by Aer-ki Jyr
The swimming races typically didn’t wear clothing either, so he’d picked up the habit too. When he walked past a few other Archons in the swimming section of the Archon sanctum onboard the Excalibur they didn’t stare. The girl Archons held their gaze a couple seconds longer than the guys, for they didn’t often see him naked, but nudity amongst the Archons was a non-issue. Within Star Force as a whole it wasn’t taboo either, though the more out of shape one got the more they clung to their clothes.
Archons were fitter than fit and not obsessed with sex, so walking around naked was normal when there was a reason to do so.
Paul headed to a nearby equipment room and got dressed in a pair of shorts and a tight T-shirt along with running shoes and headed for a two hour long run before calling his training for the morning over and heading up to the bridge after a shower. Later he’d get something to eat and a quick nap before starting his afternoon workout session in the mech simulator, but for now he wanted to check on the status of the fleet.
“How we doing?” he asked when he got to the bridge.
“We’re about 20 minutes out unless you want to try harvesting a few more.”
Paul frowned. “I’d like to and we haven’t seen even a peek into this system, but I have bad feeling that something is up. Once the sensors are in place go ahead and get the fleet moving.”
“Where to?”
“Toad then Veercom,” he said, referencing nearby system names. “After that the others can break off and return to previous assignments, but I want to keep us all together save for Morgan until then.”
“Backside watch?”
Paul nodded, with the Admiral’s recommendation being spot on. There was no way to make sure that there weren’t V’kit’no’sat spies still in the system, whether they be a stealth ship or probe hanging far off. If the entire fleet left through a jump they’d have to follow before seeing where they went and give the Star Force fleet a chance to find them coming out of a jump. But also allowing the breakoff parts of the combined fleet to go first would mean their ultimate destination would be hidden from spies, whereas if they left from here they’d know which jumplines they left on and could coordinate with other V’kit’no’sat ships to track them down or maybe lay a trap.
Paul wasn’t so sloppy to allow that, so they were all going out the same way and he was going to slam the door shut before they split up. Morgan, however, had the remains of her fleet going elsewhere and from a look at the bridge hologram he could see that she was already repositioning some of them towards a different exiting jumpline.
“Carry on and jump at will,” Paul said, leaving the fleet in Baenen’s capable hands as he often did outside of combat, for an Archon’s time was best spent on training in all 5 disciplines while naval officers only focused on one division, making them specialists, and even handling mundane ship duties fell into that category.
So Paul left him to it as he headed over to the command nexus and shot Morgan a quick holocom before she left, then he headed to one of the ship’s cafeterias and ate an Archon-level amount of food, for no matter how strong or fast he got, he never required less of it and greater expenditures of energy required more fuel. He just had to make sure he didn’t eat too much at once and have that affect his next workout, which was why he was going to hit the mech simulator after a nap, for that didn’t require physical movement when he was plugged into the neural interface.
That allowed Paul to load up now, taking two trays full of carb and sugar-heavy foods along with several bottles of supplement-laced drinks, then he sat down at a table along with other members of the crew with much smaller food loads on their trays…but that again was normal, for they were used to the peculiarities of the elite Archons, including their habit of responding to questions telepathically so they didn’t take time away from shoving food in their mouths and delay themselves from getting back to their insane training schedules.
4
October 24, 4812
Veercom System (Devastation Zone)
Itat
Half of Paul’s fleet had already entered the system before he sent off the message ping, having it emitted in a spherical burst from the Excalibur so not to give away the location of the Star Force outpost in the system. Almost 2 hours later he got a return message that was little more than a blip of data that translated into an ‘all clear’ go ahead for rendezvous.
Paul immediately transferred off his flagship and onto a Ma’kri, with it engaging its stealth field and taking him out to one of six gas giants in the system. There were a handful of uninhabited moons there, two of which used to hold Star Force colonies back when this was part of the Alliance Defense Zone, though the specificity of that name was quickly lost after the lizards had been pushed back and the refuge that Star Force had created for allies fleeing that enemy empire transformed into a center of activity and commerce, becoming a term for the approximate region that held the most heavily industrialized and inhabited systems within Star Force.
Now it was scorched, barren territory thanks to the V’kit’no’sat, and those non-Star Force races that had inhabited a scattering of systems inside the ADZ hadn’t been spared. Anyone with even a hint of connection to Star Force had been targeted, with Paul and others buying them critical time to evacuate to the Rim Region and beyond along with Star Force…but not all of them had made it out, with the V’kit’no’sat leaving a long trail of corpses across the ADZ that had long since turned to dust.
But not all the denizens were gone. One longtime ally of Star Force that had never petitioned to join the empire had been targeted as well, but they had a way to hide from the V’kit’no’sat that Star Force did not. They hadn’t originally been in this system, but had quietly moved in after the two moon colonies were destroyed as part of Project Evanescence.
It was a dangerous Star Force program that Steve-004 had put together when the Hycre had come and begged to help fight the V’kit’no’sat. They didn’t want to join Star Force and relocated most of their population out of the ADZ along with everyone else, but they did want to contribute a large number of volunteers to join Star Force for this specific purpose. They did not want to abandon their homeland, which was now the Devastation Zone, and wanted to stay here in at least some form and help with reconnaissance and anything else they could that did not involve direct combat.
So while Star Force had established outposts throughout the Devastation Zone, most of which had been built before the V’kit’no’sat even invaded, the Evanescence Hycre were given Star Force technology and training and operated under a strict agreement that they wouldn’t share the empire’s secrets with their own civilization, for while the Hycre were one of the closest allies that Star Force had and they’d shared a lot of technology with them previously, it was nothing compared to the inheritance Star Force had taken from the V’kit’no’sat and they weren’t going to share that treasure trove with anyone. If a race wanted to be advanced to their level then they had the option of joining Star Force under Star Force’s terms, but since the Hycre weren’t comfortable with that there had to be some firm barriers between the two that both civilizations maintained with mutual respect.
But to operate in the Devastation Zone was something so dangerous that you couldn’t go in with an inferior tech level, so Project Evanescence had been born and quietly dropped behind enemy lines into this system and many others…but not on the moons. The Hycre were literally floating gas bags that couldn’t inhabit the same room as Humans, for they required sulfur dioxide gas to breath and temperatures and pressures that no Human, nor most of the races in Star Force, could survive.
Temperatures and pressures that were common within gas giants, where the Hycre had always made their home and intermixed with Star Force territory, for the two did not need to compete over the same worlds. Even Epsilon Eridani, the second largest and heavily industrialized system in Star Force prior to the fall, had been shared with the Hycre who inhabited a gas giant there. It was a sign of great trust
and respect, and the friendship that had began when Star Force was infantile and in jeopardy of dying to a paltry invasion by the lizards had not been forgotten over the centuries that followed. The Hycre had saved Star Force then, and when the V’kit’no’sat invaded the trailblazers made certain to get the Hycre out. A debt repaid, now that Star Force had outgrown the Hycre by leaps and bounds.
The Hycre didn’t like that, for they wanted to help contribute in at least some small way, and Project Evanescence had them establishing an outpost in two of the gas giants here that weren’t very hospitable to them…similar to snowbound terrain for Humans that required them to live indoors where normally the Hycre could free float through the gas giants’ multiple levels of dense atmosphere like aerial fish. But while it wasn’t ideal, it was habitable in both planets and they established very deep and shielded outposts down near the liquid cores of the otherwise gas planets.
The V’kit’no’sat had destroyed such colonies elsewhere in the ADZ, meaning the Hycre weren’t safe here, but those purging measures had been difficult for the V’kit’no’sat to undertake. Persistent as they were, they’d gone and deleted them all, but finding new inhabitants was not something that was going to happen by accident. Only intentional deep scans of the planets would pick up the new residents, so as long as the Hycre played turtle they wouldn’t get noticed, and Paul was happy to see they were still safe here after the security breach at Tauntaun.
The Ma’kri came into a low polar orbit around the planet but didn’t stay there. It made a lazy slingshot trajectory around it and headed out to do a patrol sweep of all the gas giants, scanning heavily for any signs of V’kit’no’sat presence as a distraction as Paul walked across an open hangar bay facing down to the planet, exposing the interior to view as the rest of the ship appeared like a solid black dot against the starry backdrop of space.
Halfway across the bay, when he got past all the parked dropships and other assorted craft, the fully armored Archon took off running for a few steps then leaned forward, dropping to his belly a meter off the deck and staying there as he used his Yen’mer to levitate in the artificial gravity and increase speed, shooting him out of the hangar and into space with the Ma’kri fully disappearing behind him and the black blob moving off further around orbit as Paul fell…increasing his speed again as he pulled on the gravity of the planet and enhanced it, sucking himself down lower and lower as he also counteracted the orbital momentum, slowing his sideways speed so that when he did finally hit the wisps of the upper atmosphere of the green gas giant his shields didn’t ignite with a wash of friction flame.
Instead the sensor resistant blue/orange armor sank like a missile down through progressively thicker and thicker layers until Paul was forced to slow down. When he reached a certain altitude he began transmitting a homing beacon in a cone, forcing the signal down and not up. A little less than an hour later he sensed the minds in the Hycre ship before his armor’s sensors picked them up, for the soupy atmosphere was so thick it was reducing his limited sensor range down to only a few hundred meters.
But this wasn’t the first time he’d visited a gas giant in his armor, and while he had no navigational references down here he could sense which way the gravity was coming from, hence finding his way back to space again was always easy. To find the Hycre base, however, he had to rely on them to come to him.
When they got close Paul stopped transmitting his beacon and reached into their minds directly, a form of communication that even a Zen’zat couldn’t pick up if they’d been a kilometer off. He could have used his armor’s comm system, but when one was in ultra deep cover it was best to err on the side of caution, so he arranged for an open airlock that he flew himself inside, then it sealed and he waited as the interior changed its gaseous composition as well as heated up, with Paul safe inside his armor with adequate oxygen thanks to the recycling technology in the pack he wore that stripped the carbon off the carbon dioxide he was exhaling and gave him an unlimited amount of oxygen for missions like this that had him overextended into hostile environments.
Once the interior airlock opened Paul flew through the thick interior gases past some of the crew that free floated with a series of tentacles that they used for arms, but they primarily moved around via internal gas bladders and orifices that operated like small jet engines. They had no eyes, mouth, ears, or any other external features save for a single, long, plume-like fin on the top of their spherical bodies that had prompted Star Force to nickname them the ‘Mohawks,’ and that designator had persisted to this day, though they rarely called them that in person.
Paul communicated with them telepathically, and if he had wanted he could have even taken over control of their bodies and made them do whatever he wanted. That was the power that Ikrid gave the V’kit’no’sat over the other races in the galaxy, and aside from Humans, who were descendants of Zen’zat that shared their immunity to Ikrid influence, all the races of Star Force had to wear psionic resistant armor when fighting the enemy, else they’d automatically lose, being forced to turn their own weapons against each other.
Paul had that power too, but there was no need to use it on the Hycre and they’d come to trust the Archons despite being totally helpless against them. They were longtime allies and those Hycre here had specifically asked to join Star Force for this reason, so there was no distrust or fear when Paul arrived…rather the opposite. The presence of an Archon, let alone a trailblazer, was a blessing, for they could fight the V’kit’no’sat head-on where everyone else could not…and in the case of Zen’zat, the Archons were actually superior for their long list of psionics that the enemy infantry had not individually earned.
That was another reason why they hated Star Force so much, because they were ‘cheating’ with regards to the psionics, but there was no way to stop them aside from killing them, and so far they hadn’t managed to get them all and hadn’t yet been able to touch a trailblazer. All 100, or 101 if you counted Kara, were still alive and a continual menace to them, but down here in the gas giant Zen’zat were not an issue. They were useless in the thick gaseous atmosphere with no surface to move around on. Just a lake of liquefied gas at the lower altitudes and a bit of solidified core due to the extreme pressures here.
Paul and even the Hycre didn’t go that deep except in ships, which was where their hardest to get to base was…but if a Tar’vem’jic was fired from orbit it could still hit them that deep, or at least stir up the material so much to do subsequent damage, thus this Evanescence outpost had to remain secret, for ‘hard to get to’ didn’t matter to the V’kit’no’sat. Any Star Force presence in the Devastation Zone they took as a personal affront and would not let it pass even if it took them years to eradicate.
As Paul moved through the ship he had brief conversations with many of the crew, most of whom thanked him for coming, until he came to a special section that had a Human atmosphere inside. He passed through the energy field separating the two then closed the heavy doors over it before risking retracting his helmet and breathing the first non-recycled air in 4 hours.
He blew out a heavy breath, keeping the rest of his armor on a moment longer as he made sure everything was secure in the cubical chamber that had a second rectangular chamber on the end that held Human restroom/shower/sleeping facilities, for all the Evanescence ships were designed with at least one small pocket so they could receive visitors or pick up survivors immediately. If they needed more room they could reconfigure other sections, but that would take time and some scenarios had little to spare.
You didn’t want someone dying inside an Star Force ship because it had the wrong atmosphere and you didn’t have enough time to switch it out, so prudence had this little bit of refuge built for the Archons and others, with one of the side walls being totally transparent and allowing him to look out into the hot sulfur dioxide where many Hycre floated, waiting to talk to him.
WELCOME ARCHON, the translation programing in the room said, for the language the Hycre
used was wholly incompatible with Human vocal chords, and vice versa. Paul had gotten good enough with mental translations over the centuries that he didn’t need the computer intervention, but it was more accurate and had been designed with terminology that he didn’t know the Hycre equivalents of. Usually he’d just find the meaning in their minds, viewing snippets of memory if necessary, but that got tedious and using the computer to translate was just more efficient.
“Hello, Tar’vo. We have a problem.”
WHAT IS IT?
“Our base on Tauntaun was discovered. We do not know how yet, and we’ve reviewed everything on our end. We can’t find a slipup.”
AND YOU FEAR WE MAY BE IN JEOPARDY?
“It’s impossible to say without knowing how the breach occurred. How are you set for supplies?”
WE ARE NEARLY SELF-SUFFICIENT NOW. ALL WE LACK ARE ENHANCEMENTS. OUR EXISTENCE IS NOT THREATED BY LOGISTICS.
“And what of your personal self-sufficiency?”
IT IS DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN IN THESE CONDITIONS. WE CANNOT TRAIN OUTSIDE FOR SUFFICIENT PERIODS OF TIME AND INTERIOR WORKOUTS ARE PROBLEMATIC. WE ARE BUILDING ADDITIONAL FACILITIES. CURRENTLY WE ARE MANAGING ADEQUATE MAINTENANCE. THAT WILL ONLY INCREASE WHEN MORE INFRASTRUCTURE COMES ONLINE.
“Good,” Paul said with a nod, glancing at the slightly different body sizes and colorations of the Hycre. They used to all look alike to him, but now he could tell a few differences even without his telepathy giving him additional insights, but judging their fitness level at a glance was a skill he still hadn’t mastered. Humans were easy to ballpark, but other races had their own physical cues, some of which were damn hard to read, Hycre included. “Report.”
