by Aer-ki Jyr
Paul could feel and ‘see’ the other Archons as if they were a part of his own body, and all of them were linked into the mind of the Brat’mar, segmenting it like grid markings on a map as they charted out unknown territory looking for anything new and, in particular, the reason for the V’kit’no’sat attack on this base.
After more than half an hour of searching they didn’t find much. This one only knew that a base had been discovered and must be removed from the ‘cleansed area’ that the V’kit’no’sat called the Devastation Zone. They apparently deemed it ‘clean’ so long as there were no advanced civilizations there, not caring about the lowly scum that had moved in or the remains of Star Force’s associates after they’d blasted them into rubble. In fact, this one knew of many indigenous populations that were of no consequence…but they were being monitored to look for Star Force activity, as well as being used as bait to ferret out Archon scouts who might try to hide in them or make contact once again.
Paul had suspected as much but had never had confirmation, for this was the first time he or any of the others had gotten access to a Brat’mar’s mind. They didn’t typically go anywhere they didn’t win, while Zen’zat were out and about everywhere. Star Force had caught and interrogated many of them, but they were usually just low level servants who knew nothing. Brat’mar were different, but even this one didn’t have any high level knowledge about this current invasion.
The Archons released the battlemeld and their link to the Brat’mar, taking a break and recharging their strength for a few minutes before trying the other. Its mind was just as strong, if not a touch stronger, but they used their combined power and skills to work their way into its memories, finding that it did not want to be here.
That was rare, for the V’kit’no’sat had a hatred for Star Force that almost compelled them to destroy everything of the ‘heretic’ civilization on sight, but this Brat’mar resented being assigned to the ground attack knowing that it was for nothing. Apparently the V’kit’no’sat did not expect to take the base, and if they had they were told to not overrun it, but to take their advance slow and leave the Star Force troops with possession of a piece of it as long as could be maintained.
This Brat’mar didn’t like that one bit, wanting to hit Star Force as strong as possible and annihilate the base that they’d arrogantly placed on their turf, but he had followed orders up until the pullout effort left him behind. After that he’d chosen to die fighting full on, prompting a run in towards the base where he knew there would be enemies to fight rather than to wait and hope an overhead warship didn’t kill him with orbital bombardment.
But it was the reason for the ineffective assault order that got Paul’s attention, for it was designed to keep besieged Star Force personnel on the planet long enough to draw in the Star Force fleets where the V’kit’no’sat could fight and destroy as many of their ships as possible in what this one considered ‘sloppy’ combat. They were deliberately not fighting battles where they had the advantage, knowing that Star Force would just run, so they had to give them something more appetizing to hit.
The bottom line was they needed to diminish the Star Force fleet strength for an upcoming operation…meaning this attack and the others were just a setup. The hammer blow hadn’t fallen yet, and unfortunately this Brat’mar didn’t know where or what it would be.
When the Archons finished Paul and Jason dismissed the others and had a Neo-class mech collapse one entrance in the chamber to force the Brat’mar to go back the other way when they eventually woke with an implanted memory from Jason telling them to leave and they’d be allowed to live until the V’kit’no’sat eventually came to pick them up. He also told them that once Star Force left the base would be theirs and foodstuffs would be left behind for their use…as well a bit of gloating concerning the fact that Star Force was leaving them alive despite them not deserving it.
Once the chamber was sealed on the near side, Jason and Paul leapt up onto the nearby mechs and rode on their shoulders as they pumped a lot more stun shots into the Brat’mar to keep them unconscious for hours, then they took the long route back to base riding like ticks stuck to the metal-ish walkers via grip points in their armor and safely underneath the thick mech shields.
“Best guess?” Jason asked on a private comm to Paul.
“Three options. The Preserve…”
“Which is suicide for them.”
“…the grid point, or punching a breach into the front and sweeping up another chunk of territory.”
“If they’re trying to reduce fleet strength, I’d bet it’s not for a single assault. They don’t want us to be able to reinforce as much, which means splitting our focus.”
“Agreed.”
“Should we temporarily evacuate some of our bases so we don’t have to fight them?”
“We have no way of knowing which ones have been compromised…and the V’kit’no’sat are losing a lot of ships too.”
“That seems to be in line with their plan.”
“That worries me,” Paul admitted. “They don’t throw away their lives for distractions and losing fleets of this size should be a huge blow to their ego.”
“Unless it’s part of a plan to really kick our teeth in. That would salve their ego.”
“I think they’re tired of being stalled out and are devoting a lot more of their coreward strength to us. The question is how much.”
“Wish we knew who was commanding them,” Jason said, referencing the change in command the Brat’mar interrogation had yielded without a name. “If he’s old enough we might have a file on him.”
“The fact that these troops didn’t know his name suggests a shadowy change we’re not meant to know about.”
“Think Doro’mas got punished?”
“Hard to say. He took over a hundred systems from us. I think they’re rotating commanders in to see how effective they are.”
“We’re training fodder?”
“Since they can’t kill us quickly, I’d say that’s possible. Maybe they don’t realize how much we’ve got left.”
“I don’t buy it. The harder we fight the more attention we get. They don’t like rivals.”
“They haven’t taken us serious enough to really hit us hard. Maybe the attrition has finally added up.”
“That doesn’t explain the change of command unless they’re blaming Doro’mas for not doing more with what he had.”
“Still no Rit’ko’sor. Why are they holding them back?” Paul asked, knowing from interrogations in previous centuries that the rebellious race had survived the war that saw Earth abandoned and had rejoined the V’kit’no’sat. The Brat’mar knew of them too, but not one of the tiny bipeds had shown up to fight Star Force as of yet, and their ship hulls were easily identifiable, as were those of every other V’kit’no’sat race, all of which had their own unique designs.
“Maybe they don’t trust them not to switch sides again.”
“Their population should have recovered enough by now. I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t another big war happening elsewhere in the galaxy.”
“If the Hadarak had broken out again these guys probably would have heard about it. Same goes for anything else big going on…unless they’re being kept in the dark on purpose suspecting that we might interrogate them?”
“Could be either, but it’s clear they don’t want the name of the commander known.”
“So how do you want to play this?”
“We need to get eyes on as many of their fleets as possible, even if they know we’re watching. We need a heads up before a system gets hit.”
“By ‘heads up’ you mean multiple jumps away?”
“Yeah,” Paul confirmed, knowing that meant thousands of scout ships to cover the plethora of star systems within even two jump range of an inhabited system. “And I’d bet they’ve got skirmishers out hunting scout ships to keep us from doing just that.”
“Tyrenk’s evac ship?”
�
��Not unless they were following standard orders to hit everything they came across. That Kaeper was following Morgan.”
“We really need more Sonics,” Jason said, referring to the ultra fast scout ships Star Force had constructed that were little more than engines, sensors, and living quarters in order to give them a speed advantage over the V’kit’no’sat. They were so limited in size that Humans weren’t able to crew them, with Star Force having to rely on the Irondel and other ‘tiny’ races within Star Force to man them with sufficient training facilities to keep them from deteriorating…and when one was chipmunk sized that didn’t take much hull space.
“There are ways to get around them,” Paul reminded him, “but yeah, I wish we had more now too. I don’t think the V’kit’no’sat are going to wait for us to build a decent detection grid.”
“So we try to think like them and go find their mega fleets personally?”
Paul smiled. “Maybe not personally, but I think we do need to start guessing and hope we get lucky,” he said as the mech he was on knocked him upright as it suddenly stepped on something explosive.
The next thing Paul knew dozens of Zen’zat were popping up in mind’s eye, apparently having been concealed within a psionic dampening ‘tent’ of some sort, and now rushing the pair of mechs in ambush.
“Are they serious?” Jason said as he detached from the shoulder and jumped down to the ground.
“I don’t feel like asking,” Paul said, extending a battlemeld link to Jason as they and the mechs began firing on the Zen’zat who were scattering like ants and shooting the larger machines with hundreds of tiny blasts that would add up in time, but there was nowhere they could go and hide that the two smaller trailblazers couldn’t follow.
Paul circled around his mech, which was now limping on a partially broken foot, and dove into a group of Zen’zat, taking several hits on his shields as he dropped an Ubven field on 7 of them, then almost comically walked out the far side as they were frozen in place and the mech fired down on them once he’d cleared.
All too easy, Paul thought, sensing Jason’s displeasure.
You’re quoting Vader now? How Sith of you.
Shut up, the trailblazer thought as the duo went after and quickly disabled the ambushing Zen’zat to give the mechs more easy kills.
10
April 15, 4813
Poro System (Devastation Zone)
Ghostblade Fleet
Vreemont sat in a control nexus, mentally interfaced with the research ship’s computer and the active scanners that were set up around every bit of recovered debris from the new V’kit’no’sat technology. He’d been working on this for weeks without much success, admiring the recent addition the enemy had made to their tech arsenal. It wasn’t the first since this war began, but almost everything the V’kit’no’sat had created Star Force had the blueprints for thanks to the pyramid database recovered on Earth prior to its being lost. Multiple copies had been made and transported rimward long before that, so the precious data that had been allowing Star Force to advance so rapidly had not been lost along with the planet.
Vreemont had been studying it virtually all his life, and now trying to figure out something else the V’kit’no’sat had made without the blueprints was quite the challenge. They’d been right to bring it to him, for he was a level 12 tech, an ‘Ultra’ Mastertech as most people referred to them, though that modifier wasn’t official. There were only 183 level 12 techs in Star Force, spread over a variety of fields, and he was the only one that dared to go into the Devastation Zone.
But he was quite at home in the Ghostblade fleet he had helped to build, and with them constantly moving about he was, in some ways, safer than sitting on a border planet. He was also traveling in one of their largest task forces…some 1,329 ships in total. That was large compared to the numbers they normally moved about in, for they needed to stay scattered and not draw attention to themselves, but Kara didn’t want to take any chances with him or the research ship, let alone the few other vital craft traveling along with him, one of which was a Star Forge-class stellar mining station that was getting them the necessary solari without having to rely on the rest of Star Force to supply it to them.
Planting that station in extreme low orbit of a star was not an easy or fast process, and it left the station vulnerable to attack, so there were plenty of warships accompanying this fleet to be able to fight off the scouts and hunter groups the V’kit’no’sat had roaming the Devastation Zone. Right now the Star Forge was packed up and waiting alongside the factory ships as the mining ones he’d helped design were chewing through an asteroid field and picking up some more critical resources to help sustain and grow Kara’s Clan fleet.
But right now this research project was occupying Vreemont’s every waking thought. Something critical was eluding him, and even with his Sav-enhanced mind he hadn’t figured it out. All the ‘Ultra’ Mastertechs had been given the psionic otherwise reserved for advanced Archons because it gave them additional brain power, both for multitasking and analysis, but what couldn’t be genetically crafted was curiosity or improvisation. Those were traits of a person’s core, which was why Vreemont had made level 12 and so many others hadn’t. He had a knack for seeing patterns and figuring out how things worked, but at the moment he was stumped.
It was a sensor, he knew that now, but how it functioned made no sense. Something was being emitted that he couldn’t trace. Power was being consumed and atomic alterations made, but the power wasn’t being accounted for. It couldn’t just disappear into nothingness. It had to be absorbed or emitted, either as light, heat, or various other forms of energy…but he could find nothing. His sensors couldn’t pick up a damn thing and he knew the interaction had to be occurring on such a microscopic level that his sensing technology was missing it.
One could only magnify so small, then the photons or other particles being used to bounce off the target suddenly became the size of the target and you lost all ability to see it. Work at such a level then had to be deduction based, which was frustrating. You had data on side effects but not the actual happenings, basically meaning you had to figure out what was going on inside a black hole as far as scientific research was concerned…and that’s where it required a keen intellect to creatively imagine what could be happening, and then to make the connections.
Vreemont had kept running through mental simulations nonstop, even when he wasn’t connected with the scientific equipment, for all it would take was a single success and the number of failed tries didn’t matter. This was a matter of persistence combined with equal portions of insight and luck.
And today his luck came through.
He’d always known the key was what was locking the lotos together, and every scan he’d performed, direct and indirect, had come up with the same conclusion…there was a force there, but no visible particle emitting it.
But now it had just hit him. There might not be a source, but rather a reflector. For there was an external element in play beyond the components in most situations, that being gravity.
Would the V’kit’no’sat have built a sensor that only worked in the presence of a gravity field? And if they did, what range would it have? Gravity technically had no range, for like light it spread out the farther and farther it traveled. Did that mean a sensor would get weaker and weaker or would there be a prerequisite amount?
The lotos. They were being peeled away from the main crystal when power was applied, but another part of the device appeared to be reintegrating them back into the crystalline lattice…or rather a second one. There were multiples within the device, and he wasn’t talking about just the fragments recovered. What if one function required the unlocking, and in that process something was produced or absorbed he was unaware of? Then there was a reverse process to recharge whatever was being set loose.
That would account for the power mystery, if gravity indeed was being used as an additional source of charge. A magnetic field could be another poss
ibility, but he’d ruled that out as being too limited. Most planets had a magnetic field, but it was usually so low as to not matter and a sensor that only worked around planets and in near stars wouldn’t be terribly useful for tracking ships in motion.
“Captain Doornan,” Vreemont asked via the comm. “I need a favor.”
“Name it,” the Kiritas said, appearing in holo in front of the Mastertech.
“I need this ship in close to the star and the artificial gravity turned off.”
The kangaroo-like alien blinked twice. “For the entire ship?”
“No, just in a select area. I need the retrieved components exposed to the natural gravity of the star.”
“It’ll take a few hours.”
“I know, but I think I’m onto something and I need to test my theory.”
“Gladly then. We’ll head there now.”
“Thank you,” Vreemont said as he ended the comm and the research ship began moving, though he couldn’t feel it. An inertial dampening field protected him from that and the gravity fields, though technically they still pulled on the field and everything in it, making it feel like there was no gravity effect the same way a ship in orbit felt like it was floating. All parts of it were being pulled on equally, thus there was no feeling of compression like you’d have on the surface when the gravity was squeezing you against it. On the ship an artificial gravity field was generated within the IDF to the level they liked, and Vreemont suspected that was nowhere near powerful enough for what he needed.
