by Aer-ki Jyr
Kri’mas was operational again within 4 hours, but it would not be rebuilt to its former status for several years to come. Many clusters had been lost in the invasion and the mass of orbital infrastructure had been wiped out completely. Given what they knew of the lizards and their tactics the Hycre would not be rebuilding it in their outer colonies, instead choosing to build their facilities entirely in atmosphere, even when it was disadvantageous to do so.
They felt the tradeoff was worth the inefficiency and other hassles that would result so long as they were able to shield them inside the planet and make the enemy come down to attack them directly, for any battle within the thick atmosphere was almost an automatic win for the Hycre, and if the lizards chose to bombard them from orbit as they had done before the Shaven would go after those priority targets rather than leaving floating stations that made for easy pickings and locations the Hycre would be forced to defend.
This way the warfleet was free to roam and strike where it chose, and that was the worthwhile tradeoff to the Hycre, for as the years passed and they began to tinker with the cleansing beams and mauler cannons that Star Force had given them they were building stronger and more purposeful Shaven, which only increased their confidence that they could now retake and hold some of their former worlds.
How many was the question, but the Hycre were going to get some now to put pressure on the lizards and begin to reverse the formerly ‘inevitable’ advancement they had been making for centuries.
And with every world reclaimed the Hycre had an additional base behind enemy lines from which to strike out from, not for the purpose of hitting strongholds but to conduct recon and small scale harassment attacks, hitting the enemy where they were weak and forcing them to more heavily defend areas that previously were protected by the intimidation factor the lizards possessed. With that being the case, the enemy was going to have to shore up far more systems than they’d become accustomed to, which would drain even more resources from their overall empire.
There was no mistaking the fact, however, that that empire was still growing by leaps and bounds in multiple directions. That said, the Hycre were confident they could hold their own worlds and take back a few others, no longer having to play the victim and constantly running. They’d held their capitol against numerous attacks, and now it was their turn to start returning the favor and make use of the footholds they’d fought so hard to preserve.
Over the coming years more worlds like Kri’mas would be returning into the fold, and from them the sharks of the space ocean would begin to reassert their dominance, first in raids and then in organized planetary strikes using the cleansing beams coupled with the remote mech technology Star Force had also gifted them with to further harass or wipe out small lizard colonies. Before long the lizards were forced to increase their ship traffic into full blown convoys else risk ships getting poached while in transit, making the large region that was dotted with Hycre worlds hazardous to travel despite most of the claimed worlds in that area still belonging to the lizards.
Pressure was the key, emphasized over and over by the Humans, and with the Hycre gradually tipping the scales of naval combat back into their decided favor, pressure is what they contributed, with the lizards never knowing when or where the growing ‘schools’ of Hycre warships would strike next.
Tennisonne rode the civilian traffic ferries across Earth orbit rather than requisitioning a personal craft to do so, which his position in Star Force afford him the right to do, but he never liked pulling a ship off for his own transit unless time was of the essence, and in research and development it hardly ever was. So he hitched several rides across the orbital rings of habitats, factories, shipyards, and whatever else people had envisioned to build that now gave the planet 8 visible bands circling it like squashed hula hoops, each at different altitudes.
That left huge areas empty to allow for traffic coming off the surface to head directly for jumppoints or the outer halo of starports, but maneuvering within the rings was slow and tedious work. Virtually all altitudes running from Earth to Luna were occupied, with each band of infrastructure rotating around a fixed axis so they wouldn’t collide with each other.
A few facilities were located outside the bands and used anti-grav to augment their irregular orbits or lack thereof, but the small artificial moon that the tech was heading towards wasn’t one of them. It was situated within the third ring and was one of the largest sedas built to date, easily outmassing the Death Star from Star Wars, though to the Archons’ disappointment they hadn’t been able to include a superweapon in the design.
Actually, this station wasn’t mean for battle. Rather, it was a massive industrial station that fed a lot of the higher end materials to Star Force and included research and development facilities that focused on just that purpose. Tennisonne didn’t come here often, but every now and then some project he was working on would take place on the small moon, or rather within, and today was one of those days.
The recent ‘bounty’ given to Star Force by the Dsevmat had been brought here for both analysis and use. Roger had ordered it inspected just in case it contained some sort of Trojan horse, but that was just the Archon being paranoid as usual. That was his job, and Tennisonne was glad he was there to do it, which left the level 6 tech free to focus on the scientific endeavors without worrying about something blowing up…unless he was causing it.
His last leg of the journey up from Earth was a short hop via dropship from a nearby civilian terminal station, passing him through the restricted zone around the station and inside one of thousands of hangar bays that had a continuous flow of ships coming in and out with either raw materials or finished products, most of which were building materials of sorts or processed materials that other facilities would use to produce more specific items.
Once onboard he was greeted with a reception committee made up of other techs and quickly escorted through the internal city to the special hangar were the rarer items in the bounty were being held and inventoried. A lot of the corovon cubes had already been sent off for processing, but there were plenty still left for Tennisonne to see. Though it was nothing new to him, the sight of so much corovon in one place was still awe inspiring…and underscored just how far Star Force had yet to grow. They’d come a long ways, with Tennisonne doing no small part in giving them the tools they needed, but the scope of a civilization that could trade away corovon on this scale was downright impressive and beyond anything they could currently field.
Star Force shipped corovon in ingots the size of his thumb, for that was how rare it was. Then those ingots were almost immediately used to produce compounds that had corovon in them, meaning the raw element was hardly ever seen outside of select facilities and research departments. The giant cubes littering the deck before him were as much a snub as they were a gift, declaring in wealthy fashion just how primitive Star Force was in comparison to the benefactor.
But Tennisonne didn’t care about that, for he was used to being the new kid on the block that couldn’t tie his shoes or walk and chew gum at the same time. Years spent digging through the V’kit’no’sat database and multiple trips down to the pyramid underscored that far more than the Dsevmat ever could, but having so much corovon at hand still made him feel like a kid just being given his first piece of candy.
But that was a metaphor his fellow techs wouldn’t understand, for now candy was free to everyone in the cafeterias…or the simple ones were anyway.
After inspecting the corovon cubes he went straight over to the other items the Dsevmat had included, with there being 7 different ‘presents’ given to them. Two were more basic materials, one being an advanced polymer and the other an assortment of common metals in vast quantities.
The clear spheres with the pixilation in the center had subsequently been classified as fission fuels, but of a type that Star Force didn’t use. They were densely constructed molecules that when deconstructed would release impressive amounts of energy, so much so
that they made for extremely potent volume ratios, but the fuel systems that Star Force used and Tennisonne had had his hand in creating were on a tech tree line heading towards bigger and better things, meaning that using these Scvob fuels would be a divergence and not worth the effort.
Still, the compounds themselves could prove useful in research and development and give his assistants something to play with down the road. The same went for two other items in the inventory list, but the smallest one was the sweetest and the reason Tennisonne had come here in person.
There were four crates that had small, palm-sized cubes stacked in elaborate holding materials that made up the majority of the volume of the crates, which Tennisonne considered over packing, but none the less the valuable contents more than made up for the dramatic packing peanuts. In total there were 2048 cubes that were a mix of 26 different arc elements, each far more valuable than their larger corovon twins. To date Star Force had artificially created and produced in large quantities 8 arc elements, with an additional 17 in low levels of production and another 8 in research development only.
Most overlapped with the bounty, but there were 4 that did not. Tennisonne’s people had already identified what they were, with one arc element in particular drawing his attention. They were all immensely valuable, especially the 4 types that Star Force couldn’t produce yet, but the most rare type of them all had only 1 cube in the inventory…and it alone was worth more than all the rest combined.
It was an arc element known as Bi’rovsken’thrnem to the V’kit’no’sat, but to him and the other techs they simply referred to it as Biro. It wasn’t the top tier as far as the V’kit’no’sat were concerned, but it was an important component in a lot of the machinery they used on a daily basis. That might not sound all that impressive, but since Tennisonne and the others like him had to build the tools to build the tools that built the machinery that made the products, he was limited in what he could build despite knowing how to build bigger and better things.
He wasn’t able to produce Biro, therefore he couldn’t build any tools that required it. But this one little cube would allow him to create a low, but impressive number of new tools that would advance the research and development department ahead by at least 60 years, in some areas. They’d eventually get to the point where they could produce Biro on their own, but having some on hand to use was quite the cheat, and when Tennisonne found and picked up the small blue cube and held it in his hand he literally felt like he was holding onto a piece of the future.
“Alright fellas, keeping doing your thing with the rest. I’m taking this one and getting to work on it immediately,” he said, keeping the warm metalish cube in his hand as he walked a few steps through the tables set up with all the little cubes on them…then he stopped suddenly and reached out telekinetically to pick up a dirty yellow one and drag it through the air to his free hand.
“And that one,” he said so they could log it and not go running around like crazy later when they counted and found it missing.
10
May 21, 2659
Solar System
Earth
Ginsi Korinth transferred off the jumpship and onto a Falcon-class dropship along with six other A7 candidates, settling into the small bank of seats next to a trainer and a handful of other personnel heading down to Atlantis. She was both excited and nervous, for this was the first time she’d ever been to the Solar System, let alone Earth, and everything she was seeing on the trip in was blowing her mind.
Ginsi had been born on Kokiri in the Dancer System, a Human-only world that in the Core Region that held some 22 billion people spread out over a mix of forest and grasslands. It was classified as a heavy grav world, with a 1.34 rating, but Ginsi like the other natives had lived inside cities with normal AG so she hadn’t acclimated to it any more than the people on Earth or Mars, but one difference between the planets was that Kokiri had a forest of ‘small’ infrastructure blanketing the planet and lacked any of the huge structures that were present in Sol.
And not just on the surface either. Kokiri had been one of the original colonies Star Force had created, but it had grown slower than Sol and developed along a less cluttered geography, filling the planet with people and expanding as needed, but never letting the masses grow too large in any one place. Ginsi had been born to parents she didn’t know and didn’t care to know, then immediately taken to a maturia where she’d developed and trained with her classmates up through graduation, all of which occurred in a restricted part of her native city.
It was only 3 months ago that she’d even been able to roam freely and explore the planet, having known it only through vids and maps. Just as soon as she’d begun to feel accustomed to the mojo of it all she’d been whisked away to the very heart of Star Force and was having to go through yet another acclimation process to the organized chaos that was Sol. So far that’d been happening remotely, with her watching the ‘scenery’ via datapad or vid panel as her jumpship had taken her across to Sol, exiting its jump near the yellowish star, then making a slow microjump first to Mars, then Ganymede and Titan before coming in to Earth orbit.
From there it parked near a starport and a flurry of activity ensued with Ginsi watching it all unfold and staring at the great rings of infrastructure orbiting the planet. She’d heard that back in the day it had been a spherical shroud of stations on crisscrossing orbits, but at some point they’d decided to line them all up into the various rings, putting them closer to each other to allow for shorter travel routes, as well as to leave open the large gaps for the quick to ground transit that the civilian public didn’t have access to.
But her dropship did and as it exited the jumpship it flew ‘down’ beneath the ring of stations that the starport serviced and got well clear of the infrastructure before making a tiny jump down towards the atmosphere. There it braked and settled into a looping descent that would bring it a quarter turn around the planet and over the Pacific Ocean to where Atlantis sat. Ginsi still couldn’t believe she was coming here, and ever since they’d told her she’d passed the tests to become an Archon she’d been in a state of denial, expecting there to have been some sort of mistake and still clinging to a bit of worry about that.
She was barely out of maturia training and now here she was heading to Atlantis of all places! It was the most secure and secretive city in the ADZ and she just got a 1-way ticket down to what she didn’t know, but however the Archons trained it was done here, behind closed doors, with few ever glimpsing what went on. There were a wide variety of rumors, but the Archons themselves didn’t care to share about their experiences, nor did Star Force itself, leaving her more than a little worried about what she might be asked, or forced, to do.
She still didn’t think she belonged here, but the other six sitting next to her didn’t seem that different, which made her feel a bit better…and more worried, for some of the rumors said the Archons were cyborgs with the candidates receiving implants and conditioning to make them follow orders like they were nothing more than computers. Ginsi didn’t really believe that, but seeing the other ‘weak’ candidates around her the notion that they were fit to become Archons without some extraordinary augmentation was quite a stretch.
She watched on her datapad as the exterior cameras cleared up from the reentry friction and the ocean below came into view, with a tiny dot marked as the city that they were quickly approaching. Ginsi stared at it, wanting to see what it looked like in realtime, but the trainer sitting next to them stood up and turned around so he could see them all and got their attention.
“Alright younglings, we’re about here,” he said evenly and almost bored, as if he’d done this many times before. “First thing you need to know is that there are many different classes of trainees in Atlantis and you are not all in the same class. When we arrive I’ll take you to a holding area where you will be grouped with your classmates, then you’ll get your first briefing from Head Trainer Wilson and Director Davis himself…and from
there you’ll be given instructions about what to do, where to go, this and that. It’s much like your maturia training, only way, way harder. Stick to the program and you’ll probably make it through. Usually the only ones that wash out are people who just decided to quit…and Archons never quit.”
“Davis?” the boy next to Ginsi asked. “We’re going to meet Davis?”
“Yes you will. He keeps a very close relationship with the Archons and meets with every class as they begin their training. He’ll fill you in on some very important things…things the public doesn’t know and that you will need to, but for now I’m here to tell you who you are and where you’re going. You no longer will use your last names, nor does any Archon. You may be trainees right now but you get your number at the outset, not at graduation as some people erroneously believe.”
“Stan…500112. That’s your name from now on, as well as tells you what class you’re in. The last bit anyway. 112 means you’re in the 100s. All of your classmates will have the same first four digits, with the last two ranging from 00 to 99. Emil…you’re 500398 and in a different class. You won’t be seeing each other again except maybe in passing in the hallways on some rare occasions, but you’ll be doing everything with your classmates. They’ll become your brothers and sisters. Bit of advice I like to give the rookies coming in is to be honest with each other. You need to learn to work together as much as you do as an individual, and it works better when you leave your egos behind at the door.”
“If not you’ll lose them eventually, like a lot of other bad habits you’ve picked up from civilian life…and I know some of you are straight out of the maturia. Hopefully that means you haven’t picked up as many, just be aware that your classmates here are going to be on a whole different level. They’re going to be like you, the rarest of the rare, so respect them enough to be honest from the get go. You’re essentially being reborn and going through the maturia all over again, so just mentally start over and learn as you go. Let everything else from your previous lives dissipate and walk into Atlantis as a clean slate.”
