Star Force: Death Mark (Star Force Universe Book 67) Read online

  But it had happened, and there was no going back. The Zen’zat were not docile enough for Itaru to trust, so now they had to be destroyed, and were being annihilated with great efficiency across the galaxy.

  Time for another small dose of payback.

  Rajamal walked into the hangar to the front of the line of assault troops while the boarding teams did their work establishing a technological beachhead in multiple places along the hull breach. When one came back and transmitted within the safety of the hangar Rajamal had a basic map of what was available to them. Now it was his time to make this work.

  He sent out orders to various teams, reconfigured others, then engaged his cloak and ran across a small section of hangar to the edge of the atmospheric field, diving out it towards the black wall that was the Kaeper’s cloaking device. When he passed through it the two fields didn’t like each other, but they didn’t betray the collision with more than a little fizz that was too close to the J’gar hull for anyone to notice.

  Rajamal suddenly had view of the damaged section ahead along with faint tracking signals from the boarding spots. He drifted into the exposed rubble and grabbed hold of a melted girder, then redirected himself to where he wanted to go, knowing the others were following behind him invisible and silent.

  He eventually got to a position where a new airlock had been installed with a frame and a lot of goo surrounding it. His people were already inside guarding the aperture, but one was still outside and gave him a hand that glowed ever so faintly.

  Rajamal grabbed it, then was thrown through the airlock by the other Zen’zat’s strength into the gravity field of the ship. He caught his feet and remained standing as he suddenly picked up the faint tracking signals from the Zen’zat already onboard, giving him an outline on his helmet showing where they were. The signal would not show up on J’gar internal scans unless they knew what to look for and had a receiver within 18 meters. It was a weakness, but unless you were going in solo you needed to not be tripping over your own team.

  Rajamal pressed through the defenders, then waited just beyond them until several more Zen’zat piled up behind him. When enough had gotten here he moved out of the stub hallway that had led to a weapons blister that was now obliterated, or rather the Zen’zat access tube. The J’gar waterway access was below and still sealed off, for they weren’t going down there. Not yet anyway.

  Rajamal jogged out to the cross tunnel, his head only a foot away from hitting the ceiling. The J’gar always built their Zen’zat tubes cramped, and this ship was no exception, but there was no way for them to get in here physically, and with the psionic blockers in play they couldn’t telekinetically attack them either. At least not directly. The only ones who could were the Bo’ja…and there was a pair of them working on repairing something down the hallway to the right.

  2

  Rajamal ran past the two Bo’ja, ignoring them as they were soon to suffer pointblank weapon discharges to the back of their exposed necks from the other Zen’zat. He kept moving forward, knowing that time was essential here, and that there were key points within the ship they had to access and take control of before the J’gar realized what was going on.

  When the corridor branched so did his team, spreading out into groups with different assignments and Rajamal heading to the rearmost environmental control node along with four others, two of which were carrying heavy loads on their armor.

  No one was present in the node, nor should they be unless something was malfunctioning. The J’gar could remotely access it from inside the water to make any adjustments they wanted, and that wireless interlink was the first thing Rajamal cut after taking down the surveillance cameras built into the bulkheads.

  He and the others appeared as hazy ripples due to the jamming field that was interfering with the cameras, and as Rajamal began making multiple alterations to the equipment he was pulling out of the wall panels the others either fed him new components or were busy painting over the bulkheads with a cloying insulation that would block both audio and visual once the jamming went down.

  The jamming should have been noticed by now, but there was no telling how much disruption the crew was dealing with because of the damage. If they were lucky they’d get a few more minutes of anonymity. If not the remote warfare would begin.

  It was another 72 seconds before Rajamal’s comm lit up with signals from other Zen’zat indicating that they were being engaged by both the Bo’ja and the J’gar. He immediately switched off with another of the Zen’zat, leaving the three behind while he ran off under cloak towards the trouble.

  He got three turns into his run before he encountered fully armored Bo’ja heading his way. They couldn’t see him at first, but then a Jumat wave blew down the tunnel and knocked all four of them back onto each other. The Zen’zat emerged from his cloak firing as he closed distance, peppering them with forearm Dre’mo’don blasts and another Jumat wave that further disrupted their attempts to stand, as well as their armor’s shields.

  Rajamal was through one of their shields before he even got to them, then punched so hard he heard the Bo’ja’s armor crack on impact. The biped ricocheted into the inferior warrior behind him, leaving Rajamal with one standing on his right and another on his left. He sideways kicked to the right while punching with both hands into the one on the left, knocking them apart while delivering two blasts to the one who got his fists, then he pounded that one with several quick punches that coincided with weapon discharges from his wrists.

  Rajamal alternated from one to the other until he began to get through their armor, but not before he saw pings on his psionic dampeners. Particularly the one for Lachka, and he knew it wasn’t the Bo’ja attempting it because of the amount of power being used by his armor to counteract the attack was massive.

  But the attack did fail. The J’gar were unable to use their telekinesis to assist the Bo’ja through the walls…at least until his countermeasures were overloaded or ran out of power, and the J’gar were certainly capable of doing the former if they worked together, though they didn’t know what the specs on his system was or how much force they’d have to apply to get through it.

  Before Rajamal had all four killed, the walls began to peel apart. Not near him, but further down both directions where the J’gar could still use their Lachka. Piece flew off and curled into metallic paper wads, then those three balls began shooting back and forth across his position, one of which he managed to use to his advantage when he threw a Bo’ja into its path at the last moment. But when they moved past him they regained their control and came back towards him, forcing him to use his Jumat again to knock them down…but he knew the J’gar could do this game all day and he didn’t have time for that.

  He also didn’t have time for the peeling walls to form a cage to hold him in, which they were doing further away on both ends. Rajamal caught one of the balls, feeling it slip out of the J’gar’s control, then carried it with him as a shield. He had to increase the perimeter of his jamming to fully cover it, which took more power, but it gave him something other than his own armor to take the hits on as he ran towards one of the forming barriers.

  The Zen’zat dove into it, blasting it apart with his body and a Jumat wave, but not enough to get completely through. His legs caught and he had to crawl a bit, all the while seeing more components from the walls ahead peel off and begin to form either new barricades or projectiles.

  As he got through and batted away a small rectangular hatch cover from the air he lowered his Ikrid jammer for just a moment, getting a head count for how many J’gar were nearby and sizing them up. They were immediately in his head, but he had the advantage of Ikrid immunity to override control and memory raids and gained far more from the exchange even as they threw multiple disabling techniques at him. One of them temporarily tricked his eyesight into thinking he was blind, making him stumble a moment as his brain reset from the interference…then something heavy smashed into his helmet.

  Rajamal fell ba
ckwards, then did a reverse somersault back onto his feet, knowing the more attacks that came his way the less were going after the rest of his team. He punched a snake-like strand of wire that was trying to loop around his legs from the edge of his jamming radius, then opened himself up once more to Ikrid as he made an attack of his own against one of the J’gar.

  He was in his head within a split second, and despite the superior brain power he was facing Rajamal knew his opponent was a rookie. He slid through his defenses with some resistance, even as he felt the pressure of the other minds working against his. Rajamal took a knee and turtled up for a moment, concentrating his will against the J’gar’s…with his eventually winning out.

  The J’gar’s body answered to his mind for a moment, and in that moment he had it lash out with one of its Saroto’kanse’vam tentacles into a side wall, destroying a bank of control equipment the J’gar needed to interact with the ship. The effort was too much to hold, and Rajamal lost his grip as the J’gar shrugged him off, but the damage was done. There were other control points in the ship, but this one was now trash.

  “Section 5, now,” he ordered as the hallway in front of him became so thorny with peeling debris that he could barely see through to the other side.

  Back in the node, the three Zen’zat…as of yet undetected…altered the climate control of the compartments in section 5 and began lowering the temperature dramatically and quickly. The J’gar had battle armor on, so the cold wouldn’t hurt them, but it did have an effect on the water. Down and down the temperature dropped, until small bits of ice began to form around the walls, then huge spikes shot off them as the circulation systems shut down and all currents ended.

  The J’gar inside began firing at the ice, vaporizing and reheating it with their weaponsfire, but that was not going to be good enough unless they kept at it constantly. The ship’s systems were so effective at heat transfer to keep them alive and liquid during hull breaches and other damage, that the superiority of their equipment was now being turned against them. The Zen’zat were sucking the heat out and creating cages out of their own environment, and the more the J’gar fought it the less time they had to telekinetically pluck at the Zen’zat swarming the ship.

  Rajamal blasted his way through the barricades, sometimes with punches and kicks, while reserving his Jumat for the toughest sections. He didn’t have unlimited discharges of the psionic, and he could already feel some fatigue in his tissue, for he was having to use extremely large amounts to break through these blockages and get to the closest group of Zen’zat that were pinned in place and trying to shoot or bend their way through.

  When he got 4 others pried out he began getting alerts of flooding in other areas, but the Zen’zat armor would protect them from that. He just couldn’t let the J’gar physically get to them, and some of the tunnels were very close to the water levels.

  Rajamal escorted this group up to their objective, then punched aside another piece of wall that tried to intercept him as he stomped through a small stream of water coming from ahead. He backtracked it to the source, then saw several gushers coming from the right side wall. Holes had been poked into them with no Zen’zat or Bo’ja present, which meant the J’gar were deliberately flooding the tubes to make it harder for the Zen’zat to move around.

  And if the water was going to freeze, it might slow them down too if the tunnels couldn’t keep up with the thermal drain elsewhere.

  Smart move, but it wasn’t like the J’gar hadn’t tried this trick before.

  He ran forward through the gushing water, his Pefbar blind due to his jamming, and the J’gar’s as well, but all they needed to see was the blind spot to target it, and right on cue glowing tentacle tips punched through the side walls and tried to skewer him.

  They were Saroto’kanse’vam, and a single hit would rip through his shields at a minimum. If they caught him in the armor they would cut right through just like a Hjar’at’s spines would. They were constructed of the same material, except these were not flat. They were essentially claws on the end of a tentacle, while others were more like wrecking balls. Each J’gar could customize them as they wished, and some that were not Saroto’kanse’vam held other psionics, including electrical discharges that were more or less useless with all this water around…unless they made physical contact.

  The ones coming through the wall were the glowing blue claws, and given how easily they poked through the ship’s structure there was no doubt that Zen’zat armor and shields would suffer the same fate with two hits, if not on a single strike. But Rajamal had to go through this hallway, and they couldn’t turn the claws much with the walls pinning their tentacles into a straight line attack, so this was a simple dodging exercise.

  The water made it difficult, so Rajamal jumped up onto the ceiling while triggering his armor to stick on contact. He ran inverted, with his head barely above the water as he crunched down, stopping and starting again as the glowing spikes came in and out again, each followed by a gush of water that only added to the torrent already coming into the tunnel.

  Rajamal dodged 8 before he got hit…or would have if he didn’t throw a pointblank Jumat blast to deflect it away from his body. Two more such deflections and dozens of dodges got him through to the other side, then he turned a corner and was out of tentacle range from the room they had been striking from. He stepped over several dead Bo’ja before coming across a downed Zen’zat. Rajamal stopped next to Hi’nori, seeing that her chest armor had been crushed…not from a blow, but from all around. Her psionic dampener must have overloaded and allowed the J’gar to squeeze her to death.

  He put a hand on her head, interfacing his armor with hers to see what her condition actually was, and discovered she was still alive…barely. Her Kich’a’kat was broken, so why wasn’t she…

  “Crude grasp,” she said in a whisper. “They left me for…dead. Didn’t even try for the head.”

  Rajamal didn’t answer, but he understood. These J’gar must be very young and inexperienced. That, combined with the range of attack, left them clawing at the center of mass rather than going for the brain.

  His own Kich’a’kat interfaced with what was left of hers, and Rajamal took the painfully long time of repairing her body enough for her to stand on her own feet, though he had to pry several parts of her armor off her where they’d broke and pinched together. She could no longer survive vacuum or water, but they’d prepared for this.

  Rajamal boosted the range of his dampener to cover her, then he walked her away from his target until he came across another group of Zen’zat as he monitored the comm chatter. Stealth suits were still being used to move around, but they were transmitting freely when needed now that most of the Bo’ja had been located and destroyed. Only the bridge node was still occupied, and that sat directly in the center of a water level, which would be the best defensible location on the ship for the J’gar and their new servants.

  “Get her a replacement suit,” he ordered, taking the hand of another Zen’zat and putting it on her wrist. That simple gesture said more than words could, meaning the one being handed over was cargo and no longer combat capable.

  Rajamal took off again, returning by a roundabout route to the environmental station he’d started at, and finding very little moving tunnel pieces blocking his way this time. When he got back there he found out why, seeing that multiple chambers were now solid ice, or at least a slush that had driven the J’gar out of them. Including the engine room.

  He hadn’t sent any Zen’zat teams there, because he didn’t want the equipment damaged, but now it was time to take control of the air node there and deal with whatever Bo’ja had wisely stayed in place, though he doubted there would be any other than whatever they used for techs.

  Nevertheless he signaled for a team of six to join him, and all had to slog through a foot of water in the tunnels that were flowing in from other locations. It would take time for the air to flow out enough for them to become completely submerged, but t
hat also meant portions of the water levels now had air at the top, though there was so much water volume that small amount did nothing to hinder the J’gar.

  His teams had already taken control of the remaining comm arrays that hadn’t already been damaged. They’d intercepted their control lines, hacking in and denying the bridge or any other location access to them. The distance to the nearby Domjo was too far for Ikrid, so the other J’gar ship had no idea a boarding action had taken place here. Now it was time to get them moving off, and he’d deal with the crew later.

  When Rajamal got to the engine room node he opened the door into a dry area, immediately taking fire from several Bo’ja that had pathetically bad aim. Only two of the shots hit his armor’s shields, then he was in the door and sidestepping, drawing their attention as more Zen’zat came through and shot them down without much of a fight. Their armor was not up to Zen’zat standards, let alone the new modifications Rajamal’s team was wearing, but these Bo’ja didn’t even have that. It looked the same, but the melted body plates were only a quarter the thickness of the others they’d faced.

  The J’gar wouldn’t even, or couldn’t, provide full armor to their techs. But at least they still gave them weapons, for what little it had done. It wasn’t only the V’kit’no’sat empire that had fallen so far in recent years, for the J’gar Rajamal had once served would never have allowed such ill-equipped personnel to serve onboard a warship.

  Two Zen’zat broke off from combat duties and assumed their old positions in the engineering node, accessing the ship’s systems briefly before being locked out by the bridge. That only meant a delay, for they’d brought their own control crystals and began pulling apart the control boards and rebuilding them as needed to get past the lockdown.

  If the J’gar were close enough to use their telekinesis they could stop this, but to do so they’d have to swim through ice…or so Rajamal hoped. He’d assumed decent range psionics, but what he’d seen thus far didn’t even rise to that level. This was not a veteran crew for a Rit’ko’sor vessel, let alone the J’gar’s legendary fleet.