Star Force: Dominance
Author: Aer-Ki Jyr
Date: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Archon Lore

Prologue

More than 120,000 years have passed and Star Force has grown to become the dominant force within the galaxy, even more powerful than the V’kit’no’sat, though to outsiders they are two parts of the same empire.

It took 67 years to defeat the lizards, though they were never completely eliminated. Always some ships would escape to set up shop elsewhere, and wherever they were found they had to be eradicated. They were a plague on the galaxy that would not completely go away, and to this day there are still a few out there surviving in the vastness of the galaxy trying to rebuild away from the eyes of the empire.

Star Force territory now stretches all around the galaxy, based off the completed Hula Hoop grid point network, with spurs running out towards the far rim that are continuing to be expanded upon. But even then, there are still vast tracks of unexplored space in the rim and much that Star Force has no control over, for even within its domain there are a multitude of systems and races that it does not control.

The Voku are one of those races, totally surrounded by Star Force territory now like many other civilizations, yet they have grown to be one of the stronger races with the Zak’de’ron quietly guiding them. The other wards that the Voku were charged with protecting have also grown, though not as far, but beyond those Star Force does not know how many other races the Zak’de’ron have in their thrall.

The return of the Zak’de’ron never occurred. Mak’to’ran’s coreward empire has recovered and grown, even without the rogue Oso’lon and J’gar civilizations that have completely forsaken that empire. They have been replaced by Oso’lon and J’gar factions within, grown from the few planets that remained loyal, but they are not dominant within the empire, for the Era’tran now reign supreme as the leading race within the V’kit’no’sat.

Under their guidance they have expanded, now occupying more than three times the number of worlds previously possessed, and have pushed the Hadarak border close to the deep core. The escalation of that war continued for some time until a courier escaped destruction and reported back to the Hadarak of the existence of the Harthur…at which point the Hadarak seemed not to care and diminished their patrols while augmenting them with pairings.

Whatever threat the Hadarak thought there had been quietly killing them had been disproven, so they’d gone back to their normal habits save for the pairing, which meant Mak’to’ran also had to go back to the normal warfare tactics, for Harthur were not applicable against two Hadarak simultaneously. The Hadarak had learned, so even when Mak’to’ran bought two Harthur to bear in the same system, it was almost impossible to pin both of them…and the one that was free would not run without the other, meaning it would come and destroy the Harthur pinning its companion, freeing it and forcing the blood-soaked conventional warfare the V’kit’no’sat had fought for millions of years to continue.

It was that constant attrition that kept the V’kit’no’sat from outgrowing Star Force, despite the fact that the rimward faction was engaged in nearly constant warfare itself…though against lesser opponents. The few major wars in the past were over, and no one now dared to challenge Star Force with their thousands of Uriti. All save 3 of the originals had been discovered and returned, meaning either two were still undiscovered or had been claimed by the Zak’de’ron along with Bulmuthal.

When Star Force had confronted the dragons about the theft of it from the Knights of Quenar, they basically had shrugged and said ‘finders keepers,’ which made many believe they also had the other two, but no one knows for certain. It was almost a moot point now, for while much smaller, Star Force now was able to produce more Uriti of its own, each a copy of the originals with some minor adjustments.

Gone was the Chixzon self-destruct programming from the new Uriti, though the originals could not be altered. Their genetics were protected against such alteration, and only when initially developing could one craft their genome. That mean the now much larger originals were at risk, but their offspring were not, though they still retained the necessary overrides to insure they didn’t accidentally destroy a planet or fleet if they had a temper tantrum, yet the new overrides were not ones the Chixzon could access, for the coding had been altered to prevent such interference.

But while the Zak’de’ron were nowhere to be seen, the Chixzon were everywhere. Never out in the open, but since the destruction of the lizards Star Force had been fighting a cold war against them with numerous battles against other enhanced races doing the Chixzon’s bidding. And it wasn’t just outright war, but backroom deals, negotiations, trade disputes, genetic and biological plagues…the Chixzon were working against Star Force at every turn, and the V’kit’no’sat as well, for Mak’to’ran had informed Davis of the many attempts to drive a wedge between the races and start another civil war, but the bonds Mak’to’ran had forged were holding solid and growing with time.

The Chixzon could not directly attack Star Force, and Star Force could not find them. They had gotten close many times, but their agents always managed to evade capture or detection, though the evidence of their manipulations were spread across the galaxy, and especially in the regions Star Force hadn’t yet pacified, but also in the gaps within the Star Force domain.

It was a long war, and one that hadn’t diminished one iota over time. The Chixzon were patient and persistent, but so far they hadn’t found a way to get at Star Force, though they and others had tried before. Once word spread of the Uriti’s ability to destroy planets an economic war was set in place against Star Force and its trading partners, but Star Force didn’t suffer for it. Davis had long dictated that Star Force systems had to be self-sufficient, so the economic warfare couldn’t damage them, but it did hurt their trading partners.

Many had to walk away from Star Force, but over the course of time they found their way back, and even some of the instigators finally saw the futility of the embargoes and revoked them, realizing they had more to gain from the trade than Star Force had to lose. After that point it was seen as hopeless to stop them, and even the eventual emergence of new Uriti, which enraged many across the galaxy, including the V’kit’no’sat, could not unseat Star Force, for no one could find a weakness to exploit, and even with a small Uriti accompanying a battle fleet there was no way to militarily defeat Star Force short of overwhelming numbers that could no longer be produced, for Star Force had simply grown too much to be outnumbered.

So the battles moved to the dark areas, the small worlds, the cracks in the Star Force empire. And it was there that Davis prosecuted his war against the Chixzon and others, for he knew well that the larger a civilization became the more difficult it was to maintain. And the greatest threat to Star Force was internal instability, which virtually all of Star Force’s opponents were trying to stoke whenever an opportunity arose.

Equally a threat, the ability to have so many worlds and so many people to hide events within the masses was something that worried Davis constantly. He had to have alert Star Force security forces who had their eyes and ears everywhere on their own planets, making sure someone didn’t stake out their own little turf inside Davis’s own cities, and now, after so many millennia of growth, Star Force security outnumbered the military that had fought during the V’kit’no’sat war, and still Davis was worried about what might be falling through the cracks.

There were always threats and worries, but on the whole Star Force was gobbling up the Rim and making more friends than enemies while doing it, and the Star Force military had grown into such a monster that almost no one could stand against their third tier troops, let alone the elite Knight races.

Whenever there was a war of conquest, it was the Knight races that would be called upon first, led by Archons and Mavericks that now numbered in the billions, yet for every one of them there were 12 systems owned or protected by Star Force, underscoring just how large their piece of the galaxy was and how rare the Archons and Mavericks still were.

Their numbers had grown greatly, as had their power, but their rarity put them in the position of being the Jedi of the galaxy, and they were just that revered and feared, but when it came to the warfare it was the Knight races that they led into battle, for they had been granted the psionics of the V’kit’no’sat as default, whereas the other races had to attain them by individual advancement. The tradeoff was that the Knight races had no civilians, and those that wished to leave their heritage duty had their psionics suppressed rather than removed, which many could not stand after living so many years with them.

Those that did leave formed their own worlds, loosely called the Cast-offs, that were part of Star Force, but the majority of those being born or hatched into the Knight races held to their duty, which was to be the first line of defense against invasion, and the first ones to seek out combat wherever it was deemed necessary. They were made up of the more advanced races, most of which had come from the V’kit’no’sat in the form of a few individuals here and there. Some of the races that did not voluntarily migrate to the rim Mak’to’ran had sent to Davis in the form of individuals sentenced for execution…who were given a choice of that fate or being exiled to Star Force.

Some chose death, but those that didn’t provided the eggs for Davis to add every single V’kit’no’sat race to Star Force save for the Les’i’kron, none of whom would allow the dishonor of leaving Itaru’s service. It was thought that was a side effect of the culling process when they’d been diminished and genetically engineered into service, but as for the rest of the original V’kit’no’sat races, all were now Knight races within Star Force, though Mak’to’ran had added several new ones since that Davis did not possess.

The Ziviri were one of them, though Star Force still had some of their own. They were not a Knight race, and the V’kit’no’sat had heavily upgraded them over time whereas Star Force had not, for Davis felt it was better to let a race prove itself before the enhancements rather than forcing them forward and hoping they accepted the mandate. The Meintre were a good example of a race who had earned their advancement, and they now stood as a Knight race along with a few others from outside the original V’kit’no’sat ranks, though none of the original Star Force races had ascended to that level other than the Kvash…and that was mostly because of Paul’s continuing pressure on them to break their stagnation. Once they did, their true potential showed through and Davis had been pleased to add them to the Knight ranks.

Star Force appeared to be unbeatable, as did the V’kit’no’sat, whom they were still separate from, but no longer had a quarrel with. In the lower levels of both empires they were seen as two sides of the same coin, with migration allowed in limited respects both ways and an enormous amount of trade occurring across the border where the Hula Hoop transportation network had been built. It was now the focal point of the galaxy, both rim and core, and Star Force held it tightly within their reigns.

Together, the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force now controlled most of the galaxy…but that control was an illusion, for there were too many systems and too many places for nefarious individuals and races to hide. While Star Force was working to diminish that number, they would never eliminate it entirely. Not when they allowed other civilizations to exist freely as long as they behaved themselves, and Davis wasn’t going to start invading planets simply because they were not part of Star Force.

But even if he did, he knew the galaxy was simply too vast to control, and the larger he grew his empire the harder it would be to maintain it. He had broken up Star Force territory into various Kingdoms and was relying on the other Monarchs and Archons/Mavericks to govern them, but they were few in number compared to the mass of worlds out there, and he couldn’t make the mistake of growing the empire too large too fast, especially when he had the Chixzon poking around for every weakness they could find to exploit.

Many things had changed since the V’kit’no’sat war, but neither Davis nor Mak’to’ran thought they were safe, and between the two of them they guessed that their enemies were working on some truly grandiose plan beyond simple invasion, now that both of them had grown strong enough to prevent that tactic from succeeding. So while the people in both their empires saw this as an era of stability and growth, the two leaders knew it to be otherwise.

The Zak’de’ron and Chixzon were waiting for something. What it was neither Davis nor Mak’to’ran could guess, nor did they know which one would strike first, but until then they would continue to grow the Rim and push into Hadarak territory as was their mutual responsibilities, but the more time that passed the more both became worried.

Something was going to happen. And the longer it took to come about, the bigger it would have to be in order to defeat them. But when that future day came to pass, no one would see it coming…

1

March 2, 128439

Grid Point Nenritor (Hula Hoop, Atavari Kingdom)

“Here you go,” Nari Imarti said, handing her boss/father a cylinder with various food cubes in it.

“Thank you,” he said as she sat down opposite him in a small booth on the edge of the starport’s café as they waited for their departure flight over to the grid ship that would make a magnetic jump off one of the nearby 3 massive constructs that had a string of installations between them, with this starport being just one grain of sand amongst the beach of infrastructure stretching between the huge rocks.

“I still can’t believe this,” Nari said, looking out the nearby ‘windows’ that were screens that showed the viewpoint of exterior cameras outside the starport’s layer of protective armor. The sea of various stations stretched as far as she could see with the nearest construct backdropping many of them, for it was as large as an entire planet. “How could anyone build something like this?”

“It’s Star Force,” Larson Degari said simply. “You get used to it after a few hundred years.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this. You said there are places even bigger?”

“Some of the grid point have more than 3 constructs, but it’s more about the traffic flow. The more business to be done, the more accompanying stations. Even the nearest star system is full of people benefiting from this transit point, and the next few systems beyond that. Each point on the Hula Hoop has a massive population and business footprint…and I’m sorry to say we’re not qualified to operate here. The leasing costs would put us out of business.”

“Really?” his 27 year old daughter asked. Up until 11 months ago he’d never met her, or vice versa, but when she’d graduated from the maturia he’d put in for an identification request. That meant Nari had gotten a message telling her that her biological parent or parents wanted to meet her. If she declined they would never know who she was, but Nari had said yes and Larson had immediately arranged to travel to the world where she was first assigned quarters as a civilian.

“I’m afraid so. These are the big players here. As rich as we are, we have to work hard to have a presence in the medium scale locations, but most of our activities are on the newer worlds where there is much more opportunity. They don’t have the traffic flow, but there’s a lot of wealth to be made within Star Force territory if you know where to look for it. And their fees are reasonable, even here, strange as that may sound.”

“Competition?” Nari asked as she distractedly watched a rather large Bsidd transport drift by the window.

“Value. The speed that the Grid Point system allows saves so much fuel and time that it’s worth the costs of operating here. We ship a few things, besides people, through it, but most of our operations are outside the Prime Zone, so we have to use conventional gravity drives.”

“Prime Zone is what you call the area around the Grid Points?” she asked, still trying to assimilate all the knowledge her father kept throwing at her, now that she had become his personal assistant overseeing a corporation that had more than 2 million employees spread across more than 350 star systems.

“It’s not an official term, but the commerce build up at the grid points and their companion systems, and the adjacent systems that have seen a spillover of infrastructure are all high value turf. When you do business, you go where the customers are…and as you can see,” he said, gesturing to the window, “there are so many people moving through these locations the customers literally come to you. There’s actually a shortage of resources here, meaning prices go up, up, up.”

Nari frowned. “A shortage?”

“Well not here. This is a Star Force starport and they maintain a stable supply grid. But the stations out there that are not Star Force operated have to get stuff shipped in, and that’s fine for the rare, small stuff, but the larger basic building materials take up volume and mass that is too damn expensive to ship on the grid point system itself. So they have to get it from the nearby star systems…which is why they also get rich…but even then it’s expensive because there are no planets here to draw resources from, so everything has to be shipped in. Do you understand the significance of that?”

“No, I don’t. We only had basic economics in the maturia.”

“I know. The maturia doesn’t teach you much unless you go in for the higher level stuff that’s optional, but even then it’s not the same thing as experiencing it firsthand, because people don’t always behave as you expect them to, and business is all about dealing with people. At last count there were 2.3 million races in Star Force’s economic catalog, and they each have their own intricacies. Then add in the personal ones and you have an environment that cannot be predicted. You have to feel it out as you go. That can’t be taught in a maturia.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to take the higher programs?”

“You said you didn’t want to.”

“I know, but why didn’t you insist I did before hiring me?”

“I want you with me. And Star Force can’t teach you about our business, so I figure you’ll learn more relevant stuff this way, but you’re free to go back and take a maturia program whenever you want.”

“No thanks. It’s too high strung for me. They don’t let you have any free time.”

“I know. Your mother felt the same way.”

“You said you met her in the maturia?”

“She was my sister,” he said, referencing the maturia classes that operated as family from birth, though they had no biological connection other than their race. “We’d been together forever,” he said, getting a bit misty eyed.

“I never hooked up with any of my brothers.”

“Never?”

“No. We just didn’t see eye to eye on anything.”

“Really?”

“They wanted to go into Star Force service and I didn’t. I was the only one that didn’t.”

“Most of them won’t stay in it. Less than 1% of all people in Star Force end up in service past the age of 100. A lot try it, but they end up preferring less stressful civilian life or the challenge of making money on their own. Service doesn’t get you rich. It gets you responsibilities. I prefer money.”

“You’re responsible for your corporation, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I choose who’s in it. Star Force has to be responsible for everyone born into it. That’s not a job I want. I like to pick and choose.”

“Like me?”

“I chose well, Nari. You’re very much like your mother, except that nose,” he said, tapping his own with a smile. “You’re also curious like us. I’m glad you’re here. I need you, badly.”

“Is there a problem?”

“I need someone I can trust to do it my way, and we think alike. More so than any other employee I have. Plus they come and go. I need someone who will stay around, and I think you will.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not going anywhere. You’re the only person in the galaxy that understands me.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Larson said, popping one of the smaller food cubes into his mouth and chewing hard. It was mint flavored, not one of his personal favorites, but the cylinder was a mixed bag, so you got what you got. He could have ordered more high end food cubes and other items, but he was perfectly content with the freebies Star Force handed out here. No sense in wasting extra credits on luxuries when magjump travel was so damn expensive to begin with.

A monthor walked by their booth, then sat down in another two spots ahead of Nari with its hairy mass nearly eclipsing the bench it sat on, but the tray of food cubes was identical to the one the two Humans had…except there were far more canisters on the alien’s tray.

“Do they all speak English?” she whispered.

“It’s the language of the Rim, and V’kit’no’sat is the language of the Core. If you operate inside Star Force territory, it’s expected you know it. Some of our trading partners on the frontier don’t, which is why we have to have linguists troubleshoot the shortfalls in the translation programs. The Star Force scouts get a decent feel for them, but they don’t spend a lot of time figuring out the intricacies. They’re more interested in providing a base from which to teach English to those who speak other languages rather than mastering theirs.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“Why would it be? If someone told you that you had to learn something different, would you want to?”

“No, but with 2.3 million races you can’t learn every language. Having just one makes sense, unless you don’t want to facilitate communication.”

Larson smiled, for Nari has passed his little test to see if she was agreeing with him or just echoing everything he said.

“Quite right, but you also have to realize that some planets don’t want outside contact, for the most part, and their interactions are limited to a few spaceports. When we work there, we learn their language and speak it as a courtesy. If we’re not very good at it we use the translators, but a lot of our clients prefer the personal touch. It’s gotten us a number of contracts over larger and better financed corporations.”

“Interesting,” Nari said, chewing food cubes at a rapid pace in between words whereas Larson was taking his time. That was another symptom of maturia training. You were always in a rush and trying to cram in as much work, or in this case, food, into the minimum amount of time possible. It was a trait that Nari would lose in time, but less than a year out of the maturia wasn’t enough to shed most of its habits.  “They really don’t want to interact with the galaxy?”

“Star Force is rather unique in that regard, and brings a lot of people together. Others would not do things the same way. Take the V’kit’no’sat. Their borders are closed to civilian traffic, at least those without permission. They have select trade deals with some of the truly huge corporations, but most of their commerce is through Star Force itself, and they don’t care to interact with the ‘lesser’ races in the Rim.”

“Lesser?”

“Frankly they’re snobs, and I wouldn’t do business with them even if I had the chance. There’s also still some bad blood between them and Star Force that I don’t want to get between, but some will risk it. Especially for a few V’kit’no’sat trinkets not available out here.”

Something out the window drew Nari’s attention as she sipped her blue drink, enough so that she half choked and spilled some on her thin shirt.

“Blast it,” she said, swiping away what she could and thankfully avoiding a stain thanks to the synthetic fabric.

“What?” Larson asked, glancing out the window at the hundreds of things visible.

“That’s a Knight ship, isn’t it?” she said, pointing to the far left as it was entering view.

“Good eye. It is. And a magjump ship at that. They must be transiting between constructs.”

“They have their own grid ships?”

Larson nodded. “They can’t wait to hop a carrier, so they’ve got their own transit fleet,” he said, referencing the pyramid-shaped vessel that had a very elongated peak that doubled as a bow, making it look like a fat obelisk. “There’s probably 20-30 warships inside.”

“Can you tell which it is?”

“Hold on,” he said, using a small console on the table to bring up a hologram between them that mirrored the window view…except that he was able to zoom in until the Knight ship filled the screen. The dark hull had a green twinge to it, which was typical of Star Force’s advanced Tu’gor armor that the Knight vessels had, and all of their grid ships were covered in the stuff to ensure they couldn’t be destroyed in a quick ambush or by debris when traveling through space at magjump speeds higher than civilian transports were capable of.

“There,” he said, zooming in even further to a symbol on the side of the pyramid that was nearly a mile wide, but appeared tiny on the massive 268 mile long ship. “Do you recognize that shape?”

“It looks familiar, but no, I can’t place it.”

“It’s Bez. Star Force Bez. V’kit’no’sat races have similar icons, and Star Force modified them all to differentiate between the two. That’s a Bez Knight ship…and actually, there’s more than one. Looks like a convoy,” he said as he zoomed back out and rotated the camera angle around to see a long train of pyramids creeping through the dense traffic field with smaller ships zipping in and around them but staying respectfully out of the way within a decent perimeter.

“Why do they get the best ships?”

“They’re the first line of defense, and the ones going out into the deep frontier to look for problems to solve. I’m afraid you’ve been isolated from the truth being in a maturia,” he said looking her squarely in the eyes. “The galaxy is a very dark, horrific place outside of Star Force territory. And Star Force doesn’t accept that. They’re constantly pushing the borders out and civilizing the frontier, but the galaxy is huge and there’s no end to the threats out there.”

“What threats?”

“Nothing that can take down Star Force on the whole, but threats that can kill people just the same. And there are people out there born into those dark worlds with no knowledge of Star Force. Be grateful you were born here. Some of the things you will see out there will scare you shitless.”

Nari frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Oh…just a crude description of something that happens to some people. It’s never happened to me, but I’ve been close. Never mind about that. Just look at those Knight ships and remember, they’re going out to fight wars to free people from the darkness. Not to bring them back here, but to extend Star Force out to them, and the threats don’t like it. Make no mistake, those Knights are going into harm’s way, and that’s why they need the best ships.”

“But those ships don’t leave the Grid Point system.”

“True, but any delay means more people out there die, so they have to move fast when a mission is assigned. I’m not sure how it all works, but I know they don’t waste time and those grid ships are damn necessary, so they can’t risk losing them.”

“But who could damage them on the grid?”

“It’s rare, but sometimes there is debris between the stars. There have been cases where magjump ships simply don’t arrive, and it’s speculated that they ran into something.”

“I’ve never heard that.”

“Doesn’t happen much now, but in the past it did. The shields absorb most of the impacts, but the faster you go and the larger the object gets…well, physics will eventually get the best of you, and the Knight ships are designed to travel the grid much faster, so they’re in more harm’s way. Something the size of this,” he said, holding up a single food cube, “can destroy a ship without shielding because of the speeds involved.”

“Wouldn’t it just punch right through?”

“Yes, but it will spray debris along the way that will hollow out a cone that vaporizes everything in its path. And if systems are damaged, like fuel storage…boom.”

“What happens to the pieces?”

“They drift off the jumpline and miss the grid points…hopefully.”

“We were never taught that.”

“Pulse purges are performed on the jumplines at regular intervals. It’s a pain in the ass when they do them, because it has to be shut down for a few hours as the cone widens on its way out, but it tends to push away the little trash and highlight the big ones. If you see a travel delay noted, sometimes it’s because a big piece is floating through the corridor and the jumps are scheduled to let it move through.”

“Ugh…there’s so much I don’t know.”

“There’s a lot I don’t know, Nari. There’s too much to know it all. We just learn as we go and we pick up things. Over my 528 years I’ve picked up a lot. You haven’t had time to yet, but stick with me and I’ll get you there faster than most.”

Nari smiled. “I have no doubt about that.”

Larson returned the smile, then the view on the hologram suspended between them caused him to frown.

“What?”

“That’s not just a convoy,” he said, looking at the Knight ships. “There’s more than 100 of them.”

“100 grid ships?” she asked in awe.

“At least. That’s not normal, Nari. They’re either moving assets around or this is a war fleet heading across the galaxy.”

“How do you know it’s across the galaxy?”

“They’re on the Hula Hoop. If it was local they’d go straight there. If it’s around the curve of the galaxy, they come to the Hoop to get there faster than going around or cutting through V’kit’no’sat territory. They don’t have grid points. Only Star Force does and for some reason they haven’t shared.”

“Any idea where they are going?”

“No, but if it is a warfleet and not some scheduled rotation…which it might be, I’m not an expert on the Knight races…but if it is a warfleet, I’d bet they’ve found some larger than normal threat out there that needs pounding, and that’s one hell of a hammer they’re bringing.”

“That is so cool.”

“War isn’t cool, Nari. It’s ugly, even when Star Force fights it with stun weapons and takes everyone alive. Hopefully you never have to see it.”

“You have?”

“A little. I’ve been out on the frontier ahead of Star Force a few times. And when they come in and clean out a system it’s a major improvement, because whoever ticked them off had to be doing some very bad things. But the cleaning out process is ugly, because the bad guys don’t go down willingly.”

“And that’s not cool?”

“It’s serious, and necessary, but not cool. It’s downright terrifying.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes you wonder what the galaxy would be like without Star Force…and nothing gives me more nightmares than that casual thought. You’ll see, someday, and I don’t envy you that learning experience.”

“It’s that bad out there?”

“Worse,” he said, looking at the Knight ships now drifting by the starport with decent speed. “That’s why we won’t go very far out into the frontier. The deeper you go, the worse it gets, and only Knights or very stupid civilians go that far out.”

2

April 12, 128439

Quitassna System (Opaty territory)

Vinanakva

“They’re refusing to surrender,” a Calavari Knight standing at the comms station on the bridge of the Bez command ship announced. “In fact, they gave a very eloquent explanation of how we should go fuck ourselves.”

“At least they responded,” Chavarri, the Bez fleet commander, said. “Most don’t. Alright, let’s get this done. They’ve been warned. Now we fight.”

With a telepathic ping he signaled the entire bridge crew to bring the ship to battle stations as Chavarri signaled the other warships via the battlemap system that he was mentally linked into from the soft pedestal that he stood on. The Bez was the size of an Era’tran, but had a distinctive fin running high over his back that contained an array of psionic tissue, most notably Jumat, that gave them a far different ground combat profile than their ‘cousin’ race.

There were only three Bez on the bridge, with the other 52 personnel being smaller races indentured to the Bez as Esquires. These were the evolution of the original Knights, who focused on hand to hand combat and were a notch above the regular Commando. Now the term ‘Knight’ was reserved for those who sought out combat rather than waiting in defense, and applied to both the Knight races and the individuals from other races who volunteered for such duty.

The individuals had two choices if they wanted front line duty…join a Clan, if they were good enough, or serve one of the Knight races in their missions. The Esquires were also referred to as Knights, but the ‘Esquire’ title denoted that they had chosen this life rather than being born into it…whereas the Knight races were born into that duty and had to choose to leave it.

Most of the Esquires were the smaller races, but not all. There were a few larger ones too, but none in this fleet that was tasked with subjugating this Opaty system. No combat had occurred during entry, with the enemy fleet holding tight to low planetary orbit where the ground defenses could assist them in the combat to come. The Bez had laid down the terms for their surrender, but it appeared that the Opaty were going to fight to the death like the rest of their civilization in other systems.

Their race was an empire that held many other races as various types of servants, some of which were rather primitive and used for ritual sacrifices. As soon as Star Force found this out the Knights were tasked with ending their empire, and combat had been occurring over the past 8 years in a multitude of systems. The Opaty could not stop the invasions, yet they still refused to negotiate or surrender. Many of them were being taken prisoner with stun weapons, and the Bez intended to do so here as well, but they had to get through their defense fleet and penetrate the planetary shields before they could start capturing the population.

But this wasn’t going to be an easy fight. The Opaty had been a fairly advanced race in previous millennia, but they’d grown considerably as of late and Chixzon intervention had already been confirmed. They were trying to throw up yet another roadblock to Star Force, and the insistence of the Opaty to fight to the death and do as much damage as possible to the Knights probably had something to do with the wishes of their clandestine masters.

Chavarri had no Uriti in his fleet, for this wasn’t that large of a target, but he was going to lose a lot of drones getting through the mess ahead, for the planetary defense weaponry was showing more cannons than scouting reports had previously revealed, all of which were now rising up from hidden bunkers across the planet.

The Bez fully immersed himself in the battlemap system, and with his Sav psionic upgrade he could feel his entire fleet as the warships disgorged their hives of smaller drones, all of which were perfect cubes. The other militaries within Star Force had their own shapes, but the Knight races all had cubes, which was the second best geometry available after a sphere, but the spheres didn’t pack well into ships and left a lot of empty space between them. The cubes packed tight, as did the other geometric shapes, and had both advantages and disadvantages over the other designs.

They didn’t have a front or back, and could defend evenly against all angles of attack, but that was also a disadvantage when a flat rectangle could come in with its smallest side towards the enemy. A cube didn’t have a smaller side to use, but then again it didn’t have a larger side than the enemy could flank either.

Seeing the swarm of medium-sized vessels arrayed against them, Chavarri ordered his fleet pilots to combine the drones into clusters, physically interlocking and sharing shields, power, and more importantly putting physical mass in between them and some of the soon to be incoming fire. They linked up in a variety of formations, but most were spear shaped and had a body 3 wide by 3 tall, meaning the inside row was completely protected from the outside.

Those spears were sent forward ahead of the bulk of the drone hive, which was still in singles. The Bez commander also ordered the warships to move forward with them, for they wouldn’t be in significant danger given the technology gap, and their weaponry would help break through the opposing fleet quicker and get a hole in the planetary shields established so the drones could fly down and begin picking off the planetary defense cannons from close range.

As for the spear formations, they took the first incoming fire from both the fleet and the planet as they raced towards the Opaty ships, with their combined shields holding up almost all the way there before some of the cubes got hit and blown off the formations…but the rest remained intact as they got within pointblank range of the Opaty fleet, where they then broke apart into singles and began to attack on individual vectors, some of which put them in between ships and forced the Opaty to risk shooting their own vessels with rare misses.

However, the drones also had deflection shields that could bounce the energy attacks against them slightly, redirecting them into the ships directly behind them, meaning the Opaty had to get direct hits in order to make them fully stick, and the drones were moving around a lot in order to make it harder for the enemy gunners to do just that.

But with computer controlled weapons, most naval combat in this day and age didn’t see misses…especially with ships that were miles long. The drones were all under a mile and small in comparison, but without the deflection shields the enemy would not have been missing many shots at this close range.

Once the spears broke up and began to engage, the rest of the hive moved forward and joined in the assault with the warships interspersed amongst them. Those larger ships were what drew the attention of the ground-based weaponry…which was a mistake, for they could soak up a lot of shots that otherwise would have been killing the smaller drones. It was a common misjudgement in naval warfare to shoot the biggest, most appealing targets, but if you couldn’t actually kill them then you were wasting shots, and the Bez knew when to pull back just before their warships’ shields went down, thus depriving the Opaty of doing even a small amount of hull damage.

The fight went on for over an hour before the fleet was broken, then the bombardment of the shield began as the planetary defenses continued to pound the Star Force fleet. If they’d brought a Uriti with them it would have been much simpler to get through the shields, but all were currently occupied or too far away to call on, so this had to be an old school planetary invasion, though with a few new toys to help.

One of those was a shield buster, which wasn’t a warship or a transport…the latter of which were holding back out of firing range while the warships and drones did their thing…but it was a ship with one purpose, and one purpose only. Carry a big fat gun to batter down the shields of fixed targets.

This one carried a small Tar’vem’jic, and once the Opaty fleet was destroyed it was deployed to firing range just beyond the maximum range of the planetary defenses. Then it began adding its heavy hits along with the rest of the fleet as they poked down a section of the shield to the point where it snapped…then blinked back into place as the recharge rate kicked in.

Open, shut, open, shut. That’s how it went until some firepower got through the gaps and hit the shield generator below. Once it went down the gaps got longer, but there was still no clear window, for the Opaty had overlapped their generators so the loss of one wouldn’t open up a permanent hole. It took more pounding and shooting through the gaps before two more generators fell, then a small hole formed, and through that hole went the drones that then began eating away at the cannons and other shield generators now that they couldn’t hide behind their primary defense shield.

The Bez fleet retreated back up and out of range while the Tar’vem’jic continued to add some low power shots at precise points, but it was mostly the hive of drones that carried out the subsequent strikes, and when they’d cleared out a decent area and expanded on the hole in the shields, it was time to bring the transports down to either the surface or low orbit, depending on the type, and begin offloading the mass of Bez and their Esquire Knights to handle the face to face fighting that would end with the capture of the majority of the population and add yet another planet to Star Force’s holdings.

That planet appeared as an updated dot on Davis’s master empire map back on Earth weeks later, alerting him to a change in status once the information made its way across the galaxy through the relay grid. The Director noted the change and briefly analyzed the data packet accompanying it, seeing nothing out of the ordinary that would require his attention. Just another day of good work being done on the frontier, rescuing people from a barbaric civilization and giving the individuals trapped within it a chance at a real life.

The prisoners would be put into indoctrination facilities soon to be built on the planet by an army of Calavari already on the way there. The Opaty would then have a choice…learn from their mistakes and regain their individual freedom, or hold to their barbarism and remain in prison until such time they changed their minds or died, with the accompanying training facilities offering them the possibility of obtaining self-sufficiency if they tried. Which meant those truly stubborn ones could be imprisoned in perpetuity, and there was a fairly long track record of individuals in that situation that had eventually shifted after more than a century in captivity.

Davis doubted the Opaty would be any different, but you never knew until you faced that situation what one individual or race would do, but Davis had people to troubleshoot that without his getting involved and he trusted them to do what was necessary…as well as having the wisdom to ask for help if they did find a situation where they couldn’t get a handle on it.

No such requests or notations were accompanying this update, which Davis reviewed at lightning speed through the mental interface. He’d eeked his way up to Piccolo 234 in the Archon ranks, but he’d long had Sav before that, along with every other psionic and upgrade that he wanted. He wasn’t active enough to warrant a Saiyan biology, but he’d devoted enough time to develop some of the Essence skillset while he oversaw the juggernaut of an empire he’d created.

It never ended. No matter how big it grew, there was always something else that had to be done. Star Force territory now ringed the galaxy, but there were vast tracks of it that Star Force hadn’t even touched. In those threats remained…and within as well. The Chixzon were out there, and probably not keeping beyond the frontier border. They were within as well, lurking amongst the independent races dotting the interior of Davis’s domain. The big question was whether or not they were on Star Force worlds themselves, though that would have been difficult to accomplish, but not impossible.

Sensors across the empire were calibrated to their genetic code, and if they caught even a whiff of it Davis would get a direct message. So far none had ever been detected aside from where Nefron went, and it continually worried Davis that the Chixzon were so good at evading him. How had the Ancients destroyed them all so long ago? Were they overconfident and now, facing their failure, being far more cautious?

He didn’t think so, and he really wished he had more data on the previous fall of the Chixzon, but what he had learned since indicated that the great races that had become known as the Ancients had been sabotaged after their costly victory. It wasn’t just instability, but an active hand in their undoing. It was thought that the Chixzon had established agents that would enact various pre-planned campaigns in the event of their defeat, but sometimes Davis wondered if some of the Chixzon hadn’t survived all this time.

But that didn’t add up. As near as he could determine, they’d only been active in the galaxy for about 150,000 years. Now that he knew where to look, he could backtrack evidence of their ‘touch’ on many races and civilizations, and what he’d gathered told him that they truly had been gone, then come back, meaning that they had taken their vengeance on the Ancients through some other means.

Then there was the Zak’de’ron, who had been very quiet over the millennia. They’d been surprised at the resolution to the V’kit’no’sat war, and not all too happy with it. Whether or not they’d extend their ‘grace’ upon the V’kit’no’sat races in Star Force or not hadn’t been covered, but at this point it didn’t matter. Star Force wasn’t taking orders from anyone at this point, and if the Zak’de’ron wanted to move against Star Force they’d pay the price for it.

The missing Uriti was concerning, but with the fleet of new Uriti slowly growing to size the missing 3 weren’t a huge threat to Star Force. A surprise attack against a few systems would be costly, but once the Uriti fleet got moving they couldn’t hide and the rogue Uriti would either be killed or confiscated, so he wasn’t sure what the Zak’de’ron’s long term plans were. He was worried about them too, but in some ways he felt the Chixzon were the greater threat.

Davis sighed and leaned back in his office chair, looking out the panoramic windows at the Pacific Ocean beyond the rebuild Atlantis. His office was in the exact same position as it had once been, and the city wasn’t much bigger either, though this one had the capability of lifting off and moving if needed. It even doubled as a space ship, though not a very good one, and could move around Earth orbit or even out to the other planets at a slow clip, but Davis had never used it for that. It was just a backup capability that would allow it to move inside the planetary shields if someone wanted to bombard them directly over the city.

But good luck getting through the shields. They were 109 layers deep, each of which was far stronger than the original shield covering Earth when it first fell. Earth was a fortress world now, but one with low population. More of a resort world for the Star Force elite than a major population center, it was still the functional capitol of the empire and setting foot on the surface was a major accomplishment for most people, for there was no tourism allowed.

It was home to Davis, but it felt empty. Those he considered to be ‘family’ were gone, spread across the galaxy overseeing the empire and leaving the Solar System familiar, but hollow. He hadn’t seen his closest associates in a very long time, and even Wilson, who had been by his side constantly in the early years making sure he didn’t succumb to old age, was gone to his own personal training system for the Archons and Mavericks. That was his home now, which left Davis feeling very old and alone despite his physical youth.

It was quiet here, and Davis knew that was a problem if he let himself get complacent. The war being fought now was a quiet one, with the victories and defeats occurring in small measure here and there. It appeared like he was winning, but he felt otherwise. Something was going to happen, and the longer he didn’t figure it out the more he worried. The Chixzon and the Zak’de’ron were not two races that admitted defeat. They had to dominate, and they would never accept a subservient positon in the galaxy.

Right now it was the twin empires that ruled, Star Force in the Rim and the V’kit’no’sat in the Core while the true power of the Hadarak slept in the deep core, dismissively ignoring the two empires as insignificant. If something happened there it would be the V’kit’no’sat who took the hit long before they ever got to the Rim, so he wasn’t concerned about them.

No, there was something brewing. He could feel it in his bones while everyone else felt things were fine. It was just that type of an environment he’d use to his advantage if he were in the Chixzon’s position and had their lack of morality.

Davis stood up and took a lap around his office, eventually ending at his desk again but standing and looking out the window instead, seeing the cityscape far below his tower office that eventually ended at the blue wall of the ocean beyond with waves so small they barely registered to his enhanced vision.

“You’ve let me set the chess board as I liked. So what do you know that I don’t?” he whispered. “What am I missing?”

The answer wouldn’t come to him today, nor tomorrow, but the Director would never let it go. He had to see ahead while others focused on the here and now. That was his job, one among many, and his family was depending on him to catch as many threats on the horizon that he could before they manifested themselves, but this one continued to elude him.

But it was there. The feeling would not go away, and Davis felt that the more time went by the worse the situation was actually getting. The Chixzon should have acted by now. The Zak’de’ron should have acted by now. Why hadn’t they? What long term plan were they pursuing?

“Come on, Sean. Figure this out. If you wait until they tell you, it’ll probably be too late.”

3

April 23, 128439

Jaroon System (Terraxia Kingdom)

Mid stellar orbit

Jessica Parval sat in a waiting room on the space station alone. She’d arrived on a dropship from the planet of Dforan and had been nervous to the point of shaking ever since. This was the personal residence/ship of Starchaser and even setting foot onboard it was an insane honor. The fact that Mina Delari herself had requested that Jessica come was still something she couldn’t quite fully contemplate. She’d submitted her application, along with probably billions of other singers, but the idea that she might actually get an interview was…well, it shouldn’t have happened, but here she was.

The ship/station was huge. More than 30 miles long and capable of traveling around the system under its own power if need be, but it rarely moved from its parking orbit that was off limits to other traffic. It was in a band of stations owned by individuals who wanted their privacy, and within Star Force where everyone lived in cities built by Star Force and leased out facilities, the only way you could get any sort of ‘land’ of your own was to build a ship or station.

You could lease a large structure on a planet and build the inside as you liked, but there was no option of buying a tract of land and putting what you wanted on it. You couldn’t even construct a building within the cities. Star Force built everything the way they liked and let the civilians operate out of that structure, meaning those that had the credits to do more had to go to space and essentially construct their own ‘land’ in order to gain the privacy they wished for.

While Star Force was heavily populated, it wasn’t too bad. Jessica had gotten used to walking amongst crowds within cities, and when she retreated back to her private quarters she had them to herself. That was where she could disappear and get away from everyone, but if you left your quarters you just had to accept living amongst strangers. Some people didn’t want to, and this section of the Jaroon System had been reserved for private slots that the normal traffic lanes were routed around. Jessica’s dropship had to get special permission even to approach, and only those living within the zone could offer those passes.

The station she sat on now was so far from the others that you couldn’t see them, for space was huge and even a little bit of it on a system map was very widely spaced. So Starchaser had her own little realm out here in the form of this ship/station and no one else in sight to contest with. Even the nearby planets were only small dots of light in the sky. It felt lonely to Jessica, but a holy loneliness. So few people had ever been here she felt immensely honored just to have been given permission to sit in the waiting room.

Starchaser was a legend in the music industry. 125,000 years old, she had toured the galaxy many times over then disappeared for long tracts of time, only to resurface again at a random point later. Her fan base found this to be both annoying and enigmatic, and when the call for backup signers had gone out, Jessica had submitted her application with all the others…but for some reason she had been picked to make the interview process. Meaning she was about to meet Starchaser in person.

Jessica’s knees started to knock together, so she put her hands on them to steady her jitteriness. She couldn’t face her like this. No matter how nervous she was, she had to compose herself. This was the chance of a lifetime, and she’d never forgive herself is she ended up acting like an idiot when the moment came.

A nearby door swished open and Jessica jumped, seeing a man enter and smile at her. She sat back down as he gave her a knowing look.

“Relax. You’re not the first person to be nervous meeting Mina.”

“Is she ready for me?”

“Yes, but I need to prepare you for a few things first.”

“Like what?”

“Mina has the habit of not wearing clothes. Not just on stage, but here as well. Some people find that upsetting, but to her it’s just normal. If you know that going in you’ll act less skittish. Also, don’t try to predict what she’ll ask or want. Just be yourself. Mina has been around long enough to see through liars, so just be honest.”

“Ok. Anything else?”

“Some people find the ship disturbing because it’s so empty. There’s only a crew of 278 onboard. Mina wants privacy, so most of the ship is hers to roam around. She’s in the gardens now. That’s where she will meet you. Follow this tracker and it’ll take you right to her,” the man said, handing Jessica a small orb. “Do you know how to use it?”

She pressed the button and it floated up to hover just in front of her head, then painted a holographic trail of dots in front of her directing her which way to go.

“I see you do,” the man said. “Off with you then. And good luck.”

“Thanks,” Jessica said, walking out the door in a hurry and following the path as it materialized one dot at a time as she walked, gobbling them up with her body as she passed through them. The tracker floated just ahead of her and led her on a wild path through the ship. Jessica only passed two people as she spent more than 20 minutes traveling through the ship, including 3 different lift cars, until she got to the entrance to the gardens.

“Wow,” she whispered as she passed through a force field and immediately felt the heat and humidity ratchet up as she stepped onto a stone slab that looked out and down into a valley full of rock, water, and greenery. Jessica could have sworn she was on a planet, but this was all inside the space station, though she couldn’t have known that from the view, for the sky looked real, as did the overhead sun that did not match the one in the Jaroon System.

The tracker was pointing her to a nearby dirt path that led down the grass-covered slope into the forest below, so Jessica took off at a slight jog, not wanting to make Starchaser wait. She had to navigate through a maze of crisscrossing trails that were so confusing she would have gotten lost without the tracker, but it knew the way and she just followed the dots until she came to a hidden courtyard made of stone with a square pool in the center next to a grey statue of an Archon in full armor that stood some 15 meters high…tall enough to look over the nearby hedgerows.

And at the base of that statue was a nude Human female laying back on the Archon’s boot as she was soaking in the intense sunlight that was directly overhead.

“Uh…hello?” Jessica asked meekly, not sure if she should disturb her or not.

The woman tilted her head up and smiled, rolling forward with a cascade of long, thin, blonde hair following her. “You must be Jessica.”

“Yes,” was all she could manage to utter.

“Frozen stiff, huh?” she asked as she walked up to the slightly taller women. “Typical. It’ll wear off in a moment. I still don’t see what’s so impressive about me. I’m just popular, that’s all. You’re probably reacting to the legend more than the person, so try and see the girl in front of you and not the hype.”

“I’m sorry,” Jessica apologized, glancing at the ground. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

“You’re not. You’re star struck,” Mina pointed out. “Let’s walk. The activity will help you get your spine back,” she said, pointing to one of many gaps in the hedgerows that led to the maze of trails.

“Sure,” Jessica said, with Mina grabbing her by the arm when she didn’t move fast enough and locked it with hers so they stayed side by side. “How many people are you interviewing?”

“A question? That’s good. Most people don’t get that far for at least 10 to 15 minutes. I’ve picked out a handful of people to look at. I’ve got plenty to choose from, but your private entourage needs to be more than fans. They need to become family, and I’m choosey about my family.”

“Why me then?”

“It’s not your voice…well, I mean it is but there are millions of people out there that can sing as good as you or me. I’m not much better than you, just more experienced. Your voice is solid, otherwise you wouldn’t even be considered, but I need more than your voice. I need personality. Do you know why?”

“You travel with people, so they need to mesh with you, I guess.”

“True enough, but as far as the music goes, why?”

“I guess my voice harmonizes with yours?”

“No,” Mina said with an old smile, for this was a conversation she’d had thousands of times before. “You need to realize that I’m not rich because I’m the best singer in the galaxy. I’m not. There are many people that can do more vocally than I can. And don’t even get me started on the other races. The Bsidd totally blow Humans out of the water. Their range makes me feel like a newb. No. What I am is a singer who entertains. And you are here to help me with the entertainment. Now, can you guess how?”

“Um. No,” she said honestly, but with a cringe.

“I don’t like to use recordings, so if I need multiple voices they can’t all be mine overlaid. But more than that, I need people for comparison sake. Me alone on stage works, but its far less interesting than if I can interact with others. A concert isn’t so much about singing as it is an experience, and people need to be enthralled. If they don’t leave with a buzz, you didn’t do your job.”

“Is that why you don’t wear clothes?”

“For them, yes. But being naked is nothing new. Lots of people are naked, so you gotta give them something else. For me it’s about connectivity. Not hiding anything from them. They get to see the real me…or so they think.”

“A hologram?” Jessica asked, a bit disappointed.

“No, no, it’s really me out there on stage. I meant that you can be naked in public but still closed off to people. And you can wear clothes and still be exposed. Do you know how?”

“Emotionally?”

“That’s a simplistic, yet essentially accurate answer,” she said as they turned another corner in the hedge maze and suddenly found a staircase made of stone dropping them a few meters underground. “Emotions are your current mode. They reflect your state rather than being your state,” she explained as they passed through a tunnel of small waterfalls trickling down the stone walls that were bracketing them and lit with small glowing pebbles scattered erratically on the floor. Jessica had to watch her step not to trip, but Starchaser’s bare feet seemed to glide over them with ease.

“You can have all kinds of armor. Physical is the most obvious. Emotional is another. But a third is vision. You can dull your vision without realizing it as a countermeasure to other people getting too close. That’s why I live alone. So I can really expose myself to my surroundings without having to be defensive. It’s a much better way to live, and you can’t do that inside a city as much as you might think.”

“Groppers?” Jessica asked.

Starchaser laughed. “That’s just part of life. The thing is, when someone pats you on the butt when you walk by, they think they’re the only one to do that all day, so it’s no big deal. They don’t realize it’s already happened 12 times in the last 5 minutes and it’s getting annoying. So they’re not the villains as your tone suggests. And don’t tell me you’ve never intentionally bumped into an attractive guy to grab a quick feel.”

“I don’t do that…much,” she admitted, remembering what the man had said about being honest.

“It’s harmless, and just a part of living in a community. If you see it coming you can swat them away…and that’s also part of the game. It’s just a game. But you’re right that I don’t have to worry about that here.”

“It’s not always a game when they do it hard,” Jessica lightly argued.

“So you do have a backbone…good. Yes, there will always be jerks, but most taps are a compliment. The others…well, that’s why you have fists. If you’re of a mindset that your body is a temple that no one should touch without permission then you’re an idiot who should stay in your quarters round the clock. When you’re out amongst people, physical contact is going to happen, and saying parts of your body are off limits is juvenile.”

“You really don’t mind people touching you?”

“You get used to it, like all new things. Sexuality has to be tuned. If you avoid it then it can twist into some very nasty things. And you can’t tune it if you don’t have interaction. It takes two, you know. One is not enough, because procing off of imagination doesn’t allow you to calibrate. You need real experiences. And once you learn your sexuality you realize it’s not as important as you think. Why do you wear clothes?”

“I…don’t like exposing myself.”

“And my being naked and hanging onto your arm is bothering you? Isn’t it?”

“A little. I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” Starchaser said, still hanging onto her arm. “Opposites attract, likes repel. Most people don’t realize that likes repel. You’re a girl, so am I, so there’s no sexual attraction. Your personal comfort range is probably really far from your Core, if I can guess. You don’t like anyone touching you at all, do you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Do you flinch a little whenever someone bumps into you?”

“Isn’t that normal?”

“If you’re around threats, then yes, you have to be on guard. But if you’re around friends, then it’s a sign that you’re not calibrated well. That’s why you’re not repelling me. My sensitive range has been pulled inside my body. Yours is outside your body. That way when someone touches me they don’t violate my boundaries. Yours they do. If you pull in more, then you won’t get so upset by physical contact.”

“Is that important?”

“For the profession? No, but it comes in useful. It’s important for life, Jessica,” she said as they came to another stone staircase that led them back up into the daylight and more hedge maze. “You need to figure out what is actually private and what is public. And if you view your skin as private you’re not going to interact well with people.”

“Is that why you live here alone?”

“Not at all. I prefer this, but it’s not because I’m incompatible with people. Here I can think more clearly without the distraction. And even when you are used to physical contact, you still have to watch your back. Here I don’t have to. That’s a luxury worth buying.”

“Do you still get laid? I mean, if there aren’t many people here…”

“I could if I want, but I don’t. It’s an Archon thing I learned a long time ago from a friend.”

“You have an Archon friend?”

“Yes I do, and I owe her my life in more ways than one. All of my competition in the music industry from when I first began is gone. They’re all dead. A few died during the V’kit’no’sat war, but most just came to a point in their lives where they quit trying. They’d go to the medtechs and ask what was wrong with them, the medtechs would tell them what they needed to do to regain their self-sufficiency, then they would just not do it. They gave up on life for a variety of reasons and just let themselves die. Some even said that death would be a great adventure.”

“That’s sad. But not you?”

“I would have probably ended up that way too if not for my friend. She explained to me that life is like a pyramid. When you’re born the amount of what you don’t know is huge, like the base of a pyramid. Then as you go through life learning you rise up to the next level, which is not so wide. As you pass through the years you get higher and higher and it seems like there’s less and less to learn. You can’t see more than a couple levels above you, as if the higher levels are shrouded in clouds, but you can see the angle of the pyramid going up and you know you’ll hit the peak before too long, and when you do the galaxy will seem a very boring place.”

“The others got bored to death?”

“That’s one way of putting it. But the Archons are curious by default, and even though it looks like there’s not much left to learn they want to explore every last bit of it. And when they did, and they came to that peak, the angle on the walls reversed and started to get wider. They couldn’t see it until they were right on top of it, but there wasn’t a peak to the pyramid. It was a choke point that, after going through, you realized the true scope of the universe is more than you could ever fully learn. And when the Archons found that, they could never be bored again. And thanks to my friend, neither can I.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you can’t. You’re still near the base of the pyramid. How old are you?”

“127.”

“Yes, you’ve got a long way to go before you approach the peak. So it probably looks like you’re experienced and know what you’re doing. The galaxy is behaving as expected, no surprises here or there…except today meeting me,” Starchaser said with a smile, “and same old, same old. With that outlook you will get bored, eventually, unless you learn enough to climb to the peak and see through it at what lies beyond. And that beyond is what I probe here,” she said, gesturing the ship around her.

“Is that why you take so much time off from touring?”

“I don’t need the money. I’ve got enough credits to last me another 1000 years before I would need to go on tour again. And it’s so easy to make money now. Star Force is so much larger than it used to be. Even if I only performed for Humans I would not have a problem, but the other races regard Humans as special, so they want to see us perform for them even if we’re vocally challenged compared to their race. No, I don’t do it for the money. And I don’t do it for the fans either. It’s just fun. But fun can’t sustain you throughout life. You have to have a purpose, and thanks to the Archon I’ve found mine.”

“What is it if it’s not singing?”

“Where did the first Humans come from?”

“Zen’zat left behind on Earth.”

“Where did the Zen’zat come from?”

“From the Ter’nat.”

“And where did the Ter’nat come from?”

“Um…I don’t know that.”

“Nobody does. Nobody knows where the Era’tran came from, or the Bsidd, or the Tusonec. Nobody knows where any of the races come from. We’re just all here, not worrying about the past and going about our daily lives. But if you stop and think about you, you wonder just what the hell is going on. We can’t just pop into existence, or can we? When a planet gets destroyed, does one arise to replace it? What about the races on it? Eventually you come to question what the fuck is going on in the universe, and the quest to learn more about that mystery has become my purpose. What is yours?”

“I guess I just want to do what you did. Even if I’m only a little successful I’ll be rich.”

“You’re already a little successful, you just haven’t established a fan base yet. To most you’re just another Human singer rather than having a specific identity. To a lot of other races I’m the naked Human, though I’m not the only one. I’m just the one known for it. They don’t care, because they’re not attracted to Humans, but it’s still an oddity to those that normally wear clothes and their reverence for Humans adds extra attention. I have an identity that the galaxy knows, mildly, and that allows me to do a lot. You need to establish a professional identity if you want to make it big, but at the end of the day it won’t be enough. You’ll grow bored if you ever succeed, and if you don’t you’ll work yourself to death trying or just give up when it seems like it’s impossible.”

“Or become content at having a micro-career.”

“Are you now?”

“I dream big, but I’m not unhappy. Especially now that I’ve met you.”

“That will wear off. But do you have a purpose that doesn’t involve others?”

“Not really.”

“Keep an eye out for one, if it ever comes your way. At the end of the day your life has to be about you, not others. Which is why singers often lose their way. It’s sad, but true for others as well. Did you know that 98.9% of all people who survived the V’kit’no’sat war have died since?”

“No I didn’t. Is it because they got bored?”

“Most, yes. They got to a point where they just stopped trying. Maybe just for the change of routine. You have to have a purpose, or life doesn’t seem worth living. Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Because we’re on a quest. We need to pursue that quest. Staying alive is essential to doing that, but if we get stuck in a rut we’re basically abandoning the quest and subconsciously we cannot handle that. We need new stuff, and…”

“Death is new to people who think they’ve learned it all,” Jessica interrupted, then cringed. “Sorry.”

“Well said, though it’s a great deal more complicated than I can explain. It’s more complicated than even I know. Each year I learn a little more, and most of that learning is by looking internally. Why do you wear clothes?”

“Warmth?”

“Not in Star Force cities. I haven’t been outside on a planet for more than 400 years. That was the last time I did an outdoor concert, and it was sweltering. I was covered in sweat even before I got drenched with water.”

“Why do you start out the concert in clothes then?”

“So they can see me take them off. It’s all about what is normal. If naked is normal, you can’t feel exposed. But if you start with clothes you can take them off, and when normal changes you get the feeling of nudity. If you’re always naked, you’re never nude. That’s why you and the other singers with me will always wear clothes. To set up the contrast.”

“Me?” Jessica asked, not sure she heard her right.

“You’ve passed inspection. Welcome to the tour.”

“Seriously! You don’t even want to hear me sing?”

“Already checked out. But you haven’t answered my question. Why do you wear clothes?”

“I guess I haven’t thought about it. Lots of little reasons, but mainly because…”

“Yes?”

“Because everyone else is?”

“Because it’s normal. But your normal has made the sight of your body not normal. What you actually are has become lost to you. That’s why I don’t wear clothes in private. I need to see the real me. If I hide from it, cover it up, then I can’t probe the mysteries of the universe because I’m already lying to myself. And that’s another reason people wear clothes. They cover up how out of shape they are. This way, if I start to slip, it will become obvious.”

“You are in really good shape. But if you learned that from the Archons, why do they wear clothes?”

“Excellent question. I think we’re going to get along well. I actually asked the same thing to my friend. She told me it was about function. Have you ever tried to run naked?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, my breasts aren’t super big, but they’re big enough to bounce. Archons wear bras to stabilize themselves so they can run faster, dodge better, and just all around perform at a higher level. Being naked would be a disadvantage for them, including the guys. They bounce more than we do. Originally I thought Archons were shy about being naked, but they’re not. They wear clothes for a reason, whereas everyone else does just because it’s become normal.”

“Should I strip down then?”

“I think you’ve had enough shocks for today as it is, so no, not now. But when you’re alone in your quarters, try it. See if it alters your perceptions. But if you’re shy, that’s not something you get over quickly. Those that think they do really just go numb, and that’s not the same thing.”

“I get the feeling I’m going to learn a lot from you.”

“That’s the idea. So when your tour is done and you get the notoriety of being associated with me to start your own fan base, you don’t end up like the others and get bored to death. That’s a requirement, you know. I’m not going to invest time in someone who’s just going to give up at some point.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

“Promise me that if you ever do you’ll come back and talk to me before you start to waste away.”

“Done deal.”

“Good. Now we need to work on your galactic identity, and let’s start with seeing what you can do better than me.”

“Better? I don’t think I can…”

“Yes you can. I already checked,” Starchaser said with a smirk. “I suck at trilling. So you’re going to develop yours further and add it to my show. Then when you go off on your own, you can take that identity with you, but it doesn’t have to just be trilling. We’re going to look at everything you can do better than me and get you a nice identity package to work on. But I’m the only one that gets to be naked at shows.”

“Fair enough. Can you also help me with my workout routine? You are really ripped.”

“I had some Archon help with that too,” she confided. “And I’m willing to share.”

“How often do you see this friend?”

“Every few centuries. She’s very busy out there, keeping weaklings like us safe so we can go play without worry. She makes time for me, even though I can tell it’s boring for her, so I try to learn as much as I can and not waste minutes on small talk. I like to think I’m her apprentice, even if I only get a lesson every now and then.”

“That is so cool.”

“I’m very lucky in that regard. They understand things in a way we can’t, and once I got a few lectures I started to be able to see things differently. The information Star Force gives us in the maturia looks totally different through Archon eyes. The wisdom is there, we just can’t fully understand it when we’re newbs. Even now I still pick up new things from the same training videos I first saw thousands of years ago. There’s a huge hidden learning curve.”

“So where do I start?”

Starchaser reached out and grabbed the tracker that was floating just behind Jessica’s shoulder in standby mode. She reprogrammed it and handed it back to the new addition to her entourage. “Follow this to your new quarters and you’ll find instructions and assignments. I’ll check back in with you in a few days to make sure you are settling in, but most of my time will be spent alone. We’ll get to know each other gradually over time.”

“Works for me. Thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to me.”

“Get going,” Starchaser said, slapping Jessica lightly on the butt.

Taking note of that small lesson there, she pressed the activation button on the tracker and took off jogging along the holographic trail, eager to begin this crazy new life that just opened up for her, and also not to overstay her welcome and intrude on Starchaser’s private time any more.

Mina watched her go, then reached her arms up high above her head and stretched as a yawn worked its way out.

“Three down, six to go,” she said, pulling a tiny hidden clip out of her hair and holding it up in front of her face as she pressed the only button on the comm device. “Send the next one.”

4

May 3, 128439

Shangri-La System (Zavrex Kingdom)

Titon

Vraka scurried along the floor, with the Zendas Bsidd’s appendage nubs making dull thuds on the hard surface as he hurried up to one of the actual viewports along the promenade. Unlike space stations that had holographic ‘windows,’ the land-based spaceport had a series of real ones lining the half arc the cradled one of the larger landing pad clusters.

Vraka shoved his way between the legs of larger individuals until he got to an open window and stretched up to his full height of 1.3 meters so he could look out at the calm air around the landing pads…an extreme rarity given the amount of traffic on Titon, let alone in the rest of the system that contained 306 planets and 1832 moons. It was the largest system in Star Force possession, but not in the galaxy. 19 larger ones had been discovered, but they were all occupied to some extent and none of them had chosen to join the empire for varying reasons.

They were called ‘Omega’ systems, and while the lower limit was somewhat foggy, these huge systems were rare. Star Force had accumulated 207 smaller ones, but Shangri-La was by far the crown jewel in the empire, and not just because it held the largest Human population. It was also the most developed, with every single planet and moon sporting heavy infrastructure, including the gas giants that had Star Force Hycre colonies within them.

That meant an insane amount of traffic coming and going constantly, with the pause above this section of the Haedera 128 spaceport…which spanned more than 10,000 square miles…being due to the arrival of Lord Daegan. The Protovic monarch was replacing outgoing Lord Jeyron, who had been in Shangri-La since the system was first colonized. The Human had built it up from nothing into what was referred to as the ‘outer capitol’ of Star Force.

Lord Jeyron had already left two months ago to become the new ruler of the Platarro Kingdom, which was a splinter of the existing and overgrown Neonis Kingdom as new territory was constantly being added to it. The Star Force empire was so large that it had to be broken down into manageable units, called Kingdoms, and if they got too large the commerce within became stretched and the oversight and defense lagged, for the communications delays simply became too long to effectively manage.

Even a Kingdom was a huge empire of its own, and the Zavrex Kingdom was one of the oldest. Lord Daegan had been one of the original Lords when they were first created when the Grand Dukes became insufficient, and his being assigned to Zavrex now had been a surprise to many who thought he’d be transferred to a developing expansion of the empire as well while a less experienced Lord, assuming there even was such a thing, would be sent to oversee Zavrex.

But Director Davis had surprised everyone with the appointment, and many people on Titon were here and cramming the spaceport in order to catch a glimpse of the Lord’s ship when it arrived for the first time. There were all kinds of rumors as to why the Protovic monarch had been sent here, but the prevailing ones were that a rebuild was coming.

Such things had been seen elsewhere, and Daegan had been involved in several of them, but Zavrex was so old and stable that it didn’t make sense to Vraka…but what did he know? He was just a Bsidd pilot that ferried people up and down from the planet on dropships, and he’d had to work long and hard to achieve that position. The Bsidd contingent in Shangri-La was the largest by population, with the Kiritak, Paladin, and Verreti coming next, but after that it was the Humans, which was crazy because they reproduced so slow.

But they’d been coming here for so long to escape the ancient wars that their numbers had snowballed to the point where Shangri-La was known as Human territory even if they only made up 13% of the population…though that 13% accounted for 14.2 trillion individuals. The fact that a Protovic Lord was replacing a Human one also seemed a bit odd for the primary Human system, though some would argue Sol still claimed that title, and had many people confused as to what was going on.

Vraka had picked a good spot, accidentally, for when Lord Daegan’s ship descended and he caught his first glimpse of it, his piloting skills instantly confirmed it was heading almost precisely for his position. The golden-colored starship floated down to the landing pad slightly to Vraka’s left and blotted out the single white sun in the sky. It landed only 2 kilometers away and gave Vraka the opportunity to see not only the ship in exacting detail, but also the boarding ramp when it lowered.

It wasn’t close enough to see faces, but with the Bsidd’s enhanced eyesight he could make out uniforms…and when the black/gold uniform of a Lord appeared with a glowing blue head poking out of it a shiver ran through Vraka’s body, for he was looking at Lord Daegan in person. He hadn’t expected to get that lucky, but he was sure that was him while a number of other monarchs were accompanying him. Their uniforms were also notable, each for their varying ranks, including one that looked to be a Grand Duke.

Which would make sense. A Lord ran a Kingdom with a lot of help as they broke down those Kingdoms into Regions and Clusters. Regions were the designation for a geographic area that Star Force held dominance over, while not actually owning all the systems in it. A Cluster was a grouping of systems in close proximity and high in population density. Grand Dukes were responsible for Regions and policing territory that was not Star Force’s, ensuring that the independent civilizations that existed like a shotgun spread throughout Star Force’s domain held to the basic principles of independence. If they did not, they would be forcibly annexed into the empire rather than allowed to continue their bad behavior.

Arch Dukes were given Clusters to oversee, or sometimes a single race within a Region. Empire-wide racial direction was accomplished by a special appointment of Princes, who held a lesser position than Lord, but their duties were drastically different to the point that they didn’t truly hold a fixed position in the hierarchy. The Prince of the Bsidd, for example, was Karthen. The Human directed no world other than the one he was based on, which in his case was a planet called Char in the Zerus System. It was the defacto homeworld of the Bsidd, and from there Prince Karthen monitored Bsidd across the empire, trouble-shooted problems, and worked on developing their future.

Currently there were 9 different Bsidd variants, and there were rumors of a 10th being worked on. Vraka was a Zendas, and Zendas had been around for nearly the entire life of the empire. His forbearers were not as advanced, for his genome had been advanced at several points along the history of the Bsidd, and it was future enhancements that the Princes of all races worked hard on while avoiding pitfalls associated with becoming too powerful.

Vraka was a civilian who had worked for a number of private corporations. The dropships he piloted were not Star Force ones, though the design was the same. But civilian or in Star Force service, all Bsidd were looked after by their Prince, and the same was true of the other major races in the empire…not counting the Knights, who were directly overseen by the Archons along with the Clans.

They had Monarchs too, but not the higher ranking ones, and the ones that were there assisted the Archons in their leadership. Both the Clans and the Knight races were tooled for warfare, while the Monarchs were more about growth. At least that’s the way most people described them. What actually happened in their very secretive lives was beyond Vraka.

But now he could say he had actually seen one, and a Lord at that. Lords were second only to Director Davis in the hierarchy, and Vraka felt truly honored to have been this close to one.

The moment didn’t last long, for Lord Daegan disappeared from view into one of the upraised cupolas on the landing pad and moved down into the undercity beneath the landing grid. The crowd around Vraka didn’t disperse very quickly, rather still enamored by the sight of the Lord’s ship. Maybe their eyesight wasn’t as good as his and they hadn’t seen the Lord himself, but that wasn’t uncommon. Bsidd pilots had been given extra good eyesight, whereas the other Bsidd and especially Humans lacked in that regard, though there was a mix of just about everyone here now, with more races than he could count.

Vraka sunk back down and began pushing his way between the taller race’s legs until he finally got into the semi-clear area away from the windows. From there he made his way across the spaceport to a security station where he scanned his credentials and was allowed access to a private grid that his corporation owned. Vertias Unlimited had a great number of ships and dedicated pads for them, and he was due to report to work within the next half hour, glad that he’d been able to glimpse the new Lord’s arrival before his first flight of the day went up.

What was in store for Shangri-La and the Zavrex Kingdom he didn’t know, but whatever the new Lord had been assigned here to do, it wasn’t just minding the store, for it was rumored that Daegan was the Director’s favorite troubleshooter, and where he went, changes were going to be made.

Whatever was going to happen, Vraka figured he’d have a good seat to watch from, considering that Lord Daegan had chosen Titon as his capitol, whereas Jeyron had based out of Kaemro. And that shift was probably going to bring even more business to Vertias Unlimited on Titon, as people wanted to be close to wherever the Monarchs were, especially the highest ranking ones, even if they didn’t have access to them. They wanted to be seen and maybe attract their attention, for no one requested an audience with a Monarch. If a meeting was to take place, the Monarch would call for you, not the other way around.

None of them would ever call on Vraka, but he had now seen Lord Daegan and that freak moment was something he would remember for the rest of his life.

5

May 12, 128439

Vborati System (Leona Kingdom)

Sistior

The Nestafar had once been an independent race stronger than Star Force. That was a bit of history that the Nestafar of today clung to with a bit of pride, but it also served as a lesson of how they had failed in the past and Star Force had chosen to rescue and revive their race rather than let them be destroyed by their corruption.

Those two facts had driven the Nestafar of 3,000 years ago to push out of their ward status, push away from a legacy of timid apathy, and embrace Star Force philosophy as they worked to regain their status within the galaxy. It had been a long, hard road, for most Nestafar didn’t care to do anything at all. They just existed, reproduced, died, and the cycle continued until a group of brave individuals began to challenge that status quo and take on the challenges Star Force had waiting for them.

All along there had been a pathway for individuals to rise out of the doldrums, and the few that did eventually left the Nestafar worlds to join Star Force society at large. But 3 millenia ago the revolution began as those who woke from their stupor refused to leave. They wanted to rework the Nestafar race and become more than a ward that existed at the benevolence of the Star Force empire. Rather, they wanted to contribute to it in more than just a logistical fashion. They wanted to become a major player, and the first step in doing that required that they be assigned a Monarch of their own.

Previously they had been offered inclusion into the Beacon Faction, but the Nestafar had refused, wanting to maintain their simple ward status and not interact with the other races. Star Force had allowed them to do so while new races being brought in that couldn’t support themselves were defaultly added to Beacon, which now was the 6th largest faction by territory. The Nestafar had limped on as a single planet whose population never grew much, and their race became a footnote in history as Star Force grew to encompass the majority of the Rim half of the galaxy.

But 3,000 years ago that changed, and their race took up the challenge of growth. They began training in earnest, asking for additional responsibilities, and recruiting other Nestafar that, honestly, just wanted to do whatever the group was doing. That was how most Nestafar thought, and when this group of individuals had grown large enough the ‘winds’ shifted and the whole of their single planet fell in line with the new order.

Many steps had to be taken to get even a little allowance from Star Force for growth, but when they passed the initial tests a Baron was assigned to their race to see just how far they were willing to go.

And over the past 3 millennia the Nestafar had transformed themselves into a respectable Sub-Faction within the empire. They wanted to reach Faction status, but the Nestafar had serious trouble, as many races did, with the aquatics requirements. Not only could they not swim well, they had a hard time mentally adjusting to the slower nature of water combat because they were geared for the fast movements in air. Many aerial races had this problem, and the Nestafar hadn’t overcome it yet, but they were still trying as their substandard aquatics division continued to aspire to become more.

But as a Sub-faction they had a higher position within the empire than 98% of the other races, most of whom were either part of Beacon or Axius. Some of those would eventually work their way up to Province status, which was a self-sufficient civilization that operated independently but didn’t have military responsibilities beyond their own worlds. Sub-factions did, and as a Faction Beacon did as well, but each piece of Beacon only contributed a small amount of a valuable attribute from each race, with Prince Avril weaving all those together into a formidable whole.

Axius was somewhat different, in that each race did not live on separate worlds, rather they shared cities based on size, with 3 different categories. The largest races occupied the Alpha worlds, the approximately Human-sized races occupied the Beta worlds, and the smaller races under 2 foot tall or so occupied the Gamma worlds. The Nestafar that had left to join Axius lived on the Betas. They had maturias just for them, but they were taught to integrate and form teams with the other races rather than remain in their racial units. Axius was, in fact, the strongest Faction within Star Force if not the largest population wise, but the Nestafar wanted more than to just be part of a combined force. They wanted their own bit of turf and the responsibilities that went along with it.

And they weren’t alone. Many other races aspired to Faction status, while many more were content to lesser roles. At present, there were 1,398 Factions within Star Force, and another 18,439 Sub-Factions. There were also 5,319 Provinces and 723 wards, but most races within Star Force were within Beacon, numbering at 142,838 while the latest racial count within Axius…where even a single individual qualified as a race…was at more than 2.7 million.

Add in another 7,498,126 Sanctuary races that were well below Ward status and had to be fully taken care of round the clock by their handlers, and the Star Force empire was truly mind-boggling in its scope. Having risen to a Sub-Faction was a truly grand accomplishment for the Nestafar, but they did not have their own Prince. They had a Duke assigned to them that oversaw their 28 systems, all of which were located within the Leona Kingdom in a tight cluster of stars.

Duke Charri was an Ari’tat, having come to them from one of the Star Force Knight races that were beyond even the Factions. The Nestafar and others often dreamed of rising to that level, but the requirements were so high only 6 races that had not originally been V’kit’no’sat had made that transition.

Those Knight races were given the combat assignments, but every now and then one of the Factions or Sub-Factions were included, and even the Nestafar naval forces had been able to assist with the primary combat out in the frontier, but most of their combat experience came from hunting pirates, smugglers, and other malcontents that operated in the cracks of Star Force territory, and there were many. The Nestafar fleet spent part of its time guarding Nestafar systems, and part of it assigned to various task forces led by High Admirals assigned to patrol duties.

If not for those patrols a large black market would have existed, and was continuously trying to develop, where people could behave badly in all manner of horrors where Star Force couldn’t see them. They often tried to set up clandestine bases in asteroid fields, nebulas, and on uninhabited planets. They couldn’t make any real traction on Star Force worlds, for the security forces would shut it down if it grew large enough to become a significant problem…but there were crumbs of problems everywhere that could not completely be eliminated.

Star Force had cameras everywhere in their cities except private quarters. This made it very hard to commit crimes and get away with it, and that fact discouraged a lot of bad behavior, but for others it just gave them a challenge and some twisted minds rose to meet it. Small stuff happened all the time, but the key to it going unnoticed was there being no report. If there was no report, then no one would review that particular piece of surveillance footage, and in that fog of mass population the criminal element existed.

But it could not thrive under such scrutiny, which led those with bad intentions to collaborate and plan within Star Force cities, then go out into space where they could get the anonymity they needed to behave badly. They still had to work hard to get the resources to operate ships and stations of their own, but those that were skilled enough were able to elude Star Force here and there within their own systems, but it was the uninhabited ones where the criminal element showed its true colors.

Those systems had to be patrolled and routinely cleaned out, and the Nestafar had participated on many such hunts, but they never got much of a naval threat to deal with except on those rare missions alongside the Knight races. But when they did, they realized the truth of the galaxy…and how without Star Force, things would be drastically different. Despite the bits of criminality living within the cracks of Star Force territory, it was peaceful compared to what lay outside the empire’s borders.

The Nestafar weren’t discouraged by this, as many others had been and declined future cooperation with the Knights. No, the Nestafar saw the threats beyond as a reason why they needed to grow stronger and provide the empire with yet another weapon to use against them, and that’s why today there was a small convoy of Knight vessels entering the Vborati System.

They were Ari’tat, and thanks to the Nestafar’s Monarch they got a few extra missions with that particular Knight race because they were purposely trying to match the avians with them. Ari’tat were small, and had to rely on mechs in combat the other Knight races could accomplish with personal armor, but they did well enough on their own. However, they liked to incorporate others with different attributes, and Duke Charri had taken a personal stake in making the Nestafar into a significant aerial asset to complement the Ari’tat.

Today was the beginning of another mission to the frontier, and the ring-shaped Ari’tat warships were here to pick up the smaller Nestafar vessels. Most Knight warships were traditional Star Force design…elongated and smooth, concentrating mass while allowing for a narrow silhouette in one direction, useful for both attack runs and interstellar jumps where you could heavily reinforce your shields over that smaller area.

The Ari’tat were one of the few who had a different design. They built huge vessels, each more than 50 miles wide, that could carry others inside the donut-hole cavity via IDF fields and clear shields. They could also carry drones there if they wished, and carry a whole lot of them. The Ari’tat ships were more like mobile battle stations than attack vessels, but for the work they were doing that strategy worked out well, and it made it easy to bring along smaller ships that couldn’t jump quite as fast.

Star Force didn’t withhold technology, and the Nestafar ships had the newest gravity drive designs available, but the Ari’tat had designed their dreadnaughts with less firepower and more speed/shields. As such, they could move around the galaxy much faster and get to threats quicker than the other Knight races. Right now there were 4 such vessels here to pick up the Nestafar ships, with some 36 of them moving out now to dock inside the partial openings, for clusters of drones were already packed around the edges of the donut holes.

The Nestafar ships carried their own drones inside, but half of them were troop ships carrying an army of Nestafar aerial assets, both craft and the infantry in their powered suits. They would be the biggest asset to the Ari’tat once they blew an access hole in the planetary defenses of whoever they were going up against.

The Nestafar didn’t know yet, but they’d be informed enroute as they always were. But whenever the request came from one of the Knight races for assistance, the Nestafar always eagerly responded. These battles helped give their race more experience and was a way to help pay back Star Force for their immense generosity they had bestowed upon them in not only saving their race from extinction so long ago, but in allowing the Nestafar to live off of the empire’s success for so long without earning their place.

No longer. The Nestafar would always be in Star Force’s debt, but they would earn their keep from here on out, and if they had it their way they’d do more than that. A lot more. They had their sights set on the impossible goal of becoming a Knight race, and they were committed to doing the work required to get there, no matter how long it took. They just wished for more of these Knight cooperation missions so they’d have an chance to advance their position faster, not knowing that in the near future they’d have more than they could possibly handle.

And then they’d see if they were really cut out to be a Knight race or not as they struggled to help the galaxy survive.

6

May 18, 128439

Nemo System (Uriti Preserve #8)

Maanna

Poallo sat on a ledge, hanging his Humanish legs over the edge of the dirt bank as the Verreti took a break from his routine scouting mission to check on the army of minions deployed on the planet. He reached a very flexible arm backwards and pulled out a food bar from his backpack, held between the two gelatinous fingers at the end of his arm. Both were wide, looking like playing cards, but could curl up into a roll that allowed for a considerable amount of dexterity that gave the Verreti the ability to hold the bar and chew on it at the same time.

Paollo’s skin was translucent, soaking in the sunlight at various spots of green that contained chlorophyll. He’s wasn’t a plant, but his body was capable of absorbing energy rather than just burning it from digested food, giving him far more endurance in long term missions where supplies were limited.

That wasn’t the case here, for the planet was a Star Force one, but because it was in one of the 12 Uriti Preserves spread across the galaxy, there were a high number of worlds that contained almost all minions that mined valuable materials out of the planet’s crust with which to feed the Uriti in the form of creating monster cubes rather than having the Uriti tear up the planet by landing and feeding on it directly.

Those minions were not people, but biological machines, and they had to be watched to ensure they were doing what they were supposed to do, just like you would do periodic maintenance on mechanical machines looking for malfunctions. There was a telepathic function that allowed the Uriti to interface and check on the status of every minion in existence, but the ability of the Wranglers to do that was much more limited due to their small brain size and infantile telepathy. Also, you didn’t want to preoccupy those extremely important individuals with routine checks, so Poallo and other Wardens were commissioned to maintain and direct the minions.

Poallo wore a gauntlet that would let him interface with and issue orders to the minions, but not the Uriti. It also had a very short range…no more than 6 miles with clear line of sight. He’d need a booster to go beyond that, but most of his work was up close and personal, so the range was more than adequate.

The Verreti’s job was to roam the planet, tend to the minions, and ensure that the flow of monster cubes continued. Most were not produced here, for there simply wasn’t enough resources within the Preserves to feed the Uriti indefinitely, and there were many mining sites elsewhere in the galaxy that produced the bulk of the monster cubes, but this planet in particular had a high concentration of valuable compounds in the deep core that most other worlds did not.

Rather than have the Uriti travel down into the planet and suck up the widely spread material slowly and inefficiently, Star Force had decided to only harvest what bits came up into the crust slowly over time, and there was enough volcanic activity to ensure a thorough shifting of material high enough for the heat-resistant minions to be able to harvest it from mine shafts that actually ended in molten lava.

It required some specialty buildings grown at those spots, but the minions could actually siphon material out of the upper magma so long as they didn’t go too deep. They were resistant to heat, not immune like the Uriti were, but that meant they could mine the very lower edge of the crust where most races in the galaxy could not.

Poallo was not inspecting those areas, but rather the huge amount of surface operations on the planet. Minions moved over the huge world’s high gravity surface like ants, gathering resources and processing them into useful compounds, some of which were for the Uriti and some that were used by Star Force within the star system. Altogether there were 3.9 trillion minions on the planet, and they had to eat too, so there was a huge supply system established that had to be looked after, and that’s where Poallo and the other Wardens factored in. The minions were pretty good at doing their jobs without oversight, but every now and then something would go wrong and the stupid machines would make trouble snowball because they could not adapt to new parameters.

Poallo liked his job, which was a lonely one. He was able to roam the planet wherever he wanted to go, doing random spot checks until he got a heads up that he got assigned a mission to a detected problem. Usually it was just a defective minion, which he could fix using the other gear in his pack. A combination of a regenerator and a complete genetic makeup of a functioning minion meant he could attach a device to a broken one and it would fix it within a few seconds.

Other problems occurred within the hive mind, and those were more complicated to spot and correct, but he was an old hand at this, having spent the past 783 years on the planet doing this very task on his own for most of that time.

Today he was on a hike which would last 9 days before he got to a Warden outpost, which was a little city with training facilities, a few ships, supply crates, and anything else they needed from civilization to recharge themselves and refill their packs…then they were off roaming the landscape amongst the swarms of minions who didn’t bother them at all. They just kept going on their business like the machines they were, making the crowded planet a very lonely one.

Above the planet was another story, but down here it was calm chaos as the minion industrial machine churned out a wealth of supplies for the Uriti and the Star Force facilities that dotted the Preserve, giving Poallo his own little corner of the galaxy to lose himself in, as opposed to the crowded Verreti world where he had been born. It was too much metal and synthetics. Here the planet was raw and alive, with all the minion facilities being alive themselves. Everything was biological here aside from the outposts and a small city on the southern pole, and if Poallo had his way, he’d never leave. This was his sweet spot in the galaxy, and the fact that he was providing Star Force a service made his job a perfect fit for him and many other Wardens scattered across the planet that he hardly ever ran into.

In orbit it was different, for there were more minion facilities floating in the void soaking up sunlight and using it to charge biological slush that worked as a battery. Those batteries were then supplied like blood into nearby facilities that served a variety of purposes, including defense, and Star Force had advanced the minions far beyond what the Chixzon had ever dreamed of in that regard. To them they had been crude instruments of conquest, but Star Force had turned them into a refined biological technology that had a mix of strengths and weaknesses compared to standard synthetic tech.

The biggest advantage was that everything could be grown from a few ‘seed’ capsules. Star Force had similar technological devices, but they were starship sized as opposed to a mass equal about to a Brat’mar that could be deposited onto a planet’s surface and then slowly expand out into every bit of minion technology ever designed.

It had become so useful that the Paladin had incorporated some of it for their own uses, but here it was just the minions synthesizing some key compounds that were then handed over to mechanical machines that operated similar to the minions. These worker ‘drones’ took the compounds to nearby standard Star Force stations and put them into mechanical processes that worked more efficiently than the biological ones.

Some of those resulted in artificially produced solari, which otherwise was only present within stars. A few curious quirks of minion biology allowed for the production of pieces of the stellar process to occur in a mundane way, then Star Force handled the rest of the conversion in specially created facilities, cheating nature and allowing the solari production to occur artificially outside a massive gravity well.

But that was just one of many things happening in orbit around Maanna, and hidden amongst that throng of production were two special and highly classified processes. There was no obvious security around them, but the system defense fleet monitored them closely and if anyone even drifted in their direction without permission they’d get intercepted immediately. Anonymity of those factories was their first and best defense, for those factories were producing the extremely complicated and costly spawning fluid use to produce new Uriti.

Within each of the 12 Preserves there was a planet-sized biological construction in its own orbit, guarded with more ships than anyone in their right minds would ever approach, and located within a star system that was off limits to everyone without the highest classification. This system was one of those locations, which was also why so many minions were used instead of traditional workers, for the less people involved the less chance of a security breach, and the ability to produce new Uriti was arguably the most sought after secret that Star Force had, with even the Zak’de’ron having tried to steal it, unsuccessfully, at a previous point in history.

They hadn’t come in with a battle fleet, but rather a number of stealth vessels that they probably thought Star Force couldn’t detect. They’d gotten closer than everyone else, but sensor technology had also advanced over time and the strong Zak’de’ron telepathy had been their undoing, for a telepathic sensor had picked up their presence before the ships were discovered, and when they were the Zak’de’ron had not fought, merely fleeing to avoid a confrontation, but the incident had underscored how valued the Uriti were…as well as indicating that the efforts to purge the galaxy of the dormant Chixzon coding within the Protovic had been successful and the Zak’de’ron had not been able to acquire their own Nefron.

The process to create new Uriti was not a Chixzon one, but during the course of study it had been determined that the part of Nefron’s mind that had been preserved by the Archons during his transformation also meant that some data had been lost. Within it was the process used to create the Uriti in the first place. Star Force had rediscovered it on their own, but rather than use the horrific methods of capturing a Hadarak and forcing it to spawn a Uriti, they’d figured out how to clone the existing ones.

The process still required extremely high gravity, which was the primary function of the biological planet-sized spawning ‘cradles’ that used artificial gravity concentrated inward and onto a very small volume of space to spur the reproductive process. That process had to use some Hadarak genetic material recovered from some of the V’kit’no’sat kills to create the reproductive chambers that Uriti did not possess in their genome, but now that Star Force had it they did not need the Hadarak themselves. What they needed was the original Uriti, which would take the place of the Hadarak and physically bind to the cradle and take control of it as if it were a part of its body.

The process was not easy to teach them, and there were so many failures in the beginning that the Uriti almost told the Wranglers to go screw themselves, but their desire to increase their pack kept them at it until they got the correct protocols established, then they made their first attempt at actually spawning a new Uriti.

Bahamut had insisted on being the first, and after 137 failed attempts he was finally able to spawn a tiny replica of himself. Bahamut then became known as Bahamut Zero, with the newly born Uriti becoming known as Bahamut One.

It was only 14 meters long, whereas Bahamut Zero was now over 600 miles wide and restricting additional size increases to focus on training adaptation. If not regulated, the Uriti would continue to grow in size like the Hadarak did, yet they were not built for that, especially Bahamut with his winged shape. When you were round and lumpy like the Hadarak it truly didn’t matter, but for the Uriti it did and when they started to have problems with movement Star Force responded with the enhanced training programs.

As such, all the Uriti had reached what they determined to be peak size, and any future enlargement would have to be tied to performance benchmarks. Some of the Uriti wanted to grow larger, others like Bahamut Zero did not, instead wanting Star Force to help him get faster, which they had, helping him grow more gravity drive nodules rather than increasing total size. Bahamut had to do that himself, for Star Force couldn’t alter their genetics due to anti-tampering programming the Chixzon had put in, but Star Force could alter the genetics of the new Uriti before they were spawned, and that’s where the Chixzon self-destruct had been eliminated for the new ones, though it still remained in the originals.

After they were spawned the genetics were set in stone, with the anti-tampering methods kept in place for a reason. If the Chixzon or Zak’de’ron or anyone else tried to mess with them in that manner it would most likely fail, but if they removed it they’d leave the Uriti vulnerable, so they had to keep it in place. That meant regenerators wouldn’t work on them, but they had such impressive self-regeneration methods that they truly did not need them…save for the new ones when they were tiny and very vulnerable.

Star Force had never lost a Uriti, but they’d come close several times with the new ones. Each cloning was different amongst the originals, and some came with a lot of headaches. All the failures had never been alive to begin with, but those that did actually spawn Star Force worked hard to save, as did the Uriti, and so far their record had been spotless.

But during the spawning process the original Uriti had to remain physically linked with the cradle for more than a year, meaning it was vulnerable and had to be protected, as well as supplied with an insane amount of supplies. The whole process was not one the Uriti could do often, and when it happened Star Force locked down the system to such a degree that it had more defenses than Earth had during that time.

No one was allowed in to even watch, though there was nothing that could be seen anyway. The Uriti would disappear inside the biological planet and no visible changes were evident until it left again with a tiny copy of itself alongside. However, the Wranglers could see what was happening through their telepathic links to both the Uriti and the giant minion that was the cradle.

The gravity field had to be so intense and maintained for so long that a constant train of minion supply transports were feeding the cradle, and those supplies had to be built up over the course of centuries to get enough of them, including the spawning fluid that filled the center of the cradle. It responded in a very curious way to gravity, and somewhat simulated the interior of black holes, where Hadarak typically spawned. It wasn’t the same, but enough elements were similar that Star Force was able to make it work.

And a lot of the work the minions did in between spawnings was creating that fluid, for it was destroyed rapidly during the spawning process. That was why there weren’t millions of Uriti around the galaxy, but Star Force didn’t push the Uriti to spawn as soon as possible. Rather it was the Uriti pushing Star Force to let them reproduce faster, but the trailblazers kept them on a lethargic schedule, ensuring they were not hurting themselves with the synergy with the cradle. Too many uses did hurt them, so they had to have time to rebuild themselves, for while there were not obvious injuries, their skills suffered greatly after a year of no training and the stress of the spawning process.

Star Force made them wait until they were ready, then they’d add another Uriti to their pack, which was split up across the galaxy into groups centered on each of the 12 Preserves. From there they’d be sent out on field trips to various stars, black holes, or other massive gravity wells, but they were always based out of the Preserves. Then they would also go on combat missions singly, returning to their group after a period of time.

And those groups would rotate individuals in and out, so all the Uriti would be able to meet and greet the rest while still helping Star Force expand into the frontier regions of the Rim. Even a small Uriti no more than 10 miles long was a huge boon to an invasion force taking down a planetary shield…for the Uriti could simply ram it, using its mass and gravity drives to instantaneously break the small ones or push against it for a while, draining it along with the firepower of a fleet, until it broke much sooner than with fleet bombardment alone. Then it would be beneath the shield and able to attack surface targets even if the shield reformed overtop of it.

They also helped out with fleet combat, meaning Star Force had to send far less ships when they had a Uriti helping them out. Or, more likely than not, when Star Force showed up with a Uriti many systems simply surrendered, for the galaxy feared even the smallest of them, knowing that if one went inside their planet it could destroy it and they would have no way to fight back once it got below ground.

So the Uriti were constantly deployed around the galaxy, but they were given breaks where they could cluster with other Uriti, which was something they needed. They could operate individually, but once they knew there were others out there they didn’t want to be separated from them. To accomplish the mission they would, and volunteered gladly to help their little brothers, but Star Force knew to keep them together in groups and away from the rest of the galaxy.

Right now there were 113 different Uriti breeds within Star Force, and most amongst them were the Bahamut line at 36 individuals. Sometimes they were grouped together, other times they were spit up and grouped with other Uriti. To them it didn’t matter what shape they were, they were all Uriti and there wasn’t much extra loyalty to their spawn beyond the fact that they had the same weaponry and movement issues.

Right now there was no Uriti spawning going on in this system, nor in the others, but in 8 years another one would start in the original Preserve. No one would know about it, for such things were not announced to the galaxy. Star Force hadn’t even told the public how many Uriti there were, and the fact they all looked the same made it hard to count, though people did monitor sizes in an attempt to identify them.

With the Bahamut line, Bahamut 3 was the biggest at 18 miles wide…which ironically was still smaller than Bahamut Zero had been when Star Force had rescued him from imprisonment. The same was true of the other Uriti breeds. The originals were monsters in comparison and millions of years old, though they had not grown during their imprisonment. In fact they’d shrunk somewhat due to the lack of sufficient feeding. Star Force, on the other hand, was giving them donuts and candy round the clock trying to increase their size as fast as possible, but when you only start out a few meters long, getting up to a mile wide took forever.

There were many places within Star Force where the public could not go, and amongst all the off limit systems there were many still where most Star Force personnel were not allowed. The Preserves all had a single system for public access, but the other systems within were off limits, and the ones where the cradles were located were amongst the most closely guarded and highest scanned systems within the empire, for the Uriti were the bedrock upon which Star Force’s power was built…as far as the galaxy was concerned.

In reality the Uriti were a bonus, not the basis, but they were the primary deterrent for any of the major powers in the galaxy moving against Star Force. No one dared to touch them, aside from the smaller, stupid races that were acting out in defiance as they were swept up along with the other bad actors beyond the frontier.

In truth, the mere existence of the Uriti and the threat they posed caused so many planets in the galaxy to shape up for fear of being invaded and forcibly annexed with no hope of holding out that the Uriti were saving more lives than could be calculated…all out of simple fear at their insane power.

Yet that power was tiny compared to the Hadarak, which the V’kit’no’sat were doing a good job of keeping bottled up within the Deep Core of the galaxy where most people did not even know they existed. There was a huge, ongoing war there that Mak’to’ran was pressing, but the peace that afforded those in the former ‘grazing’ zone that Hadarak once roamed were ignorant of the ancient threat. They only knew of the Uriti, and many races from the Rim had actually emigrated to the Core of the galaxy to escape Star Force’s domain, figuring they would take their chances with the V’kit’no’sat…or at least hope to remain unnoticed by them so long as they stayed away from their systems.

Star Force was the ruler of the Rim even without the Uriti, but the Uriti cemented that fact in a way even a fleet ten times their current size could not have. A fleet of ships could be fought. A space monster that shrugged off weaponsfire and could destroy planets from the inside out could not be, so despite the high level of small scale combat going on in the frontier as Star Force continued to expand, their current domain was extremely peaceful on the large scale. No one dared to challenge them, nor did they risk going after smaller unaligned races within Star Force territory, knowing that would draw their ire as well.

The Rim was experiencing a golden age wherever Star Force extended its presence, so much so that most of the Rim forgot what war was, or why Star Force was so badly needed. They didn’t understand the horrors that crept through the dark places in the galaxy or the behavior of those that appeared ‘peaceful’ until the strong good guys suddenly disappeared and the true nature of those being suppressed came to the surface.

But so long as the Uriti were there, those cowards behaved themselves except in places they figured were too small to take notice. Star Force had done as Mak’to’ran had sent them out to do…pacify the Rim and keep the threats there off his back while he fought the Hadarak. But neither he nor anyone else had anticipated how successful the Human-led empire would be…nor had anyone even considered the possibility of Star Force growing a Uriti fleet thousands strong that now made a V’kit’no’sat conquest of Star Force completely impossible.

No one could take on Star Force…and that’s what worried Davis. The Zak’de’ron and the Chixzon hadn’t made themselves known and sought a diplomatic relationship that would allow them to coexist. No, they were waiting and lurking out there, meaning they had something planned to take on Star Force and the Uriti, as impossible as that may seem.

7

May 26, 128439

Farscanava System (Dovagno territory)

Beu

The Dovagno were a bipedal race, thick in build and slightly slow in movement. They had an empire consisting of 17 systems inside of Star Force’s domain, but they had no trade agreement with the Rim ruler, no embassy, no ambassadors. They were independent and wanted to remain that way…except with regards to non-Star Force civilizations. Those they did interact with, and Dovagno territory was a region that saw a lot of varied races passing through and trading with each other, but Star Force was decidedly not welcome there.

Korav Henderson was on the planet, but no one knew he was Human. He was wearing a simple robe/cloak that hid most of his body while his face had a hologram over it making him look like a blue-skinned Fortinav that were essentially vagabonds with no place to call their home. They were spread across the Rim and appeared to like it that way, for despite offers from Star Force to include them in Axius or even Beacon on a large scale had met with few takers. For whatever reason, the Fortinav did not want to come out of the shadows, but seeing them roaming about taking care of private business was not uncommon, even if it was a bit rare given their low population estimates.

The cover allowed Korav to travel without attracting attention as he roamed the busy streets of the port of Kaloo, which was a major trade hub and, more importantly, a transit point for a lot of smugglers moving people that did not want to be found. And when someone wanted to disappear for various reasons, Korav knew that many did not go far from their arrival point on a new planet, but comfortably away from the spaceport that they arrived at.

Given the history of Kaloo and the lawlessness inherent, coupled with a thieves code of honor, people could disappear here with ease as the only security forces were to prevent ship theft or mass murder. Anything less than that and you were expected to handle it yourself, and privacy was respected as a rule, because Kaloo wanted all kinds of illicit money coming their way. Crime was the one commodity that was not available in Star Force, and worlds like Beu thrived on it.

Korav’s task of finding one individual seemed impossible amongst the millions of people in the port city, many of which were not native Dovagno, but this wasn’t Korav’s first hunting assignment, and the Arc Commando had already tracked him to Kaloo. As long as he went to ground and didn’t move on, this wasn’t going to be too complicated, for he had Charro Foret Badado’s genetic profile on record, and the device Korav was wearing on his left wrist was constantly sampling the air to check for any trace of it.

He’d gotten a hit at the spaceport, but it had been quickly lost on the streets. Korav had to use his intuition and be patient, as well as his telepathy to search the minds of the various vendors and other individuals holding position rather than roaming. Protovic like Charro were easy to spot if they didn’t have a faceplate on, and there weren’t that many races that did wear full armor on an oxygen world, so it was likely that someone might have spotted something.

Korav kept scanning minds lightly as he moved, picking individuals that appeared to be attentive but he wasn’t getting any hits today. He’d been on planet for three days already and was watching what shipping records were available for passenger transports and arrivals/departures of cargo and unidentified ships. He’d been camping out around the main spaceport and the subsidiaries whenever a ship was due to leave, but he hadn’t gotten any hits, suggesting that Charro had indeed gone to ground somewhere on the planet.

That meant Korav had to leave the spaceport behind and start exploring, and less than an hour ago he’d picked up a faint trace in a public restroom…which was one of the best areas for picking up genetic material. He couldn’t find an active trail from that location, but the point on the map was logged and the Arc Commando began searching the most likely hideouts in the area while quietly interrogating locals without them even knowing it, for the Dovagno were not telepathic, nor were any of the other races here, and unless he pushed really hard they’d never know he had been in their heads.

Finally one of his Ikrid searches had paid off, for a local Dovagno prostitute hanging out on the street had noticed a glowing hand briefly appearing when a customer at a nearby food vendor paid with Feersa chips…the widest currency in the Rim after Star Force credits and a favorite of galactic travelers. The sight of the hand had been so surprising it stuck out in the Dovagno’s mind, making it easy for Korav to spot, and when he crossed the street near that particular vendor his equipment alerted him with a mental ping that it had detected the desired genetic material.

Korav walked around a bit, letting the sensor work and mapped out two directions that the trail led. Based off the prostitute’s memories, he’d seen the strange individual move to the west, so that was the way Korav went and luckily there was just enough of a trail left for him to follow with the air sensor. He switched to a short range scanner, but wasn’t able to pick up any footprints or handprints. Charro must have been buttoned up pretty tight, which made sense if he was trying to hide his glowing skin.

Korav reached out with his telepathy, looking for the Protovic’s mind, but he was either shielded or out of range. Taking his best guess after the trail disappeared at an intersection, Korav headed into the shadier undercity that ran beneath the streets, knowing from his mental scans that that was where people on the run often went to find cheap rooms where the only redeeming value was that they were unseen and the occupants would not be in a position to complain about the run down and unsanitary condition of the accommodations.

His intuition proved right as he picked up another trace that eventually led him close enough to pick up a mental ping…which immediately sent his quarry running, for the Protovic was also telepathic and could sense the contact.

Korav cursed, not having thought the Protovic that skilled, for he was a non-Star Force Protovic whose genetics had been mixed with rogues that had fled from Star Force. They were not permitted to reproduce with non-blues, because of the psionics they possessed and a biological block on the genetic sharing, but some had undergone illegal genetic alteration to allow the reproduction and now there were greens in the galaxy that possessed bits and pieces of psionics, some of which actually killed their offspring when they didn’t mesh properly.

Charro was one that had survived and used his abilities for a wide range of unsanctioned behavior, including additional recruitment and reproduction of other rogue Protovic in order to develop a splinter race that could rule the criminal regions of the Rim with their telepathy. Star Force had eventually taken notice, and that criminal family had been targeted for psionic wipe, meaning that they had to be caught and have their genetics reworked to eliminate the out of place coding to protect future offspring and to remove the psionics that they hadn’t earned.

Charro had been one of the hardest to catch, for he was smart and knew how to avoid Star Force and their associates, which was why Korav had been assigned to go after him when he got outside monitored territory, and now the Arc Commando took off running before the Protovic could get outside his telepathic range and escape again.

The blue-skinned Fortinav sprinted between people, knocking aside a few that moved in the wrong direction at the wrong time, but thankfully the undercity was not as crowded as up top and he was able to reel in the distance between them as he sensed the Protovic’s mental signature get stronger and stronger, though he was still out of sight.

A couple minutes more and he finally saw the backside of the running figure in tight fitting robes and full armor underneath, but it was heavy and clunky and not well suited to running, making Korav’s pursuit easier than it should have been…at least until Charro headed back up to surface level and tried to lose himself in the mass of pedestrian and vehicular traffic underneath the heavy sunlight.

Korav couldn’t let that happen, so when he got up onto the street he jumped up onto a nearby wall and climbed it until he got to the nearby roof and used the vantage point to spot his target. It took him a moment to plan out his route, then he ran across the low building and jumped to the next one that was much taller, requiring him to stick to the side and crawl up it, then he continued to jump/climb over the rooftops until he was able to get ahead of the Protovic.

He wasn’t sensing any counter probing telepathically, so Charro didn’t know where he was when the Protovic rounded a corner and tripped over an extended foot that sent him falling to the ground so hard that his mask popped off and his green/purple skin bathed the sidewalk in a shower of color.

“Hello, Charro,” Korav said calmly as the man tried to clear his head that was obviously pounding from the impact. “You’re coming with me.”

“Star Force!” Charro yelled, pointing at Korav. “Star Force!”

“Fine,” he said, running over to him in two steps and grabbing him by the back of the neck as he hauled him to his feet, though he tried to squirm away futilely. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

“Star Force! Help!” Charro continued to yell, with the nearby pedestrians recoiling quickly and clearing out the area around the two as Korav half dragged Charro with him. When he got his fingers on the skin of Charro’s neck the outbursts stopped as he hacked into the Protovic’s mind and took control, for Charro’s telepathic skills are mostly untrained, otherwise Korav would have had a tug of war on his hands that could have been hard to win.

But it was too late, for soon a Dovagno security patrol caught up with the pair and stopped them at gunpoint.

“Release him!” they demanded in their local language, though most Dovagno knew passable English.

“This one is coming with me,” Korav said, working his way into the mind of the three guards. “Turn around and leave us be.”

The three hesitated, lowering their weapons as they glanced at each other, but they didn’t leave fast enough and another two Dovagno, these not security, came forward shouting.

“Mind rapper!” they accused, pulling up a pair of pistols and aiming them at Korav as Charro tried to twist out of their firing line behind him.

“Shit,” the Arc Commando said, letting go his telepathic trance and ripping the weapons out of the hands of all 5 of them before they realized what he was capable of…but that didn’t stop the confrontation, for more Dovagno on the streets began stepping forward in a rage as they saw the Star Force magic being used.

Korav dug his fingers into Charro’s neck, holding him in place and focused, rendering him unconscious and dropping to the ground as more pistols were popping up and aiming at him. A couple shots got off, missing him, but the third hit and dissipated on an energy shield.

The Arc Commando shook off his robe and deactivated his hologram, letting everyone see his Human face for a moment before the gauntlets he wore on either arm suddenly melted and covered his body in Star Force scout armor colored a mix of blues ranging from a pair of bright stripes on the outside of the arms and legs to very dark blues almost to the point of grey over the chest and helmet that now obscured his face in a smooth material that had no visor.

When the locals saw the transformation they went into a rage, for Dovagno hated Star Force and every one of them that was armed opened fire, bathing the Arc Commando in a wide variety of energy discharges as Korav raised both forearms and fired back with stun weapons that arced out into area of effect hits, knocking down 3, 4, or 5 people with each shot. He mowed down everyone nearby, then grabbed Charro’s unconscious body and slung it over his shoulder as he started to run through the streets that were quickly exchanging non-Dovagno for the planet’s natives as the area turned into a free fire zone.

Korav covered Charro with his shields, but he couldn’t keep taking hits all day and when they went down he’d have to rely on his armor…which Charro didn’t have. His objective was to return him to Star Force custody, not kill him, and he intended to do just that, though the Dovagno clearly didn’t care if they killed him in the process of taking down the Star Forcer.

“Chip, get down here now,” he said over his personal comm.

“What location do you wish to rendezvous at?”

“Come down on my position,” he said, firing more stun blasts as the streets swarmed with Dovagno.

“ETA is 2 minutes 34 seconds.”

“Wonderful,” he said to himself as he picked a nearby wall alcove and dumped his prisoner there as he strode back out onto the street where he held position and bathed the approaching Dovagno in stun blasts while dodging a lot of the incoming fire now that Charro wasn’t weighing him down. Some of the Dovagno got shot with friendly fire, for they were attacking him from both directions and didn’t seem to care about anything other than taking him down.

About a minute later a ship appeared overhead, but it wasn’t Korav’s. The Dovagno patrol ship fired down on him and he had to crouch down and form a static shield over his head to take the blasts, then he jumped to the side of the street opposite Charro to draw fire away from him. From there Korav launched himself into the air and up to the underside of the two person craft where he clung inside the firing arc of its main weapons.

A brilliant blade formed from his armor’s wrist, with him slashing the flat blue energy ribbon into the underside of the ship, cutting through the weapon power lines before letting go and dropping back down to ground in time to shoot a pair of Dovagno that were picking up Charro. He had to fight another couple dozen that had amassed below, but he held his position while the now impudent patrol ship hovered overhead.

He picked up Charro again and backed into the nook, doubling up his shields from the outside and leaving his rear mostly exposed as it faced a hard stone wall. He kept firing and piled up a stack of unconscious bodies in front of him until a grenade came flying towards him and the incapacitated Dovagno.

He telekinetically grabbed it and threw it high into the sky where it exploded, throwing some small bits of shrapnel down onto those below.

“Seriously?” he yelled, then he summoned up a Fornax wave and launched it out as wide as he could in a cone ahead of him, dropping everyone to the ground twitching for a moment, but they got back up as soon as it ended.

“Targets identified. Do you wish to engage?” Chip asked as a slew of targeting options popped up on his helmet’s HUD.

Korav selected one, and suddenly a huge wave of stun energy cascaded down onto the street for more than 100 meters in either direction, destabilizing the cloaking device of the Star Force ship that was hovering overhead in a series of ripples through otherwise empty air.

“Retrieval,” he said as he jumped upward with Charro held over his shoulder and his shields evening out. His flight path angled forward as a doorway opened in mid air and he flew inside the cloaked ship as numerous additional patrol ships fired on him and the spot where he disappeared.

The cloaking field partially held, then the disruption moved off, accelerating quickly as it made a visible shockwave in the air enroute to orbit.

Korav dumped Charro into a cell box that would keep him in virtual stasis during the trip back as his automated ship continued to climb to orbit as the Dovagno tracked the disruption and brought down some of their warships to intercept, but as soon as the Star Force Trimaxion left the atmosphere behind it adjusted course and the Dovagno could no longer see it. They fired along its previous course, and Korav gave them points for effort, but he was beyond their reach now.

He deactivated his armor, with it retracting back down into two gauntlets that he took off and laid on a small table jutting out from the right side of the cockpit chamber.

“Pursuit has been lost,” the Trimaxion’s computer noted.

“Set course for the Neomis jumppoint,” he instructed rather than mentally interfacing with the ship’s systems and doing it himself. “Is the prisoner secure?”

“Statis protocols active and steady. Virtual environment is active. Prisoner is secure.”

“He was a stubborn one. Add another mark to the scoreboard.”

A hologram of dart board appeared with an array of feather-tipped and very short arrows in it. Another one came flying in and stuck with an audible ‘pling’ on impact. The image lingered for another half minute, then disappeared as the Arc Commando retreated from the cockpit to the living quarters on the one-man scout vessel, confident that the automated programming would get him to the exit jumppoint for the system on its own.

After that, it was another 3 jumps to get back to the nearest Star Force planet where he would hand over his quarry for psionic removal and an 8 month prison sentence for the fiasco he’d caused 2 years ago in the Plinth System. After that he’d be free to go, but no longer able to reproduce Protovic with the restrictive psionics.

Before then Korav hoped to have his entire crime family swept up, and as the scoreboard attested, he didn’t have that many left to find.

8

October 4, 128439

Quitassna System (Opaty territory)

Vinanakva

A large spherical mass jumped into the system, braking against the central star and coming to a stop in low orbit. It was a perfect sphere 327 miles wide and colored deep green, with heavy armor plating half a kilometer deep and numerous weapon ports spread around the thin Tu’gor outer armor layer, which was a lighter, cheaper version of Yeg’gor. The green of the Tu’gor was enhanced further, getting rid of the black the material naturally had and turning it into true Canderous green, marking it as a seda and not a Mach’nel, which this small invasion did not warrant.

It wasn’t as fast as a warship, and could barely keep up with Star Force civilian ships, but the mobile battlestation wasn’t meant to go chasing enemies around the galaxy. The Knight races and Clans had the specialized ships for that, while Canderous’s little niche within the empire was their ability to move their homes with them and set up operations in new systems instantaneously…which is why they often followed the frontier invasions to take over once the major battles were completed and the native populations were in need of annexation.

Jumping into the system a few minutes behind the seda were a multitude of ships and transports belonging to the Calavari, who would be taking possession of this system and beginning the indoctrination process for the Opaty while Canderous was responsible for security. It would take time for the Calavari to build infrastructure on the planet, and until they got up and running Canderous troops would be keeping the captive planet in line as the Bez would soon be leaving for another invasion elsewhere.

Ard Ri Esna-58321JOR-18 was onboard the seda and soon to be in charge of system security. The Human’s rank within Canderous was a rare one, for it denoted the highest rank of warrior, but one that did not wish to be an organizer…but rather a field commander. Esna didn’t want to sit safely inside well defended perimeters and use her massive experience to direct others to fight. She wanted to lead from the front and do the fighting herself, and with the Knights and Clans taking all the good fights, cleanup work such as this was as close as she could get.

Esna was one of only a few Canderians that had been born outside the faction, and she was also in the rare group of those over 100,000 years old. She kept to herself for the most part, interacting with her fellow Canderians whenever duty required, but staying inside her personal chambers onboard the seda whenever she didn’t have workouts to do. What she did in those private hours no one knew, but no one dared ask either, for an Ard Ri was the equivalent of a Khan, which was the highest rank within Canderous, and she was extremely over-qualified for a mission like this.

But that’s the way Esna preferred it. The losses Star Force suffered nowadays were not in the form of big fights, but individuals lost here and there in the small ones. That meant she had to be where she could make a difference, and taming enemy populations was about as rough as it got. Though a Canderian typically stayed in space whenever possible, once her seda made it to planetary orbit she would be going down to the surface with the army and staying down there as a venator while others handled the oversight duties.

She would pull rank if they messed something up or her experience knew a better way, but if that wasn’t required she would roam the danger zones solo, looking for trouble and heading it off before it could hit her troops or those they were tasked to protect. That proclivity had earned her the right to choose the Ard Ri rank rather than Khan, as a few others had, because they didn’t want to lose their edge in the golden age of Star Force.

Canderians were built for battle, and they needed it. Training wasn’t enough for them, and after all these years Esna wasn’t going to let her skills slip, for she knew better than the others what a shithole the galaxy could become if things went the wrong way. And to be perfectly honest, she didn’t feel at home in the sedas. They were a refuge, to be sure, and intimately familiar, but Esna was a venator in heart, never staying in the same place, always on the move, and always in danger.

Her brief experience with the Calavari Rammak had changed her in a way that had stuck, and part of her mind was still with him on the run. Peace didn’t feel right. As if the war wasn’t over. It had taken her a long time to figure out why, but eventually she realized the truth that the war never ends. Somewhere, even in the peaceful areas, someone was being hurt. Star Force couldn’t banish bad people from being born, or prevent accidents from happening, and the danger of the galaxy was something that Esna embraced rather than denied, and she preferred not to be around those that did.

Part of her still didn’t feel like she deserved to be alive, and if it wasn’t for Rammak she would have died. It wasn’t fair that he hadn’t made it and she had, and despite all the contributions she’d made to Canderous since then, it wasn’t enough to repay that debt. Nothing ever would be.

Others had become tired of life and diminished, but that wasn’t an option for Esna. Everything she did was a quest, and when she got fatigued Esna would think of Rammak lecturing her to keep going. He had seen something in her that no one else had, and she still felt like she hadn’t fully unlocked her potential.

After the V’kit’no’sat war was over she had returned to Mace and lived there a while, leaving Canderous behind as she sought to find her ‘home,’ but that world, while familiar, felt empty. The rebuilding took forever, but during that time she would run the wilds, retracing Rammak’s camps until they were eventually claimed in the new construction. After that point there was nothing left for her there, and she had returned to Canderous, but not contently. She belonged with Rammak, learning from him as they traveled and fought to survive, and nothing short of that was going to satisfy her.

It was strange, because she was far more powerful now than Rammak had been, even with his extra muscle mass and four arms. She’d beaten numerous Calavari stronger than he had been, but she still felt inferior. She often wondered if she was chasing a mirage, but if Rammak had been here he would have advanced as well, staying ahead of her the whole way. And in truth, it wasn’t the power you attained that mattered, but what you did with it, and when the time came Rammak had shown his immense superiority. So no, Esna was not chasing a mirage. She was chasing a superior that had gone beyond her reach.

So she was alone, but Rammak’s lessons were with her and she would not lose them. And that meant getting out into the wilds and breathing the raw air and experiencing the fear, death, and horrors that plagued this galaxy. It was then and only then that she felt at home, in brief blips here and there, fighting those horrors and saving someone the way Rammak had saved her, but then she had to move on. The danger didn’t stay put, and she had to keep chasing after it in a never-ending game that few others chose to play.

So when the seda made orbit she headed to the hangar bays along with the troops heading to ground as Kit Legat Bard organized the transfer of control with the Bez. She didn’t tell him what to do and he didn’t give her orders. She just tagged along where she liked, and the competent Legat usually didn’t need any overrides from the Ard Ri, but she was willing and able to do so if needed.

She wore heavy armor, which required her to walk into a hard, standing suit that then melded to her body once she was inside. It was made of the same cellular design that old V’kit’no’sat Zen’zat armor had used, though now Star Force had improved upon the design and incorporated it along with the old school fixed armor that they preferred. Her gold/black/chrome suit had thick plates, some of which contained large hardware components, while others were blocks of the moveable cells, meaning that whenever her armor got a hole in it they would flow to the breach and refill it, giving the heavy armor an insane durability.

Lesser versions of armor allowed a person to work with their skin exposed and activate the armor when needed, but Esna had first learned to use the fixed armor with Rammak, and she preferred having it now and staying behind a helmet during the down times when others relied only on their passive shields to protect them from the unexpected. Right now about half of the troops boarding the dropships had skin exposed, while the others had the heavy armor like Esna’s, except not made of the same material. Hers had extra heavy Tu’gor fibers added, but she had the musculature to handle it, and it made her a literal tank against enemy infantry in fights.

She rode the dropship down to the surface, then when the boarding ramp dropped she walked out with the others amidst the sounds of a firefight somewhere to the west. While the Canderous troops activated their armor, obscuring their skin behind Canderous green stone-like sand particles that made up the ‘flexible’ parts of their suits, Esna lazily ran off to the side and began exploring the new planet on her own while monitoring updates on the battlemap.

There was a small insurrection taking place that the Bez would quickly get under control, but whose futile attempt had been to attack and down at least one of the newly arrived dropships. They hadn’t even come close, but if there was a fight to be had Esna wasn’t going to miss it, so once she got her bearings in the swampy forest she headed straight towards the sound of energy weapons.

Well, not entirely straight, for because of her armor’s weight her footsteps were sinking in heavily in spots, forcing her to zigzag from better footing to tree branch to rock until she came to a shallow lake in trees that she couldn’t run through.

“Err,” she groaned, activating her armor’s limited flight ability and jumping off a rock that half sunk into the soft ground beneath her feet and Esna flew across the gap to land on a thick dead tree trunk. She paused a moment, letting her capacitors recharge a bit, then she jumped again…and again…and again until she got past the wetness, saving her remaining power in case she needed it later and returned to her zig zag run all the way up to the edge of what was left of the battlefield.

9

The Bez and their Esquires were small in number here, with only two of the giant bipeds and a few dozen smaller infantry. They had no mechs, nor did they need them, but the Opaty were not small. They stood 9-10 feet tall and had huge arms as wide as Esna’s body. They somewhat resembled gorillas, but with longer legs, and their temperament was tribal. What one did, the others did as well, and when combat began they would all fight or all run. There was little individuality with them, which was going to be a problem with indoctrination, but right now it made them easy targets as they all charged whatever their nearest opponent was.

Esna was approaching from a flank and didn’t get noticed until she was nearly upon the melee as small groups of Opaty were periodically being added, coming from the northwest. She wasn’t sure what their point of origin was, but the Ard Ri knew that the Opaty used tunnel networks to travel great distances rather than surface roads, and she bet there was a tunnel entrance nearby. It wasn’t marked on the battlemap yet, so she grudgingly turned to the left and away from the Opaty that had spotted her and roared at the prospect of smashing the small opponent, but when she seemed to run away they had to choose between breaking off and following her or staying with the others…and they didn’t want to leave the group.

Esna continued to run/hop through the swampy ground, passing by more Opaty going the other way save for one that did come after her. She waited until he got close, then used her Fornax to trip him up. He lost all body control for half a second, which was enough to send him falling face first into the ground. Before he could stand back up she closed ranged and pumped several stun shots into his thick chest from her forearm gauntlets that held the weapons. Unless there was a need, Canderians didn’t carry free weapons anymore, and with the Bez already here there wasn’t a lack of firepower. The weapons built into her armor would be sufficient, leaving her arms free to thrash as much as needed to overcome the muck she was running through.

When she got to the now stunned Opaty she rolled him over face up so he wouldn’t suffocate in the mud, then Esna kept working her way back along the approach the reinforcements were coming from until she found an odd rhythm in the pools of water. There were small waves forming, and when she backtracked them to their epicenter she found a reed wall out of which two more Opaty were coming.

Esna engaged her armor’s cloaking field so she wouldn’t have to fight them, then waded out into the water towards the reeds, sinking in up to her hips as she moved slowly. The cloaking field did nothing to disguise the hole in the water that she made, so she was hoping a lack of quick movement wouldn’t get the enraged Opaty’s attention. Several more emerged from the reeds and ran out of the water towards the ongoing fight by the time she got to the thick tube plants that rose well above her head, then she began to squeeze through the gaps with her hole in the water now becoming almost unnoticeable.

She got caught multiple times, for the reeds weren’t spaced far enough apart to allow her to walk through and there were clumps thicker than others. Once she had to fully come out of the water to slide through a higher gap, but eventually she came to the inner edge of the reed field. Her cloaked head poked out, seeing that the sky was not visible, for the reeds had bent over top like a canopy, hiding the clear pond the size of a dropship from view.

A large bubble emerged from below, creating a wall of water that pushed out to Esna and rocked her back into the reeds. That was obviously the source of the waves, and following it came an Opaty rising out of the water. Another bubble formed and a second emerged from below, then the pair began pushing their way through a path in the reeds that the others had partially beaten down enroute to the battlefield.

Esna backtracked into the reeds and sank all the way down into the water where she deactivated her cloak so her comm system would function. She marked the location on the battlemap and uploaded images from her helmet so everyone else would know what type of exit this was. Then she waited for the next pair to come up, and just before they left she hit them with a Fornax wave.

They both fell into the water, then when they came back up she hit them again, delaying their leaving. More continued to rise up with the water bubbles, and she kept dunking them all but allowing them to stand back up so they wouldn’t drown…if that was even possible. She didn’t know enough about their biology to be sure, but she suspected they might be able to breath under water, or at least hold their breath for a while, for this exit point was odd for an non-amphibian race.

She kept a total of 12 in the small pond before she finally let them go, but she stayed in place and kept forcing the Opaty into larger groups, giving the Bez and Canderous some more time to round up the others. After 6 large groups had been formed and released, heavy footfalls came crashing through the reeds just before the head of a Bez broke through the reed canopy and poked its thin armored snout down towards the next bubble as he shot the four Opaty already here as they peppered the copper-colored Bez armor with little effect.

Suddenly the stunned Opaty flew up into the air and were thrown out through the reeds as another bubble formed…only this time the water didn’t come rushing back down to cover the entrance. It moved further out and magically held there as a single Opaty flew into the air, was shot by the Bez’s arm cannon, then throw back out of view with the others.

“Go down,” the Bez ordered Esna.

She didn’t hesitate, jumping out of cover with her armor’s flight capabilities and landing in the center of the hole in the water. She dropped down on top of another Opaty standing in some sort of an airlock and knocked him aside as she fell…then she scurried away down a side tube into a large tunnel where dozens more Opaty waited for their lift to the surface.

Esna produced a large Fornax field and held it, knocking them all down as she ran to the left, for there were many more than a few dozen to her right beyond her knockdown range. She fired multiple stun blasts at them and those on the ground as her head began to hurt with the sustained effort. Esna had to release it as multiple orange energy blasts came her way, most of them missing, but she still engaged the heavy shield her left arm sported, creating a rectangular second shield out in front of her body and locked to her forearm. It would take a lot of hits before her skin-tight shields would once again have to take the blows, but the heavy shield operated off a capacitor, and once it was drained it would be gone.

Esna wasn’t worried though, for on the battlemap she could see the Esquires approaching quickly. The Canderian continued to fire off shots with her right gauntlet, stunning more Opaty but having to hit them multiple times to knock them fully unconscious. The others were tripping on the downed ones as they rushed her, but when they got close she sent multiple Fornax waves into them, dropping them momentarily and making it easy for her to pump shots into them.

There were too many for her to handle on her own, but before she got overwhelmed with huge calloused bodies a H’kar Esquire dropped down and opened fire from their flank, followed by a Protovic and a couple of Humans. They dove right into the mass of them, giving Esna a brief break as she finished off those closest to her…but not before one punched into her heavy shield and knocked her back 3 meters in an awkward roll as her heavy shield impacted the ground.

She turned it off after two rolls, then got her arms under her and her head reoriented just in time to dodge another fist that smashed into the ground. She flashed a Fornax orb into the single Opaty, then rolled up onto her feet where she punched into his leg with her armored fist. He didn’t collapse, but his leg did wobble a bit, and in that moment Esna jumped up, using the full power of her flight engine, and impaled the Opaty in the chest with her helmet and crossed arms, lifting him off the ground in an arc before smashing him back-first onto the tunnel floor where Esna finished him with 6 point blank stun blasts.

“Nice move,” one of the Humans said, then pointed behind her. “You up for some more?”

“After you,” Esna deferred, not sure how good these Esquires were compared to her, but they did have psionics that she lacked so it made sense to let them take the lead.

Esna dropped into a run half a step behind and to the right of the Human, with him sending her some telepathic instructions for how he wanted to charge the Opaty. She’d trained to interface with telepathic soldiers, so this wasn’t something new, and she fell into step with the Human who, right before they got to a charging wall of 4 Opaty with many more behind them, telekinetically threw Esna forward as she simultaneously jumped, turning her into a projectile that rammed the larger bipeds, then she detonated her Fornax field and dropped them 6 rows deep while the Esquire dumped area of effect stun blasts on them.

Some of those hit Esna, but her shields absorbed them. The Opaty had no shields or armor, just their muscle and the fairly advanced rifles they carried. That made them easy to take down, despite their intimidating mass.

More Esquires followed, stunning the lot as Esna helped keep them down, then the flow of reinforcements was over and they were left standing in a wide tunnel full of smelly bodies.

“I’ll scout it,” she volunteered, running down one direction while the Esquires policed the unconscious. She couldn’t match their psionics, especially their battlemeld, but she could scout as well as them, if not a little better, so that’s what she assigned herself to before anyone else did, engaging her cloaking field and relying on her eyes and her armor’s passive sensors only as she backtracked to wherever the Opaty troops had come from.

She could have been in an office on a seda right now, as many other highly ranked Canderians were, but this was where she truly belonged, with her armor being her only real home…and it went wherever she did. And Esna went where the danger was, for that was where she was needed, even if she was overshadowed by the Knights and Esquires. She’d help them when she could, then she’d venture out to the flanks where they were not, finding the mismatches she could take advantage of, for the galaxy was a huge place and there were never enough Star Force troops to deal with everything.

But Esna could take care of some of those threats, and that was far more noble than overseeing training missions and cargo transfers. She wanted to be a warrior, not a sentinel who waited for threats to come to her. And right now, policing the stunned ones was sentinel work. Scouting out the unknown tunnel was warrior work.

So off she went into the unknown again, chasing after the ghost of a Calavari that forever lived on the frontier.

10

October 19, 128439

Jepiker System (Home Two Kingdom)

Forge

Leon-4293772103 had finished his final challenges yesterday, earning him a rise in rank from Acolyte 99 to Ranger 1. With that transition he earned his green armor and his days fighting in the Trials were over. He’d spent the past 158 years training and fighting in the war games along with the other Adepts and Acolytes, but now he had finally earned the right to field work and had been flown over to the main pyramid on the planet to await transit out of the system.

He wasn’t alone either, for there were hundreds of other newly minted Rangers who would be leaving with him. They’d all finished their challenges within a past week, but only a handful of them were Human. The others were Mavericks from many different races, but he hadn’t fought any of them in the Trials. Those were Human-only for the Archons, while the Mavericks had their own versions. When asked, he’d been told that was because each race had different tactics they needed to focus on, and throwing in more variables beyond your own biology would have interfered with the emphasis of their training.

But the Mavericks had the same ranks as the Archons, at least up through Padawan. Beyond that they differed somewhat, as did the psionics their bodies could handle, but the basic principles of the early ranks were all the same, hence the identical ranks.

When a Dragon-class dropship landed on one of the flat tiers of the pyramid, Leon and the others walked/flew/hopped onboard and took their seats, with him sitting down next to a Vgora…which was basically a Human frame with rock-hard skin. He was glad he didn’t have to fight them in the Trials, for punching that body with his sometimes bare hands would have been extremely painful given all the little knobby growths that made for a dull form of thornmail.

He and others sat quietly and waited for the dropship to deposit them on a starport in orbit, then they broke up into smaller groups, each heading to different terminals that led to waiting ferries that would take them out to parked starships. The one Leon was assigned to left the system with 43 of the Archons/Mavericks and began a long trip around the galaxy, dropping them off one at a time at their destinations with Leon being 12th in line.

He got in some sparring matches with the Mavericks before it was his time to leave, finding some easy to beat and others impossible. The differences in biology were staggering, and he could see why incorporating them into the Trials would have been nonsense. Humans had to learn how to fight and improve as Humans, then take those skills onward later in their development, and the same was true of the Mavericks, especially the flyers. Having them go hand to hand with a Human was ridiculous, for they simply couldn’t. They had to stay out of range and fight from the sky, where Humans couldn’t go without a jump harness.

Leon’s stop was in the Manticora System in the Pretora Kingdom, a quarter way around the galaxy from Home Two. He’d been born in Shangri-La, and the trip out to Home Two had seemed so far away, but Pretora made that trip look short by comparison. When he arrived a dropship took him down to the only inhabited planet, Warcoren, and then the starship left enroute to dropping off the other Rangers across the galaxy.

Leon was met at the starport on the Bsidd planet by another Archon, this one a Striker judging by her armor which she wore in retracted mode, but the gauntlets on her arm that reached all the way up to her shoulders were colored according to her rank and had multiple holes that exposed her skin to the air, making the retracted armor look more like elaborate jewelry than anything. She also had a headband with a triangular jewel on it that Leon didn’t recognize, but it appeared to be built on cellular technology that could expand into different shapes at will.

“Hello, newb. Welcome to Warcoren,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb and not walking out to greet him as he carried his personal duffle over his shoulder.

“And you are?”

“Brie. The others are Fred and Darren, but they’re busy. I’m your reception party.”

“The others in our team?” Leon asked.

The Striker laughed. “Team? No, newb. We’re the only Archons in the system. We were three, now we’re four counting you.”

Leon’s jaw dropped open. “Four of us for an entire planet?”

“It’s not exactly a war zone. And have you done the math? Number of planets divided by number of Archons and Mavericks?”

“I know its low, but I didn’t think a Star Force world would only have four of us. Are there any Mavericks here?”

“Nope. Just us.”

“What rank are the others?” he asked, glancing around at the empty terminal and wondering why it wasn’t packed with traffic.

“Fred is a Striker and Darren was the newb until you showed up. He’s a Ranger 12. You looking for something?”

“Is this starport shut down?”

“No, it’s just a private one. We don’t get very many VIPs here, and the cargo goes through the others unless they get overloaded, then this one takes the extra. Warcoren is only half built and under orders to go no further until certain benchmarks are obtained. Count Visto doesn’t want us building lower level structures only to have to tear them down to build better ones later.”

“We have a Count here?” he asked, not expecting a single planet system to rate higher than a Baron.

“No, we have a planetary Administrator. We don’t rate a Monarch. Count Visto oversees this system and a few other small ones, operating out of Magenton. Bring your duffle and follow me. We’re not exactly overburdened here, but we are busy round the clock.”

“Doing what?” he asked, following her as she disappeared through the door and he had to run a few steps to catch up.

“Troubleshooting everything from security issues to building codes. If you were expecting combat, you’re going to be highly disappointed. Without a Monarch we have to take control of a lot of the planning duties. This planet is supposed to be built into a fortress world eventually. Do you know what that means?”

“Hardened world in case of invasion.”

“More or less. It also means less civilians and more workers, hence the empty starport,” she said, gesturing to structure they were walking through.

“How long has this planet been colonized?”

“About half a millennia. It’s got better than 40 billion Bsidd squeezed in, but we’re not increasing the population any further until we get the necessary infrastructure. The main problem is solari, and we haven’t got the funding yet for a Star Forge. Even when we do, the pair of suns returned a lack luster survey, so we’re still going to have to trade for the rest and we don’t have anything that’s standout here to work with. Hence our development has been slow.”

“How long have you been here?”

“73 years. This is my second assignment. I spent 12 years on Vitticor, which makes this place look small in comparison, but we’ve got plenty to do. In addition to builder work, we get a fair amount of pass through traffic this close to the Hula Hoop and the defense fleet has to ward off poachers. We’re the weakest link on three different trade routes, and when they get bold the scumbags try to ambush the civilian transports here.”

“But they don’t bother the planet?”

“Nope. Nobody comes down here, because we don’t have a public market. Everything is self-contained.”

“Is that permanent?”

“To be a stronghold you have to be self-sufficient, so we’re not encouraging public trade. Most of the civilians here operate local functions, and if they want to engage in interstellar trade they relocate to another system.”

“What’s the civilian breakdown?”

“Less than 2%. If you’re not here to build the planet, then there’s not much of a place for you. Those civilians are almost all lazy asses. Businessmen are non-existent, and we have a few artists.”

“All Bsidd?”

“The entire planet is Bsidd. Even the defense fleet. We four are the only non-Bsidd in the system.”

“Why Archons and not Bsidd Mavericks?”

“Beats me. I just go where they tell me.”

“And?” Leon pressed.

“I’m guessing its part of our training. We have to learn to deal with non-Humans while we still have other Archons to work with, maintaining the foundation we’ve already built.”

“Boring?”

“Not at all. Everything here functions like a bee hive, and we have to choose how much to micromanage and what not to. We’re here to enhance the planet, not run it. The Administrators can do that decent enough, but it’s ours to make improvements to wherever we can.”

“To get to the higher benchmarks?”

“Exactly,” Brie said as they left the spaceport and walked into the heavy sunlight from the binary stars in the system. The air was also dry, seeming to suck the moisture out of Leon’s mouth, but it wasn’t quite what he’d call a desert. Not with all the tall, blue/purple building spires surrounding them looking like flutes stuck into the ground or maybe giant grass stalks. “Over here.”

Leon followed her to a nearby mongoose, similar to what Leon had used in the Trials, but this one was larger and built for at least three people. The bench looked like you could squeeze four on it, plus a couple of footholds that would allow flankers to ride with one foot supporting them on the sides. Brie stepped on one of those, then leaned over and hit a switch causing the rear half of the seat to transform into a small cargo compartment.

“Put your duffle in there. We’ve got a ways to go and you don’t want to hold it.”

Leon slid it inside then closed the lid before hopping onto the pommel seat behind Brie a few inches, finding a pair of hand holds that he gripped tightly as she accelerated them down the fairly busy street on the four big tires that whined slightly when they got up to speed.

“You ever seen Bsidd before?” she asked as a force field popped up over top the mongoose to keep the air from hitting them in the face and making it hard to talk.

“Seen yes. Talked to, no.”

“They have a slight accent that takes some time to get used to, and their body movements will freak you out more than a snake until you get a lot of experience with them, but after that they’re not hard to predict. They give a lot of cues in their joint bends.”

“Security?”

“Not much is needed, but occasionally they will fight each other. Especially the younger ones.”

“About what?”

“Adherence to the rules. The Bsidd are born expecting no individuality, so as they gain it the others react badly to them going off the reservation. Once they grow up there isn’t a problem, but that takes a couple centuries.”

“Do they kill each other?”

“No, they just beat them up until they comply. The hive mind doesn’t let them kill unless they kill first. I’m told it’s a lot better than it used to be, but there are still some negatives in their genome that can’t be fixed without causing other problems. Same way Humans fight over mating rights.”

“Is that what they’re calling it now?”

“Who’s they?”

“Good point,” Leon said, remembering that there had only been 3 Humans on the entire planet before he’d arrived. “Who do we report to?”

“We’re Archons. We don’t report to anyone. We’re an independent planet as far as military assignments go, so we’re all Warcoren has got.”

“Why?”

“We’re sent here to take care of it. If we need superiors then we’re not Archons. If we had heavy combat to deal with it would be different, but there’s nothing here we can’t handle, so we’re on our own. We work with the Count on various things, but since this is a classified as a stronghold we’ve pretty much got the run of the place.”

“Is that normal?”

“On the smaller worlds, yeah. The higher ranking Archons have bigger stuff to do, so they leave the little ones to us. Kind of funny isn’t it? This entire planet is considered ‘little’ as far as Star Force is concerned.”

“Yeah,” Leon agreed, impressed with the size and complexity of the Bsidd city they were ripping through at decent speed. Forge had a lot of people on it, but they were all spaced out in different locations with a lot of raw planet in between where the Archons held training sessions. Here it was all city, with the insect-like Bsidd scurrying around at slightly better than pedestrian speeds.

It did feel like a bee hive, and it took more than half an hour before they got out of it at the edge of the city where the road ended at a gate. The Bsidd security guards passed the Archons through at a glance, then the mongoose crossed a half mile of paved surface before hitting the rough and very dry dirt beyond, bouncing him on his seat as they didn’t slow down at all…in fact, Brie was accelerating them now that they were out of the city traffic.

In the distance he could see more cities, looking like clumps of grass here and there with no direction being immune. They weren’t touching each other, but there were cities everywhere with a few major links between them that appeared to be clear tubes slightly elevated off the ground and some 400 meters or more wide, through which streets and trains traveled.

But not for the Archons. They were now outside the network and headed where he couldn’t see.

“Exactly where are we going?” he asked.

“Our little retreat from the Bsidd. It’s a couple miles ahead.”

Leon looked, but couldn’t see anything other than a few low hills and small rocks sporadically thrown around the landscape.

“I don’t see anything.”

“You shouldn’t. Just wait.”

Leon held onto the handles as they were continually hitting bumps, but he appreciated the rough ride as opposed to just flying. The wheeled vehicle was much more power efficient than flying, but Leon liked the mongooses because of the wild way they handled, requiring some piloting skill whereas flying transports were basically just point and click.

“Here we go,” Brie said, with Leon still seeing nothing. A moment later an energy field hit him in the face, and suddenly a small tower appeared right in front of him.

“A cloak?”

“We like our privacy.”

“What about the wheel trail in the dirt?”

“Nobody comes out here, so we’re not paranoid about it,” Brie said, slowing them down as a hangar door at the base of the tower began to rise up at her command. “Pretty cool though, right?”

“Yeah,” he answered as they slid underneath the meter wide door and curved to the right, stopping next to a few other mongooses in addition to a lot of other ships parked around the rather large hangar. Some were starships, others were aerial craft, and a couple looked like diggers.

“Welcome home. We don’t stay here much, but this is where we eventually return to when we have downtime. There’s a full Archon Sanctum here, so that’s where you’ll be doing your training. We leave the Bsidd facilities alone, for the most part.”

“You don’t spar against them?” Leon asked, pulling out his duffle and slinging it over his shoulder.

“Not anymore. Once you figure out how to not let them get within grapple range, there isn’t much to work on. You can’t fight them hand to hand without more psionics. Too many limbs.”

“I can imagine,” he said, following her through a nearby doorway and into architecture that was definitely not Bsidd. In fact, it was almost identical to what was on Forge. Squarish hallways with rounded corners, a lot of white accents and a clean, precise look as opposed to the purple/blue ovoids that seemed to dominate everything Bsidd.

“Are there Essence chambers here?”

“No. None of us is close to reaching that level, so we didn’t build any. Why? Were you going to try?” Brie asked with a smirk.

“Why not?”

“If you can’t touch your Essence yet, you can’t train with it.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Not any more than you do. We have the blueprints available to us, but honestly it’s not our place to meddle with stuff we’re not ready for.”

“But we could if we wanted to?” he asked.

“That’s part of being an Archon. Nobody is looking over your shoulder, so we can do what we want. But you’re the newb, so I’m looking over your shoulder until you get your field legs. Being out here is a lot different than the Trials.”

“I already got that impression.”

“Drop your gear there,” she said, pointing to the floor outside a door that she opened. “Time to get you your new armor.”

“Good. I didn’t like traveling without it.”

“Not that training crap,” Brie said with disgust as they walked into a very impressive mechanical room. “This is real armor.”

Leon’s eyes widened as he saw the array of fabrication equipment and the various statue-like armor suits arrayed for display.

“Spares,” she noted. “Some are standard, but one of each is for us in case we need a quick swap-out. Can you tell which one is mine?”

“That one,” Leon said, pointing to the one on the left. “Unless Fred and Darren have boobs.”

“Don’t use mine unless you have to, but in case there are no others you can trigger all of them to return to defaults and they will adapt to your shape. However, customization adds more power because we can arrange all the critical components around your body position. Step onto that pedestal and hold still.”

“Do I need to strip?” Leon asked while doing as told and hopping up on the circular silver platform 10 inches higher than the floor and set into a corner of the hexagonal room.

“The sensors can see through your clothes,” she said, working a nearby console. “What kind do you want?”

“What options are there?”

“All of them.”

“Am I stuck with just one?”

“No. You can build as many as you like and try them out. Where do you want to start?”

“Braxis.”

“Standby,” she said, selecting the armor option that had full flight capability and enhanced shields, designed for high agility but lower defense rating. Braxis was for dodgers and rovers, not heavy hitting, which made it a decent choice for a world where heavy fights were most likely not going to occur.

The machine scanned him for several moments, shifting through millions of various microscopic alignments until it found the best ones suited for Leon, then the machinery began to come alive with a flurry of sounds and lights.

“You can step down now,” Brie said. “This will take a few minutes.”

“What’s my first assignment going to be?”

“Hanging out with me until you get adjusted. After that you’ll pick your own assignments. Basically look for problems or ways to make improvements and be ready to respond to alerts. But don’t work so much you neglect your training. You gotta balance it out.”

“Do we train together?”

“Most of the time no, but when we need to spar we do. The machines are good and will kick your ass with ease, but they lack the personal touch and get predictable over time. It’s their reaction speed that you need to test yourself against, not their creativity.”

“So you’re saying I just went from highly regulated schedules to pick my own?”

“Pretty much. It’s time for you to grow up.”

“I thought I already had.”

“So did I until I got out here. Then you realize there is so much road ahead and so little behind…and that’s when you really grow up. When you realize you’re still a newb, and yet you know more than almost everyone else out there. Take us. Four Archons for a planet of 40 billion, and yet we’re still younglings compared to the Mages…let alone the Saiyans, Neos, or Borg. It’s here where you realize that we’re the tip of the spear. No one outranks us, no one is there to turn to when we can’t handle something. We have to lead, we have to find a way, and it’s here where you look out into the void of the galaxy and realize how lonely it is at the top. Just be glad there are four of us here. Some planets only get one Archon, if any.”

“There are some with none?”

“Yeah there are. Usually in systems where there are multiple planets. But there are some systems with no Archons at all because of special circumstances.”

“That’s not wise.”

“No it’s not, but there are only so many of us and when you have more worlds than Archons, that’s what happens. Then you have Archons out patrolling non-Star Force worlds and spacelanes, etc. We’re a rare commodity, even with the Mavericks added in,” she said, for the Mavericks even used the same numbering system with the Archons, despite not being trained together.

“So if this system gets hit, we’re it?”

“We can always call for help. That’s what an empire is for. But until the help gets here, yep, we’re it. Kind of scary, isn’t it?”

“It’s what I became an Archon for. I’m just surprised it’s thrown at us all at once.”

“Sink or swim, bro. No training wheels for Archons,” she said as the fabrication machine finished and a pair of silver gauntlets floated out of a wall slot with a little residual steam rising off them until they landed on the central pedestal that connected to the ceiling in a light shaft.

“Are they hot?”

“A little. All it takes is a few seconds to normalize. You can touch them now.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep. Go ahead.”

Leon reached out and touched one with his finger experimentally, finding it remarkably lukewarm. He then grabbed it and slid it on over his hand, fastening the simple clasp that triggered it to melt into a single piece covering the first half of his forearm only, as opposed to Brie’s that traveled all the way up to her shoulder. He put the second one on, then held them out in front of him so he could get a good look.

“They fit like a glove,” he noted, mentally signaling them to activate. The two gauntlets quickly melted and covered him head to toe in silver armor that had various portions thicker than others, but all of it was tailored for mobility and flexibility, with the joints and other crunch points reforming as he moved to keep the solid nature of the armor intact without hindering him.

“Change the color,” Brie told him.

“Um, right,” he said, sifting through the myriad of controls until he found the color setting and selected ‘Ranger,’ which caused the silver to disappear and become replaced with the appropriate green.

“Alright, now you’re official. Stuff your gear in your quarters then we’ll get to work on the southern continent.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Learn as you go, newb.”

“And I’m the newb until someone else gets assigned here?”

“You’re the newb until I can stop answering questions.”

“Fair enough. Where are my quarters?”

37,309 lightyears away…

“We have no choice,” the Chixzon noted calmly. “This is the only way. Star Force will not crumble from within.”

“I concur, but once started this cannot be undone.”

“That we know of,” a third Chixzon added.

“Is there any other recourse possible?”

“We have exhausted all options. It is this or we cede control of the galaxy to them and the V’kit’no’sat. We have been gone too long, and this is the repercussion of it.”

“It is not a matter of time. Star Force is an unusually formidable enemy, the V’kit’no’sat are not. It is their unity that is their strongest asset, and that is not a function of time. We have never had a worthy opponent before, and if we are to best this one we must use whatever methods are available, and there is but one. We can continue our search for more, or act now. I choose to act.”

“We are all in agreement. Send the ship...”

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