Gateways

by Aer-ki Jyr

  And those ripples were Essence weapon cascades traveling up the now detached growth, sucking the life out of the defenses in it and causing it to ‘Wither’ as the Veloqueen used a technique that backfed the Hadarak’s own Essence defenses into the Wither effect, tapping into their wells and using it to continue the ripple onward, simultaneously draining their power to defend itself with.

  And with the stem now severed, no Essence could flow out from the planet to reinforce it, with the end result being that the Veloqueen maneuver had just cut a piece off of their giant biological city and isolated it from the rest…and the Veloqueen were assaulting it with virtual impunity as the minion swarms slowly turned away from Paul’s fleet and raced to get back to the planet.

  At which point Roger knew Paul would up his game, and he wasn’t disappointed. Paul moved immediately and hit the retreating minion clouds full on, dropping the hammer and making them choose between the two targets…at which point their command and control system broke down and the defenders split their attention, leaving too few to counter Paul’s ships effectively while the time delay in the others arriving back at the planet would leave the Veloqueen with an easy escape vector should they choose to use it, but right now they were busy assaulting the growth and would continue to do so until forcibly stopped.

  Suddenly the Hadarak did not have enough units in the field to do both due to the bad positioning, and that was when all the other Hadarak in the system began to reposition at the same time, meaning they had to have sent out an Essence burst command, probably from the Spice Lords sitting safely down in the black hole. They had the luxury of nearly instantaneous communication if they chose to use enough Essence to send it out, and it appeared they had just done so, otherwise the time lag would have been visible in the enemy’s movements across the system.

  They’d just panicked, and now the rest of the Star Force fleet was going to have holes manifesting to take advantage of…and that’s how this battle was now going to go down. Roger didn’t need to ask permission or coordinate with the others. This blind combined assault was child’s play for the trailblazers and the Grand Admirals they had selected and trained, and all Roger needed was to see the opportunity arise…at which point he ordered his fleet to begin emergency jumps towards the black hole, pulling on their engines far harder than normal within a system, as he walked over to his astromech alcove and mentally detached from the command nexus interlink.

  He’d have to focus to make the Borg connection to the computer system that was the astromech, for his Core would have to extend out from his body and into it, making it an extension of himself in order to augment his brain power enough to micromanage as much of the coming battle as he could, but his fleet was still too large to do that with every function on every drone and warship. His crews would handle a little bit each, with Roger giving orders about who was to do what, target what, move where, and he trusted them to take it from there, but the flow of battle was for him to direct, as it was for the other trailblazers and their fleets in their own assault sectors.

  This was how galaxy-level war was fought. Not in a single battle, or single moment. Not a heroic move or winning strategy. This was tedious, non-stop carnage that even the best of personnel could get distracted by and lost within…but Star Force was better than the best, and they were going to stay in unison when the Hadarak fractured. And because of that they would win this coming fight convincingly, but they would have to do it day after day after day after day in order to get through all the enemies here.

  The Hadarak would have plenty of time to learn from their mistakes and adapt their tactics…and therein lay the biggest job of the trailblazers. They had to counter their adaptations and improvise to keep the flow of battle what it needed to be, for a stalemate here was a loss. And 10% casualties was utter failure. Drones could be replaced, but not warship crews. Everyone had to live, otherwise a loss of a single person here would be felt tomorrow and on into the future. And while it did occasionally happen, Roger could not let it happen or the amoral Hadarak attrition strategy would win out. Roger could trade ships for kills, but he couldn’t trade people for kills.

  And that’s what the Hadarak were going to try very hard to force him to do or give up and retreat.

  As Roger’s mind extended out his astromech came alive and his senses expanded, with him seeing through every ship in his fleet, through their sensors, their cameras, their engine pulls on the black hole, the temperature of the air inside them, the latches holding the drones in place inside the warships. He was becoming the fleet, and through the fleet he would fight as his crew onboard the Sharkhammer protected him in his now vulnerable state plugged into a machine that he could not quickly detach from.

  It was not the preferred way to fight as a warrior, but in naval warfare on this level, it was the only way to keep up with Wardens who had brains the size of starships and could control far more minions than Roger could ever hope to control drones.

  The difference was, a Star Force drone pilot sitting in a warship was vastly superior to a minion’s intellect, so Roger didn’t have to micromanage as much. He just had to maintain the flow of battle…and his people would take care of the rest.

  That was called ‘Teamwork,’ as opposed to the ‘Tyranny’ that the Hadarak employed so effectively across multiple galaxies.

  But not this one.

  Not anymore.

  10

  September 18, 158407

  Megatron Prime 37 System (Galactic Core)

  Low Stellar Orbit

  Four years. Paul-024 had been fighting naval battles in this Gateway system every day for four years, and finally it was over.

  He hadn’t had a full workout in all that time, nor had he made any improvements in his physical skills. The same was true of the rest of the Archons in the Star Force fleet, who all were doing partials to try and maintain their fitness during rotations while the combat had gone on nearly nonstop across the system.

  It had occurred in spurts, with lulls here and there, but Paul had never been out of mental contact with the battlemap network for more than a few minutes while awake. This had been the most intense system conquest he and the other trailblazers had ever taken part in, and he knew it was going to get worse as they climbed the difficulty ladder taking the remaining gateways.

  But for now it was over, and Mak’to’ran was already here with a small fleet to begin securing their foothold. He always did that personally before handing off system command to another V’kit’no’sat, and Paul knew he’d taken care of the work here as traffic was continuing to flow from outside this galaxy in both Hadarak reinforcements and other races.

  Yet now that their foothold was gone, those Hadarak reinforcements were walking into a trap. The same was true of those coming from nearby systems who hadn’t got the idea yet that this gateway no longer belonged to them. The Star Force fleet was cutting them apart almost as soon as they entered at the primary local jumplanes while the Jedein were capturing as many as they could. Already there were huge areas of the system cordoned off into refugee camps where previous minions were now encased in cocoons and slowly transforming into new forms that would not be enemies.

  Several Wardens were there was well going through the same transformation, except they were inside stars. Also they had managed to capture two Lurkers, which was a pleasant surprise, and they too were already in cocoons as the Uriti watched over them and the Jedein to make sure no one would damage them during in their vulnerable state.

  But all was not safe here. As Paul sat in his command nexus looking down at the black hole directly below him as his fleet skimmed over its surface with a chunk a their sensors being completely useless in the super high gravity, the trailblazer watched the undulations in the surface via the sensors that weren’t affected. The black hole, while invisible to normal light, was actually quite active with magnetically stirred waves crisscrossing the surface as the extremely dense material flowed like sticky water.

  T
he Uriti could go down there, as could the Hadarak Wardens and Lurkers. The Jedein stayed out of all but the uppermost layers, finding it too hard to move and they had to keep their tendrils tucked or they’d be ripped off, so a black hole of this size was really off limits to them almost as much as to Star Force. Paul could take his ship all the way down to the surface without touching it and be fine inside his inertial dampening fields as long as the engines provided the anti-grav necessary to keep them from being pulled into it. If a touch was made, and a bit of the black hole material passed inside the dampening field and was no longer gravitationally compressed, it would explode outward like a bomb and expand exponentially.

  Likewise, if a part of Paul’s ship stuck out past the inertial dampening field, the black hole’s gravity would rip it off, pull it down to the surface, and flatten it against the compressed material that would then eat it apart like acid as the molecules were deconstructed under the pressure and turned into atomic soup.

  It was such a hazardous environment that Star Force had only been able to travel down inside smaller black holes with specially built craft, and only then just to dip their toes in it, metaphorically speaking. But this one was so massive they couldn’t even do that, and it still amazed him that the Uriti could go down there. Their Yeg’gor actually thrived in this environment, with the more pressure the better, and the Veloqueen liked it as well with their technological armor somehow not being negatively affected.

  But down there was a line that Paul could not cross, and the continuing battles in this system he couldn’t take part in. There were Wardens down there that the Veloqueen were going after, hoping to capture and bring back up into space. Possibly some Lurkers too, but the main threat was the Spice Lords. They were the mirror opposite of Paul, for they could not come out of the black hole into space or they’d die. They had to have the pressure and the energy of the black hole, for it wasn’t cold. It was hotter than stars, with its gravity keeping all the sunlight and heat in as it tried to expel from the surface only to be yanked back down in giant fountains that Paul’s fleet was just riding above.

  Yet go deeper and it got far, far hotter. Physics down there worked completely different when the subatomic particles didn’t have room to breathe, and he only knew what those few who could go down there had told him. He didn’t like being out of the loop, but today he found it a relief as some of the Star Force fleets were already beginning to depart the system.

  They’d been resupplied and repaired here many times over, so they were still fully combat capable, but another gateway assault wouldn’t be possible for a long time. So many drones had to be replaced that it was impossible to launch another one now, so as the V’kit’no’sat gradually replaced them here the trailblazers and Grand Admirals would disperse their ships to smaller system battles or other assignments, then meet up again down the road to do this all over again at an even tougher target.

  That was the way of galactic war, and millions of years of enemy prep work couldn’t be undone quickly. The Hadarak growths were all gone now, destroyed by combat or consumed by the Hadarak to grow more minions when they ran out of other sources of food. Paul and the others actually had to kill the minion swarms many times over as they were continually being replaced here, as well as getting reinforcements from the outside, but with each growth they took down the Hadarak’s ability to grow more diminished.

  It had been a long chess game of attrition, but Star Force knew how to play it better than the Hadarak now…though only by a small margin. They needed better weapons, more tactical options, and a faster way for the Jedein to capture and reshape enemies into neutrals in order to achieve faster conquest.

  The Wardens captured here would eventually turn into Jedein once their minds were freed and their biological birthright was allowed to fulfill itself, and that in turn would increase the Alliance’s ability to rescue even more, but it was a slow snowball effect, and nowhere near what was required to take vast amounts of territory from the Hadarak. Hence the carnage would continue for a long time to come.

  As for the Spice Lords, the Veloqueen were the ones that were going to have to deal with them and all the other Megaloids living within the massive black hole, and because the material it was made of was so ‘sticky,’ movement inside was slower than within a star. That made the volume of it effectively much larger, so large in fact that you couldn’t explore it all in your lifetime and there were probably Megaloids down there that had never met a Hadarak.

  It was not empty down there, and the Veloqueen were now going to be the dominant force within it…or so they claimed. Already, in other systems, races stronger than the Veloqueen had been found living in them alongside the Spice Lords, but the Veloqueen packs appeared to still have the upper hand if combat was required. Paul didn’t get detailed updates about what went on down there, and if the Veloqueen were misbehaving he’d never know about it. He didn’t like that part, but it was out of his hands.

  The Uriti would tell him what they observed, but they moved even slower than the Veloqueen down there, and only went into the shallow end of the ‘pool.’ The deepest areas were where the Spice Lords lived, and to date none had ever surrendered, but few had been killed. The Veloqueen told him it was too costly to fight them directly in most cases, so various forms of containment was used to monitor and prevent them from spawning armies of a different sort down there. Armies not of the Jedein line that the Wardens were. And armies that the Veloqueen were right now having to fight their way through to get access to various regions and pacify them.

  The Spice Lords could become giant factories if they so chose, but finding the right material for food was not so easy. The black hole was not all the same stuff, and most of the Spice Lords’ bodies had to be built inside them through fusion and fission, which was a slow process. Ample energy was there to do it, but getting the right precursors often meant traveling up to the shallows where there were still intact atoms and some basic molecules to harvest.

  Regardless of what happened, the Veloqueen would keep this black hole occupied with several thousand of their people at the minimum to act as a peacekeeping operation. Paul though that was extremely small considering how much territory there was down there, but as long as they kept enemies from rising up and fighting the V’kit’no’sat defenders, their job was accomplished. They didn’t have to actually own all of the black hole, just make sure the neighborhood inside it was moderately stable.

  And by the same token, the V’kit’no’sat had to secure the neighborhood above and around the black hole, though they would never fully own it. It was like a giant public park that people were coming into and out of constantly, and Mak’to’ran’s job was to make sure none of the picnickers got assassinated and kept any roaming biker gangs from passing through.

  But dominion of the space around the black hole was now theirs, as were what was left of the planets and stars orbiting it. There was going to be some rebuilding done here down the line, but for right now Paul and his warfleet was taking a long needed breath before moving on. And as for The Admiral, while he could have kept going indefinitely, he was finding he was more tired than he had allowed himself to notice, but still too close to battle mode to fully rest, so he sat and watched the waves in the black hole as his fleet took turns poaching the jumppoints of incoming Hadarak reinforcements.

  This was one more door closed to the extra-galactic Hadarak, and the reinforcements that would keep coming here from beyond would not make it out to assist the others in this galaxy. In the past, with each gateway taken, there was a noticeable effect on the less important systems in Hadarak territory, and it made Clan Kai’sa’s job a little bit easier sweeping up those systems, but the big ones in the Deep Core were still full of them and their growths, and taking them down was going to be a long, hard grind that Paul didn’t look forward to, but was ready and able to throw himself at it as needed, and the same was true with the other trailblazers.

  Paul sat for several hours, not wanting
to do anything other than let his brain breathe, but his seething solitude was interrupted by a faint ping in the back of his mind. He almost didn’t notice it, and wondered if he had completely missed it in the past during battle, for it was Azoro trying to make contact with him.

  The Sha’kier was not here, and hadn’t been at all these 4 years. He was hopping between the now open minds of the cadets at the Praxium as he taught them the ways of the Saiolum while searching Star Force territory for more. Paul had grown powerful enough that a permanent bond was formed between them that stretched the gap of half the galaxy’s width without breaking. Paul didn’t know how much further they could go until it snapped, but it wasn’t Azoro’s strength that was the limiting factor. It was Paul’s, and he knew Azoro could keep a connection with others across galaxies if he wanted, and had done so in the distant past before his race was annihilated.

  Paul had to focus to bring that tiny piece of himself to the forefront of his mind, amplify it, and try to think in the simplest words and thoughts possible, for not much information could travel at this distance as the link between them was stretched so thin.

  I am here, he answered. This gateway is now taken. I will be leaving soon for other work. Have you tried to contact me before that I was unaware of?

  Twice now, but I assumed you were distracted. I am still surprised you can communicate at this range. The cadets do not have your aptitude for learning.

  Trouble?

  Difficulties, but nothing that is unanticipated. Progress is being made and we grow our numbers gradually. A synthesis is forming amongst them, and it is easing the transition period for new converts. I do not like using this primitive technology, for it is leaving them raw, but I see no other way.