Jake looked in both directions and said, “This corridor is seven miles long. I want everyone spaced with a mile separation. Once this corridor is clean, notify me.”
Dale looked at his display and noticed he was assigned the extreme left end of the long cave. He turned and ran. Gord was assigned the right end, with the remaining warriors equally spaced between them.” Jake noticed some Keepers’ beams begin to come through the floor.
“Junior, it appears our hosts are delivering a big serving of beam platforms. Anything you can do about thanking them for their courtesy?”
“Don’t stand above them, and allow ten feet for the passage.”
Jake fed the locations of the platforms to the combat computers of the team, and had an alarm sound if anyone moved between the platform and the surface. “We’re clear, Junior.”
Junior fired an intense micro needle that was only two inches wide, but incredibly hot, into the ground. It penetrated two levels and hit a beam platform. “BC, Ethan; use your scanner and fire a micro needle at any beam platform in your area of coverage. The team will not be within ten feet of the area above the platforms.”
“Ok, this is how we’re going to do this. This level is clear. Before you teleport to the next level, eject a bundle of bees. Use your blaster to burn a hole next to you through the floor into the next level. Then fire a bundle of wasps and two hornets through it. Wait six seconds to give the hornets time to complete their run, then teleport into that level. Your computers will take over once we jump in.” Jake looked at the warriors and said, “Execute.”
The Collective was analyzing production data when it felt thousands of its warriors dying. It sent its perception out and saw five thousand farms under attack. It heard, “I’ve sent ships to the farms and they will arrive momentarily.”
The Collective looked at the planets being attacked and one jumped out at him. Military responded again, “I see Grenwa is one of those being assaulted. I don’t know if the enemy just got lucky or knew its importance. I’ve sent a hundred thousand ships to its defense.”
The Collective said nothing, but turned its attention to Grenwa and entered the farm’s Director. “We have assistance on the way.”
“The Fleet arrived a twentieth interval ago and is coming in from the jump band.”
“Military, why is our fleet only jumping to the jump band?”
“I don’t know. Our drives will not take us any further. Science, what’s happening?”
“There is a probe emitting a frequency that is preventing our ships from jumping to the planet.”
“Just the one planet?”
“No, all five thousand.”
The Collective went back to the Director and asked, “Can you hold out?”
“The attackers are now down two levels and we are organizing our defense eight levels below them. At the current pace, the fleet should arrive before the nineteenth level is reached.”
The Collective was anxious. How did the enemy prevent their drives from operating? Then it had a sudden thought that caused fear, “If their drives were not working here, what about the fleet in the enemy’s universe?”
“Military, get a scout to the enemy’s universe and see if the fleet is also being affected by this device.”
“It won’t make any difference. They may move the populations, but we will destroy the planets until there is nowhere for them to escape.”
“Even so, find out what’s happening.”
Military ordered the scout to go and felt an unfamiliar emotion: fear.
“This just in for your viewing pleasure. A Keepers Fleet of a hundred thousand ships has just come out of jump at the drive limit.”
Jake fired a hornet at a beam platform and said as he released another bundle of wasps, “They really respond in a big way, Junior.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Jake.”
Jake sensed something in Junior’s tone, “What do you mean?”
“This is the only planet that drew that level of response. All the others only had a thousand ships dispatched.”
“There’s something here that’s important to them.”
“That’s how I see it, Jake. Have you seen anything that would justify that level of response?”
Jake fired his blaster at a Keeper coming out of an opening in the floor, “No but we’re only down to the sixth level.”
“My scanners show a huge welcome party for you on the eighth level.”
“What do you see?”
“The entire corridor is filled with Keepers aiming their beam platforms at the seventh level.”
Jake looked at his display and saw that the sixth level was clear of Keepers. He ordered a halt to the advance. The team waited and listened in to Jake’s transmission, “Junior, can you fire one of the old needles into that level and load it with hornets.”
“If he can’t, I can.”
Junior asked, “What are you doing with old needle armament, BC?”
“I love the old weapons. I even have an early Stars Realm Megaship primary beam.”
“Well, I am impressed.”
“I’ll give you one when this is over.”
“Thanks, BC.”
“As soon as you two Chatty Charleys finish your conversation, we could use that needle.”
Junior said, “Party pooper,” just as a brilliant, white beam hit the garrison and penetrated to the eighth level. Enclosed in the needle were four hundred hornets that scattered, seeking out the beam platforms.
Jake hit his mike, “Cynthia, take command and clean up the seventh level. I’ll meet you on the eighth.” Jake ran over to the hole made by the needle and jumped. His perceptions slowed, and as he slowly passed the seventh level he fired six bundles of wasps; three on each side of the hole he was falling through. Keepers began burning. Then he landed on the eighth level and saw the mayhem the hornets had caused. He fired three bundles in each direction and moved toward the largest concentration of platforms. His scanners showed forty were still operational, so he fired forty hornets that left him at what seemed normal speed. To the Keepers in the corridor, they punched though the sound barrier immediately and hit every platform in less than a tenth of a second.
Jake got behind the cloud of wasps moving up the corridor and hit any Keepers they missed with his blaster. He cleared one end of the corridor, turned and ran back to the other end, and caught up with the other cloud of wasps as it moved in the other direction. He knew that he was moving faster than the speed of sound. As he neared the cloud of wasps they picked up speed and the other end was cleared. Jake looked at his scanner and saw the seventh level was just about completed. He waited, and in three minutes the rest of the team joined him on the eighth level.
Cynthia looked around and saw more than five hundred beam platforms on her scanner. She had no idea how many Keepers had been killed because the wasps left little or nothing behind. Dale and his team were amazed at the destruction around them and were thankful they had not had to face those platforms. The team dropped to the ninth level.
Junior and the other two ships were no longer blasting the surface of the garrison. Every installation above the planet’s surface had been destroyed. There was nothing left alive to hit. Junior worried as he watched the approaching fleet. Finally he said, “Jake, the fleet will arrive in three hours and twenty minutes. At the current pace you will only make it to level twenty before their arrival.”
Jake knew time was going to run out, and he suspected that whatever the Keepers valued on this planet has to be on the lowest level. There just wasn’t enough time. He hit his com, “Cynthia, we’re running out of time. I’m taking over from here. Here’s what I want you to do. I am going to teleport into the fifteenth level at the west end of the corridor and move east. As soon as your scanners show it’s clear, teleport in and everyone fire a load of bees. I don’t want anything coming up behind us.”
“Jake, are you sure?”
Jake shrugged, “If it gets too dangerous I�
�ll teleport out and you can follow. Are you ready?”
Cynthia nodded, watching as Jake teleported to the end of the corridor and then disappeared.
Dale watched his scanner over the next two and a half hours as something moved through the corridors under him faster than anything he had ever seen. His scanner showed the huge blasts as they moved from one end of the next level to the other. His four team members were amazed at what they were witnessing. The rumors and tales about the White Demon were not even close to the reality of what they were seeing.
Finally, level twenty four was cleared. Jake stood there and the six Red Warriors saw most of his armor was covered with brown blood stains. “Load your weapons. It’s the next level that we must investigate. I don’t see anything on the next level that looks like a threat. I believe that every Keeper in the garrison tried to prevent us from getting here. Only fire at an identified threat. Everyone understand?”
They all nodded.
“Let’s go,” and the seven Red Warriors teleported to level twenty five.
The Collective saw that the fleet was not going to arrive before the enemy entered the last level of the garrison. It sensed each level die as that terrible creature killed faster than anything he had ever witnessed. Now there was no Keeper alive in the garrison for him to watch what was happening. He was hopeful the fleet would arrive in time to force the enemy to leave, but they were still a quarter interval away. He started to wish he had listened to the old Values Quadrant.
The seven warriors landed in a giant cavern that extended out into the distance. Jake turned and saw thousands of squares on the far wall and he teleported to them to see what they were. The other warriors arrived right behind him and felt immediate revulsion. Tens of thousands of clear boxes held one of the species that had been enslaved on this planet. Jake’s scanner showed they were all alive, but in some sort of suspended animation. There were no brain waves in the scans. This was how the Keepers stored their food. Jake just shook his head at the brutality of the Keepers.
“What are those Jake?”
Jake turned around and saw to the right of the storage containers a series of cutout holes in the wall extending from floor to ceiling as far as the eye could see. Jake read his scanner and saw that there were more than eight billion in just the left wall. He walked over, looked in one of the cutouts, and saw a round, brown and red, oval about four feet across. Eggs.
“Jake, the fleet will arrive in twelve minutes. You’ve got to get out of there.”
“Just a moment, Valerie. BC. Tell me you have one of the Captors’ energy balls in your storage.”
“What are those?”
“Junior, what about you?”
“No, I don’t Jake.”
“I do.”
Jake was stunned, “Ethan, what are you doing with a Captors’ energy ball?”
“I found one lying around the armory and decided to take it.”
“Teleport it down, now.”
A silver screen formed and a giant red ball appeared on the floor. “Everyone get out of here.”
“Not without you, Jake.”
“That’s an order, Cynthia.”
“So arrest me. We all go together.”
Jake turned the timer to sixty minutes and set the blast level to five hundred miles.
Valerie screamed, “Jake, come on!”
Jake threw the switch to start the countdown, looked at the warriors and yelled, “Get out of here!” All seven disappeared.
Just as Jake appeared on Junior’s bridge, the ship disappeared through a silver flash. Thousands of beams ripped through the space the three small ships had occupied one second earlier.
The navigator on the Fleet Director’s ship scanned the garrison and said, “The enemy has left a large round device in the lower chamber.”
The Collective heard the comment and ordered, “Get warriors down there and remove it.”
Thousands of landing craft screamed down to the surface and thousands of Keepers rushed into the first level. As they rushed into the sixth level, the bees in the first six levels activated.
The bee was a new type of wasp. It didn’t fly as fast as a wasp, but it carried the same sting. If it struck a Keeper, it would burn. The main difference between the two darts was the bee’s skin. Where the wasp was fast, the bee was stealthy. The bee was a leave-behind weapon. The bee would attach itself to a wall or ceiling and its skin would match the color of the surface where it landed. It would then turn off its power and wait. Once it detected movement it would remain dormant until a predetermined delay passed, then it would attack any target within range of its sensors. The seven Red Warriors had each ejected a bundle of five thousand bees on every level they passed.
Twenty thousand Keepers were rushing toward the lower chamber when 210,000 bees activated. The Fleet Director heard all of them die screaming in pain. He prepared to send more warriors into the facility but rejected the decision when an explosion ripped through the structure, blowing out into the ranks of the assembled fleet holding station just above the planet’s atmosphere.
The Keepers’ ships were not affected by the blast, but all of the landing craft on the surface were disintegrated and a five-hundred-mile-long crater was all that remained of the huge facility. Nothing was left of the egg chamber. The Collective knew that the loss of the chamber was catastrophic for the future survival of his species. It felt something new, anger and then rage.
Ales Jongo looked down on what remained of his home. Ulmerton was a ruined planet. The atmosphere had been disintegrated and the surface looked like a barren, burned desert. As he looked down on the previous location of the capital, he saw an explosion forty miles to the north where a small meteor had just hit. Without an atmosphere to burn them, even small meteorites would hit the surface. Jongo knew that the planet would look like the surface of the moon as time passed.
Ales knew he should be enraged, but he felt mixed emotions. His family was gone and his father was killed by the Keepers. He reflected and knew that his father’s death was a mixed blessing. He had never forgiven him for executing his older brother two years earlier. He loved Gilum and worshiped him. However, Gilum was infected with the same disease as his father, blind ambition, and had less patience than the Duke. He begged Gilum not to go through with his plans to kill his father, but Gilum refused to listen.
Gilum told him, “You must act like you hate me, Ales.”
“Why, you know I love you!”
Gilum reached out, tasseled Ales’s hair, and said, “If my plan fails and father even remotely thinks you knew about it and didn’t warn him…you know what he’ll do. You must tell everyone you hate me. Avoid me at meals and refuse to talk to me. I’m going to criticize you so others can see we are not friends. You must do this.”
Ales sighed and remembered following Gilum’s advice. His father even gave him the privilege of firing the blaster that killed his older brother. Before he pulled the firing lever, he saw Gilum look at him, nod, and smile. His loyalty confirmed the Duke proclaimed Ales Jongo as the new heir to the title. Ales would give everything away just to have Gilum back.
Ales also knew that he really couldn’t blame his father for what he did. He only protected himself against an enemy trying to kill him. He stared at the planet and both hated and missed his father in equal measure.
How did this happen? The other planets attacked by the Keepers were now moving around the universe, playing a deadly game of tag with the Keepers Fleets. Why was Ulmerton the only casualty? He also knew that as soon as the Keepers Fleets arrived in the Realm’s universe, all the Searchers on Ross teleported away before the planet was attacked. Why would they do that if they recommended that the Duke land his ships on his planets? There was also the issue of the failure of the teleport systems on the Duke’s fleet. Did the Keepers cause that?
He stared at the dead world and then thought, “Is is possible they detected me in the Ross system?” With that realization, it became clear that
the Realm caused the destruction. He didn’t want to believe it, but it had to be true. He didn’t think the Queen would do it, but her brother or that uncle of hers would do it if they suspected the Duke had tried to kill the Royal Family. What to do now?
Ales decided that attacking the Realm during the current invasion was tantamount to suicide. If they can stop teleportation systems and make the frequency generators fail, there would be no place safe for him. No; he was going to wait. But first he was going to ensure his fleet enforced his rule on the Province’s planets. After he solidified his position, then the Realm would receive his undivided attention. Unlike his father and brother, he could be patient and strike at the right moment. He looked at the planet one more time before he teleported away, smiling. He possessed patience but like his family, he also knew the taste of raw ambition.
Chapter Nineteen
The Collective and all Quadrants examined the data collected from the recent attacks and the Fleets operating in the enemy’s universe. After two intervals, the massive intelligence separated into its various pieces.
“Military, we have only destroyed one world since our invasion launched. At the current progress, our star will die of old age before we destroy all their planets.”
“I’m of the opinion that the enemy allowed us to destroy that one planet.”
The giant being said, “What data did you use to draw that conclusion?”
“I examined the scans of the ships that were on the destroyed planet. The markings on them match the eight ships we destroyed in our universe that revealed themselves to us. I’ve discussed this with Psychology, and we think that planet was attempting to communicate with us to negotiate its safety in return for assisting us.”
Psychology added, “The probe that is being used to prevent our jumps into the systems of the targeted planet actually prevented the drives of the grounded ships from operating. It appears the governing entity knew of their attempt and allowed our attack.”
Finding keepers a-7 Page 28
