by Aer-ki Jyr
Mak’to’ran shifted the comm signal with the song to play throughout his entire ship with a thought, then lifted his head back and roared so loud the command deck walls vibrated.
They had come. Not just reinforcements, but the trailblazers themselves and on a jumpline nobody would have expected. They didn’t have to fight their way into the system, but it appeared they were moving to engage multiple targets…with the primary being the major jumplines and the prime brake points in low stellar orbit.
So maybe this was just the first wave with the others coming in through the normal route…but it didn’t matter. The trailblazers were here, Star Force was here, and Mak’to’ran’s gamble had just been validated. As had the PanNari’s.
Star Force may have had so many races in it that Mak’to’ran couldn’t name them all, far more than the original V’kit’no’sat had, but their unity was far superior. Nobody was sacrificed. Nobody abandoned. They fought for one another, backed each other up, and above all else, trusted one another.
And unlike the cowardly Zak’de’ron, in Star Force, the strongest went in first.
Mak’to’ran ordered all his ships across the system into immediate combat mode, redeploying them towards the arriving ships and requesting instructions from the Excalibur as to how they wanted to fight this.
3
The Elloquim Nevantha was locked into the bedrock and pulling himself lower into it whenever possible. His exposed body was potmarked with massive holes that his internal drones were constantly repairing as he drew material out of the planetary crust, processed it, and produced replacement parts in a war of attrition against the damage the Hadarak were pouring down from orbit.
But he wasn’t static in his defense. His weaponry was his highest priority, and when it was damaged or destroyed it got replaced first and foremost. The dead minions from above continued to rain down on top of him, and he was using his grapple fields to maneuver the corpses to specific locations on his hull to give him a bit of cover against their weaponry where his shields were temporarily down.
Up and down they went in patches, repairs made, new damage taken, and on and on it went as his subsurface drilling and excavation teams produced tunnels that were sending drones and tendrils from his body out into the Hadarak burrowing teams attempting to create new access points to the Maty.
There wasn’t too much going on for him to process, and as he worked every angle with perfect calm he analyzed the enemy and his response to them, looking for alterations to make for greater efficiency as well as making predictions as to the future outcome.
All those predictions ended in his death and the loss of the Maty. Even with Star Force’s V’kit’no’sat arriving to reinforce…which had been instrumental to their ability to hold it from the inside…they were going to lose. The mathematics were determinate. The current mission was to retrieve as much information as possible and transmit it to the Elloquim beyond the planet so they could carry it with them back to the PanNari worlds where they would begin the long process of rebuilding, but doing so as a highly advanced civilization.
Nevantha would not live to be part of it. He could not escape the planet if he wished to now. The few primary tentacles he had left were reaching down into the magma layers and sweeping out the underside of the crust to chew away at it and break through further so he could sink in more. The heat he could manage far better than the weaponsfire from above, but it did take a toll on his mass…and it was that mass that had allowed him to survive thus far. He had lost some 27% of it already, with huge hollows inside him remaining after surface repairs were done…but he was filling those hollows with magma drawn from below.
When it cooled it became a form of armor that would have to be burned through by the enemy in order to get to his vital systems…including the small orb buried deep within his ship body that contained his central mechanical brain and Core. It had not been penetrated yet, but the Elloquim directly to his south had suffered such damage. As a result he was now dead, though many of his systems were still operating on last orders and carrying on the fight. Nevantha was currently burrowing to his corpse in an attempt to hack into it and use it better than non-living programming could.
The situation was grim, but the Maty was worth it. The secrets being uncovered in the basic structure of the facility were beyond valuable to his race…though perhaps not to Star Force. What they got out of this was not his concern, but for a biological race attempting to become fully mechanical, the legacy of one far superior to them who had achieved this was showing them in a matter of months things they had never considered before. Pathways to advancement in terms of physical components and software so complex and bizarre even Nevantha could not process it beyond a basic sense.
The mysteries of the Maty were beyond measure, and even as Nevantha slowly died he was exploring them with part of his processing power not needed for combat as he still had some hard lines into the facility that the Hadarak had not yet cut.
He would not live to use the revelations, but he wanted to explore in his final moments before his death came. Part was to help in the analysis, but a larger part was curiosity. He wanted to know what the Gahana knew, and that desire…no, need…was very atypical of him.
At least atypical of him since he had become a cranium and an Elloquim. He remembered similar curiosity when he still had a biological brain, and a great deal of the Maty was information on various races throughout this galaxy. Several of them were cyborgs, and the Gahana analysis of them indicated a similar dysfunction when they attempted to remove all biological components, particularly in the brain.
It desensitized them, leaving only logic behind. Nevantha did not comprehend this, for there was nothing beyond logic…yet his current curiosity seemed to be a breakthrough that indicated he was in fact suffering from this dysfunction. Now that he had the Gahana notes on these other races to analyze…all of which were now extinct…he was able to partially self-analyze and discover some blind spots in his own psyche even as the Hadarak were in the process of killing him.
He was undergoing more growth and self-realization now than he had throughout his time after his acclimation to Elloquim status. It was ironic…yet another sensation that was not logical or mechanical…that such breakthroughs would come now when he had no chance to make use of them.
But then he felt another non-logical sensation…awe. Not at the Maty, but at the sudden appearance of Star Force reinforcements in the system. He had anticipated they would come, and fail to secure the system given the escalating Hadarak presence despite the impressive combat capability the V’kit’no’sat had been demonstrating…which was superior to his previous estimates.
Yet what his limited sensors were perceiving now was not computing.
The Star Force Borg vessels…typically carrying their trailblazer warlords…were arriving here along with their smaller vessels and engaging the Hadarak immediately. They did not group up as the V’kit’no’sat had and form defensive alignments. No, they were behaving totally irrationally and diving at the enemy with no chance of victory.
Yet the ships didn’t die, and when Nevantha was able to tap into the Star Force battlemap in limited fashion he was able to get enough data to begin analyzing in depth how they were engaging the Hadarak with such reckless aggression and living…only to be more perplexed.
The battle algorithms they were using were beyond his own. That should not have been possible, but by reverse engineering their movements and engagements he was able to start writing superior methodology to anything he had on record for them or any other race in the galaxy, and he soon tracked it back to its source.
The trailblazers.
Comm signal density was off the charts given how much remote operations they were using, and it was peaking from their Borg vessels, meaning they were the most active control centers despite their own battles…for they were not standing off and defending. They were throwing themselves into the thickest Hadarak formations, including one coming to
the planet and physically smashing into the clouds of minions and warships above the Maty.
It was the Megazord, known to be commanded by trailblazer Morgan-063, and her ship collided with such force that it lost shields and took armor damage…yet she plowed a conduit through the blockade above enough that Nevantha could finally see some stars around the periphery for a few moments until the swarm coalesced around her ship again, resuming the total blackout of the sky with her equally black ship sticking through with small pinpricks of light that were explosions on the surface along with some weaponsfire returning back…though not much was needed on the underside.
Her ship came within a few hundred miles of Nevantha, sparing him from the Hadarak bombardment as all their attention turned on the massive ship…then the Elloquim’s limited Essence sensors indicated a buildup within the vessel.
He had been upgraded by Star Force heavily so that he could learn to drawn from his own Essence…which filled his entire body…and use it to produce a shield against Essence attacks. That shield was the only reason the Elloquim had survived when the other PanNari ships had not, for they were able to defend against the Lurkers. And through that defense they could kill them if they managed to pin them in place long enough to get a tentacle on them. For once attached, the Lurkers could not escape, and Nevantha had personally killed two such enemies before they grew wise enough to stop attempting to ram or engage them within close rage…and from further range Essence attacks lost their power, so the Elloquim had been able to stand them off.
But Star Force had also given them sensors they could use to detect and monitor Essence usage, predicting the approach of the Lurkers even when conventional sensors couldn’t see them. And now those sensors were peaking beyond thresholds as the Borg vessel charged in some fashion.
Nevantha didn’t sit and waste the opportunity. He repaired more of himself and used his weapons to shoot at the swarm around the edge of the Star Force cubical vessel…then suddenly all the minions in the sky stopped moving…except to fall.
All of them. Even the larger warships. They all fell to the planet as one, with Nevantha unable to account for it. There were weapons from the Neofan that could do things like this, but his sensors couldn’t identify Essence weaponry in terms of type, only charge and presence.
The death toll from the Hadarak was so large Nevantha could not process it due to the density of the swarms and their blocking sensor beams with their mass, but they came pouring down on top of him, and he wisely deactivated his remaining shields so they wouldn’t be drained by the impacts.
He took the impact on his hull, with it denting and breaking in many places as he was completely buried by corpses. The Elloquim had to dig through them with a tentacle to get a sensor pod above the pile so he could monitor the battlefield above and around him, for he was totally entombed in the dead…as were his fellow Elloquim that had not been directly underneath the Borg vessel.
And that Borg vessel casually rotated 72 degrees to the left, with an avalanche of dead Hadarak falling off its topside and down onto the piles below that covered Elloquim Brin, rising so high they almost touched the underside of the Star Force vessel and the magma taps Nevantha had into the planet registered a slight shift in the planetary crust downward as it was compressed under so much weight from the corpses.
With the skies clear around Maty, Nevantha’s sensors from his snorkel probe could get a good view of the higher orbits…and the ferocity of the Star Force ships was beyond measure. They attacked with such confidence that they did not layer in a margin of error in their attacks, for they were measured so precisely to push their shields and armor to the limits of what the Hadarak could attack them with. Such predication was beyond Nevantha’s capability, and he knew of no computer systems even approaching a basic PanNari craniem in Star Force possession.
He processed capabilities, possibilities, and crosschecked against variables of coincidence, finding no logical reason for Star Force’s combat organizational precision.
That left his only conclusion to be that it was the trailblazers themselves.
That was illogical, but it was happening before him…and not just with the use of Essence weaponry. Their convention technology was being utilized in a fashion the Elloquim could not totally quantify.
And that was when Nevantha experienced another ping of irony, for he was now as perplexed about this battle acumen as he was with the discoveries within Maty. But what followed it was far more intense. An emotion that was totally illogical, for the universe did not factor in wishing. Logic dictated what was and was not possible.
Yet Nevantha was now experiencing Hope. Hope that Star Force could defy his logical analysis of eventual demise and somehow do the impossible.
For it was the impossible that he was now viewing, buried beneath his protective cocoon of dead Hadarak as he continued to pursue the subsurface and surface conflicts, for the Borg vessel hovering above him had not touched them with its attack…also curious.
The Star Force battlemap, along with the signal data from the other Elloquim not on the planet, showed similar wonders taking place across the system as a new stream of reinforcements began arriving in low orbit of the stars on a conventional jumpline…all of which were identifying as Star Force Clan fleets.
They had brought their most elite troops here en mass, and what they were accomplishing was mathematically impossible, even calculating in the incalculable influence of Essence. Basic parameters of its effect had been estimated previously, and even with generous increases, this should not have been possible.
He was in the presence of superiors, despite the impossibility of that, so Nevantha did the only logical thing and opened a comm channel to the Borg vessel holding position above him and sniping away at more swarm ships coming in from far on the horizon and being downed in lethal precision that allowed none close to the Maty.
ELLOQUIM NEVANTHA REQUESTING INCLUSION IN YOUR COMMAND NETWORK, he said, transmitting his current condition and remaining capabilities. WHAT ARE YOUR ORDERS?
4
Morgan-063 raced through her ship using lifts at first, then running the last bit of distance to one of the hangar bays as one of the Elloquim’s tentacles reached up and made contact with the ship, covering the wide shield that separated the hangar from the exterior.
When she got into the bay she saw the center of that tentacle had an opening as promised, and she launched herself off the ground into a superman jump/fly directly into it…then flew down the waterslide-like corridor as she headed towards the ground in her combat armor.
Morgan went alone, getting a boost from the Elloquim as it gripped her in a forcefield and pulled her down the length of its tentacle faster than she could have flown on her own, whipping by the illuminated markers so fast everything appeared as a blur, then she slowed and came to a right angle, being pulled through it without having to do anything, as she entered the main body of the living ship.
But she didn’t stop there, for Nevantha was providing her a quick and protected route down into the bedrock in which he was half burrowed all the way to one of the entrances to the Maty, but he couldn’t get her inside, for his connecting tendrils were blocking the entrance and too narrow for Morgan to pass through anyway.
The Elloquim got her within 800 meters of it, then withered his tendrils enough for her to slide by them as she passed the Maty’s shield cupola and entered the construct. As soon as she moved inside she felt a sense of foreboding, but didn’t have time to analyze it. As soon as she got into the clear, she took off racing towards the nearest Core she could sense with her Essence abilities, for all others were being blocked by the Maty’s walls.
Morgan ran/flew towards the nearest contact, then came into a hallway with a single roaming Hadarak minion that she killed with a single shot to its small head from her forearm Dre’mo’don. It was a scout, and far away from any of the others. Perhaps it had gotten lost now that their telepathic signals were jammed, but whatever the case was
it was dead, and the first of many to come as Morgan completely disconnected with the space battles above and allowed her ship to fight on its own as needed. This was where she needed to be, where she wanted to be, and it was time to rack up an all-time high killcount solo until she came across some of the V’kit’no’sat down here.
She had no idea where they were, and her battlemap signals were being blocked by the walls as well, though the PanNari infrastructure they’d laid down here was now relaying some of them from above, but nothing on the troops inside.
That wasn’t a problem for Morgan. In fact, she preferred fighting alone, and took off leaving the first minion kill behind in search of more as she gently squeezed the irregular armored glove she wore on her left hand. The rest of her armor was typical of a trailblazer, but the glove was different and the first time she’d ever wore one into combat…for it had multiple jewels in it, each a massive Magicite storage device for Essence.
It was called the Infinity Gauntlet, and while not a weapon of its own, it would give Morgan almost unlimited Essence to fight hand to hand with.
And she expected to need all of it.
Kyra was still alive…as incredible as that was. The scores of Hadarak invading the facility had not let up, and yet the superior combat technology of the Zel’zat were what was keeping her alive as she rode inside yet another and directed it. That direction had improved greatly as she developed a better understanding of the devices and how they operated, but the magic of the design still eluded her and she found it preferable to treat them as if they were a person, for that type of interaction fared better than normal software interaction.
Her Kel’zat was currently pushing back another wave of zerglings on its own while smaller automated devices were melting and removing the corpses far behind her in the hallway. Had the Maty not had that capability the corridors would have been clogged beyond measure by now, and the Kel’zats would not have been able to maneuver as well as needed. So as many minions as she killed on a daily basis had to be cleaned up, and where their liquefied corpses were being taken she didn’t know and didn’t have time to figure out, but the beehive of floating drones was eradicating her victories from a few moments ago behind her as if they knew there was nothing ahead that could overwhelm her Kel’zat and threaten them.
