The Powers That Be

  1

  September 2, 128882

  Nien’van Sho’tugo System (Hef’ben Region)

  Tien vo Sha’cani

  “Take us down,” Oasu’kli ordered as she floated with one hand on the command tree for balance…which was completely unnecessary with the inertial dampeners in the aquatic assault ship, but she’d never gotten out of the habit.

  The Elarioni watched the forward vid screen as the view tilted and the orange/green oceans on the planet below rose up to dominate the sky as the flat oval of a ship began descending rapidly into the thick atmosphere toward one of many engagement zones as other recently arrived Jaws-class assault ships dropped on their own volition as Clan Cookie warships covered for them against the Hadarak swarms still in orbit.

  The two Wardens that had assaulted this system were already dead, but the troops they’d brought into the system were not. Many special Insertion-class warship minions had circumvented the major space battle and raced out to three inhabited planets in the system. Two of those had already been purged, but the aquatic one was not. Star Force had not yet been able to get evacuation ships here, nor had they initially tried, because this was a V’kit’no’sat system, and it was assumed they’d be able to evacuate themselves.

  Most of the groundpounders had, but the mix of aquatic races here did not have the necessary transports to leave and since the original V’kit’no’sat empire was now pretty much a fractured free for all, they weren’t getting the assistance of the empire…rather being left to live or die by their own merits.

  But Ivan-029 was having none of it, and he’d sent one of his Clan task forces to preserve as much of the remaining population as possible…yet now that the Hadarak had got their specialized minions into the water and they were reproducing exceedingly fast, orbital bombardment was not going to solve the issue. That meant aquatic combat was necessary, and Clan Cookie didn’t have enough available aquatics troops on its own to get the job done.

  Hence the call to the Star Force Elarioni…who had immediately responded.

  Oasu’kli floated on the bridge of the 15 mile wide Jaws disc with her command crown fitted snugly to her blue head with her deep red hair flowing down over it whenever she moved forward, but right now she held on to the branch-like control web that the Elarioni used rather than flat consoles. Combined with the mental interlink through her crown, Oasu’kli could command her crew, the troops onboard, and contact other ships in the relief fleet that had recently detached from the spine-like jump cradle that had brought the aquatics ships here in closely packed racks. They were all space-capable, but not built for interstellar jumps. Instead they were meant to land in or above oceans and act as bases of operation rather than do any real fighting, considering their size often exceeded that of the part of the oceans they were landing in.

  Her ship descended rapidly, picking up some fireballs along the forward shield arc until it slowed rapidly and leveled out again, taking fire from some Hadarak minion emplacements rising up above the water from the ‘lilly pads’ they were attached to…but the Jaws was too well shielded to care, and it came down right over them and smoked them out of existence with the few ‘space’ weapons it had onboard. Afterwards it settled down into the water without touching bottom, having to rely on running its anti-grav constantly to keep from smashing the ocean and creating a giant tidal wave. Instead it sank in a few hundred meters and stopped, exposing the ventral hangar bays and aquatic weaponry on the hull to the water itself.

  “Hold position,” she said in English thanks to some genetic alterations of her race’s vocal chords in the past, for they hadn’t been able to make the necessary sounds originally and always had to rely on translation equipment, but with Star Force’s ever growing medical knowledge they’d been able to fix that incompatibility. “All troops to stand by for my order.”

  The Elarioni commander twisted around and swam off the bridge, traveling through the ship until she came to a suction corridor that sped her faster than she could swim through various tunnels until she came near the hangar bay where her personal guard waited. Oasu’kli joined them, grabbing her armor and combat staff, which was double pronged and contained a variety of weapons within it, then she swam to the shield separating the ship’s pure water from the organic water outside that had a musky look to it that was going to reduce vision range even with the bright lights that all the troops were wearing on their person or built into the drone ranks accompanying them.

  Oasu’kli activated her comm unit and keyed it to all the troops crammed into the ship that were eager to get into the combat as the V’kit’no’sat aquatics races were getting overwhelmed and forced back into select areas of the planet.

  “Attack with no mercy. The Hadarak cannot be captured or negotiated with. Destroy all you encounter before they have a chance to destroy you or your kin. These are the standing Archon orders. Heed them, for they do not counsel mindless bloodshed lightly. The Hadarak are a threat that cannot be tamed, only destroyed. Do so with honor and swiftness. Now unleash our wrath on the butchers,” she said, transmitting the attack tone to everyone simultaneously.

  Every hangar on the ship began to spill out infantry, Oasu’kli with them, like tiny minnows moving at high speed preceding the slower combat drones, then following them came the aquatics mechs and smaller warships, the latter of which were detaching from special niches on the underside of the hull rather than coming out of hangars. There was no strategy involved. No battle plans. The V’kit’no’sat were overwhelmed and the Elarioni were not dropping in to reinforce them. In fact they were miles away from even the closest V’kit’no’sat outpost.

  They were instead dropping right on top of the thickest concentration of enemy aquatic minions in their staging bases that were being fed by under the seafloor tunnels that were being blocked from orbital scans and thus undetectable by starships.

  Oasu’kli and her guards ignored the immediate fighting that broke out as the Elarioni dropped on the aquatic minions with a rage not born only of defense, but one of disgust. Their forms were more agile than the large V’kit’no’sat races, but they were ugly and slow compared to the Elarioni…though not harmless. They were clearly not born of the water, but rather engineered to fight in it, but their forms were made from those of air and the void, and they did not belong here. None of them did.

  The closest Hadarak minions were swarmed by the Elarioni infantry and lanced by the energy discharges in their staffs when they made physical contact…meaning the blasts shot into their bodies meters deep, and when they were targeted to the right places even a few shots was enough to down the larger minions…who responded by clouding the waters with toxins that would kill everything but themselves.

  Wherever there was combat the ‘ink blots’ would appear, cutting off all vision as the little blue lights of the Elarioni disappeared inside it, then swam back out when the minion was dead. They didn’t need to breathe the water thanks to their armor, but anything else living in the ocean would die from it, V’kit’no’sat or otherwise. The Hadarak were attacking the oceans itself, and that only further enraged the Elarioni. They did the same to entire planets, ripping apart the land as predators rather than conquerors, but when it came to the water it was a personal matter for Oasu’kli and her kin.

  For if one wanted to conquer the ocean, one did not destroy it in the process.

  But the Hadarak didn’t care about the ocean or the planets they were infesting. They were out to destroy all major lifeforms and cared even less about the smaller ones. Several tiny fish corpses no longer than Oasu’kli’s fingers washed by as she swam through them, having been caught in the ink blots as they tried frantically to escape the fighting.

  Angered she reached out to her guards tel
epathically, asking them to shield her for a moment as she mentally connected to the battlemap that was being updated from all the units in the field, sensing the location of their ocean brethren getting caught up in the fighting. She found the safe areas behind them and plotted out escape routes…then used the powerful jewel in her crown to amplify her telepathy in a manner the lower-level races would be able to comprehend.

  Then in an act that Aquaman himself would have been proud of, she called on all the sea creatures within range to follow the invisible strands away from the danger that the command ship was now starting to produce with micro-drones popping out of its hull and flashing both lights and telepathic transponders marking the way away from the combat.

  Oasu’kli pulsed her telepathy far louder, getting past their frantic evasion instincts and giving them direction they badly needed…and within seconds the bystanders all began to move, even those that had taken cover on the seafloor, and the Elarioni troops parted for them to pass by…but they did not allow the Hadarak the same courtesy as their numbers began to swell as they diverted from other areas and gathered to oppose them.

  Which began pulling reinforcements away from the combat with the V’kit’no’sat…which was the point of hitting them behind the current battle lines.

  Once the bystanders were on their way clear of the fighting and the toxic zones, Oasu’kli returned her focus to the waters around her and she and her guards descended lower and lower, beneath most of the fighting, as several Shark Bot-class drones accompanied them. They were a multi-tasking design that had enough speed to keep up with them, but could also fight on their own when needed…but mostly they were to support the Elarioni so they could fight in their natural manner without endangering their lives too much. The heavier fighting would be left to the warships, mechs, and larger drones, and Oasu’kli had been well trained in how to pick fights that could be won and avoid those that would get her and her people killed.

  So the Shark Bots swam with them deeper and deeper, but eventually some minions moved out to intercept them from the seafloor nubs that surrounded the entrance to one of the tunnels that was basically a highway for minion reinforcements to continually pour out of from their growth fields elsewhere. If she could seal the tunnel it would do more to help the V’kit’no’sat than anything, but the road ahead was well defended.

  There were growths all over the seafloor, and some of them began shooting little stinging missiles the size of needles towards them…but the Shark Bots intercepted them with sifting shields that allowed water to pass through but nothing solid, meaning they didn’t slow their progress through the water much, though they did pick up a dirty sheen to them from some of the suspended dirt that got caught.

  Oasu’kli turned her group of 18 Elarioni further away from the combat, hoping to circle around behind the tunnel exit, but the minions were having none of it. They sent a group of eel-like attackers towards them, swimming through the water as little flexible corkscrews that would explode on contact with the hard points on their heads…and they had several, each which could detonate without killing the eel until the final one popped and with it a much larger charge inside the body.

  One of those little impacts could put a hole in Elarioni armor if their shields were down, and would kill anything else of their size on contact…which was why carrying staff weapons was so overpowering against this type of minion. The Elarioni could strike them before they got within contact range so long as they weren’t too outnumbered, which was why Oasu’kli ordered her guards to engage rather than run, and after a few minutes there were hundreds of dead eels and no casualties to her troops…which continued to try and backdoor the minion formations assaulting the V’kit’no’sat.

  She and her guards made it a long way before a huge group of minions of many varieties broke off from the main combat and headed towards them…some of which produced homing missiles that were faster than the Elarioni, but Oasu’kli wasn’t worried. Her group continued swimming as the streaks raced towards them, only to be intercepted by what looked like solid lasers being produced by the prongs on the Elarioni staffs.

  They reached out nearly 100 meters, and while they were difficult to move at that range, the little shield columns that separated the water were filled with cutting energy that would slice the projectiles in half on contact…but were programmed not to interfere with each other when one Elarioni’s ‘Fire Line’ crossed with another.

  So Oasu’kli’s guards swiped their Fire Lines back and forth like strobe lights, taking out most of the projectiles while the Shark Bots intercepted the few that got through, either with expanding shields or their own ‘laser beams’ emanating from a port on their heads.

  But the bulk of the attack had not yet come, for there were thousands of minions ranging in size from half the length of an Elarioni up to the size of a Hjar’at headed their way…but rather than run, Oasu’kli had her group keep swimming in a predictable line.

  Then out of nowhere a crash occurred on the ocean top far above them as an Elarioni warship made a leap frog jump through the air to save time and raced down to the depths far faster than anyone could hope to naturally swim. The angular craft was a quarter mile long and sliced through the water like a knife…but a knife that left a huge wake in its passing that disrupted many shots heading for Oasu’kli’s group.

  She turned them a different way now that the warship was coming down to give them cover, and from it leapt all manner of weaponry. Fire Lines, Interceptors, shield conduits that sent Dre’mo’don blasts through momentary voids, shield walls that blocked enemy movements to others that grabbed hold of targets and crushed them to death…the Elarioni war chest was a deep one, and the Hadarak had nothing to compare to it. Their strength, as always, was their numbers and their ability to quickly grow new troops in the field from local resources.

  But that wasn’t her concern now. The tunnel was, and soon they were all the way around on the backside by themselves while the battle raged above and in front of it as more and more minions continued to pour out and join in the battle.

  Yet all that could be seen of the tunnel was the exit orifice. The track of it underground had not been determined, yet the Elarioni had strong enough telepathic ability to pierce down through the mud and rock a decent distance, and working together as a group they could enhance that power enough to become a biological scanning crew tracing a line behind the exit looking for where the tunnel was actually coming from.

  They swam well past the midline where it was expected to be, then they began to sense some faint minds below. When they homed in on them all the way to the muddy seafloor, they could sense the swarms moving below on an ascending path, but a shallow one. The tunnel was deep in the rock, but where they now floated it was not so deep to be invisible to their telepathy, and the combat hungry minions being told a fight was near made detecting them even easier.

  Oasu’kli marked the position in the battlemap then waited, monitoring and beginning to trace a path back and forth to map out as much of the tunnel as they could get without moving too near the exit that was some 4 miles away at the minimum.

  Holding there she watched the combat on the battlemap, for all she could see of her eyes were an occasional flash in the murky distance. The waters had once been clear enough to see, even with the native orange murk to them, but the ink blots made it impossible to now except for a few fortuitous glimpses as the currents moved the dark areas around.

  It felt like forever to Oasu’kli, but eventually two streaks from far off emerged on the battlemap, having been dropped from the air. They both bore the mark of Clan Cookie, and moved through the water so fast towards the waypoint that Oasu’kli had dropped that she assumed they were warships…only they weren’t. They were two Garas’tox, probably enhanced by their armor, but swimming faster than Oasu’kli could ever hope to…which seemed backwards, for they were one of the massive aquatic races. There were many of them on this planet, besieged by the Hadarak attack, but these two were
not V’kit’no’sat. They were Star Force, and they were coming to Oasu’kli’s waypoint, though to do what she did not know.

  Obviously they needed to dig down to the tunnel, but how could two Garas’tox do that? She’d seen many in combat before, but nothing they had could dig through solid rock.

  Then she got orders from them…movement orders that had them retreating in their direction and a countdown clock with perimeter warnings.

  And they were currently dead center in the danger zone.

  “Move,” she ordered while slapping her tail into the effort immediately. All the others followed, swimming in an arrow-shaped formation with the strongest swimmers at the front to break water for the others and gain more speed, for the Garas’tox were not giving them much time to evac…but they had given them enough. Eventually they passed outside the danger zone markers and Oasu’kli continued to swim further away, not sure what was going to happen. They made it to the Garas’tox and slipped into formation with them, swimming back the way they’d came as the countdown reached 10 seconds.

  “What is coming?” she asked the long-necked dinosaur scathed in red battle armor alongside the other in identical yellow.

  “The ocean cannot shield everything from the void,” the red-clad one said just before the countdown ended and the 6 mile deep water over the spot they’d been highlighting suddenly got slapped from above and parted, all the way down to the seafloor by a shield column.

  “Oh,” Oasu’kli said, realizing that wasn’t coming from her aquatics ship…nor any other that the Elarioni possessed. She checked the battlemap beyond the ocean, which required an entirely different view mode, and saw a Clan Cookie Naval battleship hovering in the sky a few miles above the ocean…though when she looked up she saw nothing but black water above her.

  It was producing the shield column…which she didn’t think Naval warships were equipped for, though most of them were usually Warship-class and carried drones. The battleship did not, but apparently it had been configured to be able to move the water apart to deliver troops or a drilling team straight down to the ocean floor without them having to swim through all the water…