by Aer-ki Jyr
The Kret’net felt Kai’s mind connect to his, and Bar’ku let him in, for this was the plan they’d discussed enroute. The trailblazer needed to coordinate all of them through his own mind, but not with battlemeld. He just needed to give them a few simple instructions, and that led Bar’ku to break off from the group and head to the left as the others scattered out as well around the solid shield’s perimeter that stood slightly glowing in front of them.
The outside air was full of blowing and falling snow, but that within the shield was clear and showed 8 pillars bracketing a walkway. The pillars were just inside the nearly vertical wall that was the dome shield. It was so big it looked flat, with the very subtle curve only detectable with a good eye or a sensor kit, both of which they all had.
Bar’ku walked up to the farthest pillar, which dwarfed him. It was slightly narrower than his body, but stood three times his height. It was not made of the crystal-like material that the obelisks were, but rather rough stone covered with inscriptions. It was the language of the Founders, and thankfully Star Force had already deciphered it and added it to their translation programs, letting Bar’ku trigger an overlay that gave him a series of button labels…but with no buttons.
At least not visually. With his Essence sense he could feel little nodules within the pillar beneath the labels, and when Kai gave him the first command he sent a tiny bit of Essence into a specific one.
Nothing happened, and Kai told him to increase the amount gradually until something did. Bar’ku tried 6 times before he got enough, then the script over the button began to glow yellow out of the gray rock, forming little light feathers reflecting off the blowing snow outside the shield barrier. It remained illuminated for several minutes, then went dark again.
Kai had him press more buttons, as he was having the others do likewise on all the pillars. Two more Archons were also pressing buttons on Bar’ku’s pillar, for there were hundreds on each that made up of some sort of a code lock for getting through the shield. Kai was having to figure it out through trial and error, but each attempt meant depleting a small amount of Essence…hence the need for more fingers to push buttons.
They stayed at it for 6 hours before calling it quits and heading back, with Bar’ku feeling drained. Each button press took a considerable amount of Essence from him, and many of the Archons had to drop out before the end. He had a much larger reserve due to his body size, but the older Archons had barely scratched the surface of their internal wells and began to pick up the slack when the younger ones began to drop out.
Bar’ku was glad he’d held out through the end of the mission, but he wouldn’t be coming back here for days, minimum. It would take a lot of time to regenerate what had been lost, but the flipside to that was he’d develop a slightly larger well afterward as an adaptation effect…and that’s how things were going to work here. Essence use when you had it trying to unlock sealed locations and technology, then work exploring and building while you regenerated your reserves.
The trailblazers were much busier, for they had the largest internal wells off all, but even they had limits and this Temple had been designed for those with far larger ones. That meant any button pressing that Bar’ku could do would save the trailblazers the effort, and he was happy to assist in this manner over the coming months even as more Star Force Essence users arrived…and with them came the Knights of Quenar, en mass, once Star Force had sent everyone they could spare. Some Essence users had to remain in the empire for other duties, including some of the trailblazers, but the Knights of Quenar apparently were able to round up far larger numbers from their hidden population.
The Bridge was in use constantly once they began to arrive, and they were housed in the Star Force buildings rather than establishing their own colony. Most of Bar’ku’s work was separate from them, but 8 months in and he was assigned a co-op mission back to the same shield dome that had been on his first mission.
He was there with a dozen Archons, Kai, and some 22 KoQ as they all worked on the problem, with Bar’ku not fully aware of what was going on, for he was only pushing buttons at Kai’s request and not involved in the deliberations about what to press and in what order. Apparently the KoQ had some insight into the workings of Founder lore that had been passed onto them by the Vargemma, and combining that with Paladin-gathered information and Archon intelligence, they finally figured out the riddle before them.
The Temples had been built to oppose the Hadarak, and seeing as how the Vargemma had never met a Lurker before…for they’d always hid from them…they’d never obtained a genetic sample. But more than that, they’d never obtained a genetic sample from their ‘ooze’ weapon.
The code that finally unlocked the shield was something that the Vargemma had never figured out in Alpha Temple, for there were many locations still blocked to them. But Star Force had the full genome of the ooze, and a portion of it hinted at by the descriptive text on the pillars was what finally did the trick…though it took more than two hours to manually input the specific genetic sequence.
The shield didn’t disappear, but retreated upwards slowly, allowing people to walk through underneath while stopping some 48 meters up and keeping the majority of the location covered, though that didn’t stop the winds and snow from blowing in underneath and messing up the pristine landscape inside.
“Finally,” Kai said, blowing out a long breath and glancing at the Knights of Quenar. “Thanks, fellas.”
“Let us see what we have acquired,” one of them said from beneath a black robe that covered their wolf-like heads, but left their faces visible while protected by an invisible shield of their own. They looked particularly vulnerable, but Kai knew that was deceptive, for they held a great deal of technology within their clothes and even their bodies that could be called upon at a moment’s notice…though he’d never actually seen them wear a suit of armor.
Bar’ku stepped in through the opening in the shield, dropping 3 meters to the dry ground when he left the snowpack outside and kicking a little of it in during his slide down with his trailing tail. Then he was walking on natural rock over to the artificial path that led towards a city-like infrastructure some 300 meters ahead. It was broken up into chunks, many of which looked haphazard and sticking out at various angles without purpose, but one thing he had learned since coming here was that nothing here was random.
What they would find inside he wasn’t sure, but it had been off limits to the general Temple population and Star Force had just earned access to it. The KoQ had said the Vargemma had gone on and on about tiered systems and pockets of power that would only be opened to those who proved themselves worthy. It was an underpinning to their teachings, but apparently had been misconstrued a bit, for without the part about fighting the Hadarak, virtually everything in this Temple lost its purpose.
But given new revelations, the teachings the Vargemma had given the KoQ were being straightened out and returned to their original purpose, for both Star Force and the enigmatic Order were both empires built on action rather than internal drama. And a lot of the little hints the Founders had left behind became obscured when one took on a passive mindset.
It would take days at the minimum to search this new facility, but by the end of it Bar’ku guessed they’d have access to a new weapon…or perhaps something much more important.
Meanwhile in the Core…
Mak’to’ran had left Itaru again, and not without good cause. He continually felt more and more constrained there, for his empire was not as stable as their Rimward rivals’ was. The independent J’gar were making ploys with those still loyal to the Empire to break away and join them, while the independent Oso’lon were making territorial acquisitions beyond their current worlds. Nothing that conflicted with the V’kit’no’sat patrols or trade routes, but they were seizing systems that technically fell within the V’kit’no’sat domain and they weren’t exactly asking permission.
They thought otherwise, having claimed chunks of the galaxy as t
heir own, but Mak’to’ran had never sanctioned that and kept his own operations where they were in the Feerno Region. The actual split in the V’kit’no’sat had never been fully acknowledged, but word had gradually gotten out about it and people knew there were autonomous regions within the Empire…what they didn’t know was that they had fully left it.
That cover kept there from being a war between the Oso’lon and the V’kit’no’sat over the extra territory in Feerno that wasn’t populated by either group, and the same was true of the J’gar, who held the Hesphatus and Delogi Regions, the latter of which was soon to feel the might of the Hadarak on its throat. The two regions were connected to one another, with Hesphatus being further away from the Deep Core, but the J’gar did not actually control them. They controlled pieces, the V’kit’no’sat controlled the rest, or at least oversaw it, though the Didact claimed it all…but without the strength to actually back up that edict.
Both the Didact and the Oso’lon Primearch had agents within the empire working against him, which was why Mak’to’ran could not leave Itaru without complications. That system was the key to the empire, and he who ruled it had the visible mantle of leadership…but those were semantics that most V’kit’no’sat now ignored. The Hadarak were on the move, and Mak’to’ran had proven himself as a leader. The bulk of the empire was solidly behind him so long as he could show them a path to victory…no matter how treacherous…but there were enough traitors and cowards mixed into the V’kit’no’sat ranks to cause trouble. For there were some that would eagerly abandon their oaths in exchange for power.
But even if they claimed it, that power would be temporary until the Hadarak reached out to consume their worlds. Such stupidity did not correct itself, and the closer the Hadarak got to the V’kit’no’sat boundary line the more the unworthy would come to the surface and begin to act. He needed to purge them as they did so, but not today. Today he needed to be in combat, and right now his fleet was engaged with a tier 3 Hadarak assaulting a system of 6 partially inhabited planets.
Star Force was here evacuating as many of them as they could, but without the number of warships they’d once had. Many had been withdrawn to fight the Vargemma in the Rim, but enough had been left behind to cover the evacuation transports…but not enough to kill Hadarak. That was left to the V’kit’no’sat, but the Hadarak were getting bold and intentionally targeting evacuation sites even if they were not the closest to their expansion waves.
It was as if they did not want to let the inhabitants get away, which made little sense to Mak’to’ran. If they intended to wipe out every planet in the galaxy then the order in which they did it did not matter, but now it seemed as if the Hadarak were beginning to operate out of spite…and that was something he had never seen them do before.
Regardless, it meant they were leaping ahead to hit the evacuation sites more often than before, and this Tier 3 was a 428 mile wide monster that nobody was going to stop unless Mak’to’ran could. He wasn’t sure if that was possible, but today was the day they found out just how much damage Legion could do.
His fleet had already engaged the Hadarak in orbit around the 2nd planet, with huge swarms of minions intercepting them before they could land more than a few Tar’vem’jic strikes on the monster. The fleet he’d brought was only a fraction of the size necessary to tackle a Hadarak this large and even hope to do damage, but he needed them for the swarm, not the main target. And he needed them to provide some very specific holes in those minion swarms, which were just beginning to appear now.
Mak’to’ran personally issued the order for the first Legion Ysalamir to move out of holding position behind the combat. There was a small crew onboard to make sure no interference in communications was possible, and that crew of Ari’tat flew the 38 mile long solid spike past the fleet blocking off the swarms from getting to it, though a scattering of the minions did. They plastered into the side of the craft, trying to slow it with IDF goo, but there weren’t enough of them and the defenses on the expendable craft easily dispensed with the attackers via point defense weaponry and modulated shields that dumped the goo off into the vacuum of space as it flew on.
It could not go very fast, for it wasn’t ramming the Hadarak, and on approach it felt the grip of the grapple fields, but a countermeasure system activated and nullified the pull. It took an immense amount of power to do so, but the Legion craft had been designed with massive capacitors that would provide enough power to get them to the target. After that they would not be needed again.
The little Ysalamir landed on the Hadarak’s surface near one of the massive tentacles so that it couldn’t curl over and smash them…but another nearby tentacle could reach that point in a matter of minutes, so they didn’t have much time. The Legion bored holes into the Yeg’gor armor, latching itself in place so it couldn’t be removed with the grapple fields, then the capacitors switched from protecting the bulk of the craft to protecting the crew module as it shot up and away from the Hadarak.
The anti-grapple fields were now split, with those still in the Ysalamir being weaker and only protecting the internal mechanisms. The grounding ‘legs’ were not covered, and they visibly torqued as the Hadarak tried to pry them free, but it couldn’t do so fast enough. As soon as the crew module got far enough away, enroute to a pickup with a dedicated Kaeper designed to grab and very quickly evacuate them from the battlefield, the tick-like attached Ysalamir activated with a burst of light beneath it followed by four smokey plumes of material moving outward like compass points.
They were directed via heavy shield columns powered by what energy was left in the capacitors, to get as much vaporized material out of the line of the beam that was boring down into the Hadarak…then when those finally failed the final mechanism activated and consumed the Legion craft as it converted the internal mass into a Ysalamir bomb directed down into the newly cut shaft.
Mak’to’ran watched the boring from this Kafcha, then flinched when the final explosion came. Or rather the double explosion. First was the detonation into the weapon matrix that puffed outward from the Hadarak in spectacular fashion, then came the rebound out of the wound…and with it flew chunks of Yeg’gor armor larger than some V’kit’no’sat ships, though he couldn’t see them with his eyes for several seconds. The targeting computers had to find them for him and the others as they scoped out the damage done to the Hadarak.
An 8 mile deep hole had been bored, but the crater was some 22 miles wide and elongated, with the narrowest part being only 6 miles wide. Mak’to’ran didn’t know if that was supposed to happen or was a quirk of how this Hadarak had grown, for they’d obviously found some kind of seam in it. But regardless, they’d damaged in a ‘small’ way the massive Hadarak far more so than anything else they had in their fleet could even dream of doing short of hours’ worth of continuous fire.
“A successful strike,” Belo’chat said from behind him on the command deck, with the I’rar’et perched on a specially made raised beam installed on the Era’tran ship for their guest.
“Indeed,” Mak’to’ran mewed. “What do you make of the crater size?”
“Curious, but not totally unpredicted. We’ve never been able to detonate Yeg’gor in this fashion, so the fracture process has only been guessed at. The end result I am pleased with. Are you?”
“Far from a skill shot, but it accomplished its purpose,” Mak’to’ran said satisfied as he dispatched another of the 38 Legion craft waiting nearby to target the center of the wound in order to deepen it further. “Let’s see how many it takes to get past the Yeg’gor. I don’t hope to kill this beast today, but if we can wound it badly enough that it cannot further its assault, then we will have a worthy victory.”
“Long enough for Star Force to finish evacuating the system.”
“That is secondary, but notable. The victory will be in stopping the unstoppable…but we are not there yet. Right now it is only stung, and not even responding to the attack.”
“It wi
ll when we hit its interior,” Belo’chat assured him. “I can promise you that much, assuming the fleet can continue to screen for Legion.”
“That we will,” Mak’to’ran said as his personal ship was engaged in sniping activity from the rim of the battlefield rather than staying beyond it like Star Force control ships typically did. He wasn’t going to dive into the heaviest of combat unless absolutely necessary, but he wasn’t going to be a spectator either. He had been a naval commander long before he became the sole leader of the V’kit’no’sat, and he wasn’t about to let the position transition him into a coward. Especially not today of all days, for they were not escorting a Star Force weapon this time. Legion was theirs, as was the responsibility to hunt and destroy Hadarak, for that’s what the very definition of what a V’kit’no’sat was supposed to be, and today they were reassuming that mantle even if Star Force was unable to return to the fight.
A telepathic chorus of cheers made its way across his ship when the crew saw the damage done to the Hadarak, and Mak’to’ran echoed a ‘roar’ of his own, though the command deck remained audibly silent. A V’kit’no’sat declawed was not truly a V’kit’no’sat, and today they had reattained parity with Star Force on this warfront…and as far as he knew the Zak’de’ron hadn’t, making the V’kit’no’sat, for the first time, truly dominant compared to their former masters.
He mentally activated his ship’s comm system on an odd frequency and sent a pithy, and quite rude, message to the Zak’de’ron scout ships he assumed had followed his fleet and were observing from afar as the second Legion arrived in the crater and attached itself, preparing to detonate as it shot its crew module back out of the Hadarak’s gravity well to the safety of a pickup ship as a number of minions raced to get to it first.
