Star Force: Reclamation (SF91) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  “Here they come,” the sensor officer onboard the Warship-class jumpship Hadricore said as the ship guarded/monitored traffic passing through the Reesmiy System. It had been one of the original lizard core worlds and was now home to a small Star Force Kiritak colony on the outermost of three habitable worlds. The other two lay bare, having been reclaimed and purged of all lizard infrastructure not long ago save for the single ring shipyard around the innermost planet. It had been used during the recycling process but now sat as a silent monument to the former owners of the system.

  Silent that was until a few months ago when it had been returned to the lizards that were now working with Star Force. They’d brought in several jumpships worth of personnel to start getting it up and working again, but it wasn’t until now that the first cargo convoy had arrived, and it was a doosy.

  Jumpship after jumpship was emerging from a rimward jumpline suggesting that they were arriving from the recently surrendered territories where the lizards had not been attacked or removed, meaning they still had all that infrastructure and population in place, and it looked like the Archons were putting them to work immediately.

  “How many?” the ship’s Captain asked.

  “138 and counting.”

  “IDs?”

  “All are showing Star Force passes. They’re friendlies…despite the yellow paint.”

  “The blue ones are Clan affiliated,” she corrected him. “Expect to see a lot of the old school ships being used by the others.”

  “It wouldn’t be hard for an enemy lizard to fake an ID signature and ram something when it got close,” another bridge offer commented.

  “Which is why we’re going to keep an eye on every one of them,” she said, reminding her crew that this wasn’t just a babysitting operation anymore. “If there is even the slightest bit of suspicious activity I want to be notified and then I want it logged. The trailblazers want any and all data on the lizard operations, including reports of their routine actions.”

  “Checking to make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to?”

  “I would.”

  “Can they really be trusted?”

  “They think so, and I’d bet credits that they’re not basing that on wishful thinking. I don’t know what all of this is about, but the Archons always know what they’re doing. Just keep your eyes and ears open and watch those IDs closely. If a ship comes in without one we need to be on it ASAP, even if it is just a malfunction. Otherwise we just wait and observe. I for one want to see what they’re going to be building.”

  “More lizard ships?” the sensor officer pointed out the obvious.

  “Why? Don’t they have enough already from the captured worlds? And what would the Archons want lizard ships for?”

  “Sneaking across the line,” someone else suggested.

  “Which is why I’m curious to see what they actually build,” she said as the jumpship count continued to climb even as the first ones redirected and made microjumps towards the planet with the ring around it.

  More and more ships kept coming in that one convoy, with other groups to arrive over the following weeks as they began pouring raw materials in from the small but numerous lizard worlds that had surrendered. Those resources fed a small number of the factories within the ring, but as the months went on and more and larger convoys continued to arrive like clockwork sections of the shipyard lit up with internal functions and the huge beast of a facility slowly ramped up again. Soon it began producing not ships, but structural components that sprouted lizard cities at the base of the connecting columns that looked from orbit like weeds growing on the otherwise pristine planet.

  Those cities were not built to hold population, but rather were extensive warehouses that steadily began filling up with tanks, wisps, droplets, and all manner of ground and aerial craft. Thousands upon thousands were heading down the lifts from the shipyard and being stored there even as the warehouses themselves were being expanded upon as the slow creep of infrastructure began to spread out around the connecting columns.

  But there was one additional item amongst the masses that stood out, for it had never been seen in lizard inventories before. Billions of suits of body armor were being constructed in orbit and shipped down to warehouses where they were stacked and racked en mass, preparing for what would undoubtedly be an army of lizards grown to fill them at some point, but for now it seemed obvious to those Star Force troops in the system that this operation had one and only one purpose.

  The Archons had these lizards preparing to fight another war and they were stocking up on equipment prior to launching it. Everyone wrongly assumed it would be a campaign against the coreward lizards, for no one knew of the trouble befalling The Nexus or the efforts Star Force was beginning to make to ward against it. Nor did they know how crucial a role these captured lizards would play, for this buildup was but an appetizer for what their civilization was truly capable of once the supply convoys really started to flow, but that would take decades to escalate to as Thrawn got the surviving lizard systems reordered and kicked into maximum production.

  There was no war to fight here, but right now their enemy was time and lack of supplies, to which the lizards responded no less tenaciously than they would any adversary.

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