Star Force: Perquisition Read online

  “Yes, but to do it properly and not some butcher job, I’d need to rewrite the Protovic genetic code to remove their section of the playbook entirely. A stopgap would be to rewrite a smaller portion to block the combination. Both would require skills that I am not confident in yet. The V’kit’no’sat could do it on their lunch break, but I haven’t had the experience needed and there’s no one with greater experience to ask for help. I’m confident I can do it eventually, but right now I’m wise enough to know not to try, else I’d risk messing them up, which I won’t do.”

  “Let us know when you think you can. Make removal of their playbook a priority.”

  “As an option or a goal? If the changes are beneficial we won’t want to strip them out…and putting them back in is far harder to do.”

  “As our primary option. We’re going to find out what’s going on, and when we do get all 8 pieces we’re going to put them together and see what happens, either in a lab or with volunteers. If it goes badly, I want the ability to inoculate our population in short order.”

  “I understand,” Vortison said gravely. “Do you know where to look for the others?”

  “Not a clue. We’re going to have to go on a scavenger hunt.”

  “I have no idea how you would even begin to do that on a galactic scale.”

  “These three variants weren’t that far apart,” Clark pointed out.

  “As far as genetic diversity and insuring that all puzzle pieces survive,” Vortison added, “I would assume there would be multiple civilizations of the same variant, else this entire project, whatever it is, could fail if one was wiped out. You might just find redundants nearby.”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

  “What is?”

  “We’ve both got our challenges then,” Clark cemented. “Keep us notified of your progress and we’ll see what we can do about getting you some more variant samples.”

  2

  July 19, 2969

  Nexus Grid Point 146

  Parking Orbit

  Trey-555 sat in the command chair onboard his Ma’kri-class warship as he looked at the visual and tactical displays of the ship traffic around them. Most of the thousands of ships were parked as they were, but there was a steady flow of incoming and outgoing traffic on the single jumpline used to get to the neighboring star system from the grid point, for its gravity was too weak to make an interstellar jump from.

  That said, it was the biggest space station Trey had ever seen by far. Looking like a pair of sunglasses with two huge discs connected by a thick stalk in the middle, the overall length of the construct was 4 times the width of Earth, but it was very flat and didn’t have half its mass. It was enough to make slow jumps off of if you knew where to look for it, with most non-Nexus traffic wandering about the galaxy never stumbling upon its location.

  Which was odd, given the traffic involved. This was very much a public place, though one for only those in the know. There was nothing here for anyone who didn’t belong, no planets, moons, or even asteroids…just a massive construct and a flotilla of ships and other craft nearby it. Some of those craft were stations supplying fuel and other services to customers, some were defense stations, but most of the dots on the holographic map were ships waiting for their turn to ride the ferry to the other end of the line and deep into Nexus territory.

  And to think this was only a ‘small’ grid point. Others had more than 1 station, for each link operated like stargates, save these were always activated. They made for one massive highway running in a straight line, with bigger hubs having multiple ones coming in and out requiring multiple constructs to generate the insanely large but stable magnetic fields that the specially designed Nexus jumpships could use to accelerate and decelerate far faster than gravity would ever allow. This was the first time Trey had ever been to this location, and only the 4th time Star Force had sent a ship. Typically involvement with The Nexus was facilitated by the H’kar, but Trey’s mission was going to take him far beyond their borders.

  Information digging within The Nexus was dicey, but Star Force had made several inroads previously thanks to Director Davis’s efforts that had allowed them to do a racial search throughout their massive territory. The source admitted that The Nexus’s records were incomplete and that they had not fully cataloged every star system within their domain, but it had also noted that the database available to Star Force was not the full one that The Nexus used for internal matters. It was enough, however, to give Trey a location in which to seek out more wayward Protovic.

  He wasn’t the only one on this chase, with Archons pursuing leads across the ADZ and beyond, rifling through historical records and stories trying to hunt down any mention of the Protovic and their variants. As it turned out there were many breadcrumbs to follow, with Trey being informed of 3 locations suspected of having Protovic. His was the furthest, being located in the Perseus galactic arm and far beyond where Star Force had eeked its own quiet Tether out to. It was now beyond the Orion arm in which the ADZ and lizards, Voku, and Preema domains existed, having passed through the less dense star clusters separating the galactic swirls and branched out quietly into systems within The Nexus dominion without making any waves.

  Those Tether systems were not all a secret, for some had connections with the local star systems, but most were a private line of colonization that Star Force was not making public back in the ADZ, nor were most of the maps updated with their locations. If the V’kit’no’sat returned and blew apart the ADZ, then Star Force needed somewhere to fall back to and announcing the locations of your secret bases wasn’t a good idea, making the few maps that the higher level Archons and Monarchs had at their disposal closely guarded secrets.

  Trey had access to one such monster map back in the ADZ, but there wasn’t one onboard this Ma’kri and he hadn’t felt the need to bring a personal copy with him. Still, he knew that where they were going on this mission was far beyond the current tip of the Tether on the order of 8,000 light years. The galaxy on the whole was approximately 100,000 light years in diameter, meaning this little field trip was taking Trey and his Ma’kri 1/6th of the distance from galactic core to outer rim, which was only possible thanks to The Nexus allowing them to use their grid point transit system…for a fee.

  And it was no small price, but through the H’kar Star Force had acquired access to The Nexus’s currency in lieu of bartering precious resources and getting scammed in the process. The Nexus wasn’t totally insular, allowing commerce with outsiders on a regular basis, but they often price gouged them as a way of favoring member states rather than giving them a break. Everyone had to pay for their ride on the interstellar ferry, just some paid more than others.

  Star Force had been given access to the grid point system a while back but rarely had cause to use it. It connected far flung regions of The Nexus and unless you had business assets there it was far too costly to use just for sightseeing. This mission had been given enough of a priority for Davis to fund it, with Trey being given enough currency to move about The Nexus at will rather than trying to huff it on gravity drives alone, which would have taken years to make the trip rather than a couple months.

  Though that estimate might be stretched further if the waiting lines were this long. The Nexus had a lot of Tilars, their name for the magnetic driven jumpships, each of which was a spec compared to the construct but of whom some were so large they could have carried a Star Force command ship. The one that Trey’s Ma’kri was assigned was considerably smaller, and cheaper, with many of this model coming and going, barely sticking around long enough to refuel before heading back out again. They’d enter, braking against one giant disc, then launch off the other to avoid collisions, and as Trey watched there were routinely tilars easing into the center of the giant slingshot before disappearing with no fanfare.

  He’d been told that their turn was next, but he’d been sitting on the bridge for the past 2 hours and was getting ready to say screw it and head back t
o training when they finally got their go ahead. He had helm follow the navigational prompts out of their parking orbit to avoid hitting the other waiting ships then watched as they approached the massive tilar. They weren’t all the same make, nor design, with this one being painted bright blue and shaped like a crustacean with huge pincers that wrapped around the region where the Ma’kri and other ships would be berthed.

  Other tilars were fully enclosed, some looking like sails, and enough oddity of design to suggest that there was more than one race responsible for their construction. When the Ma’kri docked inside the assigned tilar it didn’t interconnect with the ship itself, rather settling into position within the IDF field and being gently nudged into a fixed state by several soft tractor beams. They couldn’t stop it from moving if they engaged their engines, which the Ma’kri had very little of aside from gravity drives that wouldn’t work in the IDF anyway, but it would stop them from drifting into each other or out of the docking perimeter through the gaps between the pinchers.

  The loading took a remarkably short time, with Trey thinking that while they made all their customers wait in the parking orbits they weren’t going to delay the tilars one minute if they could avoid it, so before long the Archon was watching the view through the gaps in the tilar’s arms as they and the other 14 ships were carried out over the massive disc and into the directional magnetic field. As soon as they hit the center of it the construct blinked out, with blackness replacing the dull white hull plates.

  “Easy peasy,” Trey commented, seeing nothing outside the ship now that it had accelerated up to such a speed that the tilar’s shields were blocking any radiation from hitting its precious cargo and melting through the hull plates.

  “I guess the expense is the hardest part,” the Ma’kri Captain commented.

  The Archon smiled. “Mind the store, buddy. I’m heading back to my workouts. Let me know if the neighbors get fussy.”

  “Before or after I shoot them?” he said deadpan.

  “Your call.”

  29 days later…

  When the Ma’kri arrived at their final destination point on the network they were in the rimward half of The Nexus and still had a few weeks of travel left to go, via the ‘slow’ gravity drives and bouncing from system to system. Using maps obtained from The Nexus early, Trey ordered them to get underway immediately after easing through the congestion around the grid point, though it wasn’t nearly as robust as two of their previous stops. This location only had 1 construct, but it was more congested with traffic than their starting point had been, underscoring how remote The Nexus territory was within the edge of the Orion arm that it creeped into…meaning Star Force and the ADZ were the sticks beyond the sticks as far as they were concerned.

  But once they made a slow jump to a nearby star system it was back to solitary traveling. There was a bit of traffic around the system’s star, but there was no inhabitation within the system. Bouncing across new spacelanes and eating up fuel with every stop and acceleration, the Ma’kri made its way out into territory that was considered to be unimportant to The Nexus but technically within their domain. Some records of it were kept, but very little interaction was facilitated other than by a few ‘connected’ races. Most were simply denizens on The Nexus’s lawn and probably didn’t even know the huge conglomerate even existed.

  The system they were headed for had no name, just an identification number. It had one populated planet, but nothing of interest for The Nexus or anyone else to bother with. The natives matched the description of the Protovic, and unlike the other two hits Star Force had gotten, these were not purple skinned variants. These were said to be orange skinned, set against the standard green streaks and black exoskeletal patches. Fortunately they weren’t working off of rumor alone, with a few images having been filed that seemed to confirm that they were Protovic.

  The thing of it was, the pictures indicated that these Protovic were technologically primitive, making Trey wonder what their starting conditions were like. Did all the variants have access to the same tech and knowledge, then expanded on/lost it over the course of time? There were so many questions lingering that he agreed that this mission was worth the expenditure just to get a little more data to work with, for right now they didn’t have much to go on.

  The Shanplenix had no records of their history prior to their homeworld, and the same was true for the original Protovic. The Veliquesh records, which Star Force obtained during the deconstruction of their worlds after their removal, did have mentions to grandiose origins in the form of myths and legends, but nothing concrete. It was said that they had been the devolved form of their predecessors, split up into 7 variants to avoid a horrific fate, only to one day in the future recombine and reclaim their dominance over the galaxy.

  Originally that seemed farfetched, and the ‘galaxy’ reference was probably hyperbole, yet here Trey was looking for Protovic in another galactic arm, so he granted there might be a bit more to the legends than they originally thought. That said, the Veliquesh had been crazy, so their records had to be viewed with a skeptical eye.

  All records were, in truth, for people had a tendency to lie. Star Force records were the anomaly in that they were accurate, as far as the recorder was concerned, though they might still have misunderstood or mischaracterized something unintentionally. That was why it was always better to view the subject matter first hand, and Trey didn’t know for sure what he was going to find when they arrived, if anything. If this had been a wild goose chase he was going to be ticked, then again these Protovic could also have been wiped out since the records had been made.

  There was no way of knowing until they arrived, and when they did they found an empty system, as far as starship traffic was concerned. They transited to the planet in question easily enough, then sat in orbit taking scans of the entirety of the surface on multiple laps gathering data on what was a very primitive civilization.

  Like mud huts primitive. There were no EM signatures whatsoever, meaning these guys hadn’t even developed radio or TV, scary as that thought was. Trey’s life would have been considerably different if he’d never been exposed to The Simpsons, and he felt for these poor bastards in ways that he couldn’t even comprehend.

  Scanning a planet wasn’t a simple point and click procedure, so when they didn’t pick up any EM in the initial laps Trey ordered a more detailed scan, region by region, trying to pick up any signs of real technology, even if it just be a metal roof. As the bridge crew worked through those orders Trey familiarized himself with the population distribution patterns. There were settlements on several continents, with yellow seas separating them. They were toxic, as far as Humans were concerned, but the clouds in the atmosphere were water-based and raining pure down on several sites, making for what looked like a wet planet aside from a few ‘burnt’ patches that were filled with sand dunes.

  Trey’s face blanked as he took a second look at those deserts…realizing they weren’t natural. The pattern was recognizable to someone who had seen the results of orbital bombardment on numerous occasions throughout the lizard war, and whatever had hit the planet here had been ordinance on a far greater magnitude than what Star Force used. So it wasn’t with too much surprise when the Ma’kri crew told him that there were subsurface traces of technology beneath those deserts.

  Without any more evidence he could already guess what had happened. Someone had blasted the hell out of these Protovic and only a few managed to survive, with their civilization regrowing but in a very primitive fashion. When you lost your engineers, doctors, scientists, and fabricators all your ‘common’ tech suddenly became out of reach to the average person. Within a generation such things were lost from the common cultural awareness, and when the originals died off the eradication of the previous civilization was complete, leaving these roots to grow in whatever fashion they could, in this case being a collection of small villages spread across most of the planet but without even an attempt at a large city.


  “Not what you were expecting?” the Captain asked.

  “Another puzzle piece,” Trey commented. “And those blast zones add another dimension to this mystery.”

  “You think this was original damage or something later on from the locals?”

  “Good question. Whoever attacked here had one big boomstick at their disposal. Assemble a ground team and keep constant scans going. I don’t know how long we’ll stick around, but I want to give the analysts back home as much data to work with as we can.”

  “I assume you’re going down as well?”

  Trey gave him a dumb look, then pointed his thumb at his chest. “Archon…duh.”

  “With the collection team,” he amended.

  “I may end up roaming, but we’re starting out together.”

  “How big of a team?”

  “Three dropships, with everyone that’s not ship’s crew. I don’t think anyone wants to sit up here and twiddle their thumbs. They came here to work, so let’s get to it.”

  “As you wish,” the Captain said, turning around and typing into a terminal attached to his own command chair.

  Trey raised an eyebrow, not sure if that was random or a Princess Bride reference, then headed back to his quarters to grab his armor.

  3

  Trey knelt on the surface of the planet feeling the heavy gravity tugging on his muscles. 1.6g wasn’t something that was going to stress him much, given the high gravity training that he was used to putting an hour or two in at up to 5.5g, but his team he was worried about a bit. To that end he put a time limit on their excursion and kept the dropships close by so they could get a breather inside the regular gravity when needed.

  Dipping a hand down into the sand, the Archon ran his fingers through it and got a feel for the magnitude of the weapons damage to the planet’s surface. This wasn’t ground up rock as much as it was vaporized material flash frozen into particulates. A few weapon systems he knew of had this result, and none of them were common within the galaxy. Hit a target with enough power and you essentially got a bowl of confetti as a result, and given the 160 miles of desert that he was kneeling in this place had been hit by either something massive or a lot of smaller things in repetition…which he assumed was the case given the lack of a single blast crater.