Prologue

“Are you here to execute or exile me?” Truven asked as he sensed a presence behind him as the Neofan looked out a window across the surface of one of their many Temples in this galaxy.

“Neither,” Reignor Plausious said, resplendent in his golden armor that covered him from booted feet all the way up to his midsection, leaving his chest bare, but with gauntlets and a crown upon his head that was far more than ornamental.

Truven turned around to face him, wearing nothing but a thin robe. His own regal armor had been taken from him when he’d been captured years ago.

“Then why come to me now after all this time?” he asked, a mix of anger and shame. “To visit your pet? Do you mean to keep me here forever?”

“I have been waiting,” Plausious said, pacing slightly before the former Reignor as his armored heels clicked on the hard surface of the quarters that Truven had been assigned to house arrest within.

“For what purpose? To further humiliate me?”

“You refer to capturing you alive as humiliation?”

“There cannot be two Reignors,” Truven said painfully. “I stand here a fraud. What greater shame can there be? Killing me would be a mercy that you have not granted.”

“If you truly wished to die you could do it yourself simply by expending all your Essence,” Plausious lectured calmly, “so do not coddle me with fanciful lies.”

“Why are you here now rather than speaking to me before?” Truven reiterated.

“A warrior from House Mutavi named Vikarathe has declared himself Reignor of a new House Phoenix that he is building from what is left of our people.”

Truven snarled. “Mutavi will hunt him down and kill him for that sacrilege.”

Plausious frowned at him sympathetically. “Has no one told you?”

“No one comes to speak with me at all.”

“I left orders they could,” Plausious said apologetically. “I should have expected them to avoid you, but I thought you still had friends, if not allies, left in our House.”

“My friends are dead and I was but a puppet at the end. There is no one left to speak with me, though I had thought you would, at least to gloat.”

“Truven, Yenoiv is destroyed. The Mev drove House Mutavi to declare war on all other Houses and they annihilated each other. Vikarathe has traveled there to gather what survivors he can and is recruiting exiled Neofan, any that he can find that have not already come to me. We are on the edge of oblivion.”

Truven stared at him for a moment but said nothing.

“I need every one of us that still lives,” Plausious finally said. “Including you.”

“Why?”

“Because we have no time to reproduce and rebuild. The Gauntlet War is upon us, and those who created and unleashed the Mev are now trying to destroy Star Force. If they succeed, they will have little trouble finishing us off afterwards. Our time is now. We must join with Star Force and defy our would-be executioners. I will not waste any living Neofan, no matter what their condition is. I do not care for the old conventions. They are dead now. House Atriark lives, but is severely weakened, and House Phoenix is being born from the remnants of the others. We cannot afford to kill each other for any reason, and we rarely did before, or do you not remember those times?”

“I do…barely,” Truven said, half turning back to the window. “But there cannot be two Reignors, and I cannot step down. Exile or execution is the only option.”

“You could choose another path and accept the demotion, but I know you will not, and others that are clinging to what heritage we have left would have difficulty accepting you as anything other than a Reignor.”

“Then what is it that you were waiting for before confronting me?”

“I do not care what you and the others have done in the past. There is no way to know how much of it was you or the Mev. So we are starting anew, and with Star Force’s ability to cleanse us of the Mev, we have a second chance that our enemies did not intend for us to have,” Plausious said, reaching into a pocket in his armored pants that appeared out of nowhere, from which he drew a small green pearl.

“This is what I was waiting for. Star Force promised me they would be able to create it…or recreate it…and now they have done so. It draws the energy created by all life and uses it to purge the Mev from any within its radius. It does so slowly, but it will allow us to cleanse any remaining individuals without having to call upon Star Force’s few individuals capable of doing so. We have our independence again, Truven. These devices will protect us against reinfection if the enemy attempts to destroy us in the same way.”

“What enemy exactly?”

“Their masters are called the T’fen, and their servants are attacking this galaxy now. We suspect one of their servants created the Mev, but we do not know which one. The T’fen are synthetic, not flesh and blood, so it is unlikely one of their machinations.”

“You said war was upon us. How does it fare?”

“The T’fen are sending in multiple races from distant galaxies. They are not all here yet, but with the Hadarak, they have three. The Asferja came across the galactic void using a transport technology that allowed them to land in the Rim. Star Force knew they were coming and have bottled them up. They are a swarm race, and are colonizing a nearby galaxy to grow new troops to continually send in assault. Star Force and Vikarathe went there to distract and delay them using the Vargemma, and it is there that he will establish House Phoenix. This galaxy belongs to House Atriark. We will not share it with other Neofan. This is the new order Vikarathe and I have agreed upon. If you will accept it, I have a mission for you to potentially create a third House.”

Truven spun his head around suddenly, as if he could not have heard correctly. “From what? If this Vikarathe is taking all the survivors…” he broke off suddenly as he understood.

“Not all of them. We know there are probably many from all the other Houses still waiting for transit to Yenoiv in Utovi. They may all have been destroyed by the Mev, but I doubt the Hadarak and Pafdreng could have destroyed all our Temples there. It is possible there is no-one left to rescue, but if you can find even a single one, you will become a new Reignor of a new House, and House Atriark’s predicament will be solved. There will be only one Reignor again.”

“How will I get there?”

“I will give you a small vessel with enough Essence to travel back home. After that you are on your own, and must gather whatever is left of our people, and our former servants, to survive in that galaxy. Play dead if you must and wait for the enemy to pull back. I do not think the Hadarak will continue coming into Utovi in mass when they are needed here to further weaken Star Force. You must be coy. Can you do this, Truven? Or was your ascension totally that of a puppet?”

“I do not know about my ascension. The Diem orchestrated it all. But if there is a chance to regain my honor…I will pursue it.”

“Why did they fake your death? Was it to draw me in? That seemed counter-productive.”

“Did you not ask them?”

“They are all dead, and not by our doing. The Mev consumed them in ways I do not even want to recall after we captured them. We got no information from them.”

“They did not arrange it,” Truven admitted, sitting back on the armrest of a large throne-like chair. “I did.”

“You?” Plausious asked, surprised.

“I knew I was a puppet all along, but I thought I would still be a Reignor in part. By that time they had assumed so much power I was taking orders from them. I was a fraud. I meant to escape them, so I faked my death and fled into the nether regions of the Temple and traveled to another. They tracked me down eventually, and used my supposed assassination attempt as cause to further slaughter our people. I became ‘injured’ and unable to command until healed, at which point I became their prisoner just as I am now yours.”

“I was told they had killed you, then later that you were still alive. I wish we could have come sooner, for I did not expect anything like this Mev to even be possible. I thought we had time to reconquer Atriark responsibly.”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Truven said dismissively. “You saved our House. I helped to usher in its destruction.”

“Then redeem yourself now,” he said, handing him the pearl. “It is a pathway, however small, that you can pursue.”

Truven took it from him, but sensed no telepathic interlink. “How does it operate?”

“It’s always active. Place it near those affected and it will gradually eat away at the Mev. More so in highly populated areas.”

“And this new House’s name?”

“It does not exist until you rescue at least one,” Plausious urged. “But it will be called Sovarsti,” he said, referencing an ancient legend of a deposed prince who eventually regained the throne after a long, arduous quest, “and our offspring will be trained by Star Force. That is not negotiable,” he said at Truven’s sneer. “They are already in possession of House Atriark’s, and will be of House Phoenix’s as well.”

“Why do you seek to tether us to them?”

“It was the construction of our offspring that the Mev was introduced through. The talismans were contaminated with it. Star Force’s new race, the Furyans, are much like we were a long time ago. They are nearly our peers, and they have overcome the difficulties in developing them in short order. Training is their empire’s specialty, and we are making use of it to rework our construction. It appears sacrilege, but it is wisdom. Vikarathe came to see this reluctantly as well.”

“I have no place to argue, though I find it distasteful.”

“It will not matter if we do not survive this war. At least you will be traveling far from it.”

“That is no comfort,” Truven said, referencing the purging war still playing out in Utovi that the Neofan had retreated from millennia ago, leaving their servant races behind for lack of ability to transport even a tiny fraction of them between galaxies.

“Others I would ask to accept a graft, but it is inappropriate for a Reignor,” Plausious said. “You will have to learn on your own. Learn about our bonded ally. Learn about the path of true honor. They showed it to me, and I have shown others through the grafting. It is our only hope to have a destiny beyond oblivion.”

“They are an inferior empire to us. They cannot even build a single Temple.”

“In time they will. Until then, we must make sure they survive.”

“And what of the Bond?”

“The Veloqueen have already engaged in combat alongside them. The Denogi are remaining neutral. The Bond is uninvolved except in Andromeda, where they are under attack from the Asferja.”

“They are targeting the Bond of Resistance as well as Star Force?”

“No, the Klix are simply in the way and the Asferja need their worlds to grow more troops. They are being stepped on, nothing more. Our opponents are beyond us in many ways, Truven. But together with Star Force and the Veloqueen, we may be able to survive. I want as many Neofan that can be found gathered together, so we may face this with the utmost strength possible. We cannot waste any survivors, for we cannot replace them quickly enough to matter.”

“Are we to survive, or is this an honorable way to die?”

“It is too early to tell, but the binary assaults in the Rim and the Core have been blunted. The Jaegers coming through in the Core are commanding planet-sized craft, Truven. Yet Star Force and the Veloqueen have met them and have not yielded the arrival system. It may fall eventually, but the fact that they cannot take it easily with all their assembled might should send a message to the T’fen that this galaxy will not fall easily. It is our job to strengthen them as much as we can, and our Essence skills are far beyond theirs…save for their Nuv’ernor, which we can put to far better use than they can.”

“They are giving them to us?”

“No. We will never enslave them again. We are working with them to teach them what they do not yet know.”

“Giving away our secrets,” Truven said regretfully.

“We cannot survive alone. What else would you have me do?”

“I am not fit to advise. I was never a true Reignor.”

“It takes more than an anointing. If you can rescue the others and survive in Utovi honorably, then you will deserve the title.”

“And what do you mean by honorably?”

“That is what you must learn from the materials I will be sending with you. Study them closely during your journey. This is my final order as your Reignor.”

“Then this could very well be exile and execution,” Truven said, standing up again.

“Only if you fail. If you and we succeed, the Neofan will become the Essence guardians to Star Force, and we will symbiotically claim multiple galaxies. We have the potential to rise further than we ever have before, Truven. I rarely think of it now with the challenges we face, but it is there in the background. We possessed one galaxy in full. We are no longer bound to that one.”

“It seems I am now…but I never liked leaving in the first place. House Mutavi were cowards, Pafdreng or no.”

“Good. You still have some fire left within you.”

“Fire was never the issue, Plausious. You know that.”

“Are we still adversaries, Truven?”

“I do not know that we ever were. The revelation of the Mev has me questioning everything we did going back to when we were in Utovi. Did we fail to secure it because of the Mev?”

“Probably not. I am told it scales slowly, so our stupidity would not have been as great back then. But it could have played a role in it. There is no way to know now.”

“Then we must rebirth our race from the moment of our cleansing,” he said, kneeling before his Reignor. “I am not a Reignor yet, and never truly was. Whatever is past let it be past. I will honor your request, if for nothing more than to assist you in preserving House Atriark. If they discover I am in Utovi, they may divert some of their resources there.”

“That is not what I want.”

Truven’s head came up, but his knee stayed on the ground. “No?”

“You must be cunning, not obvious. Do not let them know you are there. Stay in the shadows.”

“If I am to gather our servants, how can I do that from the shadows?”

“You must find a way. Drawing attention will doom you. Do not try to conquer Utovi, try to survive within it.”

“They will never stop assaulting it until the purge is complete.”

“They cannot see everything everywhere.”

“I do not know what you want of me now.”

“Learn from Star Force. Learn how they survived against the V’kit’no’sat, who was wholly superior to them. Star Force was smarter. And they survived until they had an opportunity to do more. You may not be able to see a way to exist long term in Utovi, so do not concern yourself with one now. Focus on the immediate future, and you will only be able to do that when you see what is going on there now. Stay alive, gather others, gain strength. Do not try to take on the Hadarak or the Pafdreng directly. That is not your mission. You are to defy them by refusing to die.”

“Give me what information you think I need, then send me on my way. Whoever is left there will be diminishing with every day. I will not waste a single one here dithering over my confusion. I will learn on the journey. I am to travel alone?”

“Yes. You must craft your new House beginning with one member and by recovering what you can of what was lost to build something anew. It is the greatest challenge a Reignor could ever be given.”

“Yours now is greater, Plausious.”

“Not in scope. I inherited power. You must build and collect it from the remnants of what we left behind…if possible. There may not be enough left, or you may not be able to find it. Communication was down before we left. You should begin in the Temples and go from there.”

“With a ship to keep?”

“Yes. I am not sending you on foot.”

“What of your agreement with Star Force to not use servants?”

“House Atriark will not. I suggest that any you find still alive you consider to be lesser allies. Use the history that still lingers, but treat them better than we did. Again, look at how Star Force incorporates other races, even the most pathetic of ones, into their empire in a useful way, yet they treat none as expendable. They have made it work. Use their example and build on it.”

“Make sure I have all the information I need, then send me on my way.”

Plausious reached forward and put a hand on Truven’s head. “I am not sending you to fail. I am sending you to somewhere that you are likely to fail. Defy the odds, and you will become a legitimate Reignor…one of three. And if we do not survive this war, we will be the last three.”

“I am not one yet.”

“The next time I hear from you, you will be,” he said, releasing his head. “Now rise and go. Utovi will not be completely destroyed by now, but it will continue to burn. Save who you can and forge them into a shield. Atriark and Phoenix are the swords. If we are able, one day we will join you and fully retake Utovi…but we must win here first.”

“I believe I understand. I am not the solution, I am the preserver.”

Plausious nodded. “Your ship is ready, all the materials are onboard. Platform 18. May fortune find you and the others that remain.”

Truven held up the pearl. “Is this the only one?”

“It is self-replicating. Place it in a nutrient bath with the necessary materials and it will double. The instructions are onboard. But do not lose it. It is the only one I have to send with you. The other we must keep to replicate more from.”

“Star Force only gave you two?”

“They only had two. They were building more, but I am told it takes a great deal of time, for the intricacy of the technology is beyond anything they can comprehend. Azoro is the one constructing them.”

“I assume this Azoro is detailed in the information?”

“He is.”

“Then I will learn of him later,” Truven said, his personal life so rapidly altered that he did not even want to think backwards at this point. “Good luck, Reignor. If you believe Star Force is the key to our future, I will trust your judgement in this. My own has led me far astray, and I will not blame all of it on the Mev.”

“The Mev cannot sway us now.”

Truven looked down at the little green orb. “No, it cannot. But I wonder what other dark powers these enemies have waiting for us when they realize this one did not completely succeed…”

1

EG29

April 8, 158438

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Megatron Prime 12 System (Galactic Core)

Zatria

Helith stood with the other Hjar’at under the edge of a shield dome as the firestorm of orbital bombardment above continued on the planet Zatria, which was sitting in orbit around a black hole along with 5 stars that allowed for very little night. Helith had come here mere months ago, during the Jaegger assaults, and had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to the 5.6g of natural gravity outside the cities…but within they could dial it back as much as they wanted. This planet was meant to train the strong, so even inside they were typically at 2g or higher.

Almost all of the cities here had not been constructed locally. This planet was almost brand new, having been built by the Veloqueen along with Star Force out of other existing and half-eaten planets in this black hole system using the unknown Essence techniques the Veloqueen possessed. And along with the V’kit’no’sat, they had been assisting in the defense of this Gateway system…which had already fallen.

The Jaeggers’ first two planet-sized ships had been confronted and defeated by their combined fleet…but not destroyed. They were too big, with too much mass, to be blown up or vaporized. So they sat out there and were slowly rebuilding themselves as more and more of what the enemy called ‘baseships’ arrived. 24 of them had showed up within the first 7 months, then no more since. The Star Force/Veloqueen alliance had not been able to stop them from entering along the path between galaxies otherwise referred to as a ‘galactic tether.’ They needed the massive gravity of this black hole to brake upon, and Star Force had recently been going around and claiming the few large enough to catch intergalactic traffic such as this one.

But they didn’t truly ‘own’ it, for it was populated by a host of megaloids other than the Veloqueen who actually lived inside the black hole or were passing through. Ships from other galaxies would arrive as well, making this a high traffic point. Star Force had managed to stop two of the Jaeger baseships, but without the Veloqueen’s Essence powers to assist with the takedowns…which they had to naturally regenerate after depleting or they’d die from the effort…the other baseships had passed through without resistance, though three intact ones had been left to batter Zatria while the other two repairing ones held position at the end of the galactic tether that led to the galaxy they had come most recently come from.

It was not their home galaxy, for they had to travel through multiple ones to get here. And despite the newness of the planet Zatria and its lack of infrastructure, it was still holding, and today was the third major assault as the three nearly planet-sized ships sent down a piece of one of them against the planetary shields, just as they had done before.

Only this was a much larger piece, and the Tar’vem’jic on the surface were having trouble damaging such a large mass as it crushed into the shields…and just sat on top of them, continuing to fire from the flanks and underside.

Zatria wouldn’t have been able to hold out a day if the V’kit’no’sat had not known they were coming. Whatever intelligence Star Force had gathered early had been legit, and they’d been able to move cities here from other star systems…all of which were designed to be flight capable for just a situation as this…and the massive planet had become dotted with them as new construction of weapons and shield generators occurred at a frantic pace.

Normally the strength of a Star Force system was relative to the length of the colonization effort, with more and more defenses being layered in over the millennia. Zatria even had one of the new world brains in it, a living being connected into a growing biological mass that would eventually spread across the entire planet. It was new as well, but it was already producing drone-like infantry that were basically organic machines with limited functionality that could be directed by the world brain.

Those units were grown fast, having been patterned off of the Uriti minions, and many had already been deployed here in battle to assist the V’kit’no’sat and take the damage…for while they were alive they were not ‘alive’ and did not have a person inside their biological bodies. Unlike Helith, who was very much alive and wanted to stay that way, protected beneath a thick layer of nanite armor and energy shields of his own, but if the Jaeggers were going to be able to get through the shield again he was about to enter combat and come face to face with their berserkers.

He'd fought them the second time they’d gotten through, but hadn’t been here for the first. Right now their miles-wide ship piece was punching down into the planetary shield and having its momentum sucked away by dampening shields, leaving gravity and a little thrust to be compensated for by the main shields. But also underneath that main shield was an Essence shield being operated by one of the three Jinxes in the system, and it was blocking any Essence hops through the main shield as had happened in the first attack.

The Jaeggers were not just highly advanced cyborgs, they also had Essence ability…at least some of them did. Fortunately the Berserkers did not aside from a few charges contained within the equipment they wore. It was thought, though not completely confirmed yet, that the Essence was harvested from their population in a way that did not require most of them to personally obtain Essence skills. Helith and most of the Hjar’at here had none as well, but many of the Hakja were, along with other elite units that were not made up of Era’tran, but their leader, and the leader of the entire V’kit’no’sat, had made it a priority. The Hjar’at had not, for they preferred blades and brute force, and as such they were going to be held back so as to avoid one shot kills against Essence opponents.

Helith glanced away from the numerous orange streaks shooting up at the massive block-like Jaegger assault piece and tearing small chunks out of it and down to his armored left wrist. In it was a small jewel that had not transformed with the other decorations that his armor became when not deployed. This one was something Star Force called a ‘Materia’ and would create a passive shield around him to absorb Essence attacks…or other effects…until it was depleted. It didn’t hold a large charge, for all of them had them, but it would stop a few attacks, and in that time he had to get within range and kill whoever it was before they had a second chance to bypass all his conventional defenses and destroy him.

He did not like this type of combat. Essence techniques were essentially a cheat against everything the V’kit’no’sat had built their original empire on, but within the larger structure of the universe beyond this galaxy Essence was the mainstay, and the races and civilizations that did not possess the knowledge and ability to wield it were the inferior ones.

Helith hated the idea of being inferior, but at least most of the Jaeggers were just as impotent in this mystical energy discipline as he was. Other Hjar’at had reluctantly begun to learn how to use their own Essence, and in doing so the reservoir of it within their bodies that held their Core in place would gradually grow…though the amount held within his jewel was the equivalent of thousands of regular individuals, if not millions. Whereas Mak’to’ran’s own body now held the equivalent of billions.

But none of that would matter if that assault ship got through the main shield and came crushing down onto the surface…which was why the area directly under it was being evacuated just in case, but Helith and the others in his formation were not directly underneath, and were likewise sheltered within the shield of a city/base should the main one fail.

Still, chunks of the assaulting ship were dropping and falling onto the main shield, hitting and rolling on it like chunks of dirt…some of which were allowed to pass through, others were obliterated by less powerful weapons than the Tar’vem’jic, but the real battle was happening unseen as an Essence battle was being fought between the Jinx in a sculpting chamber where he would enhance the mystical effectiveness of the stored Essence in the planetary wells, either accumulated by the small donations of the Essence capable individuals within the V’kit’no’sat, or a much larger donation from the distant Uriti, which had been designed as living tankers and refill stations for Essence charges for the Hadarak Lurkers before they’d been altered by the Chixzon into the assault monsters that they were today.

None were here, though, but their cousins were…both the Veloqueen and the other megaloids…otherwise known as ‘Heidoor’… all of which were inside the black hole or nearby. The Veloqueen wouldn’t come out and engage until they had recharged enough…unless the smaller Jaegger ships got separated from their massive packs and the Veloqueen could take them out without using Essence, for they were also equipped with battle armor similar to Helith’s, only it was meters thick and covered their entire bodies.

They were, in fact, living starships, except without internal space for a crew…and he was damned glad they were on their side, for what they’d done to the first baseship they’d hit…and then two more later…was terrifying. They’d flown inside them and carved them up, using some Essence technique to burn through on touch as if they were a Saroto’kanse’vam of a magnitude far greater than the energy discharge he was capable of creating within the biological blades extending off his back and tail.

A warning pinged inside his armored head…a message from the Jinx that the shield was about to be breached…and that meant the third ground invasion was about to begin as both fleets stared at each other far above the planet in a stalemate. If the V’kit’no’sat fleet moved in to engage the attacking ship piece, the rest of the Jaegger small ship fleet would as well and there would be another huge melee that would further diminish the drone count in the V’kit’no’sat fleet. They were getting additional shipments of new ones in constantly, but using the drones to win this war was a fool’s gambit, and Mak’to’ran had made that clear. They had to use planetary defenses and other large scale weaponry to eat through the enemy while leaving the drones to other tasks.

So as long as the baseships and the fleets of ships sitting on their surface didn’t get involved, Mak’to’ran was going to hold his fleet back as well and let the planetary guns deal with the chunk of the baseship now trying to get troops down to the surface.

And that suited Helith just fine. He preferred a ground fight so long as that beast of a landing ship didn’t actually get down and crush the people underneath. The two previous attempts had smaller ones, and their landed ground forces had both been repelled easily. This one, though, was more than 10 times as large, but the combined planetary shields seemed to be holding it back while the planetary defenses carved it up piece by piece, for its own shield had already been breached.

Its mass, though, was a problem, and the troops held inside were protected by it temporarily…then, with another ping on the network wide battlemap system Star Force had brought with them to the V’kit’no’sat, he saw blips appear in the air above the surface but halfway up to the stopped Jaegger ship as berserkers Essence jumped the regular planetary shield and got beneath it, dropping down to the surface in the area that had already been evacuated…but not ignored.

Streaks through the air above him made his bones rattle as hundreds of I’rar’et buzzed his formation and held low to the ground as they accelerated, a mixture of flapping their armored wings and using their antigrav to further accelerate. It took nearly a minute for them to get to the berserkers that continued to drop like fruit from a very sickened tree, and bombarded them on a quick pass, with additional information flowing through the battlemap indicating what exactly was being dropped, what they’d hit, and where the enemy was moving once they got to ground.

Meanwhile the assault ship continued to get sliced up, with another large piece falling down to the shield and hitting it, sending ripples of colorful energy out through the otherwise invisible barrier as the brilliant orange beams of the Tar’vem’jic continued to burn trenches into the main ship and move them slowly, slicing up more pieces in lieu of the explosive detonation they simply couldn’t manage with a ship of that size.

That put more pressure on the shield at other places, even as secondary weapons shot up and targeted the pieces with attacks that would vaporize or scatter the ship fragments rather than cut right through with surgical precision. Many of those were also hitting the underside of the craft with momentary gaps opening up in the shield to allow all the planet-based weaponry to pass through and not further drain their own defenses. The Essence shield, however, was lower and had no effect on the conventional weaponry one way or the other…but the enemy ship, not quite being able to touch it directly to mess with it as the assault ship was trying to do to the main shield…was apparently close enough to get the job done, for the Jinx couldn’t hold it firm enough and gaps were forming that the berserkers were dropping through using the Essence realm itself to bypass all matter then reemerge beyond it at a calculated distance, for you could not see into this realm from the other, and you had to reemerge blind to it.

That made it useful for small hops, not long journeys, and it was also why the berserkers were dropping from midair rather than ‘beaming’ to the ground. For if they moved an inch too far, they’d emerge within the ground and their bodies would cohabitate the same space and it would kill them instantly…or at least whatever limb of theirs went where it wasn’t supposed to be.

And that was why the I’rar’et did not fly directly over their landing zone. They didn’t want to accidentally merge with one of the arrivals, so they chipped away at them along the sides and kept making multiple passes as more and more I’rar’et arrived from other cities, along with transport craft carrying Hjar’at, Oso’lon, Era’tran, Brat’mar, Rit’ko’sor, and almost every other V’kit’no’sat race represented here other than the aquatics. Once the first attack was blunted, Mak’to’ran had ordered massive reinforcements down to the planet from other systems, and so far it had continued to hold despite several shield generators having been destroyed from the first two surface attacks.

No doubt they were going after more this time, for the location was different than the previous assaults.

Helith got orders to move on his battlemap system, and he along with the other 732 Hjar’at near him began walking forward slowly until the pack began to spread out a bit, then they began running in a living river of quadrupeds off towards the landing zone that was inside the neighboring city, for the berserkers were dropping inside its shield perimeter as well.

The world brain, meanwhile, had pores opening up to underground chambers nearby, one of which was the equivalent of a mass transport system burrowed underground, and out of it began to shoot the expendable minions of multiple varieties that would engage the berserkers first and soak up whatever Essence attacks or other surprises might be in store.

By the time Helith got to them, their composition and capabilities should be known.

And that’s when the major fighting would begin…

2

Bri’mas ran slowly on his large Oso’lon legs, ducking out underneath the edge of the doorway as he and his fellow quadrupeds were deposited near the battle site, having been flown in from more than 850 miles away. He could see the gigantic piece of the planet ship sitting on the shields not far above the surface as they breached again and the whole thing dropped…but the planetary shield deactivated quickly and reformed below it, catching it for the fourth time and forcing it to restart the breaching technique.

In that short gap multiple bursts of green energy orbs shot out from the heavily damaged ship, hitting troops and the nearby city whose own shields were holding as it fired up into the underside of the massive vessel…but the city didn’t have an angle for its Tar’vem’jic to hit the Jaeggers when they were this close to the surface, so now the beaten up ship that was less than half the mass it had started with, wasn’t having any gigantic sections sliced off it anymore.

Beneath it and spilling out everywhere were the berserkers that ranged in size from a meter tall to over 100 meters in some cases. Most were on the smaller side, and thousands of them were pouring out of the ship each minute, using an Essence hop to get down through the planetary shields as the ship itself was getting close to landing.

Flashes of weaponsfire on the ground showed where other V’kit’no’sat races had already engaged the berserkers…which were so named because the Jaeggers didn’t expect them to survive. All of them were cyborgs, with the larger ones being a person implanted into a giant battle machine. From what they’d learned over the past year since they’d arrived in this system, was that they grew new troops via cloning onboard their planet ships and then upgraded them with technology thereafter…which they could also do to prisoners, using the software to enslave them to the group’s will and turn them against their own race.

The other Jaegger baseships were out trying to do that right now, hitting multiple worlds that were not Star Force and a few that were. The Star Force ones were not well established, and had been going through a fighting retreat as they evacuated them…which meant the Jaeggers weren’t getting any prisoners from them, but there were plenty of races in the Galactic Core that were not part of Star Force and were not megaloids, and the planet-sized ships were simply too hard to stop short of a massive armada.

That armada was here, defending this world, so the other baseships were spreading out and doing their thing nearby. Star Force didn’t have much colonization in the Core, let alone the Deep Core where they were currently at. But if the Jaeggers could assimilate other races in addition to growing their own clones, it was possible they could reproduce as fast as the Asferja, which would explain why they were also sent in first.

But right now the three baseships nearby Zatria were committed to taking this planet, and as Bri’mas trudged off in a line of Oso’lon all wearing their battle armor deployed, it looked as if they were actually going to get their assault ship down to the surface this time.

They were miles away from it, so if it did touch down they were not in danger of being crushed, nor were the enemy troops that immediately cleared the underside…which was a ghost town of empty tree clumps set inside grasslands. All of the trees had super thick trunks due to the high gravity, and even the grass had to be resilient to rise up against that pull, but as Bri’mas saw one of the huge berserkers pop into existence beneath the ship and begin to walk forward on its three legs…which were more two legs and dragging tail…the vegetation underneath was quickly being crushed.

As the Oso’lon got near the fighting the planetary shield was breached again, and the assault ship dropped all the way down to just over 200 meters before it was caught. One more time and it would be too low to stop, and they’d no longer have to use Essence jumps to deploy troops…and they could free fire from the weapons still operational on the thing.

He didn’t have time to worry about that at the moment, for he was following his brethren as they grouped up into foursomes and went in diamond formation. He was left flank on the diamond and immediately reached down to grab one of the dozens of small berserkers running around everywhere chipping away at people with tiny weapons. The Oso’lon’s strong telekinesis picked the little monkey-like Jaegger up and pulled it through the air towards him…then pinned it to the ground a few meters ahead, whereupon he stomped it dead with one of his feet as he passed by.

When his foot pulled off he used the weapons imbedded into his armor all across his body like he was a living warship to shoot it a few times for good measure, then he pulled another and another, repeating the process until they got towards larger enemies, particularly a group of medium-sized quadrupeds that were almost as large as they were as they engaged a group of Brat’mar in a contest of energy discharge against shield and vice versa.

Bri’mas didn’t bother to play that game and summoned up a huge Jumat blast along with the other two on the leading edge of the diamond and they threw them towards the nearest berserker simultaneously. It hit and knocked it backwards hard, but more importantly the Jumat disrupted its shields, allowing the incoming horn discharges on the Brat’mar to finally get through and tear into the flesh/armor combination on the beasts.

That combination did not work well, for it seemed the Jaeggers were putting almost all of their defenses into their shields. Some points on the berserkers had no armor on them at all, which seemed ridiculously stupid, but if these troops were meant to die and take as many of the enemy with them as possible, then they were probably maximizing resources to produce the shield generators rather than proper body armor.

It was a sign of inferiority, and one the Oso’lon were going to exploit heavily as they plowed into the ground engagement and began stomping, shooting, or even ramming anything in sight, daring the berserkers to shoot at their larger mass and try to get through their shields and body armor.

Bri’mas was so distracted by the constant enemies and pick-up fights here and there as the battlefield broke down into a chaotic melee that he didn’t notice the assault ship breach the shield again until it slammed down onto the surface of the planet so hard it created a groundquake so large it knocked over the smaller berserkers.

As soon as weapons began firing from its hull at the V’kit’no’sat army, streams of I’rar’et flew in to strafe and knock them out along with subsequent groups of gunships piloted by Zen’zat as the nearby city kept firing into the hull further up as the planetary shield reformed miles above the ground again, conceding that this ship had gotten through but intent on making any others that showed up have to pay the same slow price to get down to the surface.

Thousands of doors on the intact portions of the assault ship opened up and hundreds of thousands of the smaller berserkers surged out to join the fight along with a few more of the larger ones as more and more V’kit’no’sat arrived from all over the planet.

The enemy had managed to get their ship down to the surface, but they were not going anywhere else…

Mak’to’ran watched the battle from onboard his flagship, the DinoThunder, high above Zatria as he continued a stare down with the three baseships and their ‘tiny’ swarms of attack craft. If they moved to assist or send down another assault ship he’d intervene. Until then they just waited and let the planetary defenses handle it, and right now the Jaeggers seemed content with those terms of battle.

Others would be worried that the assault ship had actually touched down on the surface, for in the first two major assaults over the past year that had not happened. The Jaeggers had obviously adjusted their strategy, not just by sending a larger piece of their giant ships, but by modifying their shield disruptors built into the ship. They had sucked energy out far faster than the second time and used it to build up an interference pattern in the local shield…which was how most disruptors worked…but they’d managed to learn the Star Force shield dynamics better, so this time they’d managed better results.

Mak’to’ran still wished this was a proper V’kit’no’sat planet, despite all the heavily armed cities that had been flown in to populate it. One of the worlds on the Grand Border half a galaxy away would have laughed at these defenses, for they’d had millennia to gradually layer in more and more weapons, shields, and power generation. If Zatria could hold at this level, it was a good sign for the future, even if the Jaeggers weren’t throwing everything they had at it. They seemed to be gradually learning and amping up their resources to figure out how most effectively to breach the shield and get down to the planet without having to rely on Essence jumps, for those had proven mostly ineffective despite the shield generators they’d managed to destroy from the previous ones.

The V’kit’no’sat had adapted as well, and there were far more troops on planet now than there had been the first time. More ships and more drones were also pouring in, while it seemed the Jaeggers were no longer getting additional reinforcements. That said, what they’d brought was a massive amount and it bothered Mak’to’ran that they weren’t making more of an effort to take Zatria. Maybe it was fear of the Veloqueen and what they’d done to two of the baseships previously in conjunction to the penetrating shots from the DinoThunder and her sister ships, especially when they had a Jinx onboard to increase their firepower more.

But had the Jaeggers simply swarmed this planet they should have been able to overrun it, and the fact that they were not was bothering him, because these ‘small’ assaults were still more massive than anything the Hadarak had ever been able to throw at them. A ramming Warden Hadarak could now be stopped with dampening shields and full capacitors, but this assault ship from the Jaeggers was actually breaching their shields once it made physical contact with them, even if it was taking time to do it and they were sitting ducks to the Tar’vem’jic while they worked.

But if they sent 10 of these down at the same time, there was no way the shields could keep them out, and a proper assault that might contest ownership of the planet would ensue.

Right now, though, it was just a question of how many troops, shield generators, and cities would Mak’to’ran lose. The planet was not going to be lost from this assault unless the Jaeggers had some tricks up their snouts.

The world brain was helping out as much as it could, but it was still very juvenile and only had a limited amount of minion production available. Just getting transport conduits set up around the planet had been a huge undertaking, for they were not built, but rather grown underground as other minions chewed and ate the rock and dirt and whatever else they came upon, providing resources and clearing the path ahead for more growths to follow.

The true power of a world brain, as promised by the Jedein, would not manifest for millennia, and while Mak’to’ran wanted to hold this planet for many reasons, protecting what the world brain had already built here and giving it a chance to grow larger was one of them. If it had to evacuate, all that would be lost, as well as the V’kit’no’sat’s outpost in this Gateway system. Even if they couldn’t stop new arrivals from coming in while the Jaegger baseships were here, they could at least monitor what was arriving and communicate it to the rest of the galaxy…as well as force some of those baseships to remain behind and not assault other worlds.

The Era’tran thumped his large right foot on the conductive deck plates as he saw another warrior die through the mental interface. In the past that would not have mattered to him, for losses were acceptable, but after being absorbed into Star Force and reborn, the V’kit’no’sat were even less careless with their troops and had learned how to craft battles to keep them all alive even if it meant delaying attacks on the enemy. Mak’to’ran could have already begun a fighting retreat and probably kept everyone alive, but he’d chosen to hold here, and now there were deaths occurring as the berserkers flooded out of what was left of the assault ship that still massed more than a chain of mountains, and engaged the defenders in a ground war, oddly with no air cover.

The I’rar’et were taking full advantage of that, and even the Les’i’kron were having a field day dive bombing the larger berserkers and tail spiking them from above with the Saroto’kanse’vam blade that had replaced the tail tip. Mak’to’ran knew the true story of how that had come to be, and it was not a kind one to the Zak’de’ron that had been reforged into the Les’i’kron, but the race before him now had been crafted into something of its own, and the Archons had a large part to do with that.

And right now the Les’i’kron were savagely ripping apart the hugest of the berserkers in flocks, stinging them repeatedly from above and being driven off only to have others come in from behind and do the same.

And that ‘sting’ could melt through meters of metal like it was butter, and it did a considerable amount of damage to shields as well.

The smaller avian races within the V’kit’no’sat were keeping their distance and picking at targets of opportunity, and that included the smaller groundpounders as well. He could see swarms of Ari’tat moving around on their small pedestals and firing their tiny weapons into any berserker that got close to the city walls…while the city shields protected them from overhead. They were even more vulnerable than a Zen’zat due to their size, but they’d learned when and where they could be useful in battle, and the tiny berserkers they were going after with a vengeance, given the size equity between them.

The Ari’tat were far more valuable in space than on the ground, given their shipbuilding capabilities and other intellectual attributes, but Zatria belonged to all the V’kit’no’sat, and none of them wanted to be sitting on the sidelines as the fighting was going down…including the aquatics that were waiting and hoping the fighting would move to the seas, or at least the shorelines, but there was none near here, so they were out of the game save for their ships in Mak’to’ran’s armada.

One of the DinoThunder-class warships that was an identical copy to Mak’to’ran’s flagship on the outside was actually totally aquatic on the inside, and the NeverIce had already seen considerable action. Mak’to’ran still found that name humorous, and he knew it had come from one of the Archons who had helped the V’kit’no’sat design these ships to fight the Hadarak, then redesign the main weapon when they’d learned of the coming Gauntlet Wars. Had they not had that forewarning, these massive ships never would have gotten through the Jaegger shields. They’d been designed for mass destruction of swarm units, not a heavy assault against impregnable opponents.

The Kamehameha-class Materia that had been installed on them gave them that punch…so long as they had enough Essence charge to use it. Without it, it was just a slightly better Tar’vem’jic in energy volume. Throw in the Essence alterations…of which there were many…and it became a superweapon. It was the only one Mak’to’ran had that could get through the enemy baseship’s impressive shields. Otherwise they could move in close and just hammer the armada or a planet repeatedly, soaking up all the damage and keeping their own fleet safely on the surface beneath those shields.

Having the Veloqueen also be capable of punching through was critical to the defense of this black hole system, but they’d been depleted for some time and he’d been told it was going to take another 5-7 months for a full recharge…which was why they hadn’t taken on another baseship, rather holding back what Essence they’d recovered to deal with smaller attacks while waiting for the next big move the Jaeggers would make.

The fear of them had to be keeping the Jaeggers from running over Zatria, and in truth, there was nothing even remotely as powerful as a Kamehameha on the planet’s surface. There hadn’t been time to build one, so Mak’to’ran’s ship and its sister ships were the only ones here that could damage those stupidly large vessels.

Here at least. Elsewhere Star Force had the Borg vessels, and they were far better armed than the DinoThunder for this kind of a fight…but against the Hadarak, which this ship was originally designed to counter, the Borg vessels couldn’t keep up in a straight up killing race. It was a matter of line of sight weapons against area of effect.

And area of effect wasn’t going to do a damn thing against a planet-sized ship.

Mak’to’ran was relieved they’d had time to do the refits, but he was still in a bad position here if the Jaeggers continued to press the attack and brought back more of their baseships. Even these three, if they went all in, could probably eat up the combined firepower of his armada and the Veloqueen, leaving at least one mostly intact to take the planet and run rough shot over the system.

The Era’tran knew the Jaeggers had to be in both conquest and learning mode, figuring out what the V’kit’no’sat and the rest of Star Force could and couldn’t do after that initial ambush when their leading ships arrived. But the longer they waited and kept these three baseships here, the less damage would be done elsewhere. It felt like Mak’to’ran was playing a bluff, but he also got the feeling the Jaeggers were a race that hadn’t lost a battle in a very, very long time…and perhaps that had rattled them so badly they were taking hatchling steps now fearing another disaster.

The original two baseships were still missing massive amounts of their internal volume. That couldn’t be rebuilt without salvaging all the debris and getting new raw materials from elsewhere. And with the Veloqueen continuing to poke those two partial corpses as they tried to regenerate, they were half aggressors/half victims at this point, with their internal populations having been reduced greatly.

Still, each baseship held at least half a trillion Jaeggers. These weren’t starships. They were artificial planets with decks inside rather than solid lumps of rock. Still with too much mass to simply blow up, but Mak’to’ran both admired and hated the idea of taking your civilians to the front lines with you, for they were literally carrying everything from their civilizations onboard those ships. Each was a copy of their home galaxy, and capable of producing anything and anyone they had back there.

That much he’d learned from interrogating the prisoners’ cybernetic components. The security on them was damn good, but since they were connected to a biological mind telepathy gave them an inroad and the V’kit’no’sat had some very strong telepathic skills. They’d gotten a lot of information, but it was a tiny, tiny drop in a feeding tray compared to what the Jaegger collective knowledge held.

They were a hive mind made up of individuals, and were eerily similar to the fiction that Greg-073 had showed him. The same fiction that the trailblazers had named their personal warships after.

Only the Jaeggers were far more powerful than the Borg had ever been imagined to be.

Mak’to’ran almost wished the Asferja had come here instead, but if they were anything like he imagined, they would spread so damn fast in the worlds of the Deep Core he’d never be able to swat them all down fast enough. This was a problem with Star Force, because they didn’t dominate the entire galaxy. Large chunks were beyond their control, or simply not yet colonized, and even then they didn’t own every single planet. But in the large dark zones a race like the Asferja could dine out and reproduce so fast it would make your head spin…and he’d personally experienced his head spinning to the point of snapping off, and he didn’t care for even the metaphorical thought of it.

If the Jaeggers could assimilate races half as fast as the Asferja could grow them, Mak’to’ran was in serious trouble here…but when they got to the Grand Border it would be another story entirely.

But if they got to the Grand Border, Mak’to’ran would have failed miserably, because they would essentially have had to concede the inner half of the galaxy to the enemy. And if they were able to take that much, well, this war was going to be determined in the early stages. If the enemy got a sizeable foothold, could hold it, and then spam more troops, Star Force would gradually lose a very long war of attrition. Winning the Gauntlet Wars would see Star Force bottleneck everything up at the beginning and choke the life out of the invaders in terms of supplies and acquisition of new worlds to harvest them on.

He really needed to completely eliminate a baseship before the warfront got spread out, but that wasn’t going to happen. Damaging and pinning them in place while they made repairs was the best he could hope for as long as the Essence shipments continued to come in. Without those, his primary weapon would run dry and the Jaeggers with an intact baseship would go wherever they damn well pleased.

Mak’to’ran knew Star Force had contingency plans for everything, including if the enemy got footholds early, but he knew they had to hold them now or it would get exponentially worse going forward, which was why he was pushing so hard to hold Zatria.

Right now it was a question of how badly did they want it, for he’d made a choice not to blink, and dozens of V’kit’no’sat were now dying in combat due to his choice.

3

EG29

May 28, 158438

MILKY WAY GALAXY

System 208337 (Hadarak Zone)

8th planet

Ard Ri Esna-58321JOR-18 toggled the mental interface on her command armor, sending out orders to thousands of Clan Kai’Sa commandos and mechs on the plain before her as she hovered in the air near a cliff face. Up on top of that cliff was a landing zone with even more troops, but on the lower plains ahead of them was a Hadarak city…and for once, they weren’t going to have to kill them all.

Working with Reignor Plausious and the Jedein, Star Force had finally been able to figure out a way they could do to the Hadarak what the Jedein could do in person…that being assert control and remake them into something other than Hadarak. In the case of the Wardens, that was to turn them back into their genetic predecessors, which were Jedein, but in the case of the minions they often had none, or none that would have been much of an improvement.

Unlike the Uriti minions…of which there were now millions of on this planet guarding the converted Hadarak ones…the enemy before them were all people. People trapped in bodies with highly controlled minds and instincts encoded to destroy any of them that deviated from their programming. Uriti minions were just biological machines and far less effective than putting people into battle. And since the Hadarak creators saw people as expendable, the T’fen or whichever of their servants had done the biological conversion had gone with the most efficient and effective measure possible.

Enslave an army of people to your will and genetically trick them into killing each other if anyone disobeyed.

So the army of monsters before Esna were also victims, born into this nightmare with no control over it, and she’d been having to kill so many of them that some days it made her sick just to think about it…but they weren’t leaving Star Force much choice, and mercy was a luxury of the dominant.

She was glad they were back to being dominant.

Though Esna wasn’t planning on using it at the moment, across her back a rifle was slung…but it wasn’t the standard Star Force battle rifle, stun or otherwise. This was an anti-Hadarak weapon with multiple settings that fired a bolt of cloying energy that stuck to their bodies like glue before soaking in over a few seconds. Within that energy was a stun charge laced with nanites…and within the nanites were the recent advancements her allies had helped Clan Kai’Sa develop.

Shoot a minion enough and it’d go down…then as it gradually bled off the charge and began to wake up, the nanites would travel throughout its body and put it into a state of hibernation while working to prep the individual for the first stage of a lengthy metamorphosis.

Bottom line was, the ‘Candy Poppers,’ as they were called now, allowed Star Force to neutralize Hadarak threats without having to kill them, after which collection teams consisting of people and drones would go around gathering up the comatose individuals who were having their cardiovascular system and base brain functions reinforced with the nanites to ensure they’d survive what was to come.

Esna had been on this planet for over 3 months now, and that was far longer than most. This one was heavily infested with Hadarak, and since there were no Jedein around to do the conversion for them, she was going about it the hard way rather than sweeping out to catch all the smaller systems as they had been recently doing. With the invasion of the Deep Core by the Jaeggers and the Outer Rim by the Asferja, the mass of Hadarak territory stood out as a major problem for Star Force, because the Hadarak hadn’t ceased their attacks on the Grand Border and the forces pushing in from there. And if troops were pulled away to fight the new invaders, the Hadarak would run wild in their absence.

This was already a 3-pronged assault on the Milky Way, it was just that this prong had been here long before Star Force even existed and was so damn entrenched it couldn’t be easily taken out short of a Neofan ship showing up in orbit and killing everything on the planet with a single attack.

That sounded both wonderful and horrible at the same time, but there was a catch. Using their formidable Essence weaponry across an entire planet came with a high price, and there simply wasn’t enough Essence to waste on the Hadarak when more powerful enemies required it to be used against them. The Jaegger baseships practically couldn’t be touched without it, so the Neofan were not going to be helping out against the Hadarak using the very weapons they’d designed for just that task. At least not much, and had she requested it of Plausious, he would have made an exception for a world as dense with Hadarak as this…but Esna wasn’t going to pull resources away from the other two invasion points that were badly needed when she could handle this the old-fashioned way with a slow grind of surface combat.

The problem the Neofan had, and why they hadn’t easily overrun the Hadarak in all the galaxies they’d touched, was because the Hadarak could regrow from surviving infrastructure…if there was any…or just reseed the planet and regrow, so killing everyone here didn’t fully solve the problem. The planet had to be secured afterwards, and the only effective way to do that was to colonize it…but Star Force wasn’t going to put people in harm’s way on planets with no defensive structure.

Hence, they were using the fast producing Uriti minions as the ‘colonists’ as well as the defensive measures that were capable of hunting down and destroying any ‘seeding’ incursions by the Hadarak later.

So Star Force was slowly replacing the hordes of Hadarak across the Outer Core with hordes of Uriti minions…and the Uriti weren’t even here to control them. Star Force did using Wranglers, and even putting one on each planet was stretching their numbers thin. Imagine playing a videogame with billions of units under your unilateral control, and that’s pretty much what the Wranglers had to do once one of these planets was captured, for the minions were not quite smart enough to always know who to shoot and who not to. They were just machines, even if biologically constructed. All the lights were on but nobody was home, or so the ancient phrase went, so Star Force didn’t want to leave a planet of living machines to mind itself. Hence at least one Wrangler was left behind to oversee them in case some wayward ship from who knows where thought about landing on the planet to explore, colonize, or was just out for galactic spring break.

She didn’t really understand that reference, but the Archons used it enough that she’d gotten the gist of it. Problem was the galaxy was huge and dense with population, even after all the people the Hadarak had murdered in their blunted purge. And sooner or later someone other than the Hadarak would come into contact with the Uriti minion swarms…and those swarms were Star Force’s responsibility, so they couldn’t just send them out to battle the Hadarak and leave them to their preprogrammed responses.

As Esna hovered in the air with a hand against the rocky wall behind her, she studied in depth how the battle was going before choosing where to get more personally involved…then she shot off from her silhouette cover and flew out across her advancing armies. Her armor was not very good to fight up close, for a lot of its bulk had been replaced with the anti-grav necessary for flight and additional comm and sensor gear that made it ‘command armor,’ decorated in the base purple color of her clan, as were all the troops and mechs below her, and the aerial craft above. She was gliding across the ground between them as an occasional shot of acid or energy weapons made its way towards her, though nobody was actually targeting her from this far back. There was just that much carnage happening ahead and some of it was passing all the way back to her.

Esna flew up nearby a mech that was firing much larger globs of the energy goo out like mortars into the sea of melee minions rushing her armored troops. When the mechwarrior was able to hit a group he could knock out a dozen or more with each hit, or take down one of the larger Hadarak minions instantly, whereas the Commandos would have to shoot it hundreds of times to get enough stun energy into it.

Her troops and weapons were damn effective, but as always with the Hadarak they spammed massive numbers at you, and already the piles of bodies ahead of here were forming small mounds that others were crawling and racing over, perhaps crushing them, but the nanites inside would try to repair critical damage and keep them alive if that happened…but nothing on a battlefield like this was perfect, and many of their newly rendered prisoners were going to die as they were stepped on by other Hadarak…or even a mech that had nowhere else to move, though they were damn nimble in the giant machines if they had a spot or two that was clear to step on, plus ‘jump jets’ to allow them to make a short anti-grav hop.

And even as they fought the Hadarak here, in the city ahead they were rapidly growing more. That’s why they had to get to the city and destroy the living infrastructure. Fortunately not all of it had people inside the ‘bodies’ of the buildings, but some did, and the Jedein had found a way to reform them as well. As long as Kai’Sa didn’t come up against a form of Hadarak creation they hadn’t encountered and cataloged the genetic code of, she could slowly convert any of them into a number of pre-selected ‘safe’ races that the individuals would wake up as with no memory of being Hadarak, coming out of cocoons after spending a lot of time inside acclimating to their new brains’ instincts and genetic memory.

In a way they were like the Paladin, and a lot of knowledge had been taken from that race’s genetic memory encoding procedures. Clan Kai’Sa wasn’t converting the Hadarak into soldiers of their own to use, but rather worker ‘bugs’ that would help mine and build infrastructure on the captured planets in concert with the Uriti minions. Those ‘bugs’ would also be encoded to be able to ‘Poki-evolve’…another Archon term she didn’t fully understand the origins of…into more advanced forms, some of which could talk and interact as citizens of Star Force if they earned those upgrades. If they didn’t, they’d just remain as workers and forever be protected by the Empire. Prizes snatched from an enemy that wanted to make everyone fight the darkside way they did. And while killing an enemy that’s attacking you is not darkside, the temptation always was to turn their tactics back on the attackers and fight expendable swarm with expendable swarm.

Star Force would rather be defeated and wiped from the galaxy than fight that way, and finding a method to rescue the Hadarak attackers from their genetic enslavement, born to fight and die without any say in the matter…well, that was the ultimate revenge against the enemy, and every single one of them they preserved was what the Archons called ‘bonus points’…and that was a reference she fully understood.

Two Hadarak minions so large they appeared to be uglier cousins of Godzilla crawled over the boundary wall of the Hadarak city and Esna immediately retasked most of the mech units to them, with missiles beginning to rain down immediately from distance, delivering small amounts of energy goo onto them that did little to slow their advance…which actually had them stepping on a few of the smaller minions that didn’t scurry out of their path fast enough.

“Shit,” Esna said, flying over and sticking onto the back of one of the Madcat-class mechs with the grip pads on her armor and the mechwarrior extending the shields above her to share the protection.

“What do you want us to do about them?” he asked over the comm.

“Those bastards must have had them in subterranean caverns,” she complained, for the aerial scans had showed nothing that large there.

“They’re always learning new tricks.”

“I doubt it. Not like this. I think they have a helper here,” she said coyly, referring to the extra-galactic controllers who had the ability to give orders to the Hadarak. One of which Plausious had stolen the ability from shortly after he’d killed him. They were called the ‘Dotra,’ and were not a single race, but a collection of individuals the T’fen had allowed to control the Hadarak after they’d constructed them out of captured Jedein long, long ago.

“If he’s here, he’ll try to run.”

“Probably long gone through a tunnel,” Esna said, mentally waving off the idea of focusing on the jerk. “He’s irrelevant now. I want to bag those big guys.”

“It’d be easier to have the starships kill them,” the mechwarrior said, though by the tone of his voice she could tell he wasn’t suggesting it, just pointing it out for reference sake.

“Clan Kai’Sa doesn’t do easy. Too boring,” she lectured him. “Try for their left legs.”

As she said it, she also loaded that targeting priority into the battlemap system so all the mechs involved would get it.

“Peg leg it is. You riding all the way in?”

“Making it up as I go. If you get any ankle biters I’ll deal with them. Hop ahead, I want us up front.”

“Well, can’t say you’re not a fun date,” the mechwarrior quipped, running his mech forward several steps then hitting the ‘jump jets’ and flying it through a long hop forward to come down inside a mess of Commandos and Hadarak, but just on the far side of the conflict. A quick ‘puff’ of Jumat from the mech legs cleared his landing zone so he didn’t step on anyone, then his smaller Candy weapons began firing on the nearby minions as he resumed his slow walk forward as other mechs fell into a loose formation on either side and pushed out into the hordes that jumped up and clawed at the mechs’ shields while others shot them with acid or energy weapons that were produced biologically, for none of the minions carried anything with them. Everything was produced inside them.

Esna had one such biological weapon of her own, but if she used her Fornax here to momentarily disable the surrounding minions she’d hit the pilot too in an area of effect burst, but if she needed she could narrow it down and send out a directional pulse, but as it was they couldn’t get through the shields and were sliding off them like a slick glass wall when they tried to jump on the mech.

The two ‘boxes’ that came up over the central body of the machine-like shoulders pumped out more and more glowing missiles that raced forward and up…then came down to hit one of the two gigantic minions known as Kaiju-class. Star Force had encountered them before, but rarely, so they had the right nanite programming to permanently disable them and prep for the conversion that would happen elsewhere with other equipment, but the biological armor on these things was enormously dense, and patches of it were the same as the Hadarak Wardens carried…Yeg’gor.

The nanites would take hours to find a way through that, but it was so stiff that it couldn’t cover the entire body of the Kaiju. Which meant the mechs had to hit the creases between it, and the water balloon-like impacts of the missiles meant even a partial miss would still get some of the charge and nanites on the weaker, flexible armor between the massive battle plates.

The Madcats kept firing missiles while other mech types got in closer and used more direct methods, including a firehose in the case of the Thor-class mechs. It had a long recharge time, but it could drench the larger minions or spray more widely into the groups of the smaller ones. She saw one of them hop forward to get in range of one of the Kaiju as the monster turned on it and shot a bath of acid over the mech.

The shields held, but the ground underneath did not…liquified by the acid, with the Thor slipping in the quicksand that resulted and fell face down, then the Kaiju began to glow on the chest as one of the Yeg’gor plates peeled open…then it fired a red energy orb into the downed mech.

The shields were penetrated with a single blast, but the armor held up enough to keep it from penetrating into the interior…but the lingering acid was now able to start eating into it, and the surrounding smaller minions turned and fired on it with what ranged weapons they had, including smaller acid spitters, but refrained from actually running across the acid pools to claw into it.

Before Esna could even order any help, a pair of Neos sprinted through the minions, not even bothering to try to keep from stepping on them. They plowed through them like an asteroid through a nebula, spraying up the smaller ones from the collisions as they got up to and in front of the Thor as it struggled to rise.

Both extended their shields over it in two umbrellas as another red energy orb eventually came their way, blocking it but leaving little shields left as more and more missiles sailed over them and into the left leg of the Kaiju, which was continuing to step ponderously closer to the Thor.

“Come on, come on,” Esna complained, knowing that leg couldn’t take much more before going numb…then she finally saw it start to stiffen, though it didn’t stop walking as the Neos fired at the smaller minions swarming the Thor and their own legs rather than at the Kaiju. All the other mechs were firing at it and ignoring the other one which was further away at the moment.

A flock of skeets flew in and hovered near the first monster, peppering its leg with even more shots as it fired back from its shoulders with anti-air weaponry, hitting their shields and driving a few of them back while the others held position and added more firepower to the left leg…which eventually gave out and the Kaiju fell to a knee, but was otherwise upright as the Thor had a huge gash taken out of its own left leg as it stood back up with the acid below having run its course.

“It’s pinned,” the mechwarrior reported, “but it’s going to take a lot to knock it into slumber land and the Commandos are getting hammered.”

Esna had already diverted a few mechs back to assist, but decided to add a little more help.

“Keep on the big guy,” she said, seeing a small Star Force relief transport fly up to a nearby Madcat and swap out its right shoulder box for a new one, then fly back behind friendly lines as it was being targeted with energy lances from far too many minions. The reload was necessary, otherwise the Madcats would quickly run out of missiles and have only their arm cannons to use against the Kaiju, and eventually the nanites in those would have to be reloaded as well, but they had far more duration.

Esna detached her grip pads and leapt through the shields…or rather the gap in them momentarily created to let her out…and flew back along the lines to a knot of Commandos that were getting swarmed but still holding. She dove into the minions just ahead of them and dropped to the ground between them, taking shield hits instantly…then she used her Fornax to render all of them within a 30 meter radius twitching uncontrollably as the control signals to their muscles were scrambled.

It didn’t last longer than a moment, but the Commandos took advantage of it as Esna likewise pulled out her rifle and began shooting a few of the minions as they began standing back up. She walked backwards into the Commando cluster and kept fighting with them for a few minutes before the situation stabilized, then she flew off again behind friendly lines and kept an eye on the overall battle.

More than 20 minutes later, the first Kaiju was finally rendered catatonic.

4

Eight hours later Esna was still out on the battlefield. The city defenders had all been rendered catatonic and the city defenses had been destroyed. The rest of the biological buildings were being searched and the living components identified for removal and transformation. Esna was perched atop one of the taller buildings with a wide view of the area while she checked up on the rest of the planet through her helmet’s HUD and the battlemap system.

This wasn’t the only place assaults were being made, but it was the largest. Smaller settlements were being plucked off the map simultaneously while Hadarak air units continued to scour the battlefields and attacking wherever they saw an opportunity. Her pilots were keeping them away from here, and many of those Hadarak landed so hard they broke their bodies on impact. Fortunately their biology was highly resilient and most survived, but not all. Esna would have preferred a clean sweep, but in a war against a formerly unbeatable opponent, she was still proud of how far they’d come.

And it wasn’t like the aerial Hadarak were making it easy to capture them alive. The pilots’ first job was to protect the ground units, and right now there was an army of Uriti minions that looked like tall spiders with tree trunk-sized legs walking around everywhere picking up the comatose units and carrying them out of the city underneath their torsos like cargo. She could see long lines of them heading over the horizon to a nearby field base that was growing rapidly as other units there would take the sleeping Uriti and start putting them into ‘eggs’ that were being grown by the minions prior to arrival.

In truth they were half eggs, and when the various Hadarak minions were set inside the half eggshell would begin to grow up and over them, eventually fully encapsulating them and beginning the transformation process. They obviously had to be fully unconscious for this to happen, but the brain wasn’t something you could just shut off. It was always at least somewhat active, and it had been a hard job figuring out how to keep the person inside from suffering as almost their entire body was rebuilt into something else, as well as their mind being altered as new brain material was grown to augment or replace pieces that were already there.

After all, they had to get the Hadarak instincts out of them, and that meant reworking the brain with the person still in it. The ‘Core’ that was that person was still undetectable by science, though its interaction with the body was not. Thankfully the Neofan had far more experience with such matters, and could see the Core using Essence. Change too much too fast and the Core would disconnect from the body and the person would die…which meant their Core would move into the Essence Realm and off to who knew where it went. The Neofan could see that much as it happened, and they also had a lot of darkside experiments in the past to draw knowledge from. The kind where they didn’t care about the person undergoing changes, to put it mildly.

House Atriark was beyond that now, officially, but old habits died hard and it had taken a while for the Neofan researchers assisting them to realize how much they’d buried their own consciences over the course of their lifetimes…some of which were measured in the millions of years. Your conscience was your moral compass, and not a product of culture or religion…but those two things could modify, twist, or bury it. It would always be there to be found again, but these Neofan had theirs buried under what was a mountain of amoral crap and they didn’t understand in the beginning why it was necessary to keep the Hadarak minions so suppressed, citing they wouldn’t remember the pain later anyway.

Esna had been tempted to beat some sense into them, but that wouldn’t have worked because they could have squashed her flat in two seconds even without using their Essence skills. She could understand why the Vargemma considered them to be gods. They were the most advanced race she’d ever encountered, but they were still as blind as anyone else when it came to morality. You’d think they’d have better developed consciences after so many years of experience, but sadly that wasn’t true. Your conscience was an ability, and it seemed everyone, no matter what the race, started out with a level 1 skill rating. In order to get to level 2 you had to use it, and then 3 and so on.

If you didn’t use it, it didn’t level up, and it was just a general sense of something being good or something being bad without a lot of useful information. And when you taught yourself to ignore that small sense, you were essentially walking around blind with only logical, logistical, emotional, or other factors registering in your mind.

Wake up your conscience, and a lot of things started to make sense that you previously did not understand. It was truly a sense of its own, and by now Star Force had mapped a minimum of 12 senses in Humans, the conscience being one of them. Some of the universe’s puzzles you couldn’t solve if you had one of them numbed up or underdeveloped. And even a race as old and advanced as the Neofan was not immune to this basic foundational reality the universe had developed.

You might start out in a really advanced body and mind, but you still had to earn your way beyond that. And if you didn’t, impressive individuals in the lesser races would pass you up in no time.

Which was why Star Force trained people as individuals rather than groups, knowing that some things just couldn’t be done for you by others. But in the case of the Hadarak minions, Star Force had figured out a way to do them a HUGE service. And it was in no small part to a single avian Hadarak that had decided to disobey its instincts and deviate from the group. Esna had actually met it multiple times, for it went everywhere Plausious did. He’d found it being pursued by other Hadarak intent on killing it for its deviation from the programming put into them, not by the universe, but by the T’fen’s servants.

Plausious had saved it and they’d been best friends ever since, with it usually riding on his shoulder like a copilot on his massive body.

Esna had come to learn as soon as she’d found Star Force as a child, that a lot of the impossible tasks in the universe were actually doable if you advanced yourself enough to be able to figure them out, and how to save the Hadarak from themselves was the biggest one she knew of. Nobody in the galaxy had even been able to effectively stand up to them and survive. Those that advanced had to hide or they’d be pursued and wiped out. Even the Neofan and the Bond of Resistance hid in the Rim and their Temples where the Hadarak were hard pressed to get.

No one thought the Hadarak could be saved…and the one Plausious had found had saved itself by breaking away from their programming. It would have died shortly thereafter had it not run into the marooned Neofan, but the point was that the monsters in the center of the galaxy were not just the enemy. They were also the victims and prisoners of this barbaric transformation. All of these minions had been born this way, true, and most of the Wardens had as well, but their basic genome had not come from the lifesprings…not that that was always a good thing…but it had been designed to make them barbaric servants.

And what one super-advanced race could mess up, another could potentially fix.

Right now there were field camps running across a third of the planet with egg-like cocoons protecting and feeding the transformation with vein-like cables grown from Uriti biotech linked back to main processors much like a computer system. Each egg was monitored and any troubleshooting was done if a transformation wasn’t happening as planned while nutrients were also sent where there wasn’t enough biomatter already in the rescuee’s body to be recycled.

All of these fields were covered by shield generators to make sure they weren’t hit by the other Hadarak, and after several months of conversion they’d start sprouting new races with the same Cores inside them, and they’d immediately know what to do, for Star Force had decided to use Paladin genetic memory templates to guide them through this first stage of their new life as they had to figure out who and what they were.

But when you had billions of eggs to grow and process, you couldn’t do one on one training sessions, so the genetic memory had been one of the many keys to making this endeavor work. Keys that Star Force had collected over the millennia, but those hadn’t been enough on their own. The Neofan had others, as did the Jedein. Combined, they had enough knowledge to make this work, and the superior moral compass of Star Force had made sure it didn’t slide off into a horrific science experiment, for the Jedein were basically highly advanced life seeders. Once they put races into place, they didn’t care for them that much, though they had been instrumental in rescuing the single Nightcrawler that still lived from the Progarren era.

Looking out for the best interests of others wasn’t something the Jedein or the Neofan were good at, but Star Force had made a specialty of it. And thanks to the efforts of all three races, each of these fields, when hatched, would lead to a new army of workers that were already constructing brand new cities on the areas of the planet that had been conquered and converted while the troops kept the rest of the Hadarak on the defensive.

When Clan Kai’Sa eventually left this world, it would not be empty and available for the Hadarak or anyone else to claim again. There would be a mix of Uriti minion and ‘Flud’ minion populations on this planet continuously building and arming it. If the Jaeggers or Asferja ever got this far, each one of these worlds would be a bump in the road for them rather than a smooth acquisition. And left to build long enough, the Flud would make the road bumps into full grown thorns.

The Uriti minions, while they looked and moved a lot like people, were still just biological drones and expendable. But the Flud were not, which was why the Uriti minions were the ones handling security for the new colonies sprouting up. The Flud…deliberately misspelled by the Archons…were the ultimate answer to how Clan Kai’Sa could remove the Hadarak from the worlds they’d taken and keep them. Cleansing a world and leaving it barren wouldn’t work unless she left troops behind to guard it.

Now the Hadarak were providing her the ‘troops’ to do it, for she was stealing theirs, converting them, and using them to build anti-orbital weapons, aircraft, shield generators, and they were either constructing it using Star Force tech, or growing it using new and constantly upgrading Flud biotech that a group of Star Force Mastertechs were absolutely giddy about experimenting with. It had to operate on the same rules as the Uriti minions…no Cores inside the biotech so you weren’t using people…but as it was, there were anti-air turrets a few hundred miles to the south being grown out of the ground like trees at an accelerated rate, and Esna had to admit the Mastertechs’ playtime was turning out some very impressive results.

The Jedein were taking any captured Wardens and freeing them of their transformation, turning them back into the Jedein genome that they still carried buried under all the alterations. Esna had fleets of her Clan out tracking and monitoring the slow moving moon-sized Hadarak, for if they rammed a planet like this there was little she could do to stop it. But she could catch and capture them after an extensive battle using the Spaceball technology, and her Clan had gotten very good at using it and developing strategies to lure in and pin the Wardens before they could run to the safety of a nearby star and dive inside.

Once captured, the Spaceballs would fly the Wardens inside their cage to a location where a Jedein was, or a Jedein would come to them. Then the squid-like space creatures would start their own transformation of the Wardens, not forcibly, but by talking to them. The Wardens immediately obeyed the Jedein once they made contact, and actually triggered the conversion process themselves, for they had the ability to alter their own bodies as needed based on any genetic code given to them. The Jedein largely just had to point out where it was in them, and in some cases help in other ways.

Regardless, that conversion was not up to Star Force or the Neofan. And the more Wardens got transformed into Jedein, the more Jedein there were to transform others.

As for the Lurkers, they were so damn fast that you couldn’t really pin them down to a location to get a Jedein to them. So most of the Lurkers had to be destroyed in combat, and only a few classes of ships in the Star Force fleet could even try to take them on. Their Essence weaponry was too damn formidable, but most of the known ones had already been killed. How many more were out there, aptly lurking and waiting to strike in ambush, nobody knew. But her Clan fleet had standing orders to run and run hard if they spotted one, otherwise they’d get destroyed in a single attack without Essence shields.

And her Clan had no Essence shields. All the ships that did were off fighting the new invaders, and the inherent value of Essence charges had skyrocketed. The Uriti were invaluable in this regard, even if they never fired a shot in a battle, but they couldn’t keep up with the demand, and the Temples only had so much stored in them. Eventually it would run out and they’d have to rely on what the Vargemma inside could produce on a regular basis.

Reignor Plausious was in charge of most of that, even for the Star Force Temples. House Atriark had unofficially become the Essence wing of Star Force in this galaxy, though the Uriti were not taking orders from them. The Neofan were, however, taking over tanker duty for Essence shipments from them…which pretty much made it impossible for anyone to disrupt those shipments. Even if a Lurker jumped one of their ships, the Lurker wouldn’t stand a chance.

That’s how damn superior the Neofan were in Essence abilities, knowledge, and technology. But once the stored Essence ran out, it was back to conventional weapons, both for this galaxy’s defenders and the invaders.

A status updated pinged as Esna was reviewing a battle taking place in real time 1418 miles to the north, and she saw it was from the Deep Core, which was far from here. They were still about midway between Core and Rim and had only peeled the Hadarak back away from select chunks of the interior, with a lot of their territory still touching the Grand Border and attacking it as the V’kit’no’sat continually defended and held the line there.

But the V’kit’no’sat were also in the Deep Core guarding the massive black holes that the majority of intergalactic travel entered and left on. And the update was from one of those.

The entry point of the Jaegger invasion, Megatron 12, had not been secured by either side. The Jaeggers still had clear passage through it that neither Star Force or their allies the Veloqueen could stop, but the planetary outpost in that system, called Zatria, where Mak’to’ran were defending, just reported back that they had held the planet against the Jaeggers…and the enemy was no longer trying to take it. Their baseships had moved on elsewhere, leaving only one intact one to guard the two that were repairing and disrupt any more ambush attempts at the incoming intergalactic jumpline like the one Star Force had initially set up.

Those two damaged baseships were the result of that ambush, and while Star Force really needed to block off that line of entry, the fact that they’d held the planet against the bulk of the Jaegger forces was damn good news.

Except for wherever those ships were now heading.

Still, it was a huge victory. The unstoppable Gauntlet Wars had just been stopped on that planet, and the enemy had moved on to softer targets.

Esna copied a bit of the data she was reviewing and added a short message in her own words, then sent it out over the battlemap to everyone in the city…and soon a rumble began of combined cheers, and somehow even the Uriti minions began wailing some sort of siren-like call. That had to be the Wrangler’s doing, but it did add to the moment considerably.

Star Force was not going to be run over like the Progarren and all those before them had been. Win or lose, this was going to be at the minimum a fair fight. And when the Dotra learned of this victory, she expected them to be quite panicked no matter how many more races were on the way to back up the three already present.

Zatria had held, and the V’kit’no’sat were the ones to notch the first clear planetary victory against the Jaeggers…how typical. When she’d been born, they were the monsters everyone feared, having destroyed Star Force on many worlds left barren, and the scattering of population left behind was where she had originated before being located and rescued by Star Force.

And now, the V’kit’no’sat were part of Star Force, but no less dominant. In fact, they’d been scared of the Hadarak back then. Now they’d just stood up to the Jaeggers and their planet-sized ships…and scared them off.

She’d never forgive the V’kit’no’sat of long ago for killing Rammak, but the V’kit’no’sat of today were an entirely different story, and she was damn glad they were part of the Star Force team.

Check that…the Star Force family. As insane as it sounded, they were a civilization-sized family, and there was no doubt whatsoever that they’d always have each other’s backs.

And Clan Kai’Sa’s job, in addition to defeating the Hadarak and reclaiming the worlds they’d stolen from thousands of races, was to bring their hordes into that family as well.

The Flud was that familial extension, though they didn’t realize it yet. They were essentially babies in adult bodies, but they were already contributing, and on some of the early worlds where Clan Kai’Sa had done its work, planetary defenses were up and running sufficient to screen any of the fleets currently engaging the Asferja…not that they were anywhere close to the Outer Core at the moment…but Esna was successfully building a backstop against the invaders, using the invaders themselves by freeing them from the T’fen’s control.

The irony of that was astounding, and also emphasized the point that Star Force was on par with the T’fen…not in all areas, obviously, but in enough. And taking their horde of Hadarak and turning them into Jedein and the Flud, that was the kind of lightside reversal that just gave you a surge of righteous revenge and hope for the future in an otherwise horrific universe.

5

EG29

May 31, 158438

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Temple 1928

Vikarathe read the message packet he’d received from House Atriark. It had gone the long way, out through the intergalactic transit network from their home in the Milky Way and to Andromeda via courier, for sending messages directly through the system was inefficient. It had not been devised to send massive amounts of data from one installation to another, but rather to send objects. There was a limited data network there to keep everything operating in sync, and the Neofan had chosen not to enlarge that capacity when they were adding new routes and destinations to the ancient transit system.

It was far better to send a secure drone hopping through the network than a signal someone could intercept or one that could get garbled due to environmental conditions. As such, a small spherical probe had come through into the Temple that Vikarathe had chosen to become the home of House Phoenix. One very near the invasion zone of the Asferja.

On the probe were a great many things from his fellow Neofan, including a message from Reignor Plausious about his intentions to try and rescue any survivors left in Utovi and merge them together into a third House called Sovarsti. He cited the odds of this happening as low, but with the T’fen’s attention on the Milky Way, they might not be that interested in overseeing the destruction of the scraps of the Neofan civilization left in Utovi…and they might even pull the Pafdreng off to come to the Milky Way at some point.

It was a good move, but Vikarathe knew Reignor Truven and his new House, even if successful, would be of no help in this Gauntlet War. They were an investment for a future beyond it…but if House Atriark didn’t survive, neither would the Neofan. He knew this, and it was why House Phoenix was being put together, not as another bastion of Neofan society should the Milky Way fall, but as a weapon to protect Andromeda and to strike at the reinforcements here that the Asferja were continuing to grow and send through the Galactic Threads despite Paul’s constant efforts to disrupt them.

Plausious had included a lot of data on the fighting going on, plus on their success finding a way to remake the Hadarak into an asset. Vikarathe already knew about this from an earlier update, but the reports coming in were astounding. Hundreds of planets had already been converted and were now either producing raw materials for the war effort or building up their own defenses to wear down future invasions by any of the T’fen’s servants if and when they broke out of the two footholds they’d gained.

The planet-sized ships the Jaeggers had brought and detailed in this report were intimidating. They’d literally created artificial planets that could move and fight…whereas the Neofan Temples, while much larger, were not designed to be mobile. He took a moment to think of what his House could build long term if they had a chance to counter or copy this ‘baseship’ of the enemy’s, but he knew it wasn’t something that could be constructed quickly. It was a legacy construct, and they were using them to fight offensively rather than creating a fortification like the Temples were.

It was a bold move for their civilization, and one that was making them almost invincible in the early fighting if not for the Essence weaponry Star Force possessed and the Veloqueen…whom he’d never seen fight at this level before. Their ability to burrow into the baseships and carve them up from within was frightening. The Neofan had never warred against their ally, and the Veloqueen kept mostly to their own galaxy, fighting the Hadarak there. Now it appeared their full power was being unleashed, and Vikarathe was not disappointed in the least.

Two of the baseships had been badly damaged, but not destroyed. That was a feat in and of itself, and they were now sitting in the Gateway system that they’d arrived in, acting as guards to protect incoming ships…though after the last of the baseships had arrived, that entry point had been silent with regards to enemy reinforcements…but Vikarathe knew that was not going to continue, for already in this galaxy a third race had entered, called the Bru’son, and their ships had started traveling down the Asferja Threads to the Milky Way after getting a small packet attached to their hulls to allow the passage.

Right now Paul was out harassing those facilities to delay their transit, but the 6 Threads the Asferja had created were now no longer within his reach. The fleet of Vargemma ships were drawing too much Essence from the Temples, and rather than wait until they were nearly exhausted of their Essence reserves Paul had split them up, sending them on defensive missions while he remained the only one on offense in his Gjardan with the Nuv’ernor Kara onboard increasing its firepower drastically. She’d been learning the Neofan techniques quickly ever since arriving here, but such things took a lifetime to master and she would only grow stronger with time and training despite her immense power already present.

They’d done what initial damage they could do, delayed the Asferja arriving in the Milky Way, and now they were primarily concerned with protecting this galaxy and keeping the Asferja from consuming all of it. If they did, they could build hundreds of Threads and overrun the Milky Way eventually. Vikarathe appreciated the T’fen’s strategy in using the Asferja in this manner, but he was committed to not letting it happen, and if Paul’s Paladin were half as good as he claimed they were, they’d make an effective countermeasure once they had grown to sufficient size.

As for House Phoenix, he was still recruiting exiled Neofan from other galaxies. Vikarathe had gone in person at the beginning, but now that he had a total of 3,922 members that had accepted a full Graft from him, he had them going out and finding more on a continual basis. The Temple network was huge, and they could be hiding anywhere within it. If they had left it, then they would have to find their way back to him…he couldn’t search beyond it and wasn’t going to try. But when the Temples responded to the commands of a Neofan and gave them everything they needed to survive, he doubted the exiles would have left them behind without a good reason…though their mental states had them not needing good reasons for things, so he hoped the lack of food elsewhere would have encouraged them to disappear into the vast reaches of what the Bond of Resistance had created over the millions of years it had existed.

And in all that patient building, events were coming to a head now…with the Neofan nearly destroyed by the Mev. Plausious said a new technology was now available, produced by Star Force, that could slowly undo it without Paul or another with the Saiolum skill to cleanse them. That put a piece of Vikarathe’s mind at ease, for while it had been promised, it had not existed until now, and with Paul needed so many places he couldn’t just travel around with Vikarathe to help him cleanse the exiles…though many of them didn’t even have the Mev. They were mentally damaged for other reasons.

And though it was distasteful to him, Vikarathe had been forcibly grafting his memories onto the young Neofan that had been born in exile and could not control themselves. In the past they would never have existed, and had they been discovered they would have been killed for the threat they posed. Vikarathe now saw the injustice in that. It was more a protection of the status quo than a real threat to the older Neofan. But even now, after giving them a great gift, he did not like it. A graft was meant to be a choice. Forcing it on another was wrong…but killing them would be even worse, and it was not their fault they had been born without a proper construction being made available to them. It was their parents’ fault for reproducing them in the wilds, and he wasn’t going to consign them to death because of what their parents had done.

Nor was he going to kill those parents. He needed every Neofan he could find, no matter what condition they were in or what they had done previously. His graft was working wonders on them, but it would be a long time before they worked out who they truly were and what part of them was him and what was them. It was a tough journey to make inside one’s own head, but it was the far simpler one to make than to recover from the depths they had fallen. When you had sunk as low as they had, typically the reasons for the sinking prevented a recovery, even though one was always possible.

That was something Star Force had drilled into their own people. No matter how bad things became, and how impossible they seemed, as long as you lived you could recover what was lost. No matter how badly damaged your body was, you could heal up. No matter how screwed up your mind was, it could be straightened out. No matter how evil you had been in the past, you could cleanse yourself of it.

And everything began with a choice. A choice to make a change…and that was where most of these Neofan would not, or could not go. They didn’t have the strength within them to choose to begin the battle to climb out of their depths of despair and depravity. But they could choose to have him drag them out of it and remake their minds.

Except for the uncontrollable young ones. They didn’t even know what a graft was, so it was impossible for them to make a choice even if he could have had an intelligent conversation with them. Most went feral and forgot how to speak entirely. But now they knew, and they knew a great many other things Vikarathe had forced into them. They were prisoners inside the box he had placed in their minds, and the only way out of that box was to grow out of it.

So they’d either grow into their own selves, or forever be his unwitting servants.

That was not how a graft was supposed to be used, but with his race nearing their end, he had to make use of what was available to him, and the full graft was by far the best option he had. The only other one was to sedate them and hand them over to Star Force in the hopes they could one day make something out of them…but these were not their responsibility. They had agreed to take on the young when they were birthed and uncontaminated. Helping these find their way was different, and while he would not have bet against Star Force finding a method to do so, it was not something they should be distracted with as they fought for their lives.

So the grafts were used, and hundreds of those wild ones were now here helping to oversee the building of their new city as an army of Temple Caretakers worked furiously to construct it, having been pulled off other tasks within the massive inverted habitat centered on an artificial star.

But while that city was rising, training grounds were already established nearby and his House Phoenix warriors were practicing first the art of muscle before they went anywhere near the art of Essence. The young ones had almost none of it in them anyway, and Vikarathe did not truly see them as useful except for their size and muscle, which against other races was usually superior. What he needed now was an elite force, and that meant calling upon the exiled ones who previously had such skills, which were now mixed with his own skills and knowledge as a warrior.

He was pleased with the initial progress so far, and a strike team led by his former teacher Vaisha was already performing missions into enemy territory to help save Klix worlds. They were working in conjunction with the Vargemma ships in some cases, others they were not, but many partially colonized Asferja worlds were seeing their key facilities destroyed by this small team, which would set back production of the necessary items, including foodstuffs, that the Asferja required before birthing more of their race.

If you limited their infrastructure, they would automatically limit their new births. So hitting such facilities was an obvious target for House Phoenix and Paul’s Gjardan on loan to him from House Atriark. As for House Phoenix obtaining ships of their own, Caretaker units on all the Temples across this galaxy were working to build pieces of that new fleet, and had units out beyond the Temples looking for more resources to harvest and bring back into them to supplement the immense stockpiles already present.

It wasn’t just Essence that the Temples conserved for future use, but raw materials as well…and those raw materials were going to allow House Phoenix to technologically rise far faster than anyone realized, and while House Atriark had sworn off using servants as a requirement for settling in the Milky Way and sharing that galaxy with Star Force, Vikarathe was under no such promise.

And he had trillions of Vargemma in this galaxy, let alone others, that were eager to volunteer.

And Paul had already been training his naval commanders for him through battle, with the competent ones out leading their own small fleet units in support of the Klix. House Phoenix would not have the skill of the servants the Neofan had cultivated in Utovi, but they would have considerable numbers to start with.

Vikarathe had to not just protect this galaxy, but rule it as well in conjunction with Star Force. The Paladin would take care of all the insignificant worlds out there, while it was his job to make sure the two Bond of Resistance races survived, as well as the other less inferior races in this galaxy. He’d begin taking some of their races…the ones who volunteered…and grooming new servants from those with valuable skills, but for right now he needed an army that could hit hard, and he didn’t have millennia to work on developing one. The already existing Essence skills of the Vargemma were his only option, and it was a good option so long as they could follow orders…which Paul had demonstrated not all of them would when a Neofan wasn’t directly present.

Nevertheless, he had several hundred thousand of the best he could sift out of the mix training here as well. Vikarathe had learned from Paul some of their methods of making the problem ones show themselves, and how to turn problem ones into assets. He wished his friend was here to further help, and while he had promised that Star Force personnel would be coming from the Milky Way to supplement Kara and the Paladin, there was no substitute for Paul-024. He was a god amongst his people, and soon he would be leaving.

Vikarathe had promised Nevvra he would protect him, and had done so, but the way this war was going to be played by Star Force and its allies required Vikarathe to stay in Andromeda and disrupt the Asferja plans as much as possible as they created a bridge into the Milky Way’s Rim for other races to enter as well. Vikarathe understood the importance of this, as well as the potential he had inherited from his race and their legacy creations, but he still wished Paul would stay, for he was the only real peer he had here…and only remaining friend. The few others who had earned that honorarium had died from the Mev. And while Vikarathe was now a Reignor, he was a Reignor of a House that barely existed in theory, let alone in practice. He was having to start all over in multiple ways, and in truth it was lonely work. The might of the Neofan race had always been behind him…now that might was reduced to his own strength and that of House Atriark.

Which was rather pathetic compared to what they had once been not that long ago.

But he was a warrior, and he had a pathway to damage, if not defeating the enemy, and he understood that he had to do his part in this gigantic war…one far larger than the Neofan had ever been part of. The assault on Utovi had been larger than the combat so far, but this Gauntlet War was just beginning, and he knew it would scale up far larger than the purging of their home galaxy.

This was a war that warriors were born for, and if his part in it was not in the center of the enemy’s wrath, then he’d make them pay for their oversight. They’d tried, and nearly succeeded, in wiping out the Neofan with the Mev…but they’d ultimately failed. Star Force had intervened, and now the Neofan were going to rise as the legendary Phoenix that Paul had named his House after.

Payback was coming, but it was going to be thousands of years in the making. Right now he needed to build and disrupt the enemy at the same time. Fortunately for him, the Asferja were giving him a bountiful number of targets as they spread outward almost randomly, assaulting inferior worlds with inferior assault forces, and doing the bare minimum in some cases to take them…after which they could grow the strength they needed.

This gambit was working for them, but not for long. Andromeda was a weak galaxy, but as House Phoenix’s ships rose from the construction slips and the Vargemma were trained to behave as proper servants to real Neofan commanders and not some mystical, never before seen ‘Founders’ that they could image as they liked, the number of easy worlds the Asferja were taking and breeding on would go away, and everywhere they struck House Phoenix would show up sooner or later to remove them.

Them, or the Paladin, for after having several conversations with their leader at Paul’s request, he was now convinced that their might would rival House Phoenix’s in time. A boast that he had almost thought was made in jest by his friend, but he knew him better than that.

Star Force had never fully unleashed the Paladin’s own swarm capabilities, and he assured him that in Andromeda, with no other support from his Empire, Supreme Viceroy Thrawn would not be held back in the slightest. He was under orders to conquer this galaxy and annex it into the Star Force Empire…and Vikarathe was keenly interested in seeing exactly how he was going to do it.

6

EG29

June 18, 158438

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Interstellar Space

Paul sat at a table in the Gjardan with three separate plates of food in front of him, systematically devouring the 6,000+ calories that were his ‘breakfast,’ though in truth he didn’t have a daily schedule onboard the ship and he barely slept a few hours when he did. His Furyan biology didn’t require more than that, but it did require lots of activity.

He’d just gotten finished with a 2 hour sparring match with Kara on their way back to Thrawn’s base camp in System 339201 on the planet that Paul had recently named ‘Wayland,’ for the Viceroy was apparently not in the habit of naming things and was just using designation numbers. Not surprising for the Paladin, who didn’t even have names except for the Viceroys, and when Paul had noted the need to name stuff in a new galaxy in a recent message exchange, Thrawn had declared that was a skill he did not possess.

So Paul had done it for him, yet going forward Thrawn was going to have to rely on Kara and the other Archons here for naming if he wasn’t going to be doing it, for it was time for the trailblazer to leave.

They were returning from their last sabotage mission, and the Gjardan had a huge crack in its surface from weapons damage it had taken. Paul had pushed things a little too close with the new arrivals. The Bru’son were totally unknown to him, other than what they’d managed to get out of the Asferja comm traffic intercepts. They were not a race that had been cataloged in the Legacy Repository, as Star Force techs had started to call it after moving in a permanent research team, so who and what they were was unknown to Paul until recently.

Their ships were extremely odd in that they were completely clear. You could see right through them, and the clear hull armor barely counted for anything. It was basically just thick crystal and not designed to resist weapons fire. The Bru’son ships were not designed as warships…but they had one of the most complex shield matrixes he’d ever come across, and they were damn hard to penetrate. It was like they had chosen an ‘all or nothing’ approach to ship design and put everything into their shields.

Their ships were long, flat, and looked like glass artwork. Their crews he had visuals of now, thanks to the transparency of the hulls. They were green as green could be, and made up of different forms of bipeds and quadrupeds. Paul guessed that green was chlorophyl in their skin, which would somewhat explain their desire for natural sunlight.

But not putting armor on your hulls was just plain stupid no matter how you cut it.

Their ships had been getting outfitted with the Asferja equipment necessary to ride the Galactic Threads across to the Milky Way, which was a series of patches that looked like scabs they had to apply to the clear hull…which he guessed the Bru’son didn’t really like given that it blocked their view a bit. Those patches were being created at a large facility nearby each Thread location. He’d destroyed the one at Daisy and then just destroyed the one at Donald, but the Bru’son had fought with the Asferja at Donald and while their weapons were not Essence-based, they were operating on some physics that both Star Force and the Neofan were not currently aware of.

As a result, the Gjardan had been damaged. Paul knew he should have pulled back sooner, but he wanted to get that facility knocked out before he left. Kara had been working her ass off in the sculpting chamber to allow him to do it, upgrading multiple weapon systems simultaneously for him to use as Paul flew the Gjardan from the bridge. He hadn’t needed to plug into his astromech to do it since the fleet was not with them. It had been a hit and run attack, and he figure it would take less time to repair the Gjardan than it would to replace that augment station.

In the meantime, the Bru’son would have to move to another Thread station or wait for Donald to come back online for them while the Asferja ships continued to slide down both without waiting, for the Thread-riding technology was built into their ships as standard equipment.

Paul had the first plate of food cleared by the time they decelerated into the Wayland System, knowing that a convoy from the Milky Way had already arrived in the Temple network and had moved to this location to meet him. He’d sent for them, which included teams from just about every division of the Empire, including more Archons to assist Kara and a Xavier to help Vikarathe with any additional cleansings that popped up. They now had technology to do that, thanks to Azoro, so all around it was time for Paul to leave and let Kara take over. Between her, Thrawn, and Vikarathe they should be able to annoy the Asferja here and cause all kinds of trouble to disrupt the flow of troops into the Milky Way, but it wasn’t going to be until much, much later that the Paladin would grow to the numbers needed to actually contend for possession of this galaxy.

That was Kara’s future now, not Paul’s. And while he was a little embarrassed about getting the Gjardan damaged, none of the crew had been hurt and that augment facility had been wrecked so badly they’d probably have to build a brand new one rather than try to put the pieces back together again. It would buy the rest of the Empire time to figure out these Bru’son, for the few that had already gotten through would be there by now or within a few months. But they wouldn’t be coming in as large of groups as they’d originally planned. Paul had successfully bottlenecked two of the six Threads against their massive convoys of ships coming out from the center of this galaxy upon which they had entered via the massive black holes. They had only constructed Threads for the last leg of their journey into the Milky Way.

Paul assumed more races would be entering the same way and traveling down the Threads to backdoor their way into the Empire’s Rim territory that they had almost no worlds in. Whoever had scouted the Milky Way for the T’fen had done a good job, for all the Threads were landing in areas that Star Force had yet to colonize or tame, which left a lot of empty or weak worlds not belonging to them for the Asferja to come out and consume.

Star Force had been stopping most of that, according to the last data dump he’d received via courier, but the more ships that came through, including the Bru’son, were going to make it difficult to detect and defend all of those systems. Sooner or later they’d find a foothold and start building on it, but that was the very thing Star Force knew it had to prevent.

Which was turning the Asferja invasion corridor into a more and more massive war zone as Factions from across the Empire were sending ships to assist in the containment. Only a handful of Asferja ships and start-up colonies had surrendered…and those only had after getting beaten into a pulp…while the rest continued to fight to the death the way the lizards had. Taking prisoners was a pain in the ass when you were being swarmed, but Star Force was still offering it and doing it for the few takers…but most of this fight was straight up carnage and would continue to be for a long time.

He didn’t know how the Bru’son were going to affect it, but it wasn’t like Star Force had played all of its cards early. The ‘bench’ of the Empire was multiple rows deep, and what the T’fen had sent so far, while impressive, wasn’t going to do much more than scratch them.

But scratching the Empire could still see trillions of people dead, so it wasn’t a small issue, but if their intent was to wipe out Star Force, they were going to need a lot more ships and troops to do it.

Which was why Paul was not surprised when the waiting ships ahead of them had delivered the most recent data package…and transmitted it out to a relay for him to get…that the Jaeggers’ baseships had split up and were putting down roots on different planets in the Deep Core…another area that Star Force had only lightly colonized.

They were not going for uninhabited planets, though. They were going for inhabited ones and were enslaving the populations via implants…and there was little Star Force could do to stop it when one of their baseships split up into dozens of fragments and blockaded the worlds in question. Landing troops in that environment would have meant a slaughter, so all the fleets could do was pick away at their baseship segments while they ‘assimilated’ the primitive native populations that, for the most part, had never even achieved space travel and somehow avoided the Hadarak purge mixed in with all the Megaloid systems in the region.

Paul knew the Jaeggers could grow new populations at a high rate via cloning technology within their baseships. Apparently this was a faster way to increase their numbers, which meant all three of the races to hit this galaxy first…including the Hadarak…were races that could spam population, albeit in different ways.

That meant the T’fen knew they couldn’t bring enough troops in from other galaxies to get the job done. They had to grow or otherwise attain them here, and right now the fighting was not to destroy the Empire, but to secure areas of the galaxy where they could do that growing.

And they might have got away with it except for the lizards had taught Star Force the hard way what it meant to fight against a ruthless and immoral spawn race. Paul knew all their tricks and tactics, as did the other trailblazers. They were not going to let them get a foothold to do that, and if the Jaeggers thought they were going to spread out to other systems and do the same with anything less than a full baseship, they were going to be disappointed.

They had their big chess pieces, and the Empire couldn’t take them out very easily, but that would only get them so far. Meanwhile, Star Force had multiple races that could mass produce replacement drones, and if necessary, replacement populations. The Bsidd were already evacuating many of their existing worlds only to grow a new generation on them as the old ones were traveling into some of the regions on the Rim that Star Force had not yet taken control of, but not the Asferja invasion corridor.

The idea was to prevent this from happening again in a new location, so the Bsidd were going to spam colonize those areas while expecting no resistance other than from some upset locals. Building up planetary defenses would take forever, but just getting a comm network and surveillance satellites up in every one of them would be something.

And making extra space on their existing worlds was also a contingency plan for relocating mass amounts of refugees if Star Force couldn’t hold the invaders in check where they were now. Evacuations were already occurring in some systems, but if there was a breakout, they’d have to start draining thousands of them, otherwise The Empire’s populations would be caught in the fighting and slaughtered.

They had to move them out first, and to do that they had to predict the course of events and be very cautious…which meant evacuating some worlds that might get hit rather than just those they expected to.

With the Bsidd suddenly making room for trillions, populations were already flowing and reshuffling everywhere, and not just in the danger zones. The entire Empire was making adjustments and turtling up to what was coming, and the addition of the Bru’son was going to add an unknown element to the mix.

But that wasn’t Paul’s job to deal with now, nor Andromeda anymore. His task was the Deebees, which would end up being their secret weapon when mature. But getting them to that point was going to take a long time, and then they’d have to reproduce multiple generations before they could even make a dent. But their spamming capability was there, in their design. He’d put it there for reasons he couldn’t remember, and like the Paladin they would be born with adult knowledge.

He just had to teach this first generation that knowledge, for they’d been hatched without it, and what they learned from him was what the next generation would inherit.

But before he went back to hide out with them while the rest of the Empire fought the beginning stages of this Gauntlet War, he had another task to accomplish.

Paul finished his other two plates long before they could reach Wayland, so he decided to sleep a little, then get in another 9 hours of solo training before hitting orbit of the quickly growing Paladin planet. Thrawn wasn’t disappointing him in his progress, but it was the convoy in orbit that had arrived from the Milky Way that was his actual destination.

He’d already covered everything with Kara and Vikarathe previously, so there was no need for any more goodbyes…and Paul was reluctant to go as it was. Pulling him away from battle was like taking a fish out of water. You could do it for a short period of time, but eventually it would kill the fish, and the same was true of an Archon. They were meant to be where the danger was and protecting people from it.

But the Milky Way was not the only place people were in danger, and he was taking on a very long overdue rescue mission dating back to the time of the Progarren.

Sitting in orbit were several small Star Force vessels along with a very big one. So big it barely fit through the largest Essence portals in the Temple network. It was a special vessel designed by the Uriti Wranglers to transport the massive Heidoor…and it was what Paul was going to use to bring back the surviving nightcrawlers scattered across multiple galaxies.

The only one they’d found on their own had been very distraught…and very glad to be found again. They’d essentially been abandoned when the Progarren were wiped out, and had just been surviving day to day, no longer with a mission in life. Paul knew what that felt like, especially for someone who started out with a mission and then lost it. It had happened to Cal-com, but at least his friend had known what was happening and had somewhere to go. The nightcrawlers had no comprehension of what had happened to the Progarren. They had simply abandoned them.

Paul didn’t know how many more there’d been that had died. Probably a lot. But the little tracking dots in his mind that Hades had put there were going to lead him to the ones that were still alive, and the Wranglers that handled the Uriti were going to see to their rehab. The nightcrawlers wouldn’t be useful in this war, for they couldn’t even come out into the strong sunlight of a star without taking damage, and this particular carrier had to be modified to be able to carry them in the dark.

The tradeoff for that weakness was that they could travel anywhere they wanted without having to use gravity or Essence to do it. They literally created a carpet of energy for themselves to travel on, so they didn’t have to use jumplines. That meant they could travel the empty places between galaxies where the T’fen’s servants most likely couldn’t go.

As far as combat went, they would be no help, and this mission wasn’t to gain the ability to sneak around elsewhere. It was to save the living starships that were in need, and right now Paul was the only one with the knowledge to find them, so this was a little side trip on his way back to the Deebees. A side trip that would probably last a few years.

But he wasn’t going alone. A crew from the Milky Way was here, along with several Archon Wranglers. Thrawn had offered to send some warships as escorts, but the more mass you took through the portals the more Essence was required and Paul didn’t want to waste it. The carrier had weapons, plus they were heading to areas where there were no planets and people. Desolate areas in the near dark where the nightcrawlers could feed.

The odds of them coming into contact with anyone else were slim other than passing by some interstellar traffic transiting low orbit around destination stars.

Paul caught a shower after his workout, then donned his armor and walked to one of the Gjardan’s hangar bays. He signaled Kara and the bridge crew that he was departing, then walked through the atmospheric shield and into space protected behind the thin layer of his nanite armor and personal shields.

He flew out across the void towards the waiting carrier ship, getting a good view of the cities on the planet below. They were spreading like a virus…but this time it was a lightside virus. One that was going to infect this galaxy with the power of true civilization. It was going to be a messy fight…a long drawn out one, just like in the Milky Way, but this one was no longer his. He’d done his part to get them started off on the right foot, and now he had to let them fight it on their own.

Fortunately this was not as hard as some might imagine, for he’d long ago learned to share duties with the other trailblazers. He just didn’t like starting something and not being around to see it through. And he had a mission to accomplish, so it wasn’t like he would just be sitting on his ass watching.

This isn’t the way he wanted to play this, but this was the way the Empire needed him to play it. As did the nightcrawlers. The fact that they were hanging in limbo made transferring ships easier, because every minute he delayed meant their rescue would be delayed, which was another reason he wasn’t waiting for a sendoff. They’d been waiting hundreds of millions of years for rescue, and he wasn’t going to make them wait any more.

Paul entered the ship through another hangar bay, this one of Star Force manufacture, to a receiving committee of some 14 individuals, but only two of which he knew personally.

He landed on the deck and withdrew his armor back into his forearm gauntlets as he looked at one of them. “Saul.”

“Paul,” the Wrangler said with a head nod. “We’re ready to go when you are. Everything you requested is onboard. We just need a destination.”

“It’s in my head, actually,” he said, looking over at Jinni-39102…a member of his Clan Saber and also a Wrangler. Saul-9928 was not, but he was one of the team that had been working with the current nightcrawler they had in their care, which was how Paul knew him.

“From a god, right?” Jinni said, still not fully believing it.

“Hades, actually…and yeah, it’s still a little weird when you think about it. The universe has layers upon layers, and this is just another one. But without Hades, we’d never have known these nightcrawlers even survived, so we owe him for that.”

“Do they chat with you a lot?” Saul asked.

“Rarely, unless they want something.”

“And what did Hades want?”

“An introduction since the Deebees are camping out in his realm. And the nightcrawlers are partly his responsibility due to their construction.”

“Because they’re half voidling?”

“Voidling, darklight, call it what you want, but yes. He can track them because of it. He can’t track anyone who’s not. He actually seemed rather nice. The fiction on him is not accurate at all.”

“First impressions,” Jinni warned.

“True. I agreed to meet him for lunch later,” Paul said sarcastically.

“How much later?” Saul asked.

“After we complete our mission and I get back to the Halo,” he said, still not quite able to say that without a hint of a smile. Yes, there was an actual Halo built in the universe and not a replica by Star Force…it was just missing the whole civilization-ending weaponry in it. But on the upside, it also doubled as a stargate, which made it special in a whole other way. “He needs some pointers on the lightside.”

“I can’t think of anyone better,” Jinni said with a smile. “Would you like a hug, or can we get going?”

Paul smirked. “Get us heading for the closest Deenat. We’re using the Temple network as much as possible to save time. We pick up the ones in this galaxy, then get to hop through 3 others, making as many trips as we have to.”

“I thought you said they’d all fit in this transport?”

“I’m hoping they will. I can’t see how big they’ve grown, only their locations. We might have to make multiple runs if they’re larger than the one we already have.”

“Oh joy,” Jinni said, exchanging a glance with another Archon. “More long space trips.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be your trainer for the duration,” Paul said with a wink that promised a lot of grueling challenges, workouts, and sparring matches she and the others couldn’t hope to win. “Saul, get us moving. I’m done here.”

The Wrangler mentally contacted the bridge, and soon the stars outside the open hangar bay swirled around as the ship reoriented itself on a course heading for the jumppoint that would give them a straight line to the system center. The bay doors began to close as they started to move and Paul glanced at the others Wranglers.

“Ok, Jinni, who are all the new guys?”

7

EG29

August 4, 158438

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Lorichar Kingdom

Pagalia Neuronis System

Yuilia

Cora-005 hot dropped in her mech, a rare biped Hunchback that she’d brought out of mothballs on one of her Clan Scorpion worlds. Normally she piloted a Neo, but Star Force had seen enough ground combat with the Asferja to understand how they fought, and their bigger units were not very agile. Not enough for her to need a Neo to dance around in. What she needed was enough dexterity to suit her, along with a larger weapons package.

The Hunchback gave her that, with its two beefy shoulder ‘pads’ containing additional pulse cannons to the weaponry packed into the arms and torso. Even the legs had some weaponry built into them, mainly to deal with smaller opponents that would try to melee the mech to death, and the Asferja had those as well. They were a swarm race, and thankfully not that terrifying when it came to single combat…though hardly any swarm race ever was, and the Asferja she was fighting now were most likely grown and hatched from their fleshy plant-like pods within the past month, so they were nowhere near seasoned warriors.

They were operating off of genetic memory, just like the Paladin did, and their primary strength…in addition to the highly advanced bodies they were in…was their numbers. Numbers that they were using to overwhelm the native Yu’kor, population 2.6 billion. They were not defenseless, but they were not a match for the Asferja and not a part of Star Force. They’d only had diplomatic relations with them for the past 1,294 years, and not even an embassy at that. The Yu’kor had limited space travel within their system, but had never gone beyond it, instead taking on a defensive posture as other races found them.

That defensive posture was what had allowed them to hold off the Asferja invasion forces as long as they had, giving Cora time to get here with her elite Clan troops to save at least some of them. Had they put up the token resistance other races in the invasion zone had, they’d have all been dead by now.

The small fleet of Protovic warships that had discovered this incursion point had done what they could to bombard the planet, but the Asferja had gotten one of their hive colonies up and running, which included defense shields. They grew the damn stuff faster than a Star Force factory could produce it. Even their warships were mostly constructed of grown metals and other fabricated materials. That was how they processed ore, lipids, and even solar energy…using biological processes. Those base materials were then constructed using more normal means, but they had an entire tech tree, it appeared, based on growing prefabricated designs without ever having to actually construct them.

The hive base was one such design. They had armies of Asferja workers scouring the planet to claim or dig up resources, which they brought back and fed into what looked like trash pits that would digest, sort, and recombine the valuable molecules gathered into what they needed.

And these damn hives could grow to shield-producing maturity within 3 weeks if properly supplied.

So the Protovic hadn’t been able to remove them from the planet, only disrupt some of their groups when they went outside the hive perimeter. That further slowed the expansion down, but when the Asferja had seed ships going everywhere they possibly could and planting themselves immediately, it was hard to keep track of all the non-Star Force worlds out here, and some were slipping through the cracks.

Cora’s Hunchback hit the planet’s surface, easing down on an anti-grav jumpjet cushion along one of the current war zones as the Asferja troops were engaging the quadruped Yu’kor. Neither troops had personal shield generators, but the Asferja had a biological carapace that was armor grade, and they had units of at least 6 different sizes. Star Force kept encountering more and more on different planets, and it appeared the Asferja were as diverse as the lizards had been when it came to their forms.

But that also meant Cora wasn’t intimidated by the swarms, and she began running her mech out towards the nearest of them as the other four mechs in her command ‘star’ dropped down and followed her a few strides behind.

The 10-15 meter tall mechs pounded the ground as they ran with what seemed like unnatural speed, and Cora wasn’t even waiting until they got close to the enemy to open fire. She used the Bra’hem in her Hunchback’s left arm to shoot kilometers ahead whenever she got the chance…and hit almost every time despite the continual bobbing of the mech as it ran. She saw other stars in her ‘galaxy’ of mechs dropping at predetermined places all along the front simultaneously, and now that they were on the ground the natives were going to have a chance to survive, but removing the Asferja was going to be nasty work.

But it was ground work, in what otherwise had started out as a purely naval war, and mech fighting was what Cora and her Clan specialized in. Paul may have been right about naval beating everything, but naval couldn’t handle every combat scenario, and right now this one was Cora’s preferred avenue of fighting as she continued to snipe ahead at some of the medium to large Asferja, with most of her shots blowing holes in them with the rest of the potent beam coming out the far side.

Asferja carapace armor might work against infantry weapons, but without shields or real armor plating, it wasn’t going to stand up against mech weaponry. Especially not Star Force mechs.

She kept poking at the distant enemy from the flank as they were moving in on the Yu’kor packs…which were wearing body armor that oddly reminded her of Dino-riders…and it took a while for the Asferja to notice her star coming in despite the deaths they were racking up. But there were so many Asferja, a living carpet moving across the mostly flat landscape, that most wouldn’t even notice when one died for they couldn’t see them through the others.

The Asferja moved like a combination of ants and lemmings, using their sheer numbers to batter down their opponents as well as their formidable weaponry and augmented claws. Cora began waving her blue cutting beam sideways as she shot, scraping multiple Asferja off the horizon as she continued to close until their air assets finally moved to intercept her. The flying Asferja here were just bugs with wings…apparently it required more infrastructure to produce their actual aircraft…and they were just spamming as many basic units as they could to try and take control of the planet right now.

It was slowly working against the Yu’kor, but those low-level opponents were easy for Cora to take down, and her Hunchback was going to decimate them when it got in close.

She’d warned the Asferja as they came into orbit to stand down, surrender, or at least leave. They’d ignored her, as expected, and she’d recorded instructions for what they should do if they changed their minds. Her mech, and all the others were repeatedly sending that message out and would continue to do so throughout combat…but that’s the only consideration she was going to give these barbarians as they continued to hunt down, kill, and sometimes eat the native Yu’kor.

As for their flying units, the top of her Hunchback’s ‘pads’ that nearly rose up above its head were anti-air pulse cannons containing Dre’mo’dons small enough that they were able to spray up in groups rather than single shots, but still strong enough to do damage to aircraft. Cora dialed back the intensity even more, allowing for a larger number of bursts per recharge time, and the Asferja literally killed themselves by passing over top of her into that fountain-like spray with no mind to the units ahead of them that were dying. They just stayed on mission and got in close to drop acid pellets on the mechs whose shields didn’t allow the goop to even touch their armor.

It dripped down to the ground around them as the pieces of the Asferja’s bodies fell as well, angering Cora even more. These were brand new births, people who hadn’t even lived a year yet, and the Asferja genetic memory had them doing pointless attacks on instinct, for she didn’t sense any coordinated battle movements from them. Nothing even remotely like their naval fleets had demonstrated upon arrival. These were just a bunch of dumb bugs that she otherwise would have stunned into submission and hauled off to holding camps where they could have been contained and eventually rescued from their own genetic programming.

Star Force had done the same many times in the past, but the Asferja were too damn strong of a race to do that with here and now. Give them even a little breathing room and they’d spam into a position of dominance. Everyone who had fought the lizards recognized the threat, so all Cora had time to do now was dive in and start killing them. If she didn’t, a lot more Yu’kor would end up dead, and she wasn’t going to trade the people she was trying to save to try and help their enemy.

If she could do both she would, but she had to prioritize the Yu’kor. They didn’t have an option to leave, the Asferja were the ones forcing this fight.

As her mech continued to eviscerate the air units trying to fly over her, Cora kept running and eventually got within a mile of the ground swarms before part of them split away from the travel group and started charging her 5-mech star. She remained in the middle and ahead of the others, with them taking longer range shots alongside, but Cora was already using her pulse cannons at a range they normally wouldn't hit at, catching some of the Asferja with the diminished weaponsfire that was still enough to kill them.

But when the swarm closed on her and she ran into the middle of them, her mech was like a lumberjack cutting down trees. Scores of dead bodies flowed past her, their running momentum carrying them on as she opened up with her short range weaponry…something that a Hunchback was known for and was not very effective against most opponents, but against a swarm that liked to go melee it was perfect.

Perfect for her, not for the Asferja, and she was cutting them down twice as fast as any of the three Neos and one Nova Cat that were accompanying her. Cora kept pressing forward until they had fought through the river of Asferja and hit the clearing on the far side, then spun around and held their ground as the incoming Asferja went after the 5 mechs rather than passing on by to follow their brethren towards the retreating Yu’kor.

Cora watched her shields slowly get drained as her killcount rose fast, but she didn’t move from her spot against the never ending stream of fresh bodies, other than to step forward into it to clear the piles of the dead that were starting to get in the way of her targeting.

The Asferja weren’t useless, though, and eventually her shields did pop…but that’s why mechs had armor plating, and she held position, watching the status of each plate in mind’s eye as she continued to fight, her weapon systems running hot from nearly constant use, but they wouldn’t break down or overheat. They’d been designed and redesigned over the thousands of years her Clan had been in existence, and she knew exactly how much punishment they and this mech could take.

The Nova Cat, however, had to back off first, running off to the side and getting some of the Asferja to follow, but one of the Neos interceded and gave his fellow mechwarrior an out as it spun around, death sabers blazing and it melee chopped up the Asferja as much as it was firing at them.

Cora and the Neos held point even as some breaches started to form in non-critical spots…but only because she could see on the battlemap ahead that the flow was reducing to a trickle. Another 20-30 seconds and they’d be done with them.

The trailblazer kept firing her leg weaponry like shotgun blasts at the smallest Asferja carving into her leg plates with their corrosive claws…which wasn’t natural, but an implant they attached to the top of their hands. It was a living creature bioengineered to create a destructive acid-like poison on demand, which would flow harmlessly down their claws like paint, and as they ‘painted’ her mech with slashes, the little creatures would produce more to replace the ‘dry brushes.’

They reminded her of the symbionts from an old TV show called Earth Final Conflict, but she couldn’t remember what they were called. If and when they were able to make safe the Yu’kor, she would have to send some collection teams around and try to save what was left of the living weaponry, for otherwise they’d starve to death still attached to the Asferja corpses.

The Neofan had used creatures like this too, but when House Atriark had negotiated to settle in this galaxy, Star Force had banned that straight off, and their living Pol’so’nep had been given over to the Empire for safekeeping and care. The people who made living weapons out of people were despicable, especially for a race as genetically advanced as the Asferja. They should have been able to create biological augments that functioned the same way without having a person in it. The fact that they didn’t just underscored how little…no, not little, but how they didn’t give one damn fuck about their own people’s lives, let alone others, so long as their race continued to survive.

Cora finally stopped the stagger step dance her mech had been doing to avoid tripping on the dead as the view ahead cleared up all the way to where another one of her Clan Scorpion stars had also intercepted the flow. Others had dropped behind and just ahead of the Yu’kor, and from the battlemap data she was getting, they had already cleaned up there enough that she’d be wasting her time coming back to help…so instead they moved on to bigger targets.

“Alright fellas, as long as you have shield generators working, let’s not dilly dally,” she said to her star. “We’re pushing all the way to the nearest hive.”

“I’m good to go,” the mechwarrior in the Nova Cat said, despite having lost a third of the armor the mech carried, but its shields were now back up and continuing to grow in strength, for the mech’s power supply…a miniature Nash’ti reactor…hadn’t been damaged, nor the conduits feeding the shield generators, weapons, or other systems.

She heard the other three in the Neos acknowledge the same, then her star moved out in formation across a short stretch of clear ground until they caught up with the carnage ahead and had to navigate around the dead or dying bodies there. She didn’t kill any of the wounded unless they attacked her, but most did and she had to pop a few as she passed by rather than risk them recovering enough to go find a Yu’kor to kill.

Her star met up with the one ahead, then another, and another, forming into a large pack of mechs of various types that eventually fought their way into range of the perimeter defenses of the hive…which were few individuals now, but mostly towers and other forms of turrets and bunkers that had living defenses in them. They weren’t as crude as the Hadarak were, but based on similar principles with a decidedly ant-like architecture to them.

The mechs ahead of Cora got to them first and began engaging in long range exchanges, with her mechs rotating as to who took the hits so none of them went down before they got within closer range and began felling the towers. The trailblazer got to them middle of the pack, then pushed on in to the Asferja complex that spanned several square miles. She used her mental interface to divvy up targets in a matter of seconds, with the various stars splitting up again and with hers heading towards the primary growth pods.

They looked like a field of cornstalks, each with between 7 and 12 pods on each stalk, and all were in varying stages of growth, some of which would be opening up every hour or so to release new units. Mowing them down now was the quick way to deal with them, but Cora wasn’t that pressed for time and just passed them by, going for the caretakers that were planting more stalks. Each of them acted like a kamikaze, containing a small sack of acid on their chests, so as she walked through the pathways in the stalk fields, they were jumping on her mech and blowing themselves up to spread the acid.

It was designed into them, and the acid itself would not hurt the pods or the stalks. It was a base-defense mechanism, so she didn’t have to worry about taking them prisoner. She just had to walk around and they’d kill themselves.

Cora didn’t like it one damn bit, but with the Asferja having more than 270 infantile hives on this planet already, she couldn’t waste time here caring for the enemy when those other ones were growing by the day and spawning even more troops.

But by being a lure to the caretakers, she was making sure they wouldn’t be planting any more stalks in this hive as the rest of her elite galaxy went around destroying buildings that thankfully were not alive as some of the Hadarak ones were. These were just biotech, and though it was messy and disgusting, the mechs could take them apart enough that they wouldn’t grow back again without having to dig down to the ‘roots,’ for these buildings were fed via conduits from digestion pits that were not going to be getting any more raw materials added to them.

It took a few hours to take down the buildings, and in that time some of the pods hatched and new Asferja came out. Cora knew they’d probably attack her, for a limited hive mind was still active on the planet even if this facility was no longer generating it. They could telepathically talk to each other from very long distances…or at least receive commands from long distances, and these new Asferja would know Cora’s unit was the enemy soon enough, perhaps even before the pods hatched, she wasn’t sure.

She had a few mechs waiting for them, and when the pods cracked open and they dropped to the ground, unarmed except for their unaugmented claws, the mechs shot them with stun weaponry…for each mech was only equipped with one such weapon, and a small weapon at that, for there was no point in taking a lot of them that they couldn’t use in battle. The Asferja dropped out of their pods, then were dropped a second time to the ground even before one of her collection ships arrived overhead now that the hive base defenses were down, including its sky side shield generator.

No matter how bad things got, Cora didn’t like to leave a messy battlefield with survivors, so she always brought support ships with her to pick up prisoners…or if things went really bad, her own mechs and mechwarriors. But she knew that if the battles dragged on for too long, she’d end up with more prisoners than she could handle, so even before the collection ship arrived, Cora and most of her mechs hopped back up off the ground and into the open doors on their transport ships that came back for them…then as they flew to their next destination on the planet, some of the worst damaged mechs got quick repairs done, which mostly meant replacement armor plates and those with missiles got reloads.

Some 22 minutes later, Cora was hot dropping again near another stream of Asferja moving to assault a Yu’kor city whose defenders were dug in tight around the perimeter, complete with canyon-sized moats that had been dug around the city. It was a curious idea, and one that seemed to be working as the Asferja were trying to cross it by swimming…something that it seemed they weren’t that good at.

Cora signaled her star to stay onboard as the rest dropped, then had the transport move over to the mound of dirt on the inside of the moat. Her star leapt out there and hit the ground next to the Yu’kor soldiers, scaring the shit out of them so bad they fired on her mech.

“Easy fellas,” she said on the external speakers as the computer translated her words into their native language, one of over a million different ones Star Force had catalogued to date across the galaxy. “We’re from Star Force and we’re here to help. Shoot the Asferja, not us,” Cora said, ignoring a few more shots coming her way as she walked down the bank, yelling “Move!” at some of the clusters of Yu’kor ahead of her, and having to jump jet over some to get to the shore-line where a few of the Asferja were climbing out after their swim…while the dead bodies of others floated in the water, already killed by the Yu’kor.

Cora stood her mech on the bank and opened up on the swimmer and those on the far shore, using her heavier and longer ranged weapons on the latter. The four mechs in her star spread out, two on either side of her, and basically claimed a stretch of the bank with no Asferja allowed to cross.

“Thank you, metal warriors,” she heard one of the Yu’kor say from behind her, which brought a brief smile to her face. Did they actually think she was the mech?

“Stay behind me and shoot any Asferja that make it onto the shore on either side of us,” she told him, continuing to rain bright and fiery death at the Asferja swimmers…only to realize that their floating bodies were creating a bridge, and soon she saw others on the far side hopping across them at a fast pace.

“Shit,” she said, adjusting some of her fire to the corpses in order to vaporize, or at least break them up enough that they couldn’t be walked on. The damn bugs were not going to make this easy on her…

8

EG29

August 4, 158438

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Mesh’va’kay Nebula

Temple #2611

Jiynalen had spent most of his life as a Neofan battle commander leading armies of their servants beyond their home galaxy of Utovi on a wide range of missions. Some were to help out other members of the Bond of Resistant in their almost futile efforts to grow into the Neofan’s peers, others were to secure the resources necessary to construct new Temples. And yet some had dubious origins that he had never fully understood. He simply obeyed.

He was formerly of House Innex…a very, very old House that had ceased to exist due to an absorption of the other Houses. They weren’t killed off, but broken up into bits and simply disappeared. It happened after he had been exiled, so he never knew the truth of what had happened to his House some 31 million years ago, but unlike most exiles he had survived his madness and now stood reinstated into the Neofan race at some 38 million years of age.

It was depressingly sad that most of his life had been spent in exile…wasted…but now he saw it as a blessing. For had he stayed with House Innex he too would have been moved to another House or ‘disappeared’ as others had simply gone unaccounted for. Not exiled, for there would have been record of that, and he’d checked the records after being reborn into House Phoenix. No, his former brothers had simply vanished, with the few others becoming members of Houses that this cursed Mev had recently destroyed.

And he would have died with them, most likely, but his exile had spared him from this Mev and the destruction it had caused. When he had been summoned to return, living in a Temple far beyond this galaxy away from anyone, even the Vargemma, at the behest of an automated drone that knew of his location, he had done so to find stories of this Mev and the suspicion of where it had come from and why.

The Neofan had not fully bowed to their mysterious masters…and for that he held some pride in his race…while at the same time he felt shame for them ever kneeling to anyone. How many of his missions had been to serve this master and not their own people? How many of the races that he had destroyed on unspecified orders had been the enemy of the T’fen and not the Neofan?

When he had met Reignor Vikarathe, the larger yet far younger Neofan had been surprised that he had not succumbed to the Mev…and then he had surprised Jiynalen when he told him that his aura was not corrupted…the very reason for his exile. It was just outside the parameters the Neofan had set…parameters that had since been deemed to be in error.

Jiynalen had been banished from his home for being too aggressive, and while he knew the risks of such emotions coupled with the immense powers of a Neofan, he had never had trouble controlling himself. Vikarathe had welcomed him into their new House without requiring the full graft that the others did, but he had accepted a partial one, for Vikarathe had told him they needed to go to war immediately and he didn’t have time to teach him what he needed to know through other means.

Jiynalen, already committed to the affront of a full graft in order to return to his race had no qualms about a partial…and with it he had learned of Star Force, the lightside, and how they had triggered an ancient holocaust upon them…the very holocaust the Neofan had originally been trying to unleash upon themselves by collecting as many Pre-born as they could, for prophecy said the race that collected them all would begin the endgame and rise to a new level.

The Pre-born were those that were born with knowledge they could not have learned. And it was not something that could be controlled, other than the more advanced races had more of them, and the only way to collect them all was to defeat and destroy the other races so all the Pre-born were born into your race. He had believed many of his missions were contingent on this, but now he saw that the prophecy had been incomplete.

That was the nicest word he could use for it.

The Pre-born were actually individuals granted knowledge by a living god, of which there appeared to be many. Who they guided and how was up to them and not how many races the Neofan destroyed, but they were trying to get races to the point where they could trigger the endgame…which was what the T’fen were trying to stop entirely. They were themselves the product of a previous endgame, which created a new race of living machines to assist the race that had triggered their creation.

The T’fen, however, had been defective and turned and killed their masters. Now, they sought to prevent other races from achieving the endgame and creating peers that would hunt them down and destroy them for their treason.

That is why those great races, like the Neofan, had been either enthralled by the T’fen into their service, or hunted down and destroyed to prevent their rise. Even the Hadarak were under their command and sent out to patrol their various galaxies looking for those who advanced too far, then destroying them before they could rise to become a threat.

And Jiynalen had been unwittingly helping this enemy, and squashing potential races that could one day trigger an endgame themselves.

He would not forgive himself for that. Nor would he forgive the ruling Houses for their compliance over the course of their history. They had chosen to become slaves rather than die fighting…but in their cowardice they had succeeded in keeping the Neofan alive this long, and because another race had risen to the point of an endgame far faster than any other, the Neofan had a chance at revenge…but only by bonding with that other race as brothers, not as servants. The T’fen wanted both of them dead, and together they would stand and fight.

No more servitude, regardless of how this ‘Gauntlet War’ turned out.

That is why Jiynalen had no qualms about following Reignor Vikarathe. He wanted war too…but a proper war. And thanks to his graft, Jiynalen now knew what proper war actually meant.

He’d been dispatched to this Temple, the first of many, as other House Phoenix Neofan likewise traveled elsewhere. The power of the Temples had been created by the Neofan over the course of their dominant history, and it was a power that the few of them that still remained alive could wield. The Mev could not destroy the infrastructure they had laid down, and now that they were purged of the Mev, the Neofan were going to war and using the efforts of past generations to build the army they now required.

Jiynalen had already made contact with the Vargemma leaders here, instructing them to notify the 3.8 trillion people in the Temple that he had arrived and would be addressing them shortly. Soon there was a crowd filling the plaza in the city where he would be speaking, but his image would be spread across all cities and all individuals, for he had ordered the Caretakers to track down those beyond the cities and display to them this message, whether it be live or on replay.

They all needed to know, and he did not intend to waste a single day here. The war had already begun, and he was late to it.

“I am one of the Founders your teachings have spoke of,” he said in his native Neofan language, knowing that the Temple could translate it to the common Vargemma tongue and refused to diminish himself to their level for the ease of communication. It also sent a clear reminder who was dominant.

“There are three races of Founders…Neofan, Veloqueen, and Denogi. I am Neofan. My name is Jiynalen, of House Phoenix. Long have you been promised that one day you would fight in a war to purge this galaxy of the Hadarak. Now I am here to tell you, that you must do much more, for the Hadarak have a master far more powerful who has commanded them to seek and destroy anyone who begins to advance to a level to challenge them.”

“We must not just defeat the Hadarak, but their master and the other servants of their master. The name of the master race is the T’fen, and they are living starships who cannot use Essence…which is one reason why they fear those of us who can,” he said, addressing a population that was almost entirely made up of Essence-users.

“But Essence alone will not win this fight. Even now, the T’fen send their other servant races into our neighboring galaxy to destroy our ally Star Force, for they have grown too powerful, just as the Neofan have. We are both to be destroyed, and together, we will both defy these T’fen. While the Denogi sit and do nothing, the Veloqueen fight with us as well. A new order is forming. Star Force is taking the Denogi’s place amongst the Founders, and together we must use all our power to defeat the invasions of the T’fen’s servants. Defeat is death, for they will harbor no equals.”

“We created these Temples to protect you, but know this…the T’fen and their servants have the power to destroy a Temple if they so choose,” he said, feeling a wave of horror in the crowd. The telepathic buzz was overwhelming, but expected. “It would not be easy for them, but they could do it. They could wipe out all of the Temples where the Hadarak cannot. None of us are safe, but right now their attention is on Star Force and they are assaulting it via two invasion corridors. One is through the Gateways at the center of the galaxy that allow for rapid travel off the massive gravity fields they produce. The other is a technology of one of their servants that allows slower travels from the Rim of one galaxy to another. This servant is called the Asferja, and they are already in this galaxy. They are using it as a staging ground as they extend their bridges across to Kerrsi, which will henceforth be known as Milky Way. Itsi, in which we now stand, will also be known as Andromeda. These are the names that Star Force has given these two galaxies, and to show our solidarity with them, we will use the same names.”

“Andromeda is being carved up to feed these Asferja as they grow new armies to send across the bridges and assault Star Force. Already some of you have volunteered to fight them in space. I am here to ask for those who are willing to fight them on the ground, for we need to raise and train an army to take back the worlds the Asferja have stolen. Purge them of all who will not surrender to us. And then hold them so they cannot be reclaimed by the enemy again. Even now, another one of the T’fen’s servants is riding across the bridge into Milky Way while we attack to thin and slow them down, but we cannot stop them. Not yet. This galaxy was not prepared for war of this level, but you have been here, waiting and training and growing your Essence power. It is not enough to win this war, but it is a key component of any potential victory.”

“I need you to learn how to be proper soldiers, and how to operate the machines this Temple is now beginning to produce. The T’fen thought us weak, but we will show them our dormant strength. The Vargemma will rise and flood across this galaxy, denying it to the enemy as a pass-through, and forcing them to wage war directly on us…which will split their forces and give our ally a better chance to win their fight in Milky Way.”

“If we are to survive this, we must both survive. If not, we will both fall over the course of time.”

“This is asking more of you than was foretold…because we did not know of the Hadarak’s master. Now we do. Now war is already upon us. If you choose to remain here, increase your daily donations of Essence in a responsible manner. Something you can maintain indefinitely…do not overtax yourselves to the point of death. That is of no use to us. You must live and continue to provide Essence, for we are using it in our ships and have already reduced the level of the Temple wells considerably to destroy several of the Asferja bridges…but they build them back, so it is only a delaying mechanism. We must have an army to take planets from them, so for those of you who are willing to embrace the danger head on, we will train you here and then as our mechanized armies are forged, you will lead them from the sky of land to the sky of stars and battle races that are our equal from far off galaxies.”

“Do not let that scare you. We have the advantage, because they can only move a limited amount of people and resources between galaxies. It is not an easy thing to do. We are already here. We already have our Temples. We already have trillions of Vargemma. We simply need to build the machines and train you to use them. Many of you will die, but if we do not fight, the enemy may come here and destroy this Temple eventually…or maybe not,” he admitted. “Maybe they will overlook it and go back into their dormant states waiting for the next high level threat to arise. Their actions are not entirely predictable, and it is safe to say you will be more safe here than out there. We need Vargemma in both places. You cannot all go. The Temple needs your donations, and we need you to continue to reproduce to replace the losses that are coming.”

“This will be a very long war, and I will not send you out before you are ready. That is why we must begin training now, as well as in other Temples. I will have several under my personal command, while other Neofan are being spread out to gather the rest of your kin. All are being rallied to war, and while the Neofan of the past may have compelled it, House Phoenix will not. We do not want reluctant soldiers. We want those of you who wish to fight. Those of you who will never give up. Our enemy is not here to conquer us. They are here to annihilate us! We will either achieve victory, or we will be turned to ash and memories. That is what we face. Now choose how you will serve. There is much work to be done, and we will begin today,” he said, pressing a button before him and activating the Temple’s education network to display a new recruitment option everywhere simultaneously.

The crowd before him wasn’t silent. As soon as he stopped speaking there was a roar of approval and energy. These people had been living in here most, if not all of their lives with the promise of going outside and fighting, and Jiynalen could feel their eagerness. Their voices overlapped into an inaudible roar that slowly morphed into a chant of ‘Phoenix.’

They didn’t need to know the House was brand new. They didn’t need to know there were only two Houses left and that the majority of the Neofan population had been killed. He hadn’t lied to them, but telling them the full truth right now would have been detrimental, and the events in Utovi and Yenoiv did not matter here. House Phoenix was responsible for Andromeda now. And it was here that they were going to fight and defend.

And it was here that the enemy was not prepared to fight. Not as much as they were going to give them. Already the Caretakers were producing a wide array of items, some already in their databanks, some new ones Paul-024 had designed for the Reignor, particularly warships that did not require Essence, or those that could be upgraded with it, but not require it. Some had crews, some were controlled remotely. Jiynalen had been given an order of battle to implement in raising this army, and it did include a navy beyond the Olopars and other old designs to face only the biological Hadarak. Fighting the Asferja was going to require a different type of ship, different weapons. Even the smallest alteration, when replicated millions of times over across all the Temples that were soon to be manufacturing the materials, could escalate into dramatically different results.

His Reignor had told him Paul was a genius and to trust in the designs. Jiynalen’s job wasn’t to tinker with them. He was to train the Vargemma to use them, including the giant battle suits called ‘mechs.’

It was a task that the old Neofan was embracing with newfound joy. He had not known joy since being exiled. It was such a long, long time ago…yet his memories and skills were still there, waiting in dormancy to be reactivated, and some things now felt like they had occurred mere days ago.

It was odd, for his exile had been washed away with the promise of battle. As if all that time he too had been dormant and waiting to reassert himself. The exile had saved him from the Mev. Now it was time to return to the battlefield and face the foe he had been unwittingly serving long ago.

His anger at that was not old, but still fresh and raw. This was not just a war for survival, but a war for vengeance. He had been used as a toy…never again. And this young new Reignor had not made the mistake of asserting himself in an egotistical way. He acknowledged Jiynalen’s experience and skill, and had simply given him his assignment and thrown him into it. No coddling, no micromanagement. He had simply told him to go to war, and regardless of what the outcome would be, to fight with honor.

Better to die an honorable death than achieve victory by becoming the enemy.

That quote was a new one for him, but he understood it intimately, and not just because of the partial graft. It was something he had always known outside of words, which was why many of his past missions had bothered him. But now it was crystal clear in his mind, and he’d never accept a dishonorable mission again.

And he didn’t think Vikarathe would ever give him one. The Neofan was a warrior himself, and only elevated to Reignor status because everyone else had died. The last ruling House was Mutavi, and Vikarathe didn’t try to restart it. Instead forging a new one from all the scraps.

Jiynalen thought that appropriate. The past was not going to save them now. They had to build a new future with their new ally, but their past had left them the building blocks to do it, and right now across the Temple, but underground, on the surface, and in space the Caretakers were busily constructing not only new ships and vehicles, but new factories and new shipyards. It would take time, but soon this Temple would be able to produce more equipment than it ever could have in the past, and pulling on its reserves of raw materials carefully hidden in the ground over millions of years, they would forge the army Jiynalen needed in short order.

Replacement materials would also need to be gathered, and the Caretakers were already ordered to begin searching the galaxy to increase their collection efforts, but for the near future everything he needed was here. He just needed more of them, which was why he would be traveling to 6 other Temples in total to raise the army that would be under his command. He would have to train them first, up to his satisfaction. He knew not to take ill-trained servants into combat. It would be a disaster, so he would have to show some patience.

But after millions of years in exile, patience was something he’d reluctantly learned.

He would not move too soon, but when he did, these Asferja would not know what had hit them…and the worlds where they were growing new troops would cease to do so, cutting off their flow to the Milky Way and to their fleets carving out even more breeding grounds in Andromeda.

For a warrior like Jiynalen, this is what he lived for, and the stakes had never been higher.

His exile no longer mattered. He was where he was meant to be, and there was much work to be done before vengeance could be exacted.

But it was coming. And coming soon.

9

EG29

September 29, 158438

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Kli’nok System

Main Asteroid Belt

It had taken a while for Paul’s expedition ship to get through the Temple Network near to the destination of the first nightcrawler, then they had to bounce their way through normal gravity jump travel from star to star until they arrived in what was known as the Kli’nok system…which was a major nexus of traffic in the Andromeda galaxy.

Why a nightcrawler would be here seemed odd until you looked at the starmap and saw that this system wasn’t centered on a star, but a black hole. The traffic used it as a springboard to travel between four others that were in most people’s jump range, but the system also had 28 different asteroid belts around it, some of which were slowly being eaten up, but most were very far away.

The main belt was huge and situated far away from the jumping ships, though none could jump through the area of the asteroids and be sure they’d make it out alive, thus there were dead zones that limited traffic lanes, but the nearby black holes happened to not be in the ecliptic plane that the asteroids were…though with some erratic orbits, every now and then there would be a story reported about a ship being destroyed during a jump and logged by the local Chi’mas surveillance stations that sought to give ‘weather’ updates on the path of the rogue asteroids. Still, sometimes it wasn’t enough, and if your avoidance programming and sensors weren’t up to snuff, you’d run into something large enough to destroy you in the blink of an eye.

Star Force had shields capable of running into small asteroids and still surviving at those speeds, and sensors with enough range to pick up the bigger ones ahead of them and slightly alter their path to avoid them. Lesser civilizations didn’t always have that luxury, and apparently they still wanted to use the convenience of the speeds this black hole afforded them. The cost was the occasional lost ship.

That was a tradeoff the Empire never would have made, but apparently the locals did.

So while there was a huge traffic flow in and near the black hole, the main asteroid belt was far away and quiet, long ago plundered for any obvious material wealth, with an array of abandoned mining stations on now hollow asteroids. But most of it was just floating rocks, big, small, and ample amounts of dust that made some sections of it appear as a feint nebula.

And in all of that, one of the nightcrawlers was hiding.

Paul brought their ship, the aptly named Easter Basket, into the asteroid field piloting it himself from a standing station. He didn’t use his hands or make any movements as he stared out at the main holographic display, for his mind was linked to the ship remotely, and the telepathic connection provided him enough data transfer for this task, else he’d have had to connect via his armor or physical contact with the command nexus he now stood within.

While the ship could have plowed through the smaller asteroids, Paul didn’t want to make a ruckus as he approached the nightcrawler’s position tucked up against one of the larger chunks that was the size of a small moon but jagged and looking like it had been broken out of a much larger planetoid long, long ago. Sensors couldn’t see the nightcrawler, but Paul’s tracking dot said it was there, and he shifted the Easter Basket into low emission mode, for bright lights of any frequency were harmful to its exterior in most cases, which was why you wouldn’t find them hanging around stars. Only in dark places where they could feed off of natural resources floating in space, which typically meant nebulas since their primary food source…the Progarren civilization…was no longer around to supply them.

Star Force had inherited their data on the nightcrawlers, including what they ate, and Saul had made sure to bring along a huge supply in the ship for multiple rescuees and a long journey to find them and bring them back ‘home,’ though since the Progarren had been destroyed, home was little more than a camaraderie with similar lightside badasses…at least that’s how it had worked when the first and only other nightcrawler the Empire had found responded to Amir-060, who’d made the first telepathic contact with it.

As they got close Saul began reaching out to it, and like a cannon going off a huge telepathic presence appeared behind the big rock…but not a happy one. It was as if Saul had just woken up a big, angry, grumpy bear that had been hibernating, and the response he could sense…the response everyone could sense…was not a pleasant one.

“Is this something you’ve…” Paul began.

“No,” Jinni answered as Saul continued to try and start a mental dialog with it. “I think this one is broken,” she said with a bit of sarcastic humor that was probably all too accurate.

“What do you expect after all these years?” Saul said as he was mostly distracted with his now heavy-laden interactions that everyone could feel the telepathic pressure from, despite it being directed at a single individual and not widespread.

“Has it scanned you?” Paul asked.

“No. It’s very cranky…almost…almost like it’s broken to a point of no return. I’ve never felt this in any of the Uriti.”

Saul immediately felt a battlemeld prompt from Paul and accepted it, with both their minds now able to view each other’s thoughts and work together. Paul extended one to Jinni as well, and soon it became a three-way meld as they tried to help Saul work through this.

The other Archons chipped in with some suggestions, but mostly stayed out of the way and the meld as Paul was still steering the ship around the large asteroid chunk and avoiding the smaller ones. Eventually they got into sight of the nightcrawler…and saw that there was a huge chunk of it missing as well.

“Oh shit,” Jinni said, seeing the damage. “What the hell did that?”

Paul brought the ship to a stop a respectful distance away, but the presence of others was throwing the nightcrawler into a fit. It would have tried to run if it wasn’t mentally predisposed to just hold one spot and not go anywhere…a typical defense mechanism that Humans and most other races had as default when they didn’t know what to do. The other one was to keep moving and never stop until you figured something out, which was usually referred to as ‘panic,’ but was a bit more complicated than that.

“It’s in bad physical shape,” Saul said aloud as well as in his mind. “Malnutrition in addition to the damaged areas. This is not what I expected.”

Paul kept the ship stable as he turned his attention inward, and both Saul and Jinni were able to see something they never had before as he kept the battlemeld active. Paul began to glow in the Saiolum…which was almost non-existent out here…and increase his own production of it. He then pulled what was coming off the crew and a little from the nightcrawler…which was both Saiolum and Darklight…and pooled it around him for a moment, altering its matrix, then sending it out in a gentle stream towards the nightcrawler as he simultaneously boosted his own telepathic ability using Essence to address it with a much larger ‘presence’ than Saul had been.

Hear me, lost one, Paul said mentally with Saul and Jinni using their experience with the Uriti to help him translate into concepts that the heidoor could understand. I have come to reclaim you and bring you back to your kin. Your former masters are gone, destroyed, but we have arisen in their place to carry on their legacy, he said, sending a flood of images, feelings, and memories that had been the calling card for when Amir had made contact with the first nightcrawler long ago.

It had responded to his ‘lightside badassery’ that was apparently similar to the way the Progarren were, though he had lacked a tail. That hadn’t mattered to the nightcrawler, and it had been eager to find someone again after all this time.

However, this one responded in a totally different manner.

It asked Paul to kill it.

It had accepted him as the same as the Progarren, and the brief flash of recognition was drowned out by its despair. It had lost the will to live, and while it wouldn’t allow itself to starve to death amongst the asteroids that it could eat, it had nowhere to go, nothing to do. It had been abandoned millions of years ago and left to die or survive on its own merits when the food at their deep bases out in the dark between galaxies ran out. They had stayed there as ordered as long as they could, then they had to return, violating their orders, or they would have starved to death.

They found the Progarren gone, their previous bases destroyed or a few that remained were abandoned. They’d had to find food on their own to eat, and the pack that this one had been surviving with…a total of 16 of them…had been hunted by numerous entities with light weapons that the nightcrawlers had no defense against. The enemies were in the dark places beyond the Rims, they were in the galaxies themselves, and the nightcrawlers could not go to the Galactic Cores…there was too much destructive energy there.

That left the only source of food amongst the outer stars, in the dark places where the sunlight could not hurt them. And in those places there were hunters. Spacefaring creatures like them for the most part, that sought to kill and eat them.

This one had been the last to survive, for they had no way to defend themselves against starlight creatures. They had only been designed to fight against darklight if necessary, so they were totally helpless except that they did not have to travel via gravity jumps, and could go places others could not. Still, they had been caught, over and over, until this one had been the last survivor.

The damage to it had not been done to it by a fellow heidoor, but rather a mining ship here that had mistook it for an asteroid in a belt closer to the black hole. The tunneling laser had caused a massive explosion that had ripped out a chunk of the nightcrawler’s body, with it fleeing instantly and never having gone back to that belt. It had limped out here and remained, nibbling on the rock and dust and just hiding.

And in all that time and torment, it had lost the will to live. Even accepting Paul as its new master, just like the other one had, it was not interested in healing and serving again, or even in seeing another nightcrawler. It simply wanted the agony to end.

The anger in Paul rose immediately, and he didn’t hide it from the nightcrawler. The anger wasn’t directed at it, but at the universe that had done this to it…and the T’fen who had had the Progarren killed, which resulted in these nightcrawlers being abandoned as they were ordered to run to the one place the T’fen’s servants could not go.

He was also angry that the Progarren hadn’t left some of their people behind to care for them. They probably had not expected to be wiped out entirely, and the orders they’d given for the nightcrawlers to wait for them had been well intended, but ultimately ill-advised, for no one had ever returned to rescind them or give them new instructions about how to survive or where to go or anything.

They’d simply been abandoned.

Drawing on Saul to translate as needed, for he had far more experience with heidoor minds, Paul summoned up as much Essence as he could to amp up his telepathy. He cut off the Saiolum current, which apparently wasn’t having much, if any effect, on the huge nightcrawler, either due to its dual nature or the fact that Paul simply had too little Saiolum to work with.

You will not die today, he commanded. I have seen this before in many others. Your vision is dark and numb. You see no hope, only suffering, and you want it to end. It is an illusion. There is a pathway to recovery, but you cannot find it. You cannot see. And your suffering blinds you to the fact that it is even possible. You forget what it was to be healthy, vibrant, and thriving. I do not. I will see for you. I will guide you back. It will not be quickly, for you have taken massive damage of body and mind. But you will soon see your kin again, for we are on a mission to rescue the other survivors. That will change quickly, but your damage will not. It was slowly gained, and it will be slowly healed. I know how to heal it. All you need to do is survive a little longer. We will take care of you now, and as things have been getting worse and worse, they will begin to get better and better and you will gradually crawl out of this deep pit you have been forced into, Paul said, with Saul translating ‘pit’ in stellar terms of a massive nebula so deep it had become lost in it.

Other alterations like that were needed, for the nightcrawlers lived in space and not on planets. As such, their mental frameworks were different, and Saul had a great deal more experience speaking in that manner, though he could tell through the battlemeld that neither him nor Jinni could say they had ever fully managed to ‘translate’ a language. All the heidoor were still a bit of a mystery in the way their massive minds worked, but they knew enough to establish a bridge between them, and Paul was drawing heavily on their experience now to edit his ‘words’ into something more intelligible for the nightcrawler.

NO HOPE LEFT. END ME NOW.

Paul didn’t need the others to translate that. The feelings and emotions the nightcrawler had just sent painted a perfect picture in his mind that he could easily translate into words.

Let me show you what has happened to you, Paul said, drawing heavily on Saul and Jinni to translate the War Within principles and the 10 rings, which were based on an island that the Wranglers immediately reconstructed into the depths of a star…which wasn’t great, because a nightcrawler had never been in a star, nor could be, but they worked constantly to refine what Paul was able to explain into useable metaphors and just let the trailblazer speak it as if he was speaking to another Human that was walking around on planets the same as him.

We are three parts, Paul began. Our body, our mind, and our Core, but in truth we are only one, our Core. We are melded with our body and mind, but they are just a machine. When they are melded with us, they become an extension of us, and when they are damaged, we feel it. We are damaged as well, because we are one with our body and mind, and the more they are damaged the more our Core becomes blind to the universe.

We are like an island in the ocean, he said, with ‘ocean’ being easy to translate as space, except for the waves part that Saul and Jinni were having a little trouble explaining, but they were managing. The ocean is the environment that we live in and it washes up on our beach every second, changing it. Each wave that crashes onto the sand alters the sand. What you built there a moment ago is destroyed, just as destruction can be replaced with a new sandcastle. It is constantly changing. This is our Ring 10. Our ‘moment.’ Right now your moment, your Ring 10, your ‘beach’ has been altered by our arrival and us speaking to you. It has been altered in a good way, but the rest of your beach is still a mess. Further up from the water is Rings 9 and 8. Those three rings are your beach, and the bigger waves hit all of them, eroding what was there before.

We are such a wave. We are the outside environment, but coming into contact with us does not hurt you. It helps you. It helps build a temporary construct, the sandcastle, on your beach. It starts out near the water, then extends up the beach higher into Ring 9. This ring also changes rapidly, but not moment to moment. The moments build it, but it takes an hour or so to change. Ring 8 even more so, for it takes multiple hours. Both of these are said to be your ‘mood,’ and it resets as the waves crash into it, eating away at what was there before. Nothing permanent can be built on the beach. Nothing good there is permanent, nothing bad there is permanent. So some of your current sorrow is being washed away already, but beyond the beach there are forests of it that you have accumulated over the past, and they will not be altered quickly.

Your beach resets each day when you sleep, Paul said, knowing that was going to be hard to translate when there was no day and night in space, but the two Wranglers were also teaching the nightcrawler some concepts as they went, and he felt from them that Paul hadn’t thrown anything too hard at them yet, so he kept going as he had numerous times before explaining this to younglings and others.

Beyond the beach is a ‘forest,’ and its roots grow from the sand and the water that the ocean provide, but the waves never reach it. The waves only touch the beach, soaking the sand, and then the water in the sand leaches into the forest slowly nourishing or poisoning it, depending on what the ocean washes onto the beach. The trees that grow there are vastly different depending upon what the ocean has provided them. The sandcastles that grow high enough are knocked into the edge of the forest by the waves and provide nourishment, but only the highest sandcastles, and they only grow high when the ocean repeats the same waves again and again, creating stacks. Stacks of sand into sandcastles, and they get knocked into the edge of the trees along with the water in them.

The type of sandcastle, the type of water, determine how the trees grow. There are no big trees along the edge of the beach, only small ones. Temporary ones. And it is in Ring 7 that touches the beach that we have the temporary trees. They grow small when needed, then die off when not. This is how we become ‘rusty’ in a skill. The temporary trees are our ‘edge,’ our edge of the forest. When it decays from bad waves, or contrary waves, we lose our edge and become rusty, but if we have developed skills deeply, the forest beyond is still there to reseed our Ring 7, and from those seeds the beach can regrow it quickly with the right nourishment.

That nourishment is your daily actions and inaction. And when it is random we call it the environment. But when we control the environment, we call it training. We create specific waves at specific heights at specific intervals to move the sand around on the beach as we want. We move it to nourish certain trees and not others. We push healing water onto the shore rather than toxic water. We can do in a very short amount of time with training what would otherwise take years to accidentally occur through the natural environment. This is why the huge amount of damage you have sustained so far will not be healing quickly, but it will be healed faster than it was accumulated, because we are masters of training, and we will not abandon you. Even if you no longer want to live, we will push you on as the environment has pushed you around for so long. But when we push, it will be in the direction you need to go but are blind to because you have grown a forest that is not healthy.

Rings 4, 5, and 6 are a stable forest. They are not temporary like Ring 7, and large trees grow here. Rather than dying and being removed when the ocean turns against their nature, they simply go dormant until it changes to their favor. Then they grow more, taking nourishment slowly leeching through the soil from the beach. If another spell of bad weather hits the beach, they go dormant again waiting to be awoken by a good beach day.

This is your good beach day. You have many trees inside you, what we call programs, waiting to be activated when they sense the presence of those like your old masters. Now that we are here, these trees will begin to bloom again, coming out of their dormancy, and you will sense much conflict within you…for there are trees in your forest that do not belong there. Bad trees that have grown from the toxic waters and poison sand. And while your good trees went dormant, these bad trees flourished throughout your forests, and you have a big problem.

But, when your beach turns good, these bad trees go dormant as well. That, however, is not good enough. They need to be removed. How do you do this? By creating waves through training…or if they should accidentally occur…that are exact opposites of the waves that created the tree. Exact opposites of the waves that created the sandcastles that fed the temporary trees and then leached further into your permanent ones. If you do the exact opposite, instead of growing a new tree alongside the existing one, you will shrink and eventually remove the existing one and grow a new one in its place.

This is how a messed-up forest can be slowly revitalized. Both by waking up the dormant good trees, and by replacing the bad ones. If you don’t know how to train, you can’t replace the bad ones other than through luck. This is why your forest feels like it can never be made right again. You feel the bad trees choking you out, and as the good ones wake up, you have much conflict in you, because the trees are incompatible with each other, and in some ways it is easier on your Core to just leave one type of them dormant. But if the trees do not match your Core, they will always torment you.

Your Core is at the center of your island. It is not made by the ocean, it is you, and it is like a mini-ocean of its own, pushing waves outward into Ring 1 and heavily influencing it. It is hard to get water and sand in from the ocean to Ring 1, but it does happen very gradually. A strong Core will grow massive trees in Ring 1 to match its nature, even if the exterior ocean conflicts with hit. But the ocean has more control over Ring 10 than the Core does. It is a neverending battle between the two, and your Core has lost control of your forests. You have been beaten and corrupted by a bad ocean. But now, that bad ocean is gone, replaced by friends who are going to help you, but the bad trees in your forest remain, and it will take time to remove them.

Your Core can remove some of them on its own if given a chance. It will wither and remove trees that are not compatible with it, and in this way it is not just training that defines your forest, but the nature of your Core. Who you are, not who you are told to be or the experiences of your lifetime. I, for example, am a warrior. My Core has grown many tall trees that allow me to fight in different ways in my forest, and they are thriving because they fit me, and I feed them with training from the ocean beyond as well. I am also a builder, and my Core has nourished useful temporary trees that accidentally formed from the environment in Ring 7, growing them into seeds that then created temporary trees in the inner rings.

In this way, the nature of your Core latches onto things in the environment, claiming them as its own and incorporating them into the forest while trying to wither those that pop up from the environment that do not match the Core. But sometimes the ocean is so strong it nourishes these temporary trees despite the Core not wanting them, and in this way a forest can grow that is tormenting to the Core, for it does not match it.

And yet, there is one more factor involved. In the inner rings, 1, 2, and 3, you have default programs…trees that are there from the beginning, and not because of your Core or the ocean. They come with your genetics, and if they are incompatible with your Core, they will torment you until you make them go dormant…or until you remove them. These can be very tall and thick trees, but the Core is ever-present and constantly nourishing or withering the ones closest to it, which is why things like your reproductive drive and survival instincts will begin similar to those of others, but customize over time to closer match your Core. In my forest, my survival tree will not kill a friend so that I can survive, while other people’s will kill anyone in order to survive. The tree started out from identical seedlings, but grew differently over the course of my life than that of others.

You are tormented now because your forest is so thick with bad or incompatible trees that you cannot see clearly. It is blocking your view to many things. But as your dormant good trees wake up, you will be able to see some things through them…and over time, we will help you through training, by controlling your ocean’s waves, to slowly destroy the bad trees and help you grow new good ones. Your forest will be cleared in time, I promise you that. I can see clearly through my forest, all the way out to the ocean from my Core. It took a long time to manage my forest and grow it in the proper ways, but it can be done. There is no forest too corrupt to be revitalized and reworked, it is simply a matter of time and knowing how to make the alterations. Your Core will make alterations to the inner rings automatically, but to change the ocean waves on the outside, and attack the bad forest from both sides, you must know how to train.

We are experts at training, and we will guide you through what you need to do. Right now, all you have to do is keep on living. We will chart your path, and every day that goes by a little more of your nasty ass forest will be trimmed away and new seedlings planted alongside the good dormant trees that will be slowly reawakening. You will thrive once more. It will take a long time to get to that point, but we will not abandon you. Those that killed your masters seek to kill us as well, but we are in a much better position because your masters left behind information to warn us. We will not be destroyed, and we will not abandon you. You will always have masters from now on, as will your kin. One has already returned to us, and we have brought this dark vessel to carry you across the stars to meet with it and the others, then to a base where your training will grow. But the first thing I command you to do is eat. We have real food for you, like you once had. You will need it to start feeding the forest of your body, while the forest of your mind will be nourished by our knowledge and companionship.

The Progarren were your family before, and we are their cousins…that makes us family as well. Come with us, Paul said as he triggered the outer doors on the ship to slowly open, revealing the massive cavern that was inside and far larger than the nightcrawler, and we will lead you out of your blindness and despair. It will be a hard journey, but the hardest parts are already past. You survived. Now let us help you through the last leg of your journey back into your long lost family.

Paul could tell as he and the Wranglers were telling the very odd story from the heidoor’s point of view, but partway through it he could sense the despair crack open and a bit of hope return. As soon as Paul gave it an order to get in the ship, a lot of those dormant ‘trees’ suddenly started to come back to life and relief flowed through it.

It had been so long since it had an order to follow from its masters. And now the path before it was simple. No matter how much it hurt, no matter how much it was confused, all it had to do was obey and the masters would take care of it.

It swam through space, producing an energy trail that ship sensors were not designed to detect, and on that ‘train track’ it crawled…which was the way darklight creatures moved in the absence of gravity fields. The nightcrawler slid through the darkness of the asteroid belt, ramming into and pushing aside some tiny chunks of rock in the process as Saul had one of the food pellets floated into the now open doorway, with the nightcrawler ramming into it and beginning to absorb the nutrients immediately as they stuck to its outer hull like a piece of gum by design.

It ’swam’ on in further and the outer doors were closed, keeping it in near darkness other than for a few frequencies that had been designed into the nightcrawler to not be harmful and allow the Progarren to ‘see’ them on sensors.

The Wranglers and Paul could now see it in the massive hangar as it tucked into a docking port, designed to be identical to the ones the Progarren had used, and snuggled up against a slow-dispensing nutrient frame that would deliver not just food, but specialized materials that were the equivalent of medicine for its varying problems…and it had many based off the diagnostic reading they were getting from the Empire’s copy and paste recreation of the Progarren technology that had been left for them in the Legacy Repository.

The telepathic waves coming from the nightcrawler were strong, but no longer entirely ugly, and as the ship began to move out of the asteroid field and back towards the black hole to jump off towards the location of the next nightcrawler in this galaxy, this one even began to ‘purr’ slightly, telepathically speaking anyway…

10

EG29

October 1, 158438

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Lorichar Kingdom

Idfadar System

Interplanetary Space

Ni’chi’ko sat with his appendages draped around the command stool upon which he directed bridge operations from in the heart of the Bsidd Hijaro-class jumpship Tani’shew. It looked a lot like the other warship/carriers in Star Force, but each Faction of the Empire had their own unique design flares though the purpose was the same. The Tani’shew was a drone carrier that had its own weaponry, notably the bloon launchers that were a favorite of the Archons and could deliver a massive amount of destructive energy in a giant glob to stationary or near stationary targets.

Ni’chi’ko’s mission now wasn’t to attack anything, but rather escort another convoy of supply ships heading into the Asferja war zone. He had 178 cargo vessels of various makes, but all were Bsidd ships and carrying a combination of food, water, prefab structures, replacement drones, and multiple passengers, most of whom were either construction workers or security forces.

They were headed to a planet where a large number of prisoners had been taken, and the supplies were going to be used to help construct a proper prison that other planets could send their prisoners to, thus freeing up the combat forces from babysitting duties. So far not many Asferja had surrendered, but given how many of them there were, if even 0.1% surrendered or were rendered unconscious and didn’t have a choice in the matter, that equated to millions upon millions as this war progressed, and Star Force needed someplace local to put them.

Rather than bring them into an existing world, they were using one of the destroyed ones the Asferja had taken from a primitive Star Force neighbor. And if the Asferja wanted to hit it again, well, Ni’chi’ko had been assured there was a trap waiting for them if they did, so the planet wouldn’t be just a weak penal colony easy to hit.

He’d also been told that the Asferja might just kill the prisoners rather than rescue them, and Star Force couldn’t allow that either.

But Ni’chi’ko could do math well. No naval Captain would achieve their position if they could not, and given the swarm-like nature of the Asferja, there was going to come a time soon where Star Force simply wouldn’t be able to take prisoners from a logistical standpoint. It was early now, but if they kept sending reinforcements through the Galactic Threads, it was going to turn into a pure and simple bloodfest with only one survivor left standing. He was sure that was going to be Star Force, and while the Empire had their invasion corridor mostly bottled up and contained for now, he knew that soon the Empire would have to stop holding back and trying to play nice with the bad guys and simply laying them all to waste before they did the same in reverse.

He'd been hatched from his egg sack during the war with the lizards, and that’s exactly what Star Force had been forced to do then, and the few prisoners they took killed themselves anyway. It was a hard lesson for the Empire to learn, but they’d learned it, and he knew they weren’t going to stupidly keep spending resources on the Asferja prisoners for too much longer, but right now they were still in the dominant position, and as he’d been taught during his Maturia training, ‘Mercy was a luxury of the dominant.’

But if Prince Karthen wanted the Bsidd to start building these camps, then Ni’chi’ko wasn’t going to argue. The Human had guided his race for a long time and grown them into the most populated Faction within the Empire, and given what the Archons had done with the lizards…turning some of them into Paladin and making them part of the Empire…he figured something similar might be in the works for the Asferja. They were always thinking ten steps ahead of everyone else, but right now Ni’chi’ko would rather have been fighting the Asferja rather than escorting cargo ships.

As he sat with his multiple purple appendages draped around his mostly hollow torso, he was mentally linked in with the ship’s systems so he didn’t need one of the bridge crew to tell him when a proximity alarm went off a split second before a ship decloaked alongside them and began firing into their long hull.

The shields were already up, and had been ever since they left the planet of Tyren further out in this system where they had to stop and pick up a few more ships in the convoy. Now halfway back to the star this was happening, and he could tell instantly it was not an Asferja ship…it was one of the new arrivals, the Bru’son, and Star Force’s limited data on them had not indicated they had cloaking technology or were anywhere near the convoy route.

His gunners returned fire automatically, following standard orders as Captain Ni’chi’ko initiated the launch procedure for the bulk of the drones within his ship as the few that were flying escort around the cargo ships immediately were moved to attack the clear-hulled vessel that was blossoming with bright lights inside just before the weaponsfire was released towards his warship.

And the hits they were taking were hard…very hard. Almost as if they had a shield penetrating quality to them. His shield controller was already adjusting frequencies trying to get better protection against the incoming hits, but they were not all uniform and his fellow Bsidd was having a hard time figuring out what matrix to use for best effect as the overall shield wall surrounding the vessel began to drop lower and lower in the slugging match.

The coin-shaped drones spilled out through the lower rear section of the elongated warship and began locking together into smaller groupings as the Captain realized the ship he was facing was throwing out shots so strong they could kill a single drone. Grouping them together into 3s and 5s would allow their combined shields to survive several hits as they fired back, slowly surrounding the vessel that was only a third as long as the warship, approximately 8 miles in length and another 3 in width while slightly shorter in height at 2.5 miles, give or take.

The design was not identical to the limited ship silhouettes they’d gotten through the comm relays to update their database, and Ni’chi’ko realized their ships must have been grown from a base template, with the variations being similar to how a tree grew from a seed. He didn’t understand the technology he was looking at, but he understood biotech and the lumpy, ring-like patterns on the clear hull literally screamed that it had been grown rather than built.

Though what it had been grown out of he didn’t know, for it looked like glass or crystal, and neither of those was biological.

The cargo ships in the convoy, rather than fleeing, were pulling in closer to the fight and adding their own weaponsfire to the mix, with the attacker seeming to have bitten off more than it could chew…but that was when other Bru’son vessels decloaked at different points and began hammering the cargo ships’ shields.

It took only a moment for the Captain’s mathematical mind to realize he was outmatched, so it was time to test the speed of this new enemy…and he ordered the cargo ships to reverse course and head back to Tyren and the safety of the Sentinel-class defense stations in orbit there.

The convoy had already been in mid microjump when they were hit, meaning they were coasting between the planet and the star, away from any strong gravity fields, so it was going to be a test of both civilizations’ engines to see who could pull harder on the weak gravity as the convoy ran them as high as possible to slow their speed towards the star.

The warship had better engines than the cargo ships did, but only barely, and that was because their drones were deployed and the cargo ships were fully stocked. Less mass to haul around compared to engine power ended up with a different result, but the base engine packages on all these Bsidd ships were the same. Other, less advanced models were in use across the galaxy, but they weren’t sending them on convoy duty into a war zone, and wouldn’t, unless things got very widespread and messy.

All of Ni’chi’ko’s ships maneuvered in sync to avoid running into each other, spreading out laterally for a moment to allow for some forgiveness to physics, then simultaneously pushed against the star’s gravity while pulling on the distant planet’s. That jerked them out of alignment with the enemy for a moment, and the Bsidd thought they’d effectively juked free of the combat…but less than ten seconds later the ships caught back up so smooth and quick it was clear they had superior engine technology…or at least were carrying less mass…and if they weren’t equipped with hull armor that was probably part of the reason, but it wouldn’t be all of it.

The Bru’son vessels were out-teching the Empire, at least when it came to speed.

But the Captain wasn’t out of tricks yet, and his ships suddenly changed speed again, pushing less hard against the star…which had the Bru’son shoot ahead of them before they adapted…then Ni’chi’ko changed speeds again, trying to keep the enemy out of weapons range as much as he could as they gradually negated their speed in towards the star and started heading back towards the planet as several clouds of defense drones were coming out from it to assist them.

But the hits were adding up, and the Bru’son got a few in every time they went through this back and forth drill…and he was amazed none of them had collided with any of his ships yet. He almost wished they would, because he had a hunch that without visible armor they’d crunch against his Faction’s hardened craft, but they were too nimble to be caught in the ‘slow’ speed collisions as the 7 Bru’son ships continued to dance around the convoy and continue to drain their shields.

His warship was taking the most hits, and he was glad for that, but before they could get back to the Sentinels or the incoming drones some of the attacks got through and hit the hull armor of the Tani’shew…barely damaging it.

It was like bee stings…they still did damage that would add up in time, but it appeared that the impressive firepower of the smaller enemy ships was largely shield penetrating and not that effective against armor plating.

Then the blue/green/yellow weaponsfire from the Bru’son altered into a deep red glow charging longer inside the first of their ships before being released in a glob similar to a bloon launcher that smashed into the Star Force warship and took a large bite out of the hull.

“Sithspit,” he said, using an old Archon curse. The enemy ships had multiple weapon systems, and this one apparently was effective against armor. “Anchor 7!” he yelled to the bridge crew as he simultaneously gave the order through the mental interface.

‘Anchor 7’ was a battle strategy for the drone pilots to employ, who were nestled into little, well protected nooks elsewhere in the warship as they remotely flew the coin-shaped drones currently in their little clusters. Now that the relief drones from the planet were getting close enough to be controlled by the warship, the remote pilots were assuming control of them and adding them into their arsenal.

And the order the Captain had just given meant they were supposed to use at least some of them to ram the enemy ships.

The clusters immediately broke apart and began flying towards the Bru’son ‘crystal-class’ ships, for lack of a better term, and tried to tag them like a game…but they were so close to each other they just bounced off the shields. The other incoming drones, having further to accelerate, did not bump…but instead penetrated deep into the enemy shield perimeter before exploding.

But no damage was done to the Bru’son ships.

Captain Ni’chi’ko replayed the battlemap data and zoomed in on the collision point, getting an update from his analysis team on the same thing a few seconds sooner. They both saw the enemy shields…which were positioned well away from their hull…dent in heavily and bleed off the kinetic force of the ramming drone. They caught it like a dampening field, then the drone exploded…which should not have happened.

Ni’chi’ko kept the convoy changing speeds and throwing off the enemy for a few seconds each time, but the incoming fire kept targeting the same spots in his hull armor that had been hit before, and soon the Bru’son got a breach inside his ship while he still couldn’t penetrate their shields, nor could he get a reading on how strong those shields were.

He had already been rolling the warship to get the primary damaged area out of the line of fire, but the Bru’son were dancing around to get back at it each time, so all he could do was bring in a group of drones and have them lock onto the hull, with the little globs of nanite armor the ship had stored within to patch small holes reaching out and gluing the drones in place as the IDF field was extended around them so the next change in speed didn’t tear them away from the ship for even a meter or two.

Then one of the cargo ships moved up alongside the warship and used its bulk to shield the ship…as well as blocking most of its weaponsfire.

Captain Ni’chi’ko hadn’t ordered that, but he wasn’t going to object either as the other Bru’son ships suddenly all appeared around the damaged warship and began to shoot it from multiple angles with their red charges.

Holes began to open up everywhere, then another cargo ship came forward and rammed one of them…and this time it was the Bru’son vessel that bounced off, though the cargo ship lost more than half its shield strength in the collision…and that energy apparently was captured by the enemy vessel, for its own shield glowed at that spot then released a golden wave back towards the cargo ship that fully penetrated what was left of its shields.

Then red globs of energy started hitting it too.

“Cancel Anchor 7,” he growled. “Their shields are charged with collisions and they can release it as a weapon. We’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

“Captain,” another Bsidd bridge crewer called out, sending a data file to his stool position with it popping up in hologram in front of his bug-like eyes. It was a missile package designed for shield penetrating explosions…meaning it wasn’t a conventional explosive. The warship had a store of multi-phasic warheads that could be reconfigured for different targets, and this was the best idea the armory team could come up with on the fly.

And Ni’chi’ko knew, even if they lost this battle, they needed to get as much data on the enemy shield matrixes as possible.

The Captain shifted over to the command prompt and ordered the missile configuration into play as his gunners saw it now available to them and began popping the little white glowing missiles out of the warship’s hull from multiple locations as the drones continued to sting the enemy ships almost ineffectively.

Though with no ability to sense how much shield matrix there was in the odd enemy defenses, they could be having great effect for all he knew. It was like someone had put a blindfold over part of his sensors that told him just how much strength the enemy shields still had left.

The missiles flew towards different targets, and most were shot down by an area of effect stream of aqua waves…yet another energy type unfamiliar to Star Force…but the few missiles that did hit popped rather than exploded, and left a residual goo on top of the enemy shields that ate into the shield matrix like acid for a few second before disappearing.

Suddenly all the Bru’son ships began targeting the locations on the hull where the missiles had come from.

“I think we’re onto something,” the Captain said. “Keep those missiles going. Empty the racks if you have to.”

More popped out and hit the Bru’son ships, then a massive jolt was felt through the warship as one of the big holes in the hull suddenly got bigger and they didn’t have enough drones left to cover it.

Another cargo ship moved in on its own accord and tried to slide over the hole, blocking almost all the remaining line of sight shots at the enemy, but the Bru’son were not going to allow the cargo ships to deny them the kill on the warship…and one of them jutted into the space between the two Star Force ships and emitted a concussion wave off its shields that physically pushed not just those two, but four of the Star Force vessels apart as more Bru’son red energy weapons hit the exposed points on the hull.

That Bru’son ship quickly ran off, making the Captain wonder just how much it had cost them to release that blast. Moving ships miles long was not something that could conventionally be done with weaponsfire, and the enemy’s bag of new tricks was getting far too deep for his liking as another blast ripped apart the far armor…meaning it had gone all the way through the ship and hit the opposite site, coring a hole through the vessel just ahead of the drone bay.

He immediately saw a death toll begin to pop up. Whatever that weapon was it was damn effective against armor.

Suddenly the cargo ships broke off and his own ship began visibly decelerating against a glowing white orb…the cloud-wrapped planet of Tyren…and despite a few now-destroyed gravity drives, the warship had plenty left to decelerate in time…right into the firing arc of one of the Sentinel defense stations.

The cargo ships were spreading out away from their original line now that they had maneuvering options, and large beams of weaponsfire were lancing out from the station and hitting the Bru’son ships…but not penetrating. He did see, however, two of them break off contact…possibly because their super shields were getting low…but he never got the chance to find out for sure, because rather than chasing the cargo ships, the remaining 5 Bru’son vessels followed the Tani’shew right up alongside the Sentinel as the Warship tucked in next to it with less than 500 meters separating the two.

The station pummeled the Bru’son ships for their audacity to get that close with a lot of short range weaponry, but they wouldn’t let go of their target. One of them stayed too long, and as soon as one of the augmented Mauler defense turrets got a partial shot through their super shields, the ship literally evaporated…not the part that was hit, but all of it in some sort of chain reaction that destroyed all the mass within the vessel, leaving nothing left to study or crew to rescue.

The resulting explosion from that ‘evaporation’ slammed into both the station and the warship, damaging the latter so badly that the ship cracked in two with the empty hangar bays in the rear being sheared off from the far more massive front half.

The other Bru’son vessels eventually fled, but not before the remains of the warship showed numerous holes in them large enough to fly drones inside.

And one of those holes led directly to the bridge…which was no longer there.

11

EG29

October 23, 158438

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Home One Kingdom

Solar System

Earth

Director Sean Davis, the oldest Human in existence despite his young physical appearance, sat at his desk atop the tallest spire in the city of Atlantis located in the Pacific Ocean on a mostly depopulated Earth…at least compared to what it had once been. Before the Vargemma attack it had hosted a Human population over 23 billion, but now it was less than 1, and that was by design.

Earth was the capitol of the Empire, and one that had been completely destroyed before…the surface population anyway. Destroying the rocky planet would have been another thing entirely, though not impossible, but that would have been work for a pack of heidoor that lived in space and ate chunks of planets, not for an invasion force.

Now that invasion force was working for them, in that the Vargemma who had destroyed the population of Earth and nearly Davis himself were now part of the Empire in at least a quasi way. They couldn’t leave the Temples without Star Force’s permission, and they were far too dangerous to let roam around non-Essence users away from the watchful monitoring of the Caretakers.

But since Star Force had taken control of the Temples in this galaxy the relationship with the Vargemma had slowly improved, and from them they had drawn recruits to create the Varkemma, who were firmly loyal to the Empire. The rest of the Vargemma continued to live in the huge Temples and either not care about what was beyond or simply had no way to access it. For while each of the Temples held the landmass equal to thousands of planets, it was technically still a prison, and those inside didn’t have the access codes necessary to get out save for a select few.

When the Neofan had come things had changed drastically, first for the better, then the worst, then the better again, with huge amounts of Essence being produced by the Vargemma above and beyond their normal donations and that being sent out to refill ship and planetary wells that the Uriti production of Essence couldn’t keep up with, for combating the Jaeggers virtually required Essence weaponry and shields unless they broke their ships down so small you could handle them with conventional weaponry.

The Asferja had no Essence skills or tech, and Greg-073, who was acting as the point-man for the entire Asferja invasion corridor, was trying to use as little Essence weaponry as possible to conserve it for higher level threats later, but the V’kit’no’sat were blowing through their reserves like crazy, because these damn Jaegers had traveled here in artificially created planets with probably better defenses than even Earth had at the moment.

And that wasn’t a small amount. The Essence-based planetary shields here were the strongest in the Empire. Davis had made sure of that after the planet had been wiped out in a single Essence attack. And now Mak’to’ran had to fight not just a surface civilization, but a planet-sized volume of technology infused with Essence, and somehow he’d managed a small victory holding Zatria and a not so small victory damaging two of the enemy’s baseships enough that they had to park where they were and work on repairs.

But the other baseships were moving out and dominating everything they came across in the Deep Core of the galaxy and the Empire couldn’t do anything to stop them until they broke their planets up into smaller pieces. The initial armada put together to face them had barely been able to penetrate their Essence shields, and it had taken Essence weaponry of their own augmented by a Jinx to do it.

Not to mention the second baseship takedown was actually due to the Veloqueen and not Mak’to’ran. In the Asferja, the T’fen had sent in a weak initial opponent that could spam their way up to considerable strength if given free reign…but the Jaegers were the heaviest hitter Davis had ever seen, and the V’kit’no’sat could not get enough Essence to them to start hunting down the baseships, though they were trying to pounce on the sub units when they broke up and flew to multiple systems.

So far they’d destroyed four of them, badly damaged another 6, but each time they had success was with a Jinx onboard. They couldn’t do more than just delay and maybe wound one of the continent-sized baseships without the Essence assist, and Reignor Plausious had immediately made the decision to order the Vargemma into extra Essence production to compensate for this new foe.

And of course the Vargemma obeyed the Neofan without question. He’d been surprised when any of them had sided with Star Force during the Temple Wars.

But now he’d gotten word, and damage results, from the third new race to hit this galaxy…the Bru’son. They’d bypassed Greg’s defensive lines using a type of cloaking device that most sensors would not penetrate, but fortunately he’d just gotten an update that they could be picked up with a Ghostbane sensor…but it was one that most ships rarely used, it had to be recharged in high gravity wells, and only detected artificial gravity…such as in deck plates or a gravity drive. So inert ships with 0g decks could still be missed.

Apparently the Bru’son still used gravity drives to move around with, so Davis was glad that they weren’t totally blind to this new enemy…but running Ghostbane sweeps constantly was going to be problematic, and Davis had already asked the Kiritak to start mass producing more of the sensors so they could get them out to the ships that didn’t have them, as well as double and triple up the ones on the warships so they could store more charges of the sonar-like pings that ignored all matter, meaning you could thankfully scan right through a planet and into orbit on the far side in the case of planetary defense sensors.

As for the places the Bru’son had hit so far, they were not sticking with the Asferja to help them. Davis believed they were being sent to torch ‘safe’ Star Force systems and get them on the defensive everywhere…with their ships already having hit in 6 different Kingdoms while the Asferja were pinned down to just the two where the Galactic Threads exited.

The lack of information on this race was also concerning, for neither the Progarren, nor their forebearers, had noted their existence. He wasn’t sure if that was because they’d never faced them or because they couldn’t recover their technology, for their ships appeared to either have a self-destruct system or were constructed in such a way that hull hits destabilized whatever crystal-like material they built their ships out of. They were clearly all-in on shield technology, but them vaporizing…including the crew…when they took even a small amount of hull damage suggested a deliberated mechanism rather than a material weakness, for the Empire hadn’t been able to recover so much as a single intact body piece from the few destroyed ships they’d managed to take down during these hit and run attacks against Star Force ships.

And that was also curious, for they were not hitting planets or orbital habitats. Only ships, and usually civilian ones. They’d hit some convoys with warship escorts, but most of their attacks were on the regular shipping lanes and they were racking up a huge amount of damage before a patrol ship eventually got to them.

And that was causing the civilian populations to go crazy. Who wanted to travel between planets when an invisible ship might poke in to blow you up at any time?

He didn’t want to tell them they had found a way to track them in a limited fashion and give away their advantage, so Davis was just going to let the fear ride itself out. Besides, he expected the T’fen to have a lot more tactical tricks like this in their Gauntlet War bag. After all, they’d apparently been perfecting the art of civilization removal for a very long time.

Davis got the ping in his desk system that his guests were arriving and would be up in less than a minute, but he kept working for most of that minute, reviewing reports from the warfront trying to discern more of the T’fen’s overall strategy and not disappointed in the least at what they’d sent after them thus far. These were not probing attacks. The T’fen were going for a gut punch right off the bat, and would need to in order to establish beachheads to get more troops and races into the galaxy later.

It's just that those damn Jaegers had blown right through the V’kit’no’sat lines even if they hadn’t been able to take Zatria, for there was no way for Mak’to’ran to bottle them up and play for time as more and more fleets from multiple Factions were headed that way now that they had some idea of what they were facing.

And Davis knew the trailblazers weren’t going to allow any conventional fleets anywhere near those baseships without Materia-carrying warships in support. They needed more Essence than the Vargemma here could produce, and while that wasn’t a problem now, for the Temples had a huge reserve built up over millions of years, this war wasn’t going to be decided in a century, and the Director knew he had to be thinking ahead…as he always was…before the Essence reserves got anywhere near the depletion point, which the Temples wouldn’t allow anyway, for they needed some for their basic functions.

But fighting ships the size of planets…that ate up a lot of the little donations made daily over the course of millennia in a matter of seconds.

“Director,” a small quadruped said as it cleared the top of the stairs into his office, followed by four more representatives of races in the Bond of Resistance.

“Harvi,” Davis said with a nod. “I’m afraid I don’t have much good news to offer you.”

“I expected not,” the Gorsheen said, sitting down on its hind legs while the other four bipeds all took chairs around the perimeter of Davis’s desk.

“The third race to arrive is bypassing our lines and hitting our civilian traffic. They haven’t made a single attack against a military vessel or facility or planet without them. We’re starting to get a handle on how to fight them now, but there’s no way we can contain them to an area like the Asferja.”

“Then it’s a good thing your Empire made a point of heavily reinforcing all of your worlds,” the Meiu Ambassador noted. “At least your ships have somewhere to run to when attacked.”

“Most aren’t making it that far,” Davis said with a wince. “And I’m starting to organize convoys to those civilian ships that want them in the affected areas, but the Bru’son appear to be spreading out. They could hit anywhere in the galaxy after a few years.”

“Tying up your warships everywhere in fear of an attack,” the carapace-covered Chas’den said with a click of its mouth appendages. “You must hunt the hunters instead.”

“We’re working on that. Clan Teemo has our best cloaking technology, so they’re going to try and deal with this one invisible ship to another. I’ve also got them going to the Core to employ some irregular measures against the Jaegers. Their baseships are too damn strong to confront directly without a massive amount of Essence weapons.”

“We were amazed at what the Veloqueen did,” Ner’as’bix said, referencing the battle footage that Davis had provided them. “We always knew they were powerful, but they are quite scary. I am glad they are on your side in this war.”

“As am I. Now, what is it you wanted to speak with me about?”

“We disagree with the Denogi’s position,” Harvi said with a hint of anger in his turtle-like face. “The Bond of Resistance needs to stand with the Veloqueen, Neofan, and you. All five of our races are in agreement with this, but transporting troops across the galactic void is problematic, as your enemies well know. They don’t have enough resources to do more than damage you at present, but rather seeds to be grown into larger armies later. They are playing a very long term game, as all must who do not have local ships available to fight.”

Davis held up a finger to correct him. “That may not hold for very long. Some standard ships can make intergalactic jumps. Just not ours.”

“Regardless, they will have to face your fortified worlds, and you have so many redundant pieces of your Empire, they could destroy 90% of it and you’d fully rebuild afterward. Even hitting here at your capitol is almost meaningless. You don’t rely on any world, or even any of your Kingdoms. We believe you have a good chance to survive this Gauntlet War, and we want to ask you how we can assist beyond what we are currently doing?”

Davis knew that meant their already existing colonies here, that many in the Bond of Resistance had requested permission to set up to facilitate communication and trade. There were some 700+ systems that belonged to their varying races out in the Rim, fortunately far from the Asferja invasion zone, but they didn’t have resources on any of them to be of much help.

“I think the greatest help anyone can be is to start thinking outside the box. Ways to interfere, slow down, or out think the enemy. But the most obvious way you can help is with Essence, for those of you who can produce it. Right now it’s about the only way we are effectively penetrating the Jaegger defenses, and we’re drawing on a lot of it, as are the Veloqueen. Even if you could get some to them so they could absorb it, it would be helpful.”

“Shipping it would be easy,” Ner’as’bix said, thinking. “But the greatest source is the other Temples. Are they being tapped?”

“Not yet, but they have the ability to ship Essence containers between galaxies already, so you wouldn’t have to send ships to do it. You could just deposit it in your local galaxies and it would eventually get to us.”

“Why not drain them all?” the Mieu Ambassador, who had no pronounceable name, asked. “Survival of your Empire and the Neofan is of far greater importance than preserving that Essence for a time of need. This is the time of need. It will only be a matter of time before the T’fen send their armies to take down us as well, even if it is a few million years distant before we catch up with you technologically and geographically. If they always eradicate the most advanced races, then we have no reason to assume they’d spare us later. We need to stand together now, and if that means draining all the Temples of Essence, I see no problem in it. The Vargemma there will slowly replenish all the wells.”

“I am glad to hear you say that, Mieu,” he said, addressing her by her race as was preferred. “Because as many servants as the T’fen send against us, every ally we have likewise strengthens our side. If you can spare any Essence, please do, but all of your races combined cannot equal the output of a single Temple, so it is something of value, but not of extreme consequence. I do not believe any of you hold the key to our survival, and if you want to help, then I suggest you pick a little corner of this conflict, whether that be geographically, technologically, or strategy wise, and see what you can add to our three civilizations. This is going to be a massively long war, and the details matter greatly over time.”

“Are the Veloqueen under attack in their galaxy?” Loqui asked, tapping one of his eight long fingers on the clear desk for emphasis.

“Not at present, and I wouldn’t expect them to be until we’re wiped out…but I also wouldn’t expect the T’fen to ignore them after this either. They know all our survival is dependent on winning this war…and down the road, we’ll have to go after the T’fen and their servants in their galaxies to put an end to this entirely.”

“Wishful thinking at this point,” Harvi said, throwing water on that bonfire.

“It’s my job to think very far ahead, as well as immediately,” Davis noted, pulling out five data chips and telekinetically sliding them all across the table to the Ambassadors. “The Neofan have agreed to join with us as a civilization. We’re not annexing them the way we have other races and turning them into Factions, this is more of a merger. House Atriark will live in this galaxy, and the newly former House Phoenix will live in Andromeda, both serving as the Essence protectors for Star Force. And while we’re not exactly weak in the Essence department, they have far more experience and knowledge than we do, and that role fits them well, even with their now diminished population.”

“What are these?” Loqui asked, fingering the data chip.

“Paul-024 was able to board one of the Asferja Threads before destroying it. The Asferja then rebuilt it, but before he destroyed it he had a look around and pulled a lot of data from the device. These are the blueprints to it, along with a few modifications…theoretical ones…that we’ve added.”

“For the Bond of Resistance?” Harvi asked, excited at the implications.

“No,” Davis said flatly. “The Bond of Resistance is obsolete. The Neofan have all but been destroyed, and the Denogi do nothing to help while the Veloqueen fight. The Founding Bond of Three has been broken, and the rest of you have already been developing trade relations with me for some time despite the fact that we are not part of the Bond of Resistance. What is also on these data chips is the layout of a new organization. The Bond of Resistance controls the intergalactic transit network that is based off Essence. Thanks to our enemy, we now have the ability to start building a non-Essence intergalactic network for a new Alliance that will run concurrently with the Bond…though to be part of it you have to adapt to Star Force basic principles, which the five of you already did for your colonies here. These principles would have to be enacted throughout your civilizations for membership.”

“We already are in compliance,” Harvi stated, though it hadn’t required much change for the Gorsheen. They were plant eaters anyway.

“I know, and the rest of you aren’t far off. House Atriark, when coming to this galaxy, had to adhere to these principles, and House Phoenix does as well. The Veloqueen can just fly between galaxies already and don’t really want visitors in theirs, so you can sort of consider them to be an honorary member on the civilian side, but they’re militarily part of this Alliance as well, which I am leading. No Councils or Triumvirate. Everything flows through us, and will flow back out, such as these blueprints. If you wish to officially join, you can assist the distant war effort by helping us to further design our own version of the Galactic Threads, and these blueprints are the base we are starting off of. As I said, I like to plan very far ahead.”

“This is an alliance with your Empire, not membership in your empire?” Loqui asked for clarification.

“Correct. All the details for the Alliance are contained there for you to review. The requirements and responsibilities are not negotiable.”

“What is this alliance to be called?” Ner’as’bix asked.

“We now know the T’fen have been destroying advanced races longer than any of ours have been in existence. What is required to defeat them is not simple or quick. It is a commitment to right past wrongs and to protect those who cannot protect themselves. This will not be a passive or economic alliance. It will be made up of those races that choose to act for the common good rather than sitting back and considering what is only in your own self-interest. It is an alliance of protectors who will go out and find enemies to fight rather than waiting for them to hit us first. We will have to be pro-active, assuming we can hold this galaxy, and not develop a defensive mindset. We mean to interfere, not just for those in the present and future who are under threat, but also for those who have already been lost. We aim to avenge them. Thus, Star Force and the Neofan are the two founding members of the Avengers Alliance…and those data chips are your invitations…”

12

EG29

October 23, 158438

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Lioth Kingdom

Starva Kinipi System

Pliu

Lan-go-no sat plugged into a terminal using the port in his left hand alongside a sea of other Noskva, a cyborg race that Star Force had annexed some 72,103 years ago as a ward on a small planet called Utinis. Back then his race had been dying out, for their cyborg implants were slowly killing them with radiation and toxins. Their lifespan had been reduced greatly by the implants, but their population had still embraced them due to the myriad of uses they allowed, most notably their ability to connect to a datanet that allowed them to almost instantly contact every other person on their world, bringing their population together in a way that had been impossible before.

They could also virtually experience many things, so those living in what were little more than shacks could be of equal virtual standing with everyone else so long as they had the implants and a landline connection. Where there were no landlines, wireless connections were added with lesser connectivity, and it was those that had killed so many of his people in those early days, for every bit of data that flowed through radiation in the air also slightly damaged the people it passed through, and given that the transmitting antennas were inside or on their body via their implants, they got the most of it when they were sending data.

It wasn’t enough to notice immediately, which was why so many fell for the technological trap. Those that knew did not care, for the benefits to their race were considered to outweigh the negatives, so their leaders back then had allowed people to be slowly poisoned by the radiation and die of a myriad of causes, all of which were labeled as something other than the true cause, and as a result the Noskva population had been steadily decreasing despite an increase in the number of births.

The people simply didn’t last long enough to keep up with the demand, and whereas their original population would live to be at least 150, if not 180 years old, they had been reduced to an old age of 70, and as a result the workforce on the planet had been cut in half.

They’d tried to adjust by using more automated factories, created drugs to try and counteract the damage to their bodies…without admitting the true cause…and while none at the time wanted to admit it, their race was slowly dying because no one would even conceive of going backwards to a time before implants. Even their children were given their first implants immediately after being born to allow for constant status updates and medical intervention early when needed, which had eliminated almost all infant deaths from medical causes.

When a Star Force scout ship had made contact, it had immediately identified the cause of their physical degradation and cured several Noskva on the spot using a magical piece of technology called a Regenerator. Then they’d given the Noskva a very harsh lecture on how they were misusing their technology at the expense of their own bodies. When the Noskva military had then attacked the scout ship in order to keep the secret quiet…well…the Empire did not respond well to such things, and the overzealous liars who ran the planet soon found themselves prisoners and Utinis was immediately annexed into a part of Star Force under ‘Ward’ classification.

That meant the Empire was responsible for providing everything necessary for the Noskva because they were either unable or unwilling to do it for themselves. One of their Archons had shown up, the legendary Jon-922813, who had completely remade their race over the following centuries, creating two pathways…one cyborg, one fully biological…and each Noskva was able to choose when they were young, for he forbid implants of their younglings immediately after birth.

The changes had not been well taken, but the power of the Empire could not be defeated…and many craved the technology that came with that Empire. As it almost always was, Star Force defeated the culture and traditions of the race in question and made them into a part of themselves…and made them better in the process.

Now, the Noskva had implants that were designed to plug into landlines wherever possible, and had short-ranged nodes everywhere else that used the minimum wavelengths possible to transmit data. Large packet transfers wouldn’t happen without a landline connection, and the transmitting antenna and receivers the Empire used were so damn sensitive they could carry far more information with even less packets of photons which all forms of radiation were comprised of…at least the standard forms anyway. There had been many others discovered over time, and some of which were utilized that were not harmful to biology…but those required large transmitters and could not be built into an individual’s implants.

The Noskva were only three meters tall, and their reptilian bodies were not allowed to be carved out to add more technology, so all of Lan-go-no’s implants were only surface deep with a limited amount of connective tissue between them…and that tissue was biological now, whereas in the past it had been purely artificial. Star Force still continued to make upgrades in them over time, and as for the transmitters that allowed for the seldom wireless transmissions, they were held on the outside of the body with shielding that would not allow it to penetrate within.

That made it directional, so they were constantly monitoring the position of nearby nodes and had multiple transmitters around their body, so they’d use the one that was pointed in the right direction at the right time rather than transmitting the radiation everywhere. Stars did that, so radiation wasn’t a new thing, but technology made it far more potent and dangerous, because the larger photon packets couldn’t penetrate one’s skin very far, but the smaller ones could. Comm signals were almost always made up of the smaller ones, and those would pass right through your body mostly. The part that didn’t was reflected or absorbed by random molecules that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And those were usually in sensitive organs that the skin would otherwise protect from the radiation of stars that were a cocktail of almost all wavelengths.

Star Force knew if they could reduce the radiation levels of the small packets similar to what stars naturally produced, or even lower, then the Noskva could still use their wireless technology like the rest of the Empire did…for on the go applications away from a proper data terminal. So the first thing they had upgraded was the omni-directional transmitters with line of sight models that would hone in on receiving stations. Then they reduced the power output of those receiving stations by utilizing better receivers in all the mobile equipment.

Sometimes less was more, and in the case of radiation that was also so. The Noskva hated the changes initially, because they could no longer do high data applications on the go, and had to find somewhere to plug in for it, but after a few years everybody got used to the new routines and nowadays nobody even questioned it. Mobile devices were for short, critical data transfers…not for watching holovids or extensive research.

Within the first year after Jon’s changes had went planet-wide, the radiative output of all the comm chatter on the planet using wireless communications reduced to 0.073% of the previous year.

And as a result, people started to magically live longer even without getting treatment from a Regenerator, and the list of mysterious ailments the Noskva came down with went down to near zero after Jon also got their food and water supplies straightened out.

Lan-go-no still couldn’t comprehend how his ancestors had been so adverse to basic infrastructure principles, but he’d also seen the same thing in his research on other races and civilizations that had been added to the Empire, whether forcibly or by choice. The status quo was something people clung to most of the time, and he considered himself fortunate that the status quo of the Empire was so well-thought out and refined after all these millennia that he didn’t have to second guess it.

That said, he had been taught during his Maturia training to second guess everything just for confirmation sake, and occasionally someone would spot something the Empire had missed or messed up. Those times were few, but the individuals who spotted the mistakes immediately became wealthy as Star Force would bestow a fortune on them for seeing what they had not, and those that simply accepted the status quo wouldn’t be looking for any problems with it. But the promise of great riches if you did find a problem had encouraged him and his maturia class to start questioning everything…especially when their Maturia built in certain flaws in their instruction so they could have something to hunt for. He’d managed to find two during those early years, and had gotten a small reward each time.

Since then, he’d never stopped questioning everything and was always looking for problems in the status quo, and now that was going to be more critical than ever.

For the Empire’s cyber web was under assault by the Jaeggers…and others.

It was the others that he was interested in, and using his landline he was doing some civilian research to assist the cyber combat teams that were handling the defense of the Noskva’s now 183 star systems. They had their own subnet within the Star Force communications grid, isolated in times of need like this, for cyborgs across the galaxy that were not part of Star Force and protected by its insane computer technology…which had been built by non-cyborgs, inexplicable as that was…were being hit and either damaged or enslaved to the new programming even if the Jaeggers were not physically present in that system.

It was happening across the galaxy, and no one could determine yet where the traffic was coming from, for Star Force’s own comm traffic was being vetted and the bits that were Jaegger sabotage that had initially gotten through were now being hard slammed into the deletion files…which were meant to record the traffic but not allow it to go anywhere else, and no one could access those files without special authorization and a dedicated system with no remote access. The files were considered hazardous, but as all software was, it could be analyzed later and potentially learned from, so standing protocol was to pin it in place and deny it access to anything else.

There were obviously no land lines between planets or stars, so anything getting to the Noskva’s net was coming in from the outside via transmissions and going through the Star Force comm stations that were typically situated in high orbit around stars beyond where the planets were. But ships passing through could also carry data, and it was the unsanctioned transfers where malicious coding was getting through and had to be combated internally.

And while the Noskva had not been permitted to upgrade their bodies with internal implants, other races beyond the Empire had, and if those implants were compromised by malicious code, they could die…or become zombie-like slaves to the code itself, with the technological components of their minds overriding the biological ones.

And someone out there was helping the Jaeggers, for there were too many plants going on halfway across the galaxy to have been occurring by Jaegger-infected couriers…which were also increasing in number. No, there had to be conspirators, and Lan-go-no was spending several hours of his day, every day, trying to help out his people with auxiliary research, as were many others. They’d learned in the Maturia that even a single discovery could help out, and when you had millions, if not billions of civilians scouring the galactic data webs of multiple races, not just those in the Empire, sooner or later they’d find something the professionals had either missed or had not had a chance to find yet.

The average Noskva, having lived most of their lives with technological implants and a direct neural link into computer systems, were natural hackers, and many in his race were stepping up to handle this threat to their Empire and to the Empire’s neighbors in any way they could.

Before him he had a map of all the known cyborg populations within the Milky Way, and he had connections to almost every one of them. Granted, they were not realtime, but packet transfers of bulk data could be requested and passed on through the direct radiation links, or by passing ships, for cyborgs had a standing rule to help carry data around through any means possible, and it was common courtesy to carry other people’s data to the nearest available relay station, and that practice had not ended with this Gauntlet War invasion.

But the cyborg races also had backdoor comm relays to link themselves to each other, and that dataload was massive compared to the rest of the Empire. It was through one of those systems that Lan-go-no was searching other cyborg statistics on the effect of the Jaegger cyberattacks, and the more advanced races were naturally reporting few incursions…successful ones anyway…but with one notable exception.

The Chamra were reporting none.

That seemed odd, for while they were one of the predominant cyborg races in the galaxy, they were not that far ahead of the Empire, if at all. Were they not being targeted by the Jaeggers?

He didn’t get answers quickly, usually days if not weeks until he could get data back from their worlds, but when someone requested something, others who requested it would instead be linked to the already existing file in their planetary database, so some things that Lan-go-no expected would take a while to find were instantaneous, and he discovered there was already a lot of data on the Chamra, meaning others had been looking into them as well.

It showed they had a special division to combat cyber warfare against outside aggressors called the Red Horizon Syndicate, and that they were not only successfully defending Chamra data nets, but they were aggressively striking back at the Jaeggers themselves where applicable, and it was usually against the enemy’s coding after it had already been downloaded into primitive cyber systems, including some cyborg races that had been converted to slaves within moments of the software hitting their nets.

Red Horizon had been taking over those populations, not to make them part of the Chamra, but to deny the Jaeggers the use of them, and they had been using their own dominant coding to do so rather than helping to purge the native’s systems and let them have their own minds back.

The Chamra had not apologized for this, saying it was necessary to keep them enslaved until they could develop countermeasures…and the neural interlinks in many of these primitive cyborgs were so full of holes they’d either have to physically remove them…which could not be done remotely…or they had to occupy them with their own software and fight the Jaeggers with it inside each individual’s mind from afar, without a direct realtime link.

So it had become a chess match of software vs software that the Chamra were at least holding their own at…except they were reporting agents on the ground on some of these planets who were upgrading the Jaegger attacks using realtime adjustments, and they were not Jaeggers themselves, but conspirators.

Red Horizon was sending out agents of their own to do the same thing, and they were looking for volunteers beyond just the Chamra to help them do it.

Lan-go-no knew immediately what he had to do upon reading that. The Empire had advanced teams out and about no doubt, but nothing like this that was accessible to him. The Chamra were offering to upgrade their implants with their own technology as well, which would mean he would become part of their collective, technologically speaking, and he’d have to go into physical danger on these worlds to spar with other agents that were in the same general locations…which was dangerous if they could track you and eliminate you rather than your software programs.

But Lan-go-no knew this was the role he needed to play in the defense of this galaxy, despite the fact he had no special training for it. The Red Horizon Syndicate was offering to train and upgrade volunteers in exchange for the hazards of the work they were undertaking.

The Noskva sent a message to the Chamra with a single thought, detailing his intent along with attaching files of his limited accomplishments within his own race. They wouldn’t be impressed with any of it, but he wanted them to know everything about him. If they could still make use of his limited cyborg stature, then he wanted in.

To his surprise he got a reply in a matter of seconds from an automated program already set up within this planetary datanet. It confirmed his membership in the Syndicate and booked passage for him offworld to a location where he’d be physically met by a recruiter and all other matters would be dealt with there, for they couldn’t risk such things crossing the interstellar comm lines.

Lan-go-no immediately unplugged from his station and stood up, looking at thousands of others seated and likewise plugged in, their eyes in cyberspace open but closed here. No one made a sound other than breathing as he got up and walked away, headed for a new planet, a new civilization, and a mission that would have far more impact on his fellow primitive cyborgs out there than he could ever have sitting plugged in here.

He was going to war, and the Chamra were going to teach him how to fight their way…which so far looked to be a match for the Jaeggers, so long as one of their baseships didn’t show up overhead and start converting your population into their cyborgs. No amount of foreign hacking was going to fix that when they had their own implants in you, for he doubted there would be any flaws in their systems that Star Force hadn’t yet found.

But you never knew for sure unless you checked it for yourself, and from here on out he was checking everything and anything hoping to find that tiny piece of data or coding that would help defend this galaxy and all the cyborgs within it. Every fight, every victory, no matter how small, mattered.

Even him. And while he hadn’t found any mistakes within the Empire since he’d graduated from his Maturia, he sensed he was going to get a chance to contribute many once he got inside the systems of the non-Star Force cyborgs out there that were being rewritten into new forms that were not well tested, for each hostile takeover had to be adapted to the race and the implants, and the hardwired software in each.

New stuff, new possibilities, new vulnerabilities…all of which sounded dangerous and necessary.

A worthy mission. He just wished he didn’t have to wait the expected 3 weeks, four days, and 14 hours before making contact with the Chamra. The enemy wasn’t waiting, and he wanted to get fully engaged in this cyber war sooner rather than later.

13

EG30

March 9, 158439

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Interstellar Space

Paul walked along the internal passageway of the nightcrawler they’d just picked up. It was the second of four in this galaxy, and it had come onboard immediately after sensing its brother. The Wranglers hadn’t even needed to coax it in, and now it was docked in the main bay of the Easter Basket alongside its brother who was slowly but remarkably adding more hull to fill the void that had been cut into it via battle damage. They were going to have to go back early to get more food, or have another transport meet them out here along the way.

At the moment, though, both nightcrawlers were content, though still damaged. While the 10 rings was hard to explain to them, it detailed exactly what was wrong…in so far as you could diagram the unseeable and unmeasurable aspects of a person. Bits and pieces you could identify, but most of the War Within was a mystery to outsiders, and only if you got a good grasp of the principles could you even navigate from the inside. Apparently it was one thing the Progarren had never fully realized, or at least they’d never taught the nightcrawlers, so with every day that passed both Paul and the team of Wranglers, who had far more experience than him speaking in the strange telepathic patterns that all heidoor seemed to use, were trying to put them through basic Maturia lessons tailored to their unique status and situation.

It seemed like the Progarren…which as far as Paul could tell were essentially good guys…had constructed the nightcrawlers as living ships to explore the areas between galaxies where there was no gravity to speak of. Using the darklight principles their type of lifeforms allowed, and blending them with starlight in a way only the Okala could have known about, they had developed a hybrid that could travel both places…just not where there was a lot of photonic energy.

But as far as training the nightcrawlers, it seemed there had been little of that, instead relying on genetic memory and using them as servants rather than teammates. Star Force wasn’t going to put up with that, so their first training lessons were coming now as they traveled between stars enroute to the third mental beacon Paul had in this galaxy.

The corridors inside this one…which they’d learned was named Sri’Tu’Na’Menis, which in Progarren simply meant 4682…were different than in the others, and it was because he was older and a different ‘model,’ but they were all built on the same internal architecture. They had a shell comprised of darklight tissue with bands of starlight material that could glow outward without hitting the shell as a defense mechanism against other darklight creatures, while there was also a thin coating of what was a very ingenious solar panel array comprised of a glossy black ‘paint’ for lack of a better word. Its own photonic energy was low and it was designed to pull excess into it and channel it through small holes in the shell to the inner layers that were made of starlight energy.

This allowed the nightcrawlers to travel inside galaxies so long as that coating was not overloaded. It also meant one nightcrawler could use its defenses alongside another and not hurt it too badly, as opposed to the darklight creatures that would have no defense against it.

At least, that was true of the Hades’ crowd. The other ones that were living along the edges of galaxies interested Paul far more, and it was possible they did have some defenses, for he guessed they were other races, like the Progarren, who had found a way to go where others couldn’t and had relocated there for any number of reasons. It was also one of them that had been hunting their first nightcrawler, and in order to do that they had to have weaponry of some sort as well, so he guessed they were either hybrids or they had regular tech carried out to those areas by their own nightcrawlers.

It was something that needed looked into, and even as there was a multi-galactic war heating up, the Empire was so big they had people that could do any number of things while others fought, and the Wranglers were one of those groups that straddled both duties, for the Uriti were interested in fighting, just not against the Hadarak. Star Force wasn’t going to send them into combat where they’d get chewed up, but with the armor plating and shields they’d created for them to wear, they could take a lot more hits now before having to tank the damage with their own bodies.

Still, the time to use them hadn’t come yet, and hopefully wouldn’t, and right now the best thing they could do was pump out more Essence for the warships with Materia to refill with.

The nightcrawlers couldn’t produce Essence, at least they weren’t designed to. Every person naturally had some, but learning to use it was difficult, and while it was possible to teach the nightcrawlers, that wasn’t by far the first lesson they needed to learn.

Back in the old days before Star Force and the plethora of useful information recovered from the pyramid database from the V’kit’no’sat, people had recognized trauma but didn’t really understand it. One lingering type was simply labeled ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ which was their arrogant doctors’ way of stating they didn’t have a clue what was actually going on, but they’d give it a fancy name to make people think they did. And all those words really meant were ‘something bad happened and you weren’t right afterwards.’

What actually happens is you get a mountain of experience in a very short period of time, or over a long grinding amount of time, depending on the case, and that creates stacks in your outer Rings, or your ‘Beach,’ far faster than normal, and as a result all types of trees spring up as fast as weeds grow after a good rain…and those weeds don’t go away on their own, so even after you get free of the traumatic environment, your ‘forest’ has all those unwanted trees in it, choking the life out of you. That’s why you can’t sense things the same way, because those bad trees interfere with the functionality of the good ones.

In essence, they block your view of the beach through the forest. Normally your Core could see out because all the good trees are lined up properly and your senses are clear as your trees do what they’re supposed to do…but when those good trees grow crooked, or new trees are planted in the wrong place, you’re able to see less and less of the Beach from your position in the center of the island. You can no longer get the cool breezes there, nor the harsh firestorms. Sometimes your body and mind grow the bad trees on purpose to try and encapsulate your Core from those firestorms…then after they pass and the cool breeze returns, you can’t feel it because those ‘blockers’ are still there waiting for the next firestorm.

Numbing up is a valuable skill your mind, and in some aspects your body, learns to do over the course of your life. But if it’s just happening automatically, and it doesn’t release when the stuff you’re numbing up against passes, your senses will either just not be there, or they’ll get all kinds of wonky as they get partial signals, then your imagination tries to process those wonky signals, trying out multiple variations to make sense of them, and that bad data actually turns your imagination into a pseudo sense itself, and when you lack real senses you start to interpret the imagination…akin to your own personal holodeck…as if it was real senses.

In this way, you can be trapped in your own house of horrors that are largely imaginary, but if you can’t sort out your senses and attune them to reality, the simulation power in your ‘holodeck’ can be one of your worst enemies. As the old saying goes, ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ and so is true of your imagination. It can do great things, but if it’s corrupted or inhibited in some way, it can also torture you with all kinds of nonsense.

The key to fixing that is not more simulations, it’s calibrating your senses to reality…but there’s the catch. If you’ve got all those bad trees blocking and corrupting your senses as your Core sits trying to listen and feel the breeze from the beach to see what’s outside the island of your body and mind, then you have to first remove the bad trees before you can calibrate.

Unless you’ve been trained to do this, your only hope is to come across another firestorm, or hurricane, or whatever that will knock down those trees and accidentally create a hole out to the Beach that will be your lifeline you cling to dearly. Sometimes that’s enough to recalibrate by, and your Internal Correction Mechanism starts reworking the branches that grew awry and deconstructing others that conflict with your base programming…in other words the really big trees in the inner Rings that define who you are. And that ICM is always working to tidy things up when they get away from their base state, and just giving it a chance to work sometimes is enough over the course of time.

But if you keep getting hit with storms and more bad trees continue to get planted, the ICM can’t keep up. That’s why you’ve got to get out of the storms…which Paul just accomplished by picking up these two nightcrawlers and ending their isolation, lack of proper food, and returning them to their family again…and then the ICM can start chipping away at the ill-grown forest.

But to truly control your own body and mind, you have to do a lot of that reworking yourself through training. And right now Paul needed to help these nightcrawlers cut down the bad trees in their forests and free their minds from the blackness they seemed to be locked in. To them they didn’t notice, because right now was so much better than a year ago, but Paul could feel how clogged their forests were. They just now had a lifeline through them to the Beach. It may have felt like they’d been healed, but it was only the first step in a very long journey to remake their forests into what they once were, or perhaps even better.

Paul always liked better. For him, the status quo was just a momentary resting spot before you dove into the future. Then again, it wasn’t just him. Pretty much all Archons thought that way.

He slid his fingers along the wall as he walked, feeling the smooth curves that were everywhere. There wasn’t a single straight line to be found. Everything had a very organic feel to it, while being made of materials that looked synthetic…yet everything in here, right down to the chairs and even the clothing the nightcrawlers could make, was technically grown. Even the food cubes that were designed for Progarren physiology were made by the nightcrawlers, taking molecules from the outside and absorbing them in and recombining them in case the crew ran out of cargo-packed supplies. The level of intricacy of their design rivaled what the lifesprings created, and here it was all geared to service of the Progarren in their explorations of the dark spaces between galaxies.

Paul could speak with this one telepathically whenever he wanted, and he guessed it was assumed that the crew would always be telepathic, for there was almost no means of manual controls in this living ship. It was more like riding a horse and nudging it this way and that. The ‘horse’ decided where to go and how while you were just cargo on its back if there was a disagreement.

Right now Sri’Tu’Na’Menis was essentially sleeping, though like Humans they never fully lost consciousness and their minds were always working, except in the case of the nightcrawlers it was more of an active sleep, for their internal and external senses never shut off completely except in one situation…where they were in a dock such as this and they had to do some massive regrowth to customize their internal structure.

That was the state the other one, Na’Fri’Tu’Ven, was in right now as it slowly filled in the hole in its body with new ‘decks’ being grown from a constant food supply being delivered to it via the physical contact it had with the berth it was in. You could walk up to it and knock on its hull and it wouldn’t notice, but Sri’Tu’Na’Menis could still see everything around it and within while it slept, ready to wake up at a moment’s notice if there was trouble or a call to service.

Unfortunately sleep wasn’t going to fix the 10 Rings inside them. That was an active war that had to be fought, and while healing the body and resting the mind did have an effect on the Rings, it was only through new experiences that they could be changed. Stagnation was an enemy that saw the status quo slowly melt away into goop as the ‘water’ from the ocean that came with experience was no longer pushed inland to the trees and they began to dry out and slowly die.

That’s why ‘resting’ often wasn’t very useful, and perhaps even harmful in some situations. No, in order to rework your messed up forest and win the War Within for the first, or perhaps second time, you had to be active and doing something that was beneficial in some way. If these had been Uriti Paul would have had them running laps through an obstacle course to give their movement ‘trees’ a good dose of fresh water to start revitalizing them, but right now they were pressed for time, and he didn’t want the others he hadn’t picked up yet to spend one more day alone and perhaps slowly dying out there, so these two would just have to ride along for now, and they seemed quite content to do that as they ate their first real food in millions of years.

“Trouble?” Jinni asked, walking up behind him in the corridor that seemed to produce no echo at all with his subtle foot strikes. Had he not been an Archon he probably wouldn’t have even noticed her coming up behind him.

“Plenty,” Paul said, stopping as he put a hand fully against a wall and closed his eyes for a moment. “These two are really messed up. The parts of them that are of the Saiolum I can get a feel for, and even their base molecular state is compromised. Who knows how many more of them there were like this that finally succumbed to the systematic damage. I’m glad we’ve got these two now, but it infuriates me to no end that the Progarren didn’t at least tell them what was happening and give them some basic orders. They’ve been completely lost, and that chaos probably got a lot of others killed that could have made it this far.”

“It did,” Jinni said, drawing a look from Paul as he opened his eyes. “I’ve been going through their memories, and back when they were still clumped together there was a lot of bad things going on. They had no idea where to go, so they went nowhere at first…then after a long time they started looking everywhere for the Progarren, and ended up going places they never should have gone. Some died, others got split up, and unless they’re close they can’t sense each other or contact the Progarren. They’re just not built for long range communications. They’re ghosts in the night, and these ghosts went out into the daylight looking for their masters…and suffered for it.”

“Their memories are a jumbled mess to me,” Paul admitted, taking his hand off the wall and replacing it with his shoulder as he leaned there.

“One of the few things I’m better than you at, then,” Jinni said with a smile. “It takes a long time to figure out how to navigate a heidoor mind. You expect to be reading letters and you end up with some numbers, emojis, and crayon markings instead. It takes a whole new mental framework to understand it, and it runs contrary to ours, which is why the learning curve is so steep. A worthy challenge, though.”

“It’s one I don’t have the time to tackle,” Paul said regrettably. “Is this one on the mend?”

Jinni nodded. “More so than the other. And Paul, we’ve got to give them real names. We always called the other one ‘nightcrawler,’ but that won’t do now. And your naming skills are far better than mine.”

“I’ve had a lot more practice,” he said in a monumental understatement. There was stuff throughout the Empire that the trailblazers had been naming since its inception, and Paul had done a bit more of it than most of his brothers and sisters. “Well, the other one is obviously Chewy.”

Jinni half laughed, half cringed at the reference to the ‘bite’ taken out of it. “That’s almost mean.”

“Naming him after the most famous Wookie is not mean. Besides, the name doesn’t matter, because the person or thing being named will redefine those letters after a while. I still remember thinking ‘Trunks’ was a horrible name the first time I heard it. Why would you name someone after a pair of shorts? But now it’s a badass name, so just consider ‘Chewy’ to be a placeholder that will be filled in with new meaning after you get to know him.”

“Shorts?” she asked with a smirk. “That’s what Trunks means?”

“Back before you were born, that was one meaning of ‘Trunks.’ Before Star Force came around and started to get people living forever, words altered quite quickly in meaning from one generation to another. Probably even faster before they had youtube videos to gain context from decade after decade.”

“What’s ‘you tube?’”

“A very primitive ancestor of Comm Access Network. We’ve improved on it a lot since those days.”

“Sounds like another dumb name that had meaning.”

“It did, but it ultimately failed due to bad management obsessed with censorship. Still, that first initial upgrade it gave to society changed it for the better, in most cases.”

“I still don’t understand how you and the first class are so impressive coming out of such a messed up planet?”

“We got a lot of experience fixing things,” Paul said pithily as they both got a telepathic summons from Saul, for their own comm technology wouldn’t penetrate the hull of the nightcrawler. They were coming up on their braking run into the next system where there should be their third rescuee.

“So what’s this one going to be called?” Jinni asked.

Paul thought for a moment. “Moya would be too obvious. But since he hopped right into the basket without any prodding, we’ll call him Hopper and the other one Van.”

“Van? As in a car?”

“Van as in ‘vanguard,’ since he was the first.”

“Oh. I guess a little context can take a dumb name and make it cool.”

“Yet some people are forever stained by the abomination of Harry Potter,” he said, slapping her on the butt as he walked by heading for the airlock umbilical.

“It’s not my fault my parents were psychopathic Potters!” she complained, then followed him a few steps later.

14

EG30

April 18, 158439

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Megatron Prime 12 System (Galactic Core)

Zatria

Mak’to’ran was on the surface of the planet when he got word of the arrivals. There hadn’t been an attack on Zatria for a year, and as such he’d begun rotating crews down to the planet as more and more V’kit’no’sat ships arrived to help defend it. He didn’t believe for one moment that the Jaeggers were going to continue to ignore this position, but he also had to make them pay for leaving it here intact.

His ships were periodically moving out to assault the Jaegger ships…the small ones…that were clustered around their two damaged baseships. He kept thinning them down with no personnel losses of his own, only drones, and he knew that was a winning strategy. Shiploads of replacement drones were coming in from across the Star Force Empire, but those coming here were being manufactured on V’kit’no’sat worlds and being shipped across the safe zones in Hadarak territory that Clan Kai’Sa was creating and expanding during their ongoing war with the Hadarak.

Mak’to’ran had been involved in that war his entire life, and only since joining Star Force had the V’kit’no’sat started to win it. But they’d held the line and protected many worlds from being exterminated over their long history, and each of those was a victory no matter how many Hadarak still operated in the Deep and Outer Core. Still, part of him wished to be finishing that old mission before beginning this new one, but the T’fen had not seen fit to give them the time, so the Empire was having to fight both at once, and Clan Kai’Sa had been created specifically to fight the Hadarak and reclaim territory from them. They would have no part in the war against the other races unless they got past the defenders at the gates…which they had here. Mak’to’ran could not stop the Jaeggers from going through, but at present it looked like they were busy assimilating primitive worlds in the Deep Core and nowhere near to where Clan Kai’Sa was operating.

He kept a lot of V’kit’no’sat ships along the string of worlds they’d colonized heading across Hadarak space, but so far there was no sign of Jaeggers there. Still, he’d had a feeling they’d be doubling back and hitting Zatria again. He just didn’t expect it to be another race doing it.

Intergalactic travelers matching the ship profiles of a race detailed in the Legacy Repository…which few V’kit’no’sat knew the secret of…had just begun coming out of their long braking maneuvers against Megatron Prime 12, but the leading elements were not moving near the Jaegger baseships. They were already transitioning around low black hole orbit and heading directly for the current position of Zatria further out, but doing so slowly so their numbers would build as a continual stream of small to medium-sized ships grouped up after arriving on slightly erratic braking lines.

That told Mak’to’ran their galactic jumps had not been so smooth as they’d liked, and they had entered a bit off course then adjusted once they got near the giant gravity well, but their targeting had got them close enough as they were immediately clearing the arrival zone to avoid random collisions with those coming in behind them in rather close spacing given the nature of the long intergalactic jumps.

The ships were known to belong to a race called the Monquo, and they appeared to be what the Archons referred to jokingly as ‘Volibears.’ They were small quadrupeds…at least compared to an Era’tran…covered in a mix of white and red hair with almost no tail to speak of. They had a notorious pack mentality, as well as a noted inability for subtle strategy. They liked to maul their opponents rather than outthink them, and it looked like that was their intent as they were massing for an attack clearly aiming for this world rather than passing it by and moving onto softer targets.

Mak’to’ran huffed, glad they were coming here, and glad they were such small ships rather than the planet-sized ones he had been dealing with. The files on the Monquo indicated they were not Essence capable aside from a few elite warriors, meaning their ships didn’t have that technology built into them, but they were noted for carrying enormous amounts of battle armor of a variety equal to or perhaps slightly better than Yeg’gor, even on their smaller vessels.

That meant they were going to be hard to take out, and he immediately advised his fleet that they should be targeting gaps in the armor to take out weapons, sensors, and other systems rather than just blindly firing into their blunt hulls that looked like a bowed head on a stubby neck, for they had a curve to them than bent down, and he knew from the Legacy records that they had a tendency to use the very thick armor on the front on the ship to ram others, breaking them apart while their ships remained otherwise intact.

This was a race that liked close combat and they’d designed their ships to last…but after fighting the Hadarak for so long with their likewise sturdy armor, Mak’to’ran wasn’t impressed, and he decided to stay on the planet to command what was going to be a very decentralized battlefield compared to the single opponents of the Jaegger baseships.

But as the Monquo continued to group up as they headed toward Zatria, Mak’to’ran got a heads up on the battlemap of a zone in between his repositioning fleet and the enemy that they were not supposed to enter.

That was nothing of his doing, but he soon saw the amendment tag indicating that it came from a trailblazer, Andy-082, who he did not even know was in the system, nor any of his ships. Only V’kit’no’sat vessels were showing on the battlemap, meaning that the trailblazer had either communicated this data from elsewhere or he was here in secret.

Mak’to’ran didn’t have to do anything. The order was already logged in the battlemap, but he suspected the V’kit’no’sat were going to get some unexpected help in this fight, for there was nothing indicating anything harmful in that zone, only that the fleet should stay out of it. If it had been something from the enemy there, even just a potential fire zone, there would have been an addendum detailing the threat.

The Era’tran clicked one of his large foot claws on the solid deck of the command center in the city that he was currently in, realizing that the V’kit’no’sat were not going to get the first shot at this new enemy. He was a little peeved at that, but was also interested in seeing what the trailblazer had planned. If Mak’to’ran hadn’t known he was here, he doubted the Jaeggers did either, and these Monquo had to be getting their information from them as they arrived.

That, or they’d just seen an intact Star Force world and headed to it immediately.

Their stubby, ram-head ships grouped up into a single long column that resembled a snake as it formed coming out of black hole orbit, and each of their ships…which ranged from 2 miles to 14 miles in length…was grouped in almost parade-style formations forming a hexagonal column thick with the little dots on the battlemap. It looked like they intended to run that column straight through Mak’to’ran’s fleet, and he immediately began repositioning his ships to counter what would be a deadly assault against whatever ships were in the way and nearby.

If he was stubborn enough to hold his ground, he’d lose ships and not just drones, but he had long ago lost his ego and knew this was not a contest of wills, but rather of strategy. That column would have to break up eventually or it would snake around orbit and give Mak’to’ran an easy flanking opportunity. Or, it could ram the planetary shields and try to punch through, but the files didn’t say anything about shield penetrating technology, or planetary ramming tactics, so he assumed they were coming here to first deal with his ships, which he was going to keep close enough to the planet to get an assist from the surface weaponry.

If the dumb ‘Volibears’ wanted to come straight at him, he’d be the one choosing where they fought. He took a moment to look up the reference, finding it was due to yet another ancient videogame, and in that game the bear-like character had a penchant for dropping to all four legs and charging at an opponent.

So the nickname apparently had a tactical component in it as well, and they appeared to be setting up for just such a run as their fictional namesake. But they were going to pass through that marked zone long before they got into firing range of his ships or the planet.

It took several hours for them to get to that point, which Mak’to’ran watched patiently, as did many others, trying to learn anything of value from this new enemy’s movements as their ship count reached 50,000 and continued to climb as the stream from a nearby galaxy had not yet ended. And all of them were coming this way to join the giant snake column as the head of it just touched the edge of the marked zone.

When nothing happened immediately, Mak’to’ran assumed it was a general zone to keep his ships away and that the threat would probably be deeper inside it, and he was right. They moved some 9% of the total width of the zone before the first of their ships ran into something.

It was an explosion, but small compared to the size of the Monquo ships. It detonated spreading a visibly glowing green goo across their shields, but rather than cancel out against them, bounce off, or slowly fizzle, it stuck to them like paint.

Multiple ships were hitting them now, and the tiny little explosions were marking the ships as they passed through some kind of mine field…and each time one went off, there was a brief transmission on a wide range of frequencies.

“Ha, ha, ha.”

It was a high-pitched laugh, not exactly the same each time, but as the Monquo column continued to push through the zone the number of impacts escalated, as did the laughs, spamming so much Mak’to’ran just muted them as his fleet’s long range sensors began to detect fluctuations in the Monquo shields.

Then he got a message from nowhere, with the trailblazer ordering him to bring his fleet out to a different box…one in between the current one and the planet…with the message indicating that he should be prepared to use his ships’ weaponry in addition to the drones to ‘take advantage of a short-lived opportunity.’

Mak’to’ran trusted the trailblazer and immediately had his fleet begin breaking orbit and heading directly towards the Monquo, but at a speed far less than microjump speeds, so they’d be able to slow down and engage them rather than just make a flyby…and they definitely could not make a flyby through that field.

Mak’to’ran watched his ships moving, wishing now that he was up there rather than down here, but as they got closer and their sensors were able to pick up more information, he was able to see that the green glowing goo was actually spreading slightly on the ships.

And it was doing so by eating away at their shields.

Mak’to’ran accessed the database on the planet, looking for information on what this weapon system was. He brought up the Clans, then had to use his special access codes to view the specialized weaponry some of them had made. He brought up the files for Andy’s Clan and scanned through a very long list of unique weaponry until he found a shield draining mine that matched what he was seeing go off against the enemy ships.

It was called a ‘Shroom,’ and it would slowly reduce a ship’s shields down to zero if they didn’t know how to alter their matrix in a specific way to either expel it or negate it, but doing either would still eat up some shield energy, just not all of it.

Which was why his ships had to avoid them as well, even though the parameters for the negation would automatically activate in all Star Force ships should they encounter one…or so the file said.

He’d never heard of this weapon before, but if it was taking down their shields then his ships would have an opportunity to start plucking away their weapons and expanding on those little holes to get down through the thick armor to the interior of the ships. And if they were like Hadarak in any way, they’d ‘kill’ the ships without detonating them, leaving them floating hulks with mostly intact exteriors while the inside decks would be gutted.

That armor was still going to be a major problem, but getting their formidable shields out of the way was definitely a gamechanger…and it wasn’t just the leading ships that were taking shroom hits, so the field must have either been staggered with a drift to it, or the mines could move about on their own to get in the way of the oncoming ships that were tracing the exact same paths as those that got hit, either because that’s the way their formations worked, or they were doing that to try and avoid more mines.

But apparently Clan Teemo had foreseen and countered such a strategy, because thousands of their leading ships were taking Shroom hits as they passed through the field en mass.

The only way they could have got those cloaked mines there was with cloaked ships, and there was no way they could have predicted the path of the Monquo before they arrived, for the orbit of Zatria would always keep shifting the path from the black hole to get here. That means the trailblazer must have a fleet of cloaked ships here that were laying down that field, perhaps even now adding more of them as the stupid Monquo passed by unknowing.

Then as the V’kit’no’sat fleet’s leading drone swarms were about to get in firing range on the first of the now shieldless enemy ships, one of the cloaked Clan Teemo vessels appeared between them and fired some sort of energy bolt at one of them. It traveled slowly, like a Bloon launcher, and it had managed to fire off three at different ships before the first one hit.

And detonated into a technological Po’letvo darkness shield around the entire ship, except this one was one way only. The V’kit’no’sat could see the enemy ship vaguely, for their sensors wouldn’t penetrate it, nor would anything else, meaning it was blinding that individual ship to what was outside it.

They could see in, but it couldn’t see out.

The Clan Teemo warship immediately started to take fire, but after shooting off a few more ‘Darts’ it ran back towards the V’kit’no’sat fleet, and once it was out of firing range recloaked again.

And all behind it, there were dozens of other uncloaking Clan ships doing the exact same thing…and blinding the Monquo ships temporarily so they couldn’t see what to shoot back at as the V’kit’no’sat fleet began firing in through the darkness field without damaging it.

The Monquo fired back, and that too passed through, but they couldn’t see specifically where they were shooting, so they just had to guess at the incoming weaponsfire and backtrack it, but with moving drone swarms that was impossible, making any hits they got just blind luck…pun intended.

The darkness fields didn’t last long, about 22 seconds in duration, but the Clan Teemo ships were circling back and firing more Darts and blinding more ships.

Mak’to’ran watched in awe as the trailblazer disabled rather than destroyed the leading edge of the enemy ships…as his own utterly owned the enemy and destroyed several hundred of them before the Monquo even bothered to break apart their snake formation and fan out into a more conventional battlefield…but that didn’t save them, for the cloaked ships were popping into view everywhere, blinding a ship or two, then disappearing again…with no sign on the battlemap where they were, meaning the Clan ships were taking it upon themselves to evade the V’kit’no’sat ones and avoid a collision, whereas cloaked ships usually transmitted a rare, faint signal so they could navigate with each other in groups.

Mak’to’ran could detect no signal, and checking the secret Clan files he didn’t find a method of coordination that could operate without it, so he studied their movements carefully as the carnage continued and he let his ship commanders handle their own tasks. He didn’t need to interfere with anything, it was such a one-sided rout. But after a while he began to sense a pattern to the Clan ships once he was able to identify several of them…for they were not transmitting IFF signatures during their brief appearances that named their ships, only a simple Star Force Clan Teemo marker…he used battle damage to start making a list of his own, and what he found they were doing was damn simple.

Each ship had its own zone to operate in, and as long as they didn’t overlap zones, they couldn’t run into each other…but that meant those individual Clan ships had to be evading both his ships and the Monquo when they passed through those zones…meaning their navigators must have been having a hell of a time avoiding collisions and still having time to pop up and blind a few more ships.

Add in all the small wreckage from the blasts that might be impacting on the cloaked ships and potentially giving them away if someone was watching close enough for the collision bounces, and what they were accomplishing was damn impressive…as well as damn effective.

He unmuted the ‘laugh’ channel, hearing even more coinciding with each time one of the ships decloaked and fired. What he had thought was annoying before was now a mark of pride as the cacophony of laughs were overlapping so much it was a reassuring noise that must have been driving the enemy crazy as the leading edge of their invasion of this galaxy was going horribly wrong in such an unanticipated way.

The data on the Monquo stated they liked to engage their opponents head on…but you couldn’t do that with cloaked ships coming at you in ambush attacks, which made this sort of Clan augment of his fleet the perfect tactic to use against them while the V’kit’no’sat laid down the heavy end of the hammer against an opponent that was used to doing the same.

Except a lot of them couldn’t see what they were shooting at, and they had weakened or completely dissolved shields from the Shrooms. And some of the Clan Teemo ships were also firing smaller packets of that shield eating ‘poison’ at the ships that had missed the shrooms when they popped into view. Clan Teemo was doing virtually no damage at all, because they weren’t sticking around long enough to engage with real weapons…and Mak’to’ran wasn’t sure how many of those they had on those ships along with the ‘special’ ones. But they were by and far the best support ships he had ever seen in Star Force, let alone any empire.

And until the Monquo figured out how to counter these unique weapons, they’d either have to back off and regroup or keep on coming to get easily destroyed by the V’kit’no’sat.

And to his dismay, but not his total surprise after reading the summary on their tactics, they opted for the latter and just kept on coming, intent to batter their way through the enemy even if their attacks weren’t very effective. For they were destroying some drones, but unless their reinforcements were never-ending, this wasn’t a battle they could win.

And if they were never-ending, or near to it, then Mak’to’ran was going to hold this position as long as he could before retreating to the planet and do as much damage as possible.

He just hoped Clan Teemo had brought a lot of their special weapons ammo with them, because if they had, his fleet could hold position and do this all day long…

15

EG30

July 9, 158439

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Deep Core

System 339281

1st planet

House Atriark had not been involved in the initial fighting against the T’fen’s servants. Instead they had laid back and waited. Reignor Plausius had offered their help against the Hadarak, for with their Essence weaponry they could clear worlds of their minions in a single attack…but Clan Kai’Sa had declined that offer, wanting to capture and convert the Hadarak rather than kill them.

House Atriark had helped them with this as Star Force began training a large batch of new Neofan younglings that had been recently born to start replenishing their race…a task that would take longer than this war, for while Neofan may get to physical maximum height in only 12 years, it took at least 120 to fully hit maturity and fill out their otherwise thin frames. But mastering one’s Essence took far longer, and until an individual could carry themself in that regard they were still considered too ‘young’ to be considered an ‘adult.’

The Construction was the process Neofan went through during these times, which was intensely regulated activities, training, and rituals utilizing talismans that provided a mental template for them to match. Every time they telepathically bonded with a talisman they’d get another ‘hit’ on that template and let it soak into them. Over time they’d naturally adapt to it, or they could do so faster by choice. Using grafts on young was forbidden, for their minds had not advanced enough to handle it and the higher level knowledge and skill that would go with it. So the talismans were the way they brought all Neofan into line initially. Afterwards they were required to keep themselves in the proper construct as measured by their ‘aura’ that was a technological readout of their current physical, and mostly mental status, as viewed through a telepathic analysis.

Neofan who fell out of alignment were banished from their civilization if they could not get back into alignment quickly, for fits of rage were common without a tight control over one’s emotions. Star Force had jokingly compared them to buff Vulcans, and while they did not like the comparison, they had to admit there was some truth in it. A Neofan was expected to be calm at all times, even in battle, else they risk reacting by instinct and unleashing abilities too dangerous to be used unregulated. That was why forethought was essential to a Neofan’s Construction, even if that forethought only took a handful of seconds.

Star Force was not teaching them this, and it was best that only the Reignor and a few others knew of how radical the training of the Neofan offspring was. Problems had been reported, but those were expected based on how the lesser advanced Furyans had behaved, and so far, while the oldest of the young were at full size, the aura readings that were being reported back to House Atriark were shocking.

Aggression was not being suppressed, it was being drawn out and refined, and reaction times were reported at less than a second…whereas it was imbedded into the young with talismans to be at least 8 seconds. Older Neofan could trim that down with experience, but Star Force was completely undermining everything it meant to be Neofan. These offspring were going to become an abomination that had to be destroyed.

Or so House Atriark would have thought if they knew. Plausious kept these reports to himself, curious as to how Star Force would confront this problem, for he did not want future Neofan to be amoral, low emotional demi-gods. He wanted them to become Jedi, or some form of it, and while he had gotten to that point via an unreplicateable path, Director Davis had promised him that their training would be lightside-based, as all Star Force training was.

Yet this was a long term experiment. These Neofan, even if successfully constructed, would never be ready to assist their House…now Houses…in this war. Not in any meaningful way, at least.

Which meant Plausious had all the Neofan he was going to get at this point. There could be a handful of stragglers that hadn’t shown up yet, and he’d take every one he could get, but most of the exiles were going to House Phoenix for their own reasons. Perhaps they saw it as a future different from the past, and House Atriark had a long past, but it didn’t matter. He’d fight this war with whoever he had available, and right now was the time to start fighting.

Star Force’s two invasion lines had breached. Not completely with the Asferja. They were still mostly bottled up with some leakage here and there, but the Bru’son were able to slip past them with their cloaking devices. They were not intended to take planets, but to destroy shipping lanes and cause havoc in the ‘safe’ areas. But worse than that was the Jaeggers. Their planet-sized ships were virtually unstoppable by all except Star Force’s most advanced Essence vessels and the Veloqueen.

The Reignor admired his old allies and their massive Essence potential, but they had to regenerate it slowly from their own bodies, whereas the Neofan could draw from the wells in the Temples. Still, they had done well to disable one of the baseships each, but neither were destroyed, and they were now sitting near their arrival point slowly rebuilding themselves with a third alongside them to assist with the repairs and guard them against further attack.

The fact that they’d tried to take the one Star Force planet in that black hole system and failed was encouraging…for it would have given those ships raw materials to work with. Denying them that meant those two damaged baseships would remain damaged for a long, long time unless they were able to leave the system or get shipments back to them with repair parts enough to get them mobile again.

The other baseships that had arrived had simply passed through enroute to other locations where they were assimilating native races…but not the heidoor, curiously. They were going for socani only, meaning those lifeforms that lived on planets rather than in space or in stars.

They were building up additional troops to invade other planets, but still, why not take control of heidoor to add to your war fleet? Did the T’fen forbid it because they too were heidoor, or was there another reason?

Regardless, they were spreading out, and breaking apart their planet-sized ships into smaller sections so they could take over hundreds of systems simultaneously…and because of that breakdown, Plausious had decided it was time to take on some of this burden in a way only the Neofan could.

Three Gjardans had been trailing a Neofan scout ship as it followed one of those baseship chunks, which Star Force had started calling ‘Ice cubes’ despite the fact that their dimensions were not precisely cubical, but their edges were smooth, so the metaphor held up somewhat. The Ice Cube in question could see the trailing scout ship, but the Gjardans were in another system and out of range. When the Ice Cube made a jump, the scout ship would signal the hunters and they would come to the next system, so forth and so on.

The Ice Cube had finally stopped in System 339281 and had moved into low orbit over a large planet, then it split off another fourth of itself into a smaller Ice Cube that traveled out to another planet, for two were inhabited here by a race of large cat-like quadrupeds that had achieved some level of technology…but not to the level of interstellar travel. The Neofan didn’t even have a name for this race, nor did Star Force, for this system was not on any of their maps as more than just a dot with the number of planets and moons indicated.

Apparently the enemy had better maps of the Deep Core than they did, and that was most likely due to the Hadarak, though why they hadn’t taken over this system already was a mystery. In a purge they were supposed to destroy everything in the galaxy and let it reset, but there were a lot of primitive races in the Deep Core that were not heidoor that had been left untouched, and it was those races that were being gobbled up by the Jaeggers.

By the time the 3 Gjardans arrived, tiny little bits of the first Ice Cube had flaked off and landed on the planet to begin harvesting the locals, but it was the big Ice Cube itself that the Neofan were interested in. It far outmassed them, measuring a total of 4,290 miles in length and about half of that wide, with a piece of it missing now out in orbit around the other planet. Before it could have a chance to join up again the Neofan sent to hunt these Ice Cubes by Reignor Plausious raced into orbit around the planet, braking at near maximum deceleration, and emerged just beyond it and began firing immediately.

The ‘flakes’ coming off it or coming back up were targeted immediately and disappeared with two or three hits each while huge beam weapons, Essence enhanced, tested the strength of the Ice Cube’s shields…but at the same time multiple Essence-only attacks were also launched. Jaeggers had Essence-enhanced shields, but that didn’t mean they’d stop every attack, and the Neofan were quickly cycling through everything they had to see if any of them would get through, or at least be more effective at draining the Essence component of the enemy’s shields.

As they did, the Ice Cube returned fire, with thousands of hidden weapons emplacements pouring down a torrent of green and blue energy blasts, some beams, other balls and lightning-like strikes, as flocks of their ships that had been riding on parts of the surface of the Ice Cube moved out beyond the shields and began making attack runs against the three white ball-shaped ships that appeared to be at a significant mismatch.

But the ‘smaller’ ships held their position, ignoring the mobile fleet the Ice Cube had dispatched and kept probing the big base’s shields as their own seemed to impossibly hold up against the onslaught. There were visible rings rising up out of the Neofan ships that met the shield perimeter in a very odd fashion…and it was one technique apparently the Jaeggers didn’t know of, because it boosted shield strength dramatically when you didn’t have to fully project them outside of the defended target.

Those rings had shields of their own to protect their mass, while the rest of the ship was guarded by the reinforced shields that ate up all the weaponsfire coming in without even having to use an Essence-enhancement. All the Jaegger weapons being used were conventional ones, while the Neofan were hitting them with all kinds of Essence attacks…one of which finally found a way through, and the Kra’ney bolt, a pure Essence weapon, ignored their regular shield dynamics entirely, melting the Jaegger’s Essence barrier at the point of impact only, then slid on through at 83% cohesiveness and impacted their hull with dramatic effect.

It chewed into it first, then exploded…bit by bit in what looked like a wave that stretched out for miles in radius before the effect ran its course…and in its place was a debris field with matter chunks no larger than a Neofan’s balled up fist.

As soon as that first Kra’ney penetrated, all three ships started firing them en mass, and suddenly the Ice Cube started coming apart one layer at a time with the debris being held inside its own shields…which was helping to block more Kra’ney slightly, but they still landed on the obscured hull with more than 95% integrity left.

That continued for several minutes before the Jaegger mobile ships began ramming the Gjardan’s at close range and splattering off their shields to no effect. Then they moved out and started ramming them from further distance…only to pass through harmlessly after a little stint in the Essence Realm.

The Neofan had long ago learned how to deal with kamikaze attacks and simply set up a portal-like field over a certain area and anything going into it would transition across the ship and out another on the far side, making reversion inside the ship itself impossible. The areas of the ship that were firing weapons couldn’t be covered, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was thwarting most of the attempts to weaken or destroy the Gjardans’ shields, but three of the ships normally considered to be ‘massive’ until the Jaeggers had arrived were more than capable of dealing with the mobile fleet the Ice Cube had been sent here with.

Soon it was clear that the Gjardans were not going to be removed or destroyed, so the Ice Cube…or the diminishing parts of it…moved up higher in orbit with the Gjardan trailing it and staying in firing range of their Kra’ney most of the time, though the weapon had a more limited range than others.

The Ice Cube eventually got to the jump point to head back towards the star and disappeared in the blink of an eye…followed by three more little blinks as the Gjardans raced after it, leaving behind some specks of dust that were in fact Neofan landing craft as the Jaegger smaller ships fled along with the Ice Cube trying to defend it.

That left this planetary orbit more or less open, with only a handful of transport ships rising up or going down. They all went evasive to stay away from the Neofan, who did not chase. Instead they headed down to the surface where there were already makeshift Jaegger bases set up and smaller collectors out capturing the local population.

One of the Neofan transports set down right next to the largest base as Jaeggers spilled out of multiple buildings by the hundreds and began firing on it with handheld weapons. The few turrets that were operational were on the prefab buildings themselves and were also ignored. Instead, music started playing from the ship as a ramp slowly descended and three Neofan slowly walked out with the transport’s shields protecting them from the hail of dozens of weapon impacts per second.

Nurso stood in the center of the three Neofan as they stopped at the bottom of the ramp, listening to the dramatic music that they’d adopted from Star Force. If there was one thing their Empire knew how to do well, it was make an entrance, and their battle song ‘Duel of the Fates’ was one of the Neofan’s favorites.

Jiol, to his right, sent out a telepathic warning to all the Jaeggers in a way that they were sure to understand, for it was in their own language that Star Force had already deconstructed and shared with their allies.

You have three options of defeat. You can run away. You can surrender. Or you can die. Choose wisely.

Nurso waited several moments, giving them the required chance to live their Reignor demanded, then he walked forward through the transport’s shield and began taking weapon hits on his own. It appeared like a bubble around him, but appeared no weaker. His two counterparts did the same, making it clear that they were the superior warriors here.

But the Jaeggers didn’t run or surrender, they just kept firing until one rushed Nurso and jumped up at him.

The Neofan flicked an arm and batted the smaller biped away with a concussion blast, never even making physical contact with him.

“Death it is then,” he said, walking forward and gesturing to various individuals…only to have them keel over, explode, or cut to pieces by various psionic or Essence attacks.

Still, the Jaegers would not run or surrender. Instead, they all charged, hundreds of them that were still gathering from multiple locations…including a few that matched the images of the locals that they had taken from orbital surveillance on their way down to the planet.

The Jaeggers had already converted some of them…and they were now about to fight against their own rescuers!

The Neofan had no time for theatrics, for more were probably being converted this moment…and when that realization hit Nurso, all three Neofan ran or jumped forward in different directions and started slaughtering the Jaeggers with such ease that it didn’t even appear to be a fight. After less than a minute all of them were dead…except for the converted locals who they had disabled and rendered both unconscious and held within invisible physical bonds. Nurso and Jiol rushed off towards the buildings where the conversions were taking place to free the thousands of penned up locals they sensed there as Viri stayed with the 16 that had been captured.

She knelt over one, with her larger mass and the cascade of prominences blocking out most of the sky as Viri studied the myriad of implants visible on the black-furred muscular cat. The hair had been cut off around it, and the damaged pink skin around the edges of the implants demonstrated their crude technology. At the minimum that tissue should have been nanite reconstructed within minutes of implementation…and the Neofan had a long history of doing such augmentations to their servants, so she knew these Jaeggers were either crude in technological comparison or they just didn’t care to be neat with their conscripts.

She touched one of the blocky implants and injected it with nanites from her own armor that covered her hands, forearms, and everything below the waist, plus the crude crown she wore on her head. They were all networked together into one unit while allowing the grey torso skin to show along with the subtle gill-like flaps on the lower chest…but she was well protected by her energy shields, and if need be could extend the armor across her entire body. But doing so would be a sign of a fair fight, and these Jaeggers were nowhere near their equal as a group, let alone as individuals.

Using her nanites she penetrated the first of the implants, finding its software far more impressive than the implementation process. Viri couldn’t quickly hack it, so she simply had the nanites start physically disconnecting it from the individual…only to find poison nodules deep within the body that were set to detonate if the implants were not removed in an approved process.

“I will not be denied,” she said, letting the poison burst and start doing massive damage to the captured individual as she pushed Essence into his body to heal him just as fast…except additional mass was needed, so the surrounding ground suddenly started to diminish as dust flew up towards the cat and was being molecularly altered into useful compounds.

Piece by piece she removed the recently implanted hardware, finding it more difficult than it should have been, leaving only those sections in his brain to deal with…which were beyond her, for pieces of the cat’s brain had actually been removed and replaced with the hardware.

Viri growled, and simply destroyed the transmitter so it couldn’t network with the other Jaeggers as she saw a stampede of the cats leaving one of the buildings, having been freed before they could suffer the same fate. They could speak, but it seemed they didn’t want to stick around to thank their rescuers, and ran as fast as possible across the grasslands with a speed she could at least respect.

“A problem?” Nurso asked as he returned to her.

Viri stood up. “I cannot remove the mental augments. It will take a proper healer to do so. They did not just add technology, they took out part of the brain.”

“As we have done,” he reminded her.

“And will never do again,” she countered, citing the command of their Reignor. “If we are to be truly victorious here, we must defeat this augmentation. They all are still under the Jaeggers’ control until we do.”

“Agreed. They did not get to many here, so we should be able to handle these onboard a single Gjardan. They will not be prisoners for long.”

“At this rate, if the Jaeggers are not countered, they will quickly double their numbers.”

“They will not do so here.”

“No, but there is a greater threat.”

“Explain.”

“See for yourself,” she said, telekinetically flicking him one of the implants.

He studied it with his armor’s nanites as well, unsure what she meant, and then he found it too.

The implants had a number of preset genetic codes for them to easily interface with. Genetic codes that had been planned to be assimilated at some point with places in their biology engineered to hold specific implants once captured.

“The Hadarak minions,” he said, crushing the small square plate in his fist. “They plan to assimilate those dumb brutes as well.”

“So why start with these when there’s a galaxy of pre-made converts?”

“A good question. Perhaps they prefer technologically advanced races for their natural brain power while the Hadarak would be weapons and labor only.”

“We have to destroy their baseships as quickly as possible, or their invasion alone will become a nightmare. The Hadarak are formidable enough without technology.”

“Indeed. We need to inform the Reignor of this immediately…”

16

EG30

November 18, 158439

THREE MUSKETEERS GALAXY

Interstellar Space

Deenat #281

The Easter Basket had just left the Essence Realm, popping back into a starfield within a portal ring not located inside a Temple, but out in the emptiness of interstellar space. The Deenat were designed for ships not going to the Temples but still traveling on the intergalactic network, so they could come and go without an extra Essence jump to get through the Temple walls. They had also been constructed to further conceal the location of the Temples, so the limited traffic that was moving around wouldn’t be emerging into star systems near their locations.

Right now there was almost no gravity whatsoever for the Star Force-built ship’s engines to operate on…but that was alright. It had a small Essence drive that could troll the ship around in the gravitaic doldrums of the galaxy if needed, and they had used it already on a few occasions to give them a little push in the direction of the nearest star. The Founders had not wanted these Deenat to be accessible by those who could not use Essence, hence they were far enough away from a star system that there wouldn’t be anyone that could get out to them even if they detected the deep space rings, which were sensor stealthed as it was, though not fully cloaked.

But this time Paul didn’t have the ship use its Essence drive. Instead of waste some of the precious resource, he had the four nightcrawlers they’d picked up in Andromeda do some pushing instead. They’d been penned up inside the big ship for a while now, and while they were quite happy to sit here and bask in each other’s company after so long away, Paul knew they could use a little activity…and they wouldn’t even have to go outside to do it.

Each of them could travel using either gravity drives or darklight energy, and he instructed them to do the latter. They began spilling it out around them like the ink from an octopus, and upon that ‘ink’ they had traction, for it essentially gripped the fabric of the universe in a way that physics didn’t allow. The same was true of Essence, though it accomplished it in a different way. Each of the four nightcrawlers laid down a trail that would persist behind them, making their own roads they could follow backwards on with ease, but going forward was slower because they were having to lay those roads.

Paul had them line up in their berths, two on either side of the chamber, so that the two in the rear could travel on the path the first two made and push on their docking arms after a little rework to the structure to make it strong enough and to match their hull shape.

The result was he had four black ovoid reindeer pushing the big sleigh, and he got far more speed out of it than he had hoped as they drove towards the nearby star, protected from its minimal light this far out by the ship, but they could take it all the way up to low stellar orbit and still be fine.

Paul didn’t need them to do that much work, just get in close enough for the gravity drive to start helping out…but the change in the four of them, even Na’Fri’Tu’Ven aka ‘Chewy’ with the slowly shrinking hole in him, was amazing. They finally had a mission and work to do, and all four of their telepathic auras suddenly came alive in a way that shocked all the Wranglers.

And it was in that moment Paul decided to give them new names…Dasher, Dancer, Donner, and Blitzen…and they carried the big ‘sleigh’ in towards a yellow/orange star more than a lightyear away, gaining speed with every second as they accelerated.

And the cool thing about darklight was, it laid down on the ‘fabric’ of the universe at whatever speed you were moving, so it was a relative placement that drifted with your own momentum. Essence didn’t do that, for it grasped the ‘base grid’ of the universe, if you wanted to conceptualize it that way. And if a galaxy was going way faster than that, laying down a carpet of darklight would be complicated. Fortunately Essence drives didn’t ‘lay a carpet,’ but the darklight creatures did, and that carpet was relative to their movement. So if they laid down one on the edge of a galaxy, it would stay there and drift the direction the nightcrawler had been the moment it put it down.

So the ‘reindeer’ were laying down a Nocturn-like trail behind them that was stretching out over time, but the energy itself would not diminish except for its interaction with starlight…meaning photons. The ship had plenty of those in it, and that left the darklight carpet coming out behind them quite a bit rougher than normal, but the trail was still there and would be for a while, though the closer they got to the star the quicker it would wear away.

But inside the ship, the nightcrawlers had no problem whatsoever producing the energy or traveling on it…though they did have to take breaks, for they only had so much of the energy built up inside them, but they didn’t have to wait to coast further in, because the first two nightcrawlers in line simply swapped with the two behind them that had been riding their trails, then they got to rest from ‘carpet laying’ and just push on the fresh energy the new front two were creating.

Paul was glad there had been four in Andromeda to get this sleigh moving, and to balance it out. In Three Musketeers he sensed an appropriate three of them, two of which were in the same location, making their stay in this galaxy only half as long as in Andromeda, though they were already a year into this pickup effort as the war raged on without his ability to monitor any of it.

It was a team effort though, and it was his job to do this part of the effort because he was the only one who could. And just because a war was going on, that didn’t mean the Empire didn’t have thousands of other things to do in the areas where there wasn’t fighting yet…and those were most areas. The galaxy was huge, and most of it would be uninterfered with for a long time, but Paul knew the biggest battles were going to be happening now, not in numbers of ships or people, but in consequence. If and when the enemy got inside and set up a proper base of operations, they’d begin spamming and the war would become much harder. They were at their most vulnerable having traveled across galaxies with limited personnel and resources.

They had to build more here, and to do that, they had to get set up in territory of their own. And the longer Star Force denied them that territory…well, the better it would be. But once the enemy got some, it would start to snowball against the Empire and would become a slugging match at the highly defended worlds he and the others had worked so long to create. But in truth, if they let it get that far, they were probably going to win a stalemate at best. If they had the strength to beat the enemies coming at them, they’d win up front and turn them back. If not, the Gauntlet War would probably succeed even if it took a million years to do it.

That’s why he had left the Deebees and gone to Andromeda, for these first initial moves were so damn important, especially with a race like the Asferja that had lizard-level spamming capability. They didn’t need to bring an army with them, they just needed to bring their queens and get some quiet time to reproduce. Then they’d grow an army in Star Force’s back yard, or better yet, Andromeda…which he had needed to disrupt as much as possible as their own spamming force started to get a foothold.

He knew Thrawn would be formidable, and had gotten him past the weakest first stages of civilization development, but he still hated being out of these early fights, for every small advantage for the enemy could yield exponential results going forward.

But still, even if they got a foothold, it wasn’t over. It would just get very, very nasty, and a lot of civilian populations across the galaxy wouldn’t be able to be evacuated in time. In order to move entire planets of people out of harm’s way, they had to at least slow, if not contain, the enemy’s advance.

And the best way to do that was to deny them a foothold entirely.

He couldn’t do that in Andromeda. They were already too well set up and he didn’t have the necessary forces to fix that. Thrawn would grow those forces eventually, but the Asferja had got here first and they had won their sizeable foothold. Hopefully that would be trimming down a bit, but it was hard to say being a year out from last contact.

And now Paul was in his third galaxy. One not even scouts from Star Force had set foot in. Since they’d been on nice terms with the Neofan recently they’d started sending out advance teams to several, but not Three Musketeers. Not yet anyway, so these few Archons were the first here, but the stars looked pretty much the same as they did in any other galaxy. Same colors, same approximate spacing, and even the Deenat they’d left behind them looked the same.

But it wasn’t. It was an entirely different playground out here, and the universe seemed to inexorably have an unlimited number of them. The sheer scale of the universe, when he let his mind expand enough to comprehend it, still shocked him. And when you think of all the planets, with all the people, including all the tiny little ants and worms in the soil, and you do the math on that…there had to be so many Cores coming through from and going out from other universes to make Anubis’s job of cataloging them all inexplicable.

As always, he had to remind himself there were some things he’d just never understand, and that he had to work with the pieces of the universe that he could comprehend and try to figure out others to match up with those. Nobody was going to puzzle out the whole thing, but the more of the tiny pieces you put together, the greater your knowledge and power was, and the more things you could do. Star Force had once been oblivious to the existence of Essence, and now they were relying on it for the higher end war applications required to fight back against enemies that also had it.

No wonder the Neofan thought everyone without the ability to use Essence was primitive…because in truth they were. And even now, as advanced as Paul was in his myriad of skills, he would be primitive compared to a Paul 1 million years old.

Damn, he didn’t even have a clue what that would look or feel like, but if past was prologue, he’d be making more discoveries and advancements that were completely out of his current view.

And maybe like a good old cartoon Saiyan, there would be multiple forms to Furyan to discover going forward. Who knew?

Pre-Essence Paul was a great deal different than he was now. Same for pre-Saiyan and pre-Saiolum, and pre-Furyan Paul. Not to mention pre-telepathy and pre-telekinesis. Those two had been earth shattering upgrades that changed his outlook completely. And ever since then the universe hadn’t stopped surprising him with more mysteries and powers to unlock.

He just hoped the races coming at them hadn’t unlocked too many of those on their own, otherwise one or more of them might squash them flat if it was a matter similar to Essence vs No Essence.

Darklight, though, was another breakthrough. Not as far as weaponry went…at least not that Paul knew of, but as far as transportation was concerned. There were advantages here to be explored, and getting these nightcrawlers back onto team ‘good guy’ was the first step in that, for Star Force wasn’t going to just start creating darklight people using the Okala for experiments on…and not just because that would make the Okala slowly shrink from the misuse of it. Star Force didn’t experiment on people period in any harmful way, and when it came to constructing a body for a new person to inhabit, you didn’t just slap something together and shrug when it sucked and the person was stuck in it.

He hoped the Progarren hadn’t been that sloppy when they first started making nightcrawlers, but he hadn’t dove too deep into the records they’d left behind on them. He really wanted to think of them as brothers in the lightside clan, but he kept expecting to be disappointed eventually, and them making the nightcrawlers was one of those cringe moments where he expected the other shoe to drop.

Star Force had modified some of the Uriti to create a pouch inside them that a Wrangler could ride inside of, but they hadn’t designed one from scratch whose sole purpose was to carry them around. The nightcrawlers were not heidoor…they were living starships designed not by the universe and put here through the lifesprings’ mysterious placement. They were designed by another race to serve them, and that usually led you to the darkside path sooner or later.

But the nightcrawlers they had recovered didn’t reek of the darkside. They were fabulously designed, physically and mentally, and the only thing Paul could complain about at this point was why they’d been so completely abandoned. That information wasn’t going to be in the Legacy Repository, nor was most of the war history. That was now lost to ashes and dust, unless some of the races invading them now remembered from the last time they did this galaxy spring cleaning on the T’fen’s behalf.

Paul knew the Deebees were important, but he still couldn’t fully understand why they were this important. The T’fen had to be outright terrified of them, and Paul wished he could remember everything he’d designed into them…but most of those memories had been purged by the universe itself, assuming that was who was actually handling that. Zeus had been the message boy, but the actual construction process was being run by something or someone else, and most of those memories had been the banned ones.

So apparently Paul got to peek inside the playbook in order to construct the Deebees properly, then had his memory wiped so he couldn’t continue to use it in other applications. He didn’t think anything like that had happened with the creation of the nightcrawlers, so the Progarren must have just been damn good at biotech even with the Okala’s massive reservoir of knowledge. Figuring out what to do was often as difficult as figuring out how to do it, and the Okala could only help with the how.

Now it was up to Paul and the Wranglers to figure out what to do with the nightcrawlers other than just rescue them. He knew there was great potential there, but he hadn’t been able to put his finger on it just yet when his mind was still focused on war applications. But either he or one of the other trailblazers would figure it out, or someone else. His original Archon class didn’t come up with all the good ideas, just most of them.

By the time Donner and Blitzen had exhausted their store of darklight energy, the Easter Basket was within the edge of the star system and Paul told them to rest, using the ship’s gravity drives to accelerate them further and eventually get down into low stellar orbit and align on a path to an unknown star that only had a catalog number in the Neofan charts. Without them, this galaxy would be a completely unknown map, and they’d have to just point at a nearby gravity well and jump blind, hoping there was no significant debris in the way and ready to dodge planets when they got into the target system, for more primitive ships couldn’t always see them coming, and it wasn’t unknown for a collision to occur.

Which was why most maps were moving ones, with the placements of all the planets tied to a clock in the map so you’d know where to expect the smaller gravity wells when you got to a system.

The Easter Basket could handle exploration if needed. Its sensors were good enough to spot planets ahead on arrival, and its engines were good enough to weave around and bounce off them to prevent a collision, but Paul was glad they didn’t need to. Every galaxy with Temples in it had been mapped by the Founders, and Vikarathe had given him the full maps of the 4 galaxies he needed to pick up nightcrawlers in. He could have probably got those on his own, given that he still possessed Reignor codes, but he didn’t know where to look, given that each Temple only had maps for the galaxy it was in.

But of course the Neofan knew where to look. They’d helped design and build the whole damn Temple system in the first place, so Paul had a detailed map of all jumplines between stars in Three Musketeers…which they called Nurien…and knew which ones were viable and which ones were obstructed.

At least, as far as the last update of the maps went…and when the Temples were millions of years old, you never knew how old the data was and what could have changed.

Still, Paul wasn’t worried. They’d get navigational data as they passed through these systems and update Star Force’s version of this map anyway. The next nightcrawler, the single one in this galaxy, was some 18 jumps away, and they should get there in about 23 days given the short hops they were taking. The Easter Basket could make longer jumps and skip over some of those stars in between, but most races’ ships couldn’t, and he didn’t feel like showing off that capability on old maps, for the longer the jump the more variance you had at your arrival point.

So better to make a lot of shorter ones with plenty of room to spare. If this had been the Milky Way, he’d have gotten them there in at least 19 days, if not sooner.

Course plotting was something that high ranking Naval Archons knew a little bit about, after all…

17

EG30

November 22, 158439

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Lorichar Kingdom

Heart Twinning System

Kiko

The Lo’rew were a Sub-Faction within the Star Force Empire, having joined late in its history some 42,901 years ago, and one of the few that had actually sought out Star Force before they had found them. They were a triple-race civilization, all having been spawned on the same world by the lifesprings and surviving the less advanced predators that still roamed their homeworld of Deguban.

Many of the Lo’Va, Lo’Ben, and Lo’Car had not survived any more than the native prey animals, but eventually the three races had banned together in order to survive, and that pact early in their existence had held true to their attaining space travel and spreading to other worlds while they only maintained one city on Deguban. One with thick walls separating them from the wild regions that saw the predators of land, sea, and air grow to immense size in the dense, oxygen-rich atmosphere of the 1.3g planet.

Most of the Lo’rew population now existed on other worlds, and they only maintained their ancestral city for sentimental reasons…though a Star Force research team had taken up permanent residence in the jungles trying to tame some of the local ecology. The Lo’rew didn’t object, but they wanted no part in it. Their history was of surviving by disassociating themselves with the wilds, and many of them had no wish to travel there for any reason.

Lo’rew worlds elsewhere were always dry ones, usually barren, for they wanted nothing like their homeworld to live on. They created giant floating cities that stayed in the air mostly, and could move when needed to avoid trouble. Only their ancestral city of Har’par was fixed in place, and it was the one exception they still kept to their fast rule about always keeping their population mobile.

In an Empire that valued hardened targets, a completely mobile force didn’t rate a full Faction status, but they did have a standing military competent in all 5 disciplines and were capable of helping their neighbors as a Sub-Faction should, but without the mass of defensive installations Star Force worlds normally held, the Lo’rew were viewed as nomads and their worlds were more like parks where they were currently set up to ‘camp’ as the Director had called it long ago.

So there was no Faction status for them, but having risen to Sub-Faction status had taken them a long, long time and was a major accomplishment in and of itself. One that they were proud of as a combined civilization, and now, it seemed, what had held them back from becoming a full Faction was going to be put to use by the Empire.

It had long ago known it would need to evacuate planets when fighting against strong enemies rather than dig in and watch the populace die in the fighting, so the Lo’rew Sub-Faction had been tasked with not just creating mobile cities of their own, but with maintaining one of the Empire’s many personnel cargo fleets.

They were large jumpships designed to carry people more than crates, which meant they had to be flying cities, and the Lo’rew already knew how to make those on a planet. It was when they’d joined the Empire and had been upgraded with all their wisdom and technology had they been able to make their flying cities leave the atmosphere and even be able to travel between stars.

One of their standing orders from Director Davis was to maintain their own fleet of emergency transports, kept empty and on standby, for when they would be called upon to evacuate other worlds. This fleet had been created thousands of years ago, and the Lo’rew were gradually adding ships to it each decade. It had seen some spot usage from time to time, but for the most part had just been sitting in parking orbits and waiting to be called for.

That call had come out from Earth, and now portions of that fleet were traveling to multiple worlds assigned to them. They only needed to transport them, not take them in as refugees. Others would be doing that, and the largest world they’d been tasked with evacuating the civilian population from was Kiko, and it was an Axius world, meaning it had a wide variety of body types they had to accommodate for, and to keep separate, so the larger races wouldn’t be accidentally stepping on the smaller ones.

They’d accomplished this by simply splitting them up between ships, and thankfully Star Force had mandated that their internal design be modular so they could adjust to whatever race it was they were carrying, all the way up to changing out the atmosphere and temperature to the extremes that some of Star Force’s citizens required…and Axius usually included most of those extremes.

High heat zones, frozen tundra for others, while some required fully submerged rooms in either water or various forms of sludge. Star Force held so many different races that you were bound to find the bizarre sooner or later if you looked for it, and the Lo’rew had to accommodate them all…or at least the ones that were being ordered evacuated, and Axius already had the life support protocols for them worked out, so the Lo’rew simply had to upload those and adjust their ships accordingly.

The problem with Kiko was, it had a population over 220 billion.

A lot of those individuals were no more than half a meter tall, while some were in excess of 10 meters. It was a varied bunch, but no matter how you sliced it, moving 220 billion people wasn’t something you could do quickly. Fortunately Star Force had ordered the evacuation before any enemy ships had even popped into the system for a quick scouting run, and in truth they were evacuating nearly every Star Force world near the Asferja invasion corridor…while leaving behind troops and essential workers that would defend the world when it came under attack.

They weren’t giving the enemy anything. They just wanted the mass of civilians safely out of the way, then they could far more easily evacuate the survivors of whatever battles would be fought here in a fighting retreat that would bleed the enemy of resources and personnel, making the taking of this world and others very expensive for them. It was part of the standard doctrine of Empire defense that had been established long ago, and part of that held that you got the civilians far away from the war zone prior to the worlds actually being hit.

So the Lo’rew were in high demand now, as were the other evac fleets in other pieces of the Empire that had been designed for something like this…though the sheer numbers involved were staggering, and not just from the Empire’s side. Their enemies were bringing in huge amounts of people as well, so it was going to be a race to get everyone out ahead of whatever they were planning…as well as a battle for the military to keep the enemy inside the prescribed box on the map and not let them do any system hopping beyond it.

Right now, sitting in orbit of Kiko…named for some long obscure anime that the Lo’rew knew nothing about nor cared for…were 17 massive Ho’var’re-class transport ships, each some 278 miles long, 58 miles wide, and 127 miles tall. They had a fleet of their own dropships, not to mention drone escorts to protect them, and they were running a continual pattern of ships up and down from the surface as they loaded up the Axius members rapidly into processing centers that assigned them billets in the mobile cities. Everything was moving at an operational lightspeed…except the ships were so damn big it was going to take months to fill even one of them.

All came with their own dropships though, so they didn’t have to take turns, and the orbital traffic of the world was so dense that it looked like hives of bees had taken up living in low orbit and were plundering the planet for all the pollen it was worth while the Axius system defense fleet awaited in high orbit, getting out of the way as well as standing guard against any Asferja…or the cloaked Bru’son…to show up and start causing trouble.

There were no battle fleets here, which was a good sign. If the Archons thought this planet was going to come under attack soon, they would have shifted them here. The fact that they only had the dedicated system-defense ships present meant this was still a safe zone. They just didn’t expect it to stay safe forever.

The Lo’rew also had smaller transport ships, and some of those had already filled and left, carrying their passengers not to the nearby kingdoms, but much further away where they would empty out on multiple planets and let the refugees either spread out as they liked across the Star Force transportation grid, or they’d find areas where certain races could resettle as a group.

There were entire worlds dedicated to such things, and the Beacon Faction had been doing just that with new races being added to the Empire that were more or less starting off as refugees. So there were Beacon planets being used, as well as brand new ones that were being set up to accept the large groups of displaced individuals.

Most people, however, were transitioning to other intact worlds that were favorable to them. And these Axius populations would most likely be traveling to other Axius worlds, for they were spread all across the galaxy. The same was true of the Factions. They didn’t have just one piece of the galaxy that was theirs. They were required to colonize everywhere so they couldn’t be pinpointed by an enemy and wiped out. As a Sub-Faction the Lo’rew did not have that requirement, and their people were located on the outer edge of the galaxy on the opposite side of the Core from Earth…which was thankfully far away from the Asferja.

So unless the enemy opened up a new invasion corridor in their area of the Outer Rim, they were going to be left alone while the fighting occurred elsewhere for centuries at the minimum, and the Lo’rew were quite happy to serve the Empire in its transportation needs rather than the heavy combat. Such duties were meant for the Clans and the Knight races, not Sub-Factions.

So as it was, Precentor Jum’ni’la of the evacuation ship Va’no’sha’ley stood upon the observation deck at the very fore of his massive ship, watching the streams of dropships coming to and from the hangar bays nonstop each day with a sense of pride in what his people had accomplished technologically, and what they were accomplishing now in terms of relocating this Axius population.

Each person counted a point in the game of war…or so an Archon had once said when they were explaining how to view their mission. They wouldn’t be destroying any enemy ships unless they attacked here, and hopefully they’d be long gone before that could happen. But every individual denied to the enemy’s attacks was a tiny win, and if you were scoring a war, every point gained whether it be in battle or in evacuations or in equipment manufacture added up to the Empire’s total.

So Jum’ni’la was quite content to stand here watching the Lo’rew add up a mountain of points in the war effort without even having to fire a shot in combat yet.

But as things usually went in the Empire, everything was perfectly normal, efficient, and predictable until the universe decided to drop some unknown shit directly on your head.

And in this case, it came in the form of a Bru’son ship decloaking amongst the stream of dropships and opening fire on them.

Jum’ni’la couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and while he had no duties involving combat protection of the dropships, each one that exploded meant hundreds, if not thousands of deaths…points lost that they had just been about to claim in this war.

The enemy was here, and they were hitting them at their weakest point, just above the planetary shield generators that had been previously protecting the dropships on the first leg of their journey up to orbit.

The Lo’rew combat drones immediately converged on the Bru’son ship, pounding its shields with weapons fire as the Bru’son simply ignored them and kept firing on the dropships that were quicky going evasive and spreading out in all directions. The enemy had to chase after some of them, then disappeared again beneath its cloak as their prey had gotten too far away and too scattered to effectively chase down.

A hit and run…and despite the weaponsfire coming from both orbit and the surface into the area the Bru’son ship had just been in, they couldn’t disrupt the cloaking field enough to track the ship.

Jum’ni’la stood on the observation deck in shock at what had just happened as he received reports viewed from a wrist-bound holographic communicator. The dropships that had been destroyed were not showing any survivors, but rescue crews were scanning just in case…and even if there were rescue crews, if they went out there they could get jumped as well.

How could he continue to evacuate the planet if the dropships were vulnerable? He immediately called a stop to the flow, bringing onboard the dropships that were closest and having the others head back down to the planet beneath the safety of its shields when he saw another ship’s flow of dropships get hit by the Bru’son ship with equally devastating results.

Except it wasn’t one this time, it was two…and the second one started firing on the first.

It took Jum’ni’la a moment to recognize the difference in the ships. Both had decloaked in almost the same area, but they were not identical. In fact, the second one wasn’t even a Bru’son ship, and it only belatedly activated its IFF.

It was a Clan Teemo warship.

The Bru’son did not ignore this one, and turned their full firepower upon it…but the brown/green warship continued to fire both standard weapons as well as some sort of clinging goo to the enemy’s shields…and within seconds of that goo grasping on, the Bru’son ship turned and disappeared beneath its cloak again.

But the Clan warship kept firing, somehow able to track the vessel despite its weaponsfire disappearing into a black void. That went on for minutes until the Clan warship finally stopped firing and made a microjump out of low orbit.

Jum’ni’la didn’t know what was going on, but with the Star Force warship still visible on the battlemap he was able to follow it remotely, albeit with some growing lag at the distances involved, and halfway to the star the enemy ship came back within firing range and another engagement occurred, with more of the green energy goo plastering the ship so much he didn’t understand how it could still be cloaked and not visible on their sensors. The Clan ship must have had additional sensors that it wasn’t broadcasting the data from.

And then, just as they started to brake into stellar orbit, the cloaked vessel that was eating up all the weaponsfire suddenly appeared in a massive explosion that got closer to the Clan vessel at the last moment apparently on purpose.

The warship took damage, its own shields breached, but its hull armor protected it for the most part…and there wasn’t anything left of the Bru’son ship to show on the sensors other than a nebula-like cloud of vaporized debris.

Soon, the Clan warship cloaked again, disappearing from sensors and the IFF system, with only a short message being transmitted before it disappeared.

RESUME EVACUATION PROCEDURES

Jum’ni’la wanted to say no. How could they keep going with who knew how many more cloaked ships were out there? But then he realized the trap in that, for you could never know for sure if there was a cloaked vessel or not nearby. They knew this one had been destroyed, and if they were going to cower in fear they’d never be able to evacuate another dropship load again.

He gave the order to his ship and the hangars opened up again, with those dropships waiting beneath the planetary shield coming up and meeting their twins halfway and passing by without incident. The flow resumed, bypassing the debris from the destroyed dropships, and the quiet efficiency of the evacuation returned…but Jum’ni’la was not calm nor confident anymore. The enemy had actually targeted evacuation ships. People that couldn’t fight back if they wanted to, in a system far from the war zone.

The Director had said the enemy’s objective was to wipe out the Empire, but only now Jum’ni’la really understand the horror of that. They weren’t here to conquer them and remove the government…they were here to annihilate every single person without even a shred of honor in their methods.

Then again, if your enemy had honor, why would you be at war? It was a hard lesson that the Precentor was learning at lightspeed, and no longer would he assume his evac ships were safe. Even if sensor scans of the entire system were clear of hostiles.

These Bru’son could be anywhere, but now he also knew so could Clan Teemo. They had to have anticipated an attack on the evac ships, otherwise that warship would never have been here to respond…and he also didn’t know how it had destroyed the Bru’son vessel so fast. The reports he’d seen on them said their shields were super-powered beyond anything Star Force had.

But he didn’t have to understand. They were here, they’d just destroyed the enemy, and now he had to keep evacuating people with the knowledge that the enemy could pop out at any time to destroy the vulnerable dropships in transit.

Suddenly he didn’t like this job anymore, but he wasn’t going to quit and give it to someone else. He had a duty, and what had felt like an easy yet vital task a few moments ago now felt just as dangerous and ugly as fighting on the front lines.

And what this meant was there were no front lines. Every system in the galaxy was vulnerable to attack, and every ship within it could get hit at any time and any place. The Empire couldn’t keep track of these cloaked vessels, and if they couldn’t see them they definitely could not keep them in a box.

So they had to keep evacuating people, knowing they might lose some of them to these ambush attacks…for if they didn’t evacuate them now, they might lose far more people if and when a full scale attack of this system occurred. And the Bru’son being here clearly meant the enemy was aware of the planet’s existence.

As he watched, the drones that had been waiting on the hull of the Va’no’sha’ley spread out and formed a conduit through which the dropships were rising and falling, establishing a sort of widespread ‘fence’ around the area that a ship the size of the Bru’son vessel couldn’t easily pass through. And out from that ‘fence’ the drones were sporadically firing energy weapons…not a lot, and not in a predictable manner, but enough that they might hit a void that would suck up the beams and bolts and alert them to the presence of a cloaked vessel before it got in close to the dropships.

It was better than nothing, and might buy the dropships a few seconds to start running before they got attacked, but it didn’t make Jum’ni’la feel any safer for those crews and evacuees as he coiled his fleshy tail around his feet as he continued to look out the artificial windows at the resumed evacuation flows.

At least Clan Teemo was still here…unless they had left. He wouldn’t know unless they told him or they jumped out of the system when visible. If there were going to be unseen ships lurking around the galaxy ready to jump out and attack anything at any time, at least their Empire had their own version of them, and in whatever inexplicable way that had occurred here, it looked like one of the Clan ones could easily defeat their Bru’son counterpart.

That didn’t bring back the dead though, but he hoped it would give the enemy pause the next time they tried to attack one of the evac ships. At the very least they’d have to wonder what happened to their ship, if indeed it was the only one in the system here.

The idea that there could be more laying in wait right now underneath their sensor field noses chilled him to no end, but they had no choice but to continue the evacuation. If they didn’t, things could get far, far worse for the people living on this Axius world if the skies began to be filled with enemy ships sufficient to batter down and penetrate the planetary shields.

And with what he had just witnessed here, he just assumed they’d bombard defenseless planets from orbit rather than bothering to send troops down to fight it out on the surface. Why bother if your objective was to kill everyone anyway?

Unless they needed to eat them...

Jum’ni’la shook that thought away. It might be true, but he didn’t even want to think about that now. He and the other Lo’rew ships were going to get this planet evacuated one way or the other. Even if it meant losing some of the dropships in the process. And as each came aboard and offloaded more of the ‘points’ onboard, he understood the Archon’s words even more. Getting each one to the ship was a victory, now that they had to run the orbital gauntlet of potential cloaked enemy ships laying in wait.

18

EG30

November 29, 158439

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Lorichar Kingdom

Pokmar System

Pokka Tula

It would later be known in historical records as The Fall of Pokka Tula, but right now it was happening in real time for Andre Nottingson. The reinforcements coming across the Galactic Threads had increased dramatically the past year as the Asferja colonies in Andromeda continued to increase despite the sabotage efforts Paul-024 and House Phoenix were making there. The battles in dozens of primary arrival systems were now multi-year affairs, with the debris fields from destroyed Asferja ships and Star Force drones now out-massing the active fleets themselves.

But something else had come through with those fleets, and it wasn’t the Bru’son. Another race had somehow slipped in through all the chaos and quietly set up shop around several stars in uninhabited systems within the Lorichar Kingdom. Systems that were not travel hubs, and ones that Star Force had no monitoring satellites in. They had chosen them well, and for the past several months they’d been assembling their ships together into very low stellar orbit to form construction platforms that drew material directly from the star.

Their identity was unknown, but for now they were just being called the ‘Star Forge Race’ and their foothold was firmly established. It wasn’t until scores of tiny ships…most only measuring a mile or two long…started flowing out from these systems was Star Force able to backtrack them to their source. Subsequent attacks by the Empire were thwarted easily, for the Star Forges were drawing energy directly from the stars and their shields were likewise boosted to significant measure. These factories also had impressive weapon capabilities, as did the ships they were actively producing from the stellar material.

They hadn’t brought a combat fleet with them across the galactic void. They’d brought factories, and now they were producing their fleets right in the Milky Way.

But they weren’t attacking Star Force. No, they were counterattacking the defense fleets to help let more Asferja into this galaxy, and while their ships were not very combat effective, somehow they could make them very, very fast. The Empire’s defense fleets tore through them easier than they were the Asferja ships, but the Star Forge race’s attacks were hitting them from behind and, coupled with the Bru’son’s assaults on the shipping lanes, enough Asferja were able to slip through and pool together in a separate system…but they didn’t put down roots there. They simply collected themselves before launching an assault on Pokka Tula.

It was thought to put Star Force on the defensive and draw their resources there, allowing more Asferja to slip into the galaxy uncontested. But what they didn’t know was that Pokka Tula and other nearby Star Force worlds had already been evacuated of non-essential personnel in the hopes that the Asferja would attack them and the Empire could use the planetary defense systems to further reduce their swarm’s numbers.

And that was happening far more than Andre had ever hoped it would, for the Asferja had already fought their way into low orbit and had bombarded the planetary defense shields into submission…which had taken some 1.2 million of their tiny ships to do it, and they’d lost more than a third of them in the process. But the entire shield didn’t go down, just a section temporarily, then they bombarded the shield generators in that section to make sure it wouldn’t go up again.

Then through that gap, they descended onto the planet and the ground war began as their fleet retreated up into higher orbit and guarded their safe corridor down to the planet, keeping any Star Force vessels away from the stream of transports they were sending down.

In reality, the Star Force fleet…which was much smaller at this point…was standing by on the other side of the planet, not to avoid the Asferja, but to maintain their evac corridor for the troops and everyone else on the planet that was going to bleed the Asferja dry as they gradually took it, for all the other shield generators and surface to orbit weaponry installations were still intact. And unless the Asferja took them on the ground, they’d have to try to do it from orbit and they’d lose the rest of their fleet in the process…and Pokka Tula was not the most heavily defended planet in the Empire by far. It was what you might call mid-level at best. Far from new colony status, but the Asferja had not chosen to hit one of the tougher nuts in the Lorichar Kingdom. Apparently they thought this one was strong enough for Star Force to try to defend, hence drawing ships away from the entry zones, but not too strong that they couldn’t take it yet.

They were quite eager about taking it too, and the ground fighting was even more intense than the firestorm that had happened in orbit. Multiple galaxies of Star Force mechs were in play on the Bsidd world and tearing through the Asferja troops, but they couldn’t hold out against the constant streams coming down from orbit…so the plan was a fighting retreat, with an army of techs going through and destroying everything of value in the cities before they fell, as well as wiping databases. They were not going to give the Asferja an intact Star Force planet to learn from, so it was Andre’s job, along with the other Mainline Commandos here supporting the Bsidd, to make sure things didn’t fall too fast.

And that was proving to be a headache. His command was only 12,400 strong, and they were spread out across five different cities at this point, with 18 already having fallen in good order. The Bsidd defense troops were proving their worth and taking few losses as they traded ground for Asferja lives. The carpet of dead were everywhere, but the Empire’s troops weren’t having to deal with it as they were retreating onto clear ground with every step they took…while leaving plenty of boobytraps in their wake that the Asferja were disarming with warm bodies.

Everything you would not want to do as a swarm race the Asferja were doing. Star Force was setting them up in so many ways, yet they didn’t seem to care. They just took the losses and kept plowing on forward…and all these troops were coming from offworld. They weren’t growing them here, not yet anyway, so every bug Andre, his Commandos, and the larger Bsidd could kill was one that had to be diverted from other planets in the Lorichar Kingdom.

In essence, Star Force let them come here in order for the Asferja to assemble in one spot rather that continuing to try and send out seeding ships everywhere else.

And the dumb bugs had fallen for it. They could have been pushing beyond this kingdom into others before trying to put down roots at this point, with the help of the Star Forgers running interference, but instead they had chosen to come here and try and knock off the first Star Force world in this campaign.

And the Empire was going to let them have it, but at a very, very high cost in ships, troops, and time.

The trick was for Andre not to get himself and his men killed in the process.

Right now he was inside one of the besieged cities, with the defensive wall having been breached in the northeast quadrant and the ground fighting moving into the streets there, but the Bsidd Commandos…which were of several variants far larger than a Human…had them momentarily stopped as the rest of the Asferja continued to pound on the exterior wall as multiple turrets and shield generators were working to stop those attacks effectively, and the mounds of dead outside were rising almost as high as the wall in some places.

The city’s shield had already been taken down by air attacks…a lot of them. The Asferja in-atmosphere craft were just as numerous as their ground troops, and even now there were anti-air turrets around the city still swatting down more of them, but most of their surviving aircraft had moved off to let the ground teams handle the rest after helping them blow a hole in the outer wall which had its own small shield generators covering sections of it.

And Andre knew why they had pulled back the aircraft…they were getting damn low on them. They weren’t going to be able to hit another city in that way until they got more reinforcements, and that was going to slow down their advance to just what their ground troops could handle, and if they tried going up against an intact city, the main shields would cover the perimeter towers that would maul an approaching land force. The aircraft had taken those out here, and now the horde was basically free to run into the city and do their thing.

But the Bsidd were doing theirs as well, and the kill count was rising drastically as they tried to buy time for the last of the demolition teams to make ‘safe’ the city of any sensitive technology while Andre’s men were busy laying out mines and setting up barricades to slow and direct the Asferja soon to get to them.

Andre was running around in his command armor, which was a bit light on the ‘armor’ but with all kinds of comm systems that could punch through a lot of enemy jamming, and the Asferja were no slouches when it came to that. It was hard to tell which bugs were carrying the gear, but they communicated telepathically with each other in a hive mind…so they preferred jamming all technological communications as a matter of course.

Star Force tech was a bit too good for them, though, and all they could manage was to reduce their range rather than jam them entirely, but in an urban landscape where the buildings also interfered with signals, once the relays built into the city infrastructure were destroyed or lost power, his Commandos were going to have to rely on line of sight, man to man comm relays, just as the Bsidd were doing now.

“Commander Nottingson,” a Bsidd-accented voice said into his helmet as he was climbing a ladder up the side of one of the city spires. “The Asferja have broken through to the undercity.”

“Shit,” he whispered. They’d sealed all those access points and camouflaged them well, but apparently not enough. “Are they flanking you?”

“Not yet, but we must prepare. We are pulling back to Zone 293.”

“Copy that. We’ll be ready,” he said, then finished the last few rungs until he got to the roof where six other Commandos were already stationed beneath a portable shield generator that was creating a hemispherical bubble over their position in case any of the remaining aircraft came back their way.

“Another wave coming in,” Commando Harkin reported from his sentry position as he pointed to the southwest. “They’re really upset this time. Did we do something special to piss them off?”

“I think they’re just trying to compensate for their lack of aircraft,” he said, zooming in with his own helmet’s gear to get a look at the column of fresh troops heading toward the city as those outside were still dying to the perimeter defenses as they tried to open up a second breach point somewhere along the perimeter. The entire city was surrounded at this point, and the route of escape for the troops and techs was actually underground…which was why the incursion of the Asferja into the undercity this soon could be problematic.

“This feels like more than that.”

“Better safe than sorry,” he agreed, using his high powered comm system to link in with the remaining transmitters in the city and to get a signal across the planet and into orbit.

“Field Commander requesting fire support,” he said, mentally tagging the coordinates and what he was interested in getting in the message packet. A single icon on his HUD was his only reply, which indicated that one of the orbital drones would be incoming.

“Brick on the way,” he said. “ETA 32 minutes.”

“Do they really have to keep them so far away?” Jenkins said. “The Archons are playing it too close on this one.”

“You’re second guessing the Archons now?”

“Why not, I helped train them,” he said, reminding his ‘young’ commander that he was some 156,429 years old, while Andre was only 7,209.

“They’re a bit wiser than both of us combined, so shut it old guy. They’re not going to let the Bsidd get mauled, even if they wouldn’t mind losing you.”

“You first,” Jenkins countered. “I’m just hiding behind your skirt.”

“What is it with you and skirts?”

“Old joke,” he said, waving it off. Some of the stuff that came out of his mouth baffled Andre, but then again he did have a lot more cultural slang in his vocabulary from all those millennia to draw from than Andre did. “I think we’ve got a runner.”

The Commander followed the line of his arm to finger down into the city and caught a glimpse of a lone Asferja. A scout, most likely. They’d pulled this before, making his team think they were just a bunch of dumb brutes lining up to get killed while sneaking a few units around to do some clandestine work.

“All yours, buddy.”

“Thank you,” Jenkins said, hopping over the wall and through the shield barrier, then falling some 32 stories down to the ground and using his armor’s limited anti-grav to slow him at the very end. He only got a five second pulse out of it before the capacitor was out of juice, but with the .8g local gravity on the city streets, he knew it’d be just enough.

He hit hard though, his knees bending and him dumping himself forward and taking some of the momentum on his torso before it all canceled out. He rolled through the badly executed somersault and came to his feet…then was sprinting in the direction of the Asferja runner, knowing they were damn fast. Faster than him in most cases, so he activated the powered armor upgrade in his suit and let it add distance to each stride his own muscles made.

That gave him a hopping boost, making him feel like the Master Chief of old. Fortunately the current generations knew what that was, for the trailblazers had made sure to preserve such valuable nuggets of Old Earth culture. Even the Commando armor looked a bit like the Chief’s Mjolnir, but in truth, he’d have been jealous of the Commando’s, for it had long ago exceeded the science fiction universe’s wildest expectations.

Jenkins made two turns, sprinting between both each time, before he caught sight of the Asferja running on six legs ahead of him. It too was leaping, and he knew he couldn’t catch it from behind so he pulled out his combat rifle from his back rack and started firing. He hit it twice before it slid to a halt and turned around, seeing what was shooting it, then decided to charge back at the lone soldier.

“Dipshit,” Jenkins said, knowing he could take it despite being out-massed at least 4 to 1.

He kept running but slowed down as he continued to fire. The scout fired back with two pistols while taking hits to its carapace, which resulted in blackened spots but no full penetration. Jenkins was going to have to make better shots into the vulnerable areas if he wanted to kill it, but the enemy’s pistol shots were just being absorbed by his personal shields. The bug couldn’t win.

Which felt odd.

Just before they got close enough to ram each other, Jenkins pulsed his now recharged anti-grav again and jumped to the right, catching the wall with his foot and twisting to shoot down on the Asferja he had launched himself over top of it by two meters.

As he did so, the Asferja exploded.

Jenkins was thrown much higher, and barely managed to pulse the rest of his capacitor to slow his fall, but he landed hard on his back and slid down the street to an eventual stop, with the padding in his helmet not being enough to stop him from getting a concussion.

The packet of healing nanites resting between his shoulder blades on the interior of the armor immediately activated, melting and coursing over his body in little silver tendrils until it reached his head and other places where he was injured. They dove into his tissue on a microscopic level and started triggering rapid new cell growth with the packet drawing new material from a small cube of dense biomatter that was situated in the armor beside it.

Within seconds the ringing in his head cleared and the tweaked muscle in his left arm healed up, with his HUD reporting the injuries and the healing seconds later, returning his status to ‘full green’ before that too disappeared and cleared his vision.

He stood up, seeing the scarring on the left side of his armor as his shields started to slowly regenerate. They’d been taken down entirely in the blast, then the damage to his armor was from what was left. The little fall on the ground had barely scratched it, if that.

He tried to connect to the Commander, but he didn’t have line of sight, so Jenkins ran off down a side street and did a bit of zigzag until he got near another Commando that could bounce the signal down others and up to Andre.

“Bug was a bomber,” he reported. “Tried to take me out as soon as I engaged rather than run. Probably after infrastructure, but it coming after me…”

“…suggests it didn’t want to be discovered,” Andre finished. “They’re counting on their jamming a little too much and think they can go where they like. Any idea where he was headed.”

Jenkins glanced around inside his helmet, looking visually and on the map inside his HUD. “Not really.”

“Get back up here then.”

“On my way,” Jenkins said, running off to get back to the command post atop one of the many spires in the city that had not yet fallen to the Asferja.

19

Two days later the Commandos and Bsidd were down in the tunnels, abandoning the city and fighting to hold off the growing numbers of Asferja ground troops despite the low level strafing run of a small naval drone that had thinned them considerably before being destroyed by their aircraft swarms.

Underground trains were hauling the Bsidd out, with Andre’s Commandos holding the terminal until the end. Then when it was time for last call, he hopped on the last car and sped off down the length of tunnel exchanging a few final shots with the Asferja, one of which caught him in the chest and dropped his shields down into the yellow range.

At least on his HUD’s monitor. The shields themselves didn’t change color. That would be stupid to let the enemy know how much shield strength you had. Better they thought they were impenetrable up until the moment they broke rather than give them a status report on their progress.

He leaned back against the wall, staring out at the length of the tunnel rapidly flashing by with marker lights as the terminal disappeared in the distance. There were no more cars left intact behind them. As per standing protocol, anything they didn’t use they destroyed. If the Asferja wanted to reach the next city through this underground line, they were going to have to walk or bring their own ride.

Unfortunately there was plenty of room for them to do it. The tunnel was wide enough to have 7 different tracks in it, with the cars riding the ‘rails’ that they never actually touched. It was a maglev line, no anti-grav involved, and the cars just glided between four rails, one above, one below, and one on either side. The cars had IDF, so he couldn’t feel the momentum changes or turns once they were aboard, so him sitting on the back end of the car had no chance of him getting bucked off and having to walk the distance himself.

22 cities had fallen so far, with another 2,918 left to go. And if the Asferja wanted them all, they were going to have to keep bringing in troops or start growing them here, and Andre suspected both were going to be true.

It was a numbers game, and right now they were successfully making the Asferja waste a lot of resources on this planet rather than having them sent to a dozen others. But no Commando liked retreating or losing cities. Even if it was part of the plan.

When they got to the next city they bypassed it and moved on to a larger one where they had a base of operations set up. The Commandos got some badly needed rest save for Andre and a few others that immediately redeployed to another city under attack along with a fresh group. He had to rotate them out or they’d get worn down too much. Fortunately for him, leading these battles involved more spectating than actual fighting, so he could go a few in a row before he had to take a break.

When he got to the next city the shields and perimeter wall were still holding, with the Asferja aircraft bombarding the clear shield dome constantly as turrets inside fired through brief holes created in it so they could hit the attackers, some of which fell down onto the shield and slid across its curve, ending up in piles on junk just outside the wall…with the city’s outer barrier then pushing out a concussion surge to clear the surrounding area, using the wreckage as ammunition in some cases where it was close to the attacking ground troops.

Andre got to the top of another spire, with communications still clear as the city’s comm gear was functional and the shields were modulated to block out the jamming waves the troops outside were already broadcasting. But off in the distance towards the area of the planet that was in enemy hands was a tall cylinder on the horizon with weaponsfire all around it. He knew it was automated defenses only at this point, but he hated not making a better defense of the primary shield generator for this region.

About an hour later it finally gave out and came apart in chunks as the Asferja tore it apart from both the land and the air. When it did, the planetary shield retracted a bit, but not far enough to expose this city’s own shield to orbital bombardment. They could reach out pretty far from one of the generators, so this one going down only exposed ground the Asferja had already taken. Had that not been the case, the fleet in orbit would have been assaulting this city directly and forcing a cancelation of all naval units in orbit, for Star Force would never have stood by and let that happen…even as they were standing by and allowing the ground invasion to take place.

They didn’t have enough ships in their orbital fleet to take out the Asferja ships, and with more and more coming in by the day, the best Star Force could do was hold position and protect the evacuation routes for the ground troops when they needed them…while making the occasional attack run against the Asferja ships when they got a bit spread out. The naval fleet wasn’t just spectators at the moment, they were a growling dog keeping the Asferja back, or daring them to come after them over top the intact portions of the planetary defense grid. Either way you looked at it, they were playing a largely silent role in this fight after losing the battle for control of orbit…but then again, they wanted to lose in order to keep the Asferja from hitting softer systems elsewhere, Star Force and non-Star Force alike.

Pokka Tula was bait, a taunt to get the Asferja where Star Force wanted them so they could cash in on all the weaponry and shields they’d invested in the planet over the previous millennia rather than making the naval fleet take all the pounding in this invasion.

A part of Andre didn’t like all the carnage, but another part of him was glad they were not having to try and stun these buggers. It was much easier to fire and forget, though he didn’t like the implications of that. Mercy was a luxury of the dominant, and if they weren’t trying to win this war with stun weapons, it meant they weren’t in the dominant position they’d like to be. This was a fight they could very well lose, so they had to go all in.

Hence the carnage. They had to kill as many Asferja as possible before they spawned so many reinforcements that they’d overwhelm them.

But even now Star Force’s own swarm races were tucked away on their worlds growing their populations as well. More than that, though, those worlds were mass producing war material, particularly naval drones. So for as many as the Asferja and others knocked down, more would be shipped in to replace them. It was a type of technological spawning Star Force had gotten better and better at over time, and it was why the Asferja had been blunted so badly in this war to date despite the massive number of ships coming through the Galactic Threads.

The Archons had a plan…they always did. He just wished it didn’t involve them intentionally losing this world…though by ‘intentionally’ he didn’t mean on purpose. They just weren’t getting the naval reinforcements necessary to remove the Asferja fleet from orbit. Those ships and drones were going elsewhere, while Pokka Tula was having to rely on the planetary defenses for their bug swatting.

Andre and his Commandos fought with the Bsidd in the next city, and the next, and the next until a third of the planet was in enemy hands. He set his mind to the grind of daily fighting, resting, and repeating. They were all trained for this, and experienced in doing it before. A lot of them had fought in the lizard war way back when, for the Archons had sent the best Commandos in the Mainline force with Andre and to other worlds like this. They didn’t send rookies out to die first like the Asferja did.

Or like in chess. That was one reason the Archons hated chess. The strongest units were always supposed to go in first, not last.

But after more than two years of fighting on Pokka Tula, the Archons broke their standard form and Andre saw that their plans for this planet were a game of chess being played out…and one of the big pieces was being moved in.

Andre was in battle when it happened, and since he was out of the blast radius it didn’t really matter other than the storm winds that would result from it. But thanks to his command post…this time inside a city park in an edge building about halfway up that gave him a good view of the grounds…he saw on the battlemap as a new Star Force fleet arrived in orbit to supplement the ships already there.

But with them came a carrier ship…but it wasn’t carrying drones.

It was a Uriti carrier. And it looked like the Archons were moving in their big chess piece after letting the little ones like Andre fight it out for a while.

Bahamut 5 emerged from the carrier resplendent in deep red battle armor covering his entire winged frame…though those wings weren’t flimsy like a bird’s. They were thick as fuck, and doubled as firing arrays.

Arrays designed to bombard a planet…and the Asferja controlled a third of this one with several hives set up that had been producing more raw reinforcements than Andre had been comfortable with.

The Star Force fleet arranged itself around the Uriti that was itself more than 29 miles wide, wing tip to wing tip. That was far smaller than its predecessor was now, though they all continued to gradually grow, but from his point of view in the battlemap, 29 miles wide was more than enough to scare the shit out of him.

Thankfully the Uriti was on their side.

The Asferja fleet apparently sensed the danger too, for they immediately moved to engage…over top the planetary defenses. It seemed the Uriti was working as a lure as well, but the Archons didn’t hold it over their own territory. They kept it slowly moving around orbit, with it shooting back at the surrounding ships using weaponry installed in its technological armor as well as some of its natural talents, but it wasn’t until they were over the middle of the Asferja-controlled section of the planet that it began to peel back the red armor on the underside of its body, with the brick-like pieces flowing up and over each other as if they were each giant nanites to stack up on its back. The dull white body of the Uriti began to charge with a glow as the fighting continued all around it. The Asferja were hammering weaponsfire into the big space creature, and the shield matrix within its armor eventually went down, but the Yeg’gor armor its body naturally carried only chipped away under the assault.

Then it fired its primary biological weapon.

The Asferja forces on the planet’s surface directly under the blast zone were incinerated immediately…as was the top layer of soil and rock…then the blast moved out laterally, shoving atmosphere with it that would ripple out all the way to Andre’s current position eventually.

But Bahamut didn’t fire just one blast. It sat in orbit as the battle raged around it, recharging its primary weapon multiple times while using its others to hammer both the surface and the ships in orbit. By the time it was finished and the red armor flowed back over its slightly damaged body, the Asferja fleet was a fraction of what it had been beforehand, and they immediately broke off to reform over what was left of their holdings on the planet as the pitiful few Star Force drones left in the fight escorted Bahamut back to the other side where their warships and the carrier waited.

The Uriti got back inside and the ship left even as more carrier ships were coming into the system…these however were carrying replacement drones, not more Uriti, and the warships that had not been directly involved with the battle quickly took control of them and reestablished their position over the evacuation zone as the Asferja likewise were continuing to receive reinforcements of their own to slowly replenish the massive amount of ships they’d lost.

But the situation on the surface was far worse. All their hives had been destroyed, and with them, most of their troops and other personnel not currently engaged with Andre and the Bsidd.

When the tidal wave of air hit the city it knocked the Asferja outside over like toys and toppled most of the trees in the area, but that was only from one really big blast near to their location. The others had a lesser effect and the fighting went on, meaning Andre couldn’t just sit and watch the naval battle and the orbital bombardment. But after twelve more days of fighting his Commandos could say they actually held this city, for the Asferja ran out of troops coming to reinforce the attackers and the battle simply stopped.

The Bsidd immediately began rebuilding what they could, with an army of their techs seeming to appear out of nowhere, with their primary effort being on the city’s shield generator, which had been taken down the previous day via a penetration of the wall and troops moving inside the city to hit its machinery rather than assault it directly from the air.

Whether the Bsidd could get it working again or not was irrelevant at this point. The Asferja had just lost, at the minimum, 300 million troops and workers stationed on the planet, as well as their immediate ability to grow more locally. And while they were still landing new ships and troops into the devastated area to start rebuilding again, the effect was not lost on all those surviving on the planet.

The Asferja were going to have to bleed and bleed a lot if they wanted this world…and it appeared they still did…and the more of it they took, the more would be open for the sort of cataclysmic bombardment that the Uriti had just delivered. It wasn’t equal to the power of the Asferja fleet when they had been bombarding the planetary shields, but the Uriti’s attack had been specifically designed to assault planets, not ships, though they were good enough at doing that in a defensive mode as well.

They weren’t invulnerable, however, especially to a race as advanced as the Asferja. But move them around like chess pieces and protect them until they could get into position…well, Andre was damn impressed, for he’d had no forewarning that was coming. And he guessed the Asferja hadn’t as well.

And that was just one of the ‘little’ Uriti, not one of the originals that had spawned the legions of others tucked away on Preserves across the galaxy waiting to be called out to do exactly this sort of thing. They didn’t want to fight the Hadarak, who were biologically their cousins, but it seemed they had no issue with exterminating a planet full of Asferja.

And with the civilian population evacuated, and the local animals being hunted down and eaten by the Asferja anyway, the section of the planet that Bahamut 5 had hit was more or less just enemy troops.

At least it had been. Right now it was a smoking wasteland with lightning storms popping up everywhere as the atmosphere gradually resettled itself into normalcy. Andre knew Star Force didn’t like using the Uriti because of all the collateral damage, and had this world been an airless one devoid of all life except the colonists it would have been an easier choice to make. But when the Asferja had started eating the animals and removing them entirely from their occupation zones rather than ignoring them, they’d essentially opened the door to this kind of attack.

And this was one of those moments when Karma was truly a bitch, for had they left the wildlife intact, Star Force would not have used the Uriti here. They’d have stuck with the plan and gone for a grinding gradual retreat using conventional weapons.

Andre’s orders hadn’t been updated, which meant Star Force still expected this planet to fall. It was just going to be a much longer and messier affair for the Asferja than they had probably expected.

But then again, the way they fought was already messy, so maybe they didn’t care how many died as long as they accomplished their objective eventually.

Andre’s Commandos had about a month and a half of rest as the Asferja landing ships built up a new army on the planet and their techs starting building/growing new bases. It would be months more before they could even attempt a new hive, but they didn’t wait for that. They started assaulting the same cities again once they felt they had enough troops and aircraft, and the urban fighting carnage that Andre had been weathering started once again.

This is what he’d trained for. This is what he wanted to be…a warrior taking on the enemy before they could get at the civilians. And while he’d have preferred this to be a stun war, if the enemy wasn’t going to fight in a way that would allow the taking of prisoners because they were simply swarming you with too many troops…well, then it was going to be a lethal war. And Star Force knew how to fight those too.

As the Asferja had just learned in the hardest way.

Andre was damn glad the Uriti were on their side…and glad that Star Force had befriended them rather than kill them like everyone had wanted to do back in the day. They had a right to fear what they were capable of, but the Empire didn’t fear strength. It was strength incarnate. And apparently the Archons’ level of strength knew how to talk to the Uriti on their terms and make friends with the ‘monsters’ everyone else would have killed in a moment if they’d had the power to do so. Even those who had imprisoned them in stasis did it because they didn’t have the ability to kill them.

But no. Star Force hadn’t killed them when they had the chance. They’d annexed them, as all proper empires did, and they’d done it in a way that was beneficial to both.

And because of that choice long, long ago, Star Force now had them on their side in this Gauntlet War. And Andre didn’t think the bugs had anything in their arsenal to match.

Score one for the good guys.

20

EG31

October 2, 158440

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

Jhar System (Klix Regional Capital)

Tidis

Venco sat on his hard hind legs around a holographic pool in the middle of the planning center along with 7 other Klix military commanders. They were currently safe in the middle of the third largest city on the planet, but its larger cousin, Voshenigra, was already half eaten by the Asferja. And by ‘eaten’ he meant the buildings, for they were being torn down by weaponsfire that seemed as much on intent as accident. Asferja warships were bombarding the sections that still held Garov Hejeni’s troops now that the last bits of the city’s defense shield were gone, and the horde of Asferja just beyond the blast zone was moving in to sweep up what was left of them.

That was being displayed in a part of the pool, while other battles were shown elsewhere. Venco’s troops were holding the perimeter of another city that still had the benefit of the primary shield generators over top of it, but the fleet in orbit could take it down any time they wanted…at a cost. Apparently they preferred the lesser cost of the lives of their troops, but they were none the less gaining ground everywhere in 6 different combat theatres, and there wasn’t anything Venco could do to stop it, only slow their advance.

The Klix fleet had been destroyed, but had held their position and cost the Asferja plenty, but their small ships kept coming into the system in groups to replace what was lost, and the only small hope the Klix had of reinforcements were a few allied ships that had popped up on the edge of the Asferja fleet making strafing runs. The enemy responded and chased them away, then they would be back again pestering them. There weren’t enough of the Paladin ships here to matter, but they were successfully destroying Asferja vessels, just not enough to save the planet.

But if there were Paladin here, maybe more would come. It meant they hadn’t been abandoned by their allies, but if something didn’t change soon, the rest of this planet would fall within 8 months’ time, and Venco’s troops, while fighting hard, just couldn’t match the numbers the Asferja were employing. One on one, his Klix would win. Even two on one. But not ten on one or the even worse odds some of the units out there were facing. And no matter how bravely they fought, no matter how many miracles they managed to pull out of thin air, more Asferja came to replace the ones that were lost and effectively undo all the gains they had made.

But Klix were stubborn, and they didn’t care what the future outlook was. They had a battle to fight now and that was all there was to it. They weren’t going to budge, and they weren’t going to mentally break down. They’d fight till they died, and that was simply the way of things.

Venco would be joining them eventually, for he wasn’t going to wait to be killed in the planning center. He’d join the other Klix on the battlefield at some point, but today he still had coordinating work to do. As long as they didn’t fall into the same trap as using swarm techniques and blunt strategy, his troops were able to acquit themselves well in a slow fighting retreat. If he allowed them to get bogged down and flanked, they’d be overrun within hours.

But it was the Paladin that kept catching his eye, and as they made another annoyance run at the enemy fleet, this time they didn’t respond. The Paladin ships just parked beside them at long range and began chipping away at their ships until it seemed the Asferja couldn’t stand it, then they broke ranks and pursued.

The Paladin retreated, but not so fast the Asferja couldn’t catch them. And like the other times before, once isolated, the pursuing ships were outmaneuvered and cut to pieces by the cunning ship commanders…who then brought their ships back to the edge of the Asferja fleet and started again.

The enemy couldn’t chase them effectively, and they couldn’t hold position with the range advantage of the Paladin’s weapons. The only other option was to retreat, and the Asferja weren’t going to do that, so the Paladin seemed to be able to rack up a lot of free kills, but there were more than half a million ships up there, and a few hundred less wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

Warnings started flashing across the holographic pond, and Venco didn’t understand what he was seeing at first, but the Asferja fleet that had been holding in stable position over the planet but out of weapons range of the intact portions of the defenses…it was now imploding on itself and firing at something unseen. There were too many ships in the way to get a visual on it, but weaponsfire was spilling out everywhere through the gaps.

A small nova appeared in that spot, vaporizing so many ships that Venco thought there must have been a malfunction in the sensors and they’d simply lost contact…but that wasn’t the case. A single contact now appeared in the middle of that void inside the larger Asferja fleet, and alongside it more contacts started popping in…smaller ones…but soon there was another fleet there.

A Neofan fleet operating under the banner of House Phoenix…

One of Venco’s subordinates, named Leoba, was out in the field when the orbital battle began, but he had no time to watch, for the Asferja on the planet were not stopping their assault on the factory zone of Trian Trecor city. Leoba wore an exoskeleton over top of his natural bioarmor, and it made him look exceedingly fat, but he could walk around in it, and it would carry its own weight…as well as bulky physical shields that allowed him to charge the enemy lines with his fellow Klix lining up behind him for cover, and in the streets around the factory zone, that tactic had been working quite well.

He stood leg to leg with another so-equipped Klix, and their combined bulk filled one of the streets while dozens of his fellow soldiers walked behind them as they charged ahead, intent on disrupting the attack taking place several blocks to the east. They got halfway there before they were even noticed, then a scattering of Asferja came out of side streets and broken walls of buildings they had been in and started mounting some defense as they were shot by other Klix riding on the back of his exoskeleton.

He also fired weaponry on the exoskeleton, picking off the scattering of Asferja soldiers that got in their way, then tramping their bodies as the column walked over them. It wasn’t until they were within sight of the river-like flow of Asferja heading into the weaponry complex that they met stiffer resistance as part of that flow split off and came down the street towards them.

Leoba kept plodding ahead at a consistent pace, and when their combined weaponsfire wasn’t enough to take down the attackers ahead, they roared a common battle cry and just ran forward, smashing into the Asferja and shooting as they went, but they physically forced many of them back until they broke through into the much larger street where the thousands of troops were passing through to reinforce those fighting in the complex to the left.

Leoba turned into the flow while his companion pushed out straight forward. The rest of the Klix filled in the gap and fired at any Asferja in sight, taking numerous hits as they did so.

“Leoba.”

“I am here,” he reported over the comm.

“Make a ring with a hollow center and hold it.”

“Where?”

“It does not matter. Just do so fast. Make sure no one and nothing is in the middle. It must be empty space.”

Leoba didn’t say anything else in words, but used his telepathy to communicate to the others what the orders were, and while some of them were taking body hits, none had fallen to the ground yet. Their naturally armored carapace was tough enough to last a while, but it was still painful when pieces of it were super-heated or exploded.

“We are in position,” he finally reported.

“Hold it.”

Leoba didn’t respond. He was too busy shooting and shuffling his feet from side to side to keep the smaller Asferja from slipping past into the gap. He lifted his front right leg up and sent it smashing back down to the ground tip first, impaling one of the Asferja all the way through, then he kicked forward and it slid off his leg spike as his wider ‘foot’ rotated back into position and came down on the ground as he continued to fire some 6 different weapons in the exoskeleton at nearly point blank range.

Suddenly he felt a wash of air behind him followed by a huge telepathic presence. He couldn’t help but glance back…and standing there, having appeared from nowhere, was the biggest Neofan he had ever seen.

“Move aside!” it bellowed, and Leoba felt himself telekinetically pulled to the right as the Asferja darted through the gap towards the Neofan…only to be incinerated one at a time, with their hot dust flowing out over him like it was a winter blizzard.

The Neofan walked forward casually, filling the gap in their line momentarily, then continued forward, killing the Asferja with such ease that Leoba was dumbfounded…yet he continued fighting nonstop. The Asferja wouldn’t give him a single moment to consider what was actually happening.

Then the Neofan raised an arm, and the entire street ahead of them exploded with dust as he killed every Asferja in that direction with a single attack.

Leoba coughed, having got some of the disgusting biodust in his mouth, then turned to help the others fighting behind him as he telepathically sensed the Asferja there as the Neofan continued ‘upstream’ into the river of Asferja reinforcements heading into the factory zone…and utterly tore them to pieces as he began to run forward and upped the intensity of his attacks.

He left Leoba and the Klix to finish the others that were starting to turn back away from their targets, but without the constant reinforcement, Leoba and his fellow Hujunari were able to do what they had long been trained to do.

Push forward and win.

With the two exoskeletons in front, they ran down the street towards the complex, fighting their way through those Asferja that turned around, and then began shooting others in the back as they went up against automated weaponry on the factory walls, plucking the turrets out one by one to get to the main doors. They’d been doing the same thing across the well-defended city, but now they were running out of troops and the defenses suddenly became all that more impressive.

It took nearly half an hour to clear out the area in front of, and around the perimeter of the complex, and it was only then that Leoba was able to take a break long enough to view from their tactical map what was happening behind him.

He saw the single Neofan drawing to him and destroying all the reinforcements coming out of the landing zone set outside the city, and at the rate he was going, he was going to be near the ships in…

Suddenly the Neofan stopped exploding the Asferja and sprinted forward far faster than he should have been able to run. He was knocking Asferja back at all angles, some even up over his head, and in some cases only pieces of them, but he was moving so fast it became clear he was less interested in the troops than he was the grounded transports, one of which was beginning to close up its doors and lift off.

The Neofan leapt, a giant hop, crushing the Asferja underneath him as he landed…then he hopped again. Six giant hops in a row to get him close enough to the lifting ship as it fired down on him, hitting what looked like a bubble shield around the massive biped and having no effect. He stopped directly under the ship for a moment, then suddenly the Asferja that were now trailing him and firing on him all rose up into the air like slow moving missiles.

And the ship started coming back down just as fast.

When it got within a few meters of the surface, the Neofan stopped doing whatever he had done and the Asferja fell back to the ground as he launched himself up at the ship and tore inside the hull with a plume of disintegrated material.

Nothing happened for a while, then the top of the ship burst open and he came out…leaping to the next ship…then the next…and the next. The Asferja transports were not large. Barely 400 meters wide, but they kept cycling between larger troops ships in orbit, and the best way to keep the Asferja from getting to the planet was taking these transports out.

And it seemed this Neofan was going to do it single handedly one at a time.

Leoba stood around with the other Klix not believing what they were seeing. They were so transfixed on the images of the battle ahead that they didn’t even notice the allied transports coming down over top of them. They didn’t land. Rather they just hovered there as they spilled out an army of floating drones…the same type that the Bond of Resistance had created for use in the Temples. They were called ‘Caretakers’ there, but these were slightly different, and looked a lot meaner.

And emblazoned on the side of each one was a symbol. It was a crown identical to what the Neofan wore as part of their armored clothing. It was an old symbol they had used for a long time, but this one had a different look. Within the sheen of the ‘crown’ was a bird. An emerald bird with wings that appeared to break apart into pieces near the end.

That was where the House moniker was supposed to be, and while he had never heard of a House Phoenix before within the Neofan, these Caretakers were clearly being produced by them, and just as they efficiently pursued those in the Temples who waged war on others, they were moving all across the Factory zone, both in the streets and going into the buildings, looking for Asferja that had not yet been eliminated.

“Factory zone being secured,” he reported over the comm. “Where do you want us next?”

Venco couldn’t believe what he was watching from the planning center, but the Neofan were not everywhere and he still had troops in heavy combat in multiple locations.

“Get the wounded back to Sector 9 for repair. Anyone who has their carapace still intact, move to Rim Zone Eti.”

“Understood,” Leoba said. “What is House Phoenix? I’ve never heard of that one.”

“It is the combination of their decimated Houses. Only House Atriark, and now House Phoenix remain. You just witnessed their Reignor in combat.”

“I can’t believe they came.”

“Nor can we, but they are here, and we finally have a chance in this war. I am told they intend to help us hold all our remaining worlds, and 12 of them are on the surface now.”

“How can so few do so much?”

“That is the power of Essence, and they command it in ways we do not understand. What they are doing in orbit is just as impressive, but they cannot be everywhere at once. You are not out of danger, nor are our cities. Do not let your guard down.”

“I will not,” Leoba said, ignoring the burning on his left front foot from a melted spot hit by an Asferja weapon that had penetrated when his shields were down…and had passed just under the physical shield he held before him attached to his artificial exoskeleton. “If the Neofan are helping us defend, will this never end? The worlds the enemy took have to be reclaimed or they will never stop sending troops against us.”

“Leave that to the Empress. We must hold what we have left before we even think about taking back what was lost. The Neofan will lead this war as they see fit, no doubt. And as of now I am content to follow their lead. Are you?”

“Quite so. Have their machines been cleared on our systems?” he asked, wondering about the automated turrets.

“Already done. Get your people moving and get the rest of the Asferja killed before they do any more damage. They will switch to sabotage when their numbers thin, and we need all our industry intact if we are to rebuild at maximum pace.”

“Deploying now,” he said, telepathically splitting up his Hujunari team into two groups. One to get to the repair area, and the other with him as they headed towards Rim Zone Eti. His wound was minor, and he wasn’t going to let it keep him out of the fight as his shields had already begun to regenerate to cover the vulnerability.

The pain he’d simply endure. That part was easy now that they had the advantage. And he didn’t want to let the Neofan or their machines do all the work that was left. This was a Klix world, after all, and he wasn’t going to have his race relegated into a protectorate. They were allies with the Neofan in the Bond of Resistance. Junior allies, albeit it, but allies none the less.

And allies fought together.

Apparently the Neofan realized that too, and from now on this would be a joint war.

21

EG32

December 8, 158441

INTERGALACTIC SPACE

Jeeno #882

It had been three years that Paul had been away from the war. Three years hunting down the lost nightcrawlers, and the task was now done. They’d already taken 9 of them back to the Milky Way when their food supply was running short, then the Easter Basket had went back out to get the rest, carrying two volunteers with them to greet the others when they found them.

Four galaxies in total had been visited, and 17 nightcrawlers had been recovered. That was all that was left of their race, but Paul wasn’t complaining. He was glad they’d found even a single one, meaning the last Gauntlet War hadn’t been a complete wipe of the Progarren civilization.

The base Star Force had been using for the original nightcrawler…which put their total at 18…was not where Paul’s ship had taken them. Given this was a multi-year expedition, back when he’d made the request for this ship to be built and sent to Andromeda, the Empire had also started construction on a secret base for them on the edge of the galaxy. House Atriark had assisted in creating an extension to the Temple Network, with Star Force providing them the raw materials to create a Deenat spur off the existing spiderweb of connections, allowing Essence travel out to a spot where there were no stars or planets. Just an empty spot in space where Star Force had been building its nightcrawler base using the data they’d gained from the Legacy Repository, and some poking around the Okala tree, to upgrade what their forebearers had used before.

The design was similar though, enough that the nightcrawlers immediately recognized it as home, with them free swimming through space while the Easter Basket had to use mooring beams to maneuver off the Deenat for the lack of gravity present to run its engines on, for it didn’t want to use its small Essence drive any more than absolutely necessary given the shortages of Essence that were due to eventually hit the Empire over the course of this war.

A little saved now would be valuable later, even if it was just enough to power a single Materia shot at an enemy supership.

But the nightcrawlers had no such limitation, and the more they flew around the base the denser the carpet of darklight energy became…which made it even easier for them to move around. They did it on purpose too, not just to get some exercise or to play with each other…for bumper tag seemed to be one of their favorite games…but it was as if they were laying down a nest to live in. The starlight from tens of lightyears away consumed it slowly, as did sensor beams from any craft passing through the Deenat, and the Deenat itself. So the base was actually located some distance away from the Deenat and drifting even further.

They’d kept it very close during the construction, but then gave it a little push and it had been gradually gaining distance ever since. One mission of this base was to be able to construct a ship hybrid using darklight technology, perhaps with biological components if necessary, to allow Star Force ships to move free of gravity wells without having to spend Essence to do it. Paul didn’t know how they’d manage that, but it was on their to-do list, as well as start building up the population of nightcrawlers the same way they had done with the Uriti. They couldn’t reproduce without the Progarren allowing it, and when they did it was asexual. A simple button press inside one of them would enable the nightcrawler to get pregnant with an exact genetic duplicate if the nightcrawler wished it.

They would have been reproducing in the ‘wild’ otherwise, and in some ways Paul was glad that wasn’t the case, because chasing down thousands, if not tens of thousands, of them across who knew how many galaxies would have been impractical. But now that he had all of them…and he was sure he did thanks to Hades’ ability to see and track them…they could start reproducing again after the Wranglers got this herd into shape, both physically and mentally. Also, since genetics did change over time…which was how adaptation occurred intentionally rather than through fortuitous accidents…they needed to examine the nightcrawlers to see if they’d picked up any small negative genetic alterations before they asked them to make duplicates of themselves.

And thanks to the Okala, they could actually analyze the samples taken from them in ways modern science could only dream of. The catch was any such samples had to be taken to the Repository and worked on while a researcher made physical contact with the Okala to gain the knowledge. As soon as they let go, the knowledge would be lost. They were writing down a lot, chronicling massive amounts of secrets from the Okala, but those writings often didn’t make sense without the underlying knowledge of the chemistry and physics involved, so Star Force’s scientists were having to learn all over again like they had when they’d first found the V’kit’no’sat temple with science far over their heads.

It hadn’t been easy or quick then, and this was not now…given that the Okala held far more information than the V’kit’no’sat empire could have ever dreamed of…and Paul had asked them to prioritize learning about the nightcrawlers and the biotech used to create them, so that they could maintain and care for them properly before they tried to increase or upgrade their population.

Paul had spent a couple months at the nightcrawler base, which he’d pulled rank on the building team to rename it the ‘Bat Cave,’ then the Easter Basket had headed back out, fully restocked by the already existing Bat Cave staff and internal foodstuff factories that were being fed raw materials by occasional shipments through the Deenat, then transforming it into the list of recipes the Progarren had used for the nightcrawlers. Once the nightcrawlers got settled in, they’d be doing most of the cargo hauling out to the Bat Cave rather than using the Deenat, but having it built prior to their arrival had been important enough to warrant the cost in Essence and the construction of the Deenat.

Those nightcrawlers he left behind at the base were quite happy to stay, and the two he had brought back out with them were eager to find more of their former brothers…all of whom somehow knew each other from long ago. The Progarren had thousands of nightcrawlers, yet it seemed they had all met each other at least at some point in their lives. And it also seemed that had been intentional on the part of the Progarren.

But when they got past 9, Paul had a little problem, for he was running short on Reindeer names. It was a challenge he eventually overcame, starting with non-traditional ones like Chet, and eventually having to come up with some new ones. But as it was, all 18 ‘Reindeer’ were now named rather than numbered, including the original ‘Rudolph,’ and he’d ordered future naming to follow the same trend.

All the new guys they’d picked up on the second trip out had been just as glad to see their kin and there had been no problems recruiting them. Some were damaged, but not as badly as Donner had been. That first one that he’d found had fully healed up by the time they got him back to the base, at least as far as the hole in him was concerned. Mentally, and on a molecular level, he was still quite damaged…but his condition had improved so much since that first day that Paul knew he wasn’t in danger. The bad ‘growth’ in his Rings would slowly wither away and be replaced with new programs, or the existing bad ones would be altered to get out the rot in them. The body and mind never intentionally made bad stuff, they were always trying to compensate or handle something else. And when an individual chose to do something wrong, well, the body and mind followed suit trying to make it more efficient or easier to accomplish…even if that meant ignoring your conscience.

Likewise, when the nightcrawlers experienced the horror of being abandoned, that too their bodies and minds tried to adjust to, in order to make it more bearable. And in doing so, they interfered with other programs, withering or even clear cutting more of the ‘trees’ to make that possible. Your body and mind were always on your side, trying to keep you alive and thriving at all times…but they couldn’t drive. You did, or your environment did, and they just followed.

Which was why it was damn important to teach all younglings in the Empire how to run their own lives, bodies, and minds, so they could customize them in beneficial ways rather than just being subject to whatever fate the universe dealt them with regards to the environment they were born in, or later lived in.

And that was why Star Force was so damn picky about how their planets were run, so the people who didn’t have a clue, or didn’t really care to fight the ‘War Within’ would already get the benefits of an environment crafted to their well-being. In essence, so the followers would follow in a good direction rather than bad.

And the Bat Cave was no exception to this. It had been designed in every way to create an environment conducive to growth and healing, and Paul knew that as long as Donner stayed here with the others, his War Within would be progressing in the proper direction whether or not he actively engaged in what some would metaphorically call ‘forest management.’

Paul preferred the term War Within, but then again he was a warrior, and not all people were. But all people still had to fight at various times in their life, and if they didn’t become a fighter on the inside, they weren’t going to control their own destiny, and the base programming they inherited genetically, combined with the outside environment, would craft their body and mind and leave them nearly as helpless as a person riding a rollercoaster when it came to navigating their life.

The universe, like it or not, was the equivalent of a horror movie, and for the people who actually had a chance to control their fate not to simply because of laziness or an aversion to fighting was beyond sad. Pacifism was a joke, as well as fictious. If you broke down everything in life, there were fights everywhere. Even your so-called ‘immune system’ was fighting every day against bacteria, rogue viruses, and other junk in your blood stream that wasn’t supposed to be there. Your body could not exist without fighting on some level, and neither could your mind. It had to curate the thoughts that went through it, pushing back on some that didn’t belong and embracing those that did, otherwise your imagination program would throw out so much illogical shit that it would literally drive you insane when you created programs based on those lies.

Lies were the cause of insanity, and Truth was the antidote. But to sift out the difference between the two was a mental fight…and basically, everyone was a fighter on some level, no matter how small, even if you didn’t want to throw a physical punch. Those who taught pacifism and peace were in effect teaching people to surrender and let their bodies and minds go haywire.

Your body/mind was your vehicle, and you were the pilot of that vehicle. You had to drive, else you’d crash, either slowly or very quickly.

Pacifists were, therefore, always liars, and they typically held that pacifism as a shield against other stuff they didn’t want people to see. It was a lie, like so many other things, and the truth destroyed it.

Hence, pacifists always had to target and try to eliminate the truth…which was, ironically, also a form of fighting. And that made them hypocrites right off the bat.

Fortunately the Progarren had taught the nightcrawlers well, and there wasn’t any deception in them that Paul could sense, though his ability to read them was limited. The Wranglers confirmed his sentiments though, and aside from the damage they’d taken in their abandonment, the rest of their 10 Rings seemed to have just gone dormant and were waking up now that they were back ‘home’ again.

So when they were on their way back to the Bat Cave with the second and final batch of rescuees, Paul took his leave of them at a Jeeno station in between the Butterfinger and Kit Kat galaxies in a small ship that he’d had inside the docking bay ever since it had first left the Milky Way. It was small, barely with enough room for a tiny gymnasium and no Archon Sanctum, but Paul didn’t care. He could take a break from heavy training for the month and a half it would take him to get back to the hidden location that held the Deebees.

So when they parted ways he had no worries about the safety or future development of the nightcrawlers. The mission had been a long, but total success. All were found, recovered, and were on their way to healing up and forgetting about the apocalypse they’d survived through. Training awaited them, along with new missions…whatever they would end up being…for they were not just going to be kept in a pen and cared for. They wanted to serve, and Star Force was going to give them that chance. How was the question, but that was for the Wranglers to figure out, and what they’d done with the Uriti to date had been downright amazing, so Paul had no worries about them figuring out a place in the Empire for the nightcrawlers.

He let the Easter Basket go through its portal first, then maneuvered his ship via mooring beams over to a different one that would lead to another waystation between galaxies. He sent the requisite amount of Essence from his ship’s well into the receiving station and it powered up, then he passed through and was in the Essence Realm again, coasting between stations as he leaned back in his chair and just took the moment to actually rest.

He'd been fighting for so long that he never actually allowed himself to mentally disconnect, but in this moment he felt it. It was like going on vacation and just leaving your house and all its responsibilities behind.

Paul felt a weight lift off him that he didn’t even realize was there, and he stupidly kicked himself for letting it build up in the first place…but then again, how could he take the weight of the galaxy on his back and not get pushed down a bit in the process?

“That’s one of the challenges in life,” Hades said as Paul suddenly found himself back inside the pristine white nothingness wearing Neo’s clothes.

He pulled the sunglasses off and spun around, not seeing any bench this time, just ‘Smith’ standing behind him.

“And one you can never escape as a god?”

“Quite right. So take the opportunity now to decompress. It’s the first time you’ve been truly alone without a crowd around you in a very long time.”

“Yet you’re here.”

“Momentarily. Thank you for taking care of the nightcrawlers. It’s a bit of my responsibility that I was never able to take care of, and a relief of my own. The universe never intended for starlight and darklight hybrids, and as such my powers were not sufficient to deal with the matter, nor were my responsibilities clearly defined.”

“Does it screw up a lot like that?”

“On the whole, no. But there are numerous lapses that arise when you process so many variables in never-ending conflict. Its success rate is phenomenal, but never perfect.”

“Do you have more house cleaning for me to do?”

Hades shook his head with a slight smile. “No. I just came to say thank you. We needn’t speak again for a long time, but can anytime you wish that you’re within my realm.”

“You can’t see the war, can you?”

“Only that which is in your mind, but Zeus seems to continually be helpful.”

“Yes he is,” Paul said, growing a little tight again and forcing himself to relax.

“You don’t want to be here.”

“I have conflicting missions. I need to be in the fight, but I also need to help the Deebees in a way no one else can. It sucks.”

“Try my job sometimes,” Hades quipped. “Would you like the tracker removed or would you like to keep it?”

“I’ll keep it, just in case it comes in handy later.”

Hades bowed his head slightly. “It is yours permanently then.”

In a flash of light he and the artificial environment were gone, and Paul was back in his seat, though the timestamp on the control board indicated that some 4 hours and 52 minutes had passed.

He stood up, feeling rather refreshed, and belatedly realized Hades had given his body and mind a chance to take a nap while he was chatting with him on purpose. The kind of nap where you just zonk out and aren’t thinking about a bazillion other things…like Paul normally did during his few hours of sleep every day or two.

“Note to self, rest more,” he said, stretching his arms and body as he stood up and went to get something to eat. Nap or no, his metabolism was still very high and he needed to shove food into his oversized Furyan stomach even more than when he’d been Human, and he didn’t think that extra fuel load capacity had been an accidental quirk of his transition. It, probably like all the other changes, had been based off of various needs the Human body wasn’t giving them enough of.

And the ability to eat and carry more food in his stomach definitely fit that purpose.

So over the following weeks Paul did light workouts only, resting up even as he was active some 6 to 8 hours a day, as his ship moved from one piece of the intergalactic travel network to another. When he eventually arrived back at the out of the way ‘Halo’ he actually landed his small ship on the largest of the original pads created on the structure and not one of the smaller Star Force additions.

When he stepped out and into the artificial sunlight of the Halo and smelled the moist scents of the jungle environment, the feelings of ‘vacation’ hit him even more. He soaked it in for a few minutes, then smiled as Mav arrived first to greet him, flying directly there and transforming as he landed, with him now standing taller than Paul by about a foot and a half.

“You’ve returned!” he said enthusiastically in a slightly ‘metallic’ voice that was still high pitched.

“And I’m going to be here for a while. The Empire is fighting well, but you guys are our long term advantage, and I need to be here more than out there. Plus, I kinda missed you guys anyway.”

“We always missed our Paul, but we understood why you had to leave to fight. Are we winning?”

“Mostly, but it’s still early and they haven’t gotten all of their races here yet. But every day we hold them back, the better it looks for us long term. They are using swarm tactics.”

“Mathematical extrapolation indicates that the best way to defeat reproductive swarm technology is to defeat their ‘seeds’ early rather than wait to fight their larger numbers later.”

“That’s what we’ve been doing for the most part, but they’ve got a few effective tricks…like bringing ships the size of planets…that make some of those seeds hard to nip in the bud.”

“Seeds do not have ‘buds.’ Buds are the protoform of flowers.”

“Old metaphor,” he said as a large blur jumped up onto the edge of the shallow platform as it came out of the trees, and the metallic T-rex likewise transformed as it walked up beside Mav.

“Hello, Grimmie,” Paul said with a smile. “You look winded.”

“I unlocked my sprinting ability,” he said proudly. “It requires an auxiliary oxygen reaction, and has limited time of use.”

“That’s why it’s called a sprint,” Paul clarified, sensing other Deebees spread out across the Halo heading towards him from different directions. He hadn’t given them any forewarning that he was landing, he’d just come down and they’d obviously figured out it was him somehow, for he hadn’t even commed Wilson yet. “You’ve grown too.”

“We all have,” Mav interjected. “Do you know how much larger we will get?”

“Not a clue,” Paul admitted. “But unless something goes horribly wrong in the war, I’m going to be here with you guys for the rest of your basic training. Then, you guys get to come with me and start helping out in small ways. And before you ask, I don’t know how long that will be. We’ll know when you get to that point when it happens.”

“We are glad,” Grimmie said, his robotic head that mimicked a Human’s smiling widely. “Do you bring new war records with you?”

“Outdated ones. I’ve been away from the Milky Way for over a year, so what you have might be more up to date than mine.”

“We have received nothing since you left.”

Paul raised an eyebrow. They must have been sending them here for his sake only.

“When was your last supply ship?”

“9 months, 17 days ago,” Grimmie replied, knowing to omit the hours, minutes, and seconds.

“And no updates with it?”

“Nothing other than cargo.”

“Well then,” Paul said, using his armor to produce holographic maps and models of both the invading races and their ships over a wide area between him and the two Deebees. “These are the five races we face now, and I’m told there are more on the way…”

Jason-025 stood on the bridge of his Clan Command Ship Never Dull as he mentally oversaw the battle on the planet below. His Borg vessel was not here, but rather plugging one of the holes in the arrival systems coming off the Galactic Threads. Captain Kleeson had that well in hand and it didn’t require Jason to be there, so he was out and mobile in one of the regular Command Ships leading smaller fleets against hotspots.

They’d found one such hotspot on the planet below, formerly uninhabited, but now sporting an Asferja hive complex that had to have been at least two years in the making. Somehow they’d gotten a seed ship here without Star Force knowing some 18,339 light years from the nearest Thread exit, but at the moment that wasn’t what was occupying all of his attention, for he’d just received a courier ship with updated interstellar comm activity from one of the neighboring Star Force systems, and there was a message from Paul in it that he was watching in the form of a small hologram before him as he stayed mentally linked into the battlemap system watching the ongoing combat.

“Jason, I’m heading back to the Halo now after having a thorough discussion with Kara about this. You know I want to be there, but the Deebees can’t be led by anyone other than me at this point. Like it or not I’m their Daddy, so I gotta maroon myself out there again,” he said with a visible grimace. “I’m counting on you to tell me when I need to come back so I won’t be second guessing myself daily. I’m going to tune out the war as much as I can and focus on the Deebees. It’s against my nature to do so, but in truth I can also use the vacation. It seems some of you were right when you said I was a workaholic. Not that I work too much, but that sometimes I forget how much I’m working. If I do the calculations myself I always like pushing the boundaries. So I’m leaving it up to you, and yes I hate this as much as you’d expect. But it needs to be done for multiple reasons.”

“Andromeda is off to the right start, but the Asferja already have a significant foothold there. The kind we can’t let them get in the Milky Way. I know you and the others won’t let that happen, and I also know we’d have slightly better odds if I was leading some of the naval fights. It’s those type of calculations I don’t want to keep running in my own head, so the only way to do this is to go all in. I’m checking out of the war until you call me back,” he said with a hint of anger in his voice, which he obviously realized, then the trailblazer’s best friend relaxed his shoulders and sighed deeply, accepting the situation for what it was.

“Wake me…when you need me.”

The brief hologram ended, leaving Jason overlooking the naval battle between Clan Sangheili and the Asferja defense fleet, with him continuing to make a few small adjustments to their placements as he watched the message throughout. He estimated another 40-50 minutes of fighting before the Asferja fleet finally broke and they could begin their pre-invasion bombardment of the planet.

“Will do, Chief,” he said to the already deactivated hologram. There was no need to compose a reply message. He’d do as asked and Paul already knew that. They were closer than twin brothers, and he knew how difficult it was to walk away from this war for him. Kara must have done some real arm twisting on that one, but Jason knew she was right. The Deebees were the reason this whole war was happening, so they must have a lot more potential power than even what Paul described in his limited recollection.

Having him putting them through their basic training was necessary, but painful, and it was a good idea to let Jason decide when he came back. That’d spare Paul a lot of distraction.

As it was, things were mostly well in hand on the Asferja front, not so good on the Jaegger one, but neither situation required Paul. Andromeda had, but now that Thrawn was in place there he had no doubt that sneaky…now blue…lizard bastard would find a way to take control of it.

So with that set in motion, it was time for Paul to go babysit the metallic dinosaurs he’d created.

But Jason didn’t have to take that sucky assignment. He was right here on the front lines doing what an Archon was meant to do. Dive into the hardest fights and kick ass.

And until the T’fen threw something more difficult their way, these Asferja weren’t going to be enough to call Paul back for. Jason would save him for something special, and only as a last resort.

In the meantime there was ample fighting to do, and Jason wasn’t going to miss out on any of it.

He stared out the simulated viewports on the bridge as he lightly directed the battle, with Asferja ships and Star Force drones crisscrossing and ramming each other everywhere as the enemy tried to get to the Command Ship, but they couldn’t. Paul had helped design them a superior fleet, and without a controlling overmind in this system, the Asferja didn’t stand a chance of outmaneuvering them.

It was just a matter of time until Clan Sangheili got through them into low orbit, and like most swarm races, they wouldn’t even consider surrendering…so it became a task of eliminating them as fast as possible before moving on to the next breach point in the Star Force defensive corridor.

This was the fifth one Jason’s fleet had found, and the most developed yet, but it wouldn’t be the last. Not by a long shot, with the number of maneuvering options the Asferja had coming in off the Galactic Threads.

But if they thought they were going to get any kind of territorial foothold consolidated here, they were sadly mistaken. This was Star Force’s galaxy, and it was going to take far more than a bug swarm to steal a piece of it away from them.

Paul wasn’t going to be needed for a long time, but Jason had a feeling that the T’fen were not sending their best in first as some others speculated. He expected this was just the opening act of the Gauntlet Wars…and the really hard hitters would be getting here later.

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