Star Force: Galactic Empire Revealed (Star Force Universe Book 63) Read online

  1

  April 4, 128557

  Hadarak Occupation Zone

  System 33920

  Hugh-1019934 had been behind enemy lines for 63 years on a one man mission, and it wasn’t ending anytime soon. He was an Archon, and a Wrangler, and those two skills were what allowed him to lead an army of Uriti minions in a private war against the Hadarak in their Second Ring of occupation. There had been others doing the same thing, and through couriers he had kept in contact with the closest ones, but they had all fallen in recent decades as the Hadarak worked to consume the territory that they had initially outlined.

  That outline had been their original invasion, encircling massive chunks of the galactic disc that they would then send their own minion fleets and a few Hadarak Wardens out to gradually consume. Those that tried to flee would run into the backline of Hadarak occupied systems, and it seemed clear the Hadarak were not as much interested in acquiring territory as they were in extermination.

  Star Force had helped 8 races evacuate from Hugh’s currently held territory, while many others had not been so fortunate. They’d died before help could get to them, and while the Uriti were no longer around here to fight, the minions they’d left behind along with a single Wrangler had one mission and one only.

  Delay the expansion by causing the Hadarak as much trouble in the ‘digestion’ areas as they could, and Hugh had been unexpectedly doing better than that. He’d actually been winning.

  The reason for that was two-fold. All his minions were biological machines, not people like the Hadarak minions were. The Chixzon hadn’t wanted that random element inserted into their armies of conquest, so they’d redesigned them into something more reliable…but less efficient. People could adapt and think, so the minions Hugh had to work with were inferior to the Hadarak ones with regards to mission profile, but they did have more weaponry.

  The Chixzon had made sure of that, because they would be fighting starships and not other biologicals. Hugh guessed the Hadarak were geared up to fight Essence monsters of some sort, and he doubted they had ranged weaponry. It was probably more melee fighting, which the Hadarak minions were best at, but they also were equipped for ranged combat…they just weren’t totally geared for it.

  Hugh didn’t know about Kara’s report. He didn’t know about the Vargemma, or anything else since he had been sent out here. There were no lines of communication back to the Empire, Star Force or V’kit’no’sat. There weren’t even any friendly fleets operating in this area. The Hadarak totally controlled it save for the little pockets where the Uriti minions were doing their best to spam and resist, and those pockets had no way of knowing what anyone else was doing except for sending out some automated courier minions to see what was going on.

  Many of those got shot down, but enough had gotten through to the other nearby Wranglers to keep some idea of what was going on in the local area. That’s how Hugh knew the others were being overwhelmed and had to pull out, leaving him the last one standing in this area, at least. These operations were going on across the entire perimeter of the Deep Core, so he didn’t know how many others on the far side were still in play, but he didn’t expect many.

  Why he was still here was due to his ability to command his minions like they were part of some gigantic RTS video game. He had started out with one system and expanded to 18 others before the Hadarak swarm had claimed all the other neutral worlds around him…but since then he had actually been able to defend his turf and expand it. Now he had 603 star systems under his sole command and was in the process of adding two more.

  The fighting was not lax here. His systems were getting hit by minion armies daily, which he would get the reports about after the fighting was over weeks later. He had to think ahead and send pre-programmed orders out to modify the existing programming in his minions, and because he was an Archon he was able to do that extremely well. Enough to counter the limited strategic wisdom of the Hadarak minions. They might be alive, but they weren’t all that smart. Still, they didn’t shoot things that were obviously not the enemy like his own minions occasionally did when there was confusion about targets. That was a machine error glitch you couldn’t work around, and some of the battle reports made him facepalm in disbelief.

  But the reliability of the Uriti minions meant they wouldn’t disobey orders and would continue to fight until they died regardless of the damage done to them…because there was nobody inside their bodies to feel pain or fear. They were just biological machines, and for as many inefficiencies as that created, it was what was allowing a single Human to hold onto 603 star systems against the constant wave of attacks from the Hadarak minions.

  Yet the main reason he was gaining ground rather than losing it wasn’t the minions. It was the lack of large scale Hadarak activity. No Warden or Lurker had ever attacked his territory. None had even passed through it. He just had the enemy minion fleets to deal with, and those were hard to fight. The reason he was able to do so was he had been able to consolidate his forces early on and not have to deal with attrition. That allowed him to build up several star systems into fortified positions that he then used to build massive cities and production facilities…just like in a videogame.

  The more production you had, the more units you could produce. And once he got decently-sized fleets of minions he flew them into neighboring systems and started attacking the Hadarak to increase his system count…because he knew if a Hadarak arrived he would lose the system. He couldn’t hold out against one of them, so he had to abandon the idea of having a heavily fortified capitol to work out of a position of strength. Against a Warden there was no position of strength, so Hugh was spreading to as many systems as he could and protecting them long enough for them to grow to the point of self-sufficiency against the minion waves, all the time knowing that a Warden or Lurker showing up would automatically lose him that system.

  But none ever had. And while the minion waves were a tough challenge to overcome, he was doing just that. Hugh hadn’t a clue why the big Hadarak were leaving him alone, for they had been attacking the other Wrangler fiefdoms regularly, but as long as they were giving him time he was going to use it to grow as much as possible.

  His massive expansion had halted in recent years as what he thought of as ‘Ultra’ units started to pop up on the battlefields. They were the equivalent of large mechs and likewise heavily armored. Not as much as the Hadarak were. It wasn’t Yeg’gor, but it was far heavier armor than normal minions carried. When inserted into the battlefield it took so much firepower to take them down that it made the rest of the enemy minions that much stronger. You either had to attack them or focus on the heavies, and either way you were screwed.

  Hugh had actually sent out orders to kill the weak minions first, then mass together and surround the Ultras. That was working better, but the battles were now more costly because of the inclusion of these units, some of which were also naval. They weren’t much bigger than the other warship minions, and still far smaller than Hadarak Wardens, but their durability was what was changing the battlefield in the enemy’s favor.

  But Hugh was also adding new units to the field, for the Chixzon had developed a large catalog of minion varieties and Star Force had actually expanded on that, giving him more advanced units that could be produced once the necessary logistics were established. Those were helping him reinforce his systems, but the swarm tactics that both he and the enemy were using made one’s head spin when you tried to calculate advantages and disadvantages.

  Therein was also an advantage of machines. There wasn’t any person guidin
g the battles to become overwhelmed or stressed. And so far the Uriti minions were doing a damn good job of holding off the attacks without any oversight…though Hugh did have to reinvade several systems that fell, or nearly fell, by the time he learned of it via couriers.

  His position was not stable, but given how everything else was dropping like flies to the Hadarak advance, he was doing unnaturally well and extending his mission far longer than expected. He was fine with that, and was continuing to chew away at nearby systems to expand further as he waited for the day when one of the big Hadarak would arrive to start busting up his growing empire in their backfield.

  Hugh really wished he had one Uriti here, though he knew that would be too dangerous for them. They weren’t meant for fighting the Hadarak Wardens, whom they considered kin, but they could jam the enemy minions into a freeze-like state that made them easy to kill. Fortunately the Wardens and Lurkers couldn’t do that to Uriti minions, which was also due to the Chixzon’s paranoia with regards to control. They’d made sure they and only they could issue orders to the minions, and however they had done it, the Hadarak couldn’t take control or freeze them the same way a Uriti could do to the enemy minions.

  But with Lurkers out hunting Ysalamir, the Uriti would become prime targets as well, and Star Force couldn’t afford to lose any of them. Not only were they people, but they were so large and old that each one was an immensely valuable asset and ally. No, this backline fighting wasn’t for valuable units. It was for expendable ones. And the Uriti minions were the definition of expendable.

  Out of all the systems Hugh had, the one he was residing in was the only one that had never been invaded by the minions. It wasn’t because it didn’t border other systems that were open, for it once had, but the minions had never come here. They had assaulted all 602 other systems in his little empire, but not this one. After a while he had chosen to relocate here and risk building up some extra infrastructure by using nearby systems to mine and send key resources to this location, knowing that if a Warden arrived his gamble would become a massive debacle, but the oddity of no attacks having been made here for reasons unknown suggested it might be worth the try.

  And with no attrition in this system from the constant attacks the others were having to endure, the Uriti minions spammed to a level that would have made a Paladin proud. Hugh now had all 8 planets in this system colonized, with two of them containing full planetary defenses…meaning every avenue of approach was guarded by anti-orbital guns. Minions didn’t use shields, so there was nothing to keep an enemy from landing on the planets other than the firepower to shoot them down first, but as the years went by he was stacking more and more cannons in between the existing ones all the while rapidly producing more factories that were giving him some of those higher end units.

  And those higher end units were bigger and better warships, in addition to mech-caliber ground units. Both had more advanced weaponry, which was harder to grow and required a lot of materials, including solari, and that primarily is what was being shipped in from other systems after being collected on planets and not from a star. None of the Uriti minions were designed for stellar mining, but if you knew where to look in a star system that was old enough, you could find deposits that the star had belched out in the past via nova, or even just a touch from solar flares.

  The Hadarak minions did not use solari, which meant every advanced unit Hugh was able to produce was going to be better than their Ultras. Some weapon systems simply had to have them, which meant solari was a critical measuring stick in the hierarchy of civilizations, and Hugh’s minion civilization here was now superior to the enemy minions coming his way, including the Ultras.

  He did know that the Hadarak Wardens did collect solari, so the Wrangler was waiting for the day when some even more impressive Ultras arrived to match his, but so far that hadn’t happened. He had a solari advantage for now, and when the Hadarak minions didn’t mine it, that meant he could take systems from them and increase his own stockpiles, which was why he was selecting adjacent systems to his own cluster that had known deposits as his primary targets for expansion.

  Hugh kept wondering when all this would end, but it never did. This system, which he’d privately called ‘New Hope,’ still hadn’t seen a single Hadarak minion show up. Not even a scout. And no Warden had entered any of his other systems. The reason for that continued to confuse the Archon, and the longer this mini war within a war went on, he began to think it wasn’t an accident.

  Originally he thought he might have been overlooked because he was in an unimportant region and the Hadarak had bigger and better targets to go after, but they’d had plenty of time to circle back on him. Their minions had, but not their big guys. His effective resistance, let alone his retaking of systems from the Hadarak, should have provoked a response beyond just the Ultras. Were the big guys required elsewhere? Were the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force giving them that much trouble?

  Hugh didn’t know was going on, so he continued to chew away at the enemy with his ‘minions killed’ counter rising daily at a far faster rate than his ‘minions lost.’ Then something happened that he had not expected.

  The central star in New Hope was a big one, and like most big ones it was colored white. The 8 planets here were very spread out, and the gaps between them Hugh was filling with minion battle stations and patrols that would either attract immediate attention when an invasion fleet arrived, or would be ignored as the planets were targeted and thus allow for his forces to get in behind the enemy and flank them.

  Hugh couldn’t have too many minions, so he was spamming everything he could and still the empty space in the system dwarfed what he had already produced. But it was the star that caught his attention today. As usual he had surveillance on it, monitoring for fleets jumping into low stellar orbit, when an odd sunspot occurred. At first it appeared normal, except for the emissions coming from it were stone cold.

  Sunspots, dark as they looked, were not truly cold. They were just less hot while still giving off massive amounts of radiation. This one was giving off nothing, which immediately flagged a protocol in the minions to report it to his attention along with anything else odd that happened here or in the other 602 systems.

  When that happened he ordered several minion monitors to fly in closer to get him a better view, and what they were transmitting back to him suddenly clicked in his mind. This wasn’t an odd sunspot. This was something in the star, like a Hadarak or Uriti, and it was slowing rotating up into view.

  He quickly ruled out both of the familiar space monsters, for the scans coming off this one were different. Not Yeg’gor armor, for sure, but something that was bending. It was coming up and breaking the surface of the star, then going back down again as its body slowly moved in stages. And by slow, it was really slow. So much so that it didn’t look like it was moving at all until you monitored it over the course of hours.

  It looked like a whale, or maybe a worm was a better metaphor. Hugh watched it for 3 days as its body very gradually rotated into view and back out again, for the material of the star made it impossible to scan below the surface. At least with the minions he had. Give him a proper starship and he’d get a bit deeper with the scans, but the only thing he had was a few hidden scout ships geared for speed and not survey sensors.

  The presence of this thing had to be the reason why the minions would not come here, and perhaps even getting near this system was why the big Hadarak were not coming into the area. At least that was the best theory he had yet, and frankly he didn’t know if this thing posed a threat to him or not, but he’d been here for the past 17 years and never seen it before. Had it really been inside the star all that time and only now coming up to the surface?

  He was wondering why it would come up to the surface at all until during the third day a spot of energy leapt out from the giant black back of the worm-thing, firing off into space like a whale blowing when it hit the surface. The stream mimicked that of a solar flare
and lasted for the better part of 12 hours before ceasing, and when it did the black back of the worm-thing began to move faster…a lot faster. It was as if it was diving again with the remaining half of it coming up to the surface while the front went down…and as it did so three massive fins appeared near the rear of the body, the top of which came clear out of the star dripping glowing material off it before finally submerging again with a bit of tail left after that.

  Then it was gone from sensors, but the plume of the pseudo solar flare it had created was still moving away from the star. Hugh sent minions to go sample it, for the initial sensor readings were coming back very odd, and once the ‘research’ minion variety got there and made physical contact with it he discovered why the sensors were having trouble identifying it.

  The material was pure solari and some other exotic compounds that were unidentifiable to the Uriti minions. That single plume had produced more solari than Hugh had mined in his empire the past 50 years. Far more, in fact. Never in Star Force history had they encountered this amount or density of material outside, or even inside, a star. And right now it was just drifting away from low stellar orbit and slowly expanding outward into a nebula.

  Hugh sent collection minions immediately before it got a chance to drift further apart or fall back into the star. Whatever that thing was down there had just inadvertently given him a massive gift…but the larger question was what was it? And did the Hadarak fear it enough not to send even a single minion here? Would it retaliate against them if it did? Was this a Hadarak of some kind on a mission, in exile, or just in a time-out? Maybe a vacation resort?

  Hugh didn’t have any answers. Not any good ones, at least. But the existence of this thing had to be reported back to Star Force now.

  He began growing a specialized fleet of couriers and assembling an escort of warship minions to go with it, expecting to lose all of them in the effort. Hadarak territory now surrounded his, and he didn’t know how deep it extended towards, or perhaps into, V’kit’no’sat territory. But all it would take was one courier minion getting through with the information to be successful. And the others would die protecting them or creating a distraction for them to slip by, over and over again, until either they ran out of ships or they made it into the clear.