by Aer-ki Jyr
Did it overload their primitive Den’gar technology? Was that a function of this weapon, so they could shoot through and reveal hidden targets? Both were possible, but right all that mattered was the fact that the shot had done no damage to the ship and they were now vulnerable again as they sent another single Tar’vem’jic beam out towards the mountain, hitting but not destroying it before another return shot came.
It was a shallow miss as he jammed the ship sideways on gut instinct. The beam hit the Essence shields and a little bit of the skin of the ship, draining them down to 38% regardless. Levi nearly burnt out the last Tar’vem’jic as he kept it firing and jiggling a bit, meaning the end of the beam was slicing back and forth across the mountain until the next forming Sha’mesh detonated in place in a huge Essence plume that indicated the turret was now non-functional.
“Damn it, we can’t do that again,” he swore.
“Not until the shields are recharged,” another Archon said via comm from the engine/shield control board. “The rest of the fleet has to deal with the Olopars the old fashioned way.”
“There’s no time for that,” he said, thinking fast. “They have to take out the mountain turrets before we can engage.”
“There’s too much grid space to cover. They’re having a hard time countering the Vargemma as it is, not to mention that mega fleet headed our way.”
“I know,” Levi said, referencing a huge Caretaker fleet coming from near the artificial star in the center of the hollow sphere. “And we don’t have unlimited Essence reserves.”
“Has a tanker come through yet?”
“No,” Levi confirmed.
“Then go low. See how depressed those mountains can get.”
“It’s an inverted curve,” Levi reminded him. “The horizon is not to our advantage.”
“I bet there’s still a minimum…wait.”
“I see it,” Levi said with relief as an update to the battlemap came through marking probable locations of other mountain turrets…and there were a lot of them. Orders had gone out for ground troops to begin probing them, as well as some Paladin ships heading there to see if they’d open up and shoot them, or if they’d get some free shots off as they rose up prior to full deployment.
“Go poke one first.”
“Agreed,” Levi said, altering course. If they could get a shot off before the mountain fully rose, which took a few minutes, then they might be able to prevent it from firing altogether, though the timing was going to be tricky. These things weren’t going down with a single shot, and without a schematic of the interior he was having to learn on the go where the sweet spots were, though right now it was more effective to just shoot and scramble the interior as fast as possible until something vital was hit.
He saw farther away as another Olopar attacked the surface, destroying a Vargemma city that had Paladin in it. They weren’t fighting, but rather had been taken prisoner earlier. Apparently the Caretakers didn’t care that they were noncombatants now with all Star Force personnel tagged for death. They’d just wiped out 23,000 of them and their Vargemma guards in one disruptor attack that turned everything into atomized rubble, creating a huge mushroom cloud that extended beyond the atmosphere and into space…with the Olopar sliding out of it and heading towards its next extermination target.
The Banner couldn’t get to that one to exact revenge due to the distance, but there were others closer that he set a course for, though he was glad to see one of them be destroyed by the Star Force fleet. One of the warships involved had a single Maturia weapon in it, and that had been enough to take down the Olopar along with a swarm of drones that got reduced by two thirds. Other swarms were engaging the Olopar in space, particularly those coming up from new holes torn into the landscape and spewing out like beautiful technological volcanos.
That had to be Paladin tunnels bringing in reprogrammed drones directly from the outside…and based on the movements of the closest Olopar they knew it too, and were moving to shut them down the explosive way. When Levi saw that he knew his next mission even before an order came in from Thrawn himself to take the Avenger there and protect the incoming drones’ path.
“He found a way in. Sneaky lizard,” Levi said approvingly as he saw not one, but 387 mountain turrets between his ship and the target location. There was no way they had time for that, so they shot up away from the surface and into the weak gravity areas more or less ballistic as they skipped from one side of the sphere to another at an angle, gaining speed as they went and expending some Essence to boost the engines.
The Caretaker ships out here couldn’t catch them, for they weren’t fast enough and the interior area was vast. It would be like intercepting a ship moving from Mercury to Venus back in the Sol system, but that huge Caretaker fleet still worried him. It would arrive in the coming hours and then all hell would break loose again. He just hoped they could hold the tower long enough to get some Essence tankers in, and by that he did not mean Uriti. Even if they could get through the portal, they’d be sitting ducks for the Temple’s anti-Hadarak weaponry, so there was no way they were going to risk one here…but there were several sitting in the nearby system as Star Force ‘milked’ them for huge amounts of Essence that was being bottled up and distributed to all ships with even a single Materia weapon onboard so they would get multiple shots instead of just one.
The Avengers were outfitted with so many Materia weapons that they were burning more in this single fight than Star Force had collected in total prior to the Uriti revelation. Levi now intimately understood how valuable the Wardens were to the Lurkers, which were the biological counterparts to the Avengers. Essence was probably the most valuable commodity in the universe, and both the Uriti and Warden Hadarak were mobile production facilities for it.
Star Force hadn’t had a clue, nor had the Knights of Quenar. It was their armor and weaponry that they thought was the Uriti’s true might, but when working with Star Force the Uriti were now wielding a power far beyond anything they could accomplish alone, and vice versa. This had not been the intent from the beginning, but it was a very fortuitous karma that now gave Star Force an edge against the Founder technology left behind, but only an edge. This fight was far from won, and many more Paladin were going to die before they could kill all of these Olopar, but Levi had found their weak spot and the Avenger design was just good enough to exploit it.
Make a mistake and you’d take a few hits from the mountain turrets and die, but all an Archon needed was a small window of opportunity and they’d make it work…and now they had that. He hated seeing so many people die without the ability to stop it, but they were beyond that point now. People were going to be killed today and tomorrow and the next day…as long as this fight for the Alpha Temple went on...and what mattered most was winning. There was no way to evacuate the Paladin in time to save them. They were committed to this fight, including all the ships that had just come into the Temple without a way out.
It was win or die, and Levi was going to make damn sure it was win.
And so far, the Caretakers and the Vargemma didn’t have a weapon to counter the Avengers. He just hoped one didn’t pop up out of storage somewhere before this fight was over.
9
When the first of the Essence tankers came through the Clint was dispatched to rendezvous with it. Ironically, it wasn’t a big ship. Just a Valkyrie-class scout reconfigured to carry Magicite, and since there wasn’t a volume limit to Essence, Star Force could pack as much into their carry canisters as their technology allowed. That was far less than the Founder carry orbs allowed, but with 806 oversized Magicite canisters crammed into the ‘small’ ship it was enough to refill a portion of what an Avenger was designed to carry.
The idea was that the most valuable cargo in the galaxy was best protected by speed rather than an escort fleet, and even in the low gravity Temple environment the Valkyrie was still the fastest ship in play, for the Caretaker technology was more buffed up than it was fast. That wasn’
t a miscalculation, for they were playing defense here and power was more important than speed, but it meant both the Avenger and the Valkyrie could get together for a short period of time to enable the transfer…after which the Valkyrie was stuck. It couldn’t leave the Temple, and previously when they tried to send a small Magicite canister through the barrier shield it had been sucked dry, so bringing them in via an ‘approved’ pathway was the only way to get the Essence here.
More tankers followed, one at a time as they grouped in a specific place on the exterior once word was passed back through the information exchanger to the exterior fleet that the trailblazers were having to bring in each ship individually, and that if they wanted one in a certain place they could be tagged as such…but there was no way to identify which was which other than by their location.
So as more ships continued to be brought into the Temple as fast as possible through all the portals, a small group of tankers was prodding the barrier shield off to the side and Cora brought them in all at the same portal near to the control tower. If she didn’t they’d be too far away to get the Avengers refilled before the main Caretaker fleet arrived, and as of now it was only 43 minutes away from weapons range of the tower. She didn’t know if they were going to take it out or cleanse it of invaders, but they were heading straight here even as some Star Force ships tried futilely to draw them off their direct path across the empty Temple interior.
And that fleet was increasing in number as more hidden installations popped out ships to rendezvous with the main group rather than sending them on ahead to get picked off individually. It looked like this was the Caretaker’s final purge option and they were going to make sure it did the trick. Long rage scans had been minimal at first, but the closer they got the better look they had at what was coming…and they were both numerous and huge.
There were a lot of designs already seen, only in far greater number, but there were also massive ships with them, each over 1000 miles long and bristling with conventional weapons. So far no Essence technology was detected, but they couldn’t be sure of that until it was used. But then again, with so much in the temple requiring Essence, would they actually create Caretakers that used it? The Olopar were built for the Vargemma to use, and to do so they had to supply the Essence for it. Did the Temple have defensive ships built the same way? They had already shown their mega turrets used Essence, so it wasn’t impossible.
To figure that out a swarm of drones had been sent to engage them, knowing they would be destroyed, but hoping to do some damage and figure out what kind of weaponry these new units were packing. Meanwhile Cora kept manually bringing more Star Force ships into the Temple, with many more waiting outside. The refit facilities in the nearby system were spamming the new technology onto all relief ships arriving, with the only limitation being the number of Essence users Star Force had available. Maybe the Knights of Quenar were assisting with that too. She didn’t know, because she didn’t have time to worry about such stuff when her button pressing kept nearly her full attention.
Had it been mental, or even telepathic, she could have multitasked much better, but the Essence action required more attention. Not so much that she couldn’t watch her back, but it didn’t allow her much exploring through the battlemap as she worked.
Steve, on the other hand, was sucking air as his body slowly recovered its depleted Essence and he fought using conventional methods the streams of assassins still coming into the tower on near suicide missions trying to do whatever damage they could. The Knights of Quenar were keeping most of them from reaching the control room, but every now and then one would get close and he’d have to help to prevent them from getting to Sara and the last line of guards surrounding her, who were also ready to take her place when her Essence reserves were expended.
In the gaps between fights Steve took notice of the drone swarm as it intersected the approaching fleet. The weapons used appeared conventional enough, but the damage being done was not. There was too little taken by the enemy ships, and by the time all the drones were killed he’d figured out why.
“Sara, they’ve got Yeg’gor armor on the big ones. And I think its real Yeg’gor harvested from Hadarak.”
“Son of a bitch. Do they have Essence weapons?”
“Not that they’ve shown. Get ready to bug out. We can’t stay here much longer. The fleet can’t stop them in time.”
“Set it up and I’ll go when you say, but I’m getting every ship in that I can.”
“Deal,” he said, then ran out the nearby door to deal with another assassin that had jumped halfway into the tower interior and smoked two Knights of Quenar within a second on arrival. The debris from their disintegrated bodies flushed through the doorway as he pushed through the pressure wave, then he drove a telepathic spike into the smaller assassin’s head, distracting it momentarily before sending a Jumat blast into his four legs, knocking him to the ground as the KoQ swarmed on him.
He was dead in a matter of moments, with whatever defenses he had either depleted or momentarily dropped from the physical battering. Either way, his internal organs and brain were now goo, which seemed to be the preferred method of the Knights of Quenar for killing their opponents. Steve was saving what little Essence he had left to use as a shield against the Vargemma from doing the same to him, but he had one, maybe two blocks left in him and that was it. The trailblazer was relying heavily on the KoQ to defend Cora while the Star Force Knight races were protecting the perimeter from the conventional threats.
He got on the comm and coordinated with them to get a few evac ships set up nearby, then ordered them to heavily push the perimeter out to the point where they could run themselves, for the incoming Caretaker fleet was probably going to smoke anything left here before their fleet could find a way to do enough damage to take them out. In truth they were probably going to have to target weapon batteries only, because that Yeg’gor was going to soak up damage even if it wasn’t fully effective. Living Yeg’gor was superior to carcass hulks, which was why the V’kit’no’sat had to fashion their own design to overcome the inefficiency. That made it basically the same as the Hadarak version, and he hoped what was on the Caretakers was dead Yeg’gor. If it was another artificial version this was going to get even worse.
Two of the Avengers got to the edges of the Caretaker fleet and launched their attacks, which were quite effective. They used the Tar’vem’jic to bore holes in the big ships, then sent bloons and other packeted weapons inside to great effect, but there was so much mass in them…slightly more than a Borg vessel given their elongated coil shape…that even the Avengers couldn’t quickly kill them. And as only a machine would, they completely ignored the attacks as they continued to head straight to the control tower.
It wasn’t until the first of them got into the atmosphere, with multiple lines of defensive warships around them getting savaged by the Star Force drones, did the big ships finally reveal their true weaponry. Hatches all over the coil-shaped ship opened up and small Caretaker drones spewed out, each a little larger than a mech, and they poured down onto the surface so thick that they blotted out the distant sun.
“Time to go,” Steve said, telekinetically pulling Cora away from the terminal and towards the far door that the Knights of Quenar were also fleeing through, though most of them were blinking out of existence as they stargated their way through the walls, leaving behind a few that were acting as beacons that had to evacuate the same way the trailblazers were.
By the time they got outside a hail of colored beam weaponry was raining down everywhere there were Star Force units. The Knight races were fighting back as they fled into defensive formations, overlapping shields and turtling up, ironically sometimes alongside the giant Turtle-class mechs, as they tried to weather the storm and knock down whatever Caretakers they could, though they could hardly miss they were so thick in the sky.
The Star Force fleet was launching AOE weapons into the atmosphere, detonating in huge explosions that sent
hurricane force winds down to the surface along with a rain of broken Caretakers, but one of the giant ships didn’t stay in space. The others did, some holding back their stores of attack ships for some reason, and as the two trailblazers and the last Knights of Quenar got onboard a dropship and raced across the surface while taking fire, the large ship landed around the tower, cradling it in the empty interior of the coil ship, and effectively giving it impenetrable walls that nothing was getting through except occasional gaps that were heavily covered with defensive batteries, making those approaches suicide for anything non-Caretaker.
“Looks like we lost the tower,” Cora said, cringing with each major hit to the dropship as she waited for a drone to slide in over top of them. One finally did, already half dead itself, but it took the rain for them as they raced to get beyond the landing zone along with all the other Star Force units flying or walking their way clear. “I hope we got enough through.”
“If the mountain turrets are their only Essence defense weapons, I think we did. We can fight around these big aircraft carriers.”
“Are we sure that’s the only control tower in the entire Temple?”
“It is,” one of the Knights of Quenar answered from her left in the cramped cargo bay. “Or the Vargemma would have locked down our entry method.”
“Everything else is so redundant, there might be other locations,” she argued.
“If there are, the Vargemma haven’t found them or haven’t unlocked them. What do you calculate our odds are that we will be able to quickly achieve what they have not?”
“You have a point, but that doesn’t mean we don’t look.”
“We are still getting new drones through,” Steve reminded her. “And we can expand the entry corridors if the Caretakers are busy fighting us up here rather than making repairs below.”
“That means we have to keep ourselves alive,” she said, looking the wolf-like face straight on as she pulled back her helmet. “Do you understand that? We can’t die or they win. We’re not getting any more Essence users in here. Not the easy way, at least.”
