Star Force: Clash of the Demigods (Star Force Universe Book 60)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Can you not use the same method of your previous arrival?”

  “We snuck in. We’ve pretty much got everyone in that we’re going to, so we gotta fight this with the people in the field, but we can use the Paladin to build whatever else we need here over the long haul. And I think this is definitely going to be a long fight, because the Caretakers can build new ships too.”

  “And what of the Vargemma?” the KoQ asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cora admitted.

  “Perhaps we can make them open the portals for us.”

  “I doubt it. Very few know how, and we haven’t found any yet. If we did we would have stolen the information from them.”

  “Then we must find it ourselves.”

  Steve shook his head. “The Responders only teach in a certain order, and we don’t have the prerequisites. It will take years or longer to get to it that way. We’re gonna have to fight this war with the people we have here, but we can bring through non-living equipment and reboot computer systems on this side if you have anything you want to order?”

  “Without our people to operate it, there is not much we can do. We will assist you and your Paladin with Essence manipulation and what ships we have left. Our technology is not designed for drone applications of this level. What is our next action?”

  “Depends where those other carriers go. If they try and secure other facilities we’ll have to avoid them for now. If they stay here, then we continue the fight elsewhere…”

  “…assuming we can take out all the Olopar,” Cora finished. “Those are still their big guns.”

  “And the mega turrets. We’ve gotta take those out via land attack,” he said, looking at several of the KoQ who were quietly listening to the conversation. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s imperative that you keep yourselves alive. Sacrifice ensures the Caretakers and Vargemma win. We have to be survivors and win through superior intelligence. Think you can handle that?”

  “We will endure as long as necessary to obtain the Temple.”

  “Good,” Steve said with a satisfied nod. “Because we’re gonna need every one of you before this is over. Now grab some food. It may not be to your liking, and we’ll get some other stuff made up later, but right now we’re on the run and it’ll be a while before you can get back to your ships, if at all.”

  The trailblazer telekinetically opened a supply crate along the wall so the KoQ could get access to it, then he pulled a ration bar over to him, opening it as it flew through the air, then bit off a chunk when it arrived in his hand.

  Cora did likewise, and the Knights of Quenar reluctantly began to do the same and nibble on the strange food, then an explosion overhead rocked the ship and everyone got shoved into each other before it stabilized.

  On the battlemap they saw the drone overtop of them get cracked in two, with a chunk of it falling down on top of them. The Paladin pilot successfully rolled them out of the impact before they got crunched between it and the ground, and another drone that was pacing them now became their protective cover as they continued to put more miles between them and the tower as curtains of Caretaker attack ships swarmed around it like an angry dust storm…

  Levi got the Banner partially refueled before the fight came to the surface, but seeing what they were up against he didn’t push that front longer than he needed to, providing some distraction from the fleeing troops on the surface that were getting hammered hard. He actually took the ship all the way down to provide a wall for some of the Knight races to retreat behind, then giant boring holes opened up in the ground as Paladin diggers broke through like giant moles, then just as quickly ducked back down under cover, leaving a sloped road heading below ground available for the fleeing troops.

  Had the Paladin not been doing that most of them would have been killed, for the attack swarms from the carriers were not holding back and forming a perimeter. They were in full eradication mode and expanding outward in coordinated swirls, sweeping all opposition away from the control tower as well as sending tendrils out to nearby Paladin bases.

  Those would not be so easy to take down, but he also saw a few heading for Vargemma cities. He didn’t know what they would do when they got there, for the Paladin troops had already left those zones of contention, but that wasn’t his concern now. His job was clear, with Thrawn issuing all three Avengers a new mandate.

  Hunt down the remaining Olopar and destroy them so they could force this fight into conventional warfare, leaving Star Force with the only Essence advantage. The Supreme Viceroy already had expeditions going out to the calculated locations of the buried mountain turrets in order to see what it would take to destroy them, with orders to the Avengers to stay clear and only focus on the Olopar.

  Levi was fine with that, so long as they could take out the mega turrets. They had to have some defenses against surface attack, but right now Thrawn was right. The Olopar were the greatest threat to the drone fleet and the surface troops. They couldn’t mount a surface war against the turrets with the Olopar able to sweep in overhead and kill everyone in a single moment, whether it be through disruption, heart attack, acid ash, or any of their other wickedly effective weapons.

  Three ships to hunt Olopar. That’s all they’d gotten through, and while it was true there were no more Avengers outside waiting to get in, there were more tankers waiting and now blocked from arriving. They couldn’t send Essence through Operation Blindfold, and the idea of recharging the ships with all the Essence users here was laughable. It would take a Uriti to do that, and nobody here came close to those levels aside from the sheer mass of the Vargemma civilization.

  That meant one thing and one thing only. He had to kill the Olopar before his ship ran out of Essence. If they left even one remaining it would heavily favor the Caretakers in the long war ahead…but they could also build more Olopar over time. He didn’t know how long it would take, or how much cooperation with the Vargemma was required, if any, because the Caretakers couldn’t produce Essence…

  “Shit,” he said softly as they flew towards the next closest group of Olopar, which were not moving to rendezvous with the main fleet, but pursue other targets for destruction on their own. The Temples’ had the ability to launch the Reapers to gather Essence in emergency situations, and this was about as emergency as it got, he imagined.

  Maybe if they ran the Temple low enough the barrier shield would go down…but then again it might all turn to ice first. There were many variables going forward, most of which he did not favor, but this was the fight they’d been wanting and now they were committed. They couldn’t run away from it now if they wanted to. This was either going to be a perpetual war zone, a place of great victory, or a massive death trap.

  Good thing Archons liked challenges.

  10

  August 2, 128549

  Krichkraw Nebula (Novatis Kingdom)

  Alpha Temple

  Travis-098 and Mark-099 snuck past the outer Caretaker guards and emerged into the green exterior glad to finally be free of the labyrinth of the Founders’ interstellar grid of hidden facilities. They ran under cloak for more than a mile before finally stopping and peeling back their armor as they felt the fresh, cool air on their skin for the first time in more than a month after beginning their third trip out into the hidden grid and finally chancing a ride on one of the mag jump ships.

  “No battlemap signal,” Travis said, stretching his arms over his head before flipping back through a slow backbend in just his uniform, now free of the armor interior that he’d been living in for weeks as he dropped his pack on the ground for a moment.

  “Huh,” Mark added, seeing the same. “We’re either in a remote location or this is another Temple. I wonder which.”

  “It’s not an ice cube, thankfully,” Travis said, telekinetically pulling out a ration bar and finally getting a chance to chew on something with his stagnation-sore jaw.

  “Yeah. So now what?”

  “E…at,” the trailblazer sai
d with a full mouth.

  “Use your telepathy when you’re eating,” Mark criticized as he ignored him and continued to look up at the sky and the hazy view of the inverted sphere beyond. “I’m going up to take a look. Be back.”

  Go cloak in case the Vargemma are nearby.

  “Duh,” he said, reactivating his armor and flying upwards a meter or so before he disappeared from view, but once he got above the treetops he could see the distant barrier cities clearly. They were not near one, but there were a few bits of shorter infrastructure visible within a few thousand miles.

  He used his visual enhancement and confirmed they were Vargemma cities, but that still didn’t answer the question of where they were, so he flew higher to get more of the atmospheric haze out of the way, going up so far he had to use his armor to breathe, and the view up there was incredible. He’d never been this far up in Beta Temple, not even in a dropship, with the horizon eerily defying expectations and refusing to peel down. It rose up clearly in all directions, but was so far away it really gave a better feel for the size of space than a standard planet did.

  The Temple was truly massive, and he still wasn’t higher up than the barrier cities reached. He could see over them though, at least the part that rose up in the distance, and very far off was where he finally saw smoke.

  It wasn’t natural, he could tell that for sure, and pushing his visual enhancement to the max didn’t reveal much more than some object on the surface it was coming from. It had to be more than a mile wide to see it at this range, but the smoke plume dwarfed it.

  “Damn,” he said to himself as he realized his mistake. That wasn’t a mile wide ship, but something far larger that only looked that small because of the distance. Without active sensors he couldn’t tell what, so he lowered his cloak since he was so far away from the nearest Vargemma city and used his active sensors to get some more data on the actual range and size.

  The thing was the size of a mountain, with the upper portion jagged. He didn’t know if that was natural or damage, and the smoke itself was blocking visuals, but the basic silhouette was visible in infrared…and the thing was damn not. Not lava hot, yet it was clearly burning and the smoke was moving away from Mark’s position, so he couldn’t get any aerial analysis of the ash.

  “Either that’s the biggest burn pit I’ve ever seen, or somebody got jacked.”

  Mark scanned the horizon for other smoke plumes…and found three more, all even further away, but there was so much smoke coming from this one he had thought there was a chance of picking them up…and he was right. Something had happened here, and if this was Alpha Temple it didn’t fit with the Paladin’s code blue imperative. Then again, if this was a different Temple, maybe the Vargemma were fighting each other?

  That didn’t make sense either.

  “What’s so interesting?” Travis asked as he flew up from below and Mark sent him the coordinates of what he was looking at. “Whoa.”

  “Yeah. Which way do you want to head…” he said, stopping when he picked up activity below them on his now active sensors.

  “Told you to stay cloaked,” Travis noted as they saw a pair of small Caretaker drones heading up towards them.

  “Why are they coming after us? Is this airspace restricted or did we trip an alarm earlier we didn’t see?”

  “Maybe they’re responsible for the smoke.”

  “Did the Vargemma go too far and tick them off?”

  “Maybe. If that’s the case this might be Alpha.”

  “I can’t get any battlemap signals.”

  “I know. What do you want to do about them?”

  “Say hi and see what they want.”

  “Really?” Travis asked.

  “We can cloak and run if we need to, and it’s not the Vargemma, so let’s see what they want.”

  “The only time they care about us is when we’re somewhere we’re not supposed to be.”

  “So let’s find out,” he said, dropping in altitude with Travis reluctantly following until they got close enough that they drew a silvery bolt of energy that smashed dead center into Mark’s chest shield.

  “There’s your answer,” Travis said, immediately cloaking as more shots hit mark and he just took them for the moment, then he used his tier 4 psionic Po’letvo and threw a black orb at the first of them. When it hit it stuck, encasing the Caretaker patrol drone in a sphere that acted like a reverse cloaking field, blocking all exterior signals from getting through and effectively encasing the target in darkness for a few moments.

  He fired a second one at the other drone, then rushed down to the first as it kept transmitting out sensor beams, but none could get back inside. It stopped moving and held position against gravity until Mark’s hands broke through the shell and grabbed hold of it in a bear hug between the weapons ports where it couldn’t shoot him.

  Travis did likewise with the other and both extended intrusion probes from their armor into the drones and began hacking their internal systems based on crude programs already designed to do just that from the Paladin and transmitted back from Alpha Temple before they had left Beta. That didn’t make the hack easy, for the Founder technology had a great deal of counter-intrusion software running, but the great thing about the intrusion probes was that they were not automated.

  Well, they were, but the Archons could also manually operate them and contend with the alien software on a personal basis. With the Sav enhancement both of them had, along with over 100,000 years of experience with computer mental interfaces, Travis got through after a few minutes of wrestling with the Caretaker as they tried to maneuver to shoot the tics off each other.

  He was able to deactivate the weapons first, then access the memory systems as Mark got his under control a few seconds later. After that it was like peeling an onion, one layer of systems after another was being hijacked and put under the trailblazers’ control, until finally they got access to the Caretaker uplink network that fed all interconnected units orders from the mainframes hidden somewhere in the Temple.

  And through that they found the kill order for all Star Force personnel, as well as all the current locations they were known to be within the Temple.

  “This is Alpha and the shit has officially hit the fan,” Mark said, digging through the few other updates available to such a base unit, then he ignited his death sabers and sliced the thing into chunks before letting them drop to the ground miles below.

  Travis blew his up with a bioplasma blast from his fist inside after he punched through the outer armor in frustration, making faster work of his than Mark had. “What the hell happened to plan A?”

  “Maybe the Vargemma torched it. Closest known Paladin location is weeks away. Looks like we’ve got a lot of flying to do.”

  “They must have destroyed the fleet, or at least the transmitters. That’s why we can’t get signals out here.”

  “Let’s go,” Mark said, reactivating his cloak and heading off at several hundred miles per hour as Travis slid into his slipstream and they began making the long trek across the Temple, not knowing who was still out there or what the situation was. And they weren’t going to know until they got within battlemap signal range.

  Think we’re too late? Travis asked telepathically.

  I don’t know. Maybe someone got here before us and took action. I don’t think the Paladin would on their own.

  What are those smoke plumes then?

  Not ours, Mark said with a note of pride. Whatever had happened here, someone was kicking ass, and he got a feeling it wasn’t entirely going against Star Force.

  3 weeks later…

  Thrawn was situated in a freshly built command node, buried deep underground and away from most other Paladin installations, but connected to many via small boring tunnels large enough to only carry a single strand of wire. A few connecting tunnels for personnel movement were also added, giving him multiple escape routes if necessary, but he was very much a spider in the growing web as he had his race e
xpanding their subsurface infrastructure more than they were actively fighting the Caretakers.

  He needed resources, and with the enemy fleet being battered after the last major fight he had the ability to destroy more of the enemy, but their industrial complex was far larger than his, so they were literally building Caretakers faster than the Paladin could kill the smaller ones. The warship-scale units were a different story, but some were still popping up regularly from subsurface locations and the hidden stations in near the center of the sphere.

  The three Avengers were still operational, but all were low on Essence and holding back on the rest until another Olopar emerged. The conventional weaponry would have to be used to do all fighting from here on out, because if/when they got another Olopar operational it would take far too much to take it down without Essence, and until they could retake the control room they had no options to get more inside.

  And even if they could, which was highly unlikely at this point with the giant carrier still surrounding it with a massive army of ground and air units patrolling nearby, it was possible the Caretakers had deactivated whatever the Vargemma had unlocked. The trailblazers thought otherwise, or the Caretakers would have deactivated it remotely if they had that ability. If they weren’t built to do that, then they probably weren’t built to manually interface with controls that could only be used via Essence.

  Thrawn acknowledged that possibility, but it was more hope than practicality. He had to plan for the worst case scenario, and that meant a slugging match with the Caretakers able to build faster than him…for the time being. If it took centuries to accomplish he would out scale them, but for right now he had to keep the personnel here alive, including the 4 trailblazers that had already arrived…though with another update coming his way he discovered that another two, Mark-099 and Travis-098 had just been detected and nearby units were moving to pick them up.