Ra took her literally and was about to repeat himself entirely.
“Okay, I heard what you said. Just tell me one thing that is going to make anything like taking over the planet possible.”
“Very well,” Ra said. “Once I awake my seven fertilized brides, they can produce hundreds of millions of Shai warrior offspring each month.
Naero’s jaw did hit the rocky ground. The sounds that came out of her mouth next were generally unintelligible.
“Given a proper food source and clean water supply,” Ra added.
Naero’s brain still hadn’t caught up with her stammering mouth.
“And our offspring can be placed in a dormant state until needed, to conserve food and energy. They can awake for battle or general construction projects.”
“So…we could have an army of billions of Shai in four months. Billions more in eight months.”
“Given enough food and water.”
“Yeah, yeah. Ra, I think it’s time that we wake up these brides of yours and get to know them. We’ll send teams with them, and find secluded, underground areas where they can spawn, and where food can be collected. During the High Crusade, I learned that huge quantities of food could be taken from the oceans without attracting much attention. The enemy has even bothered to exploit their oceans here. I suggest we get a bit of that going.”
Naero’s strategic and tactical mind ramped up and began to race.
“Each bride will need her own separate territory for their hive,” Ra noted.
Naero nodded eagerly. “There are four main continents and several large island groupings. We will pick the most isolated areas that we can and try to keep them secret until we are ready to bring them online. Like I said, we’ll try to feed them all from the oceans.”
Ra. Jan, and others started bringing in the other seven stasis containers, similar to the one Ra had emerged from.
Since Shai could compress and expand their size and density. It made transporting a potential nest of them relatively simple.
Each of Ra’s brides had a slightly varied coloration pattern, but when they emerged from the stasis fields they looked to be shaped almost identically, like Mantids. Yet even so, with her trained eye and biomancy, Naero noticed subtle differences that could also be used to tell them apart.
Not to mention smell and pheromones. With the highly developed Shai olfactory system, they could no doubt be differentiated solely by scent alone.
Although, until they moved, Naero smiled, musing that they all looked like white and orange ice cream, ready to be dipped up.
Then they stirred, and awoke, tumbling forward out of the compact stasis chambers, unfolding and shaking themselves slightly as they came around.
Ra jumped forward and caught each one lovingly as they awoke in the order he had set. He stood them on their feet and caressed them briefly, obviously very affectionate with his seven brides.
He was very proud, and rightly so, as he announced and introduced each one of his new wives–all sent with their prince on what could only be seen as a very dangerous task.
“This is Shiival; this is Kunali; meet Ishidar; she is called Cliiofarah. Next I want you to meet Pavija; this is Shiibrana; and she is known as Jahenna.”
The female Shai mantids were mighty and powerfully built, much like their male counterpart. Their heads were just a smidge larger than Ra’s, and their big, blinking mantid eyes were all shades of bright blue or green. Yet for all of their insectoid qualities, they were far from unlovely. And they all moved with the grace and beauty of the most accomplished dancers. Shai were exceptional athletes, unlike any other species known to exist.
The brides all complained to their prince of being famished after their long sleep and even seemed to be in some distress.
Fortunately, Shetanna company returned from the depths of the sea at that moment, with nanonets filled with fresh tuna and a bounty of wiggling, succulent fish stocks.
Everyone looked on in wonder, as the seven brides rushed in and made short work of all of that fresh seafood. Some even pulled back a bit a the sight. Naero had seen Ra eat before.
Even Jan quipped to Naero, “Good thing your replicants brought all that seafood back, sib. Otherwise, these Shai gals would have cleaned us out, and maybe even made a few of us disappear.”
Naero laughed. She and her assistants, in their heads and on their comps, and on the fixernet were already trying to find the best places for the seven Shai brides to be squirreled away with enough available food and water to allow their numbers to flourish over the next few months.
The rest of the Alliance personnel would hit the enemy at numerous other points, in order to hold the enemy’s attention and keep the Shai from being discovered until it was too late.
Meanwhile, Naero learned a great deal about Shai in a very short amount of time, both from biomancy and observation.
The Shai were an amazing species in so many ways. Not only did they have an extremely healthy appetite, but because their digestive systems were so empty from stasis, they processed their food rapidly. Ra warned Naero and their people about this fact, and a special chamber was prepared and located well out of the way from the main group, allowing the seven ladies to do their business in relative privacy. Then they collapsed that chamber and sealing it all away forever.
Shai poo, as it turned out, was both highly compacted and hyperdense–the consistency of a metal, actually. The smell was also magnified, somehow. Haisha, did it stink. Even the Shai themselves did not enjoy the strong odor.
No wonder Ra always made a big deal about burying his wastes deep onworld, or expelling them out into space when they were up in the black.
The seven brides cleaned themselves up in an underground pool, and after breaking their fast, and having made their toilet, they shifted slightly to an orange, white, reddish coloring combination and followed their beloved Ra around like a shuffling pack.
They were all somewhat shorter than Naero, just like Ra, yet there was some variation to them. Ra informed Naero that a group of Shai was know as a klath.
The princesses moved quickly among the Alliance forces, with Naero, Jan, and Ra. They were introduced to all of the troops, and Ra said that they could indeed remember each individual by smell.
The seven Shai females had at the very first taken great pains to imprint Naero and Jan on themselves and their minds as family. They were extremely intrigued by Jan talking later about his wife Vejjah’s impending birth back in their main timeline.
When Ra explained to them that Jan’s Spacer wife was going to have a single male child, they were all excited, assuming that the single child was being groomed and prepared to be a great prince among the Spacers.
Ra laughed, and a brief explanation was made, about how Spacers were very different from the Shai, and as mammals, they only had their offspring one or two at a time in most cases.
For a moment this revelation stunned the seven young brides. Then they burst out laughing so hard that they could not right themselves or even remain standing for a good long while.
To an insectoid species that gave birth to possibly many billions of offspring an a lifetime, the birthing of one or two children was apparently quaint and completely hilarious to the Shai.
Then Ra began to explain to them where they were, their dire situation, and what their mission was. The seven brides grew quiet and their intelligent eyes fixed and did not blink so much. An intense concentration quickly settled over them, bordering on what Naero could only define as near fury.
Naero had sparred both with Ra, and his mighty sire, Gaviok. Shai were an incredibly dangerous species. She would not want to fight an entire nest or planet of them.
A joy they soon hoped to inflict upon their foes.
It took them all of the next week to find suitable, concealed nesting sites for each of the seven brides. Alliance forces were kept with them underground to help protect and assist them with food collection. One princess was concealed on each of
the four continents, and three on tropical island networks or archipelagos.
If a nest was discovered, the princess could be whisked away, and the nest complex collapsed in the usual manner. Then if the eggs weren’t destroyed, Naero and the rest could still come back for them at a later time and relocate them.
28
With Ra’s seven brides situated and hidden, they started producing eggs and preparing large numbers of Shai to be born, mature rapidly, and be placed in their dormant, hibernation mode.
It took only three weeks for an adult Shai to mature and be fully educated. They were extremely intelligent, yet completely obedient to the parents. The seven brides and Ra could command them without question, even to the death. Shai were communal and very chummy and affectionate with each other, and they adored their mother and father.
The task of feeding them became a major issue. Then more Shai were kept active to assist in the task. They even had the fixers make them underwater suits and submersibles to farm the oceans for foodstocks. That quickly solved the manpower issue.
Naero kept herself extremely busy. By then she was creating ten Shetanna level replicants each day. And when she slept, she dreamed and sang among the KDM nodes of knowledge in her Kexxian form and immersed herself in that endless sea of wisdom and information, just beginning to scratch the surface of it all.
Before the end of the first month, they conducted their first attack on one of the four continental capital gigacities for the Dakkur and their minions.
She wanted to send the enemy a message.
As usual, she began with a massive Cosmic gigablast that rocked the entire region and split the ground around the gigacity wide open, leaving fused black glass and burning craters and chasms throughout the ground zero area, for tens of kilometers in every direction.
Such a detonation of power vaporized all enemy troops and personnel exposed out in the open. And that meant tens of millions of enemy casualties.
The foe meant to hunt Naero and her allies down and destroy them. Well, that put the enemy within that same trap, and also made them vulnerable.
Naero fully intended to teach them a very hard lesson concerning those facts.
When the gigablast effects cleared, Naero and her troops struck pre-selected military command and control, information centers, labs, and research facilities in order to gather important data and Intel on what the enemy was up to.
These hit an run tactics after the shock and awe of the gigablast proved very fruitful, after the allies thoroughly raided and hacked enemy information systems.
Then they melted away once more, to assess all the info that they had gathered.
Yet the enemy response stunned even Naero.
The enemy seemed to go insane. They executed many of their own, including military commanders. Next, because the attack occurred on the continent of Shurog, they pulled all of their plasma borers off the other continents and concentrated on going after every Cosmic energy site that they could on the one. Which was more than half.
Naero and Company spent the next few days muddying the waters further by creating many more fake sites under that continent to serve as decoys. They decided to do the same thing on the other continents, before they made another attack.
The enemy increased searching for Naero and her people worldwide, but because they were transporting, the Allied forces became virtually impossible to trace.
A week later Naero and Company hit a gigacity on the continent of Kolf in the same exact fashion. Cosmic gigablasts could strike suddenly and without warning, even though they quickly exhausted her energies.
Then they fled to a completely different continent, to sift through the stolen data files they added to the others.
Disturbing patterns began to appear. The Dakkur were rapidly expanding their influence in that area of the Gamma Quadrant–as well as five other far flung regions just like it, if not larger.
And here Naero and her people were struggling to contain and defeat just one of the enemy’s points of expansion and subjugation. The enemy plans for conquest were industrious and robust.
What’s more, the enemy were also working on advanced upgrades for their existing shields, weapons, and tech. And completely new super warship designs and devastating weapon systems–many of them based on using highly destructive and unstable Darkforce energy.
To make matters worse, there was repeated mention in their secret files, documents, and coms concerning The Armada, an apparent numberless horde of enemy fleets that were being prepared in the next closest galaxy over.
This was one of the galaxies once completely controlled and almost destroyed by the G’lothc in their hey day.
Projections had this overwhelming wave of fleets being ready within the next one or two decades. Once they crossed over the vast space between the two galaxies, they would bring so much force and firepower with them that all resistance would fall before their might.
The enemy felt absolutely certain that they could defeat Naero’s galaxy with these countless hordes. Neither were they happy being idle. Their will to conquer and destroy was restless and could not be suppressed.
While they waited for the Armada, the Dakkur and their minions would continue to soften up the other sentients and do their best to keep them worn down and on the defensive.
This was definitely terrible news, but it was also one to two decades away and could be possibly be prepared for. For now, the problems Naero and the Alliance currently faced were quite daunting enough. These enemies had always planned and plotted both for the short term and the long term.
The only way to stop them was to destroy them.
The next day the Alliance forces hit the continent of Gronet.
The day after that, they struck the largest gigacity on Uldren. Yet this time, the enemy were buttoned up and expecting them. The gigacity there was armored and shielded like a fortress. They still endured heavy damage from the blast, but they did not have as many troops out in the open.
Naero chose not to send in any raiders, and that proved to be a good thing.
As soon the gigablast was clear, enemy armies converged on that city.
Naero wished she had enough juice to zap them again.
She only had to wait until the next day, as all of those troops began to disperse. Naero took out most of them by using two divided blasts, spread out to obliterate more exposed forces across a wider expanse.
After they had acquired most of the information that they could, the data grew repetitive. Naero changed strategies, committing a variety of attacks at random, all designed to keep the enemy guessing, never knowing where she would strike next.
Naero made the lives of the enemy on Naggoth a virtual hell over the next four months.
There were also unavoidable setbacks and disasters for the Alliance.
Troops and replicants were cut down or lost in unexpected explosions from enemy booby-traps and remotely detonated ordnance. There were always chance losses that could occur during raids.
One dark day they lost sixty troops in an op where the enemy went so far as to set off an atomic at one of their own bases.
Naero and the rest of her people swore vengeance to make the enemy pay the highest price for every person the Alliance lost.
Naero grew increasingly worried that the enemy was going to discover one of the Shai secret bases. Therefore, the dormant Shai were spread out over multiple areas in other hidden pockets to better hide their rapidly expanding numbers.
The raiders mixed things up. They boarded and captured an enemy heavy cruiser, modified for ground assault. Then they used it to strafe exposed enemy armies and fleets of starships on the tarmac.
Then as other enemy fleets converged to shoot them down, Naero transported her people away, set the jump drive to activate, and ploughed it into yet another enemy gigacity to explode. The blast took out half of the city.
After that, the Alliance raiders focused on taking out the enemy fleets that were stationed onw
orld. Cosmic blasts, explosives, booby traps, and stolen ships.
These concentrated Alliance attacks were so devastating, that within three months, they wiped out almost eighty-percent of the enemy fleets on Naggoth. The others escaped further loss when the enemy hid them in the oceans or concealed them by burying them near the poles, or at other remote locations underground.
Next, Naero turned her wrath on Dakkur industry and manufacturing. They degraded that as well, but half of the enemy production capacity was concealed in underground factory bunkers. The enemy even had two underground naval shipyards.
Naero decided to put the emphasis on had.
The Alliance infiltrated those shipyards and blew them straight to hell.
By then Naero and her people had three months to go, before Naggoth came back in sync with the normal timeline. The enemy was starting to believe that perhaps it had not been such a great idea to try to take Naero out, and trap her with them in Time on a single planet for an entire year.
Naero had lost about five hundred troops by that time–about a third of her original raiders. She had many more replicants, and she was up to making eighteen of them each day, but each time she and her forces lost someone else. It was heartbreaking.
Finally, Naero was poised to turn the heat up on the enemy once more, and actually make a serious attempt at stripping the planet from them and wiping them out.
Her main concern was facing down any Dakkur Queens on the planet at the very last. The enemy’s slaves would die by countless millions defending them. Naero was counting on that part.
The Dakkur queens remained the wild blade in the fight. Naero had never fought one. Her Uncle Baeven said that they were huge and incredibly tough. She had Ra’s help, but what if all four Dakkur Queens came at them at once? Or worse–what if they had a Dakkur King on Naggoth? How many kings were there? Did each Dakkur Homeworld have one, or just Queens?
These were major uncertainties, going into an uncertain war that they could not escape from. Was Naero leading her people to victory, or certain death?
Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial Page 24
