by Aer-ki Jyr
“He’s right,” Emily agreed. “This is too big to leave dangling. Paul’s already got some leg work done, but we need to kick this into high gear.”
“Clan lizards would be new births, not converts,” Paul pointed out. “I’ve got the two separated right now, but this idea won’t help the prisoners.”
“You can’t teach everything with memory,” Kip reminded them all. “You’re going to get capable younglings, nothing more. In order for them to advance to higher levels they’re going to have to train. We can have the current lizards go through that training as well.”
“Are we talking combat for these guys?” Ivan asked.
“Support?” Megan floated.
“Have you put any of them into armor yet?” Brian asked Paul.
“No, but Thrawn has been developing some of their own. I haven’t let them use Star Force tech at all.”
“Afraid of them spiriting it off to their cousins?” Randy asked.
“Afraid of a lot of things, but mainly just wanting to keep them separate from us.”
“Why?” Dan challenged. “We assimilated the Veliquesh. The lizards aren’t any worse than them.”
“They had younglings,” Jason answered for him. “The lizards use genetic samples. There was never any need to conquer the lizards in order to assimilate them.”
“If we do this,” Kip said thoughtfully, “it will gain us a power we’ve never had before. The Kiritas gave us so much strength, but they still rely on maturias to reproduce. The lizards don’t. There are dozens of ways we can use this, but I think the bigger reason to do it, the emotional one at least, is…”
“…to prove them wrong,” Megan said with finality. “The lizards don’t have to be darkside. We can bring them into the light.”
“So we are annexing them?” Jack asked to make sure.
“Star Force isn’t,” Emily said with a coy smile. “The Clans are.”
“And to maintain our pressure cooker,” Kip added, “when they’re born we put them to work immediately. In fact, we don’t grow any of them without a specific need. Population on demand.”
“That could go very wrong,” Randy noted, “if anyone other than us was overseeing it. But looking at it as an entry point, we create the lizards out of a need and they individually choose whether or not to fulfill that role. If they decline we move them out of the Clans and into Axius or elsewhere, respecting their individual sovereignty, but the default will be to the mission. Team and unit first. You said they wanted to fight,” he recalled, looking at Paul. “That stagnation was a problem for them. This will alleviate that if we stop treating them like everyone else and make a new niche within Star Force that doesn’t utilize maturias or an individual first concept. It’ll be unit first with an individual opt out.”
Jack nodded, holding up a finger to keep Paul from answering first. “How many people have we met that just wanted to contribute? Whether it be fighting or building or just carrying someone’s bag. We tell them training first and they do it, taking years if not centuries before they really get into the fight. They have to earn their way to it, and I like that system, but if we had been born now and not given everything to do from the inception of Star Force, how would we feel?”
“We’d want to be on the front lines immediately,” Dan admitted, “doing things that mattered rather than training.”
“And if the lizards are even more prone to this mindset than we are,” Jack continued, “then perhaps it is in their best interests if we put them to work immediately and allow the few individuals who would prefer something else to leave to seek it out rather than trapping the lot of them in a workable system that really isn’t suited to them.”
“It’s what we thought Canderous would be back in the day,” Emily added, “and could never achieve.”
“But how do we incorporate younglings into combat units?” Randy pointed out the obvious flaw. “Work details are one thing, but if they really want to fight how much can we have them do without losing people. We can’t let the bloodbath tactics remain.”
“Agreed,” Kip echoed.
“I’ve already been working on that a bit,” Paul said, very glad that Jason had insisted on making this a group project, “and I think recon work would best be suited to that aspect, though training certain lizards in the traditional ways needs to happen. They can’t get strong enough on field work alone.”
“Elite units,” Randy said dismissively, “but the strength for the Clans here is going to be their ability to take a single ship to a distant planet and populate it with millions of effective workers and soldiers within a decade. Even the Kiritas can’t reproduce trained people that fast.”
“Let them fight the little threats,” Megan suggested. “We’ll handle the big ones.”
“What’s your greatest concern?” Kip asked Paul when he noted a slightly displeased look on his face.
“Scruples,” he answered immediately.
“Because of the genetic memory?”
“And the unit mentality. If one goes to the darkside, with the lemmings follow?”
Randy nodded. “You really should have called me in sooner. I’ve already dealt with a lot of this with the Kiritas.”
“And?”
“Archons lead for a reason, and amongst other things, it’s to be the torch bearers of civilization. It’s easier for others to do the right thing when they have someone to follow. Take the Archons away from the other factions and you would see a deleterious effect on them as well. The trick is, they’re established enough now that our influence would continue to linger even if we were all suddenly gone. And with so little population turnover now, in the upper levels anyway, the lessons we’ve taught and the examples we’ve made will stick with them throughout their lifetimes.”
“Longevity is our insurance policy?” Megan asked.
“Followers follow,” Randy said with a shrug. “Get them in the habit of doing the right thing and they’ll keep doing it until they’re dragged off another direction. Usually it’s the younglings that have no prior history that are the most affected. If we give the lizards the leadership of the Archons they will follow us, pattern after us, learn from us, and pass it on to others even when we are not there. We’ll have to counter various things, just like we have in all factions. The attrition of morals occurs everywhere the light doesn’t shine, but get enough people to soak it in and they’ll be able to sustain themselves through brief periods of darkness.”
“Moral glow rods?” Emily asked with a chuckle.
“Temporarily charged,” Randy added unabashed. The metaphor was sound.
“Charged off the beacons of light,” Kip said with a nod. “And given the lizards’ group nature, if we can convert them they might hold to it better than others would.”
“But they’ll be a hard sell,” Jason cautioned. “Those surrendering especially.”
“You think we didn’t have a hard time with the Kiritas?” Randy asked. “We won’t have to worry about people starving to death this time. Try teaching people to do the right thing when they need to steal, cheat, and kill just to try and stay alive.”
“I think we can all agree,” Emily said, raising her arms to encompass everyone, “that Paul was an idiot for not including us earlier.”
“I can second that,” Jason said, drawing a sigh of regret from Paul.
“But he has created a good foothold for us to work off of,” Emily added. “Him turning Thrawn is what started all this, and his little projects since then are showing good, piecemeal results. That said, this is not going to be an easy or quick fix. We’re probably going to have to tinker with the variants, maybe even make some new ones, and solve a lot of problems that haven’t even been discovered yet. But we’re a team and we work best as one. This is a very big challenge and one worthy of our combined skills, so let’s dig into this and make it happen before we run out of lizards to recruit. Every one of them we save is a victory for us.”
“I’m more inter
ested in the potential of the new ones,” Kip differed, “but you make a good point. There are multiple levels here to consider, which is why we need all of us working and managing this. We’re also going to need a lot of star systems.”
“Where are we going to work this from?” Jack asked.
“Heart of the storm,” Megan said. “Krachnika.”
Jason nodded. “We’ll need more than that, but that’s where we need to start setting up shop.”
“Time to start packing,” Dan said, heading for the exit with Ivan and Randy following a step behind.
“I’ll handle Davis,” Emily volunteered, referring to the need for more star systems.
“You going to kiss him too?” Megan jibbed.
Emily glared at her, but before she could respond Paul walked up behind her and wrapped her up in a hug, then gently kissed her on the cheek.
“Thanks,” he whispered in her ear.
“You really should have told us about this before,” she said, not struggling against his embrace.
“Yeah, I know, but we are keeping this secret from the other Clans, right?”
“Totally,” Megan agreed as she and the others started to head for the door too.
“No reason they need to know until we get something worked out,” Emily answered as Paul let her go, “but amongst us we don’t need to keep secrets.”
“On that note,” Paul said with a devious smile, “has Jason told you about his…”
“Hey!” he objected, turning around just as he got to the door and glaring at Paul. “Not cool.”
“His what?” Emily insisted, with Randy and Megan turning around as well.
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