by Aer-ki Jyr
“It looks different now.”
“How?” Cal-com asked.
“I see more detail. Little things I wouldn’t have cared to notice before because they weren’t relevant. The colors of the boats. The way the light shimmers off the water, daring you to connect the various colors to their sources.”
“You don’t see that in Pefbar.”
“You’re right. I think I’ve been relying on it more than my eyes.”
“And Pefbar allows you to touch everything, establishing a quasi-physical connection. But your eyes, and ears, and nose are simply receivers for emissions. You’re not down there on those boats, but you can see them. Sight without connection.”
“You didn’t have Pefbar with the Voku. So how did you have this problem?”
“We didn’t. Ours was a different problem. A problem of not caring enough because of lack of data. We were taught we needed to feel the galaxy in person to know how best to interact with it. Analyzing holograms and graphs and numbers are not sufficient to develop a feel, and it is our feelings that most likely are tied to our Core in some way. The Elders did not say that, exactly, but I have made a tentative connection since then. Our instincts are not wholly genetic memory.”
“So why do they not respond to our psionics? Why do I need this disconnect…which by the way I do. You were right. I just don’t understand why, though I can feel it.”
“And it’s that feeling you have been lacking?”
“I seem to have reversed myself,” Paul admitted.
“Two different points of view that one needs to be able to switch back and forth between to get a better calibration to reality.”
“And on the bridge of a flagship you can only get one perspective.”
“Indeed. I thought Archons understood this, given your 5 different military disciplines.”
“I’ve maintained all five onboard the ship, so I thought I had plenty of perspective,” Paul said sarcastically.
“As complex as the universe is, I don’t think you can ever have enough perspectives.”
“Wise words to remember. I don’t understand them, but I know they’re important.”
“What else concerns you?”
“I feel right for a reason I cannot understand, and it’s as if I must turn off my logic and experience to get that feeling.”
“That only means your logic is limited, and in order to match it to your feeling it must advance. Until then it is limiting you.”
“Do you know why?”
“You are wiser than me, so unfortunately I do not.”
Paul raised one of his hands up enough that his fingertips poked out of the long sleeves enough for him to look at his fingernails. He used to bite them, a long time ago, but had kicked the habit when he chewed a little too deeply once and they started to bleed. The Archon raised his hand to his mouth and rubbed his teeth on his index finger, not biting but filing one down a bit, with the sensation kicking in some old memories he’d thought were long gone.
“I went too deep out of a need to help others,” he said some minutes later as they both stood and watched the boat traffic pass underneath them. “Because I thought helping save as many lives as possible was the top priority. My logic says it still is, but my instincts say no.”
“That I can help you with. Would you murder an individual if that death would save 10 million?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s wrong.”
“Then your top priority is not to save the most lives. If it was, you would have gone darkside a long time ago in order to achieve that mission. All invariably do, for saving the most lives requires making sacrifices. It requires betrayal, for you must trade some for others.”
“But you don’t own them, which means they’re not yours to trade.”
“If saving lives was the top priority, it wouldn’t matter. Only what you had the power to do or not do.”
“Are you familiar with a vaccine?” Paul asked as an old memory resurfaced.
“No. What is it?”
“Something Earth used to use before Star Force. They would deliberately infect you with a virus, theoretically in a weakened state, so your body would fight it and win and create antibodies to make you immune to the virus later.”
“But there is no such thing as immunity to an errant virus unless the transmission method is blocked.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t know that back then. Or at least they didn’t tell us that. I learned later, through Star Force records, that the vaccines were maiming and killing a lot of people, but the governments covered it up and protected the vaccine makers because they felt the benefit to the populace outweighed the losses. They were willing to betray a few thousand to save a few million…or potentially save.”
“Did Star Force stop them?”
“Eventually. But I remember them saying on the news…back when it was more propaganda than actual facts…that the highest priority was in saving lives, and that no cost was too great to do so. I guess I had somehow taken the same notion with a caveat. Saving the most lives while maintaining your honor. And it’s dishonorable to kill a few to save millions…especially when those millions aren’t actually saved. But even if they were, and it was guaranteed they’d live forever, it still wouldn’t be right.”
“So the top priority is not to save lives, it’s to do the right thing?” Cal-com asked. “Didn’t Earth’s Klingons have a few words on that subject?”
“Death before dishonor, which they often noted when faced with a situation that seemed to force them to do something cowardly or die with the words ‘today is a good day to die.’”
“They turned the logic trap around on those attempting to leverage them into doing bad things for the sake of saving lives?”
“The Klingons didn’t actually exist. You know that, right?”
“I do, but the way you have spoken of them before they seemed important enough to have been real.”
“They weren’t big on saving lives. More about saving face. But they didn’t back down from a hard fight. They preferred it to stagnation….or actually they just preferred it period.”
“And you admire that?”
“When you grow up amongst a culture of weaklings, liars, and manipulators, sometimes it’s refreshing just to be able to punch a person in the face as a way of saying ‘hi’ rather than it being a crime. Things were really messed up back then, and I didn’t even realize most of it at the time.”
“You’ve never spoken of that before.”
“Problems solved and gone,” Paul said with a shrug. “Davis showed us a worthy path when he created Star Force. I guess I still owe him for that, though I’d forgotten. I’ve forgotten a lot, it seems.”
“If you lose your way, it is wise to backtrack until you find your proper path again, then follow it where it leads.”
“Is that why you brought me here? Because this planet is in bad shape.”
“We’re warriors. We go where the need is, and there is need here. We don’t think well when problems are theoretical. We need to feel them out.”
“There’s nothing here that can’t be solved with some annexation.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Good question. Now that I’m here I’m wondering why we haven’t myself, though I know the logistical reasons.”
“And that is why we must go to where the orbital bombardment will hit rather than relying on scouting reports.”
“We don’t need to bombard them to take over, you know?”
“Same principle. You just found better ways of doing it.”
“But if we annex this place, and the problems are solved, we will lose our purpose…or that’s how it felt before. Now I’m not so sure.”
“It’s because you’re here rather than onboard your ship imagining it. Imagination is limited to what you know. Exploration has no such limitations.”
“Then let’s keep exploring, if you’ll be my eyes so I don�
��t trip over anything. These robes are horrible for situational awareness.”
“But good for concealment. No one has noticed you are Human. And they don’t even know what a Voku is.”
“Let’s keep it that way. Lead on, my friend…”
3
October 18, 154929
Bo’vu’ma’shu System (Hadarak territory)
8th planet
A brilliant topaz beam shot down from the sky, momentarily blinding Esna-58321JOR-18 as her helmet faceplate switched to an alternate view that showed silhouettes of the enemy minions in the valley below for a split second before switching back to normal when the beam was gone.
It landed farther up the valley, disintegrating a tunnel entrance where a stream of Hadarak minions were pouring out…but it didn’t stay destroyed, for within seconds more pushed their way up through the ashes of their kin and into the valley as they charged with the others towards the defense line surrounding one of Clan Kai’sa’s 4 mining sites on the enemy-held planet.
Esna was standing on the defense wall along with thousands of her troops, but she wasn’t leading them. There were Archons here that were handling that, and they were far more skilled than her. She’d learned early on to defer to them in almost everything while she planned out their conquests and considered the myriad of ideas being sent to her for upgrades and new ways of fighting the enemy.
None of that had to do with her being on the planet. She was here to fight rather than sit in one of the three Zedas in orbit…which is where the topaz beams were coming from as they provided cover fire for the mining site. The weapon itself, a Zotark, was specifically designed to fight biological enemies and not energy shields. It was one of many specializations Clan Kai’sa had made in their equipment that gave them an advantage over the Hadarak that would be a disadvantage against other opponents.
But there were no other opponents here. This entire system was owned by the Hadarak, though Esna’s troops had done a great deal of damage to them since arriving some 8 months ago. They’d wiped out their naval forces, cleared the orbit of all planets of their infestation constructions, and toppled those rising up from the planets…yet they were not in a position to cleanse them of all Hadarak, especially those burrowed deep into the planet. That was not their mission here, for the assault to reclaim the galaxy from these monsters had not yet begun.
What Esna was doing was growing her Clan, and doing it by utilizing the rich resources on the planets that had once been held by others and were now completely consumed by the Hadarak. This planet had formerly been home to a primitive race that had no idea of the Corovon deposits buried in the planet, but others had noticed it and tried to take it from them previously. A lot of history later and some interventions by stronger races had seen the system still in the hands of the primitives when the Hadarak arrived, and now the natives were extinct. None had been evacuated. They had all died, with no means of interstellar travel to get even one of them out of the warzone.
The Hadarak were consuming the Corovon, and Esna was both denying some of it to them as well as claiming it for her own. But to get it out she had to put mining stations on the planet and defend them from the Hadarak armies who were not going to tolerate their presence. Hence the defense wall and the super-sized moon hovering in the sky above them that was continuing to fire down near the mining infrastructure at the enemy troops continually gaining in number.
Same old, same old. They were not going to stop, and they had no reinforcements that were different than before. It was just endless carnage that had to be fought, and the rewards were the Corovon deposits that would help build addition weapons, armor, and more Zedas. So the longer they held here, the more they would get, and even as the hundreds of thousands of minions surrounded the circular perimeter, occasional dropships were coming and going from the site as any flying minions were downed by the anti-air turrets before they could get within 8 miles of the wall.
They weren’t trying that approach much, and were sticking with the overland version. Esna was here with rifle in hand along with a lot of Commandos from many races, all of which were now in the purple/deep gray armor of Clan Kai’sa as they waited for the next wave to get within firing range.
The wall turrets opened up before then, for they had better range, and began blasting into the biological enemies and creating bloody explosions that left orange, red, green, and purple mist clouds based on the type of minion that was being killed. The Hadarak had many different varieties, and it was assumed they had been created from other races that were either absorbed and reformed, or genetic coding that was taken and used as inspiration for new minion forms.
They came in bipeds, quadrupeds, hexpeds, hoppers, runners, plodders, and crawlers, with more versions than the Paladin could ever hope to dream of. But they were all the same in design. Biological, no technology, no shields. Just claws, teeth, poison, acid, a few biological energy weapons, and sheer muscle. They were deadly in a very primitive way, but their coordination was not primitive. They operated both individually and with a partial hive mind as certain individuals acted as leaders. Taking those out could help somewhat, but there were none that were critical to the battle. Everything was redundant and expected to die, so the only way to beat them was to engage in the carnage and kill them faster than they could kill you.
And as many as the wall turrets killed, more ran by their dead kin heading for the wall and began taking shots from Esna and the others, who were peppering them with tiny Dre’mo’don blobs that absolutely wrecked their bodies when they hit those without armor. Some tore straight through and came out the other side with energy to spare, but the minions that had biological armor on them cracked and puffed disintegrated material when the shots hit, creating a cloud that obscured those behind…but the targets themselves kept moving forward and were clearly visible up until they fell and were run over by those behind them.
Beside Esna several Commandos pulled out rocket launchers from their back racks and started popping slow moving globs of pink energy out in an arc to land amongst the leaders, not even needing to hit them as the ‘easter eggs’ hit the ground and detonated, creating concussion waves that knocked the minions away from the epicenters so much they toppled like bowling pins, but most didn’t die. It was more disruption unless they were weak versions, or they took a direct hit, and the ‘Egg Poppers’ were one of many specialized Commando weapons that had proven effective at disrupting the horde in the past.
Esna took aim at one that was momentarily on the ground, putting 7 shots into it before it leapt forward onto its feet and ran a few steps before collapsing and getting tramped by those coming up from behind. She switched her aim to one of them and repeated the process until her rifle ran out of ammo, then she grabbed an extra clip from her pack and reloaded in about 3 seconds. After that she was back to firing again as a few of the lucky minions made it all the way up to the wall and swung at it with their limbs, some firing acid, but none of it got past the energy shield covering the physical wall.
They didn’t last long, with the troops focusing on them while the wall cannons kept their fire further away to disrupt the waves coming in rather than getting caught fighting at pointblank range. That had happened before, and Esna had quickly updated her Clan’s fighting profile to prefer breaking up the attacking waves rather than obsessing over shooting the closest enemies.
Those closer enemies swelled a bit, and some climbed on each other to jump up to the top of the wall only to get swatted down by dampening fields, Archons using their psionics, specialized weapons, etc. But once there were too many, and the wall itself was at risk of being overtopped, one of the Archons signaled the cease fire and Esna pulled back from the wall as the Hadarak continued to jump up towards them.
But the energy field covering the wall now extended up well into the air, stopping the jumpers but also stopping the Star Force troops from firing back, including the cannons that were now covered with the shield as well. A few seconds later Esna c
ould hear the charge building as the energy field grew more and more opaque, almost to the point of not being able to see what was on the other side, then it discharged, pushing outwards as a solid wall and throwing all the minions and their corpses back some 340 meters where they piled up, dead and alive alike, and the shield dropped back down to cover only the physical wall as it began to store up enough charge to repeat the process again.
When it dropped Esna pulled her rifle back up and over the edge of the wall, leaning it on the top rim to give her better aim than free handing it. She fired, over and over again, doing her small part along with everyone else without leading. She was in charge of the entire Clan, but in this battle she was just another Commando. One with basic psionics, but nowhere near the skill level of the Archons and Mavericks here.
She would not being going back to leading from afar. And if she died there were others who could easily take her place. Esna wasn’t exactly expendable, but her loss wouldn’t kill the Clan and that gave her a sense of peace at putting herself on the front lines. She’d tried the ‘lead from afar’ thing, but it’s not what she was cut out for. Monarchs could do that, and Admirals, but even the Archons couldn’t really stand to be away from the hardest fights for too long. Those who were the strongest needed to be on the front lines. That was the Star Force way, and it always would be.
But it was more than that for Esna. Her indoctrination into Star Force had been in battle, on the run from the V’kit’no’sat with Rammak and just trying to stay alive. After living through that, she knew she didn’t belong anywhere else. Esna had been weak and nearly helpless then, but no longer. She wasn’t the strongest or the faster, but she was capable now, and her place was helping those that were weak and helpless, as Rammak had helped her, and there was 2/3rds of the galaxy full of helpless people that these monsters were trying to get to and kill.
