by Aer-ki Jyr
In some regards he wished they’d just died and didn’t have to suffer like this, not even wanting to know what kind of experiments had been done on them, but as long as they were alive he was going to seize the opportunity and bring these guys back. The Calavari, Bsidd, and in a small way the Nestafar had all found a place in Star Force. The Hycre were independent but were still an ally and now a Protectorate in some respects. The Kvash were the fifth piece of that old Alliance puzzle and it felt very good finding them here.
He worked his way away from the glass and around to the access point for the chamber. The lizards couldn’t go in there without equipment, for the average temperature was 160 F, but that wasn’t something that was going to bother Paul’s armor and he could breathe the air thanks to a chilling function on his helmet. He didn’t expect any of these Kvash would recognize his armor or even know what an Archon was, given the fact that it had been some 700 years since their civilization had fallen and their ancestors had been brought here as captives.
Paul passed through an energy shield once the doors opened, walking into the oven that was ‘mild’ temperature for the Kvash. When he approached one of the short, standing rock piles they didn’t move. None of them did. Rather than scatter it seemed they were just impassive, though he could still sense their fear. They had nowhere to run, so these prisoners had taken to a sedate existence. That was a true pity, for it meant their lives would be even shorter without even accidental training effect from moving around in a panic.
Then again, in a place like this, a shorter life might be a good thing…save for the fact that there were less of them here to save now.
Let’s see if these guys still know how to talk, Paul thought, activating the translation program for the Kvash language rather than the trade language the Alliance had used. He doubted these Kvash would have learned two here, so he was guessing they would have preserved their default, though it could have altered over all these years without any standards in place to keep it rigid and ward against linguistic evolution.
Paul walked up less than a meter in front of one and looked down on the Kvash’s flat head. Its eyes not staring back, and it having no other features on its face save for some small slits in the rock-like exoskeletal skin that it used to produce sounds.
“You do not remember me, but I am an ally of your ancestors that were brought here as prisoners when your civilization was conquered. We have come here to destroy the Cajdital. You are no longer prisoners.”
A few rocky heads that resembled tabletops shifted, but a far cry from what was triggering in their minds that Paul could sense. Each race behaved differently, but there were some similarities. Hope, relief, disbelief…they were all there, but in different forms. The Kvash thought quickly, and if it hadn’t been for their stagnation here they could also move fairly quick despite their sluggish appearance.
“What are you?” one of them asked, but not the one directly in front of him.
“I am Human. There was once an Alliance between the Kvash, the Hycre, the Nestafar, the Calavari, and the Bsidd. We were an associate of the Hycre and joined the Alliance as a junior member. We have grown to dominance over the Hycre and all others, and are now finishing the fight that the Alliance began and reclaiming the worlds that the Cajdital took from you. The Hycre are our allies and the Calavari, Nestafar, and Bsidd are now part of our empire. We thought you were totally wiped out, and though I do not pretend that your living conditions here are anything but deplorable, I am very relieved to find some of you alive.”
“Show us your face. Prove you are not a Cajdital,” one of them said from further off as it slowly walked towards him.
“The heat is not good for us, but I can stand it for a brief time,” he said, forming a bioshield over his head and extending it out a bit to catch some air when his helmet retracted. His face blushed with heat from the spill through, but he was alright. He looked at the Kvash, twisting his head back and forth, then resealed his helmet before he ran out of air.
“I am not one of your tormentors,” he promised. “They are being killed as we speak and you will not be seeing them again. You will have to remain in this chamber until we get a properly equipped ship and transport equipment from our homeworlds to move you. We did not know you were here otherwise we would have brought it with us. We will provide you with food and supplies during the transition, but you will no longer have to fear the Cajdital. Their time here is over and all of their prisoners are being freed.”
“What others?”
“There are many captured races here, including some other Kvash. The lizards were keeping you as trophies. Whenever they conquered a race they kept a few alive and brought them here. I have a lot of people to rescue, so I ask that you remain patient until we are able to remove you from this place.”
“What will happen to us?” the one in front of him said, finally rising up a bit to its full height. Despite the naivety he sensed in these Kvash, they were remarkably even keeled. No doubt that was one reason why they’d built their warfleet the way they had, with such huge ships and starbases that required patience and wisdom to operate and was the polar opposite of the lizard’s expendable fleet philosophy.
“I will take you back with us and build up a planet where you can live free,” Paul said, feeling the urge and opportunity in their mindsets to go a bit further. “I know you know little of what you once were, but I will help you reclaim what you have lost and rebuild your civilization. If you do not want to have any part in that and just want to get away from here then you may live with us without responsibility. You will be our guests for the remainder of your lives, but your offspring will be able to reclaim the lost past and I will show them and any of you that are willing the way. The same goes for every other race held captive here, but you will have a special place with us.”
Paul looked around at all the Kvash, some of which were moving towards him. “It will take time. A lot of time. But now time is your ally rather than your enemy. You are prisoners no longer. You are simply waiting here for your ride out, and from there you will begin a journey into…things you can’t even imagine,” Paul admitted. “The dark days are over now, and you need not fear any longer. It will take time for you to adjust to freedom, but you have a future now. Welcome back, my friends.”
Several Kvash who had come close looked at each other, conversing in their own language with Paul picking up bits and pieces of it. The translation software was severely outdated, given that there hadn’t been any Kvash alive and it’d been relegated to a dead language.
“We do not know of what you speak. We only know of here.”
“Then let me show you,” Paul said, forgoing the limited holoprojector that his armor held and accessing their minds directly. “I have mind powers, and I will show you some of your history.”
The Archon sat down on the ground casually in his armor, not noticing the scorching temperatures, and began sending them memories of his own and visual recordings of battles the Kvash had fought in that he was actively pulling from the battlemap link they’d run up to the surface and using to access the fleet databases.
He was watching it on his HUD and mentally transmitting what he saw to them, and decided to take a decent amount of time with them before he headed off to meet and greet some of the other races here.
Several weeks later, when the facility had been confirmed cleansed of lizard presence thanks to a widespread and exhaustive search using Archon telepathy, Paul returned to the Excalibur and got in some decent workouts, not having had much available to him other than some long runs down within the planet based out of the mobile facilities that they’d set up camp in. After starting to feel a little better with the workout burn saturating his body, he returned to the command nexus on the bridge and took stock of his fleet’s positioning and made a few tweaks while watching the live status update from the others as they continued to engage lizard orbital assets but not having tried punching down to a major planet or assaulting a shipyar
d ring yet.
He’d been keeping in the loop from his armor link, but that was primitive compared to what he could do in a proper nexus. After getting his space footing again he went into a side task, detailing a report for Davis that he was going to send out with a courier within a few minutes. One had already been sent back requesting the relief fleet in order to get it here as fast as possible, but he wanted Davis to get to work on what was going to be a small, but major shift within Star Force. The population of the prisoners wasn’t large, but there were so many races here that had otherwise been eradicated it was going to take a lot of work to keep them from expiring now that the lizards weren’t forcing them to reproduce via sometimes horrific means.
Paul activated the holo-recorder rather than sending a text transmission, for he expected this to be a very long message.
“Davis, I’ve got a lot to put on your plate this time. As you’ve already been told there are a lot of prisoners from races that have been thought extinct or nearly so that need to be rescued, but we need to do more than just take them in as refugees. The lizards didn’t pick these races because they were collecting samples. Each one represents a significant opponent that they had to overcome, meaning there is a lot of potential in these guys. The Kvash especially, but there are others here who, I’m guessing, could hold even more assets for Star Force down the road.”
“If we treat them as refugees and put them into Axius we’re going to lose them through attrition. We need to insure that we get access to younglings and create programs to rebuild these races as a part of Star Force. Ward status for a lot of them, but with the Kvash and others we need to fast track them beyond that. I personally want to oversee the Kvash program, not so much as in spending every waking day with them, but I want to design it and run it from afar. I think I can turn these guys into a naval powerhouse once again, but there are only around 12,000 of them left so we have to hit the ground running with this.”
“I need a program set up for them to get into immediately upon arrival in the ADZ or wherever you think is suitable to plant them. It will take centuries before their population even hits nominal levels, but this is an investment we need to make. Forget their history, these guys have potential with us based off of what they are now. I haven’t had a chance to sense a Kvash mind before, but even broken as these are they are impressive as hell.”
“There are 283 races that we have discovered here, though we have not visually inspected them all as of yet, and some of them were being kept strictly as a food supply and some of those will need sanctuary status. Priority has been on eliminating the lizards and making sure they didn’t kill off the prisoners. Thankfully that hasn’t happened, but we couldn’t take chances. All the races here are in bad physical, and especially mental states, but they’re worth salvaging.”
Paul sighed. “You might think I’m just getting sentimental, but I’m not. We have a huge opportunity here to reshape Star Force…not that we need it, but this is too good to pass up. We already have a lot of wards, and this will more than double the count, but I think we can get some full factions out of the Kvash and others someday down the road and I think we should be gearing them towards that immediately, not using a ‘wait and see’ system.”
“We didn’t know these guys would be here, so we’re already a step behind. I want this to be the last lapse and I need you to work your magic on this. We’re going to have to evaluate the new guys, but as far as the Kvash are concerned this is what I want to do…”
6
June 7, 3204
Krachnika System (lizard capitol/homeworld)
Semtric
Greg-073 sat on a stool in the nexus onboard his command ship, looking down at the lizard world of Semtric as his fleet bombarded the surface relentlessly in the face of hundreds of cleansing beams and a scattering of new lizard weapons that packed even more of a punch. He was losing drones rapidly as the lizards targeted individual ones with multiple strikes, but Greg had so many in play that it was only a matter of time before one of the shields on the surface collapsed.
That happened about 20 seconds later, with him adjusting fire to the few key facilities in that newly exposed area, then on to the next closest intact shield. One of the new big beam gun batteries fell silent but the onslaught coming up from the surface continued. This was the second primary planet in the system to be assaulted, with troops already on the surface of Kennfrit battling to remove the lizards from that rock. Star Force wasn’t waiting to cherry pick these one at a time, and as long as the fleets were here they might as well strip the defenses off the other planets ahead of freed up ground troops being ready to assault the second world and shipyard ring simultaneously.
Another shield and battery went down under the fire of Paul’s fleet, then two more fell to Rio’s and Olivia’s. The longer it took to punch a sizeable clear zone down to the planet the more drones they would lose, so the trailblazers had decided to mount a huge fleet action and pound this planet’s defenses as fast as possible to minimize damage taken. The assault on Kennfrit had cost them heavily in terms of drones due to the unforeseen damage of the new lizard weapon systems and they didn’t want to repeat that, so they were literally throwing everything they had at this one and giving the lizards too many targets to choose from.
The big beam weapons were packing a considerable punch, but their rate of fire was low. Still, each time one fired they were hitting the smaller drones in the fleet and killing one with each shot. Destroyers on up could survive a hit, but their shields would be gone as well as most of their armor. It was a tradeoff that Star Force was having to make in order to get through the intense surface defenses that the planet contained…and had Star Force tried to eliminate all of the anti-orbital batteries on a single world from orbit, they would have lost most of their fleet in the process.
That’s how well defended these capitol worlds were, and the homeworld of Yamitar looked to be no different…save that it was some 38% larger than this one. That meant even more guns in range and a lesser curvature to bring others out of line with the targets in extreme low orbit. All six of these worlds were nightmares, but nightmares that had to be taken down and Star Force was going to get the job done slowly but surely.
The shipyard ring around this world had already been plucked of defenses, but there were no ground troops onboard yet. They were all down on Kennfrit expediting that invasion as much as possible. Its shipyard ring had gone to make the minefield, so in that way the lizards had saved Star Force some time, not requiring them to conquer it first or splitting their numbers with the ground assault.
With a hole now for his fleet to expand upon, Greg had a group of drones suddenly dive towards the surface. The lizards knew what was coming and several cleansing beams readjusted their attacks to target them, missing most but nailing a destroyer and a frigate that were covering for the single special drone inside their tightly packed formation. There was also a shield ship with them providing extra protection in addition to the speed they were coming down into the atmosphere with.
When they got close enough the secondary surface defenses opened up, adding a lot of shield loss and damage to the drones but they managed to get their charge down to the cityscape of the mildly wrecked target that Greg’s fleet had first hit. Most of the buildings were intact for the simple reason that they didn’t waste time targeting them when they had other nearby massive shield plates to take down.
The drones stuck with their special cousin with another destroyer dropping to the ground and ramming a building as it was knocked out while the group angled into a horizontal direction that was skimming over building tops and heading for the edge of the clear area. They kept low enough that the big guns couldn’t target them, having to fly between buildings part of the time all the way over to the next closest city, one that wasn’t under attack yet. It had a plate shield up high overhead ready to absorb a lot of punishment with its rigid design, but it wasn’t protecting laterally.
The drone
s slipped under that shield height, delivering their demolition twin to the edge then turning back, staying down in the buildings and beginning to shoot targets of opportunity now that they were on the planet. A minute later there was a huge explosion underneath that shield dome near the city center that leveled hundreds of buildings…but more importantly the shield plate dropped thanks to the kamikaze drone. The time and firepower needed to take that shield down conventionally would have cost Star Force hundreds of drones, so economically the tradeoff was worthwhile, even though Greg didn’t have very many of those drones left. Most had been used against the first planet.
Neither he nor the others wanted to wait for a lot more to come, so as soon as they had a decent supply of them they’d decided to attack, sick of having to tolerate these guys nearby as they assaulted another world.
As Greg oversaw his portion of the bombardment he raised an eyebrow when he saw the Excalibur dive down towards the surface with a flock of drones in tow. A lot of them didn’t make it, but his big donut did and parked itself over the city as a few cleansing beams nicked the top of it before it had blasted the buildings below it low enough for the ship to depress far enough to be out of the firing line.
The drones with it did the same, lowering into gaps between buildings and firing into them without bothering to worry about the lizards inside. A surrender offer had been given prior to the attack, and subsequently ignored. The lizards would have many opportunities to surrender going forward, but for right now Star Force was going to forcefully blow a hole in the lizard planetary defenses and it looked like Paul was taking a more direct approach than the others. He was using the tiny bit of his fleet that had made it down to the planet to chew apart the buildings and expand the area of destruction that would eventually connect to Greg’s region and others nearby, fully forming the ground invasion corridor that would then be used to establish a foothold on the planet.
