Blue Blades Read online

  1

  November 27, 154967

  System 9932045 (Hadarak Territory)

  High Orbit

  The Star Force scout ship had been to this system before, surveying the heavy infestation that existed beyond the planets. Great strands of what looked like string were visible even from this distance, and together they massed the equivalent of several planets, made from the inner cores of those existing ones that were now gutted. Many had crumbled into rubble orbiting the two stars at system’s center, while others were still inhabited, but with huge spires coming off them and forming thorny halos that orbited with the rotation of the planet.

  This system was one of the many that made up the zone of heavy resistance, or as some had come to refer to it as the ‘Web Wall.’ It was similar to the Grand Border, except on the Hadarak side, and was only a few dozen systems thick, but it surrounded the entire Core keeping out those the Hadarak did not want in…and potentially to keep in those it did not want to get out.

  The scout ship could not enter the system near the star safely, for it was cluttered with enemy ships and stations…all of which were alive, and they were placed along the jumplines to destroy anything that came in, or to run down anything that came in elsewhere and attempted to get through and jump to another system.

  The scout ship might have been able to make it through, but the slow route was the wiser. It had come in at slow speed and braked heavily early so it arrived out of its jump far out into the system where the defenses were not. This scout ship had been here for 13 days on this trip, with the simple mission of making sure that the area was clear of enemies where the attack fleet would be coming in.

  If the Hadarak thought Star Force was going to do a simple area sweep coming off the Grand Border, then they were going to be in for a shock. Already there were 18 columns reaching out across Hadarak territory and taking select systems in an ‘island hopping’ maneuver that was establishing supply routes…but not through safe systems. They had to pass through enemy territory dozens of times to get to the next safe haven, but given the fact that Star Force could protect its convoys extremely well and Wardens were so slow they couldn’t intercept them, the only real threat was from Lurkers, which was why each convoy had at least one Avenger-class warship with them.

  There was a string of new bases going up in the systems they took, but if Star Force waited around the Hadarak would get the idea of what they were doing, so many attack fleets were making diversionary attacks elsewhere while some fleets skipped ahead to the primary targets…and this was one of them. Star Force was going to win this war concurrently in the Core, then backfill the rest of Hadarak territory and meet up with Clan Kai’sa that was taking and holding bits of territory around the Grand Border. But in order to get to the Core, you first had to take down the Web Wall enough to get ships through to the other side en mass.

  Trouble was, some of the webs out there could use Essence like Lurkers could, though these were immobile. There was also a variety of nasty weapons not seen elsewhere on the Star Force side of the wall, making this the first big fight Star Force was going to have with the Hadarak, and if the travel times had been estimated correctly, they should be arriving any time now.

  The scout ship sat just off the jumpline and kept watch with its passive sensors, sending burst transmissions out of the system on the jumpline so the incoming ships could intercept the signals just before their braking maneuvers so they could see what was ahead of them. It was one of the more important jobs for scout ships, and in a flash of highly accelerated star light being directed back inward, the first of the warships slid to a stop within visual sight range of the cloaked scout ship.

  But it wasn’t the only one. More followed at tight intervals, like giant sharks congregating together as they got some minimal spacing between them while waiting for the others to come in. The scout ship just sat and watched, seeing a variety of support ships enter the system in the convoy before a fleet of Avengers arrived.

  The Irondel onboard the scout ship fist pumped in unison when seeing them, ready to watch some fireworks as the Avengers moved out of the main fleet into their own hunting group while the rest of the system was probably still unaware of their arrival given how far out in the system they were emerging, but that wouldn’t last for long.

  More and more regular ships arrived, holding onto their drones as the warships stacked up into rows waiting…and then something truly massive appeared. It wasn’t a Borg vessel, nor a Mach’nel. The scout ship crew didn’t know what it was until they ran it through the ship silhouette database, and just as the identification came up, a second Ysalamir entered the system, just as massive.

  “I thought they were obsolete?” the scout ship Captain said, impressed but confused.

  “ID tags indicate recent construction, and those are bigger than what we had in the past,” another of the crew answered, tapping on a tiny console given his 10 inch height as a third Ysalamir arrived, this one slightly different in make but still of massive size, measuring at least 1000 miles long.

  “I got it,” another Irondel said, coming onto the bridge carrying boxes of popcorn kernels the size of their hands, then he froze and nearly dropped them when he saw the Ysalamir on the main display. “What the fuck?”

  “Bring the food,” the Captain said, getting his box and leaning back in his command chair as he raised the foot rest up out of it and settled in with everyone else doing likewise as more support ships followed the three Ysalamir out of their jumps. “Helm, keep us in good viewing range at your discretion. Our job here is done…you did send the packet?”

  “As soon as the first ship arrived,” the comm officer said, referring to the detailed system scans they’d done the past two weeks.

  “Good. Time for the good guys to kick some ass,” he said, biting out a huge chunk of one of the popcorn kernels. “Two steps from hell,” he mumbled as he pressed a key on his command chair, delving into his personal music stash. “Battle songs and loop…”

  Grand Admiral Lucin stood onboard one of the regular warships manned by H’kar, despite him being a Kvash and far shorter than the exoskeleton-clad race. His body was actually the harder, and the more immobile, but his mind was sharp and he’d selected this ship to command in the mixed fleet given to him by Randy-021. Lucin had full command, and no trailblazer was here, nor senior Archon, for he knew dozens of assaults like this were happening at approximately the same time across the galaxy, branching off from what would soon be Star Force supply lines in a fashion that made these assaults impossible to predict.

  This one was entirely up to the Grand Admiral, and never before had anyone in Star Force assaulted fortifications such as this. The major jumplines were covered in growths, allowing only a narrow corridor of clear space at the very center to get through them safely down to the star, forcing anyone entering at any moderate altitude to emerge into a gauntlet of living weaponry, and if his intelligence was correct, some of those growths could telekinetically rip a small ship apart at a range of several hundred thousand miles.

  But not all of the growths had Essence abilities. The ones that did were the Avengers’ problem. The rest, which were dangerous for other reasons, were for the Ysalamir to tackle and remove, with the fleet covering both key weapon platforms as the Vargemma in a neighboring ship indicated they could already see Essence build up in the defenses, meaning the Hadarak knew they were here before traditional sensor bounceback could occur.

  “Gravity sensors,” he mumbled to himself. They could see the silhouettes as they arrived, given the size of his ships, and only a fourth of his fleet had arrived so far, but he couldn’t wait for all of them to get here and give the Hadarak the advantage of positioning.

  “Wing commanders, deploy,” he said, ment
ally tagging the attack vectors and assigning priority targets in the system for them to go after. “Captain, take us here…”

  Four Avengers flew in formation towards the nearest ‘webs’ on the jumpline they’d entered the system on, seeing a corkscrew-shaped tree extending millions of miles with strands only a few miles thick at most. But within those strands were Essence storage wells, and the amount they were showing charging was beyond their grand total in all the Star Force ships in this system.

  And that’s why they weren’t going to slug it out. The Maty had extensive records on how these growths worked, what they could and couldn’t do, and Star Force had found a critical weakness the Avengers were about to exploit.

  Essence existed in the bodies of all the people in the growth, and by people that meant the structure itself, for it wasn’t one giant person, but rather a colony of them melded together into a living structure. Yet the Essence wells weren’t the bodies of these people, they were the bodies of certain ones engineered into living containers that then drew Essence from the rest slowly over time for storage.

  Where they were located was impossible to determine unless you could scan with Essence, and the Avenger-class warships could, so they knew where to target. The trick was how to get there without having to slug it out.

  The Hadarak fortifications were virtually impregnable against a direct assault, and they also had enough ranged weaponry to prevent people from poking them down gradually, but what they didn’t have was localized mass, for it was spread out so far across the system it had to be thin construction, at least as far as miles wide warships went.

  The four Avengers finally broke apart, angling to different targets as they flew around or through minion swarms of such numbers they looked like nebula, but the knife-shaped ships lived up to their silhouettes and cut through them like butter, ramming those that got in the way and barely feeling the collisions as their Essence-enhanced shields burned through them on contact.

  Each of the four ships aligned on a slightly curved trajectory to their targets, then pulsed their jump drives while pulling on nearby planets for the slightly lateral movement needed…with the first one blinking out in massive acceleration while deploying a hard light Essence battering ram over from the front of the ship ahead of the shields…the latter of which hopefully wouldn’t be needed if the calculation of the density of the web strand was in the ball park.

  The Avenger sliced through the Essence well section of the strand so fast it couldn’t be seen, nor targeted for counterattack. It didn’t slow down at all, and didn’t fire a shot…merely using physics to its advantage and running into and through the target section with the speed of the collision pulling the strand out of alignment as it frayed and disintegrated, causing both sides of the breach to twist and list as they were not disconnected.

  A good hit, but hardly debilitating…unless you could see Essence, for the when the body of the ‘well keeper’ was hit and destroyed, all the Essence it contained was released in a harmless explosion that blanketed the area with a tsunami of free Essence that quickly retreated to the Essence realm, but some lingered long enough for the rest of the fleets in the system to pick up small amounts of it well over a million miles away.

  The other three ships were likewise successful, and none of them were damaged, though their ‘rams’ were disintegrated and they had to form new ones before going after additional wells on the same strand all the way in to the star as other Avenger groups were working on more strands elsewhere.

  There were so many of them in the system the ships would have to dock and refill from the Essence tankers in the fleet multiple times, but the Hadarak had no defense against the hit and run tactics. They relied on the anonymity of the wells to protect them from targeted attacks, but you couldn’t hide such Essence stores once they began to be drawn upon for system defense.

  Taking them out didn’t clip the strands of their Essence weaponry, nor the Essence currently stored in the people in the strand itself, but the majority of their power was gone, and the truly long range Essence attacks that consumed so much to gain the extra distance were now no longer an issue to worry about.

  Once those ranges were determined and a safe line was established, the first of the Ysalamir were brought in, with a conventional battle having to be fought by the regular fleet ahead of it to clear the path, and the carnage of that was mind boggling. Hundreds of thousands of Star Force drones against millions of minions and Hadarak warships. If they’d waited until the fighting was over it would have taken months, so the fleet didn’t fight to win, but rather to clear the path ahead enough for the Ysalamir to get its first shot off.

  The massive ship sent a stream of projectiles out in rapid sequence, looking like it was spitting a line of dots for Pacman to gobble up, and it didn’t stop. It kept going on and on until the first objects finally collided with the distant strand, hitting it and imbedding in the growth or, usually, just deflecting off it as a cascade of energy weapons on the strand tried to target the objects, and succeeded with many, but not all. Those that hit did almost no damage, nor were they supposed to, for they were merely the conduit for the weapon discharge to come.

  Star Force had learned this trick from an old enemy, and the Assault Pillar-class Ysalamir summoned up its destructive energy matrix and launched it out the front of the vessel just above the projectile launcher that had not stopped its stream of releases.

  The Ysalamir energy could not travel far before dissipating, but it soon found one of the moving objects and clung to it, then arced off it to the next one ahead…and the next, and the next, regathering its cohesion on each landing and launch as it made its way down the long stretch of objects that were not destroyed by it, for they had been designed to catch and release it…and nothing else.

  It took nearly a minute for the blue/white energy matrix to make it all the way from the ship to the strand, and when it did it sunk into the 1.4 mile wide growth at the desired point, but it did not explode. Instead it absorbed into it, immediately turning the sickly green/grey material of the strand black with it flaking off in bits and pieces as the effect spread in both directions down the length of the crooked coil.

  And it continued spreading for thousands of miles before finally expending the cascade reaction Star Force had built into it and tuned specifically for these growths, destroying so much mass that it would have taken the conventional fleet days of continuous firepower to rip apart everything that the Ysalamir had belatedly just destroyed over the course of 48 minutes.

  The Bsidd commander of the Ysalamir bobbed his angular head in satisfaction at the weapon results, for it had never been tested against such a structure, only small samples, and he was relieved that the Mastertechs’ analysis had been correct. But even with that massive amount of destruction accomplished, it was a small dent in the network of growths across this system.

  “Recharge weapon and deploy to second position. This is going to take a while, so get comfortable,” he told his command crew onboard the Ysalamir as the fleet continued to keep the enemy minions off them. “Time to mow the sepla grass.”

  2

  December 17, 154967

  System 882934 (Hadarak Territory)

  Low Stellar Orbit

  Paul-024 waited inside his astromech, mentally bonded to it inside the Excalibur, as the first Hadarak mainline vessels came out of their interstellar jump blind to his position. The long range Star Force weapons destroyed them before they even had a chance to flee, for Paul had accurately predicted the point on the jumpline where they would emerge…for they didn’t expect an ambush in one of their own systems.

  There were four planets here filled with Hadarak, but all the naval assets were gone, destroyed by Paul as he waited here for 5 days based on the reports from the hundreds of thousands of scout ships out gathering data on Hadarak systems and the movements of their fleets, and in this case, the position of their Wardens in particular. For while other trailblazers were leading invasion f
leets, Paul was back to solo hunting in his Borg vessel, but he was no longer trying to track down the remaining elusive Lurkers.

  He was going after the slow traveling Wardens, and didn’t even care about the mainline units he was destroying now. The Excalibur was here because there were three Wardens soon to arrive with them, and each of those took thousands of years to grow to decent size…whereas mainline ships could reach maximum size within 4 four years.

  Those could be spammed, the Wardens could not, and it was the Wardens that were the key to the Hadarak invasion, though it didn’t appear so now. Back when the V’kit’no’sat were still independent, the Wardens were the most terrifying thing in the galaxy…but only because the Hadarak hadn’t shown their other units. Lurkers were far more dangerous, and the mainline ships were far faster. The Wardens were slow, bulky, and didn’t have ranged weaponry.

  But what they were, was mobile battle stations and the brains behind the swarms.

  In addition to that, they were MCVs that could reproduce all of their units from resources harvested in the field starting from onboard factories rather than the small seed units the Hadarak were using to spread new colonies elsewhere. Those took a lot of time to replicate out into full blown bases, but a Warden could land and create a base in a fraction of the time, as well as processing the resources for it to be built with by extending its tentacles down in the molten core of the planet and siphoning material directly rather than having to mine it out of the crust with an army of burrowers.

  Paul had learned there was a lot more to the Wardens than even that, not to mention their ability to ram planets and penetrate most defenses with their sheer mass and momentum. One aspect was Essence communication, which wasn’t found in many, but Davis had teams out looking for it and had tracked some transmissions back to some specific Wardens that appeared no different than the others.