Star Force: Extirpation (Star Force Universe Book 56) Read online

  They caught a lot of the momentum, but not all of it. The Hadarak’s Yeg’gor impacted the shields and pierced them, then the Excalibur’s own Yeg’gor met the 461 mile wide mass and both deformed as the grapple field from the Lurker disappeared and the Hadarak’s latched on. Yet it didn’t have a dampener within it as Keychain’s had. Paul accelerated hard and the mooring beams that were still attached let Roger pull as well, and that was more than enough to yank the Excalibur to the side and off the Hadarak even as it sent several tentacles out and into the ship.

  Yet they moved slow and the two trailblazers’ reaction speed was unmatched, so there wasn’t much time for the tentacles to get deep into the ship, but a disruption blast from Keychain did hit the Excalibur along with something else. Roger got the damage updates as both Borg vessels sped away from the pair of Hadarak that did not pursue, though he could see a conduit open up between them with Essence pouring from the tier 3 into Keychain.

  “Paul?”

  “Give me a moment,” his voice came back, but a hologram didn’t appear for some time.

  “Are you alright?” Roger finally asked.

  “No. I’ve lost 8% of my ship and 4 crew. The rest are wobbly. We all got hit with the heart attack weapon. I was able to flush it away with Essence pretty easy, but the rest had to suffer the damage and let the regenerators repair it. I lost 4 when a section of ship was torqued with some form of Lachka, and I lost a chunk of the exterior to the disruptor and two holes to the tentacles.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, the Hadarak isn’t being fed on. It’s supplying Keychain with Essence voluntarily. It’s transmitting across a short void.”

  Paul took a moment to look, but the further and further they got away the less detail he could make out and he didn’t feel like going back.

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “What’s wrong, Paul?”

  “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “I’ve got your back, buddy. Shake it off.”

  “It added an engine inhibitor. I don’t know how and I don’t know how it works. It wasn’t complete like an IDF.”

  “I saw. If we keep two ships together at all times it won’t work again. We can pull each other out.”

  “Noted.”

  “That’s it, I’m coming over. Rendezvous coordinates,” Roger said, sending him a point far out in the system away from any gravity wells that would make it easier for the Lurker or Hadarak to get to them quickly by, then he cut the comm and began to withdraw himself from his own astromech. When that lengthy process was complete he headed for one of the Ravager’s hangar bays, but rather than hop in a dropship he just activated his armor and flew outside as the two ships came to a stop and hovered at a distance of 120 miles…which looked to be nearly touching given how large both vessels were.

  Roger crossed the distance in a number of minutes, seeing the huge missing chunk of the Excalibur in the lower right corner, but there was also a section of the ship near the midline that was bulging out. That must have been the Lachka-like attack Paul had mentioned, and while Roger had seen it on sensor telemetry, getting his own perspective on it now chilled him to the bone. The Lurker had literally reached inside the ship and yanked part of it outward, twisting as it went, but it hadn’t been able to dislodge it.

  That meant it could bypass shields and armor with more than the heart attack weapon. That was hugely problematic, but so far they hadn’t seen the Lurker use any form of Lachka, Essence enhanced or not, and the Hadarak’s grapple field couldn’t twist anything. All it could do was pull or push, making it the far inferior cousin of Lachka.

  Roger flew into one of the Excalibur’s intact hangar bays and made his way through the massive ship until he got to Paul’s personal quarters where he found the trailblazer sitting motionless in a cushioned armchair with his chin cradled in his hand. He didn’t move when Roger came in, nor did he even twitch when Roger shut the door behind him and pulled up a floating chair from the comm station and drifted it over in front of The Admiral.

  “Talk,” Roger demanded.

  “We would have died if you hadn’t showed up,” he said succinctly.

  “We’re working in the blind here, and you just got us some more intel. Not worth the 4 lives lost, but other than poking the Lurker with a stick we can’t learn this stuff.”

  “I screwed up, period.”

  “Yeah you did. So what?”

  Paul’s head remained stationary, but his eyes rotated to glare at Roger. “How do we learn if we can’t poke?”

  “If the Tar’vem’jic can outrange them, the solution to that is obvious.”

  “It won’t engage the same way if nobody is onboard. It can sense our Essence even if we don’t use it. We have to figure out what it can do, and we can’t do that with drones. Not all of its abilities, anyway.”

  “Agreed. We’re screwed on that part. But we can play standoff and still win, the same way with the Hadarak. We just need better Ysalamir to do it.”

  “We have to know,” Paul argued. “We can’t keep flying blind like this, and we can’t keep losing people to surprises.”

  “You’ve lost people before, and it burns you. It burns all of us, but be honest. You’re shaken because you almost died.”

  “We can’t fight a war with one shot kills, Roger. Attrition will be our undoing. Skill won’t matter. Only numbers will. And in that kind of war, the Hadarak win easily.”

  “Or the lizards,” Roger added. “We beat them with skill, and all your skills didn’t protect you from dying here. I did.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “But?”

  “I was reckless, but I had no way of knowing I was. I can’t counter what I can’t see coming, and I’m not throwing lesser skilled people into harm’s way to figure out what this bastard can do. Where did I go wrong?”

  “Fog of war. Learning can be a bitch sometimes. Just be glad you made it through.”

  “I can’t rely on luck. We can’t rely on luck.”

  “We do if we have to. Some of us have been closer to dying than you have and we’ve learned to just wing it.”

  “If a peon can kill a legend by shooting him in the back when he’s not looking, it undoes everything we’ve worked for.”

  “Then let’s take this by the numbers. Do we still have a navigational advantage?”

  “So far, yes. But I can’t promise there’s not a surge capacity in there somewhere that can surprise us.”

  “We can never disprove a negative because we will never encounter it. If this Lurker could catch you, I think it would have by now. Did you notice how much Essence it was burning?”

  “Looked like all of it.”

  Roger nodded. “I think it had to in order to get the range to snag you because it couldn’t catch you. I sensed extreme frustration in its movements. And the fact it waited until a Hadarak was here indicated that it couldn’t finish you without it. It took nearly all its Essence to reel you in. You’re stunned right now, so you’re not thinking clearly. I’m more confident now than I was before, because I think it tapped itself out and gave us a minimum engagement range.”

  “All I see is unpredictability right now,” Paul admitted.

  “I know, which is why I’m here. What do you think that twist was going after?”

  “I’m still wondering why it didn’t go straight for me if it can bypass the armor.”

  “It did.”

  Paul’s hand left his chin and he looked directly at Roger. It took a split second before he realized what he was getting at.

  “Highest concentration of personnel.”

  “Exactly. It didn’t think you’d be alone.”

  “But it didn’t get far enough…maybe the mass does have an effect,” Paul said, mentally interfacing with his quarters’ comm system and linking in to the ship’s battlemap. A series of holograms popped up in the space between him and Roger, with Paul making mental adjustments to them and his counterpart adding a fe
w adjustments here and there.

  “There…see it?” Roger said.

  “I do now. A pure Essence pull with the forward end twisting. Movement parameters match exactly within destroyed mass.”

  “And dispersion.”

  “It went for the highest concentration and missed. Its range wasn’t long enough. That means if it gets close enough, it doesn’t have to use its disruptor and chip away at the ship. It’ll go for us directly.”

  “Why didn’t it do that to Morgan?”

  Paul shook his head. “It’s learning about us too. The ship doesn’t have Essence, we do, so it’s learning where to destroy the threat to it. The Hadarak can deal with the ship. This bastard is here to take out the superweapons, and that means the Ysalamiri and any Essence user.”

  “Knowing is half the battle, and we’re starting to know more.”

  “Not enough. If someone met us for the first time and we used Lachka on them, how could they figure out all our other psionics? How could they prepare for them?”

  “They couldn’t,” Roger admitted. “And if they sent drones after us, they’d never learn about Ikrid.”

  “That’s why I’m rattled, Roger. The only way we’re going to learn is by losing people.”

  “They took their best shot at you and failed. You won’t give them a second shot.”

  “Not with these same tactics, no, but I can’t guard against others I don’t know about.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “How?”

  “It’s all about Essence for the Lurkers. And I am assuming there are more than one of them. Essence has range issues without a carrier, and the Lurker has no carrier. The Uriti do, but the Hadarak do not beyond their minions. This is a bad weakness that may be countered in other super Lurkers, or whatnot, but Keychain is definitely a melee champ.”

  “With a Yasuo Q flip that’s way too long,” Paul amended.

  “You’re a Cait main. Divers always rattle you.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “You prefer to keep them at range and poke away. When they get in close you run. You’ve learned to play melee with our technology and heavy defenses that allow for longevity, but we’re back to quick kills here, and that you are not comfortable with.”

  “One shot kills,” Paul reiterated. “We can’t fight like that.”

  “We…” Roger stopped short as a thought hit him.

  “What?”

  “I was about to say we need a Zhonyas, then I remembered what the Knights of Quenar said about the Essence bubble.”

  Paul suddenly perked up. “Not enough for a ship, but for a single person.”

  “Yet that begs the question of whether or not one can be attacked if in the Essence realm…or whatever it is. If you can push someone there, you can obviously interact. Can a Lurker disintegrate you or skewer you if you’re there? If not, it’d be nifty to have a backup in case a Lurker does get within melee range and tried to assassinate you inside the ship.”

  “You’d be dislodged from it if it moved.”

  “You can survive in your armor so long as you don’t emerge in a bulkhead. They have to have some way to push away atmosphere, or it’d get imbedded in them when they came to Davis.”

  “Give me the items I need and I can fight this,” Paul declared. “But right now I feel like a level 3 in an 18 teamfight.”

  “Lurker is a Rengar. Am I right?”

  “One that we can see. Most people can’t, so yeah, it’s a Rengar and we have no armor for it.”

  “But we do have health. Our ship mass.”

  “We can’t build bigger ships. It’ll just ram us.”

  “Not my point. Excalibur’s bulk keeps the disintegrator from getting to the interior.”

  “There’s that, but with other penetration weapons that’s not much comfort…wait. This really is a lot more like League of Legends than I thought.”

  “How so?”

  “Minions. You can either win by defeating the champs, or by pushing the minion waves. And if we don’t guard our inhibitors, the minions will defeat us even if we get the champs. The Hadarak and the Lurkers are the champs. Maybe we can win this with the minions.”

  “What’s our version of a super minion?”

  “The Uriti…but we can’t use them against champs. And we have no idea what their turrets look like. We may have to fight this with disposable units.”

  “But we need our own turrets…oh shit, I just had an idea.”

  “So did I,” Paul agreed. “We need some really big dampeners.”

  “And satellite relays to bounce the Ysalamir beam to.”

  Paul pulled a check on the position of the Hadarak and Keychain, seeing that they were still in low stellar orbit and just sitting there, ostensibly with the Lurker getting a partial or full Essence recharge.

  “We have to keep eyes on Keychain, but if it wants to kill us and the Ysalamir, then we can build a taunt to a trap if we want to devote the resources to it.”

  “It can be mostly hollow.”

  “I know. If Keychain has some surprise for us, this will be a very expensive test, but it’ll be equipment lost and not one of us.”

  “Feel better?”

  “Much,” Paul said, pounding his fist into his palm, only to have a massive telepathic surge cross into his mind. He flinched, as did Roger, then the ship’s telepathic shielding kicked in to dampen the overload as it pinpointed the source of the signal, though both of them knew where it came from.

  “The Hadarak has more broadcast power, it seems,” Roger noted. “There’s your proof, Paul. It’s vexed because it can’t kill you. It isn’t fast enough.”

  “So it’s calling for someone who is?”

  “Or more Lurkers to work in coordination. Either way, it’s more champs on the field. This is game on.”

  “Then let’s build some turrets. We’re going to need them.”

  Many years later…

  The Hadarak signal had made its way across their domain, passing from one repeater to another in addition to being carried by couriers. The majority of their signals were telepathic in nature out on the frontier, but once you got into the center of the galaxy the real communications network was Essence-based and invisible to most of the galaxy. When word came that the single assassin they’d sent to deal with the enhanced weaponry had failed and reinforcements were required, that message was spread across the Hadarak domain so those who needed to hear it could wherever they were.

  But it also crossed an uninhabited planet where a single mind existed that was sensitive to the messages. It had lain dormant here for a long time, watching the galaxy through the Hadarak’s eyes unknown to them and residing within their domain with impunity so long as the individual did not get too bold. It had moved about a great deal in the past, but in recent memory it had remained here, sleeping at long lengths as it filtered the hacked messages crossing back and forth between the prime territory and the frontier.

  The dispatching of the assassin had been notable, but it was not something that hadn’t occurred before. The failure of the assassin caused the mind to wake from its most recent slumber, raising its huge snake-like head up out of the curl its scaled body had been in as it looked in the direction of the Rim.

  “Have you finally decided to fight, or has another risen to challenge? You know you do not have the strength, so why now?”

  If there was a chance of a new challenger, then the mind could not remain here as a mole on the Hadarak grid. It would have to travel to the Rim and find out for itself, and after all this time, even if it ended up being a false hope, it would be good to taste uninfested space again…while it lasted.

  3

  March 1, 128533

  Hlem System (Home 3 Kingdom)

  Jenidshen

  Kara flew through the open air of the planet with nothing but a bikini top and a pair of short shorts on, feeling the thick atmosphere against her skin as she circled around the massive ship being constructed on the planet
’s surface rather than in orbit. That was unusual for a ship 26 miles long and 6 wide. The highest point was still within the comfortable zone of the atmosphere, for the planet had a blanket of gases 138 miles high, yet the air pressure wasn’t too much for a Human to handle once you got used to it.

  But for the aerial Banwion race, these were ideal conditions for construction. They hated being in space suits or having to use remote drones to construct their craft, so they preferred building medium-sized vessels on the surface and only resorted to orbital shipyards for heavy repair work or for those few cargo ships too massive to be built planetside.

  Jenidshen wasn’t their homeworld, but it had become the center of their faction once they joined Star Force. Prior to that they’d been a minor member of The Nexus and had nearly been destroyed in that empire’s collapse. Star Force had moved in to stabilize a few worlds, and out of that seed had grown a strong faction that specialized in tinkering. They had facilities to mass produce drones, like all factions did, but the Banwion preferred custom designs and getting their hands on the craftsmanship to instill a personal touch. That wasn’t the best option, but Star Force was so massive and redundant that the Banwion could afford to be quirky, and the winged bipeds were buzzing around their newest ship as Kara waited for its completion.

  The Banwion looked like big humming birds with arms, and they zipped here and there in a frenzy that made it hard to understand how they didn’t run into each other without battlemap coordination, but they’d never needed it before and they’d become a go-to for the Archons when they wanted to test out new designs, even if just for the purpose of trying something crazy.

  That’s why she’d come here, because they’d tried to max out engine speed before and it was the Banwion that had helped them do it. The trouble was, you couldn’t get much more speed than a Valkyrie without adding a lot more mass…and then that mass had to be moved to, so adding additional gravity drives didn’t give you as much of a boost as one hoped. The best they’d done in the past was a 6% improvement, and with recent breakthroughs they might get that up to 8% out of a ship far larger and more expensive to build.