Star Force: Ghostblade (SF67)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  1

  May 18, 2783

  Solar System

  Arwen

  Sophia sat on a short cliff edge, her feet dangling over and nearly touching the rocky ground below as she looked out at the tiny dot that was the sun on the horizon through her faceplate. She glanced down and ran her fingers through the sandy soil that covered the small planet on which a number of Clans had made their home centuries ago. Arwen was part of the Elvish cluster in high orbit around Sol, though that grouping was more nostalgic now than geographic given that their differing orbital tracts had slowly pulled them out of relative position to one another.

  With the navigational advancements over the years it hadn’t mattered. Everywhere in the Solar System was easily accessible, no longer the huge distances that separated civilization from the frontier…though in truth the remoteness stayed the same and it was the growth of the empire that had made everything feel so small and nearby. That was why she was here now, outside the colonies that dotted the landscape and sitting in an envirosuit on the natural surface, feeling the low gravity along with the sense of just how empty everything was.

  Inside the cities everyone was close, friendly, and working together for the benefit of Clan Snowstorm, but out here it was still empty space, with the nearest planet being beyond her reach. It was like the technology had given everyone a false sense of security, for Arwen was an inhospitable landscape despite the addition of a carbon dioxide atmosphere that Star Force had introduced to bring the freezing temperatures up to only slightly chilly. They were so far away from the star that little light reached this far out, and the planet was so small that it didn’t have sufficient internal heat production to do much of anything with.

  Sophia was sitting on top of a giant frozen rock orbiting a hot star so far out that it looked benign to her sitting just above the horizon, soon to dip below it and usher in the nighttime sky. The ground around her was a mix of boulders and sand, most of which was colored grey with hints of red, and looked for all the world like one of the last places anyone would like to live, but to her it had always been home.

  Funny though, because she’d rarely been outdoors to see the planet itself. She’d lived her entire life inside the colonies, having gone outside only during her maturia training some 140 years ago. She’d never even visited the other four Clans’ colonies on the planet, staying within Snowstorm’s holdings and never feeling the need to venture elsewhere, for there was always plenty to do right here.

  But that was all about to change.

  Sophia was about to leave Arwen, along with the rest of her Clan. While technically it was her choice of whether or not to go the fact that all the Snowstorms were leaving the Solar System left her with no real options. A few would remain on their Clan’s piece of Antarctica, but ever other territory slot and orbital station they possessed here was being traded away to other Clans in exchange for resources, agreements, or whatever other deals Oni had worked out. Sophia might be a civilian tech, but she wasn’t sure about the wisdom of the trailblazer this time. Everything they had built up here in Sol was going to be wiped out in a single trade, including her home.

  She’d been born on Arwen, gone through her maturia training here, and had lived amongst the other 3.2 million Snowstorms on the planet her entire life. And while it was true she’d only seen the interior of a colony city that entire time, this lump of rock she was now directly sitting on still struck her as home, no matter how lifeless and empty it looked right at the moment.

  She knew she wasn’t the only one in this position, for everyone else in the Clan was having to make the same move all the way out to the Bsidd Region. Apparently Oni had decided to uproot the entire Clan for the chance of colonizing an entire system of their own, as only a few others had done to date. Snowstorm never had a planet to itself, let alone an entire star system, and up until now they’d consolidated all of their holdings inside Sol while others expanded outward, often trading the Snowstorms bits of territory or ships in order to facilitate that expansion. Sophia’s Clan was ranked #12 in terms of land territory owned within Sol after so many centuries of trades and shrewd maneuvers, but now they were going to give it all up?

  But then again, therein lay the problem. That #12 ranking was the highest her Clan possessed in any field or subcategory. In truth the Snowstorms were at the bottom of the barrel, ranking 90th or worse in 73% of all tracked categories. Oni had stated as much when she’d explained the move to the entire Clan, intending for this to be a rebirth that could eventually catch Snowstorm up with the others, despite the fact that they’d have to start building from scratch.

  But Sophia rejected that. Her Clan wasn’t bad at anything, the other Clans just happened to be as good as they were…and then some. Snowstorm had grown its population by 3% over just the past 5 years, with industry up 2% and resource collection up a whopping 8% over the same timeframe. They were a thriving little empire of their own within Star Force, but the way Oni said it made her think that she was disappointed with the Clan and that something had to change.

  Abandoning everything they’d built up over the centuries to date seemed immensely stupid, especially since Sophia understood how long it took to build infrastructure like the cities sitting on the horizon and the much closer one towering behind her. It wasn’t something you could just buy, no matter how many credits you had. Clan Snowstorm might be rich as hell right now with all the trades Oni had made, but they were soon to be homeless and no amount of credits was going to change that.

  Sophia knew she could transfer to another Clan without much trouble, but she was a Snowstorm at heart and couldn’t bear to switch allegiances, even if it meant her staying in Sol, or even on Arwen…and going Mainline was even worse. Their military might be able to hold their own with the Clans now and then, but their civilian populations were considerably looser, often to the point of dysfunctional. Everyone within her Clan, no matter what position they held, wanted to see Snowstorm rise in the ranks and become a larger power within the Star Force empire, and even the lazier ones would chip in now and then to help make that happen.

  There was no such sentiment within Mainline. It was everyone for themselves, with a core group that held everything together while the rest of the population was made up of freeloaders. That excess baggage was a big reason why the Clans were better than Mainline in almost every way, save for in terms of population. Mainline numbers made the entirety of the Clans a minuscule minority and constituted the bulk of the Human population. As it was, there were almost as many Humans in Axius as there were in the Clans…which was something else that Oni had pointed out.

  The trailblazer said she wanted to issue a request to the Snowstorm population, which included Sophia and every other female member of the Clan, to make every reasonable effort to start getting knocked up and pumping out more younglings. A lot of girls like Sophia had never given birth nor cared to, focusing instead on their self-sufficiency and increasing their skills, which in her case centered on computer software. She knew she could take a temporary hit, get pregnant, miss a lot of training and become a walking blimp for a few months, then give birth and move on without losing her self-sufficiency. She was strong enough now to take a lot of hits before pushing her under the regenerative baseline, and if it was for the benefit of the Clan she’d even consider doing it.

  Oni has said that she had never issued that request because despite all of the territory the Snowstorms had acquired within Sol they were always boxed in, having to work with limited resources and space-saving measures. Sophia found that a little odd, especially sitting outside on the empty surface between colonies seeing how much unused room there was, but it was true that she couldn’t look in any direction wi
thout seeing cityscape at some point, even if it was just the tallest towers rising up over the horizon.

  The idea of having an entire planet to themselves was appealing, let alone one bigger than Earth. The system Oni had procured for them had not one, but seven worlds that size or larger, with a total of 64 planetoids that were colonizable, plus a pair of gas giants, one of which was so huge it was near to becoming its own star. That meant this new home for Clan Snowstorm had more territory than every planetoid within Sol combined, and that stat literally blew Sophia’s mind.

  But there was nothing there…at all. It was empty now that a Bsidd fleet with Snowstorm assistance had wiped it clean of the lizards, like they were doing across so many other star systems in their ever growing region. By now the majority of all Star Force troops were Bsidd, with their numbers continuing to skyrocket as all of Star Force, Clan Snowstorm included, funneled resources towards them in order for their civilization to be able to grow rapidly enough in infrastructure to accommodate such a population explosion.

  And it was paying dividends, no doubt. The Bsidd had taken more worlds in recent years than the Calavari had, and were kicking the crap out of the lizards in a region where they had been claiming systems with only a handful of ships. Those easy grabs were being gobbled up by the Bsidd and the few other units that worked along with them as they simultaneously pounded the lizard strongholds beyond Alpha Region, adding territory to Star Force’s holdings while all the time expanding the border of the Bsidd Region with it blossoming upward and downward on the galactic plane simultaneously.

  It was into that new region that Clan Snowstorm would be moving, and very near the border, far away from potential help should they be attacked or fail to set up the necessary infrastructure to house their population, but Oni has stated that was a challenge befitting the Clan and reminiscent of its early history when she had first founded it. Sophia had to take her word for that, for she had been born long after, and while she agreed this would definitely qualify as hitting the ‘reset’ button, the tech still felt it was a tremendous waste of everything they’d built to date.

  Technically none of their colonies would be wasted, for other Clans would be taking them over and populating them with their own people…and the thought of someone else sleeping in her quarters and her bed just irked Sophia to no end, but what was she going to do? It was either move out with her Clan or abandon it, and she liked the latter a lot less than the former.

  The move wasn’t going to take place immediately, but over the course of 7 years. The first startup elements were already on their way, with the population of Arwen starting to filter out somewhere in year two and finish up by year four. It would take nearly 2 months of travel time just to get to where they were going, and then they’d have to live in their ships for as long as it took to get suitable colonies on the surface of the third largest planet built. It had an environment much like Earth’s, only a bit on the warmer side, plus the view of the big gas giant that it orbited around, which technically made it a moon.

  Sophia wouldn’t need an envirosuit to walk about there, and the planet was 12% covered with water, giving the Clan’s aquatics division a badly needed playground, for all of their training was accomplish in simulators and indoor pools…which was probably part of the reason they had hit that dreaded #100 ranking several times over the past century in that division, despite their individual scores gradually creeping upward. Again, the rankings were all about competition, not performance, for all the Clans were continuously improving.

  The other planets/moons in the system wouldn’t be used for decades, if not centuries to come, but they’d be there for Clan Snowstorm to colonize down the road, with them not having to worry about expansion room for the next millennium. How many girls would respond to the call for a population surge when the time came was a question mark, but Sophia knew that many would. As it was some people only gave birth to continue the Clan without having any sentimental attachment, given that the infants immediately went into a maturia after birth…while a few others chose to make themselves baby factories, getting laid as often as they could and attracting the strongest and hottest guys for the purpose of ‘reproduction,’ or at least that was their excuse.

  Either way, it seemed to work for most of them, but Sophia knew she’d never make a career out of it. If there was a need she might contribute one or two, but then it’d be back to normal training. The up side would be her software skills didn’t require a big deviation in lifestyle, for sitting in a chair working a console and sitting in a chair watching vids while you increased in volume weren’t all dissimilar. She could probably keep working on projects during the pregnancy, unlike others that had physical jobs. In fact, she’d probably have to in order to keep from going crazy from boredom.

  The more she thought about it the less she liked the idea, but knowing that it’d only be temporary Sophia knew she could step into the stinger if necessary and take one for the team. It just didn’t feel right though, for the idea of her doing that in the past had always centered around adding to her home’s population…and now they were totally abandoning Arwen and the Solar System itself.

  She just couldn’t get past that. Sophia felt so much of a connection to this world that she didn’t know how she could ever leave it, and scribbled some meaningless doodles in the dust to her left as the sun finally dipped below the horizon. The stars took over prominence within the sky, added to by the orbital habitats gleaming alongside them. They were mere specs from her point of view, for they were situated high up around the tiny world, but several starports were much larger when visible, though at the moment none were within sight range.

  They’d be orbiting around soon enough, but for the moment it was just the stars and the lights of the surrounding cities acting as luminous beacons within the darkness. The ground beneath Sophia was covered in shadows, but even the lighted regions were dim, making her feel the isolation even more. If her own world felt like this, how would one months away from here feel?

  She didn’t know, and it bothered her right up until the first low oxygen warning pinged inside her helmet. Sophia checked the levels and saw that she still had over 3 hours left, but she knew better than to flirt with that deadline and picked herself up off the ground, accidentally throwing her body into a slight jump in the low gravity. She’d lived her entire life on this rock, but had always known normal levels within the colonies, making her home feel yet even more foreign to her, despite the pangs of nostalgia she was getting just looking off into the distance.

  That was when she knew she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just walk away from this place one day heading off into the unknown, so as she headed back over the kilometer or so that she’d walked from the external gate she tried to figure out what the best option she had was. When she got into the airlock and the normal gravity settled her body her mind wasn’t dissuaded. This was her home and she couldn’t just abandon it, but in a few years’ time it was going to be filled with Clan Thunderfist. The location might be the same, but without her fellow Clan members it still wouldn’t be home.

  “Have a nice walk?” the tech who helped her out of her envirosuit asked as she came through the airlock and disconnected her helmet.

  “Did more sitting than walking…and no, not really.”

  “Something wrong?” he said, taking the head piece and setting it on a side table before coming back to help Sophia unbutton the armored carapace covering her body.

  “I hate this evacuation plan.”

  “You’re not the only one with misgivings,” he assured her, “but you can’t argue that it’s a big challenge.”

  “It’s the throwing away what we’ve got here that’s the problem.”

  “Kind of has to happen if you want a clean slate.”

  “Our slate is fine as is,” she said, getting out of the torso section. “I can get the rest.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, carrying the section over and sitting it next to the helmet in f
ront of a row of booths that had dozens of other suits. “Are you going to try and get transferred to Earth?”

  “No. Arwen is my home.”

  The man frowned. “You’re not thinking of jumping Clans are you?”

  “Never,” she said firmly.

  “You think Oni is making a mistake?”

  “I don’t know. She’s never steered us wrong before, I just can’t shake this bad feeling.”

  “You’ve still got a few years to work it out.”

  “No,” Sophia said, pulling her thin leg out of her right extended boot. “I’m not waiting. I’m going to volunteer to go now.”

  “Why? If you don’t want to leave…”

  “Because if I go now I’ll still have a home to come back to. If I wait, I’ll be walking away for good, and I just can’t bring myself to do that.”

  “It’s a long trip out there.”

  “I know, but I’ll be able to come back at least once.”

  “And won’t have to leave facing an unknown future?”

  “Something like that. I also realized that I can’t spent the next two years waiting to find out. I’ll drive myself nuts in the meantime.”

  “What’s your specialty?”

  “Software engineer.”

  “Not sure they’ll have too many slots for that open right now.”

  “I’ve got construction as an auxiliary skillset, along with six others. I’ll fill some slot they need.”

  “Always on the move,” he commented, accepting the last pieces of the envirosuit from her.

  “This time literally,” she said, friendly waving him goodbye as she walked out of the station and back into the rest of the colony.

  2

  October 15, 2783

  Frost System (Bsidd Region)

  Flake

  Sophia rode on a Dragon-class dropship along with over 200 other Snowstorms down from the cargo jumpship watching the view via a series of wall-mounted displays and getting a view of their new homeworld as they dipped into the atmosphere. The moon was huge and covered in pinks and greens, for the natural foliage seemed to predominate in those two colors. There were a pair of ice caps on either pole and long streaks of blue that made up the planet’s narrow oceans that almost connected the two, bracketed by high mountain ranges easily visible from orbit.