Star Force: Melee (SF20) Read online

“On their own, nil. The only chance we have is to build new parts for the gravity drives, which we can if we expand their captured infrastructure far enough to include an orbital shipyard.”

  “Not soon enough then?”

  “No.”

  “Alright then. Assuming we finish up here without any unforeseen problems I’m hitching a ride on the next jumpship back to Earth. Someone needs to bring Davis and the others up to speed in person, and I want to get back before round 2 begins.”

  “We need to halt all other expansion until we can solidify our supply lines,” Paul reminded him. “As much as I want to be charting new systems, we can’t spare a single jumpship right now, let alone start setting up new colonies we can’t defend. We’re lucky the lizards only hit us here, and hopefully it’s here they’ll hit us again. We’re more vulnerable than it seems and I’m glad they’re not in a position to exploit that vulnerability.”

  “Is that your way of saying we need to focus our jumpship shipments to local industrial growth?”

  “That would be on my wish list, yes, but make sure Davis understands that we need Sol building jumpships by the dozens, no matter how drastically he has to rework our shipbuilding infrastructure.”

  “I’ll get it done,” Jason promised as a man walked up behind the nexus.

  “Sirs,” the control room officer interrupted politely.

  “What is it?” Paul said, turning away from the view of the continuing orbital bombardment as it shattered the debris piles that were all that was left of the lizard buildings.

  “The Hycre artifact is…acting up again.”

  Paul and Jason exchanged glances.

  “Finish them off,” Jason said. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “Keep me updated,” Paul said as his friend walked off with the man and left the control room. Two levels up and a few hundred meters to the east they came to an empty room that had been rededicated to the study of the Hycre probe after it had been moved from Corneria Prime during the first day of the assault on the city.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Jason said as the artifact floated in the center of the room, flashing like a strobe light from alternating crystalline segments in a fast and erratic pattern. Two other techs were present, one of which shrugged when Jason looked at him.

  The trailblazer walked forward and touched the main body…with no effect. Frowning he proceeded to touch each of the tendrils until finally one contact stopped the light show by turning on every component’s glow at the highest setting, and all in vivid pink.

  “What did you do?” the control room officer asked.

  “Not a clue,” Jason admitted, then a long screech sounded, quickly followed by a holographic line forming that started just above his head and extended down to a half meter off the ground…then a second one began at the top next to the first one and continued the pattern.

  “Where’s the damn mute,” he complained, realizing that they were receiving a message directly from the Hycre, which meant they had to be somewhere in the system.

  “I don’t know,” one of the techs said walking up to the device as if to look for the off button, but Jason put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Rhetorical question.”

  “Oh,” the man said, retreating to his seat as the sound finally stopped. The text line continued on for a few seconds, catching up with the audio, then stood glowing in deep purple characters as Jason tried to read it, but he couldn’t pick out more than a few words. He hadn’t spent much time with the device, and his Hycre wasn’t nearly as good as his lizard…which also sucked.

  “Can any of you read that?”

  “A little,” one of the techs said walking up closer to better see the intricacy of the tiny symbols. “Communication…agreement…enemy…food fight…travel.”

  “Wait…food fight?”

  “That’s what it says, I think.”

  Jason turned to look at the control room officer. “Comm,” he said, holding out his hand.

  The man took his comm piece off his ear and handed it to the Archon, who slipped it on and ran through the audial menu.

  “Paul, get over here. I’ll switch off with you if want someone in the booth, but it looks like we’ve just received a message from the Hycre and I need you to translate.”

  “Aren’t there language techs there?”

  “They came up with ‘food fight.’”

  Paul sighed. “Stay there, I’m on my way.”

  He typed in a last few commands, one of which was for the ships in orbit to fire off two more rounds each then to cease bombardment, then he gave Morgan the go ahead for the ground op before powering down the nexus and heading over to the artifact room.

  “Just this?” Paul asked as he walked in and saw the lines of text floating in between the probe and Jason in glowing holo.

  “It came through in audio, which we had to suffer through, then recorded it in text.”

  Paul bit his lip as his brain started to work overtime trying to recognize and align the symbols. Each had different connections that imparted different meanings, similar to verb tense without there actually being any words. All their symbols were nouns, sort of, so it was quite a brain teaser to try and reconstruct their script into an English sentence.

  “Anything?” Jason asked when Paul started to rub his forehead.

  “I don’t recognize half of the vocabulary, but I can look it up later. The gist of it is that they want to formalize terms of an alliance against the lizards…and I think they’re sending ships. A lot of ships.”

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