Star Force: Ysalamir (Star Force Universe Book 54) Read online

  2

  August 2, 128487

  Ba’al System (Uriti Preserve #5)

  Training Course #7

  Mastertech Tennisonne stood impatiently in a lab onboard the mobile research ship Tagora as he watched the Uriti formerly known as Shunudren firing at a number of targets in low power modes. The newly renamed ‘Shen,’ for short, had only learned to hold back enough to not destroy the targets a few months ago, and now that he did it was time to get some useful data on his seemingly impossible main weapon.

  It was a lightning discharge, but like most advanced weaponry it wasn’t made of electrons. This one the Ancients had assumed to be a Leffen pulse, which two of the other Uriti…Hulk and Mojo Jojo…also possessed, but as the level 20 Ultra Mastertech was watching the readouts he could confirm that it was similar but not the same. It had the telltale vaporizing wisp of molecular damage that caused the atoms to disengage at weak points rather than completely de-molecularize, but there was something else happening here and he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  The damage to Sonic had been detailed meticulously and sent to Tennisonne by Ace-095, telling him to drop whatever he was doing and get his ass out here, because they couldn’t move the wild Uriti yet, and upon arriving he’d been informed they wouldn’t be moving it for decades while it got its basic training. That meant Tennisonne had to study it here, and given that so far nobody else could figure out exactly what this weapon’s significance was, he couldn’t risk trying to manage this over the relay network. And now that he was here, he knew that his assessment had been right…because none of this made any sense.

  There was something else in the discharge, he could infer that much, but it wasn’t really affecting the molecular disruption of the target orbs that had been specifically designed to take physical damage rather than deflect it with shielding. The latter wouldn’t be of much good in this test, but if the target was completely destroyed the sensors imbedded within it were of no good either. Hence the low power firing mode had to be used, and taught to Shen, but a sneaky suspicion of Tennisonne’s said they were looking in the wrong place.

  “I need a larger shot,” he told the Wrangler on another nearby ship. “Just weak enough to not destroy the entire target.”

  “I don’t think he can fire that precisely.”

  “I need more. Do what you can.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Feel free to share.”

  “There might be a scaling issue. I need to find out.”

  The Wrangler sighed. “Alright, I’ll see what I can do. But Shen is about as accurate as trying to type on a keyboard wearing mittens. No promises.”

  “Mittens,” Tennisonne mumbled to himself, drawing some odd looks from his assistants who knew better than to interrupt him when he was in ‘thinking’ mode. “Who wears mittens anymore? I’m surprised that youngling even knows what they were.”

  Suddenly one of Shen’s prongs lit up with energy arcs and fired towards the target, hitting it and blasting it apart…mostly…but the central core was still intact, and it held the bulk of the sensors.

  “What the hell!” Tennisonne said over the comm to the Wrangler as he saw both the different colored discharge and the wild readings coming from the sensors in the target and from the observation platforms nearby, including his ship that was a little too safely distant to get good readings, though this couldn’t be missed. “What weapon was that?”

  “That’s his primary. I don’t know what he did to do that, but it was the same discharge.”

  “No it wasn’t, are you blind?”

  “Colorblind, what’s your point?”

  Tennisonne was about to complain about why an Archon wouldn’t have just got the colorblind deficiency in his eyes fixed…then he realized the Wrangler was just being sarcastic.

  “The original discharges were blue, this was orange/green and behaved entirely differently. What did he do different?”

  “Hold on, he doesn’t speak English, you know. Usually Mastertechs are more patient than this.”

  “What’s your name, Wrangler?”

  “Ryen-7117.”

  “And old one, huh?”

  “Just as old as you. What’s your point?”

  “I was wondering if you didn’t know what you were doing, because that was not the same energy discharge.”

  “That’s because it’s variable. That’s what Shen says, at least. He can adjust it for different targets.”

  “How many settings?”

  “They’re not settings, they’re settings and dialable levels, some of which mix together for different effects. He said this one wasn’t as potent, which is why it didn’t destroy the target.”

  “But it’s not what he used against Sonic?”

  “No, it wasn’t. We’re going to try again on another target.”

  “Please do. Why didn’t the Ancients know about this variability?”

  “Probably too unimportant to use the more potent settings on. We little people are gnats, remember?”

  “Irrelevant. He bombarded planets, so why isn’t there a record of it?”

  “Ask the Ancients. We’re moving to target #87 and going to recreate the original settings with more power. Is that still what you want?”

  “It is. Can you ask him if he was mixing energies originally?”

  “The weapon is an energy mix. There is no isolated discharge.”

  Tennisonne snapped his fingers excitedly. “That makes sense now. He’s sending carrier signals that have no measureable effect, almost as if his containment is leaking when he doesn’t mean to use them.”

  “There’s no leaking, Mastertech. It’s intentional. Something about cloying tendencies. If he tries to send them in isolation they malfunction.”

  “Can you show me a malfunction?”

  “Um…yes, he can do that. Hold on. He says it won’t reach the target in most cases. Here we go,” Ryen said as Shen began to spark pink flashes that didn’t last long enough to turn into lightning tendrils…then there were blue laser-like beams that widened drastically as they traveled away from the Uriti, dissipating too much before they got to the nearest targets. Then six more varied discharges were shown, with the last being a green lightning that circled back on the Uriti and traveled up and down its massive body before being reabsorbed.

  “Fascinating,” Tennisonne said when Shen had finished. “Absolutely fascinating.”

  “What have you got?”

  “A mystery, but one with data I can use. This weapon package is unlike anything the other Uriti have, and he’s not the most recent Chixzon model. Why didn’t they continue on with this line of research?”

  “That’s obvious.”

  “Is it? Care to explain that Archon?”

  “The Chixzon experimented with different body shapes, and eventually they drifted towards more of a spherical shape except where specific weapons required others. Shen has to have the prongs for his main weapon, and that means more Yeg’gor armor per volume. So he grows slower than the others and has more points for an enemy to attack while having less internal mass to shield his brain. Basically he’s easier to kill than, say, a Nami. Why didn’t you know that?”

  “My knowledge of the Uriti is not nearly as extensive as yours, and I’ve never seen that opinion in any notes sent my way.”

  “No point in noting the obvious. And if the Chixzon didn’t want to fight the Hadarak, they might not even know they had a weapon that could hurt them more. It might have been an accident, or it could have been deliberate aversion. Can you determine if it’s more effective against normal mass?”

  “The answer to that is an obvious no,” Tennisonne bit back, not caring for the Archon’s too familiar tone, given that they’d never met before. “It’s actually a bit weaker than the other Leffen pulses.”

  “Why do you call them pulses when they’re arcing weapons?”

  “They utilize a buildup prior to the arc that feeds it long enou
gh to be visible. The Ancients named them, not me. Though it might have to do with the damage pulse ring they produce, though that’s just my impromptu speculation.”

  “Do you still want the original setting firing with more power?”

  “Yes, more now than before. I have an idea.”

  “It’ll be a few minutes before we’re in range. Standby.”

  Tennisonne waited patiently, then saw a single arc lift off a single pylon of the Uriti and wiggle its way out to the target, seemingly to defy the void of space, but Tennisonne knew it wasn’t a true void. The Uriti was sending out slower moving energy that the primary would arc from, with the little energy packets acting like the old school frogger game and jumping from one to another in order to get out to target. If that other energy wasn’t present they couldn’t go anywhere without fizzling out, for they reformed their stability each time they arrived at a new point. It was an odd but effective means of getting an unstable energy arc to target, but better in most ways to the mist fields some of other Uriti produced.

  Shen misjudged his strength and totally destroyed the target, but there were a few seconds of useable data since the destruction of the outer layers occurred first before reaching down into the internal sensor equipment…and that data was enough to give Tennisonne a taste of an answer.

  “Sorry. I told you he wasn’t…”

  “Shut up, I got something useful.”

  The Archon was silent for several seconds, with Tennisonne thankful that he had enough respect to let him think through the moment.

  “Ok, I have a theory, but I’m going to need a lot more variations tested. More than we have targets.”

  “We can build more. Are you in a rush?”

  “Always.”

  “Theorize me.”

  “When Yeg’gor armor gets hit with energy it absorbs. If it’s too much to absorb the molecules contract on each other, making it even denser and reflecting back most of the energy. It’s when molecules absorb energy that they weaken the molecular bonds or just blow them apart. The contraction fights this, meaning the more energy attack the stronger the Yeg’gor gets. This is why they can survive within stars and black holes. The pressure in there adds to this effect, but I think one of the components of Shen’s main weapon, or maybe a combination, counteract this contraction and actually draw them apart slightly,” he emphasized. “I’m not sure what component is doing it, so I need a lot of trial and error experiments.”

  “Not a problem. We’ll have to recharge periodically, but one thing Shen and I see eye to eye on is blowing stuff up. It’s our bonding experience, so the more the better.”

  “That sounds oddly appropriate for an Archon.”

  “We work with what we’ve got. You wouldn’t believe how much more data a punch to the face can deliver than a book full of words.”

  “I’ll take your word on that. I personally prefer numbers.”

  “Then we’ll get you as much as you want. Any idea how many more targets we’ll need?”

  “Just start mass producing them and I’ll tell you when to stop…”

  7 months later…

  Paul-024 was standing in a small cubical with his body and head melded into the second brain ‘astromech’ of the Excalibur as he flew thousands of drones in intricate attack patterns, leaving lesser functions to his crew to handle as his Borg-class warship was singlehandedly taking on a tier 1 Hadarak that was one fifth the width of the massive cube, but it still outmassed the ship by a good 30%. Visually though the Excalibur dwarfed the Hadarak, with dozens of tiny Tar’vem’jic lines tracking from one to the other as the Hadarak was fleeing away from the planet it had been in the process of wrecking, and was now heading towards the safety of the star.

  Its minion swarms were nearly depleted now, giving Paul and his drones free shots that just couldn’t damage the Hadarak enough, and even with the IDF goo that they were shooting at the Hadarak to try and slow it, the beast was too big and had too many internal gravity drives that could keep propelling it forward…and it was continuing to speed up rather than slowing down, with Paul knowing that it would much rather ram the star at considerable speed than remain in his firing arcs.

  But any damage done would delay it’s moving on to another star, and Paul was going to remain in this system as long as he could, bullying it away from the three inhabited planets, of which only one was left intact, while an emergency evacuation fleet he’d scrapped together pulled the survivors out.

  Paul knew he couldn’t camp here to keep the Hadarak from moving on forever, for that would be a waste of his ship and his own skills. He and the other trailblazers commanding Borg-class vessels had to be actively going after the Hadarak while leaving the rest of the fleet to deal with the minion-infested planets. They couldn’t just let the Hadarak have free run, and a tier 1 destroyed today would mean a level 2 or greater in the future they didn’t have to face, so the trailblazers were looking for the isolated tier 1s that were coming out of the Deep Core in greater and greater numbers, but they had to wait for them to splinter off from their convoy groups and spread out into the kill zones that the Hadarak were outlining around the galaxy.

  Fighting the larger Hadarak would do too much damage to the Excalibur, and force it back for repairs. So Paul had to let them go even as the V’kit’no’sat and Zak’de’ron were taking down a lot of 2s and some 3s, but they were also ignoring the 4s, 5s, and the now 38 tier 6s that had been identified. Where they went, nobody challenged them, instead trying to clear the path ahead of the slow moving behemoths that made the tier 1s look fast. Priority evacuation teams were preceding them and getting everyone out of the way within range, for it was too dangerous to operate even scoop and dump evacuations in a system where they were, for they contained minion fleets within their bodies that could swarm even a Borg-class vessel.

  The Excalibur wouldn’t go down easily, but right now there was nothing that Star Force had that could touch a tier 6 or its escort fleets…many of whom also consisted of free minions traveling the spacelanes on their own, and the number of those was increasing with each year. The High Admirals had been deployed to hunt them specifically, but even as the minion growth fields were being savaged, huge fleets of the free minions were coming out of the Deep Core as if to spite Star Force’s containment efforts.

  The short version was that the new triumvirate was losing and that loss was going to snowball so long as the Hadarak could maintain the level of reinforcements coming out of the Deep Core, and since no one could get in there to have a look at what they had, no one knew how long they could sustain it, though Paul’s gut told him it wasn’t going to end soon enough to matter.

  The big advantage Star Force and the others had was time. The Hadarak moved slowly, even their free minions when making interstellar jumps were plodding compared to Star Force engine technology because they had to save energy to use in braking, and they didn’t have stellar radiation to recharge on during the coast phase. That meant they were fast insystem but slow when jumping between them, but even if they had been lightning fast, the galaxy was so vast that it would take forever for the Hadarak to conquer it.

  The portion they had so far didn’t even come out to the original V’kit’no’sat battle line prior to the galactic purge beginning. So the triumvirate and the rest of the galaxy had thousands, if not tens of thousands of years before the Hadarak would get to them, but their advance was not stoppable at this point. They had time to find a way, and the size of the galaxy was with them at the moment, but give the Hadarak a chunk of it to grow new minions in and the snowball growth effect would become nearly unbeatable.

  Most people would run for the far rim and never look back in a situation like that, but the trailblazers were the opposite. This was the greatest challenge the galaxy had ever faced…at least as far as anyone knew…so they weren’t going to run away from it. They were going to run towards it, and use every bit of wisdom, experience, skill, trickery, and magic they could pull out of their butts
to fight this, though at the moment it seemed they had nothing to work with. Only the ability to delay the inevitable advance a bit more with a lot of hard fought victories.

  But as Paul chased the tier 1 into the star, a portion of his computer-enhanced mind registered the arrival of a Star Force scout ship that was bringing him comm grid updates, and as those transmitted out to his ship he was able to review them at lightning fast speed even as he continued to fly his fleet of drones. That was one huge advantage of being melded with an astromech, and Tennisonne’s update caught his attention immediately.

  Paul’s body was vibrating slightly, as always, but a smile twisted his otherwise static face as his mind was elsewhere and his eyes and senses were almost totally closed to what was surrounding his body.

  Thank you, he thought as the battle outside continued to rage on as the Excalibur and drones peppered the Hadarak with more tiny bits of damage and a few larger sting marks from the Tar’vem’jic beams. Now build me a boomstick. A real one, he said, composing a message that the scout ship would take back with it shortly. I don’t care how large the platform is. I can defend it, I can move it. Just give me something that can really hurt them and I’ll take care of the refinements. One big gun, Mr. Stark. One big gun. And name it Jarvis.

  3

  February 6, 128494

  Epsilon Eridani System (Home One Kingdom)

  Corneria

  Bvitti was hop/walking down the corridor in the 14A shipyard where the Uber Yard Master had his command deck when another Kiritak ran up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. Bvitti stopped and turned, seeing a shocked expression on the other’s face.

  “What?” the kangaroo-like biped asked.

  “An Ultra Mastertech has arrived and is looking for you.”

  Bvitti’s eye ridges raised. “Which one?”