Star Force: Empire (SF58) Read online

  1

  April 8, 2652

  Baarg System (Beta Region)

  Keeson

  Larry Vich was sitting in his office looking out the panoramic window down into the valley when the comm tone sounded, bringing him out of another of his daydreaming sessions. The Administrator spun around in his chair, seeing a holographic prompt. He reached out to his desk and touched the button accepting the call, with the image of another Human popping up above his wide desk.

  “I just finished compiling the recent numbers,” his counterpart from region 18 said with a light smirk on her face, “and you were right.”

  “I usually am.”

  “But you weren’t right about the source,” she quickly corrected him. “It was D flock.”

  Larry frowned, his pleasure with being right now tinged with confusion. The former Lacvamat capitol world that they were tasked with managing pieces of had been in Star Force’s care for some time now, but not long enough to do a thorough job of reworking the infrastructure and civilization up to their standards. Humans still held all the important positions, with the fleshy fliers working their way up the learning curve and having to earn their place.

  Most hadn’t cared early on until Davis had instituted the ‘flock’ program, which was a reorganization unique to the Lacvamat. While Star Force still had the individual advancement possibility woven into the design, most of the Lacvamat didn’t care to act unless it favored a group, hence they’d been given group advancements. That was atypical of Star Force but with each race they added, whether as member, ward, or mainstay, peculiarities had to be troubleshooted.

  Technically right now the Lacvamat were a ward of the empire, but they weren’t being treated as such. Rather they were being reorganized and grown into what would one day be a mainstay, similar to the Calavari or Kiritak, and in order to make them a feasible addition their race had to be integrated into the whole…which always came with challenges.

  For the Lacvamat that was double trouble because they weren’t bipeds. Most of their movement occurred through flight, though they did have two fairly thick, short legs they could hop around on. Those legs doubled as hands with some precision talons on them that could grab or manipulate controls, but designing infrastructure for such a race varied differently than for Humans, and blending both together was far more difficult than, say, blending the needs of the Calavari with Humans.

  As far as the societal aspect was concerned the original Lacvamat were definitely routed in a ‘group think’ that the maturias had virtually eliminated, but without that cultural hive mind the individual Lacvamat were lazier than most species. There were always exceptions, but on average the fliers just weren’t cutting it, then Davis had instituted the flocks and so far that had seemed to cure the problem.

  The flocks were not made up of bloodlines, but were rather talent pools. One had to earn their way into a flock through individual merit, but after that point they worked together for a myriad of things short of full autonomy. Davis had made it clear that he didn’t want the competition factor overemphasized to the point of division, but rather to keep it friendly and constructive.

  Each Lacvamat world that Star Force now possessed was split into regions that had unique flocks within them, each of which amounted to as little as 200 or as many as 10,000 Lacvamat. Every one had a specific purpose with none being self-sufficient, but rather tasked with a tiny piece of the overall planetary puzzle. Each region was redundant and able to fully support itself, if not also assist others in times of need.

  Larry had been having discussions with Nadie as to how production quotas were going to fare for years, with both Administrators being able to call outcomes before they occurred. Recently Larry had suggested that in one of their neighboring regions, number 13 to be precise, there was going to be a quota overage in the production of iron ore. Nadie had disagreed, suggesting that they’d just barely scrape by in the six month cycle, which she now had admitted was a mistake.

  But the confusing thing to Larry was that, while he had apparently been right about the numbers, he had been wrong as to which flock had given region 13 the boon.

  Each assignment, such as a mining operation in a given facility, would have several flocks attached to it. Each would be working alongside one another, some during different shifts, others simultaneously, but never working together. The output was measured independently for each flock and scores were assigned. In this case it was D flock that had kicked the overall mining site production well over their expected quota, which was merely a loose figure that the local facility was shooting for.

  Flock D for this facility was the oldest flock in the grouping and had been in ownership of the top spot for some time. They always hit their quotas and little more, earning points for the flock that gave them upgrades to their status. Throughout Star Force civilians were assigned luxuries based on statuses that they earned or could purchase with credits, but those statuses were always individualized. With the Lacvamat flocks they were not, with the entire group rising or falling with the others.

  This ‘team’ advancement was the first for Star Force, which valued the individual above all other concepts, but in the Lacvamat’s case it was working to provide them the motivation they needed. That said, D flock at the facility in question had always been steady and reliable, doing what they needed but never going over the top, which was why Larry didn’t understand how they could have been the ones to push his estimates to fruition.

  “What about B?”

  “Just over par,” she said with some mirth.

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It’s certainly unusual, but with the new A flock coming in perhaps the vets wanted to lay the law down.”

  “That’s not how they think.”

  “Well, whatever the reason, D came through for you and you won this round. I just get the satisfaction of knowing it was by accident. Any news happening on your end?”

  “Same old, same old.”

  “How close are you on that spaceport?”

  “Still another 2 months before it goes partially online, what with these damn aerial patterns.”

  “Definitely one of the challenges of living here. Are we still on for tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to gloat.”

  “Like I’ll miss that.”

  Larry nodded. “Yes, we’re still on, and I’ll grant you a tie on this one.”

  “No, it may have been a sloppy prediction, but it still came out to be true. Take your luck and run with it.”

  “Alright, have it your way. 2 shot lead.”

  “Three, actually,” Nadie said with some dissatisfaction.

  “They came in that far over quota?”

  “Ye….ep,” his fellow Administrator said with some shame as she cut the transmission, leaving Larry alone again in his office.

  Curiosity got the better of him and he dug into the planetary files to search out the production records she was referring to. They were recent, having been filed within the past 6 hours, and showed that the mining site in question had registered a 6 month production quota at 278%.

  That blew his mind, not because he hadn’t seen numbers like that before, but because of the location and those involved. He’d expected the newer 2 flocks to up their game and put the lagging facility ahead on this cycle but he had not expected so much. Since he’d taken the over on this one the higher the number went the more credit he got for it with Nadie on their regular ‘dates’ as he liked to think of them, though there was nothing romantic involved. It was just a chance to spend some time with a peer on a planet full of aliens.

  Their dates were part work, part games with them picking two or three activities
to do over the course of a day while chatting. They necessarily had to be low effort to accommodate the conversation, and the first of which they had planned was hologolf, in which his prediction had earned him a bit of a head start. It was one of the games available in an entertainment chamber, rather than a ‘real’ game that left physics to the universe instead of computer simulation, but the luxury of being able to pull up over 300 premade competitions inside a bland, somewhat small room had its benefit for those that weren’t overly concerned with competition and just wanted to play to blow off some steam or hang out.

  There were other Humans here, of course, but only a handful of administrators and Larry liked to spend time with his peers whenever he could. Nadie was the closest of them, being located in the region to the north and only a short hop away by dropship or a longer ride by train, but all of the Administrators could get to one another without too much trouble or delay and keep some semblance of community on the otherwise bizarre planet…one that they were attempting to convert into semi-bizarreness.

  Larry swiveled his chair around so he could look back out the window. The cityscape below him was Star Force, telltale from the grid layout and the material of the buildings, but what varied was the high, needle-thin spires rising up from the center of the city and the mass of buildings clinging to the far canyon wall. They were built vertically, such as his office was on the opposite side, connected by a carpet of structures between the two with a smattering of spires in the center.

  That wasn’t typical Star Force, but it wasn’t that far outside their normal motif. The bizarre thing about it was the aerial traffic that had the open air within the canyon filled with the Lacvamat moving around. Instead of taking internal lift cars or walking down hallways they flew everywhere, making the cityscape below more of an outdoor interior than true buildings, where the roads doubled as topless hallways.

  There were enclosed structures, of course, but when one wanted to move from point to point they came out to the roof and flew over to the next location, meaning that all of the structures had to be thin and accessible to the air, with none of the big, hulky city-buildings that Star Force favored elsewhere.

  Larry and the other Humans moved about conventionally, for it was Star Force infrastructure and therefore accommodating Humans and others with subsurface rail lines and lift cars. Not far off down the canyon, where the exit of the river that flowed down the now artificial center met up with a spindly little lake, there was a large plain sitting in the middle of the otherwise varied terrain. There construction was still continuing, with the most notable feature being a spaceport…but unlike most Star Force spaceports this one wasn’t being constructed on the ground.

  It looked like a giant mushroom rising high up into the sky and spreading out laterally, leaving a thick central stalk supporting it then an umbrella outstretch that allowed the Lacvamat fliers to move across the surface beneath the starship traffic so they wouldn’t cross paths. The Lacvamat could fly to considerable height, but Larry and the others had found that giving them an altitude free of craft that they could move about through without worry saved a lot of hassle…or rather it had been an Archon that had devised that little tidbit and passed it onto them, for he was technically in charge of the entire Lacvamat race.

  But it was Administrators like Larry that held everything together, with the planning and building of individual cities to consider. The Archons would come in, change this or that, then leave again to put out any procedural and societal brush fires that popped up, but it was the Administrators that stayed in place and made sure everything progressed smoothly, for that was their function. Sometimes what the Archons wanted was a pain in the ass to do, but he’d never met one who had given orders just to yank someone’s chain and there was always a reason for what they did, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious.

  But on this planet he’d been left mostly alone. It had been the Lacvamat capitol before but, on the call of an Archon, that designation had been stripped from it and moved to another location. Keeson was still heavily populated, as far as the aerial race was concerned, though the layout of the cities was very thin and almost underpopulated compared to the Star Force norm. That was necessary, given there was only so much sky space, and while the Lacvamat could navigate in large groups fairly easily the Administrators had learned not to get them too packed together, for when they all had different directions to go the ‘group think’ of the Lacvamat kind of misfired and chaos broke out.

  Get them all going in the approximate same direction or with the same purpose and they could swarm through the air with ease, but the somewhat regulated flight patterns of the low altitudes within the cities defied that theme to a degree, though there were long, thick columns of fliers all heading the same way on what looked like roads in the air from Larry’s window.

  Little specs would split off from them and fly through the open spaces in between, coming down or up to one of the spires or surface buildings where they needed to go. It was those transitions especially that caused trouble in greater numbers, but with proper city planning and population monitoring the Star Force Lacvamat cities functioned and functioned well, though there were always opportunities to improve.

  Some 160 miles to the south was one of the temporary habitats Star Force had set up some time ago to house the Lacvamat population while the true cities were being built, and those temporary sites had been constructed in order to move people out of the original Lacvamat structures, which were now all decommissioned and in the last stages of recycling the materials. The temporary habitats would stay up until all of the Lacvamat could fit within the cities, then Larry and the others would begin expanding more slowly to suit their growth needs. Right now, however, they were building as fast as they could just to give everyone a place to live.

  Which was why the maturias were slowing reproduction rates to a steady trickle. The Lacvamat reproduced through eggs, giving Star Force the ability to firmly control population rates as opposed to live births because the eggs had to be externally fertilized. Originally, unsanctioned reproduction had been a minor problem, but virtually all of those Lacvamat that had been born through the maturias accepted Star Force’s mandates and didn’t try to circumvent them. It was those that had lived prior to the annexation that were showing defiance, and while there weren’t a lot of them left due to the war and subsequent attrition there were always some problems with the dissenters, but at least it seemed they’d given up on trying to breed off the grid.

  Most of them just sat and rotted away in their habitats, ironically cleansing the planet of the problem they represented. Some had converted over, but most stubbornly refused to help their ‘conquerors’ and were gradually fading away from the social consciousness. The planet and their race were Star Force now, with that becoming more so every day and with every subsequent generation being hatched and trained in maturia, but there was still a lot of work to be done before the Lacvamat could take their place as peers within Star Force, for right now without the Human Administrators and other ‘support staff’ the Lacvamat civilization would quickly fall into shambles.

  They weren’t ready to be independent yet, not in any way, shape, or form, but they were gradually making progress and most of those Larry interacted with now could speak English, which was a blessing, for his trade language was not in a comfortable sound range for his vocal chords. It always was a chore to pronounce, but with the conversion taking place on the planet and the Lacvamat becoming more and more Star Force, English began to take over as well, allowing normal speech that he was grateful for.

  The Lacvamat had their own dialect, of course, but it was easy to get used to given that they’d learned it from Human trainers and holo recordings. It was the non-maturia raised natives that spoke it with an almost garbled tone, and that gave him some considerable difficulty in understanding them, but he rarely dealt with those individuals anymore now that he’d accumulated a moderately sized staff of Lacvamat that he could rely on to do ba
sic tasks. Over time that staff would grow in number and experience, but it was going to be a long haul indeed.

  He’d learned early on that he needed breaks to refresh his Humanity, or more accurately to refresh his ‘Star Force.’ That wasn’t a proper term but it was the only one he had, for when dealing with the Lacvamat and trying to pull them into the massive organization he was likewise pulling himself out of it a bit, being blended with their bad habits and tendencies as he battled them.

  So it was days like the next, when he met up with Nadie and the pair took the day off from duty, going far away from the Lacvamat and retreating down into levels where they didn’t typically go to get away from their charges and recharge their Star Force batteries. As planned they hit up the entertainment facility, playing through two rounds of simulated golf by smacking the real little projectile and having the computer calculate its movements even as a force field caught it only a few meters away.

  After golf it was damough, then tennis, followed up lastly by a lazy game of holographic cards in a private hot tub as they soaked the alien influences out of them. Through it all they exchanged information, plans and concerns, turning the ‘fun’ day also into a business one, but that was just who they were. Administrator wasn’t a job you did during the day and walked away from at night, it was a position with round the clock responsibilities and while they might take time to blow off some steam and recharge, they were always Administrators and when they chitchatted it usually came back to the work at hand.

  After quick, separate showers they had food brought in for them and they spent the evening on a rooftop deck watching Larry’s city as the twin suns slowly set over the far canyon wall and the nighttime lights replaced them, twinkling as tiny Lacvamat would fly by in the dark and cause the distant lights to blink in and out almost as if they were silent fireworks going off.

  The breeze felt good and the pair sat in silence, taking one last break from the Lacvamat while still observing them, almost as if in transition back into their world and out of the tiny bubble they’d retreated into. Bringing a race into Star Force was no easy task, and if one wasn’t careful they’d lose themselves in the process. This had been underscored many times by the Archons and even Larry’s superiors. He hadn’t understood initially, but now saw the wisdom in their warnings.