Lurker Read online

  After firing, the Ysalamir immediately retreated as the minions were nearly upon it, traveling up the firing corridor and immediately around it, sneaking some through that quickly got destroyed by the cluster of escort ships as the massive weapon reversed course…but the Hadarak didn’t. Stung as it was, it didn’t head for the star or go after the Ysalamir. Instead it continued around the star, ostensibly towards an outgoing jumpline for one of the planets.

  “Just a bee sting, huh?” Riona noted from the command nexus onboard her flagship. “Alright. We’ll make it bleed then.”

  Riona pulled all her ships away from the incoming jumpline, ignoring the second Hadarak that would be arriving in a few hours, and put all her drones into fighting the minion swarm without overdoing it, which meant a fighting retreat ahead of the Hadarak’s path. With so many minions in play, it was impossible to fully focus on them with the Hadarak so near, for every ship disabled would be pulled into and crushed by the monster.

  And right now the minions were trying to get at the Tar’vem’jic most of all, though they weren’t exclusively going after it. They were operating on an intricate battle strategy with many facets, but Riona could see it all through the battlemap without taxing her ability to micromanage. Her Sav-enhanced mind, coupled with the computer systems, was enough to guide her fleet and play delaying games while minions were destroyed and her ships only lost shield energy…for the most part.

  The V’kit’no’sat were a bit less agile, slugging it out with their larger ships and making the minions run by them to get at the Tar’vem’jic, which were firing through very narrow gaps between the blocking ships. This was forcing the minions to try and flank them, going wide and around the blockers, which was causing this whole battle to mushroom out and diminish the swarm’s density.

  Which was part of the plan, and over the following hours the minion swarm was diminished and finally the Hadarak made its slow jump out towards the largest of the planets and third out from the star. Riona had guessed that was where it was going, for the closest planet was on the other side of the star, but this meant they had another few hours to fight during the microjump and further thin the minions.

  Several V’kit’no’sat ships got caught and would have been destroyed if Riona hadn’t sacrificed a lot of drones to sweep in and push them away from the Hadarak, but that was worth it in terms of lives, as well as the fact that the V’kit’no’sat ships did more damage to the minions than hers did. They’d been designed specifically to fight the Hadarak, and their higher mass and volume wasn’t an accident.

  Star Force’s fleet design wasn’t an accident either, but it wasn’t specifically geared to fighting Hadarak…at least not in a stand and die fashion…and prior to the invention of the Ysalamir the V’kit’no’sat fleet was the better way to kill Hadarak, but put the two fleets together and they overlapped each other’s weaknesses. Riona could keep the V’kit’no’sat ships alive longer, and the V’kit’no’sat could provide the heavy damage en mass while Riona’s drones went after the thinner minion formations trying to reposition around the flanks.

  But as they were just starting to make the microjump out, the second Hadarak arrived and released its minions…which were faster and going to catch up before the tier 3 made it to the planet if that’s where they headed. At first Riona thought the tier 2 was going after another planet, for it started to move around a different stellar orbital, then it reversed course and followed the larger Hadarak with better than half its minions racing ahead while the others stayed as escorts for itself.

  The second gen Archon could see the writing on the wall as soon as the minion wave launched from the tier 2, doing the math and knowing that the tier 3 would get reinforcements prior to arrival and have plenty left to cover it as it dove to the planet’s surface…and that’s exactly what happened. The Star Force and V’kit’no’sat fleets had to pull back further, then spread out for braking maneuvers that let them come into the planet at the same time rather than singly. They got to reposition for a few minutes ahead of the minions and form a gauntlet, into which the minion warships flowed like a firehose.

  They were gunned down so easily Riona almost felt sorry for them, but enough started to get through and pool that the gauntlet had to start breaking up…then the tier 3 decelerated through the mass with the minions moving in perfect timing to avoid getting hit as the small planet-sized monster drifted down through orbit towards the planet, not fully slowly, with its damaged section rotating around to face the green/brown surface below.

  The Tar’vem’jic put shot after shot into it, maneuvering between it and the planet to make their shots, then they had to break away as they began to come into contact with the atmosphere. The tier 3 did not, smashing into the gas layer like a cannonball as it gradually slowed, pushing waves out that would eventually reach around the entire planet, then it finally finished its rotation and smacked down on the surface wound-first.

  But to a Hadarak that meant nothing, for their inner tissue was hard as rock anyway…but what it did do was put the Ysalamir-induced wound out of firing range of the Tar’vem’jic, meaning the tier 3 was essentially back to full health as far as the combat was concerned.

  “Smart bastard,” she said as the minion battle continued, with her cringing as the sensors informed her in exquisite detail what the not so soft landing of a tier 3 was doing to the planet. Those beneath the Hadarak were killed instantly, but the deforming of the planet’s crust around the impact site was so intense that piece of it were actually flipping upward and fragmenting, most of which rained down as miles-wide asteroids while a few others obtained enough velocity to make it up into orbit…though they wouldn’t stay there for long. Beyond that, the expanding circle of earthquakes traveling across the planet were so extreme they were toppling entire cities on impact as if the buildings were nothing more than toothpicks.

  Riona knew there was nothing to do here except destroy minions and buy time, for every hour they bought was more dropships going down and picking people up. More lives saved and evacuated, with those fleet now focused on the backside of the planet away from the Hadarak, but even there they were not going to be completely safe from the earthquakes.

  And there was another Hadarak coming, just a few hours away. Whether it would stay in orbit and fight, or go down to the planet as well was unknown, but this situation wasn’t going to get any better. Until they got Ysalamir that could kill or seriously wound the larger Hadarak with a single shot, this carnage would continue, and Riona would be here salvaging what could be saved while other less experienced Archons might have cracked under the pressure.

  But Riona wouldn’t, and Paul knew that. They’d both been through this grinder in the lizard war, and it had inoculated them from the emotional trauma at seeing so many people die. At seeing the horrific effects of a Hadarak landing on a fully inhabited planet. She was steeled now, but not apathetic. When the universe when crazy you had to stop trying to take it all in and focus on the bits of it you could make a difference in, though the stench of failure hung over every planet a Hadarak got to, and Riona didn’t like it one bit.

  Yet the Setwori that would be picked up over the coming days would be small victories, and Riona intended to get as many of them out of here as she could…and provide a stabilizing rod to the rest of her fleet and those individuals who might be close to cracking and losing their efficiency. If she held firm, they could block everything out and focus on her targeting assignments.

  And Riona could feel it too, throughout her ship. Those people with telepathy that reflexively transmitted some of their feelings even when she wasn’t actively searching for them. The casual murder of so many people was hitting them like a stun blast and they were trying to stay focused on their jobs, but the feeling of not being able to do anything to stop this left them wanting to turn into zombies as they struggled for some way to mentally come to grips with this.

  And while they did that, people would die that could still be saved, so
Riona kept everyone on their toes and sent little messages to those that started to flag. It took some of her concentration off the minions, but she could multi-task and a good number of the crewers in the fleet were experienced enough to keep fighting on instinct that she could defer a lot to them as needed. And right now, she needed to get her own people inoculated against the carnage…but that wasn’t going to happen in a single day for most of them.

  But give them a ray of hope, even in the slightest measure, they would wake back up again. That’s what she was doing, by giving them targeting assignments and redeployment orders. They didn’t know what she was planning, and that was a blessing, for a lot of them assumed she had a plan to stop this when she didn’t. But she did have a plan to evacuate as many people as possible, and right now that’s what mattered. Those that were being lost did not, in a sense, as far as her focus went.

  And as she watched the fighting, none of the V’kit’no’sat so much as blinked. That angered her, for it was a sign that they were superior, at least in this regard, so she gently reminded her crew as needed, that if the V’kit’no’sat weren’t crumbling under the pressure, then her crews had better damn well not.

  And with that little bit of competition thrown in, her crew suddenly broke their zombie states. Helplessness was the foe Star Force could not beat, but give them any angle, any advantage, any way to make a difference and they had a purpose. And so long as her crew had a purpose, they could focus on their jobs. Give them the impression they just had to stand by and helplessly watch people die and they wouldn’t know what to do.

  And right now their purpose was to delay both Hadarak, for every minute that passed the Ysalamir was recharging, and in two more days they’d get to poke another hole in one of them. And it was going to take far more than two days for them to kill everyone in this system, so Riona was going to damage these bastards to the point they looked like a whiffle ball if they didn’t pull back to the star.

  And at the end of the day, if you couldn’t save a planet, you could at least avenge it…and with a Ysalamir and a horde of fanatical V’kit’no’sat fighting with you, there was a lot of avenging that could take place if you played your cards right and didn’t crack. And Riona’s fleet wasn’t going to crack.

  But she could understand how many others throughout the galaxy would…if they even bothered to show up and fight in the first place.

  73 days later…

  A mentally exhausted Riona watched from the command nexus as the tier 3 Hadarak corpse sailed into the star at the end of its microjump without braking. It had made the mistake of attacking the third planet first, and thus giving Star Force and the V’kit’no’sat more time to damage it once it finally had given up its half-buried bunker on the planet. The other Hadarak was now attacking the 5th planet, but this one was finally dead, having taken dozens of Ysalamir shots and a torrent of conventional weapons damage and just barely miscalculating how long it could survive. A final coring shot by linked Tar’vem’jic had made it to the Hadarak’s brain, and multiple explosives inserted through that hole had finally ended it.

  Most of the Hadarak’s mass was still intact, for they hadn’t shot random spots, but focused on 4 set in pyramid spacing so that the Hadarak couldn’t turn away from any potential hit without exposing another area. That made it easier to maneuver the Ysalamir into position, but Riona had cut it too tight a few days ago and had lost the Ysalamir…at least its fireability…in a collision. The Hadarak had managed a grazing ram as it was firing, with the fleet not being able to maneuver it out of the way in time. Many V’kit’no’sat ships had been in the path and had been hit when they were packed too tight amongst each other to avoid, and even with their dampener fields up they couldn’t completely stop that much mass.

  A partial evasive maneuver had been made, enough to save the Ysalamir, but the damage wasn’t something that could be fixed here. It would have to go back to a major shipyard, but that wasn’t her problem. Defending this system was, and she no longer had her ‘boomstick’ to fight the other Hadarak with.

  But the tier 3 was dead, and that was the first tier 3 Star Force had ever killed…though it was actually a shared kill with the V’kit’no’sat. And as it rammed into the outer layers of the star and plowed through them making a flower petal dispersion wave before the final cannonball splash marked the grave of the Hadarak, she and the V’kit’no’sat had made damn sure it was actually dead and couldn’t revive itself later.

  Rather than waste the ships and try to stop it from hitting the star, she’d sent everything else, including her command ship, back to fight the tier 2 that had only a pair of Ysalamir shots in it. They weren’t going to waste anything other than the Tar’vem’jic on it, for it was the minions that were doing the most damage to the planets. They’d thinned them considerably, but both Hadarak had planted subsurface factories that were pumping out new ones and spreading seeds everywhere above ground and below like a slow moving infection through the ravaged landscapes.

  The system was lost, for 82% of her drones were now gone, and without her ability to protect the Brat’mar ships they’d begun losing them as well, especially when they had to defend the Tar’vem’jic from several nasty counterattacks.

  Combined they still had a sizeable defense force, but not enough to finish off the tier 2. The best they could hope for was to delay further as the transports continued to run nonstop picking up people from all the planets wherever they could, but there was still 1 major world that had not been touched yet by either the evacuation transports or the Hadarak.

  Riona wasn’t going to be leaving anytime soon, and her Ysalamir had already left the system with as small of a defense fleet as she dared to get it to a rendezvous point where a larger fleet would pick it up and get it to a proper shipyard. But so long as this system was still under assault, her place was here and few in either fleet were getting enough sleep as they worked long, hard days trying to scrape together whatever gains they could manage.

  When new contacts coming into the system turned out to be minions, she let out a long, slow, deep breath, feeling her will wanting to break, but having it bottom out on a floor of steel that would not bend an inch. She would keep going until she was dead, but Riona couldn’t assume that for her crew or the V’kit’no’sat, so she activated All/Comm in order to address everyone in both fleets simultaneously…assuming the V’kit’no’sat wanted to listen.

  “We’ve got incoming minions from the star,” she said, breaking the bad news for those not plugged into a sensor feed, and in English, not bothering to translate for the V’kit’no’sat who could do it on their own. “All compromised ships are to disengage to support roles. I don’t want any unnecessary losses because people are tired or feeling like making a final stand. This is a war of millennia, so we have to play the long game even when we don’t feel like it. Those ships still capable of fighting are going to further delay the fall of this system. Every minute we do another evacuee survives, and while that may get lost in everything going on, it means damn well everything to that person, and we’re going to get as many people out as we can…then we’re going to leave. Focus on that mission, not the people already lost. And remember, while the Hadarak are growing more minions, we’re building more drones and Ysalamiri. If we can hold it together, in the long game we’re going to win. So let’s minimize these early losses and play for time. Time is our advantage now. Time builds more Ysalamiri. Time builds better Ysalamiri. And Time will win this war, despite the ass kicking we’re getting here.”

  “Keep each other alive, rescue as many natives as we can, and then we pull out when we can do no more good here. If anyone thinks this war is unwinnable, ask the Hadarak corpse buried in the star. That’s just us getting warmed up. Give our combined scientists a millennia to tinker with the Ysalamiri…well, I’ll let you think on that yourselves. Grab some sleep when you can, we’re going to be here a while longer. Don’t let yourself get burnt out, but don’t let someone die because you over
slept. You know the drill. Remember your training and we will get through this, no matter how many more minions come in on that jumpline,” Riona finished, sending orders to part of her fleet to peel off and start heading towards the star to meet the minions head on and draw them away from the planets as the evacuation fleet continued its work.

  3

  July 19, 128528

  System 11932003 (Star Force-occupied Hadarak Zone)

  7th planet

  Bhanno was a Maverick, meaning he was the equivalent of an Archon from a race other than Human. In the beginning he had resented that title, thinking it was an insult to not also be called an Archon…but that was before he understood what ‘Maverick’ truly meant.

  He was from a Knight race, the Voro’nam, and had been born into Star Force rather than transferred from the V’kit’no’sat. The Pachycephalosaurus had begun his life with a handful of psionics and gained more just by completing various forms of training unlike the majority of Star Force races that were banned from possessing psionics. The Knight races were the elite of the elite, but the Archons were still beyond them, and it had taken him a long time to figure out why the smaller race was so dominant.

  It wasn’t a special set of psionics, though after becoming a Maverick he had learned about the existence of Essence and how some of the Archons and a handful of other individuals possessed it, but most Archons did not. What truly set them apart was their culture, and it was the most powerful weapon that Star Force had. The way they thought, fought, troubleshooted, worked together and simultaneously operated as individuals was the key to the Archon identity…and that culture had been crafted around Human biology.

  Some aspects translated to other races, but then again some didn’t. Bhanno was a biped, like the Humans, but he didn’t have a vertical back and his arms were not so dexterous. He also had a tail where they did not, as well as a specialized psionic called Jar’gu’ta that emitted from the obsidian-like bump on his head. It created a mooring beam that could be used to push or pull objects of far greater mass than Lachka could ever hope to, and it could be used as a ramming weapon to enhance the stone-like bump’s collision capacity.