1

May 29, 3151

Gavratel System (lizard region)

Outer Zone

As the Clan Ghostblade jumpship moved near the construction site a tiny spec left the opening hangar bay before the dropships did, traveling through the emptiness of space until it landed on one of 18 joined construction cradles that were enwrapping a large skeletal structure that was being slowly added to. Kara walked across the landing bay, her armor unwrapping from around her body as she drew a few curious glances, but by now most people within the Clan knew that she could fly through space on her own and more often than not wouldn’t bother wasting a dropship when she needed to transfer from ship to ship.

“What have you brought for me today?” Vreemont asked, glancing at the huge Star Force jumpship only partially visible outside the open bay doors.

“Those special items you’ve been wanting,” Kara said with a smile. “No more trips back to the ADZ for us.”

The Human tech pumped one arm in celebration.

“How far along are we?” Kara asked as the pair turned to walk off the bay floor as the first of the cargo-laden dropships began to appear as dots moving away from the jumpship.

“We got another 12 shipments of structural materials in while you were gone, so that’s put us a little further ahead of where I thought we’d be at this point. Frame completion is at 72%.”

“How long before the gravity drives are working?”

“Insystem or interstellar?”

“Full working.”

“We’ll need shields before we can start hopping around too much,” he reminded her. “We’re nowhere close to getting this beast truly mobile, I’m afraid.”

“Damn,” Kara said, knowing that as long as they stayed here there was a small risk of detection. They were low on the galactic plane in lizard territory, or rather one of the star systems that the lizards didn’t want and that held no habitable planets. There was little here at all, and what there was was located in the inner and middle zones. Right now Kara had two ships mining asteroids there and keeping a close eye on any traffic that might be passing through the system. They would have no business here and not pay attention to anything beyond stellar orbit, but she didn’t want to be detected at all.

The joined mess of construction cradles was located far beyond those mining ships, beyond the high zone and all the way out into the outer zone of the system where there was literally nothing. Kara wanted it that way, because what they were building was by no means small, and if someone did find and come after them it would take them a long time to get out to where they were without any nearby planets or even small rocks to gravitationally brake against. Her jumpship had to decelerate to a stop by pulling on the distant star, but thanks to Star Force’s advanced drives it wasn’t too strenuous an endeavor, though it did take a considerable amount of time to get out this far while maintaining the ability to stop before going interstellar.

“You hoped for more?” Vreemont asked.

“Given your reputation, yes.”

“Ouch,” the tech said. “Now that hurts.”

She wrapped a friendly arm around his neck, making sure not to squeeze too hard. “I just want my baby mobile, even if all she is is a skeleton.”

“It’s going to take a while, I’m sorry,” he said as she let go. “I’ve got enough gravity drives online to slowly move around the system, but without a larger power core it’s not worth much right now aside from not having to worry about attitude adjustments.”

Kara raised an eyebrow. “Do we need any?”

“Just keeping with paranoid protocol and aligning the axis to point our smaller profile towards the star.”

“Good boy,” she said as they came to a junction and both of them climbed a ladder to get up to the next level. “You getting much drift?”

“Negligible, but every time we connect a new component it nudges her a fraction. The cradles were compensating for that, but the more mass she gets the bigger the adjustments are needed. As of now she can nudge herself back into alignment.”

“Well, that’s something then,” she said, obviously disappointed.

“You weren’t gone that long,” Vreemont pointed out. “Did you pick up any new recruits?”

“A few specialists and a handful of Archons.”

“Any good engineers?”

“Four. They’ll be transferring over on the dropships.”

Vreemont smiled. “Keep sending me as many as you can get. Calista isn’t going to build herself.”

“No, but she’s going to help us build a lot of other things,” Kara said as they got to the command center of this massive construction project…which was no more than a small utility room on the cradle that had been reconfigured with workstations and a realtime hologram set up in the center.

When Kara entered she could see the massive construct with the cradles circling it like spiders with their tethers interlocked and forming a crude cage around it that matched the view from outside, but this hologram wasn’t a visual. Rather it was a schematic that showed varying levels of completeness, the location of individuals and ships actively working on the construction, and the fleet of vessels sitting alongside that were fabricating the components for it and then passing them off to the cradles or delivering them directly to the various worksites.

As she watched, the dropships from the jumpship split apart with most heading for that fleet while a handful continued over to the cradles to deliver specific personnel and the rare compounds and equipment that Kara had gone back to the ADZ to get from Clan Sangheili. Lots of arc elements and solari, plus some special items that the Ghostblade fleet couldn’t yet produce on their own. That would be changing as upgrades were made to her existing factory ships…upgrades that these new bits of equipment would now allow them to produce.

“Are you running into any problems?” she asked, looking at what in time would become a tiny, but mobile Star Forge-class mining station. One that her mobile civilization could haul around from star system to star system to mine the solari and other stellar materials they needed rather than having to rely on their two patron Clans for supplies. Once Calista was fully operational, Clan Ghostblade would be totally independent save for personnel, with their mandate not to house younglings. Every person here was either part of Clan Saber or Clan Sangheili in the records and had grown up in the ADZ, and that was going to continue to be the way they operated.

The Clan’s ships, however, were not from the ADZ. All of them had been built off the books and away from prying eyes. Making the Ghostblade fleet something that didn’t exist as far as Star Force’s computer systems went, with her personnel simply being misplaced individuals of other Clans that were carefully marked as being in varied locations on ho-hum assignments that nobody would notice them missing from. A few extra personnel listed here and there on the master records but emitted from the local ones where an Administrator would notice absent personnel, and you had a way of siphoning off people without anyone else being the wiser.

The Clans knew what was happening, for it had been Paul and Jason’s idea, but aside from the upper management in those two Clans the rest of their populations and even Earth didn’t know about the Ghostblades, including Davis. The only person who was ever noted as being gone was Kara, but it was easy enough for Paul to claim she was out on a mission for him, which she was, but no one knew it was a permanent one or to what scope it had grown.

Tell people Kara was out singlehandedly hunting down lizard warships and they wouldn’t ask any further questions, giving her the perfect cover to build her Clan away from the ADZ…though she wasn’t the only one. Other trailblazers had their clandestine networks in play and growing by the century, and those too were kept off the books, at least as far as the public maps were concerned, but Clan Ghostblade differed in that it wasn’t an operation supported by a Clan, it was a Clan in and of itself, and it had no territory to root itself in. They were all living and working on ships, right down to producing their foodstuffs on the go, and Calista was going to give them the stellar mining power to match.

They’d have to take long stops to activate it, but that wasn’t unusual. Her fleets didn’t keep moving constantly, rather finding and ducking into little dark corners like they were now where the lizards and others never traveled. They’d park here and do what they needed, then eventually move on to reposition closer to their own supply lines or if traffic increased and there was a chance of detection. Kara had fleets moving all over, none of them getting so far away that they’d lose cohesion and their string of courier ships couldn’t find them, but the idea was that if one group ever was found it would only be a small cell of the Clan, with nobody truly knowing how large they were.

Kara knew, and a handful of others, but even most of the Ghostblade personnel didn’t know how many ships they had or where they were other than the small groups they were assigned to and rotated between, nor would they show on any map. Each fleet left a single ship at a rendezvous location, one that Kara knew to find, and with it would be the itinerary of the fleet wherever it was in the nearby region. That way the fleet could move around despite the lack of a relay network that they hadn’t yet gotten around to building.

It was coming though. After they built this star forge they’d be constructing communication ships that would sit at the predictable locations and act as mobile relays, then the roaming fleets could signal to them, knowing their location, and tell them theirs, after which a two way exchange could occur until such time the fleet moved on. That would allow information to be transmitted across Ghostblade ‘territory’ without having to send courier ships…but to get a comm ship big enough it’d have to be seda-sized and they’d need a lot of them to put up a grid across even a small region of space.

That region would travel wherever the Clan went, though as the Ghostblades grew Kara knew she was going to have to get more clever in her structure, but being able to stay in contact was essential should something happen, especially back in the ADZ. She hadn’t discussed it with Paul yet, but she was going to take one of those communications ships and stick it on the outskirts of a border Star Force system so she could tap into the grid and transmit data updates to her Clan without having the extra lag of using courier ships, though she knew she couldn’t transmit back into the Star Force grid without potentially being detected.

And to do all that she’d need a camouflaged communications ship. Yet one more thing on her to-build list, but right now communications was a luxury, not a necessity. Getting the raw materials she needed to build everything was a necessity, and until Calista got up and running she was going to have to keep sucking off of the Sabers and Sangheili for rare materials. That had to end sooner rather than later, and what she’d just brought back would be enough to construct the star forge itself, but there were a lot of other projects like those communications ships that would require a lot more, and until she had her own stellar mining operation they were going to stay in planning stages only.

Kara pulled a datachip out of her uniform pocket and slid it into a receptacle, adding to the cradle’s database a myriad of information.

“What’s this?” Vreemont asked.

“Some new ideas from Jason and a batch of new tech updates from Earth.”

“I love updates,” the tech said, pulling up the files and skimming through them in the otherwise empty room, for all other personnel were off on tasks and busy doing their part to build this monster of a mobile mining platform.

Kara waited, watching his blank face until it lit up like a fireworks display. “Oh my…god.”

“Thought you’d like that one,” she said with a smirk.

“How the hell did Tennisonne do that?”

“He’s good.”

“No…” he said firmly. “This is way over his head. Top level V’kit’no’sat stuff.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. We’re nowhere near to this tech level yet. How is this possible?”

“He found a shortcut,” Kara said deviously.

Vreemont’s eyes were still on the data files even as he was arguing with Kara. “Explain that.”

“He figured out how to do something the V’kit’no’sat never did, though in their defense they never needed to since they didn’t have a full picture of the tech progression. Jason said he’s been working on this for a very long time.”

“I don’t believe this,” Vreemont said, rereading the same summary texts twice. “He’s actually found a way to achieve atomic restructuring without an assembly matrix.”

“Only in a few cases,” Kara added.

“He shouldn’t be able to do it in even one,” the tech said firmly. He wasn’t in the top tier of Star Force’s engineers, the ones doing groundbreaking research to catch Star Force up to the V’kit’no’sat, but he was just below them and had access to everything they did, including shared field notes. Had he not been born in the century he did he would have been in that top tier, but those techs had a head start on him and somehow one of that had just found a way to do the impossible.

“Can we implement those?”

Vreemont rubbed his tongue inside his teeth as he thought. “Not right away, but the compact nature of the equipment required means we should be able to get decent production quotas out of our current hull sizes. The jumpships, I mean. We might be able to squeeze this into a factory ship, but the output would be minimal.”

“Even a little carbon can go a long way…if we rework other items into a carbon base,” she said, referencing the alchemy that Tennisonne had just figured out how to achieve in a few select transitions using what the V’kit’no’sat would have deemed irrelevantly outdated technology, but he’d done it in such a clever way that she knew the V’kit’no’sat would never have even attempted to research down that pathway. They built for the bigger and better, never figuring out how to make do with less. Star Force was middle of the road, reaching for those higher technologies while also being forced to make the most of what they’ve got now in order to grow their empire as fast as possible, but in the case of Clan Ghostblade, doing more with less was essentially their mandate.

As far as the carbon synthesis went, Tennisonne had found a way to take hydrogen atoms and remake them into carbon ones without the energy heavy and extravagant process the V’kit’no’sat used in their assembly matrixes, which typically occupied a 22 mile wide footprint on a planet for even the smallest facilities. They never really had a lack of carbon, which was yet another reason they probably hadn’t discovered how to do what Tennisonne had, with the assembly matrixes more focused on creating exotic atoms that were rare to mine and some that didn’t exist in nature altogether, as well as being able to crank them out in volume.

Tennisonne’s approach had taken inferior technology and found an ingenious way to make the hydrogen to carbon transition with a comparatively low energy application that could be achieved in a facility ideally less than a mile wide, with smaller factories possible but at a significantly reduced output rate. A certain critical mass of machinery was required to make it all work, and Tennisonne’s process was unique to each specific alchemy, meaning that one of his proposed assembly matrixes could only produce one output.

But that was so incredibly valuable for Star Force, not to mention the Ghostblades, that Vreemont’s reaction had not been overstated. And coupled with the hydrogen mining capability that a star forge provided, Kara’s Clan would never have to go looking for carbon to mine again…and if they could convert a lot of the technologies within the fleet to carbon alternates, which other techs had been researching for quite a long time, as well as with other more common elements, then she could retool her Clan to afford a lot more industrial output and not have to worry about available resources limiting their growth, or even repair efforts.

Hydrogen was the most abundant element in the known galaxy, with every star about to turn into a fill-up station once Calista was completed.

Which was why Vreemont was so geeking out right now.

“They won’t be as resilient in most cases, but I agree that carbon is our ticket. We can supplement a lot of load bearing structures with carbon configurations to replace at least some of our corovon requirements if you’re willing to suffer reduced strength.”

“Which is why I’m going to be sticking around here for a while,” Kara agreed. “You and I need to outline what acceptable limits are and see how much of a production advantage we can milk out of this. We also need to reduce the number of elemental components to as few as possible, even if just for a prototype design. If we can one day get them all down to resources we can mine from a star…I want that, in a bad way.”

“And you could just sit in orbit and soak up the energy needed to make the conversions,” Vreemont said, thinking rapidly. “Tennisonne isn’t there yet, and I could tick off a list of things we’d still have to go hunting for right now even if these blueprints were working facilities, but I didn’t think even this would be possible without a full assembly matrix. I wouldn’t guarantee anything, but if we can even just get the carbon conversion working we’re going to be able to build a lot more ships without having to poke our noses into systems we don’t want to.”

“I really want this,” Kara emphasized. “Start working on it whenever you can without slowing Calista down. Without her this doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Mostly,” Vreemont corrected. “There are still other applications available, but I see your point. This is a historic day, to be sure.”

“I know,” Kara said with a smug smile. “Star Force just got a whole lot more powerful.”

2

April 5, 3159

Shemtala System (lizard territory)

Yametren (contested world)

Jaina-61004 jumped to a branch above her head, grabbing hold and hauling herself up on top before repeating the process. She gradually worked her way to the top of the tree, branches scraping harmlessly over her dark blue armor as she got above the tree line enough to poke her helmet out. From there she could see down into the valley and the river below, beyond which there were several smoke plumes…but she didn’t think these were damage related.

The Archon made a quick check of the battlemap again, seeing no lizard assets in the area, at least as far as aircraft and known ground troop deployments were concerned, but there was always a chance you’d run into the little buggers roaming the forest at the wrong time. If they moved quick they might get there before those smoke plumes drew the wrong attention.

She slid down between the branches, falling in spurts until she finally hit dirt with her Protovic unit waiting patiently nearby. With a mental command they all started moving along with her, following in a line 25 people long as the Archon led the way at a run. All were armed and armored with supplemental packs on and had been in the field the past 5 days trying to hunt down survivors from a lizard attack on a Menbati outpost.

For 733 years the Menbati had held off the lizards, having no orbital capability but living in caves and small surface bases often hidden within the terrain, having their population gradually reduced while causing the lizards numerous casualties over the long haul…and Jaina would be damned if she let the lizards get to this group before she.

The Archon ran hard, but not so hard that she’d leave her troops behind. They weren’t too slow, but they were young. All of them were Star Force Blues, having graduated from their maturia at ‘full color,’ which was how the citizenry had dubbed those that stayed in long enough to earn all of their upgrades. None had earned any of the three additional colors and none would for more than a century, for they operated like Archon ranks, totally skill based with no additional abilities, and were damn hard to earn. As it was these Blue/Pinks were the highest ranking individuals within the Protovic that had their abilities.

The old school Protovic were fighting elsewhere, helping with some of the Core World invasions while the new Blues were pressing into less hazardous lizard territory in conjunction with the H’kar. Right now there was a large H’kar fleet in orbit that had fought through the lizard fleet with the help of a handful of Star Force ships, but they were wisely leaving most of the hand to hand fighting to the Protovic.

The lizards had about 3/4s of the planet when the allied invasion had finally got to them, and in the past 2 months they’d cleaned out half a continent of lizard bases…but the lizards obviously knew their days were numbered so they were making full out assaults on anything Menbati, trying to eliminate as many of their long term nemesis as they could before Star Force wiped them out. Trouble of it was, now that help had arrived, the Menbati were coming out of hiding themselves to fight the lizards head on. Star Force had warned them not to, but given that they’d only just met and communication was sketchy, they weren’t listening.

Lots of Star Force troops were not available for invasions this small, given the amounts needed elsewhere, but the Protovic Blues needed experience so Brad had them out on the ‘smaller’ frontier worlds getting a feel for combat with their new skillset and learning how to make use of it outside of training and challenges. Jaina was one of many Archons here leading the way and watching over them, but 99% of the troops were Protovic with unimpressive levels of combat experience.

They weren’t incompetent, far from it actually, but compared to some mainline units that had been fighting the lizards for over 500 years these Protovic were barely past being newbs and she knew she couldn’t expect too much of them. Throw in their cocktail of abilities that not even Brad had fully come to grips with yet and these invasions were part experiment, part training mission, and part ass kicking…with an added part rescue thrown in on this one.

Jaina broke trail, pushing through the vegetation and grabbing what bits of paths were available all the way down to the river with the Protovic in their brilliant blue armor trailing close behind her, but not so close that they’d trip over her or each other if someone suddenly stopped.

Which she did at the water’s edge. Able to communicate telepathically with them both ways given their own limited mental skills, this unit hadn’t said a spoken word since they’d left their dropship and started searching on foot through the vegetation that had a very high sensor reflectivity value…which was probably why the Menbati had been able to evade the lizards for so long.

Anything above the trees was visible enough, but duck below and even Star Force’s comm range dipped lower than normal. Her unit could still use short range comms and battlemap links if they stayed close, but the nature of this planet made things interesting and Archons excelled in interesting…especially whenever it brought things back to old school. The lizards couldn’t use comms worth a damn out here, but with her range she could telepathically communicate and track her team at a good distance and have them able to answer back at shorter, but workable range.

This wasn’t her first mission with Protovic, and some of these she’d worked with in past weeks, but after 5 days together they were getting used to each other and the telepathic shorthand that Jaina and other Archons working with the Blues had agreed upon using. Even though they’d been around for three centuries, the Protovic were still very raw in some respects, due in no small part to their recent conversion to Blues. That aspect of their faction was still being worked out, and as a result just about everything else had to adjust as well.

But Jaina knew it was worth it. She could work with these Pink Blues in ways she couldn’t even work with Human Commandos. Having telepathy work two way and having her troops be able to spot nearby minds themselves was a huge advantage, not to mention their default running skills that gave them enough of a head start that they could keep up with her at a decent pace…along with other tricks the Archons had been learning.

Jaina planted herself on the river’s edge and mentally coordinated with those behind her within a second. The nearest Protovic came out of the forest at a full sprint with her giving him a telekinetic lift as soon as he came within a step of the water, adding her power to his momentum to throw his blue armor all the way across. He landed on the dirt feet first then tumbled through a somersault as his center of gravity was too far forward. He recovered quickly and got to his feet just as the next Protovic was flying across the river behind him.

One by one they all came across without too much of a gap in between, though the last two barely made it. Jaina didn’t have unlimited telekinetic power and sending 25 across had nearly overtaxed her, but the Archon knew her current limits well enough considering how many times they’d done this already as they crossed the countryside looking for Menbati survivors.

Once she got the last one across she dropped into a crouch then tapped into her powered armor and jumped, getting about a third of the distance across before landing in water and having to trudge her way across as the Protovic rushed on ahead of her as instructed. When she got to the river’s edge and back onto dry ground she took off far faster than any of them could run and started to make up the gap while staying in telepathic communication and guiding them as to which way to head.

Steering from the rear, so to speak, she eventually caught up with the end of the line and started passing them agilely, working her way up to the front of the line and retaking her place. Not long after that she sensed Menbati minds and adjusted their heading. Tearing through the forest she led the Protovic on, wondering when their luck would end and a lizard wisp or transport would show up on the battlemap that was cutting in and out whenever they passed under extra thick tree cover.

When they were almost on top of the Menbati she slowed down, with the Protovic silently matching her speed all the way into the camp. Jaina reached out and made mental contact with one of the locals, letting him know someone was coming and forcing him to calm down and realize it was a friend before they burst into view.

Her dark blue armor slid through a bush and into a sub-canopy clearing that had the brush removed but not the overhead branches. Inside was a group of tents and a campfire that was leaking the smoke up through the trees, with dozens of Menbati getting to their feet as the Archon appeared, followed by sets of brighter blue armor that casually walked out behind her.

She could sense other camps nearby, with probably some 200 or more survivors within her telepathic range. “We are Star Force and were sent to collect you,” she said, using the hastily compiled translation software. It wasn’t that detailed, but was sufficient for basic communication. “We are friends.”

The little armadillo-like Menbati were standing erect about 1.2 meters tall and pointing weapons at the Archon. They were clearly agitated and afraid, but Jaina wasn’t and tried to spread calming vibes into their alien minds.

“Why are you here?” her helmet said a split second after one of the Menbati spoke in a series of guttural spikes that sounded like sharp coughing.

“To find you and bring you back to the others before the enemy kills you,” she spoke, trying to use simpler words for the program to latch onto. With a thought she made sure that the Protovic slung their weapons onto their back racks so they didn’t appear as threatening and that they did it in full view of the Menbati.

“How did you find us?” another one asked.

“Smoke. How many of you are here?”

“At least 900,” a Menbati commander said as it rolled through the others then unfurled itself to stand before her, apparently not afraid. She searched his mind, finding bits and pieces that she could decipher, along with the knowledge that he had been aware of Star Force’s efforts in other parts of the planet and the fact that they were here to kill lizards…along with an ambiguity about what else they might do afterwards.

“Gather them here,” she said with a frown, trying to extend her senses out far enough to catch them all and failing. Where the others were she wasn’t certain, but if she could sense more than a kilometer they must have been pretty spread out. Plus she hadn’t noticed any smoke further away, “and we will fly you away.”

“Where are your flying craft?” the commander asked, looking up at her opaque helmet.

“We will call for them now,” she said, sending a mental command to one of the Protovic in the back that was out of view to climb a tree and send a message in the clear, highlighting this position on the global battlemap and calling for dropship pickup, “but all of you must be here when it comes and we must cut away the trees so it can land.”

Technically they could go back to the river, but she didn’t feel like trying to move the Menbati at all at this point.

“We are spread out so the enemy cannot find us.”

“How far away are the others?”

“They are guarding *****, and cannot leave. Others can.”

Jaina frowned. The buzzing she’d heard indicated a word that didn’t have a translation. She tried to search this one’s mind for the meaning but got lost in the jumble of unfamiliar thoughts.

“All must come before the enemy sees your smoke.”

“There is no smoke at *****. They will not find it.”

“Your word is unknown to us. Describe what they guard.”

“It is important. We cannot leave it.”

“Can it be moved?”

“No.”

“Show me where it is.”

The Menbati hesitated and Jaina could feel all of their minds defensively wall up.

“No one is permitted to see *****. You cannot.”

“What if the enemy finds it?”

“We will defend it.”

“They will number more than 900.”

“We will defend it.”

Jaina sighed. “How many will join your others far away?”

“These here. More nearby.”

“We will take down trees there,” she said, pointing to her right just south of this tent camp. “We will clear the area for the ship.”

“We will help,” the commander said, with six of the Menbati behind him suddenly running over to where Jaina had pointed and began digging into the roots. She stared at them for a long moment until she realized they weren’t just digging, but also tearing into the wood with their teeth like a beaver.

“Do you eat the trees?”

“We eat many things. Trees bad, but we not starve.”

A few Protovic headed over and started pumping rifle shots into another one a little further away as Jaina got a telekinetic feel for the trunk even from where she was standing. “Do you have hurt people?”

“Some.”

“Bring them first.”

The Menbati turned around and had a conversation with the others that Jaina could only get bits and pieces of translated, for several were talking over one another and messing with the computer analysis that couldn’t yet pick out one voice from another. Maybe they all sounded alike or the software just didn’t have that ability activated, but when they all talked it basically cut out her ability to understand any of them.

Soon two of the Menbati started running on two legs away from the Archon then leaned forward and fell into a roll that didn’t stop. Forming a rough circle with their armored backs, the Menbati moved like a wheel through the forest with their arms and legs tucked inside. The perfect circle wobbled, throwing weight and shape in the forward direction to continue propelling itself in a way that was inefficient on its own, but was more than adequate of maintaining and increasing momentum once underway.

Combine that with their natural armor and they could roll through brush with ease, and once out in the open could gradually accelerate up to vehicle speeds while carrying their short rifles and equipment pouches across their center like an axel that stuck out to both sides.

Jaina figured she could outrun them, but they were impressive little things. Especially considering that they’d frustrated the lizards for so long. That spoke volumes for their indirect combat potential, despite their smaller size. Altogether she figured the one who had been talking to her was probably a little heavier than her out of armor, with the weight differential maybe evening out when she was fully equipped.

The sound of plasma stopped and Jaina telekinetically pushed, leaning the tree away from the Menbati with several Protovic also pushing with their hands and bodies at the base as the very tall tree came crashing down through others. Shortly thereafter one of the Menbati had gotten through enough roots for his tree to start leaning over, though it held firm at an angle until one more root snapped, then it came down to about a 30 degree angle from the ground, sticking on something further up in the canopy at its top.

One of the Menbati jumped on top of the trunk and walked up into the leaves, then the sound of teeth rubbing like a chainsaw resumed while the Protovic swarmed around their own tree and lifted it up with the arm power of some eight of them while two more traveled the length of it shooting off branches. Smoke from that added to the campfire, but soon the trunk was more or less plucked and the Protovic walked it off into the nearby forest and dumped it out of the way, then came back to collect and haul off the branches before they started on the next tree.

Trouble.

What? Jaina asked as a battlemap update was relayed from Protovic to Protovic then to her through the trees beginning with the scout now up above the canopy. Nothing was visible nearby, but in the very far distance there was a squadron of wisps heading in approximately their direction.

She also got an ETA on the dropships, noting that they would be arriving in approximately 2 hours and 18 minutes…which meant if these lizards had seen the smoke or would come close enough to spot the smoke that they would be in for a forest fire of strafing runs, and the materials in the leaves that blocked sensor and comm signals wouldn’t be stopping phaser blasts.

3

Jaina ran over to the nearest Menbati and got its attention, not sure which one was the leader given how similar they all looked.

“The enemy is coming by air. Stop the smoke.”

There was no response to her, but the Menbati did start chattering with each other for a few moments before several took off into the forest while another two went over to the nearest campfire and began kicking dirt on it. Jaina extended her hand towards it and put a bioshield over top, catching the smoke and holding it in a growing ball as they got it covered, then she pulled the ball towards her and started running with it, gradually squeezing out little bits and spreading it into the forest in too small of amounts for it to rise up and attract attention.

Keep working on the clearing, she ordered as she made her long trek out and back, with her hopping up into the tallest tree she could find on the return and climbing to the top. From there she got a view on the distant wisps and could tell that they had in fact seen the smoke, for their heading was directly towards where the puffs were dissipating. At least by the time they got here they wouldn’t have markers to target the camps with. They would have the clearing to spot, which meant they’d be coming on a direct line from their current position to…

Jaina marked that position as a waypoint and in her memory before dropping out of the tree and ran hard across the forest to a position about a kilometer ahead of the growing clearing and climbed another tree, racing to get to the top before the wisps got here.

She barely made it, poking her head up just in time to see them fanning out and beginning to fire into the forest randomly, intending on carpeting the area with phaser strikes given their sensors’ inability to pick out the Menbati, though there were several Protovic visible ahead once they got into a high enough angle to see down into the tiny clearing.

They might also be able to spot her, though most of her body still had some leaves covering her armor. That didn’t matter, for if they came to her so much the better. She needed them to get as close as possible…

With pink lances falling around her and exploding trees into shrapnel filled fireballs, the Archon mentally grabbed hold of the nearest wisp as it closed in and did as much hacking as she could in that short amount of time. Her skills weren’t as good as the more advanced Archons, but this wasn’t the first time she’d been in a lizard’s mind. Knowing she had to work fast, she sent it an overwhelming impulse to dive from a threat overhead.

As it passed her the yellow/tan craft dipped down, running through the top of the trees before starting to pull up again, but it caught a taller one and a thick enough central branch that when it bent over it caught on the wisp and pulled it over with it, smashing it down into the trees below that then bowled over as it broke free and tumbled into trunk after trunk as it tried to regain emergency altitude.

The small, unshielded craft rose up again and well out of Jaina’s range to influence as the other wisps were circling back around for another firing pass, but it came up dented and torn. It sailed upward in a smooth arc, getting some 200 meters above the treetops before a small puff of an explosion inside the craft preceded it from arcing back down and slamming into the forest for keeps.

That left five wisps in play, but they suddenly gained altitude and distance, increasing their range from the threat and keeping Jaina from getting close enough to snag another one. She didn’t know if they suspected an Archon was here or if they were just being wary of whatever the threat was, but they quickly began firing again randomly into the forest too high up for her catch unless they came directly over top of her.

Scatter and take cover. There are no troop transports in play, so they’re just trying to do whatever damage they can. What are the Menbati doing?

Packing up, one of the Protovic said along with a mental flash of his view from below.

Jaina realized what he meant instantly. The Menbati were taking down their tents and collecting the rest of their equipment to begin moving out with, but at the moment that meant they were all clustered around the campsites where the smoke had been rising from. Fortunately it was dispersed now, but they were still making themselves targets should the lizards get a lucky shot through. If a tree was hit it would send shrapnel out like a bomb…then again the Menbati had armored skin. Maybe they thought they’d be ok or didn’t realize the danger.

Regardless, if a piece of wood hit them in the eye their body armor wouldn’t mean a damn, but there wasn’t a safe place for her to tell them to go and it was obvious that they didn’t want to leave their supplies behind. They’d had to run from their original base with all this stuff, so obviously they though it was essential to their continued survival.

But right now it was making for a very bad strategy to avoid the phaser blasts coming down randomly everywhere around her.

There was nothing to do about that so she just waited, poking her helmet out and wondering if the lizard sensors would pick it up. Climbing a bit higher and feeling the tree sway beneath her, she tried to get a bit more visible and was rewarded with the five fighters almost simultaneously turning towards her. Two pink beams leapt out at her, one of which clipped a branch a meter to her left.

Having got their attention she slid off her footholds and fell, creating a bioshield around her to pinball her way down through the branches until she slammed into the ground. Her shield breached and she was tossed onto her side by the drop, but otherwise was fine and got to her feet as the top of the tree exploded into pieces that began to rain down on her.

She sprinted off to the side while extending her Ikrid as far straight up as she could. Unfortunately it didn’t stretch out like her Pefbar did, but if she concentrated only on a small area it gave her more focus.

A few second later a huge crash shook the ground as a wisp nosedived down into the forest thanks to a firm mental grip on it, but the other four wisps didn’t run. Instead they continued to blanket the area and shred a wide path of trees inside of which Jaina stood. Before she could grab another fighter a tree fell beside her and its branches pulled her to the ground and pinned her there as more and more came down on top of her.

She couldn’t see anything, but soon a few plasma shots from the Protovic around the perimeter hit one of the wisps. They didn’t do much damage, barely little stings against the thin armor on the fighter, but hit it with enough and you’d punch through.

With the leaves obscuring Jaina from view and sensors, the four wisps turned and went after the Protovic who smartly scattered and ran as fast as they could as more trees were being felled by the pink beams.

She knew what they were doing because they told her with a variety of quick mental shorthand and images, with the mage wasting no time as she scrambled around underneath the pile, having to break some branches to get free, but as soon as she got into clean air she gathered herself into a Jedi jump and leapt up onto an exposed trunk nearby. She ran up to the top of it, which was actually the bottom that had been uprooted, and stood there defiantly waiting for the wisps to notice her as she got mental status reports from the Protovic.

“Over here you bastards,” she said on an open comm channel, then in a few moments one of them streaked by putting a shot within a couple meters of her but it missed.

She missed too, for it flew by so fast she couldn’t get a firm hold on its pilot. The wisp bobbled a bit but flew on avoiding the treetops. Jaina really wished these guys didn’t adapt so fast, not to mention having genetic knowledge of what Archons were and what they were capable of woven into them from birth. That was a revelation that wasn’t all that old, and it seemed that the lizards relied less on databanks and conventional learning than they did genetic updates that would spread across the entire empire and make all lizards within subsequent generations aware of what Jaina could do and a few tactics on how to avoid it.

But that was ok, for the high speed pass reduced his firing run to only the one shot that nearly hit her, but it also kept him from shooting anywhere else. When the other three came in making equally fast runs, Jaina held her ground and upper her shields to full power forward, keeping her front towards them whenever they strafed her to increase her odds while also generating a bit of a bioshield as her tissues recovered from the last one getting knocked away.

Reaching for one of the wisps she tried to affect it earlier in its run but couldn’t do much more with it than the last one. Two more came in on its heels and pelted the area around her with phaser hits, destroying the trunk underneath her feet and throwing her to the south in the explosion. She fell into the leaves on the downed and smoking trees, dipping out of sensor range of the wisps.

How close are they?

Another few minutes here.

“Damn it,” she said to herself as she crawled back into view and jumped to another stump that would give her a decent foothold. She had to buy more time.

The wisps came back in again and this time she got hit, blasting away half her shield strength as the branches that she fell into burst into flame with other hits. Another shot fell near to her, blasting into the ground and covering her with a spray of dirt as they streaked by overhead, still maintaining a speed that wasn’t giving her enough time to mess with them.

As she picked herself up and waited for the next run she got an image of smoke trailing one of the wisps, though the surrounding intact trees were blocking her actual view. The image was coming from the Protovic, who’d managed to wound one of them enough with multiple rifle shots to get through the hull and do some internal damage.

Another report came in detailing the progress of the Menbati and Jaina, seeing the low state of her armor’s shields and feeling the bad frayed feeling of her bioshields being completely spent, decided that was enough. Leaping across the burning, felled trees she got to the intact forest within four jumps just as another wisp came around. Rather than trying to snag it she just ran, sprinting ahead of the phaser strikes and getting knocked off her feet to the left as one fell close to her on the right.

She flipped over midair and landed on her feet awkwardly. A split second of balance control and she was running again, taking  a sharp turn to the right and away from the last known position the wisp had her at as she was now underneath the sensor dampening leaves again.

With no visible target in sight the wisps went back to randomized bombardment, but still kept their speed up so high that she wasn’t going to be able to catch any of them with her psionics. Fortunately the Menbati were just finishing up packing when she got to the camp near the clearing the Protovic had been working on. It was the only one that had clear footing, but was too small for a dropship to land in. The ones the lizards had felled were large enough, but they were full of debris and there was no point in staying near any of them at this point.

Jaina had the Protovic follow her in a widely spaced formation while they followed the Menbati as they retreated carrying heavy packs of gear with a few left unencumbered to act as skirmishers. She ran up beside one of them and gave it a boost over a line of rocks, picking it and its pack up telekinetically and hopping it over the terrain that the one in front of it had trouble with.

It shrieked, not knowing what had grabbed it, then got back to slowly running after she set it down and ran up beside it. The Menbati probably didn’t understand what had happened, but with no enemies in sight it didn’t have time to think, only run, and it couldn’t enter wheel mode with the cargo it was carrying, meaning it was moving very, very slowly compared to the Protovic and Archon.

Phaser blasts continued to come down randomly, but the further they traveled the less danger they were in because the lizards couldn’t see them, and fortunately there weren’t many natural gaps in the tightly packed forest to let them sneak a peek inside.

After some ten minutes of running/jogging along with the Menbati, one of them rolled up to Kara in her distinctive dark blue armor that differed from the Protovic blue enough to be significant for these guys to spot.

“The ***** is this way,” it said before rolling off a different direction.

Jaina didn’t know what they were talking about, but she followed it anyway as it led away from the group of campers they had been following. Up and over a ridge and down through a couple of ravines and the Menbati stopped just short of a dirt mound that had a cave entrance in it.

“One come. Others stay here.”

Jaina nodded, not knowing if it would understand the gesture. “Yes.”

The little wheel of armor rolled slowly into the leading edge of the rim and disappeared down the three meter wide tunnel at an angle as Jaina told the Protovic to stay behind and secure the immediate area. She walked in after it and accelerated into a slow jog to keep up, using her Pefbar to see as the light from above dimmed and there was no interior illumination to replace it.

They traveled down gradually with the tunnel mostly taking them laterally off to what eventually transitioned from dirt into stone. Shortly after that the stone was replaced by fabricated materials and she had to duck down a few inches to walk inside as their ceiling hung low, but that was typical of Menbati structures. She’d been in several of their bases before, but those had all been on the surface.

This one had obviously been here a while, for once they got past a guard station the interior revealed itself to be a small city, though the inhabitants that were moving around had multiple injuries. This was no doubt the location of the rest of the survivors that she couldn’t sense in the forest, and what those on the surface had been guarding…with something else inside.

“What is the purpose of this place?”

“Emergency,” her guide said, with Jaina realizing this must have been a premade bunker stashed far out in the forest. No wonder these guys had hidden from and survived the lizards for so long.

There wasn’t much in the way of equipment or luxuries, but eventually the Archon was lead to a compartment that did have technology in it, along with a flatscreen map of this region of the planet detailing their location and the surrounding facilities, including several other bunkers that she had not known about nor had the Menbati told her existed previously.

If she’d been told she could have saved days’ worth of wandering around in the forest looking for these guys.

“You have come to move us?” another Menbati asked, this one dressed differently enough that she guessed it was a leadership caste ‘organizer,’ though the uniform was so ragged and dirty she couldn’t be for sure given the small differences in their clothing that covered only their softer bellies. Their armor had no need of coverings.

“I have ships on the way to do just that. I had not been told this place was here. Do you want to go or stay?”

“Most go. The ***** cannot be moved. You lead away.”

Jaina sighed. “Prepare your people to leave soon. I will guard the surface entrance and tell you when the time is near.”

“Thank you, Star Force.”

“Thank you for staying alive,” she said, exchanging a few more words before heading back up to the surface and filling in the Protovic, one of which was up in a tree linking in with the battlemap and passing the signal back down to those on the ground. The dropships were on their way, but she knew it was going to be a tight fit to get some 900 Menbati in them.

She linked into their comm systems and passed a message up to the lookout who transmitted it in a direct line towards the oncoming transports so the wisps wouldn’t pick it up, asking for more ships and a fighter escort.

Within a few seconds a reply came, along with a highlight of the Protovic squadron already enroute with the skeets pressing hard to catch up before a series of lizard kirbies beat them there. The nearby 4 wisps hadn’t left the area and were still shooting down into the forest occasionally in the distance. Once they got boots on the ground they’d have a much better time of taking out the Menbati, but they had to know they’d be easy pickings for an Archon.

Then she realized how many kirbies there were…not just in the group approaching, but those coming further back from not one, but four nearby bases, including the one that the lizards had just overrun and kicked the Menbati out of.

These guys really want the Menbati dead, she told the Protovic. We are not going to let that happen. We’ve got air cover incoming, but there are too many transports to avoid getting their troops on the ground. We’re going to have to go on a killing spree once they find our evac point. We can’t load fast unless we have a large clearing, and we can’t get a large clearing without letting the lizards know where we are.

4

April 6, 3159

Shemtala System (lizard territory)

Yametren (contested world)

Jaina helped a limping Protovic over a fallen tree with a brief telekinetic lift then followed her up into the last dropship, standing on the edge as the ramp closed up to make sure that nothing slipped in a final shot. All the lizards were dead, as far as her senses could tell, but you never wanted to assume.

Once the ramp/door clicked into place she found herself a seat along with the rest of her troops and rode with the flock of dropships across the expansive forest until they arrived at a Star Force staging base set just outside a Menbati city, one of the few they still had left that was visible from the air. It had survived as long as it did due to the cheap and plentiful little missiles the natives had used. Individually they packed a small punch, but the Menbati had so many of them and used them so liberally against anything in the skies that the lizards were always taking heavy loses when they went about the obvious approaches.

Even cruisers weren’t immune to the little missiles, and there were two on the horizon testifying to that effectiveness, half buried in the ground where they had crashed long ago, but not so long that they were overgrown with vegetation. More than anything the Menbati were making the lizards bleed in order to slowly take over their world, and gratefully the enemy hadn’t considered the little race too much of a problem to warrant sending in heavy reinforcements.

The city itself was barely even with the treetops, with no structure rising more than 3 or 4 stories above ground. Numerous tunnels and sublevels stretched out throughout the Menbati architecture, giving the bit of native civilization a larger footprint than appeared from the air. They’d allowed Star Force to set up a base only a few kilometers away and Jaina’s dropship headed there even as she saw others further ahead diverting over to the city to drop off the survivors.

There were none in her ship so they went straight back to base to land and offload her troops. The casualties had gone first, with one of them losing an arm and others with severe yet lesser injuries. The lizards had not been subtle in their pursuit of the Menbati and both Jaina and her unit had to overextend themselves in order to protect the little twerps who refused to coordinate with them.

The Archon was still fuming when she got off the dropship and was met by Stan-47554. He was the senior Archon assigned to this invasion while this base and its 23,000 Protovic were under her direct command, though more than a third of them were techs. Seeing him was a surprise, so as she diverted away from the line coming off the dropship she wondered what was up.

“Your guys look beat up,” he commented as she stopped in front of his nearly identical dark blue armor and retracted her helmet.

“They are,” she confirmed, showing a scowl. “Those damn Menbati wouldn’t stay put and my people had to cover for them. And don’t blame it on the translation programming. These guys don’t want to listen to us.”

“They’ll learn eventually,” Stan said, glancing over her with his Pefbar. “You took a few nicks.”

“Not worth mentioning when one of my people lost an arm.”

“Already on the way up to orbit.”

“Good. Now why are you here?”

Stan offered only a mild sarcastic look, given how upset she obviously was. “Do I need a reason to drop in and say hi?”

“If it’s bad news I can’t promise I won’t hit you.”

“Did you hit any of them?” he asked, referring to the Menbati.

“No, but I did kick one when he wouldn’t board the dropship fast enough.”

“Hurt your foot?”

“My armor is stronger than his. What’s up, Stan?”

“We didn’t ask, they did. I’m not sure they fully understand either, so we’re going to have to deal with that, but I’ve already sent a courier back to Sara to ask for instructions. The Menbati want to join Star Force.”

Jaina’s frown deepened. “You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Oh, it gets better. They don’t just want to join, they want to fight. In the great crusade across the stars.”

Jaina rolled her eyes. “How do they even know what’s going on out there?”

“They don’t, beyond what little we’ve told them. But they’re adamant. I’m not sure why, especially after I told them that we’re only here to kill the lizards and want no compensation for it. That didn’t dissuade them in the least.”

“What do they think being part of Star Force means?”

“They want to be part of the empire.”

“And…”

“I’ve talked to their leaders for several hours. I can’t get much out of them, but they have a deeply ingrained loyalty that is now transferred onto us. I would have dismissed the request out of misplaced gratitude, but there’s also a great deal of intellect in them. They’re not making a rash choice. A quick one, for sure, but there’s more to it than there appears on the surface.”

“Do they know we’ll tear their culture apart and rebuild it?”

“Yes, and they seem to think it’ll be an improvement. And to be frank, they don’t have much left compared to what they did pre-lizard.”

“That usually doesn’t stop anyone from clinging onto tradition, especially when there are millions of them remaining.”

“Billions, actually,” Stan said with a cringe.

Jaina stared at him blankly for a moment, then hung her shoulders in a visible sigh. “Underground?”

“When they asked to join us they revealed their full holdings. I don’t think the lizards ever knew how many of them there were. They’ve burrowed down through the crust nearly to molten rock all over the planet. Only a small portion of their population was on the surface.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“They’ve been collapsing tunnels and digging new ones to keep the lizards from reaching their strongholds. Very savvy when it comes to underground warfare.”

“And dumb on the surface.”

“The fact that they showed me everything also underscores how serious they are about their request. They just exposed everything, and they wouldn’t have done that if they thought there was even a possibility that we were a threat.”

“Gullible too it seems.”

“Why, are you planning on killing them after we get rid of the lizards?”

“Do they know that?”

Stan shook his head. “I don’t know. Either they’re far too trusting or they’re good judges of character.”

“They didn’t trust me a little while ago,” Jaina pointed out. “What do you think Sara will do?”

“I’m guessing that she’ll come here in person. Beyond that your guess is as good as mine.”

“What is your guess, beyond that?”

“Have we ever said no?”

“Twice.”

“And what were the reasons there?”

“Rumor says deceit.”

“And I can’t find any in these guys.”

“So you’re saying if they’re on the level then Sara is going to take them in in some form?”

“That’s my guess, but you never know with a trailblazer. They have a knack for finding other options.”

“And you came to tell me this in person because?”

“Because if Sara decides to bring them into the fold, even if just as a ward…”

“It better not be more than that.”

“…whatever she decides, I’m going to request permanent assignment here.”

Jaina’s uncomfortable look changed into disgust. “And you want me to stay too?”

“You’re already familiar with the planet,” he said with a wince. “Though maybe today is a bad day to be discussing this.”

“Very bad.”

“It’ll take Sara a few weeks to get here regardless, and we can discuss this in a few days once you cool off,” he said, holding up his hands in a warning gesture as she looked about ready to explode, “not that you shouldn’t be upset. Just remember we’ve taken formerly bad races and turned them around. No matter what these guys have or haven’t done recently should reflect on their race’s potential.”

“Tell that to the armless Protovic.”

“What were they actually doing? Running or fighting?”

“Whatever they damn well pleased! I don’t know what they were doing half the time, but some of them wanted to kill lizards when we were trying to herd them towards the dropships. And I don’t care what you think my mindset will be in a few days, I’m staying here until the lizards are eradicated then I’m moving on. If you want to rehab these morons you’re welcome to it.”

“Fair enough,” Stan relented. “Are you fit to go back out?”

“I need an hour to shower and eat, then I’ll be good to go.”

“Without shooting the next Menbati you see?”

“Not unless he deserves it.”

“Good enough,” Stan said, pointing an armored thumb over his shoulder before stepping to the side.

Jaina took off immediately, not feeling like continuing the conversation and both Archons knowing she needed to keep moving. With the lizards constantly pressing against the remaining Menbati until they were all killed, everyone was under the clock. All the army units had a mage as field commander, leaving him free to go where he needed and maintain a global view of the combat. He was going to offer to give Jaina a break and take the next mission in her place, but he knew that the best thing for her to do was get back into the action and work off some of her frustration. Sitting and stewing wouldn’t help.

And he didn’t like the news of the Menbati making trouble for the rescue teams either, though he also noted that it was a sign of how they needed proper Star Force training. And a race that had managed to outwit and survive the lizards for this long could probably be turned into an asset for the empire once the trailblazers worked their magic on them.

When Sara-012 got to Shemtala she immediately assumed control of ground operations, making a few tweaks to what the mages had been running, then dismissed the H’kar fleet to another system where they were needed, leaving her command ship and the other Star Force vessels already here to protect this world in the unlikely event that the lizards tried to counterattack. That wasn’t occurring in any of the other systems that Sara was sweeping up beyond Alpha Region, so she felt secure sending the order for the H’kar to move ahead to another invasion.

She hadn’t expected to need to come here, but a race requesting to join Star Force in this manner wasn’t something for the mages to handle. Most races requested something from Star Force, usually more than they were ever going to get, but to have one ask to be fully included without caveat had happened before, and when it did it usually meant a willing populace rather than one she’d have to wrangle into line over generations via control of upcoming younglings.

But with every new race they encountered there were always unexpected variables that needed a trailblazer’s touch, or in this case evaluation, so she didn’t waste any time and headed down to one of Star Force’s bases on the planet and over into a Menbati city, walking around in her golden titan armor with almost no hindrance at all. The short ‘Rammuses,’ as she thought of them, were tough looking but also skittish. There was no animosity present, no sense of danger, but they had also never seen the golden armor before and that was drawing some curiosity.

Getting into their heads as often as she could she sampled their mindset, culture, worries, and aspirations. They were immensely grateful for being rescued after so many years, and that obviously factored into their request to join Star Force, but there was something else underneath the surface that she didn’t catch on to until the following week.

Once she identified it, Sara began to understand the Menbati. They had never left this star system and few had ever come to it before the lizards arrived. They knew of other races but had no means to reach out to them, with doing so and taking their place amongst the community of the stars was one of their driving societal imperatives. They had no illusions about peaceful relations, expecting there to be more enemies than friends out there, but they knew they had to get into the game and had been building up their technology in the hopes of attaining space travel when the lizards came and put an end to that.

Since then all tech upgrades had been geared towards ground combat with some impressive results. In the beginning the lizards had outright slaughtered the Menbati, but there were so few lizards that the planet had time and population to spare. That wasn’t the strategy, just a simple truth that had led to further and further resistance. By the time the lizards had four cruisers and were bombarding their cities from above with impunity but without enough troops to invade them, the Menbati had upgraded their existing defensive missiles into their Hip’cha, building up numbers of them before releasing them all on a single cruiser and taking it down before it knew what was happening to it.

That first cruiser destruction had been a signal to their entire race that they could effectively fight back and had been memorialized enough that almost every mind Sara touched knew the story. Since then they’d been growing and learning all the while the lizards were doing the same and chopping off chunks of their planet for their own uses. The Menbati didn’t wait to get hit, having counterattacked numerous times, but gradually they had been losing territory, but not hope, for the heart of their society lay below ground where the lizards apparently had never gone.

That in itself was impressive, given how good the lizards were at tunneling, but it seemed they never got intelligence about the true size of the Menbati civilization, otherwise she was sure they would have found a way to get at them by now.

There was potential here, and the more she visited city after city and a few battlefronts to see and help them in combat, the more she recognized that their desire to join their rescuers and take their place amongst the stars fit in with Star Force’s own aims enough to make these guys a worthy annexation if they held to their word. There could, and probably would be problems arise, but after such a long history incorporating races into the empire at multiple levels she was confident that the Menbati would not be an issue…and if they were, Star Force also had plenty of experience dealing with such things.

What did surprise her was that the mage in command of this invasion wanted to stay after the lizards were removed and play a hand in bringing the Menbati into the empire.

So she started to investigate him as well. Stan she already knew, along with all the other 574 mages assigned to her invasion corridor, but if he wanted to take part in this annexation she needed to know more. Before publically accepting the Menbati into Star Force she took the opportunity to tour the planet along with Stan, sizing him up at the same time as learning more about the planet and pushing the lizard killing even faster than their suicidal rush to destroy the Menbati was accomplishing in its own right.

Her skill and power had impressed the Menbati to no end, and she didn’t hesitate to jump into combat whenever needed or just because she felt like it. Staying on the world for the next several months, she got the lizard infestation cleared out then began organizing the withdrawal of most of their bases now that the bulk of the Protovic troops would be moving on to another system. Already having sent back a report to Davis, she wasn’t surprised when a convoy of civilian ships with military escort arrived along with a reply.

Annexation approved. Ward status granted. Judging by the extensive underground structures the Menbati have developed I get the feeling these guys could have some Kiritak qualities with industry in mind. Their combat prowess I imagine will be lackluster, but I’ll leave that to you. Subsequent convoys will be forthcoming. I want these guys upgraded faster than typical for a ward and a full evaluation of their potential with measurable numbers. If they are eager to contribute then they may very well achieve more than ward status, and I want to know what they’re capable of.

Oh, and as for renaming them, I think it would be a good way to fully test their commitment to an empire they don’t truly understand. If they’re really onboard and willing to follow your lead, get these guys up to speed as fast as you can. If you don’t want to head up this annexation personally, I’ll let you choose a replacement or defer to me. Just get things moving quickly. If these guys balk, I want to know sooner rather than later.

Sara smiled. Not because he was giving her the green light to annex them, but because he was letting her rename them after her favorite little spike ball.

Henceforth the Menbati would be known as the Rammus. Both singular and plural in form.

5

January 3, 3160

Shemtala System (Star Force territory)

Yametren

Stan stood onboard his flagship, a Warship-class jumpship and the only military vessel left in the star system aside from Sara’s small fleet that was just now leaving orbit. He’d spent several months with her going over what she wanted done with the Menb…the Rammus, and now she was leaving him to single-handedly bring this race into the empire. That was what he’d wanted, but he hadn’t expected to be left in full command.

Sara was still going to be directing things from afar, but all the onsite adjustments and brainstorming were going to be his responsibility, with that being the largest task he’d ever been assigned to date. But he was an Archon and embraced challenges, with this one offering more than he’d ever expected to be entrusted with. That meant he had to come through, and with something like this there was no procedure to follow. Sara had laid out the basics for him, but had also made him aware of how much he’d have to rely on intuition and adaptation.

Stan blew out a slow breath, watching her ships jump out of orbit enroute to the star. It was all on him now…well, sort of. He was in charge but he had a good staff of techs and administrators with him, though they’d be taking their cues from him, and despite the instructions Sara had given him he was going to have to make up a lot of this on the fly.

Taking her advice, he was going to base himself off the warship rather than posting to a firebase on the surface. There were already a few left over from the lizard cleansing that had been converted into supply depots and interface sites with the Rammus, but a proper city hadn’t been built yet. That was waiting on the designs he set down, and Sara had left that bit up to him, for it had a lot to do with the Rammus and if he wanted a joint habitation right off or wanted a separate facility to then build others out of.

At least the translators were a lot better now. Sara had got people working on those first thing when the convoy arrived, though they did have an odd glitch in them in which ‘yes’ often was translated as ‘ok.’ Stan had asked about that and found it wasn’t a glitch per say, but an alteration that Sara had made. He’d asked her about it and she’d just smiled, not offering a reason and he hadn’t pressed. He could order them to change it, but wasn’t going to bother. She probably had a reason for it, and it didn’t really interfere with communication.

And he wasn’t about to second guess a trailblazer on something like this. She might not care…or she might kick his ass the next time they met.

He walked over to his command chair and sat down, pulling up the Star Force territory map. His efforts would be confined to this single star system, but he needed to find a niche within the empire for these guys so he had to think big picture right now.

In the center of the map was the ADZ, the population crunch interior of their now massive territory. Beyond it to the spinward side, which he tended to think of as ‘west,’ was the Calavari Region. Rimward was the Bsidd Region while the patchy network of Axius expansions were up above. The lizard coreward territory line was, naturally, in towards the core with the Achkor Region in between. To the ‘east’ and against the galactic spin was the region the lizards hadn’t gotten to, leaving it with a multitude of races and far too many for Star Force to keep track of. This area was loosely referred to as the Expanded Region and stretched out down below the ADZ as well.

Straight down from the ADZ was the link that ran to Voku territory, with the Benoid slightly off to the side. Skarron territory met up with them there, but did not touch near to Star Force. It was, in fact, getting further away as the lizard line extended and devoured the other enemy empire. There was a glut of systems coreward and down from the ADZ that had not yet succumbed to either the Skarrons or the lizards, but the latter were slowly eating into them and Stan had been told that if/when they hit the geographical boundary Star Force had marked they’d have to hold them there as well all the way down to Voku territory.

On the map there were also little lines reaching up to the top of the galactic plane all along that border ahead of where the lizards had actually reached. Each of those little dots held outpost-level colonies designed to plant the flag and provide an oasis in the great distances that had to be traveled, but were never intended to grow too large. Those living there were building, of course, but there was no additional material or personnel being pumped in from afar to speed up that process, letting them develop at a leisurely pace as they set up a network of surveillance patrols, probes, and relays along the border so they would know when the lizards eventually worked their way there.

Those little lines were insufficient on their own, but they had reached all the way up to the top of the galaxy, approximately 500 lightyears away from the ADZ that sat in roughly the center of the plane. There was no firm upper boundary, for there were scattered systems beyond orbiting off the main group, but the edge of that group had been reached and two small outposts had been established beyond it, having to jump much further distances between stars to get there, but the view they had was worth it.

Stan brought up the pictures they’d taken, looking down at the giant disc that was the galaxy from just above it and seeing the big bulge in the center. That bulge was where the V’kit’no’sat made their home, reaching out into the disc a ways, but it was that dense central region that had so many systems, so many worlds, and so much debris that it was a cluttered mess of navigational hazards offset by many short jumplines. If the galaxy could be divided into an urban and rural zone, Star Force inhabited the rural while the galactic center was the urban, which partly explained why the V’kit’no’sat had not pushed all the way out to the rim…besides the fact that the galaxy was truly so big that no one could conquer it all.

And yet, the lizards were well on their way to doing that if they weren’t stopped. Their version of conquest was that of a virus spreading to everything everywhere with no real conquest involved, only destruction and replication. Consuming the galaxy would take a very long time, but unchecked they could do it. They might not have command and control over anything given the size, but they could dominate it.

He guessed that was the difference between the lizards and the V’kit’no’sat. One wanted to dominate, the other wanted to conquer. To conquer meant you controlled, whereas in this context, domination mean pushing out all others and populating everything. Grass could do that, so it wasn’t an achievement that the V’kit’no’sat would deem worthy of their consideration. They chose to dominate by intimidation and taking out anyone they chose, leaving the bulk of the galaxy’s races as they were and knowing that they were no threat to their empire…one which was interconnected and knew what every other part of it was doing.

And looking at the visuals they had on record, Stan was very glad they were in that big bulge of the galactic core rather than out on the disc where Earth had the good fortune of being, marking the outer edge of the furthest expansion by the V’kit’no’sat and really no more than an outpost world like the few Star Force had set up on the disc’s upper edge.

Getting out there had been an achievement, to be sure, but it also meant the lizards couldn’t flank them from their coreward region. There was still a huge number of lizard systems left in their rimward hemisphere, more than half their number, but hopefully once their core worlds and their shipyard rings were taken away from them, the rest of the lizard systems would fall more quickly, potentially to others once they saw the unbeatable lizards’ homeworld go down.

It would be a very long time until the rimward hemisphere was taken out and their continuous expansion colonies hunted down, but once it was there was the threat of the coreward hemisphere spreading back out to their territories, and in order to prevent that Star Force was going to have to create a wall across the entire galactic plane from top to bottom and maintain it with the help of the Voku and any other willing allies.

The number of systems that would lie on that wall was insane, but Star Force was already beginning to throw up their detection net with these little lines of systems. Holding back the lizard empire once it’d filled out that region was going to be a constant pain in the ass, and Stan hated the idea that they had to let them get that large, but the trailblazers’ logic was sound. They couldn’t chase the lizards in close to the V’kit’no’sat. The fact that they’d been able to grow this large and not be found out testified to the size of the galaxy and their lack of knowledge this far out. But go closer and hit their sphere of intelligence, wherever it may lay, and it’d be like hitting a trip mine.

They couldn’t go after the lizards there, damn them, but they could make sure that they exterminated the buggers on this side of the line.

Star Force also had one line reaching down to the bottom of the galactic plane, passing around the edge of Voku territory rather than going through it, so right now Star Force touched one intergalactic ‘ocean’ to the other, spanning some 1,000 lightyears from which the net across the galactic disc would be stretched to hold the lizards back.

Trouble was, there was no lateral sides to that disc. The Preema held one side and, after giving up their hopes of wiping the lizards out entirely, had resolved to form their own boundary. So as long as they didn’t cave, that side would match up and keep the lizards boxed in, but the other ‘eastern’ side was wide open with no ally there to block them in down the road. Right now it was the Skarron empire poking out into that region, but the lizards were winning that fight and eventually would round the corner on the Star Force wall once it was put up, meaning that they’d have to keep extending it further and further.

The solution to that problem he didn’t know, but luckily he didn’t have to be the one to figure it out. His puzzle was the Rammus and where they would fit into all of this. Geographically they were near the outer lizard border, but that line was going to keep moving and the Rammus were going to be in safe territory.

They weren’t going to hold a border slot and they weren’t going to interlink with the ADZ…they were too far away for that. The trade routes would stretch out eventually, but they were sitting in a region of empty systems that had been taken from the lizards and there were no plans to recolonize them anytime soon.

So the Rammus were basically going to be on their own little island for the foreseeable future. They could relocate or expand elsewhere, but there was no need for that. Other factions had that covered, especially in this region with the Bsidd able to grow so fast and in so many variations.

What could these guys become? Down the road at least. Numbers wise they were tiny…not super tiny, thankfully, but with one world that was mostly busted up by the lizards it was going to be a fixer upper for sure, despite what the Rammus had maintained below ground, which was impressive. He and Sara had visited those cities extensively, feeling claustrophobic the entire time.

That was one item he was changing. All future construction was going to be big enough for Humans as well, which was Star Force standard anyway. Stan would make use of their underground cities during the transition but eventually they’d all have to be remodeled or abandoned.

But what could these guys do other than patrol the local region? That was always needed, given how many empty systems Star Force had to watch over and make sure no one else took from them. Both he and Sara saw potential in these guys, but how was Stan really going to make them distinctive and able to contribute outside of massive numbers and infrastructure that would be centuries, if not millennia in the making?

They were diggers, and Star Force didn’t have many of those. Not in a distinctive way, at least. Star Force built underground too, but these guys could literally do it by hand. They could burrow down even through loose rock thanks to a retractable claws on all four limbs, and even survive cave-ins thanks to their natural armor…from which they’d just dig their way back out given time. They even had a special fatty tissue that stored oxygen that they could burn away slowly to survive in bad atmosphere or limited atmosphere underground.

But what did that matter to Star Force? Their mechanized diggers were far better, and aside from chasing lizards into tunnels too small for Humans to easily go there wasn’t any combat advantage that he could see to it.

Out in the open they had a speed advantage in wheel mode, but nothing he couldn’t outrun. These guys were eager, he’d give them that, but biologically speaking they didn’t have anything that really bespoke combat except for their armor…which wouldn’t stand up all that well to plasma strikes. Fabricated armor was much better, so where did that leave them?

Stan didn’t know and it was beginning to bother him. He’d discussed all this with Sara but she hadn’t had any firm solutions, citing that he’d have to get them adjusted to Star Force ways of doing things before he could really evaluate what they were capable of.

And that meant years of training.

So that was his first task. Get an advanced training group going so he could build a standardized basic program for the rest of them and enough of a starter program so they could start filling out maturias. Getting those facilities built was going to take time, but he had to have the plans first so that when the first structure was ready to go they could start putting infants inside immediately. As long term of a process this was, he couldn’t afford to waste months. The Rammus wanted to be Star Force, and he needed to take advantage of that before they could change their mind or subsequent generations could be born and grow up free of the lizards…which could incline them to different ideas.

All that meant he had to make the transition for them now, as soon as possible, and get them working towards goals even if he didn’t have enough infrastructure to house them all. So what goals could he given them right off the bat?

Raw materials, obviously. They were diggers, so mining was an easy option even if they didn’t have Star Force’s level of tech. So that was one big item he could add to his list. But what else?

Picking up after the lizards. There was a lot of their infrastructure that had to be removed and recycled. If he had them bring the pieces to the Star Force recyclers that would give them something to do and allow him to use his limited offworld personnel for other tasks. About a third of those were Human, with the rest being a mix of Kiritas and Bsidd.

Wait a minute, this isn’t about what the Rammus can do, but what does Star Force need?

Or more accurately, what could it use, more of as a luxury or an enhancement, because it already had everything it needed.

Then an epiphany struck him. He thought it through with as many variations as he could imagine, settling in on an uncertain course of action but one that he knew would lead to something of merit.

He looked up from the panel he’d been working on for several hours by now, with that time having flashed by rapidly once he’d gotten on the trail of a good idea. Stretching his back a bit as he sat up, he looked at the forward vid screen that showed the planet below them from their low orbit.

He nodded at it, imagining one of the Rammus standing in front of him.

“Ok,” he whispered with a smile, then got up and left the bridge to confer with the Administrators assigned to him in order to get the ball rolling.

6

January 3, 3193

Unnamed System (lizard territory)

Planet 12

Jaina picked up a Protovic with her Lachka and threw him into a mess of lizard infantry, his blue armor balled up into an improvised wrecking ball that docked down more than a dozen of them. Plasma shots flew across over top of him, nailing lizards all around as he stood up, punching one back while two more shot him from pointblank range as his shields snapped back into place.

A third lizard jumped and looped his thin arms around the Protovic, dragging him backwards off balance as two more jumped on top of him, knocking him to the ground as a rush of lizards moved forward to fill the gap that he’d made, some of them piling on top of his blue armor as they tried to get some more rifle shots into him.

He dropped his already weakened shields, letting the lizard bodies make contact with his armor…

Suddenly the mass of them jerked, recoiling without thinking and letting him go as he sent an electrical charge through his specially designed armor that allowed him to channel his natural ability. It wasn’t a strong charge, especially spread out through so many lizards, but it was enough to get them to loosen their grip and give him a little maneuvering room that he used to get a strong kick into one that knocked it back into two others.

From there he went about punching and kicking, disrupting the lizards enough that Jaina and the others were able to mow down a lot of them as they worked their way back to him. Another blue ball shot by, landing a few meters ahead and taking more pressure off of him. Together they disabled more than killed the lizards around them fighting hand to hand, then the wave of Star Force troops rushed around them and shot the lizards they had knocked down.

The Archon clapped one of them on the shoulder as she passed, with both of them knowing to fall into the rear and get their shields recharged over their pitted armor. They’d taken far too many hits, but it had been worth the tradeoff to get the lizards out of the urban cover they’d been taking in the debris of their own city.

Jaina pushed forward for another two kilometers, cleaning out more narrow points where the lizards were trying to mass their numbers and kill any of the Protovic that they could. She either had the option of waiting or pushing forward, either of which would be to the enemy’s advantage. Protovic units were assaulting this section of city from multiple angles, working their way back to what had been labeled as an area that contained subsurface entrances. They’d hit as many as they could find from orbit and then close in with air power, but there were obviously some that they had missed and the only way of finding them was going in on foot.

She wasn’t going to make the mistake of chasing them down their tunnels, at least not with so much of the surface still left to cleanse. They’d find the holes and seal them, leaving any subsurface warfare until later and knowing that while her troops weren’t in a lot of danger up here so long as they kept their heads and fought smart, the lizards were succeeding in grinding down their supplies. Ammunition was low and their armor was getting chewed up. Before too long they’d have to pull back or find themselves in a situation where the lizards could kill them.

An upgrade to their armor let her check not only the status of everyone in her unit at a glance, but it also linked with the weapons they carried and let her see how much ammo they had remaining. They were all getting low and would need to cycle out or get resupplied, and while they were on the move that wasn’t easy. Bringing in a dropship was doable, but the lizards might have more of their little missiles launchers nearby, and while one wouldn’t be a threat to a dropship’s shields, multiple ones could be. With air cover they could take them out, so dropship reinforcement was doable if needed, but fortunately they’d come up with an alternative means of resupply.

She hit her beacon, then continued pressing forward and not giving the lizards an opportunity to regroup. After a while several new contacts popped up on the battlemap, coming from behind their lines and not lizards. They were moving erratically, surging forward quickly then almost stopping again. They didn’t move like troops nor aircraft, and she knew better than to anticipate their arrival, instead waiting for it to happen with a piece of her mind as she and her Protovic continued fighting even to lower levels of ammunition that she wasn’t too concerned about.

Surge and stall, surge and stall…the contacts kept getting closer, and she knew that the varied terrain was the cause. Give them a stretch of open road and they could get up to good speed, but maneuvering through the rubble required them to move slowly while coming out of wheel mode.

Soon the first of the Rammus came up behind them and into view. Jaina stopped and reversed course immediately, being the first to go back and meet the dark green mass of armor as it sped forward like a wheel then unraveled into a standing quadruped within a few meters of her. Across its chest was a pole that contained supplies that would become a stubby axel when it balled up again. Also, around the edges of its back were pouches built into the armor, each separated from the next to keep the flexibility required to provide propulsion while moving.

The Rammus held position, standing as tall as it could as she plucked out two ammo containers and began reloading her weapons, then pocketed some more into her own pack. Another Protovic came up and relieved the Rammus of the rest of what he was carrying, then both Archon and Commando headed back to the front lines as more began to fall back in singles or pairs while the group continued to press the attack into the lizards.

The Rammus, now with empty cargo pouches, turned around and balled up again, jumping into a roll that then accelerated by bending his otherwise circular shape. Stretching and flexing at the proper moments he gained speed, traveling down a straight section of road and passing two others coming the opposite way. When it got to a blockage it had to slow and unfurl, climbing over some chunks of building and around a turn until it found another flat section, where it then went back into wheel mode and accelerated heading back to the nearest supply depot to pick up another load.

Jaina headed back to the front lines, taking a short moment to grab a bit of ambrosia out of her pack in M&M form and slipping it into her mouth as she mentally retracted that bit of helmet. Her shields extended momentarily to include her arm so they didn’t block the little pellet as she popped it into her mouth. As she crunched and swallowed it her shields reset and her helmet reformed, then she was back within firing range and added her plasma rifle shots with the others as an automated program in her armor began selecting other Protovic along the line and ordering them to fall back whenever a Rammus got near.

That had taken some time to work out, but now both the Rammus and the Protovic had gotten good at making the exchanges fast and efficient, with the little guys marking themselves as ‘empty’ on the battlemap so no Protovic would be erroneously sent back to them and have to wait. The system kept everyone in fighting mode except when they needed to pick up supplies.

The exchange happened efficiently despite the random nature of the debris, then about ten minutes later Jaina’s troops got stopped cold as a group of tanks suddenly appeared from underground. She ran towards and leapt up on top of one of them as the Protovic scattered, doing what she needed to in order to take it out as skeets were diverted to hit the rest of the tanks…then had to pull out as hundreds of infantry-sized missiles shot up towards them.

Breaking up, the skeet squadrons began zooming around the perimeter trying to draw missiles in smaller numbers towards them and gradually deplenish the lizard ammunition, but for the moment they couldn’t get near the Jaina’s troops, which she quickly ordered to retreat. The Archon followed as soon as she got the first tank killed, using the pilots inside to open the hatch then chucking a grenade inside to render the controls inoperable after obligingly dragging the pilots out and tossing them safely to the ground…though she did land one with a stern kick on its way down.

As the tank puffed with a little smoke when the insides got junked, she ran off nearly taking a large phaser shot to her armor. As it was the near miss crackled on her shields thanks to the ionization of the air around the beam and she ducked behind the nearest bit of building as soon as she could, only to have that wall blasted apart by another pink beam.

A chunk of wall hit her in the head, another in the legs, and knocked her off her feet and into a pile of debris, pinning her for a moment as the tank lifted up on its anti-grav to clear what was left of that wall as dozens of little plasma streaks hit it as her Protovic infantry opened fire from numerous positions, but it didn’t deter the tank from going after the Archon.

“Aaahhh!” she yelled, summoning up as strong of a telekinetic bubble around herself as possible and pushed everything laying on top of her off…then she was on her feet again, scrambling up a wall and jumping over top of it as another phaser beam hit near her feet. A few seconds later and she was gone, scampering off through the debris and out of sight.

A little too close there, boss, one of the Protovic thought as she caught up to him.

No shit, the Archon replied, not bothering to slow down and chat as she ordered the retreat to continue as a Keema beam struck down from orbit and hit something in the distance. On her battlemap was a set of rings indicating firing range, and even at a glance she knew they were too close to most of the tanks for the orbiting starships to target.

The tanks knew it too, for they were chasing the infantry over the crushed buildings and able to move faster given the fact they could just float up and over the walls and debris piles, forcing the Protovic to either run or try to hide, neither of which was a good idea at the moment, so they just ran and hoped the skeets would get close enough to provide air cover, but there were still so many little missiles shooting up into the sky.

One of them streaked laterally towards the Archon. She barely saw it in time, diving to the ground and creating a telekinetic wall over top of her at an angle like her Master had taught her. The missile hit it and deflected ever so slightly, not enough to trigger it to explode, but enough to get it far enough away from Jaina before it hit a wall and blasted it apart, hitting two Protovic with bits of rubble and causing them to stumble, but they managed to run on.

A new icon lit up with a pulsing signature to get everyone’s attention. It glowed green, meaning it was a safe haven, and she immediately directed the Protovic towards it just in case they didn’t notice it on their own. It was more than a kilometer away but all of them were running fast and not making the mistake to slow and try fighting the tanks, of which there seemed to be far too many for a subsurface bunker.

Jaina stayed behind the Protovic, able to move faster than them but knowing that she needed to provide them cover with a distraction, and lizards always liked going for Archons when they could…plus she had psionics to use that the Protovic did not, and their telepathy wasn’t strong enough to deal with these tanks.

She could have taken out a few of them on her own, but there were too many with overlapping lines of fire. At least the lizard missile launchers couldn’t keep up with her infantry retreat, so they didn’t have that hazard coming at them as they all ran as fast as they could, knowing that Jaina wasn’t going to leave them and not wanting to get her killed with their sluggishness.

At the ‘safe’ marker ahead there were Rammus, already more than 20 of them there with more rolling in rapidly, each carrying a bit of machinery, some of which were so large it was visibly slowing them down. They carried it across the middles, making it look like a big bone they were cradling and rotating around, for they had been designed with a central ring that rotated so the big pieces didn’t have to.

With each one arriving another puzzle piece was added to the construction they were assembling in an open area. Bit by bit it was growing and already partially online. Once sufficient power cells arrived the Rammus activated the shield bubble over an area about the size of a basketball court. It wouldn’t block against missiles, but it would stop phaser hits. It was weak right now, as far as tanks went, but the more pieces that the Rammus brought in would upgrade it with no limit. They’d been designed for specifically this task and could grow to whatever size or strength necessary so long as they had enough of the pieces delivered.

Other Rammus were bringing different gear, flowing into the area like a river of fast moving wheels. The ones that didn’t head to the central generator went to the perimeter, some inside the shield boundary, others outside it. The pale blue dome was visible so everyone knew where it was, friend and foe alike, and would allow the Protovic to run through it given that they were physical rather than energy…though they’d have to drop their shields to do it, otherwise those would bounce off.

Two of the Rammus ran outside the front of the shield and unfurled, setting down a small device that they cobbled together from the two pieces they carried and suddenly there was a new wall across an open area between rubble piles. It looked real enough at a glance, sufficiently torn up to match the surrounding topography as new little wrinkles were added to it as the sensors got a better feel for the location.

The holographic wall was identified on the battlemap so the Protovic would know it wasn’t real and would appear highlighted on their HUD with an overlay…but to the lizards they wouldn’t know the difference.

Other Rammus moved even further ahead, setting up a few more fake walls while others placed turrets and mines, all of which were combined from multiple pieces of equipment given the fact that one Rammus couldn’t carry very much. The genius of the design was that they didn’t have to, and with hundreds of Rammus flowing out to the waypoint on the battlemap they were able to assemble a makeshift base within minutes that the first of the Protovic were now finally getting to.

Missiles streaked overhead, angling towards a skeet that was trying to sneak in over top the base but the lizards were not out of ammunition yet. It took several hits then dove down behind a building where it sat and began recharging shields. The lizards couldn’t keep this up for long, but it seemed like they were intent on killing this Protovic unit and the skeets knew they had to get in there as soon as they could.

When the first three Protovic got to one of the fake walls they ran right through it like ghosts, then were soon inside the protective shield bubble and sucking air as they took cover behind a debris pile as more scattered troops began trickling in. They didn’t hold position long before they started planning out their defense, knowing they’d only have a minute or two at most before the tanks got here.

One of the Rammus pinged a Protovic nearby, then rolled up to him and unfurled with a brand new rocket launcher held up in his hands.

“I owe you one little guy,” he said, picking it up and immediately running to the front edge of the shield.

The Rammus turned around and jumped into a roll as he headed back towards the distant supply outpost, glad to have been of service and rushing to get in another supply run as fast as he could.

With phaser strikes audible behind him he ran through a predetermined course that he was following on his HUD, using his internal balance to keep him aware of where he was without getting dizzy and disoriented with the rolling. It was a natural part of their biology, and even though he only got a brief snippet of the view ahead each time he rotated around it was enough to give him a means to navigate by. The Protovic and Humans couldn’t do that, except for the Archons with their special abilities, but even they couldn’t rotate as fast as Rammus without losing control.

It was a fact that he and the others prided themselves on, training themselves to go faster and faster to increase their usefulness in making multiple runs. He was focused on that when a phaser hit him from the side, blasting into his shieldless armor suit and knocking him off balance for a few turns. He got under control again then saw a bunch of lizard infantry pop up out of nowhere and jump in front of him to block his path in an ambush.

With a sense of fear and adrenaline the Rammus didn’t slow down and plowed right into the group with a tiny jump at the very end by stretching and snapping his rotating circle as much as he could to clear the ground.

When he hit one lizard the green armored wheel sparked with light as a sphere of stun energy was released. The Rammus hit the ground unfurled, then scrambled over the incapacitated bodies and jumped back into wheel mode, continuing on for a few seconds while marking the location on the battlemap of the ambush so others could divert around it.

7

March 13, 3193

Unnamed System (lizard territory)

Planet 12

Jaina sat on a half burnt log in the smoking forest outside what had been a lizard bunker. Barely 100 meters deep into the ground, it had some 5,000 lizards or more in it that her Protovic team had to go in and clean out. The entrance on the surface was small, but had been decently defended and was now little more than a boxy building with chunks of wall blown out where weapons batteries had been.

The entrance had plenty of booby-traps in it that she’d had to find and disable, fortunate enough not to have missed one and gotten some of her people killed, with the rest of the battle having been ground out by the ‘never say surrender’ attitude of the lizards. She could have called down orbital bombardment on that site but had chosen to go in hand to hand in order to make sure they got all of them killed. In previous engagements it had been found that some lizards still survived after orbital bombardment of subsurface structures, and it made it damn hard to get down to them after the pathways were blocked by rubble and dirt. Better to just do it the old fashioned way so you could sign off on an area and move on to the next target.

This was the fourth assault of the day for her unit, some 123 Protovic strong. The missing two had been taken back for medical treatment this morning after getting a bit too close to a lizard with a det pack. Both had survived, but their armor was a mess and their bodies just slightly less so. They’d live, but would be out of action for a while.

The rest of them needed a break, so she’d decided this bunker would be the last offense on the day and logging it as such in the battlemap while posting sentries in case the lizards tried a sneak attack. They’d get some rest then keep pressing forward against the small lizard infrastructure spread throughout the planet’s forest and other wilderness areas. Finding all of the sites was tricky and the lizards were learning how to hide them better, but the one thing they couldn’t do was cleanse a planet and miss some of them, so they had to be thorough and that involved a lot of low flying aircraft with sensor modules and Archons out and about looking for minds where they shouldn’t be.

Her Protovic helped with that, but their telepathic ranges were far shorter than hers. She trusted the Admiral in orbit to find targets for her and feed them either directly or through the commanding mage. At this point Jaina could be commanding some of these ‘small’ planetary invasions herself, but she preferred leading the elite Protovic teams personally rather than staying back and playing planetary strategist. She could, and had done that many times, but had passed up opportunities for more recently when offered.

That wasn’t a big deal with Archons, for they all had their preferred niches. They just had to be able to do any duty when necessary, and Jaina preferred getting involved in taking individual objectives and allowing herself to not worry about anything beyond them. It was when leading a planetary assault she’d have to keep the big picture in mind, with her more than willing to follow someone else’s lead in that regard.

She just wanted a target and a challenge…then to be let loose against it.

As she sat catching her breath a little green armored Rammus rolled up to her and unfurled, walking the last few steps over and opening up his cargo pouches. She saw that he had a bit of ammo, but most of his items were food or water. Jaina reached into two of them, pulling out a bottle of water and a couple of food cubes, both of which were designed for maximum volume use in order to keep them small enough not to interfere with the Rammus’ carry motion too much.

“Thank you,” she said, with the Rammus nodding in typically silent reply and closing his pouches before turning and rolling off elsewhere.

Jaina opened her helmet but kept her armor’s shields up, pushing them out in a bubble around her so she could eat and drink without interference. She took an opening swig of water, then popped one of the dense food cubes into her mouth and slowly chewed, looking around the area with her eyes but taking a moment to rest her Pefbar and trusting in her Protovic sentries to alert her to any surprises before they could get to her.

She looked down at her left leg, seeing the hole in her armor that had started oozing gel in a few tiny places, meaning it had punctured all the way through the tough material. The gel both cushioned and cooled her body within the armor, making the sidewalls of the interior safe to her legs rather than being just as dangerous in an impact as they were on the exterior to whomever she was kicking. Within that gel was a myriad of other things, including biosensors, healing packs, and whatever else the techs could work into it. Whenever it leaked, you knew a shot had hit home.

Fortunately her leg hadn’t been damaged, but that piece of her armor was going to have to be replaced and the Rammus didn’t carry such things in battle…at least not directly.

A few minutes later a pair of skeets flew by overhead preceding an aerial convoy of small transports. Each was outfitted as a light gunship, able to offer ground support or self-defense if needed, but these transports were meant for battlefield logistics assistance rather than combat, especially the large central one. It was bigger than a Dragon-class dropship by far and had the smaller transports flanking in proper formation held so rigid that it was almost comforting to see.

She could have offered a waypoint for landing if she wanted, but knew the Rammus onboard could handle the site selection themselves. That and it didn’t really matter where they set down around here, for there wasn’t anything of value or danger to maneuver around.

Staying put and watching as she finished chewing and began to gulp down half of the water bottle, the six smaller transports spread out into a flying perimeter as the big boxy centerpiece began transforming as it floated about a kilometer away from her. The compact ship expanded greatly, unfurling internal compartments that had been compacted down for transport. The cabin of the craft contained the Rammus crew while the bulk of the transport was inaccessible during flight, packed down so tight not even an Irondel could climb back into it.

Eventually the giant plate spread out and landing gear dropped from it, extending out in a length that would keep it overtop the trees, smoking or otherwise, then the whole assembly lowered and settled itself onto the ground looking like it was standing on stilts. Those sunk in a bit, then lights on the underside turned on despite it still being daylight.

Jaina glanced over her shoulder, seeing the twin suns on the horizon getting low to the ground. Night fighting didn’t bother her, but she hadn’t realized they were that close to losing daylight. She often lost track of time when fighting, but hadn’t expected this planet’s 39 hour day to be over just yet.

When the main assembly was set, the other six transports flew over top of it and landed, connecting to it in order to add the customizable modules needed for this mission. The central assembly was what the Rammus called a ‘Portal,’ for it was a way for field teams to access a bit of civilization no matter where they were. The modules were known as ‘Augments,’ each of which carried more rooms that would be added on top of the Portal. They could be warehouses, factory units, defensive weapons, shield generators…anything and everything that you could possibly imagine up until you found yourself lacking in something.

Then the Rammus would design and build a module for that the next time.

One of these augments, once docked and expanded into a tree-like add-on, dispensed a number of tiny drones into the air that spread out in patrol patterns, both for surveillance and anti-personnel missions as needed. They would monitor the airspace above the trees and give the Portal a heads up of anything coming in from afar, but they didn’t work down in the forest very well, despite having sensors to see through the trees.

Fairly soon she saw the scout armor of the Rammus coming out of the Portal and heading across the semi-clearing in front of her. They rolled through the smoke in a group of six, then dispersed when they got past her. They carried no pouches or supplies of any kind, rather outfitted with sensors and weapons so they could hold and monitor the ground perimeter in addition to the security drones.

This wasn’t the first time Jaina had worked with them and she knew she and the Protovic could now stand down from guard duty, allowing everyone to get some rest while their allies watched over them. She sent that order out, then picked herself up off the log as she finished off her second food cube and headed in the direction of the Portal.

When she got beneath it and walked past one of the thick support pillars that was keeping it aloft without burning fuel on gravity drives, she spotted three different ramps that had been lowered to allow access to the giant portable treehouse. She walked to the nearest one then scaled the stairless ramp as she passed through an energy shield and into the internal air.

Jaina dropped her shields and the armored gloves on her hands, breathing in deeply while flexing her fingers. The planet wasn’t bad, but the crisp air in here felt and smelled a lot better…though she probably didn’t. She headed for an equipment bay and shed her armor there, with bits and pieces contracting down while others split apart. As the decades went by their armor continued to improve, though the outward appearance had stayed much the same. It was the transformational technology that kept getting added, allowing them to put on and take off the armor far faster than in the old days.

The bit on her leg where the major damage was wouldn’t split apart as needed, so she had to pull her leg out of it like a massive boot while several Protovic were around the locker room-style chamber doing much the same thing. Once out of all of it and standing in her sweat soaked casual uniform, she disconnected the damaged segment of her armor and picked up the rest in her left arm. She carried the damaged boot over to the quartermaster, laying it out in front of the unarmored Rammus there with a look of frustration.

“I don’t think you can repair this one. Need to call me in a replacement before I head back out again. I don’t want to bother with a generic suit if I don’t have to,” she said, referring to the ‘one size fits all’ Archon armor sets that adjusted to a user’s dimensions rather than being custom designed to her body.

The Rammus pulled the armor piece across the table to him with stubby arms, then twisted it around in his hands with claw-like fingers picking at various points. “Are you hurt?”

“Just my pride,” she admitted.

“I’ll call for a replacement from orbit, highest priority,” the shorter Rammus said, looking up at her with its narrow, snout-like face and speaking fairly good English, though it still sounded like he was coughing with every word. This one, she knew, hadn’t been born into Star Force, but one of the early converts that she hadn’t been able to stand back then. Now the Rammus were always a welcome sight on the battlefield so long as they stayed within their support role, which they took to with great pride and efficiency.

“Thanks, Vrita,” Jaina said as she left the Rammus to deal with Protovic armor issues and headed for one of the few personal pods on the Portal. They had a Rammus design aesthetic to them, but had been configured to work for Humans and other Star Force races, though larger ones had to use other customized Portals. As was normal, everything worked for Humans though, and she locked herself inside one of the small rest room/changing/shower compartments.

After cleaning up and donned a new casual uniform she checked herself out of the pod and a waiting Protovic took her place as she found one of the small but private sleeping bunks set into a wall like a honeycomb. She climbed into an empty one head first, then tapped a small control panel near the pillow at the far end. A one-way panel slipped past her feet, closing off the sleeping area from view or sound, though she could still see out of it.

It was a tiny bunk that she couldn’t fully sit up inside without tipping her head slightly, but putting even the smallest of quarters in a mobile facility like this wouldn’t have made sense. What she needed was a place to sleep with the addition of the unnecessary but welcomed privacy. Knowing that the Rammus would be handling security for them and would wake them the moment there was a threat sighted, she let her head hit the pillow and not worry about anything else.

The Portal was far better than sleeping in her armor in the forest or having to ride a dropship back to a firebase or a ship in orbit. They had to make sure the Portals were protected, for they made good, if not quite helpless targets, but so long as they had sufficient air cover and distance from the enemy they would allow her unit to stay in the field indefinitely without getting wore down from fatigue, limited food, or lack of equipment/ammo.

Jaina fell asleep almost immediately, drifting off to dreamless sleep as her body finished digesting those food cubes and a sugar stick that she’d taken out of her own pack before setting it on a rack in the equipment room to be recycled and refilled for her use tomorrow.

But right now it was time to recover, and snugged up in the confining tube she didn’t hear a sound or feel a vibration from those outside or in the bunks beside, above, and below her. She was alone in her little island of serenity in the middle of a war zone, and the Archon knew she would be safe here until morning, as would the rest of her unit. The Rammus might not be that good in combat, but they made for loyal and attentive sentinels.

When she woke, Jaina filled up on a big breakfast then armored up with the rest of her unit, grabbing her refilled pack of ammunition, equipment, and a bit of foodstuffs and water. Enough to last her a few days if needed, for while the Rammus Portals were very welcome, you never knew when they’d be able to get to you, and if there was any real threat against them Jaina would not allow them to come in.

The mobile supply depots were another matter. They were as well armored as the Rammus were, and as Jaina joined her unit outside and began running with them through the forest she saw a new Rammus transport flying in from afar. It landed nearby the Portal as it was disconnecting its augments and packing up. By the time Jaina and her unit were on their way to the next known lizard outpost the Portal and its transports were flying away from danger and back to the nearest Star Force surface base where they would wait until they had an opportunity to aid a field unit again.

The depot, however, was staying put and would be conserving fuel on the ground as it tracked the Protovic, occasionally leap frogging across the terrain to stay close but safely behind them. If it had to deal with wisps it could run and survive long enough to get to help thanks to its thick armor, but it was meant to resupply the unit rather than engage in combat, though it too was decently armed.

Later in the day, when combat was deplenishing the ammo counts of her troops, that depot sprouted a number of offloading ramps out of which the Rammus themselves rolled in several lines of cargo carriers, all of which were headed across considerable distance to the front lines to supply the field unit with ammo, weapons, and whatever other supplies had been requested or assumed to be needed.

It was tricky for the Rammus to pull off without being ambushed or directly targeted by the lizards, but tricky was one thing Star Force’s new little ward was, for they’d been tricking and surviving against the lizards far long than anyone else had been able to, and now they were applying those skills and Star Force tech in new and devious ways, keeping their heads down and enabling the frontline units to become even more effective and efficient than before.

The Rammus might not be killing the lizards themselves, but they were seeing to it that they died in greater numbers and at a faster rate than otherwise, and were quite knowledgeable and proud of that fact.

And as far as the front line combat troops were concerned, they loved the little guys.

8

April 9, 3201

Ivataru (lizard territory)

Inner Zone

When Jaina got to the bridge of the Warship-class jumpship the fleet had already emerged at the destination star and was transitioning around to the jumpline for the known lizard planet of Chammtre, but as she’d been told via comm and could see now for herself on the long range sensors, they were not the first ones to get here.

There was already an ongoing conversation via holo with a waiting beacon for her, so when she sat down in a secondary command chair next to the Captain’s she hit a button and four meter-tall images appeared around her, three of which were Archon mages on other ships in this fleet, but the other was a mage not assigned to them and apparently the commander of the Lacvamat fleet that they were picking up on sensors around the distant planet.

His image was apparently a recorded message being played out, while the others were realtime. She caught the last bit about them needing to survey five sites on the planet for possible survivors, then the rogue mage’s image disappeared.

“What’d I miss?” Jaina asked.

“Apparently we’ve got word from independent sources that there might be an indigenous population on this planet that the lizards haven’t discovered yet,” Arron-44920 explained. “The Lacvamat fleet was sent to investigate but they’ve not had much luck on the ground. They’ve cleared out orbit of lizard warships and begun some ground bombardment, but so far they can’t find any of these hidden outposts. They need ground assistance for the search.”

“Why Lacvamat?”

“Looks like they were the only sizeable unit available. They’re holding down the airspace over the designated regions, but we’ve got to go to ground to investigate. Jaina, you’ll knock out this lizard base,” he said as a zoomed-in planetary hologram popped up with a waypoint on it a fair distance from the nearest of the marked exploration zones. “Get us a solid foothold.”

“What about anti-orbital defenses?”

“The nearest ones have already been knocked out. If we stay within the brackets we’ll be fine. Madi, you’ve got search zone 1. Knock out the lizard outposts in the area then do an extensive search. Trevor, zone 2. I’ve got 3. We’re told these guys are amphibian, so if you see any water down there that’s probably a good place to start.”

“What water?” Madi asked, seeing a planet full of vegetation but only a scattering of tiny lakes and rivers.

“Doesn’t make much sense to me, but these guys have been running some smuggling routes off this planet. They know how to hide.”

“Smuggling past the lizards?” Jaina said, doing a double take. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what we’ve been told. Not a lot, but an occasion ship in and out.”

“How?”

“Good question. We’ll find out when we find them.”

“Are we working with the Lacvamat or keeping our distance?” Trevor asked.

“They’re going to keep the skies clear and assist where able. When we make orbit begin immediate deployment. For some reason our contacts believed the locals were under some sort of time constraint, so let’s not delay…and keep your eyes open. Something about this feels weird.”

“A trap?” Madi asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did we get a name at least?” Jaina asked.

“No. Whoever these guys are they like to keep a low profile.”

“Then what was the rush…to us anyway?”

“Yuri didn’t say. He just got orders to come out here and investigate and pave the way for us.”

“I wonder what was worth smuggling?” Trevor asked.

“One way to find out,” Arron said. “Let’s get to work.”

The holograms in front of Jaina disappeared, save for Madi’s. “Looks like you get to take the biggest crack this time.”

“I don’t mind that. At least I know the lizards.”

“This doesn’t feel right to me either. There must be something really important down there.”

“Let me know when you find it.”

“Will do, sister. Happy hunting,” the mage said as her hologram also vanished.

“Nearing the jumppoint, Archon.”

“Make the jump as soon as possible, Captain. Apparently we’re in a rush.”

“What do you want opened?”

“Give me cover as you see fit and coordinate with the Lacvamat so you don’t accidentally shoot any of them,” she said with a touch of frustration.

“They’re Star Force, so what’s the issue?”

“I’ve never worked with them before.”

“We’ll be careful,” the Protovic captain promised. “You going down first?”

“Duh,” she said, giving him a stupid look.

“Would you like a landing zone flattened for you?” he said, his voice going heavily sarcastic.

“No, we’re taking theirs. Signal our ships to prepare for hot drop,” she said, getting up out of her chair and heading for the hangar bays.

“Could have made credits on that,” one of the Protovic crew muttered after she’d gone.

“Assuming someone would have been stupid enough to take that bet,” the Captain said with a smirk. “As soon as we make orbit, pull up all the records from the Lacvamat and double check their kill history. Let’s make sure the clear zones really are clear before we send our people down. We’re assuming ground control, so let’s make sure we get everything squared away. No mistakes.”

“We’ll make sure the bats got it right,” another crewer said as helm signaled that they were ready to make their microjump as other ships were visible doing so ahead of them.

“Big ass bats,” the Captain corrected. “Execute jump.”

Jaina road down to the planet in the back seat of a two person mech, being dropped off near their target base by dropship as she controlled her remote star of mechs while her Protovic pilot handled their own. Three other stars assembled with them and marched across the grassland towards the craggy rocks that surrounded the lizard base. It wasn’t a city per se, but rather a military fortification that contained a variety of buildings, which was odd on a planet like this. Perimeter turrets were plentiful and it also had decent anti-air capability, prompting the land assault.

It also had a single anti-orbital battery, which had meant the dropships had to come down to the surface far away then skim overland to get to their LZ, but now that they were below the big gun’s range Jaina was going to bust up this base, take it down, and work on securing a proper foothold for a much larger invasion heading north while the search teams were located on one of six continents in the southern hemisphere outlined by mountain ranges and a handful of rivers.

With her mind plugged into the mini nexus software, Jaina drove four mechs simultaneously, each of which was outfitted with additional weapons, armor, shields, and anything else they could squeeze into the space that otherwise would have been reserved for a pilot. That made them tougher and, above all else, expendable if need be, while the other 15 mechs out there were all piloted by Protovic.

As they came within range they began a sniping exchange, the phaser turrets crossing the distance with badly aimed shots while a few of the mechs returned fire with baby cleansing beams. Jaina made sure two of the turrets were down before she gave the order to charge, then all 20 mechs began running across the grass up towards the rocks that ringed the base. As distances closed more weaponry opened up on both sides, but with that pair of turrets down the exchange was tolerable to cross the distance up to the base wall.

Before they got here they had to pass the rocks, some of which were building sized. Keeping an eye on depression angle of the really big gun, the mechs with jump jets floated up and over them while the ones that did not climbed and mechanically leapt over the hazards, fighting their way up to the nearest turrets and taking them down before the mechs began getting hit too hard.

The group of them took refuge against the lizard wall, spreading out both directions to begin stripping the nearest turrets away with overwhelming firepower one at a time. Meanwhile Jaina’s star began pounding on the wall, not wanting to jump up and over it and into the fire zone of the anti-air batteries. It took a while, but eventually they pounded enough of a hole that they were able to press through…right into the guns of a huge tank formation.

Jaina pulled back the drone mech she’d sent in first as it was getting hammered, coming back out through the gap with ample armor damage.

“We’re going through phalanx style,” she told her pilot. “Put us fourth in line.”

The four drone mechs in her star lined up beside the eastern wall, leaving a gap for the control mech to slide in. Once in place all of them sidestepped to get out from the wall and make a less sharp angle to the gap, then the five bunched as close together as they could and Jaina shifted the lead mech’s shields full forward and charged the formation into the lizards’ firing line.

Her mech came through safely, but the first one lost its shields and an arm before the other four spread out and savaged the surrounding tanks. They’d been arrayed in a hemisphere with their full attention on the breach point, maximizing their firepower, but now that the Star Force mechs had gotten within melee range they were at a disadvantage and suffered the consequences.

When Jaina got those mechs cleared out she put her two wounded ones in the back of her star and proceeded through the base knocking out whatever shot at them and working their way towards the big gun in the center as the other mechs made their way back around to the breach point and followed them in in ones and twos. Jaina waited for them to catch up before she pushed too far, then the twenty mechs worked together to force their way up to the big gun and began chipping away at it with their weapons.

They got counterattacked four times and had to fend off lizard tanks, wisps, and infantry before finally being left more or less alone to chew through the thick armor of the turret tower. When they did Jaina sent a mech almost all the way inside to trash the interior. It blasted away at point blank range until their sensors determined the tower was inoperable.

When that happened Jaina tagged it as out, then recalled that mech and brought all of them together into a small opening within the base. It looked like a courtyard but the lizards didn’t have such niceties in their cities, at least not for the sake of mingling anyway. The 20 mechs clustered there and put themselves back to back in a defensive posture as they waited for the orbital bombardment to begin.

The shield tower they’d not bothered with, so the now low flying naval drones were hammering it as they came down through the atmosphere so they could get into better range and not worry about hitting the mechs accidentally. When the shield finally came down the triangular wedges that were the Protovic drones hovered over the city looking like tiny birds in the air, but birds that were raining down precision weapons strikes against the remaining turrets and any other large defenses that could be identified.

The mechs waited it out, then when the ‘all clear’ was signaled they broke up by stars and began to roam the base looking to clean up whatever else was left as the infantry were on approach in more dropships. When they arrived they’d do a room by room search with sensors and psionics to make sure that every last inch of this lizard base was clean of the vermin.

With a replacement mechwarrior taking over her control of the drones, Jaina got down dirtside with the rest of the infantry and helped them clean out the buildings in the base, including the subsurface structures, then got back to the surface in time to see a huge flock of Lacvamat flying overhead a few kilometers up.

She checked the battlemap and compared it to their heading, seeing that a Lacvamat ship was coming down from orbit nearby. They were probably cycling out at the end of a patrol, with the ship coming low into the atmosphere for them to fly into. They didn’t use traditional dropships, rather these considerably larger transports with dorsal entry. They rarely landed on the surface of a planet, but when they did they usually were laden up with cargo with too small a workforce to empty it quickly, otherwise they’d just hover over the ground and let the Lacvamat workers fly in the top, scoop up the supplies, and fly them out to wherever they needed them.

As she was taking a moment to watch them and snoop out what else was happening around the planet via battlemap, a section of the Lacvamat flock broke off and dove down towards the surface. Jaina frowned and zoomed in on that section, seeing sporadic enemy signatures popping up. There was nothing but grassland there, but somehow there were lizards out in the open where there had been none previously.

With a quick check of her surroundings to make sure she was safe, Jaina walked over to a chunk of lizard wall and started inputting commands, getting a sensor highlight on that region from orbit that allowed her to zoom in to the surface and see what was happening in real time.

Not surprisingly, the Lacvamat were dive bombing lizard infantry and making a mess of the little green guys, but she was more interested in seeing where the lizards were coming from. It wasn’t until one of the Lacvamat swung low and actually landed did she find what she was looking for. He pulled away a grass mat to expose a hole in the ground, dirt walled, that led down deeper than was visible. Jaina was now pulling visuals directly from the Lacvamat’s armor, looking down inside and seeing the little claw marks where the lizards had pulled themselves out through the dirt.

The Archon was about to pull up an intense sensor focus but someone else beat her to it, for the sensor map enhanced immediately and was growing in detail as a drone descended from orbit. By the time it got near the ground Jaina could make out the slight sensor distortion in the faked subsurface structure that indicated a lizard sensor blind, meaning the lizards had some sort of bunker there, and it was far away from any of their nearest outposts.

Jaina adjusted her comm, about to call in and offer to send some of her Protovic over with Rammus digging equipment to start tearing out that bunker when she got an incoming comm.

“I’ve found them,” Madi said, though her voice was a bit more tense than it should be. Jaina noticed that it was a multiple comm message, with all the mages in the Protovic fleet being included. “And I think they’re freaking out.”

“Define freaking out,” Arron said.

“They’re below ground, and from the visuals I’m pulling from their minds there’s water down there. Sensors aren’t showing it, so it must be some type of blind, but they’re down there, and I can feel a few of them freaking out. I think it’s spreading to all of them.”

“Did they see you?” Jaina asked.

“No…” Madi said hesitantly. “They felt me.”

“Meaning?” Trevor asked.

“I didn’t pet them,” Madi said snippily.

“They’re telepathic?” Arron asked.

“Yeah. They tried to get inside my head in response to me snooping in theirs and hit my Ikrid block…and now they’re freaking out. I get the feeling they’ve hid from the lizards by playing Jedi mind tricks on them. Now I’m here, with telepathic powers too, and they can’t affect me. Hence, they’re freaking out.”

“And doing what?”

“Moving around inside. I can’t sense too many of them, so I think they’re dug in deep, but I am pulling as much information as I can from the few up top…and they’re really not liking that either.”

“Have you found an entrance?”

“Not yet.”

“What are they?” Jaina asked.

“Turtles.”

“Turtles?” Arron asked.

“Flippers and all. They couldn’t fight a lizard hand to hand even if they had 100 to 1 odds. I get the feeling they do everything with telepathy and tech, and this hidden city is evading our sensors too. All I’m picking up now is a flat panel a few dozen meters below the surface. Everything else beyond that is blocked.”

“I can understand why they’re freaking,” Trevor agreed. “They’ve got no defense against us and we just blew their cover.”

“Can you try and calm them down?” Arron asked.

“Trying but failing. They’re just getting more and more worked up.”

“Can you take control of one?” Jaina asked.

“Not at this range.”

“We need to find a door.”

“I’m on it. But I get the feeling that there are a whole lot of them down there…and by down there I mean inside the planet. More than the lizards I’d guess, and I think I just ticked them all off.”

9

April 14, 3201

Ivataru (lizard territory)

Planet 4

Jaina sat crosslegged on the grass in her aquatics armor next to Madi, both of the Archons linked in battlemeld and projecting their extended range telepathy downward into another portion of the ‘turtles’ hidden civilization. They sat on what they’d discovered to be a concealed hangar bay, patiently trying to reach those beneath them and confer upon them the reason they were here and that they were no threat.

It wasn’t going well. They’d been at it two days, taking breaks for workouts and sleep, but otherwise they were here, using their linked abilities to probe as deeply as they could. They didn’t want to break in and force their way underground and were hoping that they could come to an understanding via telepathy, but so far there were only a few beneath them within range…yet they could sense that those were there specifically to received their ‘manipulations.’

That’s how the turtles saw them. The rest of their population was out of range but were able to sense through those exposed. Had Jaina been down there she wouldn’t have liked to have been the one to draw the short straw, but either these few had or they’d volunteered. Regardless, they were still very much afraid and continually vexed having had their secret entrance to their secret civilization located. The lizards were far from here and the Protovic and Lacvamat were keeping them away, leaving only the two Archons to politely keep knocking on the telepathic door. How long they’d keep doing that though, was a matter of question.

They could just leave them alone, rid the planet of the lizards then leave them be. However, they really didn’t want to do that given how few races actually possessed telepathy, even if it was an inferior form. It was becoming obvious to Jaina that the V’kit’no’sat telepathy was the premium variety, with far more depth and intricacy than was standard. She’d never fully understood that, just thinking that the Protovic telepathy was limited. Now that she’d gotten inside a turtle’s head it was becoming clear that the Zen’zat had gotten the Super Saiyan variety standard.

Not only was her telepathy raw power higher than the turtles’, there was so much she could do with it that they couldn’t. There were blind spots where she could go in their minds that even they could not. For example, they could transmit and receive while locating other minds, but they couldn’t pinpoint locate anyone. Not alone anyway. They needed several of them working together to lock down a person’s location. On their own they could sense the general area and transmit to it, but they couldn’t correlate that with their physical senses well at all.

She was also realizing they made up for a lot of things by using the group. They didn’t have battlemeld or anything like it, they just collaborated their telepathic insights as if using multiple sensors to look at the same target then sharing data. It didn’t raise their raw power any, and she was pretty sure two-way communication was locked out from multi-transmission, but these were genuine telepaths and she was wondering if they were hiding for the same reasons the Protovic Pinks had been. Were these guys hunted down too because they could get inside people’s heads?

“I’m getting sick of this,” Madi suddenly said out loud, though she didn’t need to having been linked with Jaina, for the Archon could sense the words even as she said them. “They’re not going to let us in. They’re playing ‘turtle,’ pun intended.”

“We can give it a while more.”

“Or…”

Jaina sighed. “That’ll really tick them off.”

“Well I’m tired of waiting, and we’re doing them the favor of kicking out the lizards so…they can tolerate it.”

“Fair enough,” Jaina agreed. “I’m tired of sitting here too.”

The pair didn’t say anymore, instead focusing their telepathy on those individuals below. They’d pulled a lot of information from their minds already regarding the layout below, including the controls to open the concealed bay doors. Picking one of the turtles below, they focused on him with their combined power and barely managed to take control of his mind. They held him steady at first, cementing their hold, then had him swim closer to the surface. They also made sure to look out for the others in case they tried to stop him, but the Archons were pretty sure the turtles had no idea anyone could do this.

They had their little guy find his way to the bay door controls and hit the release, then released him from their control but knocked him unconscious, along with anyone else that was in range so they couldn’t contest their entry.

The ground they sat on jolted, then slowly rose up with them sitting on what was basically a giant plate of dirt and grass. It raised up above ground level then rotated around a fixed point on one edge, moving the plate clear of the circular opening as the Archons stood up and walked towards the pivot point.

Looking down they saw an empty room big enough to accommodate ship traffic, but with nothing in sight. They knew the bay was much wider than the opening, so Madi casually jumped off the edge and slowly fell on the end of a Bataf conduit from Jaina, with the invisible rope disconnecting a meter above the floor. The Archon dropped the rest of the way and landed gracefully in a partial crouch, seeing several ships around the perimeter of the mostly empty bay. This was obviously a receiving area, and from their mind raids they knew that other races they somewhat trusted as intermediaries would fly their ships in here and have the hatch sealed while they conducted business.

Madi extended a Bataf conduit up like a pole and Jaina rode down on it, joining her on the bay floor. They left the entrance open, not worried about the lizards while they had their troops on the surface keeping them well away from the vulnerable turtles.

“Time to get wet,” Jaina said, gesturing to the hatch to the south.

“Yep. Let’s take it slow so we don’t look like we’re chasing any of them.”

“They’re already freaking out,” she said, sensing them more easily now that they were closer and resisting the urge to knock them out too now that there were more in range.

“Let’s go say hi and get this over then,” Madi said, getting a telekinetic grip on the light hatch and pulling it open without needing the hydraulics. Just below the rim of the rectangular cutout was the water, and it immediately struck both Archons as being foul.

“I guess they have something more than water in it,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Looks clear though.”

“Probably their version of air freshener. Just be glad we didn’t bring any Elarioni. They’d probably gag on it,” Madi said, sitting down on the edge and sliding in feet first with Jaina following a few seconds later.

When they got in the water their helmets automatically shut out the air and switched over to internal oxygen. Whereas their normal armor had a short backup air supply, the aquatics armor had far more stuffed inside the bulkier construct and could be augmented for days with additional backpacks. Also, if there was oxygen in the water their armor could draw it out directly, allowing them unlimited time underneath the water. If there wasn’t they could even slowly add oxygen to their reserves through hydrolysis, but that wouldn’t be enough for them to stay active. If that was all they had left they’d have to stop moving and get their breathing very, very low…but that was far better than dying.

All of that meant that the Archons were perfectly comfortable sealed up inside their armor as they went underwater. Both of them immediately began transmitting calming telepathic waves but including a bit of annoyance, making it clear they didn’t like waiting outside. They wanted to talk to the turtles and they made that known, but did so trying to make it clear that they weren’t the lizards and weren’t going to hurt any of them.

“Little bastards,” Jaina said, seeing ahead with her Pefbar.

“No kidding,” Madi said, referencing the defense turrets popping out of the walls. “Let’s make it clear who they’re trying to shoot.”

Both of the Archons swam forward using the jets in their arms and legs for propulsion as they reached out and telekinetically grabbed the little minnow-like darts being fired towards them. Freezing them in mid swim they held them there, knowing that the turtles would be watching on vid screens or whatever else they used.

Once the Archons got close enough they used their telekinesis to reach inside the turrets and break or bend what was needed to disable them. One by one they went offline as the Archons casually swam by the interior defenses continually mentally transmitting their ‘we come in peace’ vibe, but apparently these guys had seen Mars Attacks and weren’t buying it, so the pair swam to find the nearest one that they’d rendered unconscious.

When they saw it they were surprised by the glow coming off him. He was floating in the water just off the floor, suggesting these guys were a bit on the sinker side, and was covered in a more rounded shell than a typical turtle, but he had four flipper-like legs, no tail, and a stubby head that had small tentacles on it that doubled as hands. It looked gross, but it appeared they just head-butted their controls and made alterations from inches away.

This guy had four short, almost tiny arms bracketing his two eyes and mouth, but it was his shell that was glowing deep red on vein-like lines. The rest of his body didn’t glow, but neither Archon had expected that for none of the visuals they’d taken from their minds had shown it.

“They can’t see it?” Madi wondered.

“I guess not,” she said, noticing that the interior was dark. They’d been using their Pefbar and hadn’t noticed, but the lights around the rim of the hallways were dim. Jaina did a check on the light sources with her HUD, seeing that they only slightly bled over into the visible light spectrum for Humans. Most of it was ultraviolet, with her guessing that the red end was out of their ability to see. Odd that they’d be producing it, but then again Humans glowed in infrared and couldn’t see it, though not in only specific areas. On the turtles it almost seemed like decorative trim.

“Alright, let’s wake this guy up,” Madi said. Jaina held him steady, pulling him up off the floor so his flippers couldn’t hit anything but water and keeping him there with her invisible grip while the other mage slowly brought him back to consciousness. As she did so she started working on him, dosing him up heavily with calming and soothing emotions while letting him get minimally aware of their presence.

But eventually a point was reached when he realized they were not his kin and he started freaking out, but neither Archon would relent. He spent several minutes spasming, trying to swim but unable to, and with far worse things occurring inside his mind.

The mages didn’t move, merely staying still and calm and talking to him using emotions and senses given that they didn’t know their language. They kept bombarding him with the notion of ‘friend’ until he finally settled down, though it was more from exhaustion than acceptance. Knowing the razor’s edge they were walking, both of the Archons proceeded slowly, not moving, and working on him telepathically as they gradually released the physical restrictions.

When they did fully release him he bolted, getting across a few meters far faster than he looked capable of, but Jaina gently slowed him down to a stop and came swimming up beside him.

You’re not going anywhere buddy, so just chill.

“Heads up, his friends are coming.”

“Good,” Jaina said, sensing the other turtles on approach. “Let’s speed this up.”

“They’re armed.”

“So?”

“Right,” Madi agreed. “Hang onto our friend. I’ll deal with them,” she said, swimming off a few meters.

Jaina stayed put, looking through Madi’s eyes but otherwise not paying attention to what was going on behind her. She kept trying to soften up this one’s mind but years of paranoia and ignorance were layered into its mind and hard to get through. By not harming it some of those layers were peeling off in calculation, and she knew if she so much as stubbed its toe that bit of progress would be undone, so she just held him still as Madi stopped more of the little missiles that were being fired from backpacks on the other turtles.

Jaina grabbed a handful of them from where Madi had them floating and pulled them over in front of her little guy’s face. She grabbed them in her hand, held them for a moment, then pushed them down from the floor and away from both of them.

She heavily insisted that there was ‘no need’ for those weapons, and finally she felt something click in this one. Taking a guess, she slowly released her hold on him. His emotions spiked again, feeling the ability to run, but he checked himself and just stared at her hard, unmoving body, then she felt him say something to the others and they all stopped moving, just looking at the two intruders.

“Progress,” Jaina noted.

“Keep it up.”

“Working on it,” she said, bringing an image of the lizards to both of their minds and sending it the feelings of hate and revulsion, trying to make it understand that they were an enemy. When she felt understanding she added a vision of the galaxy, then zoomed down to the stars the lizards held, seeing them as little green dots, then showed them winking out in bunches coming up to this star.

Then a first happened. The turtle asked her a question. It wasn’t in words, but rather a concept. Isolation and acceptance. It wanted to know if they were going to leave the turtles alone.

It took some work, but eventually she was able to get the idea across that Star Force didn’t want this planet, they only wanted to remove the lizards from it. Then she went on to infer that they wanted communication with the turtles, but nothing more. Doing so without words was difficult, so she worked to try to get it to understand that they wanted a sample of their language to learn.

The other turtles were on the edge of blowing up inside, but this one was acting as an intermediary and Jaina stuck with him. After some not so successful attempts at him speaking to her, he pictured an image of one of their display screens and directed her to it. She accepted, then let him go and gently followed. The others freaked out again as soon as she moved, but her guide kept his nerve and Jaina kept reinforcing the calming emotions flowing to him, sensing that if she didn’t filter out all the noise from the others he’d freak out again too. The communal mind here was strong, almost to lemming levels, so Jaina decided to keep this guy in her camp constantly, not wanting to let their progress slip by releasing her telepathic domination of him.

It was odd. Usually such interference was used to cause problems with others, but she was actually helping him, giving him far more emotional structure and clarity of perception than his race had. In essence she was making him emotionally smarter by plugging her mind into his. That was a crude way to describe it, but given that all they had right now was crude communication it seemed fitting. The others obviously didn’t like what was happening to him, for they could feel it a bit and he was still communicating with them, but she knew from Madi that they thought he was in some sort of trance or possession.

More like helping someone with a limp stand up straight, but whatever. So long as this guy was playing along the others could freak out all they wanted.

The turtles’ display screens were small for the most part. There were a few large ones for general viewing, but the work stations were no bigger than their faces. That was due to the fact that their arms didn’t reach more than a few inches, meaning they were literally planting their faces in the tiny screens to work.

Her new friend did just that, working one of the consoles and bringing up an image of text on one of the bigger screens in what looked like some sort of monitoring room.

“Surface surveillance,” Madi filled in. “They keep track of the lizards a lot.”

“Big surprise,” Jaina said, having to adjust her HUD to see the ultraviolet displays that otherwise looked like ghostly images just spilling over into the visual spectrum, much like their hallway lights. She didn’t recognize the script, but thanked the turtle for showing it to her as she recorded her helmet telemetry so the analysts could study them later.

It wanted to know if she understood them, and she inferred ‘no, but that they would learn.’

The turtled popped its head back into its working face plant and tweaked a control with one of its face arms.

The text changed, not just saying something else, but into another form entirely.

“Different languages,” Jaina guessed. “They’ve got to have relations with other races out there if they’ve got smuggling going on. Hopefully we can recognize one of these.”

She recorded this one and gave the turtle a negative thought. It switched to another and another, running her through a list until it was her turn to freak out.

“Madi!” she said, a bit of trepidation spiking in her. The turtle apparently sensed a bit of it and recoiled as if he had done something wrong. Before he started wondering if he was going to get killed Jaina dismissed her own emotions to a corner of her mind that wouldn’t transmit to him, then calmed him down while quickly explaining that she did recognize it, but that it was the language of an enemy.

“Never thought I’d need this,” she told Madi, activating a tiny laser on her helmet that was configured to be a projector. Why it had been included in their armor she’d never really known, but now it was going to be incredibly helpful until they figured out how to interface with the turtles’ own comm systems. Different technology didn’t allow for plug and play options, and mating up computer systems was a pain in the ass that required some pretty good software techs. Fortunately they had some of them onboard the ships in orbit.

Jaina configured it for their light spectrum, sampling what was coming off the monitors and reciprocating, then she spoke the words she wanted and had them displayed in script on a nearby wall that she directed the turtle to.

“Asc ratch cu. Asc sen burtu,” she said in V’kit’no’sat.

10

March, 3202

Solar System

Earth

Davis walked into his office in the early morning, having just finished a pre-dawn workout in time to see the sun just climbing over Atlantis’s buildings on the east side. He sat down at his desk feeling the post-workout relaxation as he brought up his logged messages, finding 122 new ones since leaving his office yesterday.

That was typical, and he breezed through most of the notifications until he came to a rather long one. It was a data update from Sara concerning the Tamni, whose language translation was still ongoing. The turtle-like race spoke V’kit’no’sat only so far as it was in their databanks and therefore offered a means of limited communication, but overall they were not familiar with it aside from being an obscure language from their distant past.

But the fact that they knew it had been a big concern, especially since they were considerably far beyond the furthest reaches of the V’kit’no’sat empire. In this update Sara shed some clarity on that, detailing that the Tamni were not local to this region. About 330,000 years ago they were involved in a civil war that saw this faction leave their homeworld in the Sagittarius Arm. They ran far, horrified at what had happened to their kin and what they’d been forced to do defending themselves. They left their traitorous kin behind and hid themselves away further rimward.

They were pursued for a long time, then local threats forced them underground and they kept periodically moving so they could avoid their enemies, which were rapidly growing in number thanks to their benign persona and their advanced technology that many wished to exploit, for they were trading bits of it away in exchange for resources and continued to do so to this day, which was why some races were willing to try and slip past the lizard empire in order to get to them.

They had had no contact with the V’kit’no’sat, fortunately, but they knew their language as well as the commonplace knowledge to stay the hell away from their scattering of outposts and not to attract their attention. They hadn’t had many footholds, but from those they did the V’kit’no’sat dominated the region with everyone else keeping their heads down whenever they came around. Fortunately that was almost never, and the Tamni and other races went on about their business aware of the threat of the V’kit’no’sat but never having to deal with them outside of rare circumstances…but the example of those few who did was enough to let everyone else know that they could not be challenged, and to do so even once was suicide.

But this data update was more about the Tamni and their split, along with more details on their race and current activities. Their technology was impressive in some regards and primitive in others. What they were trading to others often involved small scale things. Medicines, genetic alterations, nanotechnology, stealth equipment…but no weapons. No ships either. Their gravity drives were decent, but overall their starship capability was dismal. They were not engineered to fight, or even defend. This was a race that did not like being in space, so their ships were designed to get them from planet to planet and that was about it.

Which also explained why people came to them rather than them going out to customers. They traded their technological services for raw materials they couldn’t get on their current planet and hoarded them. Sara indicated that she had offered to trade them a great deal more, and as a result the Tamni were offering up more information than she’d even requested. It seemed that they were always lacking for something and having to ration various things. Food wasn’t one of them, but their civilization was perpetually on life support. Stable, but unable to grow in any meaningful way.

And since coming out to this galactic arm they’d been unable to acquire any Solari, meaning there was a whole host of machines they couldn’t build. When Sara had told them they’d be able to trade for that as well, in small amounts, they’d immediately reversed their isolationist footing and wanted to open a permanent link to Star Force.

Sara had indicated that she was going to set up a small colony on the planet to act as an intermediary and trading partner, but wanted Davis to choose which faction it should come from.

He thought about that for a moment. The Bsidd had the largest population and this world wasn’t far from their region, but there were other races within Star Force that were looking to expand and he figured this would be a good opportunity to throw one of them a bone. This colony wasn’t going to grow to cover the entire planet, rather be restricted to a piece of it that it would develop to fill then remain contained. The Tamni owned the planet, which Sara was willing to concede to them even though it was Star Force that had removed the lizards from it, and the colony was just going to be a link into the Star Force markets in an otherwise empty region.

So that limited growth potential meant the best choice would be a ward. The colony would be open to the public, so not quite an Axius deal but it wouldn’t be closed off to one faction only like many worlds were. Davis needed a ward to run it, but one that could facilitate both Star Force traffic and other visitors while allowing the Tamni to maintain their privacy.

There were several wards that could do that, but one that had been chomping at the bit was the Aronsic. Ever since the end of the Skarron war they’d been eager beavers with little to do. Their population hadn’t grown rapidly due to a lack of females recovered from Skarron planets, but over time that had rectified itself and they numbered about 3 billion spread across two systems and 4 planets. Neither of those systems were controlled by them, with Mainline colonies and other wards present, so giving them a chance to expand beyond that would be most welcome.

Davis knew he needed to assign a veteran Administrator to the task though to handle the interface with the Tamni and to set up the links to the transit network. He pulled up one of his quick lists of personnel and input a search parameter that gave him 294 candidates. He scanned the list briefly, with only a few names sticking out at him, then he picked a Kiritas named Briddi and brought up her file.

She was 493 years old, had worked a stint with the Kiritak that lasted 43 years before returning to the Kiritas faction and helping to run one of their major trade hubs. After that she’d moved to an Axius posting, then over to work with the Calavari before finally landing in a Mainline colony with a high Administrator ranking, but not quite good enough to warrant a Monarch posting. Her skills weren’t widespread enough for that, but her proven abilities would cover this assignment easily.

He logged the transfer request and sent it off immediately. There was a chance she wouldn’t want to go, but typically most Star Force transfers weren’t declined. On occasion someone would want to stay with a particular faction, but given how much Briddi had been moving around he didn’t see a problem with it…especially since he was assigning her to the top position in a new colony. That’d be a new mark for her and he had no doubts that she’d jump at it, as most Administrators were accustomed to doing. There was so much work to do in the empire, but so few top positions available that any time you could run an operation, let alone a planet, an Administrator couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity if they had aims to increase their skillset and work their way up the leadership ranks.

And most of them knew that Davis was watching them. Monarchs were handpicked by him, and it was assumed that the more challenging of tasks that an Administrator could do the more they’d show up on his radar for future assignments. Running a world of your own was usually a Monarch’s job, so even though this was only going to be a small colony, it was the type of situation where an Administrator could show off, especially when it was being built from scratch. Briddi would be able to design it as she saw fit, and it would also be a chance to see how she could work with the Aronsic and utilize their skills.

“Knock, knock,” Paul said, coming up the stairway into his office.

“Morning,” Davis greeted, pausing his work as he looked at the now black haired trailblazer. “What happened to the blue?”

“Felt like a change,” he said, spinning a chair around and straddling it. “What’s up?”

“Just wanted to say hello to the new Vilord,” Davis said with a smile.

“You’re close to acolyte yourself.”

“Plodding along as usual, yes. Adept 98 and near to 99.”

“So long as you’re improving, the rate doesn’t matter.”

“Says the guy who’s constantly racing Morgan for new ranks.”

“Friendly competition,” Paul corrected with a smirk.

“I take it she’s not too happy you beat her to it.”

“Knowing Morgan, she’s ticked off. I haven’t talked to her since, but to be fair I’ve been camping out in the advanced training program and been making up ground. She hasn’t been back here since she moved her Clan to the border.”

“Think this will bring her back for a bit?”

“I doubt it. She’ll just try to train harder where she is…or build a bigger sanctum. How many worlds are you going to let her take?”

“As many as she can.”

“This is Morgan we’re talking about. She’ll be at the galactic core eventually.”

“Not if she keeps expanding laterally. Am I sensing some professional jealousy?”

“Yes,” Paul admitted. “She’s got the most territory of any Clan now, by far.”

“It was hard earned.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

“As was your ViLord rank.”

“Point taken.”

“So…what is Clan Saber up to now?”

“Like you don’t already know.”

“I don’t know everything, just a lot. What are you focusing towards?”

“Primarily…naval tweaks. Can’t beat the V’kit’no’sat if we can at least hold the line in engagements where we have a 10 to 1 advantage. We’re not there yet, but we need to be.”

“How do you think they’ll respond to the drones?”

“I’ve been discussing that with Jason quite a bit. If they can’t jam them, they’ll either go straight for the control ships or ignore them completely. Either way we can use that to our advantage if we can shave down their tech advantage. If we can’t, then it’s going to get ugly in the best case scenarios.”

Davis sat up in his chair and leaned forward, bringing up a map of the scattering of Clan Saber holdings, along with numerous holographic windows of Clan stats.

“You’ve done well, Paul. Damn well. As have the rest of you. But with you…I know you’ve got something else in the works. You’ve covered your tracks well, but you’re operating a lot of your colonies with a cushion. Not much, but I know you’re more efficient than that. And not resources. I mean personnel. You’ve got too much staff logged in across the board. Where are they really at?”

Paul stared at him for a moment, then hung his head. “Damn you.”

“I guessed right then,” Davis said, not having been sure until now.

“I thought I hadn’t left any traces.”

“You didn’t.”

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I hadn’t.”

“I don’t think anyone else would notice, especially since it’s Clan-wide. You each do things differently, but I’ve been with you from the beginning so I know how you think. There is no giveaway in your Clan stats that I could find, it just doesn’t fit your mojo. No outsider would spot that. So…what are you working on?”

“Not working on. Already done,” Paul said with a sigh. “Notice anything about Clan Sangheili?”

Davis’s head ticked to the side. “No.”

“Add insult to injury,” Paul scoffed.

“A joint venture?”

“Yeah. Something off the books in case our computer systems were compromised. Jason should be running excess personnel too?”

“Not that I’ve noticed, but then again he’s always been a little heavy handed in that department.”

“I’ve never paid that close of attention to how the others operated. Do we all have a fingerprint like that?”

“Oh yes. Even when you’re doing the same things there are telltale signs, though things sometimes alter when you get a new Marquis. Some of them add more flair while others go by the book and don’t alter what you’ve already established, merely adding to and repeating it.”

“Renning?” Paul guessed, referencing Jason’s current Marquis.

“There was a shift when he came on. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t notice the personnel shift, if Jason is doing the same thing you are?”

“He is. We decided to spawn a new Clan in secret. One off the books and without territory.”

“Kara?” Davis guessed.

Paul shook his head. “You really know us too well.”

“I’m on your side, so don’t worry about it.”

“Thankfully.”

“So where is this new Clan…”

“Ghostblade. It’s outside Star Force territory, raiding lizard shipping and worlds for resources to fuel a mobile fleet. Right now they’re working on a tiny moveable star forge. All the personnel are Clan Saber and Sangheili members, but all resources and ships are built beyond Star Force bookkeeping.”

Davis leaned back in his chair, eyeing the trailblazer. “You two sneaky little bastards.”

Paul smiled widely. “We learned from you.”

“And you covered your tracks well. Why not have a completely separate population?”

“Maturias? We’re not allowed to have them anymore.”

“If this is a rogue operation…”

“Not going to pin anyone down to a mobile fleet unless they want to be there. I thought I’d covered our tracks well enough to make that work.”

“Other than your fingerprint, there is nothing that I’ve seen to give it away, so I think you’re on solid ground. Has Kara really been gone that much?”

“She keeps popping around on odd assignments, but most of her time is spent with her Clan.”

“I guess she spent a lot of time beyond borders anyway. I didn’t spot that change either.”

“So I really run with low personnel?”

“Due to your pushing your resources harder than others, but you always stay just an edge on the safe line. The others may push the Archons and military, but you run your industrial base closer than anyone else does. You know how to get a lot out of your personnel, so when you slack off a bit it shows, to me anyway.”

“So that’s a compliment then?”

“Like you didn’t already know. Your starship production facilities pump out more ships than any other Clan, and I have no doubt that your twindome with Jason is why Sangheili is a close second.”

“Well, I guess I feel better then. Jason not being found out was due to his sluggishness. Yeah, I can live with that, so long as the V’kit’no’sat don’t notice the same thing.”

“I’m certain they wouldn’t,” Davis assured him. “Speaking of which, I just got an update on our new neighbors. Apparently they came from Sagittarius before the Rit’ko’sor rebellion.”

“Any reason why they moved?”

“Civil war of some sort. I was just reading through it when you came in. Sara wants to set up a colony on their planet to facilitate trade, and I’m sending the Aronsic.”

“The Hobbits? Are we upgrading them?”

“More like allowing them to upgrade themselves. I’m not planning on any push.”

“Anyone else getting a promotion?”

“The Rammus have caught my eye. They’ve come a long ways in such a short time. I wish they could reproduce faster, because they’re just too few of them right now to do what I want to do with them.”

“Which is?”

“An empire-wide support faction.”

“Support as in…”

“League of legends support.”

Paul was taken aback. “Where did you learn about League?”

“Greg turned me onto it. Not quite as good as the games we’ve got nowadays, but it does have an obvious motif structure that makes role play obvious.”

“Have you played it then?”

“A bit on the retro games platform.”

“Who do you main?”

“Main?”

“Guess you haven’t played that much then.”

“A term I should know?”

“What champ do you use the most.”

“Oh, well that’s Nedrador then. How about you back in the day? I doubt you get much of a chance to play it now.”

“Caitlyn…and no, I haven’t played in a long time.”

“Do you play any in the field?”

“I’ll hit up a little Mario Kart or Hedrasool if I need to force my brain to detox, but no, I’m either fighting, training, or sleeping. ViLords can’t afford to play video games much.”

Davis smiled. “I suppose they can’t. How soon do you leave?”

“Two days, maybe three. Depends when Aaron’s fleet is ready. Wanna go along on this one?”

“I can’t afford several years away, but part of me wants to be there. These bastards have been plaguing us and this region for so long I’m surprised we’re finally at this point, yet it seems like it’s taken far too long. Do you think there will be any special surprises waiting for you?”

“I don’t think they’ve got any tricks left in the bag, but we’ll keep an eye out just the same. We’re taking enough ships that we’ll have a significant advantage this time, and every Clan is sending at least one warship.”

“Make sure you send pics. I intend to gloat to every race out there when we take the lizard capitol.”

“Don’t worry, I promise to get you plenty of gloating material.”

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