Star Force: Phoenix (Star Force Universe Book 62)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  It was a critical mission that others would have abandoned at the first sign of the Vargemma, but Star Force was better than that, and the trailblazers had faith in Neofenn to handle this on his own. Ian-033 had said so personally before he left, and with the updates coming from the Temples Neofenn now knew that they would not be coming back anytime soon. There was no much to do in that hidden network before Star Force could focus on the Hadarak that they were rightly putting everything they had into that war, leaving the V’kit’no’sat and Zak’de’ron to fight and delay the Hadarak as much as they could.

  But these new units that had been popping up in the field…they were the tip of the iceberg. Kara had noted they were the primary troops for the all-biological navy, and that the regular minions were too weak to do much more than eat carrion and clean up battlefields. The enemies that the Hadarak had in the Core were hammering them with large, hardened units that the minions apparently were not good against. It was almost as if the Warden/Minion force had been designed specifically for lesser threats in order to keep larger ones from rising up. Or maybe they were just a very elaborate detection grid. Either way, they were not the ‘real’ Hadarak threat, and as intimidating as that information was, Neofenn felt more confident now that he had an enemy unit list, even if it was, as Kara noted, probably incomplete.

  She’d tagged the major units as Kongs, Spike Balls, Vamps, Trons, and Merlins, and as usual each name had a certain obviousness to it.

  The Kongs were the largest, but smaller than tier-1 Wardens. They had four arms branching out from a central body, almost as if King Kong was raising his arms up and ready to beat them down. In reality they were mobile docking ports so they could attach to the curved bodies of the Wardens and transfer resources to them, or receive from them. The Kongs were hybrid warships/transports, as well as being rescue ships for the Hadarak when they were wounded, able to attach and provide them with maneuvering engines, weapon batteries, etc.

  But while Kara hadn’t directly observed it, she had picked up debris from dead ones to analyze. They had weapons, unlike the Wardens that only had tentacles and grapple fields, which were damn effective as it was in conjunction with minion swarms. They also had shield generators, and it wasn’t Essence related. They were biological generators, and Neofenn knew the moment he saw the readouts that they could be attached to the Wardens to provide them with additional protection and weaponry.

  It was an upgrade that hadn’t made its way into this war yet, but even without working with a Warden the Kongs could fight on their own, pick up other damaged units, move large asteroids into feeding areas, and do a lot of other multi-tasking stuff. The arms could move quite a bit, but they were thick as hell. At first glance he thought they looked like spiders, but after seeing the name he now saw giant monkeys every time ready to beat their chest like war drums.

  And in addition to all that, they had near Yeg’gor armor levels of plating. Far beyond what any minion had. In fact, most minions had very little armor. They were offensive weapons designed to swarm and die, not survive. These mainline Hadarak units were the reverse. They were designed to endure, and when that was coupled with the minion swarms, the Triad, as well as the rest of the galaxy, wasn’t going to stand a chance with conventional weapons.

  The Legion Ysalamir would get through, Neofenn guessed. The V’kit’no’sat were doing quite well hunting Wardens with them, and their numbers were increasing as the Dinosaur Empire kept shifting more and more resources into their production. They shared almost all of their races with Star Force, but they did not behave the same. They were visceral in their assaults on the Hadarak, for they had been preparing for this war throughout the entire existence of their empire.

  Neofenn didn’t trust them, nor did many in Star Force, but they were good allies to have when you needed damage done. And the galaxy needed as much damage as possible to push back this purge.

  Though in truth, it wasn’t the entire galaxy. A huge chunk of the galactic swirl was inside Hadarak territory and operated totally different. The fact that there were other races in there was surprising. He had assumed the Hadarak would simply wipe out everything in their way, but it seemed the dynamics of the Core were far more complicated. Not to mention these Ikeo, which were beating the crap out of the Hadarak when they got in their way, were frightening and reassuring at the same time. The Hadarak were not unchallenged, they were simply winning, for they controlled almost all of the territory in the Core that Kara had been able to chart.

  The Deep Core she hadn’t been able to get to, but the defense ring she’d been able to penetrate suggested that the Hadarak feared something on the exterior. Was it the Founders? Maybe. But the lengths they had gone to when the Temples were supposed to be hidden was perplexing. As many questions as had been answered by her scouting mission were now surpassed by new ones, but for his immediate work, Neofenn now had an idea of what would be coming their way if/when they managed to put up enough resistance to trigger another escalation to the war.

  One mainline unit that really worried Neofenn were the Spike Balls. These were loaded guns with ramming weapons that would detach on will and collide with any large opponent, such as a Ysalamir or Borg vessel. They were not designed for small scale combat, but to take out large chess pieces, and they had between 8 and 29 spikes lodged into their sphere-like shapes.

  Once fired it would take time to regrow more, and it was guessed that would be months at the minimum…if not for the Kongs. The Grand Admiral suspected they could resupply the Spike Balls so they could regrow their massive ammunition more quickly. And that ammunition had a host of weapons and countermeasures built in to ensure they got to their target and then disabled it. Even if they couldn’t get a large collision speed, they had IDF nodules to ensure you couldn’t run away and couldn’t shoot them all out either.

  He could see how the large biological opponents in the Core required such a unit to counter, but it would also work extremely well against the larger V’kit’no’sat ships and Star Force control ships, being able to take out an entire vessel in a single attack…or at least damage/disable them enough for the minion swarms to finish them off in the aftermath.

  The Vamps were smaller and had a single spike on a hinge that would insert/drill into an opponent after the Vamp collided with it. They were largescale melee attack ships with an energy matrix on the spike that added to its cutting power. Their bodies were C-shaped, but contorted, and the units operated very little on their own. They’d be easy to pick apart from range, though they had heavy armor as well.

  In conjunction with other units that could pin down opponents, the Vamps could move in and deliver penetrative attacks to high armor targets, creating a weak spot that others could then exploit once the Vamp let go…if it did at all. The backside of the Vamp matched the interior curve of the Kongs, so it was possible that was the method of capturing ships and moving them if for some reason they didn’t want to destroy you on the spot.

  The Trons were the mainline ranged unit. They were disc-shaped, also with heavy armor, but they had beam and arc weapons that could be fired anywhere off their shiny rims. That meant they did not have individual weapons batteries to target and destroy, which was damn smart. It meant you had to destroy the entire rim of the Tron to disable the weapon, and when stacked together into phalanxes the rims were just about all you could see.

  The last mainline Unit Kara had discovered were the Merlins, and these were the ones that had some Essence weaponry, but they didn’t rely on it. It was more of a once or twice use cannon that could do major damage, then the Merlins could fight their way clear and survive to recharge later, either over the course of time or from a nearby Warden. The Merlins looked like dresses, for they had a downward cup shape that could probably match with the curve of a Warden with some modification, then there was a thick body section extending up from that cup.

  Those five units were augmented with smaller ones that were better armored than minions, and it was those m
iddle units that the Hadarak had begun to produce in small numbers in the strongholds out here. Whether that was preplanned or in response to the resistance being posed Neofenn didn’t know, but it was clear this war was escalating and the longer the Vargemma delayed Star Force the more they helped the Hadarak…despite supposedly being created to oppose them.

  As bad as it was now, the real fight hadn’t even started yet. And until the Vargemma issue was dealt with, the Star Force fleet was going to be in the Temple network dealing with those bastards. And until that threat was neutralized, all the Grand Admiral could do was keep evacuating people and hope they had enough time to fix things in the Rim before these heavier Hadarak units came into play en mass.

  7

  November 2, 128555

  Stugarrata Nebula (Tovok Kingdom)

  Kappa Temple

  It had been nearly a year since Cal-com had arrived in Kappa Temple. During that time he had separated all the races, which wasn’t overly difficult because they didn’t share cities, but what cross travel and links there were he removed, by force when necessary. Several buildings had been assaulted and cleared with stun weapons, then orbital bombardment had destroyed the city-edge structures. Star Force had removed the debris, leaving nothing but an empty parking lot as a reminder not to violate the boundary lines…and most of the Vargemma had got the point, for each violation was trimming the perimeter of their cities and they got tired of that after a while.

  Cal-com had also removed all Essence weaponry from them. That was more complicated, but most did so voluntarily since he wasn’t requiring them to give up any of their Essence stores. He’d actually promised them those would be theirs to keep so long as they maintained the necessary donations to the Temple to keep it operating. The races/cities that did not want to strip their primary defenses had them removed, and the efficiency of the strikes scared the others into complying. The Vargemma had nothing to stop the Star Force fleet with…but at the same time they knew that Star Force didn’t have the manpower to take control of the surface, so there was a stark division between who actually controlled the Temple.

  Cal-com owned space, the Vargemma owned the surface in their cities. The rest of the surface Cal-com had loose control over, and he had numerous patrols out making sure the Vargemma did not wander out there. Many did, on an individual level, creating trails, tunnels, and other means of getting people and information to and from the various races. In fact, it seemed they were cooperating together more now than they had before the Temple had been invaded, but so far Cal-com had not done much to accomplish his mission, though he knew a simple solution was not possible. If there was one, he would not have been sent here.

  His plan thus far was to isolate each race and deal with them individually. In order to do that he needed to eliminate communications, so in addition to banning them from using inter-racial comms he was eliminating their capability to do so with signal jamming walls being put up between them. They were little more than a series of towers that connected to one another and blocked line of sight transmissions whenever they were encoded. If someone wanted to use a laser, then the shields would block the visible light as well until the signal relented, then it would release the block. So when the Vargemma were behaving themselves the towers were mostly inert and monitoring, but when needed they could create a total blackout dome over any city as needed.

  Sabotage teams had been taking down some of the towers, but most of the time those teams got caught and the jamming walls had been designed to be redundant, so a single tower going down would create no gap. You’d have to take down three in a row to do so, and so far they hadn’t figured that out or couldn’t mount the necessary attack to get past the towers’ perimeter defenses with infantry weapons and their own Essence skills, the latter of which were the more powerful since all warships and mobile artillery and other heavy weapons had been confiscated.

  Confiscated or deconstructed. Cal-com had let the Vargemma recycle them if they wished, and it was hilarious how the Vargemma thought they could cheat him. Star Force’s intelligence gathering capabilities were far more advanced than they’d guessed, and much of that had to do with tiny, dust-sized surveillance drones that could be sent just about anywhere…with scaling upwards to allow for armies of eyes down into the Vargemma cities without having to risk a single person.

  He could see most of what they were doing out in the open. Inside buildings was a bit harder, but where he needed eyes he could usually get them. The trouble was there were so many buildings and so many Vargemma to watch that he couldn’t hope to monitor them all.

  Fortunately he didn’t have to. As long as they were hostile they were going to sit where they were, and if they started killing each other the Caretakers would intervene. Cal-com wasn’t taking personal responsibility for them like he did the Star Force personnel here, and so far nobody was really wanting to join the empire. They were just weathering the occupation because they had no other options, and fighting the Caretakers like the other Temples were meant they would die…and it seemed the Vargemma here did not want to. At least not without being able to reclaim the Temple or accomplish some other objective.

  So here they sat, much as they had throughout their history. Not much down on the surface changed, but the view in the sky had. Star Force ships flew, Vargemma ships did not. Vessels going from one city to another were allowed, but capped in altitude and mandated into approved routes only that kept them within the atmosphere where they had to move slowly. Cal-com had and maintained the high ground, but that wasn’t why he was here.

  He spent his days onboard a donut-shaped command ship well above the surface and out of weapons range of anything down there, including the Temple’s own hidden mega turrets. He monitored the data feeds that others compiled, as well as paid attention to the news snippets coming from other Temples and the rest of the galaxy, all of which had to come via couriers. The Essence barrier surrounding the Temple blocked all signals, but Cal-com had ordered a shuffler transmitter installed. Construction wasn’t complete yet, but when it was it would pass data crystals back and forth across the barrier to a transmitter on the outside.

  Given that Kappa Temple was one of the few that was inside Star Force territory, Cal-com had an outpost in a neighboring system begin setting up an ultra-sensitive receiver to give him a comm grid link as soon as possible. Building here would be limited, since nobody could get on the outside other than by automated drone. Those would carry a physical line out through the nebula into clear space where a small transmitter would be established. It would be just enough power for the outpost to pick up initially, and hopefully would be set up within the next 5 months. The holdup right now was establishing a sub-surface perimeter capable of repelling the Caretaker units without them realizing their brethren were being destroyed.

  The same had been done in Alpha Temple, but Cal-com wanted a few more precautions. Right now the construction teams were waiting in the magma layer and ready to start boring through the exterior hull of the Temple. Doing that would incur the Caretaker response, and Cal-com didn’t want to risk turning a small confrontation into an escalating war. Nor did he want to have to bore another tunnel down to the exterior if the containment on this one slipped up.

  Reliability was what he was after, not speed, but he didn’t like wasting Essence on couriers when his Temple was in Star Force’s own backyard. There wasn’t a shortage, for the Uriti were supplying them with all that they needed via Tankers coming in and going out, but Cal-com knew there would be a limit reached eventually, and Uriti did not grow very fast. Nor were any more being spawned as long as the Vargemma were on the loose out there, for they would make an easy target given how immobile they were during the spawning process.

  The amount of Essence Star Force had available dwarfed that which the Vargemma had, and they had so much it gave them power over all others in the galaxy that did not possess the skill. The quadrillions of people in all the Temples making small deposits daily was what
amounted to the large reserve pools that each race had carefully collected and used for specific missions, but in large part they were hoarders, for Essence wasn’t easily replaced once used.

  They’d been using a lot to hurt Star Force, but Cal-com knew it wasn’t more than a few percent of what they had stored. The Caretakers monitored a lot of things in the Temple, and using some of their data, coupled with Star Force’s own scans, and he could approximate how much the various wells held, though it was impossible to tell without direct sampling.

  But a person who was miles wide generated so much without extra skill involved that it dwarfed what the tiny Vargemma could manage without insane numbers, and with every Essence donation the Uriti made their own Essence capacity increased slightly. It was the one form of Essence training they could partake in, and like the Warden Hadarak who had lived millions of years, over time that upgrade would lead to immense Essence batteries for the offensive units to use.

  Yet Hadarak couldn’t be grown quickly either, and Cal-com had been interested in what the Vargemma’s battle plan against the Hadarak had been. He’d had to shop around until he found some individuals willing to discuss it, but some eventually had in exchange for firsthand data on the Hadarak from Star Force, for the Vargemma had very little scouting data of their own about what was going on out there.

  The plan they had, other than waiting for a Founder to return and lead them, was a war of attrition. The little units didn’t matter, but every time they could kill a Warden it would set the Hadarak Essence production back immensely. With so many of them out there that didn’t seem likely, but thanks to Cal-com’s information on the Uriti he understood why it mattered. The chess pieces had to be preserved, and the Hadarak were sending them out as the first line of defense almost asking for them to be attacked.