Equity
Author: Aer-Ki Jyr
Date: 2017-12-18T23:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Archon Lore

1

May 3, 4907

Knillo System (Ziviri Region)

Baskerno

Jyra Hemman was hanging onto consciousness just enough to feel every painful jab in her back as the Bsidd carried her, and with more than 10 legs in use there were a lot of little bumps with each ‘step’ that was taken. She didn’t know if two large steps per Human or Calavari stride would have been worse, but right now the Arc Commando was being tortured as she was carried clear of the battlefield where Jyra had been hit by a strafing Kat’vo while fighting Zen’zat. The Dre’mo’don had hit her shieldless armor and punched straight through, burning away flesh and ribs but thankfully not going too deep.

That said, she was barely keeping it together as her armor oozed out healing gel to combat the injury, but the exposed area was the size of her fist, leaving the center uncovered and hardening only due to the small addition made to Commando armor during the lull between V’kit’no’sat wars. Sadly it wasn’t a full blown regenerator. There just wasn’t enough room in the armor to put one without taking away additional shield generators or other systems, but they’d managed to miniaturize and incorporate a system that would trigger the body to seal off injuries faster than normal to avoid excessive blood loss.

Without it he would already have passed out and died from lack of blood, though he wasn’t far from it now. Each step the Bsidd took cracked the scab over the wound, causing it to seep more blood before hardening again, stoked on by the limited regenerator technology built into the gel layer of the armor.

Jyra wasn’t paying any attention to her battlemap, which was still functioning, and was just trying to make it through the next few seconds when the Bsidd finally put her down. The thud hurt worse when she touched the ground, but then her body stopped moving and she was so grateful for the lesser pain that a few tears finally made their way out of her eyes as Jyra’s body stopped clenching up in total survival mode.

“Stay put, Arc Commando,” the Bsidd said in perfect English but with the telltale accent produced by differently structured vocal chords. “We are beyond the fighting, but there are others that need rescued. There will be a guard left to cover you. Just stay down and stay alive.”

Before Jyra could say anything the Bsidd was gone, though she caught a glimpse of his 18 appendages and tall stature. He was a Beta-variant, meaning he was a veteran from long ago, for Star Force no longer reproduced Betas, but she was very grateful that this one had stuck around in the military for so many years. There were many of his kind left in the empire, but they were now the ‘old’ designs that had been deemed outdated and replace by the new trifecta. Aside from the queens that were hardly ever seen, there was a large bodied Bsidd warrior, a medium bodied tech, and a small bodied pilot…known as Tridas, Sordas, and Zendas.

Most of the Bsidd stationed on Baskerno were Sordas, helping to rebuild/alter Ziviri infrastructure to Star Force standards. There were a few military units assigned to security, but most of the planet was the responsibility of Clan Saiyan, which Jyra was part of. They were here to both defend the planet and keep the Ziviri in line, but there weren’t enough of them to stop the V’kit’no’sat and there weren’t any reinforcements nearby to assist them.

The Ziviri Region was separate from the bulk of Star Force territory, with a gap between it and the rest of the empire connected by a handful of systems. Not one planet in the region was well defended, for they hadn’t had time to build them up, and the shield generators that had protected this dry planet all the way around were overwhelmed by the 349 Kat’vo ships that had arrived two months ago and immediately began bombarding the planet.

The Kvash had tried to hold them off, but they only had 18 ships. They’d added their firepower to the limited planetary defenses when the time came, then fled when they were targeted, hoping to draw the V’kit’no’sat into range of additional weapons, but they just couldn’t do enough damage. They’d lost 5 of their ships, and right now the other 13 were elsewhere in the system, staying alive and making nuisances of themselves whenever an opportunity arose.

The Kat’vo seemed to be ignoring them and focusing on the surface invasion. They didn’t have many troops to deploy, but this was a minor planet in a minor system and everyone else was fighting for the more important worlds, leaving this planet to a much smaller battle for possession.

Jyra had hoped the V’kit’no’sat wouldn’t bother with the Ziviri, given how far away from the main battlefront this region was, but in recent years the V’kit’no’sat had begun hitting everywhere around the perimeter of Star Force territory. They were even coming in from the Rim and hitting the lightly defended Frontier Region, though roaming Star Force fleets were hammering those convoys hard as they made the long trek around to get into position, but there were so many V’kit’no’sat fleets and races involved that Star Force was being overwhelmed. Where they were fighting they were holding their own, but there were so many invasion fleets that some were getting in free hits, such as here.

It wasn’t completely free, but the ground forces had been in retreat the entire time. Jyra had known it was a matter of buying time and hoping someone would get to them with help eventually. That was the plan for the entire war. Planets were meant to do damage, stall, and wait for the trailblazers and their big, Uriti-centered fleets to arrive and kick the V’kit’no’sat out. Trouble was, they were all in Star Force territory, not this small annex beyond the normal border, and the Kat’vo had apparently been assigned the Ziviri Region as their exclusive invasion zone, for they hadn’t shown up anywhere else.

The avian race wasn’t the strongest amongst the V’kit’no’sat, and in fact they were almost bottom of the barrel within that empire, but when judged against anyone else in the galaxy the Kat’vo were a dominant and powerful race, made only more so with the addition of the Zen’zat that could conduct a conventional ground war with the Kat’vo providing the aerial support.

Jyra stretched out her legs, immediately regretting the movement as her wound cracked open again, but the adjustment allowed her to lay flat on the ground with her helmeted face looking up at the sky…which at the moment was a piece of Ziviri architecture. It wasn’t a new one made with Star Force design influence, but rather something that existed prior to the Star Force war of conquest.

The Arc Commando finally toggled her battlemap, thankful for the ability to do so mentally without any more physical movement as the gel layer in Jyra’s armor continued to seep out and numb the area, but it still wasn’t getting more than halfway to the center, for too much had been lost already and the armor was designed to not drain it all out one spot, holding more in others for when those parts took penetrating damage.

On her battlemap she checked the local area first, seeing several dozen Star Force icons nearby in what was a half destroyed building that rose some 8 stories tall. An entire wall was missing, and Jyra realized this was a small village that had been evacuated during the Star Force invasion and never repaired. It was a ghost town some 29 miles from where she’d been injured…and Jyra had no idea she’d been carried that far.

Apparently others had been as well, with nearly all of them being Clan Saiyan mechwarriors. They’d probably been pulled out of dead mechs, but how were they being picked up if the V’kit’no’sat were steadily pushing forward?

Jyra expanded the battlemap out further, then realized that there was no more fighting. The Star Force line had completely collapsed and the V’kit’no’sat were pushing forward so fast they were gaining ground with next to no resistance as they headed for the remaining strongholds that Star Force still possessed.

“Ouch,” she heard a voice say beside her, then the image of a female Human appeared between her head and the dark ceiling. “Did you get shot by a mech?”

“Kat’vo,” Jyra said as she tapped on the Arc Commando’s helmet, indicating that she needed to release it. She did, mentally triggering the mechanism and hearing a pop…then the female mechwarrior pulled it off and set it down beside Jyra as some sort of soft padding was set underneath her head. “Caught me with my shields down.”

“That must be one of their new belly cannons. They chipped the hell out of my mech before a siege tank finished me off. Are you numb yet?”

“Not…even close,” she grimaced.

“Then this is going to hurt. Hang on,” she said, with Jyra feeling her wound being probed. The pain shot through her head and she went groggy until a cool sensation began to eat into the pain. Her vision returned sometime later, with a hand swinging back and forth over her face.

“Still here,” she mumbled.

“Good. I’ve got a healing patch on you. Hold still and let it work. No one is nearby, so I think we’re safe for a while.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t know?” she asked with a sneer. “The Ziviri turned on us. They started throwing themselves against our mechs and the Zen’zat overran us. They just handed them the planet.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know if it was planned or just spite, but there’s word that the Star Force-friendly Ziviri were being killed too. Any that stood with us were targeted, and there wasn’t enough to stop the collapse. The Bsidd pulled me out when the V’kit’no’sat were gaining so much ground they just ignored my broken mech. Same with some of the others here.”

“Supplies?”

“We pulled in a hidden cache. Now I know why we’re required to hide them even on little worlds like this one. That’s where your healing patch came from. The Archons think of everything.”

“Do we have any of them left?”

“Not here. You’re the best we’ve got…and you look like shit.”

“That good?” she said groggily, but that bit of humor took what little bravery she had left.

“I’ve got you covered here, so feel free to pass out and let the patch do its work. We’re in survival mode now. We can’t fight the Viks and the Ziviri at the same time. This planet is lost. So heal up while we can. Once the last battleforts fall they’ll be back to pick off the rest of us. We have to be ghosts by then.”

“Thanks,” Jyra said, closing her eyes as the pain numbing effect continued to gobble up her wound in mind’s eye and the massive fatigue underriding it began to assert itself. The Arc Commando’s mind began to slip into distortion and she let herself go, glad to be free of the pain as she finally passed out.

“Come on, come on!” Jyra heard a tiny voice shouting along with a tapping on her forehead.

She blinked several times, trying to figure out where she was and having the pain in her back suddenly remind her of what had happened as the tiny armored suit covering her face moved down and stood on her chest as she tilted her head up.

“We’re pulling out,” the Irondel mechwarrior said. “The Zen’zat are coming for us.”

“Shit,” Jyra said, sitting up and half dumping the 8 inch tall ‘chipmunk’ off her chest as her back sent a shot of pain into her, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as before. The healing patch was probably numbing most of it up, meaning she had no idea how damaged she still was, but moving was going to do a lot less harm than getting shot again.

The Arc Commando found her helmet lying beside her and put it on, suddenly realizing that the battlemap around her was clear and everyone else was already gone.

“Where is everyone else?” she asked, rolling over onto her knees gently and finding that her back was holding together just enough to allow her to stand. She took it slow, but she finally got all the way up onto her feet as the Irondel grabbed and held up as best it could her assault rifle that had been lying on the ground beside her.

“Trying to pull the Zen’zat off our trail. You can’t keep up with them, so we either fight or try to evade. So far it’s working,” he said as she grabbed the barrel of her rifle and lifted it up to the rack at the top of her back that was still intact and clipped it on. “But they’re getting closer and we have to put some more distance between us and their Pefbar or we’re toast.”

“Why are you still here?”

“Someone had to wake you, and you needed as many minutes as you could get.”

“How long was I out?” she asked, wincing as she took an experimental step.

“16 hours. I’m sorry it wasn’t longer.”

“I can walk. You can navigate.”

“Deal,” the mechwarrior said, dropping to all fours as he ran a couple of meters towards her then jumped on her leg. Using the grip pads in his armor he climbed all the way up her body until he got to her right shoulder, then he sat there and latched on with Jyra reconfiguring her shields to cover him.

While the Irondel could cover decent distance on his own, it required constant running to match a Human’s walk and sprinting to equal even the slower running speeds, meaning Irondel couldn’t keep up with most of the other races, so they typically hitched rides in situations like this.

“Head north,” he said, sending her a more precise heading via her battlemap as Jyra focused on just staying erect and not faceplanting. Her back was so damaged she didn’t have the muscle strength for many corrections and the powered setting in her armor was carrying most of her weight, and the Irondel’s, but she still had to minimize torso movement as much as possible and she was having to learn on the go what she could and could not do with several stumbles and near falls as she grit her teeth against the surges of pain every time she made a mistake.

“Do we have a rendezvous point?” Jyra asked.

“No. We’re just trying to stay away from the Zen’zat.”

“Peachy. My supply pack got blasted.”

“I know. The others will come back if they can.”

“Thanks for sticking around.”

“You can repay the debt by finding a way to walk faster. A hover tank is drifting our way.”

“How far?” she asked, not able to take her eyes off her footing to look at her own battlemap for more than a fleeting glance, and even that was destabilizing her.

“6 miles. They’re going to cross within 2 if they hold course. We’re out of direct line of sight, but this area is going to be exposed in about 20 seconds.”

“How far do I need to get?”

“That wall ahead.”

“Damn it,” she said, doing the mental math and knowing she was going to come up short. “Hang on.”

Jyra put a little hop into her step, feeling her back almost cut in two, but another shuffle step followed and within a few seconds she was slog jogging across the sandy ground. She was actually managing it ok until a trip root passed under her and she had to hop extra to clear the half buried piece of debris. When she did, that was too much for her back to take and she felt something snap. Her armor locked her torso in place, thanks to the emergency protocol she’d enacted when she’d managed to stand up. That left her pitching forward but not bending at the waist more than a partial curve, though it was enough to send her off balance towards a faceplant.

Jyra responded by running hard, pumping her legs and putting as much forward momentum as she could to keep her torso in the air. It worked and she turned into a partially prone missile that got her to the nearby wall before her fall completed and both she and the Irondel went for a tumble with him disengaging and jumping off before he could be smashed by her tumbling body.

“Stay down,” he warned. “We’re out of view.”

Jyra didn’t respond. The pain was bad, but the healing patch was still fighting it and hiding a chunk of the damage that she’d just done from mind’s eyes, yet the Arc Commando knew it was serious.

The Irondel continued to watch the battlemap, with a feed coming in from one of the Kvash ships in orbit that allowed him to see the Zen’zat and not the other way around. Star Force armor was built to hide from most sensor scans, and right now the Kat’vo ships were not directly overhead. That meant the Zen’zat needed to spot them with their own equipment, and so long as these bulky Ziviri walls were between them and the sensors the extra mass would be enough to shield them.

Jyra waited a long time on the ground in her ball of bent arms and legs just trying to hold still and not make the pain any worse before the mechwarrior appeared in her faceplate with a tiny hand pointing towards her with a ‘thumbs up’ gesture.

“They missed us. I think they’re heading towards the nearest Ziviri town. The ones chasing the others are far to the west now.”

“Good. Because I broke my back again. I don’t think I can walk.”

“Can you crawl?”

“Why?”

“There are no Kat’vo patrols nearby, but if one happens over top of us we’re exposed.”

“Let me know if one is coming, then I’ll try. Until then, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Go camo then,” he suggested.

Jyra grit her teeth and moved her right leg, twisting slightly as she began to unfurl from the ball she was in. The Arc Commando made it halfway before she felt something else give in her back, but oddly it seemed to improve the pain a bit, making her wonder if something hadn’t been dislocated. With that bit of relief she unfurled herself the rest of the way until she was lying face down on the sandy ground.

“You need your armor breach away from the sky.”

“Ugh,” she groaned, realizing he was right. With obvious difficulty the Human rotated around until she flopped on her back, then remained completely still. A few moments later her dull white armor changed color to mimic the dark brown/orange sand around her and shielding her from being detected by casual glances. Even her faceplate now appeared opaque, but that wasn’t going to be enough to fool a Pefbar scan, though the Zen’zat and Kat’vo had to get pretty close to pull one of those. “What’s your name?”

“Is your HUD damaged?”

“I turned it off. You’re the navigator, remember?”

“My name is Danngi. I’m part of the mech division assigned to the Kvash fleet. We were sent in to help you defend the planet. We failed miserably.”

“Nice to meet you Danngi. I’m going to pass out now…”

“Sleep, Human. I will watch over you,” he said, not receiving any response. He shifted his own armor into camo mode, which had it changing shades of color as he scurried up the wall to a better vantage point where he could use his own eyes and passive sensors to see what was nearby. His tiny silhouette was hard to spot, and the further the others got away the less data the Kvash warship in high orbit had to relay to him. Its own sensors were extremely limited that far away, but it could still relay information.

He couldn’t risk a comm message, and the secure battlemap links were out of range, but the others were transmitting so he could see where the enemy was as they led them off, though soon that would disappear and he’d have nothing to work with except very basic orbital scans…assuming the Kvash ship could remain in position, and there was no guarantee of that.

It was up to him to guard the Human. And without her, he was going to have a very hard time covering ground, though at the moment he was technically the faster. She needed time to heal, and that dive had seemed to make things worse, but if the Zen’zat didn’t know they were here and continued to chase the others then they had time…just no supplies aside from the survival pack Danngi carried. He’d taken it out of the mech’s cockpit after it had been destroyed, but it would do the Human no good. There was enough food to keep him going for weeks, maybe a month, but given her huge size, there was no way its contents could fill her stomach for more than a day, and maybe far less than that.

No, they both had to get to an outpost, whether it be Star Force or Ziviri, and get some help…and if the Ziviri had really betrayed them, that was going to be exponentially harder, for they were effectively on an enemy-held planet now…but one with Star Force resources scattered all over it. And it was those resources they had to find and use to get the Arc Commando back into fighting shape. For without her, Danngi didn’t think he’d be getting off this planet. Star Force most likely didn’t have the resources to retake it from both the V’kit’no’sat and the Ziviri, which meant he’d have to make himself invisible and scrounge supplies when and where he could.

That or send a signal to the ships in orbit for pickup…except his armor was so tiny his transmitter didn’t have that kind of range. The Human’s did, which meant she was his potential ticket out of here…and above that she was an Arc Commando, and Star Force didn’t have as many of those to spare as they did mechwarriors. She was worth protecting, but in truth, Danngi would have stayed behind to help any of his fellow warriors. This one just happened to be extra valuable…and extra lethal, which was going to be a big help if they were discovered.

Well, if she could heal up. Until then, they were going to have to hope their luck held out, for an Irondel in a mech was a fearsome opponent. But there were no Irondel commandos, due to their small size. Even their infantry used mini-mechs, and without that augmentation he could do next to nothing other than keep an eye out while the Human rested.

So that was what he was going to do, picking a spot on the broken rooftop of the abandoned building and blending in as much as possible as he saw the dust trail from the hovertank moving further off across the dry landscape.

2

It took 18 hours before Jyra could walk again, and most of the healing patch, to enable a slow wobble, but she and Danngi were on the move across a mix of rocky outcroppings and wide open plains. Fortunately there were so few V’kit’no’sat on the planet and those that were here were preoccupied with pushing hard into the last Star Force strongholds, leaving the Arc Commando and mechwarrior safe in their anonymity.

That said, the Irondel was still watching what pieces of the battlemap were visible to him as he rode on the Human’s shoulder, knowing that she couldn’t move very fast and that if something was heading their way they needed to see it coming well ahead of arrival, though at the moment there was nowhere to go, for they were in the middle of a sandy wash basin between two high ridgelines miles ahead and behind them.

“Stop,” he told her, feeling the Human rock underneath his locked feet as she swayed to an awkward pause. “Open.”

Her helmet cracked a bit, exposing her face but not the rest of her head. Danngi crawled over her helmet and reached a small container into her mouth where he dumped the small amount of water he’d pulled out of the atmosphere via his personal vaporator. It was one of the many survival items in his pack, but for a Human it amounted to barely a few drops of water.

He poured it behind her lip then scurried back over to his normal riding spot on her shoulder, resetting the vaporator and letting it begin to collect more water molecules from the dry air. Jyra closed her helmet again, keeping her body moisture contained where it could be recycled into drinking water. She was getting much more from that than Ganngi’s additions, but her body used more water than it sweated out, so she needed additional supplies and few water droplets would help extend her range before she collapsed for good.

Her body was screaming for food and ambrosia, but she had neither. Her pack had been destroyed when the Kat’vo shot her and the supplies the others had found had gone with them, for she wasn’t able to carry anything. She could barely move her own body as it was, and the Arc Commando was just holding on at this point, knowing that without rescue or resupply she was toast.

But one thing she did know was the location of all the hidden caches on the planet…including the ultra secret ones that only Archons and Arc Commandos knew of. There was one of those 112 miles to the northeast of their current position and it was their best play, though she didn’t know if she could make it there or not.

Fortunately that wasn’t going to be necessary, for they got a friendly ping on the battlemap. There was no source, just a rendezvous coordinate right underneath her feet.

“Stop here,” Danngi said, not sure how much attention she was paying, or how groggy she was.

The Human rocked to a stop again, then slowly spun around.

“I can’t see anything either,” the Irondel said. “Nothing on the battlemap.”

“Stealth…unit,” she said, her mouth dry and fumbling the words.

Danngi looked around, trying to spot any distortion in the hot air, though it was hard with little shimmers all over the place from the heat displacement. A few moments later he felt a wave of wind hit him, then the underside of a skeet appeared in a weird techno hologram detailing where it was, though the actual hull was still invisible…but he could see the edge of it where there was a slight wrinkle in the horizon beyond.

The Arc Commando didn’t say anything, nor were there any transmissions that Danngi received. She just reached up to the underside and held on…then kicked her legs up with a shout of pain loud enough for the Irondel to hear, but her feet stuck and she clung to the underside of the skeet, locked onto it the same way Danngi’s armor was locked onto her shoulder plates.

A wave of disruption washed over him, then suddenly he could see the dark hull and nothing else. There was no light at all, even when he turned his head to look behind/down. Just blackness, which he guessed was the inside of the cloaking field. All light that hit it was absorbed and the energy transmitted to the far side where it was reproduced again, leaving nothing to actually hit the craft itself.

He felt the acceleration, for the IDF did not extend beyond the craft to where they clung, but it wasn’t enough to peel them off. He’d thought it could be extended, but it would probably interfere with the cloaking shield and not getting shot down was more important than their comfort. Whoever the pilot was flew slow enough to not risk breaking their physical locks, and after a minute or so rotated over so they were on the top of the craft and gravity was helping keep them on rather than trying to pull them off.

After that they just waited for more than two hours, then they felt the deceleration that preceded the dropping of the cloaking field. The skeet was still upside down, but it rotated over and placed the pair of survivors less than a meter from the paved surface of a Star Force spaceport as the sounds of explosions rumbled in the distance.

Danngi disconnected and dropped to the ground, running out of the way as Jyra followed, though she collapsed into a heap and did not move. The Irondel was about to call for a medic, but one was already nearby and moved to the Human as the skeet disappeared from view followed by a gust of wind that meant it had probably accelerated off to pick up more survivors.

The medic rolled Jyra over and Ganngi heard her groan, but she didn’t fight the movement…then the medic tore off the expended healing patch and placed a regenerator into the open spot in her armor. He saw it melt down into her skin and stick there, then a little more than a minute later it pulled back out and fell to the ground with the medic catching it before it hit.

“Food, now,” the medic said to Jyra as she stood up, her movements no longer hindered. “You can’t fully heal without the necessary parts. Eat up, because we don’t have an intact medical station left.”

“What’s our status?” she asked, not arguing but not moving off either.

“Pulling out as soon as we can. Most of the Ziviri are working with the V’kit’no’sat. Only the baby rocks are safe. The large ones that appeared loyal were dismissed, because we can’t trust any of them. They’re out amongst the population doing whatever.”

“Won’t they be killed?” she asked.

“We’re going to pick them up if we have room, but we can’t risk another backstab. Several of the ‘safe’ ones were just waiting for an opportunity to hurt us. If there are loyal ones left, they said they understood. If we come back to pick them up, I doubt the traitors will show.”

“Where’s our evac ships?”

“The Kvash are working on it. I don’t know more than that.”

“Thanks,” Jyra said, walking off slowly as Danngi let her go. He didn’t need to stay with her anymore. What he did need was a mech, so he ran off across the huge landing pad and got to one of the little building outcroppings and went inside. From there he made his way to the nearest mechbay, finding it empty save for a pair of damaged madcats.

“Tech,” Ganngi said, amplifying his voice via his suit to get the Kiritas’s attention. “Are those mechs claimed?”

“Salvage flown it. The mechwarriors either escaped or were captured. They were not found with their war machines.”

“I’m claiming one. Convert it to Irondel cockpit if you have the spare parts.”

“You are a mechwarrior?”

“What gave it away?” he asked sarcastically, given that he was still in mechwarrior survival armor.

“Good,” the tech said. “We need the extra room. We don’t have enough madcat parts to fit, but with a smaller cockpit we can get a thor power generator in there.

“Whatever, just get me back into the fight.”

“Two hours, at most.”

“Done,” Ganngi said, running off knowing he needed to get cleaned up, a short nap, and some food. After that he was going back out there and doing some damage. If he was going to die on this pathetic planet, it was going to be in a mech. Not getting stepped on by a Zen’zat…”

“Hey,” a Protovic from Clan Saiyan said to Jyra as he came into the base cafeteria. She was the only person there and had a plate full of food and three canisters of water, one of which was already empty, as she chewed with a ferocity that was usually only seen in Archons.

Mouth full, she responded with a telepathic ‘hi’ ping and kept eating as the Protovic walked up to and sat down opposite her, but he wasn’t here to eat.

“Baerden is down. Probably dead, maybe captured. We have no Archons left. That leaves you in command.”

“Sh….i….t,” she cursed through a full mouth.

“We’ve got an hour before they hit the outer wall, at most, and some of their warships are sneaking closer. As soon as the shield generator goes down they’re going to pound us. I don’t see how we can evac.”

Jyra swallowed, clearing her throat. “What about the other bases?”

“Not much better shape, but they’ll hold longer than us.”

“Can we evac any of them?”

“We could if it was just the V’kit’no’sat, but the Ziviri are assaulting two of them all on their own, plus some Kat’vo air cover, but it’s pretty thin. The Ziviri are throwing bodies at the defenses and we’re mowing them down, but more keep coming. They’re either stupid or incensed, and they’re handing the planet to the Viks.”

Jyra slammed her fist down on the table so hard that thump made her two water canisters bounce slightly and knocked over the third. When her hand came up there was even a shallow depression in the synthetic tabletop.

“We have to scrounge what we can. Set up a kill zone. They have to get the shield generator or we’ll take down at least one of their warships. We need to bait them in and unload on them. If they don’t take it we can hold.”

“I don’t see how.”

“We can handle the Ziviri if the Viks go away. They have limited numbers and they’re trying to preserve them. They’re not going to get bold unless they think they can take the shield generator down. If they do that, it’s game over.”

“Mines?”

“We don’t have time to place anything. We’ll have to launch them.”

“Alright. I’ll see what we can rig up. Where do you want to set this trap?”

Jyra flipped her chin in his direction as she bit another roll and devoured half of it within four seconds.

The Protovic produced a holographic map of the base from the bracelet he wore on his left wrist. The Arc Commando pointed to a spot between the shield generator that covered a diameter of over 600 miles and the outer defense wall that outlined the base.

“Done.”

“And pull in as many assets as you can from the other bases.”

“We can’t get them all.”

“Get what we can.”

“That means they’ll fall even quicker.”

“If they fall and all die, we gain nothing. The shield must hold. Smuggle out what you can.”

“I hate fighting like this,” the Protovic said in disgust.

“So do I, but this is the situation we’re in. We fight sloppy or we surrender. And I’m not trusting my life to the V’kit’no’sat or the Ziviri.”

“Agreed. What about our warships?”

“They can’t do much without getting their asses blasted out of space. If they see an opening they’ll take it. Other than that, there’s nothing for me to tell them to do that they don’t already know about.”

“Are we in an Alamo scenario?”

“I would like to say no, but we’re getting closer to it. So long as the V’kit’no’sat don’t get reinforcements we have a chance if we can whittle them down. Defender advantage.”

“Not sure how much we can stretch it, but we’ll do what we can.”

“I’ll be there shortly. I gotta eat then hit the regenerator again to fix my back.”

“I won’t delay you then. Gobble fast,” the Protovic said, getting up.

Jyra picked up one of the water containers and gestured with it to him as she continued to chew food and then washed it down with another couple gulps, then she went to work on a plate of noodles using her telekinesis to rapid fire them into her mouth. Anything within her body the regenerator could use for raw materials, so all she had to do was get it inside her. Didn’t matter if her stomach was so full it looked like she was pregnant, for it would even out magically within a few minutes.

It wasn’t the preferred way to do it, but without a mass of biomatter for a medical station to use, this was the best way to cheat to the system…and she needed to be back as close to full strength as she could get if this really was going to be their last stand.

3

May 6, 4907

Knillo System (Ziviri Region)

Baskerno

Jyra ran across the base, dodging back and forth between buildings and bits of debris as the Zen’zat army pushed towards the foot of the shield generator. Star Force had delayed them as long as they could, but they were now inside the perimeter and peppering the secondary shield covering the generator itself with firepower…but not enough to get through. She still had 18 mechs in the field, some barely limping around, leaving the rest of this fight to the infantry. Fortunately they were only fighting against Zen’zat and not something bigger, like Oso’lon. If they had been, they’d have lost the base long ago.

But they were still losing it, and it was the last position on the planet that was holding. What few survivors there were from the other bases had been evacuated here or into one Kvash ship that had dared to make a run to ground. Apparently the Kat’vo hadn’t expected the run underneath the planetary shields and they’d pounded the crap out of the Zen’zat army attacking the base, but they’d taken damage and were currently still hovering under the shield further to the northwest.

Jyra wanted to bring the ship over here, but it wasn’t a true warship. It was a jumpship with some weaponry on it, but it was meant as a drone carrier and all its drones were now gone, sacrificed to get it to ground. If it made a run for space now it would probably not make it with the atmospheric limitations, but it had at least been able to transport the survivors from the other bases here, taking pot shots the entire time.

As it was, it had to stand off before it got nibbled to death and the Kat’vo had to decide whether to pursue it across ground or ignore it and focus their full attention on the one remaining base. They’d chosen the latter, and right now the Kvash warship was recharging its shields and making what repairs it could, though most of its weaponry had been plucked from it already by well-aimed V’kit’no’sat attacks.

She could see it off in the distance and had been using it for some long range fire support, but this close in to the buildings it didn’t have the line of sight needed, so it was mostly just sitting there waiting for her to call. If the generator was about to go down it would move in and take whatever damage was required, but the longer she let it sit there the more repair work could be done.

Jyra had no troops with her. They were all fighting in other positions as she was working her way around in a long flanking maneuver. Arc Commandos were good in hand to hand fighting, but that wasn’t why they were chosen. They were meant to be quiet assassins, ghosts that moved about hitting where the enemy least expected it. As one of her trainers had told her, they were 007, not Goku, and right now she was hoping that guile would do more damage than face to face combat.

Her body had fully healed up from her back injury, but she was tired and had a lot of new weak tissue replacing what had been lost. So she was at ‘full’ strength, but that full strength was not what it used to be, plus she was partially exhausted from the fighting over the past two days. Right now though, none of that mattered. She had a pack full of explosives on her back, a rifle in her right hand, and a stealth suite worked into her armor that made her even harder to see. She was a shimmer in visible light and absorbing everything else that hit her. That was a problem if there was a building behind her that should show up because her shadow created a bit of a void, but it was much better than the enemy getting a direct sensor ping off her.

Jyra eased up alongside one broken building, then put her fingertips on it and began to climb, clinging to the material like spiderman until she got to the top and poked her head over. She had no battlemap access, for her stealth field interfered with it, and her armor’s sensors were powered down so not to give her away. She had her Pefbar, but it only reached out to about 22 meters. That wasn’t much, but it was enough to watch her back. However, she needed to navigate, and to do that she had to see what was ahead.

So she stuck her invisible head out just enough to get an eye line on the Zen’zat army. They didn’t use mechs, but rather large vehicles that floated over the ground and could transform into buildings when they decided to settle in. When they did that, the power to the shield generators increased, but right now the 6 she saw nearest here were still moving…or rather drifting, meaning they intended to advance further. Several large buildings were blocking them from firing on the shield generator, and on the backside of those buildings she saw dozens of Kat’vo roosted there. They were clinging to the walls like bats, staying out of the Star Force fire and waiting for moments of opportunity to strike from the air.

Jyra still had 4 skeets and 1 gunship operational, which she had kept in reserve to cover the area around the shield generator. It looked like both aerial supports were holding off and letting the ground troops fight this out, for she could hear the firepower of the mechs and turrets clashing with more of the Zen’zat vehicles. Some were smaller than a dropship while others were as big as the turtle mechs…of which she had none left. They’d been targeted earlier, leaving only the smaller, more agile mechs in play.

Jyra planned out her next set of maneuvers then dropped back to the ground, using her anti-grav to cushion her landing. It wasn’t powerful enough to fly her more than a few seconds, but that was all she needed to give her a far greater range of movement.

The Arc Commando crept in closer, moving in a zigzag pattern until she spotted a group of Zen’zat ahead. She knew she couldn’t let herself get within Pefbar range of them or they’d see her easily through the stealth field, so she had to go a different direction. It took her far longer than she’d hoped, but she came out in the rear of the enemy army and crept through the open area behind them up to the rear of one of the floating war machines.

Its shields were up, she could feel them with her Pefbar when she got close and there was a faint shimmer to let the infantry know exactly where their boundary was. And it wasn’t skin tight either. Rather it was erected a meter and a half beyond the armored hull.

If it had its shields down, or even a gap underneath it, she could have attacked it directly, but her explosives wouldn’t do much good now, and the other 8 she could see from her current position also probably had their shields up…save for a damaged one that was parked up against a far building. It had a big gaping hole in the side that had partially made its way into the interior…

That was her sweet spot, but it was going to take a while to get to it without being spotted. Right now all she had to do was wait, for she’d left timestamped orders, knowing she’d be out of communication…and if she broke her stealth and used her comm, she doubted she’d survive a minute, for the Zen’zat could trace it and the Kat’vo could swoop down on her position far faster than her ancestors could move.

Most of the fighting she’d done in the past had been against Zen’zat supporting other races. This was one of the few times where she had to fight them directly. They were being directed by the Kat’vo, but the aerial race was more accurately supporting the Zen’zat in a tactical sense. It didn’t seem fair that her own blood was fighting against itself, and she often wondered what had possessed the Zen’zat left behind on Earth so long ago to break the rules and reproduce, for there hadn’t been a single turncoat in this invasion. Not a single Zen’zat that had even tried to switch sides. They were dedicated to the V’kit’no’sat, and the Arc Commando truly wondered if any of these Zen’zat, if left behind, would have second thoughts or follow the V’kit’no’sat code to their deaths.

Jyra pondered that until the Zen’zat war machines started moving, in response to something she couldn’t see but could hear. It wasn’t loud, but the air disturbance of a starship moving at pedestrian speed through the atmosphere always produced a rumble, and she could hear the Kvash coming into the engagement. She waited for another 40 seconds before making her move, ensuring that their attention was fully on their target and the warship before she ran across the open areas between buildings towards the one damaged floating tank that was taking up a rear position, but still intending to fight with the others and add damage to the huge warship now visible in the sky to Jyra’s left.

The infantry moved too, repositioning and making Jyra go evasive twice to avoid their Pefbar bubbles, but eventually she got to the rear of the floating vehicle and was happy to see no shields up on the underside. There was one on top, but the damage must have knocked out a generator or an emitter, so the crew was putting all their defensive power to the most obvious angles of attack and covering the breach in their hull….leaving the intact underside armor uncovered.

Jyra ducked down and scurried her way through the 1.5 meter gap as she dug into her pack. The little mines were stealthed when she pulled them out, then appeared when they touched the underside. If the crew were watching they could probably see them with her Pefbar, but she hadn’t sensed their fields…meaning they probably didn’t have them up and were using the vehicle’s sensors and targeting data. The infantry around them was supposed to provide backup screening against this type of attack, but right now, in the rear of the formation, it was extremely lax.

Jyra planted three devices on the hull then took a knee, letting the vehicle drift over her until her head was clear, then she ran off to the side and found some cover as she waited for the countdown timers to end. The three explosives synced with themselves, for concussion wouldn’t set them off and one blowing before the others would just disable them. But linked together they detonated in unison, with the blast wave being strong enough to knock her to the ground and even interfere with her stealth for a moment, but she was running and invisible again before anyone noticed…with the underside of the vehicle billowing smoke through the cracks in the dirt as it smashed down to the ground unable to move.

“Got ya, you bastard. Now who’s next?” she asked herself as she heard a large strike from one of the Kvash’s main batteries hit nearby. Pieces of broken building were dislodged and dropped all around her, but it hadn’t hit the structure. Rather it had hit another of the Zen’zat tanks, and if it hadn’t finished it then Jyra would once she could get to it.

She had to keep looking with her eyes constantly, and as she did a rotation around to look behind her she saw that the Kat’vo were gone, no longer on their protective perch. Her eyes glanced to the sky and she saw flocks of them, more than had been here, shooting at the warship in a swarm of little dark spots that were going untargeted. Apparently there weren’t many, or perhaps any, point defense batteries still working, and the big guns would be a waste on the small targets, so the Kat’vo were essentially getting free shots.

Jyra couldn’t watch more than a glance or two. She had to keep moving and repositioning, for the Zen’zat were still advancing and she had to take down as many heavy vehicles as she could. For if it came down to hand to hand with the infantry, they weren’t going to be able to disable the shield generator from the outside. They’d have to fight inside the structure, and her Knight teams could take them in those confines…not to mention the mass of workers waiting there with spare weapons around outlined kill zones.

No, the main threat was from bombardment on the exterior, and each tank she could kill or finish off meant one more heavy gun that wasn’t going to do damage.

8 hours later…

Jyra put a rifle shot, one of the few she had left, into the Zen’zat on the ground, making sure he didn’t get back up again. Over the course of the war with the V’kit’no’sat, the Zen’zat had gone from having no regenerators in their armor to having a small one that could revive them from modest injuries, but the hole she’d just blown in its chest was beyond its ability to heal, meaning he or she was now unrecoverable.

The Arc Commando limped on, having had to take down 4 Zen’zat herself in the last 10 minutes. Fortunately 3 of them had been wounded before she got to them, with her catching them from behind as they retreated. One of them had full armor, but weak shields, and she’d had a handful with him. His larger size made grappling untenable, so it was just a matter of shooting and evading, with his armor having more volume due to his 7 foot height. That meant more goodies in it, and with the ability for it to reform over damaged spots meant she had to put a lot of firepower into him to finally take him down.

He was the one she’d just shot an extra time to be sure, and her own armor was covered in melted craters…but they’d held up better than his because he couldn’t land shots in exactly the same place. Jyra had lost 16% of her emitters, meaning her shields could not recover to full strength, but right now they were recharging and giving her just a hint of a shield as she moved on through the wreckage of the dead Zen’zat tanks.

Some were still partially operational, now working as buildings with a few small turrets that she had to be careful of, but none were mobile. She had 2 mechs left in good order, and they were moving around to take out those heavier guns, but the threat to the shield generator was gone. Now only infantry saboteurs had to be guarded against, and that wasn’t going to be a problem with so many people stuffed inside. Too many, for their limited supplies, but there should be stuff in the outer buildings that was salvageable.

Off to the west the Kvash starship was on the ground, and in it, for the triangular hull had dug deeply in the dirt when it finally crashed. It had saved the shield generator by soaking up all that damage, but it was not spaceworthy by a long shot. Some of the interior would be, but Jyra didn’t know how much. She was still comm silent and prowling the battlefield looking for targets to stab in the back, but her explosives were long gone and her ammunition was about out. It was time for her to get back before she was caught weaponless, and against the Zen’zat her tier 1 psionics didn’t count.

She continued to snoop around until she caught sight of a group of Clan Saiyan troops, then she shot them a battlemap blip a moment before her stealth went down so they wouldn’t shoot the disturbance. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, but with what they’d just survived she expected them to be jumpy. So many people had been killed that, at this point, shooting the first non-battlemap signal that moved made a lot of sense even if you weren’t half crazy from all the carnage.

“Jyra,” a Bsidd said, scurrying up to her. His armor was still intact, which wasn’t surprising considering he carried extra shield generators within the gaps between body stalks, “you survived.”

“Affirmative,” she agreed, walking up and putting a hand on one of his appendages. “But just barely hanging on. I’m almost out of ammo.”

“We’ve got a store left,” he said, taking the liberty to make a request through the battlemap. “It’ll be here shortly. Can you still fight?”

“Yeah. What have we got left?” she asked as she studied the battlemap with half her attention.

“More than they have. We wiped out their entire army save for some infantry. Do you want them run down or let them retreat?”

“Pick off the easy ones. No air cover left?”

“All down long ago.”

“Let the others go and consolidate our perimeter. We need to salvage supplies and get what production we can back. I see nothing’s changed in orbit.”

“You’ve been dark this entire time?”

“I had to.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“My body…is trash. I didn’t have time to acclimate the new tissue. Feels like I’m about to snap.”

“You need out?”

“Don’t have that luxury,” she said as a small blur appeared from the direction of the shield generator that towered over them, but was actually more than 2 miles away. The blur had a battlemap signal, and Jyra recognized it as a Rammus rolling its way like a wheel at high speed across the debris field. When he got near them he slowed, then unfurled and ran on his tiny legs until he fully decelerated, then he popped open the cargo canisters he carried on either hip.

Jyra reached inside and pulled out ammo clips for her rifle along with a couple of food cubes and a tiny pouch of water.

“Watch my back a moment,” she asked the Bsidd as she peeled back half her helmet on mental command enough to expose her face. She was beat red and slick with sweat, but the Bsidd didn’t have long to look as she downed the biofuel and sealed back up. “I need a new pistol,” she told the Rammus, tossing her own damaged one on the ground.

“Ok,” he said, sealing up the pouches then turning around and running a few steps to get momentum before beginning his body spin that would accelerate him far faster over distance.

“That’s not blast damage,” the Bsidd said, looking at the cracked pistol.

“No. I had to use it as a club earlier,” she said, showing him her knuckles and the cracked armor on them. “I ran out of long punches.”

“You were well chosen for your rank, Human. What do you need of me?”

“Priority goes to our wounded. If any are salvageable, get them. Then we need to go after the prisoners before the Kat’vo put them onto their ships or move them beyond the shield dome.”

“An attack?”

“I don’t feel like it, but we have to hurry and recover as many as we can.”

“I agree. I will organize the search for survivors. Rest here while you assemble a strike team,” the Bsidd said, scurrying off before Jyra could object.

She took a long sigh, knowing better than to let herself actually rest or her body would start to shut down the emergency overrides that were keeping her going. She had to stay on the move, so she began to walk the way the Rammus had gone while she made some contacts via comm and got some information about where the prisoners were and how many guards were on them…

4

May 18, 4907

Knillo System (Ziviri Region)

Baskerno

Jyra sat in the command center next to the shield generator when she got word of reinforcements coming into the system…and they were Star Force, not V’kit’no’sat. It wasn’t much, only 14 Bsidd Warship-class jumpships and 2 troop transports, but it was a welcome sight on the sensors as the ring of Ziviri around the base continued to grow by the day.

They were attacking regularly, though they didn’t have much in the way of weapons. They were simply using their bulk to try and rush past what little defensive lines Jyra had left. So far the base was barely holding and keeping the shield generator intact while the V’kit’no’sat sat in orbit watching and waiting for when it fell. Their ground troops were nowhere near here, having taking up residence some 1200 miles away in another fallen Star Force base. Jyra had everyone left gathered here, including the prisoners they’d rescued shortly after the V’kit’no’sat attack on the shield generator had failed.

There were others still out there and out of reach, but now that the Bsidd had arrived she hoped that would be enough to reclaim the others before they were killed or moved to orbit.

Naval command was not hers, for she wasn’t an Archon, and the Bsidd and Kvash linked up on their own and began to approach the planet before contacting the ground base and filling her in on their plans.

“We do not have enough firepower to defeat the Kat’vo fleet,” the Kvash commander said, “but they can no longer keep us from getting to ground. We can evac you or reinforce your position. What do you prefer?”

“We can’t hold the planet with the Ziviri turning against us. We have 3,000 baby Ziviri and a couple hundred adults that are still loyal. We can’t leave them behind, but our first priority is the prisoners. I need the Bsidd troops to take them back as soon as possible.”

“If I am reading the battlemap correctly,” the Bsidd commander commented, “most of the prisoner sites are beyond the shield perimeter. Our troops would be vulnerable to orbital bombardment if we land there.”

“Which makes it tricky, but not undoable. You have to come down directly on top of them so the warships can’t pick you out from their own troops.”

“That is extremely risky,” the Bsidd warned.

“It’s that or leave our people behind. Give me a few hours and I’ll lead the assault myself.”

“You look like you’ve got your hands full with the traitors…no, we will handle this. I’m also sending down two stars of mechs to reinforce you. Do you need infantry?”

“Infantry don’t do much good against the Ziviri. We need the mechs.”

“Done.”

“We can reconfigure our mech bays for Ziviri life support,” the Kvash stated. “It will take time, but we can accommodate some of them if you can send the appropriate foodstuffs.”

“Our hangar bays can handle the remainder, though it will be a tight pack,” the Bsidd echoed. “At least we don’t have to fit your mechs.”

“A small silver lining,” Jyra agreed. “But I’d ditch them anyway in exchange for our people. I don’t know if any prisoners have been transferred to the warships. It wouldn’t make any strategic sense, but I can’t rule it out. If they have been we can’t rescue them, and we need to strike before those on the surface can be moved to orbit.”

“How many Kat’vo are still in play?” the Bsidd asked.

“Unknown. We killed most of those in combat, but how many more they have in reserve is guesswork. Expect at least moderate aerial resistance.”

“I’ve got enough squadrons to put them down. It’s the warships that I’m concerned about.”

“We have to get dirty,” the Kvash said, referencing something that Jyra wasn’t clear about.

“I know,” the Bsidd agreed. “But there’s no other way with your limited drones.”

“Explain,” the Arc Commando insisted.

“We have to use our warships for combat,” the Bsidd said gravely.

Jyra swallowed hard, knowing that the jumpships typically did not fight and habitually stayed away from weapons range while remotely controlling the drones. “Will that work?”

“Our heaviest weapons are on the jumpships,” the Bsidd sternly pointed out. “And even if we just soak up hits it will prolong our drones’ viability. If we don’t, too many warships will be able to cover the surface. If they choose to anyway, we could actually win this battle.”

“You’re our only ride out,” Jyra noted. “Or is there more help on the way?”

“We can get some cargo ships here, but warships are thin. With your comm relay down we’ll have to send a courier. If we’re going to recover the prisoners, we cannot wait.”

“If you send your troops here after the assaults we can hold against the Ziviri until we can get a cargo fleet here. I’m not worried about that. But if the V’kit’no’sat show up with reinforcements we can’t hold at all.”

“I can send one of my ships to summon an evacuation fleet,” the Kvash offered, “after the fighting is over.”

“I think that’s our best bet,” Jyra said, waiting for the Bsidd to respond.

“If we can fit everyone onboard the ships here, we leave immediately. If we can’t, we gamble and wait for a cargo fleet. It will depend on the damage we take.”

“I can live with that.”

“Agreed,” the Kvash echoed.

“Stay where you are, Human. We will handle this. Kvash, let us go now before they have time to think.”

“You have fleet command,” the Kvash relinquished verbally, though it was within the battlemap that the transfer actually took place.

“Kick some ass,” Jyra said before the link cut out and the fleets began to merge together enroute to the Kat’vo blockade in orbit around, but not over her current position on the planet, for she still had a few planetary guns operational. “Help’s on the way guys,” she said, whispering to the captured troops that could not hear her. “Hang on a little longer.”

Sar’fen woke when he heard/felt the first series of rumbles through the ground into the holding cell where he and some of the other Clan Saiyan prisoners were held. It wasn’t something Star Force had built, but rather a V’kit’no’sat designed structure that had been erected from a pre-fab kit. The Scionate knew the walls were not very thick, nor was the roof and floor, but there was a shield sitting just inside their perimeter that made it impossible to touch them.

Even beneath him there was a small gap between the floor material and the shield that he laid on, not allowing them to damage the structure and potentially escape…and when they had managed to beat their way through the limited power shield the entire bay holding some 17 prisoners, but made to hold several hundred, would be bathed with stun blasts, knocking everyone out.

It made for an effective prison in the short term, but the Commandos were already figuring out ways to beat it, for there wasn’t a single guard inside. How many there were outside was unknown, and no Archon had been permitted to live, otherwise they might have been able to see through the walls.

Everyone had already been mind raided, for outside their armor they had no defense against such invasion. Fortunately there had been no beatings or dismemberments, though a couple of Calavari had broken arms that were not given treatment after they’d resisted some of their handlers that brought them here. Sar’fen figured it was both punishment and a warning, letting them know that they needed to sit still and be good prisoners or they’d return as much trouble as was given to them.

But right now his mind wasn’t on the past, but the present. He didn’t know where he was, for he’d arrived here unconscious, but something was going on outside, and close too. He and the other prisoners listened for several minutes before a mind reached into his, warning him to get away from a particular wall. It wasn’t the one that held the door, and he tried to warn whoever it was about the stun weapons, but apparently they weren’t listening to his thoughts, for a moment later that wall blew out as soon as a couple of Humans nearby moved away.

As soon as it did the stun guns opened up, and as agreed beforehand the prisoners clustered together and tried to shield each other with their bodies, hoping that someone in the middle would stay conscious. Sar’fen wasn’t that person, but as he felt stun energy soaking into him he didn’t completely black out. Instead he was very loopy as he heard other weapons firing nearby, and they weren’t stun guns.

Soon he was being physically peeled off the pile by Bsidd appendages and dragged across several meters where he was dumped on the now shieldless ground. He stayed there for a while, trying to get his vision to clear, until a Bsidd came over him and injected him with a destunning serum. His head cleared within a few seconds and he saw more than a dozen Bsidd in their purple armor along with one that was identical except that it was clad in black and red armor…indicating that Bsidd was a Maverick.

“Dropships are outside. V’kit’no’sat fleet is overhead,” one of the Bsidd Commandos yelled. “Move now or we get blasted into oblivion!”

The Scionate didn’t argue the point, jumping up on wobbly legs and running for the exit as the Bsidd went with him and the other Clan Saiyan prisoners. When he passed through the gap in the wall he saw several additional prison chambers spaced around a yard that had V’kit’no’sat structures with smoking defense turrets behind them. He also saw several Spider-class mechs that had 8 legs on moveable joints that gave them a lot of maneuvering options. They had less than their Bsidd pilots did, though some of the mechs were standard Neos that resembled a Human frame without a head.

Sar’fen knew Bsidd used both, but most mechwarriors in their race preferred the additional legs, and he was glad to see anything with heavy armor and weapons that was Star Force made…but he wasn’t going to stare, for he had a dropship ahead of him that he needed to get to, and without armor of his own he was a sitting duck for even a small arms shot to kill him.

He decided to sprint ahead of the others, using his four legs and long stride to outpace them and get to the dropship first, though there were already some Bsidd inside without armor, and he guessed they were former prisoners as well. He scooted in amongst them, making room for the others as the dropship was quickly filled and sealed, then it lifted off taking them somewhere, but Sar’fen didn’t care where as long as it was away from here and eventually back into the fight.

Danngi sat on the edge of a low roof along with fourteen other Irondel, watching the dropships arrive with the rescued prisoners as 10 Bsidd mechs patrolled the perimeter and shot any Ziviri that got too close…and not with stun weapons. They looked to be pissed, and Danngi understood why, for the Ziviri were out for blood and would advance at any time they thought they had enough numbers to push their way in and get at the remaining Star Force troops.

There were piles of Ziviri bodies, some dead, some still alive, around the perimeter, but the undamaged ones didn’t seem to care about their fallen. They were waiting…no, lurking around the base waiting for a weakness as more and more arrived from across the planet. There were tens of thousands of them out there now looking like rock statues as they waited motionlessly aside from when they attacked with bare hands that could break through weak walls on their own.

Unfortunately Danngi and the other Irondel could not help. Their mechs had been destroyed, and without them they were useless. They’d be evacuated back up to their Kvash motherships, but there they’d just sit and wait until they got to a Star Force depot and received new mechs. Until then they were just in the way, so they’d decided to sit up here and watch while staying away from the large feet that could squash them with a single misplaced step.

The Kvash moved so slowly they were easy to move around, but onboard their ships they didn’t intermingle because their natural atmosphere was so hot the Irondel couldn’t survive in it. Instead the Irondel had their own section onboard the Kvash ships, but they were so small they didn’t take up much room. Thus they’d been the perfect match to give the Kvash mechwarriors and aerial pilots that could fit inside their Star Destroyer-class warships that were meant to be a one-stop shop for warfare.

The Kvash had other models that had their own mechwarriors and pilots, but the Irondel worked so well with them that they’d been paired up for longer than Danngi had been alive. The Irondel race hadn’t joined Star Force. They still had their own planets and military, but it was small and ineffective compared to what Star Force had. Danngi had been born into Axius along with a lot of other Irondel, all descended from others who had joined the empire as individuals. Because of that the Irondel did not have their own faction, and were used to supplement the Kvash in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

The Ollafan served the same purpose with the Kvash in an aquatics sense, though none were onboard the ships in orbit. The Kvash had Star Squasher-class vessels for aquatics assaults, so Danngi had never met them, but there were even fewer Ollofan in Star Force than Irondel, because their race was destroyed by the lizards with only a few survivors making their way into Star Force.

Both the Ollofan and the Irondel were tasked with big rolls in support of a full-fledged faction within Star Force, but right now Danngi just felt helpless, and so did the others. They’d all survived because of the survival pods within their mechs and their small size, but without their mechs they couldn’t do crap.

Another Irondel walked up beside him and sat down, with Danngi recognizing him as Seepla, one of the Kvash’s aerial pilots that had lost his ride as well.

“You know, we make a better target all sitting together.”

“At least we’ll take the shot meant for someone else,” Danngi said with a grim sarcasm.

“The Humans and Protovic can’t do much against the Ziviri either without mechs.”

“They can fire rifles.”

“So can we.”

All the mechwarriors down the line and turned to look at the idiot.

“Okay, okay,” Seepla said, raising his tiny hands in surrender. “A thousand of us couldn’t bring down one of them with ours. I’m just saying we’re not the only ones dispossessed.”

Danngi was about to say something, then a warning signaled inside all their helmets, for they were wearing their survival armor with battlemap links…and it said they were evacuating and needed to get to the spaceport.

“Let’s go,” he said, looking on the battlemap to see who else was nearby as the pack of Irondel scurried off the ledge and headed across the roof. Two levels down he saw there was a Scionate, so he contacted him on the comm and asked for a ride.

He received a waypoint in response, then they met the large quadruped on the floor below them. It stopped and held still as the little chipmunk-like Irondel jumped up on its armor and climbed up to its more or less flat back. They all got up there together and latched on in three rows looking like they were on a rollercoaster, then the Scionate took off at an easy run through the base and got them to the spaceport far faster and safer than had they gone on foot themselves.

The Scionate ran them all the way up inside the nearest dropship and made sure none of the Bsidd in it stepped on them. He slid up beside a stack of crates and let them hop off, then he didn’t stick around, instead running back out of the ship and off to what looked like the battle lines around the base that were surging with activity now that it was abundantly clear that Star Force was pulling out and the Ziviri wouldn’t have another chance to kill any of them.

“Bunch of ingrates. We ought to bombard the base when we leave,” another Irondel mechwarrior commented as they all watched what was going on around them via battlemap as their dropship lifted off.

“They won’t leave the shield generator up,” another said. “The V’kit’no’sat or the Ziviri could use it.”

“We’re not safe yet,” Danngi countered, seeing the alarmingly high number of Vik ships still in orbit and very few Star Force drones left alongside the Bsidd warships that they were not heading to. The larger vessels were shooting back and forth at range with the Kat’vo ships, but neither seemed to want to close to short weapons range, and many on both sides had marks of hull damage to testify to the slugging match that had previously taken place.

In fact, one of the Bsidd warships was not taking part in the fight, rather limping off behind towards the Kvash ships that were taking onboard the first waves of dropships. Danngi didn’t know where they’d fit them all, for they couldn’t stand the Kvash air, but that wasn’t his problem. The Irondel levels were built for their tiny size and the other races couldn’t fit in them, so he wasn’t going to be cramped once he got back…though he saw he wasn’t heading for the same ship he’d been assigned to.

“They got one,” another Irondel said, referencing the nearly dead Bsidd jumpship. “It’ll never leave the system.”

“At least they’re not trying to stop us from leaving,” the pilot pointed out. “Maybe they want the planet more than our deaths.”

“That would be a change,” Danngi commented as they continued to fly, then just before they got to the Kvash hangar bay he saw the shield generator go down. He backtracked the battlemap records and saw that one of the Kvash ships had dropped down into the upper atmosphere and fired on it, with the shield going down just before that happened.

So it had been intentional, not an enemy attack, and as he checked he saw no more battlemap signatures on the surface. They were all in dropships headed up to orbit.

“We shot it?” another Irondel said aghast. “What a waste. We protected that damn thing for so long…”

“Yeah, I know. But if we come back I’d rather not have to shoot through it,” Danngi said as he saw the Kvash warship shooting other targets on the surface, but not the hordes of Ziviri. He almost wished they would, but that wasn’t Star Force’s style. They may have betrayed them, but they were no threat now and as much as he wanted to shoot the arrogant bastards, he was just as glad to be heading away from the planet to some other place where he could get a new mech.

5

June 22, 4907

Sanisten System (Ziviri Region Capitol)

Balboa

Jyra’s evacuation fleet had traveled to the nearest Star Force-held Ziviri planet, with their Bsidd ships being peeled off and reassigned while the Kvash continued as escorts for the survivors that were transferred to cargo ships and sent to the Sanisten System, which was the command and control center for the Ziviri Region. It was the most well fortified, though not the original Ziviri capitol. Rather it was where Star Force chose to place its regional capitol and where it had located most of the loyal Ziviri so they could grow and develop amongst likeminded individuals rather than have the constant drain of dissenters slowing them down.

Jyra and the Clan Saiyan survivors had expected to be put back into the field, with their recall to the capitol being a curious call until the Arc Commando was summoned to the planetary command center and personally debriefed by Duke Yani. From him she’d learned that the comm grid relay link back to the rest of the Star Force empire had been broken in the Sopva System, which laid outside the Ziviri Region but not far from the border spinward. The Kat’vo had destroyed the relay and the status of the system was unknown, but there was no longer any information flow coming to and from the region.

They were cut off, blind to what was happening elsewhere in the war, though this wasn’t unexpected. Duke Yani and Archon Victoria-243 had expected that to happen eventually, though the amount the Ziviri Region was being targeted was a bit of a surprise. It wasn’t strategically important for the assault of the major Star Force systems and they’d figured there was a chance the V’kit’no’sat would ignore them entirely, but no such luck. They were hitting the smaller systems, the weaker ones, the far flung ones, trying to draw out Star Force’s fleets and Uriti in a chasing game.

But there were no Uriti in the Ziviri Region. Nor was there much infrastructure. The Ziviri were a mostly unwilling annex and one still in the early stages of conversion, but the Kat’vo were here hitting them hard and now Star Force had to deal with not one, but multiple Ziviri uprisings.

The Knillo System wasn’t the first, but it was one happening more or less at the same time as four other invasions of Ziviri systems. It also appeared to not be accidental, for Zen’zat messengers had been discovered in the Hvwen System and their capture and interrogation had confirmed that the Kat’vo were actively recruiting their help with the promise of inclusion in the V’kit’no’sat Empire afterward.

That last part Jyra hadn’t even contemplated. She knew the V’kit’no’sat had a number of servant races beyond the Zen’zat, but them taking on the Ziviri just struck her as odd. She wasn’t sure if it was desperation or choice of race, though their size certainly fit with V’kit’no’sat standards, but typically slave races added something unique to the empire. It wasn’t until the Duke explained the full potential of the Ziviri genetic memories did she understand. If they could program one Ziviri exactly as they liked, whether through medical alteration or training, that one could reproduce an army of the same mindset, insuring their loyalty and predictability.

That was the working theory at least, and a good number of the Ziviri were buying their offer. Precautions were being made in all other Ziviri systems, but this tactic had caught several off guard already and the V’kit’no’sat were now in sole possession of three systems with dozens more under siege.

The Duke said he was talking to her because they needed everyone with telepathy they had to go out to the worlds not yet taken and help to figure out which populations would be susceptible to the V’kit’no’sat offer when made, for they were sure to repeat the tactic elsewhere. Jyra was being reassigned to surveillance duty, and those worlds deemed vulnerable would start to be evacuated even before they were attacked.

Star Force was at a disadvantage as it was, but there was no way they could hold what they had with the Ziviri turning on them too, so the plan was to pick a handful of worlds and pull all the loyal Ziviri to them, along with all the other Star Force personnel on the other worlds. Once they did that they might have a chance of holding out, for they weren’t expecting any reinforcements from the rest of the empire.

To put it bluntly, they were in a bind. Balboa was stable with decently strong shield generators across the entire planet and a loyal population, but it was a mostly empty world. They did have Bsidd and some Kiritak that could reproduce rapidly if needed, but building planetary infrastructure took time and they’d been relying on the Ziviri to operate, if not produce, the bulk of the region’s logistical production.

“It looks like we’re screwed,” Jyra said to Phobotsi, a fellow Protovic Commando in Clan Saiyan that was sitting on a bench in the equipment room as Jyra was packing a duffle with various types of equipment…including a telepathic booster, for Ziviri were hard to read even when making physical contact.

“Then we at least make them pay for it.”

“I can’t stand these ingrates,” she said, half throwing a canister into her open bag. “We play nice, keep most of them alive, then help them rebuild and they turn on us the first chance they get.”

“What did you expect? They were hostile before…”

Jyra sighed. “I expected some of them to see the light. I guess that was just wishful thinking on my part.”

“Some have.”

“Less than 1% on Baskerno, and those that stayed loyal were killed by the others. They don’t even care to spare their own race.”

“Genetic memories can be a bitch,” the Protovic told her, not knowing the irony of that statement, for most of the Protovic were unaware of the time bomb that had been in their own genetic code before Star Force had quietly washed it away.

“Yeah, but there comes a point where you have to make a choice. I expected more of them to choose us after we showed them what we really were and they had enough data to counteract any propaganda.”

“Apparently they did make their choice. I just wish I could help you.”

“Not your fault they’re dense to everything but a deep Ikrid scan.”

“I’m surprised the V’kit’no’sat would tolerate that.”

“They gave the Zen’zat blocks, so why would that be so bad?” Jyra countered as he continued to pack what looked like far more equipment than she should need.

“Zen’zat are elite slaves used as intermediaries between the member races. The other slaves are not. How do they expect to control them?”

“The old fashioned way, I suppose. Just kill any that don’t do as they’re told.”

“You think this is also a play for the Rim after they get done with us?”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“It just doesn’t make sense to me,” the Protovic argued. “It looks like they need help to beat us, and that should hurt their ego.”

“Having to hit and run hurts their ego, but that’s preferable to getting obliterated by the Uriti,” Jyra said as she finished and sealed up her duffle before swinging it over her armored shoulder. “Make sure this planet is here when I get back.”

“Make sure you get back,” he said, accepting her handshake.

“That’s the plan. Seriously though, if we lose this system I think we’re sunk.”

“They’ll have to fight against these Ziviri to do it.”

“That doesn’t leave me inspired.”

“Nice to know you’re not going to get backstabbed though.”

“Point,” she said, heading for the door with the Protovic in tow. “Though don’t put it completely out of mind. Especially for the converts. They could always shift.”

“Not a chance. They’ve seen the holos of Ziviri killing Ziviri, and they’re pissed. Any of those traitors set foot here and the loyals will finish them off for us.”

“They won’t be the ones coming,” Jyra said as she moved into the hallway and threw the Protovic a short, two fingered salute, then headed to the spaceport and from there left the planet.

10,478 lightyears away…

Kara-317 stood on her hands upside down in a wobbly handstand as her feet wavered over top of her, near to tipping. Her muscles tightened and realigned for more than the thousandth time as she fought the gravity inside the training chamber. It was set at 22g, more than any Human could survive, but Archons weren’t quite Human anymore and she also had additional upgrades from her Vorch’nas, but she wasn’t using its IDF field to cheat. She was fighting the gravity with nothing but muscle and grit, with her hands being pressed into the semi-soft floor nearly half an inch from the compression.

The clock in front of her, also inverted, showed her only at 3 minutes and 29 seconds, but that was in fact a new record for both her and Star Force at the 22g mark. In fact, no other Archon had ever logged a mark above 16g. At least, nothing more than a few seconds, and it took at least 20 seconds to make the scoreboard. Anything less was deemed a failure.

Kara didn’t have much left in her. Her muscles weren’t overly tired, but the stress was more than they could handle. She made it another 5 seconds before her feet tipped backwards and she couldn’t fully correct. Her body went through several contortions trying to readjust but she knew she’d lost it long before her back came slamming down on the floor. The normal short fall was amplified by the heavy gravity and hit her like a punch to the gut by Paul, and had it not been for her Mebvat psionic, her bones would have broken with the hit, she had no doubt.

But this wasn’t the first time she’d hit the ground. Far from it. Kara rolled over onto her side and forced herself up into a crouch on one knee to rest her arms, though they were being dragged down to the floor as if pulled by magnets.

She barely felt it, having gotten used to the heavy gravity, but her arms simply were not as strong as her legs and unable to support her weight, which well surpassed a ton with the gravity set so high.

Kara would have mouthed off if she could, but the gravity worked on her jaw muscles as well, making it hard to talk. In fact, it worked every muscle in her body, which was why she liked these training sessions. They were short but very intense, and having been in the chamber for less than 5 minutes and barely moving, she was already sweating considerably.

The Archon forced herself to stand, feeling wobbly again but able to handle it with the superior strength of her legs. She walked a few laps around the basketball court-sized circular chamber, then she’d had enough, having to call ‘uncle’ and mentally reset the gravity in the chamber to a measly 5g.

Kara’s body ached with relief as the weight seemed to disappear, despite the fact that the chamber still had gravity 5 times normal, which was Earth standard. It always had been since Star Force’s inception, but right now this felt ‘normal’ for Kara. She gave herself another 30 seconds to recover, then began running laps and punching at various floating orbs that didn’t seem to feel the gravity at all.

That wasn’t true, for they were affected just the same, but they had gravity drives that kept them afloat no matter what the pull of gravity was and they always felt light when she hit them, for her arms were having to fight the gravity more than the mass of the targets…and even more so now, for her arms were protesting mightily after the 22g handstand she’d made them endure.

But Kara fought through it and got in a ‘light’ 5g workout before turning the gravity back to normal and shutting down the chamber, for no one else used it but her. Other Star Force races handled gravity differently, but none could naturally deal with 22g. The Bsidd were the best, but even they would crumple here. Others like the Kvash might not physically be squashed, but they couldn’t move much at all, becoming little statues while the Dvapp would just become a pool of sandy playdoh unable to hold much of a shape.

In fact, if they were spread out too far they’d die, so they had to be extra careful in gravity chambers, though the Star Force Dvapp used them often at lower settings. Kara didn’t know if the independent Dvapp race did or not, but then again they weren’t all that keen on training and relied mostly on their natural abilities rather than acquired ones.

Kara’s ability to survive here was an acquired one, and she intended to get all the way up to 25g before she started to fan out her training and get better at maintaining the higher gravities rather than pushing her short term tolerance further. But today she was done…here at least. The rest of the day would be normal gravity training, but after a nap. Heavy gravity always drained her in an odd way, and if she didn’t let her body process the microdamage immediately her other workouts would suffer for it.

She sensed the Paladin mind outside the door before she opened it, then saw Viceroy Brisco waiting for her.

“Trouble?” she asked rather than invading his mind to find the answer, but his mood told her something was wrong.

“It’s finally happened. Two V’kit’no’sat races have invaded our coreward border. We are under assault.”

Kara’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Up until now in the war the Paladin had continued to expand and had been sending back shipments of standard drones to assist in the replenishment of the existing fleets, but with all the low priority targets the V’kit’no’sat had been hitting, including some in the Frontier Region as the enemy hit them at their weakest point, she’d expected them to show up on the Paladin’s turf eventually.

“Which races?”

“The Zep’sha and the Tim’ka, and they’re working with combined fleets.”

Kara growled, knowing this wasn’t good, and the Viceroy huffed his agreement. The Zep’sha were cousins of the Oso’lon, formerly known as ‘Diplodocus’ in old Earth history. Their necks and tails were a bit closer to snakes while the Pas’cha had higher arching necks than even the Oso’lon. All three were damn near identical, but the Zep’sha and the Pas’cha were essentially the Oso’lon’s personally annexed races and had both the stature and firepower that position allowed. They were not top tier races, but both were strong second tier and now one of them had been sent to fight the Paladin.

The other race, the Tim’ka, was a mid level aquatic formerly known as the ‘Nothosaurus’. They could live on land, so technically they were amphibian, but they spent most of their time in the water and did not participate in land combat. They used Zen’zat for that, but if they were pairing with the Zep’sha they wouldn’t have to worry about it…and the Zep’sha wouldn’t have to worry about assaulting water worlds. Together they made for a very formidable duo, and Kara wondered why the Paladin had attracted such a heavy hand.

“Looks like we’re not getting off easy.”

“It would seem not,” the Paladin agreed. “We will carry our weight in this conflict after all.”

“Yes we will. Let’s get going. Thrawn is going to need all the help he can get.”

“Your flagship has been put on notice. I was merely waiting for you to finish your workout.”

Kara patting him on his scaly shoulder, for most of the Paladin uniforms did not have sleeves, and the pair headed for a waiting dropship that took them up to the monstrous jumpship that Kara would be organizing this war from, now that the V’kit’no’sat had finally arrived. Thrawn was already deployed closer to the coreward border and would be there before she was, and both would be bringing huge fleets with them.

If the V’kit’no’sat thought they’d be able to sweep up a massive amount of territory and pressure the main portion of Star Force from the spinward side, they were going to be deeply disappointed.

6

July 2, 4907

Gahjo System (Yev Region)

Siotol

Arch Duke Karthen had led the Bsidd since trailblazer Larissa-048 had annexed their race into Star Force. He’d had sporadic contact with her over the years, for she had never stopped keeping an eye on the Bsidd, but unless there was something new involved she left the running of the faction up to the Arch Duke. When they’d decided to create new Bsidd variants she’d been heavily involved, but as for the growth of Star Force’s largest faction, that was mostly Karthen’s doing.

Every region in Star Force territory other than the Paladin Zone had a strong Bsidd presence, either in the form of shared systems or exclusive ones, but the Yev Region was dominated by the insect-like race and Karthen had the job of maintaining the border. It didn’t connect to the Devastation Zone, rather it was bracketed by systems that were neither Star Force nor those purged by the V’kit’no’sat, but being inhabited by other races didn’t prevent the V’kit’no’sat from crossing through them to hit the Yev Region.

They hadn’t previously, content to go for the closest systems and hammer away until they fell, then move on to the next closest ones. Now they were employing a totally different tactic…hitting where Star Force was weak across the entire border, and even backdooring around the perimeter to come in through the rimward section of the Frontier Zone. Fortunately there weren’t large amounts of enemy troops doing that, but there were enough that they were taking systems and forcing some of the roaming fleets to be dispersed to the rear rather than reinforcing the main lines.

So far the V’kit’no’sat were not skipping over too many systems and plunging into the interior. That would have been stupid, for the ganking potential of nearby Star Force systems would be too great. There would be too many avenues for reinforcements to arrive and cut them off, so the V’kit’no’sat were keeping open space behind them, more or less, so their reinforcements could flow somewhat unhindered. The trailblazers were not letting them move freely, constantly ambushing their relief fleets as they arrived and hitting them while they moved laterally back and forth across the border, but if the V’kit’no’sat dove past the front and hit the interior systems their movement potential would be blunted by the system defense fleets that could easily pop over a system or two to assist.

Karthen didn’t know where most of the trailblazers were, for they were roaming around wherever their instincts told them to go, but he did know that the Yev Region was the only one under assault where the V’kit’no’sat did not have a firm fixed base of operations. So far the Bsidd, along with numerous Clans plus Axius and Beacon troops, had prevented any permanent holds. When the Uriti came knocking they punted all temporarily taken systems back into the Star Force category, but the same was not so elsewhere.

The V’kit’no’sat had taken many systems and secured them with a combination of ground troops and prisoners. The prisoners prevented direct Uriti attacks and the ground troops kept Star Force from reclaiming them, as they were doing in many systems. But those systems that were now firmly held by the V’kit’no’sat were being used as staging bases and the trailblazers couldn’t keep their Uriti sitting there in blockade mode or many other systems would fall in their absence.

Karthen was intent on not letting the V’kit’no’sat get a foothold in the Yev Region, and he had two Uriti of his own assigned to non-trailblazers and tasked with guarding a sub-region each. They would not travel beyond it, rather be the guard dogs patrolling the most important systems that were pouring out replacement drones and other necessary equipment at a rapid pace. The other Uriti were out and about roaming  the front lines, and so far the two Uriti Karthen had under his command had not seen combat because the V’kit’no’sat had not pushed far enough into the region to draw them out.

Ross-059 and Clark-066 were out on the border now fighting a combination of Sarofan, Vid’sen, Qua’cho, and Sli’nar with Bsidd fleets escorting the Uriti and numerous others defending key systems or roaming the front systems so the V’kit’no’sat couldn’t predict where they were or how many ships they had to bring to the fight. That unpredictability was helping the war effort in all regions, but there were so many V’kit’no’sat fleets that Star Force couldn’t keep up and systems were permanently falling…and when that happened the V’kit’no’sat got stronger and were able to throw up supply bases that Star Force couldn’t touch without killing their own people, which wasn’t an option.

Karthen had hoped to keep the V’kit’no’sat out of the Yev Region as he played ‘whack a mole’ without giving them any permanent roots, but a fifth race had recently showed up and started kicking the crap out of his fleets. Apparently the V’kit’no’sat realized they’d not assigned enough heavy hitters to the Yev Region, so now a portion of the Hjar’at fleet was in Karthen’s backyard and he was seeing constant reports of how ruthlessly efficient they were. Even their warships were better than the rest, if only in how they organized their fleet formations, but on the ground they were incredibly hard to stop.

Mech combat was dicey, because the Hjar’at would simply charge the mechs, activate their Saroto’kanse’vam, then do a battle roll the equivalent of a somersault right into the target mech and shred it on contact. They’d also tear up the dirt or rock beneath them, but it didn’t matter. They could pretty much one hit kill the smaller mechs, and their Zen’zat support troops were far better than those the other races assaulting the Yev Region were using.

They still couldn’t do anything to counter the Uriti, so at least Star Force had that advantage, but the Bsidd didn’t have anything to really oppose the Hjar’at on the ground other than numbers…and it seemed the Hjar’at were bringing so many of their own into play that the Arch Duke was certain it was intentional so he couldn’t mass resistance against them.

With the trailblazers continuing to make hits on the border and beyond it, Karthen could tell that even with the Hjar’at now involved this was going to be a very gradual war of attrition, meaning he had time to figure out some counter to the Hjar’at…but at the moment he couldn’t see anything, and if it was easy, someone else would have thought of it by now.

But the Bsidd were his responsibility and Larissa was busy fighting, so it was up to him. He had to find a way to make the Bsidd at least less vulnerable against the Hjar’at.

As far as infantry went, the Bsidd couldn’t stand toe to toe with the larger Hjar’at who had enough psionic weaponry that they could fight mechs even without wearing armor. There were 27 different Bsidd variants he had the potential of producing from the Queens’ eggs, but none of them could do anything against the Hjar’at. Even if he had a super large Bsidd crafted, they wouldn’t be any better than a mech.

Karthen had been trying to refine the Bsidd to less variants, with the 3 currently being hatched used for all applications. The Tridas were the infantry, mostly, though there were many other variants that qualified as Commandos. Karthen did not allow actual castes to form in the Bsidd, and anyone who wanted a job and could pass the qualifications were included, even if their body hadn’t been specifically designed for the task. However, 99.999% of the new infantry were made up of Tridas, and the same was true of the Zendas. They were designed small in body to fit into cockpits of mechs and aerial craft without taking up too much space.

They weren’t designed as small as Irondel or Urik’kadel, but they did have different joints that allowed them to comfortably crunch down into an even smaller mass than a Human, thus allowing their craft to hold more machinery in lieu of a larger cockpit. When a Tridas became a mechwarrior there were modifications to the mechs made, and they were already designed to be modular to accommodate different pilots, including Humans and other races if needed, but the current Bsidd mechs were created primarily for the use of the Zendas.

The Sordas looked the most like the original Alphas, and were a medium-sized variant with a pair of appendages that broke apart into what looked similar to fingers. They allowed the Sordas to handle tech work that required fine adjustments, making them physically more suited to the work, though mechanical add-ons allowed other variants to handle the micro-adjustments.

Those three variants were the core of the Bsidd reproduction queues now, though Karthen had the option of ordering up any of the other 24 variants if he saw a need. Queens were always necessary, and didn’t count as a variant, but a few of them did enter combat in various rolls. That was by choice, but Karthen always made sure they had enough safely tucked away from combat to supply the necessary eggs en mass.

It was those Queens that had allowed the Bsidd to reproduce so fast and to become the dominant race in the empire, population wise at least. Humans were still the controlling faction because they had the most Monarchs and the Archons, but there were enough other races working their way up in Karthen’s wake and within the Maverick ranks to almost make that a moot point. Karthen didn’t lead because he was a Human, but because he was more experienced. Humans started Star Force, so it was a small group of Humans who had the most experience and that would never change…unless he and the others were killed.

That wouldn’t be happening to Karthen, for as a Monarch he had to stay away from the fighting and handle the logistics work that would otherwise tie up the Archons. They needed to be free to take risks and fight while he handled the support work. That was the role of a Monarch, but Karthen did not want to be too far away from the front, because the more distance involved meant more lag time in reports. He needed to stay in the loop, but couldn’t risk himself getting killed or captured. He knew far too much to allow himself to be captured, so he especially had to stay away from the enemy.

He had time to think, long and hard, while others responded to attacks. He knew his Bsidd could fight the Zen’zat more or less equally in terms of infantry, and while there could be a new variant made to handle them better, it was the Hjar’at that were the main threat.

So that meant either strategy or technology upgrades. The Archons handled the strategy, so Karthen needed to supply them with something new to use. Something that…

The Arch Duke stopped his whirl of holograms over his ‘throne’ chair as a thought occurred to him. Maybe he needed to do something stupid, logistically speaking. His mind was constantly wrapped up on production numbers and efficiency of material use, but maybe it would be necessary to waste some resources on inefficient weapons.

No, not weapons…walls.

A hologram materialized before him, with his mind making adjustments far faster than keyboard input would ever allow. The biggest threat of the Hjar’at was their Saroto’kanse’vam, both in the form of physical contact and the energy discharges they could throw out like targeted lightning. The blades themselves cut like lightsabers, allowing them to destroy mechs and the shields protecting them at rapid speed.

However, their recharge was not so rapid, meaning that the charge the Saroto’kanse’vam held had to be replenished if totally used up. Usually the Hjar’at he’d seen could kill a Neo with less than a full charge, but some had to deactivate their blades for short periods of time before they reignited them.

He thought about outfitting a small number of mechs with higher grade armor, but even if he put Yeg’gor on a few it wouldn’t be wide-scale enough to matter. So the key wasn’t going to be higher grade armor, but more mass.

The mechs couldn’t carry it, for it would slow them down and turn them into little more than turrets. But if he had walls built, mobile walls that could fly and drop in wherever needed and just soak up damage, then his Bsidd troops could line up more shots from range.

Karthen cringed as he began to get a feel for how much material was going to be involved to get the wall segments to fly and eat up Hjar’at energy when they did strike them. They couldn’t just go ‘puff’ like a snowball, they had to stand up to a lot of pounding…

The Arch Duke had another flash of insight, changing the wall to a pyramid-like staircase that would allow the mechs to walk up and over them without having to jump. He added another expensive component the equivalent of Jumat or Lachka in that it was an energy field that physically moved objects. If programmed appropriately, the wall would allow the mechs to cross over, shoot, then withdraw, but if a Hjar’at tried to climb over it then the energy field would knock them back the other way while the mechs kept shooting them.

That, he knew, would be the difference maker. Delay the time it took for the Hjar’at to get to the mechs and allow them to rack up more shots. He had to give his Bsidd a way to avoid most of the quick kills.

But there would be cost. And it would come in the production of other things, such as mechs or naval drones, but if Karthen didn’t find a way to slow down the surface conquest rate of the Hjar’at the rest wouldn’t matter. They’d establish foothold planets shielded by prisoners, and if the Bsidd couldn’t hold them to begin with they’d have little chance of invading and taking them back.

It was going to be a huge waste of resources, but if it altered the course of battle it might be worth it in the long run. There was no way to know for sure, but Karthen had to do something. If he didn’t, the Yev Region was going to have a big chunk bitten out of it within a few decades and that was going to make the trailblazers’ job exponentially harder. They had to deny the V’kit’no’sat footholds as long as possible, and if making some flying brick walls helped to do that, then so be it.

They might be ugly, cumbersome, and inelegant, but so long as they stopped those damn battle rolls he didn’t care. His Bsidd needed an advantage, and if it meant building artificial terrain, then that’s what it was going to take.

Karthen spent another half hour working on the designs then sent them off to his engineers for finishing work. Within 4 hours the final blueprints were done and by the end of the day the first factory began to produce the Bsidd ‘speed bumps.’

7

December 8, 4907

Ichyson System (Yev Region)

Hammat

Ichomo stood in the cockpit of his Spider-class mech, held stationary by an IDF field that kept his body still no matter how the machine moved. Even if it got knocked over his body wouldn’t feel it, but his mind would, for it was linked to the machine as if it was his body, with his real one a hazy afterimage in the back of his mind.

Ichomo was walking his mech across a flat plane along with 4 stars of identical mechs, 20 in all, as they moved to reinforce a battle already taking place between other Bsidd mechs and several columns of Hjar’at. He fired his 4 Bra’hems from hard points on the body of his mech and not the moving legs, sending the green beams out to hit two of the Hjar’at from the flanks. It was a long range shot coming over more than 3 miles, but for the mech’s targeting systems it was an easy hit. With no terrain to hide behind it was virtually impossible to miss, which was why both the mechs and Hjar’at carried energy shields.

His Bra’hem hits were totally absorbed, weakening the shields but not penetrating them, and when the mechs beside him joined in and tried to target 3 specific Hjar’at, the V’kit’no’sat ranks altered suddenly. Different Hjar’at moved into the firing lines to take the shots while the ones with weakened shields rotated to the other side as those front in line began sprinting ahead and firing green Dre’mo’don orbs ahead at the already embattled mechs. Halfway there they flashed their clear Saroto’kanse’vam to life with the back spines glowing blue with a ferocious light.

Ichomo put some shots into them as his mech continued to cover ground at a rapid pace, but the spiders were nowhere near as fast as the biped madcats and ravens that were approaching from behind and gaining ground rapidly. They were from Clan Saber, but they were 2 miles further behind and wouldn’t get to the battle before the Bsidd reinforcements did…all the while the skies were full of aerial craft, with the V’kit’no’sat versions being manned exclusively by Zen’zat. They’d kept the landing craft further away, making the mechs walk/run the last part over ground, and it was allowing the Hjar’at to rip apart the leading elements of the engagement force.

The Bsidd watched as the sprinting Hjar’at stabbed their necks towards the ground right before coming into contact with the mechs, forcing them to do a somersault forward and into the other spiders. Fortunately half of them missed, for the spiders jumped sideways and lost a leg or two, but those that were caught in the body were gutted and the Hjar’at were tangled up in the mess as their energized blades tried to burn through the material. They thrashed, throwing molten armor and interior components around as short lived lava blurps, but eventually they freed themselves of the wrecked mess and got their footing again before looking for other targets.

Ichomo selected one and fired on it before it could get back to its feet, sending four small glowing missiles across the miles of grassland. He set the missiles to shoot high so he wouldn’t hit the mech underneath in case the pilot was still alive, then mentally guided them as they readjusted to hit the Hjar’at on the top side.

The Bsidd coughed a rough laugh when he saw them catch the Hjar’at with its shields down, for the Saroto’kanse’vam could not operate with them up. The rest of the large body was covered, but holes were included for the spines when they were active, then the shields expanded back up to cover them when they were not. The spider’s missiles had caught the Hjar’at in the transition, with the glow gone but the shields not yet extended to cover them.

He saw two of the spines blown completely of the Hjar’at, flying into the air as short lived projectiles before they fell to the ground and caught the grass on fire from the residual heat. There were fires all over the place as the grass couldn’t handle the weapon misses and hot metal, making little smoke plumes that marked the location of the roaming battlefield that now extended more than 20 miles to the northwest. The Bsidd had been fighting a continual retreat trying to spread the Hjar’at out as they lead them back to the artificial terrain to the west, with the smoke marking their progress for all to see.

Ichomo flinched when he saw the Hjar’at he had maimed turn and run in his direction along with a dozen others, accelerating up to a higher speed than the spiders could manage, but with both sides running at each other it wasn’t going to take long for them to get to melee range.

Ichomo got a signal to hold position, which he did along with the other spiders as they dug in, literally, with their legs burrowing into the ground slightly as they set themselves and shifted shields forward while charging up their bloon launchers. It took time, but right now they had some as the Hjar’at fired at them across the gap, but the shots couldn’t get through their reinforced shields.

On the battlemap he got launch icons from the Clan madcats coming up from behind them, and a moment later smoky streaks passed over his mech like a fast moving bank of clouds, then they tipped down and landed all around the Hjar’at, though many were shot down first by the point defense weapons on the enemy armor.

Fortunately his sensors still worked through the smoke and fire, and when his bloon launcher was fully charged he sent the purple orb into one of the Hjar’at indicated by his star leader. He didn’t worry about the rest of the targets, trusting in the organizational power of Star Force, and saw his bloon half hit as the Hjar’at dodged the slower moving energy ball. It melted the armor where it hit, then the rest passed on by and spread out, landing and setting a couple of acres of grass on fire along with an explosion of dirt thrown up by the blast.

The Hjar’at who dodged his bloon ironically got hit face on by another, and Ichomo saw its head emerge from the explosion with most of its helmet armor gone and its grey/green skin black from burning. The armor then began to alter and flow forward, recovering its damaged head as it angrily charged forward along with the others. Three of the Hjar’at went down and did not immediately get back up, but the others eventually made it to the spiders despite being in bad shape.

Five of them dove into the Bsidd mechs, glowing spines hitting first and destroying their shields but only scratching their armor, for the enhanced shields had blunted most of their movement. The mech to Ichomo’s left took two of its legs and pressed them forward, throwing the Hjar’at backwards to where it landed on its feet. As it did so Ichomo ran to the side and fired at it with his Bra’hem just before he punched out with two of his legs.

He knocked it aside a few steps, but the Hjar’at didn’t fall over. Instead it got its footing and spun in place, bringing its tail around and landing the four tooth-like spines on the end into Ichomo’s mech body where they stuck, then suddenly his spider was thrown to the side before the tail dislodged. The mechwarrior felt his machine roll over the ground as one of the legs no longer functioned, but the other 7 did and he got his mech back up and fired when he could as the Hjar’at was ravaging the other spider.

The mech did not survive the engagement, but neither did the Hjar’at. Ichomo was able to get too many free shots off as the enemy seemed obsessed with tearing apart the other Bsidd mech. Eventually the Hjar’at took a heavy shot to its ribs that got through the now paper-thin armor and it went down hard. Ichomo fired over and over again into it, making sure it couldn’t regenerate and rejoin the fight. By the time he finished, the other Hjar’at were also down…along with most of the spiders. Only two others were still operational, and there wasn’t much difference ahead where the other Hjar’at were winning over the Bsidd.

The Clan mechs sprinted past Ichomo to join the others as he saw another wave of Hjar’at approaching a few miles away along with a lot of Zen’zat vehicles. It was the main body of the assault, and while they’d managed to string out the forward elements, this group had maintained cohesion and was going to run over them in a few minutes if he didn’t get out of here.

Ichomo pinged the downed mechs finding that at least two mechwarriors were still alive. He signaled to them to bail out and rendezvous with him, with his mech suddenly growing a belly pouch that the two now mech-less Bsidd climbed into. He searched the other nearby wreckage, finding one more badly wounded Bsidd that had no comm, but with the help of his two passengers they got the third onboard and began running the now 7-legged spider as fast as he could while altering his status on the battlemap to indicate that he was now a rescue vehicle.

The Hjar’at were coming faster than he could move, but he saw that he was going to make it to the artificial terrain before them. The turrets placed alongside the speed bumps were already firing across the distance and giving cover to the other retreating mechs as a few intact Hjar’at were trying to run them down before they could get there, but most had to turn back as the turrets’ firepower was too great for them to sustain.

Ichomo walked his mech up and over the stair-like mound then did the same for two more before he got passed the primary battle line as more mechs were taking position on the ridges, or just behind. He kept his mech moving, knowing he had to evacuate the other mechwarriors he was carrying, but he was able to watch via the battlemap when the Hjar’at finally got to the artificial terrain.

The first wave of sprinters were hit hard with weaponsfire as those behind covered for them, forcing the Bsidd and Clan mechs to take a lot of shield hits in order to fire on the Hjar’at. Most of them didn’t need to, able to hide behind the speed bumps for the most part, but they were up top and visible as a taunt, for the Hjar’at didn’t know what the speed bumps actually were.

The sprinters headed for the sitting duck mechs with their spines ablaze in destructive energy, but when they got to the edge the mechs retreated backwards over the top, still firing, then the Hjar’at hit dampening fields that their Saroto’kanse’vam did nothing to weaken. Those fields restricted their movement and essentially stopped them in place as the mechs poured firepower into them.

A few managed to push through and over the top edge, the rest were killed before they could get to battle roll range. Those that came over the top were hit with the ‘bumpers’ that acted like Jumat and popped them up off the ground or knocked them back the way they’d come. None of them were able to land more than a tail swipe, for their momentum was gone and their battle rolls were simply not very effective without it.

The stragglers were finished off, then the main force began to spread out and try to flank the speed bumps…but that forced them to thin their formation and the mechs were peppering them with hits as the Hjar’at focused mainly on the defense turrets, trying to take their heavier weaponry out first.

After that Ichomo didn’t see what happened, for something damaged in his mech failed and his battlemap went out along with two more legs…leaving him only 5 to crawl forward on, but that was enough to keep his mech upright and moving while the battlefield behind him was igniting a wildfire that was moving only slightly slower across the plains than Ichomo’s mech was.

8

December 26, 4907

Ichyson System (Yev Region)

Hammat

Cora-005 looked down on the planet from orbit as her fleet arrived. The trailblazer didn’t have a Uriti with her, nor did she have an enormous fleet of drones. What she did have was enough to keep the Hjar’at fleet away from the planet as she watched the large-scale warfare taking place on the surface. The enemy was engaged in 83 different locations, pressing the Star Force defenders hard and mopping up territory at an incredible pace. The Bsidd and Clan troops were fighting well, but they were simply outnumbered and, for the most part, outmatched.

The Clan troops were not, but there were too few amongst the Bsidd and for every hold that was made 10 cities fell. Cora’s contribution in this war had come in places just like this, moving in to fight the ground battles while the other trailblazers mostly focused on the naval aspect. With the Uriti the V’kit’no’sat could not win this war navally and they knew it, but they were making their gains on the ground and Clan Scorpion was going to put a stop to it here.

Her entire fleet was made up of her Clan, as were two others out counterattacking invasion points rather than spreading themselves thin in defensive positions. They were the heavy hammers meant to counter the hardest hits the V’kit’no’sat could send their way…and thus far her Clan’s record was 18-1. Only in the Yarreen System had they failed to retake the planet before all planetary shield generators went down. After that happened they had to evacuate, otherwise naval firepower would have destroyed them with ease.

Here though, there were plenty of shield generators still active and for the moment she held naval superiority. That meant the V’kit’no’sat on the surface had to fear her naval guns, and right now those weapons were targeting units caught out in the open and bases that didn’t have strong enough defenses. Additionally, she was coordinating with the planetary shields so they would lower where she wanted and hit the Hjar’at and Zen’zat fighting beneath them.

Unfortunately that wasn’t good enough, and better than two thirds of the Hjar’at were well placed so they couldn’t be targeted. They didn’t have any captured shield generators, only damaged ones sabotaged by Star Force before they were overtaken or hit by the Hjar’at themselves prior to her fleet’s arrival.

What they did have was their own mobile shield generators, and they were damn strong. Some were fixed buildings that were being added to with additional supplies and pre-fabricated units, while others were specially constructed ships that could float over the surface and move the shield with the ground troops. Cora had yet to see such elaborate methods used in this war to date, and she guessed this was new technology…or at least a new use of it…for the V’kit’no’sat.

She studied the battlemap readings as her ships moved into lower orbit and began to deliver dropships and landers to the planet. From everything she was seeing, they Hjar’at wanted this planet and wanted it bad. They were moving with such rapid pace and alarmingly high numbers that Cora began to wonder what was special about this location. It took her a few minutes before it dawned on her, then everything became crystal clear.

The Ichyson System was relatively new, in so much as only Hammat had been heavily populated, but there were 19 other worlds that had hardly been touched. They held a lot of untapped resources that Star Force was going to exploit later, but there was no point in devoting so many resources to a system that was close to the Devastation Zone border. All the material was being put here, on Hammat, beneath the heavy shield generators. If they’d proceeded to the other planets already they would have needed 19 equally strong planetary shield grids on all of them…and that would have been a waste when other systems needed those shield generators.

But if the V’kit’no’sat claimed this system they could defend it against the Uriti so long as they had hostages. If the Uriti wanted to blockade this system and not let the V’kit’no’sat set up on the other planets that was a win, for other assaults would be given a free hand. If the Uriti left and roamed, the V’kit’no’sat could build on the other 19 worlds and protect them against conventional attack with a single system defense fleet and spread the prisoners out as they liked.

This was a long term play, for the V’kit’no’sat needed local resources to fuel this invasion. They couldn’t ship enough cargo out from their current territory to build what they needed. There just wasn’t the amount of safe cargo shipping conduits for even a fraction of that. They had to build with local materials and then ship in the rare commodities that couldn’t be acquired here.

Cora could see this system mushrooming with mines, factories, and shipyards in a few decades, and those assets would fuel rejuvenated V’kit’no’sat fleets to further press into the planetary defenses across Star Force territory. The V’kit’no’sat did not have the resources to take them all down quickly. They had to grind them down gradually or Star Force would win the war of attrition.

Assaulting planets was much more costly than defending them if you had the proper defensive infrastructure set up, which was why Star Force wasn’t even thinking about invading V’kit’no’sat territory. Even with the Uriti it would be damn difficult, which was why the V’kit’no’sat could pull their fleets away from defensive patrols and bring them all here…for their planetary defenses would protect them from just about any threat on their own.

Star Force had never had the time or resources to develop this system to its potential, but Cora could have sworn that was exactly what the Hjar’at were going to do, and they weren’t taking any chances with this attack. They meant to secure the planet fast before a Uriti and its corresponding fleet could arrive and ruin their party.

The Hjar’at were established enough that a Uriti alone wouldn’t fix this, but three quarters of the planet was still in Star Force possession, though being eaten away at quickly. Cora had enough to work with here, but this was going to be the hardest fight of the war yet for Clan Scorpion, and the first against the Hjar’at.

She’d fought them before, during the ‘easy’ war, but never in these numbers. Fortunately her Clan had gotten a breather in the interim, and her Clan worlds were busy producing replacement mechs at a furious pace, so she didn’t have to be careful with these. They were expendable, the pilots were not, but she had a feeling she was going to lose a lot of both before the fate of this planet was determined.

“Admiral Harrington,” she said, abandoning her place on the bridge, “the fleet is yours. Watch our back.”

“If they do not get reinforcements we’ll hold orbit,” the Human Admiral promised.

“And if they do, hold it anyway,” Cora said as she walked away. “This is going to get messy.”

“I have no doubt,” he said as she left the bridge and he assumed command within the battlemap network, giving him pathways to all of the 629 Warship-class jumpships and their corresponding drones. There were only 94 Hjar’at vessels in the system, for many had been destroyed during the initial breach of the planetary shields, but they had another 128 on the surface of the planet. Some of those were full warships, but most were transports and shield carriers.

Harrington felt confident that the Hjar’at navy could not push Clan Scorpion out of orbit, but the Admiral also had 1378 cargo ships and troop transports to defend, with a chunk of them already deploying their smaller craft to begin the transfer of troops down to the surface according to Cora’s targeting orders.

The trailblazer was going down with them, for she didn’t like to watch as other mechwarriors fought. In fact, she did very little naval work whenever there was a ground battle going on, leaving Harrington to take care of that responsibility…for which we was both grateful and cautious. If he failed, then the troops on the ground would get slaughtered.

That was the curse of naval. They had the power to do great things, but when that power failed the rest of the Star Force military was vulnerable. Everything depended on the navy, though in this fight it was the mechs that were going to win or lose the planet…so long as he gave them a chance to fight. That was his job and he knew it, and without his orbital cover Cora could never attack the currently held V’kit’no’sat areas. He had to hold orbit if the planet was to be completely retaken, and Cora didn’t care to fight for half measures. They’d either win totally…or abandon the planet. Clan Scorpion couldn’t get tied down in any one place. They were the best collection of mechwarriors Star Force had, and they had to stay mobile and go where the fighting was the worst.

And it was Harrington’s job to make sure Cora was able to do hers…but only 629 warships made him uneasy. That should be enough to do the job here, but much larger fleets had been seen regularly in the first years of this war. They’d since spread out, making engagements much smaller affairs now that the V’kit’no’sat had stable bases of operation to work out of, but it still worried him.

He had to fight the problems before him, and if a huge fleet showed up there would be little he could do to stop it…but for the moment he was in the dominant position and he intended to make the most of it.

Admiral Harrington, now that Cora was gone, took personal control over the targeting of the V’kit’no’sat ground units that were vulnerable and began probing somewhat safe areas trying to see if a little nudging here or a redirect their movements there could have an effect. He needed to keep the fleet an active participant in what was happening on the ground and a thorn in the enemy army’s side rather than be a quiet observer watching what was happening from orbit.

Harrington picked one of the heavy shield generators the V’kit’no’sat had brought in and ordered combined firepower against it. He didn’t think he’d be able to get through, but by attacking it he could size up its capability better. Star Force still didn’t have reliable schematics for this equipment, for it wasn’t in the V’kit’no’sat database recovered from Earth. These were new constructs, though based on familiar technology.

Could he penetrate these mobile shields? Maybe, maybe not, but if he could he wasn’t going to be bluffed out of trying. He was going to make the Hjar’at prove their defenses before he gave them anything on credit, and his warships had enough power available to them that he could engage in some potentially pointless bombardment without depleting his naval firepower.

So it was time to poke as the cargo fleet rained down dropships that were delivering the most badass mech army Star Force had every produced, including the most skilled mechwarrior ever seen in the form of the Scorpion trailblazer.

Cora dropped out of a heavy transport as it was taking fire from scores of Hjar’at a few miles off. Its shields held, but not by much, as her Voltron-class mech and 6 stars of others were deposited very near the edge of an ongoing city assault. Along with them came a Michelangelo-class ‘turtle’ heavy assault mech. It dropped to the swampy ground with a loud ‘smack’ of its six wide feet, then it began to walk forward slowly as the transport flew off now shieldless and taking some armor impacts that failed to penetrate.

As soon as the transport was clear the Michelangelo began lobbing energy mortars of two different makes up and over Cora’s mechs to land near the Hjar’at herds. They were not exactly pinpoint accurate, but if the Hjar’at didn’t move quickly they’d get hit. The slower of the two was the Uit Streamer that delivered globs of goo-like energy gel that essentially vaporized whatever it hit. The faster was a Hadju, and it was a Star Force original based loosely on the bloon launcher. It was contained energy inside a short lived bubble, and when the bubble expired the energy was released in an exploding orb.

Those orbs were popping inside the Hjar’at formations, forcing them to scatter a bit and keep moving, else the Uit Streamer would land on them. Their shields would protect against it if they deployed their ‘bubble-mode,’ but they couldn’t do that when moving. It was a special type of shield that worked with their Saroto’kanse’vam and it didn’t take the hit of the Uit Streamer. Rather it made them immune to it, with the gel sliding down to the ground around them.

Problem was it messed with their conventional shields, forcing them to go down…and the ‘bubble’ shield did not protect against projectiles. Most races didn’t fire projectiles, so it largely didn’t matter, but Cora had brought some of her drone mechs equipped with rail guns and the duo of mechwarriors in the Morpheus-class command mechs triggered them to target and fire the instant they saw the bubble shields activate.

The Corovon-heavy metallic slugs shot out from the arms of several drone madcats and slammed into the side of the Hjar’at, punching huge dents in their armor that then carried through and damaged their bodies with the equivalent of a boxer landing a gut punch. It didn’t take them out, let alone kill them, but it did expose a fault in the V’kit’no’sat armor design. The tiny segments that linked together to form the armor and allow it to reshape as needed, when hit with high physical impact with a sheering effect, morphed rather than broke their connections, adding a little short lived flexibility.

The Hjar’at that got hit might very well have broken ribs because of that, and Cora hoped they didn’t live long enough to see the weakness and make adjustments to their armor now or in the future.

The Michelangelo continued lobbing firepower as it slowly walked on its 6 legs behind the other mechs while more were being dropped on the other side of the battlefield. Another 23 stars in total, bringing their heavy mech count up to 4. They were bracketing the Hjar’at force assaulting the edge of the city with the Bsidd doing little more than delaying their advance, and their arrival was forcing the Hjar’at to split their attention, thus lengthening the combat potential of the Bsidd mechs as they had to deal with less firepower being thrown at them.

Cora reached her mech’s hand back over its shoulder, though her own arm did not move. She held still in her cockpit as her mind was linked to the machine. Other mechwarriors used a hybrid mode to control movements, but she had found her own body movement slightly interfered with her efficiency. It was so small that most mechwarriors couldn’t tell the difference, but as soon as Cora had discovered it she’d adjusted her ‘riding’ style to eliminate it, now leaving her in what looked like a meditative trance while all the action was occurring within her mind and outside her IDF bubble that was keeping her body stable.

Cora pulled the sword handle out from its sheath and activated it, lengthening the sword and causing it to glow bright blue just like the Hjar’at Saroto’kanse’vam. In fact it emitted the same energy, and when one of the Hjar’at fired its electrical-like discharge at her running mech, she brought the sword up in front of her and the arcs went right to it, being absorbed harmlessly.

The Hjar’at had constructed their biological weaponry so it couldn’t hurt other Hjar’at, at least not the males that had the Saroto’kanse’vam. It had been Jason’s idea to augment the Voltrons’ swords to mimic this, thus allowing Cora and the few others piloting this type of tier-2 mech to totally block the ranged discharge as long as they got the sword close to the line of transit.

Cora sent the overcharge back, shooting the lightning into the ground between two other Hjar’at so they couldn’t reabsorb and use it. The slightly swampy ground exploded in a plume of dirt and steam as the water in the soil vaporized, then Cora’s sword went dark as she got near the Hjar’at. Both sides were hurling Dre’mo’don shots at each other, but Cora got to them as they swung around to face her before either’s shields went down…then one had to dodge a Uit Streamer that the Michelangelo mechwarrior had timed perfectly.

The Hjar’at dodged to the left, exposing its left side briefly. It actually activated its bubble shield on reflex, with the bottom edge dragging on the ground as he moved rather than flowing over it as most shields did. In fact the far edge caught on the dirt and raised the Hjar’at up off its feet briefly as Cora dashed through the energy-only defense barrier and jabbed her now de-energized sword into the Hjar’at’s side.

She felt it move where it wasn’t supposed to go, which was the Hjar’at reacting quickly with its Lachka and trying to steer the sword away from point of impact. Cora half corrected for that, with the rounded tip of the sword hitting at an angle and skipping over the armor as she knocked the Hjar’at to the ground.

Its bubble shield was down now, with its normal one popping back up as Cora punched with her left hand as she knelt beside it. The Hjar’at kicked at her leg, knocking her knee back but not getting far enough under it. Cora retreated half a step and stood up, firing her Dre’mo’dons into its shields as she got hit with numerous green orbs from the Hjar’at in front of her and two more to her right.

She turned and fired a Jumat cannon, knocking one completely off its feet as another Uit streamer landed on the Hjar’at in front of her. Its bubble shield came up just in time, shifting the blue goo down to the perimeter where her mech foot was. She jumped out of the way in time, then saw a couple of rail gun rounds smack the Hjar’at in the head.

Its bubble shield went down, but it looked distracted and Cora jumped over the goo as her sword reformed into a sharp blade. She stabbed it down towards the Hjar’at’s neck and saw it hit armor. Once the tip was there she reactivated the Saroto’kanse’vam mode and pushed hard, digging it into the armor and feeling it slip through after a couple of seconds as the spiked tail flipped up and around and hit her mech in the shoulder.

Her Voltron tumbled to the ground with the hit, her shields on that side almost completely gone as the Saroto’kanse’vam spikes on the tail tried to cut through it. Cora let the tumble turn into a roll and came back up on her feet only to see the tail flop back down limp. A quick look at the neck told her she’d decapitated it within its armor. Maybe not completely, but enough to sever its spine.

Cora jumped back over to it, bringing her sword down in multiple strikes to cut through the rest of the armor before the Kich’a’kat reconnected and healed the Hjar’at. She almost got its head completely off its body before another Hjar’at rammed her away from its kin.

She saw it coming and turned into the hit, allowing it to bounce her one way while the Hjar’at went the other. Her mech stumbled due to its size and lack of agility, but she kept it on its feet as a neo fired its two heavy arm cannons into the other side, making the Hjar’at choose between the two of them.

It fired back with his Dre’mo’don in both directions, but stood over the other Hjar’at and guarded it, forcing Cora to make a choice. Either she tried to engage it and finish off the one beneath, or she went after another target.

She chose the latter, calling for the turtle to target the location, then running off to a nearby engagement as the energy rain came down. The top Hjar’at deployed its bubble shield over them both, then Cora couldn’t watch anymore as she caught another energy discharge on her sword before getting knocked to the ground.

It took her a second before she even realized what happened, then saw the little disruption on the ground that was the shape of a Zen’zat. It disappeared shortly after the explosion debris was no longer disrupting its cloaking shield.

“Fuck,” she said, sending out an alert to the others that there were invisible mine layers and saboteurs on the battlefield, but otherwise ignored it as she got up and shot in the area she had seen it. No hit was made, but she wasn’t sticking around and had to deal with the bigger threats. Her mech was bigger than the Hjar’at, the tier 1s were not, so she had to focus on them and leave the Zen’zat to the cleanup crews. Fortunately they did not have an Ultra in play, but already she was attracting a lot of attention and taking too many hits.

The other Voltrons were not because they were carrying physical shields, but Cora never did. They were too heavy and didn’t allow her to run and fight like a Commando. The Voltron was slow for that, but tolerable, though there’d been a long learning curve to make it do the things Cora did. The other Voltron pilots couldn’t keep up with her, so she roamed the battlefield rather than working in conjunction with them, often fighting with the smaller mechs and taking heat away from them.

As she was doing now, with a star of tier 1s firing from range and hitting her attackers with impunity as the Hjar’at focused on her. She was pretty sure they didn’t realize she was a trailblazer, but they could tell from the proficiency of the combat that she was amongst the most deadly mechwarriors involved in the battle. The Hjar’at were giving her the compliment of a lot of weaponsfire heading her way, with her armor already getting hit in areas when a shield temporarily collapsed.

Cora would then twist her body around and take the hits on another intact shield section while the other recharged, always keeping one direction clear of enemies with the nearby star helping her do that. If she got completely surrounded she would have no safe zone to work with, which was why she wasn’t pushing further into the Hjar’at formation.

On her battlemap she got a warning just prior to a group of Zen’zat aerial fighters zooming in and targeting her. She took a knee and suffered through the bombardment while firing back and hitting one, but it wasn’t enough to take it down. A Hjar’at charged her at the same time, with her unable to get back up before she took the ram. Instead she rolled to her right and away from the spinning buzz saw of energized Saroto’kanse’vam, then she punched into the flank armor so hard the Hjar’at spun out and flopped on its back, momentarily getting its spines stuck in the ground while upside down.

A couple of Hadju detonated on its belly, then a Uit streamer landed on it a split second later. It had half rolled back to its feet, but not enough to get over the hump as it swung back into the furrow. Unable to put up a bubble shield without its spines being in the air, the blue gel hit its armor and burned through with ease. A moment later the wriggling Hjar’at stopped moving, replaced by a greasy black smoke plume as the Uit streamer burned into its body, vaporizing half of it before it the gel was spent.

Cora took cover behind it for a moment, then ran on by as she headed to intercept a Hjar’at going for her backup star. She had to get to it before the Hjar’at could ram one of the five mechs, and if she sprinted hard enough she just might make it…

9

March 19, 4908

Ichyson System (Yev Region)

Hammat

Admiral Harrington watched with a grim expression on his face as V’kit’no’sat ships were entering the system along a jumppoint he couldn’t guard. It didn’t seem fair, for Cora and Clan Scorpion had reclaimed the planet no more than 2 days ago. Three quarters of the Scorpions’ primary mechs were destroyed and 8% of their pilots were dead, but all of the Hjar’at were gone.

They’d fought to the death, and Cora hadn’t been in a mood to go the extra effort to take some of the last few alive if they didn’t feel like surrendering. She’d given them a choice and they’d chose to fight…so she’d wiped them all out while taking a few final casualties.

The mech losses were steep, though they had replacement mechs standing by in the transports. The loss of 8% of their mechwarriors made Harrington sick to his stomach. Many of those lost he knew personally, and so many centuries of hard work and advancement were literally wiped away in an instant because the V’kit’no’sat wanted to ‘test’ Star Force. He didn’t know if he should hate them for that or thank Mak’to’ran for not bringing the Era’tran and the other 37 races into the fight, but there was something seriously twisted in their empire if they thought fighting to the death qualified as a ‘test.’

They might view their own people as expendable, but Harrington could not tolerate the idea with Star Force…and now, when they’d finally rid Hammat of their presence, another Hjar’at fleet was arriving with the bulk of the planetary defenses still down.

He couldn’t get his small fleet to the jumppoint in time to do anything worthwhile, so he kept them in orbit covering the ground troops as Cora worked to get them under existing shield generators and started prepping for a defense against a new ground assault. And it looked like the Hjar’at wanted this system pretty bad based on the size of the vessels coming into the system. A lot of them were large troop transports, and the Admiral got the feeling that the Scorpions and the Bsidd on the planet were about to be overwhelmed.

Harrington slightly turned his head to the side, closing his eyes as he resigned himself to what needed to be done.

“Contact the Count,” he told his bridge crew, referencing the Monarch that controlled this system. “Tell him to begin the planetary evacuation and get the request for civilian transport ships into the comm grid before the V’kit’no’sat take it down. I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop them this time, if the number of ships coming out of this jump is as large as I fear it is.”

3,277 lightyears away…

Thrawn had once had his claws removed by Star Force, back when he had been their prisoner and Paul had released him back to the Li’vorkrachnika. The trailblazer had rightly assumed that Thrawn would have killed himself, suspecting some sort of subterfuge, and the removal of his primary method of doing so had given his mind just enough time to analyze the situation for what it was…a true release.

Since then his body had gone through some minor changes, in which he had gotten his claws back, but the red-eyed Thrawn would never use them against himself. Nor would the Paladin. Star Force valued life whereas the Li’vorkrachnika treated it as next to worthless. The V’kit’no’sat were not so disrespectful, but it seemed the cruelness of the galaxy had corrupted them into partly believing the lie of a ‘necessary sacrifice,’ which was playing out before him now.

Whatever the V’kit’no’sat had thought when they invaded his territory, they were now fully aware that they were attacking into a mismatch. Thrawn had so many ships deployed along the border to counter their assaults that they hadn’t managed to hold a single world they’d taken…yet they kept pressing and taking unnecessary losses.

The mastermind side of the Supreme Viceroy recognized the tactic for what it was…a larger strategic play, though he couldn’t positively identify the end game. The V’kit’no’sat were accepting the death of many of their troops in exchange for something, and at the moment it wasn’t planets. It seemed they were more interested in the combat itself, or perhaps they were so arrogant they could not understand how the Paladin were defeating them.

Thrawn knew that could not be the case. Arrogant they may be, the V’kit’no’sat had a reputation for adaptation once their arrogance was proven wrong, yet he was seeing none of it here. Thus he had concluded they were intentionally dying in exchange for a larger goal.

It had taken him weeks of contemplation and study as he personally led two of the counterattacks and studied the battlemap data from the 17 different systems that had been hit thus far, but a sick suspicion was forming within him and the longer this wasteful combat continued the more certain he was becoming.

The V’kit’no’sat were not fighting honorably. They were sacrificing their troops in hopeless battles in order to draw Star Force out. Draw out their reserves and their Uriti, along with whatever other surprises the trailblazers had waiting for them. Thrawn was convinced that the assault on the Paladin, while initially it may have been intended to gain territory, was now meant to keep the Paladin here rather than reinforcing the rest of the empire…and if that meant continuing to send some of their troops to slaughter, they were willing to accept the losses in exchange for eventual victory.

That was a strategy worthy of the Li’vorkrachnika, but not the V’kit’no’sat. Where was their pride? Why were they not fighting Star Force strength against strength? It was almost as if they were conceding that they were the inferior and had to use subterfuge in order to achieve victory…and that was not the V’kit’no’sat he had come to both hate and respect over the past centuries.

They feared the Uriti, he knew that much, and they were wisely avoiding combat with them, but had Thrawn been commanding the V’kit’no’sat he would have used much the same approach but with different low level tactics. One could engage and distract without wasting troops. Star Force had taught him that long ago, and the fact that all of their space navies used expendable drones was a statement to the galaxy that the tactics of the Li’vorkrachnika were inferior, no matter how effective they might be.

Star Force could do better, and he had assumed the V’kit’no’sat could as well, for their empire had been around for millions of years and they were the dominant power in the coreward half of the galaxy…minus the Hadarak Zone that was dead center in the great galactic swirl.

And therein was the hint of an epiphany that Thrawn had just had. The way the V’kit’no’sat fought the Hadarak differed greatly from the way they fought everyone else. Against the Hadarak they died in huge numbers just to damage one of their foes. It was a war of carnage, and one that he now understood intimately thanks to the Rit’ko’sor that had joined Star Force, for some of them had been hatched before they had rebelled and went extinct as far as the galaxy was concerned.

They had told Star Force much, and Thrawn had access to all those files. He was one of the few within the Paladin that did, and he’d learned that the V’kit’no’sat did not use drone fleets because their combat efficiency against the Hadarak swarms was lower than crewed vessels. It was a lag issue, for the dynamics of swarm warfare were extremely complicated. He knew better than the trailblazers the secrets and pitfalls of such warfare, for it was how the Li’vorkrachnika had built their empire.

Reaction time was critical, and while Star Force would have accepted more equipment losses in exchange for the small amounts of lag and intermittent control disruption…which they partially countered with detailed automatic programming…the V’kit’no’sat did not. They felt that they needed to bring maximum combat potential, otherwise they would be wasting ships, for the Hadarak could so easily kill them. They’d made the choice to sacrifice personnel, which were easier to replace than ships, in order to stem the tide of losses.

They had calculated that sacrificing troops in battle would result in less loss of systems…and if even one lost system could not be fully evacuated, the number of lives saved would eclipse what was lost in battle. But above and beyond that, a system maintained was industrial capacity that would allow them to make more ships.

Thrawn could appreciate the debacle they were perpetually entangled in, and the reason why Mak’to’ran was so interested in gaining even the slightest bit of inside information about the Hadarak, but they were shirking their duty, as if the fear of the Hadarak was driving them slightly mad and they would do anything required to avoid losing systems.

Perhaps it was their ego, but Thrawn knew from his genetic memory that when many died there was no point in being fearful. Death was irrelevant. Victory was all that mattered. So he knew to be calm and disconnected as his troops died, in order that he could make their deaths matter. As cruel as the Li’vorkrachnika were, even they did not get their troops killed without their deaths serving a purpose.

But the V’kit’no’sat did, in at least a small way, against the Hadarak. Thrawn felt it was fear of failure that was driving them to sloppiness, whereas Thrawn had been engineered to feel no fear of failure. He always knew that if he could not win, others would replace him and carry on the work, thus he had to make the most out of his life, even if it was in a losing effort. He understood team warfare in a way that few others did, and in the face of death and failure the Li’vorkrachnika never so much as blinked.

And neither did Thrawn.

Paul had referred to it as ‘ice water’ in his veins, and the Human had admitted that the trailblazers’ default nature was to feel a symbiosis with those they were to protect, but they’d all learned in times of chaos and overload to disconnect. They had to do it, otherwise the fear of loss would compromise them and they would become sloppy at the minimum. In order to safeguard those under their care, they had to admit that they could not guarantee their survival and work to do what they could. Save as many as possible without betraying one.

The V’kit’no’sat were not so detached. Apathetic, they may be, but not detached. They were fearful of the Hadarak, and they chose betrayal of a few to safeguard the masses, the same as the Li’vorkrachnika. The root cause was different, for Thrawn had long suspected the Li’vorkrachnika Templars simply didn’t care about him and their other servants more than the worth of their service. The V’kit’no’sat appeared to have had higher motivations, then became corrupted out of fear of failure. They had to defeat the Hadarak, and they’d never been able to do so…with the thought of losing what small gains they had driving them a shade into madness.

And now it seemed they were responding to Star Force in a similar manner. Perhaps it was the Uriti that was doing it to them. They were too similar to the Hadarak, yet there were none in Paladin territory. Those fighting here did not have to face down a Uriti, yet they were still fighting in the same disrespectful manner, wasting their troops against mismatches as if their goal was not conquest, but rather keeping the pressure on the Paladin.

Thrawn did not like it. He expected more of them. A better challenge. Perhaps this was subterfuge for a greater strategy, but he suspected the simplest answer was the correct one in this case.

The V’kit’no’sat were not here to demonstrate dominance. They were here to win at any cost, even if it meant treating Star Force as a superior enemy. They were latching their ego to the final outcome, not the methods used to obtain it, and they were doing so out of fear of failure rather than standing toe to toe and measuring themselves against their enemy.

It was routed in cowardice, and that disappointed Thrawn. The great V’kit’no’sat empire was, at its core, insecure and fighting scared. Their ego was probably established to compensate for this, creating a bubble of false reality they cradled themselves in except for when they had to face down the Hadarak.

And it was probably that bubble that had shielded Star Force for so long. In the beginning they could have snuffed out their enemy with an invasion of this size, but their bubble of dominance wouldn’t admit that a small, illicit offshoot was that great of a threat. Now that they’d let it become a much larger one they were taking notice, but only after the insertion of the Uriti into the active fighting.

Denial did not befit a warrior, and with this latest epiphany Thrawn believed he was starting to truly understand the V’kit’no’sat. They were powerful, wise, and nearly unbeatable…but now that he and Star Force were ascending the galactic skill ranks he had a different perspective. He was starting to see the V’kit’no’sat from a peer perspective, despite their age and experience levels, and what he saw was cracks in their dominant visage.

And they were compensating for those cracks, those weaknesses, by spending the lives of their troops in swarm tactics in exchange for eventual victory.

They might eventually succeed at that, given their numbers and their industrial backing. They could replace their fleets and crews faster than Star Force could, but they didn’t have the Uriti. That was Star Force’s main advantage and the reason why each Uriti had a trailblazer-led fleet guarding it. They could not lose them, and the V’kit’no’sat were wisely avoiding those fight whenever possible, leaving the fate of the war in the hands of these secondary conflicts that Thrawn and others were responsible for.

Paul and others couldn’t win this war on their own. There were too many systems, too many planets, too many ships. An empire even of Star Force’s size was too vast for one small group to control. The trailblazers could move themselves to the largest battles, the most valuable points, but it would be those they had trained and preserved that would decide this war. Thrawn should have been killed by them long ago, but they saw value in him and made a great effort to save him, even from himself.

Now, after everything Thrawn had learned, and how much he’d grown, he was still their inferior. He did not see this as a bad thing, for he could continue to learn from them. He’d assumed the V’kit’no’sat were the same, and while not an ally, he’d thought they were an enemy that he could learn from…but not now. Either they were growing more stupid or he had finally advanced to a level of peerdom with them, for he saw nothing new in this approach. Only desperation.

But it might work, and that galled him…the idea that the trailblazers could be defeated by lesser warriors. Thrawn knew well that the leadership of an empire was critical, but it was not enough on its own. The mass of the empire mattered just as much, and Star Force’s mass was small compared to that of the V’kit’no’sat. Very, very small.

Thrawn didn’t fear death, nor failure, but the idea of Paul and the others being overwhelmed by inferior tactics angered him. It angered him greatly. Like them, he couldn’t turn this war on his own. Or even with the entirety of the Paladin. But he did have his part to play, his piece of the war to wage, and he was intent on returning their investment in him and the Paladin.

He knew the trailblazers would lose and be destroyed rather than betray a single person to attain victory, and it mirrored the ‘ice water’ in the Supreme Viceroy’s own veins. If they’d only had a few hundred more years things would be different. More time to lay defenses and build more drones. More time to grow while the V’kit’no’sat foolishly remained stagnant.

But there was no more time. The nearly full might of the V’kit’no’sat was upon them, and they were no longer assuming superiority. They were fighting as if they were inferior, and applying everything they’d learned about combat with the Hadarak against Star Force.

They were not going to fight honorably, for when their dominance was unviable, they fought with only one purpose…eventual victory, no matter what the cost, for the insecure minds who could not fathom that they were truly the inferior warriors had to have it to maintain their delusion.

But even inferior warriors with more weapons and greater numbers of soldiers could still prevail. It was how the Li’vorkrachnika had defeated many superior opponents, and Thrawn could not stand the idea of that happening to the trailblazers.

If they were trying to keep pressure on the Paladin to discourage their reinforcing the rest of the empire, Thrawn was not going to play their game. They were not devoting the resources needed to counter the number of ships he had. Perhaps they did not know, and while it was tempting to play for time so his Paladin could grow to even greater numbers with their rapid expansion potential, Thrawn knew he had to do the reverse.

If the V’kit’no’sat thought they could distract him with hard, but winnable battles, he was going to respond with equal pressure…but not in defense. He’d hold the line here, not giving up a single world without making the V’kit’no’sat earn it, but he was going to do something no one else was doing. While he had the advantage in numbers he was going to gather them to the front and push beyond it…backdoor the V’kit’no’sat assault line that was gradually eating into Star Force territory and begin assaulting worlds in adjacent regions that the V’kit’no’sat now firmly held.

If the enemy thought that Thrawn was just going to sit and play defense while they dictated the course of the war, they were about to get a lesson in how the Li’vorkrachnika fought…only amplified tenfold by Star Force methodology.

He knew he couldn’t permanently counter the V’kit’no’sat advance, but he was going to gut punch them where they thought they were invulnerable. Avoiding the Uriti and retreating when they entered a system was their plan, but they were not expecting a wave assault on dozens of systems simultaneously.

Sometimes the best strategy was not to attack to win, but to attack to disrupt your opponent. Do what they did not expect. Get them off balance, distracted, and guarding other potential weaknesses that you did not even know about, for if you can find and exploit one, they would continually be worried about the others, for they did not know how much you did not know.

It was time to turn the ‘fog of war’ against the V’kit’no’sat, and right now he held the strongest force not fully engaged. Hitting with the strength he needed meant leaving Paladin systems vulnerable, and we was willing to give them up if needed. Not to death, but to evacuation. As it was going, they were going to lose them anyway given enough time, so he was comfortable with the gamble.

It was time to make the V’kit’no’sat truly aware of the Paladin, and see if he couldn’t take some of the pressure off the trailblazers. Give them even the slightest advantage and they would make use of it. And right now they needed whatever disruption he could provide.

Thrawn’s glowing red eyes brighten as a toothy grin spread across his scaly face.

If the trailblazers were going to fall, the Paladin would fall first. Paul and the others had to survive. They were Star Force. And if the mercy they had showed the Paladin must be repaid in blood, Thrawn would happily pay it…in Star Force style…taking as many of the enemy with them as possible.

Thrawn left his private chambers and moved to the bridge of his ship, getting the attention of the crew immediately with just his presence. He looked over them briefly, with them holding his gaze, then he turned to the comms officer.

“I need couriers sent on Omni dispersion. Message is ‘Summons: Armageddon Protocol,’ location is the Tano System.”

10

July 12, 4909

Juniper System (Rim Region)

Stellar Orbit

Paul sat in his quarters, mentally linked into the nearby computer station as he reviewed thousands of various items coming into him from the three planets in the system and across Star Force territory through the comm grid. They’d managed to save the relay in this system, meaning Paul didn’t have to suffer through weeks of operating in the dark as they cleaned up the V’kit’no’sat presence left over on two of the three planets.

The Kret’net had hit the system hard, but they only had a few footholds by the time Paul’s fleet had arrived with Trident. The Uriti was currently soaking in the sun, literally, as it was submerged within the central star in the binary system. The other star was far, far away, beyond the planets even, and was barely a tenth the size of this one. Between the two they messed up the day/night cycle on the planets greatly, but since Star Force lived inside contained cities it wasn’t an issue for them.

The naval battles were over, with the Kret’net totally abandoning the system after Paul made it clear he wasn’t going to let them stick around and watch from afar. After two weeks of constant pursuits they’d elected to jump out, and since then Paul had been guarding the main jumppoints in, half expecting at least a scout ship to return. He didn’t want to let the V’kit’no’sat have any eyes here, so he was playing a game against their stealth craft, hoping to catch one in entry, though the odds of doing so were not in his favor.

Paul could have been down on one of the planets taking part in the ground fighting himself, but he wasn’t truly needed. It was intense mop up work, and while having him involved would always be an asset, he’d learned to delegate long ago, though he always cringed at the idea of someone dying because he wasn’t there. So far in this counter invasion no one had, for his fleet was aggressively pushing the enemy back and any fallen mechs or aerial craft were getting their pilots picked up rather than captured, and the Kret’net had already lost their two Ultras in play here. One of which Paul had insisted be captured.

It was going to be taken to the Detention System and held there. He would have preferred capturing them all, but the V’kit’no’sat were not playing nice and he couldn’t delay here any longer than needed, for there were dozens of other systems that needed a Uriti visit and were not getting them. The entire warfront was overtaxed, but Paul was picking his spots along with the other trailblazers and hurting the V’kit’no’sat push as well as they could.

They were coordinating across the relay grid, so it was important that Paul stayed in contact as much as possible. He figured his time was better spent now in tactical mediation, with him lounging in a soft chair as his mind worked at a furious pace that the Archon’s continual advancements had made seem almost lethargic.

He knew better than to burn himself out, but the rate his Sav-enhanced mind sifted through the data was astonishing even when he was holding back…but the numbers kept saying the same thing. Star Force was winning the short game, but they were losing the long one. They had too many systems to defend, and none of them were sufficiently hardened. It wasn’t poor planning on Star Force’s part, just a reality of spending so many centuries at war and not having the luxury to build up legacy defenses like the V’kit’no’sat had.

‘Legacy defenses’ were those you put down in times of peace. They were extra that you added, a little at a time when you had the resources, but over multiple millennia they added up to extravagant levels. Prior to the civil war, Itaru was one such system whose defenses were mind boggling. So much Yeg’gor, so many Tar’vem’jic, and so many conventional defenses stacked on top of one another it was virtually impossible to breach. When the V’kit’no’sat had turned those against each other it had been a blood bath on massive proportions that Paul had been unaware of until the Raptors had brought some limited battle data to them.

They’d left before the Rit’ko’sor had been reabsorbed, but there was enough information exchange first that the Itaru implosion had been passed along and the Raptors had brought it with them. But even with the numbers killed and the ships lost, most of the ground defenses were still intact. Not even the V’kit’no’sat had the orbital firepower needed to cleanse the legacy defenses, only poke some holes in them to drop troops through then try to take over the strongpoints from the inside.

Star Force had never had the luxury of building like that, aside from Earth long ago. Ever since it had fallen they’d been on the run, pulling back over and over again and feeding resources into ships and front line defenses to try and stall the V’kit’no’sat advance while they evacuated people further away from the fighting.

They’d put down heavier defenses at strategic points, but there was no substitute for time, and with an empire millions of years old the Star Force planetary defenses seemed pathetic in comparison. The V’kit’no’sat would be halfway through the Rim Region by now if not for the Uriti, and they were the one threat to the legacy defenses, though such attacks would have to be made carefully and slowly, otherwise the Uriti would accumulate too much damage and would become vulnerable.

But there was nothing even close to that level of a threat out here, so the Uriti dominated everywhere they went and the V’kit’no’sat avoided them. But Star Force needed thousands of them, and where they weren’t the conventional warfare reigned until Paul or one of the other escort fleet commanders could get one to them.

And there wouldn’t be anything to stop the V’kit’no’sat from coming back to this system and trying this again, especially now with a lot of the massive shield generators destroyed. The system would be more vulnerable, but Paul couldn’t stay. He could win any battle with the Uriti involved, and the V’kit’no’sat knew it, so they were giving up the systems they’d claimed if they couldn’t scare him off with the potential death of prisoners, and fortunately they’d gotten here in time to prevent that scenario. The ground troops had been able to rescue the prisoners without needing the Uriti to shoot or crush something on the surface, but in other systems it was too late.

The V’kit’no’sat had permanent territory now that they controlled underneath at least some huge shield generators with hundreds of thousands of prisoners that would die if a Uriti assaulted those locations. Paul had been involved in two campaigns to take one of those strongholds back and he was 50/50 so far. One they’d been able to slowly reclaim, but the other had received additional reinforcements and the Oso’lon were holding it firm. It didn’t help that that system held some of the strongest shield generators Star Force had ever produced, and the enemy had captured or repaired some of them in addition to what they were shipping in.

Paul had blockaded for a while, but eventually he had to leave. He hated doing it, but if he couldn’t retake the system then being tied up there meant other systems were getting hit hard without relief. It still burned him to leave those prisoners behind, but the Braum System was fully in V’kit’no’sat control now and even a blockade was too much of a distraction to mount.

It was one small victory for the V’kit’no’sat despite their hundreds of defeats, such as here. They were leaving their ground troops behind in the hope that they could dig in and persist until Paul left, but that wasn’t going to be the case this time. Paul hated this game of whack a mole, but it was the most he could do at the moment.

Thrawn, on the other hand, was not going to play that game. Paul hadn’t ordered him to stop, but the former lizard mastermind was doing something very dangerous…then again, nothing in this war was ‘safe’ and Paul could appreciate that, but he also knew the double edged sword the Supreme Viceroy was wielding, and it was him, not Kara. She wasn’t stopping him either, instead playing second fiddle and backing him up, but with almost all of the Paladin fleet going to Thrawn.

And he was using it to go after the V’kit’no’sat. Not to free prisoners or retake worlds. He was hunting them and doing the latter as an afterthought. It was leaving Paladin territory exposed, and Thrawn knew it, but he didn’t care. He was going for their throat and forcing them to play defense, and Paul had to grudgingly admit it was working.

Thrawn had pushed the V’kit’no’sat back from the spinward front, at least in terms of bases, but Kara had sent a recent report stating that the V’kit’no’sat fleets were still operating in Paladin space and returning the favor. They weren’t taking territory, they were razing it and she was short on defenses, but she backed up Thrawn, saying in the grand scheme of things it was a beneficial tradeoff and she’d evacuate her people while he played venator.

That was sloppy warfare, but that’s where they were at and he couldn’t fault Thrawn for going after them. Paul wished he could, but he had so many systems to defend that he couldn’t. He had to stall for time while Davis worked out a plan for ultimate victory…diplomatically. He hadn’t received any updates from him, nor did he need them. His place was here, fighting, while Davis had his eyes set on the distant future and how to shape it.

He had faith in the Director, but the simple truth was that Star Force was going to lose as this war played itself out, even if at the moment they were ahead on the score board.

3,692 lightyears away…

“Their victory in the Ichyson System clearly shows that even against the Hjar’at, Star Force has attained combat equity,” the Yioj Ambassador stated in the communal embassy chamber in the Arbiter System. “None of us can say the same. We have some advantages, but when taken in whole, we cannot stand nose to nose with them. Star Force is, even without their Uriti.”

“Yet they are losing,” the Guetar Ambassador pointed out. “I do not mean this as criticism, for they are doing more than anyone else in recorded history, but even if they could hold them here in a stalemate, the industrial strength of the V’kit’no’sat will prevail over time. Star Force is not large enough to fight a permanent conflict now that they have the V’kit’no’sat’s full attention.”

“All the more reason for us to unite,” the Deervew argued.

“Star Force has proven its worth,” Sarquori Ambassador said dismissively. “The lingering question is whether or not the V’kit’no’sat will honor their word.”

“It does not matter,” the Zeeross said. “Star Force has leverage.”

“What leverage? If the V’kit’no’sat move to wipe out my race, what can Star Force do to stop it?”

“They can withdraw their promise not to assault V’kit’no’sat worlds with their Uriti, or have you forgotten that clause in the Mak’to’ran deal?”

“Insignificant.”

“Very significant,” the Knight of Quenar stated firmly.

The Sarquori looked at him oddly. “How can you say that?”

“You underestimate the power of the Uriti. Star Force has never fully unleashed it for public view, but I have seen from the past what they can do, and they were specifically designed to assault and destroy civilizations. A fleet can move, a fleet can flee, a planet cannot. If I had control of a Uriti, rather than Star Force, and fully utilized it against the V’kit’no’sat, they would not have a single system that would be secure from attack. Not even their capitol. That threat is far more serious to them than your pathetic race…from their point of view,” the KoQ amended so the Sarquori knew it was not meant as an insult.

“We are still gambling on their reaction,” the Dqwet warned.

“Do not concern yourself with predicting their mindset, rather focus on what potential the Uriti have. The V’kit’no’sat are not naïve. If they will tolerate Star Force’s existence in the Rim, they will tolerate us if we ally with them,” the KOQ said, standing up from the table and looking down on the other Ambassadors. “You have seen how the enemy fights. You have seen how Star Force fights. They are peers, though one is far younger and they possess the Uriti. They are also amicable, whereas the V’kit’no’sat do not tolerate rivals. Allowing Star Force to fall is also a gamble. A gamble that the V’kit’no’sat will ignore you. If they do not, you have no chance alone. The choice before you is which gamble shall you take, and I warn you not to expect the V’kit’no’sat to behave as they have in the past. The paradigm has irrevocably changed.”

“I agree,” the Haf Ambassador reluctantly echoed, with others making similar silent gestures of support.

“You must choose now. If you wish to stand by and watch, hoping to profit by our effort, you will not be protected later. Only those who sign on will be linked to Star Force. Only those who legitimately combat them will be protected, and the Knights of Quenar will be watching. We will know if you fulfill your obligations or not, for we are everywhere within the galaxy. This compact must not be entered into lightly or deceitfully. If you decide not to join, then do not and take your chances. Falsehood will be punished.”

“Do not threaten us, Quenar,” the Xioxi Ambassador sneered.

“I am making sure there is no ambiguity in the choice before you.”

“Duly noted, but we do not answer to you.”

“We will avenge betrayal. Other than that, we do not care about you and will leave you alone,” he said, with his wolf-like visage underscoring the ‘avenge’ part of that statement, as if his race had been tailor made for such things. “Does anyone believe they need more information before a choice is made?”

No one could argue that they did. Over the previous years, Star Force had shared ample data on the war, and all of them knew the virtually unstoppable force they were being asked to oppose…but one that was focused on Star Force and had the majority of their fleet engaged here, not standing guard on their border systems across the galaxy.

“Then I believe it is time,” the Zeeross agreed. “Contact the Director.

Two days later the Ambassadors reconvened in the same chamber, but of the original 94, seven were absent, leaving the number of races represented at 87…though three of them were actually representatives from various consortiums that contained multiple races each, similar to what The Nexus had originally been, as opposed to the fragmented train wreck that it was now.

Never the less, The Nexus had been here, though they were one of the 7 that had departed. They did not have the strength to hold their own borders, let alone fight the V’kit’no’sat. Davis had included them along with the Jonstar, the latter of which was already engaged in combat against the V’kit’no’sat. He’d hoped the Sety, at least, would offer some token assistance in the form of a fleet or two, but in the end they stayed true to their selfish objectives and would not send anything. They had wanted to be on the grand stage, but had no intent to earn their place.

Davis had dismissed them from the Arbiter System along with the other 6 that had declined, making it clear they were not Star Force’s responsibility and they would have no diplomatic contact with them until this war was over, with the exception of The Nexus, whom they already had existing ties with. The others would not be gaining from this association without contributing, so their Ambassadors were gently being shoved out the door as the remaining ones once again gathered here.

A few minutes after they had arrived, a Human walked in. Though they had never met him before, they recognized him as Director Davis. He had deliberately not made personal contact with any of them, instead working through intermediaries. Him showing up now was a subtle gesture of both trust and inclusion as these races made their final choice.

“I will be blunt with you,” he said as he sat down in a high backed chair. “What we have discussed for many years is a gamble. It is a very dangerous gamble, but I believe it is achievable. The agreement I have with Mak’to’ran states that if we can survive this invasion we will be given a permanent armistice and dominion over the Rim while he leads the V’kit’no’sat against their true enemy, the Hadarak. He does not like wasting troops and ships against us, and this fight is as much a power struggle within the V’kit’no’sat as it is an attempt to destroy Star Force.”

“If we can thwart the opposition, Mak’to’ran will gain power and secure his leadership. I believe I can work with him, from a distance, and establish a mutually exclusive relationship. They leave us alone, we leave them alone, though it is impossible for us to monitor a border of galactic size. They could launch an invasion of another region, completely conquer or destroy a race, and we would never know about it. If you agree to sign on, we will establish monitoring of your territory. If you are attacked, we will know, and it will violate whatever final agreement I strike with Mak’to’ran.”

“An attack on you will be the same as an attack on us. And if such a violation occurs, we will be free to strike at them with our Uriti. We have done so once, in a light attack to prove our ability to do so. They know the threat, and this current war is contingent on us not doing so, or the V’kit’no’sat races who are sitting it out will come to the others’ aid. We also cannot attack any of their current territory. They want this to be a test of our worthiness, and we are complying because doing so is to our advantage. We gain nothing from assaulting their territory, for such battles would involve their planetary and system defenses. So long as we are the defender, we have the advantages that come with that status, but do not assume we take orders from them or Mak’to’ran. They are killing my people, and I do not tolerate that for the sake of a ‘test.’”

“The agreement says nothing of you. If you attack the V’kit’no’sat it does not violate my agreement with Mak’to’ran. If you do so, and force the V’kit’no’sat to withdraw from their war against us to defend their territory against you, we will include you as part of our domain on the following conditions.”

“One. If such an agreement is made, you will not violate the border.”

“Two. Any territory that you take from the V’kit’no’sat during this war may or may not be retained. That will be determined during the negotiations as to what the final border will be. If you refuse to give up a world taken, I will abandon you from our protection. What the final border will be I do not know, but it will be similar to what it is now. Some of you have lost territory to the V’kit’no’sat in the distant past and want it back. You may be able to keep it, or you may not. My final decision and agreement with Mak’to’ran must be honored regardless of whether you agree with it.”

“Three. Many of your races do not hold to our standards. We are not in a position to impose them on you, but do not construe this agreement for sanctioning your misdeeds. For example, the Sarquori possess many slave races. If you were closer to us, we’d invade you and free them. Right now we are not close to you, nor do we have the ships to spare. But if this works, and an armistice is reached, we will be taking domain over the entire Rim. It is not something we can do in any short amount of time, and that delay and the distances involved mean your empires will be out of our reach long into the future…but we will not tolerate bad behavior, and do not construe this agreement for anything other than mutual defense against the V’kit’no’sat and basic diplomatic relations.”

The Sarquori stood up angrily and pointed a tentacle at Davis.

“How dare you insult our empire with threats you clearly cannot follow through on. We come here in good faith and you spit on our presence. We will not…” he said, suddenly choking up as he had trouble breathing.

Davis theatrically had his hand raised towards the Sarquori with his fingers making a cupping shape so everyone knew who it was doing it to him, even if they didn’t fully understand how.

“I am currently engaged in a war with millions, soon to be billions of my people dead or captured and many more on the way. Do you really think I care about the protestations from your race on the other side of the galaxy?”

The Sarquori tried to answer, but his voice was mumbled and bubbling as his slimy throat tried to breathe and talk at the same time.

“The only reason you are even allowed here is because of the strength of your empire and how far you have come. You have achieved great things, but there is stain on your civilization. I do not care in the here and now because I can do nothing about it. You are not an ally. You are not a friend. You are a representative of a sick race who is also endangered by the V’kit’no’sat. I am offering you a limited alliance that could be mutually advantageous, but whether you take it or not, if we survive this war, we will be coming for you eventually. It might be a million years from now, but we will never accept slavery or the other misdeeds than many of your races have committed and admitted, not truly realizing what you are doing is wrong.”

Davis dropped his hand and the telekinetic pressure on the Sarquori’s neck, with him sucking in air heavily as he cleared his throat.

“The advantage you have, and the opportunity you have, is time. If we succeed in containing the V’kit’no’sat to the Core, we will not be able to come after you for a very long time, and during that time you will have ample opportunity to change your ways before we can act.”

Davis glared at them for a moment, but the Sarquori’s defiance had turned to fear and he was not interested in speaking again, clearly surprised that Davis had the ability to do that to him.

“I am being honest with you, rather than lying to get what I want. Stand with Star Force now and we will include you in the Armistice agreement. If you do not, we will not guarantee a strike on the V’kit’no’sat with our Uriti if they choose to attack you. We might overlook it depending on the situation, especially if your slave races would have slightly better lives under V’kit’no’sat control, though that’s not saying much for them. Both situations are intolerable, and I am letting you know where I stand here and now. Signing on does not mean we tolerate your bad behavior. It is only germane in matters where the V’kit’no’sat are involved. The Knights of Quenar already know this well.”

The alien in question huffed a slightly ironic laugh. “We do not hold to their scruples, particularly in how we acquire some of the Uriti, but because they cannot control us they do not try to and accept the Uriti regardless. We have an antagonistic relationship, and have always had one since the beginning. It why, even now, he is wearing a shield generator so I cannot slip a probe onto his body.”

Davis smirked slightly, for he was wearing such a shield generator, though cleverly hidden beneath his clothes so no one would notice, but apparently the Knight of Quenar had.

“We can work with Star Force even if we do not agree on methods, but if they were adjacent to our worlds they would act to stop us. We are based far from them, so there is no need to pursue animosities that have no basis in application. Our relationship is based solely on the Uriti. If they were not involved, we would not be here and we would happily watch as the V’kit’no’sat destroyed them, for it would not be worth our effort to intervene, though we hold no love for that empire either.”

“You have been their greatest supporter?” the Freii asked, its face in total shock.

“We support the logic involved, and the mutual benefit. Nothing more.”

“We are different,” the Jonstar said. “We had an alliance with another race known as the Trinx. They misbehaved and Star Force fought, conquered, and annexed them. They are now one of their member states, and we have no problem with that at all. Star Force is trustworthy, and we are already fighting alongside them because their existence is an enhancement for the galaxy. Without them, it would be a much darker place. We support both them, and the logic of the situation.”

“To each their own,” the Knight of Quenar said dismissively.

“The point being, we don’t have to like each other,” Davis continued, “and this Consortium will be bare bones. Additional items can be added later if needed or wanted, upon individual acceptance of each involved, but right now my concern is forcing the V’kit’no’sat to cede to us dominion over the Rim, which from their point of view includes all of your territories. I will then negotiate with Mak’to’ran in this manner, and from his point of view I must be unchallenged. You must obey the terms before you, to the letter, or do not sign. There can be no middle ground. You are either all in, or all out and you take your chances alone. And from personal experience, I believe Mak’to’ran will expand V’kit’no’sat holdings to provide more resources to fight the Hadarak. Whether that will be in the Core or into the Rim I cannot say, but they will not remain static. I can guarantee you that much.”

“You have had time to review this ad nauseam. You are here because you have made a decision. This is your last chance to back out, and I hope I have made it clear that I do not like all of you, so this isn’t a gesture of friendship. It is a business relationship only. And that business is war against the V’kit’no’sat,” he said, telepathically triggering the table to morph slightly with two large buttons forming and rising on the tabletop in front of each Ambassador.

Some of them flinched, a few stood up in shock, but then all settled when they saw before them the text and function of the buttons. Red for a rejection, Blue for acceptance.

“Register your choice,” Davis said simply, crossing his arms over his chest as he waited.

Most didn’t hesitate, pressing the blue button that resulted in a holographic image of their civilization’s symbol popping up over the tabletop in front of them at approximately head height, partially shielding their face in the translucent glow as the symbol rotated around its own axis.

Others delayed a few moments, but in the end even the Sarquori pressed the blue button, despite his vexed state. His anger would have prompted him to decline, but he already had orders from his leadership, and nothing said here had violated their stated triggers, so he was obliged to agree…but Davis had known that already, for the Sarquori were not immune to Ikrid, nor were most of the Ambassadors here.

One by one, 87 symbols appeared around the perimeter of the elongated table, with a Star Force symbol popping up in front of Davis. They all glowed, then shot a tiny blue beam towards the empty center where the glowing lines pooled together and formed a lumpy mass as the beams ended. That mass transformed into a new symbol that had an R with a large crescent above and capping it. Together, the two pieces were an R and a C, representing the name of this limited, war-time relationship.

“The Rim Consortium is hereby officially enacted. Now call for your military advisors to come to the war room,” he said with a snap of his fingers as the wall to the far right split and began to reveal a vast chamber with a large number of workstations and holographic maps. “I want to get to work immediately.”

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