Star Force: Rammus (SF83) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  1

  May 29, 3151

  Gavratel System (lizard region)

  Outer Zone

  As the Clan Ghostblade jumpship moved near the construction site a tiny spec left the opening hangar bay before the dropships did, traveling through the emptiness of space until it landed on one of 18 joined construction cradles that were enwrapping a large skeletal structure that was being slowly added to. Kara walked across the landing bay, her armor unwrapping from around her body as she drew a few curious glances, but by now most people within the Clan knew that she could fly through space on her own and more often than not wouldn’t bother wasting a dropship when she needed to transfer from ship to ship.

  “What have you brought for me today?” Vreemont asked, glancing at the huge Star Force jumpship only partially visible outside the open bay doors.

  “Those special items you’ve been wanting,” Kara said with a smile. “No more trips back to the ADZ for us.”

  The Human tech pumped one arm in celebration.

  “How far along are we?” Kara asked as the pair turned to walk off the bay floor as the first of the cargo-laden dropships began to appear as dots moving away from the jumpship.

  “We got another 12 shipments of structural materials in while you were gone, so that’s put us a little further ahead of where I thought we’d be at this point. Frame completion is at 72%.”

  “How long before the gravity drives are working?”

  “Insystem or interstellar?”

  “Full working.”

  “We’ll need shields before we can start hopping around too much,” he reminded her. “We’re nowhere close to getting this beast truly mobile, I’m afraid.”

  “Damn,” Kara said, knowing that as long as they stayed here there was a small risk of detection. They were low on the galactic plane in lizard territory, or rather one of the star systems that the lizards didn’t want and that held no habitable planets. There was little here at all, and what there was was located in the inner and middle zones. Right now Kara had two ships mining asteroids there and keeping a close eye on any traffic that might be passing through the system. They would have no business here and not pay attention to anything beyond stellar orbit, but she didn’t want to be detected at all.

  The joined mess of construction cradles was located far beyond those mining ships, beyond the high zone and all the way out into the outer zone of the system where there was literally nothing. Kara wanted it that way, because what they were building was by no means small, and if someone did find and come after them it would take them a long time to get out to where they were without any nearby planets or even small rocks to gravitationally brake against. Her jumpship had to decelerate to a stop by pulling on the distant star, but thanks to Star Force’s advanced drives it wasn’t too strenuous an endeavor, though it did take a considerable amount of time to get out this far while maintaining the ability to stop before going interstellar.

  “You hoped for more?” Vreemont asked.

  “Given your reputation, yes.”

  “Ouch,” the tech said. “Now that hurts.”

  She wrapped a friendly arm around his neck, making sure not to squeeze too hard. “I just want my baby mobile, even if all she is is a skeleton.”

  “It’s going to take a while, I’m sorry,” he said as she let go. “I’ve got enough gravity drives online to slowly move around the system, but without a larger power core it’s not worth much right now aside from not having to worry about attitude adjustments.”

  Kara raised an eyebrow. “Do we need any?”

  “Just keeping with paranoid protocol and aligning the axis to point our smaller profile towards the star.”

  “Good boy,” she said as they came to a junction and both of them climbed a ladder to get up to the next level. “You getting much drift?”

  “Negligible, but every time we connect a new component it nudges her a fraction. The cradles were compensating for that, but the more mass she gets the bigger the adjustments are needed. As of now she can nudge herself back into alignment.”

  “Well, that’s something then,” she said, obviously disappointed.

  “You weren’t gone that long,” Vreemont pointed out. “Did you pick up any new recruits?”

  “A few specialists and a handful of Archons.”

  “Any good engineers?”

  “Four. They’ll be transferring over on the dropships.”

  Vreemont smiled. “Keep sending me as many as you can get. Calista isn’t going to build herself.”

  “No, but she’s going to help us build a lot of other things,” Kara said as they got to the command center of this massive construction project…which was no more than a small utility room on the cradle that had been reconfigured with workstations and a realtime hologram set up in the center.

  When Kara entered she could see the massive construct with the cradles circling it like spiders with their tethers interlocked and forming a crude cage around it that matched the view from outside, but this hologram wasn’t a visual. Rather it was a schematic that showed varying levels of completeness, the location of individuals and ships actively working on the construction, and the fleet of vessels sitting alongside that were fabricating the components for it and then passing them off to the cradles or delivering them directly to the various worksites.

  As she watched, the dropships from the jumpship split apart with most heading for that fleet while a handful continued over to the cradles to deliver specific personnel and the rare compounds and equipment that Kara had gone back to the ADZ to get from Clan Sangheili. Lots of arc elements and solari, plus some special items that the Ghostblade fleet couldn’t yet produce on their own. That would be changing as upgrades were made to her existing factory ships…upgrades that these new bits of equipment would now allow them to produce.

  “Are you running into any problems?” she asked, looking at what in time would become a tiny, but mobile Star Forge-class mining station. One that her mobile civilization could haul around from star system to star system to mine the solari and other stellar materials they needed rather than having to rely on their two patron Clans for supplies. Once Calista was fully operational, Clan Ghostblade would be totally independent save for personnel, with their mandate not to house younglings. Every person here was either part of Clan Saber or Clan Sangheili in the records and had grown up in the ADZ, and that was going to continue to be the way they operated.

  The Clan’s ships, however, were not from the ADZ. All of them had been built off the books and away from prying eyes. Making the Ghostblade fleet something that didn’t exist as far as Star Force’s computer systems went, with her personnel simply being misplaced individuals of other Clans that were carefully marked as being in varied locations on ho-hum assignments that nobody would notice them missing from. A few extra personnel listed here and there on the master records but emitted from the local ones where an Administrator would notice absent personnel, and you had a way of siphoning off people without anyone else being the wiser.

  The Clans knew what was happening, for it had been Paul and Jason’s idea, but aside from the upper management in those two Clans the rest of their populations and even Earth didn’t know about the Ghostblades, including Davis. The only person who was ever noted as being gone was Kara, but it was easy enough for Paul to claim she was out on a mission for him, which she was, but no one knew it was a permanent one or to what scope it had grown.

  Tell people Kara was out singlehandedly hunting down lizard warships and they wouldn’t ask any further questions, giving her the perfect cover to build her Clan away from the ADZ…though she wasn’t
the only one. Other trailblazers had their clandestine networks in play and growing by the century, and those too were kept off the books, at least as far as the public maps were concerned, but Clan Ghostblade differed in that it wasn’t an operation supported by a Clan, it was a Clan in and of itself, and it had no territory to root itself in. They were all living and working on ships, right down to producing their foodstuffs on the go, and Calista was going to give them the stellar mining power to match.

  They’d have to take long stops to activate it, but that wasn’t unusual. Her fleets didn’t keep moving constantly, rather finding and ducking into little dark corners like they were now where the lizards and others never traveled. They’d park here and do what they needed, then eventually move on to reposition closer to their own supply lines or if traffic increased and there was a chance of detection. Kara had fleets moving all over, none of them getting so far away that they’d lose cohesion and their string of courier ships couldn’t find them, but the idea was that if one group ever was found it would only be a small cell of the Clan, with nobody truly knowing how large they were.

  Kara knew, and a handful of others, but even most of the Ghostblade personnel didn’t know how many ships they had or where they were other than the small groups they were assigned to and rotated between, nor would they show on any map. Each fleet left a single ship at a rendezvous location, one that Kara knew to find, and with it would be the itinerary of the fleet wherever it was in the nearby region. That way the fleet could move around despite the lack of a relay network that they hadn’t yet gotten around to building.

  It was coming though. After they built this star forge they’d be constructing communication ships that would sit at the predictable locations and act as mobile relays, then the roaming fleets could signal to them, knowing their location, and tell them theirs, after which a two way exchange could occur until such time the fleet moved on. That would allow information to be transmitted across Ghostblade ‘territory’ without having to send courier ships…but to get a comm ship big enough it’d have to be seda-sized and they’d need a lot of them to put up a grid across even a small region of space.

  That region would travel wherever the Clan went, though as the Ghostblades grew Kara knew she was going to have to get more clever in her structure, but being able to stay in contact was essential should something happen, especially back in the ADZ. She hadn’t discussed it with Paul yet, but she was going to take one of those communications ships and stick it on the outskirts of a border Star Force system so she could tap into the grid and transmit data updates to her Clan without having the extra lag of using courier ships, though she knew she couldn’t transmit back into the Star Force grid without potentially being detected.

  And to do all that she’d need a camouflaged communications ship. Yet one more thing on her to-build list, but right now communications was a luxury, not a necessity. Getting the raw materials she needed to build everything was a necessity, and until Calista got up and running she was going to have to keep sucking off of the Sabers and Sangheili for rare materials. That had to end sooner rather than later, and what she’d just brought back would be enough to construct the star forge itself, but there were a lot of other projects like those communications ships that would require a lot more, and until she had her own stellar mining operation they were going to stay in planning stages only.

  Kara pulled a datachip out of her uniform pocket and slid it into a receptacle, adding to the cradle’s database a myriad of information.

  “What’s this?” Vreemont asked.

  “Some new ideas from Jason and a batch of new tech updates from Earth.”

  “I love updates,” the tech said, pulling up the files and skimming through them in the otherwise empty room, for all other personnel were off on tasks and busy doing their part to build this monster of a mobile mining platform.

  Kara waited, watching his blank face until it lit up like a fireworks display. “Oh my…god.”

  “Thought you’d like that one,” she said with a smirk.

  “How the hell did Tennisonne do that?”

  “He’s good.”

  “No…” he said firmly. “This is way over his head. Top level V’kit’no’sat stuff.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t. We’re nowhere near to this tech level yet. How is this possible?”

  “He found a shortcut,” Kara said deviously.

  Vreemont’s eyes were still on the data files even as he was arguing with Kara. “Explain that.”

  “He figured out how to do something the V’kit’no’sat never did, though in their defense they never needed to since they didn’t have a full picture of the tech progression. Jason said he’s been working on this for a very long time.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Vreemont said, rereading the same summary texts twice. “He’s actually found a way to achieve atomic restructuring without an assembly matrix.”

  “Only in a few cases,” Kara added.

  “He shouldn’t be able to do it in even one,” the tech said firmly. He wasn’t in the top tier of Star Force’s engineers, the ones doing groundbreaking research to catch Star Force up to the V’kit’no’sat, but he was just below them and had access to everything they did, including shared field notes. Had he not been born in the century he did he would have been in that top tier, but those techs had a head start on him and somehow one of that had just found a way to do the impossible.

  “Can we implement those?”

  Vreemont rubbed his tongue inside his teeth as he thought. “Not right away, but the compact nature of the equipment required means we should be able to get decent production quotas out of our current hull sizes. The jumpships, I mean. We might be able to squeeze this into a factory ship, but the output would be minimal.”

  “Even a little carbon can go a long way…if we rework other items into a carbon base,” she said, referencing the alchemy that Tennisonne had just figured out how to achieve in a few select transitions using what the V’kit’no’sat would have deemed irrelevantly outdated technology, but he’d done it in such a clever way that she knew the V’kit’no’sat would never have even attempted to research down that pathway. They built for the bigger and better, never figuring out how to make do with less. Star Force was middle of the road, reaching for those higher technologies while also being forced to make the most of what they’ve got now in order to grow their empire as fast as possible, but in the case of Clan Ghostblade, doing more with less was essentially their mandate.

  As far as the carbon synthesis went, Tennisonne had found a way to take hydrogen atoms and remake them into carbon ones without the energy heavy and extravagant process the V’kit’no’sat used in their assembly matrixes, which typically occupied a 22 mile wide footprint on a planet for even the smallest facilities. They never really had a lack of carbon, which was yet another reason they probably hadn’t discovered how to do what Tennisonne had, with the assembly matrixes more focused on creating exotic atoms that were rare to mine and some that didn’t exist in nature altogether, as well as being able to crank them out in volume.

  Tennisonne’s approach had taken inferior technology and found an ingenious way to make the hydrogen to carbon transition with a comparatively low energy application that could be achieved in a facility ideally less than a mile wide, with smaller factories possible but at a significantly reduced output rate. A certain critical mass of machinery was required to make it all work, and Tennisonne’s process was unique to each specific alchemy, meaning that one of his proposed assembly matrixes could only produce one output.

  But that was so incredibly valuable for Star Force, not to mention the Ghostblades, that Vreemont’s reaction had not been overstated. And coupled with the hydrogen mining capability that a star forge provided, Kara’s Clan would never have to go looking for carbon to mine again…and if they could convert a lot of the technologies within the fleet to carbon alternates, which other techs had been researching for quite a lo
ng time, as well as with other more common elements, then she could retool her Clan to afford a lot more industrial output and not have to worry about available resources limiting their growth, or even repair efforts.

  Hydrogen was the most abundant element in the known galaxy, with every star about to turn into a fill-up station once Calista was completed.

  Which was why Vreemont was so geeking out right now.

  “They won’t be as resilient in most cases, but I agree that carbon is our ticket. We can supplement a lot of load bearing structures with carbon configurations to replace at least some of our corovon requirements if you’re willing to suffer reduced strength.”

  “Which is why I’m going to be sticking around here for a while,” Kara agreed. “You and I need to outline what acceptable limits are and see how much of a production advantage we can milk out of this. We also need to reduce the number of elemental components to as few as possible, even if just for a prototype design. If we can one day get them all down to resources we can mine from a star…I want that, in a bad way.”

  “And you could just sit in orbit and soak up the energy needed to make the conversions,” Vreemont said, thinking rapidly. “Tennisonne isn’t there yet, and I could tick off a list of things we’d still have to go hunting for right now even if these blueprints were working facilities, but I didn’t think even this would be possible without a full assembly matrix. I wouldn’t guarantee anything, but if we can even just get the carbon conversion working we’re going to be able to build a lot more ships without having to poke our noses into systems we don’t want to.”

  “I really want this,” Kara emphasized. “Start working on it whenever you can without slowing Calista down. Without her this doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “Mostly,” Vreemont corrected. “There are still other applications available, but I see your point. This is a historic day, to be sure.”

  “I know,” Kara said with a smug smile. “Star Force just got a whole lot more powerful.”