Carnage Read online

  1

  August 18, 154929

  Uever System (Grand Border, Oso’lon Section)

  Kli’merack

  They came in via waves, all through the same jumppoint. Hadarak mainline units clustered together into clumps for the interstellar voyage that immediately scattered upon entry to the system and braked on their own individual courses.

  It was a new tactic the Hadarak had developed in recent years to combat the V’kit’no’sat’s ability to blockade certain lines when they had advance warning of a surge coming, and it virtually guaranteed large chunks of their invasion fleets would bypass the gauntlet waiting for them in low stellar orbit.

  C’fad watched them pouring into the Uever System remotely, for he wasn’t onboard one of the V’kit’no’sat warships meeting them in battle. He was the planetary defense commander for Kli’merack, the largest of the 7 inhabited worlds in the system. All had Oso’lon on them, and all were lightly populated. No hatchlings were allowed in the Grand Border, and on the odd occasion where eggs were laid here, they were immediately transported back beyond the border to the safe V’kit’no’sat worlds.

  The Oso’lon here were volunteers who knew their duty, and C’fad was no exception. The Uever System was one of many navigational points spread across a narrow barrier between Hadarak territory and Star Force territory. Too deep for the Hadarak to bypass in a single jump, but far too thin to suffer the loss of two consecutive systems. If that happened, the Hadarak could long jump through the pair, skipping over the neighboring heavily defended systems and getting into the ‘safe’ Core worlds.

  And that was what they were trying to do. C’fad didn’t know how the Hadarak learned what they learned, for they had never been past the Grand Border since the surge began, but they knew exactly what they were doing as some of their mainline units didn’t stay to fight...rather moving around the star and jumping out the far side that would lead them to another Grand Border location. It would be the responsibility of the system defense fleet there to catch and kill them before they could move on, but there were no large numbers getting through. And certainly no Wardens, though there were plenty coming into the system.

  They were scattered amongst the Skarron-like flow of reinforcements coming in, and so far there had been 82 show up here in the past 3 days. The Oso’lon fleet had decimated them on entry, but their Essence reserves were getting low and the call for V’kit’no’sat reinforcements from adjacent systems had not yet been answered. It was clear the defense formations in low stellar orbit were going to be insufficient, and that meant the Hadarak would either try to move through or attack the worlds here…and it appeared to be the latter. They didn’t just want to bypass the Grand Border, they wanted to break it permanently.

  C’fad stood on a slightly elevated platform inside the planetary command deck on the surface in one of the many small cities scattered across the world as he saw 4 Wardens break through along with swarms of minions and some mainline ships as they got to the jumpline for Kli’merack. Once there they didn’t hesitate, making their slow jumps toward his planet with their arrival calculated at 13 hours from now.

  The V’kit’no’sat fleet could move much faster than that, but they had to choose between fighting the Hadarak coming in on the jumpline when they were in a partially compromised state or chasing after the 4 Wardens that had gotten through.

  This wasn’t the first time the V’kit’no’sat had faced a situation like this. All along the Grand Border there had been battles fought in such circumstances, and the procedure was clear. Stick with the incoming jumppoints in order to do maximum damage to the Hadarak fleets, and let the planetary defenses deal with the ones that got loose, for the enemy might be attempting to draw the defense fleet away from the jumpline intentionally.

  Whether it was intentional or not it was still effective. The Wardens were too large to quickly kill, and the Hamob-class Avengers could not get close enough to do maximum damage when the swarms deployed into skirmisher formations. As much as Star Force had adapted to the Hadarak, the Hadarak were adapting to them as well…though not enough to get the job done. Just to make it harder, and today was going to be a hard day for Kli’merack. C’fad could feel it in the tip of his tail.

  He calculated the arrival time of the Wardens and where the planetary rotation would fall, then gave the evacuation order for the slice of the planet that would be facing the jumpline at that time, for if they were going to ram they had to do it off an interplanetary jump, otherwise they wouldn’t have the speed needed to be effective.

  Within seconds of his command, the small V’kit’no’sat cities in the danger zone began disconnecting from the permanent infrastructure built up around them, with the elongated diamond-shape city centers eventually activing their anti-grav and floating up out of their berthings, leaving diamond craters in the infrastructure as every person stationed there was evacuated while the bulk of the defenses stayed put, fed by subsurface power lines that didn’t rely on the city reactor cores that were now leaving the predicted impact zone.

  Sentinel-class defense stations in orbit also repositioned, some moving out of the way while others moved into flanking positions on the jumpline. They were also diamond-shaped and completely unmanned. Massive remotely controlled weapon platforms that Star Force had developed back during the war between the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force, and now since the merging of the two former enemies and the combining of their technology and ingenuity, the Sentinel platforms had become far more deadly.

  Ramming aside, a single Sentinel was an even slugging match with a tier 2 Warden, even when it got into grapple range. Special capacitors would dump energy into negation fields for when the Warden would wrap its tentacles around the stations and try to crush them, buying time for the weaponry to dig into the target. If it got to the Hadarak center first, the Hadarak would die and the Sentinel would win. If the capacitors were drained first, the Hadarak tentacles would crush the station and the Hadarak would win.

  Never in the history of the independent V’kit’no’sat had there existed such a weapons platform or warship that could stand against a Warden on its own, but now they were common across this system and throughout the Grand Border. The current killcount for Star Force in this seemingly never-ending war was 2,928,217 Wardens to date, though that number would be slightly higher due to the lag effect of all the Grand Border systems communicating with each other, for all had interstellar transmitters. Big ones. Redundant ones. So information flowed rapidly around the rough ring that was the Grand Border while branching out through the Star Force Core region through Star Force systems.

  But every single system in the Grand Border territory was owned by the V’kit’no’sat. Even the ones without planets. There was no exception. There could be no exception. So C’fad had killcounts updated regularly as the information flowed around the galaxy, but the Warden deaths that were occurring in Hadarak territory itself would not be reported until a ship came back, and there were both V’kit’no’sat fleets out there in nearby systems hunting down Hadarak fleets as they tried to assemble large numbers to launch against individual systems, as well as High Guard fleets roaming further out.

  Those fleets rarely lost ships, for they were not supposed to fight hard battles. They were supposed to poach moments of opportunity while preserving their numbers. Numbers that were growing to the point where Star Force could finally launch an invasion of Hadarak territory itself…but they couldn’t do that until they had the High Guard numbers so large they could take the fight to the Hadarak without the V’kit’no’sat…who had to stand guard on the Grand Border with most of their fleets.

  That’s why the High Guard was only assisting and thinning the enemy numbers before they slammed into the Grand Border. It was the V’kit’no’s
at’s job to take the hits and stop any breakthroughs from occurring, no matter what the cost.

  Retreat was not an option…but neither was needless deaths. That’s why every city was mobile, and the planetary defenses were configured to do their job with little to no maintenance crews. This planet had been designed to fight and, if necessary, die to stop the Hadarak. In 12,793 years that C’fad had been stationed here, there had been three Hadarak incursions into this system that had gotten beyond the system defense fleet. None had breached the planetary shields, and a piece of the corpse of one of the dead Wardens from those assaults still orbited the planet waiting for Clan Kai’sa to come and strip it of the remaining Yeg’gor for use in their Zedas.

  They had been here and left before using it all, and as disgusting as it was tearing apart a corpse, it was necessary. Yeg’gor was so valuable it couldn’t be wasted, though C’fad found the continuing carnage in the way the Hadarak fought distasteful. There was no honor, no professionality, no skill. It was all visceral lashing out at the enemy with a little strategy thrown in. Their ‘ships’ were living, and expected to die. The Oso’lon often wondered what their mission was, beyond these units here. What were the Spice Lords that controlled them trying for? Purge the galaxy of all life for what reason? They didn’t value their own lives, not the way they fought, so what was their purpose in all this?

  It could be a basic self-preservation directive, killing everyone else before they had a chance to kill you. He’d seen that in many primitive races, and not because they were necessarily bad people, but because it had been encoded into their genetic blueprints as default instructions that they had never ascended beyond. But for a race as powerful as the Hadarak, he couldn’t see them being that mentally primitive.

  C’fad had wracked his brain many times trying to figure out a possible mindset for them, but he hadn’t come up with anything that matched the way they fought. It was almost mindless violence for violence sake, with no respect for the sovereignty of the individual. He’d been told the V’kit’no’sat had been like that once, at least in part, but that was before he’d been hatched. He’d been born into the Star Force V’kit’no’sat, developed in one of their maturias, then had taken the call of duty upon himself and transferred to the Grand Border, putting himself into danger as he continued his training here, on this very planet, and eventually rose to become planetary defense commander while many of his peers transferred to other systems.

  But this was his home, and right now there were not one, but four Wardens coming his way, and he doubted he had the ability to stop them all…but his forces weren’t helpless.

  The tract of the Hadarak on approach put them a few minutes apart from one another, and before the first one arrived minions came through, decelerating as best they could, but they smashed into the planetary shields and killed themselves instantly…save for those that were clinging to the sides of the mainline units that had the engine power to fully decelerate into the overlapping firepower of C’fad’s planetary defense fleet, which was backed up by 34 of his 93 Sentinels that were now in firing range of the jumpline.

  He’d ordered no Essence weaponry to be used until the Wardens arrived, but other than that he let his people do their job without micromanaging. They knew the stakes and how to combat this assault, so he watched and waited for some alteration that he needed to order, but every single one of the incoming ‘small’ Hadarak were vaporized within seconds of their arrival into planetary orbit, with the debris spreading out into a growing cloud that the first of the Wardens punched through so fast you couldn’t see it. Suddenly there was a hole in the debris cloud with a shockwave punching outward attesting to something that had passed through, though there was nothing left to see.

  At least not in high orbit. But in middle orbit there were large ‘sails’ of mobile dampening field emitters stretched out across the jumpline. Some 149 of them that the 220 mile wide tier 2 Hadarak hit and ripped through, then it stuck on the upper part of the planetary dampening field, which finished fully negating its momentum with little effort. Once it stopped there lances came up from the surface and down from the Sentinels, burning holes into the Hadarak through conventional means as well as Essence.

  The Essence ones did the most damage, punching through to its core within seconds as the Hadarak couldn’t move as the dampening fields had augments that pinned it in place, but as it quickly died it released all its internal minions, pumping clouds of the living ships out as the Sentinels and planetary defense weaponry began picking them off rapidly, for none were able to get through the planetary shields that the Warden had not been able to get to.

  Before that cleanup was over the second Warden arrived, with the ‘sails’ having barely recharged at all. They slowed it down a little, but the tier 1 Warden got further than the first did, penetrating deep into the dampening shields before it was stopped and skewered very near the dead one that was being lifted further into orbit by several Sentinels with grapple beams so the dampening shields didn’t have to hold it aloft.

  They didn’t even have time to start moving the tier 1 when another tier 2 came slamming through, overloading the dampening field and hitting the planetary defense shield so hard the Hadarak visibly deformed, with the front of its egg-shaped body crumpling before the shield finally broke, then the massive 189 mile wide mass hit the surface and crushed two cities along with their weaponry, shield generators, and dampening emitters.

  It also punched down into the crust, creating a huge impact crater that spawned instantaneous volcanoes around the perimeter as the 5 mile thick crust fought to keep the far larger Hadarak aloft, with it half sinking into the magma below before the latent momentum finally was negated.

  C’fad cringed when he saw the damage to the planet, but he knew it was inconsequential compared to what was coming. The system defense fleet had kept the other Hadarak occupied, but there was still one more Warden coming in a minute and 32 seconds. And the sails, dampening field, and planetary shield were all down or at low power.

  Which meant it was going to ram at nearly full speed.

  “All cities take flight now!” he ordered planetwide, hoping this wasn’t going to be necessary, but fearing otherwise.

  The seconds ticked by, during which he watched the volcanoes continue to spew lava out so high it tickled the underside of the reforming planetary defense shield supported by other cities extending their portions to cover those that were now toast. And though he didn’t order it, three of the Sentinel stations moved into the approach corridor, hoping to absorb some of the impact speed.

  One of them disappeared in the blink of an eye, but the computers logged the collision and the speed reduction it equated. It slowed down the ramming Hadarak by 7%, but the 243 mile wide mass could not be easily stopped, and it punched down through the sails, dampening field, and planetary shield as if they were not even there.

  Then it hit the surface and pushed through the planetary crust like a rock dropping into a pond of water.

  C’fad didn’t breathe for a moment, hoping it was that simple, but he knew there would be a reaction from the planet…and he wasn’t wrong. A sub-surface ripple belatedly formed, causing a land tsunami as the hard rock covered with dirt and trees and cities suddenly became visibly liquid and spread outward as a huge amount of bright red magma shot out the impact zone at such bounceback speed that it easily reached orbit and kept going, rising up past the Sentinel stations and achieving escape velocity, meaning it was going so fast gravity would not be able to pull it back down again.

  That didn’t concern C’fad, it was the surface. The ripple wasn’t slowing, moving across thousands of miles in a matter of minutes, and when it hit his cities it didn’t spare them. The surrounding infrastructure was crushed as the diamond-shaped city cores desperately tried to rise up fast enough to avoid the land wave.

  Most made it, but he saw two get hit by the crests, bouncing the cities upward. One kept rising, but another broke apart and fell back do
wn, landing in the chunks of crust that were moving around randomly in the backwash as magma began shooting up at random spots.

  C’fad mentally linked into the system and found the nearest vessels and ordered them down to the site, hoping to pull some people out of that mess as he began to get reports from other cities that had just made it up before the wave hit that not everyone had been evacuated in time. Some had been in the surrounding infrastructure and could not make it back.

  The Oso’lon smacked his tail onto the floor multiple times as he cursed himself. He hadn’t expected that much depletion of his defenses, otherwise he would have ordered more cities to evacuate. He’d calculated the shields to hold up through the third impact, but they hadn’t. Why?

  As he organized the rescue ships and watched the land wave continue across a third of the planet’s surface, all the while causing earthquakes and volcanic activity across the rest of the planet, he studied the analytical data coming in from his people as they were already in the process of analyzing everything that had just happened…all the while the defense fleet was chasing the remaining minions from the second and third Hadarak across the planet now that the shields were down and they appeared to be going after the floating cities.

  They could defend themselves, so C’fad wasn’t worried about that. He’d just massively screwed up and he needed to know why.

  It wasn’t readily apparent, but some 28 minutes later someone found the reason and updated the battlemap.

  It was the minions that had preceded the 4 Wardens. They’d essentially been a waste of resources, or so he’d mistakenly thought. Those minions had somehow destabilized the energy shield, for he’d ordered them to be let through the sails and dampening fields, for he didn’t want to waste any energy on them.

  Analysis was coming in fast as others picked up on the discovery and added to it. Apparently those minions were not standard varieties, or at least not all of them. Mixed into the group were goo-carriers, and when they splattered against the shield they released some sort of compound that interfered with the shield…and they’d done so in the exact spot the 3rd one had hit.