Star Force Perseverance (SF81) (Star Force Origin Series)

  Star Force Perseverance (SF81) (Star Force Origin Series)

  Aer-ki Jyr

  1

  May 19, 3101

  Shangri-La

  System (Cygnus Arm)

  Inner Zone

  Count Jeyron stood on the bridge of the Mammoth-class cargo ship that he’d spent

  the last 2 years and four months on, for the most part, as this supply convoy

  of 284 jumpships made its way up the tether from the ADZ. They’d stopped off at

  a few ports along the way…Lothlorien, Mandalore, Dakara…but most of the

  breadcrumbs of systems leading out from the ADZ and into the Perseus galactic

  Arm they’d skipped over, either flying through them or bypassing those star

  systems entirely.

  They weren’t all arrayed on a straight line, meant

  rather to be quiet outposts that most people wouldn’t notice. They weren’t a

  secret to the locals, but there was no map in the ADZ that had them included,

  save for the ones the Archons and the Monarchs had, and up until he’d been

  assigned this mission by Davis he hadn’t even known about the Tether’s

  existence. He’d been a Baron for some 83 years without hearing so much as a

  whiff of a rumor, which he attributed to the Director’s ability to keep secrets…and

  this one was a doozy.

  Star Force had quietly stretched a string of oases

  across the local Orion arm and into The Nexus’s domain, then hopscotched across

  it with even greater distances between Tether outposts. They’d actually

  established a link across the entire Nexus, through the Perseus Arm, and out

  into the very big Cygnus Arm that made up the fat edge of the galaxy.

  Cygnus was more than twice the width of the Orion Arm

  and even bigger than Perseus. It stretched out through thick star clusters and

  technically even contained the much thinner dispersion of stars that bled off

  into the galactic void. There was no fixed edge to the galaxy, and those border

  systems were technically still part of it, though their relative location to

  each other would make travel impossible unless you had very strong and accurate

  gravity drives.

  Star Force hadn’t made it out there, not even close

  yet, but the fact that they had not only left the Orion Arm but were all the

  way out in Cygnus had astonished Jeyron when he’d been let in on the secret,

  along with the destination system that they’d recently colonized that he was

  going to be tasked with grooming and growing even further.

  Then the bombshell of the V’kit’no’sat had been

  dropped on him and suddenly Star Force’s history and actions up until this

  point had crystalized into understanding and trepidation. If the dinosaurs ever

  came back they’d wipe Star Force out, not quickly, but assuredly. Meaning that

  unless they wanted to die when that happened they’d need someplace to retreat

  to that was off the V’kit’no’sat maps.

  The system that the Count was looking at now was one

  of those systems. The primary, as it was now. It wasn’t part of the Tether so

  much as it was the first of the new territory that Star Force had built the

  Tether to connect the ADZ with. The goal had always been to reach Cygnus, and

  now that they had they’d been doing more reconnaissance and scouting missions

  than they’d done before establishing that line of breadcrumbs across the

  galaxy. They’d essentially mapped a corridor out here, now they were doing a

  much more thorough survey of this region.

  Which was still a drop in the bucket compared to how

  much raw territory there was. The Nexus had no public maps with information

  this far out, and Star Force hadn’t made contact with any of the local races so

  they were essentially flying blind as they sent out hundreds of scouting

  missions to add to their map while looking for a place to put down their first

  permanent colony.

  Not that the breadcrumbs weren’t permanent, but they

  were never intended to be built up as large or as fast as the primaries. If

  Star Force lost its industrial muscle on Earth and the ADZ entirely, it was

  going to need something to fall back on for ship production. And small yards

  weren’t going to cut it.

  Luckily Star Force had quickly stumbled onto a region

  that was virtually uninhabited. For all they knew it bordered a major power

  that they’d end up being enemies with, but right now it was essentially a dead

  zone full of systems but no races that could leave their own worlds. Nearly all

  of the systems were uninhabited and they were continuing their mapping missions

  to expand the perimeter of that area…in which Shangri-La had been found.

  That was the name given to it upon discovery, and even

  while the mapping expeditions hadn’t progressed as far out as he and even the

  Director would have liked yet, they knew they could not pass on this system.

  They’d colonized it like the Tether systems immediately, then had been sending

  additional support to further build it up to a manageable starting point. An

  Archon had been in charge thus far, but now there were enough pieces in play to

  warrant a Monarch be sent to put down the firm roots that the Director wanted,

  and Jeyron had been his choice.

  With the promotion to Count he’d been sent out here

  along with another supply convoy, taking the long road that bypassed The

  Nexus’s transport grid. They’d used traditional grav jumps between stars and a

  handful of black holes, following the trail blazed by others until they’d

  arrived at this destination point moments ago with the map being updated with

  current sensor readings and transmissions from the limited infrastructure

  already in place.

  That gave them laggy connection to the battlemap, but

  it instantly filled up with new facilities built in both orbit and on the

  ground of the single planet that had been colonized…out of 306 total, not

  counting moons. Of those 306 planets situated around a giant white star, 57 of

  them were habitable and 16 marginal. The rest were airless but none the less

  had good amounts of gravity, including a few that topped 2g. That meant there

  was a wealth of raw materials buried in them, not to mention the fact that Star

  Force didn’t need atmospheres to colonize planets.

  This one system was the equivalent of dozens, if not

  hundreds of others back in the ADZ, all confined into orbits around a single

  star. This was where Star Force had to put down roots, and it wouldn’t need to

  look beyond this location for some time, for there was plenty of worlds right

  here to build up to a level that even Sol or Epsilon Eridani couldn’t begin to

  reach.

  But that was far down the road. This system had

  potential…and that was about it right now. The colony had a population of

 
; 394,000 prior to this convoy arriving, which would add another 126,000. Not the

  smallest starting point in Star Force history, but without even a million

  people to work with this was considerably smaller than Jeyron’s last

  assignment.

  Though his mandate here was far bigger than anything

  back in the ADZ and he had to make it work, for literally everyone’s lives

  could be riding on it someday in the future. Shangri-La was to be the invisible

  backup to the ADZ, and right now it could barely throw spitwads militarily. He

  was going to have to change that, and do it almost entirely with local

  resources. More convoys would be coming regularly, but with the massive

  distance involved both he and Davis knew this had to be an independent

  operation. The convoys were just a shot in the arm to get the process started.

  After that Jeyron would be the lone Monarch out here, with orders to build an

  empire within a single star system…the most important star system on the Star

  Force maps.

  He’d asked the Director why a Duke wasn’t assigned, and

  he said that if Jeyron was able to pull this off he would have gained the

  experience and skills necessary to warrant that title. So he had assigned a

  Duke to this, in the sense that this is what it took to become one aside from

  going through the Clans, but he also pointed out the fact that managing such a

  small colony at this point would be a waste of a Duke’s skills. They were

  needed on much larger fronts organizing existing infrastructure and

  populations, not building new ones from scratch.

  And right now, seeing the updates flowing in via the

  battlemap transmissions, he heartily agreed. For there was nothing here worth

  mentioning.

  A single city had been established on planet A, which

  hadn’t even been assigned a name yet. The city itself was more than just a

  startup and had been here a while, so he was glad he didn’t have to start entirely from scratch, but there were

  only a few auxiliaries on this planet and a few other locations around the

  system. Mining sites and such, without even the smallest of shipyards having

  been built yet.

  That was like a gut punch to a Monarch, for without a

  shipyard you might as well have been back in the Stone Age. He’d hoped the

  Archon in charge would have built, or at least started to build one by the time

  Jeyron got here, but no such site was being listed on the battlemap…though

  there was a large new section of the city on planet A that hadn’t been there

  before.

  Jeyron used a console to zoom in on that area as the

  ship continued to soak up more battlemap signals across the system-wide

  lag…which would be even worse considering the size of that star’s gravity well.

  Planets orbited at distances that would have put them outside other star

  systems, giving this one a very large volume of space to move around within.

  Fortunately the battlemap signals were constantly transmitting, though he

  wouldn’t be able to retrieve specific information without querying for it and

  that would require and out and back from the comms systems.

  But right now he had position and status data on every

  facility and ship, noting a decent grouping of military vessels in orbit of the

  planet. 6 Warship-class jumpships

  full of drones were already here, with another two having arrived in this

  convoy. They would have absolutely nothing to do in this deserted region of the

  Cygnus arm, if the scouting reports held true, but there was no way Davis was

  going to let this system be established without immediate defenses.

  The Archons he was bringing with him told him that it

  wasn’t a big deal so long as they had a sanctum to train in. Boredom didn’t

  exist for them, and a lack of missions and fighting just meant more time to

  increase their skills. That was a very positive spin on it, and in their case

  he actually believed them, based on his somewhat limited knowledge of Archon

  customs and culture, but the fact was this was out in the middle of nowhere so

  far away from home that they were essentially lost in space save for a few

  convoys coming now and then.

  But that’s why a Monarch had been assigned. Operating

  independently was what they were good at. And if he really was going to someday

  warrant the Duke’s title he was going to have to prove it here first…and by the

  time he did this system would no longer be nowhere. It’d be somewhere, the somewhere in Cygnus, from which everything

  else in this doomsday territorial expansion would flow.

  The cargo ship he was riding on sat in stellar orbit

  and waited for the rest of the convoy to arrive before they transitioned over

  to planet A…which would be getting a new name as soon as Jeyron got around to

  it. He wanted something special, so he was going to wait and give it some

  thought. He should have been doing that on the trip out but he’d expected

  someone to have assigned one by now and he hadn’t planned on undoing whatever

  moniker it had already gotten.

  But it seemed that this system was an entirely blank

  slate for him to get around to naming. One of the few perks that was usually

  reserved for mapping expeditions or Archons, and he had a whole list of planets

  here that he got to label as he liked.

  Putting that on his eventual to-do list, Jeyron stayed

  on the bridge and got a better view of planet A when they microjumped into

  orbit. He’d seen records of it previously, but watching it here in realtime was

  an entirely different experience. This was live, not some data file, and if he

  didn’t do his job everyone out here could be put into jeopardy. Not because he

  was indispensable, obviously. This colony had gotten along fine without him to

  this point, but taking it forward was his responsibility and there was no way

  of knowing when someone out here might come sniffing around and find them.

  And if they were a superpower like The Nexus, well,

  Jeyron would have little to defend this system with…and the number of planets

  alone would be reason enough for someone to take it from them if they found it.

  Calling for help would be pointless, for they’d be

  dead before a message could make its way back to the ADZ. No, the defense of

  this system would lay, for the moment, in the Archons and warships sent here to

  watch over it, but in the long run it would come down to what defenses and

  ships that Jeyron could build from local resources. Archons would come from the

  Earth and always would, but commandos, naval officers, pilots, techs, etc could

  be ‘grown’ locally out of the population. Maturias would be established and

  freedom of movement would be retained via the sporadic convoys, so no one would

  be stuck here if they truly wanted to leave…but by the same note volunteers

  would still be coming in to supplement this system’s population.

  Fast forward centuries and you’d have a large enough

  population that you’d see people staying here rather than leaving, meaning that

  this little piece of the Star Force empire was going to be almost entirely self-contained,

&nbs
p; and it was up to Jeyron to design, build, and manage it. That was a monstrous

  task and one that he was kind of glad was going to take a while, because he was

  going to have to learn as he went, as all Monarchs did, though the Director had

  given him some notes for him to make use of going forward. Notes from Davis

  himself that he’d compiled over the years that Jeyron had virtually memorized

  on the trip out here.

  “Count, there’s an incoming message for you,” Captain

  Jihadia said, startling Jeyron out of his daze.

  “Go ahead and put it on the main display. It can’t be

  my mistress all the way out here,” he said with a sarcastic wink.

  Jihadia snorted a quick laugh, then the holographic

  image of an Archon striker appeared out of armor, but with the telltale

  identification stripe on his uniform that Jeyron could just barely make out.

  “Welcome to Shangri-La, Count Jeyron,” the man said

  with a polite bow.

  “Klevin, I presume?”

  “I am. I’ve gotten this system up and running, but it

  needs a Monarch’s touch and I’m glad you’re finally here.”

  “Situation report?”

  “Still empty space around us. Scouting teams have

  found a few more native civilizations, all pre-grav drive tech. If there are

  any significant powers out here they’re not right on our doorstep.”

  Jeyron visibly sighed. “That’s a relief.”

  “Quite so.”

  The Count winced, trying to find a non-accusing way of

  asking this. “I didn’t notice any shipyard construction yet?”

  “Priorities,” the Archon said apologetically. “Getting

  the base industry established was more important, thus I had resources focused

  on giving you as many building blocks as possible. We’ve got enough ships at

  the moment, so a full shipyard was unnecessary.”

  “Support craft?”

  “Dropships are being built in a surface shop within

  the city.”

  “Ah,” Jeyron said with some pleasure. So they hadn’t

  built a proper shipyard, but they did have a tiny one for the smaller craft up

  and running. That was most welcome news. “I had hoped for as much. I trust I

  can leave the security of the system in your hands while I get to work?”

  “Always. We’ll watch your back while you build.”