by Aer-ki Jyr
“See that line on the floor,” Sara said, pointing back towards the door. “Go stand there.”
As he ran over to the mark lugging the large rifle, Sara backed up to another mark on the floor, giving them about 15 meters of separation.
“Alright,” she said, bringing her sword up in a guard position. “Try and shoot me.”
The boy raised the thick rifle, slid the safety off, then fired a blue blur at the Archon.
Sara whipped the training sword around one handed and easily knocked the compact foam ball out of the air, ricocheting it off into the seated younglings on purpose. “Again.”
The boy fired a second time, but she batted it away just as easily.
“Try three in a row.”
The boy did as instructed, but with a whip-like blade she batted them all out of the air.
“Hmmn, I think he needs some help. Two more volunteers.”
99 hands rose up, so she picked two seated in the front row.
“You…and you,” Sara said, pointing. “Get your weapons and stand behind your marks.”
The handlers brought two more training rifles up and showed them where their marks were, situated about 30 degrees to either side of the boy at the same 15 meter distance.
“Alright, when he says go you fire as many times as you can and try to hit me,” Sara said, slipping into a combat focus. This wasn’t going to be as easy.
“Ready…” one of the handlers prompted. “Go!”
The three children fired off their rifles, not in sync, but close. The blue balls shot out quite fast and Sara had to fling her sword around in a Jedi-ish sequence to hit the first two, then ducked to the right and let a high third cross over her left shoulder.
“Again…and this time don’t stop until you run out of ammo!”
“Go!” the handler yelled.
Ball after ball shot out, with Sara quickly deflecting each one of them…but in random directions. They were coming in too fast for her to intentionally line up a rebound on the thin, round blade, making for a fireworks display of deflections flying every which way, including a few that hit hard enough to bounce all the way back over the shooters’ heads to where the Legionmaster stood, who caught one of them barehanded out of the air without so much as budging from his straight line posture.
By the time the children had run out of ammo the floor was covered with spent ammunition. Sara finished off with a few roundhouse swings in a sort of cooldown flourish, then launched the sword through the air and back to the handler that’d given it to her. He caught it midair, then she walked back over to the group of seated younglings.
“Training gives you superpowers,” she told them in a lower voice, then looked at the child who’d spoken first. “And superpowers are not boring.”
2
At the end of a long day of ‘schooling’ the younglings and getting in her own workouts, Sara retreated into her temporary quarters within the maturia and found that she had a new message waiting from Clan Mantle. She clicked the play button and leaned back in her chair, massaging a kink in her neck.
“Status report on Clan activity,” the image of Katharine-422 said in a formal tone. “Two trials have been completed since your last update. Clan Saber has successfully claimed the firearms production facility in Charon orbit, while Clan Stark narrowly defeated Clan Croft for a micro-territory on Titania. In addition, Davis has announced three additional trials ranging from 3 to 7 months. The earliest is commando, followed by an aquatics and another commando. Prizes for the three are a micro-territory on Rhea, a foodstuff production facility on Europa, and a small shipyard orbiting Neptune.”
“We also have four outstanding trials on the books, two of which we’re entered and the chatter suggests we’re about 5th in line for the aerial trial. I personally think we could go as high as third, and Clan Vulcan has stated that they will not be vying for that prize. Apparently they have a batchall with Clan Raven scheduled during that slot and are devoting their best people toward winning that. I don’t know what they’re fighting over, but it must be big if they’re passing up a chance at another land grab.”
Katherine smiled, breaking the formality of the message. “Oh, and I saved the best for last. Davis also announced that, one year from yesterday, there will be a comprehensive trial to determine full possession of Dysnomia.”
“I did some checking, and at present only 12 Clans are qualified for the trial, not including us, because he’s tagged it as level 3. The good news is Clan Saber is also not qualified, so whoever gets it should start to break up the dynamic duo’s stranglehold a bit. Thought that would brighten your day,” the Archon said, ending the message with a wink.
Sara stared at the message prompt screen, whistling appreciatively. Davis was certainly upping the available prizes through an increased number of trials, but this was the first time he’d ever offered up an entire moon to the victor. Dysnomia was a small moon, about as small as one could get and still be considered a planetoid, in orbit around Eris, making it well beyond Pluto and on the edge of Star Force’s domain.
The only other distant outpost that they currently had was on Sedna, a small planet about three times further from the sun than Neptune currently, however, during its highly elliptical 11,000+ year orbit it would travel out more than 10 times that distance. That wasn’t a concern to Star Force, given that their engine technology was advancing faster than Sedna’s orbit, and Davis had established a small outpost on the world to serve as a foothold in the local orbital belt that held many hundreds of other planets.
These outer planets were small, accompanied by even more asteroids that were just on the wrong side of the planetary line…with gravity too weak to compress them down into spheres, which was the definition of a planetoid. That said, those large asteroids were almost as valuable, giving Star Force literally thousands of ‘land’ grabs available beyond Pluto, but the trick was they were spread out across a vast area of space, some of which made the distance from the Earth to the Sun look like it was just next door when you zoomed out the holographic map so that you could see them all.
Some of these small planets the general population didn’t know about yet. Star Force had been conducting an extensive survey, but even they didn’t have the sensor technology available to the V’kit’no’sat, so the old system survey was more complete than any other available and gave Davis the locations of some fairly large planets in extreme orbits that no one else had yet discovered. At the moment they were too far out of range to bring them into the fold in terms of the Star Force transportation grid, but eventually they’d expand out into them, and Sedna and Eris were yet another pair of stepping stones in that direction.
As it was, Star Force listed all planets within the star system into four zones. The inner zone ran from Sol out to Jupiter, and in this was the bulk of the system’s economy and colonies. A lesser amount inhabited the middle zone that ran from Jupiter out to Pluto/Neptune, whichever was furthest at the time. The high zone ran from Pluto/Neptune out to just past Sedna’s and Eris’s current positions, at about 100 AU or so, with an ‘AU’ being the distance from Earth to the Sun.
The fourth zone was called the ‘outer zone’ and it comprised the unexplored regions out to the edge of the star system…which was defined by the furthest an object could still be orbiting the star. That was a bit of an arbitrary measurement, because mathematically that could include insane distances if the object’s orbital speed was almost at a standstill. According to the V’kit’no’sat records, the furthest detectable planet lay at 12,000 AU but they’d never so much as set foot on the world, given that it was essentially a rogue planet and so cold not to be worth their time.
Being so hard to get to, the Archons had nicknamed it ‘Mordor’ and Davis had eventually sanctioned the moniker.
Dysnomia was just next door by comparison, as were the other high zone planetoids. National expansion zones had just begun creeping into the middle zone, with the most recent territorial allotmen
ts occurring on Callisto in Jupiter orbit. That left nearly the entire middle zone open to the Clans to colonize, along with the distant high zone, according to Davis’s master plan.
Two years into the Archon’s competitive Clan program Davis had approached them with an ambitious upgrade. He’d told them that he wanted to combine their military angle with a civilian one, just as Star Force was split into both divisions. He told them that he needed to train ‘mini-me’s’ but didn’t have the option of doing so when he was running everything. All his subordinates were specialists, and he wanted at least some of his people to learn what he had when he first began building Star Force from scratch.
Thus Davis suggested that each Clan be assigned a ‘director’ that would work with the Archons to expand their holdings and create industry of their own…all independent of the Star Force markets. They could only produce their own material or trade with each other…those were the rules Davis wanted. He assigned each Clan a small territory in Antarctica, gave them a stockpile of resources and various industries, and let them see what they could build.
The Archons loved the idea, especially when Davis added economic prizes to their competitions. Now every battle they fought with each other had a tangible outcome that would affect the growth of their Clans. Survival of the fittest, so to speak, with the dominant Clans being able to grow faster than the others through conquest in addition to self-replication.
The prizes Davis had been offering them all came from Jupiter orbit on out, nothing in the inner zone. With every year that passed by he offered up more and more prizes, for which the 100 Clans fought over in one of the five combat categories: Aquatics, Commando, Naval, Aerial, and Mechs. A few rare and precious prizes held larger contests, in which all five areas had to be contested with a combined score determining the victorious Clan.
It had been three years since the last one, when Davis put up a small amount of metallic hydrogen as the prize and all 100 Clans had dove into the fray, with Clan Saiyan winning out. They’d taken their prize and had their techs construct one of the newest Star Force power cores, which now ran their entire colony on Ganymede, which functioned as the Saiyans’ capitol.
That contest had been a level 1, which meant that all Clans that had attained a level 1 rating in each of the five categories could enter. The current contest required level 3 in all the categories, which made it the hardest challenge yet that any of the Clans had faced. Clan Mantle currently had only one level 3 rating, and that was in Aerial. The rest of the Clan had worked hard to earn that rating by passing an insane number of challenges, but they’d worked even harder to earn level 2s in the other four, making Clan Mantle one of the more well-rounded Clans.
Well-rounded had been Sara’s goal, but it also meant that her Clan was unlikely to win any of the single category trials, which usually were swept up by the specialists. Her Clan had missed out on their first win 12 years ago on a comprehensive trial where they’d finished a close third, given that the parameters of that contest had suited her Clan’s strengths well. Within each category there were numerous subcategories from which one would be chosen to determine the victor, and Davis was always rotating them around so no one Clan could focus specifically on one aspect and expect to win repeated.
Some Clans still did, hoping to take advantage when that subcategory came up again. For example, Jason’s Clan Sangheili prided itself on having the best swordsmen of all the Clans, but swordplay was only one of dozens of subcategories within the Commando classification, which covered everything from unarmed fighting to team-based stinger matches.
Morgan’s Clan Ninja Monkey was the dominant Commando Clan, but whenever they met the Sangheili in a swords competition they always lost. Jason was simply too good, and he’d passed on his skill to his fellow Archons. Likewise, Paul’s Clan Saber was also a swords specialist Clan. They could both beat the Ninja Monkeys in that narrow slice of the pie, but Morgan’s Clan dominated the rest of it.
Likewise, all the other Clans had their specialties, whether they intended to create them or not. Clan Saber was the strongest of all the Clans, well balanced, but with the swords peculiarity. They rated a level 5 in naval, 4 in commando, 3 in aerial and mechs, and a 2 in aquatics, whereas most Clans hadn’t yet surpassed level 2 in any category. With the head start Paul had gotten in the beginning, his Clan had swept up many of the initial prizes and quickly established a larger economic base than the others, rounding out his needs for self-sufficiency off Earth early on, then pursuing avenues of conquest of his choosing while the others scrambled to establish footholds. His methodical approach had served his Clan well, and he’d progressed in the areas he wished with few setbacks, gradually growing his Clan to not only be the strongest, but also the largest.
The Sabers held the most territory, the highest population, and the biggest fleet. While that didn’t directly relate to the trials yet, come 2140 all equipment used within the trials had to be produced by the Clan, or else they wouldn’t be able to use it in the simulators. That meant everything from stinger rifles up to warships, and Paul had wisely set his Clan on a course to attaining all the necessary technology to stay afloat once that change in procedure was implemented.
That said, the Sabers still had help. As in all things, Paul and Jason had teamed up, forming an alliance in which they shared everything from resources to personnel to prizes. If there was a prize that the Saber’s wanted, but didn’t have the strength in a particular subcategory that was being contested and the Sangheili did, Jason’s Clan would fight for and win it, then trade it to the Sabers in exchange for something they wanted.
The Sangheili weren’t as strong as the Sabers, but they were well balanced with a tilt towards commando while the Sabers tilted to naval. Combined, they made an intimidating pair with both Clans reaping the rewards of that alliance and growing stronger because of it.
The rest of the Clans saw what the pair had done and sought to emulate it. They’d always traded amongst each other for small things and the occasional high volume trade wasn’t unheard of, but actually coordinating together had been something of a taboo early on, but once the dynamic duo had broken through that hesitance other alliances sprouted up, with the 8s being the largest.
All of Rafa’s former team coordinated their 10 Clans into a shared economy, with each focusing on a different aspect. Five of the Clans each specialized in one of the 5 areas of contention, while one went straight even across all areas, trying to have no weaknesses. Two others completely eschewed balance and completely got rid of their aquatics, aerial, and mech categories, focusing entirely on naval and commando. The last two did the reverse, one focusing on aquatics and aerial, the other on aerial and mechs in the hopes of claiming more prizes that could then be shared with the rest of their alliance.
Indeed, the 8s had swept up more prizes than anyone else, but individually their Clans weren’t impressive. Together they were dominant, but none of them had the individual ratings necessary to qualify for the Dysnomia trials, meaning they wouldn’t have a chance at grabbing the moon and sharing it amongst their 10 Clans.
Each of the 100 Clans took their own unique route to prosperity, with none failing. Even those who had never won a trial still had the opportunity to grow on their own merits, and some of the Clans had chosen to remain isolationist, only participating in trials for competition’s sake. Clan Star Fox had broken into the top 10 so far as territorial holdings without ever winning one through trials, instead waiting for periodic allotments similar to what the nations were receiving from Davis. Difference was the Clan allotments were private, minuscule by comparison, and tied to a Clan’s economic achievements.
Other Clans chose a third option to increase their holdings…or diminish them. The ‘batchall’ was a challenge between individual Clans in which one would offer a prize from their own holdings in exchange for something they valued that another Clan possessed. If they came to agreeable terms they would compete against each other, with the victor claiming the
spoils. Some Clans, especially Clan Forerunner and Clan Scorpion, were proficient in offering batchalls that the opposing Clans thought would be to their advantage, only to find that the opposing Clan had found a way to outmaneuver them in combat. Some learned from this and declined future batchalls from either Clan, while others sought out the challenge and offered them batchalls.
Needless to say, those who wanted the private versus battles had plenty available to them, with the consistent winners growing their Clans by leaps and bounds over the others…but true dominance in the batchalls was nearly impossible, so all saw setbacks. The wily Clans gained more than they lost, providing them an avenue of advancement even if they weren’t the overall strongest of the Clans…they just had to be better, or better aligned, than the one they were squaring off against.
On occasion there would even be paired batchalls, in which two allied Clans would face off against two, or even three, others. In this way all the Clans, no matter how weak or dominant, could find sufficient challenges to keep them razor sharp, all the while looking after Star Force’s primary military, in addition to their own small Clan militias.
Those militias were quickly growing into full scale armies of their own, having recruited retiring Star Force officers into their ranks, as well as picking out promising newbs to groom in what the Archons referred to as their ‘grand experiment’ as they worked with different strategic and equipment packages ranging from new Knight combat tactics all the way up to original warship designs coming out of Clan Saber. What they found useful they copied into Star Force itself, while their failures were just chalked up as experience points.
In recent years some of the Clans had began calling batchalls between non-Archons, squaring off their Knights or naval officers for the sake of training and pride, but with no prizes attached to the outcome. These quickly became sporting matches, with the civilian members of the Clans being given access to watch the competitions live or on replay and spreading the competitive vibe the Archons lived and breathed out to the rest of their people, who cheered on their own with the fervor of a local sports team.
