Star Force: Ysalamir (Star Force Universe Book 54) Read online

  That meant Star Force wasn’t the shining jewel that Davis had wanted it to become…from his point of view. Everyone else thought it was the greatest thing to ever hit the galaxy, and that might be true from a relative point of view, but all Davis saw in these few reflective moments he took out of his busy schedule was all the failures and inadequacies that still remained.

  And try as hard as he had, there was no way to determine what kind of a Core manifested inside a new body. He could play with the genetic memories, but not the Core. Good people could reproduce bad ones, and bad ones could reproduce good ones. It appeared to be totally random insertion, and that meant threats could arise from within Star Force if not properly monitored and handled.

  Fortunately there were enough good people scattered across his empire for Davis to collect and put in charge of everyone else, and the larger Star Force grew the more he found…but then again there was also more need of them, especially now with population levels skyrocketing due to the evacuations. Star Force was taking in more people than it could reasonably handle, but thanks to lessons learned from long ago wars and similar evacuations, he was going to keep the newcomers contained and not let them contaminate the more behaved worlds.

  The evacuees would be far better off than they had been, but it would take time for them to learn to behave enough to be released into the general population…plus there were a lot of genetic memory issues to tackle with time and training. It was a mess and it was only growing worse as the Hadarak expansion pace increased along with their minion growth fields, but so far most of the people in harm’s way were being pulled out in time…it was where to take them that was the issue.

  Davis was having to expend so many resources on the evacuees that it was cutting his war effort in half, and some days he felt like he was endlessly running on a treadmill with no true victory possible. Maintain pace or fall off. Stagnation or defeat with no hope of a permanent solution, but Davis wasn’t going to accept that. Part of him never would, while the rest of him was pragmatic enough to accept it on a level necessary to mitigate it. He could play the long game, and he was the best person suited for it within Star Force, but every now and then he had to stand down and take a long, deep breath and admit that he was in over his head.

  For a few moments he let go of his responsibilities and shrunk down to the small chair in his office, letting himself be just a person in a single body rather than the central brain of a massive empire at war. The perspective was one he badly needed, and every time he did so he got a brief but very badly needed recharge. Lifting that burden from his shoulders, even for a moment, was enough to breathe new life in him and recharge his desire to tackle the challenges the universe presented.

  Many people, when they found the time, asked what the purpose of life was beyond simple survival. Davis had long go given himself a sufficient answer for that, and with that answer he had never been bored. Never lost his way or become self-destructive. He needed a recharge from time to time, but he had a purpose, even if it was just a temporary one.

  And that purpose was to figure out what the hell was going on with the universe.

  Nothing added up. Nothing made sense in a larger, grand scope. People often asked what happened to your Core after death, but to Davis the greater question was where did it come from in the first place? Where did Humans originate from? They’d come from Ter’nat, he knew that much, but where did Ter’nat come from. Where did all the races in the galaxy come from? Why hadn’t all the races died out? Were they being replaced with new ones? What the hell was truly going on?

  Pursuing those mysteries was like a beacon to Davis, with the universe rewarding those with answers who could survive long enough to figure them out…and only to those that dared to question, dared to think, dared to wonder, and dared to challenge the status quo of the darkside.

  The conscience. It all came back to the conscience. Why was it there? To Davis it was like a little thread that all people had access to pull on, or like bread crumb to follow to…where? Davis didn’t know the ultimate destination, but he had traveled so far on that path and learned so much, that his immediate future was clear.

  He would keep following the path of the lightside and try to figure out the deeper and deeper mysteries of the universe while clearing the path for others to follow…but he knew they would not make it even a tenth as far as he had. Other than the trailblazers, he had no equal in this department, and because of his unique situation, in some ways he was above and beyond them, and always would be, though he welcomed the help when they figured out something he hadn’t.

  If they could keep up with him in his search for answers, he welcomed the company, but he did not rely on it. Davis accepted that he would have to walk this path alone and use what he learned to continually advance Star Force…but the further he got the more he sensed he was just beginning. Most people instinctively thought they knew it all, or at least most of what there was to know. Many people died because they thought there was nothing more to life to explore, despite hardly knowing anything at all.

  The truly wise man saw the universe for the mystery it was, and acknowledged how much he did not know so he could search for the answers.

  And in recent years, Davis was realizing just how much more there was that he did not know, and if Star Force was to survive the higher tier enemies it was attracting the attention of, he needed to figure out what the hell was going on in the galaxy before he could plan a strategy to combat it.

  Meanwhile in the Hadarak Zone…

  The ‘scream’ of the Hadarak had been released from many systems where the Ysalamir struck, traveling across interstellar space and fading as it did, but today one of those faint screams, years after it was released, reached another system with a neophyte minion colony growing on a tiny continent on the 8th planet in the system, having been deposited there by a single warship minion with a seed.

  The minions were programmed to be able to hear the signal, and as soon as they did the small colony began growing a factory to produce courier minions, which they currently did not have. It took 4 months before the first courier was born, and then another 3 months for it to suck up enough resources to grow to a size necessary to survive multiple interstellar jumps. It and 28 others recently produced were then released on multiple jumplines carrying the memory of the transmission as they searched the warzone for the location of a Hadarak.

  Most were destroyed during travel as they came across V’kit’no’sat patrols, but one passed through another minion-held system before it was eventually destroyed. It had copied the message to that colony, and that colony had used its current production factories to produce over 600 couriers with the copied message, sending them out, and the process repeated through every minion-occupied system, replicating like a bacteria until one eventually made it to a Hadarak and delivered the message.

  The Hadarak immediately altered course for the nearest rocky planet, diving inside it and nearly ripping it in half as it sunk deep inside, almost disappearing aside from the top edge of its spherical mass poking out along geysers of pressurized magma being released along the seams of the broken crust. It stayed there for months, soaking up resources and growing a very special minion inside its body, then it broke free of the planet, leaving such a large hole in it that the planet’s rotation was now off center and the edges of the impact site began to peel away due to the centrifugal force, causing newly forged mountain rages hundreds of miles high as the magma lake forming beneath them slowly solidified.

  The Hadarak, once again in space, opened a seam on its body and released a minion larger than any seen before. It was 12 miles long and looked like an obsidian knife-blade, and the way it moved through space definitely justified the comparison.

  The super-courier moved off to the star at a speed no other minion, let alone a Hadarak, could match, then it jumped into interstellar space at equally impressive speed enroute to the Galactic Core far faster than the normal couriers would carry the message.
It would arrive there in a little under 9 years, and had enough internal mass to supply it for the entire journey without stops, though at the end it would be less than half the size it was now.

  And when it reached the large-scale minion colonies in the outer defense ring and delivered the message, the war drums began to beat again, but this time in different rhythm and with a greater importance.

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