so I know what to expect.”

“Supply drops will be on time, you can be assured of that.”

“Did you have a similar challenge to face?”

“Not like this, but in a way I am always alone. My responsibilities are not shared by any of you, nor anyone on this planet. We work as a team, but my tasks are solitary ones…despite my being surrounded by people.”

“I do not understand. Do not others help shape your thoughts?”

“I don’t allow that. I can connect with others telepathically if needed, but what I have to do requires an isolation of mind. In truth, others would slow me down unless they were my peers…and Monarchs do not share worlds. We are too valuable to overlap our skills.”

“Do Kings and Queens never see one another?”

“Occasionally, when there is a need or when we have time to spare. I have many things to do, which is why I cannot leave this world…and they have tasks of their own.”

“The Great War?”

“The Archons more than the Monarchs. Our tasks are delivering them what they need to fight, and in a way it is a form of combat in and of itself.”

“I have often wondered what it is you do, and what the rest of our vast empire is like…but my path lies elsewhere. That is clear, in the near future at least. Have you any last advice?”

“Live in the moment and do not count the days. Both the combat and isolation will teach you more of yourself…and knowledge of oneself is the key to unlocking even greater power.”

The green haired Wood Elf nodded respectfully. “I will remember your words.”

“Move swiftly, ranger,” she said, pointing to the frontier beyond. “And good fortune.”

“We make our own fortune,” Lein said as he turned and began running…far faster than Jessica could. She watched him zigzag between the few trees while carrying both his bow and survival pack on his back, but he had no armor or clothing other than his ranger suit.

Jessica went back to the control panel and raised the pod up above the trees to give her a better view of the plains as the Elf deftly ran out onto it, leaping across a large boulder as distant spots in the sky began tracking towards him. If she moved her pod just a little further the ‘bots’ would come after her too, so she didn’t let her craft drift that way. They wouldn’t cross the frontier border, but the stun-weapon bearing little drones were vicious by design and would hunt any Elf or craft that crossed into their territory.

They were a creation of the Archons to give the Elves an opponent to face, and one that she’d been reluctant to sanction initially, but the results had proven the Archons to be completely right. The Elves responded to the threats and grew stronger because of them, with peace alone quickly turning into stagnation. Training grew boring if one didn’t have a reason for it, and self-sufficiency wasn’t enough for many Elves to drive themselves onward as much as Project Legolas required.

The bots provided an enemy the equivalent of what the Archons called the ‘Black Knight’ that had terrorized them in their own initial training. They’d told her he would break bones without worry, trusting in the Kich’a’kat regenerators to fix them up afterward. She did not want the bots to do that to the Elves so a different system had been devised, but one that was relentless.

If Lein was to survive out here he’d have to keep moving and fighting them off, otherwise they’d stun him unconscious and haul his body off to a penalty area known simply as ‘EC’ but no Elf knew what those two letters stood for. They had gained a definition in and of themselves, but to the Archons they stood for ‘English Class’ and were a throwback to a time before Star Force. Such a place had nothing to do with language and was place of continual torment…thus the perfect name for the Elves place of torment…and the Archons had truly made it such.

The captured Elves would have to effectively become slaves to work their way free of it on their own via puzzles or be rescued by other Elves…but none knew that Lein was out here, specifically, for he wasn’t wearing a homing beacon. Meaning if he got caught he’d spend weeks, if not months in the EC before breaking free onto to be hunted again.

All three of the Elves had to spend 2 years in the frontier on their own, whether on the run or in the EC, before they’d be allowed to return…and they had to return free. If they were in the EC when the 2 years expired they would stay there until they worked their way out, then they’d be given a final destination point to get to.

The longest it had taken a ranger to complete the Isolation was 3.4 years, but thanks to the bots Jessica and the Archons could keep an eye on them, and from what others had told her afterwards this was going to be a very difficult thing for these three to go through, and not just because of the combat. The lack of having other Elves in your mind was something they’d been able to tolerate for short periods of time, but out here they had to become comfortable with their own thoughts alone.

That was something Humans didn’t have to experience, though she knew loneliness was not exclusively an Elf thing, but for them it was far worse. Some of them had shared memories of their Isolation with her and it was a pain that she’d never experienced before…but it was a necessary pain, for they had to learn to be individuals, otherwise their telepathic unity could become a crippling weakness if an enemy knew how to exploit it.

This was but one of many factors Project Legolas was probing, and this trial was as important for Star Force as it was for the individual Elves. The V’kit’no’sat knew how to manage populations with telepathy and telekinesis, but Star Force did not. Archons were all individuals to start with and chosen for their uniqueness. Elves were born this way, all of them, and even without them having telekinesis the differences were striking.

Star Force had a lot to learn about this higher level of civilization, and the fact that Zen’zat had never been designed to reproduce was in stark evidence every day. The development of the Human race was now up to Star Force, without precedent from the V’kit’no’sat to follow…as far as Ter’nat and Zen’zat were concerned…but there were many other races to study and try to steal inspiration from. It was never enough though, and even if the Zen’zat could be replicated in generational form they wouldn’t have the Archon-level advancement drive.

The Elves needed to become something new, and aside from stealing ideas from the V’kit’no’sat, troubleshooting new ideas was what made the Archons and Monarchs what they were…and the reason why she was in her own isolation here. She had to deliver answers that others couldn’t, and the interdependency that the Elves had was one of her worries with the Zezdi reproduction method.

Individuality had to be the basic building block of all races within Star Force, but it was coming hard to the Elves and even more so the Zezdi who were not even remotely as advanced. She could either try to teach them individuality over time or force it on them initially, and the Duke still couldn’t decide which was for the best…and it wasn’t something she could experiment with a year or two to figure out. It would take centuries to discover if she was right or not, so she had to anticipate and predict this, otherwise she would delay the development or even harm the Zezdi…and the latter was totally unacceptable.

Jessica closed the top of the pod then began to fly it back towards the Elvish city where her skiff and pilot waited. Halfway there she sent a message saying she’d be delayed a few hours and changed course, heading to a small lake north of Lake Nessi and brought her pod down directly onto the water.

No one was immediately around, but she could sense a few Water Elves off in the distance and sent a telepathic ‘hello’ to them, with them starting to head her way immediately.

Jessica pulled the canopy on the pod back and triggered her clothes to retract down into a thick cape that she left puddled on the deck. She dove into the water nude, thankful that Monarchs had also been given Lovo’nek and she could breathe underwater…but she still had to keep her mouth shut to keep it out of her lungs.

She was a pathetic swimmer, but she’d learn to use her Lachka as underwater paddles on her hands and feet to help her move a bit better. That didn’t matter now, because she just wanted to spend some time in the outdoors in the water and mingle with the Water Elves a bit. They’d be happy to see her, and her lack of clothes didn’t matter. She was helpless in the water compared to them anyway, but there were no threats here to worry about so the Duke let herself get immersed in the natural landscape of Eoxion for a while, knowing that returning to her castle command center probably wasn’t going to yield any breakthroughs in the next few hours, so why not a change of pace while she was out here?

It took only a few minutes before the first of the Elves got to her, swimming so fast through the water on their enhanced Lachka that they looked like slow moving missiles. Those that got to her were all brown haired, meaning no rangers, and they were all clad in smooth body suits with their hands and feet exposed. Jessica looked odd amongst them with her naked body, but she wasn’t an Elf anyway and always stood out.

Without being able to talk underwater the following conversations were all telepathic and energetic, with not one of the Elves not glad to see their ‘Ice Queen’ who almost never visited from her polar stronghold. Her being a rock star amongst them was normal, but something she’d always slightly cringed at. Today, however, it was anything but as she opened up her mind and accepted as much of the telepathy flowing through them as she could. They couldn’t reach into her mind without touching her, but she could feel theirs and it was like a warm embrace that never lifted.

Even though she was an outsider it felt like home and she let herself immerse in the sensation as more Water Elves swam towards her from afar. She could feel the unity here and the power within it, and it was an advantage that Star Force was not going to overlook…but how not to let it become a negative was the lingering question.

Right now she didn’t worry about that, and after a half an hour or so she realized she’d been trying too hard. She’d never thought of herself as having many attributes similar to the Archons, but apparently she’d picked up some of their relentlessness. She needed a vacation to recharge, maybe then she’d be able to find a solution to the Zezdi’s problem. Sitting and staring at the walls certainly hadn’t helped her up until this point.

And that vacation might as well start now…if she was going to spend a few weeks or months away from her normal routine who better than to spend it with than the Elves? She hadn’t done a tour of all 8 realms in forever, and she knew they’d be overly pleased if she did again.

When she shared her thoughts with the Water Elves around her they immediately agreed, providing a lot of suggestions for where she could go or stay, offering to take her there. Jessica immediately thought of swimming back up to her pod and grabbing her clothes, but the two Elves that had hands on her immediately disagreed, urging her to come deeper in the lake and travel with them as she was.

The Queen didn’t need clothes or defenses amongst them, they said. She was welcome as is and if she really wanted to disconnect from her normal duties for a while she should leave everything behind for a while…and if she really felt she needed clothes they could provide her with some elvish ones.

Another Elf further off had another idea, which then rippled through them all like a ping pong ball passing from mind to mind.

Why not just disappear for a while? They’d spirit her off away from view and she could move about the Elvish realms quietly, avoiding large crowds and just soaking in the planet that she rarely saw aside from in her chambers.

Jessica quickly realized she’d been sharing more thoughts than she’d expected, and the two Elves touching her broke contact in apology.

No no, it’s fine, she told them. I’m just not used to having others inside my head.

We’ll avoid physical contact then, to make your visit easier.

No, Jessica said, reaching out her hands to the nearest two Elves. I’ll learn. Send a message to the Archons that I’m disappearing amongst you for an unspecified amount of time and have someone return my pod, then you can spirit me off to wherever you like. I haven’t had an adventure in a very long time.

Come then, they said, grapping her gently by both wrists and bending the water around her body in order to provide her propulsion, gliding her through the cool depths smoothly as the rest of the Elves swam in formation around her in a telepathic warmness that was already beginning to loosen her clenched mind up…and far more so than she had previously realized she needed.

The Ice Queen begins to melt…

Jessica smiled as the current pulled her blonde hair back in a trailing streak behind her head, acknowledging that they were right and thanking them in a single thought.

She was in bad need of a vacation, and even as she considered how much the Elves sensed her concern and dismissed it, promising that they’d make sure she opened up enough to relieve her mental oppression brought on by her responsibilities…and the first thing they did was politely forbade her from wearing any clothes for the duration, citing it would help fight her natural habit of closing herself off.

Jessica blanched at first, but with the Elves in her head via the physical contact on her wrists they saw the thought and quickly helped her correct it, teaching her as they went, all in a matter of seconds, after which she relented. She wasn’t going to be doing any mating and they accepted that, pointing out that she needed to open up not just to the Elves but to the planet itself, and serene connection was better than passion.

Jessica thought about it and quickly decided to humor them on this. Her connection to the water did feel better naked, so why not? It was a vacation, after all, and she needed to refresh her mind…and the Elves had a lot more experience with matters of the mind than she did. And that was experience she was able to sip at through their group telepathic bond.

Actually, she thought she probably needed to spend time amongst them just to learn more of it and how it might be pertinent to future developments and the Zezdi…but those things she kept behind a mental wall, for there were many secrets she had that a Monarch needed to keep. Jessica opened the rest of her mind up to them as much as she could, with her habit being to keep pulling back, but the Elves promised she’d get used to it in time, so Jessica decided to fully put herself into their care…with the idea of not knowing where she was going or what was going to happen being quite refreshing.

She had led for so long, it was nice to actually be led for once. That wasn’t a luxury she could indulge in often, but this was a special occasion…and perhaps the spur she needed to break through her Zezdi problem.

5

February 24, 4827

Tauriel System (Seon Region)

Eoxion

Neitti hop/walked along an elevated platform that ran the length of the injector assembly in fabrication center #498, one of hundreds of factories along the planet’s equator that were building parts for the shipyards in orbit. This one in particular was forging warship armor in a lengthy and extravagant process visible to his left as thousands of cubic meters of molten material was suspended in null gravity and constrained by force fields as it was bombarded with Rafna energy nonstop.

The excess Rafna was reflected back in on the molten material, bouncing it around until saturation occurred and not exposing Neitti or any of the other Kiritak workers. If saturation wasn’t met then the armor precursor would harden and the molten material would solidify and essentially clog up the train of alterations occurring to it…the last of which was the combination with a different precursor that would cause the molten material to become immune to the Rafna energy so that a Rafna weapon could not be used to easily penetrate it in combat.

That meant the last stage had the saturated material being mixed with another molten material very fast and very thorough as it was poured into energy molds further down the facility, but Neitti wasn’t headed that way. He was just coming back from his shift break and eager to get to work on making more Teteron cubes…a component of the visible molten slurry introduced earlier in the process.

The Teteron cubes had a bad habit of frying the sensors used to monitor their construction, thus a live person had to be involved in the construction process or the automation would eventually make a mistake. There was a chamber ahead that contained thousands of Kiritak, each with a room-sized workstation where they painstakingly checked the automation and checked each of the fist-sized cubes with an array of equipment, tossing out the components that failed and ensuring pure produce for further down the line.

Given that fabrication center #498 was over 20 miles long, moving up and down the length of the mostly rod-shaped building could be tedious, but there were enough service stations for the crew to take their rest/food breaks in that Neitti didn’t have more than a mile to travel to get back to his workstation…and a mile to a Kiritas was nothing when they used the full power of their legs and literally bounced ten meters at a time with each hop.

Neitti wasn’t going quite that fast, having started back a little early, when he heard a massive screech that curled his ears. It lasted a couple of seconds, then everything seemed to be back to normal.

He stopped hopping, instead standing and looking around at the other Kiritak and a scattering of Humans on the wide pedestrian platform, with no one seeming to know what had caused the noise, then as people began moving again the first boom sounded.

A chain of them followed, and before Neitti could see anything to coincide with the sound the force fields around the molten slurry up and to his left deactivated.

Dread ran through him, along with the realization that the Rafna generators were also offline, because as soon as the long tether of material began to fall the outer shell hardened. Neitti expected it to hit he backup shields just below…but they never materialized. The huge length of now semi-molten material fell to the emergency trench below, cracking the exterior case and spewing bright green interior material out like the bursting of a water balloon.

The trench caught most of it, but the splashes went everywhere, melting through the equipment they touched and causing further malfunctions. Neitti dove to the side as a glob arced up over the side of the platform and came falling towards him, changing from bright green to black as it bled off the Rafna energy in droves, burning Neitti from range like a bad sunburn even before the glob hit the deck.

Thankfully the platform’s emergency shields were still active and caught the physical material over the railing. It splashed open into green brilliance again then hardened quickly over top the shield, forming an impromptu tunnel as more splashes hit and stuck on the physical shield, blocking out partial vision of the catastrophe occurring beyond.

The Rafna energy from the cooling globs was still burning through wherever you could see green, and by the time he had a partial roof over his head Neitti’s skin was beginning to peel off in places…but not the underside of his feet, for the Rafna was coming from above, and his shoes had only burned away on the top.

Or rather partly, for they were still attached to his feet, but his clothing had melted rather than caught on fire, as it was supposed to, leaving him wearing nothing but tatters along with the others who had been spared from the falling material but cooked by its proximity.

His eyes hurt, but thankfully he could still see as he followed the emergency holograms depicting the best evacuation route. He didn’t get far before he saw a Human lying on the ground, her skin black and red in places where it had been burnt. Another Kiritak got to her before Neitti did, and together they pried her up off the ground and, painful as it was, put her over their shoulders and carried her…leaving behind patches of her skin stuck to the floor.

She was dripping her red blood on them, but that didn’t matter…nor did the pain of her body on their wounds. They had to get everyone out, and across the fabrication center the rest of the crew was doing the same. No one was being left behind, and before the pair of Kiritak could even make it halfway out of the facility a squad of armored Kiritak medics rushed up to them and took the Human, carrying her on an anti-grav shield bed that cradled her body far more gently than they had been.

“Stand still,” one of the medics said, coming up in front of Neitti and stopping his zombie-like progress as he continued to follow the evac holograms, “before you lose your foot.”

Neitti finally stopped, not wanting to touch the aqua-colored armor and hurt himself further, and looked down at his feet. His left one was missing one of his toes and what looked like a third of his flesh. He could see bone in a few places between shards of shoe…then the pain suddenly diminished as the medic pressed something to his forehead.

“Temporary hold,” the medtech said as his skin stopped what bleeding it had, regrowing slightly while most of his body went so numb he couldn’t even stand. The armored Kiritak caught him, then a few moments later had him floating on his back.

“Get the others out first,” Neitti complained, but didn’t have the bodily control to physically object.

“You first. You won’t make it another hundred meters with half that foot, and the less we have to repair the better. Off you go,” the medtech said as Neitti stared at the ceiling that was now moving…or rather he was, but the medtech wasn’t with him.

He lifted his head up and looked, squeezing his eyes open and shut a few times to fight the sudden blurriness, then he saw other Kiritak hobbling beside him plus a few more floaters that were being carried on tiny, hand-sized machines that were emitting energy fields to cradle them above in an invisible grip that glowed ever so slightly the same aqua color as the medtechs’ uniforms.

Neitti had to be in one as well, and it was auto-piloting him along the line of evac holograms as he heard even louder bangs and screeches from the direction he’d come, now obscured by ceiling and tunnel as they headed perpendicular to the main construction train through the support chambers to the nearest exterior entrance.

Alarms were sounding everywhere, but they were almost muted by the noise of further destruction. Was the planet under attack? They’d received no warnings of an invasion, and Star Force industrial machinery was too well stacked with redundancies for this to have been an accident.

In fact this should not have been occurring at all save for a warship or mech firing on the fabrication facility directly…and even then the number of backup failures made no sense. What in Helinat’s Grasp was going on?

Neitti thought about it for a moment, then as the shock began to wear off a severe heaviness dragged his head back down and he decided to lay still and let the medical drone carry him off to a medbay or wherever it was taking him. His eyes didn’t hurt so much now, but they were blurry and his lids were now heavy. He knew there was nothing else he could do to help now, so he eventually surrendered to the fatigue and half passed out as he floated on amongst the sea of Kiritas and Humans fleeing fabrication center #498.

ViLord Connor-1381923 was out on the ice plains at the northern pole of the planet wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts as he was running across several inches of snow while getting pelted with incoming fire from his left. The Archon took a few hits, then used his own bioshield to block the other snowballs coming at him from the group of Ice Elves who’d been hiding behind a snow bank. He hadn’t seen or sensed them there due to the Ikrid jammer in place on the training field and his promise not to use his Pefbar to cheat, and he was proud they’d gotten a few hits in on him…but they were still going to pay for it.

He slid to a stop, dropping to a knee as his left foot went out from under him in a skid, then with a theatrical wave of his hand the snow around him rose up into the air and condensed into several dozen orbs…that he began firing off one at a time with lethal accuracy, pegging some of the Ice Elves with straight shots while having to telekinetically arc the others to hit when they otherwise would have successfully dodged to the side. Most of them managed to stay on their feet, but two of the youngest ones actually ran into each other and went spinning to the ground on impact.

“Gotta pay attention newbs!” he yelled before pulling up more snow and throwing it over them like a tsunami as the Archon ran past and headed for one of their fort outposts. When one of the Elves stood up out of the snow he’d just blanketed them with, Connor used his telekinesis while still in range and smashed the Elves’ head back down into the snow face first…then issued the most taunting laugh he could as he ran away.

He was having fun…there was no denying that…but he also wanted to make the Elves mad if he could and really show them how bad things could get when they didn’t focus. Forcing them to operate as a team without their telepathy was making this all too easy for Connor, despite the basketball-sized snowball that came flying at him from the outpost cannon. He dodged it and the next two, then skidded to a halt and punched the next one out of the air just for fun as he heard light footsteps approaching him from behind.

He didn’t cheat and look with his Pefbar, so he knelt a bit as he spun, seeing a trio of females running at him. They weren’t carrying any snowballs, but one of them was sporting the white hair signifying a ranger. That one leapt towards him, using her agility upgrade from Kex to become a flying weapon that tried to grab hold of him.

He obliged, holding on long enough for her to tackle him to the ground…then he rolled over and used her momentum plus his own physical strength to toss her the other way. He added a bit of a Lachka push and his telekinesis succeeded in getting her all the way over to their fort outpost where she bodily hit the snow-packed brick wall…with her feet.

The Ice Elf ranger landed in a controlled fashion and jumped off the wall before she could fall, flipping over acrobatically and landing on her feet at a run heading back towards him.

Connor picked up some more snow telekinetically and planted a couple of tightly packed orbs in his hands, then he went hand to hand with the other two female Elves that were trying to tackle him. They ended up with face-fulls of snow as he tossed them to the ground, then one of the cannon balls hit him from the side.

He half fell to a knee, then rolled away before another one could hit him, but not before a cascade of long range snowballs came over the snow bank to the west…except these weren’t orbs, but rather snow arrows. They peppered the ground around him and he caught those that were going to hit in a telekinetic grip…then sent them back so hard they flew through the snow bank and he heard one satisfying grunt as he hit someone on the other side.

The next thing he knew there was someone jumping down on him from above, and as he turned to parry the attack he got hit with a weak Jumat blast that knocked him to the side.

“Stop!” his Padawan yelled, holding up her hands so he and the Elves could see. “Everyone stop now!”

The Elves obeyed instantly, and Connor could now see the speeder she’d flown in on hovering above them a few dozen meters.

“You’re needed, now,” Carrie-1621197 said, her tone indicating trouble.

Connor couldn’t ask her telepathically what was going on with the jammers in place, but he could tell from the way her eyes were squeezed slightly that she was angry.

“Spit it out.”

“Three factories just got hit by massive ‘malfunctions.’ Too many and too severe to be an accident. I think we’re under attack, but there are no orbital or other contacts.”

“Casualties?”

“Many. Most will survive, but we’ve already lost 4 Kiritak and two Humans.”

A distant snowball shot towards them and Carrie angrily knocked it out of the sky with another Jumat blast…a psionic Connor had shared with her early and that she was still learning to use, but at least her aim was spot on.

“Tell the others to stand down and turn the jammer off,” Connor told the nearest Elves, signaling with his hand for them to run off and make it so. Several did, but Carrie just waited for what her Master decided to do…though there was only one choice.

“Let’s go,” he said, with her immediately signaling the speeder to lower via the dark brown armor that she wore helmetless. Before the small bike got all the way down Connor jumped up to it, with Carrie following a moment later and opening the rear hatch while hanging onto the side.

“Hold up,” she said, pulling out an approximate cube of silver/pink material.

Connor took the compact armor without saying a word, getting the clear impression that his Padawan thought he was in danger out here, and as he activated it and had the material fold around him body and encase him in his ViLord Archon armor he felt the Ikrid jammer cut out, allowing him to telepathically communicate with the Elves again.

We have a possible security threat. Cancel all training activities and assume defensive positions. I don’t know what’s going on, but do not let yourself get caught off guard.

With that Connor sat down on the speeder with Carrie behind him and they zipped off across the snowy plains as he commed for a dropship to come and meet them enroute.

“Best guess?” he asked her after they had things set in motion.

“Sabotage, but there’s no sign of it yet. I don’t think 3 massive malfunctions would happen simultaneously. Theoretically one shouldn’t even be able to happen.”

“What kind of malfunctions?”

“The kind where molten material goes places it’s not supposed to and safety shields do not engage.”

“Shit…”

“Exactly. And the Duke is still AWOL. Zander is going after her.”

“There’s nothing she can do right now. This is our job.”

“He’s worried about her being a target.”

Connor mentally frowned, sending the telepathic impulse to his Apprentice. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“It’s early, but some of the sabotage is suspected to be hacking. And how many people can hack our systems?”

“Quite a few, actually.”

“And how many of them would dare blow stuff up at the same time?”

“You have a point.”

“We only have three Archons on the planet. If there are Zen’zat infiltrators here…”

“That’s why we have Regulars, Carrie. They’re not helpless.”

“I’ve still got a bad feeling about this.”

“Just work the problem,” he said, with them staying silent for the remainder of the time before the dropship finally got to them. It didn’t bother landing, rather just flew out ahead of the speeder and opened the rear hatch. The Archons flew inside, then the dropship rocketed off taking them back towards the equatorial cities far faster than the speeder ever could…and the sooner the Archons could get on scene the better.

Especially if there were Zen’zat here that they’d have to hunt down. He almost wished it was internal sabotage, but knew the Star Force crews here were too good for that. This had to be an exterior attack, and if that was the case his Padawan was probably right about it being the V’kit’no’sat.

And if they were all the way out here, it wasn’t by accident. It was because of the work they were doing with the Elves…meaning they were all in considerable danger and totally unprepared for what might be coming their way.

6

February 25, 4827

Tauriel System (Seon Region)

Eoxion

Jessica was laid out on top of a warm rock ledge with the nearest sun high in the sky, bathing the dry, barren landscape with a windless heat as she and 9 Stone Elves soaked up the warmth. The Duke had already started to tan heavily over the week she’d been here, having gotten far more sunlight than she had in centuries. In fact she couldn’t remember being this dark since her early days back in New Zealand long before the V’kit’no’sat had ripped that island chain to shreds.

Her home at that time had been Epsilon Eridani, but even there she was indoors constantly. There was plenty of light indoors…with Star Force having a ‘light’ theme to its architecture. There were strips, beams, orbs, and little bits of light added everywhere to the rooms, corridors, and chambers inside Star Force cities. So much so they ended up not having very many windows to the natural environment outside.

That kept tanning almost non-existent. With genetic alterations people could customize their skin to whatever shade or color they wanted, but the natural tanning procedure was almost an afterthought now. During her time in her first home she and others would use artificial tanning beds to get darker, for New Zealand wasn’t exactly near the equator where you got more direct sunlight, but now there were literally no tanning beds available in Star Force. There was no market for it and no reason, for the Human body tanned as a countermeasure to too much sunlight and the old cities on Earth had people walking outdoors to get from building to building.

Now that wasn’t the case, with undercities that allowed you to go everywhere without setting one foot on the surface, making a city literally one gigantic building with many, many rooms. Gone also was the country living, the farms, the single houses…even the suburbs. No one owned property anymore, merely leasing buildings from Star Force as they designed all cities. That was one of the primary jobs of Monarchs, designing the infrastructure for each planet to make the most out of what they had, and all private citizens and businesses operated off of that cityscape.

Sure, they might rebuild the inside of a factory, but the factory frame wasn’t theirs to change and was leased from Star Force. That meant every factory shell, at least, was built and maintained by the empire. Same went for all land. There was no private ownership, so everyone lived in cities or outposts as Star Force wished, close to security and safety personnel and beneath the protection of energy shields and armor plating on the city exterior.

Those cities also protected from varying levels of sunlight at different latitudes and in systems with different types of stars. That kept everyone inside adapting to the same levels, rather than old Earth where you had Humans with a variety of different tanning levels that were passed in some part to their offspring. That’s why those populations living near the equator had ‘black’ skin and those living further toward the poles had ‘white’ skin. It was the accumulation of tanning, or lack thereof, over the generations.

When Earth developed to the point where people weren’t confined to within 100 miles of where they were born and could move across the planet at will, all the tanning levels got mixed up and you had dark skinned people living near the poles and light skinned people moving to the equator. They didn’t change their base tan, because that came with their inherited genetics, but they did adapt to where they were living and then passed that adaptation along with their base genetics on to their offspring.

Add to that the better living conditions that kept people indoors more and out of the sun less and you had the pseudorace mythology thrown on its head even before Star Force took over and reworked the planet with proper infrastructure…but now it was a moot point entirely. Everyone knew Jessica’s race was Human, and ‘white’ was just a color.

It was also the color of all Humans, now that they didn’t live outdoors and the various tanning levels that had been baked in over the generations had gradually diminished. Now all Humans being born were white…at least until they decided to get some genetic alteration to make them darker, blue, spotted, stripped, bioluminescent, or whatever else they wanted...and those did not pass on through reproduction.

That left natural tanning an obscure thing that only those born long ago even knew about, and Jessica was glad that the Stone Elves had brought it back. She had to make sure not to get burnt with them, for they literally couldn’t burn as their grey-skinned bodies soaked up the energy from the sun and other sources thanks to their tier 3 Beynat psionic that was linked to their Nakane…otherwise known as ‘bioshield.’ Jessica had that one, but not Beynat, which allowed the Stone Elves and the Archons that had it to funnel the energy into recharging their bioshield, meaning that when someone shot them with an energy weapon it would partly recharge their bioshield at the same time.

The Stone Elves differentiated themselves from the other Clans, in addition to their grey skin, with the Mebvat psionic that made their bones so hard they rarely broke. The old adage about jaw bones winning out against knuckles didn’t apply with the Stone Elves, for their tiny hand bones could break jaws when enough force was applied.

But Jessica didn’t care about that, for she wasn’t going to be getting into a fist fight with any of them. They liked coming topside from their subsurface, dwarf-like cities to sip on the energy from the sun, especially when all 3 were in the sky, because they like preferred carrying a little extra charge around in their bodies just in case…as well as using the time laying out as a form of meditation, with all the Elves here not reaching out to the others’ minds as a courtesy.

Jessica’s couldn’t be accessed anyway, and she wasn’t in a prying mood so she just laid out with them…her skin redding far sooner than she liked and causing her to head back down far before the Stone Elves did. Their grey skin didn’t tan at all unless their Beynat failed or was full, so they really didn’t have a time limit out here and would spend several hours once or twice a week to refill their Beynat, only to see it gradually bleed off even if they didn’t use it to boost their bioshields…which operated off a different internal supply.

The Duke’s ring, setting beside her left leg so it didn’t shade her finger and give her a tan line, pinged when its timer expired. Jessica was laying on her chest and slowly rolled over, making sure not to scrape her soft skin on the rocks as she flipped over, turning her warm half downward and exposing her semi-cool front to the sky as her ring automatically reset to give her another tanning cycle without her having to worry about the time, allowing her mind to roam wherever it liked.

And no matter how much she allowed herself to be momentarily distracted, her thoughts would eventually circle back to the Zezdi. While Jessica was feeling immensely better and her mental haze had been bled away by the Elves’ persistent hammering on her to loosen up, her Monarch mind couldn’t get away from work for too long. But at least here she would work on the problem while relaxing, rather than figuratively banging her head against a wall until she came up with something.

This half of today’s tanning session didn’t last long, for a telepathic impulse hit her and the Elves, signaling there was some concern as a ship was incoming. A few of the Elves sat up, but Jessica didn’t. They’d told her she needed to react less and see more, so she used her telepathy to mix with theirs and see through their eyes while she continued tanning evenly.

Eventually the Star Force speeder landed on another flat rock shelf nearby and an Archon jumped out, heading over to the Elves who all stood and padded over the rocks on bare feet to meet him.

Jessica stayed put, seeing that he was obviously coming to her, and choosing to remain as relaxed as possible. He might be here to pull her away on business, but more than likely he had just tracked her down to make fun of her for taking so much time off…or something. Either way, she was going to continue her vacation until she had a reason not to, which right now meant soaking up more sun.

Zander-1538834 walked over to her as the Elves happily surrounded him, then the Mage’s showed crossed over her bare chest as she squinted up at him.

“You’re in my sun.”

“I thought you were the Ice Queen? Why haven’t you melted?”

“If I stay out too long I will. Feel free to strip down and join us.”

“Not why I’m here. We have to go…now,” he said, far too firmly.

Jessica frowned and sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“Not totally sure, but best guess is V’kit’no’sat sabotage teams. Three factories have been hit and people are dead, but there’s no sight of who did it. They have to be wearing stealth suits, meaning they could be anywhere on the planet and could very well be coming after you.”

“Nobody knows I’m here,” she said, standing up to face him.

“I know. Took a while to find you, but I can’t take the chance of one of them getting you. You’re coming with me and the rest of you,” he said, glancing at the nude Elves, “are going into high surveillance and defense mode. It’s possible that you will come under attack too, so get ready. The Duke is coming with me, the rest of you get inside. Orders will follow.”

The Stone Elves were suddenly a buzz of telepathic chatter, with it extending down into the city and exploding there, but they didn’t delay in carrying out the Archon’s instruction and quickly began grabbing their clothes from the neat piles they’d made of them on the stone, then ran over to the subsurface entrances before even pulling them on.

Within seconds they were gone, leaving Zander and a naked Jessica by themselves on a landscape that was without a single living thing…tree, bush, or even insect…other than the two of them.

“Where are yours?”

“I haven’t worn clothes in weeks,” she said, grabbing her ring and slipping it back on while Zander raised an eyebrow. “Elf therapy. Let’s go…I’m not shy,” the Duke asked, softly jogging on bare feet towards the speeder as the Archon protectively kept pace beside her in his armor. “How many people are dead?”

“I feel it,” Belinda said to Tahiri as they ran through The Wood, hopping over a fallen tree and sliding slightly on the mossy ground as their sandal-clad feet hit it, “…but I can’t see it.”

“Same,” the other Wood Elf said, running towards the blankness in The Wood. “I wonder what it is?”

“Maybe an Archon?” Belinda floated. “But we can always see them when they visit. I don’t understand how The Wood can be blind.”

“I don’t know,” Tahiri added, ducking under a branch and making a slight left turn. “Only one way to find out.”

As the two Wood Elves continued to run, they saw what was ahead of them using their Clan’s special psionic. No one else had it, and even Archons couldn’t us it. It was an altered version of Pefbar that not only the Wood Elves had, allowing them to see in the dark and even through some objects, but the trees had it as well.

Not every tree on the planet, but the ones in The Wood did and they shared what they saw with the other trees and the Wood Elves through something like telepathy, but it wasn’t. They had to be in range of their own ‘Wood Sight’ that extended a few meters for the very young and a few hundred for the older Wood Elves, but so long as they were within the ‘sight’ of a tree or another Wood Elf, they acted like relays expanding the coverage.

Belinda and Tihiri could see everywhere in The Wood if they focused their minds, even zooming in on a particular spot if they needed greater detail, but the empty spot moving slowly through The Wood was obvious. It didn’t belong, and the two Wood Elves could feel others more distant heading their way, probably also to investigate, but they were too far away to communicate telepathically. The trees didn’t help with that, but the Elves could see each other and this pair intended to be the first ones to get to and find out what this anomaly was.

They weren’t warriors, let alone rangers, but The Wood was their home and these two brown haired Elves were out on a long walk far from their closest village when the anomaly entered on the eastern border. It was coming further in, but not in a hurry and the Elves were moving with such haste that they were not in danger of losing it…but they still couldn’t see it. It was like The Wood’s sight didn’t exist in that spot.

Sometimes the Archons felt that way, but not always. When they were here the trees could still see them even if they couldn’t touch them, for they also acted like passive sensors and could absorb light, heat, and other things that could then be added to The Wood sight, letting the Elves see beyond the borders without being able to feel what was out there.

But where this emptiness was moving through The Wood there was nothing to see…but it was leaving tracks. Subtle depressions here and there where the ground was soft, and as soon as the emptiness passed The Wood could feel the depressions. These Elves were too young and inexperienced to be able to compare the before and after, but others were not and they were sprinting towards this location from afar but unable to warn these two curious explorers because they were still outside of telepathic range.

One ranger, however, was on the way but unable to see what was happening. She wasn’t a Wood Elf, but a visiting Sky Elf coming out from Tiolla village flying extremely fast above the trees. She didn’t get to them in time, but she did get within telepathic range just before they got to the anomaly.

Do not approach! she warned. There is danger. Turn and run, now!

The two Elves skidded to a halt, but hesitated from turning around. What is it?

Run to me, it comes for you now! Move!

Belinda and Tahiri suddenly felt the blankness accelerate...and in their direction. Not knowing what was going on they took the Sky Elf’s word and began running in the direction she was approaching from with the blankness increasing in size as it sped towards them.

When it finally crossed over them their connection to The Wood disappeared, feeling as if it was ripped from them. Their own little sphere of ‘sight’ was also stripped from them…then their feet were knocked sideways by something invisible and both fell in tandem.

Tahiri looked at Belinda, confusion and worry on her face…then shock as the Wood Elf was pulled backwards, dragged through the short grass and bits of mud.

“Tahiri!” Belinda yelled, but when she tried to get up her legs were frozen in place…but there was nothing touching her.

The other Elf moved about 20 meters before being drawn up in the air, upside down, and hanging by her legs from nothing as she squirmed around trying to free herself.

Belinda could feel her fear and worry, their telepathic bond running strong…but then a poison leapt into it. Tahiri’s mind seized up along with her body and Belinda could feel another mind taking control of her friend.

She did what any good Elf would do, giving her as much telepathic backup as she could, but against this poison their combined strength was useless. If it wanted to take Belinda as well it could, but it didn’t even seem to care that she was there as Tahiri’s memories were being drained and the Elf was interrogated in forceful ways to give up their secrets.

Belinda had never thought the Elvish minds weak, but this was something far beyond them and…

Energy blasts rained down through the wood, burning leaves and branches as they shot into the blankness from the Sky Elf’s Battle Gauntlets as she came into view high up but didn’t descend all the way to ground. Most of the golden blasts hit the ground and exploded the dirt, showering Belinda and Tahiri with hot sprays of vaporized water and burnt mud and grass, but some hit something else and the Elves saw for the first time what was creating the blankness.

It was a person…a huge person nearly 8 feet tall and wearing black/green armor across its entire body. It was bathed in invisibility, but each time the Sky Elf’s shots hit it disrupted that invisibility and let them see what was…

Suddenly Tahiri was dropped and it was the Sky Elf that got dragged down, almost into physical range of the intruder, but the ranger managed to free herself and fly back upward, firing nonstop from both weapons attached to her forearms as her blonde hair free flowed across her shoulders.

Run! she repeated, and suddenly the grasp on Belinda’s feet disappeared.

Tahiri sprinted away a different direction and Belinda didn’t wait either. Both scattered, trying to get away from the intruder, but Belinda was tripped again and ran head first into a tree…but she could feel now, now outside the blankness, and her feet were not locked in place again, so she continued to run as far as she could go while the Sky Elf fought behind her, most of which she still could not see in her Wood sight.

As soon as the Sky Elf demonstrated her Rentar ability the Zen’zat leapt straight up, firing a few Dre’mo’don blasts as he did to disorient her with shield strikes as he got hold of her ankle…then he dragged her down to the ground with him, taking her point blank shots and weathering the storm before punching her once in the gut.

The blow came so hard it penetrate the Elves’ shields, and with her wearing no armor even the slightest hit to the midsection doubled her over, knocking the wind out of her until the following slap to her head knocked her unconscious entirely.

An unnecessary hit, for this Elf had no Ikrid block and the Zen’zat could have taken control of her mind from range if needed, but she was stronger and his domination of her mind might not be instantaneous. More were coming, he knew, from what he’d learned of the other Elf, and he needed to raid this one’s mind quickly…which was easier when she was unconscious and not fighting back.

Ronoken drained valuable information from her, then something that he had not anticipated happened. Several of the trees nearby moved…actually twisting and swinging their branches down towards him. At first he thought it was broken and fallen, then he realized it wasn’t an accident as one swept right into him and tried to knock him away from the Sky Elf.

It was slow and he easily jumped over it, but the branch and others pulled over the prone Elf as if guarding her. A few more reached for the Zen’zat and he blasted one of them apart, telekinetically grabbing a shard of wood and drawing it to him as he sensed more minds on the horizon approaching at decent speed. All were on foot, but he was going to have to act quickly or some of them might get away.

He slid the sample of wood into a slot behind his left shoulder and reached down to the Sky Elf, who was now covered with branches that would have made a decent cage to keep others out, but they did nothing to guard against Lachka and Ronoken easily crushed her skull and scrambled her brains inside, killing her and making it impossible for her to be revived later.

After that he was off running through the forest chasing after the two young ones. The trees seemed to defy him, twisting and swatting and trying to keep him from getting to them but he was too fast and his prey was too slow. He caught and killed the first one with a Dre’mo’don shot to her back, then made her unrevivable with a quick telekinetic jerk before running off the other way and tracking down the other one.

She was moving fast, but nowhere near the speed that Ronoken was capable of. When he got close he telekinetically grabbed her, yanking her back through the air towards him then punched into her back, breaking it with a single blow then leaving her dead and unrevivable as well.

More Elves were coming, and he picked one to go after, engaging his stealth field again and trying to flank the approaching heretic, but somehow he knew where Ronoken was and avoided him. The Elf was obviously trying to buy time for others to engage with, but that wouldn’t save him. The Zen’zat let three of them arrive, then he chased down and forced a fight that left two of them dead and the third held in a telepathic trance as Ronoken searched his mind for an answer to the trees…finding that they had been bioengineered to be a weapon and sensor platform these heretics could telepathically access.

They could see his Pefbar field moving through them…which meant he had to leave. This forest could track his movements, and that was no good. He didn’t want to attract too much attention, so he killed this last Elf and took a small tissue sample that he added to his stash, then ran off back towards the eastern edge of the forest. When he got there he reengaged his stealth and disappeared from Star Force’s tracking again…this time knowing to stay clear of this type of trees.

He’d have to do his hunting elsewhere, otherwise a starship in orbit could target his location and scratch him off with ease or aerial fights could strafe his position…assuming they could coordinate these telepathic sensors with their battlemap technology, and Ronoken wasn’t going to assume they couldn’t.

7

March 2, 4827

Tauriel System (Seon Region)

Eoxion

Jessica sat on her ice throne, now fully clothed, surrounded in status holograms monitoring the cleanup and repair efforts at the now 8 factories destroyed. In addition to that ongoing mess a total of 19 Elves had been killed by what was reported to be a lone Zen’zat hunting them…first in The Wood and more recently on the Ice Plains. All the Elves were now in lockdown mode and armored up so the Zen’zat couldn’t kill them with a mere thought, but they were clearly outmatched and a few of the Commandos and Knights on other planets in this system had been dispatched to augment their defenses.

It turned the Duke’s stomach to think of them being hunted down and killed so easily, but she wasn’t thinking of them now any more than necessary. The Archons were out trying to track down both the hunter and the sabotage parties…but in truth it was the infrastructure damage that was giving Jessica headaches. She abhorred the deaths on her planet, but from a management standpoint she wasn’t going to be short on personnel because of the losses.

But the factory damage was starting to add up and it was imbalancing her carefully laid out production schedule.

In order for a Monarch to get maximum production out of a planet they needed exactly the right amount of material resources being gathered to match the number of factories where they processed those materials into components. Then she needed either exports of those components to other systems or the local assembly apparatus to use them…which meant shipyards for the big stuff or alternate factories for smaller items like clothing, hand weapons, food, etc.

She had a lot of mobile construction teams that could build just about anything on site, and some of them were deployed to the damaged factories to rebuild inside the intact shells, but they didn’t work fast. Even the most elite Kiritak team couldn’t match the output of an assembly line set up to produce exactly the same thing over and over again. The construction teams were meant to get odd work down in odd places, not to crank out produce, and attesting to her supply chain problem Jessica had warning holograms floating all around her head indicating disruptions.

The raw materials coming in from the mining sector were piling up, and while she had warehouses to store them in they were not unlimited. She’d already sent a construction team to start building some additional ones, because if she could not get the factories up and running again the mining produce would eventually overflow the current warehouses and they’d either have to stop mining more or start piling it up on the surface of an airless world called Dantolin where most of the warehouses were.

She knew there had to be a V’kit’no’sat stealth ship in the system somewhere, but if they started piling the valuable resources in plain sight all it would take was a little orbital bombardment to waste weeks’ worth of effort…or another clever sabotage team getting to it, though as of yet no planet in the system had been hit other than Eoxion.

Jessica still had a lot of processing factories up and running, so it wasn’t as if her total supply system was shut down, but the backup was building and the sabotage teams were still out and about. So far none of them had been detected, let alone stopped, and the extra security going up was slowing production a tick on its own.

That meant what was coming out of the first tier factories was greatly reduced…currently down 13%...and that left second tier factories operating below threshold. They needed more refined material but they didn’t have it, so a lot of workers were left just twiddling their fingers as they had nothing to do and wouldn’t until Jessica could get the damaged factories back up and running.

She wanted to kick herself for not having backups, but ever since she’d been given this assignment she’d been building out of panic rather than patient planning. The V’kit’no’sat war wasn’t going to be put on pause while she set up proper infrastructure, so she’d been going for maximum production from day 1 and that left no backups for when something went wrong.

Typically, if she’d been able to build freely, she’d have more factories than workers and have them operating at about 60% capacity. The trouble with that was she’d have to build a lot of excess infrastructure that she wasn’t using and that would be wasteful. She wasn’t the only Monarch in the Seon Region, and their combined exports were already far lower than the other rimward regions due to the amount of supplies their client races required.

The first factory to get hit had been one forging armor plating for the warship drones…which was the #1 priority export for all of Star Force territory. Five out of 7 drones produced in Jessica’s realm were sent to the V’kit’no’sat front, 1 was sent to the rimward front, and 1 was kept locally to gradually build up her defense fleets and to deal with local threats that kept trimming that number down occasionally.

The other Monarchs in the Seon Region were maintaining at least a 50% export rate to the V’kit’no’sat front, with hers at 71%, but the more developed ones in the heart of what was now Star Force territory were all in excess of 87% and producing in far greater numbers than Jessica could even spit at. The trailblazers needed as many drones as possible to replace what they were losing in battle, so Jessica had built up her infrastructure to produce as many as fast as she could, balancing her supply chain damn near perfectly and counting on uninterrupted production in this quiet, out of the way system that nobody really cared about.

But now that’d been wrecked and her shipyards producing the drones were grinding to a halt. The Zen’zat had been smart in the strikes they made, and as of now only one drone hull armor factory was still functioning. She’d had 4 originally, and with 3 down that meant she was at…23% production capacity at the moment. Jessica was waiting for that number to tick up a bit when the first section of repairs were made at the first factory hit, but so far nothing was coming through and even if it started there was no guarantee the sabotage teams wouldn’t just hit it again.

The last intact factory was the primary target and the Archons had it buttoned down tight, but there was no guarantee she was going to be able to hold it, and the shipments of raw materials coming in had to be scrutinized, as did the arriving workers, and that was slowing down output and causing the factory to operate at 94% rather than the normal, smooth flowing 100%.

All of which meant the shipyards in orbit where the drones were being built would continue at 100% until they ran out of armor plating, then they’d have to pause all construction in slips that wasn’t receiving that remaining 23%. Jessica could choose to give a little to everyone or route it all into a few slips, the latter of which was the most beneficial, for when those drones were completed the slips could be cleared and new framework started.

But that left nearly finished drones just sitting in the other slips taking up space as they waited for hull armor to get to them, so she’d ordered those unfinished hulks removed so new ones could begin construction, with the 19 Warship-class jumpships in the system emptying their carrying capacity and having their drones free fly while the unarmored ones were moved to and taken in by those vessels for safekeeping…but they’d fill up eventually, meaning it was only a temporary time saving measure.

Then there were the other factories being hit, one of which was a bioharvest facility. The indoor growth pods hadn’t been damaged, for there were so many stretched across miles of facility it would be hard to do much damage to them without a warship overhead. No, the saboteurs had hit the mechanized part of the process where grains, nuts, fruits, tubers, and other produce was harvested and processed. It was the factory part of the bioharvest facility that had been hit and damaged, which again caused a pileup of raw foodstuffs that couldn’t be dealt with locally.

Thankfully there were manual ways of harvesting the crops and the Duke had assembled emergency teams to keep the flow going and reroute it directly to the cooks who would then have extra duties preparing it. Also, foodstuff supply was one area that necessitated redundancy, so Eoxion was producing more than it needed and laying emergency supplies away continuously from 729 different bioharvest factories on this planet alone. The disruption in only one of them might not seem significant, but it did matter and was one more thing Jessica had to account for as she shifted resources and people everywhere trying to put out figurative fires before they started as the literal ones continued to pop up.

And just now another one did. A warning came across from a drone frame production facility along the equator. Massive malfunctions were occurring and the emergency shutdown procedures were locking the entire factory down at the first sign of a glitch to mitigate the damage, but multiple explosions were being reported internally with no sign of…

Wait. There was something going on. A ‘curiosity’ flag had been pinged on the battlemap indicating that someone should take a look at it. Jessica knew security would be handling it but she zoomed in on the location and saw a string of Kiritak workers leaving the facility…but they weren’t. Rather they were running around in a circle and…

Then Jessica saw it, zooming down even lower, and a group of them were jumping on something invisible and trying to hold on to it as security was running towards them. The Duke saw several of the smaller Kiritak get thrown through the air like cannon balls, but others rushed to replace them and dove at what they could not see but could still feel.

Then several stun blasts were fired as non-Commando security officers in armor ran up and just fired on the ball of Kiritak with enough shots getting through them to disrupt the stealth field beneath. When that happened the computer operating the sensors immediately tagged Zen’zat armor and alarms sounded across the planet for those watching the appropriate screens.

The Zen’zat, apparently knowing his cover had been blown, dropped the stealth and began shooting back with the security officers all but running away as the Kiritak scattered. It wasn’t until the shields of two security officers were breached and they were lying on the ground with holes burnt in their armor did a security Commando finally arrive with a few other non-Commandos with her. Apparently she ordered them to stay at range and shoot while she rushed the larger green/black silhouette.

She didn’t make it far, for another invisible body slammed into hers and threw her aside…then both Zen’zat took off running under a hail of fire.

Jessica wanted to watch but knew she couldn’t, letting it go and knowing the Archons would be organizing everything from afar as she watched the readouts from the factory get worse and worse, finally plateauing at less than full damage as production ground to a halt. With a combination of minds’ eye and the holograms she quickly got readouts on what had been damaged and began calculating time for repair as she immediately sent construction crews there to start cleanup and repair.

The loss of this factory would slow the orbital drone production even more, for with less framework available the slips she was opening up by transporting the armorless drones away would soon begin to go dark as the lack of material finally caught up to them. That hadn’t happened yet, though they were only a few weeks away, and the additional loss of part of this factory would only snowball that in about 3 weeks time.

Jessica slammed her right fist down onto the ice-like smooth armrest of her throne. She wished she had an army of Archons here to hunt these bastards down, or even a few Arc Commandos or Arc Knights who could see through these damn stealth fields with their Pefbar, but all she had was the 3 Archons and herself. No one else on the planet had Pefbar and the reinforcements from other systems hadn’t arrived yet…not to say there were many coming, for the Archons assigned to her realm numbered all of 23 and she had no Arc Commandos or Arc Knights.

Her territory was not on the warfront, V’kit’no’sat or Rim, so there was no point in wasting their presence here when there was plenty of fighting to do elsewhere. Some Archons had to be around just in case, and those here were mainly helping with the development of the Elves, but she was not equipped to fight this type of invasion.

Sure, she had plenty of Commandos and Knights, and if these Zen’zat were visible they could take care of them, but only the security stations, her castle, and a few other valuable locations had ‘Mist’ scanners, which was the common term for technological Pefbar that covered an area with an energy field and could feel anything that moved through it. The stealth fields these Zen’zat were operating with wouldn’t work on the Mist scanner, so she was fairly safe here in her castle…assuming they tried to get in the front door and not go through a wall…but nowhere else on the planet had them.

There were portable units that the Archons had deployed to their best guesses for upcoming targets, but there were far too few and despite her reallocation of resources to start mass producing more there was no way to throw down a wide enough net across all her cities without a decade of prep work…and with this being a quiet system geared for maximum exports she’d never had reason to do so before, but was regretting it heavily now.

Maybe now that a Zen’zat had been spotted the Archons could run them down, but Jessica wasn’t counting on it. The Wood Elves realm was the safest place to be now, for their biological sensory net was programmed to withdraw from the presence of a Pefbar field and that’s apparently how the Zen’zat navigated when fully stealthed. That meant whenever one went into The Wood the Elves could feel the blank spot, as they had initially, though not before they all recognized the threat.

Since then there had been no more incursions there, and Jessica wished she’d planted more of the Ysalamiri trees in the city. As it was there were none save for one in the bottom of her castle. It had been the first one created, and not only did it produce a detection field over 100 meters in radius, it could move its branches like arms when so directed, taking on different shapes to create steps or platforms, or even to hit enemies that were stupid enough to stand beneath it.

Only the Wood Elves could control it, though, and that was by design. Even she and the Archons couldn’t tap into the ‘sight’ of The Wood, though the Elves could pass it onto them telepathically like any other thought.

As bad as this situation was, it could have been a lot worse and Jessica was grateful they didn’t have an enemy fleet over their head firing down on the planet. But while she was responsible for her realm she also had a responsibility to aid those on the fronts with exports, and every attack that happened chipped away at her ability to do so. Eoxion was her major export producer, and if these sabotage teams continued this rampage Jessica was going to have to face self-sufficiency problems of her own…and she did not want to have to ask for support from other realms.

While Monarchs always helped each other out, it was with heavy shame that one became a burden to the others. They were meant to be the ones planning and preparing for the bad days so that they could support others…to become needy meant failure, and Jessica was quite angry to have these invisible little pricks tearing apart everything she’d been building on top of the deaths they were racking up.

Of the 15 regions in what was currently Star Force territory…not counting what was lost in the now Devastation Zone…Seon held a place on the Rimward border, but it was a long territory and Jessica’s realm was in the coreward half butting up against the central Deu and Pavana Regions. Deu connected to the largest Region, simply designated ‘Rim’ because it had originally been the ‘Rim Region’ when Star Force first acquired The Nexus expansion races. A great deal more had been added since, but the Rim Region was now the coreward border, and that fact underlined how much territory was being lost to the V’kit’no’sat.

Which was why Davis had left the name ‘Rim Region’ intact, as a reminder, as he worked out of the Totana Region. It was on rim border and heavily involved in expansion fighting as trailblazer Steve-004 was pushing outward trying to get to the Neerson race…one of the abandoned Nexus races that had long ago applied for membership in Star Force. Yori-007 was with them now, trying to help them survive until the border could reach out to them, with Davis working to integrate and sustain those other smaller races being added to the empire with limited supplies.

The Director was making more out of less in a way that inspired Jessica whenever she checked on his status updates, with all the Monarchs able to watch each other in order to better coordinate resources. There was so much she’d learned from just watching him, and Jessica always took any opportunity she could to communicate with, let alone visit the Director and the Arch Dukes, who all were true masterminds of logistics and civilization creation.

It had been Davis that had personally chosen Jessica for her elevation to Monarch back before that’d even been the official designator. He’d made her a Baron, like he did with everyone else he found worthy of this high position of responsibility, and Jessica was proud to have risen all the way to Duke since, but he’d chosen her from outside Star Force unlike everyone else that had come from within.

She’d always felt that in some way he expected more of her and she’d wanted to live up to that benchmark, and when she’d been assigned as the replacement for Arch Duke Hightower in Epsilon Eridani Jessica felt that had validated her. It was the second most important system within Star Force and she’d been entrusted to guard and cultivate it while the best of the best went rimward to work their magic on the frontier.

When Epsilon Eridani fell it hadn’t been a surprise, but what it did to Jessica had been. She’d felt hollow and useless afterwards…not because of failure, but because her ability to do anything had been stripped from her. A Monarch’s power was in her infrastructure, her population, her cargo fleet, and in a lesser amount her warships and Archons that pretty much did their own independent thing. When she’d lost the second most powerful system in the empire she’d been left with just being Jessica again, and she’d hated that. It was like she’d been elevated to superhero status then had the enemy suck away that superpower.

She’d gone back to being normal…and normal was awful. She couldn’t help anyone, and somehow worse was the way that she’d been eliminated from the action. Jessica was out of the club, even while still being a Monarch, and that had felt so wrong.

The Director had seen it differently, but then again he was never out of the club. He had built the club and the whole of the empire was his to command. After Epsilon Eridani Jessica had nothing of her own to command until Davis had given her this startup…an agonizing process for a Duke who was used to dealing with so much, but it was her chance to get back in the club and she’d been dutifully increasing her industrial power to this day. Even with all her current systems combined they were no comparison for what Epsilon Eridani had been on its own, but this realm was hers again and she was a player on the empire-wide scene...albeit a small one, but entrusted with a project key to Star Force’s future.

Now that project was under attack and her infrastructure was being stripped from her a piece at a time with her unable to do anything about it. The Archons handled security, not Monarchs, and she didn’t blame the 3 here for what was happening. It was fate that she was upset with, that after all this time and effort she was beginning to be diminished again…and with trillions of people on the rim front living or dying by the supplies the Monarchs could export to them, it wasn’t a selfish desire for power that was driving Jessica, but rather the reverse. She needed to be in the game in order to help protect people…and here she was getting booted from it again.

She wasn’t out yet, and it would take a handful of saboteurs a long time to take down everything she’d built across 18 systems, but she could see it happening all over again, this time in slow motion, and the helplessness she was feeling to stop it was making her sick to her stomach as she tried to mitigate the damage and reroute resources and personnel to combat this…but it felt like a hopeless endeavor that she was just stretching out longer.

But she’d do it, if only to give the Archons more time to find and stop these bastards. They might be able to, or maybe they wouldn’t. She didn’t know, but she’d give them and the rest of the people in her realm every advantage she could. That was her responsibility and privilege, and if her power was going to be taken from her yet again she’d go down fighting…if only out of spite to do everything she possibly could.

Davis had taught her that after Epsilon Eridani, for he’d had to watch from afar as his Sol had been taken, including Earth, and she had to admit that was far worse. She’d only inherited Epsilon Eridani, not created it from scratch like Hightower had.

So she was going to fight this to whatever end, for that was her duty and privilege. For the moment she still had power to act with. They hadn’t taken it from her yet.

And if they were going to, she was going to be as stubborn and steadfast as possible, making them rip it away from her with all force.

That’s what Davis had told her to be, no matter how much it hurt in the process. Despair was something she could dwell on after it was all over.

So Jessica sat in her control throne sending out widescale orders and micromanaging even the slightest of others. Anywhere and everywhere she could get traction on this she would, for she was a Monarch and she was not just going to take this lying down…and even one additional drone sent to the front would make a difference, for they needed all they could get.

8

Connor sprinted across the top of an industrial building near to where the sabotage had recently gone down, stopping momentarily to reach back to Carrie, who was lagging behind, with a Bataf conduit. The energy field stretched out between them, linked in battlemeld, and allowed him to pull her towards him…essentially reeling in a solid string connecting them only to use it as a pole vault at the very end and send her flying out ahead of him.

She landed on the roof of the next building with the ViLord sprinting and jumping across the gap, closing in on his slower Apprentice as they managed to stay within Ikrid range of one of the Zen’zat that was now fleeing the brief battle. The Kiritak and security forces had managed to identify and delay him just enough for the Archon pair to get to the approximate location and send out a Neritu pulse…an upgraded version of Ikrid that used both minds combined with a little special tissue added to greatly increase their range.

They’d gotten 3 pings off it, but had lost the other two as they raced on ahead. The dropship that had brought the Archon in had flown in as close as they could, then they’d fallen to rooftops and continued the pursuit on foot with their psionics being the only way the Zen’zat could be tracked within their stealth fields.

This Zen’zat was fast, but Connor was faster. The problem was he needed Carrie with him and she wasn’t…hence the cheating to push her past her natural speed. Unfortunately Connor hadn’t reached Frieza level yet and obtained the ability to fly, making this an even chase, for no Zen’zat had ever obtained it either as far as the V’kit’no’sat database from millennia ago knew and none had been seen in the time since.

Just before he caught up to the Padawan she jumped off the edge of the building, falling partway to the distant street below where the Zen’zat was sprinting through, but she hit something before she got halfway down and angled to the side in the direction their quarry was running. Carrie stepped from one invisible foothold to another as she descended the stairs that the pair had just created with their Qwe’kal psionic.

Connor was producing them for Carrier to step on, but they were firmly locked to their positions even as he ran…then when he fell he landed on one that she produced for him, with both of them literally running through the air downward as they supported each other until Carrie got to ground a few dozen meters behind where the Zen’zat mental signature was…though they didn’t even need it now, for they were within the Pefbar bubble he was using to navigate with and a telekinetic shove partially slowed Carrie down before she pulsed her Rentar to negate it.

But then she stopped entirely and planted her feet before Connor could get all the way to ground. She let him pull a Jedi jump off of one step, then they both let go their Qwe’kal as a new Bataf formed between them. Carrie’s boots skidded on the pavement as she dragged the invisible conduit that felt as firm as a metal pole over her head via her outstretched hands, adding as much momentum to Connors jump as she could.

Both their minds were linked together, so there was no inefficiency in communication as the ViLord was launched ahead of her and landed on the other side of the Zen’zat…where he released a Jumat blast that knocked the 7 foot tall warrior into a sidewall, disrupting his stealth field momentarily before he disappeared again, but not from both Archons’ Pefbar sight.

Using Carrie to help him, the pair emitted a small Yinbi field around the Zen’zat…which was the same as the IDF used to protect starship crews from acceleration damage. On the Zen’zat it negated gravity and his next step sent him flying up into the air and partially out of the IDF. The two Archons altered it slightly, catching him midair and floating forward on his momentum in a slow cartwheel.

Dre’mo’don blasts came immediately as his stealth field dropped and Connor’s shields began taking some hits, but the Zen’zat was missing as much as he was hitting…then Carrie’s strength hit its limit and the Yinbi failed. It wasn’t her fault, for it was a new psionic to her and they hadn’t practiced it much over the two years she’d had it, but they’d managed to catch the Zen’zat off guard with it…and now it was time to use their nearly full arsenal of battlemeld psionics to take him down.

Connor began with another Jumat, knocking him back as Carrie grabbed his feet in a Lachka hold, tripping him up until he too used his Rentar to free himself. Seeing her dark brown armor in contrast to Connor’s pink, the Zen’zat went for the weaker one, pouring firepower into her shields then swinging down towards her head with his left fist as she dropped to the ground and Connor pulled her through the gap in his legs with another Bataf.

When underneath she hit him with her own weaker Jumat, punching him into the air as she became the Anchor and pulled her Master forward on the Bataf, launching him feet first into the Zen’zat’s back and knocking him to the ground ahead of them as another Pefbar bubble came into view behind them, followed by a spray of Dre’mo’don blasts as another Zen’zat came to assist.

Crap, Connor thought as the two Archons stood up back to back charging their next attack as they also fired Dre’mo’don orbs at the Zen’zat from their own forearm gauntlets…but theirs were less powerful and the Zen’zat shields more so, meaning they were eventually going to lose that exchange if it was allowed to persist.

Suddenly the first Zen’zat got their attention, with both Archon minds focusing on it as he emitted a Wequay telepathic lure. Too late they realized what it was, turning their attention back on the other one as he punched Connor in the chest so hard it knocked him and Carrie back 6 meters and sent them sprawling on the ground while both Zen’zat poured fire into their nearly depleted shields.

Both Archons pulsed their Cerden, linking their bioshields and enhancing them greatly to give their mechanical shields a few seconds breather, then Carrie took off, running into the sky on invisible steps as Connor stayed put on the ground. A few seconds later she dropped to the ground on the other side of the Zen’zat that tried to swat at her leg but missed, then the pair emitted their charged Jumatran from a common focal point between the two…that was now oriented sideways to the Zen’zat that had punched them.

The Jumat-like blast formed as a distortion in the air then launched almost immediately into the Zen’zat with such force that he ricocheted off the building wall, leaving a slight dent in the hard material as dust-like shards of it and his armor fell to the ground as the two Archons went after the other one with Connor turning Carrie into a living weapon, throwing/pulling her balled up body into the other Zen’zat, taking a few shots on the way and knocking him back…but Carrie didn’t bounce off. Instead she grabbed hold and wrapped her body around the Zen’zat while she dragged a Lew conduit from Connor.

That energy ribbon hit the Zen’zat, bypassing its armor that wasn’t designed to stop such things because the V’kit’no’sat were unaware they even existed. It impacted the Zen’zat’s body and delivered the predetermined Ikrid command past the mental blocks that otherwise stopped the Archons from doing to the Zen’zat what the Zen’zat had done to the Elves.

His mind froze up momentarily, with him fighting off the effect soon thereafter, but not before Connor and Carrie turned him into a punching bag, hitting him back and forth between them with physical blows with added Dre’mo’don blasts thrown in where they could manage it. Both Archons pulsed their Tavitor, briefly enhancing their physical strength to really hammer some of the hits home, and before the Zen’zat could recover his shields were down and he was taking armor damage.

The other Zen’zat shook off the unbelievably large Jumat hit and came at Connor from behind, but thanks to Pefbar there was no ‘behind’ as far as vision was concerned and Carrie darted off, walking sideways against an invisible wall halfway across the street from where the physical wall was, and curved around behind the second Zen’zat that was hit with what felt like a physical impact as she dragged the Neofen ‘clothesline’ into him.

He didn’t see it coming, for it was an energy the Pefbar couldn’t detect, and it knocked him sideways into a Connor reverse elbow to his dipping head. The Zen’zat fell backwards as Carrie came forward, landing a diving elbow-first Archon Punch into his back that cracked armor. Connor used his Lachka to drag the flying Zen’zat into a bit of curve and got the two to collide, then Carrie poured more Dre’mo’don fire into them as Connor pulled a small rod off the minimal rack on his back. It elongated into a sword with no sharp edges, and he took it to the Zen’zat as they got back to their feet, using the extra range to stay out of their arms’ reach as he went melee into the nearest one.

Occasionally pulsing his battlemeld Tavitor to really hammer a particular blow home, he broke more bits of armor off them as it flowed across their bodies, getting thinner and thinner as it spread out to cover any small holes. Meanwhile Carrie stayed back getting in several more shots until one of the Zen’zat pushed past Connor and went after her…but she just walked up the invisible steps into the air out of his reach and the two exchanged Dre’mo’don fire until a silent object appeared at the far end of the street and moved towards them as tactical data flowed into their helmets.

Carrie pulsed her Yetu, doing a Jedi jump upwards then hung in midair to create an invisible step for Connor to land on as he did the same…simultaneously creating one for Carrie to land on as both Zen’zat beneath them reactivated their stealth fields, but too late. They disappeared from view as the street beneath the Archons was flooded with bright blue flashes of much larger Dre’mo’dons from the skeet that had dipped down to street level and was gliding forward between the tight sidewalls.

Connor telepathically helped the pilot aim at the invisible targets, though it wasn’t needed as their stealth fields fell with even glancing hits. The two Zen’zat ran the other direction, spreading and trying to get distance on the much faster craft as it zipped by underneath the Archons who were leaping from invisible step to step to follow midair. They got a good view of the green/black Zen’zat armor being blown apart and the first Zen’zat going down, but the other made it to a corner and disappeared from view.

Up, Connor said to Carrie through their battlemeld connection, and both began climbing those invisible stairs up to rooftop again to continue the chase but the second Zen’zat target wasn’t able to reengage his stealth, making him an easy target for the skeet once it rounded the corner. He went down as well, this time in pieces, while the two Archons dropped back down to street level and went to the body of the first Zen’zat, knowing that their armor would revive them from even serious damage so long as their head wasn’t hit too badly or the armor too chewed up.

But that wasn’t the case for this one, who’d they’d hoped to interrogate as to the location or targets of the other one or ones. A full quarter of his head was blown off around his missing right ear, meaning he was unrecoverable for either the armor or the Archons’ healing abilities.

“Well done, Padawan,” Connor said as they released their battlemeld.

“I was in over my head and you know it,” she countered, looking at the few melted spots in her armor, all of which had failed to get all the way through to her skin.

“I couldn’t have taken both of them alone, and even one would have been a challenge. I’ve never seen one with Wequay before, and they both at least had Rentar,” he said, citing both tier 2 psionics.

“Thank you for making me look like a badass.”

“We fight as a team, and that makes our linked pairing a badass. I’m proud of you.”

“They are so damn fast.”

“I know. These aren’t low level Zen’zat. I’d guess high-level Zardaku at least,” he said, referring to the second tier of Zen’zat rankings out of 6…with level 6 being virtually unobtainable.

They both saw the skeet reappear over the buildings and resume a patrol hover. Apparently there were no other targets visible, with at least one other Zen’zat still on the loose nearby, but Connor couldn’t sense anything and guessed he was running for his life at this point…and rightly so.

“Two down,” Carrie noted.

“No clue how many more are left. Hopefully this slows down their sabotage a bit,” he said, rotating his right arm around in a stretching motion and encountering a hitch. It jammed up until he lowered it a bit, meaning it was damaged, but it wasn’t too bad and he didn’t feel like heading back to grab another set just yet. Carrie had damage too, but she was still moving well.

“Next move?”

“Patrol and see if we can get lucky. That one is still relatively close.”

“After you, Master,” she said, feeling his battlemeld prompt and accepting it so she could create the invisible steps for him leading up to the rooftops.

Connor took them in large leaps, able to see them thanks to the battlemeld sharing of their senses and skipped several of them, then when he got to the roof Carrie jumped and he pulled her all the way up on a Bataf conduit, leaving the Zen’zat remains for security to deal with as they ran off at slower speeds and began building hopping again while extending their Ikrid range as far as they could hoping to get lucky and get another Zen’zat hit.

9

March 24, 4827

Tauriel System (Seon Region)

Eoxion

Jessica paced around her throne room, cape trailing in the air behind her as she was too focused and angry to sit still. Even with the deaths of two Zen’zat the sabotage had not stopped or even slowed. More and more of her factories were getting hit and another 28 Elves had been killed…but the one Zen’zat that seemed to be hunting them had been wounded and driven away more than a week ago and there hadn’t been another Elf hit since. Hopefully that would hold, but the loss of the Duke’s infrastructure continued.

The damage wasn’t great, but the disruptions in production were mounting and some of the repair work that had been completed had been hit a second time…infuriating her even further. It was like there was no way to win, and even the handful of other Archons and a team of Mavericks that had arrived hadn’t been able to catch any more Zen’zat. They were still moving about freely, and she had far too many factories on this planet to defend…giving them a plethora of targets to choose from.

And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it other than rebuild, but at the rate the Zen’zat were moving she was losing ground and their ship or ships still hadn’t been located yet despite massive ongoing sensor sweeps. The damage to her factories were being accomplished with explosives and hacking to maximize the damage, but they weren’t obtaining the explosives from here. Her stockpiles were well guarded and mist generators surrounded them now, so the Zen’zat had to be using their own supply.

Were they near to running out or getting additional reinforcements in under her nose? The best time to detect a stealth ship was when it was moving through atmosphere or coming out of a jump and ramming into so much stellar radiation it usually gave off a blip no matter how much it tried to absorb. Star Force had experimented with ways to negate that, but collision speeds of multiple times lightspeed made total capture almost impossible.

But so far there were no arrival pings on any jumpline noted, and Jessica was pumping out more detection satellites to increase sensitivity, but those wouldn’t be in place for months…at least not enough to lock down the system with a fine sensor net.

Jessica was also pouring through the data files coming through the comm grid from the rest of Star Force. Were they also experiencing this and did they have any suggestions of how to proceed?

There was some data on stealth activities, including the Ghostbane sensor, but until Star Force got its own version up and running the V’kit’no’sat were apparently going to have full run of her territory and who knew elsewhere. If their stealth tech had improved to this level then no system was safe.

So why here? Why was her home system the only one under infiltration? The Elves she could understand, but why the sabotage? There were plenty of other systems with more important infrastructure to hit, and a lot closer to the front. So what were they playing at here other than trying to weaken the defenses around the Elves?

Jessica didn’t know. She didn’t know anything and was chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole day in and day out. The Archons were frustrated too, but at least they were out there doing something. All she could do is wait to see what was hit and try to adjust her production lines to compensate, changing her growth into a holding action at best, meaning the longer these Zen’zat ran free sabotaging what they liked, they were doing far more damage in terms of disruptions than they were worth…making this clandestine attack quite the coup.

No shield generators or planetary defenses had been hit yet, thankfully, for she didn’t trust an invasion fleet not to come into the system and wipe out all the Elves in the most efficient way possible. They had to be the key to this…something to do with V’kit’no’sat edicts or paranoia over misuse of psionics…but aside from the lone assassin that seemed to be hunting them the rest of the Zen’zat were ignoring the Elvish cities and going straight for Jessica’s industrial infrastructure.

That made it personal, and she wasn’t going to sit here and…

Jessica stopped pacing, her momentum pulling her cape forward around her body as she was frozen in thought. It wasn’t an attack, but rather an epiphany. Not to do with the Zen’zat attacks, unfortunately, but what she hadn’t been thinking about for weeks…and that being the Zezdi.

“Damn I’m stupid,” she said, forcing thoughts of the Zen’zat and what she couldn’t do aside and focusing on what she could do…namely solving the Zezdi developmental problem whose solution had just hit her out of nowhere.

Jessica walked back over to her throne and sat down, mentally pulling up her holographic interface ringing her with information. She adjusted most of them to data fields, pulling up familiar research she’d been doing while digging up a related post in the medtech advancements. She’d seen this a few years ago, but only now had it popped back into mind…

There. She had the summary up again, including an update that she hadn’t read concerning Star Force’s ability to write genetic memory. Primary research into that area involved the Paladin, but knowledge had been gained from the V’kit’no’sat database that had allowed them to go even further and pack more information into each of the new Paladin born, making them superior upon release from their growth pods.

The reason the Zezdi held onto their offspring so long was to give them the necessary experience and instruction above and beyond the physical development. That gave their parent enormous influence over the 8-12 offspring they carried on their flanks/back in little nodules with their heads poking out. The spider-like race was extremely hive minded but accomplished it without telepathy, primarily due to this long period of coexistence before the younglings disconnected and became independent.

Jessica had originally thought of them as the ‘spider kangaroos’ when she’d been assigned to oversee their conversion and development, and they’d proved to be very resistant to change due primarily to this method of instruction…for while in this state there was some neural connection, meaning their minds were partially linked and that dependency was something that had debilitating side-effects when not implemented.

Though rare now, in the past when a Zezdi had been killed while carrying younglings some of those younglings could survive, but if they weren’t close to release anyway they became almost zombie-like without the mental link to their parent. Jessica had worked to develop those individuals using the typical maturia system but it had not worked well. The Zezdi were built to reproduce this way, which was why she was having so much trouble finding a way to separate them from their bad habits that literally clung to them generation after generation.

She’d been watering down those bad habits, but until the individuals could be separated from their hive mind they could never take their true place in Star Force. That had been the paradox she was facing, and as it turned out the solution was really very simple in concept, but would be a headache to genetically program.

Replace the learning phase with genetic memory, allowing the younglings to disconnect almost immediately once sufficiently physically mature while mentally developed similar to the Paladin…but just enough to get them free from their parent. Not to turn them into new…

Wait a second, she thought, stopping her perusing through the genetic writing notes she’d pulled up. Why not? They’ll never reproduce as fast as the Paladin, but why not have them fully tricked out with genetic memory. That would increase their productivity exponentially…

Then the downside hit her. Paladin were heavily regimented, limiting creativity and making it a long hard struggle to develop to the point of independent thinking. The very things that made her a Monarch the Paladin did not have, save for the Viceroys, but even they were wearing blinders that had to be unlearned to truly excel. Individuals raised in the maturia system were the reverse, having to learn unity and coordination that the Paladin literally lived and breathed.

The Paladin had been allowed to stay as they were almost as a mercy, but over time their usefulness had been proven more than that. The fear was they’d become tools rather than people, but that had never occurred with Archon oversight. The Viceroys had tended to think that way based off their genetic memory, but that had been modified over the years and, to be honest, the Paladin were truly becoming impressive despite their limited individual status. Their strength was their numbers and rate of building speed, not in their high skill levels.

Humans were the reverse, with individuals like Jessica reaching great heights that Paladin simply could not achieve in any great number. A few of their individuals had overcome their base programming and were on the same path now, but they were rare and far behind where other races were, and Jessica and the other Monarchs didn’t like inhibiting an individual’s growth for the sake of their race.

With the Paladin they’d chosen to work the problem in the opposite direction, chipping away at the regimentation just enough to free their minds a bit without collapsing their entire civilization, but it had been assumed that every other race would use the maturia system.

But in the case of the Zezdi, who already had this debilitating linkage, would a Paladin-like system actually be an upgrade?

Jessica knew it would and didn’t understand why she hadn’t seen this sooner. Maybe she’d just been trying too hard, but right now this was something she could constructively do rather than just pace and spin her wheels regarding the Zen’zat. The truth was until the Archons caught or killed the Zen’zat they’d continue to do damage and the orders she’d give to try and work around the problem weren’t that complicated. She had plenty of spare time, especially if she was stuck in her castle so not to become another victim of the Zen’zat, so why not do something valuable while this played out?

Her mind was abuzz…finally she could do something rather than sit and watch her infrastructure get hit like a punching bag. She was going to need to bring in some specialists, particularly those that had experience with the Paladin, but not the Paladin themselves. They were good at manipulating their own genome, but didn’t show as much innovation when consulting about others. That’s why she’d requested Kiritak workers rather than Paladin when they’d been offered from Davis, despite the Paladin’s greater growth rate.

She’d regretted that many times in the past, but the Kiritak were so solid she hated playing with anything else. She preferred them to the Bsidd as well, but other Monarchs swore by the Paladin for startups and bulk production while Jessica knew the Kiritak were a long term investment and would individually exceed each Paladin down the road, for they learned faster. Now that she had a great number of them in her realm she didn’t regret her decision, but she was going to need outside help, for this type of genetic memory induction into a race that had very low levels to begin with was going to be fraught with problems.

She needed a Mastertech in genetics, and those that had developed the Elves were not based here. Jessica was merely their caretaker, so she needed to find her own expert…or in this case a team of experts. And the sooner she got them recruited the better.

The Duke had no doubt they would come, for manipulating a race on this level wasn’t something they typically got to do…and for that reason she knew she had better run it by Davis. Technically she didn’t have to, but this was a huge alteration to a race taken in from The Nexus. He’d brought all them in individually, and if this was something he wasn’t ok with she needed to know before she started tampering…let alone breaching the subject with the Zezdi, who she knew would resist if for no reason other than spite at the notion of change.

She could handle them in her own way, but Davis had to sign off on this first. Expecting him to, Jessica sent out the invites to many medtech specialists inquiring as to their current availability and interest in the project. By the time Davis got back to her hopefully she’d have a list of candidates assembled. If he nixed the idea no harm done, but if he approved it she’d be able to hit the ground running.

Jessica sent the messages out quickly, then began planning what she could with the medtech specialists she had on planet, bringing them to her castle and having work sessions almost round the clock. The Humans had a hard time keeping up, but the Kiritak were more eager than her to work and they’d got a basic plan set up with all the hard microwork to take place later as she waited for a response from Davis.

He’d sent a ‘proceed with planning’ reply, but that was merely a hold order while he worked on something. It wasn’t an approval, and the longer she waited the more Jessica wondered what was going on. If he didn’t approve he would shoot the idea down instantly. If he did, then what was he waiting for? More data? Did he have serious concerns he was checking on?

Jessica got her answer a couple months later when a special envoy from Davis arrived in the system under heavy guard. Four Warship-class jumpships escorting a cargo ship, with the military vessels coming with more Archons and hunter teams signaling they were going to go after the Zen’zat saboteurs while a smaller group operated as an honor guard for the nameless emissary that arrived in her throne room clad in a deep black robe that covered every part of the individual save for his mind…and one of a race that Jessica could not identify.

“Monarch,” a Piccolo-level Archon said, who was operating as the bodyguard for the individual when they entered as the other escorts were working their way around the castle to further lock it down.

“Archon,” she responded in kind, standing up and walking a few steps toward them. “Who is your mysterious friend?”

“Someone you’ve just received clearance to be made aware of. His existence will have to be concealed from most of your staff, for we can’t risk word of his existence getting out. Only the research team he selects will be allowed to interact with him, and my security team will see that no one else gets access.”

Jessica raised an eyebrow, resisting the urge to take a peek inside the robe with her Pefbar. “A secret race a Duke doesn’t know about? Now I’m really curious.”

“A race of one, hopefully,” Nefron said, pulling back his cloak’s hood to reveal his rough features and pulsing his glowing green eyes. “If you find any others, shoot them on sight.”

“Who are you?”

“I am formerly Protovic. Now I am Chixzon,” he said, seeing Jessica’s eyes going wide. “I possess their genetic knowledge and have studied what you took from the V’kit’no’sat database. If your conversion of the Zezdi is going to be successful, I have the best chance of making it so.”

“Davis sends his approval…and his specialist,” the Archon noted. “He’s one of our few advantages over the V’kit’no’sat…and we can’t let them find out he exists.”

“The inoculation of the Protovic failed?” Jessica asked.

“Only once,” Nefron attested. “I helped create the inoculation so this would not happen to any of the others. I have remained Chixson to use their knowledge against them when they eventually return, but inside I am still Protovic…more or less.”

“Ego exponentially increased,” the Archon added, “but with skills to match.”

“I believe your assessment of the Zezdi is more or less correct,” Nefron said, ignoring the jab and focusing on the Duke. “They must be broken free or they will never truly become part of Star Force.”

“Well damn,” Jessica said, half laughing. “What else is Davis hiding from us?”

“A lot,” Nefron admitted.

“I have no doubt,” Jessica agreed. “Thank you for coming. I assume…” she said, looking at the Archon.

“Ian,” he offered.

“…Ian will handle security. We have a Zen’zat problem and haven’t been able to identify their insertion method.”

“We know, which is why we’re moving him to a Zezdi planet after we get through initial work here. Until then I’m his close escort.”

“My name is Nefron,” the Chixzon offered. “This type of work requires an immense amount of simulation before actual trials to avoid damage to the race in question, so we need to begin soon. Your efforts to rework their race will be on hold without a solid reproductive schedule.”

“Indeed,” Jessica echoed. “I guess I won’t be needing the medtechs I recruited after all.”

“What you have locally will be enough to assist me.”

“Well then, let’s get started…and you can fill me in on how Davis acquired you while Ian screens my medtechs and staff.”

“Happening already. I’m staying put,” the Archon said firmly.

Jessica frowned. “He’s in that much danger?”

“My existence is a fluke not easily repeated. If not for some quick action on behalf of the trailblazers I would permanently be their enemy. The Chixzon programming within the Protovic is very thorough.”

“The others are safe now, correct?”

“Our Protovic are.”

“Good. I have a few in my other systems. Damn you’re ugly.”

Nefron’s eyes glowed briefly. “I receive that sentiment a lot, but few actually speak it.”

Jessica pointed to her hair. “Blondes tend to bluntly speak their mind. You’re telepathic?”

“I am, but I do not have your Ikrid block and my own telepathy is inferior, but we can communicate in that manner if you wish.”

“Useful,” Jessica said, pointing to a nearby doorway. “My personal chambers are in there, and there are a few spare rooms I never use. We can set them up for you and your team. You won’t have to leave the peak of the castle unless you wish it.”

“Good,” Ian said, glancing out the windows. “These are one way, correct?”

“Of course. Not that there’s anyone out there to look in,” she said, referencing the mountains beyond, with the cityscape below so far down that they couldn’t see in anyway unless you were standing on the very edge.

“This will do,” he said, confirming that with Nefron via a simple nod. “He’s all yours.”

“Well then,” Jessica said, waving a hand and telepathically triggering the floor to open up and another ice-like chair to rise out from beneath it as a hologram of the spider-like Zezdi appeared in the center of the room along with a lot of data charts circling around it. “Let me fill you in on what I want done and you can start to troubleshoot.”

Nefron pulled his cloak completely off, dropping it on the floor and flailing his tail around visibly behind him.

“Oh,” she said, causing the back of the chair to ‘melt’ away and leave a stool-like platform behind that his tail could hang over the back of. “That’s cute.”

“Not really,” Nefron said as he walked over and sat down, stretching his shoulder pikes out vertically then around in a circular motion before tucking them back in again behind his head.

Ian frowned with exaggerated disappointment. “Where’s my chair?”

“You can sit on my lap if you like,” Jessica said sarcastically as she returned to her throne. “Don’t you have my medtechs to clear? I’d like them in here as soon as possible.”

“On it,” he said, walking across to the doorway into her personal quarters. “Anything in there you don’t want me to see?”

“No hidden boyfriends, if that’s what you mean?”

“Is there a signup list?” he said with a wink, then disappeared to check out the area that Nefron would be living in for the foreseeable future.

“You’ve obviously gone through the notes I sent to Davis,” she said, turning serious. “Your initial thoughts?”

10

July 13, 4827

Medforjet System (V’kit’no’sat territory on Star Force warfront)

Tivonmenk

Ronoken arrived back at the V’kit’no’sat stronghold along with the remains of the sabotage team, most of whom were still here minus the 3 that had been killed. Their leader, Virrian, was summoned with him to the Rit’ko’sor’s lair with them being sealed behind privacy fields again.

“Report,” Sess’met said evenly as he looked up at the two Zen’zat.

Ronoken telepathically poked Virrian, allowing her to speak first.

“Considerable damage done to their infrastructure, but nothing that can’t be easily repaired. A short term disruption in their supply lines has occurred as expected. We lost 3 Zen’zat during operations, but most of us were never seen.”

“How did those three die?”

“We didn’t observe their deaths, but later saw on the public news feeds that Archons combined with aerial craft took them down once their presence was located by incidental contact.”

“Incidental?”

“Tripping over fleeing crowds most likely. Rather than run, the crowds tried to tackle them and delayed their escape long enough for the Archons to get to them. They can see through our stealth fields the same way we can.”

“No technological penetration?”

“None that we encountered.”

“I did,” Ronoken interrupted. “Two different varieties, one which is biological.”

“Explain the technological.”

“It was in one of their Elvish cities…their new Human variant located away from the equatorial industrial zones. Most had no such detection, but I believe a portable unit was put in place that operated off of Pefbar.”

“Technologically generated Pefbar?”

“Yes.”

“But it wasn’t widespread?”

“I only encountered it in one of their cities on a main approach. I believe it was placed there in response to our attacks. Not preceding it.”

“Do you concur?” he asked Virrian.

“We encountered none in their factories or surrounding areas.”

“Good. Confirming that was part of the reason you were sent. What was the biological source?”

Ronoken reached over his shoulder and pulled a few small vials out of the cargo compartment there that then reduced in size and disappeared, flowing into the rest of the armor and giving him a smooth shoulder blade.

“I retrieved a sample. They have engineered their trees with some sort of detection system. It was not Pefbar, otherwise I would have felt it, but they could track my position whenever amongst the trees. They also were able to move in crude defensive maneuvers.”

“The trees moved?”

“Yes. They tried to both attack me and shield the Elves I was killing. Very ineffective, but totally unexpected. I believe it is another experiment not yet fully developed.”

“With no Pefbar signature?”

“None.”

Sess’met broke eye contact, beginning to pace left and right with his tail waggling slightly with each step.

“They do not include much biology in their cities,” Virrian noted. “Do they suspect our activity on uninhabited planets?”

“Limited use,” Sess’met said, dismissing it as a potential reason…then he stopped and looked at the Zen’zat. “What occurs when Pefbar meets Pefbar?”

“They overlap and you can feel the interaction,” Ronoken answered.

“And Lachka?”

“They do not overlap. One must push against the other in order to reach a target.”

“Which is why we must use tethers to work in concert,” Sess’met added. “We use Pefbar to see where these tethers are even if we cannot reach them.”

“Your point?” Virrian asked.

“If you wish to detect without detection, your Pefbar cannot overlap. What if it was designed to recoil from another Pefbar field?”

“Then it would not have vision…”

“Exactly,” Sess’met said, looking from Virrian to Ronoken. “You were in the trees. Were you using your Pefbar to navigate?”

“I have to while stealthed.”

“Then perhaps they detected your Pefbar bubble and tracked it?”

“Why would I not feel the other field on my periphery?”

“It would have to be structured differently…or perhaps they have created an altogether new type of sensor. If that was the case, sporadic technological Pefbar would not be used in their cities.”

“I believe you are correct,” Virrian answered. “Altering Pefbar would be simpler than developing something entirely new.”

“Regardless, it is clear they are experimenting on more than just their own race.”

“I retrieved samples of that as well. They were easy to kill,” Ronoken said, floating the vials over to Sess’met. “They did not have an Ikrid block.”

The Rit’ko’sor’s neck twitched back suddenly, then he began pacing again and Ronoken could tell he was both surprised and worried. He stayed silent for so long that the Zen’zat began to wonder if they should leave or not.

“They are trying to gain parity,” he finally said. “We are born with telepathy. They have never known this and are trying to ascertain if there is an advantage. They have to remove the Ikrid blocks in order to allow juvenile interaction that otherwise would be blocked.”

“We can still communicate with it,” Virrian pointed out.

“Yes, but not like we do. Our interactions bind us together in ways you will never know. It is not a…simple process to refine. It is a mark of a superior race. They are trying to gain this but do not know how. Thus the experiment.”

“What threat does it pose?” Ronoken asked.

“I do not know. Your race was given much that we were not in order to compensate. You are built to be individuals, but the Archons have achieved more in that regard. Them trying to reverse this could be their undoing…or a great achievement if they could master it. I do not know what will come of this.”

“What have we been given that you do not possess?” Virrian wondered.

“Unlimited psionics and Ikrid shielding. We must rely on mental strength to defend. You are immune. Do not underestimate that.”

“The Humans are no different.”

“They can always add the Ikrid block later,” Ronoken pointed out before Sess’met could answer. “Something that we are not allowed to do.”

“No we aren’t. Ikrid blocks are forbidden save for Zen’zat. You must be immune to be useful servants, but if Rit’ko’sor were immune and Oso’lon were not, we could potentially overpower them. Strength of mind is our way, and your blocks are meant to allow you some parity with us. Star Force is reaching for more than they gained from us. They are not copying as others believe. They are ascending, quietly, while we fight a war we believe we are destined to win by default. They are using our arrogance against us.”

“We will kill them all eventually,” Virrian pointed out.

“Will we? Why haven’t we done so already?”

“That is not for me to know.”

“It is arrogance. We have taken so many worlds from them we expect them to crumble, but they do not. They are like V’kit’no’sat and respond to threats via adaptation. Not surrender. So long as they live they are a threat. If Mak’to’ran was truly wise he would bring the full force of the empire down upon them. It is arrogance that shields Star Force now. It is arrogance that I have to fight to get the ships I need. Thus another path is required. If Star Force does not have Pefbar detectors widely deployed, then we have a window of opportunity.”

“Do you wish us to return?” Ronoken asked.

“Not to the Tauriel System. I need you and many others to deploy to a closer target. If you are able to penetrate their security, I require the seizure of one of their shield generators and as many of their adjacent anti-orbital batteries as possible.”

Virrian starred at the Rit’ko’sor closely. “You think we can create a foothold that will also defend against their orbital fleet?”

“You see…Zen’zat can think when you try. Yes, if you can move undetected then there is a chance. And if we can have their own defense shield protecting our landing zone we can take one of their worlds with far less loss of ships.”

“You have been waiting for this, haven’t you?” Ronoken asked.

“I have. We cannot keep trading losses to take planets, for we have not been given enough resources to stomp this heresy out. We must therefore use guile, and I needed to know if insertion was viable. Better to test it on a world far from the border where you were likely to return to report.”

“The Archons can see us,” Virrian pointed out.

“Which is why we must choose our target carefully and you must move even more carefully. We can use this tactical only once, for they will adapt to it. Where then do you think we should try for?”

The Zen’zat glanced at each other, then both answered in sync.

“Gallifrey.”

“Gallifrey,” Sess’met agreed, “would be a worthy target. One they feel is safe. Getting a fleet there will be problematic, so the timing must be precise. We require reconnaissance first and a slow infiltration. I want both of you there first to hunt for these technological Pefbar devices or these altered trees. If the way is clear, more will come and hide. When the time is right, if we have an opportunity, we will strike. If not, we will withdrawal and try another target. Again, patience is key.”

“We understand,” Ronoken said. “We are not so arrogant as you believe.”

“You still have much to learn, but if you were unbearably arrogant I would not have chosen you. I require subordinates that can think, and unfortunately that means retraining you. Do not allow yourselves to be killed or I will have to start over with others more arrogant than you.”

“We serve the V’kit’no’sat however is required,” Virrian said firmly.

“You are beginning to, and in that I see hope. If only I had drone warships…” Sess’met said angrily. “The empire is eager to learn how to fight the Hadarak better because we know we are inferior, but where we assume superiority we are stubborn and slow to change our ways. I need this attack to be successful not only for our campaign, but to teach others who assume they are my superior. So more Zen’zat and others are not lost needlessly due to arrogance. We must be both lucky and precise. If we cannot have both we must withdraw. It is essential that you understand the gravity of this.”

“Three of my Zen’zat were killed on this past mission,” Virrian answered. “I do not underestimate Star Force. I learn from failure and adapt.”

“That is why you will be in command of the assault force. Ronoken will be in command of the reconnaissance. Use your own judgement wisely. I will not be able to direct you from afar.”

“When do we leave?” Ronoken asked confidently.

“Choose Zen’zat less arrogant than most. 3,000 in total spread over dozens of ships. Leave as soon as you are ready.”

Both Zen’zat bowed lightly out of respect, then turned and left immediately, leaving Sess’met to analyze the samples delivered. His report needed to be sent to Zyrnox immediately, but not his plans for Gallifrey. The upcoming assault was going to be on his own authority…and better not to tell anyone of it beforehand. If successful he would use it to bash some sense into their arrogant heads. If it failed, he didn’t feel like explaining why to his idiotic peers.

www.aerkijyr.com

Uriti Strike

1

November 4, 4831

Kasterborous System (Rim Region)

Gallifrey

Aaron-010 casually woke up in his bed. There was no alarm or any sign of trouble, but as per his habit he immediately stretched out his Ikrid to its limits and got pings from the various minds around him in the quartary all the way to the outer walls where his telepathy ended. His range was greater than that, but the walls had been rebuilt with psionic blocks in them after several Zen’zat stealth teams had attacked those sleeping without even entering the building.

They’d used their Pefbar/Lachka to crush the brains of 38 individuals in one night, then accumulated another 137 more, including 2 Archons, before heavy patrols were enacted around the quataries with Archons and Arc Knights. That act alone had pulled so many off other duties that the Zen’zat had managed to hit other locations and set up two raids by the larger V’kit’no’sat camped out under their single captured shield generator. Now that the quartaries had been secured against psionic attacks while people slept the psionically-capable Clansmen were back on the combat front around the captured foothold.

But knowing that there were walls the Zen’zat could not see or reach through didn’t totally put Aaron at ease. He’d trained himself to relax when he did go to sleep, but once he woke up he wanted to pull a quick check and make sure everything was alright within his quartary where over 8,000 Clan members slept.

Not all of their quarters were filled, for they had to take shifts, but even trailblazers had to sleep during combat and the siege of Gallifrey was already nearing 3 years in length. Using their Ghostbane technology the Zen’zat had infiltrated the planet en mass and seized a single planetary shield generator along with 6 anti-orbital batteries on the Clan-only world, but before the invaders could be overwhelmed and the infrastructure retaken or destroyed, stealthed V’kit’no’sat ships began appearing in the atmosphere to reinforce them.

Those delivered their regular ground troops, including Oso’lon, who had held the shield generator and 5 of the anti-orbital batteries. Star Force had taken back one of them, though the V’kit’no’sat had made sure to sabotage it before they lost it. Now there was a small window of clear airspace where V’kit’no’sat ships could operate, and many of them were packed in hover mode over top the shield generator itself, making it impossible for a counterattack without suffering massive losses.

The fleet in orbit was the obvious choice to deal with the situation, but the V’kit’no’sat had Star Force’s own shield generator that they had to beat their way through and now 5 anti-orbital Ardent beam cannons. That wasn’t much compared to the size of the Clan fleet in orbit, but the V’kit’no’sat had also brought in a large fleet of their own that was keeping the Star Force fleet from hitting the ground foothold on Gallifrey…which was the largest and most heavily defended planet in the Rim Region and the current capitol of 17 different Clans including Aaron’s Nova Wolves.

There were no civilians here. Every single one of the planet’s 18 billion people were Clan, meaning they were the best of the best from techs through Commandos, and the V’kit’no’sat had made almost no progress out from their foothold over the past 3 years. That said, Star Force hadn’t been able to remove them yet either, with both fleets in orbit playing cat and mouse games, knowing that a full fight would wipe out most of both fleets and neither side could afford those losses. Hence the Siege of Gallifrey had resulted in a stalled ground war to determine the fate of the planet, and not even the inclusion of 6 trailblazers had managed to break the stalemate as of yet.

Aaron rolled out of bed after getting his Ikrid ‘all-clear’ scan, withdrawing his powerful psionic back into passive awareness mode where he could feel the mind locations of those nearest him in the other rooms and a few down in the cafeteria a few levels below him as he walked over to, but didn’t sit down at his quarters’ terminal. He checked for new messages using the telepathic interface, with a holographic screen rising up to his current eye level.

There were several planetary updates and requests of moderate priority, but there was a non-priority message that got his immediate attention. It was from Master Medtech Vortison, and Aaron immediately pulled it up, resulting in a familiar hologram of a man with a none too pleased expression on his face.

“I’ve reviewed the scan you sent and have come to the only conclusion possible. As we discussed previously, your Ikrid tissue cannot keep getting denser forever and I believe you have finally reached saturation point. Your cranial pressure has pegged out and none of your psionic tissue will increase in size because of that. I’ve analyzed every single cell in your Ikrid tissue and have confirmed they are all level 18 in density. Unless there is a level 19 that we haven’t discovered, which I doubt, you have now reached saturation point. You can no longer improve your raw power output. Your brain is simply too small.”

“Fuck,” Aaron whispered.

“Fine control is another issue that you may, and probably will, be able to continue improvement on, but you now have a power cap. Range will only increase if you are able to better funnel a directional scan, but spherical range is now also capped. I’m sorry, Aaron, but there is no way around this. No amount of training, as far as I can determine, will increase your power output further. I can tell you that your muscular development is nowhere near saturation, but there you have the option of adding more muscle tissue.”

“The size of your skull limits the amount of brain tissue, and unless you want to go with the Knight size enhancements there is nothing else I can do. You’ve run out of room inside your cranium, and if not for the safety measures the V’kit’no’sat programmed in your Ikrid tissue density would start to crush weaker tissue in your brain as it increased.”

“I know you don’t want to increase your body size to Zen’zat levels, and I would advise against only a cranial enlargement, for it would seriously throw you out of balance, but unless you get more room inside your head your Ikrid tissue cannot increase in volume and the density level cannot go any further by my analysis. As you’ve stated before we don’t know if there is another level or not until we hit it, but not a single one of your cells is showing anything beyond level 18 density. You’ve either hit a plateau or a dead end, and I’m betting on a dead end. Let me know how you want to proceed.”

The hologram froze on its last frame, awaiting replay or banishment, but Aaron just let it linger and stared at it. He’d known this moment might be coming, and the research being done with the Elves was partly to probe what happened when one’s brain was allowed extra Ikrid tissue in place of other psionics that the Elves would never have. The results so far were impressive, but no matter how many revisions one made they’d never touch the Ikrid levels of the Oso’lon simply due to their much greater brain size.

Aaron and the trailblazers had constantly been pushing the training element as a way to partially make up for that, but now it looked like Aaron had tapped out. He’d hit the highest level of Ikrid power his body frame would allow, and any further training past this point would result in no power upgrades.

That was the theory anyway, and he’d come up against plateaus before that had eventually resulted in new and unexpected advancement when a way was found to break through, but this was probably not one of them. You could only pack so many molecules together before they became non-functional, and the cellular density the V’kit’no’sat had designed left little room for improvement. If Aaron had Vortison design a denser cell the efficiency level would probably drop, because the components would literally be getting in the way of each other. A level 18 cell was theoretically the best possible, and a few centuries ago it had likewise seemed impossible until Aaron had started spawning them in response to his excessive training.

But according to Vortison no level 19s were manifesting themselves, and despite the ongoing war Aaron was getting in very good and lengthy workouts. If he had nothing but free time to train…which he was tempted to go for simply out of spite…he didn’t expect to make any headway in terms of raw power. He’d studied the microbiology on this issue so much he almost knew as much as Vortison, and he was forced to concur. His cells simply couldn’t get any more dense without losing efficiency.

Bottom line was, after all these centuries of continual advancement, his Ikrid progress…in terms of raw power at least…had finally hit the ceiling for his body size.

That meant the Archon levels they’d design for beyond this point were flawed. Aaron couldn’t reach them, and Archons with a slightly smaller head size than him couldn’t reach his Goku-411 Ikrid level. In theory Arc Knights could, but none of them were even near a Goku Ikrid level. The highest of them was only at Mage 329, for they were hand to hand specialists and only spent time training on things that helped them in that capacity. Most Arc Knights only had Striker-level Ikrid skills and developed them exclusively for ranged tracking and combat within a few meters radius.

And they’d gotten good at that, causing Aaron some unique challenges when he’d sparred with them, but nothing that he couldn’t handle. His Ikrid skills were so far beyond theirs that their larger Ikrid tissue wasn’t a threat. He had more power with his smaller cranial volume, but the Arc Knights had developed a few new tricks stemming from their specialty that he’d gladly learned from.

But even they’d have limits eventually, though it’d take them a lot longer to get to them even if they worked as hard as Aaron at it. The same went for every race, but the larger V’kit’no’sat ones, he doubted, would ever reach their peak. They had so much tissue to pull on their cells wouldn’t densify unless a need was continually present, and he doubted they would put themselves through that kind of training unless a threat arose that required it of them.

There were aspects of Ikrid that involved getting inside another’s head and engaging in combat in a virtual sense…and that was an area that Aaron could still improve on, so not all of the planned Ikrid levels beyond his current position would have to be junked, but they’d definitely have to be reworked. This was the first time any psionic had reached saturation point, but the trailblazers had been aware of the possibility for a while now.

And not just for psionics. A Human couldn’t keep getting faster and faster in terms of running. Aaron had gotten his max speed under standard gravity up to 71 miles per hour. That was his best sprint, but the length of his legs was a limiting factor even if you ignored his muscles. An Era’tran could travel much further with a single step than he could, and they typically could run around 100 miles per hour if they were in decent shape…though they should be able to get a lot faster.

There were limits on the trailblazers’ horizon, and that ran counter to everything that they’d based themselves on. They were literally married to the concept of continual improvement, so the idea of a firm ceiling on even one ability really left a bad taste in their mouths. Their initial reaction was to disbelieve it, and after years of breaking through other barriers they were right to do so, but this one, Aaron admitted, looked to be the real deal and not just an illusion.

His head was only so big, and for that matter his body. Unless he wanted to increase his size there was going to come a point where he couldn’t improve raw power anymore.

But that didn’t mean he was done. Trailblazers were problem solvers, and they’d chart a way forward for the Archons before the mass of them even approached this level. He wasn’t sure how they were going to rework the Archon levels yet, but they’d figure it out eventually.

Frustrated, Aaron dismissed the message and ran through the others quickly before heading down to the cafeteria and filling up on food before donning his armor and running the stairs up to the roof. There he took off in flight, using his Yen’mer tissue that, thankfully, was amongst the newest in his body and had a long, long, long way to go before even thinking about hitting a limit.

Aaron flew off over the building tops as he scanned downward using his massive Ikrid range now that he was outside the building, looking for stealthed Zen’zat infiltrators as he headed for a nearby spaceport. When he got there he jumped into a skeet and flew off with a squadron of regulars across the landscape towards the distant V’kit’no’sat zone where both sides were continually probing one another in a tedious chess match.

The enemy couldn’t get far from its shield generator without getting pounded from the sky, so they had been bringing in smaller V’kit’no’sat generators, ill-prepared to defend against orbital bombardment but more than adequate to blunt most aerial strikes. If the enemy took another building or block of buildings they’d bring them in and creep out their lines…with Star Force counter attacking and trying to take these little footholds back.

But they couldn’t push too far or the parked warships underneath the primary shield would pound them with naval weaponry. Aaron and his squadron couldn’t go anywhere near them, hence the stalemate. Unless the V’kit’no’sat started to win and win big they were going nowhere, and he didn’t understand why they were sticking this out in this manner. They should either cut and run…which was unlikely…or bring in more ships and hammer the breach their stealth infiltrators had created for them.

Their empire had more than enough ships to wipe Star Force off the map if they wanted to, and Aaron knew it was only a matter of time before they sent more, but he was wondering why they weren’t here already. The V’kit’no’sat were stuck, and he and the other 5 trailblazers on planet were going to make sure they stayed stuck, so what angle were they playing? Was it pure ego that they didn’t want to retreat, or were they hoping Star Force would pull in more ships to remove them and leave other systems temporarily exposed?

Aaron didn’t know at this point, but his duties here were clear. The stealth infiltrators had done more damage than anything, and he was the best Star Force had at sniffing them out. Last night another team had been detected but not caught, some 900 miles inside the border, and that’s where he was heading now. He’d get in the vicinity and start mentally scanning, then if and when he got a hit he’d go to ground and his squadron would provide fire support from the sky. They were all Regulars and didn’t have Ikrid, but he could use his own to interface with their minds almost as well as if they had battlemeld, allowing him to call in air strikes with a thought during hand to hand combat.

Aaron had killed thousands of Zen’zat in this manner already, but he couldn’t be everywhere at the same time and the V’kit’no’sat kept spending their little infantry to make hits across the planet while Star Force continually kept reworking its infrastructure with more protection and detection against such strikes.

Others were handling the mech combat on the main front lines, but it was these clandestine strikes that Aaron had been requested to come in and handle personally…and the fact that he could no longer get a power upgrade on his Ikrid through further training was a gut punch as he flew with his squadron across the planet. It wasn’t going to affect his combat today, but down the road he needed every advantage he could get…and according to Vortison he wasn’t going to be creating any more through training.

He was either going to go Knight size or face the limitation, and Aaron wasn’t going to accept that. He needed a third option. Star Force had to continue to grow bigger, better, and stronger if they were going to have a chance against the V’kit’no’sat in the long term. He didn’t doubt Vortison’s analysis, but he knew that just because the medtech was right didn’t meant there wasn’t another route forward. He and the other trailblazers just had to find it.

That was a burden others didn’t understand. Standing and facing an uncertain future. Was there a way or would they just be wasting their time chasing the impossible? One didn’t know until they tried, and tried, and tried. But Aaron knew they were going to have to try something different here.

He didn’t figure it out by the time they got to the target zone, and once he got his first Zen’zat mental ping all thoughts of psionic advancement got pushed to the back of his mind. He went into hunter mode, jumping out of his skeet while in flight and falling to the ground where he angled into a superman-like streak that ended with him head-butting one of the cloaked infiltrators…starting the fight that would leave another 9 Zen’zat dead plus two injured and captured.

Those he would interrogate and find out what their target had been, then chase down more teams he discovered had been assigned to different targets. As large as they were, these Zen’zat couldn’t stop his mind from getting into theirs and picking it apart with remarkable speed…after which they’d be stripped of their remaining armor and dumped back near the V’kit’no’sat lines.

Star Force didn’t kill prisoners, but he knew these would just gear up again and get back into the fight later…but that was a fair enough price for the intel he got. Plus a reminder to the V’kit’no’sat that Star Force didn’t fight their way and never would. This was more than just a war of survival…it was the lightside vs those that believed they were in the right no matter what. Whether or not that made the V’kit’no’sat evil was a matter of opinion, but it definitely meant they were not lightside.

Becoming the enemy to win was not a victory, and all of the trailblazers would rather be killed than go to the darkside.

So the prisoners would be released and Star Force would probably kill them in combat later…but they’d have a choice. The people the V’kit’no’sat were killing in these invasions had no choice, and if and when Star Force ever got around to invading V’kit’no’sat worlds they’d make sure to do so honorably rather than slaughter everyone on sight.

That was the V’kit’no’sat way, and would never be Star Force protocol. It was death before dishonor…rather than dishonor before defeat.

And though he didn’t do so today, Aaron had personally tattooed that sentence on the foreheads of some of the prisons before sending them back, making it clear to the V’kit’no’sat that they were in the wrong rather than the Humans being vermin deserving of execution.

So far none of them had seemed to listen, but you never knew when a simple word of truth might break through.

And the trailblazers were all about breakthroughs.

2

November 11, 4831

Titran System (Uriti Preserve)

Command Ship Kadon

Hera-2574 sat cross-legged on a circular pedestal rising barely a foot and a half off the floor. Her body was perfectly still, but she wasn’t meditating nor sleeping in an upright position. The chamber she was in was small, barely 5 meters wide, and there was nothing in it. The walls were blank, figuratively and literally, as they blocked Pefbar. Hera couldn’t see through and no one else with Pefbar could see within, meaning that Lachka wouldn’t work either. That was necessary so no one could attack her through the walls, though the threat of that was almost nonexistent on a Star Force command ship.

But the extra protection wasn’t lost on Hera, for right now she was very vulnerable to attack. Her mind was elsewhere, linked into the Uriti transmitter built into the ship via the wristbound gauntlet she wore. When in public she always wore long sleeves that covered it, but onboard her own command ship there was no need. Hera wore nothing but short shorts and a tank top now, revealing the intricate golden bracelet that stretched from wrist to just below her elbow.

A green light was lit within a jewel on the surface, indicating that she was in alignment with the device and had a telepathic link to the Uriti. No one was in the room to see it, and even her telepathy was blocked by the walls save for a pinprick on the door behind her that allowed the Arc Knight guard outside the ability to communicate with her if needed, though he had to stand in a specific spot to line up the connection.

The Arc Knight was meant to protect against threats the psionically dampened walls could not, and in the past some of the telepathic races ‘overseeing’ the Uriti Preserve had tried to access the Wranglers’ minds when in contact with the Uriti. With their Ikrid block it was impossible for them to pull information from the Archons, but they could still transmit impulses to them and mess with their minds…with the hope of the others being that they could get their own message through the Archon to the Uriti.

Such attempts had been punished severely, and Hera’s recluse status had not changed with the advent of the V’kit’no’sat war. If anything the attempts made by the others to get access to the Uriti had increased, but the Uriti Wranglers gave them few opportunities to pry. Hera never contacted the Uriti without an Arc Knight guard watching over her and never met with the other races…save for the few times she went out unannounced amongst the ‘tourists’ to try and draw the enemy to her.

Sometimes that worked and they were able to identify and punish those looking for a crack in security, other times she was able to move freely without notice, but always in disguise and never in an Archon uniform.

Star Force still controlled the Preserve, and the Wranglers made a point of that by not always hiding. It was their turf and they’d move around it as they liked, but the majority of the time it was best that they just be ghosts while the Dukes and other Archons handled the obvious duties within the Preserve…while they handled the most important.

There were only 112 Wranglers at present, up considerably from the original 12, and while many of the trailblazers had learned to use the interface technology they didn’t have the time to develop a relationship with the Uriti. Riley-038 was the closest, but most of his time was spent doing trailblazer things, leaving the Wranglers as the only reliable conduit to the giant ‘space monsters’.

That’s how most people who came to visit or snoop around the Preserve thought of them, but that wasn’t even close to true. The Uriti were massively intelligent, but that intelligence was manifested in a totally alien form. Their minds were literally so large that it had been difficult to even establish communication in the beginning, and to be frank it had been the Uriti that had done most of the hard work there. They chose when to talk, and Hera had eventually discovered that was because of the learning curve the Archons had to work through. The Humans had seemed like annoying children unable to utter a complete word…though that was more than the Chixzon ever had bothered with.

A lot had changed since then, and right now Hera was talking to 3 of them simultaneously. That had been impossible before, but she’d had more than a millennia of experience with the Uriti to learn from, and now she was able to half think like them, which allowed real communication. It still annoyed the Uriti a bit, because she wasn’t up to speed with their level of thought, but the relationship she and the other Wranglers had developed with them allowed the Uriti to overlook the inefficiency in light of everything that had happened.

And what had happened was a combination of training and combat. When the V’kit’no’sat had attacked the Uriti Star Force had been there to help defend them, and the Uriti realized they needed Star Force to do it. Previously there was nothing that could touch them, but the V’kit’no’sat could kill them and the Uriti knew it. Not easily, and at great cost to the V’kit’no’sat, but a Uriti could be destroyed and that was something that all these Uriti had never thought possible.

They’d worked for the Chixzon defeating fleet after fleet and wrecking planets without any real hindrance to the point that they’d come to think the ‘little beings’ couldn’t seriously harm them. They didn’t know about the two Uriti that had been killed long ago, because prior to the Preserve the Uriti had never encountered one another before. They knew nothing but their own experiences, which they now shared amongst the 73 gathered here. There were still 43 unaccounted for in the galaxy and there were leads on two more that were being explored by the Knights of Quenar, but inter-Uriti communication and social dynamics were something the Chixzon had never bothered to explore.

Star Force had, not only for their own knowledge, but for the Uriti’s sake. They had been spawned with altered genetics from a single captive Hadarak with one purpose and one purpose only… the Chixzon wanted to use them as a living weapon that few in the galaxy could oppose and had engineered a control system that ensured they would go where instructed and destroy the targets the Chixzon gave them.

It had worked until The Ancients had discovered the sedative chemical that effectively put the Uriti to sleep. Unable to kill them they’d imprisoned all the Uriti, taking away the Chixzon’s ultimate weapon that had led to their eventual defeat, and while The Ancients were wise to do so they never truly understood what the Uriti were either. To them they were the destroyers of worlds, rather than being unwitting slaves held in the Chixzon’s grasp.

Star Force now held the reins the Chixzon once did, but they didn’t use them anymore save for emergencies. The Wranglers had established an independent communications method separate from the command triggers and had explained to the Uriti what they were doing, in essence weakening their own ability to control them, but gaining an increased friendship in the process. As large and powerful as the Uriti were, they were also victims of what had been done to them, and Star Force wasn’t going to continue that enslavement so long as they could ensure that the Uriti wouldn’t take a nap on an inhabited planet and kill a million people in the process.

The power that the Uriti had was feared by many, and that fear led them to react in any manner of ways, but Star Force didn’t fear power and they didn’t fear the Uriti. They understood them better than the Chixzon ever had now, and while wary of what they could do if they wanted, they also knew they were slower than Star Force’s ships…which was why the Uriti needed them to fight the V’kit’no’sat, who were also faster, and used their speed and agility as their primary weapon against the Hadarak.

Combat against the Uriti was quite different, but still routed in the same methods. Star Force had acted as an essential escort when the V’kit’no’sat attacked the Preserve while the Uriti did the heavy fighting…and the bond that had formed there was, in some ways, more potent than the Chixzon command pathways. While ‘little beings’, Star Force was now seen as ‘little brothers’ to the Uriti, and the Wranglers like Hera were their voice.

Star Force still hadn’t told the Uriti about the Hadarak yet, knowing that they would want to go and find them immediately, but the Wranglers were eventually working up to it, sharing more and more of their knowledge with the Uriti and learning from them in return. The biggest secrets that the Uriti had revealed involved the inner nature of stars and black holes…which the Uriti lived in. While right now the three Hera was talking to were in space, they were just as comfortable inside the massive gravity wells and needed to feed there regularly on the energy and materials within.

Less often they needed planetary ‘rock,’ though that was primarily for repairs, spawning, or growth spurts. Stars and black holes contained such material, having fallen into their gravitation grasp long ago, but the material wasn’t as concentrated as it was in a planet, so the Preserve had several half eaten planetoids that Star Force had designated for the Uriti prior to learning exactly what they needed and organizing mining operations to get it out more efficiently.

Those mining operations used both conventional Star Force methods and the Uriti minions, whom the Wranglers had helped refine greatly. They were biological machines rather than people, and two of the Uriti had even allowed Star Force to make genetic alterations so they could grow a new model. That had not gone down well with ‘the others’, seeing as how Star Force could grow an army on command if they liked, but to date none of those minions had ever left the Preserve so they had grudgingly tolerated it.

The Council thought they had more say than they truly did, and Duke Setti had her hands full dealing with them on a regular basis. There were made up of 28 major races with embassies here from across the galaxy…but oddly none from the core. There never had been, which in some ways was due to the V’kit’no’sat’s dominance there, but also due to the fact that the Uriti had never gone there during The Ancients’ war against the Chixzon.

Back then the core had been Hadarak territory, with them roaming and destroying at will. There were many, many races there but no civilizations on the scale of these. The Chixzon had seemed uninterested in confronting the Hadarak, so they’d focused their efforts entirely on the Rim of the galaxy…which was where the Uriti had been defeated, sedated, and imprisoned.

So the races with knowledge of them had come from the Rim, with the strongest three being the Knights of Quenar, the Bocadeem, and the Tsarik. All three had technology that Star Force didn’t fully understand, making it hard to assess their true strength other than when they engaged the V’kit’no’sat. They didn’t have many ships here, but all three had fought to keep the V’kit’no’sat away from the Uriti, as had a handful of others. Most of the 28 major races within the Council had simply observed the combat, not choosing to take part or pick a side. Whether or not they had contact with the V’kit’no’sat was not known, but Hera assumed some did and they didn’t want to make themselves a target.

There were a lot of those races with a tech level similar to Star Force, some slightly less, but many, many more that were inferior and here for more or less tourist purposes. The Uriti Preserve existed to contain and protect the Uriti, but it had become the outer Rim’s top diplomatic position…which was saying something. Star Force had learned a great deal about other parts of the galaxy, some of which were far more advanced and larger than The Nexus was, and nowhere else known were the most advanced races gathered together.

That gathering had attracted many others, despite the ongoing war with the V’kit’no’sat that had scared off some. The fact that the Preserve was still standing attested to the power of the Uriti and that power offered a lure that few major players could resist, so while not all fought in defense of it, the thousands of races with embassies here needed the diplomatic communication offered…along with the inherent opportunities such contacts availed them, even if they had no real play with the Uriti themselves.

The 28 major races did, and saw themselves as Star Force’s watchdog, ready to take action against them if they ever misused the Uriti. Star Force had partly accepted that, but never officially acknowledged it. The Uriti had done so much damage to so many races Hera understood their need to see what was happening and know that the Uriti would never return to their regions of the galaxy again…which was why so many had voluntarily chosen to give up their sleeping Uriti in order to bring them here.

And those that hadn’t had considerable pressure put on them to do so by the others…plus a war or two by the KoQ to forcibly remove those that did not willingly comply.

They were not Star Force’s ally, yet they acted like it most of the time because their goals ran parallel to Star Force’s…but the discussion that Hera was having now with Bahamut, Falco, and Samus was one that she was pretty sure the KoQ were not going to like, let alone the other major races that the Uriti had simply referred to as ‘The Others’ and Hera, having spent so much time in contact with their awe-inspiring minds, had also began to think of them as the same. The Uriti believed they were inconsequential and Hera was starting to agree, but she also knew that the potential of the Others was not fully explored and they could become a significant enemy if pissed off.

But it seemed that if Star Force didn’t do something it was the Uriti they were going to piss off, and if Hera had to choose between them and the Others she was going to side with the Uriti.

The green light on her gauntlet shifted to yellow, indicating that Hera’s mind had gone out of sync with the equipment and her conversation was over. She blew a strand of hair out of her face with a frustrated breath, then telekinetically pulled it back in line with the rest of her short, rainbow ponytail that matched her fingernails and toenails.

She was also covered in sweat, which was a natural side effect of the communication she had been doing. It always stretched her mind to talk with more than one Uriti at a time, or one for a prolonged period, and this conversation had been both, leaving her literally dripping onto her cushioned pedestal as she stretched out now stiff legs and put her bare feet on the carpeted floor next to the pile of her Archon uniform.

Hera took a moment to telekinetically squeegee the sweat off her, pulling it into a small orb that she floated in the air. What had fallen into the carpeting she didn’t recover, but the quarter-sized glob of liquid she floated in front of her for a second before flinging into the wall in frustration where it splattered like a water balloon.

She stretched her legs out and flew her pants on over her shorts, lifting herself up into a flying hover a few inches over the pedestal as her shirt, socks, and shoes followed. She set foot back down on the ground fully clothed and marched out of the small chamber, almost pushing the Arc Knight aside when the door opened.

“Dismissed,” she said simply, letting him get back to whatever else he was doing, but apparently Hera’s voice betrayed her foul mood.

“What’s wrong, Archon?” he asked, standing in full armor with an opaque faceplate that hid his own features.

Hera glanced back but continued walking away. “The Uriti are calling us out, and I’m having a hard time finding excuses to deny them.”

“Deny them what?”

Hera stopped walking, and turned back to face him. “A chance to fight alongside us.”

“Beyond the Preserve?”

“Yes.”

“Will the other races allow that?”

“It’s not up to them…and apparently not up to us either. The Uriti are going to help us whether we want it or not.”

“Is that not a good day then?”

Hera hesitated before she answered. “I don’t know. It could end up being that, but there’s going to be a lot of bitching going on…and maybe some shooting.”

“If they are truly our enemies in disguise, better to reveal them now and get it over with.”

“I’ll remind you you said that if this ship starts to get blown up,” she said, a bit lighter in tone, as she turned and walked off. In truth she didn’t know what the Others would do, but she didn’t think she was going to like it.

But better to have them pissed at you than a Uriti. That was one relationship that Star Force could not afford to burn.

3

November 30, 4831

Alamo System (Uriti Preserve)

Warden 8 Station

“Ok, what’s up?” Travis-098 said as he walked into the ultra-secure lounge on the Star Force-only station, having come straight from his command ship after receiving a high priority but unspecific summons for the closest trailblazer to the Preserve…which had been him. He’d left his patrol fleet on mission and had come here directly, but he still didn’t know what was going on as he looked at half a dozen Wranglers and the three Dukes that operated the Preserve.

“I made a promise that you need to sanction,” Hera said with a crooked smile on her face, as if she knew she’d overstepped her bounds and was now trying to make it right.

“Uh oh. What did you do?” Travis said, sitting down in the only open oversized chair in the impromptu ring formed by more of the single seats and a couple of couches.

“Bahamut again,” Peter-2576 said with a shake of his head.

“My favorite Uriti,” Travis commented lightly. “What’s he up to now?”

“He says that the Uriti are not going to stand by and watch while Star Force is destroyed,” Hera explained. “They’re going to fight the V’kit’no’sat whether we like it or not…and they’re asking for a ride.”

“Did he now?” Travis said with a smile, but Hera could see the wheels working inside his mind at lightning speed. “Why the change?”

“They’ve been wanting to help for a long time and we’ve kept saying no, it’s not their fight unless the V’kit’no’sat come here. From their point of view we’re the weak ones that need protecting and they think we’re about ready to break.”

“You’ve been updating them on the war status?”

“Sure,” Jeen-2572 said. “The more they talk with us the better, and that’s a subject they’re curious about.”

“Do they know about the Hadarak?”

“Not yet,” Hera answered.

“So they’re adamant about fighting the V’kit’no’sat to save us?”

“It’s a little more complicated. That’s part of it, but they also don’t like sitting on the bench while the freshman team plays.”

“Ouch. We don’t even rate as JV?”

“We’re the ‘little beings,’ remember?”

“Didn’t realize we were that little. What’s this about a ride?”

“They know they’re really slow, and it’s a long hike over to Tarric 3. They’d prefer if we carried them there.”

“Stargate?” Travis asked. “Is that your suggestion?”

“No, it’s theirs. I ran out of excuses to say no, so I said we needed some time to get a fleet together then we’d take them there…that’s the promise I made, and I really don’t see another option without pissing them off.”

“Because they’re right,” Peter added.

“They’ve wanted to help before?” Travis asked, glancing at Duke Pryon who was in charge of the Preserve.

“They’ve wanted to go after the V’kit’no’sat in response to their attacks, but this is the first time they’ve told us what they were going to do rather than asking.”

“Not my point. They’ve been wanting to help?”

“They were built to fight,” Logan-2522 pointed out. “And we’ve been training them…for what? They’re self-sufficient by default and don’t understand the point of individual improvement for the fun of it. They see it as a gradual development for a purpose.”

“Can’t argue with them there,” Travis agreed. “So they’ve thought they’ve been training to fight eventually?”

“Ever since the first attack that’s been their priority,” Hera explained. “And they’re tired of sitting and waiting for the V’kit’no’sat to come back here while we’re getting our asses kicked elsewhere.”

“Who said we’re getting our asses kicked?” Travis said incredulously. “Our asses aren’t getting kicked.”

“We’re losing more systems, even if we’re in a more or less stalemate. Compared to what we used to be up against it feels like we’re holding our own, but from the Uriti’s perspective we haven’t taken a planet back yet, so we’re still losing despite the number of V’kit’no’sat ships we’ve destroyed. They also know we can’t handle more if they send in another wave of reinforcements.”

“That’s debatable,” Travis cautioned. “What kind of strategic sense do they have?”

“Fairly good. They’ve got a long history of killing our little ships.”

“We’re dug in,” Logan went on, “and prepared to fight to the bitter end. The Uriti are sitting on the sidelines, watching and wondering when we’re going to use them, and can’t understand why we’re waiting. Bahamut, especially, is starting to question our sanity.”

“And our trust in them,” Hera added. “If they’re fit to fight, which they proved here already, why aren’t we using them?”

“Because we promised not to,” Duke Yetti, Inquisitor of the Preserve and the mouthpiece for Star Force with regards to the other races set up here, said warningly.

“The Uriti made no such promise, and do not care,” Hera said firmly. “They think we’ve gotten stupid and are going to save us from ourselves. Our credibility is beginning to get tarnished, and it would only have gotten worse if I told them no.”

“If we take orders from the Uriti, this situation is going to explode,” Yetti warned.

“I can see why you called,” Travis said, rubbing his chin as he sat back and rested his head on the chair cushions. “Why Tarric 3?”

“They know we’re concerned about collateral damage. We’ve been hammering them over accuracy in their training, and there’s this big fat enemy fleet sitting out in the open. They don’t have to be accurate to smash it, and they’re wondering why we haven’t used them there already.”

“But they decided to go on their own?”

“They’re not flipping us off, but they’re not putting up with hesitation anymore. They know accuracy isn’t an issue there, so they see that as a good spot they can help us with and see no reason to sit here and wait. The only reason they’re waiting now is because we can offer them faster transport. If we deny them that they’ll go on their own.”

“But we can order them to stay,” Yetti insisted.

“I won’t do that,” Hera said, with the other Wranglers nodding their agreement. “We don’t use those commands except under emergency situations where time is of the essence and the Uriti will see we were right after the fact. If we use it in conflict with reason…bad things may happen.”

“You said they’re already questioning our reasons?” Travis asked.

“Yes and no,” Jeen answered. “Uriti thought is…odd. We communicate best when the subject matter can speak for itself. Lies will get nowhere with them.”

“What have you told them the reason is that we’re not using them?”

“A combination of their not being accurate enough and that we’re trying to protect them. They almost laughed at the second part until Nami got hurt. They’re not used to losing fights, and every single Uriti here never failed to carry out orders. The two that were destroyed never had access to the others to share experience with and the Chixzon never bothered to inform them of such things. All they know is winning, and each time the V’kit’no’sat have come here we’ve beaten them…but they know it was a team fight and that they kinda need our help. The V’kit’no’sat move too fast. They need us to pin them in place so they can whomp on them.”

“If we told them about the Hadarak, would they mutiny and go look for them?”

All three Dukes blanched at the mention of that, but the Wranglers looked at each other curiously until Hera answered for them.

“We’re not sure. It would be a huge revelation and they’d definitely want to find them. I don’t know if they’d leave or not.”

“Then we’d have to use the command override,” Pryon pointed out.

“I think, if I’m reading this correctly,” Travis said cautiously, “the Uriti have grown up enough to start asking questions that need answering. They’re not shell-shocked victims anymore?”

“Exactly,” Logan confirmed.

“Then the status quo isn’t maintainable,” Travis agreed. “If we force the Uriti to stay here then the situation is only going to get worse.”

“We can’t let them leave,” Yetti said, aghast, with a few smiles from the Wranglers oddly following her statement.

Travis inquired of the other Archons telepathically, and they responded with a running joke about Yetti being Claire Dearing from Jurassic World. The trailblazer’s memory on that movie was a bit groggy after a couple thousand years, but the Wranglers knew it well and filled in the gaps. Claire was all about controlling the Dinosaurs as property while Owen Grady cited that he didn’t have control, he had a relationship with them. The fact that Yetti looked like Claire added to the joke, and her attitude towards the Uriti kind of fit as well…though Travis knew her concerns were with the Council races’ reactions and not totally unfounded.

“Am I right in saying that you think we need to renegotiate our relationship with the Uriti?” he asked, with the Wranglers immediately agreeing. Yetti did not, but Pryon and even Ander were not in agreement with her.

She looked at Duke Ander, who was in charge of the tourism part of the Preserve, and gave him an exaggerated frown. “Traitor.”

“What the galaxy truly wants is the threat of the Uriti controlled, and how we do that doesn’t really matter,” he explained.

“The Council will,” she countered.

“If we have to choose between the Council and the Uriti…” Hera floated.

“We go with the Uriti,” Travis finished.

“We have a pact with them,” Yetti pressed.

“To not use the Uriti on offensive operations,” Travis reminded her. “This entire war is defensive, and though we haven’t used the Uriti outside the Preserve doesn’t mean we don’t possess that right to do so according to the pact.”

“Technically accurate, but the fact that we’ve never done so will have repercussions regardless. How well we fought alongside them here caused a pushback, because they fear the power we possess. The more we use it, the more fear there will be.”

“So we’re supposed to put the Uriti in a bottle because of the ‘little people’s’ fear? How is that fair to them?”

“I’m not saying it is. I’m simply stating that there will be trouble…and we’ve got enough enemies already as it is.”

“And the best allies in the galaxy that we are not allowing to help,” Hera countered, looking at Travis. “Was I wrong to promise them what I did?”

“No. If they’re really going to go anyway, better that we help them get there quicker.”

“So we’re going to allow this?” Yetti said, wide eyed. “We’re not going to use the override?”

“We’ve been kind of teaching them to ignore it anyway,” Eaton-2503 admitted. “If they’re adamant about something, they might be able to override the override.”

“You’ve done what?” Yetti all but yelled, and even Pryon looked aghast.

“Teaching them about where the control command originated from allows them to understand it,” Travis said, guessing as to the Wrangler’s intent. “Keeping the Uriti ignorant is how the Chixzon controlled them.”

“And they had very little communication,” Jeen added. “Basically point and destroy. They never gave them an order they truly opposed.”

“Which is also why they kept them separated,” Hera continued. “By helping them develop we’ve helped them slip the leash a bit, and there’s only one way to know for sure how much slipping has been done.”

“Which is to piss them off then tell them no and see what happens,” Logan said pointedly. “Which we’re not going to do.”

“Of all the…” Yetti said, standing up and walking out of the circle angrily.

“We don’t throw anyone under the bus,” Travis reminded her. “Uriti included.”

“I’m not arguing that we should, but we’re playing with fire here,” she said, then saw Hera hold up a palm and ignite a plasma flame in the slit…then toss the orange glob from one hand to the other.

“It’s what we do, Duke,” Logan said, accepting the toss from Hera and squelching it in his own hand.

“My point is the Uriti are more powerful than the V’kit’no’sat and we can’t control them. If the Uriti start thinking for themselves they might decide they don’t even like us…and our only real leverage is that control override. Even if we never use it, we need to keep it in place for a rainy day.”

“We’re not the only ones who can pull that lever,” Jeen pointed out ominously.

“Are the Chixzon back?” Yetti challenged.

“One is,” Travis pointed out. “Thankfully he’s on our side, but if another emerges beyond our territory and feels like giving contrary commands to the Uriti, we need a way to override the override.”

“How do we do that?”

“By making friends,” Hera said quietly, knowing how flimsy that sounded.

“If the Uriti go rogue now, we may not survive to see another Chixzon arise,” Yetti said, crossing her arms over her chest as she stood behind her chair looking at the others.

“Worst case scenario?” Travis asked.

“All the races here turn on us.”

“Regarding the Uriti?”

“They go back to default and destroy everything like Hadarak do…only with enhanced weaponry.”

Travis held up a finger. “I don’t think you’re reading this right. If we tell the Uriti about the Hadarak and they go rogue…whose problem will they be then?”

Pryon smiled, though Setti did not. “If they head to the core to find the Hadarak, they’re the V’kit’no’sat’s problem.”

“Which would take them away from the Rim where all these races call home. Problem solved, from their point of view, whether the Uriti survive or not. I, however, care about what happens to the Uriti, even if they don’t. And if we’re going to continue to be allies, then we need to start acting like allies and not caretakers. Risky as that is.”

“So we tell them?” Logan asked.

“We explain why we’ve been hesitant to use them, and why we didn’t actually want to ‘use’ them. We have to get our credibility back, regardless of what it costs us with the Council races.”

“They’ll never approve this,” Setti warned.

“We don’t need their permission…which is why we’re going to have our talk with the Uriti first, Council second.”

Setti covered her face with her hand, pinching the brim of her nose as she already could predict the forthcoming reaction.

“The Uriti are the ones we need to be considering,” Travis told her. “If we have to choose, would you really choose the other races against the Uriti?”

“We have a workable system. I don’t see why we’re messing with it.”

“The Uriti, apparently, are outgrowing it. We have to adapt. If we don’t, then we truly will lose control.”

She stood there for another moment, then reluctantly walked back around her chair and sat down.

“I wish I could argue that, but I can’t.”

“Is Bahamut still our primary contact?”

Hera nodded. “He’s the most talkative.”

“And the best coordinator with us,” Logan added. “If we’re going to Tarric 3, I suggest we take him and him alone.”

“One thing at a time,” Travis said, though in agreement. “We have to have a chat with the Uriti first, and I want in on it.”

“Hera made the deal,” Eaton pointed out. “You’d better talk through her.”

“Where’s he at presently?”

“Titran,” Hera said, “but he wasn’t the only one inquiring.”

“We’ll start with him and see where this goes. How many are at Titran?”

“Six,” Pryon said.

“Bring him to an empty system,” Ander suggested. “If he takes the news badly and bolts, we can at least keep him from telling the others.”

“I agree,” Yetti said instantly. “If this goes south we can at least minimize the damage.”

“It won’t work,” Logan insisted. “They’ll eventually want to know what happened to him if he does bolt for the core or comes looking for the others and we move them around to avoid him.”

“No,” Travis said firmly. “We’re not playing games with them. We’re going there now and laying out everything. If this alliance is going to work in the long run it’s not going to be by playing games and running rings around them. It’s going to work off of respect, even if we don’t share every single secret we have with them.”

“And if it blows up in our face?” Yetti asked.

“We point them towards the core and let the V’kit’no’sat deal with them.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ander said supportively. “I’m hiding here in case they blow up something, but good luck just the same.”

“Typical Monarch,” Jeen said, though she knew he was half kidding.

“Live to build another day,” he echoed, looking at Setti.

“Just give me a heads up before let the others know about this. We need to be as diplomatic as possible even if the Uriti are playing nice. We don’t want the Knights of Quenar shooting at them if they don’t like the change in protocol.”

“One problem at a time it is,” Pryon decided. “Do you need me with you there?”

“No,” Travis said. “We can handle it…one way or another.”

“I’ll stay here and get ready for the diplomatic scuffle.”

“Scuffle?” Yetti said with a huff. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“Hera, looks like you’re my date,” Travis said, standing up. “Let’s get going.”

“Mind if we tag along?” Eaton asked.

“Does multiple minds have a negative effect on the communications?”

“We can listen in without participating, but no, it doesn’t seem to.”

“The more the merrier then.”

“Take my ship,” Hera said to them all. “That won’t draw suspicion, and you being here at all is going to arouse questions that Setti won’t want to answer. Yours doesn’t have a transmitter anyway.”

“Done,” Travis said, heading out with the other Archons racing to follow him, leaving the three Dukes behind.

“This is going to explode,” Setti told her peers.

“It might,” Pryon admitted. “But we can’t put it off any longer or we could create more problems.”

“I think we’re creating a huge one now, even if the Uriti don’t freak out,” she warned.

4

December 27, 4831

Alamo System (Uriti Preserve)

Babylon 382

“That is…totally…unacceptable…” the Bocadeem ambassador growled in English through his mechanical faceplate that contained the hydrogen atmosphere that his gecko-like race breathed. “If the Uriti will not remain in place, and you cannot control them, then they must be destroyed! There is no other option.”

“No, they won’t be,” Travis said firmly, seated on a slightly higher bank of seats on one side of the pentagon-shaped council chamber. Beside him sat Duke Yetti and a hologram of Hera, for she wasn’t allowed to be in physical contact with the other races for security reasons, but everyone else was physically here as the revelation of the Uriti’s new deal with Star Force was forthcoming. “They have the same right to exist as you do, and unless they go on a murdering rampage we’ll defend that right.”

“You have no right to do this!” the Neeten ambassador yelled before the Bocadeem could respond. “You gave us your word and now you break it?”

“They have not,” the Knight of Quenar said so calmly it drew the gaze of all 27 ambassadors here to their side of the pentagon.

“How is this not a violation of their oath?”

“They promised no offensive action. This is an operation within their own borders against an invader. It is defensive regardless of how long the V’kit’no’sat have occupied it. Furthermore, any strike against the V’kit’no’sat in any of their systems is also defensive. Star Force promised not to use the Uriti to attack others, but held a caveat for self-defense that applies here. Your argument is without logic and your tone insulting.”

“You are ok with this?” the Bocadeem asked.

“It is not a violation of their oath, and if cooperation is necessary to maintain control of the Uriti then it is a wise step forward when the status quo cannot be maintained.”

“They have claimed,” the Vitas ambassador pointed out, “that they have the ability to order the Uriti as their creators did. Now they claim their control is failing. How is that logical? Either they have control or not.”

The KoQ didn’t answer, merely swiveling its head towards the Star Force contingent.

“We can influence them heavily,” Hera answered via hologram. “To some that is the same as control, but we cannot actually command them as we would a drone. They have to choose to follow our orders, and have been designed to do so by default, but they are still independent beings such as yourselves. So far we have never given them an order that they were strongly opposed to, and I for one do not want to try. Most of our commonality with them is due to wisdom. Denying them their request because you have concerns is not wisdom, it is folly. They do not take orders from you and neither do we. You are observers, so observe and shut the fuck up.”

Yetti and Pyron cringed when she said that, but Travis half smiled. He didn’t glance in her direction, though. Instead he kept his eyes on the ambassadors gathered here, though psionic barriers were preventing him from reading their minds. The room appeared to be open, but there were shields in place between the Star Force delegation and the others for security reasons. It blocked every known ability of the KoQ and others, including Travis’s Lachka, from reaching across the barrier…including microprobes that many of those races here had previously tried to place on Star Force personnel in the past.

“We have a right,” the Tsarik said evenly. “We gave you possession of our Uriti. We are not mere observers here.”

“Aren’t we?” the Shanwen scoffed. “They provided the solution that none of us could. They’ve maintained the Uriti. Researched them. Given us the data. We have contributed nothing and have had these dangerous beasts taken from our realms. They have done us a service. We are observers.”

“Some of us have fought to keep the V’kit’no’sat away,” the Polensav countered. “We have bled to protect this place, so do not say all of us have not contributed.”

“A small action,” the Shanwen admitted, “that pales in comparison to what Star Force has done.

“We are partners,” the Sety interjected, here representing The Nexus as a whole, “but without Star Force we have no options. They hold the key to controlling the Uriti. We do not.”

“Because they haven’t shared it,” the Yion snipped.

“That knowledge cannot be shared,” the KoQ said, his words dripping with lethal intent. “Star Force has a proven record of reliability. That is why we have helped bring more Uriti here. We do not trust any of you to that extent, and should Star Force share control with any of you we would intervene.”

“You threaten us?” the Tsarik challenged.

“If such events were to come to pass…yes.”

“No one is getting control,” Travis said, waving away the notion with his hand. “And you’re missing the point. The Uriti are not possessions, they’re peers. We are treating them as such while holding the control option in reserve in case something happens. If we overuse it they may find a way to disobey, so it’s best if we operate through dialog and mutual respect.”

“The bottom line is,” Duke Yetti continued, “the Uriti are going to be around indefinitely and we have to prepare for long term control. We can’t burn our influence in the short term to satisfy your demands. The longer the Uriti live the more they develop, and the interaction between the Uriti was something the Chixzon never had to deal with. We do. Our relationship with them must adapt in order to maintain control, and how we maintain control is of no matter to you so long as we are successful.”

“If you misuse them it is of great concern to us,” the Horocov said amicably. “While this proposed mission is not a technical violation of your promise to us, it sets a new precedent that is disturbing. The Preserve is meant to be a containment region, not a base to launch attacks from. We are legitimately concerned.”

“We should destroy them while we have the chance,” the Bocadeem reiterated. “We can sedate them again.”

“How is that destruction?” the Tsarik challenged.

“Because when we sedate them we can use the void option.”

“It didn’t work before,” the KoQ pointed out, citing an early attempt by the Ancients to strand their first sedated Uriti in interstellar space…deliberately jumping it out in a containment vessel on a course that would intersect no star. It was meant to starve to death lost in space, even after waking when the sedative ran out. They thought they’d succeeded until 93 years later when Bwersiom reemerged at a random star.

That should not have been possible, for the course set kept it far enough away from all gravity wells to prevent it from reeling itself back in. The Ancients’ calculations had assumed three times the power of the Uriti’s biological gravity drives than they believed Bwersiom to possess, yet somehow, in seeming defiance of physics, the Uriti had managed to navigate out of the void.

It was calculated to have cost 26 trillion lives to get Bwersiom resedated, in the combat required and the planets wrecked leading up to it. After that the Ancients deemed any further attempts at destruction not worth the risk, so sedation and continual containment were mandated even while many theories for their destruction were floated. None were further tested, as far as was known, because a failed attempt would be too costly. Many races in the Ancients’ alliance had been destroyed in the efforts to sedate the Uriti, and they weren’t going to sacrifice any more to test a theory.

The Uriti known as Bwersiom was now in Star Force hands and renamed Boomer after its boomerang-like return from certain death. Analysis of Boomer showed massive internal trauma that had not healed during sedation. Though what happened was not precisely known, Nefron thought that somehow Boomer had been able to cannibalize large sections of its body in order to both sustain itself and to grow additional gravity drives once it found itself stranded too far away from any gravity well to get a decent pull on them.

That’s why it had been able to survive its deliberate exile, but at great cost to it. Some of that damage Star Force had helped it repair with specific supplements given to it in far greater numbers than the other Uriti, but its internal configuration had not fully returned to normal. Part of those extra gravity drives had been maintained while others were deconstructed/digested to make room for other organs that had been reduced or sacrificed.

Travis was still ticked with that. If you were going to kill someone you did it fast, you didn’t cause them to starve to death. The Ancients were being slaughtered by the Uriti, so you couldn’t totally blame them for striking back in whatever way they could, but what they had done wasn’t right in response to things the Uriti had done that weren’t right…except that the Uriti were following the orders of the Chixzon and that made them victims as well, which further ticked Travis off, but he was glad that Boomer had found a way to survive.

That said, the tactic wasn’t flawed, and the void option that the Bocadeem were referencing would actually work…though Star Force hadn’t shared that data with them, nor the impact velocities required to kill them if they tried to throw them into a star or black hole. That was another theory the Ancients never tested, nor did they have the necessary engine power to do it, but Star Force did if they really wanted to make it happen…assuming they could be sedated again.

“The Ancients did not send them outside the galaxy. If we take them to the edge and throw them into the void, they will not be able to return. We can do this now if we can sedate them or Star Force can trick them into transport. Such a long journey would require sedation, I believe, but they could be sedated while in the transport ships. We can do this and end the threat here and now.”

“This is folly,” the Xaritn argued. “The void option failed, which is why the Ancients did not try again. We cannot experiment on such things when failure means the death of untold planets.”

“We need not experiment, it will work.”

“In theory…and in theory the first void option should have worked, but somehow Boomer was able to return. Do you know how? If not, then sending them out beyond the galaxy is not a guarantee of destruction.”

“Why destroy them at all?” the Sety argued. “Ever since Star Force took possession there has not been a single incident. So long as that remains the case, why seek their destruction?”

“They are too powerful to be allowed to exist,” the Bocadeem said firmly.

“Some would say the same of you,” Hera pointed out. “Should we kill all Bocadeem because of your potential for destruction?”

“She’s right,” Travis said before the Bocadeem could respond. “We don’t fear power, and destroying the Uriti out of fear is not right. It is ego to assume power yourself and deny it to others on the grounds that power alone is justification for destruction. Presently the Uriti are our allies and they will be treated as such. Destroying them is out of the question.”

“If they obeyed us rather than you, would you still be so supportive?”

“I’d be less comfortable, but I wouldn’t call for their destruction.”

“Our situation had become much more favorable, and you all are missing the real implications of the deal Star Force has just struck,” the KoQ said.

“Do elaborate,” the Tsarik asked.

“We face two threats. One is Star Force using the Uriti as a weapon against us. The other is the Uriti running free and attacking who they wish. The latter threat is now significantly reduced.”

“How so?” the Bocadeem challenged.

“We now know where the Uriti will go if they escape Star Force’s control.”

“And it won’t be to the rim,” the Gorchen said, catching on. “They’ll go to the core to find the Hadarak and away from us.”

“And they will fight the V’kit’no’sat. If they are destroyed, then that solves our problem. If they survive, the V’kit’no’sat will be weakened, which also favors us. Our previous problem becomes theirs, and if we indeed have to resedate or kill them, it will be much easier to do so when they are damaged from combat with others. The change in the status quo is to our favor, and we support the upcoming strike.”

“You support Star Force using the Uriti?” the Bocadeem asked, clearly surprised that the KoQ would agree to that.

“We fear Star Force being destroyed and the Uriti running free in their absence. As for their intentions, if Star Force wished to use the Uriti as the Chixzon did they would have done so before now. They have kept them here, safely contained, while half their territory was lost.”

“Until now,” the Chokdron noted.

“The difference is the Uriti requested this rather than being ordered.”

“And what if they request to attack someone else?”

“Then we use our control to say no,” Yetti said firmly. “The Uriti want to fight the V’kit’no’sat because they have already seen combat with them and they want to assist us. If the threat of the V’kit’no’sat ever ends, we will help them get to the core to seek out the Hadarak. That is where their ultimate focus is, not on you, and I highly suggest no rogue attempts at sedation be enacted…otherwise you could gain their focus in none agreeable ways.”

“If we only observe we are not threatened,” the Polensav said pithily. “And a rogue Uriti now goes straight to the core. The Knights of Quenar are correct. Our situation has improved.”

“Assuming Star Force keeps to its oath,” the Bocadeem reiterated. “If they order it, the Uriti will strike at whoever they want.”

“Even if it takes them away from the V’kit’no’sat and the Hadarak?” the Tsarik floated. “That begs the question how much influence they actually have and whether or not it is diminishing.”

“The new arrangement functions as a backup to that eventuality,” Travis added. “The Uriti have been used and abused, despite the damage they inflicted on others. They were created as tools of the Chixzon, and it is the Chixzon that bear the ultimate blame. The Uriti have proven they can coexist with us, unlike the Hadarak, and now that they have a purpose other than following orders, that purpose is more useful than their destruction with regards to keeping them away from your territory.”

“Agreed,” the Sety said, along with similar sentiments from several others.

“Assumptions,” the Bocadeem growled. “The only way to be sure their threat is eliminated is to destroy the Uriti. This Preserve is only a temporary hold.”

“Why then did you send yours here?” Hera asked.

“To study it in an active state.”

“And to remove it from your territory,” the KoQ added. “Do not rewrite history. Star Force has taken an immense burden off of you, as they have all of us. Now you seek to repay their generosity with dissent.”

“We seek an ultimate solution, as all of us once did. Why has that now changed?”

“Forget the Uriti,” Travis said, drawing several odd looks from the ambassadors. “What about the Hadarak?”

“What about them?” the Bocadeem asked.

“Why aren’t you fighting them? Why aren’t you sedating and flinging them off into the void?”

“They are not our concern.”

“Why not? Because they’re not on the Rim, and even in the past before the V’kit’no’sat pushed them in, they never reached the Rim. They’re not in your territory and therefore not a threat, so you don’t care. Correct?”

“We have claim on the Uriti. We brought it here and assisted with the others.”

“But they’re no longer in your territory,” the KoQ countered. “They could return to it the same as the Hadarak could. The threat is equal, yet you are unconcerned with the greater one.”

“The Uriti are far more powerful than the Hadarak.”

“But limited in numbers. The Hadarak are the greater threat. The truth is you are drawn here by the power Star Force now possesses and you want to deny them that. The Uriti are no longer a threat to you on their own any more than a Hadarak expansion into your territory. Star Force has removed that threat. The only one that remains is the betrayal of their oath.”

“And you do not fear that?”

“We are here to insure that they do not break it, and if they should we will take necessary action against them. So far they have not, and this new arrangement with the Uriti does not violate it. We will wait and watch, but the status quo has improved because of the deal they have struck. That logic cannot be denied save for an absence of sanity.”

“So you will back them?” the Bocadeem said, strain in his voice.

“As they have stated on numerous occasions, they need no backing. We are observers. We will continue to be observers so long as they hold to their oath, but we will advise them as we deem necessary. Our advice now is to pursue this deal, for it is wise.”

“And already concluded,” Travis pointed out. “I am informing you now because the movement of the Uriti has always been broadcast ahead of time and us taking one off without telling you might appear to be us breaking our oath…but my informing you of this means you have knowledge of an impending strike against the V’kit’no’sat that must remain secret. If they are forewarned there will be complications. You will maintain secrecy or there will be painful consequences. I trust I do not have to elaborate further?”

“May we accompany this strike force as observers?” the Tsarik asked.

“For those of you with stealth technology, you don’t really need to ask, do you? As for the rest of you, we will allow one ship to accompany us…no more. This is a military operation and we will not be hindered with an observing fleet to coordinate with. We will supply a vessel for any ambassadors to travel on if you wish, along with a small staff, but we will not allow any others to follow. I trust that will be adequate?”

“One ship? How is that enough?” the Dojka asked. “The first time a Uriti is used in offensive action against an enemy is a monumental event. There should be far more witnesses than a single ship.”

“This is not a sightseeing expedition,” Hera all but spat.

“No, it’s not,” Travis agreed. “This is war, and I am allowing a single ship, take it or leave it.”

“How soon are you departing?” the KoQ asked before anyone else could make stupid comments.

“As soon as we assemble the necessary escort fleet. The V’kit’no’sat know how to kill Hadarak, so we’re not sending Bahamut in alone.”

“Bahamut?” the Bocadeem asked.

“He is the one we agreed upon for this strike.”

“You’re only taking one Uriti?” the Killechad asked.

“Do you hear the idiocy of your own words?” the Sety asked. “A single Uriti is capable of destroying star systems.”

“We fought here with multiple ones,” he countered.

“And the V’kit’no’sat were massacred. Why not take two or three and spare yourselves more ship losses?”

“If there are two, they have to restrict their weapon discharges to avoid damaging one another,” Hera answered. “We don’t have the ships to screen for two of them if they’re widely separated. The V’kit’no’sat will either run or fight, and if they fight they’d concentrate on one anyway. There is no point in taking two for this mission.”

“Why Bahamut?” the Tsarik asked.

“He has the best coordination scores,” the Jei noted. “He’s probably the most reliable for a mission that is partly an experiment in and of itself.”

“Exactly,” Hera agreed.

“So you risk the pack leader by taking only one?” the Bocadeem challenged.

“If Bahamut is destroyed you would be thrilled with the outcome,” the Sety scoffed. “What is your complaint?”

“We don’t trust Star Force’s judgement, and insist that this mission be canceled and normal containment operations continue. If the Uriti will not accept that and risk going rogue, then we must sedate and send them into the void at a rate of speed that they will not be able to return from no matter what tricks they may continue to hide.”

“Neither of those things are happening,” Yetti said calmly. “The mission has been agreed upon with the Uriti and will proceed. The only question is whether or not you’re going to interfere with it using more than words.”

“We will not look kindly on an act of sabotage that will threaten Star Force’s relationship with the Uriti,” the KoQ stated, essentially killing any rebukes from the other ambassadors, though the Bocadeem didn’t quite relent.

“We will do what is required to keep the Uriti contained.”

“As will we,” the KoQ echoed.

“I’ll let the two of you deal with each other then,” Travis said with a cruel smirk on his face. “If any of you want a ride, get your delegations assembled within a week. We won’t be leaving that soon, but we’ll go the moment we’re ready and you need to be as well. If not you’ll be left behind.”

“About time,” the Oion said, flapping its gill puffs. “You should have used the Uriti long ago. I don’t know why you waited this long.”

“Because the word V’kit’no’sat means ‘hunter of Hadarak.’ They know how to kill them, and we were not going to order the Uriti into battles that were not their own. They never understood the real threat because we had never told them of the Hadarak. Now they know the score and they’re demanding that they be allowed to fight with us, we’re not going to turn down that help. We didn’t tell them earlier because we were afraid of them running straight to the core and getting killed along the way…which some of you would welcome…but they’re our wards and their wellbeing is our responsibility.”

“Apparently no longer, if they’re giving you orders,” the Tsarik pointed out.

“Our relationship has altered,” Travis added. “They want to be our allies, and we’re going to treat them as such while looking out for their best interests. They don’t fly in ships, and whenever they take weaponsfire it’s their bodies that get hit. We don’t like fighting that way, but it’s how the Uriti fight. A defensive battle is one thing, but if we’re going on the offensive we’re not going in even and put them in a situation where they have to take massive damage.”

“Which is why you should take two or more,” the Sety reiterated, “to spread out the damage.”

“How fast we kill the enemy fleet largely dictates how much damage the Uriti will take,” Hera explained. “And trust me…taking Bahamut in solo is the best way to knock down a single target as fast as possible.”

5

February 27, 4832

Dumbo System (Meintre territory near Grid Point Stargate)

Stellar Orbit

Kara-317 came through the jumppoint in the first of the Clan Ghostblade ships to arrive from the Devastation Zone. When the call had come through her fleet was split up into dozens of segments off hunting V’kit’no’sat supply convoys and playing with their escorts, but now it was condensed down into three fleets. Two of those were taking other routes to Tarric 3, but they were scheduled to arrive at the same time to force the V’kit’no’sat to defend three different jumppoints in addition to the Canderous sedas that would be coming out from the grid point itself.

That meant reinforcements coming into the system from 4 directions all the while the transport with Bahamut tucked safely inside would come through last. Kara had him with her fleet, and now that they were inside friendly territory again he’d be making one last star plunge before the last bit of their journey. The Meintre had some 18 star systems nearby the grid point that held almost a third of their entire population, and so far the V’kit’no’sat had not tried to assault any of them…nor the three held by the Albos, or the two by the Gfatt, or the 9 held by other Nexus races.

All were so fortified that they would have hurt the V’kit’no’sat badly if they attacked them, but the blockade fleet in Tarric 3 had done considerable damage without them having to fire a single shot at The Nexus systems. The grid point was their link to the rest of The Nexus, and the blockade of it had caused numerous problems. Now ships had to go through the Devastation Zone to get to Grid Point Annsa in H’kar territory, and the V’kit’no’sat had not left them alone.

The up side was that many of these systems possessed massive shipyards that were producing warships for use elsewhere in The Nexus, and without the ability to send them through the grid points they were piling up here waiting for crews that likewise couldn’t get to them. That meant there was more military might here than normal, though undercrewed. This system in particular had some 8,300 Meintre warships on station in addition to numerous defense stations protecting the shipyards and other vital structures.

There were 6 planets here, all packed with the elephant-like Meintre, but Kara’s fleet wasn’t heading to any of them. They were just passing through and waiting here a bit to sync their invasion timing perfectly. They had two jumps to make to get to Tarric 3 and they wouldn’t be stopping at the next one. Hopefully if the V’kit’no’sat had scout ships that had detected their movement they’d see them coming here and maybe not the grid point just yet, for the size of Kara’s fleet wasn’t large enough to take it back by any stretch of the imagination.

She didn’t know what their odds of getting to Tarric 3 undetected were, but if they had to fight their way into the system they would…though she expected the approaching sedas coming out from the grid point to get the bulk of their attention, for if those got into position they were going to be hard to remove. Stopping them from pooling together at the jumppoint was key for the blockade fleet, and she expected that to be the big distraction needed to get the fleets in without getting chopped apart at their arrival points.

Bahamut’s carrier was coming in last to protect it, as well as to get the V’kit’no’sat fleet fully engaged before they revealed their surprise…though it was possible they would know what was coming from surveillance of the Preserve and they might just leave prior to their arrival, but Kara hoped not. She wanted to neutralize as many of those enemy ships as they could so they couldn’t be used elsewhere against Star Force.

That, and she really wanted to see Bahamut kick their asses.

A signal from the Meintre defense fleet came through to her within a few minutes of the leading edge of her fleet arriving and beginning to pool nearby, which she took in the command nexus on her flagship Yi, with a small hologram of the very large Meintre appearing over her control board.

“Welcome Ghostblade fleet. How may we assist you this day?” the computer translation said in English.

“Just passing through, though we will need to borrow your star for a bit.”

“Our star? For a mining operation?”

“Sort of,” she said with a coy smile. “We’re launching an attack against the blockading fleet at Tarric 3 and we need to recharge our primary weapon using your star.”

The four tentacles on the Meintre’s face clenched with surprise, for they hadn’t been informed of the upcoming attack, nor had anyone in The Nexus until now.

“How many of our ships do you require?”

“None. We’re going to take them down on our own.”

“You want no assistance?”

“Not this time. We’re employing a Uriti, and we’re not quite sure how well it’s going to work. We don’t want anything other than drone warships working in concert with it just in case its weaponsfire isn’t as…accurate as we hope.”

“You’re bringing one of the beasts here?”

“Yes. It’s at the end of this convoy in a transport ship. It will need to disembark and soak in your star before we leave. We want it fully charged when we engage the V’kit’no’sat.”

“You’re bringing one here?” the Meintre reiterated, aghast.

“Just passing through, as I said. There won’t be an issue.”

“You have that much faith in your control over it?”

“We’re not controlling it, we’re working with it. The Uriti want to kill V’kit’no’sat for their own reasons, so we’re helping each other out.”

“What distance do we need to keep from it for safety reasons?”

“When it’s inside the transport there is no worry. When outside stay further away than our fleet is from it. It’s just going to dive into the star, soak for a while, then reboard the transport. Then we’ll be on our way at timestamp 22:38. We have other fleet components meeting us at Tarric 3 simultaneously, so we have a slight delay before we can depart. A Nexus representative is accompanying us in a vessel that will arrive shortly, along with others from the Preserve that want to witness the event. I’m sure the Sety will be able to answer any security concerns you might have.”

“Frankly, we take your word to be more legitimate than that of the Sety, but if the Uriti should attack us we have little to defend ourselves with against it. Which one have you brought?”

“One of the bigger ones…and also one of the more reliable. There will be no issues here with Bahamut, I can promise you that.”

“And what of our stellar mining operations?”

“He will take care not to hit them. It’s a big star, after all.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing, both here and at Tarric 3. We badly need that grid point open again.”

“I know. If this works you’ll have transit passage within the week.”

“Do you think they will flee?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“I will pull our fleet back from the jumppoint now that you have arrived and inform our other vessels to give you a wide berth.”

“Thank you,” Kara said as the Meintre ended communications. All things said, he’d taken the news fairly well, but if she’d been a Meintre living on one of the planets here Kara doubted she’d feel too comfortable with a Uriti arriving in her system…especially when this sort of operation had never been done before.

When Bahamut’s ship eventually arrived it dwarfed even the Star Force jumpships. It was over 80 miles long and 40 high, carrying the Uriti inside a hollow chamber with the rest of the massive vessel comprised of gravity drives and shield generators. There was no crew onboard, for it operated as a drone flown by a nearby jumpship, and once it came out of the jumppoint and moved off from the fleet down to almost touching the outer atmosphere of the star, shields ablaze with radiation pouring off them, the transport spit open along the front, looking like an alligator opening its mouth, and inside of it the prone pale yellow Uriti stirred.

Having held still for weeks and tolerating the confinement that they did not relish, Bahamut pulled itself out of the transport and accelerated down into the stellar atmosphere, happy to be within the outer tendrils of it while the transport looked to hate even that ‘light’ contact. Though he flew through space like a ship the Uriti was vastly alien to the construct, with the latter moving up and further away from the star to a holding orbit as the Uriti sank so deep that it eventually dropped off sensors to take a quick bath and soak up a decent charge. Bahamut only had 6 hours, but sitting and doing nothing didn’t drain his reserves much, so this was just a topping off venture and would be accomplished well before they had to leave.

As much as the Uriti hated the confinement of the transport they preferred it to traveling between stars on their own. Not only was this faster, but they didn’t have to expend the energy to accelerate and decelerate when the ship did it for them. Hanging in interstellar space unable to move but a very small amount on stars too distant to really pull on, the jump between systems was a hated necessity that confined them as much as being within the transport.

It was where they were the most vulnerable…and oddly where they were the safest, for someone attacking them during a jump was almost impossible. They weren’t concerned about that anyway, but they could be damaged if they didn’t decelerate enough at the destination point or couldn’t correct their course if they tried for a really long jump and ended up a bit inaccurate. That was why Uriti preferred shorter jumps, and being carried around by Star Force, while not something they liked, was highly preferable to doing it on their own…which Star Force had them do time to time for training purposes anyway.

But this wasn’t training, this was a mission and they needed Bahamut as strong as possible when they engaged the V’kit’no’sat…and right on time the Uriti came back up out of the star and into communications range with Hera onboard the pacing jumpship. They had a brief conversation and he reported he was ready…with her ordering the transport down to him. Bahamut entered without incident, to the relief of the watching Meintre, and the pair of ships headed for the outgoing jumppoint where the Ghostblade fleet was already leaving through and had been for the past several hours.

Kara had gone through first, as had Travis in his command ship. Hera would be linking up with him through the battlemap system later, which she could use while in communication with Bahamut. Her own psionics wouldn’t work, for the most part, due to the concentration required, but the computer systems that connected directly into her nervous system would, allowing her a semi-battlemeld link to Travis rather than having him here holding her hand so they could coordinate properly.

The plan was to have already engaged the V’kit’no’sat when she arrived, fighting a losing battle that was believable enough to make the enemy think they were trying to thin the blockade fleet without getting themselves killed in the process…then when Bahamut arrived everything would change, one way or the other, and Hera could feel the Uriti’s anticipation as it sat cradled inside its transport.

Bahamut had been built to attack, and had not done so since it was revived from sedation. Bahamut had fought in one of the V’kit’no’sat attacks on the Preserve, but that was still a defensive action. Bahamut had previously been a destroyer of systems, and Hera could feel his urge to put his skills to use helping Star Force kill the ‘little beings’ that were hunters of his Hadarak kin.

Star Force had never met a Hadarak, let alone attacked one, so their relationship was not tarnished, but Hera could feel that the Uriti would side with the Hadarak against Star Force if it ever came to that choice. Friends they were, but Star Force was still ‘little beings’ and the Hadarak were peers. Hera could feel the anger Bahamut held for the V’kit’no’sat, and she knew Star Force could never let themselves be put in a similar situation. They needed to help the Uriti fight the V’kit’no’sat more efficiently, and thus, in a way, help the Hadarak…who might very well try to kill the Uriti if they ever met them.

Hera didn’t know…no one knew what would happen when that meeting eventually took place, but right now it was a moot point. The V’kit’no’sat were here, trying to kill both Star Force and the Uriti, with both having plenty of work to do in the near future just to stay alive, but the Uriti were no longer going to be spectators or protectees. They were going to become war buddies, and this mission was going to set the precedent for everything going forward.

Jeen was here as a backup, on another ship should something happen to Hera’s, but this was all on her and Bahamut and how well they could work with the Star Force fleet…and if Bahamut would keep his cool or go wild when he saw the V’kit’no’sat, now that he knew what they truly were.

6

March 4, 4832

Tarric 3 System

Stellar Orbit

When Hera’s Warship-class jumpship finished its deceleration and linked in to the Star Force battlemap in the system she saw the battle with the blockade fleet already heavily underway. The 284 Canderous sedas were clumped up around the jumppoint to Grid Point Stargate, with the V’kit’no’sat having hit them already but now pulled away from the much larger space stations to engage the smaller warships…who were not grouping with the sedas.

There were Canderous warships and others from the Grid Point with the sedas, but the attacking Star Force fleet had mostly recombined from its numerous arrival jumppoints and was engaging the larger blockade fleet in more than just probing action…with the V’kit’no’sat deciding to smash it first then go back and get the sedas. If they hit the sedas first the big stations would soak up too much damage, allowing the Star Force fleet to get free shots off at them. That meant Star Force needed to group up and force that fight…but they weren’t, and the V’kit’no’sat were going to make them pay for that.

Hera smiled dangerously. Everything was going as planned, and even though Kara’s fleet was taking a beating, the Queen of Diamonds knew how to drag out a fight like this long enough to get their heavy hitter in…and to keep the enemy from running. By now Kara already would have given the ultimatum to leave…which the V’kit’no’sat obviously had ignored…and now was the time to see if word of Bahamut leaving the Preserve had made its way to the V’kit’no’sat yet.

Some 40 seconds after Hera’s ship arrived the last in their convoy came through, that being the massive transport ship that dwarfed the Wrangler’s vessel. Jeen was already here and engaged in the fighting along with the other jumpships, guiding drones that were doing the actual attacking while the control ships dodged any attempt by the V’kit’no’sat to get to them, and that’s where Hera’s ship was headed now as she stood in the command nexus onboard her warship. Linked in to the battlemap network she ordered the transport to begin opening up as she focused and triggered her gauntlet to connect to the massive transmitter onboard her ship, giving her a telepathic link to Bahamut.

It’s time, she said, in a mix of thoughts that weren’t quite words but a type of shorthand they’d developed over the centuries. Follow my lead and I’ll get targets for you to kill. Do it just like training and be mindful of your targets. I need as much precision from you as possible.

Bahamut signaled he was ready as the gator-like doors continued to crank open, exposing the Uriti inside as the transport continued to move closer to the battle. Hera wished she could see the V’kit’no’sat’s reaction…especially as Interdictor-class drones in the fleet began pinning various ships in place and stacking up the massive blockade fleet so it couldn’t run as well as normal.

Go, she said when they were finally in range.

Bahamut surged out of the transport, slow for a starship but fast considering the speeds he used to be capable of. Star Force training had enhanced all the Uriti, but Bahamut was the one that had taken to it the best. Somehow he understood the wisdom in it and had come to trust the Wranglers’ direction, with him now letting Hera guide his movements almost as if she was remote controlling him, though that wasn’t truly the case. She would give him direction and he would fight within those boundaries…hopefully. Hera could feel his anger at the V’kit’no’sat, his wish to utterly obliterate them for what they had done to the Hadarak, so the Wrangler focused on helping him do that in the most effective way possible.

Their goals, Human and Uriti, overlapped today, and Bahamut was savvy enough to let the little being do her job as the 52 mile wide space beast moved towards the rear of the Star Force fleet, passing by the jumpships sitting safely behind the fighting and heading for the ‘smashed sphere’ formation the V’kit’no’sat were now trying to break out from. They’d fought enough Hadarak to know this was horrible positioning and that they had to making strafing runs against it from afar…fighting in close melee range was a death sentence, and many Star Force drones were sacrificing themselves to keep a large portion of the enemy fleet stuck in position.

At Travis’s urging, Hera had Bahamut maintain speed rather than slow down, knowing that the V’kit’no’sat were not going to be held in place for long. Many were slipping out already, but there was a clump of Kafcha-class vessels and other large ones pinned between Star Force ships and their own vessels, and there was a moment of opportunity that was not going to be squandered.

Bahamut did as directed, plowing through the Star Force drones that couldn’t get out of the way in time, having to sit still and keep their IDF fields on the outer V’kit’no’sat vessels even as they were being destroyed by the enemy fleet. Almost half of what Bahamut plowed into was debris of what had been drones, but it didn’t faze the Uriti. The impacts slowed him a bit, then he hit the first of the V’kit’no’sat vessels, smashing them on impact even as he began to decelerate on his own.

Before he could get completely slowed down there were thousands of stings to his body, which Hera could feel, but it was insignificant. The V’kit’no’sat couldn’t kill him quickly, but the reverse wasn’t true. The physical impacts were buffered somewhat by dampening shields, but they couldn’t stop the Uriti’s mass quick enough to save the first few ships that broke apart like piñatas on impact. The heavy armor they possessed was nothing compared to the Uriti’s own flesh, plus the V’kit’no’sat vessels were essentially hollow with living space for the crews.

Bahamut was solid through and through, and by the time the V’kit’no’sat’s dampening fields brought him to a full stop he was a third of the way to the center of their fleet.

Boom, Hera thought, with Bahamut running through a quick charging routine that had yellow energy forming over his two wings. It became so bright it appeared to be a star within the V’kit’no’sat fleet, then the upper and lower portions of his wings discharged similar to a Jumat blast, only this energy was something vastly different.

The golden glow wasn’t plasma, and it wasn’t Jumat. It was faintly reminiscent of Ta’lin’yi, but just as deadly to shields as it was physical matter. In a few seconds a double nuke cloud formed, rising above and below while sparing those ships off the flanks, with the V’kit’no’sat vessels disintegrating on impact along with many smaller Star Force drones further out. The debris and what was left of what the Chixzon called a ‘Torronna’ discharge took down shields, damaged hulls, and knocked ship against ship in a domino effect that didn’t quite make it out to most of the Star Force drones. Some had been destroyed, but most were blocked by other V’kit’no’sat ships around the perimeter, allowing them to continue holding some of the enemy fleet in place as Bahamat launched his second attack.

It wasn’t a Torronna, for that was a planetary assault weapon that could not be repeated for more than an hour, but Bahamut had many weapon systems built into his genome. While missing the tentacles that Hadarak had, they still possessed Lachka-similar energy fields that allowed Bahamut to drag ships towards it and create localized gravity fields to crush weaker vessels against his sides.

That wasn’t going to work here, for the V’kit’no’sat vessels were too strong to break without tentacle help, but the Chixzon had given Bahamut something else. So when the Uriti moved forward and towards the intact enemy ships he closed to range on a clump of them and fired a massive directional energy blast from his ‘head’ lump. A huge blue beam that could outrange very weapon the V’kit’no’sat possessed save for a Tar’vem’jic hit another Kafcha that had suffered shield loss and some minor hull damage, punching through its 36 mile wide mass after a few seconds of burn through.

The remainder of the beam hit another two ships below and a Star Force drone further off while bits of it escaped the battlefield entirely. The Varot cannon did not move at lightspeed or greater, but was a cloying matrix that acted much like plasma…only far greater in degree and Bahamut could repeat that attack every 15-20 seconds.

That meant a ship killing blow with each shot while the V’kit’no’sat weapons only scratched Bahamut’s own hull/flesh. Meanwhile the Uriti continued to collide with intact ships and elicit mine-like discharges that were mere ripples compared to the Torronna earlier, but of the same energy. That left Bahamut’s ‘body’ as the weak link, to which the Chixzon had given him a proximity discharge that allowed a red lightning-like strike against anything within a few miles range…which the V’kit’no’sat were trying to clear away from, but their own debris and Star Force’s now encircling fleet tried to delay their escape as long as possible.

There were too many V’kit’no’sat ships to control, with chunks of their formation breaking away and circling around to attack the Star Force drones in order to open up more pathways out of the blast zone. They didn’t know that Bahamut couldn’t release another one for a while, because he hadn’t used this attack during combat in the Preserve. Too many friendlies had been nearby and the enemy fleet never got close enough to him for it to be effective, but even if they had known they would have been wise to run, for his other weaponry was enough to deal with them all if they stuck close.

Even in their panic the V’kit’no’sat continued to take shots at the Uriti in specific locations, trying to punch a wound through its thick outer skin, though the flesh inside wasn’t all that much more forgiving to energy weapons…but such a wound, if inflicted, would not heal very fast. At least not compared to shields that could come back up in full within minutes or hours, and Hera had wondered along with the other Wranglers how much more powerful the Uriti would be if they had bioshields…a biological technology that the Chixzon had never acquired.

On Travis’ command every ship holding position with the sedas broke free and accelerated towards the battle, being several minutes away at top speed, but the trailblazer needed every intercept possible to run down the fleeing V’kit’no’sat vessels and force them to either stop and fight or abandon their other pinned ships. The sedas couldn’t move fast enough to engage, but they didn’t want to get near the Uriti anyway so they held position offering a safe haven for Star Force drones to run to if needed.

Most of Hera’s focus was on her link with Bahamut, feeding attack orders from Travis to the Uriti, but she could also see the battlemap data and how the V’kit’no’sat responded was a mix of awe-inspiring and terrifying. They didn’t break ranks, didn’t panic, didn’t scatter and run. Their fleet morphed quickly, attacking where they could as they created channels outward to evacuate the others…leaving the wounded behind but doing damage to both the drones and Bahamut as they maneuvered. Their fleet was more than strong enough to defeat everything Star Force had brought to bear except the Uriti, and their response was…

It wasn’t normal. This wasn’t how the V’kit’no’sat normally fought, and it wasn’t until a comment from Travis…who was partially in her head to help coordinate Bahamut’s strikes…pointed out the difference. V’kit’no’sat claimed dominance over everyone save for the Hadarak. They knew they were the inferior in that fight and approached it differently in response. During the attacks on the Preserve the V’kit’no’sat had been hesitant and probing, but not like this. This was them fighting from behind, much like Star Force had learned to do through loss after loss over the past millennium.

Then it clicked, and she thanks Travis for the insight. The V’kit’no’sat were used to dominating their opponents, often not losing a single ship, but there was another side to their psychological coin that she was seeing now.

They were used to fighting and dying and scraping out hard wins against the Hadarak, and these V’kit’no’sat were slipping into that mode of fighting instantly in the power shadow of the Uriti...who in many ways were even stronger than their coreward kin.

Before the Archons could do anything about it, 6 fleet groups emerged outside the containment radius and ignored every drone save for the Interdictors, trying to peel them off to allow others to escape the rampage that Bahamut was on inside the perimeter…a place that no Star Force vessel could have survived more than 30 seconds in. The V’kit’no’sat vessels were so powerful and so closely stacked together that it would have been suicide for the Star Force drones to try to go in there, but a Uriti was another matter entirely and Bahamut was right where he wanted to me.

With Hera’s help he was targeting specific ships and getting the most out of the opportunity until there were no more intact ships remaining in close range. Holes formed in the drone curtain around the area allowing Bahamut to fire at range using his beam cannon, hitting more of the larger ships and taking them down in single shots…though a few intact Kafcha managed to survive one hit with their shields and most of their armor sucking up the massive amount of energy.

The battle quickly devolved into several strands of enemy ships running away like giant snakes with the drones chasing after to harass or grab, with those ships snared swarmed by other drones or held in position long enough for Bahamut to target them. Hera saw several drones go with the V’kit’no’sat ships, for the Varot Cannon blast was over 3 miles wide, and even if it didn’t hit the drones head on the destructive blast from the enemy hulls vaporizing would take them out.

That was an acceptable loss because there were no people onboard, and ton for ton the exchange was heavily beneficial, but Travis quickly tagged several pinned vessels as ‘safe’ from being Bahamut’s targets. The Uriti didn’t understand that and almost fired at one anyway, with Hera about to use a command override if necessary, but she didn’t have to. Bahamut, consumed in battle fervor, pulled back enough to take the Wrangler at her word and focus on the other targets given to him…which were rapidly diminishing. The V’kit’no’sat were far faster than the Uriti, and now that they weren’t massed around it his kill power was becoming non-existent.

Hadarak and Uriti both used minions to go after enemy vessels and drag them in range, but today that tactic wasn’t being used. The Star Force drone fleet was, and was better at it than Bahamut’s minions ever could be…especially since he didn’t have to focus on controlling them. Uriti were telepathically powerful and smart, but they weren’t the naval tacticians that the Archons were. This arrangement had proven best in training, and now in their first successful strike even Bahamut was pleased, comparing this to others he had done in the past on Chixzon orders and giving Hera a lengthy but quick analysis of how much better this worked.

Bahamut was also very happy that Star Force had tricked the enemy fleet into range for his primary discharge. Only the stupidest of the Chixzon’s foes had ever gotten that close in those numbers, and Hera was likewise pleased…and somewhat appalled…at how much damage the Uriti had done in that single attack. She could imagine being on a planet when that hit the surface, and hated the Chixzon even more for what they’d done and the cowardly way they fought. It was effective, but wrong, and slaughtering people randomly turned her stomach.

But now Bahamut was under Star Force’s guidance and his weaponry was being used for legitimate purposes…though now Hera had to convince him to stand down and not kill the remaining debris, for Travis wanted some of the damaged ships saved to put survivors on to send back to V’kit’no’sat territory. He didn’t want to kill them, and he didn’t want to take the responsibility of imprisoning them…for that had proved very hard to do in the past. Patching up some of their lost ships and sending them home was the best method, as well as providing eye witnesses to what happened here.

When Hera passed on that reasoning, so that the ‘little beings’ could flee and tell the other V’kit’no’sat how they should fear the Uriti, he understood but didn’t wholly agree. He would have preferred just killing them all, but had no problem letting Star Force deal with the scraps the way they wanted. With the amount of damage he’d done to their fleet…which was in excess of 60% when all things were done…Bahamut was satisfied enough to request a dip in the star that Hera granted. He was not needed for the little bits of battle left as the V’kit’no’sat ships fled to the nearest jumppoints and ran with Star Force ships chasing them all the way out.

A few battles broke out as the V’kit’no’sat tried to take advantage of some mismatches, now far away from the Uriti, but only 12% of Kara’s drones had been destroyed and they were massing to put the final damage into wounded V’kit’no’sat ships…meaning the enemy had to get out of here despite still having the ability to do a lot of damage.

Hera could tell they didn’t want to run, but between Travis and Kara they eventually gave them no choice after some intense fighting at two jumppoints. As more V’kit’no’sat vessels left those remaining were in a worse and worse position, with many having to flee across the system to other jumppoints because they were having to wait in line.

Most of them got out, but a few were caught and disabled, adding to the captured fleet that would be taking the survivors back.

As for Hera, when Bahamut sank into the star and began soaking up energy and hunting for materials deep within the gravity well, she lost contact but knew he’d be in there for a while as his regeneration sequences began to heal the cuts he’d received. None had made it all the way through his outer layer, but that hard material didn’t regenerate as quickly as Hera would have liked, though in comparison to other biologicals it was almost magically fast.

Add in the fact that the V’kit’no’sat couldn’t do much to one within a star and Bahamut had a safe haven to flee to no matter how badly damaged he was. Hera knew that was a constant problem for the V’kit’no’sat in their ongoing war with the Hadarak, but thankfully that tactic hadn’t been necessary here…and never would be, as far as she was concerned. They’d never launch a strike that put Bahamut or the others into that kind of jeopardy by choice, but in defensive efforts it could come in useful.

As she was monitoring the cleanup effort and not yet ready to leave her post in case Bahamut wanted to talk, a notice came through the battlemap from Travis. It wasn’t to her specifically, but a wide notice to all of Star Force and its allies that would be transmitting through the comm network to the neighboring systems and all the way out to the most rimward Star Force colonies.

The blockade of Grid Point Stargate was broken, and the trade routes were now open again.

Hera smiled, thinking of but not sending a signal to Bahamut that probably wouldn’t reach him anyway if he was too deep within the star. The status quo of this war had just changed, and changed drastically. Now she wished that Star Force and the Uriti had come to terms earlier, and she was glad they had forced their hand by demanding to help the ‘little beings’ whether they liked it or not. Bahamut was worth ten Mach’nel at least, and now that they’d proven they could work together without some catastrophe occurring, Star Force was going to make good on their word to the Uriti and incorporate them into the war whenever possible.

And that, Hera knew, would be bringing a smile to many Archons’ faces when they got word of the success here, including Davis. She hoped he was proud of what the Wranglers’ had accomplished and mentally tipped her hat to him. He was the master of long term investments, and this was probably one of the largest in galactic history.

How the other Uriti would integrate with the Star Force fleets was still in question, but Hera knew Bahamut would school them once they were reunited. For now though they were going to camp out here and gloat. For they’d been playing a game of capture the flag and finally took one of their own back from the V’kit’no’sat…and this one they were going to keep, not evacuate and run before they could get hit again.

Where she and Bahamut would end up beyond this she didn’t know, but their work was done for now and it was time to manage the victory…with Hera watching through the battlemap as V’kit’no’sat survivors were located and pulled off their wrecks of ships whether they liked it or not. She wanted to be on those boarding parties kicking some ass directly, but knew she couldn’t risk it. There were only two Wranglers in the system, and while the transmitter could be used by others, particularly Travis, they didn’t have the personal relationship with Bahamut that she did.

So Hera had to sit this out and watch, but that was ok. This war was a team effort, and while she didn’t like it, sitting and watching was easy. The hard part had just been done, and she couldn’t have been more pleased with Bahamut, who continued to surprise her.

A few hours later he contacted her and expressed similar sentiments, happy with the help Star Force had provided and asking how many ship losses they had suffered and if any of them had been mistakes on his part. His professionalism was extremely welcome, and Hera was right to have chosen him for this first strike. This was truly an alliance now, and Bahamut was the best friend a space navy could have.

And as Paul had said many times,

Naval beats everything.

7

May 29, 4832

Alamo System (Uriti Preserve)

Stellar Orbit

When Hera returned to the Preserve with Bahamut she stayed linked into the Uriti telepathically to observe what happened. She couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversations between each other, but she could monitor their activity, biological stats, and make herself visible to them if they wanted to communicate.

And communicate they did. There were only 8 Uriti in the system at the time for Bahamut to converse with, and their telepathic comm channels lit up in a firestorm of activity. A mix of anger and pride flared in the others, almost simultaneously, as she assumed he was telling them what had happened at Tarric 3.

It didn’t take long after that before she was the focus of the conversation, with multiple Uriti other than Bahamut asking her when they would get their chance to fight, what combat options they had given their unique weaponry, and a lot of technical aspects that many people probably hadn’t thought about yet.

Since the communication was in images and feelings rather than words, she got glimpses of what Bahamut had sent to them, including his tactical impressions of strengths and weaknesses in the V’kit’no’sat fleet, possible effectiveness of each of the other Uriti here, and the level of damage he had taken coupled with his assessment of how that would have affected the others of smaller size.

Even tiny Papa Smurf, at only 1.7 miles long, was expected to own a fleet of similar size without taking too much damage, and the youngest of the Uriti collected to date was pounding Hera with questions along with the others about when they would get their turn. Now that the combined strike formation had proven itself in combat they didn’t see a reason to wait and wanted to start hitting the V’kit’no’sat hard in multiple locations.

Hera put the brakes on that, reminding them that they needed large Star Force fleets to protect them and help snare targets, otherwise they’d run away and strafe the Uriti over and over until they were hurt so badly they’d have to retreat to a nearby star to hide and heal. That was unacceptable as far as the Wranglers were concerned, with Hera insisting that they were hunting victories and not just combat.

A few other Wranglers’ minds popped up and joined the conversation, but not soon after it began an unusual one joined them. He wasn’t a Wrangler, but he was known to the Uriti and now drew their full attention as he started floating hypothetical formations and tactics…that they immediately responded to with their own alterations in a back and forth that left Hera somewhat confused and trying to keep up.

That shouldn’t have surprised her, at least not on Paul’s part, but the fact that the Uriti were possibly better naval tacticians than her and somewhat in The Admiral’s league was shocking, so she just sat back and absorbed as much as she could. The idea of using minions to replace Star Force drones was eventually floated, but Paul said they’d already simmed them against the V’kit’no’sat and they had neither the longevity nor speed needed to ensnare the enemy ships. Hadarak minions were different because they were alive and didn’t require remote control, but Uriti minions were different and could not operate tactically without a nearby controller.

Sure they could fight on their own, but no better than a preprogrammed machine…which is what they were. Biological machines with nobody at the helm, much like Star Force’s drones. Hadarak minions were living beings that could think and adapt on their own, and the V’kit’no’sat knew how to fight them…making Uriti minions not optimal tools for combat against this formidable enemy, but could possibly play a support role as they did in the Preserve when the V’kit’no’sat had attacked. That was because there was a large number of them already here, and shipping them to a target system didn’t make logistical sense.

The Uriti had been designed to beat up on races that couldn’t kill them, so they were going to have to fight the Star Force way rather than just bully their way into systems and dominate. The Uriti understood this clearly now, but Paul was warning them about the enemy’s ability to adapt and that they needed to be cautious, but he did have one mission for them already in mind…a small one. In fact it was only a single shot that needed to be fired, and he needed a Uriti with enough discipline to do just that and a weapon that could hit a fairly precise target.

That eliminated the area of effect weapons, and the Uriti here quickly decided that Bahamut was the best suited. Oddly they didn’t quarrel amongst themselves as to who got to go next, which Hera found relieving. They were showing the professionality that they’d hinted at over the years in exchanges with her, and it was impressive to see how they worked together now.

She was also glad the trailblazers had another mission for them, for she didn’t want to tell them otherwise and to just ‘sit and wait’ until something came up. She should have known the trailblazers would be on this and have a course charted forward before they got back, and Hera was glad she didn’t have to chart that course. The Wrangler much preferred being the middle man and figuring out how to carry out broad orders given to her, because charting the course of the Uriti was troubling enough even if you had a destination point already marked out.

The conversation between Paul and the Uriti continued for hours, at the end of which he called for Hera and Peter-2576 to transfer to his fleet, with her coming onboard the Excalibur…which apparently had already been refitted to carry a Uriti transmitter. Peter’s command ship also came with them, but Hera’s stayed here and she joined Paul onboard his flagship where they began heavy co-op training, with the trailblazer trying to get a feel for how the interaction between her and him would work in more intense combat where split seconds stretched into eternity.

It wasn’t as beneficial as he wanted, with Hera having to tune her mind to the proper procedures to interact with the Uriti without using the override commands. Those were easy now, even using a wrist-mounted relay, but their alliance with the Uriti meant they would only use those as a last resort, and after what had happened at Tarric 3 he wasn’t predicting any trouble with Bahamut despite the limited role he wanted for the upcoming strike on Gallifrey.

Jas’tul was on the surface of Gallifrey when word came down that a Uriti had entered the system. The Oso’lon wasn’t engaged in combat at the time, but was coordinating the constant front-line probing attacks that had been going on for 3 years now. Little progress was being made, but Star Force hadn’t been able to evict their very cheaply won foothold on the planet and if they could only maintain it then the attrition of the war elsewhere would eventually work back to this world and the resistance would lessen…opening up the planetary conquest that most V’kit’no’sat saw as inevitable.

The breaking of the blockade at Grid Point Stargate had changed everything, and right now the battle on Gallifrey was in a holding position. No one knew what was going to come next, and what many had dreaded happening was now here…a Uriti had been brought into this system to fight or bully away the V’kit’no’sat fleet in orbit, and once that happened the orbital bombardment of the Star Force fleet would begin. The few captured anti-orbital batteries and the smaller ones the V’kit’no’sat had installed wouldn’t stop an unopposed fleet…and the only choice before them now was to force a fight with a Uriti in order to cover the ground troops.

They didn’t have enough ships to do that successfully, but when the demand for them to cease fighting and withdraw from the system came through from Star Force’s premier naval commander, Paul-024, stubborn pride caused them to refuse the generous offer. He was not demanding they surrender, only stand down from combat and leave. In retrospect that would have been the preferred option, but old habits ran deep in the V’kit’no’sat, once of which was that they dictated the course of galactic events and were not dictated to.

Even as plans were being made to start evacing the ground troops the V’kit’no’sat refused to the deal, having expected the Uriti to park in orbit and dare their fleet to come in close and stop the Star Force orbital bombardment that would follow…but that’s not what happened. Rather the Star Force fleet stayed above weapons range of the planet while the Uriti sank in lower over the foothold point, its bulk visible in the sky, larger than any ship in both fleets, as it hovered over the atmosphere and rotated around so its wings were pointed downward at them while taking ineffective hits from ground-based weaponry.

The captured Ardents and the smaller portable ones of V’kit’no’sat manufacture scratched the yellowish mass, causing small bits of damage that would only matter in time if it held position and allowed the attack to continue…but it didn’t. With the Star Force fleet much higher up and away from the Uriti the V’kit’no’sat almost attacked them while there was a gap between the two, but they didn’t have time before the Uriti known as Bahamut fired a bright flash of a discharge in only one direction.

The attack didn’t rise from the top of its wings as it had in the battle against the blockade, rather it only fired down onto the planet…something that Jas’tul and the others thought would never happen with Star Force troops so nearby. The Oso’lon was able to see into the sky from his vantage point on a large promenade as he walked between buildings to get to one of the grounded warships first in line for evac when the strike came. It blinded him with sensory overload as the wave of energy slammed down into the protective Star Force-made shield above him and overloaded it within a second across a 36 mile wide area.

That then caused the entire shield to collapse, with the remainder of the blast pushing through and hitting the surface where the V’kit’no’sat had their foothold…and only hitting the foothold. Jas’tul was smashed into the ground as his personal shields flared and failed, with his armor and body burning as he lay cratered into the stone beneath him in a stunned state. It wasn’t until minutes later that his armor’s Kich’a’kat restored enough of his sanity for him to carefully stand up half naked with his armor leeching out to cover his exposed areas. As it stretched very very thin he saw the limited damage to the buildings around him…along with bodies from the dead and wounded, of which there were about half and half.

The smaller V’kit’no’sat races that were caught out in the open didn’t survive, with every Zen’zat in sight being little more than smear marks on the ground with a bit of burning flesh and broken armor remaining, but Jas’tul’s Oso’lon bulk had saved him as he stood up and glared at the Uriti far overhead. It wasn’t firing at them again, and the Ardent attacking it had thinned to only a third of their previous number, but soon there were little dark specs coming down all around it that the Oso’lon’s recently regenerated eyes could see were Star Force’s drone warships…and they were firing at targets on the surface.

The grounded warship that Jas’tul had been headed to was still intact. Its shields had protected it after the main planetary shield had soaked up most of the blast…which had been far too accurate a yield. It had broken the Star Force-built shield with only a small amount of excess getting through, otherwise Jas’tul would have been dead. He had no idea a Uriti could be that precise, but it was clear now to him that Star Force had done it on purpose to spare most of those V’kit’no’sat on the surface while now swooping in to eliminate their defenses.

The Oso’lon knew the fight was lost, so he sat back down on the quickly cooling ground as molten bits here and there resolidified and gouts of steam rose everywhere a body had been hit like little pyres marking the location of the dead or wounded. Jas’tul’s own pyre was out now that his flesh was no longer burning, and with the only dominate act he had left available to him he calmly held his position as the warships buzzed over his head firing on anything that fired back at them. The Oso’lon waited and horrifically watched as their foothold was reclaimed by Star Force troops, all the while staring up at the Uriti above him that remained ominously silent.

The message was clear, and Jas’tul wasn’t going to contest this Star Force victory. If past actions proved precedent, then he would be captured rather than killed so long as he didn’t fight back, so he let the Star Force mechs surround him and deactivated his armor on command when instructed, all the while staring up at the Uriti as if in acknowledgement that they, born of the Hadarak, were the V’kit’no’sat’s only true bane. Not Star Force. Not these little heretics that were being systematically exterminated.

So Jas’tul let himself be captured with the knowledge that it was the Uriti that had been the game changer, and that so long as Star Force held control of the Uriti the V’kit’no’sat could not fight them short of a massive, bloody war the likes of which had not been seen before. It was true there were less Uriti than Hadarak…far less, in fact…but these Uriti had powers that not even the Hadarak had, and Jas’tul had felt the effects of one first hand. These Chixzon who had designed them long, long ago had incorporated the strengths of both the Hadarak and a warship into one massive strategic and tactical advantage that Star Force now exclusively wielded.

This day was lost, and had they known this was going to happen the V’kit’no’sat should have accepted the offer of withdrawal. Instead Jas’tul became Star Force’s prisoner while others fought to their death. There was no winning this fight today, and ego was not sufficient reason to die here when they could survive. The empire was now in more peril than it could have imagined, and the only thing Jas’tul could do to help the V’kit’no’sat now was to survive and hopefully one day return to them with the knowledge of what happened here and the precision with which the attack had taken place.

They needed to know, and even if they found out through other means they were going to need every fighter they had in the coming centuries to wage this new war. One that Jas’tul did not know how it would end, or even how they would combat it, but foolishly throwing away his life was not beneficial. He understood that, along with many others who allowed themselves to be captured after the shield fell.

All of them were coming to grips with the new reality of the transition taking place…and the fact that the V’kit’no’sat were no longer unchallenged beyond the Uriti. Star Force was now a power to be reckoned with, not mere scraps of heretics to be exterminated as they had been promised. Someone had made a massive mistake, and it was one the empire was going to have to pay for.

They should have eliminated Star Force quickly and with overwhelming numbers from day one. Now they had a growing monster on their hands that they could not control.

8

December 12, 4832

Yavarris System (Totana Region Capitol)

Nexchi

“Do you understand?” Davis asked Roger-009 from across the Director’s desk as the two men shared a rare personal meeting.

The trailblazer nodded. “We’ll buy you time, at the minimum.”

“Time and planets,” Davis amended.

“If Sonic and I get along, I think we can do a lot of damage with sufficient ships. We can’t build a surplus in the near future, though.”

“I know. Spend what you need to, but get me some breathing room as soon as possible.”

“How long before you think they send a real fleet to smack us down?”

“Hard to read. They should have done so long ago and decided against it, so I’m not entirely sure what’s motivating them.”

“They did try at the Preserve,” Roger pointed out.

“And it scared them off? No, I don’t think so. They respond to fear with overwhelming firepower. Something else is in play and I can’t put my finger on it. It’s clear they had decided to leave the Uriti until they killed the rest of us so they wouldn’t have escorts enhancing their combat ability, but even that was a timid move combined with the lack of ships sent.”

“Not that they didn’t send plenty, but I agree it’s far more than they could have sent. You’d think they’d stop underestimating us and just get it over with.”

“I suspect it has more to do with ego, but that can’t account for it all. Regardless, this is going to provoke a reaction. Possibly a huge one. I don’t want you holding back because of it. Poke the tiger straight in the nose and we’ll deal with the consequences. Cementing this alliance with the Uriti is our priority at the moment, and we need combat for that.”

“It’s a gamble, but I don’t disagree.”

“Which part?”

“It’s a gamble on multiple fronts, but I was referring to the rim.”

“There is always going to be one system more just beyond our reach with people in need of help, and letting them fall is never going to sit right with us. This plan is the best way I can see to help the most people in the long run. If we don’t stop our planetary losses now our heavy industrial worlds are going to get hit and we snowball in the wrong direction. We’re going to have a problem outgrowing this if the V’kit’no’sat get into H’kar territory.”

“Squeezed on all sides…how is that not normal?”

“We always knew this was a war we would probably lose. I for one am tired of losing but fighting well. I feel like winning for a change while we still have our core industrial territory intact. To do that I need the V’kit’no’sat defending, not advancing. Gallifrey was a turning point, now I want you to hit them hard and fast before they can fully understand the new order of combat.”

“I still don’t like leaving you shorthanded here.”

“Has to be done. We don’t have enough fleets to cover multiple Uriti strike teams.”

“Technically we only need one,” Roger said before Davis threw him an odd look. “Ok, we’d like more, but we can get by with only one.”

“I don’t want you to get by, I want you to soar. Go do your thing. I can handle things here with the others. We won’t lose ground.”

“But we’ll lose more of our neighbors,” Roger said, standing up from his seat at the desk. “I hate that.”

“Give me some breathing room and we’ll be able to grow faster than now. If that can happen, we’ll help a lot more neighbors in the coming decades.”

“Won’t help those that die in this one,” Roger said, arguing with the galaxy more than Davis. “You sure about Rajch?”

“I am.”

“Time to meet my new buddy then. Thanks for the visit.”

“Some things can’t be handled via hologram,” Davis said, rising to match his height, though his own Striker-level Archon skills paled in comparison to Roger’s Goku level. The trailblazer could break Davis like a twig if he wanted, but the Director held a higher skill level with regards to the overall empire. He was the top Monarch, but his also being an Archon and the creator of the empire put him in a unique position that all the trailblazers’ respected enough to seek counsel from when needed, in addition to loyally carrying out whatever missions Davis wanted. He knew Roger would get this done, even above and beyond the other trailblazers, due to his naval skill that was going to be badly needed for this raid.

“Don’t break the empire while I’m gone,” Roger said, turning to walk towards the door.

“May the Force be with you,” Davis added, drawing a sarcastic frown from Roger.

“I’m not Paul.”

“But you’ll still need it.”

Roger’s humor bled away, with him catching onto the Director’s meaning. “Understood.”

After that the trailblazer left Davis’s office and then the system, heading across Star Force territory enroute to the Devastation Zone and then the Uriti Preserve where another mission was already being launched from.

Jason-025 stood in the command nexus onboard his flagship, the Sanguine Blade, as he was locked into the battlemap system and directing both his guardian fleet and the Uriti known simply as ‘Claw’ while Paul-024 and Riley-038 led their own fleets that were engaging the V’kit’no’sat and keeping them off of Jason, for the most part, as they assaulted the planetary shields of Tivonmenk in the Medforjet System. It was one of three systems that the enemy had claimed right under Star Force’s nose, but after this battle that would no longer be the case…assuming everything went as planned.

Right now Claw was taking Tar’vem’jic fire and Jason didn’t like it. It wasn’t a big weapon, but it had been putting shots into his fleet as they approached and now Jason couldn’t shield the Uriti from it with his drones anymore, for it was firing back at the planet with its orb launcher and needed a direct line of sight. The Tar’vem’jic was doing more than scratching the Uriti, but Claw’s mass was protecting him even as his outer skin layer was being penetrated in a key spot near his primary weapon array.

Jason had ships as close as he could to it, but the V’kit’no’sat’s aim was spot on and the orange beam was chewing through the outer armor and getting into the slightly softer interior…but the saving grace was that the Uriti was so big that it amounted to little more than a bee sting without the backup of the system defense fleet. What the enemy was trying to do was damage the orb launcher so it would stop firing its barrage of glowing white Arkko energy that was doing considerable damage to the planetary shields.

They didn’t ring the planet yet, covering only a huge chunk of the planet and allowing for troops to be deployed around the perimeter if desired, but Jason wasn’t having any of that. Claw was going to get him in the front door and he was going to use it to take out the outpost so long as he didn’t take too much damage in the effort. Paul and Riley were doing a good job of keeping the very large V’kit’no’sat fleet busy while Jason’s own ships took hits from the conventional anti-orbital weaponry and flanking warships trying to come up from underneath them through the planetary atmosphere.

His fleet was in good position while the other two were getting chewed up badly, but as Claw dropped orb after orb on the shield at a rate of one every 7 seconds he knew he was almost through it and only had to hold on a little longer. Through Logan-2522 he could feel Claw’s damage, like a spike of pain near its ‘mouth’ that was little more than a gap in its ring-like body. Thicker on the backside and thinnest near the tips, it had a gap that made up the firing chamber that was otherwise exposed to space, and in that gap the Arkko energy was gathered before being released, making it look like it was crying tears that would hold in place then randomly drop down to the planet.

When they hit they didn’t do nearly as much damage as Bahamut’s wing blasts, but their higher firing rate partially made up for it in addition to the Arkko energy being a partial shield penetrator, and despite the heavy generators the V’kit’no’sat had installed in recent years they weren’t going to be able to hold off the Uriti for more than a few more minutes…and in those minutes there was no way for the V’kit’no’sat fleet to fight through Paul and Riley to get at him.

That meant Jason was going to get through, and when he did Claw’s very accurate energy bombs were going to target specific structures and pluck the planet’s defenses away from…

His attention caught a comm channel activating from the planet, directed to his ship and asking for Jason specifically. Multi-tasking as he was capable of, the Archon received the holographic message that in returned showed Jason but not Logan who was standing beside him and linked into the same console as he guided Claw.

The image of a Rit’ko’sor appeared, and Jason could tell by the way his lips crinkled that he wasn’t too happy.

“You will be through our shield in moments,” Sess’met admitted calmly. “There is no need for further combat. The planet is yours if you will honor the offer you made earlier and allow us to leave.”

“It is,” Jason said just as calmly. “Call off your fleet and we’ll cease bombardment…after which the shields must be lowered and stay down.”

“Agreed,” the Rit’ko’sor said, with Jason seeing an instantaneous alteration of the battlemap as the enemy fleet began to disengage and retreat to a higher orbit. Paul and Riley let them go, having seen the comm between Jason and the Rit’ko’sor, and not wanting to lose more drones anyway.

“If there is any mischievousness in the pullout your safe removal will be revoked,” Jason warned.

“Mischievousness?”

“Sabotage, subterfuge, explosions…”

“We are deleting our database, but the buildings I do not care about. They are yours now.”

“Including the Tar’vem’jic?”

“If it will secure our safe departure, it is yours as a spoil of victory.”

“Generous of you.”

“You allowing us to live is more generous, and there is no need to not reciprocate. You have beaten us.”

“Finally a wise V’kit’no’sat. There are so few of you.”

“Unfortunately true. May I ask a question?”

“Without a guarantee of answer, yes.”

“Have you always had this capacity with the Uriti?”

“We chose not to use them in this manner previously.”

“What changed?” Sess’met asked curiously.

“We didn’t want them fighting our war for us. They decided otherwise.”

“You do not control them then?”

“We have a relationship and an alliance. They now know you are the sworn enemy of the Hadarak, whom they see as kin, and they hate you for it. They want to fight you. We are now obliging.”

“Why did you not do so before? Why wait until so many of your planets were destroyed?”

“They are our allies, not our tools or possessions. You know how to kill Hadarak. The Uriti believed themselves to be nearly indestructible based on their previous battle history. Their protection is our responsibility. Now they are more than our wards. They have chosen to be our allies.”

“I do not understand. You had the ability to command them to do this earlier, yes?”

“We did.”

“And you did not because you feared for their safety?”

“We were not going to order them to do something they did not wish to do. Now they want to fight you, so situation solved.”

“So you sacrificed your own people, by the billions, to protect a Uriti that needs little protection to begin with?”

“Is doing the right thing so alien to you?”

“How is it the right thing to lose a war you could be much more effective in waging if you used the obvious tools available to you?”

“That’s the key point here,” Jason said as he relayed the order through Logan for Claw to cease firing on the planet now that the anti-orbital batteries were now also silent. “They’re not tools, they’re people, and they don’t have ships to fight in. They take the weaponsfire to their bodies, and while they might survive, we are not comfortable with that type of combat. The Uriti made the choice for us, and we respect that choice, but we will not order it. They have to choose it, and now they are.”

“You did not tell them of the Hadarak earlier?”

“No.”

“You feared they would leave to find them?”

“We did, but that fear was unwarranted. We are united now against you, so take your people and ships away from this world and tell the others they need to leave as well. We’re taking back everything you took from us, one way or another. I’m glad you’re choosing the easy way here.”

“Don’t expect it elsewhere. Their ego may prompt them to stay and fight. Are you willing to kill them all if they do not relent?”

“Have you studied our war history?”

“In great detail.”

“Then you know we had to deal with intransigence against the Li’vorkrachnika.”

“Which is why I know opposing you further here is illogical and wasteful. You are not bluffing, you are waging war on your terms.”

“Now a question for you. Why are you the first Rit’ko’sor we have encountered in this war?”

“Our race is still under populated and not fully trusted. Our specialty is in fighting the Hadarak, so that is where most of our contribution to the V’kit’no’sat is devoted.”

“So why are you here?”

“You were costing them too many ships. I was here to give them other options.”

“You were responsible for Gallifrey?” Jason guessed.

“I was. Unfortunately you had a counter for that strategy that I did not deduce. I assumed if you could use the Uriti in this fashion you would have done so long ago. I still do not understand your reasoning, but I clearly miscalculated. I do not believe I will have another chance to correct my mistake. My tenure on this warfront will be terminated.”

“Killed?” Jason asked.

“No, I will not be killed. But my reputation will be stained with failure, as you have stained many others.”

“What will your leaders do now?”

“If they are wise they will bring the full might of the empire against you.”

“Why have they not done so already?”

“They continually underestimate you, not wishing to admit to your danger. You are heresy, and heresy is meant to be weak and squashed. Your death was meant to occur at Terraxis, with cleanup actions afterwards, but that was not a deathblow to you as it should have been. There have been many deathblows that you recover from, and now you unleash a power the V’kit’no’sat have never faced before. Expect a strong response.”

“But not a full one?”

“That depends on those higher rank than me.”

“And there is no chance of you just leaving and letting us live beyond your borders?”

“No. You are too steeped in heresy. You must be eliminated.”

“Odd thing to say when I hold the power to obliterate you right now.”

“I assumed you sought honesty. Would you prefer convenient lies?”

Jason smirked. “Honesty is always sought. And here is a bit for you. The V’kit’no’sat started this war, you are in the wrong, and you had best figure out why before you insist on continuing a fight that does not have to continue.”

“You seek an armistice?”

“No. We’re never going to sanction you mother fuckers after what you’ve done, but it is you that are pressing this war into our territory. You would be wise to pull back to your own borders and leave us be.”

“Only to let you grow stronger? I think not. That would be utter foolishness.”

“So you’re committed to our destruction?”

“It is not personal, but we are.”

“I find that highly personal.”

“What I mean is that it is not in regard to what you have done, but to what you were born to be. You didn’t personally choose to be the offspring of Zen’zat. But offspring must be destroyed.”

“Because you have a rule that says otherwise…and you can’t see how flimsy that logic is?”

“It is not flimsy. Zen’zat are not designed to reproduce, as you have probably realized.”

“Not a reason to kill us.”

“The reason is to maintain the natural order, with Zen’zat remaining individuals and not a race.”

“Odd thing for a Rit’ko’sor to say.”

“A bit of irony, for sure, but our war was over the natural order not being honored. There are still…revisions that need to be made in the empire, but the perversion has been eliminated. Save for you.”

“Best you get going before I decide to shoot your dumb ass,” Jason said, letting a bit of his anger show through.

“As instructed,” Sess’met said politely, but with a grit that made it obvious that he was only doing so because of his disadvantageous position, then his image disappeared with Paul’s and Riley’s popping up to replace it.

“Arrogant little punk,” Riley noted.

“He did just save us a lot of drones,” Paul pointed out. “Nice score there for diplomacy.”

“Even when they’re losing they won’t relent,” Jason said with a shake of his head. “They’re going to come back hard, sooner or later. They won’t let this vendetta drop.”

“Did you expect otherwise?” Riley asked.

“From a civilization as advanced as they are…yeah, I expected that some of them would wise up eventually. After we kicked their asses, at least.”

“They’re as loyal to their dominance as we are to the lightside,” Paul suggested as all three saw the first evacuation ships begin to lift off from the surface. “I wouldn’t expect them to change their ways.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“But not betting on it?” Riley asked.

“No,” Jason said with finality. “I think we are going to have to kill them all before they give up the fight.”

9

June 12, 4833

Rajch System (V’kit’no’sat Hatavera Region, Brat’mar territory)

Stellar Orbit

When Roger’s command ship, the Diadem, entered the system out of its interstellar jump Admiral Charrit already had their foothold in enemy territory secure with a ring of jumpships and their deployed drones protecting the incoming ships. Typically Roger would have come through near the head of the fleet, but not with the Diadem being one of two ships carrying Uriti Wranglers.

He trusted the Admiral enough to let him get the first taste of combat, and he wasn’t mistaken in seeing that there were some Brat’mar ships poking holes at the Star Force lines while most of their system defense fleet was in transit out to the jump point. As expected, they didn’t know they were coming and Roger had packed his fleet in extra tight on this last jump so the leading elements could emerge closer together.

That was a relief, as were the battlemap reports that no ship had suffered anything more than shield depletion. That meant the full incursion of his fleet into this system was not going to be challenged here, unless the Brat’mar were really feeling stupid today, and they’d wait for Star Force to attack one of the 7 planets or orbital installations that made up this valuable star system 1200 lightyears in from the V’kit’no’sat frontier. Fortunately there were plenty of systems between those claimed by the V’kit’no’sat to sneak through, and as Roger had also guessed they didn’t have a good detection system this far out through the ‘useless’ territories that they barely patrolled.

Rajch, however, was not useless, and was a major frontier shipbuilding center. Six of the seven planets were mining centers with the last being a standard colony and home to over 900 million Brat’mar. Add in their Zen’zat servants and the population rose to 2.2 billion on Zatarax alone, giving the entire system a combined population of 7.8 billion and plenty of breathing room to grow, but only the two races were here, for it was not a shared system.

There was also a plethora of orbital stations, including a pair of stellar mining platforms. Having two around one star was atypical for the V’kit’no’sat, but instead of building a larger model they’d chosen to go with two smaller ones. It was a stepping stone along the path to greater infrastructure that this system was taking but still able to produce the flow of solari that the system required to maintain its exports.

It was what was considered a ‘safe’ shipyard, far from the Hadarak and any of the annoying powers that the V’kit’no’sat had to occasionally deal with, including Star Force. It didn’t even border the Devastation Zone, but was spinward of it a great deal, having taking Roger’s fleet nearly 5 months to get here on a route that took them clear of the Devastation zone entirely. They’d crossed through systems that only scouts had entered, and now they were on the V’kit’no’sat’s doorstep spilling warships into the system and starring down an undersized defense fleet for what he was bringing…even without the Uriti.

But the planetary defenses were strong, very strong in typical Brat’mar fashion. Their disc-shaped ships were formidable enough, but their building planning always erred on the side of extra defense before expanding other areas. That made Brat’mar worlds hard and costly to take, but Roger wasn’t going to try that today. He was here on Davis’s orders for a more important strike mission…one aimed directly at the ego of the V’kit’no’sat.

With a thought Roger accessed his command ship’s database and pulled up one of Paul’s favorite battle songs…the Imperial March. He set it playing across the command circuit that linked him to his four Admirals and all other Archons in the fleet, save for the Wranglers. They had enough on their minds not to need the distraction, but he wanted the music as a reminder of why they were here…and Davis’ suggestion that the Force be with him made it fit perfectly.

By the time Sonic’s ship arrived his fleet numbered at 12,834 Warship-class jumpships and 238 command ships…vessels that had all been pulled off the rimward side of Star Force’s territory and not from the fight against the V’kit’no’sat. That wasn’t a decision that Roger would have made, but Davis was convinced that they could weather the storm for the year that the trailblazer would be away on this mission, though he was counting on most of them making it back intact. That, second only to the V’kit’no’sat’s reaction, was why Roger was going to need the Force with him today.

The V’kit’no’sat defense fleet numbered 4,721 vessels, which did not leave them with a clear advantage in a straight up fight. Sizing up the tonnage and weapon capabilities through the battlemap Roger saw that he in fact had a 3 to 1 advantage over the Brat’mar fleet and he expected they knew it too…but throw in the planetary defenses and he’d lose most of it in order to get a foothold on the surface of one of the planets to begin an invasion.

But he hadn’t brought any troop ships with him…not that he’d need them. At first it would appear that this was a raid rather than an invasion to the Brat’mar, but when the Uriti transport arrived and the 9-armed Sonic was released the enemy commander had to realize Roger had more than enough firepower to simply overwhelm the planetary defenses and bombard the surface without needing to bother with a ground invasion.

Just to rub in the fact that they were now in control of the system, Roger had his escort fleets reform into a parade stance that had the Uriti dead center and the jumpships lined up around it in bars with the drones coming in to fill in additional ones. They weren’t all quite touching, but given the size of the ships involved it looked like they were from afar as a giant Star Force emblem was created out of the fleet as it headed around the star to the location of the first stellar mining installation that was even now beginning to head away from them on its own engine power…and it wasn’t moving slowly, meaning this was one of their interstellar-capable models that were fully mobile.

A pit that. He’d wanted to take those out too, but he wasn’t going to go chasing after them and force a conflict with the defense fleet. That wasn’t the goal here, so he began heading towards the first band of shipyards, of which there were three, somewhat near the third planet. He set course and speed for the fleet at a minimal rate that would give the V’kit’no’sat plenty of time to see them coming and evacuate first.

“Attention V’kit’no’sat,” he said over an open comm, specifically using their empire name rather than their racial one to make a point that this wasn’t personal with them, but a consequence of their alliance’s actions. The Imperial March continued to play in Roger’s ears, but wasn’t audible on the other end. Only the trailblazer’s voice was, along with his holo, as he stated his demands.

“In case you haven’t been informed, the Uriti have now agreed to an alliance with us against your empire. This means we are no longer simply defending our Preserve as a base of operations and sanctuary for the Uriti, as we have done previously. Now knowing that your empire was forged to hunt and kill Hadarak, whom they consider their cousins, the Uriti are no longer willing to sit and wait for you to attack and have offered their services in combat beyond the Preserve.”

“Several strikes have already been made in the war zone, and if you have received word of them you know what is about to befall you. This Uriti alone is enough to breach your planetary defenses and allow my fleet to bombard your cities into rubble strewn fields, just like you did to ours. We now have that power, but we’re not going to misuse it as you have. I am not here to kill you, I am here to deny you the tools to kill us. You have 45 minutes to abandon the shipyards we are currently headed towards, along with all others in this system. We will be eliminating them all. If you wish your crews to live, get them out now. If they are still onboard when we arrive we will not care. You have a chance to save their lives. If you do not remove them, the shipyards will be destroyed regardless.”

“And if you wish to retain your defense fleet, keep it out of weapons range…unless your arrogance blinds you so much you cannot fathom the thought of standing by while we destroy your shipyards. If you are that stupid, then please come forward and we will do your race the service of eliminating your stupidity from your genetic pool. If you are wise, save your ships in case we assault the planetary shields. It will not stop us, but it is strategically your best option to do the most damage. Such a strike will not occur because we do not seek slaughter, but make no mistake that we can bring the war to you as easily as you brought it to us…and with the Uriti as our allies, you are badly outgunned.”

“If you have not received reports from the warfront, then you are about to get an education in how the Uriti are superior to the Hadarak. Stay out of the way and live to learn from the lesson. Get in the way and you will die as you fathom the sheer firepower they possess…and that is at my power to command. There will be no further communication. Evacuate your shipyards. This is your only warning and only opportunity to do so. When we arrive, they will be promptly destroyed.”

And with that Roger let his fleet creep forward slowly, not knowing what was going on behind the scenes with the Brat’mar, but the mad rush towards his fleet by theirs on a suicidal ego-driven attack did not occur. The two stellar mining platforms were covered in their retreat and the Brat’mar fleet kept its distance as a spattering of small craft began to leave the shipyard complex first on his ‘to-destroy’ list…

Tarsi was waiting on the hangar deck along with the last few Zen’zat techs on slip 34 of the Brat’mar shipyard complex as the defense stations opened fire on the approaching fleet. They could see out the open doors through the atmospheric shield as the Star Force fleet held its odd formation. The Zen’zat didn’t know the significance of the shape, and many of them barely knew the name Star Force. While they weren’t on the other side of the galaxy from Terraxis, they were enough lightyears away to be out of the loop and not connected with the invasion in any way. Even the ships produced here didn’t go to that fight, so the idea of it landing on their doorstep was considerably unnerving.

But what was unnerving the most was an altered Hadarak heading their way and not enough drop pods to get everyone off the shipyard. The evacuation hadn’t started in mass until a wave of craft had come in from the defense fleet and other ships in the area, for the nearest planet was too far away to get to them in time. The shipyards were deliberately in null space where attacking craft couldn’t get to them quickly without having something nearby to break upon and that was hampering the evacuation considerably.

Then there was the fact that many of the partially constructed warships were being given priority for evacuation, leaving the Zen’zat not nearby one stuck as they waited for a return trip of the drop pods…and now the fighting was beginning with the enemy fleet not even bothering to break formation to deal with the 6 Imenta-class defense stations and the one massive Barkod that stretched 840 miles wide. All of the stations were flat discs, and even the shipyard complex was a cluster of disc-shaped slips connected to each other by massive ‘scaffolding’ that was on its own miles wide.

Heavy shield strikes began hitting the enemy fleet, then a single blue beam leapt out from one of the arms on the Uriti, emitted from the semi-flexible tip, and it drilled into the shields of one of the Imenta, failing to penetrate them, but a few seconds later the Uriti began to slowly rotate and fired again from its next tentacle-like arm.

It took only four shots before the hull of the Imenta was hit, then the Star Force formation finally broke and their drones swarmed the 104-mile wide disc, targeting weaponry, shield generators, and any other sensitive systems while the Uriti held position and fired on the next closest Imenta. The fleet took ranged shots from the others and the Barkod continued to pepper the attacking ships, all ignoring the Uriti as thankfully another drop pod eclipsed the Zen’zat’s view of space and moved into the hangar.

Tarsi ran with the other techs onboard, cramming in tightly to fit everyone, then they were flown away from the shipyard and deposited on a nearby cargo vessel along with other evacuees. Less cramped here, they Zen’zat clustered around each other giving the larger Brat’mar as much breathing room as they could, while they watched the tactical displays as the cargo ship eased away from the fighting.

Oddly the defense fleet was not engaging along with the defense stations…leaving the crews on them to die as a wave of displeasure rippled through the Zen’zat and Brat’mar. That telepathic sentiment was eventually countered by clarification…the defense stations were probing the enemy’s strength, and if feasible the defense fleet would assist them…but if not they were going to hold their firepower for an assault on the planetary shield.

Many Brat’mar didn’t care for such a cowardly tactic, and the Zen’zat shared their displeasure at having to stand by and watch while their kin were overwhelmed on the defense stations. Even the Barkod, which was more heavily armed than a Mach’nel, couldn’t stand up to the Uriti’s firepower as it easily knocked down the shields and allowed the Star Force fleet to swarm over its surface, losing many of their ships in the process but doing little to diminish their overwhelming numbers.

Numbers that could have been countered by the defense fleet, but Tarsi’s displease didn’t run into stupidity. Her expertise was not in combat, let alone fleet combat, and she hoped that the Brat’mar’s uncharacteristic hesitancy was the right move…but she couldn’t help thinking about being one of the Zen’zat on those stations, as she had just been on the shipyard before being pulled out. It wasn’t fair to them, but then again maybe they hated the idea of just sitting by and watching the shipyards be destroyed. It didn’t seem to be worth their lives, but perhaps that was the very reason for withholding the fleet.

Even if potentially wise, it didn’t sit well with the Brat’mar here and she could feel their ire…which made the Zen’zat keep a few extra steps away from them so they didn’t get stomped in a temper tantrum…but their anger and helplessness twisted into something else as the battle progressed. Other than knocking down the defense stations’ shields, neither the Barkod nor any of the Imenta were targeted again. In fact they were deliberately sparred other than for their defenses and weaponry, with the Star Force fleet swarm passing away from them and leaving their bulk behind…along with what was hopefully their crews, inside and intact if they’d kept away from the outer hull.

The swarm of enemy ships did the same to all the stations, leaving them floating helpless before the Uriti as its slow spin had gradually accelerated, throwing its arms out in a star shape until it was moving alarmingly fast…then it began to travel, maintaining its spin, towards the shipyard where Tarsi had been just before.

The shipyard’s shields were still up when it got close, but before the spinning mass of a 30 mile wide Uriti could impact the dampening shields the blue beams reappeared, strafing the shipyard with precisely timed discharges so they didn’t spray everywhere in a 360 degree arc…but they did penetrate the shipyard’s defenses and then some, slicing through deck after deck with ease as explosions followed and a few drones dashed in to target the dampening shields that would have brought the Uriti to a halt no matter how much mass it had.

Those drones left as quickly as they arrived, then Tarsi, the other Zen’zat, and the Brat’mar got to witness the power of the Uriti put on display with the Star Force fleet patiently watching nearby and staying clear of the debris field that was soon to be born.

The Uriti’s spin had increased even more by the time the first rotating arm hit the station. The armor of the Uriti was akin to what the Hadarak grew and was the inspiration for the Yeg’gor that made the Mach’nel so formidable in battle. When the Uriti’s arm hit the sturdy construction of the station it tore through it like tissue paper, pulverizing material with each hit as it continued to spin and move forward through the much larger construction. The shipyard was so huge that it dwarfed the Barkod at more than 6,000 miles wide, though most of the interior space was empty to accommodate movement and work crews.

The Uriti tore through it like a buzz saw without firing another shot, slowly moving around and just hitting everything in sight with its rotating arms that barely seemed to slow with even the most brutal hits…only to increase in speed again afterward. It was a sickening sight to watch, but at least the crews had gotten off in time. Or at least hers did. If anyone else was still there…

No, everyone had gotten off before the first impact. That was the telepathic sentiment flowing through the group as others were obviously thinking the same thing she was and someone with information answered the question for them. So there was that, at least, but she and the rest of the V’kit’no’sat were being forced to watch the destruction of their painstakingly built shipyards at the hands of an enemy that should never have been here…and one that controlled its own Hadarak of immense power.

Power that the system defense fleet couldn’t counter. Power that even a Barkod couldn’t counter. And a power that, for the first time in her life, made Tarsi feel inferior…and that was not a sensation that the V’kit’no’sat had ever believed possible. They dominated this galaxy and fought the Hadarak on their behalf, but no one other than that galactic menace could stand against them…until now.

10

June 30, 4833

Yewren System (Hadarak Border)

Asteroid Belt (Assault Fleet)

Mak’to’ran was onboard his command Kafcha waiting off the main Hadarak patrol path until his full fleet arrived when sensors picked up an incoming jump. It was neither a Hadarak arriving nor another fleet segment, but a Voro’nam Kaeper that immediately transmitted a query for the V’kit’no’sat fleet.

When Mak’to’ran received it his ships were hidden behind the largest asteroids but not totally invisible, so they sent an affirmation ping with their location and the courier vessel traveled to them at high speed…too high for a typical run, suggesting that whoever was onboard was in a hurry, and that did not bode well, so the Era’tran went down to the hangar bay to meet the dropship when it came across the void of space to the much larger vessel.

Off of it strode one of his senior commanders, the Voro’nam Zyrnox who was supposed to be out on the rim finishing the extermination of the Humans and their broken but still defiant little empire…not here in the core. Mak’to’ran emitted a displeased telepathic aura and the hard bulge on the Voro’nam’s head dipped lower in shame, meaning something had gone wrong…yet again.

“Explain why you are here,” the leader of the V’kit’no’sat said evenly, but with anger seething behind each word.

“I have failed, I do not deny that, but the status quo has changed to accomplish that feat. We were making progress, taking more worlds from them with regularity. I admit our progress was not effective enough, and for that I bear the blame, but the Humans are now using the Uriti in offensive missions. They have the power to breach our planetary defenses. I cannot hold the systems we have taken. Two have been reclaimed and the third is likely to come under attack soon. Terraxis will follow, I fear, and I do not have the ability to stop them.”

“They have struck beyond the Grid Point?” Mak’to’ran asked, knowing of that loss but nothing further, having been out of communications range for some time with the only updates coming from ships being added to his constantly shrinking fleet.

“They are engaging in planetary assaults using a single Uriti, and we cannot stop them. The Uriti are far more dangerous than the Hadarak. I do not think the planetary defense station on Terraxis would be enough to stop one, and the Humans are escorting them with massive fleets that prevent us from engaging them as we would the Hadarak. I do not know what to do other than pull back and spare us needless losses.”

“I was told this would not happen,” Mak’to’ran said, walking forward and past the Voro’nam, his anger now spread in multiple directions. “Analysis said that if they had this capability they would have used it previously. What has changed?”

“Our spies say a new relationship with the Uriti has been formed and they are willingly attacking us…not being ordered to do so by the Humans.”

“So they do not have firm control?” Mak’to’ran wondered, spinning back around to look at Zyrnox as a small crowd had gathered around them, but were keeping a respectful distance.

“It is rumored that they have gained an ability to communicate with them beyond the firm controls the Chixzon implanted them with. It seems they are reluctant to use the latter, for reasons I do not fully understand.”

“Their philosophy hinders them constantly,” Mak’to’ran pronounced, having given Star Force much thought over the years as he was busy fighting the Hadarak and other problems. “They will not use slaves in any way, shape, or form. Even if it was to save themselves. The Uriti are far more formidable than their own fleets, yet they protect them in battle as if they were invalids. That is clear from our attack on their Preserve, but you’re saying they have now hit planetary targets?”

“They have…and it gets worse. On my way here I received an update of a strike beyond their territory. They hit the shipyards at Rajch, destroying them all, but sparing the planet and the defense fleet. They delivered a message then left, but they had the numbers and firepower to destroy the system if they wished. They chose not to, and they wanted us to know that they could and can at will if they decide to change their minds. They told us to stay away from them in the future.”

Mak’to’ran grew deathly still, and Zyrnox was fearful of a backlash from the powerful Era’tran, as were the others in the hangar, but none came. He was frozen as if a statue for some time, looking at the ground as his telepathic aura was compact and almost unreadable. Zyrnox did not interrupt whatever thoughts he was contemplating, and eventually the stillness was broken by a slow but jarring head turn towards the Voro’nam.

“The failure is not yours. Not on the part of the Uriti. That failure is mine…for trusting the fools who did the analysis. If there is some form of diplomacy present between the Humans and the Uriti that is a factor that was never considered…and it would explain a great many things. Why they have not used them in this manner before. Why they would fight at the Preserve and nowhere else. Why there is such a great interest in them from around the galaxy. We assumed they were merely powerful tools, and in our possession we would have used them in the first stage of the war. We had to learn the hard way when we invaded their Preserve and were dealt the humiliating losses.”

Mak’to’ran began to pace around Zyrnox, but the Voro’nam no longer felt threatened. He knew he did bear some blame, but it was clear that Mak’to’ran did not want an excuse, he wanted to get to the truth of the matter.

“If they have been playing a longer game and buying time towards it, then we are the fools,” Mak’to’ran floated. “If the Uriti are truly more powerful than the Hadarak, and they have a working alliance with them, they now possess a power that we do not…and if they manage it in typical fashion, they will refine and hone it to exacting degree before putting it into use. And if they have struck at us beyond their bastardized realm then they are going beyond self-defense. They have become bold and flaunt us with their mercy at the same time. Tell me, did they destroy everything in the planetary assaults?”

“No. They warned us and let us evacuate where we agreed. Where not, they killed those who fought up until the end, then they captured the last few and sent them back to us in disgrace.”

“They are continuing to tell us that they are in the right and we are in the wrong,” Mak’to’ran said, wishing this mess had been resolved long ago, but no one had expected this heresy to be so resilient. “And reminding us that if they wanted, they could fight by our terms and do an immense amount of damage.”

“How can we defend against this?” Zyrnox respectfully asked. “We have too many systems to defend with the numbers needed.”

“Indeed. If they are willing to strike at our proper border then we are vulnerable. How close were you to breaking their fleets before the Uriti strikes began?”

“Very close. Both they and us were stressed in terms of ships, and that slowed down the scale of conquest, but a Rit’ko’sor subcommander of mine found a way to circumvent the problem and nearly handed us their strongest system on the warfront. We had a foothold on the planet without requiring a planetary assault, but then they brought in a Uriti and took down their own captured shield generators with a single, precisely calibrated shot. One discharge from the Uriti and even the Humans’ own most powerful shields couldn’t stand against it. No Hadarak could do the same.”

“Wrong. Some could simply by landing on it,” Mak’to’ran said, knowing that was beyond the point. “We cannot let them damage us with impunity, nor can we assume that the loss of more planets is going to weaken them enough undercut their escort fleets, correct?”

“They do not have an unlimited amount of ships, but they do have strong planetary defenses. We can’t pluck their industry from them without high cost.”

“And in the meantime they can hit anything they want with the Uriti. No, this situation is untenable and must be countered forcefully.”

“We would have to redirect the fleets from the Hadarak front,” Zyrnox floated. “We must truly have so many ships that the Uriti cannot flee. I urge you not to underestimate the damage they can inflict.”

“I am not,” Mak’to’ran promised. “I have been given assurances that the Humans would be destroyed so many times I would not believe it now even if it were true.”

“Then we must mass our full strength against them. I can see no other way, and even if we do we will be badly hurt. I do not see them splitting up the Uriti to allow us to assault individually. We might catch one or two alone, but…”

“No.”

“No?” Zyrnox asked, not sure what exactly he was referring to.

“The fleets on the Hadarak border will remain unless absolutely necessary.”

“We will have to pull system defense ships away from station. That will leave us vulnerable across the empire.”

“To whom?”

“A calculated risk then.”

“I do not like it either, but we do have that option. However, we will not take it…at least not as of now.”

“What else can we do?”

“We fought a war with the Rit’ko’sor because we did not treat them with the proper respect. They had to be fought, do not mistake my words, but the way we handled it was poor and we deserved the damage we took. We have been assuming these Humans are inferior and would fall eventually. We’ve taken away their capitol and all of their primary systems and yet they still persist…”

“In truth, they have grown stronger,” Zyrnox corrected him.

“That they have, despite the illogic of it. They are steeped in heresy and must be stopped, but we are through underestimating them. They wanted to deliver a message to us with Rajch…then I am accepting the message and taking it at face value. They want to be an enemy of equals, and that status I will grant them.”

“Should I evacuate Terraxis?”

“If they attack, yes, but not yet…assuming they haven’t in your absence. How did your Rit’ko’sor capture their shield generator?”

“Stealthed Zen’zat dropped on the world. He did not think the tactic could be repeated again without the Humans creating a counter for it.”

“How did Zen’zat take a shield generator on their own?”

“Getting them to the surface was the difficult part, but once there they could move about with impunity. Detection of stealthed units is sparse within their cities and reserved for high security areas only. They overwhelmed the shield generator and other installations simultaneously, with the assault timed to coincide with our fleet’s arrival. We flew our ships down underneath the shield and delivered reinforcements almost instantaneously.”

“I want to review those records closely.”

“I brought them and all pertinent information with me, but I do not have as detailed files on Rajch.”

“Who is this Rit’ko’sor?”

“Sess’met, and he is highly arrogant, even for a Rit’ko’sor, but he proved effective.”

“And what does he think of the Uriti threat?”

“I have not asked him. He surrendered his world rather than fight the Uriti when it arrived. He has been subject to much shame in that regard.”

“Could he have held it?”

“There was no chance of that.”

“So why fault him for avoiding an unwinnable fight?”

“He could have reduced their warship count.”

“Enough to be worth it?”

“Every loss they suffer has an effect.”

“As do ours. We have a vast empire but our ships and personnel are not infinite. I would think that after all this time fighting the Hadarak you would understand that by now. We can’t afford to waste resources.”

“Others do not like surrender.”

“If the Humans allow it without penalty, then it is probably wise to accept the shame rather than the quantifiable losses. Send this Rit’ko’sor to my ship.”

“To this system?”

“No,” Mak’to’ran scoffed. “The Hadarak combat will continue without me. I am heading to Terraxis and dealing with this situation myself.”

“With what fleet?”

“A few escort ships only. I will determine there what is needed. Until then the fight against the Hadarak will not be slowed.”

Zyrnox looked at him disbelievingly, then dutifully nodded regardless.

“We will not waste more ships throwing them at an enemy we do not know how to defeat,” Mak’to’ran explained. “The Uriti are not Hadarak, and we must learn what it will take to kill them.”

“How do we do that without combat?”

“Every time they strike at one of our systems we will have data to analyze…that should be obvious.”

“Are we to let systems fall to gather data?”

“You said they did not attack beyond the shipyards at Rajch, correct?”

“Yes. You think they would hold to that protocol going forward?”

“I think they want to negotiate and feel they need to have an advantageous position to do so…but they don’t want to enflame us with slaughter. They have positioned themselves carefully, and are showing restraint even while they demonstrate their superiority. It is a message to me, and I will not do them the disservice of sending someone else to Terraxis. I will go myself and deal with them directly.”

“To negotiate what?”

“That is for me to decide, but at the very least it is time I had a talk with them…again.”

“Shall I accompany you?”

“You will not be remaining here in shame, Zyrnox. This is our mutual problem and you are going to help me solve it. You can release your Kaeper to other duties. I’ll take you back on this ship directly.”

“As you wish, but I recommend a larger fleet in support.”

“Why? Can the Uriti travel as fast as us?”

“No, but the Humans carry them in transport vessels that are nearly our speed.”

“Can they force combat on us if we do not wish it?”

“Only by striking a planet.”

“Then we will remain safe as long as we are mobile.”

“What of the border worlds?”

“We will quietly begin to reinforce them, but as you have stated we do not have enough ships to spread across every system. We have to know where the Uriti are and where they are moving. Do you have scouts tracking them?”

“We do.”

“Then how did one make it to Rajch without warning?”

“The escort fleet was so large that they were able to make a second jump before we could arrive in the destination system. Our scouts ended up chasing the tail of their convoy, but it diverted to another route and we lost the Uriti.”

“Clever. We must have better detection capability than a trailing scout. A rimward detection border must be created.”

Zyrnox almost cringed, knowing how expansive the galaxy was and how much of a cost maintaining the Hadarak detection system was to the V’kit’no’sat.

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

“I am tempted to say seek them out with full force and destroy them now, but even I do not think I would like the outcome if that were to come to pass. I do not have the answers we need.”

“Neither do I…but I know where to begin,” Mak’to’ran said as the Kafcha began to break ranks with his fleet at his mental order to the ship’s commander. “I will meet their trailblazers personally.”

“What good can come of that? They must still die. What is there to negotiate?”

“You disappoint me, Zyrnox. Is your mind so regimented you cannot see potential opportunities?”

“I admit I cannot in this situation.”

“They have spoken to a Uriti,” Mak’to’ran said, his eyes gleaming with cunning as he looked at the Voro’nam, “and I am very interested in what they had to say.”

www.aerkijyr.com

Imperial March

Table of Contents

- Earth Evacuation

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

- Endless Crusade

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

- The Admiral

- Prologue
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- Epilogue

- Ice Queen

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10

- Uriti Strike

- Map
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10