Star Force: Dominance (Star Force Universe Book 50)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  There was a small insurrection taking place that the Bez would quickly get under control, but whose futile attempt had been to attack and down at least one of the newly arrived dropships. They hadn’t even come close, but if there was a fight to be had Esna wasn’t going to miss it, so once she got her bearings in the swampy forest she headed straight towards the sound of energy weapons.

  Well, not entirely straight, for because of her armor’s weight her footsteps were sinking in heavily in spots, forcing her to zigzag from better footing to tree branch to rock until she came to a shallow lake in trees that she couldn’t run through.

  “Err,” she groaned, activating her armor’s limited flight ability and jumping off a rock that half sunk into the soft ground beneath her feet and Esna flew across the gap to land on a thick dead tree trunk. She paused a moment, letting her capacitors recharge a bit, then she jumped again…and again…and again until she got past the wetness, saving her remaining power in case she needed it later and returned to her zig zag run all the way up to the edge of what was left of the battlefield.

  9

  The Bez and their Esquires were small in number here, with only two of the giant bipeds and a few dozen smaller infantry. They had no mechs, nor did they need them, but the Opaty were not small. They stood 9-10 feet tall and had huge arms as wide as Esna’s body. They somewhat resembled gorillas, but with longer legs, and their temperament was tribal. What one did, the others did as well, and when combat began they would all fight or all run. There was little individuality with them, which was going to be a problem with indoctrination, but right now it made them easy targets as they all charged whatever their nearest opponent was.

  Esna was approaching from a flank and didn’t get noticed until she was nearly upon the melee as small groups of Opaty were periodically being added, coming from the northwest. She wasn’t sure what their point of origin was, but the Ard Ri knew that the Opaty used tunnel networks to travel great distances rather than surface roads, and she bet there was a tunnel entrance nearby. It wasn’t marked on the battlemap yet, so she grudgingly turned to the left and away from the Opaty that had spotted her and roared at the prospect of smashing the small opponent, but when she seemed to run away they had to choose between breaking off and following her or staying with the others…and they didn’t want to leave the group.

  Esna continued to run/hop through the swampy ground, passing by more Opaty going the other way save for one that did come after her. She waited until he got close, then used her Fornax to trip him up. He lost all body control for half a second, which was enough to send him falling face first into the ground. Before he could stand back up she closed ranged and pumped several stun shots into his thick chest from her forearm gauntlets that held the weapons. Unless there was a need, Canderians didn’t carry free weapons anymore, and with the Bez already here there wasn’t a lack of firepower. The weapons built into her armor would be sufficient, leaving her arms free to thrash as much as needed to overcome the muck she was running through.

  When she got to the now stunned Opaty she rolled him over face up so he wouldn’t suffocate in the mud, then Esna kept working her way back along the approach the reinforcements were coming from until she found an odd rhythm in the pools of water. There were small waves forming, and when she backtracked them to their epicenter she found a reed wall out of which two more Opaty were coming.

  Esna engaged her armor’s cloaking field so she wouldn’t have to fight them, then waded out into the water towards the reeds, sinking in up to her hips as she moved slowly. The cloaking field did nothing to disguise the hole in the water that she made, so she was hoping a lack of quick movement wouldn’t get the enraged Opaty’s attention. Several more emerged from the reeds and ran out of the water towards the ongoing fight by the time she got to the thick tube plants that rose well above her head, then she began to squeeze through the gaps with her hole in the water now becoming almost unnoticeable.

  She got caught multiple times, for the reeds weren’t spaced far enough apart to allow her to walk through and there were clumps thicker than others. Once she had to fully come out of the water to slide through a higher gap, but eventually she came to the inner edge of the reed field. Her cloaked head poked out, seeing that the sky was not visible, for the reeds had bent over top like a canopy, hiding the clear pond the size of a dropship from view.

  A large bubble emerged from below, creating a wall of water that pushed out to Esna and rocked her back into the reeds. That was obviously the source of the waves, and following it came an Opaty rising out of the water. Another bubble formed and a second emerged from below, then the pair began pushing their way through a path in the reeds that the others had partially beaten down enroute to the battlefield.

  Esna backtracked into the reeds and sank all the way down into the water where she deactivated her cloak so her comm system would function. She marked the location on the battlemap and uploaded images from her helmet so everyone else would know what type of exit this was. Then she waited for the next pair to come up, and just before they left she hit them with a Fornax wave.

  They both fell into the water, then when they came back up she hit them again, delaying their leaving. More continued to rise up with the water bubbles, and she kept dunking them all but allowing them to stand back up so they wouldn’t drown…if that was even possible. She didn’t know enough about their biology to be sure, but she suspected they might be able to breath under water, or at least hold their breath for a while, for this exit point was odd for an non-amphibian race.

  She kept a total of 12 in the small pond before she finally let them go, but she stayed in place and kept forcing the Opaty into larger groups, giving the Bez and Canderous some more time to round up the others. After 6 large groups had been formed and released, heavy footfalls came crashing through the reeds just before the head of a Bez broke through the reed canopy and poked its thin armored snout down towards the next bubble as he shot the four Opaty already here as they peppered the copper-colored Bez armor with little effect.

  Suddenly the stunned Opaty flew up into the air and were thrown out through the reeds as another bubble formed…only this time the water didn’t come rushing back down to cover the entrance. It moved further out and magically held there as a single Opaty flew into the air, was shot by the Bez’s arm cannon, then throw back out of view with the others.

  “Go down,” the Bez ordered Esna.

  She didn’t hesitate, jumping out of cover with her armor’s flight capabilities and landing in the center of the hole in the water. She dropped down on top of another Opaty standing in some sort of an airlock and knocked him aside as she fell…then she scurried away down a side tube into a large tunnel where dozens more Opaty waited for their lift to the surface.

  Esna produced a large Fornax field and held it, knocking them all down as she ran to the left, for there were many more than a few dozen to her right beyond her knockdown range. She fired multiple stun blasts at them and those on the ground as her head began to hurt with the sustained effort. Esna had to release it as multiple orange energy blasts came her way, most of them missing, but she still engaged the heavy shield her left arm sported, creating a rectangular second shield out in front of her body and locked to her forearm. It would take a lot of hits before her skin-tight shields would once again have to take the blows, but the heavy shield operated off a capacitor, and once it was drained it would be gone.

  Esna wasn’t worried though, for on the battlemap she could see the Esquires approaching quickly. The Canderian continued to fire off shots with her right gauntlet, stunning more Opaty but having to hit them multiple times to knock them fully unconscious. The others were tripping on the downed ones as they rushed her, but when they got close she sent multiple Fornax waves into them, dropping them momentarily and making it easy for her to pump shots into them.

  There were too many for her to handle on her own, but before she got overwhelmed with huge calloused bodies a H’kar Esqui
re dropped down and opened fire from their flank, followed by a Protovic and a couple of Humans. They dove right into the mass of them, giving Esna a brief break as she finished off those closest to her…but not before one punched into her heavy shield and knocked her back 3 meters in an awkward roll as her heavy shield impacted the ground.

  She turned it off after two rolls, then got her arms under her and her head reoriented just in time to dodge another fist that smashed into the ground. She flashed a Fornax orb into the single Opaty, then rolled up onto her feet where she punched into his leg with her armored fist. He didn’t collapse, but his leg did wobble a bit, and in that moment Esna jumped up, using the full power of her flight engine, and impaled the Opaty in the chest with her helmet and crossed arms, lifting him off the ground in an arc before smashing him back-first onto the tunnel floor where Esna finished him with 6 point blank stun blasts.

  “Nice move,” one of the Humans said, then pointed behind her. “You up for some more?”

  “After you,” Esna deferred, not sure how good these Esquires were compared to her, but they did have psionics that she lacked so it made sense to let them take the lead.

  Esna dropped into a run half a step behind and to the right of the Human, with him sending her some telepathic instructions for how he wanted to charge the Opaty. She’d trained to interface with telepathic soldiers, so this wasn’t something new, and she fell into step with the Human who, right before they got to a charging wall of 4 Opaty with many more behind them, telekinetically threw Esna forward as she simultaneously jumped, turning her into a projectile that rammed the larger bipeds, then she detonated her Fornax field and dropped them 6 rows deep while the Esquire dumped area of effect stun blasts on them.

  Some of those hit Esna, but her shields absorbed them. The Opaty had no shields or armor, just their muscle and the fairly advanced rifles they carried. That made them easy to take down, despite their intimidating mass.

  More Esquires followed, stunning the lot as Esna helped keep them down, then the flow of reinforcements was over and they were left standing in a wide tunnel full of smelly bodies.

  “I’ll scout it,” she volunteered, running down one direction while the Esquires policed the unconscious. She couldn’t match their psionics, especially their battlemeld, but she could scout as well as them, if not a little better, so that’s what she assigned herself to before anyone else did, engaging her cloaking field and relying on her eyes and her armor’s passive sensors only as she backtracked to wherever the Opaty troops had come from.

  She could have been in an office on a seda right now, as many other highly ranked Canderians were, but this was where she truly belonged, with her armor being her only real home…and it went wherever she did. And Esna went where the danger was, for that was where she was needed, even if she was overshadowed by the Knights and Esquires. She’d help them when she could, then she’d venture out to the flanks where they were not, finding the mismatches she could take advantage of, for the galaxy was a huge place and there were never enough Star Force troops to deal with everything.

  But Esna could take care of some of those threats, and that was far more noble than overseeing training missions and cargo transfers. She wanted to be a warrior, not a sentinel who waited for threats to come to her. And right now, policing the stunned ones was sentinel work. Scouting out the unknown tunnel was warrior work.

  So off she went into the unknown again, chasing after the ghost of a Calavari that forever lived on the frontier.

  10

  October 19, 128439

  Jepiker System (Home Two Kingdom)

  Forge

  Leon-4293772103 had finished his final challenges yesterday, earning him a rise in rank from Acolyte 99 to Ranger 1. With that transition he earned his green armor and his days fighting in the Trials were over. He’d spent the past 158 years training and fighting in the war games along with the other Adepts and Acolytes, but now he had finally earned the right to field work and had been flown over to the main pyramid on the planet to await transit out of the system.

  He wasn’t alone either, for there were hundreds of other newly minted Rangers who would be leaving with him. They’d all finished their challenges within a past week, but only a handful of them were Human. The others were Mavericks from many different races, but he hadn’t fought any of them in the Trials. Those were Human-only for the Archons, while the Mavericks had their own versions. When asked, he’d been told that was because each race had different tactics they needed to focus on, and throwing in more variables beyond your own biology would have interfered with the emphasis of their training.

  But the Mavericks had the same ranks as the Archons, at least up through Padawan. Beyond that they differed somewhat, as did the psionics their bodies could handle, but the basic principles of the early ranks were all the same, hence the identical ranks.

  When a Dragon-class dropship landed on one of the flat tiers of the pyramid, Leon and the others walked/flew/hopped onboard and took their seats, with him sitting down next to a Vgora…which was basically a Human frame with rock-hard skin. He was glad he didn’t have to fight them in the Trials, for punching that body with his sometimes bare hands would have been extremely painful given all the little knobby growths that made for a dull form of thornmail.

  He and others sat quietly and waited for the dropship to deposit them on a starport in orbit, then they broke up into smaller groups, each heading to different terminals that led to waiting ferries that would take them out to parked starships. The one Leon was assigned to left the system with 43 of the Archons/Mavericks and began a long trip around the galaxy, dropping them off one at a time at their destinations with Leon being 12th in line.

  He got in some sparring matches with the Mavericks before it was his time to leave, finding some easy to beat and others impossible. The differences in biology were staggering, and he could see why incorporating them into the Trials would have been nonsense. Humans had to learn how to fight and improve as Humans, then take those skills onward later in their development, and the same was true of the Mavericks, especially the flyers. Having them go hand to hand with a Human was ridiculous, for they simply couldn’t. They had to stay out of range and fight from the sky, where Humans couldn’t go without a jump harness.

  Leon’s stop was in the Manticora System in the Pretora Kingdom, a quarter way around the galaxy from Home Two. He’d been born in Shangri-La, and the trip out to Home Two had seemed so far away, but Pretora made that trip look short by comparison. When he arrived a dropship took him down to the only inhabited planet, Warcoren, and then the starship left enroute to dropping off the other Rangers across the galaxy.

  Leon was met at the starport on the Bsidd planet by another Archon, this one a Striker judging by her armor which she wore in retracted mode, but the gauntlets on her arm that reached all the way up to her shoulders were colored according to her rank and had multiple holes that exposed her skin to the air, making the retracted armor look more like elaborate jewelry than anything. She also had a headband with a triangular jewel on it that Leon didn’t recognize, but it appeared to be built on cellular technology that could expand into different shapes at will.

  “Hello, newb. Welcome to Warcoren,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb and not walking out to greet him as he carried his personal duffle over his shoulder.

  “And you are?”

  “Brie. The others are Fred and Darren, but they’re busy. I’m your reception party.”

  “The others in our team?” Leon asked.

  The Striker laughed. “Team? No, newb. We’re the only Archons in the system. We were three, now we’re four counting you.”

  Leon’s jaw dropped open. “Four of us for an entire planet?”

  “It’s not exactly a war zone. And have you done the math? Number of planets divided by number of Archons and Mavericks?”

  “I know its low, but I didn’t think a Star Force world would only have four of us. Are there any Mavericks here?
”

  “Nope. Just us.”

  “What rank are the others?” he asked, glancing around at the empty terminal and wondering why it wasn’t packed with traffic.

  “Fred is a Striker and Darren was the newb until you showed up. He’s a Ranger 12. You looking for something?”

  “Is this starport shut down?”

  “No, it’s just a private one. We don’t get very many VIPs here, and the cargo goes through the others unless they get overloaded, then this one takes the extra. Warcoren is only half built and under orders to go no further until certain benchmarks are obtained. Count Visto doesn’t want us building lower level structures only to have to tear them down to build better ones later.”

  “We have a Count here?” he asked, not expecting a single planet system to rate higher than a Baron.

  “No, we have a planetary Administrator. We don’t rate a Monarch. Count Visto oversees this system and a few other small ones, operating out of Magenton. Bring your duffle and follow me. We’re not exactly overburdened here, but we are busy round the clock.”

  “Doing what?” he asked, following her as she disappeared through the door and he had to run a few steps to catch up.

  “Troubleshooting everything from security issues to building codes. If you were expecting combat, you’re going to be highly disappointed. Without a Monarch we have to take control of a lot of the planning duties. This planet is supposed to be built into a fortress world eventually. Do you know what that means?”

  “Hardened world in case of invasion.”

  “More or less. It also means less civilians and more workers, hence the empty starport,” she said, gesturing to structure they were walking through.

  “How long has this planet been colonized?”