Blue Blades Read online

  So they not only coordinated the local units, acting like a mastermind to make them fight better, but they were also somehow linked to other Wardens across the galaxy…but not in a regular manner. The Maty had some information on this, but not enough, and Paul knew they hadn’t seen the full Hadarak playbook yet.

  But his instincts told him he needed to go Warden hunting, but he couldn’t just wait on a pipeline and pick them off coming in. He needed to know where they were and where they were moving to, and thanks to the scout ships he had an updating map that he checked in with periodically at secret drop boxes within Hadarak-owned systems that the scout ships would dump their data into, then others would make patrol runs from one drop box to another, copying and carrying the data around so people like Paul had a decent idea of what was moving where given the fact there was no communications network this deep into Hadarak territory.

  Paul wasn’t all the way to the Web Wall, but he was two thirds of the way to it, intent on getting the Wardens before they could get to their targets, and some truly massive ones were showing up recently. He didn’t know if they were held in reserve in the Core until now or were coming from other galaxies, but each one he picked off could not be regrown during this war. Star Force would be at the Core long before that, and once they blocked off their intergalactic reinforcements, only local growths would come into play.

  At that point there would be a fixed number of Wardens, and without them all the Hadarak had was the Lurkers…which were thinned out already…and their Mainline ships with minion transports. Those Star Force knew how to handle, and even a small outpost with planetary defense shields could stop them from getting onto a friendly planet or a recently cleansed one. It was the threat of Warden ramming that made it impossible to establish strong points and lock down planets against the Hadarak save for a massive amount of resources being devoted to the task.

  Others were out hunting Wardens too, but Paul was better at it because they didn’t have a full map to work with. He had bits and pieces coming in, and the ones tagged he could find easily enough, for they couldn’t go too far in any direction if Paul showed up at a system and didn’t find them. It was finding more nearby and guessing where they might be moving through the most that Paul was having to use his instincts for.

  And he was getting very good at it.

  But the galaxy was huge, and they could move thousands through it without Paul knowing up until they hit the Grand Border…and right now it was getting very little business, for Star Force had moved the fight into Hadarak territory and they enemy’s mobile fleets were now fighting on the defensive.

  They were losing, and bad, but they had previously conquered so much territory the losses of systems were insignificant. The losses of Lurkers and Wardens were not, so while others focused on taking territory away from them and breaching the Web Wall, Paul was going for the longer lasting victories, and he was about to get another 3 as the approach vector sensors began to ping a large contact in super accelerated reflected sunlight.

  Soon afterwards a Tier 4 Hadarak came out of its braking maneuver amidst a swarm of mainline ships before and after it, along with an Essence-enhanced Tar’vem’jic nailing it almost immediately and burning through the outer layers of Yeg’gor like a chainsaw, with the mainline ships running into the beam intentionally to try and protect the Warden as it began to slowly spin, dragging the constant beam away from the hole it was digging into it.

  Paul flew the Excalibur closer, plowing through the minion clouds being released from the Hadarak and seeing his shields dip with the ramming, but he kept the Tar’vem’jic in line with the target hole and dug it deeper and deeper as a second Tier 4 Hadarak arrived behind it, and almost rammed it as the first one had not yet fully cleared the jumpline.

  The trailblazer ignored it and stayed in position over the first, switching out Tar’vem’jic batteries as each had to periodically recharge. He had 4 of the largest ever built installed in the Excalibur specifically for this mission…along with enough Essence wells to provide him with additional firepower for months of heavy combat without having to be refilled by tanker, for he was far from any such support. He’d have to return to a secret waypoint base for supplies and Essence, which he had already done several times, and he hated leaving to do it. But each back he made came with several hundred Warden kills, and without the modifications made to the Excalibur that would have been down to 10 or 12.

  Paul was having to tank a lot of damage with his ship’s shields in order to stay with the Warden, but he remained outside grapple field range, as well as tentacle range, and the Warden was not fast enough to even try and maneuver away from the Borg vessel. All it could do was spin and order its escorts to attack, but Paul had killed so many in stages as they came out of the jump they didn’t have the numbers to force him to break off, and every minute he stayed with the Warden meters and meters of Yeg’gor were disintegrated.

  This Warden had thicker armor than most, and the Tar’vem’jic didn’t penetrate to the weaker inner tissue until a depth of 28 miles. That was odd for a Tier 4, and the first Paul had seen. He knew the Yeg’gor got thicker with age, like trees adding rings, but they also got larger and that required more Yeg’gor to keep the same thickness. This one had to have maintained its size and added more depth to its armor, making Paul consider the possibility that maybe this was a different breed, or maybe had a different mission prior to this purge, but that didn’t matter, for Paul eventually got through the outer layer and continued to burn down through the other miles of tissue much faster, eventually getting to the central brain using Tar’vem’jic alone as the second Hadarak tried to ram the Excalibur.

  It was a good move, and he had to break off to dance around it like a slow moving snowball rolling down a shallow hill, and as it blew past him he moved the Excalibur back into position and continued to pour a tiny needle of energy down into the beast and poke into its brain.

  He saw the visible twitch when it finally got there, but the beam kept going straight through, not expanding laterally, so it didn’t kill the Hadarak. This one was too big for that, and it continued to adjust its rotation to try and throw off the target lock Paul had as the view of it was so obscured by minion clouds that Paul could barely see what he was shooting at on visuals.

  Now that he had the conduit burrowed through the armor, he released an Essence attack on the surrounding cloud of minions, killing all of the small ones immediately as the heart attack weapon targeted their blood pumping and shut it down. The larger ones, along with the mainline ships, were hindered momentarily, but shook it off and kept fighting as the corpses of the others were plowed aside as the Excalibur moved out of the mess, giving Paul clear shots at the remaining Hadarak ships that continued to pursue him.

  It wasn’t hard to target each of them mentally, but Paul let his crew handle most of it with the smaller weapons covering the cube-shaped vessel burning through or exploding them with single shots for the most part. The mainline ships took more hits to go down, but even with the arrival of the third Hadarak, which was a smaller Tier 3, and its release of minions, the Excalibur was in good enough position to clear a conduit down to the first Warden and fire another Tar’vem’jic briefly to clear out the creep of the innards that was slowly sealing off the hole beneath the Yeg’gor.

  As soon as that beam shut down a projectile was shot out from the ship which Paul flew remotely down to the Hadarak, fighting against the grapple fields and some minions that tried to block the hole and ram it aside. Neither worked, and the specialized drone bomb flew down inside the bore hole heading towards the brain at the center.

  Paul kept the ship over the bore hole so he could maintain control. If his comm array moved to the side slightly the bulk of the Warden would eclipse it and the drone would continue on its own preprogramming, but the trailblazer wanted to keep the reigns on this one all the way down.

  He flew it from the drone’s point of view, traveling down the conduit as bulges of material
burst out from the side walls with cascades of liquid falling down like waterfalls under the gravity of the Hadarak itself. He was flying a half mile every few seconds, and was slowing down as he went, for if he rammed the far side it would destroy the drone before it could detonate. It wasn’t a ‘blow it up with anything’ bomb, but one that required a very specific chain reaction internally, and that meant the drone had to survive to target, otherwise it would be destroyed or prematurely detonate where it wouldn’t seriously hurt the Hadarak.

  Even with all of Star Force’s Essence weaponry, destroying one was almost impossible. They were just too big and had too much mass. The key was to get to the brain and kill it there, leaving the rest of the Hadarak intact.

  Apparently the other two Wardens realized they weren’t going to save this one, so they called off all the minions and Mainline ships still alive, along with those still arriving on the jumpline, and summoned them to the two Wardens as they accelerated as hard as they could towards the star, attempting to run there and hide before Paul could come after them.

  That was also a smart move, but it wasn’t going to save them in the long run, and as the drone finally got to the ocean of liquid and chunky gore at the bottom of the bore hole and rammed into it at slow enough speed to penetrate, Paul flew it down into the zero gravity at the center of the Hadarak while also was reconfiguring the ship for star dive.

  The drone eventually got to a point where the bore hole was too small, and it got jammed between two walls of swelling inside the brain, but it had reached its detonation. Paul triggered the overload to begin, then monitored the geyser of material shoot out the bore hole and into space after the transmission from the drone cut out.

  The rotation of the Warden became ballistic, meaning no more corrections to try and twist out of alignment with the Excalibur. The tentacles also stopped moving, and the grapple fields surrounding the beast disappeared. It was now brain dead, but it would take days for the rest of the body to catch up, and the minion production factories inside could still be active for weeks, so all of the danger wasn’t gone yet, but the Warden could no longer maneuver or attack, meaning mission accomplished.

  Paul left that dead Warden behind and headed towards the star, not catching the two fleeing Hadarak before they got there, so he dove into the star following the convection trail they left upon entering, and seeing that they had split up as they delved deeper into the glowing material.

  He couldn’t attack them here the same way, and they couldn’t use their tentacles at extreme depths without exposing the softer innards under those orifices in the Yeg’gor. Their grapple fields were also hindered by the mass of the stellar material, though they could still use them for some tasks.

  The only way Paul could kill them now was to basically dock with one of them and repeat the process at point blank range…but he had to find and get to them first, and if they went too deep he wouldn’t be able to follow…and with this star, he couldn’t scan all the way down either. The material was too dense, so if he didn’t get them quickly, and they went straight towards the interior, he was going to lose them.

  But not today. He was going to get at least one, and if the other survived he’d leave a cloaked monitor drone in the system to watch for when it came out, then that drone would run to the nearest drop box and report it leaving while Paul went chasing other leads. He knew better than to wait here and lay siege, for that was a waste of time even if he eventually did catch it coming out.

  There were too many Wardens out there for him to go after, so if he couldn’t get them by the end of today, or maybe tomorrow, then he’d leave. And within a star, one didn’t fly through it at any sort of ‘speed,’ especially when you were in a 327 mile wide warship or a nearly equal sized living asteroid. At least not when you got down to the deeper and denser layers in the star.

  Right now they were still in the thin stuff up top, and Paul had caught up enough to already catch some draft off the one that had gone left and was angling down rather than doing a straight deep dive.

  He’d catch up within an hour and a half, maybe two. Then it was as good as gone. It was the other one that he wasn’t sure about, but he was still tracking it, even as the sensor image grew gradually fainter over time.

  And this was one of the rare few times he kicked himself for going with an unaerodynamic box-shape for a warship, for the drag on the hull was far worse for the Excalibur than it was for the Hadarak, and he didn’t have the shield power to alter its shape by creating null zones around it. There was too much buoyancy factor to fight if he did that, which amplified the deeper he went.

  But Paul’s ship was still faster, and now that he was on the scent, he knew this one wasn’t going to get away, and it probably did as well, so he took the opportunity to reach out to it telepathically using the equipment on his ship designed by the Furyans and Uriti Wranglers after they had had their partial language breakthrough with the enhancements in the Furyan minds.

  If you wish to live, we can negotiate terms… he said, not in words, but in a method that the Megaloids should be able to understand, no matter what their race.

  What terms? it replied, shocking Paul so much his passive, eyes closed face in his astromech cocoon visibly twitched…

  3

  If you stop fighting us, I let you go, Paul said, not sure where this was going.

  Go where?

  That was a good question. If the other Hadarak wouldn’t accept a traitor, he didn’t actually have anywhere to go.

  You can stay here and we will ignore you. We are fighting because your kind are trying to destroy us. Stop doing that, and we are no longer enemies.

  I do not want to die, but what you ask is impossible. We must cleanse this galaxy so life can restart anew. It is our purpose.

  I know of others like you with a similar purpose. They found out that they had a choice and could find a new purpose. Now they are our allies. Why must the Hadarak be our enemies?

  The current says so, and we obey the current. To defy it is worse than death.

  Why are you talking to me when the others wouldn’t?

  You speak of the young ones. They do not know how to interpret your thoughts. I learned long ago during my first cleanse. This is the 18th.

  You came from another galaxy?

  We travel amongst the great swirls of stars to those that need assistance. Many die, but we always accomplish our mission. I have been fortunate to survive and learn. You are more powerful than I, this I know. Now I die, but the others will live and finish the cleanse. This is the way.

  That made Paul mad, and he sent memories of the Uriti and their history in a mega-dump of information that would have overloaded a Human mind, but the Hadarak would not have an issue with it. He just hoped it could understand it, for Paul didn’t have the time to translate it into the Uriti speak he had been using.

  This is the way, he countered.

  They are corrupted.

  They were, but we have uncorrupted them.

  They must be destroyed.

  They still see you as brothers, and do not want to fight you. Does that not mean they are uncorrupted?

  Do they still hear the current?

  I have not asked them, Paul said carefully. What is the current?

  It is what makes the will of the Hadarak known. In the center of the swirl we can hear it ever-present. Out here it is brought to us as memory by those who carry it. I cannot betray the current.

  Where does the current lead you now?

  To destroy all life in the outer region of this swirl of stars.

  And then?

  Then the current will tell me what to do next.

  Has it ever told you to do something other than destroy?

  It tells us when to spawn. It tells us where to travel. It tells us how and what to make. We live to serve the current.

  How will your death today serve it?

  It will not unless I can damage you.

  Do you hear the current now?
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  Within my mind only. I must fight.

  Why then are you talking to me?

  Because you spoke to me.

  Why are you not larger like the others?

  The current does not tell me to grow larger. It tells me to grow stronger.

  How can I hear the current?

  The suddenness of the response caught Paul off guard, for it began within a fraction of a second and in a form he had trouble understanding, but as it played out over a few minutes he cataloged it and analyzed within the astromech part of his mind that his Core simultaneously inhabited.

  He felt the call, the need, the purpose of the Hadarak…and it overwhelmed him until Azoro stepped in and clarified his mind for him, adding the context and experience he was missing.

  Is this what you have been looking for? Azoro asked Paul.

  In the ballpark, Paul said, his eyes tearing up.

  It is not your path, but it is a clear path and it resonates with you because you have nothing else that is a closer match.

  How can I ask him to defy this? Paul said, knowing the hopelessness of it…then Azoro gave him an idea.

  Thank you for sharing the current with me, he said after a long pause. The Uriti have found a superior method of cleansing this galaxy, and we are in their employ, so there is no need for us to be enemies.

  They are cleansing?

  They have partnered with us. They give us their power, and we do the cleansing for them. None of them die. We protect them. Our partnership is cleansing the outer edge of the galaxy and removing those that do not belong. Why are you trying to deny us our current mandate?

  The current does not speak of you as part of the unity. It labels you as those to be destroyed. Show me your current memory.

  I do not have memory. I can feel it ever-present here.

  I cannot. Feed it to me so I can confirm your unity.

  Paul knew he was stretching here, for he didn’t even understand his own purpose in this life as well as he needed to, but he didn’t need to share his own. He had a much older one already worked out.