by Aer-ki Jyr
The Hadarak learned fast, and before long they’d develop some tactic to make these strikes harder. But before they did that, Mak’to’ran was going to have his fill of vengeance and turn this beast running. It was high time they saved Star Force, and several hours later when the Hadarak had been wounded deeply enough to make it flee for the safety of the system’s star, Mak’to’ran also sent a pithy, but not so rude, message to the Star Force ships in the system.
YOU’RE WELCOME, HATCHLINGS.
5
August 28, 128548
Nephestus System (Repository System, Terraxia Kingdom)
Ittalika
Davis stood in the war room along with four of the trailblazers as the newest batch of updates from the Beta Temple came in, with all 5 of them silently digesting the information along with the information from the rest of the empire that was flowing more freely. The Beta Temple had to send reports back through the Bridge, and then couriers had to carry them to the outermost part of the Star Force communications network before they could be transmitted at a more reasonable pace.
But it worked, and though delayed, Davis and the other hidden Star Force leadership was able to monitor their progress and get the benefit of what they learned…and today there was a bit of new weaponry that they were adding to Star Force’s armory.
It had been protected behind a code locked shield, and the access code turned out to be a segment of the genetic code of the ‘ooze’ weapon the Lurker had deployed against Morgan’s now dead Borg-class warship. The Paladin had reported the existence of an identical facility on Alpha Temple, but to date the Vargemma had not been able to unlock it. And if it truly required contact with a Lurker, then that explained their difficulty. It seemed the Founders only wanted to give knowledge and power to those who needed it, and the Lurkers were not the first line of Hadarak defense, but the primary responders when the Hadarak were able to be killed in too quick a fashion.
The facility that had been unlocked on the Beta Temple was a factory to produce a counter-agent, though a technological one. It was an ooze of its own, designed to eat and destroy the Lurker weaponry without damaging anything else not specified. It could be modified to consume natural resources in order to expand itself further, but those had to be preprogrammed into the nanites before release. And those nanites also had a time stamp kill code mandated, so they couldn’t spread indefinitely, because they were hardened against area of effect interference. No signals could be received to override or alter their programming. They were essentially a technological version of bacteria designed to eat the ooze.
The rate of consumption was far inferior to that of the ooze, but the Shi’va’ti could be used to lay down a line of defense that the ooze would have a difficult time penetrating, thus giving the Founders and their chosen resistance fighters the ability to cordon off sections of affected landscape to prevent the ooze from spreading across an entire planet, or in quick moving applications, parts of a ship or facility.
Basically it was a fire extinguisher that could grow itself once deployed, and Davis was relieved to have it. Beta Temple was producing a large amount to send back for further research, but so long as they held that Temple they’d have the ability to design and produce Shi’va’ti to use in the war against the Hadarak. So far the Lurkers hadn’t used the ooze again, so Davis had nothing to test it against, but as soon as the Star Force fleet returned to hunting the now multiple Lurkers he was certain that they would start employing more and more of their exotic weapons.
He’d gotten word from Mak’to’ran that Legion was now in effect and living up to its promise. 18 Hadarak were now dead from it, and that only in a handful of months. The V’kit’no’sat were mass producing the kamikaze Ysalamiri, and he was glad to see that they were becoming effective. So far the Vargemma hadn’t shown up to interfere, but then again they weren’t going after true Ysalamir, but smaller expendable ones. That would make it almost impossible to track and destroy them, especially if the V’kit’no’sat were devoting resources to produce thousands of them.
Sadly though, Mak’to’ran also reported that a Lurker had already responded to the assaults and massacred one of his Legion-augmented fleets. When they attempted to latch onto the Lurker it simply disintegrated the Ysalamir. The backup plan the V’kit’no’sat had was to skip the drilling phase and just ram the Lurker with a timed detonation. Nearly all attempts were intercepted and destroyed, with just two getting through…and those only burned the surface armor for less than half a mile of penetration. It was a noticeable wound, but it wasn’t going to be enough to kill the Lurkers.
Davis had promised Mak’to’ran that if he could avoid the Lurkers and just hunt the Hadarak ‘Wardens,’ he’d send Materia-carrying fleets to assist once the Vargemma situation was resolved. He needed those badass weapons here to kill Olopar with, for the losses Star Force was taking across the empire were escalating badly. The Vargemma were being coy about what they were going to attack, which left Davis and the others having to guess with regards to where they sent their Materia.
Sometimes they guessed right, and the Olopar kill count was now up to 7, but the Vargemma had been able to knock out 9 constructs at 6 different Grid Points, and repairing/rebuilding those was not a quick process. The trade disruptions were giving Davis a headache, but he’d been rerouting much of Star Force’s priority shipping through black hole routes where applicable. The Vargemma couldn’t take those out, and a slower route was better than having to turn around whenever an existing Grid Point link suddenly went down.
But the civilian traffic was a nightmare in these locations, though the local Monarchs were managing it. The Grid Point system was something everyone in or associated with Star Force had come to rely on, and without it the galaxy suddenly got a lot larger. What normally took months of travel now took years in some cases, though most of the Grid Point network was still up and running, but Davis didn’t expect the Vargemma to stop knocking holes in it until they were forced to, and without a means of reaching the other Temples, Star Force couldn’t do that.
The death toll was catastrophic, for the Vargemma weren’t just targeting constructs, which had millions of people inside them anyway. They were firing on anything Star Force, and anyone at Star Force locations, so when they hit a Grid Point and the city-like spread of space-based facilities surrounding them, trillions of people were being slaughtered across the galaxy in total, and Star Force had no way to keep the enemy away from the highly populated areas other than to hit them with as much firepower as they could when they emerged.
That, at least, was diminishing the targets hit by requiring the Vargemma to send larger fleets to screen for the Olopar, but Davis knew they were just making more of them inside their Temples, as well as their own warships, which were dying en mass to accomplish these missions. Their technology was far inferior to Star Force’s, but it was getting the job done because the Essence technology added to it was letting them pop in and out wherever they wanted, bypassing traditional stellar orbit jumpline defenses.
Davis was used to it now, and though he didn’t like taking losses and becoming calloused to it, he had no choice. The Vargemma were attacking and he couldn’t stop it, so the only way forward was to weather the damage as they pushed for a means to attack the Vargemma in their secure Temples. Davis didn’t want to look at the lists of the dead, but occasionally he did just to remind himself of the horrors he was hiding from out here. For the sake of those dying and those who were going to die, he had to live and find a way to avenge them.
Another piece of the update from Beta Temple detailed Greg’s exploration of one of the ‘orbital’ facilities. There were no orbital mechanics inside a Dyson Sphere, just anti-grav to resist the tiny bit of gravity the shell emitted. Still, that little bit was enough to travel via dropship out to one of the facilities, all of which were shield locked until you passed the Founders’ little puzzles. Greg reported the Knights of Quenar were indispensable in this, for their Essence ski
llset seemed to cover areas that the Archons’ did not, and vice versa. Together they were unlocking a lot of stuff, but Greg reiterated that the bigger locks, such as on the portals, were far beyond their reach until they learned and grew their skills following the Temple’s training…and that was going to take years, if not centuries, to get to the prerequisite points.
Davis tried to console himself by remembering that they had shut down the attacks coming from the Alpha Temple, so the Vargemma had less to hit them with, but it didn’t seem to matter when viewing the battle reports coming in. Star Force was being blindsided everywhere, despite their adaptations that were causing the Vargemma to lose more and more ships as the Archons learned better how to fight them. The power of Essence was just too great to counter with standard weaponry, and the Vargemma were obviously willing to pay the price of these suicide victories with their numerous populations inside the Temples.
He still didn’t know how many there were, nor how many were inhabited or to what extent. Most people inside had never traveled between them, so the Paladin Mind Raiders couldn’t pull information about other Temples from them. Eventually they might grab someone who had traveled elsewhere, but based on the number of attacks hitting Star Force, Davis guessed they had dozens of Temples as full as Alpha…at the minimum.
Thrawn had gone a step further and actually attacked Alpha Temple from the exterior, after confirming that the inside of the attack point was clear of people. He tried all types of weaponry, but none of it affected the Essence field for even a moment. Where it was being emitted from was still a mystery, and the hole they tore into the exterior of the Temple was immediately tagged for reconstruction by the Caretakers…who did not travel beyond the Essence barrier to attack the Paladin ships outside. They just repaired the damage, invisible to those attacking from beyond.
A follow up report on the Caretaker activity repairing the breach caught Davis’s eye, as he was curious where they were drawing resources from. Were they mining them out of the crust, or did they have backup warehouses with ready-made replacements available?
The Paladin had backtracked some of it, dead ending in well defended facilities with shield-covered access points. The Caretaker craft were being allowed through the shields, and were coming out with crates that the Paladin had intercepted thereafter enough to scan inside…to find raw materials.
Not perfectly geometric cubes of hydrogen or other resources, but chunks of ore, or in some cases finely ground sand that were being processed in other locations in the Temple.
That made no sense to Davis. Why weren’t they being processed on site then transported with lower volume? They had their choice of the crust in the entire Sphere to mine, so why…
Davis froze as a thought occurred to him, and the subtle change in either his body or mind caught the attention of the trailblazers.
“Davis?” Paul asked from his left where he was reviewing other material with a halo of holograms around him.
“The raw materials are not coming from the Temple. They’re being imported to replace the mass that Thrawn extracted from the exterior.”
“From where?” Jax-064 asked.
“If it was another Temple they wouldn’t be crude. They’re coming from the field where the Caretakers do not have extensive refinement infrastructure.”
“A field trip,” Paul echoed.
“Exactly. How far are they going to get ore?”
Rex-079 pulled up a starmap of the area surrounding Alpha Temple. “Unless there are pockets hidden in the Nebula, the closest point is Kanethrol. I doubt they’re getting in there under our nose, so the next closest would be…19.2 lightyears away. It’s in the nebula or they’re using Essence travel.”
“Beta has no nebula, so where would they get theirs?” Blake-030 asked.
“The Caretakers are going in and out somehow,” Davis reiterated. “Maybe they don’t use the main portals after all?”
“A private back door between Temples,” Paul said. “And one out to quiet mining locations. The lost Olopar and warships would diminish the total mass within the Temple. If they’re precisely monitoring it…”
“More likely it’s the superstructure they care about,” Jax countered. “I’d guess the surface stuff is expected to be depleted over time, and they put a lot in to begin with.”
“Point,” Paul conceded. “Unless the Caretakers are programmed to restock it from underground. They have the burrowing technology to do it.”
“Too visible,” Blake pointed out. “If we get in there and really set up shop, we’ll be depleting resources faster than they could replenish them without an army going out into the galaxy they’re supposed to be hiding from. I’m with Jax on this one. The Temple is supposed to be a storehouse that gets depleted, but repairs to the superstructure are classified differently. They probably have to replace whatever they use to make the repairs, so that the denizens still have their full amount of resources available.”
“How’d they build these without being even more visible in the first place?” Paul asked.
Jax shrugged. “I don’t know, but the increase in Caretaker activity occurred when Thrawn poked a hole in the shell. Mass wise, that’s a lot less than the Vargemma are mining daily.”
“I still bet they have a backup plan for material loss. If they do for Essence, I bet they won’t let the entire Temple run out of resources.”
“That’s a lot to go through, Paul, but I agree,” Blake said with a nod. “My gut says they’re probably not anywhere near that point. The Essence was nearly empty, so they had to refuel to minimal levels.”
“Because the Vargemma have their own wells and didn’t give enough?” Rex wondered.
“We haven’t even found the reapers yet,” Paul pointed out. “I bet they have a separate Caretaker network of portals, and the visible ones are for denizen use.”
“Piggyback?” Rex floated, pointing out the obvious idea that Davis had been referring to.
“Without pissing off the Caretakers,” Jax amended.
“Or going through them,” Davis said with a clenched jaw. “We don’t have the time to play by the rules. We have to get to the other Temples, even if we have to destroy every Caretaker to do it.”
“They can make more,” Paul added. “I wonder if they will ever stop hunting us if we kill one of them in view…”
Rex smiled. “Yeah, we just have to be sneaky about it. How much surveillance do they really have?”
“Not enough down in the crust,” Jax said, referencing how the Paladin had killed snooping Caretaker drones beneath the surface where their comm signals wouldn’t penetrate. “But we’ll have to be damn careful up top in their facilities. The walls probably have a lot of imbedded tech.”
“We might be able to sneak through,” Blake suggested, “if they can’t track our bodies’ Essence.”
“Regardless, we have to find out if there’s another way to get to the other Temples,” Davis reiterated. “Don’t be shy about this. They’re just robots.”
“And robots don’t use Essence to get through the front door,” Rex noted. “The activation of any portals has to be by signal, so maybe, if they use the main ones…”
“We can replicate the signal and open them up drawing off the Temples’ Essence reserves,” Davis finished. “But that’s assuming we can hack them. We’re not there yet.”
“I think piggyback is our quickest option,” Paul said, flexing his hands in front of him. “And if we’re going where no man has gone before, we need our best.”
“Go,” Davis said, glancing at the others. “All of you. If we can fight a ground war without the fleet, then we will.”
“Well now I’m definitely going,” Rex said, cracking a smile at the thought of facing off against trillions of Vargemma solo.
“And if you can’t get through,” Davis said, acknowledging a very real possibility. “Find the smallest portal you can and tear it apart. Reverse engineering our own might be quicker than passing the Foun
der skill tests.”
“Right,” Blake acknowledged, knowing that would probably put them in the decades range, at least, before they could get reinforcements to the Paladin, let alone any other Temple. “My money is on sneaking in, and if there’s a way we’ll find it. I promise.”
“Just get it done,” Davis said, pained. And they all knew why, for they shared the same frustration at sitting helpless while people were being ambushed and killed and they had no way to stop it, only survive it, and that did not sit well with any Archon of any rank, let alone the Director who took a more personal responsibility for the Empire that he had crafted, more so even than the trailblazers did.
Rex punched Paul lightly in the shoulder and ran out, with the other three trailblazers following and getting the rest still in hiding here to join them as they went straight to the hangar bay and then off planet. That left Davis here alone, but that was fine with him. If he couldn’t go with them…and he really wanted to…then it was better not to hamstring any of them by keeping company.
He still had an empire to run, and though it could do well enough in his absence, a few little orders given here and there could make a difference in lives, so he’d wait and watch from here, passing along clandestine messages to the Monarchs where needed, and keeping himself alive just in case something went horribly wrong in Beta Temple. But a part of him wanted to be there if it did, for he didn’t want to survive if the trailblazers did not…but he had to. That was his responsibility, for he was the Vargemma’s number 1 target, and after surviving in a situation where he should have died, he wasn’t going to test his luck again, though he very much wanted to be exploring the Temples with the trailblazers and actively doing something to get at the Vargemma, rather than sitting in the center of the spider’s web and watching the empire take hit after hit after hit with no relief in sight.
