by Aer-ki Jyr
Yes. Thrawn had anticipated well, for there was a second Avenger-class warship coming through a portal, and if he knew his Viceroy mindset well, there would be more coming. Thrawn couldn’t see what was happening except on considerable delay, so it was Samsiv’s decision to make up until the time that Thrawn came through, but that was unlikely. He was too valuable, and he would have to sneak in at some point outside of combat, but every ship entering was obvious and being tagged for interception by the Vargemma. That meant this was Samsiv’s fight, and the tactic that Thrawn had given was not an order, but rather an option if needed to be used.
If Star Force tried to fight in a way that wouldn’t trigger the Caretakers, then the Vargemma would win. And with Star Force unable to learn the necessary powers to manually activate the portals for years to come, at the minimum, the barrier shield access system was their only option. If the Vargemma retook it, it was possible they might know a way to lock it down again. If that happened, it would be game over for decades to come.
Samsiv would stay and fight the long fight if needed, but that would mean Star Force worlds would continue to burn as a consequence of their failure here. The chess game they’d been playing in the Temple with the Paladin had just turned into checkmate for the enemy. So the Viceroy either had to start prepping for the next long game, or begin a new one right here and now.
He ran the calculations through his mind, as much as he could given the limited amount of time as the Knights of Quenar ships began to take long range fire from the approaching Vargemma fleets that his Paladin ships were harassing as much as they could, but they would not be able to hold out for long. Even with the few Caretakers warships rising from the surface to deal with all the ships that were attempting to, or succeeding to kill others, the numbers were not adding up. If the Vargemma acted fast, they would be done with the task before a sufficient Caretaker response could be mounted to stop them.
Samsiv had preprogrammed orders already prepared for this moment. He’d had them from the beginning, though he’d expected never to use them. That hadn’t stopped him from writing them, along with many others he never expected to use, for battle favored those who were prepared for the unexpected. And Viceroys favored adding whatever odds they could to their future success through tedious, and often mundane work that others would not bother with.
When he made the decision there was no hesitation and no wasted time. He triggered the rescinding of Code Blue, along with battle plans to fight both the Vargemma and the Caretakers simultaneously, and sent them out to all Star Force forces within the Temple with a single press of a mental button within the hidden command nexus that he stood.
Moments later, as he was writing new orders incorporating Thrawn’s suggestions, he saw the battlefield shift radically. The harassing drones and warships he had engaging the Vargemma suddenly turned into ravagers as they activated their lethal weaponry, tearing into the weaker enemy ships that had already been using their lethal weaponry on the drones and stun weapons on everything else.
The Paladin vessels tore into the Vargemma, and in a very short time completely undid the reinforcements heading towards the now 5 KoQ ships over the trailblazer tower, for one of the vessels had already fragmented and impacted the ground nearby, thankfully landing on Vargemma troops and not Paladin.
He assumed that was due to some piloting ability left in the doomed ship, but the Paladin troops all around the perimeter of the tower were now moving rapidly as they switched to lethal weaponry. The Vargemma troops began to get mowed down as the Paladin were no longer required to hold back. They had orders to shoot and kill everything on sight, Vargemma or Caretaker, because they all knew the heavy hand was coming down soon, as this was now a war to their death unless both the Vargemma and the Caretakers could be destroyed first.
And that’s what his second set of orders were for, and when completed a few moments later he sent them out to the two Avengers already inside the Temple, ordering them and their Archons to immediately move to the nearest Olopar in the vicinity of the tower, and to preemptively take them out.
He didn’t like killing the crews onboard, for they had no control over the craft, but he couldn’t wait for them to evacuate…though he did simultaneously send a message in the open to all Vargemma, telling them to abandon the Olopar immediately or die. Whether or not they did was up to them, and it was quite possible they didn’t have enough escape craft onboard to do so, but if he didn’t kill the Olopar soon they’d murder his fleet and surface troops just like the one had previously.
Whether the Vargemma would turn and run or go all in he did not know. They’d suffered from the Olopar attack far more than the Paladin had, so maybe they would be hesitant. He hoped so, but wasn’t counting on it. This was soon to be a 3-way war, two with people and one all machine army with hidden assets he wasn’t aware of. He didn’t like fighting against an enemy that he didn’t fully know the potential of, but battle did not always allow you foresight. Sometime you were forced to dive in and figure things out as you went, and today was going to be a day that all Star Force would remember as an example of just such a scenario, regardless of how it played out…
Levi-145 was commanding the first of the Avengers to come into the Temple, and when he had received Samsiv’s ‘suggestion’ he didn’t hesitate to follow it. Archons didn’t get caught up in chain of command issues. What they valued was who was right, and while a Paladin Viceroy didn’t outrank an Archon, let alone a second gen, he was the current field commander with far more knowledge of what was going on than Levi had. And after a brief analysis to confirm the wisdom of the order, he chose to follow it and accelerated the Banner towards the far off command center tower that was an eighth of the way around the perimeter from the ship’s entry point.
Other ships were much farther away, and some closer. It seemed they were coming through whatever portals were available as fast as possible rather than all coming through the same one. That was problematic, but if they were on the clock and needed as many ships inside as they could get, then it made sense. But the Banner was so far away he wasn’t going to get there in time to help Cora and Steve…but then again, he didn’t have to. His mission was the Olopar, and there were many closer than he could get the attention of now and hopefully draw them away from the tower, for he saw the Clint entering from a closer portal.
“Head straight to the tower,” he told the sister ship on a fairly lagging comm channel due to the distance involved, “and begin poaching Olopar. I’m going to engage them here first, and hopefully that will pull them this way.”
He didn’t wait for Raven-266 to respond, altering course and adding Essence to the engines to increase speed along the upper atmosphere where the Temple’s artificial gravity still worked. If he was going straight to the tower he would have taken a straight shot across the inner vacuum, but the nearest cluster of Olopar was not too far away, situated near a station thousands of miles above the surface.
The Banner skimmed the surface until they were under that point, then slammed to a halt and launched itself upward towards the three distance Olopar. Levi sat down into the chair that suddenly formed in his command nexus, with him resting a hand on each armrest, through which he was going to operate part of the Materia weapon systems. He had 6 more Archons onboard that were Essence capable, one of which had just ran up the engines at his command. Now they would all take the critical systems from around the ship as he tagged the closest of the Olopar as their first target.
The Vargemma ships at the station had moved out towards them long ago, but the Olopar just sat there. Either the Caretakers had locked them down or the crews didn’t bother moving because they knew they were unable to fire the weapons. Regardless, they just floated next to one of the stations that built the impressive weapons. The Avengers were far smaller than the 72 mile long Olopar, at only 16 miles long and shaped like a knife set up on edge and with the off center tip at the upper side. Someone had said they looked like ‘cleavers’ bu
t the name hadn’t stuck.
That shape gave them a very narrow forward silhouette, and that allowed them to concentrate the shields over that location multiple times as they made attack runs on a single target, with now being such a case. The conventional weaponry opened up on the Vargemma ships as they passed them by, but Levi didn’t waste any Essence on the inferior ships. The Banner’s shields held up as they passed each other by, with the Vargemma skidding to a stop in the low grav environment and trying to reverse course to follow them when the Star Force ship deftly dodged their attempted trap block and sailed right through heading towards the ships no sane person would attack.
But this wasn’t the first Avenger attack on an Olopar. Star Force had gotten its first Avenger/Olopar combat weeks ago, with the news of its success having reached the fleet outside Alpha Temple in the last two days, so Levi had that data aiding his calculations as he sought to take on 3 single handedly. The advantage here was that the Caretakers wouldn’t fire first, so he needed to do maximum damage in the first few seconds, and to do that they were going to have to fire on all of them simultaneously.
He only had two Tar’vem’jic in the ship, so if he was going to attack soon he would have to leave one standing. The Archon monitored the progress of the Clint, not wanting to hold off long enough so it made the first attack. The triple assault would have to be abandoned, because their sister ship was would be within extreme firing range within 24 seconds, and the third Olopar here was just a little too far out.
With a thought he sent firing commands to the other Archons, and along with him they fired two Tar’vem’jic, enhanced with Essence, at the two closer Olopar. The thin orange beams leapt out from what looked like a tiny ship, though both images were deceptive given the sizes involved. The beams were actually quite thick, and when they slammed into the Olopar they hit Essence shields that barely raised in time. Had they been reliant on the living crews they would have got through, but the automated Caretaker systems didn’t suffer from any delay.
But the beams didn’t shut down. They continued to stream energy into the Olopar until both of them cracked…literally. The shields were penetrated and the hulls were punctured, then huge cracks formed in the central ball before sheering off one star spike on the left target and two on the right. The Tar’vem’jic hadn’t cut them off, but rather something inside had fractured and caused the massive damage. Levi hoped they were out of commission, but he didn’t know that for sure. The third Olopar, however, began to move out to reinforce them immediately, but even it couldn’t match the range of the Tar’vem’jic.
Levi waited until it came within range, then hit it with two beams as well, one upper sphere and one lower sphere, and the entire thing cracked in two as he personally saw an Essence bloom out from it. It was invisible to sensors and normal vision, but he could see the explosion of the contained Essence inside its well. Whatever was left of the ship was going to be powerless, as far as the big weapons were concerned, but the other two were not yet out of commission.
Levi slowed their speed and used the Tar’vem’jic to finish the kill on the other two, with one of them attempting to run away. It couldn’t match their speed and the takedown was made fairly quick, with one important lesson being learned.
The Caretaker-run Olopar didn’t have any weapons that could match the Tar’vem’jic’s range. If they did they would have been used instantly, for there was no crew to debate on what to do or any reason to hold back. Even now the Olopar all across the Temple were moving…and all moving towards the Banner, because his ship was the one that had killed an Olopar. That meant, per their programming, he had to be destroyed…and it was drawing them away from the other combat across the Temple, up until the Clint opened fire and destroyed another.
Wisely their sister ship raced up away from the surface as it did so, drawing more attention off the tower with the trailblazers in it, even as it released an area of effect weapon known as a ‘popper’ into the middle of one of the Vargemma fleets. It was a concussive energy weapon, similar to Jumat, but it exploded outwards in a spherical range like a bomb. Only it was enhanced by Essence and pushed ship into ship as it battered them into dented hulks, some 283 of them simultaneously, peeling off the major threat to the now 3 remaining KoQ ships over the tower.
But then the Banner shook from a hit, a massive hit that was only survived by Essence-enhanced shields. What it would have done to the ship he didn’t know, for it didn’t match any known Olopar Sha’mesh, which was what their pre-weapon summoning matrix was called.
Levi saw the source of the attack and grimaced. It was from the surface of the Temple, in a newly raised mountain that had been hiding underneath the landscape. Apparently the Sphere itself had Essence weaponry beyond just the Olopar, and the Banner was well within range of the surface, being only some 5,600 miles above it.
“Down,” he said, not sure if they could run from it or not. Their shields had just taken a 43% hit, even with the Essence enhancement, so they could only survive one more strike of that magnitude. That meant they either had to take out that mountain or run so fast it couldn’t hit them…and in the low gravity environment beyond the surface, their maneuvering options were limited enough to make that questionable.
“Take it out before it takes us out!” he told the others via comm while operating one of the Tar’vem’jic himself. It was charged up again, conventionally, with plenty of Essence ready to be added in a split second, but if one shot wasn’t enough to take out that mountain then this engagement was going to end badly…
7
Raven didn’t engage the Olopar with the Clint as soon as the Banner did, so the Caretakers didn’t response as quickly to her ship and she got a chance to see the massive mountain weapon rise up and fire on the other Avenger before one began to rise up near her. The Archon immediately broke off the attack on the second Olopar near her and swung around at the maximum possible speed towards the surface, firing the forward pair of Tar’vem’jic when they came within the narrow targeting cone off the bow.
The two beams sunk deep into the shields covering it, failing to penetrate, but she could see with her own Essence-enhanced eyes the disruption the weapons were causing as a Sha’mesh began to form at the peak of the mountain beneath those shields. Fortunately her ship was not at maximum range, and a single Essence-enhanced orb leapt from the Avenger and traveled at a much slower pace down to the mountain than the nearly instantaneous Tar’vem’jic.
That orb was the traditional ‘bloon’ technology that bottled destructive energy in order to transmit it across long distances to target. Energy that could not be formed into a cohesive beam like the Tar’vem’jic. It would do a lot of damage on its own, but Star Force had found a way to lace it with Essence in order to make it extra corrosive and when it hit the mountain’s shields it momentarily smashed against them, deforming and breaking across the curved defensive barrier, then the remains fell like rain down onto the weapon as the shield overloaded.
The Tar’vem’jic continued to fire their constant beams, boring down into the mountain but not finding any critical systems as the Sha’mesh formed into a beam and shot out to hit the Clint. Raven’s enhanced shields held up, but like the Banner her ship couldn’t stand up to more than two of those shots. Fortunately the bloon residue dropped onto the mountain and ate into it like hungry acid, exploding out the resultant residue like a smoldering firecracker that prevented another Sha’mesh from forming, though the mountain looked more or less intact.
“Hit it again,” she ordered, cycling off the Tar’vem’jic before they burned out and pumping Essence into more bloons. Three more rained down and shredded the top of the mountain, capping it in an expanding debris cloud that obscured it from view.
No other mountains poked up nearby to fire on them, but three Olopar were moving into firing range…one close and two further away…forcing her to turn her attention back to them as she noticed the Banner get clipped by another shot just as it finished off its
own mountain turret.
“Damn,” she said to herself, seeing one of the Tar’vem’jic on her sister ship go down. She couldn’t let that happen to her ship, for there was only one more coming. The Cap hadn’t arrived in the Temple yet, and if they lost weapons in exchange for trading fire with those long range turrets they’d never win this battle. She had to get further away from the Olopar and poach them from range…but without getting too close to another mountain turret, wherever they were.
She checked the battlemap and made inquiries as she launched another Tar’vem’jic attack on the nearest Olopar while flying her ship sideways further up from the surface. They had to point the ship to target the big guns, which was a huge disadvantage, but it was well worth it in exchange for the insane knockdown power. As they got more altitude, she confirmed that the Paladin had no knowledge, actual or rumor, about these mega turrets…which meant they didn’t know how many more were out there or where they were. And she didn’t want to find out by taking hits from them either…
Samsiv received Raven’s request for search parties, and then ground assaults if practical against the newly revealed mountain turrets. Now that he knew what to look for he had a decent chance of finding them, but since they were buried under more than at least a kilometer of dirt and rock, scanning for them would be difficult unless you knew where to look. He was going to have to use his intellect and the resourcefulness of his researchers to guestimate where they were. Until then, the Archons’ new ships had to stay within the now cleared areas, which gave them limited engagement capability.
But one of those areas had the control room tower in it, and that’s the one spot in this sphere that they had to hold. Seeing that there was now a real chance at victory, Samsiv activated Operation Blindfold, with massive explosions occurring on the exterior of the Temple near one of Thrawn’s fleets. The Essence barrier shield was still in place and unaffected, but debris flew out through it with no warning. Fortunately Thrawn had prepared for that with standoff ships ready to catch and remove that debris, then long blocky chains of drones stacked together began to move into precise coordinates that they couldn’t see at first, but then several little beacons emerged from beneath the Essence barrier, marking the newly created conduit on the other side.
