Star Force 65-68
Author: Aer-Ki Jyr
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Colonization; Dystopian; Galactic Empire; High Tech; Military; Space Fleet; 90 Minutes (44-64 Pages); Literature & Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Adventure; Two Hours or More (65-100 Pages); Action & Adventure; Space Opera; Genre Fiction; War; Health; Fitness & Dieting; Exercise & Fitness; Yoga; War & Military; Space Marine; Teen & Young Adult; Star Force
Description: Anthology containing: Star Force 65-68
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

1

May 2, 2739

Merovingian System (Core Region)

Low stellar orbit

Paul’s dropship took him across from the Warship-class jumpship he’d arrived in the system on and over to the much larger mining station situated in extreme low orbit around the red dwarf star that filled the view below them. Dubbed the Prometheus, the station was a prototype that had only recently gone online with minimal production, and when Paul had got word of it finally working he’d made sure to arrange his schedule to bring him back to Earth, then made the 9 lightyear hop over to check on its progress in person.

The star was small, some 17% the mass of Sol, with significant surface activity that altered the luminosity regularly. That turbulence wasn’t a problem to the mining efforts, and this star had been chosen in particular because of its size, proximity to Sol’s industrial base, and being within a system that was 100% Star Force territory. There were no planets whatsoever here, with a cluster of sedas taking their place that utilized natural resources from other systems to sustain themselves, though with the Canderians virtually every seda they build could exist on minimal shipments via internal recycling measures, which was why they’d been given this empty system to colonize.

The construction of Prometheus had taken more than 18 years, and to date was the third largest orbital structure ever built by Star Force, with the other two being monstrous sedas that were literally the equivalent of small moons. Neither of those were here in the Merovingian System, making the Star Forge-class mining station the centerpiece by far.

It wasn’t a Canderian construction, but rather one of Star Force’s mainline projects that had been on the drawing board for centuries. Unlike the V’kit’no’sat versions this one was a permanent feature, without the gravity drives that allowed theirs to migrate from system to system. This one had minimal engines, both to keep it aloft and to navigate its way around the star to access different places on its surface. Right now there was a tiny shield conduit stretching down into the star that functioned as a binary straw, and as Paul enhanced the magnification on the dropship’s cameras he could see the stream of glowing matter rising up through it.

Likewise, there was a less luminous flow going back down with unwanted materials. That secondary filtering process was taking place within the Star Forge itself, while the primary was happening at the base of the straw through an enormously complicated series of energy shields that were pulling on various materials and keeping others back, then sending the wanted slurry up to the station for a more selective filtering process.

Paul had been told the ‘straw’ was barely functional, but that regular harvesting had begun anyway…and now he could see for himself that it was continuing, though if it had been up to specs the tiny tendril of light would have been much thicker to the eye. He continued to watch the transfer process up until his tiny Falcon-class dropship was swallowed up inside the pillar-like Prometheus, which felt akin to flying inside the side of a Death Star, size wise.

The trailblazer chucked his datapad aside and left it with the craft before stepping out onto the hangar deck to find Henderson waiting for him.

“About time,” he told the level 6 tech in charge of the project.

The man frowned heavily. “Don’t give me that lip. You have no idea how much of a handful the shield calibration has been.”

“I’ve been reading your notes regularly,” Paul said as he fell into step beside the taller man who led him across the mostly empty hangar bay towards the station’s interior corridors.

“Then you should know it’s a damn near miracle we got her functioning as is. The Vic’s built theirs with a lot of cool toys that we don’t have, so this beastly testament to inefficiency is naturally going to have problems popping up around the clock.”

“Production continues?”

“Amazingly yes, and we’ve already harvested 4.3 kilograms of solari…which triples our lifetime synthesis tally.”

“I trust you’re putting it to good use.”

“Not here. What they’re doing with it is out of my hands. As of yet we haven’t seen any return.”

Paul knew that wasn’t unexpected, for the machines the solari would be used to help make had never been created by Star Force before, and thus prototypes would have to be built and tested before any upgrades to the Star Forge could be shipped out to them.

“Corovon?”

“Trace amounts. We’re not anywhere near that deep yet, just scraping a little off the surface layers. About half a metric ton that we haven’t bothered shipping out yet.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “You’re calling that trace amounts?”

“Trace as in what we’re getting from the slurry. Be impressed if you want, but you know this beast is capable of far more when we eventually get her up and running. I’m so buried in her innards I don’t even care to think how that compares to production outside this system. And on that note, the Canderians were wondering if they couldn’t have a kilogram or two.”

“It’s in their backyard, so it only seems fitting…if you’re able to sustain the ‘limited’ production.”

“We’re fishing, remember, so I can’t promise results, but the syphon is relatively stable now. Crude as hell, but stable.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Give them 1.5 kilograms then route all remaining corovon production directly to Sol.”

“Get the cargo ships moving and I will. Right now it didn’t seem worth sending an entire jumpship for.”

“Why didn’t you send it with the solari?”

“I did, but we hadn’t collected more than 3 kilograms by then. This load we got when we hit a pocket of higher concentration. This is our fifteenth probe point. The ninth was the heavier corovon ‘deposit,’ though I hesitate to use that term given how much convection there is in the star. We can sink a syphon down and let it linger for a long time before saturation levels bleed off, though not as long as I’d like.”

“How far have you repositioned?”

“We move at least 100 kilometers each time, but all our taps have been in the same geographical area. Didn’t see the point in moving us around a lot until I got the syphon working better. Really this isn’t harvesting yet, just messing around and tinkering.”

“I know a lot of people that are going to be very happy to hear you say that,” Paul commented, realizing that if this Star Forge even got to a percentage of its full capability it would revolutionize Star Force mining operations, which would then have repercussions throughout the empire as the new volume of materials became available.

“You’re welcome. Are you here to look or get your hands dirty?”

“What do you need?”

“Some troubleshooting assistance.”

“Happy to. What are you working on?”

“Everything,” Henderson commented, running his fingers through his blonde hair as they reached a lift station. “It’ll be easier to explain when we get to the control room.”

Paul stood with the master tech overlooking a large pit of a room with a fully staffed control team. There were numerous workstations all facing in around the large central hologram that had a sliver of the star at the base and the elongated Star Forge floating above it with a single tendril down to the surface. He knew it was designed to have many such tendrils operating simultaneously, but so far there was only the one and Henderson said that would be the case for many years to come given their lack of necessary equipment.

As the level 6 techs continually progressed through the V’kit’no’sat database they had come to the mutual agreement that there were four phases left before Star Force caught up with their level of technology…or rather their previous level, for there was no way of knowing how far they’d advanced in the interim. As it was now, Star Force didn’t exist on any one tech level, for it had pushed various lines of rediscovery faster than others, so the entire technological acumen was a mishmash of various strengths and weaknesses.

Their comm systems were the top priority, and as such were more or less located on the highest level Star Force had managed to date. The Ta’lin’yi were also on a similar level, with the cannons and comm both being phase 5. In order to progress up to phase 4 in any way, there were solari particles that were needed in the construction of the tech, or the construction of the machines that would then make that tech, hence creating a roadblock much as arc elements and corovon had been before them.

As it was there were still more arc elements that Star Force didn’t have access to, because the ability to synthesize them required tech that utilized solari that they presently didn’t have. In this way there was a crisscrossing of prerequisites that were needed to advance the overall tech level of the empire, with sudden surges coming across the board when they were finally made.

Solari were the next stage of advancement in a big way, and would open up the next four phases once they got their hands on the necessary compounds. Star Force was very, very close to creating a phase 1 piece of tech that they’d been researching hard for what seemed like forever, and that was the Dre’mo’don, which was lacking one solari that was holding back its production.

That solari was denomsi, which was an atom in the Trelpo element list. That list, like C-type elements that required corovon in their makeup, had a pair of subatomic particles called hrat and varsh added to the standard protons, neutrons, corovon, and electrons. Denomsi was made of two neutrons, a corovon, and a proton bonded with a varsh, around which a halo of four electrons were compressed, and was one of the rarer forms of solari, which was basically a catch-all term for compounds almost exclusively harvested from within stars.

There was probably no denomsi within Merovingian, for it was typically found only in high mass stars and small black holes. Varsh bonding required some very exotic environmental circumstances, and while Star Force had been able to recycle a small amount of the varsh particles from V’kit’no’sat ‘trash’ within the pyramid, they were nowhere near close to the point where they could synthetically bond them to protons, thus denomsi was a compound that they would either have to collect directly as a raw material or wait a very long time to be able to build the type of equipment necessary to synthesize it later down the line.

Given that it was the one roadblock to creating their first phase 1 piece of tech, primitive as it might be in comparison with the V’kit’no’sat models, it was high on both the trailblazers’ and the techs’ priority list, which meant getting to the point where they could mine the high mass stars. Prometheus was essentially the field laboratory where they would experiment and learn how to build a Star Forge that could do that, all the while collecting what they hoped would be a shopping list of solari that would help them create the higher level machines necessary to build such a device.

Paul had seen the blueprints for the Prometheus before and knew that a lot of it was empty space waiting to be filled with newly created equipment when it came online. What he didn’t know was to what extent Henderson had gone to get the first few pieces working. His masterpiece of ingenuity reminded Paul of O’Neill’s power generator in Stargate, where the legendary Colonel had gone around collecting all kinds of stuff from the SGC, tearing it apart and picking out the pieces that he needed to then build a crude, but functioning power source to briefly give the Stargate the boost needed to travel very far away.

He hadn’t seen that episode since before he went into basic training, but that sort of tech wizardry had always impressed him…and it was that sort of thing that Henderson wanted his help with now.

Inside the hazy boundary of the star on the hologram the shield column could be seen penetrating a short distance, then it broke apart into seven different directions like the roots on a tree. Each of those filaments then broke apart further until they ended in small nobs. Those nobs were really shield spheres that were sifting out various compounds within the star and allowing what they wanted through into the interior of those globes…more or less.

That slurry of material, which ranged from corovon to solari to basic hydrogen depending on the filter they used, was then collected in a small holding shield before being shunted up the primary line and into the station. Right now all seven tendrils were sifting for the same thing, that being a range of heavier materials above basic hydrogen and its plasma counterpart, but low enough that corovon and bulkier molecules would be obscured.

What they collected was all being shunted up together without any delay, for the Prometheus couldn’t yet accommodate multiple shafts in the connecting tendril, only the two…one up, one down, and the bonding rod that ran between them. That was also made of shield energy, but used for the purpose of structural integrity and doubled as a wire connection allowing for control signals to be sent down into the completely matterless construct.

It was those shields that operated the entire harvesting process, and those shields that were barely up to the task in Star Force’s case that were holding the whole operation up. It was a miracle that they’d gotten as far as they did without the solari, and Henderson’s work was to be credited with that. The Prometheus was a crude piece of crap at the moment, but it was marginally functional and sifting out the compounds necessary to improve it later down the line.

Right now Henderson wanted Paul’s help improvising, not in a purely scientific way, which he knew the trailblazer lacked in prerequisite knowledge, but in the basic problem solving mindset that the Archons were infamous for.

“We can’t get more than 53 kilometers deep without risking the stellar fluctuations from overloading the filaments,” the tech explained. “The power we’re receiving from the absorption shields are sufficient to maintain the overall structure without us having to tap our reserves on the station, so that’s not the issue, it’s the matrix strength. The further we stretch the weaker it becomes. The farthest we’ve been able to get a single probing column has been 72 kilometers, and that was luck. The currents are so chaotic that it literally snaps the matrix below 60 with the torsion between levels.”

“And we need to get lower why? Beyond the obvious,” he added when Henderson gave him another displeased look.

“Because we sampled chori on one of the probes, but haven’t detected a single particle of it above 58 kilometers.”

Paul rubbed his bare chin with his left hand. “Just out of reach then.”

“Are you away of how many machines this station needs that require chori?”

“A lot,” Paul said, knowing the exact number was somewhere in the dozens.

“I can’t get the depth with our current equipment. I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“Is there a less turbulent region?”

“The only way to find out is to send down a probe, which means blind luck. We don’t have any sensor equipment that can penetrate the surface. We need Pro’phad energy for that.”

“Which requires hrat manipulation.”

“And the easiest element to produce it with is chori. If we have to move around and just poke randomly we can, but there’s no guarantee we’re not already in the most stable region.”

“Or the most chaotic,” Paul offered, but he realized the dilemma. “Did the sample bring back any?”

“No. The lifting structures are quite different from the samplers. They simply detect what’s there and transmit the data back up the control conduit. The probe is just that conduit surrounded by an absorption matrix and capped off with the sensor dome.”

“What about an inefficient straight line tap? Beef up the shields as much as you can and just try to get a handful of particles, enough to build a single piece of equipment that can then be used to upgrade that tap?”

“Already tried it. When we reinforce the shield matrixes we diminish the depth. I’ve pushed and pulled every angle I can think of. 53 kilometers is the furthest I can get with any collection capability.”

“Have you tried stirring the pot?”

“Meaning?”

“Bring the lower materials up to collection depth.”

“The currents are already pretty rambunctious, but the lower levels are unaffected. Different densities keep them separate. Even if I could create a stirring mechanism near the filaments it wouldn’t pull the deeper materials up, just move the higher ones around laterally. I’ve been working on doing just that to facilitate the remixing of the saturation levels around the collection points, but only on the drawing board at the moment.”

“Shaken then, not stirred.”

“Other than the Bond reference, I don’t see…” Henderson said, cutting himself off as a thought occurred to him.

“Boom,” Paul offered, seeing the twinkle in the tech’s eye suddenly spark.

“Shielded missile penetrating to depths then detonating, creating a surge of heavier matter into the upper levels…wouldn’t be efficient, and that sort of disruption would snap any shield matrixes we had in place…”

“Deploy them after. What’s it take, less than 30 seconds?”

“Depends how much we want to stretch, but most deployment times are under 30.”

“All we need is to sniff a little bit, right?”

“4.78 kilograms of chori is what we need to build heavier emitters. Get me that and I’ll get you twice the depth. You got some spare warheads I could borrow?”

Paul smiled. “Not onboard my ship. I’ll have to swing by the vault to pick up some.”

“What’s ‘the vault?’”

“A little place in Sol where we keep all the cool tech that we haven’t really found a use for. Stuff we built just to build to see if we could…or for a rainy day. Military operations don’t call for bombs very much, especially the big ones.”

“How big are we talking? I’ve never been involved in the munitions research.”

A slight smile crept across Paul’s face as he accessed the nearby control station and dug his way into the Star Force files, pulling up a restricted section and waving Henderson towards the grocery list of boom-booms.

“Any of these big enough?”

The tech looked through the list, pulling up several and seeing their insane yields. “Explosive junkies.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

2

May 7, 2739

Merovingian System

Prometheus

Paul’s ship approached the Star Forge for the second time in 5 days, having just made the short jump over to Sol and back again, this time carrying 15 warheads and an equal number of penetration vehicles, for you couldn’t simply shoot a missile into a star and expect it to get very far without being destroyed first. Each of the vehicles was the size of a dropship and heavily shielded, having been built originally to get the fat bombs to their targets before they could get knocked out of the sky by anti-air defenses.

As soon as Paul’s warship came within range of the Prometheus he received targeting coordinates from Henderson, then using the yield level they’d discussed previously, the ship launched the remote craft with the trailblazer flying it remotely down and into the star. He stayed with it as long as he could, but eventually the control signal was cut off and both men had to wait to see what would happen.

Several long minutes followed, with Paul knowing it would take time to reach the necessary depth within the star. Had the penetration vehicle been using standard combat shields it would have been destroyed almost instantaneously, but Paul had some quick swapouts done in Sol to replace the shields with the absorption variety. Calibrated using the data from the Prometheus, the shields were designed to soak up the energy from this star, taking that power and redeploying it into the shield matrix. If the calibration was off part of the destructive power would get through and kill the bomb before it had a chance to detonate, so there was no way of knowing if the first attempt was going to be successful or not other than to wait for the bang.

Paul had brought 15 for a reason, and it wasn’t just to shake up the surface levels multiple times. If some additional tweaking of the shield matrixes had to be done, he didn’t want to have to run back to Sol again to get some more…not that they had that many on hand. The yields were so great that there wasn’t much cause to build them, though he’d really like the chance to throw a few against the lizard shipyard rings.

That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so their limited supply was just sitting and collecting dust when he dropped by the vault to pick them up. Hopefully now they could be put to a more productive use.

They weren’t all the same make, and the one he’d just sent down to the star was a concussion model, designed to be detonated within a medium and use the surrounding material as the destructive force. Had it been detonated in space it would still do damage at close range, but couldn’t affect much of anything across a vacuum, for the energy matrix had an expansion distance of less than a kilometer. It would push through it so fast that anything hit would be thrown out violently, but beyond that boundary line the energy fueling the push fizzled.

That wouldn’t be an issue within the star, for the density of material surrounding it was more than enough to trigger a huge blast wave…if it detonated.

Paul watched the clock ticking off the seconds, not knowing for sure how fast the penetration vehicle could descend. It had a small gravity drive to pull it through the stellar matter, but there was no way to know how it would respond because nothing like this had been tried before. The only data they had was from the shield columns dipping down into the star, for research into the internal dynamics was pointless considering the database in the pyramid.

That meant to date Star Force hadn’t sent any physical probes down into any star, nor could they have until the recent development of the absorption shields. Paul was fairly certain this would work, but there was no way to know for sure other than chucking one in and seeing what happened.

The Prometheus was situated 120 kilometers above the surface of the star, but stellar fluctuations had bits of atmosphere tickling its own absorption shields, meaning there wasn’t a definitive boundary above the somewhat chaotic exterior…that became a lot more chaotic when the bomb detonated. It took time for the shockwave to hit the surface, but when it did a huge bump formed, rising up several kilometers before breaking and shooting out a shower of stellar matter halfway up to the Star Forge before gravity started dragging it back down again.

Paul watched and waited, seeing a shield column begin extending down from the Prometheus following the retreat of the glowing stellar material. It punched down inside it even as it was churning about, then the telemetry feed from Henderson showed it push down even further, eventually spreading out its tendrils like a growing tree.

He saw some of them disappear, snapping under the strain of the turbulence, but others remained and continued to sprout more roots. Soon a glowing tendril began to shoot up from the surface, traveling in the lift column and eventually reaching the Prometheus where it was taken inside and separated into its constituent components with any unwanted material heading back down the opposite side of the giant straw.

The amounts collected were known almost instantly, with Paul watching the feeds. Solari particles were a small minority within stars, and it required a lot of sifting to get a significant amount of them, so when no chori showed up he didn’t immediately label their first try a failure. Rather he waited and watched, seeing a few trace amounts of other solari popping up as it was separated from the hydrogen and helium, which were both sent back down into the star a waste material.

In the future those would have been claimed as well, but the storage areas for the bulk materials weren’t yet activated. When they were they’d fill up quickly, which would require regular cargo shipments off the station, and as of yet no regular jumpship traffic was routed here so the Prometheus hadn’t bothered harvesting any of the common elements.

The analysis telemetry had registered 9 different compounds so far, then a tenth was added as a bit of corovon was collected. It was a tiny amount, but in its rare form. Most corovon Star Force collected was bonded to other compounds and had to be separated from it on a subatomic level, but most of the corovon in the star had already been separated due to the destructive soup that made up the star…or at least the trace amounts this far up. The deep core was another matter, but Star Force didn’t have the shield strength to reach that far down as of yet.

It took more than eight minutes before the first bit of chori was reported, and just a tiny spec at that, but another followed some 23 seconds later, with more bits and pieces coming up the straw and into the Star Forge.

A hologram of Henderson popped up beside the main feeds in the command nexus where Paul was watching from and the trailblazer mentally flipped the image to a headshot rather than a full body image.

“A few hits,” Paul mentioned.

“How long the plume stays within the radius of the collection field is in question, but if this saturation level persists a number of days we’ll have enough out of this single detonation. If not, we’ll need to reposition and repeat.”

“I’ve got two more of similar yield. If it takes more than that we’re going to have variations to deal with.”

“Keep your fingers crossed then. In the meantime head back on over and we’ll troubleshoot the rest of our headaches, unless you need to be elsewhere?”

“I’m going to stick around a while. I’ll be over within the hour.”

Henderson nodded, then his hologram cut out.

Paul glanced at the updating collection numbers again, seeing a steady trickle of chori being brought up and wondering how soon the subsurface currents were going to sweep it aside and outside of the filament perimeter.

Paul stood on the floor of a huge chamber, or rather the lack of one. The artificial gravity was working, but everything over his head was empty space inside the Prometheus…for 17 miles.

He looked up, unable to see the ceiling in the darkened distance and knowing that this area was reserved for future construction. The outer shell of the Star Forge was complete, as was a lot of the interior, but there were voids such as this that had atmosphere but little else on the 94 mile long mining station. It’d taken a hell of a lot of resources to build it, but now that it was here those materials were going to be returned in the form of stellar mining resources from now through infinity. At the moment there was only a negligible trickle of exports, but that would gradually grow and as it did so would the station’s interior.

At full strength it was estimated that at least a crew of 200,000 would be needed, but the Star Forge had been designed to house upwards of a million with ease, and areas such as this could be fitted with additional residential areas if necessary. How the Prometheus would eventually turn out was unknown, allowing for the adaptation that was required in any prototype. The trick of it was that you couldn’t build multiple prototypes of this size, so you had to get all the kinks worked out in this one effort before you got around to building any standardized Star Forges down the road.

Paul threw a handful of small lights out into the chamber, catching them telekinetically and spreading them out in a wide circle and sticking them in place with the light adhesive on their backs. He flicked them all on, bringing far more illumination to the void than the open doorway behind him allowed, but it still got ate up by the immense distances involved, for the chamber was over 4 miles wide.

The trailblazer closed the door, leaving only his small lights as a source of illumination. He had his Pefbar, of course, but that was soon about to be outranged, thus the need for a visual source of reference. He touched a small control panel attached to his left forearm and dialed down the gravity in the void to 5%, then gently dropped to the ground, bending at the knees briefly before launching himself up with a Yetu-enhanced jump.

He shot away from the floor like a missile, with the bit of gravity gradually slowing his ascent but not before he angled into the near wall. Paul kicked off of it, sending himself out towards the interior where he essentially hung weightless traveling through a giant arc in the dark, with only the small circle of lights below giving him any point of reference.

It took more than two minutes before he landed again, so far out into the chamber that the lights appeared to be a mere pinprick in the distance across the floor. Paul dialed up the gravity to 12% and took off running in long strides that eventually began to reach in excess of 20 meters each. It was an odd motion, but one that he’d practiced before…yet never had he had this much open space to play with.

He ran in a straight line in the total dark, his back to the tiny prick of light, and jumped on the next step, doing a triple flip in the air before landing again. Next he threw in a cartwheel at considerable speed, flipping over twice before getting a running step back in and righting his motion, then jumping up again in a Hulk-sized leap that was more lateral than up.

Using his Pefbar he could see the ground below as he flew across it about 30 meters up and still gaining altitude. Eventually the gravity nulled out his upward momentum and he began drifting back down again, where he eventually hit and restarted his loping run…which he halted by leaning backwards and slamming his staggered feet down, transitioning into a skid that ground on his shoes and brought him to a stop.

He dialed the gravity down to 3%, then launching himself straight up, letting himself pass beyond his Pefbar range of the floor and into the darkness. He couldn’t maneuver much at all, with only the air around him to grip, but he created some bioshield fins on his arms and legs and used them to spin him about so he could see the tiny dot of light in the distance.

Paul centered himself relative to it and just ‘floated’ as he continued to move upwards, closing his eyes and trying to feel something similar to what it was to fly, and not just for fun. Five months ago Kara had had another revelation revealing the identity of one of the elusive tier 4 psionics, and to his and other DBZ fans’ great delight, she confirmed that it was, in fact, a biological gravity drive similar to what the Zak’de’ron possessed.

They didn’t need it, being able to fly with their wings alone, but the added ability gave them insane maneuvering capabilities, and given their insistence that their Zen’zat be able to fly as well, which Kara could thanks to her Vorch’nas, it only made logical sense that they’d included the biological equivalent in the hidden genetic triggers.

Paul didn’t think that he could learn to fly here and now, but as long as he was here and had this massive chamber to play around with, he might as well try and tickle the sensation a bit, not knowing how in hell one was supposed to find the trigger for flight when one couldn’t fly.

So he just floated upwards, eventually coming to the apex and slowly sinking back down again. He kept his Pefbar focused below him, so he could see the ground coming when he got close, but otherwise put his mind into a meditative mode and just tried to bounce around a bit inside his own head, hoping to glean a bit of insight but not really expecting to find anything.

When his spherical sense picked up the approaching floor he bent his knees slightly and readied himself for the landing…which was about at the same speed that he had jumped from. He caught himself with his legs, then bounced off a bit when he failed to negate it all, rolling through a light somersault and awkwardly jumping back up again.

This time he didn’t try to soak in the feeling, but instead deployed a series of bioshields along his legs and moved them down towards his feet, disengaging them there and deploying another at his hips simultaneously…his version of a crude jet engine. He had done this sort of thing in the water, but the loose air was another matter entirely.

He used the multiple shields to push the air down away from him, adding to his upward momentum while throwing fins off his back and arms to guide his movement. The shields had to be locked to his spine, rather than independently deployed, but that only made them easier to generate. The trick was in creating multiple ones simultaneously, as well as moving them relative to his body.

Once getting a feel for the air and remembering his rhythm rate, for he had no visual reference to judge his speed off of, Paul just focused straight up and put himself through a workout, able to seemingly fly in any direction for an infinite distance, for he couldn’t detect the far walls, let alone the ceiling. He also wasn’t moving very fast, for the propulsion he was providing was now having to fight the gravity without his upward momentum.

When that transfer happened his gut settled slightly, for he was no longer ballistic and the gravity was tugging on his insides a bit more than his fall rate allowed. It wasn’t much, but Paul knew he was on his own power now and intended to stay aloft for quite some time, throwing in a few aerobatic maneuvers while he was up there.

He gradually increased the gravity as he progressed, making it harder and harder for him to counter the pull, with him eventually coming back to ground when he hit 9%. Pedal as hard as he could, he just couldn’t move the bioshields fast enough to get enough air underneath him to counteract his weight.

Tired from the effort, he switched the gravity up to 20% and created a telekinetic plate beneath his feet, then split it in half and spread it out like an inflatable bag, pushing him up into the air by forcing distance between his feet and the floor. Paul launched up and slightly forward, pulling a quick flip and coming back down again, using the same tactic to create a ‘crashbag’ underneath him to help slow his descent.

That one failed, badly, for instead of crunching down it merely stopped him cold up until the point his feet overloaded and breached the weak field, bringing him down to the ground with Paul catching the rest of his momentum on his legs with ease.

“Damn it,” he said in the dark, with the tiny circle of lights so far away now that he could barely make them out. “How the hell does Morgan do that?”

Paul set himself and launched upwards again, trying multiple times to get the ‘cushion’ effect and hoping to learn from the succession of failures.

3

April 19, 2741

Daxmet System (Old Calavari Region)

Cjom

Heema walked down the long hallway onboard the Alliance jumpship, following a row of other Reen that were making their way to the hangar bays to leave the ship. Almost the entire complement of passengers on the Star Force vessel were Reen, with Cjom now being the furthest endpoint of the ADZ transit grid into the region that had once been dominated by the Calavari, though this system had never belonged to them.

Two years ago it had been infested with lizards that a Star Force fleet and army eradicated, freeing the former transitional system that had been used to funnel Calavari and other survivors away from the lizard advance and into the ADZ. Now that they’d returned to reclaim it, the new Alliance that Star Force essentially controlled was giving the Reen’s former system back to them.

It was something that Heema and others had been pressing for relentlessly in their efforts to grow their race’s dominance within the ADZ. Already they possessed two planetoids of their own within those borders and numerous pieces of others that defaultly belonged to Star Force and operated under their limiting, but fair code of conduct. However, this was the first opportunity they had to reclaim what was once theirs and to establish a foothold outside of the ADZ, whose climate was stable, but overly populated with any type of expansion requiring considerable skill and resources.

The worlds outside the ADZ were another matter, with plenty to seek out and colonize now that the lizard threat had been pushed back…except that Star Force wasn’t allowing any such colonization to occur except with their express permission, and the Hycre and Protovic were backing them on that. The mysterious Voku also seemed to be in their pocket as well, for that overly powerful race had just set up its first embassy within the ADZ and was beginning to make civilian contacts with what they referred to as Star Force’s wards. The Reen didn’t like that term very much, but in truth Heema had to admit it was accurate.

The Reen had been sucking off of Star Force and the others defending the ADZ against both the lizards and the Skarrons for so long that a lot of his people had never known life outside of it. Heema was one of the few that had, though he owed his life to Star Force as well, thanks to their wisdom in regards to training to attain self-sufficiency. It was a new concept for the Reen, but a small portion of the population had heeded the Humans’ help and even requested personalized tailoring of their training programs.

Heema had been through one of those himself, and had found that his greater size was not such a disadvantage as others had deemed. Star Force knew ways to work around their weaknesses and give them access to the high intensity workouts they needed. As a result Heema and many others onboard this jumpship had formed a guiding core to Reen society, reducing the turnover of new leadership and allowing their race to begin focusing on larger, grandiose goals above and beyond pushing their reproduction to acquire new territory from Star Force Alliance World regional allotments.

Gone now were the days of driving the purely civilian angle, with the Reen having rebuilt their military fleet to respectable levels, though not yet up to a strength that could confront the lizards on an even playing field. The radical advances in Star Force technology were not being shared with the Alliance, save for some key pieces that had gone to the Hycre and Protovic…and those two races had guarded those gifts closely, leaving the rest of the races having to work with their own tech or what they were willing to share with each other.

That tech level had gradually increased with the ventures that were being pursued in the ADZ interior, given that it had been almost exclusively free of lizard incursion and both races and corporations had been able to develop to a level where they could begin funneling resources into endeavors above and beyond mere survival. The Reen had absorbed what new breakthroughs they could, buying others and researching a few of their own, but their warfleet looked much the same as it once had, with numerous green scarabs floating in orbit nearby that welcomed the Alliance jumpship when it arrived via unnecessary escort formations.

It was true that the lizard border was close, but Heema and his colleagues had known that reclaiming Daxmet would require a significant level of defensive forces that they couldn’t yet field. When Star Force had approached them with the offer to return one of their former systems to them, free of charge no less, for the Reen had played zero part in the invasion that had cleansed it of the lizards, they had also offered a deal for protection if the Reen wanted. That, or they could go it alone and hope the lizards didn’t hop the line and hit them, given that they’d be the one weak link in the Alliance reclamation zone, for no other race had been given a world in this region aside from the Protovic, who’d expanded out colonizing a few new systems and adding to what had become a relatively isolationistic empire on their part.

They interacted a fair amount within the ADZ, but now that both the lizards and the Skarrons were no longer on their doorstep they were not pushing the war fronts, merely staying put and building up their defenses while Star Force continued to be the aggressor. In addition to the Voku, a race called the H’kar had sent a huge fleet to the ADZ and the small colony they’d been allowed to establish as basically a resupply base. Heema knew little beyond the public news releases, but it was said that the H’kar had come here specifically to fight the lizards, and their technology level was far beyond that of the Protovic or the Hycre, so their replacing of one of the former cornerstones in the Alliance combined operations was apparently an upgrade that Star Force was comfortable with.

He hadn’t heard a word of malcontent about the Protovic turtling up, and rumor was that Star Force had simply outgrown them, with differing objectives in sight now that the immediate threat was no longer encroaching on their mutual borders. The Protovic were pursuing their own internal agendas while Star Force was growing by leaps and bounds, both inside the ADZ and out, with several new regions being added to the general public knowledge. Already there was the Achkor Zone that was coreward of the ADZ, but now this huge new swath of territory that was being opened up around Daxmet was loosely being referred to as the Calavari Region by a handful of Star Force people Heema had regular contact with.

Then there was an even larger third region out beyond the Alpha and Delta Regions, as of yet not picking up any identifier that he was aware of, but he knew the majority of Star Force troops there were Bsidd and that they were planting a lot of colonies for that rapidly expanding race in the area while returning a slew of small worlds to their former owners…but in the Calavari Region only the Reen had been singled out, and no one yet knew as to why.

That had made quite a few races very mad, for other systems had been reclaimed that they had owned a piece of previously, but Star Force wasn’t yet returning those. In fact it was rumored that they were colonizing them for themselves, though without the transit grid extending out to them yet there was no way to be sure. Most races within the ADZ relied on the Star Force run grid for most of their movement needs, and as such didn’t have the jumpships needed to go snooping around the region to see for themselves what Star Force was up to…plus the threat of being jumped by the lizards was ever-present, even in the reclaimed areas.

That was why Heema and several other senior Reen leaders had argued for making a deal with Star Force to have a permanent presence in the system. At first there had been pushback on that, for a lot of the young Reen wanted to get away from what they felt was an overbearing empire denying them their sovereignty, and from a certain point of view they were correct, but as Heema and others had taken a long time to understand, Star Force’s control was limited to only a few areas of society, and so long as you operated within those requirements you were essentially free to do whatever else you wanted.

They always reserved the right to intervene anywhere they wanted for any reason, which made a lot of people, Reen and otherwise, more than leery when reading such proclamations, but Heema had come to understand that was simply a caveat to insure that if something bad happened they’d have an established avenue in to deal with it rather than them trying to control the Reens’ daily lives. A big, yet underrated part of Star Force philosophy with running the affiliated portion of its empire was with giving races the freedom to experiment and grow, yet requiring them to gain a certain level of aptitude before dealing with them on more than a caretaker level.

Heema knew many viewed that attitude as a slap of disrespect to the races that were not members of Star Force, but the Reen leadership had come to understand early on, at least in part, that it was actually a subtle test and challenge they were laying down, allowing a path for peerdom if a race proved themselves worthy of it. The Reen had been pursuing that agenda in various forms for nearly 200 years, and now that they had a full system of their own to do with as they pleased, with no Star Force presence watching over them, many Reen didn’t understand why Heema and others insisted that they strike a deal to bring them in.

The obvious reason was security, but it was more than that. The rebuilt Reen empire was intrinsically linked with Star Force, and rather than try and go their separate way, which was virtually impossible given that Star Force was expanding so rapidly that systems like this were quickly becoming engulfed in new controlling regions outside the ADZ, they should make use of the advantages that gained them in order to take their civilization up another order of magnitude and rise above their competition that was still stuck inside the ADZ.

Heema had been part of the negotiating team with the Star Force representatives, and he was almost sure that they had been hoping for this response from the Reen, for they came up with numerous detailed options that heavily favored the Reen without requiring any sort of payment from them, which was highly atypical for Star Force interactions, but which suggested that the Reen’s status had risen to a level above that of the other races and now they were starting to see the perks of such a status.

Heema didn’t expect them to be on the same level as the Protovic, but then again if they were retreating within their own borders and attending to their own needs there was an opportunity there that the Reen weren’t about to pass up. While their warfleet was miniscule in comparison, their economic base was about 1/3rd that of the Protovic and growing with every year. That put them as the number 1 race within the ADZ, economically speaking, that wasn’t a member of Star Force, but Heema and others saw the opportunity rising to leave that peer group behind and take a step towards the Protovic, and even the Hycre.

Right now the Reen were in a league of their own, somewhere between the big powers and the peons, and how the they developed this system was going to play a big part in where their race went in the power structure. Heema had no expectations to ever get beyond Star Force’s influence, though a great number of their former worlds had existed on the other side of Calavari territory where Star Force had never even ventured to date. Whether or not they’d ever get to them again was unknown, but if they did he fully expected it would come on the heels of Star Force pushing out that far, not in the Reen going there themselves, for as it was they were no match for the lizards.

And such long travel times would break apart the well-knit little empire they were building here. Daxmet was the furthest stretch, but with the ADZ transit grid extending out to it that kept a link that the Reen didn’t have to build…which was yet one more of the reason to have a Star Force presence in the system. The Reen were a very different civilization now than they had been pre-ADZ, and that civilization was better, in his opinion, compared to the far flung loose alliance of worlds they had previously commanded.

The current Reen were united with a common focus and working towards a series of goals, growing rapidly in both population and material, with this system going to add to the latter almost instantaneously. The key to that was in getting their high population here, and this jumpship transfer was just one of many that would be forthcoming. The Reen had hired out a specific portion of the ADZ fleet at great cost to begin bringing them here in droves, with this being the 13th ship to arrive in the past month.

When Heema got to the hangar bay there were a number of Reen transports already inside and loading up passengers, ready to take the large, six-legged ‘giraffes’ down to the surface and come back up again to pick up more. According to the ship’s sensors, there were already thousands of the craft making the round trips, having been brought in here some 8 months previously with the main transitional fleet that was busily rebuilding a tiny spec of civilization on the planet even while Star Force crews were still deconstructing the lizard infrastructure elsewhere.

Heema climbed onboard the transport and walked to a nook-like depression in the floor of the giant craft, settling down there along with many others nearby him in an egg-crate fashion since the Reen didn’t use chairs. He waited there until the Reen ship was filled with 62 of them, then it lifted off the deck and flew out into space, transitioning down to a lower orbit enroute to the excessively thick atmosphere of the planet.

Heema watched via a display screen on the ring of his personal nook, seeing the massive Sentinel station off in the distance. There was currently only the one in the system, but with it was a Star Force warfleet that would keep the lizards at bay indefinitely. That fleet wasn’t situated around this planet, however, but rather one of six moons in orbit. It had been named Brobdingnag, and was the location of a modest construction effort that was building the framework of what would become an Axius colony, but one for the larger races only.

That would bring the Axius Reen with it, giving the independent civilization and their Axius kin a geographical link, as well as the opportunity for the two to exchange individuals when they wanted. It also meant that Star Force would be protecting one of its own worlds in the system against invasion in perpetuity, rather than the Reen having to negotiate some sort of payment deal to keep them here on contract.

The Sentinel had been placed around the planet, both for strategic reasons and a sign that the defensive effort was going to be a mutual one. The Reen had their warfleet now, with most of it present in this system, and over time they hoped to improve it to the point where they wouldn’t have to rely on Star Force, but right now they would back them up however necessary if a reprisal attack from the lizards did come.

The Sentinel acted as an island in orbit that both fleets could run to for sanctuary if needed, and just having one of the massive stations here had a psychological effect on everyone in the system, for it stated that this was permanent territory within the Star Force-led Alliance and any invading race was going to have to pay a very high price in order to take it from them on the first try, let alone the inevitable counterattack to come later.

To Heema that single Sentinel signified that this was home and part of the ADZ whether it was within those borders or not. The planet may be 100% Reen, but the system truly belong to their benefactor, even if they weren’t going to colonize past that single moon. That confidence was what was attracting so many Reen here, for behind Heema’s flight were many more coming with individual citizens that had not been ordered or deployed here in any governmental fashion. They were coming to take part in the colonization effort on their own merits, and it was up to Heema and a few other veterans to make sure they had room for them all prior to arrival.

4

When Heema’s transport got to ground he walked out into the thick atmosphere, taking him and the others a moment to adjust. He breathed in heavily, with the air taking time to get all the way down his long neck and into his four lungs, giving him a bit of a head rush when the higher concentration of oxygen processed through his bloodstream. It passed quickly and he followed the others out across the tarmac, looking around at the partially complete city in which they’d landed.

The green infrastructure was everywhere, which clashed slightly with his blue/green body. He wore no clothes, nor did any of the others, save from foot pads. His skin was hard enough to double as light armor in some places and the Reen weren’t all that sensitive to temperature changes, so the idea of clothing was something that their race rarely used. It had been said that some in Axius had taken up the custom, but Heema saw no need for it.

He walked over to a large entry port that doubled as a tunnel that led into the city. Given the Reen’s native size everything here was built bigger than most ADZ civilizations. They also had no liftcars aside from cargo transfers, leaving people with the responsibility to move themselves around for the most part within any given city.

Heema took to a series of ramps that descended down into the subsurface, then found one of the main ‘roads,’ for there were also no Reen vehicles for transport, given that they were themselves the size of small vehicles. He accelerated up into a six-legged scuffle trot and moved down the mostly empty throughways heading for the distant command complex. Building ahead as they’d planned, the emptyish city was going to be filling up quickly as more transports came down with passengers and Heema wanted to get situated before that organized chaos began.

He traveled for several kilometers before finally reaching his off-ramp and ascending up to the surface, crossing over a street there and entering the command building. It looked like a stubby rock from above, but within it was nothing short of gleaming with polished everything. Most Reen construction was crude and functional, not given to aesthetic concerns, but the command complex was one of the rare exceptions.

Heema passed by the ceremonial guards and moved into the guts of the building, climbing a small ramp spiral up to where he’d been told his pit would be, then walked out into it through an archway, seeing several of his support staff already there and working.

“How do things look?”

One of the other giraffe-like necks turned/twisted around to look in his direction. “The construction efforts are slightly ahead of schedule and the offloading is proceeding smoothly, though we’ve only had a small fraction of what’s in orbit come down as of yet.”

“Get me up to speed,” Heema said, walking over to his personal pit and settling in. He lowered his main body down over a short, wide pedestal with is legs spread out around it and sank into the cushion, relieving his front legs to use to manipulate part of the controls in front of him. The rest he would operate using his head, teeth, and very supple neck.

“Status reports are waiting for you.”

The Reen jabbed one of its long legs out and triple pressed a button, sorting through a primary display prompt and getting to the preset data packet. He used a nearby set of buttons to scroll through the table of contents and selected the overview, knowing that the rest would be more detailed information of everything summarized here.

Heema read through it slowly, but didn’t double back on anything. A lot of it he already knew, and it was just a matter of getting caught up with the communications transit lag. A relay network hub had been set up immediately following the defeat of the lizards, and ever since this system had been on the grid, but that still left a considerable delay given the distances involved, plus the time he’d spent blacked out during transit.

The majority of the resources being used to construct the city were being shipped in as well, and to facilitate that a series of six depots had been set up on the surface from prefab structures. Heema checked the resource levels within them, finding their stockpiles had dwindled down to almost nothing. The convoy he’d come in with, which was actually staggered over a series of days, was bringing a lot more cargo to infuse those depots with, but the long term development of the planet couldn’t rely on such interstellar shipments.

The cost of such shipping was enormous, meaning like any prudent planner would know, you had to build from a local base of resources if any massive project was slated.

Heema checked on the status of their mining sites, finding four that were in the initial stages of setup. None were operational as of yet, but one was already burrowing down into the crust to set up the first of the catacombs that would house the primary mining habitats and processing centers, all of which would be located below ground, with only a spaceport and surface transit line hubs being built on the surface.

The rail lines were also under construction, stretching out from the growing city and about halfway to the nearest mining site. Once completed they’d be running cars back and forth on four different tracks that ran parallel to each other with a few hundred meters gap separating them. The first load of cars was in a jumpship half a day behind Heema’s, so it looked like they were going to be arriving prior to the completion of the tracks, which was proper. They didn’t want any delay in ore shipments once they began coming up from below ground, for the simple reason that they had nowhere to store them on site.

The main resource center was going to be located in its own region of the city, with a massive yard filled with bins and warehouses to contain it all as it arrived via train, then the ring of factories surrounding the yard would begin processing the already sorted and crushed materials into whatever basic building blocks the Reen needed. Structural ribs, wall segments, adhesives, wires, lighting…there was a long list of compounds the mining operations had to find and produce in order for the factories to do their job, and Heema knew that list wasn’t going to be fulfilled overnight.

To expedite matters there was already a pair of recycling stations up and running. They were connected to the city via a dirt road with thousands of Reen vehicles crisscrossing the countryside and cycling back and forth from those mobile stations, which were moving around periodically to hunt down the piles of lizard debris that Star Force was letting them salvage from. The Human-led empire was taking most of it for themselves, which was only right given that they’d reclaimed the planet, but they were as interested as the Reen in seeing the planetary colonization spur get underway.

What exactly it would gain Star Force Heema wasn’t sure, but he knew there was always an angle to whatever they did…it just wasn’t always a greedy one. He still hadn’t, after all these years, fully figured out the motivations behind their decisions, but their actions were very predictable. Those who behaved themselves and showed merit were courted and rewarded. Those who caused trouble or showed themselves to be inept were contained and dismissed as irrelevant.

He had no doubt that the Reen were here now because of their past actions, and that those long term efforts were now paying dividends. Heema was convinced that giving them this system back was another test, leading up to what he couldn’t guess, but he’d noticed that when Star Force gave someone as much leeway and free assistance as they were giving the Reen now, they were interesting in seeing how they used it.

And Heema was adamant that they not waste a moment of this opportunity.

After getting situated with the new staff and the familiar few that he’d brought with him, he immediately headed out into the city to start making contacts with the newcomers and getting them put to work immediately, for there was a bit of uncertainty spreading amongst the incoming population as to what to do next, with most seeming to think they’d have time to relax and linger as if this was a holiday before the hard work started.

Heema quickly put such notions to rest, culminating with a speech to the highest ranking 300 or so Reen on the planet in which he outlined his suspicions that Star Force was testing them here and that they could not let an ounce of laziness or indecision creep into the colony. They had to be focused on clear goals and working to achieve them round the clock. Lack of coordination or visible purpose would send the wrong message, and even while the civilian population began to arrive and figure out what part they wanted to play here, the leadership core group could not afford any such wanderings.

Plans had been made previously, and Heema reiterated them again, giving clarifications where needed, then the group broke up and returned to their respective duties with a much quicker pace. Most of them had thought of this as their chance for some breathing room away from Star Force’s oversight, but grumblings as to that once again being present confirmed the other Reen’s acceptance of what Heema had said. They viewed it as partially a negative, whereas he truly saw it as an opportunity, as well as a goad.

Were the Reen competent or not?

Wanting to prove that they were, Heema set himself on a tireless schedule, personally checking in and sometimes overseeing every new startup operation as it came online, as well as making personal contacts with the populace and it continued to grow. He had help from a few of his colleagues that arrived later, but the larger the population would grow the harder it would be to keep everything moving at lightspeed. Some lagging would take place somewhere, and Heema was insistent on hunting it down and rooting it out, replacing the personnel if need be.

This colony had to be full speed ahead round the clock. Anything else was unacceptable.

The growth of the Axius colony on the moon above happened slower, not because of Star Force’s construction crews being inferior to the Reen, but because they devoted only a small number of them to the task at hand. This was not going to be a large startup, and it took more than two years before the first transfers were allowed, with nearly all of the inbound Axius colonists being Reen.

A few others that qualified for the ‘large’ Axius colony, due to their bodily size, came with the hexpeds, but that was more out of a sense of adventure in going somewhere new than any connection with the planet below. The Reen in Axius were interesting in seeing how their race fared, as well as in establishing personal and business relations with them. In the beginning there were only a few hundred thousand Axius colonists, and when they took up residence the construction crews left to move on to other startup projects.

That left local construction crews with the responsibility of expanding the city as needed, and such expansion was deliberately kept at a slow pace. The majority of the resources collected from the nearby moon mining sites was directed into the shipyard in orbit, starting with a single small slip and expanding the infrastructure out into a progressively larger facility that would be able to service the war fleets operating on the nearby front lines.

Having a safe haven where they could refuel, rearm, or undergo repairs was invaluable, for otherwise the transit times would be long and lengthy having to run back to the ADZ for such things. The moon colony wasn’t building any drones or cargo ships, but it was focusing on building up a stockpile of spare parts and ammunition production so that they would be able to service a growing number of vessels coming back from a wide number of ongoing battles and the raiding fleets continuing to probe deeper into lizard territory ahead of the reclamation invasions.

The Axius colony therefore focused its efforts on the service function rather than pushing to grow their population. A trickle of additional infrastructure continued, as did a small amount of immigration that was strictly controlled. They’d offer up a few slots now and then, as most Axius colonies did, with people swapping residences for a number of reasons. After the shipyard was established a fair number of non-Reen Axius came in to work them, as well as the mines and factories that fed them materials, but the bulk of the civilian population remained Reen and was gaining about a third of its growth from planetary individuals seeking to join Axius.

Several annual slots were reserved for them as well, but the numbers were minuscule given the size of the colony. They had to contend with maturia growth estimates and not overflood the moon with population, always wanting to keep residential occupation at no more than 90% capacity, allowing for quarters swapping and advancement. They did not want to tell an individual who had earned an upgrade that there were no units available, so they had to make sure habitat construction always ran ahead of population numbers.

So Brobdingnag would remain a mere spec of Star Force civilization within the star system while the Reen infrastructure grew by leaps and bounds. Within a decade of their arrival their population had grown to half a billion, with many more ready to make the move once additional facilities were built underneath a halo of Sentinels. No one seemed overly concerned about the threat of the lizards, Heema included, for Star Force never would have built a shipyard here if they felt it was a vulnerable location, and as the years passed more warships would be seen in orbit guarding that station, with an occasional and very welcome shipment of new Sentinel segments coming in to assemble yet another massive piece of anti-lizard deterrent.

Then one day many years later a huge Star Force fleet of warships and Ma’kri entered the system and began offloading damaged drones that the shipyard hurriedly began to repair, filling all its slips and yet having more waiting in line. Two of the Ma’kri had even suffered significant damage and were moved into the larger berth, one at a time, with a small army of Axius workers supplementing the onboard techs as they began to rebuild the ships with the crews still onboard.

The Ma’kri-sized slip was exposed to space, for this wasn’t a super-sized shipyard, but it was surrounded with an always running energy shield to protect it against attack or rogue debris. Inside that shield there was no atmosphere, which made the repair efforts tricky, but it wasn’t something new to the crews, nor above their expertise.

What was new was the type of damage they were seeing, for it wasn’t plasma in nature. It was the result of more of a cutting beam-type weapon, and since all the traffic they got here was from conflicts with the lizards, who almost exclusively used plasma weapons, the damage to this fleet was a bit of a shock, not to mention the scale to which these ships had been damaged, for some of the drones were barely able to fly from jumpship to repair slip under their own power.

Scuttlebutt gradually worked its way around from the Ma’kri crew to the shipyard workers, with word being that the lizards had developed a new weapon and a fleet full of the augmented ships had come to the relief of one of their planets that was under invasion. The Star Force fleet now sitting in orbit had fought and defeated them, protecting the ground troops and allowing them to continue battling on the surface without naval interference, but they’d gotten beat up in the process.

None of the jumpships had been damaged, for the weapon upgrades weren’t anything that was going to get through those shields without considerable, repetitive banging, but the smaller vessels were not so fortunate, especially given that they didn’t have the option of retreat when they had to protect the troops on the ground.

Fortunately no one had died from the damage to the two Ma’kri, but their hulls were still a mess and a lot of the junked weapons couldn’t be replaced with the stores the moon had. They were going to repair the hull and armor damage, but to replace the more sensitive components fully they’d have to travel to some place with larger stores.

The commander of the fleet, a trailblazer no less, wasn’t going to wait that long. She wanted this fleet back in as much working order as possible, then they were heading back into the fight, intent on hunting down these newly equipped lizards that were roaming around and knocking them out before they could jump planetary defenses. The new weapon was more powerful than plasma, but worse yet it had range, meaning the lizards could easily engage the Star Force drones outside their mauler and talon cannon kill zones.

That changed the game considerably, taking the short range lizard fleet and upgrading it to a significant mid range threat with what the crew had already dubbed as ‘phasers,’ which turned out to be either a long burning beam or shorter flare of more intensity. The lizard fleet had operated with both weapon varieties, though it was said they were comprised of the same destructive energy.

The lizards had been making small upgrades to their tech ever since Star Force had first encountered them in Epsilon Eridani, but now it seemed they had hit upon a major breakthrough…and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before all of the lizard worlds began producing ships of the same make and model.

5

December 31, 2754

Rotunna System (Beta Region)

Ida

Kara-317 flew through the skies of Ida, passing out over the city’s edge and buzzing the jungle’s treetops following one of many surface trails. She’d arrived insystem less than two hours ago enroute to a bit of a summit gathering on Sashneo. It would take weeks to get there, coming from the clandestine missions she’d been pulling outside of the Achkor Region, and she wanted to pick up a couple of Archons to take with her. Currently they were out running a workout together on the trails, and she didn’t feel like waiting around until they finished up and returned to the city.

Her armor’s sensors penetrated the treetops and gave her body heat indicators from all the lifeforms in the jungle, but only for a set distance. No Human signatures were within her current radius, but she was familiar with the set of trails, having spent a month here previously on another layover. They didn’t appear to have changed much in the past century, and if she knew Prick and Pram they’d be taking the longest of the trails, so Kara followed it expecting to pick up on them eventually.

She moved quickly, knowing that the invasion date wasn’t going to change if she arrived late and she was cutting it close as it was. Kara hadn’t realized it was even going down yet until she’d gotten back on the grid and caught up with current events and postings. Her mission had seen her behind enemy lines for the past 2 years, with her going all the way out through lizard coreward territory to try and find their current border of conflict with the Skarrons.

She’d had to go really far to find it, for the lizards were taking it to the super huge empire far harder than they’d ever come after Star Force…and it was paying dividends for them, for they were acquiring an enormous mass of territory. How well they’d colonized it yet was still uncertain, for there was only so much scouting Kara could do with her single jumpship, but knowing the lizards they’d suck up every system that was to their liking within the regions they dominated and begin using them to spew out more conquering fleets and armies.

By now Kara was assuming that the lizards controlled a region coreward of Star Force that was at least equal to everything they had around their own core systems…which was freaking huge. Too huge, for it meant the lizards were growing by leaps and bounds with literally no one around to stop them. Add in the new phasers they were slowly implementing to their fleets, and even their handheld weapons, and their threat level was literally shooting through the roof.

Star Force did not have a full map of their territory, and very little was known past the no-go line aside from what the Hycre were snooping around to find, and Kara’s travels were adding to that, but only in a small way. She had found the new Skarron border, but it looked like it was still in flux. Several systems were falling to the lizards when she got there, literally being overrun, while a handful of others were holding firm and seeing insanely huge fleets battling it out.

Those she watched from afar, and conceded that the Skarrons were still every bit as deadly as they’d once been. How the lizards were beating them was a question mark, but they were doing it, evidenced by the long trail of conquered systems on the ‘green’ side of the border.

At least that’s how Kara thought of it, and had her ship’s maps labeled. Most lizard tech was yellow/tan, but their bodies were green and she’d always mentally associated that color with them. On the reverse she saw the Skarrons as white, because that’s what their walkers were colored.

The green on the map was eating into the white at an alarming pace, based on the distance from the ADZ that it had now stretched, but Kara knew the white stretched across an entire galactic arm and into the next, which was why she was surprised the lizards were still doing so well. No matter how many systems they took, the Skarrons should still have been able to bring in a fleet, or 100 fleets from elsewhere and hammer them back. That wasn’t happening, yet, but it definitely wasn’t because the Skarrons weren’t trying.

She’d given the Skarrons a little push of her own, racking up 6 lizard warship kills while she was out scouting solo. Her armor had so many uses it was crazy, and she’d gotten in the habit of sneaking onboard enemy ships and destroying them from the inside. Every ship the lizards didn’t have to throw against Star Force was an improvement, but she was kind of pulling for the Skarrons in this fight, despite the fact that they were the larger threat. Kara didn’t know why for certain, but it just seemed like the lizards were the cocky upstarts that needs to get the wind knocked out of them and that hadn’t happened yet.

Star Force was working up to that, and were already doing so in small scale around the ADZ, but the first big counterattack was about to happen and she wanted to be a part of it, for the lizards really had this one coming their way.

As for the pair of Archons she wanted to bring with her, it wasn’t for her sake, for she usually fought better solo, but they’d been kind of ostracized, mostly by their own doing, from the rest of the Archons and Star Force, and had been holed up here training on their own for the past 6 years after completing some fairly successful counter-ops into lizard territory. They also liked to work alone more than with others, and Kara was probably their only true friend…which she found to be sad, hence the slight detour coming here to pick them up for a mission that they really needed to be a part of, not only for the skills they brought to bear, but for their own sakes.

She spotted several individuals ahead on the trail, but there were 5 of them and Kara knew that the pair she was after would be alone so she didn’t bother dropping down through the trees to identify them or use her Ikrid to get a mental fingerprint. Flying on, she passed by several other groups and singular individuals, finding only one pair amongst them, but when she dropped down underneath the jungle canopy she discovered it was the wrong duo…and not even Archons at that, just a very fit couple of commandos.

Kara flew back up above the trees and searched on, reminding herself to mentally look before heading down again on an assumption. Eventually she found another pair 18 kilometers out and relatively isolated, already headed back on the trail. She didn’t bother to try and get a feel for them telepathically, breaking her own rule given that she was sure it was them this time, and dropped down to the trail a good 600 meters ahead of them. There she waited, arms crossed over her chest as her armor retracted back down into the clear jewel on her left wrist.

Kara sent out a short telepathic ‘hi’ when they got close so they wouldn’t run over her, for they were moving at decent speed and the trail was anything but straight. She felt them slow a bit before they rounded the thick tree trunk ahead and came into view, with Karen almost skidding to a stop a meter and a half ahead of Travis who mimicked her sudden deceleration.

“Where the hell did you come from?” he asked the mage.

“Nice to see you too,” she responded with a genuine smile, looking at both of them in all their sweaty glory. In one sense they were peers, even beyond her when you took into account their battlemeld psionics, but in other ways they were still her two little younglings and she was proud they’d advanced their way up to the striker ranks by now, and well eclipsing their former classmates, most of whom were still rangers and acolytes.

“Trouble?” Karen wondered, walking up beside Travis and gently brushing elbows with him as they filled up the narrow trail. They often did that, making physical contact where others would leave at least a few inches gap, and Kara assumed it was a side effect of the battlemeld, for they kept themselves linked together virtually round the clock in addition to their own lesser, but unique twin link that they’d had since birth, or whenever it had actually formed.

The honorary trailblazer shook her head. “Just passing through enroute to Pagaliss, but I don’t have much time, otherwise I wouldn’t have interrupted you two out here. I only got word of the invasion a little while ago and if I don’t hurry I might miss the beginning, and I figure that’s where I might be able to make the biggest difference.”

“More than on the ground? I doubt that,” Travis commented.

Kara inclined her head slightly to the right, as if she was studying him, or perhaps his stupidity. “My personal warship kill count is now up to 87, and that includes two lizard assault pillars.”

“I thought those were sneak missions, not during battle.”

“Which is why I want to get there before the shooting starts,” Kara pointed out.

“At least you got an invite to the party,” Karen said, disgruntled. Of all the Archons being rounded up for this mission from across the ADZ, she and her brother and their unique skills had not been included in the battle planning…nor much else over the last century aside from small missions that usually saw them doing some sort of short term or solo work. Nothing truly befitting their skillset.

“And now you’ve got yours,” Kara commented, seeing both their eyebrows raise a tick, also in unison. “What, you thought I’d waste time just to drop in and say hi?”

“Did they want us, or you?”

“I am one of ‘they,’ and you’re wasting time. Get your asses back to the showers and get cleaned up. I want us out of this system and on our way ASAP.”

“You could just fly us back,” Travis said as Kara stepped aside to clear the path and motioned them forward. Karen took off running, with him following a step behind.

“I don’t like you that much,” Kara said as they passed, with their conversation coming to an end. They could have continued it telepathically and she could have ran with them, but there was really nothing else to say at this point…plus she could feel them accelerate and start to hammer the last section of their workout, and there was no reason to go with them and show just how slow that actually was compared to her skill level.

Once they were gone Kara jumped up into the trees, with her Vorch’nas spreading out to cover her body as she zipped up through the leaves and into the sky again, keeping pace and following the pair from above given that she didn’t have anything else to do. They were the only reason she’d come down to the planet in the first place, and it wasn’t going to take all that long for them to work their way across a few kilometers of jungle, no matter how twisty these trails were.

Her Vorch’nas had more than enough power to let her just linger in the air, lazily following from above but out of their sight. She even went so far as to engage her Kgat ability, which was essentially a cloaking mechanism for her mind. She couldn’t use any of her other psionics with it active, but it essentially took her off everyone’s mental radar, with their Ikrid unable to penetrate or even detect her shield. Likewise she couldn’t sense them, but it made for a very useful trick for sneaking up on people who didn’t already have their Pefbar active.

She didn’t want the twins knowing she was pacing them, but she kept watch on them and the few others on the trails below with her armor’s sensors, which she attuned for a narrow scan on their pair of heat signatures, giving her more data and allowed her to ‘see’ them through the trees. Kara could tell from their movements that they were excited, which was another reason why she didn’t want them to know she was watching.

They pushed hard all the way back to the city, which was when Kara left them for a bit after making mental contact and arranging a rendezvous point. They were there with some half-full duffels slung over their shoulders exactly 27 minutes and 13 seconds after they entered the city, which was about 18 minutes faster than she’d expected. Though she was sure they weren’t going to say anything, Kara knew they were aware of the gravity of the invite she’d just extended to them.

“Took you long enough,” Kara quipped sarcastically as she turned and walked ahead of them down the connecting tunnel to a tram station that led to the spaceport where her dropship was waiting…or rather the dropship that she’d arranged to have waiting, for she’d just hopped out an airlock in orbit and came down to the planet in her armor. That was one bit of freedom she relished, and was more than grateful that the dragon had been arrogant enough to slap the Vorch’nas on her wrist without asking permission first, which at the time she would have flatly denied.

“What are we going to be doing?” Karen asked after they got situated in the dropship, with Kara sitting back in one of the seats with her feet up on the headrest of the one ahead of her, with no one else onboard save for the pilot.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing, and I’ll defer to Morgan’s preference when I get there, but I expect that you two can assume a lot of ground work after the orbital battle is completed…unless you think you can find a gunner with lesser skills to boot.”

“The general information we got didn’t say much beyond we’re taking back the old Calavari capitol,” Travis added. “I’m guessing your closed files said a bit more.”

“Did you see the reconnaissance reports?”

“No,” Karen answered for them.

“Whether out of pride, spite, or some logistical concern, the lizards have built up Varasiss more than the other former Calavari conquests. A lot more. The planet isn’t as developed as some other lizard worlds that have been around longer, but it’s going to be the strongest one we’ve hit to date and will open up a huge chunk of territory around it once the supply lines go down. For that reason alone, we’re expecting multiple reinforcement fleets to arrive while we’re hammering on them. With their new phaser-type weaponry it’s going to be one hell of a naval battle before any of you set boots to ground.”

“You said Morgan was leading the invasion?” Travis asked.

“There are going to be at least 5 trailblazers involved, so it’s more accurate to state that they’re leading the invasion.”

“Why’d you say Morgan then?”

“She’s Morgan,” Kara said with a ‘duh’ look on her face.

“Are the Calavari going to be part of this invasion? I assume they would be,” Karen added.

“Just about everyone is invited to this party,” Kara pointed out, “but we’re keeping it to a Star Force only affair. The H’kar will stick to other engagement sites. This one is personal.”

“Hycre?”

“They’ve got plenty on their hands reclaiming their own conquered worlds, and the Voku are busy causing trouble elsewhere. This is going to be in-house.”

“Assuming we can take it, are the Calavari relocating there or just adding it to their collection?”

Kara smiled. “Oh, we’ve got big plans for that.”

“Care to share?” Travis asked.

“Why do we only produce Sentinels in Sol or Epsilon Eridani?”

“Biggest industrial systems we’ve got,” Karen answered.

“Pagaliss is slated to start producing them too.”

“Damn,” Travis whispered, realizing that without a lick of infrastructure there now it was going to take some massive construction efforts to get them to the point where they could build Sentinels with any regularity. Sol was chucking them off a virtual assembly line like they were lego bricks, but they’d had 700 years to build up that industrial capacity, while Pagaliss was starting from scratch. “They’re ambitious bastards, I’ll give them that.”

“We, youngling. We.”

“We doesn’t usually include us,” Karen pointed out.

“It is this time. And for crying out loud, you’re just strikers. Don’t expect to be running things. Even without my armor I could snap you two like twigs…simultaneously,” Kara said, exaggerating a bit.

“We’re catching up,” Travis said defiantly.

“Just quit assuming that the trailblazers should treat you as equals. They’ve been doing a whole lot of stuff way over your heads, and was doing it before you were even born.”

“Why do you treat us differently then?” Karen asked a lingering question that had never come up before.

“I happen to like you two arrogant pricks…”

“Why do people always call us arrogant?”

“Because you are. There’s a line between confidence and arrogance, and you live on the far side of it. You literally ooze it, which was one reason I insisted that you shower before we left.”

“We do have the best battlemeld skills, trailblazers included,” Karen pointed out, “and we’re the reason the trailblazers even have them.”

“But they can still kick your ass. Until you can hold your own you shouldn’t be talking like you can.”

“We did break their record.”

Kara smiled. “That alone is reason enough for Paul and Jason to stick it to you every time they can. You should take that as a compliment, by the way, not an insult.”

“And how should we take getting passed up for all the important missions?”

“Ah, hate to break it to you there, but we recruit the best available and our favorites for the missions we’re in charge of.”

“What’s your point? We are the best,” Karen said as if that should have been common knowledge. “Within our area,” she added belatedly.

“If you’re local they’ll use you. They won’t waste your skills. But if you’re out of system they won’t call for you unless they have to.”

“Why?”

“You don’t have a Clan.”

“So?” Travis asked. “There are others that don’t.”

“No one else rejected their Clan stating that they were too important to Star Force to be involved in one.”

“Our battlemeld research was top priority…or am I missing something.”

“Your Clan affiliation wasn’t hindering that. You ditched it to state you were on the level of the trailblazers, not a subordinate…which is pretty much like flipping them off. The fact that you haven’t hooked up with a Clan since then is going to keep you on a lot of people’s black list, and when they’re recruiting favorites, well, that ain’t going to be you.”

“Except for you, it seems,” Karen pointed out.

“Oh, I completely agree with the others. You two are unbearable,” Kara said deadpan. “I just happen to like you anyway.”

“Thanks, sis,” Travis said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

Kara pointed a finger at him to her right, and suddenly he was bodily slammed across three empty seats and into the wall by her telekinesis. She turned to face Karen with an apologetic look on her face. “Sorry. Was channeling Paul there for a moment.”

6

February 27, 2755

Numar System (Calavari Region)

Sashneo

Kara’s jumpship entered the system to find a long stream of vessels in the process of making the microjump out from Sashneo and pooling around the exiting jumpline headed to Pagaliss…meaning they’d got here just in time to catch the convoy before it left.

The honorary trailblazer watched from the command nexus as she sent a waypoint to the ship’s helmsman indicating where she wanted them to converge. Once they were in close enough range for realtime transmissions she got a line to the Megazord, with a hologram of Morgan materializing in front of her from the waist up.

“You’re late, youngling.”

“Couldn’t be helped. I was out of comm range for a long time.”

“Heavy fighting I heard.”

“Very,” Kara emphasized. “The lizards might be moving the line in their favor, but the carnage is pretty even. We’re lucky neither of them is focusing that level of attention on us.”

“They couldn’t get past the Sentinels without being eviscerated first.”

“Agreed, but we couldn’t be pushing outward like we are now, tech advantage or no. I really think we’ve been put on the back burner. They’re having to fight hard against the Skarrons, but the territorial gains are huge compared to what the ADZ would offer.”

“They always have focused where others are weak.”

“I wouldn’t call the Skarrons weak, but they are kicking their ass right now.”

“As big as the lizards’ empire is compared to us, the same is true for the Skarrons compared to the lizards. They’re not going to beat them, especially if we start cutting the heart out of their territory here.”

“I wouldn’t make any bets at this point. Did you read the full report?”

“No, I just skimmed.”

“When you get some free time look at the Broongal invasion. We camped out there for two weeks, with recorders running the entire time.”

“I’ll add it to my list. Are you coming in that jumpship or do you want to transfer over to my command ship?”

“We’ve still got a full complement of drones to add to the melee, so I don’t see any reason not to bring it along.”

“I meant where do you want to ride.”

“I brought the twins with me, so I’ll be staying here unless you want them on your ship.”

Morgan laughed. “I may not like them, but I’m not banning them from my ship. Transfer over before we jump and I’ll add your warship to my fleet group.”

“Sounds good.”

“Where are you planning to throw down once we get there?”

“Are we ramming down their throats, or do I have some time to sneak around first?”

“The bulk of the ground troops are coming on a three day delay, but I am sending a few ships ahead of the main body to pull scouting data so we’re not blind when we arrive.”

“If they’ve got an invoker or assault pillar I’d like a crack at getting onboard before they go on alert. If not I can at least take out a dreadnaught for you.”

“I envy you that. But I’m not sure how secret we can keep our arrival.”

“I just need a few hours head start. If I can’t get onboard so be it, but I’d like to try regardless.”

“Alright, I’ll take us to the front of the line and make sure we get there ahead of the others. When I release the scouts to do their thing you can hitch a ride on one of them. They’ll be paying attention to the donut, so you may be able to slip in a back door.”

“That works for me. I doubt they’d send one of the big ships out to deal with a single command ship.”

“Not without a support fleet, no. But we’ve been kicking the crap out of them so bad that they’re bound to find a new wrinkle or two in their tactics to make it harder on us. I didn’t check earlier, but what’s the phaser distribution like on the Skarron front?”

“Oddly enough I didn’t see a single phaser-equipped ship. They’re doing everything with their plasma tech.”

Morgan raised an eyebrow. “So they ignore us with the bulk of their fleet, but start sending their most powerful ships after us and not the Skarrons? That doesn’t sound right.”

“It may be that they’re just burning off the old vessels rather than trying to upgrade them, and doing so against us won’t gain them much in return.”

Morgan considered that. “Well put.”

“I’ve had some time to think on it. How many are you seeing out this way?”

“Their roaming fleets seem to have all switched over, but the planetary defenses are still mostly plasma. Not sure what we’ll find in Pagaliss, but give the lizards a few decades more and I think their plasma weaponry is going to start being a rare find.”

“Their turnover can’t be that great.”

“Might be upgrades too. The hull designs are identical, so if they want to take the time to swap out the interior it might be more prudent than building entirely new ships.”

“Save for the places you know you’re going to lose a lot of them anyway.”

“If they’re beating the Skarrons with plasma, then why not send your best ships to somewhere they’re more needed? I just hope the techs get the bugs in the Keema worked out soon. I want our range advantage back.”

“We still have the cleansing beams,” Kara pointed out.

“If Paul were here he’d smack you right now,” Morgan said with a smirk.

“I think he’s more interested in getting a Dre’mo’don prototype up and running. That’ll far outclass the Keema damage at medium to short range.”

“True, but I still prefer our base weaponry to outdistance the lizards’.”

“They were bound to make an upgrade at some point. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more, to be honest, with all the races they’ve conquered up till now.”

“Annihilated, not conquered. When you kill everyone in sight there’s no one left around to tell you how to make their toys.”

“Point taken, but they did incorporate a Kvash plasma streamer into their ships.”

“Which is now obsolete.”

“How much better are the phasers? I’ve read the numbers, but what’s the feel like?” she asked, referring to how they affected the fleet engagements when viewed through the command nexus, and therefore ‘felt.’

“They’re still weak ships compared to ours, but it feels like we lost Teemo’s blind and he’s just playing regular, dominant ADC.”

“That bad?”

“The Keema will give us that back. Just have to get the damn beams working. Hey, we can talk later. Get your butt over here before we jump.”

“Going,” Kara said, deactivated the nexus and turning around. She jogged down the L-shaped hallway and onto the bridge, pausing when she got to the Captain’s chair.

“I’m transferring off and you’ll be entering Morgan’s group.”

“Going hunting?” Captain Hafferson asked.

Kara smiled. “You know me.”

“Good luck.”

“Likewise,” she said, running out into the corridors and heading for her quarters to pack up her few belongings. She gave the twins the heads up and had them do likewise, then the trio met up in one of the hangar bays and got on a dropship that took them across low stellar orbit toward the schools of space ‘fish’ waiting there.

Those fish weren’t individual warships, but rather full-fledged jumpships with all of the naval fighting craft tucked up safely inside their holds. Some were twice as long as others, for there were many different models, but spaced amongst them were 7 larger donuts, with a few more on their way out from Sashneo. Each of the five trailblazers here had one, plus some more pulled from various duties to bolster the strength of the fleet as well as add more drone controllers to the mix, increasing the efficiency of each of the ‘little’ warships with more eyes and hands available to fly and fight the ships.

Kara could see that this was easily the largest Star Force fleet ever assembled, even bigger than what they had guarding Sol…not counting stations and other ‘permanent’ defenses. However, along with this typical warfleet were a few jump cradles carrying the segments to not one, but two Sentinels. They weren’t going to wait to take the system before deploying them, and so long as the fleet kept the segments covered as they were assembled the addition of a pair of ‘safe’ islands in orbit would be extremely useful in the fighting to come.

Aside from those three types of ships there was no additional diversity of designs. All the cargo and troop jumpships were still in orbit around Sashneo, with the Ma’kri waiting there to escort them in later. As big as those ships were, they weren’t suited for really heavy fighting the way the drone warships and their controlling jumpships were, so the trailblazers were electing to put them to support duty rather than delegating one of the warships, such as Kara’s, to that task.

The jumpships were capable of taking a lot more fire than the Ma’kri were, essentially having become mobile mountains that were very difficult to destroy, with the bulk of their firepower residing in the crewless drones. The Ma’kri were not crewless, and more suited for medium to small-scale engagements where they could dominate with their speed and capture capability.

But while the Star Force fleet looked relatively uniform, it was anything but. Morgan-063’s group was comprised of mainline units, while Larissa-048 had brought a chunk of the Bsidd fleet over for this assault, as well as a conglomeration of 18 different Clans. Connor-018 was commanding the Canderous, Scionate, and Lacvamat, while Kian-093 was bringing a huge Axius fleet to bear…yet it was nothing compared to the Calavari fleet, which had the largest ship count and was under Liam-090’s command.

Both the Bsidd and Calavari had radically different drone designs, eschewing the standard ‘blocks’ in favor of other geometric shapes, but they all used the same basic jumpships, meaning that from the outside the massive fleet looked to be from one faction, but in truth it was a representation of Star Force’s diverse naval power and the unity of design and purpose that bound them together.

But beyond that, it was just damn impressive to look at.

Kara’s dropship seemed smaller than a gnat in comparison, flying amongst the huge vessels and over to Morgan’s command ship, slipping inside one of the small bays on the otherwise packed hull of the ship that was not designed as a carrier, but rather a badass fleet-buster that did a good impression of a pint-sized Sentinel.

But it was far more than that, with the interior segmented up into all sort of command and control functions, weapon storage, survey gear, medical facilities, and just about everything else you’d expect from a command center. This one just happened to be mobile and sat in the middle of the fighting rather than safely behind the fleet.

Those who lead have to lead…and the only place to do that was in the front.

The idea of sending the peons first was not part of Star Force’s military structure, which was a major reason for their troops’ and ships’ longevity. Even the drones, which were considered expendable, were not wasted by flinging them at the opposition, nor were they designed flimsily. They could take hits and damage and still be able to retreat to be repaired later, which was the perfect counter to the lizards’ swarm tactics.

But the biggest thing that was evident by the command ship in front of the dropship and the jumpships surrounding it was the sheer size involved. Star Force had grown massive over its 7 centuries of existence, and there was no way tiny little cruisers were going to take this fleet down. Kara felt a moment of pride as they transitioned over, looking at the assembled fleet, then they were inside and walking off across the bay and into the connective tunnels that crisscrossed the entire vessel.

The trio of Archons boarded a small pod car and zipped off across the kilometers of ship, eventually coming to the armored central region that housed the more sensitive areas. It was shaped like a ring that surrounded the central plug that was the TF-class dropship housed inside. That was currently full of ground troops, mostly mech division, but likewise protected by the second layer of armor, ensuring that this command ship could survive an insane beating and still keep most of the crew alive to be recovered afterwards.

That wasn’t going to be an issue in the coming battle, for Star Force wasn’t bringing a fleet designed to make it a fair fight. They were bringing a sledge hammer that was going to pound the known lizard forces flat and have considerable margin for error knowing that they’d bring in an unknown number of reinforcements to counter them as the invasion progressed.

Still, it felt good to be standing behind that much armor, just in case something did go horribly wrong.

In Kara’s case she had an out, and in some respects she’d be safer flying through space in the middle of the battle than standing inside a ship…so long as she didn’t come up against any anti-air batteries. She was small enough to avoid the aim of the big ones, in theory, but the small ones would rack up so much consistent damage that they’d puncture her advanced shields in a relatively short amount of time.

That said, she liked having a backup plan as well as the fact that she’d be fighting in the naval battle personally, rather than plugged into a gunnery station or in a command nexus. That was something that no other Archon had ever had the pleasure of doing, and only she understood just how reckless it really was. It all came down to guile and positioning, which she would have to be employing in a couple of days, for Pagaliss wasn’t that far away from Sashneo.

“Play nice,” Kara said when she finally sensed Morgan approaching from around the corner in one of the more crowded interior hallways.

“You know us,” Travis said just before the trailblazer turned the corner and her face came into view. “What the hell?”

“Never seen a tattoo before?” Morgan asked as she walked up to them.

“Didn’t know you’d gotten one,” Karen answered, referring to the scattering of dots and curvy lines on the right side of her face, giving her an exotic pirate-ish look that was extremely badass.

“It’s about a year old. You guys here to fight or mouth off?”

“Can’t we do both?” Travis asked deadpan.

Morgan smirked, for cocky or no, that was typical Archon. “Where would you like to figure in? Ground ops I assume?”

“We can supplement gunners if you need some extra hands.”

“We’ve always got extra seats for strikers. Do you want leadership duties, heavy combat, scouting, or sneak ops once we make ground?”

“Heavy combat, preferably,” Karen answered. “But we’ll fill wherever needed.”

“How do you feel about working with Arc Knights?”

“They’ll slow us down,” Travis said bluntly.

“On a reinforcement team that I send into trouble spots where we’re facing the heaviest resistance.”

Both of the twins’ eyes gleamed a bit. “That works,” Karen answered for them.

Morgan mentally gave the two directions to the section of the ship where those Arc Knights were going through training drills in the very crowded sanctuary. “Find Chandler and start making friends. You’ll be working with his strike team. He leads them, you tag along and work on your kill counts.”

“Come on, sis,” Travis said aloud for Kara’s benefit as the twins walked past Morgan, “time to play nice.”

Kara watched them go, but waited until they were out of earshot until she spoke to Morgan. “That went well.”

“I’m actually glad they’re here. They may be cocky sons of bitches, but put them in the right fight and they’ll dominate. Speaking of which, where do you want to be assigned…or do you just want to roam as normal?”

“You know me, I just make it up as I go. Unless you need another team leader?”

“The five of us can handle those duties, so feel free to go where you feel you can make the most impact, cheat armor and all.”

“Yeah, yeah…you’ll change your tune if we ever figure out how to duplicate my little baby,” Kara said, lifting her left arm and pulling back her sleeve to show off her Vorch’nas.

“I’m not having one glued on my arm even if we do.”

“That’s what I thought too when Puff stuck it on. Now, I’m glad he did. Never have to worry about losing it. I was horrible with my car keys.”

“Why?”

“Multiple thought lines. Until basic taught me how to turn it to an advantage I was always distracted and losing stuff. And those are genetic, not ink, right?” Kara asked, gesturing with her chin towards the top Archon’s face.

“Of course they’re genetic. No one sane uses ink.”

“Just checking. Looks good, by the way.”

“I like my natural hair color, so I figured I’d experiment with my skin. You feel like running or sparring?”

“How crowded is the track?”

“Very. But we can take a hike through the outer ship and get away from everyone else. Nice long hallways, very few turns.”

“You have a course set up?”

Morgan smiled. “I do.”

“Show me where to stow my duffle and I’ll give you one hell of a workout.”

“No armor, cheater.”

“I won’t need it,” Kara said with a confident smirk.

7

March 2, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Low stellar orbit

Morgan sat on a stool in the command nexus, her hands on the control sphere and her mind interlinked with the ship’s computer as she watched through delay as to what was happening around the system. The Megazord had come out of their braking maneuver along with one Warship-class jumpship that had then deployed its drones in a scouting capacity, with several models designed for such a role. The command ship held position guarding the jumpline that the fleet would be following on in a few hours’ time, with the linear jumpship tucked up alongside it.

The lizards knew they were here, for the system had a plethora of tracking devices set up that the Star Force vessels could detect the signals from. They hadn’t, however, come out to fight the interlopers. Rather they were sitting in planetary orbit around Varasiss, forming up into what they thought would be the best defensive formation possible. Typically the lizards would have rushed the command ship, but it seemed that they weren’t taking the bait this time, despite their overwhelming numbers.

The drones had spread out across the system, updating the last intelligence report and confirming two small colonies on other planets. It was one of those that Morgan was watching now, for the small fleet of 129 cruisers there had a Star Force icon amongst them. It was a tag that had been placed in response to a location ping rather than an active signal, but it was the location where Kara currently was.

The aggressive little twit had wanted a shot at the two invokers around Varasiss, but there was no way for her to get in to them or the defense stations ringing the planet. Rather than sitting the upcoming battle out on the command ship she’d opted to go for a low priority target, and the superficial mining colony had been accessible. One of the drones had deposited her in orbit of the rocky planetoid and she’d done the rest from there. How she didn’t get blown out of the sky Morgan wasn’t sure, but Kara had managed to board one of the cruisers and was now inside, hence the icon to make sure no one shot that ship…not that there was anyone here yet to do it.

As the trailblazer watched the cruiser she was on suddenly lurched from its sitting position and gently rammed the one next to it…with a little spec transferring across from hull to hull like a flea.

There was no way Kara was going to be able to sneak around now, but she hadn’t yet called for pickup. Rather, a signal came in, relayed by the drone that was sitting in a higher orbit around the planet, that indicated that the first cruiser was dead, either through internal sabotage or the lack of a crew, and it looked like the arrogant Saber was going to press her luck and go for a second.

Morgan’s mind was simultaneously watching the huge fleet around Varasiss, with no response from them yet. They were still shifting about their positions somewhat, but keeping well off the main jumplines in and out. The invokers were in the back row, with the mass of cruisers and larger warships situated out in front and around the defense stations, probably because they knew that against Star Force the invokers were vulnerable, and while they might lead with them against other races that was just a good way to lose them early on here.

As Kara’s confirmation signal came in that she’d breached the second cruiser’s hull Morgan placed the Star Force ‘no shoot’ tag on it, with her attention being diverted to the incoming jump ping. It was a signal that was sent out a few minutes prior to arrival, hyper accelerated due to the coast speed of a jump, but one that would arrive prior to an incoming ship. Morgan’s command ship hadn’t sent one when it arrived, for there was no one friendly here to receive it, but it did allow her a heads up to send back a return signal with any last minute instructions.

Since the lizards hadn’t come out to the star to fight them she sent the ‘all clear’ signal along with the preferred jumppoint she’d like them to come out on…which was an easy one in close to the star that would require less fuel. Had the arrival point been ‘hot’ they would have braked harder and emerged further away so the odds of the lizards being able to poach their ships one at a time as they emerged were low.

That was also another reason to send a ship ahead to a fight like this. If surprise wasn’t going to be a factor then having a good scouting report before you brought everyone else in was worth the effort. Had a tenth of this lizard fleet been waiting for them around the star they would have been walking into a trap that could have destroyed every last one of her ships.

As it was, the lizard defense fleet had the potential to destroy the forces she was bringing to face them…if the Star Force ships were being flown by newbs. The firepower the enemy had at its disposal was massive, but there was more to naval warfare than just having big guns and pointing them at the other guys. There was a lot of strategy and small-scale tactics involved, which was why she liked having as many remote pilots as possible controlling the drones. The more time one had to think the better they would fight, and the less duties per controller the freer their minds would be.

Kara’s call for evac came about thirty seconds prior to the arrival of the first command ship, which was followed by a series of jumpships in close proximity, forming a line as they came in that diverted to positions Morgan indicated to clear the approach lane. Meanwhile the drone in orbit around the mining planet headed straight into the cruiser cluster there as the enemy ships were firing on their own, now that Kara’s presence had been noted. To kill her they were going to destroy their own ship, meaning it was time for the Archon to run.

Morgan watched with a part of her mind while she monitored everything else going on, picking up a few additional bits of data from the holograms around her, but most of her data was coming directly through the neural link. When the drone got to the cruisers it didn’t engage them, choosing to fly in amongst them and pancake the lizard cruiser that Kara was on. With its ventral shields dropping for a moment, the Archon jumped across and clung to the hull while the corvette was getting pounded with plasma orbs and streamers.

Once she was inside the perimeter of the shields Kara stuck herself to the hull and the exposure reclosed, with the corvette rushing off and outside the cruisers’ firing range before its defenses could go down. Satisfied that Kara was out safely, Morgan turned her full attention to the huge chess match about to be played out, giving the deploy order to the jumpships that had already arrived to start releasing their drones here at the star rather than wait until they got under the lizards’ guns.

Travis sat in one of the control booths onboard the Megazord, operating the shield controls for a cruiser. He could have handled the entire ship himself if needed, but he was just backing up the regular pilots at the moment and applying the special touch that could make the difference between victory or defeat when this many enemy guns were in play.

The drone he was connected to was engaging the lizards in orbit of Varasiss in a massive exchange that he couldn’t even begin to follow…but that wasn’t his job here. He was to focus on the shields for this one ship and that was it, trusting in the rest of his team and the overall strategy of the trailblazers on site to guide them where they needed to go. The fact that the ship he was sitting in was also under attack didn’t phase him, for he understood naval warfare on this scale and the need to delegate, otherwise it would turn into a randomized free for all.

Those were sloppy and costly, with the lizards having more than enough firepower to make them pay for it. As it was his cruiser was getting hit hard, and not from the ships nearby. The few that were within mauler range were going down quickly, but those beyond that and plasma range were firing their phasers through the gaps and turning the drone cruiser into a pin cushion of pink streaks, allowing several dozen, if not hundred of ships to target the cruiser simultaneously.

The range increase from short to medium had given the lizards so much more naval power it was nuts, but Star Force’s tech and skills were still superior. It was likely that this cruiser was going to be destroyed, for apparently they were to hold position and slug it out for a moment. Normally when the shields dropped below 20% they would be on their way to the back lines to get a breather and a recharge, but not now.

Travis wasn’t controlling the helm, so he didn’t see the communications from others or know the battle plan. Shield control was pretty much an isolated job, with him having to watch the surrounding ships and decide which of the 18 shield segments needed reinforcing more than the others. He had two options for that…the regenerative energy coming from a continuous feed, or the cannibalization of other shield segments to send to one of greater priority. He didn’t like using the latter, for some of the matrix was wasted in the process, but on occasion it was necessary in order to safeguard the ship against a huge hit you knew was coming.

Right now there were no big hits, just lots of little pink stings mixed in with green plasma. The ships around the cruiser were about 2/3rds the old variety, leaving the other third with the new weaponry. In fact those ships were sitting further back in the formation, leaving the plasma-equipped cruisers to run head on into the approaching ships and get chopped to pieces while drawing fire themselves…all the while the more advanced models snipped at the Star Force ships outside of mauler and talon range.

The cruiser had a cleansing beam and it was using it to great effect, but if the ship wanted to throw its full weaponry against the ships shooting at it from afar it was going to have to get closer. In the meantime the enemy was going to get some free shots off, whereas in the past it had been Star Force getting those free shots while the enemy closed distance. That swap alone was giving the enemy more teeth, but they were still losing ships rapidly.

Travis took a chance to look around mentally from time to time, seeing how many drones were going down…and there were plenty. This wasn’t going to be a roll-over engagement, and Star Force was going to have to pay a price in equipment to take control of orbit, which was why Travis had elected to take the shield control rather than the cleansing beam. That was just point and shoot, while the management of the shields could be much more intricate in the hands of an experienced controller.

When the cruiser got down to under 10% shields Travis got a rare prompt from higher up the command structure, telling him to stand ready to lower shields. Along with the stylized order, which appeared as a unique icon rather than words, was a tag for an incoming ship that the striker saw was of the support variety.

That was why they’d been holding position rather than retreating, and when the slightly larger vessel pulled over top of the cruiser Travis deactivated a single sector, sending a coordinate ping to the controller on the other vessel. A moment later a stream of sand shot across and accurately targeted the opening Travis had made for them, with the replicator armor blocks clinging to the hull there and piling up on it in a lump.

As soon as they did so Travis got a second function under his control. In addition to the shields he now gained control of those armor blocks and immediately began spreading them out over the hull like a wave of water. The shield ship kept pouring more in, as if it was a giant grain harvester unloading into a wagon. Meanwhile the rest of the cruiser kept fighting and getting hit, with Travis easily able to multitask the two duties. He poured a little more recharge energy into sectors 3 and 8, anticipating increased attacks on those vectors as the enemy ship placement began to shift again, then rushed the secondary armor to those areas first, just in case the shields did breach soon.

When the shield ship was done it pinged him, and Travis reformed the shield over the hole, with the clump of blocks there sitting just below the extended radius as he continued to move them out and around to the locations he wanted, simultaneously pushing the cruiser’s shields several meters out from the hull to accommodate the armor and holding clumps that he built up like wood stacks at various locations. He needed them nearby to reinforce upcoming damage, otherwise it would take too long to drag them across the hull from a single location and the enemy weaponsfire would get through to the primary armor or even interior mechanisms.

All this was done in his mind ahead of the incoming damage, for the shields had not failed yet, in any sector, but that was his job as shield controller. He had think ahead and preposition the matrix energy, for it didn’t form or move instantaneously, and neither did the secondary armor blocks.

And he didn’t need anyone to tell him why the support ship had reinforced the cruiser, for the answer was obvious. The smaller ships didn’t have cleansing beams, for the most part, and whoever was controlling this battle group wanted the cruiser’s beam in play constantly. Had they retreated to recharge their shields they would have temporarily lost the damage the weapon was doing.

That was better than losing the ship and the weapon permanently, but the support ship gave them another option and the cleansing beam kept poaching enemy ships at even greater range, targeting the more advanced models, Travis noticed, which was definitely the correct play. If they got the enemy down to all plasma varieties he could alter the shield settings for anti-plasma and tank up their ship considerably, but while those phasers were being used he couldn’t weaken their defense against them with the specialty shield, meaning the sooner the advanced models bit the dust, the better.

With that strategy making sense, the cruiser suddenly began to move forward, prompting an eyebrow raise from Travis. He wasn’t going to distract anyone by asking what was going on, but he was curious…then he noticed several smaller drones falling into position behind the cruiser a moment before he got a second prompt telling him to shift the majority of his shields into the forward arc and fan it out a bit to provide cover for them.

That was a very aggressive play, but if that’s what they wanted then so be it. Travis made the changes to shield shape, then gutted 80% of the rear shields and shunted that energy forward, losing a lot in the transfer but almost immediately doubled the forward matrix density. He left a thin layer around the rear of the ship and began redistributing armor blocks there to cover for the lesser defense, but for the moment the only ships with a good firing line on the cruiser’s rear were her sister ships, so it seemed to be a worthy gamble.

Over the next ten minutes the cruiser dished out and took a hell of a beating, eventually reaching a range where it was able to fire a number of cleansing beams into a nearby defense station before that weapon was damaged. It didn’t retreat then, and Travis stayed with it gaining every little advantage that he could for the ship as it played blocker, running into a thick group of enemy cruisers and tearing into them with its maulers and talon cannons while subsequently attracting the majority of the enemy firepower to it.

The smaller drones that were following it were therefore allowed to get deeper into the enemy lines than they otherwise would have, bringing them within short weapon range. They stayed in the cruiser’s shadow as long as they could, then they broke up and dove at the enemy like a Nidalee on a half health ADC.

Travis only saw part of that battle before the cruiser was destroyed and his screen blanked, along with the mental connection severing. He had a breather of all of six seconds before he saw a request prompt on the screen asking him to take control of a specific function. The Archon accepted rather than surfing through the options and wasting time, suddenly finding himself in control of two mauler cannons on a frigate. He saw the end of one of them firing as his screen came up, meaning he’d just replaced another pilot from that duty…who would be shunted to another task or reduced from multitasking down to a single, more efficient focus.

Travis took the controls and got another salvo off with barely any break in sequence, seeing a full dreadnaught eclipsing his gunner’s view. The enemy ship had its shields down and bare hull in front of him, with Travis gladly using his pair of weapons to chew apart the yellow/tan hull plates at nearly pointblank range.

8

March 5, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Low stellar orbit

“Ouch,” the Captain of the troop jumpship said upon seeing the fleet status as it updated upon their arrival into the system.

“What?” Iden-202747 asked from the commander’s chair behind his, where a large holographic map of Varasiss had just come up showing a considerable lizard fleet still holding on to a piece of orbit centered on a trio of defense stations.

“Look at our drone count.”

The striker pulled up those numbers with a few button presses, seeing that better than two thirds of the drones had been destroyed. He frowned, bringing up the jumpship count and finding that all of those were still operational, meaning no one had died in what, at first glance looked to be a defeat for Star Force. It had been expected that the orbital battles would have been completed before the convoy of troop transports arrived, or at least with the lizards being driven off into other parts of the system to be hunted down later.

With the amount of drones lost and the lizard foothold in orbit, it appeared things were not going well.

“Orders,” the Captain said, relaying the updated transmission that was being bounced from jumpship to jumpship as they came into the star system, with Iden’s being the 18th in line. The mainline troops had jumped ahead of them, with this convoy being comprised of all the Clans. Behind them would be the Axius convoy followed by the others.

Iden read the orders, seeing the Captain signal to the helmsman to get them underway immediately. The jumpship began to move on the primary bridge map around the perimeter of the star following the other Clan vessels as they cleared the jumpline for more of their own to come in and began the trek over to the Varasiss jumppoint, for it seemed they were wanted at the planet immediately.

And not just for a holding orbit. As Iden read through the orders he saw that they contained a sitrep explaining the situation…and he suddenly understood why so many drones had been lost.

“Larkey?”

“What’s up?” the ranger asked, standing behind him a few steps.

“Looks like we’re going to have to earn this one on the ground. The lizards have set up some extremely large surface to orbit phaser arrays preventing orbital bombardment. The fleet sacrificed a lot of drones to punch out a few colonies to give us a blind spot, but the rest we’re going to have to take down on the ground before the fleet can move in.”

“Shit. Sounds like a Hoth scenario.”

“It is,” Iden said, pointing to the section of the orders that identified it as such, “and they want the Clans going in first.”

Larkey-319228 smirked. “We are the best.”

“Softening duty,” Iden continued. “Mainline will mount the main assault supported by the non-Human units. Extreme hazard conditions for us.”

Larkey nodded. “Looks like we’ve seen the end of lizard extermination missions then. Didn’t think it’d be that easy this long. About time they came up with a proper surface defense.”

“The fleet is going to work on taking out the last of the orbital defenses while we head down, meaning that if they lose we’re going to be in a very awkward place.”

“Did we lose that many ships?”

“Have a look,” Iden said, enlarging the armchair display and throwing it up as a second hologram that showed the losses on both sides, with the green lizard numbers far exceeding the Star Force gold.

“What the hell. Did they really have half the enemy fleet here?”

“Seems like it. Sorry we missed that fight, but it looks like we’re going to have an even harder one on the ground, for they’ve stacked defenses down there too.”

“Bring it.”

“Cap, give me shipwide,” Iden said, pausing a moment until a light on his armchair showed that he was connected. The Archon telekinetically pressed the button and began speaking to the air.

“Attention all badasses. Our favorite waste of bullets have proven themselves just as devious and dangerous as well all know they are, but this time really takes the cake. They’ve taken their new weapon and used it to take away our orbital bombardment capability via a lot of really big guns on the surface. Naval has pounded us an entry vector the hard way, leaving us with only a third of the drones we came with and more lizards in orbit left to kill.”

“While they work on winning that fight we’re going down to the surface, head of the line. The Clans are going to be the tip of this spear and tasked with the hardest objectives. We have to soften the lizard defenses up enough that the Calavari and Bsidd don’t get slaughtered, and mainline will be holding their hands throughout, but the lizards have dug in good and have a nearly infinity supply of their scaly asses to throw at us, so we’re in for a tough fight.”

“This one we have to earn, and without air cover until we knock down a lot of defense turrets. That means infantry and mechs and no Lacvamat until we take down the priority structures. Not sure how we’re going to play this one yet, but Clan Jinx gets to live up to its namesake in the coming days. Everyone get prepped immediately. In a few hours we’re going to be on Varasiss dirt.”

Iden clicked the button again, this time with his finger, cancelling the comm channel. “Cap, find us a good parking spot…and thanks for the ride.”

“Wreak some havoc,” he said, which was Clan Jinx’s version of ‘good luck.’

Iden threw him a two fingered salute as he stood up and jogged off the bridge with Larkey, intending to get geared up and on the first dropship heading down.

By the time Iden and some 200+ Jinxes were in a dropship flying down to the surface the first of his jumpship’s heavy transports had already detached from its holding rack. The four destroyer drones they’d brought with them were also gone, having been sent over to the main fleet to help replace what had been lost, but the rest of the jumpship’s carry space was full of landing ships carrying the bulk of the troops and the heavy equipment. A scattering of conventional dropships were going with them, along with a pair of drop pods.

Those two were trailing slightly behind Iden’s dropship and heading to firebase 8 on Larissa’s orders and would be depositing their Mark III Madcats directly into battle. The landing zone Iden was heading to was one of the more stable ones, located on a plain that existed between the mix of buildings and rubble that were the nearby lizard colonies that the fleet had painstakingly pounded from orbit to eliminate any aerial hazards that could have interfered with the grounding of the troops. As it was there were hundreds of thousands of wisps in the air and currently being held at bay by an army of mechs with anti-air capability.

The madcats would add to that considerably, with the first priority right now being to get the firebases up to snuff and their defenses online, which wasn’t only against ground troops but naval ships as well. Each of the prefab structures contained at minimum one cleansing beam capable of reaching back up to orbit located on the top of a high tower, allowing it to tip over and shoot targets on the ground so long as they weren’t too close, given the angles involved.

Clan Ninja Monkey and Clan Firestorm were already on the ground and had set up the most complete firebase, which was where Iden’s troops were coming down with the exception of the madcats. As soon as his dropship landed he and the other Archons streamed out, then split up to collecting their regulars that would be coming out of the larger transports.

Iden was the sixth highest ranking Jinx on site, but the operation was still under the trailblazer’s command so he had orders waiting for him in his helmet once he made it to ground and Larissa sent them out. Right now there were far too many wisps in the air and more on the way, crossing the planet to get to their location, and only a handful of anti-air batteries had been set up. Star Force’s skeets and other aerial craft were pinned to a small area around the firebases, else they’d run into the anti-air turrets of nearby colonies. That meant they could only fight here, in a region approximately 200 miles wide, and it was about to get very, very crowded.

Iden wasn’t assigned to deal with that, but he did need to protect the units on the ground that were setting up the prefab structures and growing the firebases. They couldn’t protect themselves yet, but buy them enough time and the battleforts would allow the rest of the troops the freedom to roam while they could fend off any nominal attacks on their own.

The lizards were currently sending waves of tanks from the surrounding colonies in to the contested area, not to mention the troops already there that had survived the orbital bombardment. Star Force hadn’t taken the time to level everything, just enough to knock out the key structures. That meant there were plenty of intact buildings, not to mention underground structures that would have to be fought through to clean out and properly safe the area.

That couldn’t be done while the firebases were under assault, so first priority came to protecting them long enough to get properly set up and have the mainline troops start coming down. After that the Clans would be free to push out and start hitting key targets.

Iden ran from point to point, leaving Larkey and the others to head to their individual assignments as he headed to one of the currently descending transports, making sure to stay away from the box on his HUD that showed the no-go zone where the ship was slated to land. The Archon waited nearby, then as soon as the doors opened up he ran inside, bypassing a slew of thors and ravens as the mechs walked out, all of which were painted ponytail blue.

Iden contacted the bay control as he ran and got one of the reserve mechs for himself. Typically he fought as infantry, but not every mech was assigned a pilot so that if one was damaged in the field that pilot could cycle back and pick up a fresh ride. It was one of those replacements that the striker claimed, with a pair of techs waiting for him next to the neo running a quick final prep when he arrived inside the mobile mech bay.

“How we look?” he asked, climbing the ladder up to the catwalk to get to the rear access hatch in the back of the mech.

“We’ve still got one empty module. Do you want to wait and have it loaded?”

Iden shook his head. “No time. I’m going to be a mauler baby today anyway.”

“She’s good to go then,” the tech said, stepping aside and waving him to the open hatch.

“Tear ‘em up,” the other said as Iden telepathically connected with the mech controls and began sealing the hatch as he walked through into the small compartment. Upon a second mental command a series of panels on the floor depressed and slid aside, with a control harness rising up and locking into vertical position. Iden walked around to the front of it and stepped backward into the loose boots.

He leaned back and the few other fasteners tightened around his waist and wrists while the boots snugged up firm against his own shoes. A headrest was fitted into place, then he felt the prompt from the new telepathic controls in his mind. He pushed the imaginary button and felt his vision go out for a moment, with his body likewise going numb as the machine’s status flooded his own senses.

The next moment he was seeing from the perspective of his neo, his body’s stimuli replaced with the machine’s. He didn’t care for the crude sensation, for this interface was barely out of prototype, but he had full control over the war machine from that moment on and walked it out of its berth in the bay with no more effort than trudging around with a heavy backpack on. The neo’s steps were his own, not a computer-controlled driving experience, and now had instantaneous reaction speed compared to the old harness system that he’d actually gotten to be fairly good with.

He walked in line over to the exit doors, getting hung up on the back of the flood of mechwarriors who had already been in the ship and ready to depart immediately. As such he was the next to last mech out, with Iden working the battlemap and tagging those mechs he wanted reassigned to him. Other formations had already been worked out, but since he was a striker they were immediately reworked around his needs.

Two more neos and six ravens pinged in their acceptance of his redirect and he set a waypoint on himself as he maneuvered through the mechs outside the ship and found a bit of open ground. Overhead there were wisps everywhere around the firebase, with a ring of mechs firing so many sammies up that it looking like the finale of a fireworks display…except that it never stopped.

Iden ran his neo out through the rain of lizard ship parts and popped open the left shoulder on his mech, inside of which there was a small anti-air sammy turret as well. He set it on auto + exterior control, allowing either his onboard computer or a controller back in the firebase to target the wisps above while he focused entirely on the ground fighting. His other shoulder had an anti-infantry plasma scattergun that he kept locked up, for the tanks ahead weren’t going to be needing that.

The empty slot was on the ‘head’ of the neo, which was just a small lump that held a modular slot that hadn’t been filled with a weapon. The two mauler cannons in his arms were the primaries though, not to mention the hands on the mech, which could now grip things like they were his own. That sort of dexterity was worth using the crude mental interface, as was the running speed.

When he got into the clear he sped up, but not as fast as he was capable of for the light blue mechs behind him were piloted by regulars who could not use the mental interface yet. In the future it would be able to access a person’s mind, but right now most of Iden’s access was him using his telepathy and the regulars didn’t have that or any other psionics.

The two neos were using the harness controls that Iden’s mech also contained but that he hadn’t deployed. His ‘harness’ was just to hold his body still while his mind expanded out into the machine, allowing him to stride in a way that no computer could ever hope to match, giving him the fastest mech on the field.

There were other Archons out there, but none of the other strikers were in them, leaving him top dog…amongst the Jinxes at least.

There were a lot of other Clans operating out there, but as far as his Clan’s mechs keeping up with him were concerned, he had to ride the brake a bit to keep them in formation behind him. That formation right now was a line, with the other 8 mechs just covering ground behind him as they raced toward a pair of voltrons in the distance that were getting hammered by green plasma and quite a few pink phaser beams.

It seemed the lizards had upgraded their tanks with the new weapon as well.

“Two ravens per neo,” Iden ordered, mentally tagging the two ‘chicken walkers’ he wanted on his wings. “Stay fairly close to each other, but operate in kill trios and take some of the heat off those Ninja Monkeys.”

Iden signaled the two monster mechs and let them know that support was coming, then he got a request from the starboard one barely a second later. He looked ahead on his battlemap and saw some huge new tanks that were packing a beefy version of the phaser, making the scene look something like an old Godzilla movie. Those big tanks were far in the back, with the smaller ones swarming up to the voltrons’ feet where a few dozen other Ninja Monkey mechs were hacking them to bits.

“Damn that’s a lot of tanks,” Iden whispered off comm. There was no way he could get to the big ones without going through the little ones…nor did he have the long range weaponry needed to snipe them, though the voltrons were doing a decent job of that. There were just so many of them, and more were coming up in the distance. If they didn’t knock this group down now, there would be so many piling up here that they couldn’t suffer that multitude of weaponsfire, for their dominance relied on giving their shields a chance to recharge. Throw a lot of fire on them and they’d be reduced to taking armor damage.

They had to split them up and keep them in manageable numbers, and the lizards looked like they understood that fact too and were spamming them without holding anything back, ground or air.

As Iden’s shoulder sammy hit and downed a wisp in front of him the craft careened into the ground at his feet, causing him to jump up and to the right. He had the presence of mind to retract the sammy with a thought before his neo hit head first on the ground…but thanks to the interface he was actually able to roll the machine through a somersault and crawl back up onto his feet.

“Nice dodge,” one of his ravens said as they passed him by, slowing a bit until he got back up to speed. He popped the turret back out and let it get to work, then accelerated up into a full run, leaving the ravens in his dust.

“Follow me in and pick up the pieces,” Iden said, actually managing a sprint in the mech, which was something that only a select few had ever achieved. He came up even with the voltrons and their defending mechs and punched on past them, skipping a few of the lizard tanks and diving into the sea of them until he ran out of running room.

Then, with a boost from his jump jets, he leapt into the air as if he was doing the long jump and came down on his target mech further ahead, bending his left elbow and driving it down into the top of the yellow/tan machine and crumpling its weapon cupola on top, killing the crew inside as he drove the parts down into the interior as he pancaked the vehicle.

Laying on his belly on top of it, Iden popped up the mauler cannon on his right wrist and fired at the nearest tank as he crawled his way back to his feet, with the ravens doubling up on his target as they finally came back within range.

9

April 17, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Kajit stood perched atop one of the buildings in firebase 3, his two clawed feet latched on to the edge of a stubby spire along with a host of other Lacvamat situated on his left, right, and behind him, cluttering the rooftop so to keep the ground clear for the walking troops as they waited. Kajit was watching the battlemap inside his helmet and the assault taking place on a colony several hundred miles to the north. The area in between them and it had been fought over and largely destroyed in the past weeks, but so far the Lacvamat had not been allowed to participate in the assault.

That was supposed to change today, and right now a Clan unit was attacking the colony from the rear while mainline troops were doing most of the fighting out front and working their way into the lizard city. It too had an orbital defense battery, but the Clans weren’t going for it this time, rather they were sneaking in and trying to take down the small scale anti-air defenses first so the Lacvamat could join in on the assault.

As it was, the war to conquer the planet was going Star Force’s way…yet slowly. The planet was huge and nearly a third of its landmasses were covered in lizard structures, meaning there were a lot of them to kill. Orbit had been secured and the Sentinels orbiting directly above the ring of firebases were a welcome presence, but a lizard relief fleet had arrived only three days ago and done considerable damage to Star Force’s remaining drones before being defeated. Most of the lizard ships had been hunted down and destroyed before they could flee the system, but there was no way to know when the next group would get here.

Kajit couldn’t worry about that, for it was a naval matter and he was fairly sure they wouldn’t see lizard cruisers in atmosphere aiding the ground troops anytime soon, though that was always a lingering threat. With the lizard naval assistance out of the question Star Force was creeping its way across the planet, taking down more of the orbital bombardment capability as they went, but in order to get to it they had to take the colony first or conduct a solid raid into it, meaning the ground troops had to fight through the worst defenses the lizards could throw at them before Star Force’s naval power could be applied.

That sucked, but there was no way around it. The ground army needed the Lacvamat involved, but the anti-air defenses that were holding the fighters back would also be effective against the flyers, and they were a lot less protected given their small size. There were encountering so much resistance from the lizards, however, that a change in tactics had been made to hit the anti-air batteries first so they could bring in the flying infantry support.

That’s what Kajit was waiting on. The battlemap had giant no-go zones around the firebase where they weren’t permitted to fly, and right now it was better to keep the airspace overhead clear for dropships and larger transports to bring supplies down from the recent cargo convoy. A lot of heavy equipment plus foodstuffs and ammo were flowing to the surface, so the Lacvamat simply sat on the rooftops in full armor and waited for the go ahead.

When the anti-air turrets would go down was not a thing that could be predicted, so Kajit spent the better part of 5 hours sitting and waiting before the giant red box over that colony disappeared. When it did he had to wait all of three seconds before the transit order was given, then Lacvamat all around him began to leap into the air and flap their armored wings to gain altitude, staggering themselves so they didn’t run into one another.

Kajit waited until he found a gap then took off, using his small anti-grav jump pack to help him get airborne. He could fly under his own power, but the armor that he and the others wore made it difficult, for every part of their bodies, from their two feet to their thin, fleshy wings were covered in flexible, yet hard plates that weighed them down. It was a workout to move in them, but the anti-grav compensated for that with a light, constant lift during flight or a short burst of altitude such as now with the device adding to the leg kick that sent him skyward.

The Lacvamat didn’t waste any time circling above and moved off towards the north in a long column. A few hundred miles was a workout, but nothing that would exhaust them. Had this unit been Human, Calavari, or any of the other groundpounders they would have had to be transported by dropship to the battle site, but the Lacvamat didn’t have that handicap. They’d fly there on their own, and do so at considerable speed once they flapped their way into a high enough altitude to begin a shallow dive and use the air resistance to launch themselves even further ahead.

As such the long column looked like a series of waves heading up and down, but with each repetition they gained speed, using the anti-grav units to do most of the climbing and sparing them the fatigue. Alongside the 5,500 Lacvamat were a couple of squadrons of skeets flying escort to make sure the lizard fighters that were still roaming the planet in swarms didn’t try to ambush the flying infantry. Kajit and the others could fight them fairly well, but it wouldn’t take much of a hit to knock them out of the air and Star Force didn’t like personnel being treated as expendable.

Kajit assumed that was why it had taken the trailblazers so long to call them into combat, waiting for the right moment when they could put their skills to use without facing the unavoidable loss of personnel. Lacvamat combat within Star Force was still in its infancy, but it had been laid out plainly to them that they were not the heavy hitters in a ground fight, but rather the support. That wasn’t due to lack of skill, but rather the differences in biology. If Kajit landed on the ground he was not going to be able to fight hand to hand well, especially since he didn’t have any hands.

He had trained to make some use of himself if he ever found himself in that situation, but the Lacvamat were meant to stay in the air at all times and offer fire support to ground infantry units, which was why when he and the others finally arrived at their waypoint just outside the colony under assault they broke up into smaller units and went into a flock-wide holding pattern just behind the four Hoth-class walkers bombarding the city buildings with cleansing beams.

Soon a slew of dots popped up on the battlemap throughout the city, with one in particular being highlighted. That was where he was supposed to go first, and along with 7 others he flew up about twice the height of the hoths and broke away from the mass of Lacvamat as about half of them also clustered up into groups and headed different directions. Kajit made sure to stay below the designated ceiling where the skeets were operating, for they didn’t want anyone to die from a needless head on collision while the aerial fighters were keeping what was left of the wisps off them.

Kajit activated his armor’s shields and biased them 95% to the underside, trusting in their air cover to keep the lizard fighters busy and their topsides safe. That allowed him to better protect his wide profile from the ground view, for the wings on the Lacvamat were necessarily huge in order to lift their body masses and made for easy targets when spread wide.

Speed was their best defense, but having a thick shield matrix underneath their wings helped greatly. If he or the others took any armor damage it was a signal to turn tail and run immediately, for the thin layer covering their wings couldn’t stand up to much pounding due to the weight issues. They simply couldn’t armor themselves like the Calavari could, so most of their defense had to be shunted to the shields and evasion.

Kajit pinged in his approach and linked up with the ground unit they were tasked with assisting, getting revised targets and suggested approach vectors. He and the others split up further, conversing amongst themselves as how to organize this, then the Lacvamat turned the corner around one of the taller lizard buildings and suddenly they were looking down on a large firefight between a sea of lizards on the streets and a few clumps of mainline Human troops.

There were no tanks or mechs on either side, just infantry, which made Kajit cringe at their numbers but also salivate at so many exposed targets…from the air anyway. They’d erected a lot of barricades on the streets, but the waiting pools flooding across the streets and into the buildings, or rather out of them, were just standing in the Lacvamat’s firing arcs.

The trick here was not to get shot down, for so many plasma orbs fired skyward would almost undoubtedly hit him, if only through sheer accident. To counter that he picked up speed and angled for a low approach, charging his own plasma weapons that were located along the inside of his legs, as well as the secondary array that ran up his chest. Those concealed hatches opened, revealing an ice cube tray of slots, each of which slowly filled with a potent blue plasma orb.

The two rifles on his legs also powered up, then when he swooped over the target coordinates given to him via the battlemap he fired them off onto that location in two blue streaks, then released the cluster bomb directly over top of it as he passed by. The tiny blue orbs went sideways a bit into a dispersal pattern to cover an area rather than hit a pinpoint target, then exploded out like bombs when they hit. After that Kajit fired his leg weapons twice more each as he buzzed the lizard troops, then came to the end of their crowd a moment later, turning the corner and putting a building between him and their hasty return fire that was too slow to target him.

Another target pinged on his battlemap, in approximately the same location, and he circled around the buildings to come at them from a different angle. Meanwhile the other 7 Lacvamat in his group were doing the same, with the ground troops feeding them targets as quickly as they could hit them. He hit his second one, then a third before he noticed at a glance that a Knight wedge had used one of their soft spots in the flood of lizards to press a barricade and physically push it aside. Now they were moving out into the larger group of enemy infantry, hiding behind their overlapping physical shields as they led a column of Regulars through the breach point.

Kajit circled around and made another strafing run, never knowing how many he killed for he was flying past them so fast he couldn’t look back to see the damage he was doing with the array on his chest, but he could catch a glimpse of his leg rifles when he angled them forward onto targets he was just coming up on.

After that last flyby he received a different request that had him circling around another building and flying back over Star Force troops that were pushing their way towards the breach point. Kajit came down to street level, landing on a bit of clear pavement as the Regulars nearby parted to give him room, not wanting to be caught up in his wings, but he neatly tucked them into two vertical fins bracketing his head as he landed.

There he waited a few moments before an Archon ran up beside him and climbed on his back. The green-armored warrior was heavy, but with full power applied to his anti-grav Kajit was able to get them both up off the ground with some very heavy and fast wing flaps. He had to maintain that heavy cadence to keep them moving while reducing the anti-grav down to a sustainable level, else the capacitor would empty and he’d have no assistance whatsoever for the few seconds it took to recharge.

The Archon sent a waypoint to Kajit’s battlemap, not even bothering to say a word of thanks for the ride. That wasn’t rude, but rather a reality of how Star Force fought and the intensity of the current battle. They were both here to do a job, and the less distractions they had the better.

Fortunately Kajit didn’t have to fly far, for the Archon wanted dropped off on the other side of the lizards so he could flank them. He took him around by a safer route rather than flying directly over the horde, then came to a stall over the ground, tipping his back end down and allowing the Archon to slide off without interfering with his wing flap.

As soon as he was free, Kajit took off heading to another of the communal attack points given that he hadn’t received any more specific targets. He landed several more plasma attacks directly over the lizards before their formation eventually broke and they began to retreat…not to escape the enemy, but to fall back into more favorable points for ambushes and other means to kill the Human troops.

Kajit took it on his own volition to fly in low and attack some of those isolated lizards, even coming down so low that he grabbed one of them by the back of the neck with both of his feet and dragged him into the air half a meter before firing one of his leg rifles directly into his head. He dropped the corpse and banked hard right, using his anti-grav heavily as he tucked his wings to avoid his left from running into the side of the building on the narrow street.

He kicked off the wall then popped his armored sails out again, taking several plasma blasts to his shields as he reset them for universal coverage after seeing what was behind the nearest lizards. Trusting in his training and resisting the urge to run for the sky, he flew down to head level and extended his wings out as far as he could, then rammed a whole line of retreating lizards and clotheslined them in the chest/face.

Kajit got caught on them and would have tumbled if all the bodies hadn’t held him back. Once his feet hit pavement he retracted his wings and balled up on the ground, then a hail of blue plasma flashes surrounded him as the four Regulars that had been chasing after this dozen or so lizards mowed them down. Kajit got shot two more times, but his shields held up long enough for the Regulars to finish them off as he held his somewhat panicky cocoon.

“Are you alright?” one asked, walking up beside him as Kajit unfurled enough to stand up.

He curved his long neck towards the suit of bipedal grey armor. “No armor hits.”

“Thanks for the takedown,” the Human offered before running on.

“My pleasure,” Kajit said to his retreating form, then he fully unfurled his wings and took to the sky again as he searched the battlemap for more local target pings.

10

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

“Damn,” Larissa said, heading for the door of the command center in firebase 19. “I’m going in. Get everything there now.”

She didn’t bother to wait for a reply from the other Archons in the control room, busy interfacing with her helmet’s battlemap and comm system tracking down the nearest skeet in the air and recalling it to her as she made her way to the roof. Her Bsidd were pressing into another lizard colony, much as they had been doing the past months, but the sneaky bastards had thrown them another surprise…and this one was a full-fledged trap.

Containment walls the size of buildings had sprouted out of the ground, having been buried under dirt and trees with no visible sign of their presence, and locked her troops inside a ring that surrounded the colony. Meanwhile subsurface tunnels began spewing out heavily armed lizard reinforcements, including tanks and wisps, all of which had been held back while the city defenders had died fighting over the heads. They’d sacrificed them to get the Bsidd in position above them, then sprung the trap.

That was cold, but very typical of the lizards. She just hadn’t seen hidden walls be used before, and unless they had some subsurface building apparatus that had gone into effect since the invasion began, this trap had to have been built in place before this world ever came under attack.

That wall was keeping the infantry in and the mechs out, for it was too high for them to jump over. The wall was literally a series of skyscrapers having jutted up out of the ground, and was something that Larissa had never expected. What the hell had the lizards been thinking?

None of the other colonies had seen this type of defense system, and what was the point of just doing it here, when the entire planet was being overrun. It made no sense to her, but it was happening none the less. Larissa swung by the equipment room on the way to the roof, grabbing odds and ends and adding them to the armor she already wore while stuffing her pack as full as she could get it.

When she hit the roof she had to wait a few minutes, then out of the southern sky a skeet appeared, heading her way fast. It looked like it was going to overshoot, then braked hard until it was over her head, with the pilot fully aware of what was going down and sharing the trailblazer’s urgency. He lowered the skeet down to her, turning off the shields in the process so Larissa could jump up and grab on to the underside with her hands.

With those stuck into place with the grip enhancements in her armor’s gloves, she swung her feet up and latched on with those two, hanging from the underside of the fighter and squishing herself up along its surface as aerodynamically as she could.

“Go,” she said, with the skeet’s shields reforming over top of her and the building disappearing from her Pefbar vision. Trusting in the pilot, her face was buried in the view of the grey armor plates and her body tucked into the IDF that was likewise extended along with the shields. It didn’t feel like they were moving, but her battlemap said otherwise. This skeet had been engaged in combat in a neighboring colony that was mostly overrun, but now it was headed a bit further out to where the lizard trap had been sprung.

The new firebase wasn’t too far away, for it was logistically improbable to operate an invasion with ground troops over long distances. It was going to take at least 20 minutes for the pilot to get her there, but on the upside the Bsidd carried the heaviest armor of any Star Force infantry, and she hoped that most of them would be able to survive until she and the other reinforcements got there.

“We’ve got company,” the pilot said. “I’m not going to be able to set you down gently. Do you have a jump pack?”

“Unfortunately no.”

“The skies are full of skeets, and I’m going to take a beating just getting you to the wall.”

“Take the low road,” Larissa said, studying the battlemap of what was happening ahead. There were so many skeets pounding the troops inside the walls and the mechs outside that some of the ravens had started to go down and the others were pulling back. “Just get me to the wall. I can climb over.”

“That’ll take too long. If I get you on top, can you find your way down the other side?”

“Yes,” the mage said confidently.

“Alright, I’ll get you there, but this is going to be rough…and you’re going to be a target once you drop off.”

“No, they will be,” she said icily as a pink flash hit the shields to her left, with there being so many fighter icons around them that there was no way to know which one had just shot the skeet.

“Standby for release. I’m going to get you low enough that you can sense the roof with your Pefbar, but I’m not going to be able to come to a complete stop.”

“Just get me under 100 miles per hour. I’ll bleed off the rest.”

“You sure?”

“No time to argue. Drop and run and don’t look back.”

“Ok. When I signal, don’t hesitate. Ten seconds.”

On the battlemap she saw the skeet zipping low to the ground, buzzing treetops then passing low over a field that led up to the wall where the pilot curved it to the right and traced a path around the wall as swarms of wisps descended to chase after them. The pilot had the skeet moving fast enough to prevent them from getting any good shots off, but there was no way he was going to be able to drop her off at this speed.

When she saw the skeet begin to gain altitude, rising up very near the wall as it continued its breakneck speed laterally, she understood what the pilot was doing, using the wall to shield the fighter for as long as possible. Suddenly the speed dipped off and the skeet rose up above the height of the wall, exposing it to fire from the wisps inside the perimeter.

Larissa readied herself, then ‘felt’ the rooftop of the wall appear beneath her, flashing past rapidly. That gave her mind something to focus on, and she began summoning a telekinetic field just below her when the shields disappeared.

“Now!”

Larissa let go of her grip points, expanding the telekinetic field into a crash bag that pushed against both the ground and her, slowing her fall of only a few meters but doing nothing to stall out the insane forward momentum. It did allow her a moment to simultaneously create a spherical bioshield around her entire body, and when that touched the rooftop she felt the impact. The silky smooth bubble didn’t offer much friction resistance, but there was enough that it started to spin her around, head over heels like a hamster in a ball.

Before she got spun into dizziness Larissa also emitted a different kind of telekinetic field outside the shield, this one acting similar to a crash bag except that it sustained itself rather than deflating and acted to bleed off momentum as if the bioshield suddenly had a blanket of glue covering it.

Larissa still spun herself sick before she rolled to a stop, but fortunately she had been able to use her Pefbar to see where she was going the whole time and avoid careening off the roof. Trying to hold still for a moment and flush the disorientation out of her still spinning head, she extended her Ikrid out and picked up the minds of the lizards in the nearest of the fighters. Most had chased the skeet, which was now well outside her mental range, but a few of the enemy craft had noticed her drop and were swinging back around to target her.

She froze one mind when it got within range, with it flying on its previous course and passing by her on the outside of the wall…then crashed into the ground below. The next one was also going too fast for her to do anything with other than freeze it, but it flew out of range before hitting the ground and recovered thereafter, though it was now outside of weapons range.

The third one she managed to get within her Ikrid range long enough to do a more intensive mental hack, taking control of the lizard and having it fly the wisp low over the wall and stop in front of her. Had it not been under her control it could have shot her easily, for she was still woozy and couldn’t have managed more than an awkward roll if necessary.

Larissa hobbled over to the fighter, her balance not yet fully returned, and made like Garfield against its hull. She had the pilot take off again and fly her down along the inside of the wall. She didn’t have full control, only able to point him where she wanted to go and allow the free sections of his brain to handle that task, which was always a risk, but until her head settled she couldn’t try for anything more.

The wisp got her close to the ground and she figured it was good enough, so she let go and fell again, this time with far less forward momentum, and used another telekinetic crash bag to cradle her landing. When her feet hit she fell over, more from the lingering disorientation than anything else, but she slowly got her legs under her and forced herself to move. Larissa was in the interior slice of the grassy plain and an easy target, with the nearest city buildings about half a mile away.

To her far right she saw lizard troops and tanks, about 2 miles away, maneuvering around in the open area. She spotted some Star Force icons nearby within the cityscape, but the trailblazer couldn’t worry about them just yet, for several fighters were redirecting towards her. The one that she’d hijacked began to turn around through a sharp turn, but Larissa froze it again at the edge of her range, with the turn not being sharp enough to avoid the inside of the wall.

It crashed into it softly, crumpling the front and dropping it down to the ground mostly intact. She let it hit before she released her hold on the lizard’s mind, then she reached out and began freezing every fighter within her range. That wasn’t enough to keep all of the weaponsfire off her, for a few pink bolts hit nearby, but their aim was off…and all of these fighters appeared to be equipped with the upgraded weapons, which gave them far more range than the old school wisps.

Larissa’s balance returned as she ran, with her accelerating further as it did. She crossed to the nearest buildings in under two minutes, disappearing into a narrow street and not sensing any lizards in the nearby buildings, so she ducked into the nearest one, breaking down the door when the handle didn’t respond.

Now that she got her head out of the view of the fighters she pushed out her Ikrid and Pefbar to make sure the building was empty, then she took a closer look at her battlemap, trying to find where the Bsidd were and what their condition was. The city/colony was some 18 miles in diameter and her troops were spread out across more than half of it when the trap was sprung, but only after a group of lizard tanks had led most of their mechs outside the boundary line for where the wall came up, leaving the Bsidd infantry inside with only a few mechs as backup.

The combination Bsidd/Mainline skeets that had been providing the ground troops air cover had been driven off or destroyed by the wisp plumes, meaning the enemy now owned the airspace as well, and unless they came low enough for Larissa to psionically grab they could stay up there and rain down phaser blasts on any troops outside the buildings, which meant the few mechs they had left were going to be easy targets unless they could find some sort of overhang or hangar to hide out in.

With no aircraft above to relay battlemap signals the connection between the troops within the city was going to be hit and miss as buildings got in the way, but Larissa was able to see where most of her troops were, including several ‘loud’ pings for assistance that were not signal stealthed. Those would be visible in orbit and through layers of rock and metal, with one of them occurring less than a mile away.

That was enough for Larissa, so she took back to the streets and held close to a sidewall at all times, trying to avoid making herself a target from above and diminishing the firing angles when she did. A couple more fighters smashed into building sides was all it took to get her close to the nearest ping, but as she got there more signals began to pop up inside the nearby buildings. She diverted towards those, breaking in another door only to belatedly realize it wasn’t locked.

Larissa didn’t have time to waste, for the longer this trap was allowed to play out the more of her Bsidd would die. How many had already gone down she didn’t know for sure, but there were markers all over the map indicating downed troops, including a pair nearby a group of 30+ live signals amongst a sea of lizard minds.

The trailblazer pulled her rifle off her back as she came up on a trio of stragglers probably intending to flank the Bsidd, but she saw them coming before they came into her hallway and gunned them down before they had a chance to fire a return shot, though she did have to freeze the third one to accomplish that. She hurdled their stupid bodies and kept running towards her troops, getting a feel for what was ahead.

These Bsidd were bunkered up in a large commons area, and by ‘large’ she meant more than the size of a football field. There were lizards everywhere around them, but mostly on one side. She could feel several of them dying per second, indicating that there was an ongoing firefight and her Bsidd were doing what they were trained to do when they were outnumbered…turtle up if you couldn’t run and share damage with shields and armor, using their own bodies to block for one another and hope to outlast the enemy’s body count.

There were over a thousand lizards in that room alone, with more stretching off into adjacent hallways out beyond her Ikrid range. Through a mix of anger and confidence Larissa found a way up to the second level where there were balconies overlooking the main complex. She could feel some lizards up there, undoubtedly shooting down on her troops.

When she got up top she came to an empty room that had a sheer glass wall rather than a balcony, meaning she’d guessed wrong and the snipers were another room over. She reached out with her Ikrid and put them to sleep, along with as many others as she was within range of as her comm activated.

“Archon beware,” a Bsidd voice said, coming from one of those holed up in the commons, “there are too many lizards. Do not try to come to our aid. Turn back and try for targets of opportunity.”

“Not part of the plan,” Larissa said, walking up to the glass and looking out over top the swarm of lizards and seeing the columns and upturned tables where the Bsidd were hiding and fighting out of. “How damaged are you guys?”

“Most have armor damage, but only three have burns.”

“Get ready to shoot disabled targets.”

“Where?”

Larissa’s lip curled up in a silent snarl. “Right in the middle of them, to your northwest.”

“Do not, you will be killed.”

“I’m a mage,” she reminded him, pinging the location on the battlemap where she wanted them to be ready to attack. “Get ready. Shoot the ones on the ground, but don’t move towards them or you’ll get caught up in my disable.”

The Bsidd didn’t argue any further, instead responding with a ready ping followed by a slew of others as the rest of them acknowledged that they were in position.

Larissa gently set her hands against the glass, stepping back with her left foot and readying a combination of Yetu, Lachka, and bioshield.

“Fiddle me this,” she whispered, blowing out the glass ahead of her, running a step forward, and launching herself out the window and over the heads of the lizards below, landing in the midst of them and emitting a huge Fornax field that dropped hundreds to the ground twitching uncontrollably.

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1

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Sam Nestor held his skeet in a steady line as he glanced at the battlemap, seeing the rest of his 10-man squadron flying around him at nearly maximum velocity. While their engines could go faster their shields could only handle so much sustained friction, and traveling up to a high altitude for the diminished drag would actually take longer to reach their target so they’d decided to punch through the densest region overland as quickly as possible, with each of the fighters being a fiery meteor on its way to the distress beacon.

That beacon had gone out with orders, drawing all mobile units nearby to a particular colony that had inexorably sprouted containment walls and opened up a flood of lizard reinforcements from below, including a cloud of wisps that was now measuring over 300,000 and still growing. The Star Force aerial craft that had been on site previously were now gone, either shot down or retreated, and heading directly into that mess was a virtual death sentence. Naval assistance would have been very nice right about now, but a few limited attempts had already been thwarted.

The main defense tower for the colony was already down, but enough nearby ones were still online to prevent any warship from coming within firing range. Despite that fact, one of the command ships had flown down and got its shields hammered long enough to unleashed three Ka’sevron rounds towards the colony, set to detonate in the atmosphere rather than hit the surface where their troops were, with the intent being to knock down a lot of the fighters while they were grouped so close together.

None of the three rounds made it to the target, one getting sniped down by a lucky phaser shot coming from the nearby colonies while the other two were hit with anti-air missile swarms from the same sources. The Clan team that had gone in to knock out the anti-air defenses in this city had paved the way for the skeets to come in on a very low ground level, but rise high enough up and you’d expose yourself to the long range anti-air from the neighboring locations, which unfortunately the descending missiles had to pass through.

Sam was currently flying under that ceiling, having been pulled off another assault and redirected to the ambush site along with numerous other units. He could see a large group of Calavari Valeries approaching from further away to the south, plus a scattering of Canderous remote fighters being controlled from orbit. Everyone else was further away, leaving Sam’s skeet squadron and a few others nearby as the closest reinforcements.

His squadron had been configured for anti-air operations, but a few of the others had anti-tank and standard variety skeets, plus a few gunships that were going to be badly needed here. He knew they couldn’t dive into the swarm, but if they could entice a portion of it out from the city to chase them they could double back and pick them apart slowly…not fast enough to get to the troops inside the colony, or what was left of them, but they had to start somewhere.

This was by far the largest concentration of wisps the lizards had deployed, and they were all coming up out of subsurface hangars. That was insane, and made it look all the more obvious that this was some sort of preplanned trap…but to what end? Even if they killed all the Star Force troops within the city that was only a small portion of the invasion army. It was true that they were having trouble beating the lizard defenses down as quickly as they’d originally hoped, but this one debacle wasn’t going to stop the inevitable progress they were making across the planet, so what the hell were they thinking?

And more importantly, if they had anticipated an invasion and prepared for it, what was special about this one colony, or were there more of these wall rings hidden around other sites?

Another contact on the battlemap nearing his squadron at high speed caught Sam’s eye. At first he assumed it was some type of missile, wondering if a Ka’sevron had been smuggled down to the surface and fired off at low range to beat the anti-air defenses, but they weren’t built for gravity resistant flight. The icon on it was definitely Star Force, but then he realized that it wasn’t a weapon per se, but rather a unit traveling at speeds the skeets could never hope to match and catching up with them quickly.

Sam activated the comm channel reserved for his squadron. “Heads up, the Queen of Diamonds is in play.”

“Music to my ears,” one of the other aerial Regulars replied as Kara’s icon shot by the squadron to their left and didn’t slow to keep pace with them.

“Looks like she’s going on ahead. I know she’s nimble, but watch your firing lines when we get there. She may juke into them as easily as away, so keep a good margin when the fray starts.”

“How are we playing this?”

“Lightly,” Sam insisted. “Even the gunships can’t plow right in, so we’re going to have to nibble.”

“The ground troops don’t have that kind of time,” another pilot said. “Have you seen the estimated number of ground troops they’ve deployed inside the walls?”

“I know, but we’re no good to them dead. We can’t go anywhere near that swarm and expect to survive for more than thirty seconds.”

“How about a 20 second hop in and out then?”

“I feel the same way you do, but we can’t beat these guys, only trim them down a little. So let’s focus on that.”

“What do you think she’s up to then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe heading to ground like Larissa did, or maybe she’s going to fight the swarm too. If she wants us to coordinate she’ll tell us, but aside from direct orders we’re not going to dive right into the lizards’ preferred kill zones.”

“Agreed,” another pilot said. “Are we waiting for the gunships or start nibbling on our own?”

“We can’t wait. Let’s see how many we can bait out and knock down. If they flood towards us we lead them off and hope someone else can exploit the opportunity.”

“Copy that.”

Sam looked ahead, through the battlemap since the camera view was little more than a fireball at this point. The shields were keeping his hull safe, but there was so much turbulence covering the needle-shaped energy barrier that it was disrupting a lot of his sensors. The battlemap connection was holding, so he could fly by that along with a few other means, but he was definitely isolated from the outside world in the friction cocoon, with the other members of his squadron flying nearby but far enough away that his turbulence wouldn’t interfere with them.

The trip over was a lot of waiting, but when they were still more than two minutes out Kara’s signal intercepted the lizard swarm and he immediately saw two enemy signals wink out, followed by a stream of others. He didn’t know how she was taking them down, but the question as to whether she was going to ground or not appeared to have been answered.

Sam gripped the flight controls eagerly, then began to decelerate well beyond the colony perimeter along with the rest of his squadron. The fireball faded and his camera views that covered the interior of the opaque canopy returned. He reset his shields to conform to the T-shape of his craft and felt a considerable amount of drag hit the skeet, slowing it even more until the normal feel returned and the magically appearing boundary wall came into view ahead on the horizon, with the bee hive of tiny green dots hovering over top of it so thick that they looked like a sick cloud.

“Irelia, Candice…go knock on the door.”

On his order two of the skeets stopped decelerating and shot on ahead while Sam and the others began taking on a holding pattern. In response a plume of wisps shot out from the cloud to intercept the pair, exchanging a bit of weapons fire, blue for Star Force and all pink for the lizards. That was a bad sign, meaning that these wisps were the upgraded variety with greater range and kill power. He just hoped they hadn’t added shields yet.

As the two Regulars swung around after killing five of the wisps, they dragged their pursuit with them and out away from the rest of the cloud, bring them back towards Sam and the others.

The pilot cringed, for there were hundreds following them out and only the 10 of them, with Kara nowhere near them to help out.

“Here we go. Don’t get greedy and pull back at the first sign of trouble. We can repeat as often as we want,” he said, readying his plasma scatterguns and taking aim at a clump of fighters nearing his position. He swerved slightly to the left and accelerated hard, getting up close to them and unloading into their general area, seeing bits of plasma hit their hulls and confirming that they had no shields, but aside from some smoke trails on the others only one went down.

From that point on Sam was lost in the twists and turns of combat, seeing nothing else of the multifaceted battle as he was consumed with his little corner of it.

“This is insane,” Namkrel said over the comm to his fellow mech pilots as they flew their Jamtror-class war machines towards the distant colony capped by a swarm of lizard wisps.

“There’s an army of Bsidd in there, not to mention a lot of Humans, the Queen of Diamonds, and a trailblazer,” Hemror said firmly. “We’re going in.”

“How?” another Calavari mechwarrior asked as their group of 34 jamtrors flew in aerial mode side by side, having gathered from three different battles at a series of rendezvous points while other units raced on ahead to relieve the besieged Star Force troops.

“We go as far as we can by air, then fight the rest of the way in on the ground.”

“I don’t think we can make it to the wall in the air.”

“Neither do I, so we’re going to land outside and beat the crap out of their wisps until the skies clear enough for us to get over.”

“Now that sounds like a plan,” Namkrel said, reversing himself. “For a second I thought we were going to fly straight into that mess.”

“We’re not that reckless,” the Calavari said with a bit of sarcasm. “But we’re not going to let our allies die retaking our capitol.”

“Have you looked at the battlemap?” another in the group asked via comm. “There are a lot of downed signatures in there.”

“If all we can save is one, then we save one,” Hemror said, making it clear with his tone that there was no room for argument. “Then we avenge those that were ambushed.”

“Alright, let’s do this,” Namkrel said, a mix of eagerness and worry. “Give us a waypoint.”

“In a moment. Let’s see if we can’t sneak a little closer. Follow me down,” Hemror said, dropping his flying mech from altitude until he was skimming the grassy plain they were approaching by. It was the least contended approach, but with plenty of wisps circling around lazily above the city waiting for anyone to get close. The mechwarrior kept his bulky fighter moving quickly, waiting to see when the enemy would react to their presence.

Like clockwork, when they came within 9 kilometers a group of wisps broke off and headed towards them, prompting Hemror to mark a position 3 kilometers away from the wall as their landing point. They would meet the enemy fighters before that, but their shields and weapons would be sufficient for them to engage and pass through them before they were overwhelmed.

“Fire on targets of opportunity, but do not deviate from course. We have to stay grouped up or they’ll pick us apart individually,” he said, firing his single lachar at a distant wisp and missing…but managing to hit the one behind it. The beam punched a hole in the front of the fighter, penetrating the cockpit and hitting the pilot in the head, dropping the mostly intact craft to the ground where it plowed into the dirt in a debris-ridden streak.

“That was a hell of a shot, Hem.”

“Thanks,” he said, not bothering to mention his true target. He fired off a scattering of lachar blasts with less luck, hitting a few more of the tightly packed wisps but not taking any out of the sky with the weak weapon. When they came within range he fired off his scattergun along with the other pilots and filled the space ahead of them with cones of tiny plasma packets, catching dozens of wisps as they angled in and peppered the heavily armored and shielded hulls of the jamtrors with phaser strikes.

Hemror was pleased to have killed at least two himself, though many of the wisps were flying from cone to cone so it was impossible to determine how much damage he alone had done. Still, there were many fighters falling out of the sky, though the mass that had come out to meet them seemed not to have been thinned, for they were all over them now and hitting their shields hard with the massed firepower.

The Calavari pushed through it stubbornly, getting to the waypoint with some of their shields going down and their thick hull plates beginning to take hits, but Hemror came to a hover over the ground with some 12% remaining and immediately transformed his fighter, with it sprouting legs and four arms while it floated just above the ground. When the head piece finally formed he set it down, feet sinking into the grassy soil, and the power from the anti-grav transferred over to his shields, recharging them at more than double their previous rate.

His light mech sprouted an anti-air cannon and the Calavari began pepping the sky above him with sammy blasts, targeting the approximate area he wanted the computer to chew up, then its quicker calculating capability tracked and hit the wisps within that area as they flew about, save for a few that were fast enough to avoid the shots. Most were too boxed together to maneuver much, so a lot of wisps started to fall out of the sky, especially when the other mechs landed and contributed their own fireworks.

Hemror signaled for them to form up into a moving cluster and the biped machines began gathering around his mech, making for a virtually impenetrable airspace above and in front of them that the wisps simply couldn’t survive within. The 34 mechs kept together and walked forward, heading for the distant wall and downing aircraft while their shields began a slow recharge. They were still taking hits from range, but with every craft they shot down there was one less phaser hitting them…until more reinforcements began to come out and replaced those that were lost.

By the time they reached the wall the air was so thick above them that they could barely make out the sun. Most of the mechs no longer had any shields and were taking hull hits, so they clustered up at the base of the wall and used it for some cover, allowing them to focus their sammies into half the airspace they had been covering before, increasing damage against the wisps while decreasing their own vulnerability. The worse hit mechs were pushed against the wall and mostly blocked by the others, allowing their shields to begin regenerating and hopefully allowing the group to eventually recycle themselves back into fighting shape.

All the while aircraft were dropping from the sky like bugs, some of which actually fell into the mechs. Some of them were quick enough to reach up with their four mechanical arms and grab the pieces as they came down, but others were knocked off their feet and had their armor damaged by the larger hits.

As they were turtled up there Hemror and the others got a course and a destination waypoint over the wall and into the city from an Archon. Crazy as that sounded, the Calavari were relieved because they trusted in the Archons’ judgement implicitly. So when the countdown ended and it was time to go, the lot of them began hovering up along the wall and holding to it as closely as they could while still taking hits to their weak shields.

Those hits suddenly stopped as the wisps were pulled away by a large group of Valeries and skeets that roared in over their heads, effectively plowing a path for them to move into the city, but one that would only exist for a few short moments.

Hemror recognized the opportunity for what it was, so when he reached the top of the wall he set down on it and immediately began running across to the far side that was some 350 meters away. When he got there he jumped off, using his anti-grav to slow him to a barely controlled fall, during which he transformed his jamtror back into fighter mode and shot off across the plain towards the city’s outer buildings only meters above the ground.

He took some fire as he went, despite the disruption occurring above him, but he made it to the outer edge with 8% shields left and set down there, wedging his fighter between two buildings on a narrow street and transforming back into mech mode. Others did the same nearby, scattering to find cover, then they began marching their way towards waypoints that he and a few others began laying down so they could gather in some larger openings and keep peppering the sky in groups as they forced their way towards the lizard tank and infantry armies.

In the blink of an eye their fighter cover was gone and the swarms reformed over their heads, with a lot of them firing down into the streets from directly above, but with most of the skyline now obscured by the surrounding buildings.

2

July 1, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Flying low to the ground two Star Force drone cutters skimmed under what was guessed to be the minimum depression angle of the lizard anti-orbital batteries, flying in close proximity to each other and the Canderous transport that was trying to keep up behind them. It was manned, while the cutters were not, and already the swarm of wisps over the besieged colony were starting to break their holding patterns and come out to meet them.

There were multiple units already on site, ranging from the Calavari to the Clans to even a small Scionate team that had managed to sneak in close to the wall and deposit a mobile anti-air battery, but it wasn’t enough. As the hours passed more and more Bsidd signals within the city were going down, and until the massive amount of air cover was removed there was no easy way to get troops and mechs into the city with the walls blocking ground access…not that it would have been safe inside either, for the wisps were shooting anything alien that moved within their sight, meaning those Bsidd still alive were holed up within the buildings and not on the streets.

Bringing a command ship down again, this time all the way to ground level, was impossible without drawing fire, for it was just too big to get under the necessary altitude, so two of the smallest drones were sent with the Canderous transport being a mere afterthought. It was headed in with a load of mechs, all of which were the remote variety that they heavily favored and could be controlled from orbit. It also meant that they were expendable and the Canderians intended to use that fact to inflict maximum damage on the lizards that had flooded what had looked to be a captive city enroute to being fully in Star Force hands.

The fact that the enemy had baited them annoyed everyone, but the Canderians most of all. They were sending more manned mechs and infantry units via other means, but fast tracking these mechs via transport in order to get them there as soon as possible, though they knew the odds of it getting shot down before it made wall were good, hence the quick rendezvous with the two cutters that had been deployed at approximately the same time.

Those two planned to pave the way, all the while using their strong shields and armor to weather the phaser fire long enough to inflict serious damage to the fighter swarm. They too were expendable, so long as their remains didn’t fall down and crush the very troops they were attempting to save.

When the wisp cloud met them there was a furious exchange of fire, with the anti-air weapons on the cutters opening up and downing handfuls of fighters per second, but their larger weapons didn’t do as much damage, though they were also firing them off into the swarm and hoping to get some lucky hits. As the wisps circled around and engulfed all three ships more sammy fire sprouted from even further away as a Madcat Mark III that was jogging towards the colony opened up with its beefy anti-air batteries in the shoulder boxes and began trimming more enemy fighters out of the swarm.

Still it wasn’t enough and the Canderous transport was forced to ground before making the wall while the two cutters pressed on, dragging a good portion of the wisps away from the Canderian ship while it unloaded its drone mechs. A few Valeries flew overhead, poaching some isolated fighters then running like hell before they could be overwhelmed, but the sky was still filled with targets and even more wisps were coming into the colony from other lizard strongholds, meaning that for as many as Star Force shot down there was no guarantee of them ever getting through the aerial cover to rescue the stranded Bsidd.

That was unacceptable, so while even more Star Force troops were assembling to assault the lizard city the Canderian mechs ran out of their cargo bays and didn’t even bother shooting into the air, making a straight line across the sparsely wooded countryside towards the massive wall ahead as the two cutters began firing on it with their mauler and talon cannons.

Huge chunks blew out with the hits, all the while the anti-air batteries continued to down wisps, dropping them over the already cluttered landscape like dead flies. The Canderous mechs had to avoid those, running a zigzagging pattern at times, but they still arrived at the wall before the cutters had even gotten halfway through it.

Seeing what they were doing, a huge chunk of those fighters still hovering over the city detached and moved on the ships, firing so many pink streaks into the shields that it looked like the ship was growing a fur coat…and just the one, for nearly all the wisps’ firepower was directed away from the second. After some six minutes of concentrated attack the first cutter dropped from the sky and landed outside the wall, digging into the ground and breaking in two from the impact as already melted supports snapped, but a few weapons batteries remained operational and the remote gunners continued to use them to shoot fighters or the wall where they could.

The flock of wisps followed the drone down and silenced those guns quickly, then they redirected to the other cutter while the Canderian transport ran for its life, already having deposited the mechs that were themselves getting chewed up from the fighters. They were firing back now while they waited to see if the second cutter could get through the wall before it went down, but to their dismay it didn’t. It had blown out a trench almost all the way through when it was knocked out of the sky, with the Canderian remote pilots immediately running their mechs into the gap before the mass of fighters could redirect their attention towards them.

They held there, having trouble walking over the blasted rubble, but eclipsing most of the sky and firing up through the parts they could see to keep the fighters from just parking over them and shooting down. Meanwhile three of the mechs at the lead of the group began using their own smaller weapons to carve out a tunnel through the underside of the wall, which eventually took them completely out of the wisps’ firing line.

18 of the 92 mechs were destroyed before that tunnel was completed, but when they blew out a connection to inside and could see the lizard buildings ahead the mechs ignored the fighters above and moved through the gash and onto solid ground…then started running like mad for the cover of the city buildings ahead.

All of the mechs were thors, specially modified to fit Canderian specs, and not the fastest movers within the Star Force catalog, but they weren’t slow either, so the wisps only had a short window of opportunity to target them. They made use of it, downing another 36 before the rest finally disappeared within the city and scattered, linking up with the various clusters of Star Force troops there that already had located the best hiding spots to stay out of the fighters’ firing arcs.

It was a costly delivery, but even one Canderian thor was invaluable when facing off with lizard infantry…though more important now was the gash in the wall, with all other ground units approaching the city directing to that spot. Likewise the lizards did as well, sending a mass of tanks to put themselves into blockade and ambush position just on the inside, intending to plug the hole rather than let the Star Force troops run the aerial gauntlet and succeed in getting a scattering of reinforcements inside.

A group of Clan Tron ravens ran up a shallow river in single file, using the waterway to pass through the forest that was too dense for them to push through on foot. The transports that had brought them here didn’t dare risk getting anywhere close to the wall and safely dropped them off at range, allowing them to approach at their own discretion while a multitude of other units did likewise all around the perimeter so the wisps couldn’t concentrate everything they had in one location.

This group intended to head for the gash if possible, but right now they just needed to get close to the wall and the river was the quickest way to get to the surrounding plain. When they eventually got through the trees and stomped out onto dry ground they saw the smoking remains of a hoth nearby. Its crew had been pulled out already, but the still standing corpse of a mech was a testament to the damage that wisp swarm could do if they chose to come out this far.

They weren’t at the moment, and had only came out after the hoth when it started carving up the wall with its cleansing beam, but typically fighters couldn’t touch a mech with that heavy of armor, indicating that both the numbers and new weaponry involved were escalating this battle up to an entirely different level.

That said, the ravens continued forward. They weren’t going to throw their mechs away needlessly, let alone their own lives with a rushed attack, but they needed to be in position to do something if an opportunity arose. Following that logic they continued to head for the wall at a position about 50 degrees north of the gash, intending to play this by ear.

Larissa stood leaning against a wall, taking a quick breather after killing another 20 or so lizard infantry. The Bsidd with her were barricaded inside one of the lower levels of a huge building that the fighters would have a hard time tearing down even if they tried. That would give her troops time to reposition if it came to that, but it also gave them a fairly large playground to fight in without exposing themselves to the air cover and she was making the most out of that advantage.

The lizards were still pouring troops into the building despite the number of entrances that she’d destroyed to limit the flow. There was an abundance of killing necessary and Larissa had already been at this for 19 hours. The Bsidd were even worse off, but she was buying them some quick naps when she could, taking the bulk of the harassment raids on herself.

She was getting loopy though and relying on her ambrosia to keep her going. Her Inas ability had sustained her thus far, but unlike in training there was a constant flow of adrenaline here that added to the wear and tear on her body and mind, prompting her to grab even a few seconds of downtime when she could, with this bout lasting all of 27 seconds before she sensed more troops approaching around the corner in the hallway 20 meters ahead of her position.

Pushing off the wall she gathered herself and aimed her pair of lizard phaser rifles ahead as she jogged towards them, having expended her Star Force ammunition long ago. Larissa pulled the triggers even before the first one showed its scaly head, with the first little pink flash hitting it in the armored chest as soon as it came around the corner. She peppered the next two, which had their traditional armor vests augmented with nearly full armor, leaving only their hands, feet, and head exposed. It stopped a few hits, but the potent phaser blurps eventually burnt through and took them down.

The trailblazer would have preferred just mowing them down, for her psionics were being stretched even more than her physical body, so she compromised, throwing a Fornax field over the group as they spilled out into the hallway and began shooting back, then she ran forward a went hand to hand with them. Dropping the rifles after a few more shots, she snapped more necks than anything, eventually leaving a pile of corpses as she sensed more lizards approaching from a slightly different area of the building.

“Archon, we have friendlies incoming, southern street entrance.”

Larissa paused, expanding her battlemap and seeing no one there…but then again these thick lizard structures were hampering the signals to no end.

“Who and how many?” she asked the Bsidd.

“Scionate and 26.”

Larissa frowned, returning to a jog towards the nearby lizards as she searched the battlemap again, expanding it out even further…then she finally saw them.

“Cover the northwest lobby with a strike team, hit and fade if you can’t own them. I’ll get the Scionate inside,” she said, heading a different direction and leaving the nearby group of lizards to her troops. As she made her way to the south entrance she watched the battlemap, seeing the quickly moving signals hopping from one building top to another at a speed that she would have been hard pressed to match.

There were wisps hounding them up there, but somehow they’d made it this far and she was determined to get them inside, though cursing herself for not having lugged a jump pack all this way, for there was no way she could reach the rooftop in time using the internal structure. She would have gone up the exterior, but without a jump pack her spiderman wall climbing would never get her there fast enough.

Larissa came to the southern entrance, then telekinetically started pulling objects off the debris pile blocking the doorway before wedging herself into the gap and using her powered armor to throw the heavier pieces aside. She really wished they’d found the Jumat trigger by now, but as it was Morgan was still the only one to possess that tier 3 psionic.

Clawing her way through the mess, she eventually broke her through into the now nighttime sky and was met by a hail of pink rifle fire. Her shields took a few hits, then a Fornax field took down the 30+ lizards waiting outside with Larissa pulling a pair of their rifles loose and shooting them down with their own weapons, finishing just as the first Scionate fell over the rooftop far above her.

The dive slowed near the end, decelerating enough that a low flying wisp nearly rammed him as he tried to snipe the Star Force solider out of midair. Fortunately it missed, then the fighter took a nose dive down to the street and crash/skidded past Larissa, with her mind locking down the pilot’s long enough to make sure the wisp was crumpled beyond a return to flight before she reached her Ikrid out to the other fighters above as the rest of the Scionate spilled over the rooftop like a waterfall of suicide jumpers.

With her providing psionic cover the wisps never got a good shot and three of them careened into the sides of the nearby buildings, pinballing around with two of them crashing. The third managed to bounce outside her Ikrid range and skillfully recovered quick enough to avoid a fatal smash, but limped off slowly into the sky with a dented and damaged craft.

“Archon,” the first Scionate said as he approached her position and swung around her backside, coming up on her right flank in a guard position as he surveyed the dead lizards around her.

“Inside,” she ordered. “Kill all you can find, but stay within the confines of the building.”

“Gladly,” it said, running on all fours and diving into the gap in the debris still partially blocking the door while Larissa stayed put and continued to cover the others as more wisps poked their way down between the buildings. The yellow-armored cats eventually all fell safely to ground, then sprinted over to her position and followed their brethren inside, with her ducking through last and beginning to reassemble the barricade with the bits of junk she’d moved aside earlier.

“Did you lose anyone on the way in?” she asked the three that had stayed with her.

“Not us, but many mechs have fallen to the fighters, both Calavari and Canderous. Archon Connor sent you this,” he said, producing a small container from the pack on his armored back that rotated around his body to his belly where his paws could reach it.

Larissa took it telekinetically then opened it with her armored hands, finding a canister of ambrosia senzu beans inside.

“If he was here I’d kiss him,” she said, popping the seal on her helmet and telekinetically flying three of them up and into the storage slots before stowing the rest in her own pack. “The Bsidd in this building are very battle fatigued. Protect them and help me hunt the lizards. They keep sending waves into the building and I’m having a hard time covering all the angles.”

“Hunting lizard infantry is our specialty,” the armored mask covering the Scionate’s muzzle said before turning to the right and sprinting off with the other two following on its armored tail.

“Thank you, Connor,” she whispered, taking another few seconds for a microrest before finishing up the barricade. It wouldn’t hold up to a tank blast, but fortunately they hadn’t sent any of those to her position yet. Other Star Force units hadn’t been so lucky, but she’d cobbled together what survivors she could find and rallied them here, with none of the Bsidd mechs that she’d come across having made it this long.

With the battlemap signal disruption being what it was, she hoped there were still others out there, but at the moment the only ones she could pick up were a trio of Calavari jamtror about two kilometers away that were poaching lizard tanks while sticking to a region of the city that had a multitude of overhangs. Larissa wanted to be out assisting them, but there was no way she was going to leave these Bsidd infantry alone. They were barely hanging on as it was, and there was no way she was going to risk them dying after all they’d done to stay alive thus far.

She considered leaving them in the Scionate’s protection, but nixed the idea immediately. There were too many lizards still coming at them for the Scionate to handle alone, and right now her psionics were the big reason they were able to mow down so many that the Bsidd were having to assign cleaning crews to remove them from the hallways in the interim between fights to keep their bodies from clogging up their pathways and firing lines.

No, she was going to stay put unless there were other troops nearby that she could bring back to them, and those mechs wouldn’t fit in the building. Until someone else strayed nearby she had to stay here and hold out until the rest of Star Force fought their way in to rescue them.

3

July 2, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Kara saw the break in the fighter swarm above and leapt up from her position between two very close buildings, shooting into the sky like a missile and arcing towards one of the nearest wisps. It didn’t respond to her approach, frozen on its current course thanks to her Ikrid as she moved up close to it and produced a small green/white orb in her hands and sent it into the hull at a range of less than 20 meters.

The Archon curved away sharply as the fighter detonated in a confetti-like spray and headed for the next closest one as the others took notice of her position. There were only a few hundred within reliable firing range and she intended to tear up at least a third of them before having to retreat back down into the city.

As she hunted down, froze, and destroyed her next target, a larger battle was brewing out over the gash in the wall. Star Force troops had been hammering it relentlessly and subsequently destroying a lot of the lizard tanks in the process, which had taken pressure off the city streets and the few surviving Star Force mechs roaming there. She’d been down helping them for most of the past two hours, but couldn’t miss this opportunity to strip away a bit more of the enemy air cover.

That air cover had been continually reinforced by units coming in from other colonies now that the hidden hangars below the city had emptied themselves. Between her, the mechs, the dead drones, and the Star Force fighters operating on the periphery of the swarm, they’d killed over 120,000 wisps, but there were still more than a quarter million in operation. More than half of those were now centered over the gash and engaging a lot of mechs that were increasing the kill count drastically.

The only infantry that had gotten into the city were through hot drops, with several Archon teams making their way across the wall at other locations while the swarm was preoccupied with the gash. Those had met heavy resistance but managed to slide through, with the lizards keeping enough fighters over all parts of the city to prevent any mass of troops from getting through and inside the barrier wall.

Morgan had come in with one of those teams, meaning that there were now three trailblazers on site, if she included herself. Had either of them asked she would have linked up and used their battlemeld abilities against the still numerous sea of infantry inside the city, but Kara knew as well as they did that her armor gave her too many combat options to keep her reserved to commando work, and that the biggest problem right now was the air cover, hence her taking out groups of fighters whenever she could.

With more and more heading to reinforce the gash against a third drone warship making its way there she now had a lessened concentration above the buildings, yet still far too many for the mechs to come out into broad daylight. As she zipped about taking down wisps while the others nearby tried to regroup to mass fire on her, Kara noticed another lizard convoy coming in over land on the opposite side from the gash. There was probably at least 20,000 more fighters providing air cover for it, with so many tanks and transports that it was clear that the lizards badly wanted this colony held for some reason.

When Kara eventually had her shields ripped off by the mounting phaser fire she dipped back down below the rooftops and lost her pursuit, ending up clinging to a wall in shadow mode and watching the approaching convoy as one of the wall segments in their path began to lower back into the ground. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but for some reason this convoy hadn’t been hit on its way in…and it was probably due to that excessive amount of air cover. The lizards were notorious for learning and adapting, and it looked like they’d taken a cue from the burning hulks of ground transports stretching out in lines around the colony resulting from their previous failed attempts to reinforce the city.

Suppressing a long string of cussing, Kara slid down the side of the building and kept to the shadows as she moved through the city, stopping only once to kill a group of lizards that were moving about in small number and out in the open as she headed to where the reinforcement convoy was now coming through the mechanically created gap.

She waited amongst the buildings as the tanks rolled in and crossed the plain that separated wall from city, letting them get just onto the streets before she jumped out from the side and stuck herself to the first tank where it couldn’t shoot her, nor could the ones behind it. She summoned up a large energy orb and used it to melt through the armor with a single hit, then sent a second one inside that detonated and shredded both the crew and interior components while leaving the outer shell visibly intact.

The hovering tank dropped to the ground, blocking a third of the street, and Kara jumped to the next few repeating the process and creating a blockade of junk as a mix of phaser bursts and large plasma orbs rained down on her and the dead tanks simultaneously. She weathered a few glancing hits to kill one more, then flew off down the street and turned a corner, getting out of their firing lines.

A huge pink beam passed over the city with a telltale buzz, but from the angle she knew it had come from another colony. When it abated she heard other faint buzzes, immediately flying up to building top level and taking a look despite the trio of wisps that noticed her and fired bad shots in her direction.

Another huge beam passed over the city and she could see many others crossing the landscape from other neighboring colonies and converging on a point back inside what was now Star Force territory…where she saw a distant, but huge mass coming across the ground. Kara did a double take as her battlemap tagged it as the Ironstrike, one of the command ships in the orbiting fleet. It had come down to ground level but was so massive that it couldn’t get below the closest of the neighboring colonies’ firing lines and was taking heavy fire head on.

Kara finally paid attention to the wisps and flew up to meet them, killing two before heading back down into the city and avoiding the pursuit that inevitably followed from 50 more nearby. She cycled around through a few blocks then came up on a more concealed perch so she could see with her own eyes what was happening.

The giant grey donut got larger and larger on the horizon, but was still so far away that she could easily see around either side. With her armor enhancing her sight she was able to zoom in and confirm that its shields were still up, but those planetary defense beams had to have been hitting it hard. Like a giant tsunami coming towards them the Ironstrike grew larger and larger, eventually becoming its own mountain range before it even got close to the boundary wall.

But it didn’t have to get too close before its cleansing beam leapt out and backtracked one of the pink beams to a neighboring colony, returning the attack on the distant defense tower even as the mass of weaponry coating its hull began firing at the wisp swarm whether they were designed for it or not. Kara saw several bloons launched into the mass, followed by Ta’lin’yi and maulers in addition to an insane number of anti-air batteries mainly designed to shoot down missiles, but that proved to work equally well against fighters.

As awe inspiring as that was, it didn’t dawn on Kara what they were doing until the ship reached the edge of the swarm near the wall gash and a warning was sent out over the battlemap to get indoors and under any available cover immediately.

She held her position, eagerly awaiting what was coming. As the swarm looked to hold its ground and continue firing on the Star Force troops at the gash until the last moment, an IDF field expanded out from the command ship and caught them all in its grasp. Suddenly the gravity of the planet disappeared from their point of view and with it the ability for them to maneuver with their anti-grav…leaving them floating in midair on whatever trajectory they previously had.

With them incapacitated most of the fire coming down to the surface ended as they were no longer to aim properly, but as the first of the planetary defense beams got through the Ironstrike’s shields and blasted a huge crater in its armor the ship continued to move forward at considerable speed. The mass of air preceding it knocked the fighters askew, then the hull hit and splattered the wisps like bugs against a windshield.

The command ship mowed down so many of them that they fell like bits of yellow/tan hail down to the surface. That storm continued up to the wall, covering the mechs that were fighting their way to the gash and then on in to the outer buildings. Before long the edge of the donut passed over Kara’s head and knocked the wisps out of the sky right down on top of her.

She held her ground, mentally calculating their fall angles and having to jump aside once to avoid a collision. Once the forward edge of the massive ship was past her she saw hundreds, if not thousands of wisps flying around beneath it that hadn’t been caught up in the IDF, or held there long enough. Using the battlemap she confirmed that the field was only extended off the front of the ship, so Kara jumped back into the sky and started hunting the remaining wisps aggressively now that their concentration had diminished to almost nothing and they were scattered about with plenty of room for her to maneuver beneath that beautiful donut.

As she flew to her first target she noticed on her sensors as chunks of the command ship also began to fall to ground as the planetary defense phasers carved up the outer layers now that the shields were down.

Larissa was running down one of the city streets with two Scionate pacing her when the ‘duck and cover’ order came in, but they were being pursued by a pair of tanks at the time and didn’t have the luxury of doing so. They’d been probing a large infantry gathering point and bit off more than they could chew when several nearby buildings began producing far more infantry than they had previously contained, indicating a high probability of additional tunnels beneath this section of cityscape.

The tanks she could have taken on her own with her psionics, even fried as she was, but with infantry pacing them there was no way she could knock all of them down and kill the tanks at the same time, so the only legitimate option she had was to run, regroup, and find some other place to probe to keep the lizards’ attention off her Bsidd and more to their own defense.

With each corner they turned they got a brief respite from the weaponsfire, but there were multiple groups of lizards now pursuing them, including a handful of fighters that ventured down into the narrower city streets. One of those that got too close Larissa snagged and had it swivel about and fire on one of the tanks, delivering a pink phaser burst into the yellow/tan hull armor.

After that she lost contact with both, running out of controlling range for the fighter and turning yet another corner as they zigzagged their way back into ‘friendly’ territory where the rest of the Scionate and a small group of Archons were patrolling and hunting down any small lizard teams that ventured inside.

By the time she and the two Scionate reached that zone the sky disappeared a la Independence Day as the command ship moved over the city, plowing into the wisps and gratuitously knocking them out of the sky…save for the fact that she was running where some of them were falling.

With a telepathic urge she sent the Scionate over to the nearest wall and joined them in running there, hoping that the wisp pieces would bounce off the walls and not hit the ground within a few meters of the buildings. She was right for the most part, but they did get sprayed with small debris twice as impacts on both the ground and the buildings above threw components and glass everywhere.

Larissa’s shields held up to that sandblast, but the street was literally dotted with dead fighters and she assumed a great deal more were covering the rooftops, which fortunately were more or less flat in most cases, else they’d been funneling all the wisp remains down to the streets. The Scionate likewise were alright tucked up alongside the wall and the three of them continued running back into friendly territory, with the giant ship above them entirely eclipsing the sky but not firing down on the remaining fighters.

For a moment Larissa wondered why, since after the ‘duck and cover’ order had been given there shouldn’t have been anyone in the streets to get hit by misses, then she saw several squadrons of Star Force skeets and Valeries making their way overhead and engaging the remaining wisps directly, along with Kara’s signal that was prominently displayed on the battlemap so everyone involved would be aware that she was there when often they couldn’t see her, given her body’s tiny size compared to the fighters.

That and she was a badass, so she might as well have a badass marker on the battlemap.

Larissa likewise had one of her own on the ground, letting all other nearby units know where she was at a glance rather than potentially lose her small dot in the mix of others. Right now Morgan’s icon was half a city away, with the full battlemap returning now that there was a Star Force command ship and fighters overhead to relay the weaker signals around the buildings.

To her relief she saw many active Bsidd units scattered across the battlefield, but at a glance she knew there was less than 10% of what had originally been here, with the ‘down’ markers covering the city in large clumps.

Before she could pull up a count of all markers that had gone offline, either destroyed or deactivated since the beginning of the ambush, the command ship began pulling back with large ‘no-go’ boxed popping up and traveling along with it as large chunks of the ship’s forward end were falling off and crushing buildings below.

“Oh shit,” she said, realizing just how much damage it was taking and stopping in her tracks. The Scionate nearly ran over her, but skidding to a halt a few meters past as they jumped to her outer flank. “Stay here and be ready to run, warning or not. Keep your eyes up.”

Larissa did likewise, watching both the battlemap and the sky as the sun returned underneath the retreating edge of the ship. Just then another thick pink beam hit and a chunk over her fell off. The trailblazer didn’t move, even as the warning box fell on them at the last moment as the ship’s computer estimated the general area that was vulnerable. It didn’t have time to calculate individual pieces, for there wasn’t that much distance for them to fall, so it was giving generous measurements.

Larissa watched the building-sized chunk detach and gravity take hold of it. “Stay put,” she said, eyes up as it fell perilously close, landing on the roof of the building they were hunkered up against and pancaking the top. She couldn’t see the impact, but a moment later the upper levels puffed out debris that began to rain down on them, then a waterfall of material followed it over, soon to add to the wisp debris clogging the street.

“Follow me!”

Larissa took off across the street, dodging a big piece that came down and taking them into a zone between the dusty waterfalls that followed. A few bits hit her shields and bounced off, with a huge chunk hitting and half burying itself in the street to their left while a pile of debris fell and built up on top of it, as well as one to their right.

The next thing she knew dust from both flowed out like clouds and covered the area, making it so none of them could see what was around them.

Larissa clicked on her Pefbar and mentally linked to the two Scionate, giving them a bit of her psionic vision as well as the ability to warn them if any more chunks came down towards them, though she couldn’t see the top of the building and would only have a split second to react if something did come within her range. Sending calming ‘hold’ orders telepathically, she had them wait with her while the building continued to crumble, eventually losing the majority of the top 5 levels as the command ship segment imbedded itself as the crowning ornament on the lizard structure.

“I think we’re in the clear,” she said, mentally telling them which way to head. “Let’s try and get out of these clouds…then we have a ground war to fight.”

“The lizard fighters are gone,” one of the Scionate commented as he looked at the battlemap.

“Most of them,” Larissa agreed. “We’ll have troop transports on the way and mechs coming in through the gash shortly.”

“Are we evacuating or fighting this out?”

“The wounded will be pulled out, but we’re definitely killing these bastards here and now.”

The pair of Scionate growled appreciatively inside their armor.

“Thought you’d feel that way. Come on, let’s go find that group we were just playing with and reintroduce ourselves.”

4

July 6, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Morgan ran ahead of the Ninja Monkey Regulars, leaping up onto the side of one of the shorter buildings in the city and climbing the rest of the way to the top. From there she sprinted across to the far side while her troops circumvented it around the perimeter and began to engage the lizard infantry on street level that had bunkered themselves behind a series of what looked to be premade blockades and a courtyard with an overhang that prevented attack from the air.

Or mostly, for when Morgan reached the edge of the building she jumped off shallowly and fell down between the wall and the edge of the giant infrastructure umbrella that was concealing the courtyard, slipping through the two meter gap and landing on top of a trio of standard variant lizards that were seated in the shadows below eating some of their battlefield rations.

With a thought she knocked them and the dozen or so nearest her to the ground with a Fornax field, then ignored them and ran further under the canopy towards the back lines of the mass of troops heading to engage her Clan infantry out and around the corner. She didn’t even bother to pull out a weapon, merely throwing a few Fornax blasts to her left and right to stop enemy phaser fire from coming her way as she barreled into the back of the crowd and punched right into the midst of them, pulling a few aside with telekinetic grips and tossing them through the air and out of the way, but mostly she fought her way inside hand to hand until she was buried amongst the horde.

Suddenly a wave of bodies surged up over her head and pushed outward, scattering like leaves as she started throwing concussive energy around. Morgan moved through their ranks like a snow plow, knocking them aside and unconscious in many situations from the blunt force until she worked her way up to the front lines and attacked the barricades from behind. They were several meters thick and seemed to have extruded from the street…and would have been impossible to blow through with only infantry weapons in any realistic amount of time, but she spotted a control station imbedded into the wall on her left as a handful of lizards managed pointblank shots into her shields.

She tossed them aside casually with another Jumat burst from her left arm and ran up to the terminal, physically pulling the two lizards in front of it away and throwing them out behind her before bringing up a bioshield covering her back as she quickly studied the controls…which weren’t complicated. There were only two buttons, one that toggled a holographic interface and another that operated the barricades.

She didn’t have time to explore the hologram and punched the other button. Agreeably the barricade plates began to retract into the ground one by one and slowly, opening up first a door-like slit that allowed the first of her Ninja Monkeys thorough behind the cover of a heavy Knight shield.

The lizards that had been sniping thorough narrow peep holes pulled their weapons out of the crack-like gaps and fired on the column of Star Force infantry appearing, but Morgan took care of them with a series of Fornax blasts, disabling them long enough for the commandos to come through and shoot them as they were twitching on the ground.

Her shields kept taking hits, but there were so many lizards nearby that they could hardly shoot at her without hitting their own and she wasn’t about to let them get any space by backtracking. The trailblazer ran with their pullback, sprinting a few steps back into their midst and scattering them again with consecutive Jumat attacks while her troops shot them where they fell.

Playing vanguard, she lead her Clansmen further under the overhand and into their makeshift base, eventually pulling out her own rifle and helping to finish off the last stragglers before the entire area was clear and she marked it as such on the battlemap. In that first moment of freedom she looked around, seeing piles of crates scattered around tables and what looked like makeshift bunks. The entire ceiling was solid save for the gaps around the edges on the eastern and western sides. Stretching out her Pefbar into the structure she saw the internal mechanism that allowed the roof to retract, meaning this courtyard was originally exposed to the air.

A closer look at the wall she’d fallen down along revealed several imbedded ladders, meaning that the lizards had a backdoor to escape should they need to. Seeing that she took to one immediately, climbing back up to the rooftop and looking around.

There was no one in sight, visually or on her Ikrid radar. As typical the lizards had fought to the last man, but whoever had designed this makeshift base had left them an out. Maybe they hadn’t used it because they knew they could be picked off by the aircraft circling above, but even having the option was something new for lizard methodology, not to mention the retractable canopy.

Morgan jumped across the small gap and landed a few meters down on top of it, feeling it with her Pefbar as she walked across. It wasn’t just a roof, but an armored one that could take a lot of hits from aircraft before it was penetrated. This was definitely meant to be an infantry bunker, and had she not taken the backdoor approach it would have been very difficult for her troops to fight their way inside. The tops of the barricades had been open to the air, meaning they’d have had to climb or jump over them to get to the other side…which explained why so many lizards were pooled and waiting there to gun them down the moment they did.

This colony was full of surprises, but fortunately this was going to be one of the last few. Star Force had control of most of the city by now, with only a few pockets of resistance such as this holding out, though it would take weeks to search the entire city and properly safe it. They didn’t have that luxury, for there were many more on the planet that needed to be conquered. Why this one had so many tricks and traps she didn’t know, but she betted it wasn’t going to be the only one. They’d have to do some more thorough scouting before committing to the future engagements, and she planned to be handling a lot of that herself going forward.

“Archon, we’ve found a tunnel entrance,” someone reported over the comm.

“Coming,” Morgan said, jogging back over to the gap and dropping down below the roof, cushioning her fall with another Lachka field. She saw the location of the commando that had commed her and ran over to his position to find a concealed panel in the floor underneath one of the tables. It was already open and showed a single person ladder tube heading straight down.

Morgan sensed further than she could see with her Pefbar, but the terminus was too deep for her to make out, with no minds present to add any datapoints.

“Damn it,” she said, checking her battlemap. “We’ll have to come back to it later. We need to get moving to point 6. Grab what replacement weaponry you need and follow me,” she said to everyone in her 33 man unit over the comm.

The pair of Knights ran over to her immediately, their shields tucked up against one arm leaving the other free to punch or fire from. They still had some Star Force ammo left, but most of the Regulars were out and had resorted to using lizard weapons given the 7 hours they’d been out hunting the bastards down. They were almost done now, with only two or three more engagements to go before they could head back to a firebase or resupply point within this city, but until then they’d have to make do.

Morgan had saved a few rounds of her own, using her Psionics most of the time and doing a lot of damage with her Jumat. She’d gotten to the point where she could snap necks with it if she applied enough force at just the right angle and speed, literally giving her the ability to point her finger and make one of them die, but she’d found it much more effective in attacking groups solo, or better yet with a fireteam in support to clean up the easy targets that she knocked askew.

The only Archon in the group, Morgan headed back to the barricades, seeing that they’d all retracted into the ground and were now little more than a few paving stones across the street. She ran over them with the two Knights trailing a step on either side while the commandos formed up into a column two wide and followed her out with the entire group picking up speed as they headed on foot to the nearest location that was still seeing combat.

Cvog was walking his Granthor-class mech through the lizard streets in line with two others of a similar make as they transitioned to a waypoint given to them by an Archon. All three orange mechs were physically torn up, with Cvog’s having lost a third of its shield generators. Still, the designs were so robust that they were more than capable of chewing up any lizard tanks left roaming about, let alone able to snuff out any infantry that was stupid enough to oppose them, shoulder mounted rocket launchers or not.

The Calavari had seen a bit of calm for the last 15 minutes and were now moving about in a patrol pattern that kept them handy in case any of the last combat teams needed assistance. Most of the other surviving mechs had already left and headed back to the makeshift firebase set up within the city’s outer edge near the gash, but Cvog and his two senior mechwarriors had pulled one of the last duties, given that they were the most experienced and the lesser soldiers needed the reprieve more than they did.

He was fatigued, but pushing through it. Even after Star Force had regained aerial superiority the fighting had not been one-sided. The defensive setup in this colony was completely different than what they’d been encountering in others, almost as if this had been where they’d put their main defensive efforts into the architecture and everywhere else was just secondary…except that he didn’t know of any reason why this city was special. It wasn’t the largest they’d hit, nor had any significant industry or spaceports. It was a standard city, except when it came to fighting for it.

There were so many subsurface tunnels that it had taken more than 2 days to hunt down most of their tanks, and it was rumored that there were still some moving about where the air cover couldn’t spot them. Those tunnels that had been found were now shut down, but unlike other lizard designs they weren’t all connected to each other, so the discovery of one didn’t open up them all to the invading army…and the subsurface of the city was coated with plating that made it more difficult for Star Force’s sensors to penetrate.

This was the most dangerous battlefield Cvog had ever fought on, for you never knew for sure when the fighting was over. That, combined with his fatigue, made him twitch when a battlemap contact suddenly landed on his mech’s left shoulder and stuck there. It took him a moment to process what was happening, then he did a doubt take when the Star Force icon told him that the Queen of Diamonds had just flown in and perched on his mech.

He hesitated at first, then opened up a direct comm channel to the Archon. “Is there something you require?”

“Just felt like riding a bit while I catch a breather. How are you three holding up?”

“Well enough, but our mechs need considerable repair.”

“I can see that, but unlike a lot of others yours are still battle worthy. We’ve lost over 60% of what we brought in here to the scrap pile already.”

“That many?”

“Afraid so. We pulled most of the pilots out alive, but equipment wise we’ve lost a lot. And that’s not counting what the Bsidd lost prior to the reinforcement.”

“Do you know why this city was so heavily fortified?”

“No one does. And we’re not launching any new assaults until we find out what’s going on, just finishing up the ones we’re currently engaged in.”

“Their tunnels have given us considerable headaches. We never know when a street is clear or not, and they’ve been very good at disguising the entrances.”

“Are your shields inoperable?”

“Diminished, but waiting in standby.”

“Noticed they weren’t up when I landed. How much has the rocket infantry been bothering you lately?”

“They’re gone as far as we’ve seen. The last half hour has been rather boring,” he said as they came to an intersection and made a left turn, with him walking his mech through the maneuver via the full body harness system that had him standing inside the cockpit with all four arms latched in, which made for far more fatigue than the seated models.

“Been that way for most, but I’ve got a feeling we’re about to see another breakout.”

“Breakout?”

“Troops coming up from underground.”

“Where do you want us?” Cvog asked, his attention escalating a notch.

“Right where you are until…check that,” she said, sending him and the other two mechs a waypoint a few dozen city blocks ahead. “Just got intel on another tunnel entrance. Feel up to an ambush?”

“Depends how many there are, but yes, we’re ready to fight.”

“Looks like a holding area with about 80 tanks of various makes.”

“80?”

“I’ll go with you, and Morgan is already down there waiting. She’ll disable a lot of their pilots and I’ll get the ones nearest to you. You just have to point and shoot.”

Cvog smiled. “The techs should build a seat for you up there so you can ride along all the time.”

“Gets kind of slippery when your shields go up, so I’ll jump ship just before we head down but keep close by. Shoot the nearest targets regardless of whether or not they’re firing back.”

“Copy that,” the Calavari said, rechecking his weapon status. They were all good to go, save for the missile box that had long since been depleted. He followed one of the other mechs as it sped up into a mechanical jog, with the trio making better speed through the cluttered streets and having to step over sporadic debris, either from wisps, ruined buildings, or occasionally Star Force equipment, for this area had seen heavy fighting previously.

Which made it all the more ironic that another tunnel entrance was located here. The lizards must have been saving this one and Star Force had completely missed it the first time through.

When they eventually arrived at the spot all they saw was an intersection with a waypoint on it, but then the road suddenly broke apart geometrically and rose up on pivot points like an opening flower, exposing a ramp that led below ground into a tunnel. The trailblazer hopped off his mech’s shoulder and began to free fly on her own beside them, with the Calavari bringing up his mech’s shields again as they walked down into the dim tunnel that only had two narrow strips of illumination running along either side of the ceiling.

The gap between walls was large, allowing two of the mechs to walk side by side with ease and Cvog brought his up alongside Garavat’s as a new waypoint was added. They trekked towards it, descending several more ramps and taking two multiple fork intersections to the right until their battlemap showed a huge chamber inside of which a single Star Force icon was located, which also had a trailblazer tag.

The little firefly that was Kara zipped on past and entered ahead of them, ducking to the size a few meters and hovering near the wall as the big orange war machines entered and opened fire on the nearest tanks…that didn’t even swivel their turrets towards them.  Some further behind them did and fired off pink phaser streaks that had far more intensity and duration than the wisps did, but they met the mech shields and did not penetrate with the first few shots.

The maulers that the mechs returned fire with did far more damage to the tanks, and with each one that they killed one more lizard tank behind them would suddenly stop firing and freeze up, with Cvog knowing that was the Archons using their magical psionics.

This lot of lizards was going to take some chewing to get through, but with not one, but two trailblazers to assist them he had no doubt that they’d be able to succeed in destroying them all. The only real question was how much more damage their mechs would take in the process.

5

July 14, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Larissa stood in the center of an enormous underground bunker, looking up from the floor to see racks upon racks of wisp docks stretching out from the walls in a latticework of space-saving designs. There were open airways between them to allow for mass movement, but the 30 story tall room was definitely designed to allow for very compact storage and quick release, with tunnels connecting to the surface appearing on the ceiling in multiple places.

The racks were empty now, for all the lizard fighters in this colony had been destroyed and were now laying in pieces around the cityscape. As far as Larissa knew the purge of the locals had been completed two days ago, but there were so many nooks and crannies for survivors to hide in that she didn’t consider anywhere on the planet outside of the Star Force firebases to be truly safe.

After a good day of rest the trailblazer had come back out here to have a look around as survey teams were continuing to map the underground chambers, often having to use very powerful sensor equipment brought below ground to circumvent the dampening layer in order to find new tunnels whose entrances hadn’t yet been discovered. There were hundreds of independent systems, some like this one having been burrowed more than 2 miles below ground. The lizards were notorious for developing subsurface structures, but they’d never gone to this extent with a surface city overtop.

Normally their robust underground facilities were camouflaged on the surface, with little or no infrastructure above. This colony clearly wasn’t one of those cases, and unlike the others these subsurface facilities weren’t all interconnected, making it clear to Larissa that they had been built for one purpose and one purpose only.

To confront, confound, and ambush an invasion army.

If one tunnel system was discovered the others wouldn’t be exposed, allowing the mass of lizards below ground to operate with virtual impunity until all of their hideaways were rooted out. In this case that hadn’t happened, for the mass of them had come out to ambush the Bsidd army conquering the city. Had she had a command ship directly overhead in orbit they probably could have detected the tunnels with an intense sensor scan, or at least they could now that they knew what to look for, but with the orbital defense guns the lizards had developed there was no way to get a ship into that low of an orbit to do the scan…and that meant there was no way of knowing how many more of the lizard colonies on the planet had this sort of ambush infrastructure in them.

It was time to launch two more attacks, but the trailblazers were holding off on those and finishing up the ones currently in play while they studied this colony in depth, not wanting to risk another surprise until they had some answers here. A Mainline/Clan reinforcement fleet was on its way to help solidify their hold on orbit, for two days ago another lizard fleet had shown up and had to be beaten off. They’d killed a few drones in the process, and if they kept whittling down their numbers they’d be at risk of allowing ships to get to ground, and that was unacceptable.

The lizards weren’t going to reclaim orbit though, not with two Sentinels holding pieces of it, but the risk was in allowing lizard cruisers to get in-atmosphere and directly attack ground troops. Star Force held naval superiority, and that was the only reasonable way that they were going to be able to conquer this planet, for the majority of it still lay in lizard hands. That would take a lot more killing and equipment loss to accomplish, and Larissa didn’t expect to leave this planet for more than a year, possibly longer if more surprises were waiting for them.

Other empires wouldn’t mind just spamming troops and overrunning the enemy, which was difficult with a spammer like the lizards, but Star Force wasn’t going to send anyone into battle assuming that they were going to die. Loss of equipment was one thing, but loss of life was completely unacceptable. Larissa had lost over 70,000 Bsidd to the ambush in this colony, and she was going to take her time now to avoid walking into another such debacle again.

And that time right now was being spent wandering around the captured colony, looking at what the lizards had built and how they’d used it, all the while just thinking things through while others dealt with security sweeps and debris removal.

Larissa sensed the mind approaching from her left before she ever saw the dark blue armor, and kept her eye line on the racks above as Liam jogged over to her position. If something had been wrong he would have commed her immediately.

The trailblazer in command of the Calavari on this mission decelerated to a smooth stop beside her left should and looked up in the same direction she was. “Ingenious little bastards, aren’t they?”

“What’s new.”

“Them not trying this in other locations.”

“We don’t know that for sure yet,” Larissa said, finally looking at his faceplate.

“It’s not part of the planetary design, and there were no partially constructed bunkers like this in the colonies that we’ve already taken.”

“Are we even sure about that? Some of the smaller ones we could have completely missed.”

“I’ve been having the Calavari do some double checks. Nothing has turned up as yet.”

“And?”

“I think this was a test.”

Larissa raised an eyebrow. “Of what, exactly?”

“What it would take to kill us. They lost a huge amount of troops, but now they have data to analyze and how many they have to throw, against the Bsidd at least, in order to overwhelm our shielding and armor advantage.”

“A little late in the game for that.”

“They’ve never been able to take away our orbital bombardment capability before.”

“Point.”

“I think they’re going to be even more devious now that they don’t have to duck and cover like they have in the past. And once they get these defense batteries widespread, we’re going to have a hell of a time taking planets…at least ones with a full grid like this. We’re going to have to hit them while there are still sections of the surface accessible to landing craft and knock out the guns via ground assault. If we wait and let them fully turtle up we’re going to be burning through drones like crazy making entry corridors.”

“Welcome to the new age,” she said dryly. “Was there something in particular you wanted, or were you just roaming the area and felt like stopping in for a chat?”

“Need some space?”

“No…I didn’t mean it like that. I’m alright. I just hate losing people.”

“Ditto, but we have to keep pressing on. The lizards are growing new troops and building more wisps by the minute. We can’t be reckless, but the invasion has to keep moving forward.”

“No, we need to catch our breath and figure this out before we hit another target.”

“What are we missing?”

Larissa sighed. “I don’t know. This is too drastic a change. I admit, the lizards have always been inventive, but we’re seeing a slew of new technologies and techniques. These aren’t the same lizards we’re used to dealing with.”

“Actually, if they’d continued to let us dominate them that would have been out of character.”

“Something has changed, and until we get a feel for it I don’t think we should press forward with any amount of pace. That damn sensor dampener is going to cause more problems than we’ve encountered already.”

“This may have been a test of it as well,” Liam noted. “To see if we could detect the boundary walls and chambers like this.”

“And with their interstellar transmitters currently out of reach they’ve no doubt been feeding that data back to the rest of their empire. Damn it.”

Liam looked at her, but didn’t say anything more.

“Alright, point taken. But we have to find a way to detect the boundary walls if there are any more of them out there.”

Liam pulled a small device out of the pack on his back and set it on the floor. A moment later a series of holograms sprung up around them with the trailblazer using a telepathic interlink to make adjustments on the buttonless little white disc. The three images moved out to form a circle around the device, with Larissa and Liam making up two of the five points around the circumference.

“She back with us?” Morgan’s full body image asked Liam.

“Yeeessss,” Larissa answered for him, annoyed more with herself than anything. Hesitancy wasn’t an Archon trait.

“I’ve been on site for the past 6 hours,” Kian said from Larissa’s left on the impromptu little Jedi council ring. “I’ve been taking point blank sensor readings and I cannot detect a subsurface wall ring, nor any dead zones. Even if they have the full setup within this colony, without the wall they can’t pin us there and we’ll have the option of retreat.”

“And the fighter swarms?”

“I’ve got most of the mods on the Axius mechs reconfigured to anti-air, so if they try the same trick again they’re not going to have so easy a go at it. That said, I think we should proceed a bit more cautiously in the coming days. I want to double up with the Bsidd on this one.”

“Calavari are doubling up with Mainline,” Morgan pointed out. “It’ll take a lot longer to knock colonies off the list, but it’ll take a lot more of an ambush to overwhelm us if they do have any more blindsides coming our way.”

“Agreed,” Larissa said, pushing aside her past worries. There’d be plenty of time for thinking going forward, and if the lizards were using a new playbook it was best to read a few more pages of it. “But let’s start with a few probing attacks before we mass into the city.”

“Allow me,” Conner insisted. “If Liam or one of you can take my assault list, I can have Canderous split up and play vanguard for all future hits. Their drone mechs and fighters are a good stick to poke the lizards with, and they certainly don’t mind going in first.”

“Not a bad idea,” Morgan mentioned, “but the lizards waited a long time before springing the trap. They might just wait out the probes.”

Liam raised a finger, prompting everyone else to stop talking, for they knew his mannerisms well enough to recognize he had just come up with a new idea. “Morgan, how deep are those sensor dampening plates located?”

“Mostly just below ground level. The techs have found a few deeper below the largest buildings. They’re speculating that those were added after construction rather than during.”

“What if we have the Canderous mechs escort a remote drilling unit, either attached to a mech or something independent, that can break through that shell and stick a conventional sensor probe underneath? If the plating is all more or less at the same depth, we should be able to get a peek at what’s underground.”

“That’ll take an awfully big transmitter to penetrate the surrounding structures,” Larissa pointed out.

“Yeah, but that could work,” Connor said, thinking hard. “We’d have to cannibalize a naval drone, but we’ve already got reclamation equipment here that can be converted to digging purposes. Patch in the sensor array and we’ve got a short range trap detector.”

“Might have to sink it down in a few locations to cover the entire city,” Kian added, “but I like the idea.”

“And we can use it to bait the lizards out if we bring it in to search for the wall rings...wait, never mind. We can just use a low flying drone for that if we don’t care about being stealthy.”

“Are the walls sensor stealthed laterally or just on the caps?” Larissa asked Morgan.

“Just the caps, but even then they can’t hide against that close of a scan at that magnitude of power. I think the lizards designed them to fool orbit scans, not anything down on the surface.”

“Fighters?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan wavered. “We only have one wall to work with, and we can’t rebury it to find out. Until we detect another one this is all just guesswork, aside from the subsurface bunkers.”

“We’ll need a calibration run to determine how many drill points we need before we send Canderous in,” Liam added.

“How do Kara’s sensors stack up?” Connor wondered.

Morgan shook her head. “The advanced design can’t compensate for her lack of power. Already had her try and it didn’t work.”

“Are we holding back the Clan strike teams, or still sending them in first to hit priority targets?” Kian asked, looking at Larissa.

“I’d say simultaneously, otherwise the Canderous units might draw too much attention.”

“If we do the sensor sweeps and the colonies come up clean, do we still want to double up on targets?” Liam asked.

“Yes,” Larissa said firmly, then raised a hand to dismiss any thoughts of her still being gun shy. “There still might be new surprises in store for us, so let’s just pull back a little and lay the hammer down hard until we see their full basket of tricks. After that, which will probably be the end of this planetary invasion, we can get more economical with our troop deployments…what?”

“I agree,” Liam said, “but I’m still waiting on the day when the lizards start building their cities with bombs and just destroy them when whenever we put troops inside. The larger force we use to take them the greater incentive that will be.”

Connor sighed. “That would fit right in their playbook.”

“I don’t think so,” Morgan differed. “While I admit they certainly could do that, it…oh, damn.”

“Yeah,” Connor agreed, seeing the same thought process that had just gone through his mind go through Morgan’s. “Exactly.”

“I don’t think they have the yields for that,” Kian differed. “And even if they go piecemeal their own buildings are going to block a lot of the damage. They can’t kill all of our troops with a trap like that, and I think they’d start with a kamikaze bomb tank or wisp before they tried anything on that scale.”

“Well those two caveats are lovely in and of themselves,” Connor commented.

“Could we do it?” Morgan wondered.

“I don’t know,” Liam said, thinking hard. “Certainly not the most economical way of destroying a colony. It also depends on how strong the buildings are. Ours can stand up to a lot more than the lizards’ can. Most effective way would be a kinetic impact, but you can’t do that from inside…unless you had an asteroid in orbit and just called it down, but you’d lose the surprise effect and give time for the ground troops to evacuate.”

“Scale it down then. What if we booby-trapped individual buildings with our biggest bombs?”

“We could,” Liam agreed. “And to a lesser extent I think the lizards could too. If they ever go that route…”

“We start leading with all drone mech and even infantry units,” Larissa said, pointing out the obvious countermeasure.

“Or just blast them from orbit like normal,” Connor added.

“That’s probably why we haven’t seen that tactic yet,” Liam pointed out. “But I wouldn’t put it past them at some point going forward if we have to keep using ground assaults to disable orbital defenses.”

“Damn it,” Morgan’s hologram swore. “Other than taking our chances, do we have any way of detecting bombs of that size prior to launching an assault?”

“In theory, we should be able to scan inside buildings so long as they aren’t sensor stealthed,” Liam said, thinking a few steps ahead as he spoke. “A bomb of that size would be very large, given lizard technology…”

“Which is improving,” Kian added.

“Granted, but you know as well as I do why starships don’t have self-destructs. Too much mass to move around. Blowing up buildings is no different, especially when you want to wreck several blocks at once. If the lizards want to build that big of a bomb we should be able to see it from orbit if we look closely. If they put it underground that will dampen the blast. If they sensor shield an area we’re going to be careful of it regardless.”

“So a sensor shield above the ground line?” Morgan asked.

“Yeah, I’d say that’d be bomb bait. If they put one below ground they could kill a fair number of our troops, but they couldn’t get enough of them to be worth the effort. It’d have to be above ground.”

“Or in a cruiser they fly in kamikaze,” Larissa wondered.

“We can stop or dampen those with mobile shield generators,” Liam dismissed. “Have you guys seen many det packs recently?”

“Not really,” Morgan answered. “They’ve pretty much given up on those attacks against infantry. I’ve seen a few try to grab a mech leg and do damage, but our infantry just shoots them down from range.”

“Same,” Larissa agreed. “They’ve become very selective in where they deploy them, probably because they can’t be sure to kill us with a single blast given our armor strength nowadays.”

“Good,” Liam declared. “Let’s hope they stick with that mindset. All the same, we need to start working on some defenses against a larger implementation of that tactic if they choose to push it in that direction.”

6

October 24, 2755

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Iden dashed through the forest and up to the clearing surrounding the lizard colony that was their target along with 9 other Archons from Clans Jinx, Sneaky Fox, Stark, and Vulcan. There was barely a strip of 50 meters separating the trees from the outermost buildings, but Iden suspected that had been deliberate, for on scouting this colony they’d detected another hidden underground wall buried beneath the trees ready to be sprung up at a moment’s notice, trapping whatever Star Force troops were inside.

They assumed there were hidden bunkers underneath the city that held more infantry, tanks, and wisps but that remained to be seen. It had been decided to skip this colony and attack the others without the traps, as they’d been doing for the past 3 months. All of those that they’d hit up until now had been normal colonies, with this being the second ‘trap city’ as they’d come to be called. Problem was, it had an orbital defense tower like all the others, and if they wanted to be able to operate high altitude aircraft and bring down transports anywhere in this area it had to go down along with its neighbors.

Those were being taken down as the colonies fell one by one to the seemingly inevitable march of Star Force troops across the planet, but that slow march was going to be hindered even more so if they left this orbital gun intact until the final days of the planetary assault. It’d been decided to send a team in to take out the tower and the tower alone, then leave the rest of the city to rot while they moved on to other targets. Trouble was, with so many troops conceivably hidden inside waiting to be released, a standard Clan assault to target the key structures was problematic.

Their solution was to send an Archon team in on foot and exploit the vulnerability of having the forest that close to the perimeter, which Iden now was as he sprinted across the gap and jumped up onto the wall, sticking there for a moment then climbing up with no one else aware of his presence other than his fellow wall-crawling Archons.

Sonya-837 and Chrissie-10398 had the lead on this mission, being a master/apprentice pairing and bringing their experience and unique psionic skills to bear while Iden and the others were strikers and rangers. They were all carrying heavy packs with jump packs layered underneath, making their transit a bit clunky, but destroying the tower with psionics alone was almost impossible, hence the myriad of explosives that he and the others were carrying.

Send a missile in and it’d get shot down by the numerous anti-air turrets within the city. Carry their own version of det packs in on the backs of Archons that the lizard infantry would have to counter and the odds increased greatly. That said, this strike was incredibly bold.

Which Iden rather liked.

When he got to the rooftop he followed the pair from Clan Vulcan at a running pace, crossing the wide building and jumping across the street below to the next…and having to fall a couple of stories in the process. He cushioned his fall with his jump pack easily enough and ran on, with the other seven Archons doing likewise as they avoided the streets entirely and pressed to get as far into the city as they could before being spotted.

The little armored fleas had come in at night for just that reason, and were able to hop across the cityscape with remarkable speed until a patrolling wisp finally shot a pink blip down into the rooftop 12 meters away from Iden, blasting a small crater out of it and blowing up a pyre of vaporized plating and water, for the recent rain was still puddled everywhere.

A telepathic prompt from Sonya told everyone they were headed indoors, with them altering their running direction as soon as the Vulcans pulled the fighter down and into a nearby building with their psionics. Once it was out of line of sight they broke away from their run to the next building jump and swerved into a rooftop entrance, taking the stairwell that led down into the building.

“Stay tight and focus on point defense,” Sonya told them over the comm. “We’ll handle ranged targets.”

Doing as told, Iden pushed out his Ikrid and Pefbar to cover the rooms closest to them, traveling behind a Clan Sneaky Fox ranger. Most of the minds he came across were already unconscious by the time he sensed them, with the lead pair knocking them out at range like she’d said. If they missed one or couldn’t handle a large number of them then it’d be his and the others’ job to take them down, either through Ikrid blackout or by shooting them, but their mission wasn’t to kill lizards this time, it was to kill the defense tower, so they couldn’t get distracted with firefights and had to keep moving at all times.

For Archons that meant constant running, but that wasn’t a challenge considering the kind of workouts Iden and the others did. The mage and padawan weren’t moving too fast so he wasn’t having a problem keeping up, but he knew that trouble was all around them and could be shoved down their throats at any moment. The only way they were going to get where they wanted to go was to not let the lizards zero in on their position and stack bodies against them. That was the trick to this entire mission and why it was so dicey.

It was certainly doable, but they couldn’t take a frontal assault mentality. They had to be ghosts as often as they could, disengaging more often than not and confusing the enemy as to which direction they were headed. They couldn’t take a direct line to the tower or the lizards could prepare for them and put so many infantry between them and the target that there would be no way even a trailblazer could get through them all.

If that did happen, Iden had already been told that they’d revert to secondary targets, taking out some anti-air towers or ground defense turrets and try to pull the lizards attention back away from the primary target. If that didn’t work they’d have to improvise, and pull out if necessary. They weren’t going to risk another normal Clan assault to get the towers, though the first one hadn’t triggered the traps until the mop up crew had come in to fight the army within rather than hit the defenses. That was probably to maximize the number of Star Force kills they could get, but now that their secret had been revealed there was no guarantee they’d wait as long at this location.

So this was going to be it, one way or another. If they could sneak in and blow it, great. If not they’d work around the tower and neutralize this city until the end…then pound it to rubble from orbit. A single defense tower could do a lot of damage coupled with the city defense shield, but it was the combination of overlapping defenses that gave this new lizard tactic its true teeth. A command ship could probably take a tower 1v1, so if they had to they’d wait and deal with it that way.

But they really needed the airspace clear to keep hammering the surrounding colonies, so Iden and the others were determined to make this work. They kept close, running a staggered two-wide formation with each a step ahead of their buddy as they ran through corridors and down stairwells, using some ladders where they had to, but avoiding all lifts that could be computer overridden. The Archon team traveled all the way down into the substructure and into the shallow tunnels that ran underneath the city streets, allowing them to pass into another area without making themselves visible.

The trail of sleeping lizards, however, was quite obvious, so as soon as they found a empty area the team disappeared, avoiding lizards rather than subduing them so they could sneak off and keep the enemy confused. That took time, and Sonya made sure to keep them heading away from the tower more often than not. That made the trek across kilometers of city seem like Frodo’s hike to Mordor. They stopped twice to rest, eat, and catch a bit of sleep, then after two days of skulking around in the undercity they finally got near the tower.

Which was where they ran into a brick wall, so to speak. There were underground defense stations guarding the access routes into the skyscraper-sized complex. The lizards might be stupid, but they weren’t stupid and knew that if a battle broke out Star Force would be more than willing to undercut any surface defenses and backdoor the big tower.

They were stupid for having subsurface access routes at all. They should have completely sealed off the tower aside from a handful of access doors several meters thick. Instead, there were large archways allowing road-like access inside…behind a wall of gun turrets, barricades, and loads of infantry.

“We go up,” Sonya answered before anyone voiced the question. “Quietly.”

Iden followed the mage on a short backtrack then up above ground inside a nearby building. It wasn’t the closest, but a row back from the tower that was smashed into the infrastructure. That did provide it with some building blockers from lateral attack, but it also gave them jumping access to the exterior if the shields were down.

He wasn’t sure how she was going to play this, but the tower itself had a very robust defense shield covering its moderately armored exterior. There were even sporadic anti-infantry turrets clustered around its base and anti-air varieties higher up, but no window access for them to come in at altitude. That meant only the street level access points were left, but those, he knew from past Clan missions to destroy these beasts with mechs and strike-level infantry pushes, had even more formidable defenses around the base of the tower than they’d just seen beneath it.

He didn’t think they would be going in that way, but then what was left? Climb up to the top and go in through the gun mechanism itself?

Once on the dark roof and crouched down amongst the limited urban terrain there, Iden saw Chrissie pull out a compact sniper rifle, swinging out the front section on a midpoint hinge and snapping it into place. She dialed down the intensity, then shot off a very thin sammy beam towards the tower. The beam disappeared to his vision halfway there, and hopefully it wouldn’t draw too much attention amongst the rest of the city’s night lights.

“Shield’s down,” the padawan confirmed, packing up the weapon and returning it to her back rack.

“Target,” Sonya said, with a waypoint popping up on Iden’s battlemap, bringing a rueful smile to his face. She’d tagged one of the anti-infantry batteries five or six stories up from the ground, but considerably below the anti-air variety. “I’ll come last and throw the rest of you. Chrissie goes first and cuts an entry hole. If we can’t get in drop to the surface and run like hell. We’ll rendezvous here.”

Another waypoint several buildings away popped up and Iden’s helmet stored the marker for future use while diminishing its aura in the rest of the map and giving him an easy toggle ‘find me’ visual button on the left of his HUD.

“Let’s go,” the mage said, jumping out of her crouch and running to the building’s edge where she leapt across to the next one.

Iden followed second to last, making the jump that was just at the edge of his range on half a charge. He upped his jump pack’s anti-grav duration a bit more to be safe, landing on the far roof and following the others across it to the far side where Sonya stopped ahead of the others, knelt down on one knee, and extended a battlemeld link out to everyone. While they all didn’t have the same psionics, especially the rangers, they did all have the basic ability, which was one reason why they’d been chosen for this mission.

Iden accepted the link from her and extended the ‘handshake’ to the others. Soon they were a 10-man mind with him having to numb up his senses a bit to keep from overloading from all the shared stimuli. The rangers had it worse than he did but this was something he’d practiced before, as most of them had. Going beyond 10 was unusual, and holding a 10-man link for a long period of time was just as rare.

They wouldn’t be needing it for long, Iden knew, with him combining his Lachka with 6 of the others and using it to shove Chrissie off the building as she ran up to the edge and jumped, using her pack, muscles, and a repulsor conduit from Sonya to shoot her out like a missile across the extra-long distance. Acting as one mind their timing was perfect, and Sonya feathered the conduit enough to land her two meters above the wall turret where she stuck on impact with her armor’s gloves and boots, then she slid down a bit and began cutting into the weak armor around the edges of the battery.

Iden couldn’t feel what she was thinking, for they’d thrown her beyond their battlemeld range…but not beyond Sonya’s. It was weird, because even though his link to Chrissie was gone he could still get a few snippets relayed from the mage’s mind. Whether that was intentional or not he didn’t know, but as soon as Chrissie landed the rest of them started going across one by one at slightly staggered intervals, with the two rangers going next and leaving the most psionically capable Archons for last.

Iden went 7th in line, feeling the push from behind but unable to create a repulsor conduit because he hadn’t yet learned that ability. He compensated by goosing his jump pack to maximum and floated across the gap until he smacked the edge of the tower, bouncing off it and only grabbing on with one hand. There was no leverage whatsoever, but his fingers stuck to the wall and he thumped against it as his body finally bled off the momentum of the bounce.

Chrissie was below him and to the right, and he realized she had a specialized cutting tool as their battlemeld links reformed that was literally melting the plating away, with the pieces being held up in the air nearby telekinetically by the others, with Iden also grabbing a piece to help out so they wouldn’t fall to the street and alert anyone to their presence. Before she could get them a man-sized hole, Chrissie paused what she was doing and braced herself against the wall in a three point stance, then reached a hand out toward Sonya, using a repulsor conduit to help reel her in with no one left to push the mage across.

The set of dark blue armor smacked the wall three meters to the right of Chrissie and more than a story below, bouncing off like Iden had but holding both hands to the wall and keeping them there. Her legs rebounded and flopped against the wall as Chrissie got back to work, soon prying loose an entire section of the weapon and diving in head first, with more parts coming back out as she dug like a gopher through the equipment with her cutter leading the way.

Iden took a moment to look around. There were no fighters nearby angling for them, and no one down on street level looking up. In fact, there was no one down there on the plaza surrounding the tower, with all the defensive troops tucked into overhangs that would protect them from aerial bombardment…and fortunately now cutting off their lines of sight upward.

“I’m in,” Chrissie said over the comm after cutting the battlemeld link.

“Junk first,” Sonya reminded them, telepathically steering a few floating pieces through the gap. Iden passed the two that he was holding aloft and felt Chrissie take them, sucking them inside the hole along with a steady flow of others.

Sonya went in after the parts, then the master/apprentice pair began clearing out the immediate area, putting lizards to sleep from afar but finding only a few nearby as Iden and the rest of the Archons slowly climbed inside. When he got to the opening he saw how tight a fit it was, having to press his chest down as low as he could to keep from snagging his weapons rack on bits of machinery. His Pefbar allowed him to see it all so there were no unintentional snags, just a lot of slow, deliberate movements up until he came to the proper wall and the hollow space inside.

From there he slid along without broken components trying to grab him until he came to another hole, this one cut by Chrissie that led out into an internal hallway. As he ducked down to crawl out he felt a telekinetic tug hasten his transit, with him throwing the ranger on the other side a ‘thank you’ gesture with a wave of his free hand while he reached back and took his rifle off the safety hook on his pack with the other.

He waited for the others to come through, then stepped over the junk pile and followed Sonya’s waypoint, running to catch up to the pair that had already moved three floors up and wasn’t slowing down.

7

Iden dug through his pack, which he’d disconnected from his armor and was now laying on the ground as he pulled out his portion of the explosives all the Archons were carrying. They’d worked their way up to the top of the tower, intent on scrapping the weapon itself rather than the power supply. Conduits could always be replaced, but the actual array would be more difficult to rebuild and so far none of the other colonies that had come under attack had managed to replace theirs…though this one was going to be sitting here for a long time, meaning they had to wreck it as much as possible.

They weren’t bringing down the tower. It was far too big for that and the small amount of explosives they’d brought, plus the fact that they were still inside. What they were aiming for was wrecked components, with the fist-sized cubes Iden was pulling out and tossing into the center of the small room he was crouched in being telekinetically caught by another striker and pulled inside an open maintenance panel.

Four other Archons were doing likewise in the room, with everyone feeding the explosives into the base of the main gun and the Archon placing them inside at the most pesky spots. To date no one had gotten inside one of these things to figure out how it worked, for all the other towers were just being blasted from the outside, but placing explosives was more about breaking things than understanding them on this trip, so anything that looked fragile or combustible got a cube stuck to it.

Iden emptied his pack and tossed the last pair into the air, seeing them disappear inside the open panel along with a stream of others as he picked up and reattached the mostly empty pack to his armor. There were still some foodstuffs and ammo left, but most of the bulk he’d been hefting around was now gone and he felt noticeably lighter as he retrieved his plasma rifle and stood guard until the other striker climbed back out of the assembly.

“We’re good to go here,” he said, with Iden giving him a moment to grab his pack before the group headed out. The others were split up between defending their lower flank and placing explosives in other key areas nearby, all of which would be on a countdown once triggered.

A waypoint flashed on his HUD, indicating where Sonya wanted them to come. As Iden and the others moved down through the defense tower’s upper levels, which were mostly maintenance access, he saw a countdown pop up at 15 minutes .There was still a ‘boom’ button that Sonya had, but should they get out of range of the small transmitter the countdown would take care of giving the final order on its own.

Fifteen minutes though told Iden that they were going to have to fight their way out, and as soon as he got within a level of where Sonya and Chrissie were he sensed lizard minds coming up from below. Halfway down the stairs he got a personal waypoint, along with seeing others popping up as the mage told them where to go, spreading the group out across the level, for the lizards were coming up at multiple stairwells.

The striker sprinted over to his position, relieving Chrissie who headed off another direction. Iden stayed put and gun pointed down his stairwell for several long seconds, staring at a pile of bodies below before live ones began to crawl over them.

He fired two shots into the heads of the pair that came into view, adding their corpses to the pile and caused those behind them to stay behind the wall and not try to force their way up until they had greater numbers. Iden could sense them pooling below him, then a plasma blast zipped past his head from the flank and hit a lizard further down the hallway on his level that had seemingly come out of nowhere.

Chrissie ran by him to deal with it and Iden turned his attention back to his stairs just as the group behind the corner below charged up and onto the pile of bodies, clawing their way over them and up the incline towards him, eating his plasma streaks and dropping dead or injured to trip up the others.

But as usual, the tactic was not completely suicidal. The lizards up front acted as shields for those behind, gaining them a meter at a time until the horde was almost within touching distance. Iden backed up a step, continuing to fire down as the closest lizards reached the upper three steps and began shooting back. The striker held his ground and killed two more, taking a pink spurt of phaser into his shields before he stepped forward and kicked one back into the group, causing a domino effect that knocked half a dozen down before the kinetic momentum was bled off.

More from behind pushed those who had fallen back up and onto their feet, with Iden going hand to hand and smacking the next closest lizard with the butt of his rifle. A telekinetic push sent another on the stairs tipping backwards. Flipping off his shields the striker tossed his rifle aside on the floor of the hallway and tackled the next closest lizard, emitting a Fornax field as he did so. The resistance in its limbs and those behind it vanished, with him pushing the pile of them back down the stairs using his own momentum and weight.

He kicked himself free and climbed back up the stairs before he released the field, summoning his rifle back into his grip and using it to shoot the stack of disoriented bodies below as he got a recall prompt and new waypoint. A wide Fornax blast as a going away present covered his tracks as Iden raced down the hallway to the left and joined up with two of the others as all the Archons converged on Sonya’s position and pushed their way down a single stairwell.

“We’re going out through the lobby, run and gun,” she told them. “Stay behind me and Chrissie and shoot targets of opportunity, but don’t break off. We’re going to have to hammer our way out.”

“What happened to the gun port?” Iden asked.

“I can feel wisps outside, so that’s a no go.”

“Looks like we got their attention,” one of the rangers noted as Sonya/Chrissie threw up an invisible wall that shoved some 8 lizards back from the base of the stairs at the lower level and into the hallway, clearing a path for the Archons to continue moving down. Iden snapped off a pair of shots as he passed, hitting at least one lizard as the others did the same, with the last man in line throwing Fornax blasts behind them to keep their tracks clear.

Their route down through the tower was predictable, with every level there being more and more opposition, but it wasn’t until they hit the bottom third of the building did they run into the first physical barricade blocking the stairs. Iden felt a battlemeld prompt and accepted, with the Archons using Nemsa to create a joint telekinetic push that dislodged the heavy canisters from where they sat, picking one up and throwing it further down the stairwell where it bowled over or crushed numerous lizards below. The others they moved into a side hallway one by one, with the Archons without Nemsa using their Ikrid to disrupt the lizards on the other side and throwing in a few Fornax blasts where they had clean lines of sight so they wouldn’t hit the other Archons.

Iden had gotten his Nemsa not through individual ascension, but from another Clan Jinx striker. Likewise most of the other strikers had acquired a handful of battlemeld and tier 2 psionics in the same way, with Pren being the only trigger that he’d found on his own. It added to his telekinetic power, which was then multiplied many times over by combining it with the others’ power levels. Adding theirs together not only gave them a sum total greater than what any individual could produce, but by using multiple emitters they gained a power boost from the overlap, and the more minds involved the larger the boost.

They could have lifted a small tank together if need be, so they didn’t have trouble moving the makeshift barricades until they came within 3 levels of the surface and found structural components welded across the stairwell. Together they tried to dislodge them, with a few openings sprouting a phaser blurp or two before the lizards on the other side were psionically shut down through one means or another.

“Cover us,” Sonya said, disconnecting from the battlemeld along with Chrissie. Iden and the others stayed linked, for it made for precision Ikrid and Fornax attacks through the physical barricade without them worrying about hitting each other, not to mention it allowed them to watch their backs via the Archon there, for all could see/hear/feel what the others did. Having the big two out of the link made it less stressful and Iden was able to maintain the smaller group battlemeld without too much effort, even managing a precision plasma shot back through one of the small peep holes in the crisscrossed pile of trash blocking their way.

Both Sonya and Chrissie removed one of their armored gloves, with the padawan grabbing Sonya’s wrist as the mage pressed two fingers up against one of the weld points and held them there for several seconds before the metal began to glow. Using the battlemeld Irod ability, the two overlapped and strengthened their Rensiek fields and concentrated their channeled body heat up to temperatures that neither could have handled individually. It was slow going, but soon the first weld point melted away and Sonya drew her fingers across it like she was smooshing aside sticky, glowing goo.

When they finished with that one they moved their locked arms over to the next point, heating and dislodging it as Iden sensed lizards massing above them and in the nearby halls, closing in on them from all sides.

Suddenly he turned, throwing a mutual telekinetic hold on a lizard coming down the stairs from above them and stopping it dead in its tracks. A moment later the det pack carrying lizard started to fly back up the stairs, and apparently figuring this was as close as it was going to get, hit the trigger half a level up, blowing itself and the surrounding structure apart.

The concussion wave hit Iden and the others, taking down his shields and piling him on top of Sonya below, with two more armored bodies and bits of wall falling on top of him.

“What was that?” she asked, pushing the others off her with Chrissie’s telekinetic help. “Damn it,” she added, sensing the pain in her padawan.

“I’ll live,” the Archon said with a grimace, referencing the charred hole in her hand where some of the molten metal had dripped on her in the tumble.

“Det pack,” Iden informed her, given that she hadn’t been linked into the battlemeld to see it coming. “And we’ve got a hole,” he said, telepathically pointing to the outside wall that was missing a huge chunk of structure, with a lot of the debris having fallen through it down to the next level.

“Go,” Sonya said, still being on the bottom with Chrissie.

One of the rangers beat Iden to it, running up to and jumping through the hole to fall several meters down to the next level. When the striker came down there was a flurry of phaser blips crisscrossing the area, and Iden’s weak shields went down after a few hits, having been drained of power in the explosion. Adding his plasma fire and psionics to the ranger’s they cleared out a perimeter around the hole and pushed the lizards back, allowing the others to come down and form up, with a regauntleted mage and padawan pushing into the lead and plowing through the sea of lizards pooling around them.

They fought their way to the next stairwell, finding no barricades on it and quickly making their way down to ground level. They didn’t stop there, but went down further into the subsurface levels until they got to the security checkpoints that they hadn’t wanted to fight their way through to get in. Hitting them from the opposite side took some of the turrets out of alignment, but there was an even larger sea of lizards waiting for them, with plenty of room in the road-like hallways to stack their numbers and return fire en mass.

“We’ve got the turrets,” Sonya told them as she and Chrissie leapt ahead, falling into small craters of lizards as they made room by emitting short range Fornax fields to allow them to leapfrog ahead into the tightly packed masses. “Plow the road guys.”

Iden and the others knew what that meant and fired into the lizards closest to them, using the distraction the other two were making to their advantage but only killing or dislodging enough of the enemy infantry to create a momentary corridor for them to move through. It felt like him playing football all those years ago, with barely any gap gained, but even a little bit was enough for the Archons to wedge themselves in and through, then killing more just ahead as they turtled up into a group, allowing their bodies and shields to cover each other’s flanks as they powered their way through, with almost everyone having their shields at low to no power.

Their armor held though, and with so many bodies in such a small space the lizards couldn’t get many shots off. They needed a bit of air between them and their targets to really dish out the phaser blasts and the Archons weren’t giving it to them. Like a pack of security guards escorting a celebrity through an animated crowd, the 8 Archons pushed their way up to the gap between the nearest two turrets that were now smoking with plasma damage.

Both of the elite Archons were already ahead of them, attacking the other turrets and killing their gunners as they tried to pivot them around to shoot the opposite direction. They reminded Iden of grunt plasma turrets from Halo and fired the same, for they oddly weren’t equipped with the new phaser tech.

Chrissie took one hit square on in midair, with the plasma blooming to cover almost her entire body as she punched through the green destructive cloud and landed on top of the turret, swinging her body around and whipping her armored foot into the lizard’s head who was sitting behind the protective blast plate. A few shots from her rifle into the control mechanisms junked that turret, with her armor holding up against both that intense burst of plasma as well as dozens of phaser hits.

Iden knew she and Sonya were wearing the heavy armor varieties that their ranks afforded them, but they were still pushing the limits in order to take out those big guns, which he knew the lizards wouldn’t hesitate to fire into their own people in order to kill even one of the Archons.

As that pair leapfrogged across the 7 turrets in total Iden and the others pushed their way through, with a lot of the standard variety lizards just jumping on them and grabbing for their weapons, arms, legs, or whatever other handholds they could get to drag them to a stop so the others could shoot them, but with the group battlemeld linked they could see it all coming and used a lot of impressive hand to hand combos and their psionic kin to intercept or knock away the grapples. Part way through they pushed out their formation and formed a small opening inside that Sonya and Chrissie jumped into, their armor ugly with melt marks and the padawan with a slight catch in her left arm movement where the elbow joint was no longer swinging smoothly.

With the turrets gone all that was left was a football field-sized area full of lizard infantry. Getting beat up by the occasion phaser hits and the physical contact draining shields whenever they started to regenerate, the 10 man Archon team slugged their way across, killing a lot but with even more lizards piling into the underground road behind them as they came down from street level. This was the biggest spamming effort Iden had ever personally seen, and he was glad they’d decided to bring a full 10 Archons, for any less and he doubted they could have made their way across without enough armored bodies to soak up all the incoming damage.

A telepathic signal from Sonya told them not to use their Fornax, for the lizard bodies around them were also a shield against the others, so Iden stopped throwing out any such attacks laterally and used his Lachka and limbs to fight off those nearest him. All he had to worry about was the two meters to his left, for he had an Archon in front of him, beside him on the right, and one behind him, giving the striker the ability to focus on his little part of the armored turtle and avoid taking hits from all around, though is left arm and hip were getting pretty chewed up.

To counter that he switched with the striker to his right in an awkward transition, but that left both of their highest damaged areas facing each other and buying them more longevity throughout what felt like an eternity of shuffled steps moving forward. Eventually Sonya gave them the heads up and launched Chrissie forward like a bomb, with her landing in the midst of those ahead and toppling them to the ground twitching from a Fornax field.

As a group the other Archons ran over them, with Chrissie and now Sonya throwing Fornax blasts out ahead to keep those lizards down while avoiding disabling their own people. Iden and the others fanned out, jumping over the tightly packed fallen bodies and throwing their own Fornax blasts into them and helping each other with telekinetic lifts, including one from Sonya that pulled Iden up midair into a hail of phaser fire and over the last knot of them, but landed him on a small patch of clear tunnel ahead.

He twirled about, punching the nearest lizard to him and shooting the next as the other Archons reached the semi-clear area and were able to start fighting their way forward at a jog, doubling up on targets and getting some momentum into their formation. Half a minute later they were all but in the clear, with them all accelerating into a high run with the master/apprentice pair taking the lead and scouting out any hazards while planning their underground route back to the city perimeter.

All Iden had to do was keep up and follow the group, while keeping an eye on their rear and the swarm of slower lizards trying to chase after them.

8

February 11, 2756

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Karen shot through the air like a guided missile, landing foot first into a lizard with a rocket launcher and knocking him back, throwing off what would have been a shot into the cluster of Calavari going hand to hand with a horde of lizards blocking the narrow gap in the rocky ridge. As soon as the Archon’s body hit the ground the Bataf link to Travis ended and she bounced on her hip, rolling to a knee and keeping some of her momentum as she sprang to her feet in one fluid motion, detonating a Fornax field that took down the other half dozen lizards around her with only one of them managing to get a shot off into her black armor.

Her shields caught the pink blib as she brought her rifle to bear and shot the downed lizards, then she reached a hand back over the edge of the ridge and leaned the opposite direction, reestablishing the Bataf and connecting herself to her brother with another repulsor conduit, yanking him up to her and getting both of them high above the battling armies throwing down in the forest north of the current target colony.

Unlike previous assaults, the lizards hadn’t waited to fight within the city boundaries, instead choosing to come out and into the forest to fight Star Force as they began to hack away at the perimeter turrets. A combination of tanks, wisps, and rocket carrying infantry had hurt the mechs badly on the narrow, treeless approaches, forcing them back with only the six hoths still in play at range, but even those were getting hit hard by wisp clouds that were funneling in from two other nearby colonies. More than half the planet was now in Star Force hands, or rather had been removed from lizard ownership as the invading forces hit and moved on, not putting down any roots aside from a handful of firebases.

Deconstruction of those sites would occur later, with the current priority being the removal of the enemy troops. Once again the lizards were being devious, with the Calavari assaulting the colony having to fight through the forest in order to get to the city’s edge, for it protected them against tanks and aircraft alike, though on several occasions a rain of phaser fire had punched through the canopy on precise locations, strafing the Star Force troops before being beaten back, either by mobile anti-air units the Calavari were carrying or a handful of mechs that were tromping their way through the trees and making some very long roads to get in closer.

The wisp cloud defending the colony was keeping Star Force air cover away, but it wasn’t so thick that they could be reckless with their numbers. Aside from a few brave strafing runs on the infantry beneath the green/black leafed trees they were staying back over their own buildings and reaching out in several tendrils to hit the hoths that were continuing to snipe the perimeter turrets from range, though they were having to find inventive spots to establish line of sight given the hilly terrain.

With some of the turrets taken down already the infantry had an open door to get into the buildings and return to the normal street fighting that this invasion had grown accustomed to, but the lizards weren’t going to have it and were saturating the hills with troops. Virtually all of them were standard variants, for maulers were next to useless against armored Calavari, but the one that Karen had just kicked out of firing its rocket had been a mauler, with the muscular variant having been repurposed into a heavy weapons carrier.

There were more of them popping up almost at random, and while they were typically going after tanks or a lucky aircraft hit, they’d begun using them to shoot clusters of infantry the past two days, with this current pass through one jaggedly cut hillside seeing the most resistance of any location. Karen knew there were tunnels carved into the hills, for she had already spotted two entrances, suggesting that this hadn’t been a last gasp effort on the part of the lizards to keep Star Force out. It was another planned tactic, though this city did not have any boundary walls traps. That said, the landscape worked almost as well to keep people in or out.

Until the wisp dome over the city was removed they had to be careful not to get surrounded, for there was no way of knowing how many of these small tunnels there were, or how far out they reached short of flying a drone warship up and scanning the hills further. The one they’d sent to check for a buried wall had had a hell of a time getting close enough without rising up too high passing over the hills to come within range of the defense tower that was still operational, not to mention those in the nearby colonies that could double up firepower if a ship rose high enough.

With the initial Clan insertion having failed, the main Calavari force had been brought up to join them in a more conventional assault…that had turned unconventional quickly, forcing them to fight in these hills with the lizards able to move around far more easily given their smaller size and, mostly, because of their tunnels. The Calavari couldn’t fit inside them, and from the reports going around in the other locations across the 12 mile wide front, the Clan infantry couldn’t either unless they got down and crawled on their hands and knees.

Karen suspected that was deliberate, for the lizards moved around on all fours as easily as they did biped, meaning they could reposition across the battlefield far easier than even she and her brother could, allowing them to flank and ambush to their hearts’ content, which was making this battle such a pain in the ass that an Arc Knight team had been sent in to assist, with Karen and Travis coming with.

Those six Knights were down below, split up into threes and both working their way towards the choke point, cleaning out the flanks on the Star Force side from where they knew there were concealed tunnel entrances. They’d help the Calavari secure the area and press on through, but it was up to the twins to sniff out any surprises in the gap itself.

To that end they both ran through the trees along the top edge of the ridge, making sure not to fall off the corroded hillside that was already giving way. The portion exposed to sunlight was full of bushes and other plants eating up every available ray, and inside of that there were multiple lizards sniping down on the Calavari or waiting to do so when they had an opportunity. The trees below offered some cover, but there were plenty of deadfalls that Karen would have bet the lizards had cut down previously to give them firing lines on anyone approaching the gap.

With their greeting party now dead, the two strikers ran together along the edge using their psionics to detect the lizard minds hidden in the brush even before their Pefbar could make them out amongst all the jumble of branches and vines. Battlemeld linked, the pair had no trouble picking them up one by one and chucking them over the side. Whether they died on impact or were merely wounded upon landing they didn’t care. They were getting them out of sniping position and giving the Calavari some easy kills while keeping their own noise to a minimum as they made their way towards their mission objective.

They’d come up the hillside/cliff pretty far away, giving them some cover while the lizard units were split between the gap and the creek bed further to the southeast. That was much heavier guarded, with numerous concealed turrets to bust up mechs trying to use the waterway to walk through. A fight was going on there, but a cautious one, with several Clan teams trying to pick off the turrets to allow their mechs and the Calavari’s to get through once they got up to them. Any on approach within 5 kilometers were getting a wisp greeting, so the fighting was designed to take down the ground defenses before they sent the mechs into harm’s way.

There were over a dozen other locations that the Calavari and Clans were trying to make their way through, with this gash being the smallest. Some loner units had scaled the hillside already and were making light probes into the area beyond the lizard defensive line, but those were quickly being forced back through sheer numbers of infantry. Each of those forays did get a little bit more battlemap information for the entire army to use, with one tunnel location ahead having been spotted previously and marked for the twins to avoid.

They could feel minds moving around deep underground, but how many was unknown due to the depth involved. Putting a few to sleep just to mess with them, Karen and Travis swung wide of the tunnel entrance, sensing a few waiting there in the bushes to secure the location and ambush anyone who came close…which would then be followed up by a flood of the scaly infantry spilling out.

They didn’t want that now, so they bypassed them by jumping up into the trees and going the slow route, branch to branch. Fortunately the forest was large enough to get them up more than 10 meters, and it was the thick upper branches that were protecting them from aerial fire that also allowed them to hop between trees, made all the easier with their psionics. A combination of climbing, jumping, and lifting each other got the pair past the tunnel entrance, then they dropped back down to the forest floor and kept moving cautiously but at speed, knowing the Arc Knights would add that extra something special to break through the bottleneck below in short order.

It didn’t take long to get within Ikrid range of the lizards lining the gap, and there were hundreds of them spread out along either side up top and even more within what were probably carved out hideaways within the narrow V-shaped crack that ran probably better than 300 meters at its steepest, but with nearly a half mile of full stretch from flat forest floor to the same on the other side.

It was a kill zone for sure, but it wasn’t the lizards that the twins were looking for.

They crept as close as they could get before there were too many minds around them, so they jumped back up into the trees and gradually got their Pefbar range close enough to see their half of the gap, or at least their piece of their half.

Damn it, Travis told his sister telepathically as they both crouched on separate branches emanating from the same two meter wide trunk, they do have explosives.

And plenty of live bait to conceal them, she added, seeing the boxes buried just inside the dirt/stone on the inner edge of the ‘V’ in a way that they could bury anyone passing through. I don’t see any landlines. Must be remote activated.

That’s bad.

When in doubt, ask for help, Karen said, using both her and her brother’s psionic strength in unison through their battlemeld to access the lizard minds nearest them and start rifling them for information. The first 20 or so didn’t have any knowledge about the explosives buried beneath their feet, but finally they found one that did, but he didn’t have the trigger.

Or… Travis suggested, with her knowing exactly what he was thinking before he could say it.

I don’t think they have a detonate button on them, she said, bringing her Pefbar back to the location of the meter-wide block buried about 80 meters ahead of them and to the lower left, just shy of one of the concealed bunkers on the inside of the gap, but with enough rock and soil around it to blow out like shrapnel when it did go up.

If we get closer maybe we can disable it and not worry about a trigger.

Good call, Karen said, immediately beginning to hop to the next branch then, setting herself, she lifted Travis telekinetically over to the nearby tree, adding a repulsor conduit to supplement her Lachka. Travis landed across a fair sized gap then returned the favor, helping his sister across and the two of them began moving slower and slower, keeping as quiet as they could until they were directly over the heads of three lizards hunkered down behind knee-high wall segments hidden within bushes that they could snipe from and hide in when the Calavari eventually got to the trench below.

Travis kept a mental eye on their minds, ready to freeze or distract them if necessary while Karen reached down into the ground with her Pefbar getting a better view of the explosive and looking for something to mess with. She took a moment to be careful and consider her options, but the sounds of the firefight just a few hundred meters away and the lizard troops running back through the gap in retreat underscored just how little time they had.

Warn them off. This is going to take some time, plus we don’t know how many of them there are, she said, using her telekinesis to pull apart a wire from its connection on the buried device.

She felt Travis smile, then abandoned her sabotage effort as her brother jumped down from the tree and she followed, landing next to the mind-frozen lizards as both of them abandoned their subtlety and sprinted along the edge, drawing attention and numerous lizards out of their hiding spots on the flats above the gap. One concealed tunnel entrance opened up and a line of lizards began pouring out but the twins ignored them, heading for a specific bunker on the other side of the gap and nearly a quarter mile down it, almost dead center in the entire giant booby trap.

Going for pure speed, they didn’t fire any shots nor bother to disrupt the lizards other than with a few hasty psionics. They were standing on top of a giant minefield and had to get to the middle bunker now, else risk the whole thing blowing up underneath them. They figured that wouldn’t happen until the Calavari got at least partially inside, which was prompting their recklessness.

When they got down almost all the way to the target they turned hard right and Karen launched her brother across the gap long jump style, steering him to the wall niche a few meters below the edge that he entered feet first, sliding into a short tunnel about Hobbit height. As soon as he was inside he emitted a Fornax field and kept it up, sliding/crawling his way into a connecting tunnel and dragging one twitching lizard out of his way, kneeing him in the ribs as he pushed by him.

Maintaining the Fornax field at half his maximum radius wasn’t hard, but the longer he kept at it the more stress his head would feel, and like pulling on a rubber band, the further you stretched it the more power it took to maintain the effort, meaning he was on the clock.

Scurrying his way through the small tunnels he pulled a fishhook turn that led him back to a concealed bunker that had one-way view panes into the gap, hidden behind a clever holographic camouflage screen of leaves and sticks that were also transparent with barely an outline showing on the wall of the little, traitorous den. There were three lizards inside, all lying on the floor save for one, who was twitching uncontrollably in his seat as Travis’s head began to complain from the sustained effort.

He pulled out a pistol from his back rack and shot them all twice in the head, then pushed their bodies over the entrance and stacked them up like lego bricks, blocking the entrance.

“Got it,” he told Karen via comm, now that she was running like crazy back through the forest to the Calavari with an angry army of lizards following her and hopefully not noticing him. “Tell them the trigger is secure and I’ll remain here to make sure it stays that way.”

“You want me to double back and help?”

“No, just get clear. These tiny tunnels mean they don’t have a chance of getting to me, and there’s a camouflaged window here I can break out of if I have to, so I’m not pinned in.”

“They can break in too, you know.”

“I’m fine. Get the team up here and take out those sniper positions before the Calavari start pouring through like big fat targets.”

“Alright, see you after,” Karen said, with her soon passing outside of his ability to mentally track. Their battlemeld and twin link were broken, leaving Travis with only his own thoughts for a while, which was odd considering how they did almost everything together.

But then again this wasn’t the first time they’d split up, and they had trained themselves accordingly so that it didn’t become a weakness. Still, the sooner his sister was back inside his head again the better. For now though, there were lizards scurrying about in the tunnels on the other side of his meat blockade and he intended to gum up the tiny roads with as many sleeping beauties as he could arrange.

9

June 1, 2756

Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

Varasiss

Liam returned to his command ship’s nexus, having spent a very long couple of months groundside since his last visit doing commando work and helping to take down key targets during or in front of the massed assaults on the remaining lizard colonies. Now there were only 7 remaining, spread out widely across the planet having been bypassed by the Star Force troops because they were trap cities. Five of them still had their orbital defense towers intact, but the trailblazers had decided not to risk any more clandestine assault teams, for the last one that Morgan and Kara had been on had turned into a wounded evacuation run.

It’d had five mages, three padawans, plus the two trailblazers and hadn’t managed to kill the tower. After the three previous successes and numerous other similar missions behind enemy lines in the less defended colonies the lizards had enacted numerous new safeguards, some of which had involved detonating entire buildings around the tower when security breaches were noted. The team had been in one of them when it came down, but fortunately the armor they were all wearing kept them alive, not to mention a few hasty bioshields being thrown up in the process.

Six of them had been wounded to the point of limping, with three having to be carried out and an air evac being impossible. Kara had got them through it, going rogue and hunting the lizards in the depths of their substructures to act as a diversion and to clear passages, with a one-armed Morgan doing plenty of damage despite her left limb having been broken and hanging limp inside her cracked armor. Others had been more badly injured, but the few that had only a few dings in the chaotic building collapse supported the trailblazer enough to get everyone out.

That was three months ago, and all the Archons in questioned had long since returned to battle after regenerator treatments. The V’kit’no’sat tech was still far ahead of Star Force medical devices and rebuilt their bodies within hours, though all were weaker for it after the fact…something that infuriated Morgan to no end because it could possibly see her losing her top Archon status.

After that mess the trap cities had been ignored, with assaults on the others continuing with less surprises but still an incredible amount of heavy fighting. The lizards were no longer the soft targets they once were, and it seemed like the entire point of their planetary defense being a test of their new tech and tricks. The trap cities that remained would give the lizards even more data to work with when Star Force hit them, and the interstellar transmitters that each had were continually broadcasting signals out to other lizard worlds when they came within line of sight during the planet’s rotation, meaning that even if no lizard left the system alive their empire would still gain from the knowledge of what had happened here.

And of what it took to stop or kill the Star Force troops.

But with the rest of the colonies now destroyed the amount of firepower a single, or two orbital guns could throw back at the fleet was low. But then again their defense fleet was near to anemic, for the lizards had been continually sending in relief fleets to whittle their drones down. Star Force had been bringing in occasional jumpship fleets with replacement warships but their hold on the planet was tenuous, though there was little chance of the lizards actually retaking it with the two Sentinels in orbit…short of yet another escalation that had Liam a bit concerned.

They needed to finish off Varasiss soon and start fortifying it themselves, and to do that these last few colonies had to go.

Rather than waste more drones on an orbital assault, or even use the command ships and see them potentially take more hull damage on top of what they’d already racked up to date, Liam accessed the Sentinels and had their limited engines begin altering their orbits to bring them down to a very low altitude rendezvous point. He wanted both of them together to insure that neither one lost shields, for to date they hadn’t been scratched and letting the lizards get a few hits in now would have been beyond sloppy.

It took a great deal of time to get them together, then as they lowered themselves with their anti-grav running high to counteract the planet’s gravity they started taking fire from a single phaser beam coming up from the surface. The pink energy tore through the clouds and hit the starboard Sentinel’s shields, with them warding off the attack with ease. Liam studied the data from the shield loss and ran through the quick math, seeing that it would take more than 500 hits at present levels to penetrate.

That wouldn’t take too long, for the recycle on the lizard gun was only 1.7 seconds. Liam held off firing the Sentinels’ weapons until both were in position, using the extra energy to supplement the gravity drives and shields, then pulled power from the latter and engaged the heaviest cleansing beams.

Six beams from each shot down their pale white lines and hit the defense shield covering the lizard colony, with their recharge rates linked together so they all hit simultaneously in an attempt to create a momentary breach with the overload and sneak some damage through. The slugging match that followed was mostly one sided, with the lizard colony’s shields coming down within a minute and the defense tower another 20 seconds later. That ended the orbital threat, for no missiles had been fired from the surface, oddly enough, but then again the Sentinels had enough anti-air weapons to knock them down with ease, so Liam wasn’t sure if this colony didn’t have them or wasn’t choosing to waste them.

There were numerous defense turrets across the city, but it was impossible to determine exactly what they all were when some were buried beneath armor plating until they were revealed. At this point Liam didn’t care, and quickly reset the power flow away from the shields and into the weapons in order to give the Sentinels full firing capability. Targeting the beams himself, he began to cut the colony’s buildings apart, starting first with the defense turrets and hangars, then moving on to the other buildings while the wisp cloud that had been hiding underneath the city shield began to grow and disperse, running off to other locations around the planet.

There was no knowing how many other lizard bases were concealed on Varasiss, and with some luck they might lead them to one. He didn’t expect the enemy to be that sloppy, but you never knew.

The Star Force fighters patrolling the planet were ordered to keep their distance and let the lizards run while the Sentinels bombarded the colony, then moved on to the others. Once they had all of them torn to shreds they’d begin hunting down the remaining units across the planet, and there was no point in risking further engagements until that was completed.

After several hours of bombardment Liam redirected the Sentinels to the pair of colonies remaining that had overlapping fields of fire, knowing this would be the bigger test. Based on the data from the single beam he knew there wouldn’t be a mathematical issue with taking them down, but still there was always an opportunity for surprises, and with the pair of phaser beams reaching up to strike back at the Sentinels came the missiles from both colonies.

Liam turtled up and deactivated the cleansing beam, routing full power to the shields and point defense weapons, weathering the missile storm until it eventually ran out and knocking down most of them before they could hit. When they ceased and only the ongoing phaser strikes continued he reengaged the cleansing beams and began hammering against one of the two cities’ shield discs.

It took a while to knock it down, then the tower, then he did the same to the second colony, but he managed it all without so much as a shot hitting the hull of either defense station. Afterwards he turned the firing control over to other gunners and let them methodically rip apart the two cities while he left the nexus and headed to the command ship’s sanctum for a good long run before catching a few hours of needed sleep and returning to the bridge to oversee the next colony attack.

Meanwhile the ground troops were out and about in numerous locations, hunting down and safing the underground tunnels in the colonies that had already seen combat and were now nominally in Star Force hands…though all that meant was a handful of scouts looking for lingering enemies. The planet was huge and now full of ruins, without enough troops to properly occupy each site. From the reports continuing to come in there were still lots of pockets of small resistance everywhere, with about half of them operating with cohesion rather than random, last ditch attacks from survivors.

The other four trailblazers and Kara were down there leading the efforts to eradicate them and locate what they thought were hidden control centers. There were so many tunnels underground that a good portion of their drone fleet was now floating over the surface doing intense scans to try and locate them in an effort to identify potential traps before the Archons and others started their expeditions into new areas. Morgan especially wanted to be there running point to look for more detonation devices, and while they hadn’t seen hardly any employed in such a manner during the length of the invasion, the gradually increasing popularity of blowing up your own building to get the enemies inside was alarming.

If that trend continued Star Force was going to have to readjust their tactics when assaulting other lizard worlds, else risk losing chunks of personnel with every structure they forced their way into. When you didn’t care about dying and were just trying to achieve maximum damage to your enemy you opened up a lot of darkside tactical options that looked like they were uncounterable, but Liam and the other trailblazers were notorious for finding ways to get around the problem, though this one was going to be one of the worst to tackle to date.

Kara flew across the sky a couple miles above the surface of their recently reclaimed planet, traveling from one ruined colony to another as she took a momentary break from tunnel diving and just did some patrolling up top. There were no Star Force fighters in the area at the moment, and the lizard survivors had a habit of moving from place to place so that when you finally did fully clear out a city, if that was even confirmable, they could move back in again coming over ground. The areas with wide plains were easy to spot them on, but the forested areas not so much.

She didn’t expect to spot any lizards in the trees from this altitude, but felt like snooping around a bit while another subsurface assault team was getting prepped for her to lead. The Scionate she’d been with had been recalled and a group of Calavari were coming in to replace them, though they weren’t exactly the best at crawling around in small spaces. Most of the lizard infrastructure underground was large enough to accommodate them, but it was the small auxiliary tunnels that they couldn’t fit inside, nor did Kara like the idea of crawling in there herself.

More than once she’d gotten a bit claustrophobic, recognizing the fact that if she got pinned there it would be almost impossible to dig her way out. It was worse for the others because they didn’t have her Vorch’nas, and talk amongst the trailblazers was that some of these locations would best be dug out from the top and simply removed from the surface in a massive earth moving endeavor rather than trying to explore and safe them manually.

Some prototype AI drones were getting their evaluation work in, with masses of the things being ordered up for production in the ADZ and shipped out here, with the first load scheduled to arrive within the month. They were all the size of a bowling ball or smaller, with interconnective capability like the drone warships used but designed to operate almost exclusively in blackout situations like, say, having tons of rock between you and a transmitter.

They weren’t combat models, with Star Force not trusting computer programming with weapons in an urban setting. There were too many factors to preprogram for, and they didn’t want so much as one accidental death because of a miscalibration. Artificial intelligence was a myth, and a machine could only do what it was programmed to do. Without someone at the controls that programming would always be limited and unable to adapt to new situations, hence the little bug bots didn’t get weapons.

What they were was surveillance and scouting equipment, able to transmit to each other over short distances and extend a net of comm and control lines down through tunnel networks if placed appropriately and in large enough numbers. Right now the bots they had were scouring the innards of one dead lizard colony, mapping it out as they went and roaming where they chose underground. They’d discovered three lizard hideouts so far, as well as constructing a battlemap of the lower regions without any Archon or Regular having to hike down every corridor.

The prototypes were serving their purpose more here than ever expected, for this was the largest subsurface infrastructure they’d seen from the lizards to date and Kara expected jumpships full of the little buggers to be roaming the planet for years to come as they slowly deconstructed the mess. Everything Calavari had been eradicated by the lizards in their time here, and Star Force was intending to return the favor, tearing out all the lizard infrastructure rather than coopting any of it for their own use.

As Kara was approaching the edge of the colony ahead she got a ‘request for assistance’ beacon on her battlemap. It was coming from a city to her west that had Lacvamat patrolling from the air and they seemed to have located a nest of lizard tanks operating in the rubble. They were making strafing runs on them, but reported enough of an anti-air presence that they couldn’t press the issue on their own and required assistance.

Kara banked to the left and picked up speed, elongating her personal shields into a needlepoint above her head and cutting through the air as aerodynamically as possible. There were several other units responding to the call as well, with a squadron of Calavari Valeries closer than she was, but there was only so much one could do from the air and the Lacvamat had rightly called for what they referred to as ‘groundpounder’ backup.

Signaling that she was incoming, the honorary trailblazer watched the landscape zip by underneath her during the long trip. Fast as she was, there was only so many kilometers that she could eat up per minute and the planet was, obviously, huge. When she eventually did reach the location she zipped down from altitude and shot through the gaps in the Lacvamat flocks, coming down to an altitude that they weren’t risking and landing directly in the center of a formation of six tanks that were firing up into the air trying to hit the Lacvamat and doing a bad job of it.

“Surrender and I’ll let you live,” she said in their native language, broadcasting the edict loudly from her armor’s external speakers as well as sending it over the lizard comm channels.

Kara just stood there in her red scales staring at them from behind her head covering, which had no visor nor any other openings to signify a face, just more red scales covering and protecting her eyes that were seeing a camera image displayed before them. Even though she could see it coming, the tank to her left swiveled around and fired a blast at her from less than 50 meters away.

She didn’t dodge, but took the shot on her shields as she stared it down, with the other lizard troops likewise turning towards her and opening up with a lot of infantry weapons, for they were literally crawling around in every nook and cranny she could see from street level, and it was obvious that they had no intention of accepting her generous offer.

“Can’t say I didn’t try,” she said to herself, using her anti-grav to juke her out of the way of the next tank blast and transition into a flying run inches over the ground as she summoned up an orb of green/white energy and delivered it to the closest tank by hand.

10

May 1, 2762

Pagaliss System (Calavari Region)

Varasiss

A part of the 22nd mainline Star Force fleet, some twenty warships strong, entered planetary orbit around Varasiss and broke off from the cargo convoy they were escorting, heading towards the large starport in low orbit while the 226 fat transports began sending down dropships to the surface as a flock of even more flew up to them to begin unloading the supplies and personnel being brought in to the revived Calavari capitol. The warships had convoyed out with the cargo jumpships as a matter of convenience, but they would not be returning with them. Rather, they were here to use the Pagaliss System as a base of regional operations as they contributed to the ongoing assaults on lizard worlds nearby.

The starport they were rendezvousing at was Atlas-class, and more of a battle station than commerce center. It was the size of two command ships and had enough shields, armor, and weaponry to make it a strongpoint defense rather than a helpless target that the fleets would have to guard, but its primary purpose was still to facilitate traffic to and from the surface now that Varasiss was linked into the Star Force transit grid.

There were dozens of civilian ships too large for the hangar bays docked with an outer ring around the disc-like station, but the warships wouldn’t be availing themselves of that capability. They were sitting themselves into nearby parking orbits and sending over dropships of their own, knowing that they’d be waiting here for at least 2 weeks before joining up with a H’kar raiding fleet and heading out. Giving the troops and crew a chance to get off the warships and have some free time was permissible given the secure nature of the system, with 16 Sentinels and thousands of drones patrolling orbit as the surface of the planet was being slowly reworked.

‘Slow’ was a point of view, and while visible from orbit as small dots the actual construction on three different cities was occurring at a blinding pace. Star Force had devoted an enormous amount of resources to get the first city built to operational status within 15 months, then using a combination of supplies shipped in from the ADZ and local resources either harvested or recycled, they’d begun expanding on it rapidly for another two years before now having branched out to another pair of locations on the planet.

The original city was easily identifiable from orbit as the dropships from the 22nd fleet crossed over to the starport, depositing Bronsor and a number of other Knights and commandos onto the massive station. They were most likely remaining there for their downtime and mingling with the civilian population that was about half Calavari and half a mix of everything else. The ADZ knew that Star Force had big plans for Varasiss going forward and many people wanted in on the action, with a lot of entrepreneurs already having set up shop on the starport while the surface cities were currently reserved only for Calavari citizens and Star Force personnel.

Bronsor was rare in that he was a Calavari, but not part of the Calavari faction within Star Force. He’d joined the mainline fleet long ago and had never had cause to regret that decision. Virtually all of his fellow soldiers were Humans and he had to live by their standards, which were far harder than those the Calavari used because the smaller race was more agile than them, hence they expected mobility that few Calavari could ever hope to match. It had been a struggle for him, but gradually over the years he’d developed enough speed in his big body to keep up with the Humans, to a degree, which allowed his natural bulk to become an asset rather than a liability to the assault teams he was deployed with.

The Knight left his fellow soldiers to their own business and saw about arranging transport down to the surface, which his position allowed. There was little in the way of entertainment facilities down there, unlike the starport that had commerce as its number 1 priority, but Bronsor wasn’t taking this trip to unwind. It was of a personal nature, for he hadn’t set foot on the Calavari capitol for more than 300 years.

He was one of a rare few that still remained that remembered the time before the Calavari had joined Star Force, with most of their current population having been born after that fact. He regretted losing so many friends and kin over the years since, but most of the losses were due to lack of self-sufficiency and them simply choosing to wither away rather than train. He wished that hadn’t been the case, but their choices were their own. Nowadays self-sufficiency wasn’t such an outlandish concept, and any race that was part of Star Force practically lived and breathed it, with those who chose otherwise being the outcasts of society rather than the dominate drivers of it.

Not all Calavari, and not even all Humans, achieved and maintained self-sufficiency, for it was a personal war that one had to continually fight and for whatever reason people would find a reason to quit. The stronger one was the more time they had to reconsider before they lost all their strength, but Bronsor accepted that there would always be the cowardly and the stupid in the galaxy. He just wished that more of his former kin had lived in this era, for he was sure they would have made it had their old culture not held them back from taking the Humans at their word in those early years.

Bronsor was now amongst the oldest of the Calavari, and was by far the strongest. His training had not only maintained his self-sufficiency, but built on it, leveling him up at a modest pace over the years with his Human peers pushing him in ways he’d never expected. A few other Calavari had followed his example and worked their way into the mainline ranks, but none of them could take him hand to hand. Some in the Calavari military had tried, years ago when he’d had some downtime to spend helping to illuminate them as to the greater potential they had, and only two had bested him.

Those two stood more than two feet taller than him and had taken their training to heart. To his credit Bronsor beat both of them in a rematch once he got used to dealing with their larger size, for fighting with and against Humans required different movements, and he’d been momentarily caught off guard in the transition. Credit was due to those who had temporarily bested him though, but since that day he’d never let it happen again.

Bronsor eventually found his way onto a dropship heading down to the original city, with him seeing that it now stretched out across more than 50 miles with densely packed spires built in Calavari fashion. Rather than blocks they were smooth lines with no sharp corners whatsoever, but beyond that it was standard Star Force, with him knowing that those buildings were packed with structural supports and space saving designs to maximize every square mile of the landscape. The Calavari had a slightly different way of doing things than the Mainline did, but they had learned quite a lot from the Humans and assimilated a great deal of their architectural principles.

As the dropship headed for one of the spaceports he could see the gigantic central spires that looked like they were literally holding up the entire city. At present there were five of them, with one located dead center and the other four spread out around it in compass points. More would be added as the cityscape expanded, with Bronsor knowing that each was a shield general/defense turret. If needed a very powerful defensive barrier would go up over top of the city that could block a considerable amount of orbital bombardment while the spires returned fire with the brand new Keema weapons.

Inefficient and power hungry as the prototypes were, they offered so much range and firepower combined that they made the cleansing beams look like toys in comparison. The energy was an exotic type, requiring several rare arc elements to produce, but the result was a clear beam that carried a slight visual distortion with it, making the energy conduit look like glass even in the void of space. It didn’t have any special effects like the Ta’lin’yi did when it hit matter, or the maulers with their shield disrupting nature. No, the Keema were just a straight up, normal weapon that was simply overpowering in intensity.

Each spire had one Keema atop, with lots of secondary weapons, including cleansing beams so they could attack both starships in orbit and troops or aircraft on the planet. So far this was the only location to have any functioning Keema weapons, for the drone warships were too small to accommodate the crude designs. Even Earth’s planetary defense hadn’t constructed any, wanting to wait until better models reduced the size and energy expenditure, but here, near lizard territory, the Calavari had wanted the big guns immediately, just in case the lizards decided to try and retake the planet before Star Force dug in deeper.

Right now the fighting was still going their way, but the lizard worlds were getting harder to take. Bronsor and the others had their work cut out for them in the coming years, but that was what they were here for. This little trip down to the surface was an addendum, and had there not been time nor the opportunity Bronsor wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

But so long as he was here, he was going to take the moment to revisit the planet.

When the dropship landed in the city he exited it with the other passengers then promptly let himself get lost in the cityscape and just roam, tasting the distinctive air once again and having a flood of memories rush back. The Calavari were better for the changes that had been made to them, and eternal thanks to the Humans for that, but something had always been missing for them, and standing on the surface of Varasiss again he now understood what it was.

Legitimacy.

For three centuries they’d been refugees, despite the numerous former Calavari worlds they’d already retaken and begun repopulating, and even though Bronsor didn’t think of himself in that way, and hadn’t for a very long time, something deep inside of him that had been buried came to the surface with the taste of the planet’s atmosphere, prompting him to head for the city’s perimeter and find his way out into the wilds surrounding the construction sites.

It took him a while to pass through and around them, for there were so many construction mechs working that it looked like the planet belonged to a race of metallic giants, but eventually he found some clear space and jogged off through the grassy plains on an impulsive workout and just got some distance from himself and the city, feeling the natural gravity of the planet that further brought out the old memories.

The sights, sounds, and smells of the grasslands were the same as they had been when he’d first come here, so long ago. He hadn’t been born on Varasiss, but he’d done his military training here and immediately considered it to be home, as did virtually all Calavari. There was something unique about the planet, and only now did he truly understand what it was after all his training and experience gained with Star Force.

It was pride, and knowing that this was their home and that they belonged here. Even now that his own pride was centered in the mainline fleet and his acceptance by the Humans into their hallowed ranks, a piece of him remembered that old pride and being back here, with the planet no longer in enemy hands and rightfully returned to the Calavari, the long missing piece in his buried psyche was finally unlocked and he could feel himself healing the last of the lingering damage from the near destruction of his race.

And being here, now, made those memories feel as if they’d just been yesterday, almost as if part of his brain had shut down during all these years of service with Star Force and he was permitting it to finally wake up. With it came the pain that would always be with him, for the losses suffered were not something that one ever forgot. The memories could be set aside, along with all others, until they became relevant again, but the key to healing wasn’t in forgetting or forgiving, it was in getting oneself on the proper path…and a hefty dose of payback.

The Calavari now had it. Varasiss was their capitol again and millions of Calavari citizens were flocking back to their homeworld as fast as the infrastructure expansion could accommodate them, but above and beyond that Star Force was investing heavily in the system, intending to make it one of the rare few cornerstones in the overall empire, or so the rumors went. From the mass of construction already having occurred in a just a few years, Bronsor didn’t have any doubts as to Star Force’s intent for the system.

With a lot of running and a loss of a sense of time, the unarmored Calavari eventually made his way across the grasslands to a clump of trees that created a little island in the otherwise flat and empty horizon preceding the main forest still some 20 miles away. He decided to stop there, slowing to a walk as he got to the edge and exploring the bit of untouched countryside that was a rarity on the planet after two massive wars had been fought on its surface.

These trees were large and old, telling Bronsor that they too had been here before the lizards had invaded. He walked over to one of them and brushed his bare hand against the slick, smooth bark trying to soak in as many sights and sensations as he could and reconnect. When he touched the tree he let his hand linger, eventually closing his eyes and taking several deep, slow breaths, then opening his eyes again.

What he saw was victory. After so many years and battles and losses and horrors, the Calavari stood here victorious. The lizards were being beaten back and the Nestafar were gone. Bronsor and only a few others would truly appreciate this, and he felt both isolated and privileged to have that unique perspective. He was one of the last survivors from that time period, and now he stood here as a representative of all his kin that had fallen.

“We won,” he said, speaking to the dead. “We won.”

Several hours later Bronsor made his return run across the grasslands, having put the last bits of unfinished business to rest in his memories as his mind turned to the future as the horizon in front of him was filled with the spires of the ever growing Calavari city. He felt so small compared to them and the grandiose landscape he was in that it was both humbling and exhilarating. He was a part of something so vast and complicated that he could never hope to understand it all, but he didn’t have to. Star Force had earned his trust long ago and never given him cause to second guess them, and his people had assimilated to their way enough that they were now equally Star Force and also deserving of that trust.

That meant Bronsor could revel in all that they’d accomplished together without having to be responsible for anything other than his tiny role in all of it…and he knew that’s the way it worked for everyone else, even the trailblazers, for right now they had no idea he was out here running across the wilds getting in a workout. That workout was his responsibility and totally off their radar. He held up his end, they’d hold up theirs. That was how Star Force worked and downright thrived, not through forcing or constricting people into a philosophy and supplanting their own judgement with an exterior edict, but in trusting each person to figure things out on their own and do what was needed without monitoring or nudging.

The population in general would always have losers, in various forms, but so long as enough people held true to their personal responsibilities they could carry the rest of the living baggage with ease. Bronsor was part of an empire that thrived on freedom and trust, giving people time to experiment and learn and fail, then grow stronger from it if they chose. Some wouldn’t, some would, but those that did would add to their ranks, for they would never grow old and the longer Star Force remained in existence the greater the numbers of the responsible ones would grow and overshadow the losers.

Those would eventually die off from their own stupidity and laziness, but Bronsor and the others would remain indefinitely, continuing to grow and learn from each other, further strengthening the empire in ways that the Calavari had never before dreamed possible. Bronsor was literally living a dream right now, after having fought his way through a very long gauntlet to earn it.

And him being here now wasn’t just for himself, but in memory of all those who had fallen along the way. Not in some misplaced sense of debt, but in the understanding that what Star Force was had to be protected. It was too valuable, too sacred to allow to be damaged, let alone destroyed, and being here, now, with all of the past memories fresh in mind, he realized more than ever that the galaxy and life itself was more than just chaos and death. There was good and light to be found amongst the darkness, and he had finally come to it.

For the sake of the fallen, he would protect Star Force in every facet to his dying breath, including himself. He was part of Star Force, and his own body was a battleground that only he could fight on. Saving and strengthening others was important, but it would never be more important than the battle within. He was a piece of Star Force territory, no matter what planet he was on or what circumstances he found himself in. Maintaining that piece was his sole responsibility, and he’d never compromise it.

Others would eventually tire of the training and fighting, ‘retiring’ to civilian life and gradually losing their self-sufficiency, perhaps to wake up and realize their mistake before it was too late, perhaps not. He would never go down that road, for it would be a betrayal of who and what he was, in addition to being a betrayal of all those who had fallen and not lived to see this golden age. He would not die for Star Force, he would fight until he was dead for it, always striving to survive, persist, and overcome…but never sacrifice.

For sacrifice was the same as surrendering, and was a betrayal of all that Star Force was. They didn’t stand for something, they were something. Something real and tangible, not an idea or belief. Star Force was the literal light in the galaxy, from every building to warship, every uniform to cookie, and every Scionate to Human. They were all Star Force, but each with their own path and purpose, right down to the shoes that were protecting his feet as he ran across the grasslands.

Bronsor wasn’t just fighting for the light, he was the light. And as such he could affect great things within the galaxy…or be consumed by the forces of darkness, whether they be an invading army or the insidious corruption of apathy and laziness. This was real, not academic, and for the first time he truly understood how closed off he had been after the fall of the old Calavari empire, with the parts of him that truly cared closing themselves off in virtual denial of the horrors around him.

But turn away from it as he may have, he was never out of the game. He was always live, and had found a way through it all, which is why this victory now felt visceral, for the threats were still out there. He wasn’t safe, Star Force wasn’t safe, and they never would be. Life was a fight, one battle to the next with no guarantees, and if the light of the galaxy was going to persist it had to earn its way forward, one day, one mission at a time. There would never be a finish line. Battles would be won, but the war would never end.

So what was the point of it all? Bronsor now knew, both from what he had learned and the perspective he had given his age and all he had witnessed. The purpose of life was to be the one in the right, to be the light and fight the darkness, in all its forms. Now that he was here and he knew what the light truly was he felt fulfilled, but not finished. Never finished. He was complete but always with more work to do, more enemies to fight, more workouts to complete.

Life was a neverending story, and the ultimate victory lay in being the light, moment to moment.

That is what Star Force was, and the transformative cleansing that Varasiss had undergone stood as a testament to a vital fact that Bronsor would never forget.

He was Star Force.

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1

May 18, 2783

Solar System

Arwen

Sophia sat on a short cliff edge, her feet dangling over and nearly touching the rocky ground below as she looked out at the tiny dot that was the sun on the horizon through her faceplate. She glanced down and ran her fingers through the sandy soil that covered the small planet on which a number of Clans had made their home centuries ago. Arwen was part of the Elvish cluster in high orbit around Sol, though that grouping was more nostalgic now than geographic given that their differing orbital tracts had slowly pulled them out of relative position to one another.

With the navigational advancements over the years it hadn’t mattered. Everywhere in the Solar System was easily accessible, no longer the huge distances that separated civilization from the frontier…though in truth the remoteness stayed the same and it was the growth of the empire that had made everything feel so small and nearby. That was why she was here now, outside the colonies that dotted the landscape and sitting in an envirosuit on the natural surface, feeling the low gravity along with the sense of just how empty everything was.

Inside the cities everyone was close, friendly, and working together for the benefit of Clan Snowstorm, but out here it was still empty space, with the nearest planet being beyond her reach. It was like the technology had given everyone a false sense of security, for Arwen was an inhospitable landscape despite the addition of a carbon dioxide atmosphere that Star Force had introduced to bring the freezing temperatures up to only slightly chilly. They were so far away from the star that little light reached this far out, and the planet was so small that it didn’t have sufficient internal heat production to do much of anything with.

Sophia was sitting on top of a giant frozen rock orbiting a hot star so far out that it looked benign to her sitting just above the horizon, soon to dip below it and usher in the nighttime sky. The ground around her was a mix of boulders and sand, most of which was colored grey with hints of red, and looked for all the world like one of the last places anyone would like to live, but to her it had always been home.

Funny though, because she’d rarely been outdoors to see the planet itself. She’d lived her entire life inside the colonies, having gone outside only during her maturia training some 140 years ago. She’d never even visited the other four Clans’ colonies on the planet, staying within Snowstorm’s holdings and never feeling the need to venture elsewhere, for there was always plenty to do right here.

But that was all about to change.

Sophia was about to leave Arwen, along with the rest of her Clan. While technically it was her choice of whether or not to go the fact that all the Snowstorms were leaving the Solar System left her with no real options. A few would remain on their Clan’s piece of Antarctica, but ever other territory slot and orbital station they possessed here was being traded away to other Clans in exchange for resources, agreements, or whatever other deals Oni had worked out. Sophia might be a civilian tech, but she wasn’t sure about the wisdom of the trailblazer this time. Everything they had built up here in Sol was going to be wiped out in a single trade, including her home.

She’d been born on Arwen, gone through her maturia training here, and had lived amongst the other 3.2 million Snowstorms on the planet her entire life. And while it was true she’d only seen the interior of a colony city that entire time, this lump of rock she was now directly sitting on still struck her as home, no matter how lifeless and empty it looked right at the moment.

She knew she wasn’t the only one in this position, for everyone else in the Clan was having to make the same move all the way out to the Bsidd Region. Apparently Oni had decided to uproot the entire Clan for the chance of colonizing an entire system of their own, as only a few others had done to date. Snowstorm never had a planet to itself, let alone an entire star system, and up until now they’d consolidated all of their holdings inside Sol while others expanded outward, often trading the Snowstorms bits of territory or ships in order to facilitate that expansion. Sophia’s Clan was ranked #12 in terms of land territory owned within Sol after so many centuries of trades and shrewd maneuvers, but now they were going to give it all up?

But then again, therein lay the problem. That #12 ranking was the highest her Clan possessed in any field or subcategory. In truth the Snowstorms were at the bottom of the barrel, ranking 90th or worse in 73% of all tracked categories. Oni had stated as much when she’d explained the move to the entire Clan, intending for this to be a rebirth that could eventually catch Snowstorm up with the others, despite the fact that they’d have to start building from scratch.

But Sophia rejected that. Her Clan wasn’t bad at anything, the other Clans just happened to be as good as they were…and then some. Snowstorm had grown its population by 3% over just the past 5 years, with industry up 2% and resource collection up a whopping 8% over the same timeframe. They were a thriving little empire of their own within Star Force, but the way Oni said it made her think that she was disappointed with the Clan and that something had to change.

Abandoning everything they’d built up over the centuries to date seemed immensely stupid, especially since Sophia understood how long it took to build infrastructure like the cities sitting on the horizon and the much closer one towering behind her. It wasn’t something you could just buy, no matter how many credits you had. Clan Snowstorm might be rich as hell right now with all the trades Oni had made, but they were soon to be homeless and no amount of credits was going to change that.

Sophia knew she could transfer to another Clan without much trouble, but she was a Snowstorm at heart and couldn’t bear to switch allegiances, even if it meant her staying in Sol, or even on Arwen…and going Mainline was even worse. Their military might be able to hold their own with the Clans now and then, but their civilian populations were considerably looser, often to the point of dysfunctional. Everyone within her Clan, no matter what position they held, wanted to see Snowstorm rise in the ranks and become a larger power within the Star Force empire, and even the lazier ones would chip in now and then to help make that happen.

There was no such sentiment within Mainline. It was everyone for themselves, with a core group that held everything together while the rest of the population was made up of freeloaders. That excess baggage was a big reason why the Clans were better than Mainline in almost every way, save for in terms of population. Mainline numbers made the entirety of the Clans a minuscule minority and constituted the bulk of the Human population. As it was, there were almost as many Humans in Axius as there were in the Clans…which was something else that Oni had pointed out.

The trailblazer said she wanted to issue a request to the Snowstorm population, which included Sophia and every other female member of the Clan, to make every reasonable effort to start getting knocked up and pumping out more younglings. A lot of girls like Sophia had never given birth nor cared to, focusing instead on their self-sufficiency and increasing their skills, which in her case centered on computer software. She knew she could take a temporary hit, get pregnant, miss a lot of training and become a walking blimp for a few months, then give birth and move on without losing her self-sufficiency. She was strong enough now to take a lot of hits before pushing her under the regenerative baseline, and if it was for the benefit of the Clan she’d even consider doing it.

Oni has said that she had never issued that request because despite all of the territory the Snowstorms had acquired within Sol they were always boxed in, having to work with limited resources and space-saving measures. Sophia found that a little odd, especially sitting outside on the empty surface between colonies seeing how much unused room there was, but it was true that she couldn’t look in any direction without seeing cityscape at some point, even if it was just the tallest towers rising up over the horizon.

The idea of having an entire planet to themselves was appealing, let alone one bigger than Earth. The system Oni had procured for them had not one, but seven worlds that size or larger, with a total of 64 planetoids that were colonizable, plus a pair of gas giants, one of which was so huge it was near to becoming its own star. That meant this new home for Clan Snowstorm had more territory than every planetoid within Sol combined, and that stat literally blew Sophia’s mind.

But there was nothing there…at all. It was empty now that a Bsidd fleet with Snowstorm assistance had wiped it clean of the lizards, like they were doing across so many other star systems in their ever growing region. By now the majority of all Star Force troops were Bsidd, with their numbers continuing to skyrocket as all of Star Force, Clan Snowstorm included, funneled resources towards them in order for their civilization to be able to grow rapidly enough in infrastructure to accommodate such a population explosion.

And it was paying dividends, no doubt. The Bsidd had taken more worlds in recent years than the Calavari had, and were kicking the crap out of the lizards in a region where they had been claiming systems with only a handful of ships. Those easy grabs were being gobbled up by the Bsidd and the few other units that worked along with them as they simultaneously pounded the lizard strongholds beyond Alpha Region, adding territory to Star Force’s holdings while all the time expanding the border of the Bsidd Region with it blossoming upward and downward on the galactic plane simultaneously.

It was into that new region that Clan Snowstorm would be moving, and very near the border, far away from potential help should they be attacked or fail to set up the necessary infrastructure to house their population, but Oni has stated that was a challenge befitting the Clan and reminiscent of its early history when she had first founded it. Sophia had to take her word for that, for she had been born long after, and while she agreed this would definitely qualify as hitting the ‘reset’ button, the tech still felt it was a tremendous waste of everything they’d built to date.

Technically none of their colonies would be wasted, for other Clans would be taking them over and populating them with their own people…and the thought of someone else sleeping in her quarters and her bed just irked Sophia to no end, but what was she going to do? It was either move out with her Clan or abandon it, and she liked the latter a lot less than the former.

The move wasn’t going to take place immediately, but over the course of 7 years. The first startup elements were already on their way, with the population of Arwen starting to filter out somewhere in year two and finish up by year four. It would take nearly 2 months of travel time just to get to where they were going, and then they’d have to live in their ships for as long as it took to get suitable colonies on the surface of the third largest planet built. It had an environment much like Earth’s, only a bit on the warmer side, plus the view of the big gas giant that it orbited around, which technically made it a moon.

Sophia wouldn’t need an envirosuit to walk about there, and the planet was 12% covered with water, giving the Clan’s aquatics division a badly needed playground, for all of their training was accomplish in simulators and indoor pools…which was probably part of the reason they had hit that dreaded #100 ranking several times over the past century in that division, despite their individual scores gradually creeping upward. Again, the rankings were all about competition, not performance, for all the Clans were continuously improving.

The other planets/moons in the system wouldn’t be used for decades, if not centuries to come, but they’d be there for Clan Snowstorm to colonize down the road, with them not having to worry about expansion room for the next millennium. How many girls would respond to the call for a population surge when the time came was a question mark, but Sophia knew that many would. As it was some people only gave birth to continue the Clan without having any sentimental attachment, given that the infants immediately went into a maturia after birth…while a few others chose to make themselves baby factories, getting laid as often as they could and attracting the strongest and hottest guys for the purpose of ‘reproduction,’ or at least that was their excuse.

Either way, it seemed to work for most of them, but Sophia knew she’d never make a career out of it. If there was a need she might contribute one or two, but then it’d be back to normal training. The up side would be her software skills didn’t require a big deviation in lifestyle, for sitting in a chair working a console and sitting in a chair watching vids while you increased in volume weren’t all dissimilar. She could probably keep working on projects during the pregnancy, unlike others that had physical jobs. In fact, she’d probably have to in order to keep from going crazy from boredom.

The more she thought about it the less she liked the idea, but knowing that it’d only be temporary Sophia knew she could step into the stinger if necessary and take one for the team. It just didn’t feel right though, for the idea of her doing that in the past had always centered around adding to her home’s population…and now they were totally abandoning Arwen and the Solar System itself.

She just couldn’t get past that. Sophia felt so much of a connection to this world that she didn’t know how she could ever leave it, and scribbled some meaningless doodles in the dust to her left as the sun finally dipped below the horizon. The stars took over prominence within the sky, added to by the orbital habitats gleaming alongside them. They were mere specs from her point of view, for they were situated high up around the tiny world, but several starports were much larger when visible, though at the moment none were within sight range.

They’d be orbiting around soon enough, but for the moment it was just the stars and the lights of the surrounding cities acting as luminous beacons within the darkness. The ground beneath Sophia was covered in shadows, but even the lighted regions were dim, making her feel the isolation even more. If her own world felt like this, how would one months away from here feel?

She didn’t know, and it bothered her right up until the first low oxygen warning pinged inside her helmet. Sophia checked the levels and saw that she still had over 3 hours left, but she knew better than to flirt with that deadline and picked herself up off the ground, accidentally throwing her body into a slight jump in the low gravity. She’d lived her entire life on this rock, but had always known normal levels within the colonies, making her home feel yet even more foreign to her, despite the pangs of nostalgia she was getting just looking off into the distance.

That was when she knew she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just walk away from this place one day heading off into the unknown, so as she headed back over the kilometer or so that she’d walked from the external gate she tried to figure out what the best option she had was. When she got into the airlock and the normal gravity settled her body her mind wasn’t dissuaded. This was her home and she couldn’t just abandon it, but in a few years’ time it was going to be filled with Clan Thunderfist. The location might be the same, but without her fellow Clan members it still wouldn’t be home.

“Have a nice walk?” the tech who helped her out of her envirosuit asked as she came through the airlock and disconnected her helmet.

“Did more sitting than walking…and no, not really.”

“Something wrong?” he said, taking the head piece and setting it on a side table before coming back to help Sophia unbutton the armored carapace covering her body.

“I hate this evacuation plan.”

“You’re not the only one with misgivings,” he assured her, “but you can’t argue that it’s a big challenge.”

“It’s the throwing away what we’ve got here that’s the problem.”

“Kind of has to happen if you want a clean slate.”

“Our slate is fine as is,” she said, getting out of the torso section. “I can get the rest.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, carrying the section over and sitting it next to the helmet in front of a row of booths that had dozens of other suits. “Are you going to try and get transferred to Earth?”

“No. Arwen is my home.”

The man frowned. “You’re not thinking of jumping Clans are you?”

“Never,” she said firmly.

“You think Oni is making a mistake?”

“I don’t know. She’s never steered us wrong before, I just can’t shake this bad feeling.”

“You’ve still got a few years to work it out.”

“No,” Sophia said, pulling her thin leg out of her right extended boot. “I’m not waiting. I’m going to volunteer to go now.”

“Why? If you don’t want to leave…”

“Because if I go now I’ll still have a home to come back to. If I wait, I’ll be walking away for good, and I just can’t bring myself to do that.”

“It’s a long trip out there.”

“I know, but I’ll be able to come back at least once.”

“And won’t have to leave facing an unknown future?”

“Something like that. I also realized that I can’t spent the next two years waiting to find out. I’ll drive myself nuts in the meantime.”

“What’s your specialty?”

“Software engineer.”

“Not sure they’ll have too many slots for that open right now.”

“I’ve got construction as an auxiliary skillset, along with six others. I’ll fill some slot they need.”

“Always on the move,” he commented, accepting the last pieces of the envirosuit from her.

“This time literally,” she said, friendly waving him goodbye as she walked out of the station and back into the rest of the colony.

2

October 15, 2783

Frost System (Bsidd Region)

Flake

Sophia rode on a Dragon-class dropship along with over 200 other Snowstorms down from the cargo jumpship watching the view via a series of wall-mounted displays and getting a view of their new homeworld as they dipped into the atmosphere. The moon was huge and covered in pinks and greens, for the natural foliage seemed to predominate in those two colors. There were a pair of ice caps on either pole and long streaks of blue that made up the planet’s narrow oceans that almost connected the two, bracketed by high mountain ranges easily visible from orbit.

The rest of the planet was more or less flat and covered with forest as far as Sophia could see. She’d run through the reconnaissance reports earlier, but seeing it here now, in person, was an entirely different experience. There was so much open space that it literally felt mindboggling, and for the first time since she’d volunteered for and acquired an advance slot on a construction crew did she start to wonder if Oni really did know what she was doing by orchestrating this move.

And the planet, or rather moon…she wasn’t going to get used to thinking of it as such since it was way bigger than Arwen…had been given a proper Clan name of ‘flake’ rather than one assigned prior to their acquisition of the system. In fact, all the planets/moons were getting fitting names, which was another sign that this was indeed going to become home as soon as they set down proper roots…which she was seeing none of from orbit.

There weren’t any cities whatsoever, and since her volunteering had occurred prior to any major construction reports getting back to Sol she didn’t know where they were actually heading. When the dropship decelerated and hit the thick lower atmosphere she was surprised to see them dart off across the water, leaving the land behind entirely and her wondering if her Clan had started with an aquatic colony. That would be very odd if they did, but at this point she and the others were just along for the ride and would have to wait and see.

About 20 minutes later a dot appeared on the watery horizon that eventually grew into a large island, on top of which a few spires were visible. When they got closer Sophia could also see a large structure jotting off the side and into the ocean, which she recognized as an aquatics facility. Smiling, she realized that for a startup this was in fact the perfect location, giving all aspects of the Snowstorms a chance to get up and running immediately.

As the dropship crossed over the wide beaches and into the vast interior it flew through a forest of pink with only a few dots of green here and there. Several more minutes and they finally came to an artificial clearing and landed on a dirt field, with instructions for the passengers to debark immediately. Sophia got up out of her seat with the others and moved out, having no personal belongings with her. As an advance team they couldn’t be burdened with extra cargo and wouldn’t have personal quarters, rather being bunked in a communal facility that would rotate people in and out.

She’d have a room, but a tiny one. How long it would be hers she didn’t know, but as more people came in she expected to get moved around so she and the others would be living off the equipment rooms rather than their own collections of clothing and accoutrements.

A trio of hovering vehicles stood waiting for them outside the dropship with the passengers splitting up for them as instructed. Sophia got in the line for the second one, noticing the dozens of other dropships and transports spread out on the field around them…and the proper spaceport beyond that was full of ships on the tarmac. This dirt extension had obviously been made recently, suggesting that her Clan was serious about getting this startup going as fast as possible, and she found herself beginning to share in that urgency and a bit of the excitement that seemed to be permeating the air.

The gravity on the planet was a bit heavy, but as soon as she stepped into the vehicle the artificial gravity took over and returned the feel of her legs to normal. She found a seat along with the others and before long the ‘bus’ was on its way, taking them to who knew where given the fact that there were no windows and only a panel showing what the drivers saw. They were in a forward compartment while everyone else was in the back, protected behind decently thick plating, as was standard for all Clan Snowstorm vehicles.

The ground transport moved off through the grid and eventually came to the forest edge, following a dirt road between the pink trees until they gained altitude a few kilometers later to overshoot a trio of construction mechs that were actively adding to the road. Sophia’s vehicle skimmed the treetops, flying the rest of the way out to a small patch of forest carved out of the mass of trees. There they found another dirt landing field settled up next to piles of crates and a few prefab structures.

When she exited the vehicle there was a processing station, so everyone got in line and waited their turn. When Sophia got to the station that was little more than an archway with a holographic terminal attached, her ID was confirmed and the attendant gave her a designator chip, then pointed in the direction she needed to go. With that being all the handholding that was going to happen, the tech walked in that general direction while fingering the chip and activating the holographic interface.

Watching to make sure she didn’t get run over or stepped on by some of the few mechs moving around, she ran through the instructions and saw that she’d been assigned to an excavation team that was carving out the bedrock at this site in order to establish the substructure of a mining station. She was going to be part of the material relocation rather than the actual digging, which meant she got to play with all the dirt and rock that came up.

Finding an exact location that she was supposed to report to, Sophia got her bearings and began jogging towards one of the distant prefab buildings, feeling her shoes sink into a few patches of mud enough that it came up to her ankles. One time she lost her shoe entirely, having to stop and go back for it. Luckily she hadn’t been wearing any socks, otherwise they would have been dirty as hell by now.

She slipped the shoe on and tried to do a better job of navigating around the muddiest spots, but with the trees having been recently cleared away there was no grass or moss or anything else to stand on until she got to her destination and stepped up onto civilization in the form of ground plates looking like huge, flat legos that had been connected together to create a solid base on which the building and several crate stacks had been placed.

Sophia jogged across it, leaving muddy footprints that were far smaller than the ones the mechs had left, and was waved over by a woman standing near the entrance.

“About time you guys got here,” she said, seeing a few more people trailing behind Sophia. “We’re half an hour behind schedule already, and that means the diggers have to wait until we clear out their transition piles before they can continue.”

“Where do you need me?” Sophia asked, handing her chip to the handler so she could scan it and read her file on a datapad.

“Equipment room. Get into a work suit and grab a bite to eat. We’re going to be pulling some long hours until we get more hands on site.”

“Got it,” Sophia said as she entered through the small doorway and went inside, stopping to pull off her shoes and go barefoot to keep from spreading mud on the mostly clean floor. She followed the hallway until she got to the first intersection, taking a right and heading for the equipment room that was based on a standard design that she was familiar with, for she’d lived in one of these structures before during training exercises.

She padded her way into the elongated bay and dumped her shoes in a cleansing bin where they’d be recycled into the communal closet, which she now walked over to and pulled out the items in her size, then took them over to a personal booth and shut herself inside. She stripped down and hopped in the shower, cleaning off all the mud before stepping into her clean clothes, first a set of underwear, then a thin shirt and shorts. From there she left her station and ran barefooted over to a nearby room that had a number of prepackaged foodstuffs. She grabbed and ate several quickly, finishing off with a bottle of water before heading back to her booth.

She used the restroom inside then pulled on her armorish clothing. It was entirely flexible, but sealed against the outside environment from the neck down if need be. She left the gloves and helmet back on the racks, knowing just how warm it was outside. Snugging up the boots to fit the exact size of her feet and ankles, Sophia grabbed her ID chip and put it in a concealed pocket, then headed for the lounge/information center that was only a few running strides down the short hall.

“Good to go,” she reported to the woman there.

“Take number 6 and get busy loading with these two.”

“Let’s get to it,” she said, glancing at the two men who got up out of their seats to join her. “I’m Sophia Brent.”

“Nathan Pergusson,” one said, giving her a slight nod.

“Jarod Grembly. Looks like we’re driving. Try not to ding the rim.”

“No promises,” she said with a smile as the three of them walked off and eventually out of what would be their home for the next few days at minimum. Outside there was a small parking lot nearby, in which there was a lot of open air cargo trucks and a handful of excavation mechs. She found the one with a big number 6 on it and climbed up the handholds on the right leg while the two men went to their trucks.

“Been a while,” Sophia said to herself as she got past the waist on the huge mech and climbed inside the cockpit that was located on the chest between two huge arms. It was open to the air save for a thin layer of transparent material. Had this been a military variety that would never have happened, but given that this mech had no weapons or armor it was best to keep it as functional as possible, with its designed geared towards channeling all functionality towards earthmoving.

Sophia slid into the seat and strapped herself in, for this variety didn’t have artificial gravity. It was a big, beefy workhorse that stood twice as tall as a thor, with it literally swallowing Sophia up inside its chest cavity.

“Ok, big guy. Let’s get to work,” she said, powering up the mech and getting a comm channel from one of the trucks. She opened it and keyed to have all transmissions from that source automatically routed through to her cockpit, then did the same with the other truck.

“You ready, sexy?”

“So that’s how it’s going to be?” she asked humorously.

“All we have time for, unfortunately.”

“Awfully confident…mech checks out. I’m good to go.”

“Take the lead.”

Sophia blew out a breath and triggered the computer-controlled movements to begin walking the bipedal giant forward. The first few steps were jerky, but once a little momentum was built up it traveled smoothly with her turning on a heading towards the mountains of material next to the dig site about two kilometers off. She walked it over there, seeing not a single other mech in action, but noticing the drilling spigots silent as they held position over some of the mounds.

Had everything been up and running they would have been pouring material out for her and others to pick up and load into the trucks, and while they were silent that meant no digging was taking place on the other side in the pit.

“Time to get this show moving,” she said, walking up to the nearest mound and laying a waypoint down for where she wanted her trucks to position. The second one hung back, but the first one came up and sat square on the spot while Sophia positioned the mech in between the vehicle and the mound.

She shoved the left arm into the dirt/rock mix and activated the rotary claws which fed the loose material into a conveyor that ran through the shoulders of the mech, over her cockpit, and down to the other arm. Sophia set it in the bowl-like truck bed and began pouring material into the deep bucket, seeing the hovering vehicle bob a bit with the extra weight being added.

Using a hand control on the left, she swiped the receptacle across the nearest part of the mound in a line, then reversed direction for another before repositioning her giant metallic feet half a step closer as the material was being eaten up at a fast rate. The truck, however, was bigger than the mech, though only half as tall. It stretched out in a long rectangular barge style, and it took a fair amount of time for Sophia to fill up half of it.

At that point the drilling spigots began working again, but only two of them. They began adding material to an empty slot two down from where she was along with an almost full pile, anticipating that there would be more room opening up shortly so they could begin low scale continuous digging operations. That meant they could only operate as quickly as Sophia could move the material out, so she was the pace setter as long as her pair of trucks could keep up with her.

Eventually the first was filled and it signaled to her with a departure ping. Sophia shut down the feeds and lifted the arm up and out of the way, then pinged the truck back that it was clear. It floated off slowly, carrying a huge load, with the empty one sliding in right behind it to waste no time. Sophia began loading it immediately while the first truck headed for the forest edge where it lifted up over the treetops and carried the material several kilometers away to another clearing that a pair of mechs were in the process of expanding upon. Infantry units were in play and visible on the construction version of a battlemap, locating and chasing off any wildlife in the area so they wouldn’t get chopped to bits in the clearing process.

The truck passed over them and headed for the small open section that had been cleared and leveled, then it opened its bottom doors and dumped the full load in the center of it. The vehicle shot into the air a moment before the anti-grav compensated, then it closed its doors and headed on the return trip as a third mech woke from its statue-like stance and headed over to the pile, intending to work it down into a meter thick bed, compacting it with a series of rollers in order to lay the base for an artificial mountain they’d be constructing.

In the future that mountain would be cannibalized and eaten away by processing machines for raw materials, but right now those facilities hadn’t been built yet and wouldn’t be coming online for weeks at the minimum. Right now the digging crews from multiple sites needed somewhere to put the dirt, and this would be it.

Over the next 24 hours there would be more mechs and trucks coming into play as the influx of personnel arrived to run the machines, which would also be added to by subsequent orbital drops. It would be awhile before surface factories started making any useable projects, meaning that right now it was all about earthmoving and setting up some basic, permanent facilities built from materials being shipped down from the jumpships sitting in orbit around the enormous moon.

And there were sites like this all across the island, most of which were just getting up and running. Sophia really had gotten here at the outset, and while this planet was definitely still on the frontier and very wild, with every bit of dirt she moved was helping to make it into their new home. The feelings of unrest at having to abandon Arwen would never totally leave her, but now having a hand in the construction of this world she was able to put aside the constant worry and dive into the work, for helping her Clan was her foremost priority, and if this was the course that Oni wanted for them, then so be it.

It might still be a stupid move but it was the trailblazer’s to make, and the Snowstorms would make it work eventually, no matter how much they lost in the transition.

3

December 2, 2783

Frost System (Bsidd Region)

Flake

Marquis Sheen sat at her workstation onboard the jumpship Polar Veil, a Clan cargo ship that was already half empty after only a week of unloading, which was quite a feat considering its size. It was a product of Clan Humungousaur and had been traded to Sheen’s Clan along with a lot of other equipment and payment promises going forward for part of their territory on Titan. The cargo ship design was the largest within Star Force, but had a disproportionate amount of its bulk dedicated to engines, making it more maneuverable and a touch faster than your traditional jumpships.

It wasn’t cheap, by any stretch of the imagination, and economically speaking you could have built 5 Mammoth-class cargo ships for the same amount of resources, which was why Mainline and most of the Clans had never bothered to go that route. As more technologies were unlocked from the pyramid the size of Star Force’s ships was getting larger and larger, but the Humungousaurs had taken the leap forward without the necessary tech and gotten around the lack thereof through innovation and by cannibalizing a good part of what would have been storage areas for additional engine power and other ship functions.

The Island-class design definitely lived up to its name, and while there were only 16 in existence this one alone had brought in its holds enough foodstuffs and collapsed prefab buildings to set up the next expansion site on Flake by itself. The primary site in the ocean was progressing well, but now that Sheen was here with a much larger fleet they were going to start construction efforts on a number of other sites across the moon. All would be resource gathering operations while the ocean island was going to be the focal point for the influx of population and technology to come. She knew she had to get its factories up and running before the surge of raw materials began arriving, and so far everything was proceeding according to the schedule she and Oni had worked out.

The trailblazer and several other Administrators would be overseeing the rest of the evacuation of their facilities in Sol while the Marquis was now here in Frost to stay. Oni had wanted her here early and she’d agreed that the events of the coming months had to come off without a hitch else they’d risk jeopardizing the transition. Cities couldn’t build themselves, and without proper infrastructure there wouldn’t be room to put Clan Snowstorm’s population when it fully arrived. As it was they were going to have to make use of a lot of prefab settlements just to get the people off the ships initially, with the permanent structures soaking them up as they eventually came online.

Oni knew this was going to be a camping trip these first few years, and it was imperative that they hold to the evacuation schedules that they’d negotiated with the other Clans. If they had to delay the others wouldn’t penalize them for that, for the Clans weren’t cutthroat with each other, but they were professional and not meeting the deadline was something that just wouldn’t do. Each Clan had its own objectives within the Empire and would be making schedules of its own with regards to the new acquisitions, so if the Snowstorms couldn’t hold up to what they’d promised they’d mess up a lot of other Clans’ plans.

That was unacceptable, for the Clans didn’t sabotage each other. They always wanted to outdo each other, but that was from sheer performance. The stronger each Clan became the stronger Star Force would be overall, so the impetus was always on improvement and success, never destruction and hampering one another. Sheen knew this better than virtually everyone else because she’d been running the Clan for the past 129 years. Technically Oni was in command, but as a warrior needed she was off fighting most of the time and only kept in contact to stay appraised of ongoing events and to troubleshoot new endeavors going forward.

The routine business of keeping the Clan running smoothly was the job of a Marquis, with the administratorial position requiring constant oversight. Having all Snowstorm possessions within a single star system had allowed her to micromanage to a far greater extent than the Clans that had pieces of planets across the ADZ in their possession, and it would be no different here. The lag in communications was mere minutes compared to the days and weeks elsewhere.

Right now there was a split, because the Frost System wasn’t even hooked up to the grid yet, meaning all communications had to come through courier ship. That necessitated her presence here and other Administrators back in Sol, for one couldn’t keep track of the other, even on relative delay, without the communications grid link. Here was the more important task so here Sheen had come, and the Polar Veil was making for the perfect orbital command post now that the cargo was flowing out of its holds and numerous prefab structures were being set up in the empty spaces, creating a makeshift city inside that would grow with select personnel as they came in.

And here she would stay until the primary surface site reached a prerequisite level of completeness…which wasn’t expected to occur for the next seven years. This entire move was a gambit that would have the Snowstorms reduced to a nomadic existence in the near future, and it was one that Sheen had not wanted to undertake. Oni had eventually convinced her of the long term advantage and the Marquis had agreed to accept it as a challenge, though they were giving up everything they had built up in Sol for the opportunity.

That development was what was now funding this opportunity. Director Davis was still masterminding all territorial expansions along with the trailblazers and had told Oni that he wasn’t going to allow for such a valuable and distant acquisition of the system unless they could do better at developing it than any of the other factions. In fact they were so close to the lizard border that well over 60% of the Clan Snowstorm fleet now sat in orbit to safeguard the construction efforts. The rest was out helping the Bsidd fight the lizards on nearby worlds and would continue to do so going forward, with their Clan literally putting down roots in this frontier region and taking a personal interest in its defense.

Such a determined effort was what had convinced Davis to agree to Oni’s request, but he wasn’t going to fund the transfer. The Clan had to do that on their own, and per the terms of the origination of the Clans they couldn’t trade with anyone other than each other. That stipulation had relaxed in times of need in order to benefit the overall Empire, but the principle held true to this day so they couldn’t hire out or purchase equipment from anyone other than their fellow 99 Clans, and vice versa.

The idea was to keep the Clans isolated from the rest of Star Force so that any disruptions in the overall economy, or even a massive invasion into the ADZ, wouldn’t affect them in terms of their production capacity. Relying on the larger economy was a strength at times, but also a weakness…and it was a weakness the Clans had been designed to circumvent.

Given that all of the trailblazers were essentially clones of one another, the Clans had developed along the same philosophies that they all shared. That said, competition between them had garnered alterations to be made that distinguished one from another. The choice to keep all territory within Sol had been one of those deciding factors for Clan Snowstorm, but there were also some structural differences as well.

Early on Oni had wanted Snowstorm to be self-sufficient, but above and beyond what they all had decided was necessary for the Clans. Originally the groupings had been developed to facilitate Archon training and advancement through competition, but when Davis had insisted that they be expanded into miniature empires of their own Oni had made infrastructure redundancy a top priority. She’d wanted them making everything themselves rather than having to trade with their fellow Clans, but then again that’s the way all of them operated.

What she had done differently was to instruct her previous Marquises to build planetary infrastructure with an obsessive redundancy and to keep their production levels at approximately 60% capacity. Rather than upping that productivity when needed, they’d build more facilities to compensate for the growth. From a certain point of view that had been wasteful, but she wanted the ability to absorb bad scenarios with their current assets rather than being forced into a situation where they had to deal with shortages or rely on trade with the other Clans.

Several other Clans had taken the same approach, each with a different percentage as protocol, but Clan Snowstorm, Clan Emerald Shark, and Clan Apex had collabed with each other on a development project that would take the infrastructure redundancy to the next level. Oni, Roger, and Wes had done most of the work themselves, in secret, and designed modular add-ons to the standard drone docking berths on warships and other carrier craft. These were more than just docked ships, and required a layover at a shipyard of scale to accomplish, but if you had one sitting ready it would allow you to convert a warship or hybrid cargo vessel into a mobile factory within days.

These pseudo MCVs were not designed to build new infrastructure from scratch, but rather to produce specific high end produce just as if they were a factory on the surface of a planet or an orbital facility. The three Clans hadn’t shared the designs with anyone else, though word of them eventually spread after a few decades of limited use and a few copycat projects sprung up, but neither the original mods nor their designs were ever offered up as trade, and all three Clans went about building their own industrial mods and quietly storing them away in stasis orbits should a time come that they would need them.

Over the years Clan Oni had sold off about a third of their mods to the Emerald Sharks and Apexes, given their Sol-only territorial move. The other Clans were able to put them to more use as they expanded to new systems, able to fly the factories there and have them continue production immediately so long as they were given the necessary raw resources via supply flow. Oni had instructed Sheen to always hold back a sufficient supply of them should there be a need…and now there was, more so than ever before.

The Marquis had been in negotiation with the other two Clans to buy or trade for more of the mods, resulting in a sum total of 245% of their original number, many of which had entered the system along with the Polar Veil and were already spinning up production. Everything from fuel to foodstuffs would start to be made locally to supplement their cargo stores, and the flow of raw materials would also be coming in as other Clans would be sending shipments to them in exchange for what Clan Snowstorm was leaving behind.

There were hundreds of deals that had been made, some by Oni herself, but a lot by Sheen on her behalf. Oni would often tell her what she wanted and the Marquis would make the contacts and see what was available, though sometimes the trailblazer could directly acquire things that Sheen never could, simply because of her relationship with the other trailblazers. Together they had spent more than 2 years hammering out deals, with many of them detailing that the production of natural resources within the territories being transferred would be shared at a rate of 50% for the first ten years, then 25% for the following five.

That would mean for the next decade several other Clans would be sending half their mining produce from the transferred territories to the Snowstorms, and would be responsible for the shipping themselves. That meant the Marquis wouldn’t have to be relying on just the infantile surface production to supply the modular ship factories with the materials they required, and other deals had been made for them to receive finished products from other Clans, giving them a supply flow to suck off of while they got around to building what they needed on Flake.

This entire operation had been designed, not as a startup operation, but an active transfer from one location to another. There was a lot of loss happening in the transition, but the Clan was still going to remain very active…or at least that was the plan, and Sheen was here to bring it to life as much as she could while Oni was off fighting lizards with the Bsidd or who knew what other projects she had cooked up with the other trailblazers. Most of the time her Marquis didn’t know exactly where she was or what she was doing, but then again she didn’t have to, for the relay grid sent out duplicate messages to every receiver station, on which they were then stored for infinity.

Sheen had her work and the trailblazer had hers, but together they were going to make this move happen, and if Oni was right, their Clan was going to shoot into the upper ranks a century or so from now. For a lot of people that seemed like forever, but to the Clan it wasn’t, and to Sheen it was a lot of work ahead of her but the timeframe didn’t seem unreasonable. In the meantime their warfleet would be working out of other ports, some Clan, some Mainline, some Bsidd, for refitting, rearming, and resupply in lieu of the fact that as of soon Clan Snowstorm wouldn’t have a shipyard large enough to accommodate anything larger than a drone destroyer.

They had brought along several MRVs that were jumpships that had been modified to act as small-scale shipyards, capable of repairing extensive battle damage on the smaller drones in short order, but they only had a handful and the larger vessels couldn’t fit within their tiny slips, meaning that any work done on them would have to be ‘by hand’ and would take forever, hence the deals made with the other Clans and factions within Star Force to compensate in the meantime.

That was already happening across Star Force territory, for Clan warships weren’t always returning to Clan facilities for repair work. They were all a team and helped each other out as necessary, so that didn’t violate the exclusion protocol for the Clans, but if the Snowstorms wanted to acquire new vessels they’d either have to produce them themselves or trade with the other Clans. New drones could not be supplied from Mainline facilities.

So deals had been made to compensate for that snag, because Oni insisted that the Clan was not taking a ‘timeout’ from the ongoing lizard war. She’d been adamant that they not scale back military operations at all, but they were going to start centering around this star system in the coming years. The sooner Sheen got a working shipyard built, no matter how small, the better Oni would feel, hence it was one of her top priorities.

Getting a major shipyard established was more of a dream at this point than a workable goal, but Oni had already slated one of the insane Sol-level facilities for their future plans, though Sheen knew that such a monstrosity was going to soak up so many resources that it wasn’t going to be viable in the next 50 years, minimum.

They’d talked for hours upon hours about what the trailblazer’s future plans for the Clan were, and they were nothing short of ridiculously ambitious. She seemed to think that with isolation came opportunity, and absent the few Trials they would be participating in back in Sol everything competitive here had to come from within, and with their own brand new oceans to play in, aquatics was going to be their first major push.

That was why they’d dropped a huge amount of resources into prefabricated surface facilities that had already allowed aquatics craft a home on the shore of the primary site. Even as initial underwater construction was ongoing training missions were being held and obstacle courses set up. Oni wanted to see them rise in the ranks within two years in that category, and was devoting a lot of resources to get the type of facilities set up that had been impossible to create on the barren, rocky worlds they’d possessed in Sol.

Had Sheen been making the call, training would have come in as a distant consideration, but Oni wanted it first and foremost, even before sufficient housing was built for the Clan’s population. The Marquis knew that getting basic quarters built for every single person was the right way to go before expanding out to other infrastructure projects and had argued against the fact that they could live on the jumpships for a considerable length of time if necessary.

Oni had nixed that, stating that they couldn’t let their people grow stagnant with the limited training facilities onboard the jumpships and that when they had a full planet to play with now they were going to take advantage of that from the beginning, reminding the Marquis that this was to be an active transition.

That word was going to come back to haunt her, Sheen knew, for what Oni wanted across the board was more than just a challenge…it was nuts. She had no way of knowing how much of what the trailblazer wanted was possible, for there were too many variables to consider. The only way forward was to get her ass on site and start working the problems one by one and see where it all led.

So now she was here, sitting in her orbital castle overseeing the ever growing army of workers beginning to transform a pinprick of the moon into a bastion of Clan Snowstorm civilization. Meanwhile the other Clans continued to grow, some by leaps and bounds considering what they’d just acquired from them. In the short term it seemed like a huge step backwards for Snowstorm, not just a transition, but Oni was adamant that this was going to work and that was enough for Sheen to pour everything she had into the effort.

But if this didn’t work, and work well, her Clan was going to be diminished to an insignificant blip within Star Force.

4

July 3, 2811

Solar System

Earth

Sean-939221 ran up to the entrance of the final chamber along with two of his teammates, Vlad-939228 and Sarah-939225, taking cover amongst the crooked halls as they scouted what was beyond…seeing the large open chamber with a low wall on the other side and the holographic icon floating over top of it, marking the end of the trainees’ Final Challenge and their graduation from basic training. They’d already spent more than a day surviving the twists and turns of the labyrinth they had to fight their way through, and now the 100 of them were almost to the end, with the rest mopping up some mobile drones that had sniped down a few stragglers.

Those trainees were being recovered and reawakened from the stun hits, for everyone made it to the finish line or no one did. That wasn’t a rule per se, but it was how everyone felt, and regardless of whether it was one of Sean’s 2s or any of the other teams, all 100 trainees were equally committed to completing this challenge and becoming Archons. In a rarity over the past three years, they weren’t competing against each other. This time they were all on the same side and the course was the enemy…and then some.

“Damn it, looks like Dash was right,” Sarah commented, seeing the lone figure in the room ahead waiting for them. “That bastard is just standing there waiting for us.”

“Wouldn’t feel right if he wasn’t here,” Sean commented, seeing the Black Knight waiting with stun sword in hand. Whether or not he’d spotted them peeking around the corner was unknown, but if he had he’d chosen to stay put, still as a statue, and literally daring them to come to him.

Which they had to.

Sean ran his pale fingers through his bleach blonde hair. “Let’s stay out of sight until we figure out how to deal with this.”

“There are 100 of us and 1 of him,” Vlad countered. “We just rush the mother.”

“You really think it’s going to be that easy?” Sarah asked.

“Probably not,” Vlad admitted, glancing around the room, or what he could see of it from his position. “Walls look clear, so if there’s any turrets they’ll be hidden inside.”

“He’s probably just the bait and that whole room is a kill zone,” Sarah floated.

“We need to find out for sure,” Sean suggested as another pair of trainees caught up to them and hunkered down behind them in their white with blue stripe uniforms, one of which had a pair of blue paint smears on his left hip more than 12 hours old.

“What’s up?”

“Our old friend is here,” Sean said, stepping back so they could have room to look themselves.

“Shit. Like this wasn’t hard enough already.”

“We think there’s probably concealed turrets,” Sarah said as more of them began to catch up with the scouts, some armed with pistols, others with stun sticks and grenades.

“I’ll go,” Sean offered. “Just be sure to drag me across the finish when it’s over.”

Sarah frowned. “Go and do what? You really think the turrets will come out just for you? If I were the trainers I’d hold them back until most of us got in there.”

“She has a point,” Krich-939281 said, placing a restricting hand on Sean’s shoulder.

“Got any better ideas?”

“Make it a trio,” someone else suggested, tossing a shield up and over the heads of the others that Sean grabbed out of midair.

“Thanks,” he said, bringing the 3/4th length narrow piece of armor up in front of him. It’d do well to stop any incoming stingers, so long as they were shooting him from the front and didn’t hit his feet. He could crouch down to cover but would have a hard time maneuvering around, though he’d done it before. Adding two more similarly equipped trainees would allow them to turtle up in a technique they’d developed early on in their training to beat the pesky hidden turrets that the trainers seemed to place everywhere.

That said, he still didn’t think they’d get very far.

“On my back and stay close,” Sean said as the other two got up to him and pulled their shields across one side of their back, with both looping an arm around Sean’s waist so they could pull close and maximize their defense while being able to feel where each other were. That way they could still walk without creating unnecessary gaps for the stingers to get through, though their heads were still open to ceiling shots or grenades. It wasn’t a good situation all around, but it was better than going in solo. Even on the run, all it would take was one lucky shot to Sean’s back and he’d be down and unconscious, leaving his teammates to find a way past this last roadblock.

“Just probe,” Sarah said as they began to walk forward around the last corner in the hallway. “We’ll handle the rest.”

The trio of trainees came into view with Sean peeking around the corner of his shield. A window in the damn thing would have been nice, but they weren’t designed that way. He caught a glimpse of the Black Knight ahead, but it looked like he hadn’t moved yet.

“Nothing behind us. Clear walls.”

“Black Knight is just standing there.”

“I don’t like this,” Sean told the others, but they all kept moving forward.

“If we make it halfway we split.”

“Agreed.”

Step by small step they moved forward, with not a sight nor sound evident in the empty room save for their own footsteps and breathing, which thoroughly unnerved Sean even though he knew more or less what was going on. They got all the way out to mid room and still no response, which was when the trio blew apart, running in opposite directions that left Sean heading straight for the Black Knight.

Still nothing happened.

Sean didn’t intend to actually fight him with only a shield, for he’d left his pistol with one of the others so it wouldn’t be lost when he got stunned, but he wanted to at least provoke a reaction before he ran like crazy, half expecting the big guy to track him down despite the heavy armor he wore. When he got within five meters of him Sean juked to the right and made a dash for the low wall ahead, while the other two likewise rushed it, intending to try and get over and to the finish so long as no one was going to stop them.

That called the bluff, for even as the Black Knight raced to his right to catch Chad-939245 a series of panels on the wall pushed out alarmingly fast and brandished stinger turrets that peppered the area ahead of the trainees with shots. Sean resisted the urge to try and stop them, but knew he couldn’t delay either, else the Black Knight would circle back to him within a few seconds. If he was going to make for the wall then this was the moment, else he would have to run back to the others and probably get gunned down in the process.

Tucking his shield against his right side, which was the slightly closer wall, he dove in a skid on his right knee, sliding a meter before popping up and jumping into the air to do a shallow flip, all the while his shield was getting peppered with hits. He was hoping to disrupt the targeting with the extra movement long enough to gain some distance, but as he went midair his right ankle got hit, numbing it so much that when he got his feet on the ground his right leg collapsed for lack of muscle control.

That sent him tumbling to the ground where he landed smack on his face, with his shield hitting him on the head as it laid over him. He expected to get covered in stinger shots momentarily, but the sounds of the increasing weaponsfire didn’t result in any more loss of function. He twisted his neck slightly, playing dead as he guessed they thought he already was, and saw the others running out into the room and attacking the turrets on the walls, neutralizing them one by one as even more revealed themselves and flooded the room with paint.

Bodies were dropping every second, but so were the turrets…and then there was the Black Knight moving amongst them, whacking them down with his sword or fists.

Sean mentally ignored his right leg, pulling himself up to a crawl and hobbling away from his shield towards the wall that was three meters in front of him. A turret on the left wall turned to shoot him, but it got hit with  a trio of sniper shots and deactivated, giving Sean enough time to stand up on one leg and hop up to get his hands on the wall edge. He pulled himself up enough that he could see over it and the finish pedestal beyond…then suddenly a giant hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and threw him back into the room.

He cracked his head on the somewhat soft floor when he landed, then there were a blur of bodies passing over top of him. He could see several of his fellow trainees hunkered up inside a shield turtle that blocked enough of the stinger shots for them to get up close to the Black Knight, then they broke ranks and rushed him, shooting him at pointblank range with pistols, chucking grenades in his face, and then finishing him off with a series of stun sticks as they were taken down by the surrounding turrets.

Sean reached out for the pistol laying near him, finding it a few inches short of his fingers and cursing himself for having to hold back. He crawled up onto his shoulder and got to it, miraculously not attracting the attention of one of the remaining turrets. Rather than shoot at one of them on the walls or ceiling, he took the pistol and shot the downed Black Knight, knowing that his armor would suck up the stun quickly and he’d be back to bashing them in no time.

Sean might not be able to run or fight, but he could keep the bastard down while the others did the hard work…that was, until the pistol eventually ran out of rounds. He tried to climb to his feet and hop forward, but was caught by the armpit on the way up and dragged forward by Sarah. She got him to the wall along with the others, then got underneath his feet and stood up, pushing him up and over where he unceremoniously fell to the ground.

The crawl over to the finish line was short, and the most blissfully rewarding few meters he’d ever crossed. He got there after a large group of the others, entering a blue-lit hallway that gleamed with what appeared to be dragon scales covering it on floor, walls, and ceiling. As soon as he touched those he officially became an Archon…then he turned back to look for the others who were still piling over the wall.

One of the other trainees came over to him and injected his leg with a de-stunning serum, one of the few they had left from their ordeal in the labyrinth, and he felt his limb return to life. He stood up and ran back over to the wall, hopping up enough to look over and see where the rest of them were.

There were a dozen left, shooting the last of the turrets as the Black Knight stumbled to his feet, regaining coherence with every second. Seven trainees lay unconscious on the floor, with the others moving towards them. With his limb now back in action Sean abandoned the finish and went back over the wall, picking up one of the injured and freeing up a trainee that was still armed…who then shot the Black Knight as he came at her.

The shot didn’t take him down, but two others dove on him with stun sticks and managed to knock him away from the last few downed trainees being carried over the wall. Sean got his passenger transferred to others that were standing on top to facilitate the process, then he ducked to the side as the Knight’s stun sword whipped through where his head had just been. On instinct he ran sideways, getting a step on him as a hand reached down from up top.

Sean took it and was pivoted up and over the wall with the help of three other trainees acting as a counterweight. He didn’t care that he fell hard on the other side, more concerned that everyone made it over…for if they didn’t, they didn’t graduate. The idea of having to repeat the entire basic training was abhorrent, which was why all of the trainees were committed to getting everyone across and they wouldn’t hesitate to all go back over the wall if necessary.

Fortunately that wasn’t going to be needed, and the last man over yelled ‘all clear’ prompting Sean and the others to walk back into that beautiful hallway and out the now open door on the far side, completing the hardest 3 years of his life.

Head Trainer Wilson was there, along with a pair of Archon Acolytes, but it was the big guy that spoke. “Congratulations…now on to the hard stuff. Your basic training is now complete, and you’ll soon be assigned Clans where you will begin your adept training. Next time we see each other will be under different circumstances, for now, these two will guide you through the transition process.”

“Let’s go younglings,” one of the acolytes said, waving the group of them forward down the hall. “First a badly needed shower, then some food, and then you get to see where you end up. Hope for Clan Mantle.”

The other acolyte scoffed at that but said nothing as the group moved on, leaving Wilson behind.

Sean stayed with him, drawing a curious look from Sarah and a couple other 2s, but Wilson waved them off and they left with the others. They walked down the long hall and disappeared around the corner before either of the two men spoke.

“I’m proud of you,” Wilson told him. “And not only because you didn’t slip up. I honestly didn’t think you had it in you until after that first year.”

“I wasn’t sure myself until just now,” Davis said, wiping the sweat off his forehead. “That is one hell of a training program you set up. The team camaraderie is so intense it surprised me, even after all these years dealing with Archons and the trailblazers specifically.”

“You were always an outsider and the guy in charge. It looks different from this perspective, in a way that I’ll never know. I envy you that.”

“Do you want to play Director for a while? I kind of want to stay Archon.”

“You never told them?”

Davis shook his head. “And they never suspected. I didn’t think the alterations would work, but no one ever made the connection.”

“It’s the voice more than anything,” Wilson said, referencing the genetic alterations made to Davis in the pyramid so he could enter basic training anonymously. “Are you going to tell them now?”

“No, I don’t want to disrupt the transition process. They’re splitting up, correct?”

“Probably. Some could end up together depending on which Clan they land. They usually keep in touch afterwards, so they’re going to want to know what’s up with you. I wouldn’t recommend lying.”

Davis frowned. “Never. Don’t take this personally, but they’re closer to me now than you are.”

Wilson smirked. “That’s one of the main objectives of the training.”

“I knew that going in, but experiencing it is something altogether different.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Davis nodded. “And then some. Did the trailblazers find out?”

“I had to tell Greg so he’d stop snooping around, but no one else knows. He promised he’d keep your secret.”

“I know it’s going to be difficult, but I want them all back here.”

“Very difficult. Why?”

“I’ve been living on the civilian side of Star Force so long that I know it inside and out, but now that I’ve got a foot in the Archon world I’m seeing flaws everywhere.”

“You suspected as much going in.”

Davis shook his head. “Not like this. It’s like I’ve been blind my entire life and now I’m just opening my eyes. We’re going to have to rebuild everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know for sure, that’s why I need them here, in person, so we can figure this out. Doing it by message packet isn’t going to cut it.”

“Spill old man, before I have to beat it out of you.”

Davis glanced up at Wilson, who was still several inches taller than him and who no doubt could carry through on the threat if he chose, Archon or not.

“We’ve been too soft, and I’m afraid our mindset has been centered on the lizards for far too long. The ultimate enemy is the V’kit’no’sat, and now that the ADZ is safe from the lizards we have to start tooling to fight a superior opponent, not a large numbered inferior one. That, and a lot of mistakes I’ve made with the civilian population. We have to have a segmented society rather than a single large pool.”

“Skilled based?”

Davis nodded. “I’ve got some ideas, but to make this work I need the trailblazers, you, and most of the senior personnel in on this. I’ve only kept up on the basics. How soon can we get all of them here?”

“If they directly recall, six months…if they want to leave their current combat assignments. Some are in pretty heavy actions along the Calavari border, last I heard.”

“We’ll make it a year then. I’ve got some research to do in the meantime.”

“After we get you fitted for your armor,” Wilson insisted. “You are an Archon now, so you need a custom set whether you plan to use it or not.”

“Lead on then.”

“Shower first.”

“Do I smell that bad?”

“You guys always do coming out of the Final Challenge.”

Davis smiled unguardedly. “It’s going to take a while to get used to that, but I like it already.”

“You earned it. I made sure of that. I’m just sorry you had to hold back. That’s not something we want the trainees to do.”

“Psionics would have been cheating, so there was no choice. Like you said, I needed to earn it.”

“Well you can kick that bad habit now, and I suggest you do. Adept rank or no, there’s no point in hiding the fact that you have them. And you’re not the first either.”

“I’m still staying Sean as far as the Archon ranks are concerned. The public isn’t going to know the Director is also an Archon, and I want it to stay that way.”

“Not a problem. Security was sound for your inclusion, so you can keep on as is with no problems so long as word doesn’t get around on its own.”

“Good.”

“You. Shower. Now. Talk later,” Wilson said, pointing down the hall. “I’ll take you to the fitting station afterwards.”

Davis bristled a bit at his tone, but brushed it off with a smile and a silent salute before jogging off down the hallway in typical Archon fashion.

5

July 19, 2812

Solar System

Earth

Davis walked into the amphitheater seeing the 100 trailblazers sitting in the first few rows almost identical to the way they had been centuries ago when he’d first met them all. The only difference was the blue stripe on their uniforms was darker and their bodies were razor fit…plus an assortment of oddly colored hair and genetic tattoos they’d been experimenting with. Those minor details aside, this was the first time in forever that they’d all been together in the same place at the same time, and as he walked up onto the stage and headed for the podium he felt a burning nostalgia that he quickly squashed.

Abandoning the podium he turned around and sat on the edge of the elevated platform, legs dangling over the edge as he looked out at them in a very Archon fashion. None of them said a word, merely waiting to see what they’d been recalled for and sensing a definitive moment coming.

“A long time ago I brought you all here, to this very room, to tell you of the V’kit’no’sat threat and how you would build and lead a Star Force military in defense of Earth. Fortunately that threat hasn’t shown itself yet, for while we’ve grown far more than I’d ever expected, we’re still no match for them. We’ve rightly focused on the lizards and Skarrons, for they were the ones knocking on our door trying to actively kill us and our allies, but during that time you all have been working towards the day when we eventually have to face our race’s past and fight the V’kit’no’sat.”

“I wish there was a possibility of that never coming to pass, but so long as we are here and they are out there a confrontation is bound to occur. Even if they don’t come searching this part of the galaxy and are consumed with interior matters I still don’t feel safe, and I don’t think any of you do either. My mistake in all this was my ignorance, for I’ve been blind to the magnitude of the threat. That sounds ironic, since I was the one to bring it to your attention, but as at least one of you knows I’ve been having subordinates take over most of my duties the past few years, up until recently.”

“As of now, thanks to carefully crafted duplicity and some genetic alterations that I’ve since abandoned, I am now Sean-939221. I completed Archon basic training about a year ago, and ever since I’ve been working on a new plan now that my eyes have been opened to certain realities.”

“Whoa...wait a second,” Jason interrupted him. “You’re an adept?”

Davis smirked. “Yes I am. A level 2, actually, as of last week.”

Morgan leaned forward, eyes wide. “When did this happen?”

“I wanted to keep it a secret, and even my classmates didn’t know who I was. I needed to earn it, same as you did.”

“Psionics?” Steve asked.

Davis nodded. “I had to refrain from using them. Which wasn’t easy when the Black Knight was busting my skull…even if it wasn’t Vermaire.”

“Holy shit,” Kerrie said with a laugh. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“It was something I needed to do for myself,” Davis explained, “but also because I knew I wasn’t seeing things clearly…all the way back to when Oni came to me asking permission to relocate her Clan outside of Sol. She made her case well, but I never fully understood her reasons. Abandoning that much infrastructure to start over from scratch made no logistical sense, but as always you guys operate on a level that I do not, and vice versa, so I trusted her judgement. How would you say it’s gone thus far?”

Oni blew out a slow breath, trying to pick the right words. “Mixed results to date, but the future looks promising. We’re going to be able to do more going forward than the limited territory here would have allowed us. That said, the transitional curve isn’t any less steep than I’d imagined.”

“Her Clan’s scores have gone up noticeably,” Paul pointed out.

“Not much,” Oni countered.

“But enough that I noticed as well,” Davis added. “You don’t have nearly the same level of training facilities that you did here, but your people have gotten markedly better. Why?”

“Isolation has its advantages.”

Davis pointed at her. “That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until I became an Archon, along with many other things. What exactly is the isolation offering you?”

“Focus,” Oni said without hesitation. “While I still keep a sizeable team here for the Trials, everyone else is either off fighting or exclusively training, and I’ve tightened the requirements a bit to compensate. My people have adjusted to a higher level benchmark and our overall skill set has improved faster than a few other Clans in certain areas, though we’re still bottom of the barrel in most cases.”

“Paul?”

“I’d add that they have a greater sense of purpose now, given the all-or-nothing course she’s set her Clan on. We instituted the Trials so the Archons would have a chance to gain combat experience outside of a war, but also to stave off boredom. We need to have mission objectives, and rebooting her Clan seems to have added an element of fervor to the Snowstorms that the rest of the Clans lack, giving them at least a temporary advantage.”

“Not enough to catch the Sabers,” Oni commented.

“Who can?” Paul scoffed, but his merriment was cut short as Sara jabbed him in the ribs.

“I follow all of the Clans very closely, and have done so even more the past year,” Davis said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back slightly as he swung one leg freely. “What you’ve done with the Trials and expanding them out beyond the Archons and into every facet of Clan civilization is beyond impressive. It’s something that I could never have conceived of, but I have found a flaw in it.”

“Do tell,” Greg prompted.

“It’s all for the lower levels. You don’t have a program for the elites. I know you’ll say that most of your time is spent fighting the lizards or pulling duties with Mainline, but the strikers, padawans, and especially mages don’t really have any internal system in place to test and hone your skills. What you’ve done with the advanced training group shows how fast you guys can really improve if you go all-in on it, but you don’t as a matter of course. Its bits and pieces here and there when you can. You need to do better.”

“What would you suggest?” Liam asked.

“I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now, and I don’t have a full answer. You’ll have to figure it out, but I do want to lighten your burden, as far as the Clans go.”

“Wait,” Megan stopped him. “If you’re suggesting we abandon the Clans…uhuh. We’ve put way too much work into them to turn them over to subordinates or administrators.”

Davis smiled. “I had thought about that, then nixed the idea for the same reason. No, when I say I want to lighten your burden I mean to take the younglings off your hands. I’ve learned well that the company you keep has an effect on you. That’s why you created the sanctuaries early on to train in without having newbs and what not slowing you down. I think the same principle needs to be applied to the entirety of Star Force, with the Clans remaining as the highest tier, one that you can further sculpt into a more efficient and effective civilization.”

“You want merit standards for citizenship,” Rex guessed, “rather than people simply being born into the Clans.”

Davis nodded. “I know that differs from your current mandate, but when we first created the Clans we never intended for them to become anything like this. You wanted them as competitive teams and I added the civilian side to things, both to see what tweaks you’d make and to train high level administrators with the autonomy they afforded. We’re past that now, and a single Mainline system is more complex an operation than running one of the original Clans. Some are even more complex than running one of them now. Clan Dark Knight has the highest population of 2.2 billion, and there are 29 Mainline systems with populations greater than that.”

“Yet yours are interstellar civilizations, for the most part, which is a different situation entirely. And they are the home to all Archons, save for a few neutrals, such as myself. No, I’m not taking a Clan affiliation or participating in the Trials. My training will continue in isolation as a private side project, and though I’m tempted to go full Archon I know my place is still being Director, though I did appreciate the vacation.”

“Just do both you slacker,” Larissa quipped. “We do already.”

“Granted, but I’m nowhere near your league. There’s also a much larger problem looming on the horizon that I have to tackle, and reworking the Clans is only a part of it. Star Force is growing so large that our previous methods are becoming strained. There are successes across the board to be proud of, but one thing that going through Archon training has done for me is that it erased the past. With everything that we have done over the years, we’re the oldest Humans in existence…V’kit’no’sat aside. We remember what it was like before Star Force, and a part of me was always comparing the now to the then and seeing what a huge leap forward it has been.”

“I think that was because I was never a part of Star Force. I created it, guided it, molded it, but I was always the teacher, never the student. You all have been the guiding force behind the military and many other facets, but you began as cadets, in this very room, with me telling you what was coming. I’ve always been the leader, having to come up with new ideas and then pass them on to the benefit of others.”

“But when I went into basic I had none of that. I was the newb learning from the efforts of others. It was like finding a stack of presents under the Christmas tree and opening them as fast as I could, learning things I could never have figured out on my own. For the first time I felt what it was to be a part of Star Force, and having to earn my way into it. No one knew my identity, so I was literally a clean slate. That washed away the past from my mind, and good riddance. Now that it’s gone I’m seeing cracks and flaws everywhere within our structure that I had been blind to before. My standards were set too low because they were being dragged down with the memories of the past, but no longer.”

“Problem number 1 is Axius. There is a core group there that is holding all the rest together, but the balance of their population is nothing but slackers. This cannot continue, for the simple reason that people who are on the fence about what to do going forward often look to those around them for cues, and if they see laziness and apathy they are probably going to reciprocate it. We can’t, and never will, force someone to work. People have to have the freedom to do nothing without repercussions, but they need to earn their place in society. To date, Axius has just been a big party that people born there don’t have to earn their way in to above and beyond their maturia training.”

“I don’t think the maturia training needs to alter. We’ve got that pegged down pretty well for the early years. Canderous has pushed that about as far as it can go without negative effects. Anyone know otherwise?”

“I think the Human maturias are pretty solid,” Aaron answered. “The others not so much. We still need to dial in what the different races are capable of rather than just copy and paste off of our profiles. We’ve done that to a point, but there still needs to be a lot more improvement there.”

“A valid point, but is there anything new that is required, or just calibration?”

Aaron whistled softly. “I would say calibration, but I’m not the one to ask,” he said, looking towards Larissa.

“We still haven’t tapped the Bsidd’s full potential, but we’ve been allowing them to make adjustments on their own since we don’t have their bodies to experiment with.”

“That’s a mistake we have to correct,” Davis said firmly, to nearly everyone’s surprise. “We have to probe what they’re capable of and use our experience to troubleshoot. Anything they can add from their perspective is wanted, but we can’t waste time letting them tread the same ground we did. We have to use our experience to their immediate benefit. Same goes for the other races, right down to the wards. Axius is the worst, because they have so many races that are not part of Star Force, and the individual maturia programs are lacking.”

“I can see that now because I’m an Archon. I can do things that my old self never considered possible. I was a civie, pure and simple, and didn’t have what it took to be an Archon. That was stupid thinking. Everyone has the potential to do everything, it’s just a matter of each person finding their way there. Most won’t, because they don’t care or aren’t intuitive enough, but the potential is still there. We need to lay out a path for them to follow if they choose, whether or not we think they’re capable. Civilian life should not be the norm in Star Force society. It should be the B-team.”

Jason nodded. “And you want to strip the B-team elements out of the Clans.”

“More than that, but yes, for starters. I also suggest that all adepts and acolytes not be assigned to a Clan.”

“Make them earn their way in too?” Paul asked.

“I’m not sure about a lot of these things, so just treat them as works in progress, but I think we need the Clans to be the super elite, and not just in Archons. Military personnel down to techs. Everyone has to be operating at an insane level of skill and output just to keep their position. If they can’t handle the workload they may only be in a Clan for a year or so, then transition over to Mainline and bring the skills and experience from the Clans with them, further enhancing Mainline. But the Clans will have to operate like your advanced training group, only on a much larger level.”

“We have an opportunity now that we’ve never had before, in that we have numbers. From general population all the way up to Archons which are creeping near that million mark, and virtually all of them have survived to this day. We’re gaining depth, but we’re not tooled for it. We need to make adjustments, and we need to establish a top tier to Star Force in all departments that you guys can play in with peers, more or less. The Clans should become the sanctums of Star Force.”

“Oh, I’m liking this already,” Greg said, theatrically rubbing his hands together.

“Good, then I’ll pause there,” Davis said, hopping down off the edge and walking up the aisle towards the rear entrance. “Discuss amongst yourselves for the next half hour, then I’ll be back to continue this conversation…with donuts.”

The trailblazers watched him go without saying a word, then when the door closed Jason glanced around at the others, seeing they were thinking the same thing.

“Damn, he really has gone Archon.”

6

“Ok, Christmas lists people,” Davis said as he finished off a donut as he sat on the edge of the stage again, this time next to a stack of mostly empty boxes. “Oni, let’s start with you since you’ve already got a head start on everyone else.”

“Our construction crews are good, but not good enough,” she said immediately. “The lizards still build faster than we do, and that’s become painfully obvious for my Clan. The Voku also build faster. I’ve looked into some ways to make improvements but haven’t come up with anything big enough to close that gap.”

Davis crossed his arms over his chest again. “To my knowledge, they build round the clock with excessive manpower on well prescribed tasks that are utilized everywhere. No customization, just replicative redundancy.”

“They do, but when I’ve tried to have my crews do the same thing we still don’t fully catch up. We’re building better infrastructure, but that shouldn’t matter. We have better tools than them, yet we’re still lagging behind.”

“We don’t have much intel on their building process because we haven’t stuck around anywhere long enough to monitor it,” Paul pointed out. “I’ve been through their internal procedures that we captured previously, and there’s nothing there we haven’t already explored and done better. What they’re doing current day to increase productivity I can’t put my finger on either.”

“I can,” Randy said, tossing a crumpled wrapper at Paul’s head. “The Clans use Human workers. Lizards are better.”

“They shouldn’t be,” Paul said, telekinetically catching it and compressing it down into a tiny dot that he tossed off into one of the open boxes.

“They’ve been genetically engineered for specific tasks, Humans have not. Their standard variants aren’t designed as soldiers, they’re designed to be workers. Toting guns around and firing them isn’t much of a stretch, and the way they fight should tell you everything you need to know.”

Roger raised an eyebrow. “Kiritas?”

“Bingo,” Randy confirmed. “They outwork our Human techs by a mile because they’re good at completing one task and seamlessly moving into another with nearly unlimited repetitions. When you’re doing the same things over and over again you don’t have to troubleshoot, just get the work done reliably and fast. Our techs are trained to be quick but cautious, and our cities aren’t carbon copies of one another. We can build fast if we want to, but the races that are naturally more industrious are going to have an advantage.”

“They’re also using cheats,” Devan said. “They’re not building their big structures that quick, they’re basically constructing transitional infrastructure first to get their colonies established. If we took the same approach I don’t think they’d have an advantage. We build ours to last, they build theirs to function and function quickly to spur their snowball effect.”

“Do you want the Clans to remain all Human?” Taryn asked Davis.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Some of you have a handful of non-Humans in your ranks already. Care to comment?”

“It’s not any different than the Mainline troops,” Rex answered. “They met Human standards so we let them in. No reason not to.”

“Most of Star Force is now not Human,” Morgan pointed out. “Granted, we have psionics and they don’t, but if you’re wanting the Clans to be the upper tier we’ve got to have one for them as well, otherwise we’re cutting the legs out of our own plans.”

“If the ultimate focus of the Clans is to be on the V’kit’no’sat,” Jason added, “then we need to keep it all Human. Zen’zat are what we’ll be fighting against, and we have to be used to engaging on that level. I hate to say it, but every other race in Star Force will have their asses handed to them if they go up against Zen’zat. If we’re serious about building into anti-Vik, we have to stay separate.”

“The size of the Calavari and Bsidd are lost against the V’kit’no’sat’s larger massed races,” Paul added. “We can theoretically survive because of our nimbleness. If we went Bsidd against even one Hjar’at they’d be slaughtered.”

“For now,” Larissa countered. “I think I can find ways to get a few of them up to speed while negating the disadvantages. But you’re also thinking just infantry. I don’t see any downside to mechwarriors so long as they have the skill.”

“It’s all about the requirements,” Greg said, cutting to the heart of the issue. “What makes a person Clan-eligible or not. And I suggest we each write our own, taking what races we want, in what circumstances we want. For the bulk of the races, and even the other Humans, there has to be another tier just below the Clans for them to excel in. Actually, I think there needs to be multiple tiers, which I think Davis was hinting at earlier.”

“Yes I was. I’m just not sure how to structure them.”

“Start at the bottom. What do you want the civilian party zone to look like?”

“Preferably under 20% of the population, though I’m not sure how doable that is, nor how soon it could be accomplished.”

“Hold up,” Tyr said, raising a hand to add emphasis. “Are we going with Archon rules here? If you go soft you lose your placement, or are these tier advancements permanent?”

“I want there to be considerable lag with a person losing what they’ve obtained, but there has to be an active component. If someone really quits trying they’ll eventually land back in the bottom tier.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Taryn interjected, “but that’s not how you currently have the system structured, as far as quarter allotments and stipends are concerned.”

“I know. I’m going to have to rework it. Within the lower tier there will be some things kept for keeps after they earn them, but those things won’t transition them up to the next tier. In fact, let’s just say all advancement within the bottom tier…which we’ll just start calling the ‘civilian’ tier, will be permanent. The aspects that will allow a person to advance to a higher tier will run parallel with them and be perishable, say after a decade. That won’t put pressure on individuals who have setbacks, but it will clear out the stagnant and not allow them to poison the water, so to speak.”

“I’d suggest making the second tier a light tier,” Liam said, thinking ahead. “Will these be in the same colonies or separate?”

“There has to be separation in order to make these tiers distinctive. Not so much as in different planets, but the communal areas have to be located in such a way that transit isn’t banned for the civilian tier, but the most convenient places to eat and shop are separate.”

“How light?” Paul asked Liam.

“Those who are working for Star Force, even in a small application, so long as it’s current.”

“Not enough,” Greg differed. “Everyone should start in the civilian tier when they come out of the maturia, then have to work their way up. We don’t want it to actually become a collection bin for only the stagnant.”

“Greg is right,” Davis agreed, “but the Star Force work angle needs to be present. Say 5 years in a minimal position gets the bump up, faster if they land a higher caliber slot. Individuals will also be able to buy their way in with credits, giving the business class access. That will mean a disproportionate part of the people with credits to spend will be living in the second tier, so let’s just call it the ‘economic’ tier. This pair will make up the non-Star Force population, with the third tier reserved exclusively for experienced in-house personnel.”

“Are these tiers going to extend to the other races?” Megan asked.

“I’d suggest,” Sam said before Davis could answer, “that all races and Axius operate with the same, but separate civilian tier. Allow transfers in the economic tier, but keep all maturias with their respective races then allow individuals to move where they like. If a Calavari wants to live in a Mainline colony so be it, and if a Bsidd wants to live with the Calavari, same thing. Most people will stay where they began, but it will also reinforce that we’re all Star Force and that merit is what matters, not origin point or race.”

“Transfers from colony to colony or between factions?” Davis asked.

“Factions. If someone is born in Axius, they stay in Axius unless they advance to the economic tier, but they can always request relocation to another Axius colony or planet.”

“That won’t work for all races,” Jason warned. “We’re still going to have size issues, let alone atmosphere. There are going to have to be some blocks that can’t be breached. I don’t think an Irondel would be safe living in a Bsidd colony.”

“Easy fix,” Randy offered. “Make tier 2 moveable between the racial faction and Axius only. Tier 3 will have access to other factions given that it will be work related. That way you don’t have to put any blocks in place, because we’re not going to assign personnel to inappropriate locations.”

“I like that,” Davis said with a nod of respect.

“Back to the Christmas list,” Mark-084 brought up. “I’d like to see Mainline integrated with difference races where beneficial. Calavari operating as pseudo-Knights works well enough that we should explore implementing it regularly.”

“You tell me,” Davis said, deferring to the trailblazers’ military expertise.

“We need both,” Paul said flatly. “Integrated units where advantageous, not like Axius that uses a combined force out of need of numbers.”

“That begs the question who pairs best with each other,” Greg said, hinting at something more.

“Damn, you’re right.”

“What?” Davis asked, not picking up on the cues.

“There might be combos that don’t even involve Humans,” Jason answered. “Aside from Archons.”

“That brings us back to the question of whether or not Mainline is being geared towards fighting the V’kit’no’sat or others?” Taryn reminded them. “If we’re invaded, do we use them? If we’re invaded, will the V’kit’no’sat ignore them and only come after us? Or will they hunt down and destroy all of Star Force?”

“If we lose,” Greg added.

“If it’s tomorrow, we lose,” Taryn quipped. “I know we’ve all thought about this, but I’ve never heard a strategy talked about. If we fully integrate then we’re pulling the others directly into that fight, and without Ikrid blocks they’re sitting ducks for a slaughter. Against the lizards it’ll work. Against the V’kit’no’sat it won’t.”

“What’s their mental range,” Davis asked, “in naval engagements?”

“He’s got a point,” Liam said. “So long as they’re not sitting on our jumpships’ hulls they’re not going to be able to use that disadvantage against our naval crews, it’s the other four divisions of the military. And since we’re not using Ikrid between ships, we can even conceal the jumpships inside Ikrid blocking hull plates. We know that a fight with them is going to be virtually all naval unless we lose, at which point having non-Humans in a ground fight will be a slaughter.”

“And if we build a Calavari an Ikrid blocking helmet like Magneto?” Ace wondered.

“The Dsevmat have psionic capability,” Roger pointed out, “and there are probably other races out there. Are we going to hold back all but our Human troops if we ever have to fight them?”

Ace nodded. “We have to upgrade them, through equipment if not genetically. Or at least be able to if a sufficient threat emerges. Right now it’s lizards, lizards, and more lizards. We need to use our strengths to whack them down as fast as possible…while also building towards greater threats. I think we need parts of Star Force working on everything so we have options and flexibility if an unknown hits us.”

“Agreed,” Paul said, thinking ahead already to what Clan Saber was about to become. “We need to maintain separate armies for each race, where applicable. The Lacvamat aren’t going to be building aquatics and the Elarioni aren’t going to be fielding commandos, but the races that can field all 5 divisions need to do so and have independent units. We can, the Calavari and Bsidd can, Scionate maybe.”

“No, their swimming skills suck horribly,” Lens pointed out.

“I’m sure the Elarioni would say the same about us,” Megan countered.

“We can debate that later,” Paul said, waving off that discussion. “We may even want to elevate some of the wards that are physically capable of all 5, but that’s not the point now. We need that redundancy so each faction can operate independently of the rest of Star Force if disaster were to befall part of it, like say Earth and all the Human colonies were wiped out. That’s why we have separate economies, and the same should remain true for the military, Archons aside. That said, I think we need another level of military that integrates advantageous configurations.”

“We should expand Mainline,” Liam suggested. “Keep some units Human only, then add additional ones with whatever combinations we find useful.”

“That won’t be enough,” Steve differed. “There are far more Bsidd troops now than Humans. Mainline is and always will be Human-led, but we’re going to need combo units with few Humans involved, maybe even just Archons only. Calavari pilots coupled with Bsidd/Scionate infantry teams is just one example I can easily come up with. The key here is that this new faction wouldn’t be tied to any territory. Mainline has held the responsibility of going everywhere and doing everything for centuries, with the other races helping out when and where they could. That’s not the case anymore, so I think we do need a new format going forward.”

“On par with Mainline or above it?”

“I’d say on par, so far as newbs being able to join from the get go.”

“And this mixed fleet would use what ships?”

“Special construction per unit requirements,” Paul answered. “Our pick, not the factions.”

“Doable,” Roger added, “but it’d take a long time to set up and we’d have to commission additional shipyards specifically for it. I don’t want Mainline suffering production shortages to cover.”

“I can see to that,” Davis offered. “The fourth tier of non-military personnel will be segregated to exclusive planets. Those will supply the ships for this new fleet, as well as be exporters to the rest of Star Force. The populations will be there to work and nothing else, experienced individuals only that will live with like-minded people, and I believe that will increase production up another level, much like I experienced in basic training.”

“With the Clans being the next step up,” Jason asked, “for both civilian and military?”

Davis nodded. “Maturias will be a pseudo fifth tier that will feed all graduates into the civilian tier. The others will pull individuals up rather than have to worry about reproduction from inside. The new fourth tier colonies will have maturias on site as needed for transitional purposes, but the infants will be shipped off to other worlds as soon as possible. That way they won’t be burdened with younglings or rookies living amongst them, and the same method would be used in the Clans.”

“So much for a population surge,” Oni said sarcastically.

“I know that interferes with some of your Clans’ population pushes, but am I wrong in thinking that it will elevate the skill pool?”

“You’re right,” Morgan agreed. “And we’ll still be able to push our numbers, just through other means. We won’t have to try and stack the odds of a youngling buying into the Clan mojo when we can directly recruit those who already do and boot those that lose their way. I like this idea a lot, but it will require a lot of transitional headaches, biggest of which is the loyal Clansmen we already have that won’t measure up to the new standards.”

“Keep them if you want,” Davis suggested. “As much as I want the Clans to be the elite of the elite, I also want to maintain and even enhance your experimental status. Try whatever you like and see what works best. The Clans are your little empires, continue to tailor them to your wishes.”

“What of Canderous and Australia?” Mark-099 asked.

“With regards to Canderous, there is only one alteration that I see being necessary, but feel free to add anything you like. I think they’ve got to become not only a space-bound faction, but a nomadic one. If we are to face the V’kit’no’sat we need to have bases that they don’t know the location of, and the only way to do that in the face of a potential computer hack is to have mobile ones. All future sedas need to be constructed with interstellar gravity drives defaultly internal. No more reliance on jump cradles.”

“We’ve been thinking along those lines for some time now,” Paul admitted. “We were just waiting on the necessary technology to catch up. As it is now, we can order a redesign with a loss of a decent amount of internal space to accommodate the drives. It’ll lower their population count, but we can work on increasing it over the years rather than waiting for a prerequisite number. What about Australia?”

“They’re the weak link, by far, but so small in number I’m considering not even tinkering with them. Thoughts?”

“Let me handle them,” Remy suggested.

Davis raised an eyebrow, about to ask what that meant when Randy interrupted.

“Um, we’re overlooking the Kiritas/Kiritak why?”

Davis sat up a bit straighter. “I had assumed the Kiritak were good to go as is. As far as the Kiritas are concerned, the Kiritak are already their upper tier, and to date you haven’t wanted them involved in military operations. Are you wanting to change any of that?”

“I’m just wondering why, if we’re altering all the other factions to the same model, are we leaving them unchanged.”

“Frankly I hadn’t considered it because their civilization is so polished already that I didn’t want to mess with it. You know them better than anyone. Do you think they’ll benefit from an internal tier structure?”

“Not my point, exactly. But Mainline already has a large number of Kiritak in it, working mainly the cargo fleet. Are we expelling them to keep it all Human? And this new tier 4 you’re planning sounds an awful lot like what the Kiritak already are, minus the reproduction part.”

“I feel a criticism here. Just spit it out.”

“We can’t be split minded on this. Either we’re Star Force or we’re just the Human Empire. Humans and Kiritak integrate so well together in naval there’s no functional reason to split them up. If we’re worried about the V’kit’no’sat targeting them along with us, then shame on us. We can’t treat them as family and outsiders in the hope that the enemy will leave them alone one day in the hopefully distant future. We’re either in this together or not, and if not we need to split Star Force apart and give the various factions their independence and stop feeding them additional technology. That’s the only way they have a hope of not being targeted.”

There was silence for a moment, but then Liam blew out a long breath. “He’s right, and I would go forward to add that we can’t pretend that Humans are just one faction out of several. We are the core of Star Force so we shouldn’t try to isolate ourselves. We need to extend the Mainline fleet, not create a separate group. Same goes to civilian operations. We pull other races in where beneficial while letting them keep isolated groups as a supplement.”

“We can’t evacuate everyone out to the rim,” Davis said regretfully. “And if we fight it out here, we’re most likely to die along with them. I don’t see a good option in this, so please feel free to throw out ideas.”

“Let the Clans experiment and figure it out,” Randy suggested. “If the V’kit’no’sat come back now we’re screwed anyway. You work the present, we’ll fight the future.”

Davis looked around at the 100 trailblazers, realizing how simple that solution was. Not because it was a solution, but because he knew he could trust them enough to take that burden off his shoulders and find a way, if one existed, to make this monster of an empire they’d cobbled together work in the face of that potential doomsday.

“I can live with that,” he said simply, suppressing a grin for what he was about to say next. “So, the next question before us then is whether or not Kara gets her own Clan.”

“Ah…” Paul groaned, burying his face in his hands in visible complaint while several other trailblazers snickered.

7

July 30, 2812

Solar System

Earth

“Found something?” Jason asked, walking up behind Paul in the Zen’zat barracks in the pyramid as he was reading a vertical holographic display.

“Just trying to size them up with an eye towards where they might be in the present.”

“The others have gone already. Figured you would have been first in line.”

“Clan Saber is pretty set, so we won’t be heavily contending the territorial allotments. Why are you still here?”

“Same reason you are. Trying to find another angle.”

“Any luck?”

“I’m giving all my current people immunity to whatever standards we use, so there’s not going to be a turnover period,” Jason said casually. “The younglings will start being shipped out to Mainline colonies as soon as the message I sent arrives, so I’ve got time to ponder.”

“What about the race for the six systems?”

“You know as well as I that our Clans are more even than others. We don’t stand a chance of earning a major slot, so I’ve chosen not to waste resources overly prepping. I thought you might, given your naval dominance.”

“I’m working a different angle.”

“Care to share?” Jason asked, sitting down on the bench next to Paul’s.

“Territory defense only works if we can gain an advantage on the ground, otherwise it becomes a death trap. We can’t put down roots where the V’kit’no’sat can see them.”

“You thinking of moving your Clan rimward?”

“Even that’s not good enough. We can’t just hide, we have to strike and be on the move at all times. I keep running scenarios through my head and the only way I can see that Clan Saber can have a chance of effectively combating the V’kit’no’sat is to stay mobile and never fight a defensive battle. We have to be rogues, pirates even, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Rebels against the Empire?” Jason floated.

“Davis is right to worry about the masses. Until we can build planetary defenses sufficient to hold out against a modest fleet we’re sitting ducks. I don’t want the Sabers being sitting ducks. If we’re playing defense we can’t be protecting others. We have to be free to move. A Jedi has no attachments for a reason, and I’m seriously considering applying that principle to my entire Clan.”

“Like Canderous?”

“Yes.”

“That’s going to set you back so far you’ll be worse off than the Snowstorms.”

Paul smiled.

“Alright spill,” Jason insisted.

“Think Starcraft. The Terran structures built on the ground could fly if necessary to evacuate so you didn’t have to leave them behind to get destroyed.”

Jason stared blankly at the holographic text and diagrams for a moment, remembering back to the ancient game and realizing the genius in it. “Incredibly difficult to create, because you’d be starting from scratch, but you’d still be utilizing and living on the surface whereas Canderous does not. If your position is compromised you could evacuate in short order, then put down your infrastructure at another location and almost instantaneously have full production resume. Downside would be size. You’d have to have everything small and exchange mega facilities for hundreds of smaller ones, but it is theoretically viable.”

“Far more than viable.”

Jason frowned. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”

“It would make my Clan very hard to kill so long as we have forewarning. Everything would be naval. I’d build the structures into starships rather than mobile sedas. Quick to move, easy to replace if lost. Focus on a smaller fleet rather than having big chess pieces. The necessary few we could keep in deep space and safely anonymous. The problem is we’d become very, very small and give up the industrial base we’ve established. Against the lizards or even the Voku we’re better off proceeding as we are, but the V’kit’no’sat are so far ahead of us that this is the only way I can think of to give us a chance at survival. We have to be able to run and poke, no full-on engagements. No even fights. We have to be ghosts operating out of view when necessary.”

“And you’re thinking sooner is better than later? Which is why you’re not even interested in the territorial allotments.”

“I get the feeling that if we’re tied to any planet we’re not safe. We’ll make use of them when necessary, but we’re not going to stay anywhere permanently.”

“You’ve settled on this then?”

“We can’t all do it. It’ll leave us too weak. But I’m nearly convinced that this is the path Clan Saber has to go down. Not my first choice, but it has too many advantages over an enemy that typically holds all the cards. The more I review past battle records, the more I see the V’kit’no’sat being used to running over people through sheer tech advantage. They find out where you live then they pick the circumstances you’re bound to because you have a home to defend. If we become homeless they’ll have to fight in another manner, which they don’t have a lot of experience doing.”

“But there are some cases?”

Paul nodded. “They’re cagey, and almost exclusively utilize computer or mental hacks to get the information they need to track down those who hide or run away. If you leave a trail of breadcrumbs they’ll find and follow it, but the cases that interest me the most are those they never succeeded in locating.”

Paul adjusted the holograph telepathically, bringing up a list in V’kit’no’sat script along with a galactic map. “These are essentially bounties that were active at the time of the last update, citing races deemed for extermination that they knew had at least partially escaped their grasp. Those ships they’d tagged were still at large, including some seda-like colony ships. It seems that if you run, and run hard, you have a chance of getting away from them, and the Elarioni are living proof of that.”

“But you eventually have to settle down somewhere,” Jason pointed out, “and when you do you risk being discovered.”

“Which is why you have to stay ghosts, living in the anonymity that the galaxy is cloaked with. Always a rebel with no real territory…at least none that you can’t live without.”

“You’re thinking about fighting them in the here and now, not the future?”

“Surviving in the here and now. Other than some very low ground conflicts we can’t stand up to their weaponry for even a short while…but running is running, and I’d rather have the option now and not need it than keep hoping to go unnoticed while we continue learning from the database.”

“Your logic is sound, I just don’t think Clan Saber is the Clan to do it.”

“Who then?”

“I think we all should, piecemeal. That way a part of us could survive even if they came back tomorrow and live to rebuild the rest of the Clan. We need to be empires, not just fleets of roaming ships, but with that backup plan if things come to pass not in our favor. The Sangheili will help you develop this tech, for I think it’s worthwhile, and I’m guessing others will as well, but if we’re going to have a Clan go all-in and convert 100% to this methodology then I think it’d be best to start from scratch with zero population and build it up one ship at a time.”

Paul turned and glared at Jason. “You backstabbing bastard.”

“Am I wrong?” he asked innocently.

Paul squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think of a reason to disagree. “There’s a freedom to the strategy that is very appealing, and I want it for all of Clan Saber.”

“Is it worth losing your industrial muscle?”

“Depends.”

“We have the Tether colonies to fall back to. And even if we are invaded 10 years from now having a roaming Clan fleet of any size isn’t going to stop the carnage from ensuing. We need a Clan to pursue this as another page in the Star Force playbook, but Clan Saber is too important to other pages to focus on just this one.”

“But it’s such a cool one,” Paul protested.

“You can’t have two Clans, buddy,” Jason said, then did a double take as he thought through his own statement as Paul’s eyes widened a bit. “Or can you?”

“No reason she has to stop being a Saber,” Paul said as he stood up, knowing that he’d just found his solution.

“Where are you going?”

“We must move quickly if the Jedi Order is to survive. You in or not?”

“In for what exactly?”

“Maintaining our duo dominance.”

Jason grinned. “Always.”

“We can discuss it on a run around the command deck. Then I’m leaving the system to get to work before anyone else can get the jump on us.”

3 weeks later…

Kara’s dropship set down inside Paul’s command ship with the trailblazer waiting for her at the foot of the ramp as it descended. She eyed him curiously, wondering exactly what the fuss was about concerning this secret summons. She’d been hunting lizards on the far side of the Achkor Region and had to abandon a war fleet she’d been tracking to come back to Star Force territory to rendezvous with him.

“Now do you feel like telling me what the rush was?” she asked, stepping off onto the ship’s huge hangar deck.

“Big shake up across Star Force. Everything is getting reworked.”

“Yes, I know. Davis sent me a personal heads up.”

“He did?”

Kara nodded.

“Well, we’re still finalizing plans but Davis is handling everything non-Clan with some input from us, which is why we haven’t made a public announcement. There’s a lot of behind the scenes retooling that has to be done and we’re expecting it to take no less than a year before he starts reorganizing the civies. The Clans are going to be reworked into Star Force’s highest caliber factions, with all maturias being transferred to Mainline facilities so that our populations will be totally merit driven entries and no natives.”

“He said as much. Please tell me that’s not why you brought me all the way back here.”

“No. I could have sent you a message with that,” he said, thumbing towards the exit. What we have to talk about has to be off the record.

Go on, she replied telepathically so there would be no eavesdroppers.

Everything is changing for the Clans and our powerbase is going to evaporate if we don’t adapt accordingly. Davis is offering up territorial prizes for a series of elite level challenges…that you won’t be a part of. No offense, but your…

Is a cheat, I know.

The territorial prizes are so large it’s going to tip the current power balances along with all the other changes that will be happening. Each Clan is gearing itself towards facing the V’kit’no’sat threat while Davis is going to focus on the here and now, and from what we’ve been discussing with each other there are going to be some wildly different strategies employed, all of which will be centered around an enhanced competition between the Clans to get us better prepped for going up against Zen’zat.

Lizards don’t offer up much of a challenge, Kara agreed. Will that mean we’re pulling back on our combat assignments?

The theory is that with so many Bsidd and Calavari troops available the Clans can pick and choose where we strike rather than carrying as much of the workload as we have been. We will be keeping a higher percentage of our forces in training and Trials but we’re still going to fighting, with an emphasis on the heavier engagements.

Other than the maturias, what’s changing?”

We’re amping up everything. People either keep up or wash out back to Mainline. We’re cutting the newbs and slackers out and making the Sabers top of the line. Where exactly the benchmarks will land I’m not sure yet. The harder we make them, the less people we’ll have.

We’re kicking people out?

No, I’m not. Those already Sabers will remain Sabers if they choose. The standards will apply to others going forward and I’ll reduce the transitional training wheels over time. Eventually we won’t have any true civilian population left. Everyone will be working to advance the Clan in some fashion or they’ll expire their membership.

Sounds a bit harsh for some of the old timers.

I’m going to make sure it’s not, but everyone has to get up to running speed. No more walkers.

And what was important enough for you to come out and fill me in in person?

Clan Saber is going to have a lot of new projects in the works going forward. Some I’m working on now, others I’ll come up with later. A few of them will be co-op ventures with other Clans, and Jason and I will be developing one in particular that we’ll share with all the Clans after we get it smoothed out and a decent head start. We’re going to design and build mobile infrastructure so that we can land it on a planet and get a functioning colony up and running within days rather than years. On the reverse end we’ll be able to evacuate the infrastructure instead of just the population if we come under serious attack.

Isn’t that going to be ridiculously inefficient?

Yes, which is why we’ve got a lot of work to do on it. The up side is we can move our infrastructure around where the enemy can’t find us. If we’re tied to one location the V’kit’no’sat can simply come in and stomp on us. We need to be able to run, hide, and ambush with more than just our fleet. We need our industrial muscle to do the same.

For the entire Clan or just an addendum?

An addendum as far as the other Clans are concerned. I had considered moving Saber completely in that direction, but Jason and I have come up with something better. Instead of sacrificing our existing infrastructure in exchange for the transition, we’re going to build a mutual third Clan that will be entirely mobile. No sedas like Canderous. It’ll be all these new mobile structures and the warfleets they can build…and no one is going to know it exists. Everything we do from here on out is going to be geared to one day fighting the V’kit’no’sat, and if they can ever hack our computer systems this Clan isn’t going to be in them to find.

Kara’s eyes widened. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?

This new Clan is going to start with nothing more than an idea and have to be built from scratch. I’m overseeing it and working with Jason to develop the technology and methodology necessary. It will be comprised of Sabers and Sangheili, and on all records that will never change. This Clan doesn’t exist, and no one else will know about it. Not the other trailblazers. Not even Davis. But while me and Jason will be building it, I want you to run it.

So you’re giving a fake trailblazer a fake Clan? Kara said, noting the irony.

But here’s the good part. We’re not contributing resources to building this Clan, or territory. It has to be mobile and exist in the shadows. Once we get the key pieces built it’ll have to survive and grow on its own, pulling volunteer personnel from both Clans as necessary, but all industry will have to be its own and be fed by raiding the lizards for resources.

Hello.

Figured you’d like that part. It’ll pretty much be you pulling solo missions to grab cargo ships or hit small expansion colonies along the periphery of their territory, probably taking you far away from the ADZ, but the more you steal the faster the Clan will grow. You’ll be able to continue missions against them with a direct impact on the Clan’s success, so no administrative duties. This would be a private triumvirate, but you’d be the one in the field while Jason and me work to develop the Clan while we also rework Saber and Sangheili. That is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Kara’s neutral face spread wide in a toothy grin. You had me at ‘raiding the lizards.’

8

July 30, 2812

Solar System

Earth

Gavin walked in the conference room doors of the Clan Metal Gear command tower in their territorial slot in Antarctica with his local senior staff of Archons and a few administrators and techs already present. He’d alerted them to gather as soon as he’d left Atlantis, but his Marquis and other top Clan members were outside the system at present. He wasn’t going to wait for them to get here before he got to work, though he’d sent out a summons all the same with instructions to get their butts back to Earth ASAP.

“What’s up?” a striker asked as the trailblazer walked over and slid onto one of the stools that surrounded the large flat worktable that already had a few holos sprouting from it, but when Gavin slid a datachip into a slot on the edge a whole forest of glowing data arose within the perimeter of the faces of those gathered.

“Star Force 2.0,” he said evenly. “Davis is reworking just about everything and has an altered mandate for the Clans. While he remakes Star Force with present day threats in mind, the Clans will focus on preparing us for the V’kit’no’sat. He wants us to increase our standards and cut the slackers out of the population by whatever means we want, but as of now all maturias are going to be shut down and the younglings shifted to Mainline facilities. Inclusion in Clan Metal Gear will be by invitation only.”

Another mage whistled, realizing just how big of a shift that was.

“You have no idea what’s coming, and we have to get on this sooner rather than later. All the other Clans are going to be scrambling to grab up the talent pool in the rest of Star Force, so we’re going to have to give them something unique to offer. One thing I’ve decided is that we’re going to remain Human only and press that combat front. When the V’kit’no’sat come we won’t be going hand to hand with Era’tran, we’ll have to take them with mechs, so virtually all of the commando combat is going to be us vs. the Zen’zat, so that’s what Metal Gear is going to focus on. How close are we to getting the holo simulators?”

All eyes went to the level 5 tech. “Not very, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking you’re thinking. The shield matrix is too weak to accommodate blows of even average intensity. We might be able to work up a useable training model for younglings, but not Archons. Our tech hasn’t caught up enough to their standards for us to even remotely copy their simulators.”

“What about the programs themselves?” Gavin asked.

“Copied and stored for future use. The processors will be the size of a room to compensate, but we can run them. It’s the holographic hardware that’s holding us back.”

“Put a team together to push that angle as a priority 1 project. We have to be able to train against opponents that fight like them, and the only way we can do that is with their own procedures. We’re Archons, not Zen’zat, and we need to get to know our enemy’s quirks so we can compensate and exploit them.”

“Even if we get matrix strength up to snuff, we’re not going to be able to simulate very many materials. It’ll be like punching glass, stone, or rubber every time.”

“Never the less, I want us using their training simulators as soon as we can, even if it is in a reduced capacity. In the meantime we’re going to keep personnel in the pyramid continuously. As long as we have the real deal we’re going to make use of it, then those individuals will come back and use what they learn to teach others. Going forward I’m instituting a split between training and field work. We have to have a section of the Clan that is on permanent training duty pushing their limits while others are out kicking the crap out of the lizards. Davis wants us to pull back in that area so we can pursue other projects, but over my dead body are we letting Mainline do all the fighting.”

“Percentages?” another mage asked.

“We’re going 30 field, 70 training and will hold to approximately that number through swapouts, but I want a core of at least 20% that are permanently training like our advanced training group here. We can’t have everyone taking turns. We need some to lead the way, and as much as I hate being a shut in, I’m volunteering myself for that. I’m the best we have, and if we’re going to pull the rest of the Clan up ahead of the others then I have to be the one kicking your asses to provide a greater challenge.”

“You’re giving up field work?” Jen-475 asked, who was the Clan’s third highest ranking Archon.

“I am. I know that’s something the others won’t do, so it’ll give Metal Gear an advantage. I’ll be training with the Clan mostly, and jumping in with the advanced training group time to time to learn from them, but eventually I want our core to be on par with that, if not better. Doing that across the board will be almost impossible, so I want to skew our training towards non-psionic hand to hand and press that hard. To that end, I also want to build and recruit the strongest Knight core in the Clans and work on using them in numbers rather than their typical unit support role. Zen’zat are going to be their size, so we need to get used to fighting teams of them. There are bound to be advantages we haven’t probed yet in that area, and I want us to find them.”

“Arc Knights?” a Baron asked.

“No. Others will want them badly, but we’re focusing on non-psionic combat. I want our Knight training core to be just that. Arc Knights have to split their time like Archons do, and I want them with a singular purpose. Get them strong and fast enough and the Archons will have to work hard to catch up while multitasking. We have to apply as much motivational pressure as we can to the training group, so much so that we’ll have people leaving the Clan because they can’t handle the stress. They’ll go back to Mainline and take the skills they’ve learned with us with them, so they won’t be washouts and I never want to hear you refer to them as such. I want Metal Gear to be tops in terms of commando intensity. That will help with our recruitment, though it will lower our numbers greatly at the outset.”

“If we have no younglings of our own,” the Baron asked, “we’re going to have to be recruiting our civilian population as well?”

“Yes, and though others are giving their current populations immunity we’re not. We’re going to institute a transitional period to give our current slackers and retiries a chance to get back in shape, but if they can’t pass muster they’re going to Mainline with everyone else. This is a train that ain’t stopping for no one. You keep up or you fall off.”

Gavin raised a finger in caveat. “However, I want our commando division to be the insanely hard one. The rest of our Clan will be amped up, but not to such a level. I don’t want to weed out a large number of our techs and reduce our industrial capability. We’re just going to get rid of the freeloaders there without much of a boost in standards. We’ll tweak it a bit, but I want that to be much more relaxed. Hand to hand is going to be our pressure cooker.”

“And Naval?” Jen asked.

“Same as always,” he scoffed. “Look at what Paul, Liam, and Roger are doing and see what we want to copy.”

When Morgan left Earth she took a warship directly to the nearby Sirius System in the Core Region where Clan Ninja Monkey had located its capitol, sharing the world of Everlast with a Mainline colony. Her Marquis was there, along with a handful of other high ranking Ninja Monkey Archons, though most of her Clan was spread out through numerous systems and deployed on active missions, whether they be Clan business or overseeing Mainline or other fleets.

Morgan called those present together in Marquis Falconi’s office for an informal chit chat, during which she began to give them a summary of what the trailblazers and Davis had decided on Earth and how it was going to affect Star Force and their Clan in particular.

“Also,” she continued, “all adepts and acolytes are going to be Clanless and coming out of basic they’ll be transitioning into a new program we’re developing, which we’re loosely referring to as ‘Null Clan.’ It will function the same way ours do with regard to the Archons, a lot of training and Trials mixed in with a bit of field work, but will be overseen by appointments the same way we assign Archons to the Mainline fleet. The catch is, we don’t get to draft any of them when they make ranger. We have to recruit them.”

“Oh hell no,” Gary-933 said, knowing exactly what that was going to mean.

Morgan held up a hand to stall the coming complaints. “The entire Clan system, from Archon down to accountant, is going to be recruitment based. Already the others are developing angles to attract key personnel and gaming their internal standards to either amp up the difficulty or keep it low and spread out to attract higher numbers that they hope to develop over time in exchange for the younglings they no longer have. We’re not playing that game, and are going to continue on the same way we have been.”

“How?” Falconi asked. “If Davis wants us prepping for a V’kit’no’sat invasion we’ll have to make alterations, and the lack of younglings is going to necessitate a variety of changes.”

“Not really,” Morgan said dismissively. “We all know that if the V’kit’no’sat come back now we’re toast, and that’s not going to change much going forward. The key to being able to fight them is and always has been the technology difference. Until that catches up we’ve got nothing more than our ingenuity to work with. Others are working that angle now and with luck with come up with a few tricks we can use, but the really effective stuff will have to be built down the road when we’ve got the tech we need, so the Ninja Monkey’s aren’t going to waste time with wishful planning.”

“What we are going to do is keep advancing, in all areas. Our commando strength is going to diminish in comparison to some of the other Clans based on what they’ve hinted at, and we’re just going to ignore that as best we can and focus on improving our marks rather than getting hung up on the comparisons. We need to be a well-rounded Clan, as we’ve already been working toward, and will continue to press that agenda even if we slip in the ranks in the interim. We won’t go down to the bottom of the barrel, for the specialists will end up there in their off categories, but I’m afraid our stature is going to take a hit going forward. Please feel free to surprise me with the contrary.”

“Why are you so sure we’re going to get our asses kicked?” Gary asked.

“Two reasons. First, several of the Clans are going to be instituting heavy training programs to the point of isolation, mimicking the advanced training program we’ve got going on Earth for Archons. They’re going to sink a percentage of their people into those to the exclusion of all else, hoping to make up ground lost and advance their core strength up to levels that will better be suited to fight the Zen’zat. They plan to lose a lot of people in the process, with them washing out and going into Mainline for the non-Archons, and risking Clan transfers for those who don’t like the intensity.”

“Second reason is they’re also going to be devoting the higher ranking Archons to the new Trials…and we’re not going to do that. Mainline and the other factions may have stepped up their military presence through numbers, especially the Bsidd, but we’re not abandoning the war front in exchange for Trials wins. I’m personally not going to be involved in many of the Trials but the others will be, and they’ll be bringing along scores of mages and padawans with them. We’re going to go heavy at the first trial that is scheduled to occur in two years, but after that we’re pulling our elites down to a handful and using rangers and strikers to fill out the balance.”

“We’re starting upper level Trials?” another mage asked.

Morgan nodded. “It’s been pointed out that we’ve been slacking off in that department by going out on field work too much. I disagree. We’ve got the advanced training program that is far more effective at amping up our workouts than Trials alone will do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m practically watering at the mouth as far as what this new system is going to be, because Wilson is designing all of it and I’m diving in along with the rest of the others. But after we get a good taste of it, we’re going back to field work…and that’s what the identity of our Clan is going to shift into.”

“As well as being our recruitment tool?” Falconi guessed.

“Exactly. A lot of people don’t like training non-stop. I can do it, and like doing it, but not when there is fighting going on out there. I can’t just sit on the sidelines when I know I could be making a big difference in the never-ending wars we’re plagued with. Some people need to take a break and train, but that’s not true of me or this Clan. We know how to train on the go and not fall behind, so we’re not making the internal alterations that the others are. We’re sticking with the program and adjusting for the lack of younglings and lazy personnel, which will boost the Clan in terms of professionalism. That will advance us enough on its own that we won’t need really hard standards for inclusion.”

“Where do our current ‘slackers’ go?”

“Mainline. We’ll give all our people a chance to stick around, but if they’re intent on going on permanent vacation there won’t be an opportunity to do that here anymore. That’s what Mainline is good for, and rather than drastically rebuilding our Clan like a lot of the others we’re just going to streamline it.”

“And?” Gary asked, picking up on something in her mood. Something that she was holding back.

Morgan let slip a wry smile. “We’re going to keep a good number of our Archons in Mainline leading it, but our combat operations are not going to be pairing with them anymore, nor the Calavari or Bsidd. Not even the Voku or H’kar. We’re soloing from now on and advancing our Clan towards fighting the V’kit’no’sat through combat experience gained. When the tech rolls around we’ll incorporate it, probably steal a lot of ideas from the others in the process, but our people are going to be the most combat savvy because we're going to be spending our years on the fronts rather than in pure training.”

“Pure training hasn’t hurt Vermaire,” Gary pointed out almost apologetically.

“Pure training doesn’t hurt anybody,” Morgan clarified, “but you don’t get the same edge you get from fighting in live situations. Those with extensive Trials experience might be more polished, but those with combat experience will be more savvy. Trials are explosive and intense, frontline combat is often grinding and one-sided with moments of intenseness the Trials will never match because of what is on the line. Losing is bad, but losing people is unacceptable. The Trials are meant to build skill sets and do so extremely well, but applying them in the field is a whole other trick that we are going to set the benchmarks for.”

“Define soloing?” Gary asked skeptically.

“A little arrangement I worked out with Davis privately. The others will know soon enough, but we’re not going to expand any more within the Core Region. We’re going to hold on to what we’ve got, no way we’re making the mistake the Snowstorms did, but any territory that we win in the upcoming Trials we’ll trade off. We need to focus what population we have at our new home.”

“New home?” Gary asked when Morgan didn’t say any more.

“Our borders are constantly in flux, with us beating back the lizards on most fronts and colonial expansions, even if in piecemeal, on the others…save for one. Our coreward border is fixed by the no-go line, and even though the Voku have a presence there that is keeping the area somewhat subdued, the more the lizards eat up the Skarrons and spread out through their back territory we’re going to have to counter them all along the line and hold it…without taking the worlds from them.”

“That’s a situation we’ve not faced yet,” she said with all sincerity, “and it defies our very drive to smash the enemy. We can’t chase them coreward. They have a safe haven to operate out of now, against us anyway. The Voku can go after them if they wish, but right now they’re busy with other matters, and even if they weren’t they don’t have the numbers to purge the galaxy of these bastards. As much as I hate to say it, we’ve got to put up with them being there on our coreward border, and how to do that effectively hasn’t been established yet, for they haven’t had a chance to truly strengthen those areas.”

“Even if we don’t colonize beyond the line,” Gary differed, “we can still mow the grass a bit.”

“Yes, and we will,” Morgan assured him, “but it’s just a matter of distance going back far enough to where we won’t visit that they can build up massive armies and have them sitting and waiting to hit us where we’re weak. Even if we turtle up well there’s always going to be a lot of tension there, especially if they develop another new toy and are willing to throw trillions of disposable troops at us testing it.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Falconi asked.

“Davis has granted Clan Ninja Monkey permission to take possession of as much of that border as we want and to hold it indefinitely, shielding the Achkor Region and everything else beyond. He’s not giving us any worlds or resources, but is letting us keep every lizard world we can take.”

“Damn,” Gary said with a laugh as he glanced at the others in the room. “That’ll one up the other Clans and then some.”

“Each of us is finding a way to contribute to Star Force’s future,” Morgan explained, only slightly suppressing a smile. “We can’t do it all ourselves, but we’re going to do more than the others. They’ll experiment and train, teaching us new tricks as we go along no doubt, but we’ll be the one fielding a well-rounded empire out of necessity. We’ll be picking a fight with the lizards on our own and holding the line on our own, learning and growing as we go. Whether you are an Archon or a tech, if you want to find the heaviest fighting to contribute to, Clan Ninja Monkey is where you go. That’s our recruitment incentive,” she said, looking at Falconi. “Use it to get me as much civilian support as you can. I’ll handle the recruitment of the troops…from multiple races. We’re not just sticking to an all-Human Clan. Anyway who wants in on the fighting is going to be welcome to join our ranks and help carve out our border territory.”

9

August 8, 2812

Retari System

Atlantica

Erin-016 literally ran through the Star Force colony city of Manaan coming off the dropship that had landed her here, having taken a jumpship directly from Earth as soon as the trailblazers’ brainstorming session with Davis was completed. She knew as well as the others that there would be a mad rush for recruits going forward and there was one in particular she wanted to get to before the others, having sent a message on ahead to forestall any remote grabs. Being the first to get to her in person, she hoped, would give Erin an advantage.

When Erin came to one of the air/water transition sections she grabbed a breath mask off a nearby rack, checked its functionality, then pulled her shoes off and stripped down to her underwear, leaving her clothes in a pile on the floor and diving into the aquatics section of the city. She swam through a myriad of tunnels, passing by a number of Elarioni and a handful of individuals from other aquatics races until she eventually came to where the city’s computer had logged Ariel’s present location.

The pale Human swam into one of the many workrooms that had several dozen Elarioni going about various tasks. They all looked similar, save for their hair which was a myriad of colors. She found only three emeralds in the room and pulled a quick mental search to identify which one she wanted, then swam across the chamber and up behind Ariel.

The Elarioni turned around before she got to her, hearing the crude swimming strokes of a Human, but she grinned widely when she saw who it was.

“Hello, Erin. I didn’t expect you here this soon.”

“Am I too late?” she asked, with her mask also handling the computer translation as she floated in near neutral buoyancy making small hand motions to steady herself about a meter off the floor as she slowly sank down, for all Archons were sinkers due to their muscle density and trim bodies.

“For what? I haven’t heard from any of the others.”

“Really?” Erin said, surprised. But then again maybe she’d just caught a break while they were pursuing other ends. Aquatics wasn’t high on most people’s wish lists, but she was really surprised Lens or Kyler hadn’t said anything to her yet. “Guess I’m just faster than them. I want your help.”

“Gladly. What is it that you need?”

“I want you to join Clan Alterra.”

Ariel blinked her glowing gold eyes curiously. “Join?”

“The Clans are changing drastically and we’re all scrambling to grab up whatever advantages that we can get. I want to grab you before anyone else does and have you help me add Elarioni to my Clan. We need to go above and beyond what Star Force has already done with aquatics, with an eye geared towards the larger threat…in the core.”

“Are they coming?” Ariel asked, knowing better than to use their name amongst others who probably didn’t have security clearance high enough to know about the Humans’ relationship to the V’kit’no’sat.

“Not that we know of, but while the rest of Star Force lives in the present, the Clans are going to work towards the future and I want your help.”

“I’m not sure how much further help I can be. I’ve already shared all I know with you.”

“I don’t know either. We’re going to be looking for ways of doing things that we haven’t tried before and I want you on my team. And now that we’re not limited to just Humans, I also want you to help me kick the crap out of the other Clans in the Trials.”

Ariel smiled. “And that’s why you thought the others would ask me as well?”

“I think it’s only a matter of time before they do, and I wanted to get to you first. Especially before Paul or Jason did. Their Clans are too dominant as it is.”

“Not in aquatics.”

“No, which is why I’m sure they’ll be after you eventually to join them, as will many others I’m sure. I’m hoping that me getting here first gives me at least a little edge in your decision?”

Ariel reached out a thin blue arm and gripped the Human’s shoulder with her three fingers as she smiled soothingly. “You can relax, sister. I’d be honored to join your Clan.”

“Sweet!” Erin exclaimed, jumping off the floor with an excited twitch of her ankles.

“When do we leave? Or are you expanding your Clan to this world?”

“I wish. Kyler’s been keeping us out, but Clan Alterra has some water of its own to play in on Demacia. Currently we’re ranked 38th in overall Aquatics, and any Clan that adds Elarioni is going to shoot up their skill scores. Some of the Clans are staying all Human for various tactical reasons and I really want to stick it to them in aquatics, as well as getting our Humans less slow in the water.”

“Less slow…good word choice.”

“Just being honest.”

“As always, but you have a funny way of putting things. Where are your clothes?”

“I didn’t take time to change and I didn’t want my air clothes slowing me down.”

“Am I really that big of a prize?”

“Yes,” Erin said flatly. “And you already agreed. No second thoughts allowed.”

Ariel laughed, which amounted to a melodic screech that the computer didn’t try to translate. “I am yours, Erin. When will we leave?”

“As soon as I can snag an aquatic starship. Give me three hours?”

“I will be ready, and rebuff any further requests that may come in in the interim.”

“Even if it’s Paul…and he’s begging?”

“Even if.”

Erin pointed a finger at her. “I owe you big time. Be back,” she said, pushing off the floor and awkwardly swimming away at decent speed from the Elarioni’s point of view.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Having doubts?” Randy asked as their dropship was flying down to the surface of Kirit.

“This is a huge alteration based on a whim,” Mara-677 argued. “Shouldn’t you think it through first?”

“You think I haven’t?”

“Not enough.”

“What am I missing?”

“If I knew that I would have said something by now. I just have a funny feeling.”

“I know the Kiritas better than anyone,” Randy reminded her.

“I’d feel better with a gradual shift.”

The Clan Star Fox leader shook his head. “No need. I’m sure about this.”

“Still think you’re jumping the gun.”

“The others are rushing to make changes too.”

“That doesn’t make it any smarter.”

“What’s the downside?”

“It won’t be our Clan anymore,” she said without hesitation. “Too many new faces…we’ll lose the essence of who we are practically overnight.”

“Like hell we will. What exactly do you think I’m doing?”

“The Kiritas don’t think like we do. We’re a Human Clan, who knows what we’re going to end up after this little experiment.”

“Badmouth it all you want, but don’t call it little.”

“Ah…you’re incorrigible.”

“Careful, your British is showing.”

“No such thing anymore.”

“A complaint?”

“No, just a statement of fact,” she said as they began to heavily decelerate against the thickest part of the atmosphere while simultaneously braking against the planet’s gravity.

“Bedazzle me with another.”

“You’re dragging me along just to gloat.”

“Half fact,” the trailblazer corrected her. “I also want you here to learn.”

“I already know you’re reckless.”

“You were never involved in our Beta Region colonies, so you don’t know the Kiritas any better than the other Clans.”

“I know the Kiritak well enough.”

“Same thing, yet not the same thing.”

“Thank you, that clears up so much.”

“Watch and learn, youngling.”

“Damn it, Randy, I’m as old as you. Stop with the youngling crap.”

The trailblazer just smirked and left it at that for the rest of the ride down.

“My friends,” Randy said, standing on the floor of the Kiritas High Council and staring up at the 58 members seated around the rectangular floor he was standing on. “Meesa back.”

Mara, who was standing beside him and a step behind his left shoulder did a visible facepalm, but Randy either didn’t notice or didn’t care to show it.

“You have not been on Kirit for a very long time,” one of the Kiritas said. “We are very pleased that you have returned to us. Is there something we can assist you with?”

“Yes there is. Star Force is about to undergo a major revision, with all factions affected. The changes to the Kiritas will be minimal, but I think I’ve found a few improvements to be made.”

Mara noticed all the Kiritas sit up a bit straighter, and she could feel their curiosity spiking as well.

“Please tell us what you want us to do.”

Randy clasped his hands behind his back. “First, the rest of Star Force is being restructured into societal tiers in order to reward those who are working for the betterment of everyone rather than pursuing business ventures or just kicking back and relaxing. That isn’t needed with you, for your race has a work ethic that puts most others to shame. With your permission, I will be making some structural alterations to increase efficiency.”

“The Randy does not need to ask,” another Kiritas said, almost taking offense by the politeness. “We will do whatever you want us to do without question. Have we given you reason to think otherwise?”

“No,” Randy said dismissively, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at Mara. “But I have more to ask of you than just this. I need your help.”

“What do you require of us?” another said with evident determination in his voice.

“The Clans are changing, more so than the rest of Star Force. We are no longer raising younglings of our own, but are increasing our numbers through recruitment of those sufficient to meet our standards. Such recruits will be volunteers, and may leave the Clan whenever they like, for our internal activities are going to be far more stressful than normal. All the Clans are amping up the intensity in order to make us stronger, and any individual that joins us for even a short time should benefit from the environment and take their upgraded skills back to other sections of Star Force.”

“As such we will be the elite within Star Force, pushing the boundaries and developing new strategies that we will then share with others. The competition between the Clans is also increasing on multiple levels. Clan Star Fox is one of the largest Clans, but with our new mandate I intend to make it the largest, and by a huge margin. Not just in terms of population, but in industry. There’s a nasty rumor going around that the lizards can out-build us. We certainly take our time and do things right, but are we really slower? I don’t think so, and I intend to prove it by growing Clan Star Fox into a giant.”

“Do you require additional resources?”

“Such outside economic assistance is still forbidden within the Clans. Star Fox has to build internally or trade with other Clans only, so no, I cannot accept any help from the Kiritas…at least not in such a way. All 100 Clans are taking their own route towards our new mandate and are diverging more than we ever have before. We each have our own goals and vision of what we want our Clans to become…and then we’ll see who prevails in the Trials and power rankings over the coming years.”

“Clan Star Fox has been a Human Clan up until now. I’m altering the makeup to allow for individual Kiritas to join the Clan if they meet a very high standard of measurement…and they must continue to meet these standards to remain in the Clan, just as the Humans will have to do. There is no longer any room for true civilians. Everyone has to work and keep working. If someone can’t handle that, or wants to take a long break, they will leave the Clan and land somewhere else, but knowing you as I do, I know that won’t be an issue for most Kiritas. The question is how many of you will be able to make the various standards I set forth.”

“Furthermore, I intend to experiment with integrating Kiritas into our combat units in addition to your obvious industrial aptitude. I don’t know what he end result will be, but already your advanced units have shown promise and I intend to probe your capabilities even further. Even if the combat angle totally bombs, I still want you guys as part of the Clan to help bolster our supply and transport units.”

“How many volunteers do you need?”

Randy smiled. “That all depends on how fast we can build, for I intend to take as many Kiritas that want to join and can qualify. I suspect there will be more willing than we have room for, but like I said, I want to kill this nasty rumor that the lizards can out-build us, and I figure the best way to do it is by expanding Clan Star Fox as fast as we can and literally putting all the others to shame. We have no additional territory as yet to work with, so we’ll have to work with the sites we currently control, but there are plenty of untapped resources there if we devote the necessary energy to go after them.”

“There will be new territory slots awarded for Trials success, but I’m not counting on us gaining any of them. If we do it’ll be bonus, but I’m planning to work with what we have and expand it rapidly. In order to do that I need an influx of qualified volunteers, and there is no one better at the supply game than the Kiritas. Not even the lizards.”

“May we volunteer the entire Kiritas race?” one of the High Councilors asked.

Randy laughed. “I appreciate the sentiment, but my Clan is too small to accommodate even a fraction of your numbers. Plus the standards I’m going to be setting down are going to be a stretch even for you guys in terms of productivity and fitness. Most of you won’t qualify initially and will have to work your way into a slot over the years to come, with more slots opening up the faster we can grow our infrastructure.”

“Oh, and if the other Clans ask for volunteers as well, feel free to help them if you wish, but I can guarantee you my standards for membership will be higher than theirs, for I know better than them what you’re capable of. And I’d prefer if the best of you tried to get into Clan Star Fox before you accepted any of their invites…especially after we show them what you guys can really do.”

“Thank you for giving permission for us to entertain their offers, but I can assure you that no Kiritas would choose to work in any other part of Star Force if given the option of joining your Clan, even if it was only for a week. We are humbled…”

Randy raised a warning finger.

“…honored by your offer,” the Kiritas corrected himself, “and will supply you with as many volunteers as you can make use of.”

“Good,” Randy said, cracking a sarcastic smile. “Humble workers are no good. Too lazy.”

10

January 3, 2814

Unknown System beyond Delta Region

Lizard territory

Kara crept along the low mountain ridge, staying within the nooks and crannies on the terrain as she magnified her vision of the distant lizard mining outpost. They had over 100 of them set up on the planet, all of which were feeding the development of two small but growing colonies in this backwater expansion. The local population was gone, but their corpses still littered parts of the planet giving Kara an idea of the timeframe of the invasion. She guessed the lizards had been here less than 2 years, with the most recent to have died within 4 months. Had she arrived sooner she would have been able to save them, and was silently cursing their luck.

That wasn’t why she was here, though. She’d come far out from Star Force territory, traveling directly up on the galactic plane until she reached an unmapped region that the lizards were casually pushing into with what looked like no resistance. She couldn’t be sure, having only lightly scouted a few systems along the way, but this planet only had three cruisers to defend it, suggesting that the locals had been primitive pushovers.

Kara could destroy the entire lizard occupation herself if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the mission. There were a lot of lizards closer to Star Force territory for her to go after if she just wanted to work on her kill count rather than spending 8 months traveling out to this distant lizard border. No, she was here to exploit their weak areas and do to them what they had done to Star Force so long ago…though technically it had been inept civilian contractors. They’d been blindsided by the presence of the invaders on Corneria, and now she was going to turn the tables and hit the lizards where they didn’t expect Star Force to be.

And she needed to do it quietly so not to draw attention, hence her sneaking around and approaching across land rather than just dropping down from orbit on top of them. The Clan Sangheili warship that she’d borrowed was tucked away safely around another planet and hidden from the lizard sensors, with her and a team of volunteers having come down via a fleet of dropships onto an uninhabited part of the planet. They were staying out of sight miles away while she crept in towards this isolated outpost, figuring out how she was going to play this.

Most of the complex appeared to be below ground, with several structures sprouting out of the sparse vegetation and marking the location like pillars. Kara could also see several adjacent buildings, but everything was pretty compact…which was to her advantage. She spotted no guard towers or turrets, but she knew better than to assume there would be no guards on station, though from this range she wasn’t going to be able to pick them out if they were concealed behind the scrub brush of ugly trees that were more thorns than leaves.

Scanning the terrain in between her and the outpost she plotted her course and began moving, walking/running where needed and flying spot to spot inches off the ground whenever possible. It was dark, so her shadow mode made her virtually invisible to the lizard eyes, but she could detect scattering traces of sensor beams reflecting down from the atmosphere, telling her that there was an aerial detection array in place. Kara didn’t know at what altitude it was operating, so she had to go in on the ground.

It was possible that her shadow mode and other countermeasures might be able to hide her, but there was no point in taking any chances this early in the game. Unnoticed wasn’t something that you could get back once squandered, so she was going to take this slow and easy, working her way up close to the lizard outpost and keeping an eye out for whatever surveillance they might have in play.

Kara wasn’t expecting much, given how low scale the lizard presence was on this colony, and she wasn’t disappointed. Once she got in close she found three scouts on patrol around the site and another two within. Accessing their minds she secured enough information to know that another shipment of processed ore was coming up from below within the hour and a flight of Kirbies would be here in approximately six to pick it and the others up. Right now the landing platform was only a fifth full of crates, so Kara decided to wait it out a bit longer and took the opportunity to sneak inside the perimeter and do some wall crawling.

She found the sensor array easy enough and hacked into it, inserting a program that would ignore a certain vector and allow free flight without registered detection, despite the fact that the sensor beams would still be going out as normal. With that built-in corridor established she commed two of her distant dropships and got them on the move, albeit slowly and over ground, much as she’d approached by.

While they were on their way the main cargo doors to the subsurface structure opened up and allowed an elevator platform rise even with ground level. On it were a few dozen lizards that proceeded to transfer the new crates full of valuable materials off the lift and over to a waiting area on the edge of the landing pad. The lift went down again and came back up three more times before they finally finished, with Kara holding the dropships off back beyond the ridgeline until they were done.

Reaching out with her Ikrid she scanned the surrounding buildings and started knocking everyone unconscious, having to move around a bit to get within range and doing it in a way that no one would see someone else just keel over and have time to wonder what was going on. She finished up with the perimeter guards, seeking them out and giving them the remote night tap before calling the dropships in at speed.

Two Falcon-class vessels zipped in over top of the lizard mining colony and landed on the pad with Kara standing watch via Ikrid and ready to subdue anyone that woke up or, more likely, came up from below ground. A crew of techs spilled out of the dropships and began moving the lizard crates inside using their own equipment. They worked quickly and got the two ships nearly full before all the cargo was onboard and the landing platform was clear of crates. Kara signaled them to leave by the same vector they arrived and held position until they were out of sight.

She dropped down from her perch near the lift and moved out closer to where she dropped the perimeter guards, taking control of their bodies and standing them up so that when she woke them they wouldn’t realize that any time had passed. It was a tricky thing to do, but each one shook off the disorientation and continued on about their patrols, minds focused on the present and washing away the bit of curiousness as to their momentary mental blip.

Kara kept to her stealth and moved over near the buildings, doing the same with those inside though it was harder, for they were doing more than walking. She tried to disguise their waking up as much as possible, but there was no way at least some of them wouldn’t realize they’d been taking a nap. Still, the more confusion she could sow the better, so she tweaked the waking patterns enough that with a little memory implantation she convinced them that some noxious fumes had escaped containment and rendered them unconscious.

It wouldn’t hold up to an examination of the facts later, but it would keep them preoccupied with internal matters for the moment, and with the perimeter guards swearing that a group of Kirbies had come in to take the cargo crates early, Kara figured she could cause a lot more mayhem before the lizard planet began to suspect they had unwelcome company.

Climbing up to the sensor array again Kara undid and deleted her programming cover so that it wouldn’t be around to be found, then dropped back to ground and distracted the scouts’ minds as she crept off into the night and headed back overland to the ridgeline, then from there on back to the rendezvous point with the dropships via direct flight once her sensor silhouette was blocked by the terrain.

“What did we get?” she asked as she landed inside the open ramp to one of the full dropships as they all sat parked on a dirt-covered plain in the middle of nowhere to the distant north.

“Nothing special,” one of her new Clan Ghostblade techs answered, “just some iron and carbon pellets.”

“I wasn’t hoping for special,” she said, retracting her armor back into her forearm jewel with the red scales vanishing to reveal her white with dark blue stripe Archon uniform. “Just useful.”

“It’s free,” another commented. “And I really like free.”

“So do I,” Kara said with a smirk. “That went well, but let’s hit a few other locations before they have a chance to think about what’s going on.”

“You want us to take this load back to the jumpship?”

“No. Stay here and we’ll all go back together. If we get spotted I’m your only defense, so we can’t afford to split up.”

“Right. Where to next?”

“Southeast of here there are a couple of outposts within 50 miles of each other. I want to hit them both. If that doesn’t fill the holds we’ll sniff around the others. I got the impression that there’s a regular shipment pattern and if we start catching them when they’re full we won’t have to make as many raids.”

“And when they do figure out what’s going on?”

“We’ll play it by ear, but we’re not tipping out hand and exposing ourselves. We have to be ghosts in this, no matter what they suspect.”

“Understood.”

“Give me a head start, then bring four empty dropships with you to the rendezvous point I lay down.”

Kara turned and walked two steps back towards the open ramp, then her body was covered in the red scales once again as she shot off into the dark.

“Damn, I really want one of those,” a tech said, with the others nodding their wholehearted agreement.

Kara and her crew continued to raid the lizard planet for the next 2 months, gaining both resources and information. With a map of the nearby lizard colonies she was able to pick and choose her targets more carefully, focusing on the slightly larger worlds and getting a wide choice of supplies to raid from for the following year then, with a hold full of stolen goods, she ordered her jumpship back to a predetermined rendezvous point on the edge of Delta Region.

When she returned she found a handful of other ships waiting for her…all of which were running under Clan Ghostblade IDs. None were new constructions, for per operating orders Kara had to build everything herself so there were no records to trace back to, meaning the jumpship she was on had to be returned to Clan Sangheili at some point, and the same was true of the six jumpships ahead that were waiting for her. Those, she quickly saw, were carrying brand new smaller vessels in their external docking holds, and they definitely weren’t drones.

“Greetings Clan Leader,” Lev-922 said with a smile as his holographic image popped up next to Kara’s command chair.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked with a laugh.

“I volunteered,” the fellow Saber admitted. “Though you could use some more psionic help with your raids.”

“I’ll take any help I can get. You with or without padawan?”

“Without. She was ready to fly solo anyway, and with her being a Firestorm I couldn’t bring her in on this.”

“What else did Paul send me?”

“Archon-wise none, but Jason sent along a couple of rangers. As far as the ships go we’ve got prototype Ghostblade industry ships with jump capability within a system. We’re still going to have to ferry them around by jumpship, and these are just on loan until we can build our own.”

“I know. What about support personnel?”

“Got an army of techs for you and a scattering of Regulars. Paul and Jason will send more if you need them, but they figured you were going to be pulling mostly solo ops for a while.”

“Now that you’re here that’s not true, but I am looking at going after their shipping lanes if we can figure out a way to get the cargo transferred. I haven’t killed any lizards yet and I want to keep it that way for now.”

“Generous of you.”

“I’d rather trick and steal from the helpless rather than slaughter them.”

“If they’re traveling in convoy we can take two ships, swap one crew for the other’s cargo and let them go on their merry way while we take the other one off their hands.”

“That’s a lot of minds to freeze, and on two ships simultaneously. Until you got here that wasn’t an option.”

“And now?”

“How many drones you got?

“Six cutters, three corvettes, and a destroyer. But I thought you were thinking about taking them from the inside?”

“I can sneak onboard, if I’m lucky. You, not so much.”

“Piggyback ride?”

“My armor can’t expand coverage like that. Are any of those drones interceptors?”

“Three cutters are, but we’ve got some other mods onboard if you want to swap them out.”

“Good. If we’re going to be jumping convoys we’re going pirate, not sneak thief. What’s the timetable look like before we can start building our own drones?”

“Depends how much these babies are fed.”

“I’ve got a jumpship full of raw materials to start with.”

“The plan Paul sent along has us building a myriad of other ships, mostly duplicates, before we start trying to go for a mobile shipyard, but the plans for one are here and the segments break apart into individual ships…but we’ll need a secure location to set up in, and in theory the teardown time will be in the hours, not the minutes.”

“Ground or orbit?”

“I believe ground is preferred, but they’re also capable of orbital production.”

“Even for jumpship slips?”

“Haven’t got one of those out of design phase yet. Everything I’m referring to has been hastily built in prototype back home. What I’ve got here are the first and last of the production models. Everything else going forward stays with Clans Saber and Sangheili, while these were quietly misplaced in the construction logs. The crews that built them will be cycling out to us as they train others to replace themselves in the program, so we’re still ghosts in this, though the sooner these jumpships get back to normal operations the better, because we still have a trail until they do.”

“Paul really is worried about a computer hack, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t say worried, just playing things safe. This Clan is going to be our ace in the hole should something unexpected happen, V’kit’no’sat or otherwise, and he wants us to live up to our name as soon as possible. Nice choice by the way. Pays homage to both Saber and Sangheili.”

“This is a joint op, so it only seemed fitting.”

Lev raised an eyebrow. “This is way more than an op, unless Paul has been telling me tall tales?”

“Right now it’s an op. I have to build the actual Clan along the way.”

“Are we basing outside of Star Force territory or just visiting to grab goodies?”

“We’re staying outside and out of sight for now, though we do need to establish a line of communication back home. We can’t build relays of our own, so we’re going to have to have proxy ships within both Saber and Sangheili fleets come out to meet us for information downloads. If we access a relay directly there’s an electronic trail to follow, while a ship can give us full access to records without any system flags going up.”

“Now you are just being paranoid.”

“Being thorough. Very, very thorough.”

“How are we going to communicate with our own fleet once it gets large enough to be spread out?”

“That’s one of many problems yet to be solved, but since we don’t have a fleet yet we’ve got time to chew on it…along with a lot of other things. Paul and Jason have promised to work most of it out from their end, I’m here to put it into actual practice.”

“And hit the lizards to no end.”

Kara smiled. “Exactly.”

Lev crossed his arms over his chest. “Why do I get the feeling we’ll be going after more than cargo ships in the long run?”

“Star Force has gotten very good at recycling lizard tech. It may not be as convenient as stealing their cargo, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than mining it ourselves.”

“Yeah, I’m definitely going to enjoy being part of this Clan,” Lev said with a smile. “We need somewhere to ground these puppies. Do you have a site selected yet?”

“Yep. Two jumps from here and a nice, quiet little frozen ice ball with a lot of untouched ore fields.”

“Ice?” he said, losing his merriment.

“The rebels didn’t choose Hoth for the scenery,” Kara reminded him. “Clan Ghostblade has to be invisible, which means going to the fringes and avoiding all the obvious vacation spots.”

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@aerkijyr

1

August 18, 2822

Solar System

Earth

Jason ducked under a spinning holographic Zen’zat arm, dropping down to his ankles before jumping up and backwards into a flip, kicking out simultaneously into the opponent’s gut with both feet, but he wasn’t fast enough and the warrior twisted at the midsection and sidestepped causing Jason’s feet to miss. The trailblazer arched his back midair, not getting the backwards momentum he expected, then he created a Lachka field in between the two of them on reflex, knocking them apart before the much taller warrior could grab hold of him.

He dodged a kick by a few inches and rolled sideways onto his feet, deciding to stay low and launching himself back towards his opponent. Jason went for a grapple, throwing in a feint with his hands. He reached them upwards as he lunged, then snapped them back down and got hold of one of the giant’s legs. This one was bigger than most Knights by a good six inches and had the body mass to match. It would have been hard for Jason to move him if he hadn’t been so strong, but pulling aside and tossing a 320 pound mass wasn’t a big deal nowadays, even without a psionic boost.

Jason used it though, surging his speed using a Yetu boost as he stepped to the left and pulled the big leg with him as he also twisted and extended his grip, throwing the male Zen’zat simulation program across the ring near to the out of bounds marker. For this exercise it was activated, so as the very agile giant caught himself in a three point stance Jason launched into him, again feigning high but dropping low instead. He balled up just shy of the Zen’zat’s feet then exploded upward, shoving both coiled arms into the man’s pelvis in a Kamehameha-like shove that knocked the hologram up off its feet and backwards.

The green-clad hologram passed by the out of bounds line and the simulation ended with the man disappearing as if he’d been Jedi-ghosted. The control board on the other side of the room lit up with holographic stats as Jason walked over to it and read the V’kit’no’sat script. The point of this drill was to keep himself from getting thrown out of bounds, for the Zen’zat programs didn’t hesitate to use their mass against him and even one grip point was enough to send him flying into disqualification territory, which usually ended up with him bouncing off the surrounding walls.

Jason had to move quickly and not make a mistake, but so long as he could do that he owned this program, for his Sav made everything look like it was in slow motion. The fighting never overwhelmed his mind causing him to miss things, and even when he did get hit in the head or otherwise disoriented he recovered so fast he didn’t miss much. This challenge would punish him handily if he made a single mistake, but this time at least he’d come out on top, making him 11/5 today.

That should have been a clean score, but if these training simulations were accurate then the Zen’zat were beasts where commando skills came into question. There were 6 basic tiers to Zen’zat strength levels, which translated into status positions. Level 1 and 2 constituted the bulk of their forces, as of 100 millenia ago anyway. Level 3 was their elite class, with the others being rare to acquire and making up less than .5% of their number. Ironnsey had been a level 6 and over a million years old when the Zak’de’ron had killed him in an orbital bombardment during one of several civil wars, though it had also been their largest and most costly internecine.

There had been two more previously, with the known Raptor Rebellion later that had led to the abandonment of Earth. Jason knew most of the elite Zen’zat had been killed when the V’kit’no’sat had tried to destroy the Zak’de’ron, and thankfully so. With any luck the Rit’ko’sor had knocked off a few more, but even Zen’zat being born on the day Earth was abandoned were now more than 100 times older than Jason and the eldest Archons, which worried him considerably.

However, he and the trailblazers did now have an advantage on most of them, for it wasn’t typical for Zen’zat to possess as many psionics as the mages now did. Zen’zat had to individually discover each beyond the first tier and battlemeld didn’t exist as far as they knew. That meant an opponent with roughly equal hand to hand skills as Jason would be a pretty easy takedown with the psionics added on top…though it’d depend what the other guy had as well, not to mention to what level he’d adapted them, for the psionics had a great deal more potential than even Jason had attained.

The telekinetic wedge push he’d just used was such an example and was something that he could not have even attempted to do when he first developed Lachka, for he had to project the field independently of himself. That little trick had taken a long time to learn, then even longer to develop to sufficient levels, and there were many more in the database that he’d not yet figured out, plus who knew how many other applications that had yet to be discovered.

The Archons were basically writing the book on the battlemeld customizations since there were no records in the pyramid, but so far they hadn’t created any new tricks with the known psionics, for the Zen’zat had millennia to figure out, work on, and refine those. That said, Jason and some of the others were seeing potential in some places now that they had Sav to work with, and that was an ability that few Zen’zat had ever achieved.

The training program Jason had just used was a tier 3 level 82, and had he not possessed Sav there was no way he could have held his own. Though there was no true translation between Zen’zat levels and Archon ones, for they both trained and measured skills differently, a level 1 mage was roughly equivalent to the boundary line between tier 1 and tier 2 Zen’zat. Throw in the slew of psionics the mages had and that meant that, per their levels 100,000 years ago, the mages could best more than half the Zen’zat population…in theory.

Archons were smaller than Zen’zat, and that factored in heavily in a way that the V’kit’no’sat measurements couldn’t fully anticipate. Jason knew that with their smaller size they would have an easier time attaining the mobility and agility necessary to really put Sav to use, though individuals like Vermaire had shown that the extra bulk didn’t mean one was slow and the thought of Zen’zat like him coming after them really made Jason worry, for right now he couldn’t take him, nor could most of the trailblazers unless they were working together.

Now, that was because they weren’t using psionics when they sparred, and Morgan especially with her Jumat could take Vermaire down with little trouble, but in sheer hand to hand combat the Black Knight was superior and Jason knew he ranked somewhere in the 2nd tier of Zen’zat levels…and that was without Sav, which presently only the trailblazers possessed.

Their battlemeld skills gave the trailblazers the ability to take on higher level Zen’zat in groups, so Jason felt fairly confident that if/when they faced them they could hold their own, but the real problem now was the fact that the V’kit’no’sat wouldn’t just deploy a small team of Zen’zat, they’d deploy them in the millions if necessary. They were their infantry, and the Archons were not for Star Force. They had the Regulars and Knights for that, so when you compared apples to apples it was still going to be a slaughter.

Time. Time was what Jason and the others needed. Given that, he was confident they’d find a way to defend themselves, though how that was going to work he wasn’t sure. And the Zen’zat were the least of their problems.

Jason went through another 12 rounds in the small sparring chamber then left the upper levels of the pyramid, running down the ramp system until he got to what had originally been the Oso’lon section. Given the huge size of the Brontosauruses their chambers were likewise large, including their own holographic training chamber. When Jason got down there he coasted to a stop at the entrance and saw a group of Clan Metal Gear Archons going through some sort of joint challenge against what looked to be three Zen’zat.

“Jason,” one of the Metal Gears who was standing off to the side observing said when he finally noticed the sweat-drenched Archon. “You need this room?”

“Yeah. How close are they?”

“They just started a 45 minute drill.”

“Oooh, yeah. I’m not waiting that long. Sorry.”

“Not a problem,” he said, turning around and walking over to a very large control board that was set into the floor. “You’ve got priority. Mind if we stick around and watch?”

“Just stay out of bounds,” Jason said as the Archon brought up a much smaller holographic interface that was built for Zen’zat and deactivated the current program. The three Zen’zat disappeared and one of the Metal Gear’s who was throwing a punch at the time tripped forward when the blow hit air instead of body. He recovered going through a somersault and flipped back up onto his feet as he looked over to the side in question and protest.

“Clear the ring. Jason’s called dibs.”

“Sorry guys,” the trailblazer apologized as they walked off the parking lot sized sparring area and over to the control station near the door. Once they were all outside the designated area he stepped up to the holographic controls floating in midair and pulled up a different training program with the Metal Gear’s training officer’s eyes going wide when he saw which directory we was accessing.

“I thought those were banned?”

“They are, save for us,” Jason said as a 4 meter tall Voro’nam appeared in the center of the huge ring, which had been designed for combat training amongst the larger V’kit’no’sat races.

“Holy shit,” the Archon whispered, then turned to the others. “Grab a seat and some popcorn fellas…up next to the wall.”

“Thank you,” Jason said as he headed towards the holographic Pachycephalosaurus. Like the Zen’zat holograms this training program had no safeties involved, meaning this monster was quite capable of stepping on him and breaking bones in the process. Jason wasn’t wearing armor either, which made things even more dangerous, and was why the trailblazers had banned the use of any of the programs other the Zen’zat ones.

As soon as Jason stepped into the ring the Voro’nam charged him, lowering the bony dome atop its head into a battering ram as the Human likewise ran towards him, crossing a football field before the two met. Dangerous as the head dome was, the spikes coming out the back of it were quite lethal, even if holographic, though with regenerators handy it was unlikely that any V’kit’no’sat actually died during training. Star Force kept several here and the medical staff running the facility were amongst their best, trying to decipher more of their secrets as well as to aid the numerous teams that were both training and analyzing the small city built inside the V’kit’no’sat structure.

Jason knew what recovering from that level of an injury would mean and didn’t want to go through losing more of his hard earned levels with new tissue having to be grown, so while he wasn’t worried about dying he really didn’t want to get jabbed. That said, he did have bioshields that could block him from getting spiked if he made a mistake whereas most Archons did not, but still this was risky and he was intentionally doing it without armor.

And it wasn’t the first time either, which was why he was confident that he could handle the basic level training programs of the much larger race. Voro’nam had a variety of sizes, growing larger with rank rather than years, and this one was a third tier, which made it larger than most of the skeletons found on Earth and easily outmassed him equivalent to that of an elephant, save this one wasn’t slow at all.

Voro’nam were amongst the most agile of the V’kit’no’sat races, and the head butt attempt the hologram tried was merely a feint with the biped twisting around on its feet in a level spin at the last moment, swinging its thick tail around and trying to roundhouse Jason. With his Sav and well-trained reflexes he could see it coming a mile away, for while the Voro’nam were fast by the big guys’ standards they weren’t nearly as fast as Zen’zat or even Rit’ko’sor.

But they were strong, and had that tail hit him Jason would have been sent flying and possibly cracked a few ribs. He jumped over it, then landed in a spring hop that brought him up and over the Voro’nam’s head as it rotated around to nail him a moment later. With his Pefbar on Jason could see everything as he flipped over in midair, knowing where he was coming down so he could juke to the right before that tail came at him again.

When it missed he shot forward, jumping into a kick that hit the Voro’nam in the left side of its body between foreleg and aft. The impact barely moved the big thing, and Jason had to retreat quickly to get out of range of either tail or head, which is what the program typically fought with.

Crouching down so that its front legs touched ground and it momentarily became a quadruped, the Voro’nam loaded its back legs into a power crouch as it oriented towards Jason. He held still for a moment then tweaked his Yetu to launch him into a power jump up and over the Voro’nam as it flashed horizontally across the ground towards him in its own power jump.

Its head crossed a meter underneath Jason and he came down on its flat back, for it had no spines or tusks other than the four on the back of its head. He landed well away from those and let himself slide off to the right before latching on with his left hand. From there he quickly pushed off with both feet and landed hands first on the ground beside the Voro’nam, springing into a second bounce that landed him on his feet and he ran for distance.

The Voro’nam’s tail swung towards him but missed, then it rotated around in a full circle and charged after him, head low enough to the ground to show Jason the tips of those spikes on the back of its domed head. While the training simulators couldn’t replicate psionics, neither could they replicate any energy expenditures, leaving them simply hand to hand practice tools, otherwise a ruby red beam of energy would have been coming off those and sniping him down.

It wasn’t the same type of energy as what the Hjar’at had, but a type of slow moving laser-esk bioweapon that could be used to shoot enemies off their backs or tail, but could also be used in a limited forward arc when they lowered their head such as this. Rit’ko’sor especially liked to jump and land on the backs of their opponents, and Voro’nam was one race that had been genetically engineered to counter that threat.

Jason knew that, but as long as this hologram didn’t have them then he was still going to hop on and off the thing whenever possible. He couldn’t beat this thing, and never had been able to pass even the first level tests due to his simple lack of concussive damage. Unless he could get some hard hits in the internal counting mechanism wouldn’t give him any credit for the light taps he was attempting to lay down now and the sparring match would continue indefinitely.

To Jason that was a challenge he couldn’t refuse, plus he wanted the practice for if he ever went up against one of these things in real life. It’d have its weaponry, he’d have his armor, so he figured this was about as fair of a training sim as he could imagine. And as a sim, none of his Ikrid tricks would work on the thing, so he was going to have to use brute force alone…which was laughable given the matchup he was in, for he had no brute force to work with, relatively speaking.

Jason kept playing with the thing, ducking and dodging for several minutes before he finally made an attempt to land a heavy blow. After getting use to the Voro’nam’s movement patterns he baited it into another spin then yanked down telekinetically on its tail as hard as he could, forcing it to drag across the ground and slow the spin to a stop. The Voro’nam’s legs got twisted up underneath it and it stumbled for a moment, dropping to a knee as Jason darted forward with a Yetu running burst and aimed directly for the top of its horizontal back as it sat head up and tail down.

His sprint arced ever so slightly into a jump that brought him elbow first down onto the place where tail transitioned into torso. Without armor on his elbow he impacted the holographic representation of a hard, callous plate that sent tingles up his arm on impact as he nailed his own funny bone, but the Voro’nam sunk slightly with the hit, which was enough time for Jason to whip himself away and kick off into another jump that got him clear of the damn tail as it swung around again to nail him as the Voro’nam sat on the floor, leaning forward with both arms and shuffling frantically to create the momentum swing.

“Check that hit,” Jason said to the Metal Gears as he continued to evade as the Voro’nam came after him again. He didn’t bother to look at the distant Archons, knowing that if he lost his focus and this thing even stepped on him with its small legs he’d end up in the med bay.

“Two point six!” he heard one of them yell back, but that number impressed him far less than the observers. He was hoping at least for a 4, with other Voro’nam typically registering 12 or better with even their light grazes against each other.

Jason kept trying for another half hour then stopped before he got too loopy and made a mistake. Rather than use the far controls he simply linked into the telepathic array, finding the node in the ceiling and shutting the hologram down directly. The dangerous Voro’nam disappeared in the blink of an eye with just a hint of pseudomotion as it vanished, then Jason walked back over to the very stunned onlookers.

“That’s why we need to shoot the things,” he explained to the rangers and strikers. “We can’t land blows that do more than tickle them. If you ever find yourself up against one of these things, run away, find a damn mech, then go kick its ass. You can’t do it hand to hand.”

2

August 20, 2822

Solar System

Earth

Jason’s dropship flew him across the planet to the opposite pole, taking him from the Antarctic pyramid up to a brand new city built in the Arctic Ocean. Technically it was sitting in the ice, poking up above the surface while its substructures went all the way down into the seafloor. The city was a third bigger than Atlantis and her copies that covered Earth’s oceans, but there were no civilians here, nor Star Force employees. This city had but one purpose, and that was to house the elite Archon Trials.

Davis and Wilson had designed it together, leaving the Archons out of the equation. The first major Trials had happened 8 years ago and were located in a number of other facilities reconfigured to utilize the new challenges Wilson had devised…but he’d gone all out on this facility and hadn’t let the Archons know what half of it contained. Part of the Trials was empire status marks, but Wilson had also added individual Trials so that Archons, like the trailblazers, could rack up scores even when they weren’t on Earth. Those Jason was familiar with, but everything else here was going to be a surprise.

The first Trials had resulted in Clan Sangheili gaining a chunk of the first prize system, which they’d then traded away to Clan Scorpion, but the biggest winners were Clan Joanna and Clan Badass Mongoose, who took the top two prizes. Megan and Bo now each had a planet of their own within the Neffa System, while the rest of it had been divvyed up amongst the other Clans that earned at least small victories. Given how many subcategories there were some 28 Clans had gained territory there, but the current system they were working on was Chorra and it had more than twice the territory to be handed out, with a good 60% of it coming from what happened over the next month in the primary Trials.

None of the Archons had been allowed within the Trials facility until today, which left Jason arriving more or less at the same time as the others. As his dropship approached the city that aptly was named Solitude, there were hundreds of others in the airspace with many more already on their way down from orbit or across the surface. Jason had arrived early to get some training in at the pyramid, but the rest of his Clan was coming down from orbit over the next three days, after which the first round of the Trials would begin.

He was bringing some 1,023 Archons, Knights, and Regulars with him, all of whom were upper level and arguably the best the Clan had. They would be doing what he didn’t know for sure, but as soon as he landed he guessed he would find out…unless Wilson meant to keep it a surprise up until the moment the Trial began, which was a distinct possibility knowing the man’s tendencies. The previous Trials had been his typical brand of challenging, with all the Trailblazers feeling like they were back in basic again. That had prompted them all to return for this one, including Morgan, who virtually never got involved in the ongoing Trials save for her individual marks.

Those she was racking up in one of the new Elite Sanctums that the trailblazers had collectively agreed to build. There were a scattering across the major Star Force systems like Sol and Epsilon Eridani, but most of them were within the Clans themselves. His Clan had only built one, which would service only mages and up going forward. That meant there were only 32 Archons within Clan Sangheili that could use it, yet it was the largest sanctum they possessed and held a lot of new training equipment and challenge courses, most of which Wilson was responsible for. He’d really taken Davis’ mandate to heart and was helping the Clans up their game by playing adversary and subjecting them to a whole new level of badassery.

And the trailblazers were losing to his challenges…which they totally liked. Not the losing thing per se, but what it meant was they had real challenges to overcome now and that was something they’d been sorely missing. When Jason and the others had built new challenges for themselves they always knew how to beat them, in theory anyway, once they got strong enough, but with Wilson you had no clue what was coming and had to figure it out on the go.

To put it simply, you couldn’t hide your own Easter eggs. And with this new mandate Wilson had taken the reins of Easter Bunny away from the trailblazers, for the most part, and returned them to being the searchers…which was why they were all coming here, eager to fight it out with the rest of the Clans, but just as eager to see what Wilson was going to throw at them.

The elite sanctums were restricted to the upper levels because, literally, they were too dangerous for any of the weaker Archons. There were tons of safety protocols in place, but everything was built for the expectations of strength, speed, and agility far beyond what an adept could produce. There literally weren’t any ‘easy’ settings on the basic challenges, meaning that though the sanctum held the same stuff you’d see in a normal version, it was all supped up to the point where lesser Archons simply couldn’t use it.

Jason liked that idea so much that he had started to see the normal sanctums as kiddy playgrounds. He used them when he needed, and they did have settings for mages and beyond, but he just felt at home in the elite sanctum and spent most of his training time there in isolation. Occasionally a few other mages would be training at the same time, but they were almost always off on missions, leaving the elite sanctums across Star Force territory empty most of the time. Clan Saber had the most mages of any Clan, currently sitting at 57, but that was going to climb greatly as the larger number of Archons behind them started to catch up.

Originally there had been only one class per year, if that, but now they were graduating approximately 30 Archon classes every calendar rotation and that number was rising along with the Human population. It was never fixed, for it was derived from the amount of candidates that passed the tests, but the further you went down the timeline the more Archons there were, meaning that eventually the elite sanctums would start to fill up with mages as they earned the rank. As it was, Jason and the other trailblazers were nearing the end of their dark blue armor status.

He was currently a level 498 mage and ranked 7th among the Archons. Ahead of him one level was Ryan, with the other five already having transitioned to the next 500 level rank of Titan that came with the golden armor. They were Greg, Kerrie, Aaron, Paul, and of course Morgan. She currently held a level 11 titan ranking, putting her 12 ahead of him. That was a chunk of training that would take him anywhere between 5 and 10 years to catch up to, though you never knew for sure how you were going to advance through each level. Some were harder than others, and with all 5 skill divisions having to be mastered it was always your weak area that determined your upgrade timetable.

For Jason and a lot of the Archons that was aquatics, but for Morgan it was currently aerial that was her lowest area. Her commando skills were 42 levels above Jason’s, so the Archon rankings were a bit deceiving as to who could beat who in a fight and really a mark of overall skill, but he was still surprised that he had held so close to her after all these centuries. Right now the lowest ranking trailblazer was mage 424 and that was Clark-066, with the next closest Archon to him being level 392. There was definitely a gap between the trailblazers and the others that was widening a bit with time, which was both good news and bad.

The second gen should have been closer than that, and aside from Kara they’d been losing ground slowly. On the up side Ginsi was continuing to tear her way up the ranks for Clan Croft. Her pace had slowed a bit from early on, but she was now a level 45 striker and pretty much leveling up twice as fast as everyone else. Her primary area of expertise wasn’t clear, for every time she gained a few levels in one area she’d shunt her training focus to the weak one, keeping all 5 marks basically the same. Jason doubted she’d catch up to the trailblazers, but it was impressive to see her working her way through the training so fast.

His own scores were increasing in pace now that Wilson was feeding them new challenges, and it was clear to Jason that Ginsi wasn’t so much a prodigy as much as she was a peer. The difference was that every level the trailblazers advanced was crude, for they were pushing the limits and actually writing the level requirements ahead of them. Those usually didn’t get revised, but the more Archons that passed through them essentially left notes for others to come so they could maximize their training effectiveness for all the tricks needed. Ginsi was getting the benefit of all of that, so if her badass skills were on par with Jason’s then she should be leveling up faster than he did.

Taryn had said she was bringing her to these Trials despite her lower rank, and Jason was curious to see if she had any magic in her. Archons loved a challenge and she was basically getting thrown in over her head. It would be fun to watch, but if she came up against Jason he was taking her down quickly. Clan points mattered, and everyone was going to be fighting for each and every one they could get, as they should be. Territorial allotments aside, this was the type of competition that they needed to really ratchet up their advancement.

When Jason’s dropship landed it came in through an atmospheric shield that kept the polar air out so that the crews could operate without wearing envirosuits. Jason stepped out into room temperature air despite the sky overhead being clear of any machinery. The shield was just a bubble covering the landing area, with a few other dropships coming down in through it as his unloaded him then took off again, heading back to where it had come. Only the crews necessary to facilitate the Trials would be staying here, meaning all dropship pilots would be stationed in nearby cities and called for when transport was needed.

Jason had come without gear, knowing he could get whatever he needed here, so he walked across the landing pad and into a wall entrance with free hands and a clear head, looking around almost like a tourist to see what Davis and Wilson had built. He ducked into a tunnel and walked down two levels until he came to a reception area with a check-in desk.

“Mr. Sangheili himself,” a male attendant said, pulling out a datachip from a special batch and handing it to him. “All instructions needed. I’m not allowed to say any more.”

“Who’s orders?” Jason asked curiously.

“Head Trainer Wilson. Please step into the car and insert the chip.”

Jason smiled and walked towards one of the three pod cars with open doors. He chose the middle one and stepped inside, pivoting around and finding a tiny slot on a wall panel but no other controls. He slid it in and the doors closed, taking him elsewhere in the facility.

He half expected there to be a holographic interface, maybe a brief explanation of where he and the other Sangheili would be billeted, but nothing happened. He couldn’t feel the movement of the pod due to the artificial gravity and IDF so he just waited in silence, not knowing how long it would take. After what seemed like a long time he began to wonder so he pushed out his Pefbar to look through the walls and see how fast the pod was moving…which was when he realized he couldn’t. He could see everything around him inside the pod, but not past the walls.

“What the hell?” he said, spinning about and looking with his eyes. He reached out to touch the walls but stopped short as a slight buzz sounded over his head. He saw the energy shield materialize there both with his eyes and Pefbar a moment before the floor dropped out from under him.

He fell fast, brushing up against his hip into the angled tube of a dry waterslide that was completely dark. Jason could make out the interior of the tube with his Pefbar though, but again he couldn’t see through it. His mind went through several scenarios in a split second, with him knowing in his gut this was Wilson’s doing even before the short ride ended and he exited the tube into freefall.

His Pefbar opened up around him just in time to make out the wall of water below him. He hit it butt first and smacked the back of his head on his way in, getting a jet of water up his nose in the process that he clamped down on. The pool was deep and he couldn’t find the bottom for a moment, but he could still see the surface with his Pefbar so he clawed towards it as he forced himself to tolerate the water in his airways knowing that his Hanme would start giving his bloodstream the oxygen stored in nodules around his body automatically.

Having no knowledge that this was coming he was caught off guard, but pulled himself together enough to get himself to the surface. When his head came up into the air he coughed out the water and used a telekinetic wedge to move it out of his nose that his Pefbar allowed him to see internally. Treading water he tried to get his bearings, unable to see the bottom of the water or anything else around him in the pitch black. Wherever he was it felt like a void, with only the distant ceiling just barely registering to him.

He kept his senses keen, not knowing what was coming next. If this was a test by Wilson then it was also a signal that there were no holds barred, for one didn’t mess with water in training situations unless one had knowledge of it going in. It was very easy to drown when you got dunked, for with the loss of air also came confusion and disorientation, with the submerged person not knowing which way was up. Jason’s mind flashed back to his childhood and the few times he’d dunked others in the pool and got dunked himself, never realizing how stupid they were being.

Wilson knew better, and even with Jason’s psionics this was crossing a line. Even if there were hidden safety teams nearby it didn’t matter. You did not mess with water in the lungs…period.

With that realization slapping him in the face Jason picked a direction and started swimming, his soaked uniform dragging him down as he moved. He wanted to peel it and his shoes off to make himself more agile, not knowing what was coming his way, but he relented for the same reason. He didn’t want to lose his clothes and then need them going forward.

Jason swam a good ways before he finally saw something in his Pefbar, coming up on a containment wall that he then followed to the left. It arced on a predictable curve, but there were no handholds or entrances within sight. Expecting it to be the edge of a circular chamber he knew to just follow the perimeter around until he did find an exit.

Jason spent the next half hour swimming, finding the ‘predictable’ curve to disappear within 100 meters and transition into a twisty curvy nightmare. He held to his plan and followed the outline, but without a battlemap he had no way of knowing where he was and the other side of the water was outside his Pefbar range, so all he could see was the nearest piece of the wavy wall that had several inlets, all without exits, ladders, or even a dot of texture. They were sheer and unclimbable without his armor tech, not to mention blocking his Pefbar…and Ikrid. If there were minds on the other side he couldn’t sense them, and his Ikrid range was much larger than his Pefbar’s.

Trying to measure his distance and location by mental plotting, Jason figured he went all the way around the water at least twice before the undulations in the wall became familiar. That frustrated him to no end, having spent the past half hour swimming around in a lumpy circle, but he knew it was probably part of the test. He’d looked everywhere he could swim, so what the hell was he…

Then he realized he hadn’t looked everywhere. Taking a deep breath he sunk himself below the surface and swam down following the wall and searching out the bottom of the tank, for there was no way this was ocean. Too warm and not salty.

His lungs began to burn mildly before his Hanme kicked in, and would remain that way letting him know he was on the clock. A second sensation accompanied them, as if it was a mental progress bar that was slowly diminishing, which to his point of view felt like a metallic bar that was being consumed. He could ‘taste’ how much of it was there, which was how he knew how much reserve oxygen he had. It was the biological equivalent of a status bar on a helmet’s HUD, and Jason knew he had a few minutes to work with while he was actively swimming.

That bar got below half before he finally found the bottom. As soon as he did he used his telekinesis to push the water around him out in such a way that a little bit of it vaporized and created an unbreathable atmosphere around him that he then sealed inside a bioshield. Releasing the Lachka and holding the shape with the shield only, his buoyancy pulled him up quickly, enhanced as he changed the shape of a shield into a cone to give him less drag.

When he got back to the surface he let go the shield and began to breathe in healthy gulps of air to recycle what was in his lungs as well as to start refilling his Hanme reserves, now even more frustrated, knowing that searching the bottom of the large pool was going to take forever.

3

As soon as he recovered enough he headed back down again, this time pushing his pace with the technique Paul had taught him using bioshield ‘tractor treads’ to provide propulsion along the outside of his legs. He hadn’t practiced it much and it was very tricky to pull off due to the control factors, but he managed to goose his speed in spurts, unable to hold the effort for more than a couple of seconds. He did manage to reach the bottom with some time to spare, then he began swimming laterally and scanning the bottom with his Pefbar.

He couldn’t stay down there long and found nothing in his limited search area before he had to come back up…then wait through another Hanme recharge period. If this really was Wilson’s doing then he guessed this was going to be a grinding process, with Jason setting his mind to the task of multiple dives with tiny search areas below in order to map out the base of the artificial pond. In the meantime he had to tread water one way or another, for there was nowhere to get a handhold.

He flipped over on his back and floated there with a slight leg kick to keep from sinking as he breathed in and recharged, keeping his Pefbar locked on the nearby wall to keep from drifting and losing his position. He had to be meticulous in his search else he could miss something on the floor. Without a map or light to see by he had to be very careful in this else he could be looking for something forever…and to make it worse he didn’t even know what he was looking for.

When Jason was on his 18th dive the silence of the dark chamber was broken by an impact overhead. It was too far up for him to see with his Pefbar, but the sound waves traveled down to him none the less. He jerked with surprise and lost an air bubble from his mouth, then abandoned the search and created another mist void bubble around him to bring him up to the surface as quickly as possible, for while his Pefbar couldn’t reach up that high his Ikrid could and he sensed a familiar mind.

When Jason reached the surface he took a couple of deep breaths then began swimming across the chamber for a few strokes before thinking better of it and holding position.

Over here, Jason said telepathically, not wanting to lose his orientation in the pond and waste all the mapping runs he’d already made.

What the hell is going on? Blade-097 asked as Jason felt his mental dot start to move towards him.

One of Wilson’s surprises, I’d wager. I’ve been around the entire perimeter and there is nothing on the walls to use. The bottom is deep and I’ve started mapping it out, which is why I don’t want to move or I’ll lose my orientation and have to start over.

How long have you been here?

I’d guess at least an hour, but I have no clue. And the walls are Pefbar and probably Ikrid blocked.

Noticed that, Blade said as he finally popped up on the edge of Jason’s Pefbar as he swam towards him with decent speed. More than decent, actually.

Do you have bioshield augmented swimming?

Yeah. I thought we all did?

Mine sucks, and the slower I go the less time I have to explore the bottom. It’s the only place I can think of to look for an exit.

What about up?

Can’t climb the walls.

Don’t need to now, Blade pointed out.

I’ve looked with Pefbar, but unless there’s some tiny switch I’ve missed there’s nothing up there. My money is on down.

Have you seen any of the others?

No. I walked into this trap as soon as I got into the city and I can’t sense beyond the walls or floor.

Well, if we’re going down let’s do this the fast way, Blade said, sending Jason a battlemeld prompt. As soon as the trailblazer accepted it he knew what his fellow Archon had in mind. Reaching out with his Lachka, Jason lifted Blade out of the water when he was still some 20 meters off and sent him towards the ceiling, tipping him upside down. As he did that Blade used his telekinesis to split the water below him, forming as long of a tunnel down as he could before Jason released him and he picked up speed from the gravity drop, sliding into the hole in the water and continuing down until he hit the bottom of the air column.

He split the water with a bioshield needle and covered distance quickly until the drag finally slowed him, then Blade transitioned to the leg augments and motored his way straight down to the bottom, barely hanging onto his battlemeld link with Jason due to the distance. Once down there he was able to see the flat bottom of the pond, then began moving around in a search grid using Jason as a navigational point. Eventually he came back up when his air ran out, helped by a telekinetic tug that pulled him up out of the water a meter, then Blade dropped down into a bioshield bowl that floated him like a boat.

“That is a long way down,” he said, sinking himself back into the water gently before fully releasing the bioshield as he lifted Jason up into the air and positioned him to the next search point on their little grid. When he shot him down in the same manner Blade stayed on the surface sucking air as he watched the results through their battlemeld link.

When Jason came back up he went again, with the pair alternating too many times to count before Jason finally found something. It was barely a finger-sized depression in the floor, but it held a button that he did not press immediately, choosing instead to come back up and recharge his air supply. Blade went down as he did, heading straight to that spot and finding the button again. He didn’t waste air and pressed it immediately…with a blinding flash of light shocking him as the bottom of the pond lit up in a variety of concealed lights.

Seeing through Jason’s senses more than his own, Blade saw the entire floor of the pool for the first time, for the water was crystal clear, though the outer lights began to wink off, shrinking the pattern until it reduced down to a spiral that eventually disappeared at the center…which was not where the button was.

What the hell was that?

I don’t know, Jason answered. Try again.

Blade hit the button a second time and the light show returned, diminishing down to the same spot on the floor before disappearing. Jason sensed that Blade was going to need air soon and felt him start to come back up to the surface while he mentally kept a plot on the spiral midpoint. Blade knew what he was doing, so when he got topside he swam over to where Jason guided him and sucked air for a bit as his counterpart swam over to the button location. When both were ready Blade picked Jason up at the edge of his telekinetic range and gave him the accelerated head start before heading down the old fashioned way himself.

Jason reached bottom a few seconds ahead of the faster Blade and pushed the button. The lights came on same as before, but as Blade followed the diminishing spiral down to its finishing point he found…absolutely nothing.

Not giving up he ran his hands over the smooth floor, hoping to find something his Pefbar was missing, but eventually he ran out of air and had to go back up top again after three more light cycles.

“I don’t get it,” he said across the gap to where Jason was treading water.

“We have to be missing something.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Maybe it’s a countdown rather than an arrow.”

“Could be,” Blade agreed. “But to what?”

Jason kicked himself around in a circle, extending his Pefbar out in spotlight mode to get more distance. “Go tap it again.”

Blade swam over to his position, knowing what he was thinking thanks to the battlemeld. Jason picked him up in a Lachka grip and sent him down torpedo style again, but instead of looking down at the lights he focused his Pefbar up and laterally. He still couldn’t see the whole chamber in spotlight mode, but the extra range he gained he used to make a quick sweep that he repeated through a regular oscillation.

Nothing showed up, so he swam as fast as he could over to another section of the pond and had Blade hit the button again before he ran out of air. Jason scanned that section of the wall and ceiling, still getting nothing. Blade came up and launched Jason down and the two switched roles, with two more section scans before they spotted a small anomaly on the wall just above the waterline.

“Got it,” Blade said enthusiastically as the lights disappeared and the small blip with them. Jason was still battlemeld linked with him and knew to press it again one last time before he ran out of air and came back up to the top. As he rose up he saw through Blade’s senses as he swam frantically to that side of the pond, then managed to shoot himself up out of the water and over to the wall the last few meters.

He smacked the wall and slid down, his hand running across a depression that vanished just as he got to it. He felt a handle disappear underneath his touch, then he slid back into the water and was out of reach of it by half a meter. Blade locked that spot firmly in his mind and waited out Jason’s recharge period, intending to get it the next time.

“How did you do that frog jump?”

“You saw it. Do you really have to ask,” Blade answered, referencing their still active battlemeld.

“I felt a shield and a reverse crash bag.”

“I didn’t use Lachka.”

“What then?”

“I jumped with a Yetu burst.”

“Off your own bioshield?”

“Sure.”

“How the hell did you do that?”

“I linked it to the water like an overlay. It helps get around the projector difficulty.”

“So you’re close to creating stair steps in the air?”

“Might look like it, but no. Unfortunately.”

“Funny, I don’t recall you mentioning anything about that in your training logs.”

“Really? Must have slipped my mind,” he said, giving Jason enough surface thoughts to read to know that he’d been working extra hard on aquatics for both himself and his Clan Cortana. “Now would you please press that button one more time?”

Jason sucked in a deep breath, mentally letting him know he and Blade were going to have a long chat on his little technique later. Being too far away for a telekinetic assist, Jason made his own conduit in the water beside him then ducked head first into it, not getting half as far as their original torpedo but still managing a bit of a head start. He wasn’t fully recovered yet, but he didn’t need to be to just get to that one spot and back again so he swam hard until he saw the blip on his Pefbar, then eased down to it and pressed the button after giving Blade an unnecessary heads up.

Up top the other trailblazer waited, ignoring the lights as they snapped on and focusing on the patch of wall above him. Like clockwork, as soon as the water lit up the depression formed, sinking into the wall to reveal a T-shaped handle inset into the hole.

Blade used his bioshield tractor treads to raise him up until his torso was even with the calm water. From there he reached up to grab the handle and felt for how it worked with a probing yank. When it didn’t move he experimented, finding that it did pull out laterally like a drawer. Using it as a handhold he pressed a foot against the wall to get some leverage and yanked it out a good foot before he heard a click to his right and a short doorway formed inches above the waterline.

Got it Jason. Get your ass up here, Blade told him as he swam over and climbed up inside the meter high tube. When the lights disappeared the hatch over the opening began to close, but Blade wedged himself into it and was ready to use both bioshields and Lachka to keep it open if necessary, though there was hardly any resistance in the mechanism aside from a gentle push.

Blade reached a hand towards the water and created a Bataf repulsor conduit down to Jason then retracted it rapidly, pulling him up through the water at an angle and over to his wedged position. When his head broke the surface Blade let go of the Bataf and the battlemeld.

“That bastard made it a binary,” Blade complained as Jason swam the last few meters up to him. “There’s no way one person could make it on their own.”

“Let’s leave it open just in case one of the others gets dunked in here.”

“Good idea,” Blade said as he slid in a bit further to give Jason room to climb in while holding the two halves of the hatch apart with his arm and foot. The other trailblazer climbed inside and Blade let go, sliding down the dark tunnel a bit more and unable to see anything beyond the straight tube.

“This would be easier if I could see inside the wall,” Jason said as he tried to bend the door segments.

“Just melt it.”

“Yeah,” Jason agreed, concentrating and summoning up a heat surge into his right index finger…then suddenly he and Blade were yanked down the tube. Jason’s hand caught him on the edge of the hatch as it moved to close with his fellow trailblazer disappearing into the distance. His grip didn’t last long, for the hatch reversed direction and fully retracted into the tube wall giving him nothing to grip. He felt a force field activate on the outside of the wall so he couldn’t slide his fingers over the edge and latch on, then the last bit of hatch disappeared and he got sucked down after Blade.

The tube made a tight turn after a few seconds, then he was dropped into a larger one and got dunked into water again, this time the moving variety as he slid down what was essentially a pitch black waterslide with his Pefbar again not penetrating the walls. Blade’s mental signature returned for a split second before disappearing a second time as Jason entered a long straight section that had him falling at a steep angle before dragging him around a spiral that eventually ended with a bright light…

Jason flew through the air and landed in a telekinetic grip as Blade stopped his fall, bringing him down into the shallow pool of water alongside him with the overhead sun glaring down on both of them as they looked out over a huge forested valley from what appeared to be a mountaintop. Jason spun his head around, seeing the same thing stretching out behind him in all directions without a wall in sight and with the water splashing down behind them coming from a magical hole in the sky.

“What…the…hell,” Blade said, looking around and seeing miles of countryside stretched out before them and all at a lower altitude so they could get a grand view of it all.

Jason stood up and took a few steps forward, enough to see a piece of the pool spilling over the edge of a drop off into a long but thin waterfall that transitioned into a quickly flowing creek that disappeared into the greenery. “This has to be holographic at some point.”

“What the hell is Wilson playing at?”

“I don’t know, but…”

Run! Greg’s voice said telepathically with a mental arrow pointing them over the waterfall.

Jason and Blade exchanged glances then took the trailblazer’s warning at face value and dove over the waterfall as a buzzing sound suddenly overwhelmed the noise of the falling water.

4

Jason went over first, with Blade stepping off the edge of the waterfall as he clicked on his Pefbar and noticed a cloud approaching from their left. He didn’t have time to analyze it, for a moment later he was in freefall and landing in a churning pit of water half a step behind Jason, who slid down the incline and underneath the vegetation as he traveling along the water flow. When Blade hit he submerged up to his shoulders before being carried off in the flow between a series of rocks, noticing the cloud overhead coming down after them.

Don’t let them touch you, Greg’s said just as Blade saw the tiny little dots shoot through the leaves after him. Come to me.

Blade stayed in the water flow, feeling Jason just ahead as Greg’s mental impetus showed them where to go. He clawed at the rocks to get him more speed, for the amount of water was low enough that it wasn’t pulling him along rapidly and the cloud was catching him. Before they got to the second waterfall the first of the little bugs pushed through the thick branches and leaves overhead and into the tube-like tunnel that the water was flowing through underneath. There were dozens of them at first, with thousands more visible on his Pefbar, and they were all headed towards him.

Blade threw a telekinetic push back towards them, scatting those closest but they were coming at him from multiple angles. He seemed to still be ahead of the swarm but could feel another section of the cloud moving on ahead, as if they intended to ambush him further down the line. That was when he felt a battlemeld prompt and he linked up with both Jason and Greg. A moment later a repulsor conduit was created between Greg and him, with Blade jumping off the next waterfall and swinging on it like a vine. He put up a bioshield and rammed right through the little stun bugs, knowing from Greg that it would protect him.

But with each contact his shield weakened, for every mechanical bug carried a stun charge and they were all detonating against his bioshield. He made it through the open air and was reeled in partially as Greg landed him in a pile of brush 20 or so meters up from the water flow and near to where Jason had also landed. Back under the brush again, Blade scrambled to get his footing as he climbed up what was left of the small ravine until he came to a path where Greg was waiting, with Jason stepping into the open a moment later.

“Follow me,” Greg said, throwing several Lachka fields up into the open air above the path to knock back the stun bugs as he led them on the downhill portion of the dirt trail. “And knock them down every chance you can get. Smash them if there are only a few.”

“How long have you been here?” Jason asked on the run as the three of them moved single file with Greg in the lead.

“A few hours, but they got Dina. If even one of those things hits you it’s the same as a full stun shot from a pistol. They only have one charge, but if three of them land on your arm you’re unconscious. We didn’t know what was happening until it was too late and they got her. I managed to get a bioshield up over us but couldn’t sustain it and had to run.”

“Where is she?” Blade asked, throwing another invisible wall up over their heads and using it like a fly swatter. These stupid bugs were fast in air and looked to be able to match their foot speed.

“Captured. The bugs stun you then the drones haul you off. I couldn’t get close enough to stop them.”

“What the hell is going on?” Jason asked, linking up with Blade and using a combined Lachka field to encircle and then compact a few dozen of the bugs into a mechanical snowball. They double crunched it, making sure the damn things were destroyed, then dropped it and swatted away some more tendrils of the ever growing swarm that had to number in the hundreds of thousands.

“I don’t know,” Greg said, jumping over a log and taking a spur on the trail that led through a tunnel in the rock. Jason and Blade followed him in, then came up short as he stopped inside. “Keep a field on that entrance. They didn’t come inside last time, but don’t take chances.”

“Got it,” Blade said, throwing up a bioshield to cover the door-sized entrance.

“No, use Lachka. Your bioshield will trigger the charges.”

Blade deactivated the glass-like energy barrier and replaced it with a completely invisible one as the buzz of the swarm passed it by but, like Greg had said, they didn’t try to come in through the short tunnel that had an exit only 15 meters on the other side.

“I was exploring the lovely traps over there,” Greg said, motioning to the other side of the ravine, “when I felt you guys come in. This whole place is a cleverly sculpted nightmare.”

“What traps?” Blade asked, keeping his Pefbar extended out the way they’d come while lowering his Lachka field, ready to snap it back into place if anything tried to come through.

“Gravity traps, about two meters wide. I’d guess 10g. If there were bugs on that side they’d leave you a sitting duck. You can’t run anywhere without taking the chance of hitting one of them and falling flat on your face. I’ve been trying to map out and mark them, but have only had an hour or so.”

“Go back to the part where who took Dina?” Jason asked.

“Big flying drones. They came in and picked up her body, then flew off in that direction,” Greg said, pointing where he’d felt her mental signature disappear on the other side of the mountain. “You come in through a dark pond?”

“Yes,” Jason answered. “Button on floor, door in wall?”

“Same for us,” Greg answered. “And if the others will be doing the same once they arrive we need to get to them before the bugs do. I don’t think we can stand up to them directly. Bioshields won’t last for long and all they need is one of the little things to slip through to get us in the head or chest. I got hit on the shoulder and lost the use of my arm on the way down here, and I’m still a touch numb. No destunning serum that I’ve found yet, but this place looks huge and I wouldn’t put it past Wilson to have left caches of equipment hidden somewhere.”

“So this is some giant new test?” Blade asked.

“Has to be,” Greg said as he stepping through the tunnel and held up just from the exterior on the other side, with the artificial sun making his eyes squint. “Our Final Challenge was the same way. No heads up as to what we have to do and we have to work our way out of it.”

“The Trials are supposed to be Clan versus Clan,” Jason argued. “Seems like we’re all on the same team in this.”

“Or maybe its survival of the fittest,” Blade suggested. “No way out and it’s just a matter of who lasts the longest.”

Greg wrinkled his brow in disdain. “If it is we’re definitely not playing it that way.”

“We need to find Dina,” Jason insisted, “and hook up with any others coming in. Any chance that this isn’t the only entry point?”

“I haven’t sensed anyone else, and I’m curious to see just where the walls are. Some of that view has to be holographic.”

“Agreed,” Blade said, looking ahead. “How were you marking the traps?”

“Stick ‘X’. It gets squashed flat and is easy to see so long as you stay on the trails.”

“And off the trails?” Jason asked.

“The brush is so thick that you can’t move fast enough to evade the bugs. I don’t know if they’re programed for only the other side, but I don’t want to take the chance of getting caught out here. I’ve stuck to the trails and was working my way around the circuit when you came in. There are a couple points where you can jump from trail to trail, but it looks to be a deformed loop.”

“How far down?”

“There’s another trail below it, but my spidey senses said there might be a trap in the crossing so I haven’t explored there yet, but I did get around most of this loop.”

“And no bugs over here at all?”

“Not that I’ve seen yet, but it’s not very hard to fly up and over this tunnel.”

“At least we can see into the ground here,” Blade commented, able to stretch out his Pefbar below them and into the rock.

“There has to be more than one pond,” Jason said, thinking out loud. “No one knew when I was going to get here and the others will be coming in at random. That room was designed for 2 and I bet they keep it that way.”

“One of us needs to stay near the top to key in the others if they do enter the same way we did,” Greg pointed out. “I could sense you from here, but it’s out of telepathy range. I had to sprint up the trail a ways before I made contact. If you can find a hiding spot further up be my guest, but someone has to start exploring the immediate area. The Trials aren’t supposed to start for 3 days and we can’t assume everyone is going to arrive today. If there’s food out here we need to find it.”

“I’ll take care of the newcomers,” Jason volunteered. “You two go exploring. We’ll make this our base camp until we find something better. Looks like Dina is going to have to wait until we get a handle on the geography.”

Further down the mountain, following the water flow, the ravine spread out into a small crater with a lake in the center. The creek continued out the far side and continued going downhill at a much softer gradient, but left the mostly calm pool behind it mostly contained as only a small opening was available for the water to flow out through a pair of overlapping rocks. The nearly mirror smooth surface of the water suddenly rippled as a disturbance in the center pushed up a pipe to just over the waterline, then it sprayed forth a geyser of water well up into the air that arched over into a tree-like fountain and fell back down into the pool on all sides but with a slight list to the south.

A few seconds later a body came flying up with it and shot 6 meters up into the air before splashing down into the water beside it, then was followed by another as Paul landed on top of Brian, knocking the wind out of him and pushing him underwater. The two separated with a stern kick from the lower Archon and swam back up to the surface, with Brian spitting out a gulp of water then coughing out the rest.

“Sorry,” Paul said as he treaded water and got his bearings, seeing a wall of greenery all around the pond they were now in, as well as the bright sun overhead. “Where the hell did we go?”

“Gravity alterations,” Brian said, swimming over next to him. “There’s no way of knowing which direction that slide took us. I thought we were going down, but apparently not…unless we crossed to the other side of the planet.”

A slight rumble sounded as the tube that had spat them out shut down its fountain and retreated back below water level, with both trailblazers watching it go down.

“So now what?” Brian asked.

“Let’s get to shore and find out,” Paul said, beginning to swim over to the edge. Brian came with him and they got halfway there before they both noticed another mind nearby…and a familiar one at that.

Randy? Paul asked.

No time to explain. Keep swimming but don’t touch button. I’ll yank you out when you get close to shore. Ignore the fireworks behind you.

Taking his fellow 2 at his word Paul and Brian both kept swimming towards shore, then a few seconds later there was a huge blast of water behind them. Paul saw it in his Pefbar but kept swimming as instructed, seeing a small aquatic mech rise up from below the surface as not one, but four trailblazers jumped out from the trees along the shore and on top of it.

Just then he felt Randy’s presence run up near to them but still hidden behind the greenery, with Brian being lifted out of the water and deposited on the shore ahead. A second later Paul took flight through the air and did likewise, landing on a platform of moss just short of the excessively thick brush.

Randy telekinetically yanked them both through and into sight of him, with Paul seeing a worried expression on his face.

“Run!” he yelled, taking off through the tree trunks as a buzzing sound began to overwhelm the noise of the mech.

Paul and Brian both followed him, not having a clue where they were going but apparently he did, for Randy ran a very evasive pattern through trees and around rocks and overhangs that Paul couldn’t have guessed at, eventually leading them to a small creek that flowed into the pond.

“Under,” Randy said, diving in head first and disappearing beneath a bit of calm water.

Paul took a breath and dove in second, following Randy as he made his way through a rocky tunnel and into a submerged chamber. He came up into a pocket of air only two feet high but one that was large enough to hold ten people. Brian followed him in and the three wet Archons stood on their knees in the claustrophobic den with their chins just above the waterline.

“What’s going on?” Brian asked.

“A lot,” Randy said, relaxing for a moment. “What day is it?”

“Last I checked the 21st, but we spent a while in a dark pond before getting spit out into that lit one.”

“I’ve been here about a day then, and by last count there were 77 of us already in. You two make 79, but 11 have already been captured.”

“Captured?” Paul asked.

“Wilson’s got some wicked challenge set up for us this time,” Randy said, shaking his head with dismay. “The reason why I told you not to touch bottom in the pond is because some of the others entered the way you did and got swarmed by stun fish. We think it activates when you touch the shoreline. A few of those buggers hit you and you’re unconscious, with a lung full of water to boot. We lost Ben that way, but we’ve learned from it and several other mistakes.”

“Lost?” Brain emphasized.

“He’s not dead. As soon as he went under a drone flew in and yanked him out of the water. Same thing happens everywhere in this park. They’ve got traps and stun bots galore, including little flying bugs. You go down and you get picked up. We’ve tried to stop them but only succeed once. You can’t mess with those swarms, and the lemmings are the worst.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Paul said, not fully catching on.

“Little agile robot rabbits that stun to the touch…and they come at you with lizard-like numbers.”

“Sounds fun,” Brian said with an ironic laugh. “What was that back with the mech?”

“Multitasking. This little hideaway actually had a few prizes for us on those ledges,” Randy said, pointing at the empty slabs now. “Foodstuffs, a touch of destunning serum, comlinks…which will just lead the swarms to you, so don’t use them…a few weapons, ammo cartridges that don’t match, and a lot of other little challenges. We’re finding and collecting as much as we can, and that mech was guarding a big underwater stash. When someone comes in the fish congregate in a specific place in the pond and it draws them off from the mech location, so we had to wait until someone else came in to jump it. Look up.”

Randy tilted his chin upwards, with both Paul and Brian extending their Pefbar through the ceiling and thin layer of soil to the forest above…where a cloud of tiny objects was passing by.

“Those are the stun bugs. They fly in swarms and should leave this area shortly. We need to stay here until they do. They can move as fast as us and will drain your bioshields with too many hits. You have to use Lachka, but miss even one and you’re in trouble. Single charge, equivalent to a pistol shot.”

“Damn,” Paul said, realizing his day had just gone from bad to horrible. “What’s the objective?”

“We don’t know. We’re just trying to collect everybody and not lose any more newbs falling into traps we’ve already sprung.”

“Thanks,” Brian offered.

“Ditto,” Paul echoed.

“Do either of you know when Morgan was supposed to arrive?”

“Not specifically, no,” Paul said, with Brian likewise shaking his head in the negative.

“We haven’t found her yet, and I’m really hoping she didn’t come in first and get captured. We need her Jumat to take down these swarms. The weapons we’ve found are pretty much a joke. No area of effect. Just a tease from Wilson, we think.”

“Sounds like him. Is Jason here?”

“Yeah, he was one of the first in, and the sooner I get you back to link up with him the better. We really need the dynamic duo out here.”

“Guess that makes me a cheerleader,” Brian quipped.

“You’re not hot enough,” Randy said with a smirk as he sensed the area over them clear. “Let’s get moving, but stay tight and follow my lead until you get the lay of the land…and don’t touch any of the berries. They’re stun-laced too.”

5

“We’ve found where the others are being held,” Jace said, pointing to a scribbled map in the dirt with a few pebbles highlighting key locations as Paul, Jason, and a half dozen other trailblazers looked on. The rest were out continuing the scouting efforts and trying to locate supply clusters while the tunnel in the ridge had become their storage area, which they were standing just to the outside of on the ‘safe’ side away from the bug zone.

“Held?” Paul asked.

Jace nodded. “They’re unconscious and laying out on pedestals like prizes…and there are 100 pedestals in total.”

“That’s our mission fail,” Jason said with certainty. “And probably bait.”

“We didn’t get too close, but were able to make Ikrid contact. They’re the real deal, not holos, but the place is guarded to the hilt. We spotted every known trap laid out on this mountain and then some. It’s going to be almost impossible to get in there and out with them, and we might lose more than we rescued.”

“Highlights?” Sara asked.

“They’ve got dinobots.”

“What?”

“Oh crap,” Jason said, knowing what he meant even before Jace sent the telepathic memory to all nearby so he wouldn’t have to explain in words. “That’s something Jax was working on with Cora. They’re experimental mechs they’re using to try and map out the movement idiosyncrasies of the V’kit’no’sat so our own mechs don’t get blindsided.”

“And they’re both prisoner…wonderful,” Sara said with a sigh.

“Well these were patrolling the perimeter and we could hear more inside the compound. All Rit’ko’sor and Era’tran models with no obvious weapons.”

“They’re not automated,” Jason said. “That much I know. They have to be remote-controlled using a neural interface, and I bet Wilson has a host of trainers on the other end just waiting to pound…oh shit, I bet he even got the ones that we had in basic. That’d be just like him.”

“The patrols looked automated.”

“Maybe for walking in a circle, but if they’re going to fight they have to be driven. Next gen rovers I’d guess.”

“The old rovers couldn’t step on and squash you,” Page pointed out. “Don’t suppose they have a target sphere?”

“Not that we saw,” Jace said regretfully, “but then again, nothing here has. I think Wilson wants this to be live.”

“The weapons he gave us aren’t stun,” Paul added. “Let’s just hope these dinobots are.”

“Still begs the question of what’s our mission goal?” Sara reminded them.

“Until we find the edges of this park there’s no way to be sure unless we stumble across it,” Jace said with a touch of awe. “They really went all in on this one. There’s at least a 2 mile radius around the mountain.”

“Did you get beyond here?” Sara asked, pointing to the pebble that he’d used to mark the holding facility on the plain to the northeast.

“We couldn’t. Everything past this line,” he said, dragging a telekinetic finger through the dirt in a very precise fashion, “is dino territory. I don’t think they’re just there to guard the prisoners.”

“Our endgame is probably in there,” Paul said, rubbing his left knuckles with his right hand.

“Or everywhere around the mountain has them,” Jason added as a mental signature popped up above them.

“Incoming,” Kent said, running back through the tunnel and up the mountain on the other side as a pair of Archons fell from the waterfall in the sky down into the collection pool.

“Get them out,” Jason said as he sprinted up behind Kent with Paul trailing on his heels, “we’ll hunt the bugs.”

As Kent made mental contact with directions for the Archons to flee down the creek, Paul and Jason ran further up the trail as the stun bug swarms gathered near the top, but one group nearby the Archons spotted them and diverted their way. Paul and Jason both ducked into the thick vegetation and got off the trail, using their bioshields to push through the thorns and branches at decent speed and met the bugs further in where the darkness kept the vegetation a bit more sparse, though the varieties that had been planted were used to little sunlight, so both Archons were mired in growths that came up to their waists as the bug swarm came down through the canopy above them.

The duo linked up and stood back to back, then Paul threw up a bioshield around them both while Jason corralled the bugs with cup-like telekinetic walls. When those cups overflowed and the bugs came in at them Paul added his own Lachka and pushed as many away from the bioshield as possible so they wouldn’t drain its charge. Meanwhile he pulled a small grenade off his equipment belt and passed it through the bioshield where Jason then grabbed it and held it aloft nearby.

After he had gotten most of the bugs where he wanted them both trailblazers used the linked Nemsa ability to combine and enhance their Lachka skills, granting Jason enough power to fully enwrap the bulk of the swarm into an invisible sphere…into which he primed and sent the grenade. As Paul kept the other bugs off them, both of them squeezed the sphere down as tightly as they could before the explosion, which overloaded and broke their telekinetic hold, as well as destroying most of the bugs.

“Well that worked,” Paul said as the pair took off running back the way they’d come and telekinetically squishing a few isolated bugs that zipped off after them.

“Unfortunately they have friends,” Jason pointed out, literally, with a mental prod to their right. The stun bugs that had been going after the others had finally gotten around to coming back to them, suggesting that the others had gotten to safety and were no longer priority targets.

Both Archons busted out of the brush and onto the trail simultaneously, with them turning left and running down the path just in time to see the other threesome duck around a curve below them. Having gotten used to the trail intimately by now, Jason and Paul caught up with them before they made it to the tunnel. Jason threw up a bioshield over the entrance just in case as they slipped inside, then flinched as a whole swarm impacted and overloaded his shield.

“Shit,” he said, throwing a telekinetic wall at the bugs to push them back. “They’re coming through.”

“Other side,” Kent yelled, getting Kian and Hans moving and smashing his map with boot prints on the other side…only to realize that the bugs were also coming up and over the ridgeline.

“So much for predictable,” Sara said, with her and four others linked up and pushing them back with massive invisible walls where they could spot them, knowing that all it would take would be one getting through to really mess up her day. “Grab some gear and run!”

“This is fun,” Hans said, grabbing a container of who knew what and taking off down the trail following Kent.

“They touch you, you’re unconscious,” Kent explained. “So stay with me until you get up to speed. Kian too. And don’t step near the Xs,” he said pointing out one ahead and running to the left through a section of brush that had been cut out and piled to form an X that was smashed flat save for the extreme edges.

As he ran around the detour a whole new swarm of stun bugs came up from somewhere in the vegetation to the left and flew directly into him. He threw up a Lachka wall and bioshield, blocking most of them but a few came through and released their charge on his inner barrier, draining it of power. Paul and Jason threw a combined wall up covering him and the others across the detour, allowing them to continue on sheathed in bioshields from head to toe, then the pair threw the wall back into the vegetation and smashed it all back two meters as the last of the Archons passed the by.

“They’re everywhere,” Jace said in a grunt’s voice as he ran past, prompting a quick laugh from the duo despite the seriousness of the situation. Once Sara was by they brought up the rear, flicking off the stun bugs wherever they could with their Lachka but unable keep them all off their bioshields. As they ran down the mountain and through the twists and turns of the trail that barrier got weaker and weaker, with most of the bugs getting blocked by the telekinetic walls but almost always some would sneak by the cracks, for it was impossible to keep a ground-tight telekinetic wall as you were running and difficult enough to do when standing still.

Bioshield wrapped around Paul instinctively, with the Lachka much better at remote grapples and flat walls, but it seemed the designers of this little horror park had anticipated that, for no matter how many bugs they stopped more would slip through, and this time there were so many coming out of the vegetation that he honestly didn’t know if they were going to get away from them or not up until they hit the bottom of the loop and jumped across a small hillside of meter-high brush between two marked gravity traps and landed on the opposite trail below.

“Hold up,” Sara said as they came down, but her eyes were focused behind them. “They’re stopping.”

Paul skidded his foot across the dirt as he stopped and turned around, adding his normal vision to his already active Pefbar and seeing the cloud of bugs stop like a layer of fog against an altitude temperature barrier, for they literally spilled out above them and did not come any lower on the mountain.

“There goes most of our supplies,” Jace said, kicking a rock off the trail in frustration, then he and the others all got an Ensek relayed message, for the trailblazers had spread themselves out across the park with various individuals in between the base came and the scouting teams so they could bounce Ikrid messages across them and cheat the distances involved. It reported another two trailblazers had been discovered, including Morgan.

“Finally,” Sara said with relief.

“That’s all of us,” Jason noted, glancing up at the swarm. “And I think we’re entering phase two of this little game.”

“You think they’re going to drive us to the dinobots?” Paul asked.

“I think they’re just going to keep us off the mountain top for now, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

“How long have you guys been here?” Kian asked.

“We all got grabbed as soon as we came into the city,” Paul explained, thumbing a finger at Jason. “He was one of the first lucky enough not to get stunned and hauled off to our little prison facility…long story that we’ll get you caught up on later. Right now let’s put some distance between us and those bastards,” he said, pointing to the dark cloud of tiny flying machines as he turned and started walking along the trail to the left and into another curvy mess of path that tried to confuse the heck out of you at every turn.

“What the hell is going on?” Morgan asked when she finally got to a large group of her fellow trailblazers, though more than half of them were missing from the stomped out section of forest that they’d carved into the underbrush a few dozen meters from the trail edge, and in the center of which was an open hideaway with an array of supplies.

“About time you finally showed up,” Greg said, walking over to her while the others stood around, some keeping an eye on the surrounding area and the others here to hear what was going on as they figured out their next move. “You had to wait to the last day to get here, didn’t you?”

“No point in sitting around waiting for the Trials to begin,” she argued, having come straight from her Clan stronghold on the lizard border. “Then again if somebody had mentioned there’d be a pre-party I might have shown up a bit earlier.”

“None of us knew about this.”

“What is this?”

“That hasn’t been told to us, nor has anything else,” Greg explained. “We’ve got search teams out mapping the boundaries of what is a multiple mile park and looking for additional supply cashes like this one. We’ve recovered a lot, then subsequently lost them when the top of the mountain was taken over by the stun bugs. We need your Jumat to deal with them, because they eat up bioshields quickly and can slip past our Lachka. One bug is the equivalent of a stun shot, and there are millions of the things swarming the top of the mountain right now. They were holding to a specific sector, but when the last of you arrived they took over the whole thing.”

“There were three entry points,” Paul added. “One in a lake, one on the top of the mountain, and the one in the cliff wall that you came out of.”

“What about the prisoners?”

“They’re being held northeast of the mountain in a fortified area, and this mountain alone has a lot of nasty little traps. Short story is, if you get stunned a drone comes and picks up your body, and you get added to the trophy case.”

“Trophy case?” Morgan asked, frowning.

“From what we could see,” Jace answered, “all the prisoners are still unconscious and laid out on pedestals.”

“Well that’s rude.”

“And probably a trap,” Greg added.

“So you need my help rescuing them?”

“That’d be nice, thanks.”

“Bigger problem,” Jason continued, “is we don’t know why we’re here yet. If we all get captured that’s obviously the fail point, but if there is a finish pedestal somewhere we haven’t found it yet.”

“Any live opposition?”

“Not that we’ve seen. And the weapons we’re finding are all lethal, so I doubt we’ll be going against anything other than machines.”

“Are theirs lethal?”

“All stuns of some sort. Including gravity traps.”

Morgan’s face darkened.

“We estimate about 10g and they’re only 2 meters wide, but if you’re running from the stun bugs and hit one of those they’ll swoop in and nail you before you can recover.”

“Ambrosia?”

Jason laughed. “Not a drop so far.”

“Now that’s just crossing a line,” she said, balling up her hands into fists.

“Most of us are low or out now.”

“My Jumat feeds off of it. I won’t be very powerful if it has to recharge naturally, so if there’s something you want me to bust up now is the time.”

“I would say take down some of the swarms,” Paul added, “but it looks like they’ve got an unlimited number, so thinning them isn’t going to be an option.”

“Why do you say that?” Sara asked.

Paul glanced at her. “It’s Wilson.”

“We assume,” Greg corrected.

“No one else would have the balls to do this to us,” Morgan said definitively. “And going in cold just makes for another element to neutralize our abilities. If you do find any ambrosia I non-greedily suggest you send it my way, but I doubt there is any. He’s taking us back to day one as much as possible.”

“There are also dinobots,” Jace added with a smirk.

“Fitting,” Morgan said, rolling up her left sleeve and snugging it above her elbow, then doing the same to the one on the right to expose her forearms to make it easier to throw Jumat blasts without having to take her clothing into account…that and it was plenty hot, not to mention that her clothes were still soaked. “Did anyone get a bundle through? Mine was yanked off me in the transition from tank to tunnel.”

“I got yanked when I tried to melt the door open for the rest of you,” Jason said after there were a few nods of agreement from the others. “I think they wanted us here without any goodies or help.”

“How are we on food?”

“Low now that we lost the mountain stash.”

“You said it was guarded by these bugs?”

“A whole lot of bugs,” Paul corrected. “I don’t think even with your help we’re going to fight our way through them.”

“How about I fight and one of you sneak your way up and grab the stash?”

Jason and Paul exchanged glances.

“We don’t know where they are or how many there are,” Greg answered.

“Or if they’re going to stay put,” Ace pointed out. “I volunteer to play rabbit and try on our terms before they make a move.”

“I’m game,” Morgan said, flexing her arms, “and on the clock.”

Paul sighed. “Alright, but we all go…everyone here anyway, save for one. That one stays just below the threshold and yanks you out if you go down. No reason to make this distraction anywhere else. We can preposition and do some sneaking up through the brush, then give you the signal to unleash hell on the swarm. If you get bit we can at least recover you before a drone swoops in to pick you up.”

“Lovely,” Morgan said, tossing her hand palm up in an open gesture. “Lead the way.”

6

Mark-084 stepped up to the null void in his Pefbar and touched the open air in between trees with his hand, finding nothing. He took a step forward and his fingers touched the soft wall that an intricately designed hologram was placed over. The more he pressed the deeper his hand went, but the stiffer the resistance he encountered.

The Archon pulled his arm back, with it returning to view and the jungle brush ahead looking very real to his eyes. He guessed it was overlaid onto a restraint field, and at least that meant if someone ran full on into it they wouldn’t smash themselves against a hard surface. This was more like a rubber band and would throw you back out after impact, but the field was also invisible so it allowed the hologram to set up in real space rather than having to try and put it on an actual wall.

As Mark looked past the nearest brush he could just faintly detect a misalignment in the trees. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to know that they were in fact holographic rather than the real ones behind him. He glanced to the right, then the left, seeing that there were no trunks on the approximate border line, but there were some branches sticking out. He walked sideways over to them and reached for the invisible wall…but it wasn’t there.

Backtracking he found the original point and ran his hand along it as he walked until it suddenly disappeared. Feeling it out he found that the field made a sharp turn inward, and following it he discovered that it was a nook in what otherwise would have been a flat wall that ran around the circumference of this tree and its branches.

That was smart, otherwise there would have been a line of daylight marking the edge where the branches failed to meet the hologram. The deviation would be minimal, but it might be detectable from above. Wilson had gone to great lengths to make this park as seamlessly real as possible, but Mark had just found one none the less.

He reached out with his Ikrid and found Nik where he’d left him, then sent him a telepathic report of what he’d just found, including images, that the other trailblazer viewed and copied with Ensek, sending out the same Ikrid message to everyone within his range…who then in turn sent their own copies, making for a Human relay system to cover the vast stretches of the park. It was hard to measure with all the varied terrain, but Mark guessed he was somewhere between 5 to 7 miles away from the mountain at this point and only now was encountering a boundary wall.

That easily made it the largest interior park in Star Force, and gave the now less than 100 trailblazers a huge region to explore looking for supplies, threats, and their mission objective. With this point finally plotted Mark continued to work his way around the perimeter, keeping a hand on the invisible wall at all times and seeing where it led.

Rafa was also out on scouting duty, but on the opposite side of the mountain and nowhere near a boundary wall when he stumbled across a clearing in the forest. Approaching it carefully sensing a trap, he scanned everywhere he could with his Pefbar and slowly walked out into the daylight towards the single object at the center…or rather buried beneath the grass. It was hidden underground and when the trailblazer neared it a hologram formed in front of him in the image of Obi-wan Kenobi.

“Greetings, younglings,” it said in a reasonable knockoff of the original. “By now you’ve obviously realized that these aren’t the Trials you were looking for. Be that as it may, it was decided that the lot of you deserved a greater challenge. And for any proper challenge you must have a mission objective, which I will give you now. Be wary, for I will state this only once, then you’re on your own.”

“Find the heart of the storm and quell it at its source, then the light of day will guide your path onwards…oh, and did I mention you should run now? Farewell, and may the Force be with you,” the hologram said as the dirt beneath its feet burst up through the grass and a series of tubes emerged, out of which flowed little mechanical quadrupeds by the dozens.

“Shit,” Mark said as he turned and ran, diving into the underbrush and pushing through it with his bioshields. He wasn’t near a path so he was just going to have to improvise. The lemmings were damn fast and if he couldn’t get out in the open he wasn’t going to be able to evade them.

Then again, if he delayed to fight them more would catch up to him, so he decided to just try and make a run for it.

The first little rabbit-sized machine that caught up to him got picked up and hurled backward telekinetically, followed by others as Mark pushed his way through a wall of vines. He’d been trying to run the way he’d come, but these hadn’t been there so he must have already veered off course. The forest was so dense off trails that it was almost impossible to keep your bearings without a battlemap and right now all he had to work off of was a pair of mental signatures that were both more than a kilometer away.

As he ran Mark relayed the hologram’s message just in case he did get caught and stunned, then did his best to lose his pursuit, hoping like hell they didn’t have any flanking units ahead of him or he was going to run square into a trap at the pace he was being forced to move at.

“Heart of the storm?” Paul repeated, exchanging glances with the others in their new base camp.

“Like…cloud storm?” Kerrie suggested.

“Oh hell no,” Morgan said, realizing what she meant.

“There’s still a lot of the park we haven’t searched yet,” Greg pointed out.

“She’s right,” Jason disagreed. “It means the mountain. We have to go back up there.”

“We barely made a supply grab. We can’t go exploring up there.”

“We’ll need everyone,” Kerrie insisted. “And maybe some specialized equipment is hidden out there somewhere for us to find. If a return to the mountain is the endgame, then the size of this park suggests us doing a lot out there before we get to it.”

“It didn’t say endgame,” Paul pointed out, drawing a few cringes of agreement.

“Regardless, it’s where we have to go eventually,” Morgan said, dropping into a crouch and resting on her ankles. “But we’re going to need everyone, which means a prison break has to come first.”

“I get the feeling we might be in here for a long time,” Rio said, sitting down on the ground next to Morgan. “I’d prefer getting the others back sooner than later, so if it’s possible at this point, we need to get them out now.”

“If it’s possible?”

“There could be time locks, in the form of unbeatable challenges. Or like Kerrie said, maybe there’s something else out there that we need to earn first to be able to take those dinobots down.”

“Oh we can take them down,” Morgan said dangerously. “We just have to link up into a massive battlemeld.”

“Which puts us all in the same place at the same time,” Paul added.

“Let’s start with the small ones and see what happens,” Jason suggested. “And let’s split up what supplies we have in case we lose this firebase as well. I don’t want to have to make another bug run, especially with Morgan low on ambrosia.”

“I’ll be out within a day, two tops if I don’t use it again.”

“When’s the last time you trained dry?” Sara asked.

Morgan shook her head. “I don’t.”

“Yeah, that’s a big middle finger from Wilson,” Jason said, punching his palm. “He trained without ambrosia for so long he’s used to it. Us…not so much.”

“We’ll adjust,” Paul said with a reassuring tone. “We always do.”

“Meanwhile the others are stuck in nap time,” Sara reminded them. “I agree, we get them out first.”

“At least we finally determined one thing,” Andre said as he suppressed a smirk.

“What?” Greg asked.

“There are only 100 trailblazers. Kara’s not here, so apparently Wilson doesn’t consider her one of us.”

All eyes turned to Paul.

“She’s busy, and if I used her in the Trials you’d all complain about her jewelry anyway.”

“Just saying that Wilson didn’t con her in here either.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Morgan said dismissively. “He got us without our armor. You can’t disconnect hers.”

“Short of lopping off her hand,” Greg added.

“Just saying…we’re back to old school,” Andre clarified.

“Yes we are,” Yori agreed. “So let’s get the others and figure out how to beat this thing.”

Dina woke up groggy as hell with a telepathic shout echoing through her mind and a person standing over her. As soon as she moved her body it hurt from stiffness, but it was more the urgent emotions pouring into her from Larissa than the pain that woke her up enough to sit up and see where she was.

“Don’t ask, just move,” Larissa said, throwing a telekinetic wall behind Dina and knocking back a rogue lemming. “Now!”

Dina was yanked to her feet with her fellow trailblazer’s Lachka grip and the Archon stumbled her first step off the stone platform where she had been laying…but it was the sight of a pair of mechanical raptors running towards them that shot adrenaline through her body that flushed out a chunk of lingering stun energy.

“Get behind me,” Larisa said as she stepped in front of Dina just in time to block a mouth shot of stun energy from the closest raptor. The blue dot spread out into a ring that was over a meter wide by the time it hit Larissa’s bioshield, but she took enough of the blast to keep both of them clear…then all of a sudden Dina saw the raptor lifted off its feet and its legs and arms crumple into its body with shrieks of metal breaking.

The other raptor charged them and Dina stepped up beside Larissa, throwing a small Lachka hold around its left foot and yanking its leg to the side. It stumbled and nose hit the ground as it very agilely got its balance again and jumped at another nearby trailblazer…who dove out of the way after deflecting it with another invisible blow.

“Don’t touch them or you’ll be stunned,” Larissa told her as she pulled a still groggy Dina her way. “Run with me.”

“Oh this is fun,” the green-haired Archon said as she kept a wobbly pace behind Larissa, dodging another row of flat pedestals as she saw a few others being revived. The rest of the Archons were spread around the area engaging what looked to be an army of metallic dinosaurs…including a huge brontosaurus that was just now tromping its way into the clearing out of a jungle path.

“Not that way,” Larissa said, throwing a hand against Dina’s bare chest to stop her as a swarm of stun bugs flew out of the formerly clear section of forest they’d been running to. “Damn, we’re going to have to do this the hard way. Hope you’re awake.”

“More or less.”

“Link up…and cross your fingers.”

Dina accepted the battlemeld link and the pair ran off across the chaotic battlefield as there were Archons moving about everywhere confronting any number of threats that she didn’t recognize, but what little she remembered from her entry she figured everything here was equipped with stun weapons.

From the information flowing to her through Larissa she sensed the threats each posed, along with the plan to run directly at the worst of them, which was the brontosaurus. Even as they took off the long necked dinosaur sprayed a curtain of stun shots down across the ground like a broom, hitting two Archons that survived beneath bioshields, but Larissa knew they couldn’t last long under that amount of energy and now so did Dina, yet that was exactly where they were heading.

Dina knew Larissa would match her speed, so she tried to pump as much juice into her waking legs as she could while linking her psionics and pushing away some more rabbit-sized machines as another raptor came at them from the right side, sprinting across the clearing surrounding the pedestals. It fired as it ran and both Archons created a telekinetic crash bag between them, forcing them apart to allow the stun ring to pass through the gap, then Larissa pulled Dina through a hop leap with a short lived Bataf conduit as Paul and Jason sprinted in from the opposite direction and punted the raptor back with an invisible clothesline as they ran on either side of it, yanking it away from Dina as Larissa was doing her best to get her to safety on only a partial destunning charge.

The girls headed directly for the brontosaurus again, intending to take the trail it had come up on, but the dynamic duo circled around and got ahead of them, drawing the next head blast while leg turrets opened up and fired smaller, rifle-sized rounds at all four of them. Dina slid in behind Larissa and they used their Cerden to link bioshields in order to increase their strength, with the first trailblazer’s silhouette blocking all the incoming fire. Dina could feel how each stun shot ate away at their shield strength and knew that they couldn’t stand up to the rain that was coming down on Jason and Paul.

There was no time to wait and watch, with the girls suddenly up near the giant’s legs and darting left directly past the walking turret shelf. Dina got hit once, but the speed of both Archons made them hard to target and they flashed past the rear legs…then Dina found herself being thrown up into the air by Larissa as the tail whipped around into their faces.

The fully awake trailblazer dove underneath it, then launched herself into a Yetu-enhanced jump as it reversed direction with a flick and swung its tree trunk thick limb back at her. It passed under and made one more reverse, trying to flick her with the tip, but Larissa shoulder dove over it at the last moment before somersaulting back up into a run next to Dina as she got hit with a rear turret.

Their shared bioshield held up and they raced off down the trail, but they weren’t out of trouble yet.

“Don’t stop running,” Larissa insisted, leading her down the length of dirt road and scanning ahead with her Pefbar as a giant roar sounded from behind them.

“Wasn’t planning to,” she said as Larissa darted off the trail and into the brush. Dina followed a step behind and dived in with the brush sliding over her bioshields and not tearing into her exposed skin…for sometime during her nap her clothes had disappeared, which she groggy head barely noticed until she stepped on a rock and did a half jump into the air, after which she shunted some bioshield beneath her feet, though that made her movements slippery and even slower.

“Almost there,” Larissa said while sending her a telepathic warning. “Just gotta get past the sentries.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Dina said as they broke through the edge of the forest and onto a sandy beach that stretched a good quarter mile up to a body of water separating the forest on the other side. There were three T-Rexes out there with a host of smaller raptors, all of which seemed to be holding their positions until the two Humans hit the sand.

“Blow through and jump. Do…not…swim,” Larissa said a she slowed a bit so the pair of them could share one shield again as the beach erupted with various forms of stun blasts. The raptors sprinted towards them while the T-Rex nearest on the left turned its giant head and blew out a stream of air at hurricane speed, kicking up a wall of sand that threw down a line in front of them. She sensed form Larissa that they had to go in, but as soon as they hit the wall of moving air and grit Dina was knocked off her feet and cartwheeling to the right.

Larissa formed a Bataf conduit with her and that kept both of them from spinning completely out of control, so that when they hit the ground again they were able to walk through the storm slowly, then when it stopped they took off running again, but not before a trio of raptors got to them. Larissa ran towards them, distracting them away from Dina as she signaled for her to sprint on ahead as the trailblazer began to dance around the mechanical bipeds in a series of jumps and flips, all the while avoiding touching them to avoid the stun charge their body plates would render on contact…which would knock her immediately unconscious with even the slightest brush.

When Dina got within a few steps of the water’s edge she knew it was too far to jump, but she was determined to get as far across the moat as she could and launched herself up into a pathetic leap having no shoes and with her feet sinking into the sand and sucking away her pushing power. As soon as she was airborne she got a shove from Larissa, then a Bataf conduit that telescoped out and delivered her to the other side.

The nude Archon dropped into the sand and turned around, ready to help Larissa get across. It took a few seconds for her to evade the raptors, then another sandstorm covered them all. Thanks to their battlemeld she could still sense where Larissa was and vice versa, essentially giving the other Archon her senses to use. A moment later she hit the shore and jumped, with Dina pulling her across as much as possible.

It wasn’t enough and Larissa splashed down three meters from safety, landing face first in the water and scrambling to get back up as a swarm of tiny machines swam up towards her. Dina pulled her out with their invisible rope, but not before Larissa got ‘bit’ on the leg by two of the little fish bots.

That broke their battlemeld link and sent Larissa into a wash of dizziness worse than what Dina was still feeling, so the less groggy trailblazer pulled the other the rest of the way up and out of the water with her Lachka until she got a physical grip on her arm and hauled her up a safe distance onto the sand, watching the robotic dinosaurs to see if they could come after them or not, not to mention the forest behind them that was an unknown.

“Da eet,” Larissa said, her words slurred by the stun as she tried to shake her dead leg with her loopy right arm.

“I’ve got you,” Dina said, picking her up in a fireman’s carry and almost losing her balance. She held it together enough to get them both up the short sandy incline to the forest and set Larissa down against a tree trunk a few dozen meters inside as Tom contacted her telepathically inquiring as to their status.

She told him where they were and how incapacitated Larissa was, with him telling her to stay put until someone got to them.

Dina hunched down on her bare feet, keeping the rest of her smooth, pale skin from touching the dirty ground as she took a series of deep breaths and tried to slip into a bit of Sesspik to clear the rest of the grogginess from her body. She had no idea what was going on, nor where her clothes had gotten to, but she got the feeling that some major badassery had just gone down to get her out.

Then her full bladder finally registered and she slipped over behind a bush to take care of that problem before the others arrived.

7

Morgan peeled off her uniform top and flicked it to Dina, who caught it telekinetically from two meters away and pulled it to her as Morgan stripped down to her underwear but kept the shoes for herself, with several other Archons doing likewise to give the escaped prisoners some clothes.

“Thanks,” she said gratefully, pulling the uniform on and looking around at the others who were clustered in a clump of trees not far off from where they’d been held while most of the Archons were deployed in a distant perimeter looking for threats and buying some time as those who were stunned recovered. Five were totally unconscious, with six others being partially awake but numb like Larissa, but everyone had been pulled out, bringing their team strength back up to a full 100. “How did we end up naked?”

“Probably our fault,” Morgan said, standing in a jog bra and skin tight short shorts. “When we first found you laying out there you had clothes, but we didn’t want to risk a rescue until we figured out where the dangers were. I think losing your clothes was a penalty for us not acting sooner.”

“Look on the bright side,” Jason said, walking up beside Dina as she flicked her long, loose green hair out of the neck of Morgan’s uniform. “Probably made some trainer’s day getting to take them off you.”

“I feel so much better now,” she said dryly, stepping into the pants but still being barefoot. That was going to be a problem going forward, bioshields or no.

“What’s the situation?” Boris asked as he pulled on Paul’s uniform. “And how long have we been out?”

“None of us has a watch,” Jason answered, “and the sunlight is on constantly, so we don’t know how long we’ve been in here. The situation is we’re a cold insertion two at a time, with those getting snagged by the stunbots being hauled off by drone and deposited in the prison we just sprung you from. There are supply caches hidden around this very large park, but only a handful of destunning serum injections. We used all that we had to wake you guys up, so those who got hit on the way out are going to have to sleep it off.”

“Ouch,” Dina said, knowing that meant a load of pins and needles. Fortunately she’d skipped that stage, but was still feeling a touch groggy despite the wakeup run. “No extra shoes in those supplies?”

“Unfortunately not, but I think we can make some crude sandals. There are enough thorns around here that I wouldn’t want to risk going barefoot even if it meant slowing me down a bit.”

“How crude is the question,” Landon asked.

“Depends how inventive you are. But big picture, we’ve finally got a mission assignment, delivered via ghost Obi-wan. There’s a big mountain full of stun bugs and apparently we have to find their lair to disable them, then we’re supposed to know what to do next.”

“That’s it?” Dina asked, finishing tying her hair into a knot on her head in lieu of the hair tie that had also been stripped off her body.

“More than we had previously, but yeah, that’s all we know.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Getting you guys out…then going from there.”

“Peachy,” she said, throwing in a few stretches, for her body was very tight after lying on that rock for who knew how long.

“We need to investigate the area beyond the mountain,” Morgan said, getting down to details. “There may be items to be obtained that will help us assault the mountain. We recovered some grenades from taking down an aquatic mech earlier, and I’d bet there are more goodies out there.”

“Stun grenades?”

“Nope. All the weapons we’ve recovered are the real deal…and next to useless against the swarms. Wilson’s mockery, we think.”

“Why didn’t you use any against those robotic dinosaurs?”

“Smash and grab op. We weren’t sticking around long enough to try to take down any of the big ones, and if we so much as touch them we get stunned.”

“Now that’s just not fair,” Dina added, stopping her overhead stretch to glare.

“Not much here is,” Jason added. “Which I think is the point. There’s also no ambrosia, so we’re all running on empty by now.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said, looking at Morgan.

“Tell me about it.”

Dina huffed. “Where do you want me?”

“Same,” Zak said, with the others waiting to hear or simply nodding in agreement.

“We’re splitting up by teams and going after what objectives we can find,” Jason said as the last of them finished dressing and walked over to the group that was forming. “We’ll get to the mountain later. Right now we’re going shopping…and the 2s are going to try and bag a raptor.”

Megan sprinted out across a dirt path that held numerous lemming holes, drawing a stream of the speedy little bots out of the ground and heading towards her as she jumped over a boulder, tapping the top theatrically with her hand mid flip, then landed and kept running into the perimeter of the dino zone that surrounded the prison.

When the lemmings followed her Dan and Brian came through at nearly the same spot, crossing the dirt and heading off into the forest in the opposite direction towards the raptor bot they’d scouted. There were probably more of them in here than just the one, but they’d adjust as necessary to what they found…which didn’t take long, for a partial stun ring flew out from the left, hitting Dan’s bioshield and sucking a good measure of strength out of it as the pair pushed their Pefbar to the max and saw two more raptors nearby heading to their direction.

“That one,” Brian said, changing targets and running directions, sending a mental ping to the team as they raced towards the raptor closest to the dirt boundary. They ran quickly, dodging trees and brush while spreading out slightly. When the raptor got within line of sight it fired at them once before jumping into an aerial lunge intending to land on Brian, but the Archon was quicker and rolled to the left as he ducked, causing it to overshoot with the help of a telekinetic shove from Dan.

Both Archons used their Nemsa in battlemeld to shove it down into the ground for a moment, but they couldn’t hold it there for the machine’s leverage was too strong. It stood up and shot at them again as the other two raptors got close to firing range themselves.

A ping from Paul told them to hold position, and before the raptor approaching on the left could get to them he and Jason emerged from behind and knocked it away with another of their invisible clothesline attacks. Jack and Randy came up on the other side a moment later and did the same thing, diverting the other raptor while Ivan, Emily, and Kip linked up into a 5-way battlemeld with Dan and Brian. As one they lifted the pinned raptor up off the ground where it could only kick at the air, then they threw it through the trees all the way out to the lemming dirt clearing.

The Archons followed, but Emily and Kip split sideways to push back the lemmings coming at them from even more holes in the ground. The other three Archons lifted the raptor again and chucked it across the boundary and into the trees on the other side before sprinting across the gap and going after it before it could get away.

Megan showed up and joined the trio after circling around and losing her lemming horde. The four of them pinned the raptor in place again, then got close to it and carried it in the air through the trees another 60 meters before they lost strength and had to put it down. It staggered in place while they restrained it partially while their mental strength regenerated. It lunged towards Dan, but came up short and got its face planted in the dirt so it couldn’t fire off another stun blast.

A moment later Randy and Jack caught up and they added their strength to the battlemeld and carried it again, this time more than 100 meters and further away from the dino zone. After another pause they decided to throw it again, with Dan and Brian going ahead to ‘catch’ it when it landed and hold it there, more or less, until the others caught up.

Bit by bit they moved it through the forest for nearly a kilometer until Paul and Jason signaled that the others had finally retreated, apparently giving up on it or sensing a trap…with the latter being more likely if there were trainers on the other end remotely controlling the things.

When the duo caught up with the others they all linked up and pinned it to the ground as Randy used his Pefbar/Lachka to look inside the thing and start pulling bits apart. It managed to shoot another stun ring into the ground near Paul’s foot, but shortly thereafter Randy was able to cut power to the weapon. A minute after that the entire thing went slack and was pancaked to the ground by the combined telekinetic power of the 2s.

“I think that did it,” Randy said, continuing to poke around inside.

“Who wants to touch it and find out?” Emily asked.

“No rush,” Paul insisted. “It might take a while for those plates to fully discharge.”

“Easy fix,” Ivan said, telekinetically snapping a thin branch off the nearest tree and floating it over to the raptor.

“Poke it with a stick?” Megan asked with a laugh.

Ivan smiled and moved the broken part of the branch into the side of the raptor. He tapped it three times, then rotated the entire branch over and whacked it a fourth time. “Looks dead.”

“I’ve cut the power feeds to the armor plates,” Randy said. “But the welds are solid. I can’t pry it open from here.”

“Do you see what I see?” Emily asked.

“An Easter egg,” Paul confirmed. “Let’s get this thing open.”

“What’s in it?” Ivan asked, tossing the stick aside.

“I think it’s shielded. I can’t sense anything.”

“Booby trap?” Megan wondered.

“Let’s find out. Stand back,” Randy said as he walked up to it and the others scattered. “If I wake up naked I’m blaming Megan.”

“Twit,” she said in a whisper as he knelt down beside it and pressed a finger to the head. He didn’t fall over, then proceeded to tap it a couple more times ensuring that there was no stun charge left, then he held his finger over it a couple of inches and waited for more than a minute. Finally he touched it again, this time with his finger sinking into the thin armor plates amidst a cherry red glow of melted material. He punched through then pulled his finger across it slowly, cutting open the mechanical raptor and creating several seams.

“Pry these please,” he said, working his way down towards the tail.

Paul and Jason linked up again and telekinetically pulled apart the metallic petals that Randy had exposed, bending them back and exposing the inner mechanisms. As Randy moved on the duo pulled more and more apart until it looked like a gutted tauntaun from Star Wars.

Randy pulled his finger out and theatrically blew on it, then he reached inside and started pulling apart the exposed machinery that they intended to make use of however possible. “Make like Legos guys.”

Dan, Brian, and Megan stepped in and helped him along with Paul and Jason while the other four stood guard. There were some more small melting cuts that had to be made, but between their physical leverage and their psionics they were able to disassemble the thing without too much delay, eventually exposing a small canister tucked away inside that had no obvious purpose within the raptor, though it did have a button on the casing.

Randy pulled it out and walked away from the others, not knowing what would happen. A stun grenade would be poetic at this point, or a summons for a swarm of stun bugs or a T-Rex to come and stomp on them. But the only way to know was to press it and find out, so after he got about 80 meters away he held it out as far away from his body as possible and pressed the biometric button that required flesh rather than telekinesis to trigger.

Waiting for a bang, he was puzzled when it simply clicked and the shell cracked a hair. He pulled the top open with one hand and saw a small vial inside with a label that read ‘500 doses.’

“Guys,” he said, jogging back over to them. “It really is an Easter Egg.”

“Candy or money?” Jason asked.

“Better,” Randy said, holding up the small vial of reddish liquid for them to see. “Ambrosia.”

“Son of a bitch,” Emily said. “Then they did expect us to tear one apart.”

“Wonder what one of the big ones has inside,” Kip commented.

“Box of donuts would be nice,” Megan quipped.

“More like truck,” Paul amended.

“Don’t suppose they stuck a suit of armor out there somewhere,” Ivan asked.

“That’d be too easy,” Emily said dismissively. “The stun soak would give us too much endurance. And armor without it wouldn’t do us a lot of good here.”

“Wilson might have thrown a set in just to taunt us,” Randy added, “just like the weapons.”

“I still think we can make use of them,” Paul insisted. “And a little live fire test on this one should answer some questions.”

“So we’re hauling this whole thing back?” Dan asked.

“Waste not, want not,” Emily said, prompting the others into a team-wide battlemeld link to make the carrying easier. “Let’s get going before the carcass attracts any more critters with the smell of hydraulic fluid.”

The others turned and looked at her as the pieces of the raptors flew up into the air and back into the main body.

Emily frowned. “Sorry. That sounded better in my head.”

“We did kill the transmitter, right?” Jason asked.

“I got it,” Randy assured him. “Intact but without power.”

“Good,” he said as they started walking with their floating cargo between two rows of three while the other four circled around as skirmishers but still close enough to help share the telekinetic load. “Don’t want anyone crashing our party when we get back.”

“I think the trainers already know every move we make,” Megan commented. “This whole park is probably full of sensors.”

“No need to invite trouble,” Jason cautioned. “And if Wilson is willing to punish us for tardiness by denying us clothes, then I can imagine him sending something after us if we failed to silence a transmitter.”

“True,” she conceded.

“You still think this is all Wilson?” Kip asked. “Or are you wondering if it might be a bit Davis too?”

“This is Wilson,” Paul said with certainty. “Davis may have given him permission, but this level of ‘kick you in the balls’ is definitely telltale Wilson.”

Just then a thought struck Jason that was profound enough that all the others heard it through the battlemeld link.

“Oh my god,” Emily said with dread. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

“It fits,” Randy admitted. “And if he’s here he’ll have armor, I can guarantee it.”

“What about the weapons? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Decoy?” Paul guessed.

“They won’t do much to him anyway. We need a game plan if he does show up,” Ivan said, knowing how bad this could get if they were right.

“In the meantime,” Jason cautioned, knowing they were getting ahead of themselves even if they were right, “we’ve got some dino hunting to do. Let’s bag some more prizes and hope Wilson isn’t as devious as he could be.”

“Wanna put credits on that?” Emily scoffed.

8

“Look what we found,” Greg said holding his hand out as he came back into the trailblazer’s camp where the 2s, 3s, and 6s were either sleeping or building, using the components from trashed dinobots to create a variety of tools, including some physical shields to help block stun blasts.

Jason raised an eyebrow at seeing the six senzu beans. “Where the hell did you find those?”

“Inside a T-Rex.”

“You took down a Rex on your own?”

“Nobody takes down a Rex,” Rex said with a sarcastic smile as he walked past Greg and pulled a makeshift bottle of water out of a stash they’d made and hauled up here from one of the creeks.

“The 8s helped,” Greg answered. “A little.”

“Perfect,” Morgan said, telekinetically pulling all six beans out of his hand and flying them across into hers, which she then cheeked.

“Hey!” Greg complained. “That’s all of them.”

“You won’t need them, hopefully,” she said, pulling off her left shoe and tossing it to Dina who’d just returned with the 7s. She took off her right and did the same, then proceeded to take off her jog bra.

“Whose birthday is it?” Rex asked, staring at her as she also pulled off her pants and rolled both garments up in a bundle and stashed them next to a tree, now completely nude.

“I’m going up the mountain,” she said, glancing at the others who were giving her questioning glares.

“Jumat or not you’ll never make it,” Greg said, not sure what she was thinking.

“Continuous emission?” Jason asked.

“That’s the plan,” she said, not caring one bit that she was naked, knowing her clothes were going to get in the way of her Jumat.

“You don’t know where to go,” Dina said, slipping on the second shoe and giving her bare feet a badly needed break from roughing it. Both she and the other former prisoners had a variety of cuts on their soft feet, with a generous bioshield usage the only thing keeping them from being totally torn up and their attempts at raptor hide sandals failing badly enough that she’d chucked them earlier.

“We know what sector,” Morgan said, looking a little like a chipmunk with the beans stashed in either side of her mouth. “The only one the bugs have been in this entire time. The others we got a chance to look around before they swarmed the top. That leaves the few places in that sector that none of us have ran through to look.”

“You haven’t been up there at all,” Paul reminded her.

“Show me what you’ve seen, but I’m the only one that can go short of fighting a war that we very well might lose.”

“And if you get caught then what?” Greg asked.

“At least they won’t be stealing my clothes,” Morgan said as she started to walk out of camp.

“How long can you sustain with those six?” Jason asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, pausing and glancing back. “Depends how much force I need to use. I’ll turn back before I run dry, and at least get a scouting run out of this.”

“Don’t you think we should wait until everyone gets back so we can be standing by at the border?” Greg insisted.

“No, but I’ll take Rex with me as an Ensek relay. He can stare at my butt on the way there, and if I do go down he can let the rest of you know to come break me out of prison. Just don’t try it on the mountain. I think this is Wilson’s way of thinning our numbers, and I think I can counter it solo.”

“Have to now,” Greg said deadpan. “You just saliva claimed the senzu beans.”

Morgan smirked and looked at Rex. “Come on.”

“Alright reckless, I’ll humor you,” he said, jogging up next to Morgan with her matching pace as she stayed a step ahead and ran barefoot out through the surrounding brush, with her nude form and Rex’s white uniform disappearing from sight.

“It’s days like this that make me really wish I had Jumat,” Greg said after they’d left.

“Ditto,” Paul echoed.

When Morgan and Rex reached the bottom of the bug zone a swarm of the bastards moved in to greet them, spilling against the low altitude barrier as if it were a glass wall rather than just a geographical line. The path they were on ran laterally, with the higher one doing the same across a gap and uphill. When Morgan had shoes on she could have jumped it easily, but now she was going to lose some power given that her size 8 feet were already starting to get sore and didn’t give her as flat of a platform as she needed, with the balls of her feet sinking into the partially soft soil given the mist showers that had blown in from a nearby waterfall.

“I could use a boost,” she asked.

“Sure thing,” Rex said. “Just jump and I’ll do the rest.”

Morgan repositioned one of her six beans between her teeth and chomped it up, swallowing the very dense ambrosia dose to start the overload process that would kick in after a short delay. She’d already filled up on ambrosia to her normal levels drinking the limited supply of liquids they’d obtained from hunting raptors, meaning that as soon as this bean hit her bloodstream it was going to start giving her overload headaches…but those would diminish rapidly as soon as she started using her Jumat as extensively as she was about to.

“Might want to step back a bit,” she warned Rex, who took two steps to the side. “Maybe just a little more.”

He laughed and retreated another two steps, then Morgan closed her eyes and focused. She needed to emit from all parts of her body else some of the bugs might slip through and make contact. Typically she didn’t do this, summoning up strong blasts from specific regions, usually her arms, and pooling the energy in a transfer state outside her clothes or armor. This was going to have to be a direct feed and trying to pool it through a transition phase would have been adding too much difficulty. She was going Amazon on this and had to fully commit, else a lapse might form and she’d end up stung into unconsciousness in short order.

Rex felt a gentle push of air hit him as he saw Morgan’s ponytail lift up off her neck. It was tied up using a bit of wire from the raptors and held its form, but her bangs flew about wildly as the invisible energy flowed off her, quickly increasing strength. A moment later a surge hit him and he took another step backwards as Morgan was pushing the leaves on the surrounding trees back and bending the branches like a micro hurricane. She dipped down into a crouch then launched her naked body up into the air, with Rex grabbing her telekinetically and pushing her up into the stun bug swarm as requested.

When she hit it the bugs parted against the storm winds, part from the moving air, part from the concussive energy that was tuned to hit and move large objects rather than air molecules. The atmospheric pressure forced many of them to slip back in through the blasts while the much large stun bugs had no such luxury, being pushed back and thrown aside gently, not hard enough to damage them unless they flew into a rock or tree.

Morgan’s air supply also diminished due to the lessened pressure. She was pushing out so much that she was essentially thinning the air around her, but enough of a blowback was occurring that she still got the oxygen that she needed, plus she wasn’t doing anything that physically strenuous so she wasn’t going to be requiring a lot anytime soon.

She landed on the upper trail and didn’t look back, blowing bugs, dirt, and leaves aside as she jogged to the right and disappeared into the tree line from Rex’s position, but she knew he would still be following her mental signature. If she discovered anything she’d send him an update so he could pass the information on in case she didn’t make it back, but right now she didn’t worry about keeping track of him, for all her focus was on the stun bugs and how close they were getting to her.

The first few wisps of ambrosia overload were now gone and she pulled back her Jumat flow a bit as she ran through the crooked trail. The terrain made it difficult to monitor the bugs, for her body movement affected where they were knocked and every stride she took repositioned her emitters into different alignments, leaving her with a chaotic energy pulse that she didn’t hope to predict. Reducing it as much as she thought prudent, Morgan tried to conserve as much energy as she could while crunching up another senzu bean to stay ahead of the ambrosia need.

By the time she reached the cave tunnel the headaches were manifesting themselves, which she took as a good sign. She’d never sustained the flow this long before so Morgan was in unknown territory and was glad she hadn’t burnt through two senzu beans already. She ran by and hopped over a half empty crate of supplies that had been left behind and ducked into the tunnel, temporarily reducing her Jumat output now that the walls were covering for her. The air in her lungs dipped a bit and she found herself out of breath, but as soon as she reached the other side the airflow upped again back to the formerly thin level.

But as soon as she got to the other side she had to pulse a much larger blast into the continuous flow, for the air was so thick with stun bugs that she couldn’t see the trees ahead. That was a good sign to her, despite the danger, meaning that this was where she had to go and she hadn’t guessed wrong. Add in the fact that the lower trail in this section didn’t connect to any below and that meant you either had to hack your way through the brush or enter via an adjacent sector. The memories of the others who had been here guided her up to the top of the mountain, but that’s not where she needed to go so she headed downhill, plowing a path with her Jumat flow as her Pefbar allowed her to navigate through the dark cloud of tiny machines.

As she jumped half a step down her foot hit something sharp and she reflexively bent her knee to cushion the blow in a one-step limp. When the object stuck in her foot she telekinetically pulled it loose and let the concussive energy toss it aside before her next step, unable to stop or cover her feet with bioshields. Right now it was total body emission or something far less. She couldn’t do 95% and had never bothered to train herself for that, though she was adding it to her future workload because right now it would have been damn handy.

Twenty meters down and the trail split, with her now being in unknown territory. She took the right fork that ran lateral rather than down the mountain and pushed her Pefbar out further, not wanting to miss something in the forest nearby the trail if that’s what she was here to find. Fortunately she was able to multi-task both psionics, but her body was already starting to buzz a little from the continuous Jumat production.

Morgan ran as fast as she could without tripping, following the trail and trying to keep some semblance of her position…which was nearly impossible with all the switchbacks, so she just memoried where she’d come so she could go back if necessary. Get lost here long enough to run out of ambrosia and she’d be toast.

Traveling the path and racking up meters Morgan looked for something, anything that might be the source of these things but there was nothing to be found. She moved through two more intersections before the density of the stung bugs dipped a bit, which was her first clue. The Archon coasted to a stop and started to backtrack, heading for the last intersection and heading the other way. The density of the stun bugs increased again and she used that as her guide, finding another intersection and guessing wrong only to have to retread ground and go the other way, crunching another senzu bean and putting herself on a mental countdown to when she’d need to start back.

She kept looking and looking, starting to get dizzy from the sustained effort that she had to keep increasing due to the number of bugs pushing back against her concussive energy, especially across the ground where they tried to slip in under her waves, but they’d always get repulsed when they got near her feet, for they were continuously emitting a mist of blood from the cuts on thorns and rocks as she bled out and the concussive energy wicked it away from her skin.

Morgan hardly noticed the pain save for when she stepped on something new. She was getting near to her return window when she came back across her own trail, realizing that what she’d just run had been a circle, bringing her back to her previous fork in the trail. It was hard to tell from the geography, but her footprints where there to be seen and settled her fatiguing mind. This region had the highest concentration of the bugs, literally with so many that she could have reached out with a hand, swiped it through the air, and came away with a fist load of them.

Crunching her fourth bean and knowing she had about 2 minutes before turning back she dove off trail and into the brush and getting all kind of cuts on her naked body as branches whipped back at her after being repulsed by her hurricane. She couldn’t put up a bioshield for it would block the concussive energy, meaning her smooth skin was about to turn into a bloody mess of cuts and scrapes.

It wasn’t as bad as she expected, for the Jumat kept most of the contacts off her body, but those that did hit were always strong ones, branches rather than leaves, and some of them definitely had thorns on them. Morgan had to dislodge a few that the Jumat didn’t push out of her body and was beginning to question this wild goose chase when the concentration of stun bugs, momentarily diminished by the closeness of the forest, escalated beyond anything she’d encountered yet.

That told her to press on, even as her mental clock guessed it was time to head back. Saying to hell with it, Morgan decided to go all-in and gave up on the retreat option. Upping her flow rate to compensate, she literally pushed aside buckets of stun bugs out of her sight, which was virtually gone. Between the trees and the bugs she was walking naked through brush in nearly pitch black conditions despite the overhead sun. Her Pefbar allowed her to see through it all, but with so many objects moving about in chaotic fashion she had to mentally filter out the moving stuff else start to suffer vertigo from the sensory overload.

She focused on the ground and tree trunks, walking blindly through the brush that she could no longer see, but what was still scraping her up, even stopping her when she walked into a bush that wouldn’t move out of her way. That set her back, having to backtrack a few steps and find another way around, literally stumbling in the dark trying to see any large objects out there in the aptly titled ‘storm.’

So numbed up from the mental mess and Jumat fatigue, Morgan took her next step and fell right into the source of the stun bugs, dropping some ten meters down a tube to land on a hard floor onto her left shoulder…that popped from the impact that she couldn’t see coming. Her head also banged into the ground, disorienting her into a state of punch drunkenness, but fortunately that made her mad and she reflexively upper her concussive energy flow, blowing back so many stun bugs that they literally ran into each other and broke, for there was so little air for them to move about in.

Morgan coughed, with a senzu bean stuck in her throat as she rolled over face down. With a telekinetic tug she pulled it out and chomped down on it, chewing it and the last one up and finally clearing her mouth. Her shoulder hurt, but far less than it should for being dislocated, telling her just how doped up she was right now. Turning off her Pefbar for a moment the mental storm disappeared, letting her focus on her energy flow and her major injury…as well as the sum total of all the cuts across her formerly attractive body. She couldn’t see it now in the pitch black conditions, but she was a sliced, nasty mess.

Getting a telekinetic grip on her shoulder she tugged it back into place, but forgot to pull her tongue in. She bit it with the pain spike, tasting blood and cursing herself for being so dumb. The Archon rotated her shoulder around, finding it hurt but was still functional as she stood up and turned her Pefbar back on and saw the snowdrifts of dead stun bugs on the floor around her and a snowstorm of active ones surrounding her at no more than a meter distance.

Morgan held position and scanned the area, finding three tunnels heading out from the vertical tube she was now at the bottom of that was itself the size of a small room. Walking on gratuitously flat floors she headed down one of the hallways and came to a dead end some 50 meters away…or so it looked until she got closer. There was a large room that spread out sideways from the tunnel width, and on both sides of that room were equipment banks in the wall that had numerous vents that were spewing out more stun bugs.

In the middle of that room was a circle on the floor that Morgan almost missed save for the fact that she stepped on a slightly raised ring, bringing her attention down to her feet. Depressed below the surface of that circle was a hidden switch that could only be accessed via Lachka…or by breaking through the floor. She used the former and flipped it, with the vents on either wall shutting and cutting off the flow of stun bugs.

With an angry sneer she threw her arms wide and punched the entire room with a much larger Jumat blast, throwing the tiny bugs into the walls and crushing most of them. They scattered around in the maelstrom like bits of debris, eventually working their way to the floor and piling up there as Morgan walked back out to the center tube and headed down another of the three hallways. She found an identical room and switch there, turning it and the stun bug production off before heading over to the last chamber.

When she hit that switch the vents closed but the swarm around her was still active. She sent out another burst and took down most of the ones in that room, but there were so many coming down from aboveground that the air was still thick with them, though she had a tiny respite that she did not allow herself to linger in. Morgan kept up the Jumat flow, knowing now would be an ironically bad time to let one slip through and take her down, as she headed back to the entrance, not sure if she could jump high enough to get out in her present condition.

When she got back there she noticed a new circle in the middle of the floor. As she walked towards it a pylon rose up from the ground with her first thinking it was a step up to get out of the hollow, but then she saw that it was made of crystal with a glowing icon in the center…that was blue.

There were no visible buttons to press, nor internal ones, so Morgan just summoned up a directional blast and threw it off her good arm, hammering the crystal and cracking it. She repeated the attack four more times until it broke apart and the blue light likewise disappeared…with every stun bug in the air suddenly shutting down and dropping to the floor, save for the fact that she couldn’t see that with her battering them all over the place. It was the lack of additional ones coming down from top that first clued her in, not to mention the bits of sunlight coming down onto her mauled up body. She eased back on the Jumat flow and the remaining bugs flew into the walls and piled up on the ground, adding to the black snowdrifts.

She took it down another notch and the air finally cleared. Morgan let go her effort but kept her Pefbar active, just in case something else was going to happen, and felt the blood begin to seep out of her in small rivulets. She nearly fell over with the effort release and stepped forward off the circle in the center. She noticed the rim in her Pefbar just before she fell, not remembering it having been there, then when her foot hit the ground and a piece of crystal dug itself into the center of her foot the floor fell out beneath her, crumbling into hundreds of pieces as a bright gold light burst through the cracks.

Morgan wheeled about mid fall, grapping the edge of the platform with her bad arm and feeling it wrench again. Her fingers held on past the pop as her eyes squinted against the glare from below. Forcing herself to twist on her dislocated shoulder, she got her other hand up to the rim and one armed herself up until she got her chin on the edge, then worked her way up over the edge mostly with her good arm, slithering onto the shattered crystal and cutting herself up further, but avoiding the fall.

Come to me, she shouted telepathically, not even bothering to try and find Rex’s mind to send a direct message. I need help.

9

On my way, Rex told her, immediately leaping up the gap between paths and sprinting over the black snow on the ground and crunching the little stun bots with every step. He had a fix on her mental location, and with the stun bots no longer an issue he was able to run freely aside from making detours around the gravity traps.

It didn’t take him long to get to the cave tunnel, then from there he was in unfamiliar territory and asked Morgan for directions rather than just guessing or trying to claw his way through jungle. She replied with the first turn instructions, then after that her memory was hazy but she said she hadn’t encountered any gravity traps.

This side of the cave was covered in stun bots like patches of a giant puzzle laid down in various locations wherever a swarm had been at that time. When Rex crossed over a patch of clean ground he was sucked down into a faceplant, smashing his nose into the compact dirt for a moment before he did a slow pushup and got his legs under him enough to crawl out of the gravity trap…which told him Morgan hadn’t come this way.

Sensing her closer now he decided to abandon the trails and head straight for her location, so summoning up a bioshield he dove into the brush and disappeared beneath the trees. At least this way he wouldn’t run into any more gravity traps, for they’d pull down the brush with them and give away the location. Previously though there had been other things off the trails to worry about, and about halfway to Morgan he found one of them in the form of a little mound in the ground that a slew of lemmings came up out of.

They chased after him and nearly caught him in the ankles before he telekinetically threw them off, then he broke through onto another trail and kept to it, heading in Morgan’s approximate location with the things nipping at his heels for a moment before he got up to speed.

Rex lost them eventually, then came around full circle on the path before realizing that Morgan was in the center of it. He got confirmation from her of that and dove in, eventually coming to a hole in the ground that was brightly lit from below with the telltale light that the hologram had spoken of. When he got to the edge he found Morgan at the bottom on a narrow platform around which was the light coming from somewhere below, though he couldn’t make out where with his eyes or his Pefbar, for it was being blocked below a certain level.

He also noticed that Morgan was covered in blood.

“What the hell?” he asked, with her glancing up at him.

“Pull me up, please.”

Rex got a telekinetic hold on her waist and lifted her up through the opening, though there was an audible groan from the trailblazer as he did so. Her bloody, nude body came up out of the hole and he set her to the side…and to his surprise she let herself drop to the ground rather than standing on her feet.

“What did this to you?” Rex asked, taking a knee next to her.

“Running naked through sticks and thorns.”

“You ran out of bioshield…oh crap, you couldn’t use it.”

“Nope.”

“You need to slip into a healing trance.”

“Already have. Can I ask a favor?”

“Sure,” he said, knowing it was virtually unheard of for Morgan to ever ask a favor.

“Take your shirt off so it doesn’t get bloody and carry me on your back under your bioshield while I heal.”

Rex raised an eyebrow. “I can do that, or we can just bring everyone here and go through that portal when you’re ready.”

“No,” Morgan said, keeping her body locked in a lounging position so to minimize movement for the sake of the Sesspik. “It’s shielded from psionics. If there’s something nasty waiting for us on the other side we have to be ready first. That means more hunting parties collecting ambrosia and whatever else we can find. That’ll take at least a day and I’ve already lost a fair amount of blood. Most of it blew off with the Jumat, so I need to heal this as soon as possible.”

“I can stand guard here so you don’t have to move.”

Morgan sighed. “Just get me back to camp.”

“As you wish,” he said, pulling off his shirt and rolling it up into a bundle that he held in his left hand as Morgan stood up and climbed on his back. The blood made her warm skin slick on contact, but between his arms looping through her legs and a little telekinetic reinforcement he got her snugged up against him and made sure she could just sit there without having to hold on much.

“Just veg, I’ll get you back,” he said, slipping a bioshield around both of them and walking off slowly through the brush with it passing harmlessly around her naked body.

“Thanks,” she said, trusting him enough to close her eyes and her senses and give herself over to the healing trance.

Many hunting parties later all 100 trailblazers gathered at the portal carrying their weapons, shields, and other knickknacks that they’d constructed out of the debris as Kerrie jumped up over the hole and froze there, tipping face down in midair as the others held her aloft and slowly lowered her down into the chamber below. She had a battlemeld link with Aaron so he could see what she saw as her head dipped into the energy field that was further down around the central platform below and glowing a blinding gold.

Kerrie passed into it, for it wasn’t a thin layer and her vision was bathed in light so much that she had to shut her eyes. Her Pefbar told her that she was in a short tube, at the bottom of which was a hatch that snapped open as she approached, probably expecting her to fall through rather than float above it.

With that physical barrier gone she could sense but not see what was below. There was an arching tube curling to the right like a dry waterslide, beyond which she could not sense…

Suddenly her body was jerked out of the Archon’s telekinetic grip and she disappeared from sight and sense.

“Damn, I lost her,” Aaron said.

“So much for intel,” Morgan said stepping up to the edge in her underwear and reclaimed shoes. “Any reason to wait?”

“Nope,” Bo said, diving in ahead of her. He landed feet first on the platform below then hopped off into the golden light with the others following at slightly staggered intervals.

Greg came down with a full length shield, tucking it up against his back and riding it through the curved tunnel like a rough surf board made from metallic dinobot hide. He could see Dina ahead of him a few meters and could sense the others behind him as they slid down a long straight decline in the dark until it corkscrewed through one last hurricane-like twist before dumping them out on a short drop of 4 meters into a large chamber.

Greg landed on top of Kerrie’s unconscious body, seeing her just in time after squinting his eyes against the brightly lit chamber to arch his back and land on all fours overtop of her…which fortunately kept his shield strapped onto his back as a stun sword swung down onto him.

With his Pefbar adding to his eyesight he knew he and the others were being ambushed as they came in, so he grabbed Kerrie in a telekinetic hold and shot her body away from the landing area as he sprinted away from the guy with the sword, noticing two other Archons already down before he realized that it was an Arc Knight waiting for them.

The man was fully clad in black/gold armor and had one of the wicked stun swords that the Black Knight had made infamous in their training days. This guy was using it to whack the trailblazers unconscious as they came down, and had it not been for Greg’s shield he would have been taken unaware as well.

Knowing that had to change now, Greg threw a Fornax blast back behind him and into the Knight as he ran, causing the giant to stumble as another trailblazer came down. He missed Jace by a hair when he swung next, which was when Greg sent a quick telepathic message out to all within range letting them know what was happening. The others would relay it up the slide, he knew, so hopefully they’d be ready to fight the moment they dropped out of the ceiling.

After getting Kerrie clear he turned around behind his shield and ran towards the Arc Knight as Jace held him back with a telekinetic grip for a moment, only delaying him until he activated his Rentar and melted the Lachka tendrils holding him in place. That delay was enough for Greg to get to him and ram him off his feet with his six foot tall flat shield, knocking the Arc Knight to the ground in an armless tackle and clearing the exit for the others to come down.

Jace stepped up next to Greg and held position while Erin came down and pulled Bo’s body out of the way and began to work on the others. Seeing that he was now outnumbered, the Arc Knight rolled to his feet and telekinetically pulled his dropped stun sword towards him as he ran off…but Jace was too quick and used his own Rentar to break the grip on the Knight’s sword, causing it to drop to the ground a meter away from him, then jerk back towards Greg as he got his own hold on it.

The Knight tried to disrupt that but was too slow and the sword dropped to the ground with Jace running forward and scooping it up in his hand before it could hit. Seeing that there wasn’t a lot the Arc Knight could do now with a fourth trailblazer dropping down behind him he chose to run rather than fight, for which Greg was grateful. Getting hit or kicked by a guy wearing full armor was painful, plus the only way they were going to disable the Knight was through psionics, for there was no way they could hit hard enough to get through that armor.

Greg backtracked as the Knight ran off across the room that was the size of 6 football fields and disappeared into a door that opened for him. It shut after he went through, leaving the trailblazers in command of the circular chamber with four of their number unconscious already.

“That was close,” Jace commented, checking the power level on the stun sword and feeling much better for having it.

“So much for a finish line,” Greg scoffed as more of the others fell down through the opening. “Good thing we took down that Brontosaurus, otherwise we’d be down four right now.”

“Yeah, Morgan made a good call there,” Jace agreed, knowing that the generous amount of destunning serum hidden within the monstrous beast was worth the headaches they’d had taking it down. “And I’m loving this little baby.”

Greg glanced at the sword. “You know their armor will have stun resistance.”

“Just means I have to hit them a lot…and what do you mean by them?”

“You think there’s only one?”

Jace frowned. “Probably not. I just hope the mother isn’t down here.”

Greg winced. “Don’t call him that. It’ll just piss him off.”

“Come on, Braum. Let’s see if there are any traps in here to set off,” Jace said as he jogged off towards the door the Knight had escaped through.

Knowing that there was a trap waiting for them, Paul and Jason had come down together and dropped out onto the floor with two short shields blocking their backs as they were essentially hugging each other when they landed. They got the ‘all clear’ mental signal from Oni a moment before they came through so they didn’t spring into action, merely letting go of one another and walking out of the drop zone as they got their bearings.

Most of the Archons were here already, with about 10 left to come through, though it looked like four were already down. Paul knew the destun and ambrosia carriers were coming through last so they didn’t risk losing those precious supplies, and he was glad it was just four of them, for they’d already used a chunk of the serum after that big raid and trying to wake someone with psionics alone was troublesome. They needed to flush their system of the energy rather than circumvent it and leave them a walking zombie for the next half hour.

“Where’d he go?” Paul asked.

“Ran off through the wall,” Morgan told him as she met up with the dynamic duo. “No gravity traps or other little surprises that we’ve found yet. And the door won’t open from the inside.”

“Walls shielded?” Jason wondered.

“Of course.”

“What now?” he said, looking at the ceiling and visually scanning the entire chamber as the last of the trailblazers came through. There was nothing here, for the walls were entirely smooth without so much as a hint of texture and pure white, emitting a low glow that lit the area. Jason couldn’t even see any doors, guessing that they were built with the first level transforming tech that Star Force had begun employing based on a Voku homage.

“At least there are no more sticks and rocks to step on,” Morgan said as Olivia dropped out of the ceiling, bringing them back to a full 100. Morgan gave her a telepathic heads up as to the ones that needed waking with the destun serum just as the room exploded with sound.

Everyone jerked from the transition, with the music playing so loud it immediately shot their adrenaline up, for it was a song that many of them were familiar with.

Define your meaning of war, to me it’s what we do when we’re bored, blared from the speakers as Olivia took off sprinting towards the downed trailblazers, knowing that she had to get them woken up as fast as possible.

Jason and Paul linked up in battlemeld and moved to the outside of the trailblazer group as the others around the perimeter scouting out the walls fell back in towards the center.

I feel the heat comin’ off of the blacktop and it makes me want it more.

Jace twirled his stun sword as he flicked the power switch back on, stepping up alongside Sara who had a metallic bar the length of a doubleblade sword and linking up with her to form a swords pair as Greg ran over to group up with the other 7s.

Because I’m hyped up out of control. If it’s a fight, I’m ready to go, played as a giant holographic clock appeared over their heads with 20:00 gleaming in bright blue, then twelve man-sized doors opened up around the perimeter of the room with bright white light shining out behind black silhouettes of Arc Knights as they casually walked out together.

I wouldn’t put my money on the other guy, if you know what I know that I know.

Then a thirteenth door opened up, revealing another silhouette of black armor with a stun sword…except when this one stepped out into the open his armor had no golden trim. It was full black.

It’s been a long time coming, and the table’s turned around. ‘Cause one of us is going down. One of us is going down.

“Fuck,” Morgan said, her ponytail flicking up as she sent out a Jumat pulse in anticipation as the clock flicked over to 19:59 and started to count down. “He’s mine. Paul, Jason, help me!” she said as all thirteen of their heavily armored opposition started running towards the unarmored trailblazers at the center of the room at Archon speeds, indicating that there was no more theatrics or holding back. They were going to beat the crap out of them if they could.

“Don’t get cocky,” Jason warned as they joined Morgan into their personal battlemeld, forming a trio that jogged towards the juggernaut sprinting towards their group. Morgan took the lead and came to a halt with Paul and Jason fanning out to either side as she summoned up a huge Jumat blast and held it contained in front of her, waiting until he was close, then flicking it towards him in the hopes that he wouldn’t dodge the invisible Kamehameha.

She caught him with a partial hit, for he was so fast even in armor that he twirled to his right in a moving sidestep that got exaggerated from the blow. He got tossed off balance but found his feet easily enough until the trio forced him to the ground with a Lachka wall that formed over his head and crushed down on top of him.

That wall melted as he activated his Rentar and jumped up, closing the gap with them and swinging his stunsword down on top of Morgan as she staggered backward in her casual shoes, which weren’t the best for quick movements, but Paul yanked her to the side with a Bataf conduit so that the sword blow missed by about a foot. Vermaire pivoted and went after Jason but another conduit pushed him clear of the next blow, then Morgan yanked him towards her in another redirect that left the Black Knight whiffing with each hit.

There was no way they were going to take down the thirteen of them in armor, and the countdown clock made it clear that their objective was to survive until completion…with the Knights doing their best to take out as many of them as possible and needing only a single hit with a stun sword or gauntlet to disable them enough to make a quick takedown, even if that blow fell on a finger or toe.

Vermaire knew this too, so as soon as he saw that this trio was merely diverting him he made another lunge at Paul as a feint and sprinted through it, crossing the next twenty meters and coming up on Greg from behind. Rex saw him coming and threw a Lachka wall at him, which barely slowed him before melting into nonexistence. Greg was dodging an Arc Knight’s sword at the time and only had time to accept a Bataf link from another nearby Archon that tried to pull him away from the Black Knight in time, but failed.

That big stun sword came down on top of Greg’s shield, bathing it in stun that numbed his arm a bit with the bleed through, but the physical power behind it knocked the Archon to the ground and a swift boot kick tore the shield from Greg’s grip. He tried to pull himself free with another Bataf from Rex, but Vermaire brought a fist down to the ground in an overhead punch that caught him in the foot as he slid away, numbing his entire lower body.

The next thing Greg knew his momentum stopped as his midsection crumpled in a telekinetic grip that held him in place just a split second, which was more than enough for Vermaire to dash forward and smack his sword tip across Greg’s head, knocking him out instantly.

10

The Black Knight turned and went after Nik as a slew of Lachka fields wrapped him up, but aside from a slight hesitation they didn’t stop him, for he melted through them all and closed on the Archon rapidly, jumping up and coming down with an overhead strike as an Arc Knight stopped Nik with his own Lachka grip onto the Archon’s ankles.

Nik tripped up and turned it into a somersault to keep his momentum, then the Black Knight’s sword came down on his back and he was out, but just as the sword blow fell Paul came flying into the back of the Black Knight’s legs as Morgan and Jason mutually hurled him towards their target. Vermaire went down and Paul scurried away, sending a Saven flash into his mind to temporarily overload his Ikrid and hopefully distract him. He could still see with Pefbar, but the locations of all minds around him would be momentarily lost during the sensory overload.

That and a Bataf yank from Jason got him clear as the Black Knight snapped around on him with a kick/punch combo just before Morgan got up to him and did a full Kamehameha into his chest. That was something he couldn’t block with Rentar and Vermaire went flying through the air as a pair of Arc Knights came to his aid and went after Morgan…which was a mistake.

She balled up pools of Jumat on her arms and ducked under the first sword slash, dipping down to the floor then jumping horizontal in a Yetu flash to land her left palm into the Knight’s abdomen. He went flying off to the left as Morgan rolled under the other Knight’s sword and quickly reversed her momentum, soon to do the same thing to him.

Jason and Paul knew they had to stay on the Black Knight at all times or he’d wreck them all, so they’d followed him through his tumble and added to it with a few Lachka pushes midair before Bataf yanking Morgan back towards them like a slingshot. With the help of Mark coming in behind the Black Knight as he was standing up and hitting him with as strong of a Fornax blast as he could, Vermaire stuttered ever so slightly, which was just enough of an opening as they needed.

Both of them yanked on his sword telekinetically, freeing it from his hand an inch before he grabbed it again…just as Morgan slammed into him as she put a shoulder into his chest and released another Jumat blast from her own torso.

Mark ducked down and turned himself into a log, catching the Black Knight’s legs as he flew backwards and using the man’s momentum to flip him head over heels with Morgan eventually ending up on top of Mark. He telekinetically pushed her up to her feet so she could keep hammering on Vermaire, but as soon as she was off him and moving forward an Arc Knight came in and jabbed Mark while he was still on the ground, cleaning up the bodies that Vermaire was dropping and taking another Archon out of the equation.

Paul and Jason ripped the sword out of his hand as Morgan hit him, momentarily disabling his Rentar. Paul let Jason have it, with the Archon immediately taking off towards the Arc Knight that had downed Mark. They went through a slew of blows and counterblows, but the Knight was no match for Jason’s skill with a sword and he slipped a blow in on the man’s upper left hip. The stun soaked into the armor and did little to slow the giant, but every little bit made him slower and slower with the small hits adding up and allowing Jason to make bigger and bigger ones as the other trailblazers covered for him.

It didn’t take long before the Arc Knight went down and Jason telekinetically kicked the sword out of his hand and into Megan’s as he delivered one more stun blast into the man’s helmet before running off towards another Arc Knight…but only a few seconds later this one stirred, his head clearing as the armor soaked the lingering stun energy up, but he wisely stayed on the ground until he was ready to fight again. Waiting for the proper moment, he let one of the Archons get close to him, running away from Vermaire, then he jumped up and tackled Andy around the left leg, stunning him with his armored glove and taking him to the ground as Vermaire finished him off with a punch to the chest.

Then Morgan was on him again, knocking the Black Knight 10 meters away where he rolled onto a knee and got back up again, not even trying to engage the top Archon and going for the weaker ones instead as the Arc Knights made plays to set him up with kills. It was clear to Paul and Jason what they were doing and it was working, with 8 of the trailblazers already unconscious.

But they had his sword, and two of the others, with the dynamic duo deciding that’s where they needed to focus their efforts as others helped Morgan. With Jason taking the lead the pair headed towards the nearest Arc Knight with a sword and Jason engaged him while Paul used his psionics to disable or disrupt him enough that Jason didn’t need more than 10 seconds to take him down…then Paul got his own sword.

Both of them got a prompt from Kai, then after linking him into their battlemeld he pulled both of them across the room as if they were on skis and up behind two other Arc Knights that were chasing down a group of 5s. Paul took the one on the left and Jason the one on the right, with Tyr throwing the metallic ball he’d brought with him into the back of Jason’s, knocking him forward and into the sword tip of his opponent. A few more quick disarming slashes and the trailblazer was able to kick his sword loose, then proceeded to stun him up enough that he eventually went down.

Tyr let the basketball-sized metallic lump of junk bounce off the Knight then telekinetically picked it up and threw it towards the other one, but he saw it coming in time to evade both the ball and Paul’s blade. Tyr stopped it midair once past the Knight and redirected it back towards him, catching him in the right leg and knocking him off balance…which was all Paul needed to disarm him as well.

Then the lucky bastard telekinetically grabbed Paul’s leg and yanked him towards him, getting a feather’s brush of his armored fingertip on the trailblazer’s leg.

Paul jabbed the sword down into him multiple times as he fell, his leg completely missing from his mind’s eye and his head more than a little wobbly. Someone else yanked him away from the Knight and he gave up his sword to Kerrie as she swooped in beside him and finished off the Knight, albeit temporarily.

A prompt from Olivia ended up with her dragged Paul across the room and over to her, where she administered the destunning serum a moment before Vermaire got over to them, intent on not letting them undo the damage inflicted. Morgan reacted instantly, letting others fling her like a weapon through the air towards him before he could get to Paul…but that’s just what he wanted. Expecting the attack he turned into it, head down so that Morgan flew over his head. She battered him into the floor with her Jumat as she did so, but he got a hand on her and she rolled uncontrollably when she landed on the ground, now unconscious.

“Damn,” Paul said as his leg returned to working order, then he saw the Arc Knights all coming towards him and he realized it was Olivia they were after. “Run!”

Kerrie stepped in front of Paul and flicked him his sword back while linking with him, then they both grabbed and threw one of the Arc Knights so fast that he didn’t have a chance to break the Lachka hold. After that she was off elsewhere and Paul was exchanging blows with another Arc Knight, parrying each and knowing he could own one of them if he just had a few seconds to work with, but Vermaire was headed directly for Olivia and two Arc Knights were now standing guard over Morgan’s body so that no one could wake her up.

Then Rio pulled an insane backdoor move, sneaking up on them using Kgat until he was so close that he Yetu jumped the last few meters in between both of them, stepping on Morgan’s bare abdomen in the process but knowing she wouldn’t care afterwards. With only a moment to use before they twisted around and took him out, he surged his Lachka as quick and as forceful as possible, forming two ‘crash bags’ and expanding them off of each of his hands as he touched the armor on both Knights.

The result from Brad’s perspective was a sneak jump in on top of Morgan with Rio blowing both of them off and away from her, then pushing her body even further away. Brad grabbed it with a Lachka hold and dragged her over to him where he got hold of her wrist and picked her up, running her across the room to a safer area where the ‘hot potato’ of the destunning serum was eventually going to end up as the Archons passed it from person to person after Olivia chucked it away just prior to going down.

Rio took three sprinting steps away from the Knights as others with swords came in to counter them then he froze, not because of anyone doing something to him, but because of what was happening inside him. It took him a moment of hesitation to be sure, then he was suddenly knocked to the side by Scott as another Arc Knight lunged for him with his stun gauntlets.

“What’s wrong?” Scott asked, grabbing him by the shoulder and pulling him away as others intervened seeing that Rio wasn’t fighting anymore.

“Ascension trigger,” Rio said, fighting a huge surge of instability that made him trip once and Scott had to catch him again.

It took all of a tenth of a second for Scott to realize what was happening, for all of the trailblazers had shared all of the known triggers, meaning that whatever Rio was getting was going to be a new ability and they couldn’t squander that, so he pulled him into a telekinetic hold just above the ground and moved him like an anti-grav cargo crate away from the center of the room.

Seeing an opportunity to down a weakened opponent, an Arc Knight shot after them at full sprint with Scott putting out a mental ‘help’ call to all the Archons along with a priority marker on Rio. Within 3 seconds four bodies flew across the room to hit the Arc Knight. He stunned one of them, but the others knocked him down and away from Rio, trusting in Scott’s judgement even though they didn’t know what was going on just yet, though that would change shortly as he transmitted to everyone in the room what was happening.

The Black Knight stopped instantly, raising an arm and calling off the Arc Knights. The trailblazers stopped when he did, then Vermaire ran over to Rio, pulling off his helmet mid sprint. Scott stepped aside as Rio was kneeling on the ground trying to focus on the instability, letting Vermaire get to him. The giant pulled the tiny biomonitor off his own forehead and put it on Rio, then stepped back and watched.

“I could use some help,” Rio asked. “This is worse than I’ve ever had.”

“I’ve got you buddy,” Scott said, grabbing his wrist and linking to him mentally and feeling the huge storm surging throughout his entire body, meaning this was going to be tissue growth in more than just his brain and those were always the nastiest ascensions to go through. He gave Rio a firm point to center himself on and he felt Rio latch onto it desperately. He needed to let this go and try again the next time it manifested, but there was no way the trailblazer was going to let a brand new trigger get away, for there was no way to know when or if it would come again.

“Hang on to it,” Kerrie pressed, with Scott transmitting to all of them so they knew what was happening internally. “3 red.”

“Oh this is going to hurt,” Rio said as it bumped up to 4 red and he laid himself down flat on the floor in anticipation. 18 seconds later it went to 4 flashing red and the pain of tissue growth suddenly exploded inside of him.

He yelled, both mentally and verbally, suffering through an insanely painful 8 seconds before he went limp and nearly passed out.

“You got it,” Scott said, trying to numb up some of the residual pain for him as well as clear the whirlwind from his mind. “Easy now,” he said, looking up at the others. “He is cooked head to toe.”

“Worth,” Vermaire said, pointing to the wall that opened up with a doorway. “Challenge over. We’ll call it a draw, but it looks like we all just won a new ability.”

“Well said,” Jason agreed as Scott picked up and carried Rio towards the exit, then he looked up at Vermaire’s helmetless head. “So whose brilliant idea was all of this?”

“You needed a real challenge. It was Wilson’s plan, though I made a few suggestions.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Morgan said, walking up behind them with a slight limp after getting destunned and still having a few pins and needles working through her right leg.

Vermaire raised an eyebrow and looked at her standing there in her underwear, as were several of the others. “For what it’s worth, he never expected you to be able to get through the swarms on your own. That was supposed to be something all of you had to work together to defeat, which was why he amped it up so much.”

“You saw?”

Vermaire nodded. “I didn’t think you could sustain the effort that long.”

“Was this the end of the challenge, or did we have something more to do?”

The Black Knight looked up at the clock that had 1:32 remaining. “This was to be your finish line, though you weren’t going to get there. I had you down. The rest were just a matter of time.”

Paul mock coughed.

“We’ll agree to disagree on that one,” Jason added, sharing the same sentiment. “Are there any more surprises awaiting us?

“The scheduled Trials, but nothing like this,” Vermaire said, putting his helmet back on and walking towards the exit along with the rest of the Arc Knights. “Though Wilson has some worthwhile tests for your Clans that you won’t easily pass.”

Morgan walked up behind Jason and put a hand on his shoulder so he wouldn’t follow the others out. “What happened to Rio?”

“Not sure, but it was a full body ascension.”

“Think he got Jumat?”

“We can only hope. If not, it’s something totally new.”

Morgan switched to telepathy so no one else could eavesdrop. That aside, we are going to get even with Wilson for this one, right?

Jason smiled. Oh, we’ll think of something over the next few days. I can promise you that.

Rio lay on a flat bed in the med bay with a host of equipment around him scanning his new tissue that, from his perspective, was so on fire that he had no idea what it did. He was in total body pain, but it was easing ever so slightly and from past experience he knew he just had to weather it for a while until it dissipated. He was in no condition to fight, let alone train, but was more than thrilled to have gotten a new ability, though the grimace on his face attested otherwise.

“We have a match,” the medtech said to Scott and the other six Archons in the room with them, then swung the monitor over to show him. The tissue growths were not Jumat, as many had suspected, but were an enlargement of his Lachka tissue in his brain and duplicate particles across his entire body. There was only one psionic that had that structure, so it was an easy diagnosis to make.

“Tier 3,” Scott told Rio.

“Jumat?”

“No. You got Ubven.”

Rio laughed, which shot a super jolt of pain through every part of his body. “Damn. And I always hated Amumu.”

“You’re our mummy now,” Scott said with a smile, realizing what the lingering Lachka field drop ability was going to mean for hand to hand engagements, especially large numbered affairs like they’d just been in. “And you’re going to absolutely wreck team fights.”

iTunes: "You're Going Down"

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