by Aer-ki Jyr
THREE PATROLS NOTED. IDENTICAL SEARCH PATTERN OF THE MOONS. WE BELIEVE THEY ARE DOING PERIODIC SWEEPS EXPECTING STAR FORCE TO RETURN. WE FIND THAT ODD CONSIDERING THEY ARE STILL ATTACKING AND EXPANDING THE BORDER. IT SUGGESTS A LEVEL OF FEAR THAT DOES NOT BEFIT THEM.
“I agree. If we established a full blown colony it’d be easy to spot and eliminate before it got too large to handle. They are being overly persistent. What were the period lengths?”
3 MONTHS 6 DAYS AND 8 MONTHS 2 DAYS.
“Not a fixed circuit then. How long ago was the last?
1 MONTH 18 DAYS.
“What type of ship?”
SINGLE KAEPER CLASS VESSEL ON EACH OCCASION.
“Any stellar activity?”
OUR SENSING CAPABILITIES ARE LIMITED. WE HAVE NOT RECORDED ANY OBVIOUS MOVEMENT UNTIL YOUR FLEET’S ARRIVAL. WE DID NOT DETECT THE KAEPER UNTIL THEY REACHED PLANETARY ORBIT AND BEGAN SCANNING. THEY OPERATED WITH STEALTH.
“Full cloak?”
YES AND NO. TWO OCCASIONS SAW SHIPS WITH SENSOR DAMPENING TECHNOLOGY. THE MIDDLE OF THE THREE OCCASIONS SAW A SHIP WITH A CLOAKING FIELD. IT HAD TO LOWER TO THOROUGLY SCAN.
“They probably don’t want us to know they’re looking unless they find something.”
COULD SUCH A VESSEL HAVE EXPOSED TAUNTAUN?
“No. Our own stealth tech would require an active pulse from them to locate and no one got sloppy on approaches. I don’t have an answer yet.”
THANK YOU FOR THE WARNING.
“My fleet is passing through, so our backside jumppoint is blocked from pursuit. I have to be back onboard the Ma’kri before the last ship comes through just in case they are being bold enough to follow,” Paul said, using the mental interface in his helmetless armor to query the Hycre’s computer and execute a data dump. “Uploading updates.”
RECEIVED, the Hycre confirmed, with Paul noticing twitches in those that saw the recent battle data pop up as they talked amongst themselves for a moment. DO YOU WISH TO REPLENISH DRONES?
“Yes. How many do you have available?”
36 CRUISERS 18 CORVETTES.
“I’ll take them all.”
HOW DO YOU WISH TO EXECUTE THE TRANSFER?
Paul thought about that for a moment. There was no safe way to do it if someone was watching and he was hesitant about using their traditional methods after Tauntaun, but there was no point around the fact that his fleet would be increasing its ship count unless he brought a jumpship down into the gas giant and loaded up there, but that maneuver would be easy to see and give away the location of the base…unless it was cloaked, but even then one of the jumpships in stellar orbit would go missing for hours.
Paul wanted to be safe, but he wasn’t going to get paranoid. That would be a victory for the V’kit’no’sat without them even having to fire a single shot, and Paul wanted as many replacements for his lost drones as he could get, even if this group would only scratch at the total he’d lost, which was upwards of half a million of the smaller ships. But out in the Devastation Zone getting replacements was not easy and he needed his fleet as strong as possible for whatever the V’kit’no’sat’s next move was…which he felt would be sooner rather than later.
“Same procedure. I’ll transfer the coordinates personally.”
DO YOU WISH A FULL STATUS REPORT NOW OR A DATAFILE TO TAKE WITH YOU?
“Now. I won’t be able to ask questions later and I’ve got a few hours. Take me through what you’ve accomplished and I’ll see if I can tweak it a little.”
5
When Paul flew back up to orbit he waited, visible as a tiny blip on sensors for anyone looking close enough, as a blob of signal nothingness moved to intercept him. Most ships’ sensors couldn’t see it, and only the more advanced ones with special programming could use the backlight from the green gas giant to spot the pseudo-black shape that seemed to pull the surrounding light in around it. If not for the minds onboard Paul would only have noticed the stars going out as it approached, then a rectangle of light lit up as one of the hangar doors opened as it quickly approached.
Paul flew backwards, picking up speed to match as he angled in enough to hit a capture field just outside. Like a giant mitt it caught the trailblazer and accelerated him up to speed gently as the Ma’kri continued in its orbit, knowing that if any V’kit’no’sat ships or probes were here they wouldn’t see it deviate from its previous course. Paul’s tiny armored silhouette would have been easier to spot, but he had minimal sensor dampening capabilities that would hide him from anything but a full intensity scan. Hopefully that meant his little trip down hadn’t been noticed, but he wasn’t exactly invisible.
When the capture field matched his speed to the ship it pulled him inside and the hangar disappeared again as the Ma’kri continued its orbit that it wouldn’t break for another 18 minutes, then it would head back to one of the moons, give it another full scan, then travel to stellar orbit where the bulk of the fleet was. Parts of it were already reconfiguring into smaller fleet groups that were heading off in multiple directions, but most of those hadn’t fully assembled yet at their outgoing jumppoints.
The bulk of the fleet was still Paul’s and would be maintaining its grouping as they left, but the smaller reinforcements were going back where they came and the sooner the better. Having everyone grouped together was advantageous in some circumstances, but it left other areas open to attacks in the absence of backup and the Devastation Zone was tricky enough to get around as it was. Star Force couldn’t keep a full comm relay network up and running, so they had to pick and choose systems and try to hide the relays from the V’kit’no’sat. This system had none, as did many others, so if there was a call for help elsewhere coming in right now Paul wouldn’t know about it, so he needed to get the smaller fleet groups back out there immediately to cover for that possibility.
When the Ma’kri dropped its sensor field it was back in stellar orbit and Paul took a dropship across the gap to his command ship, sending the order before he got there for all 18 of his specialized Warship-class jumpships to engage their stealth fields, with them dropping off the battlemap as if they didn’t exist.
Normally the jumpships did not carry the stealth fields, and these had to cannibalize parts of their interior structure to accommodate it, meaning they could carry less drones than the other vessels, but these were necessary to visit the Hycre worlds in private, so as Paul got back onboard the Excalibur and oversaw the continuing fleet reconfiguration the specially modified jumpships, each more than 20 miles long and looking like slightly modified cylinders, traveled out to the gas giant and slowly settled down into the upper atmosphere until their sensor defying blobs disappeared beneath it.
They dropped low enough for the gasses to provide them cover then lowered the underside of the field, allowing the waiting Hycre below to see them, who then sent the smaller rectangular drones up from the depths and into the open docking slots after they released the packets of salvage they’d collected. Those sunk down through the planet’s layers until Hycre ships intercepted and caught them, preventing them from going so low they’d lose them in the liquid layer where they were currently mining a partially submerged moon that had been sucked down into the planet long ago.
It was actually sticking out above the liquid layer on one side of the planet, making the center of gravity slightly askew, but from the exterior the planet looked like a perfect sphere as the gasses surrounded everything at the center. That broken and swallowed up moon as the reason Star Force had put the Hycre here. If it wasn’t then the planet wouldn’t be able to produce new drones, for getting the necessary raw materials would require combing the liquid and solid layers of the planet and mining smaller bits of debris. The Hycre had done so long ago in their history, finding the bits and pieces necessary to build their first habitats and then starships that had allowed them to visit the inhospitable rocky worlds where they found the treasure troves of raw materials that their gas giants lacked.
The swallowed up
moon gave them a fair amount to work with, but the salvage was far richer and there was no need to haul it halfway across the Devastation Zone in the bellies of the mostly empty warships to find a place to make use of it. The jumpships themselves were capable of making repairs and deconstructing a little of it, but not the mass amounts that Paul had ordered picked up. He gave the Hycre a lot of the salvage, at least as far as their current infrastructure was concerned, with only one of the Warship-class jumpships keeping its bays open for the 54 new drones to fly up into and dock.
All the jumpships reactivated their full stealth fields and eased up back into orbit, knowing that someone taking a close look would see the little null spots while they were above the green orb, but once they got away from it and back into deep space there was nothing but a few pinpricks of starlight to give them away as they returned to the fleet then popped back up on the battlemap before the last of the fleet arrived insystem.
If any V’kit’no’sat ship was following them it’d come later, with Paul’s interaction with the Hycre now over. Hopefully that would keep them secret and safe, but there was no way of knowing for sure if there was a hidden probe somewhere here. They’d purposefully neglected putting a hidden comm relay in the system to avoid scrutiny and so far the Hycre had gone unnoticed despite these occasional visits, but the discovery Tauntaun still bugged Paul to no end.
It took two more jumps before Paul’s now smaller fleet came across a system with a comm relay, which was the first chance for him to get a glimpse of what was going on elsewhere in the Devastation Zone. The lag of relays sending pulses between systems and then passing them on was always frustrating, but it provided so much information that it was an invaluable tool…which was why the V’kit’no’sat made a point of hunting down and destroying the relays whenever and wherever they could.
And another one had gone offline on the other side of Earth, far away from Paul’s current location but the approaching ship had been detected and the information on it had been transmitted before the relay went down, then trickled across the grid to every other relay that then stored the information into a growing packet that ships would eventually pick up. Each packet had a timestamp on the data so ships could get records going as far back as necessary without having to query the relays to dump everything they contained each and every time.
The Excalibur and every other ship in the fleet got updates, which the trailblazer immediately reviewed at lightning speed as his mind was plugged into the command nexus and browsing through all the minutia looking for…
Paul stopped his browsing when he came across the report from some of the damaged jumpships he’d detached to get repairs. They’d picked up survivors from one of the evacuation ships that Paul thought he’d gotten away safely, but apparently the V’kit’no’sat had a ship outside the system that was faster and had run them to ground. He read the report from Tyrenk-1482995, the only surviving Archon from the ship, concerning the deaths of all but two others when a Kat’vo vessel had been taken out within the atmosphere of a jungle world via a very clever ramming maneuver.
The surviving crew members of both ships had fought it out on the surface with the Archon narrowly prevailing while losing almost all of those crew that he was trying to protect. Paul’s gut clenched a bit, knowing what that sort of situation would feel like, and noted the occurrence of a spontaneous psionic development in another surviving Human…but that wasn’t what had got his primary attention.
In the Archon’s report the last of the Kat’vo had died trying to destroy components onboard their crashed ship. That should not have happened, because the V’kit’no’sat knew that Star Force already had copies of their standard technology. Whatever was onboard that Kaeper-class vessel had to be something new, but the remains of that vessel were in such a state of disarray the recovery team that had picked up the Archon and survivors didn’t know what it was, though they’d had taken onboard all the relevant pieces.
There was no further word about it, but Paul knew where they were going and he needed to know what that ship contained, for it had been a scout vessel trailing Morgan’s fleet that she hadn’t noticed and could be involved in how Tauntaun was discovered. Paul had no hard proof of that, but his gut told him this was important so he diverted his fleet to the temporary location of the Ghostblade mobile shipyard at maximum jump speed.
Hopefully the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t picked up on this loss yet, but if and when they came across the ship wreckage and investigated they’d know…but until they did Paul had a window of opportunity he intended to stretch out as far as possible.
To that end he split off a chunk of his fleet to go to the Chawik System and hold stellar orbit, discouraging the V’kit’no’sat from taking a look at the wreckage…or perhaps even finding it…for as long as possible. If Tyrenk hadn’t made that desperate and brilliant ramming maneuver to disable the Kaeper Star Force would not have had this opportunity, as the V’kit’no’sat knew they’d outmatched the evacuation ship and it should have made for an easy kill. Their hatred of Star Force probably had caused them to chase when they should have kept to the shadows, and if this slip-up of theirs did give Star Force an insight into some new technology of theirs Paul needed to take advantage of it quickly.
When he finally arrived in the Harver System he was glad to see that the Ghostblade fleet hadn’t left yet, still hidden amongst a far-out asteroid belt as they worked to repair some of the ships he’d sent. The others had already left, but after a quick comm to Ghostblade he found out that the salvage was still here and their techs were already working on it…and were thoroughly stumped.
Paul hopped on a dropship and flew over to the massive, spindly construct that was 349 miles wide. Most of the interior space was empty, looking like a spider with legs everywhere that cradled ships they were working on, but it still dwarfed everything in Paul’s fleet and would outmass them by far when it curled up into travel mode when the Ghostblade fleet left the system. For now they were still harvesting resources from the asteroid belt as the nomad-like Clan moved around the Devastation Zone and areas beyond it and Star Force territory, hiding out and performing odd missions that allowed them to stay off the V’kit’no’sat’s radar for the most part, though they did have a long list of enemy ship kills to their credit, though all of them were from pirate-like ambush attacks rather than straight up fleet versus fleet combat.
Paul’s tiny dropship was lost in the size of the shipyard as it landed in one of the ‘thin’ spider legs that was itself miles wide, dropping the trailblazer off with several Ghostblade Archons waiting to meet him.
ViLord Todi-1001934 was the ranking Archon here and he had a couple of Titans with him, all three of which were in uniform with only the colored stripe down the outside of their arms and legs denoting their rank on the otherwise pure white Archon garb. Paul was dressed the same, not wearing any armor, except his rank was high enough that it required two stripes, one orange and one blue, denoting his Goku-level that far surpassed the three Archons before him.
“Some type of sensor,” Todi said before Paul had a chance to speak, “but we don’t have a clue how it works yet. The Viks did a good job smashing it, but we’re also guessing it works on some level of physics we’re not familiar with.”
Paul raised a blue eyebrow. “Sensor? You’re sure?”
“Fairly,” Todi said as the four Archons began walking together across the hangar. “We’ve identified an emitter and receiver, but how they function is speculative. They have some type of material that is not atomic and above our tech level. We’re doing what we can, but I think you’re going to have to take this to the top tier techs. There’s nothing like this even mentioned in the pyramid database. We’ve even checked the non-V’kit’no’sat entries.”
“Damn it,” Paul whisper swore. “They found Tauntaun, and maybe with this. We need to know what its range is or every facility we have could be at risk.”
“Can’t hide from what we can’t see, I know. Wis
h we had better results for you, but we haven’t had a lot of time to work on the…unfamiliar aspects.”
“What can you rule out?”
“Everything we already know. It doesn’t match up against any simulations, but without functioning components we’re extremely limited as far as testing goes. The Kat’vo did a good job in pulverizing it, but they did leave a few intact chunks that our techs are scratching their heads over.”
“Including your master tech?”
“She’s been on it day and night, but recommends we get this to Vreemont or even Tennisonne ASAP.”
“Tennisonne is too far away. We’ve got major V’kit’no’sat fleet movement and I need an answer yesterday,” he said as the four of them walked into a lift. Todi input the destination coordinates and they started traveling at great speed throughout the tunnels in the shipyard to get where they needed to go.
“Talk to Raena then. All I know is the key components are crystal based and it’s not atomic crystal.”
“Sub-atomic lattice?”
“There’s something in it that we can’t identify, but there are a large amount of grid-locked lotos. Beyond that don’t ask me.”
“Lotos,” Paul said, letting his mind drift in thought as the box-like lift car traveled through the ‘spider leg’ and towards the main body of the shipyard.
Lotos were a tier 2 particle slightly larger than an electron that bonded with select solari. In their individual state they would lightly pool around each other, making them basically useless particles. Their only known use was in combination with solari to form basic building block compounds. He didn’t even know how to grid lock lotos, but while he had acquired a fairly good understanding of physics he’d never tested out as a tech, only worked with Star Force’s best to develop several key pieces of equipment.
He wished Tennisonne was close, for he was the best there was at figuring out new things, but Vreemont was far closer…except he didn’t know exactly where. Ghostblade fleets were split up and roaming constantly, with very few knowing where they actually were.
