Star Force: Benefactor (SF19) Read online

  She waited what felt like an eternity for the 7th wave to arrive and find their targets, but eventually all of the projectile icons matched up with the tracking signals, leaving the only odd man out being the crawler, which Rafa was still maneuvering around, gathering intelligence on the base.

  “Pop goes the weasel,” Morgan announced to the rest of the Archons, killing the delay signal.

  Small explosions popped up across the base, then were sucked back up by the night as the fireballs died out…then one last, bigger explosion went off as the crawler detonated its payload underneath the false canopy covering the shipyard, breaking it apart in a flash with the pieces falling down on top of the site in the ensuing darkness.

  Morgan smiled once, then turned her back to the base and dropped down through the tree branches, slowing herself by momentarily grabbing them as they passed before hitting the ground hard and rolling out of the fall. She redirected the momentum into a somersault and came back up onto her feet in a run, heading deeper into the forest following the others as they fled the lizard base.

  2

  October 4, 2264

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Paul walked into the research lab fresh off a shower, workout, and long night’s sleep after their recent mission to find Greg was already there ahead of him. The Archon frowned as he walked in.

  “You beat me.”

  “That does happen on occasion,” Greg said, tapping one of the crystal shards on the alien holographic device to get it to flip screens.

  Paul dragged a stool over next to the floating device and ran his fingers through his short hair, flicking a bit of residual water away. “Where are you at?”

  “Trying to make some sense out of this grammar,” he said, looking at a screen of five ‘words’ that were made up of slashes and oddly shaped dots. “Their vocab primer is easy enough to understand, but their sentence structure is annoyingly odd without any verbs.”

  “What’s the vocab count up to now?”

  “The techs got past 3,000 yesterday, though I did spot a few inconsistencies, so don’t take their list as fact.”

  Paul looked at the nearby table, spotting a particular datapad and got up to retrieve it. He turned it on and began sifting through the basics of the alien language as the probe had instructed them. It had begun with a hologram of water transitioning between solid, liquid, and gaseous states, then tagged the images with the vertically written word. It had then gone on through hundreds of others, establishing a basic vocabulary for the Humans to learn, along with their vocal equivalents that sounded like fingernails on chalkboard.

  Fortunately the sound had to be triggered by pressing one of the crystal arms within the hologram so they didn’t have to suffer through that every time they looked up a new word, but the process of learning a completely new language was tedious enough, even when they’d been given everything they needed by the mysterious race that had built and sent the probe to them.

  Paul looked through several new vocab entries, committing them to mind as best he could, knowing that the more times he saw and used them the more likely they were to stick, then put the datapad aside and focused on the text document that Greg was looking through. It was wide, with 13 vertical lines of text. They’d confirmed that it was read left to right, top to bottom, but as his friend had said the language contained no verbs, so reading even this basic primer was difficult, let alone sifting through the library of first contact data that it contained.

  They had managed to get a name, both in writing and their screeching language. Morgan had altered it enough to be useable, dubbing them the Hycre. There was what looked like a complete autobiography on the race included in the probe’s databanks, they just couldn’t read it until they learned the language.

  Paul was glad they’d taken the initiative, not to mention warning them of the lizards’ additional bases. He’d much rather pit the trailblazers’ creative intelligence against the problem of establishing communication rather than hope the other side could figure things out. This probe was either standard issue for first contact situations or they’d taken a long time to design it just for them.

  Or it could have just been something they’d pulled off the shelf and reprogramed, but never the less Paul was thoroughly impressed at the complexity of the artifact and the underlying significance that it held.

  Fortunately for their sanity not everything in the databanks were text documents. There were also a great number of pictures and diagrams. The Hycre, as it turned out, were completely alien in physiology. They were, in crude terms, floating gas bags that existed in what they thought was labeled as an atmosphere of sulfur dioxide. They had no arms or legs, but six worm-like tentacles, four air ‘atriums’ that allowed them a measure of jet propulsion by compressing and expelling globs of air for movement, and a spikey tail fin that rose up over top of their roughly spherical bodies like a mohawk.

  They also had no eyes, ears, or any other surface features. Their sensory organs were instead incorporated into their translucent skin. Paul wasn’t sure what their full capabilities were, sensory wise, but they appeared extremely weak. They had a large internal air bladder that, from what the diagram said, contained biologically created hydrogen gas to give them buoyancy enough to float around on their homeworld, which was listed along with a very complete map of this region of the galaxy.

  After Greg had finished his round of Hycre lessons about an hour later he left Paul to continue working on his own. The Archon finished up a few new vocab entries into the shared database for the techs to continue with later, then touched the crystal shard on the lower hemisphere that brought up the probe’s collection of maps, starting with the largest one that had the Epsilon Eridani System on the very edge of what appeared to be a more rimward civilization.

  It looked like a video game map with all the various factions labeled in different colors and symbols, each of which had a brief bio attached. Based on the pictures they had been able to identify 3 of the races along the coreward edge of the map as having been listed in the pyramid database, with confirmation requests on the others which were now in transit via jumpship for analysis. Paul doubted very many of the 28 other races would be in the V’kit’no’sat records, for between him and the other trailblazers on Corneria they had a good collective memory of the threats looming around the known galaxy.

  About half of the marked territory had been claimed by the V’kit’no’sat on the edge of their empire, including Earth, but none of it had remained in their possession, at least according to the Hycre, and the fact that so many new races were abound suggested major changes in galactic politics. He doubted very much that the V’kit’no’sat had been destroyed, but was glad to not have them breathing down their necks any time soon…though Earth was on the edge of the Hycre map, so it was still possible that their primary enemy could still be nearby on the coreward side.

  What it also meant was that their galactic playbook was out of date. Had the Hycre been in the pyramid database they would have had a language file on them, including comm frequencies and technological tie-ins. Having one computer system match up with another race’s was statistically improbable, meaning that a lot of tech work would have to be done before they could even link up their comm systems. The V’kit’no’sat had already done the leg work there for every race in their database, including the ones they’d eradicated, but Star Force wasn’t going to be able to rely on that resource with these rimward races, for they were complete unknowns.

  The closest Hycre system was 53 light years away from Epsilon Eridani and 42 light years away from Sol, lying above Star Force’s home system within the bulk of the galactic disc, whereas Epsilon Eridani lay below it. The system had yet to be named on Star Force charts and lay on the outer edge of the V’kit’no’sat survey zone, which had cut lower on the galactic plane this far out, missing a lot of the upper systems. In total, this portion of the galaxy was about 2,000 light years thick, meaning Sol had a
mass of star systems around it in all directions.

  According to the Hycre map the system contained 3 planets and 6 moons. All three planets were gas giants, but only one had an atmosphere suitable to their physiology. According to what Paul thought were temperature numbers, they liked the atmosphere hot and thick, meaning that Star Force and the Hycre probably wouldn’t be fighting over planets anytime soon. He wondered where, exactly, in a gas giant they built their infrastructure, or how they could even gather resources to build ships and technology.

  The answers were probably contained within the databanks, if they’d been so forthcoming, but they were going to take a lot of time to decipher. Right now he just wanted to get a feel for who was out there…and where exactly the lizards were coming from.

  The Hycre had a name for them, but it was so high pitched that there was no imitating it. He doubted that was what the lizards called themselves, so they’d held off on naming them just yet. Their system tags were stretched across a good chunk of the map, but none were within 75 light years of Epsilon Eridani. That made Paul feel better, though in truth that could be very nearby depending on how fast their jumpships were, but he doubted they were close enough for quick reinforcement. Their homeworld was tagged as being 308 light years away at an angle, part rimward and part counterclockwise while being depressed into the lower half of the galactic plane.

  They had 38 star systems tagged as their territory spread over a large region. Paul and the others figured that those systems were ones where they had colonies, but that they probably laid claim to many others. It was possible that Epsilon Eridani fell into that category and that they hadn’t sent a patrol through the system for the past decade, or maybe they were simply scouting out beyond their borders in search of enemies or new races to pick on. Either way, their main territory being considerably far away was a relief to Paul, suggesting to him that he might be able to establish naval superiority if Sol could keep sending him ships in addition to the few new models coming off the local shipyards.

  He didn’t mind burning through them if it meant taking out one or two of the lizards’ if the enemy couldn’t replace theirs as fast. Exchanging ships like chess pieces had been one reason they’d gone with drone warships, otherwise they would have had to fight much differently in order to protect the crews onboard. Without crews they could act more liberally with their attack fleets, reserving their defense tactics for their command ships and battleships.

  Paul wished he had a command ship in system, but they were far too large to haul across interstellar space. They had to be built locally, and that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. He wished he knew for sure how fast the lizard jumpships were, and how many they had available, but at least the Hycre had given them a good look at the playing field, even if they couldn’t detect the damn ships when they entered the system.

  Paul had already been through the lizard territory system by system on earlier days, so today he picked a section of the map not dominated by the lizards, trying to get a feel for who the other major players were. He hoped some of them were giving the lizards hell on other portions of their border, because he feared that the more they held them off here, the more attention they’d get back on their homeworld…which might then decide they needed to make an example of the Humans. Paul much preferred thinking of Corneria as being a backwater planet the lizards didn’t truly care about, though they were going to quite an effort to set up shop here, even if they had to pay their own way with local resources.

  The Hycre had their territory stretched out into fingers delving into a number of other race’s chunks of territory…though to be accurate the little colored dots on the map were all they truly controlled, not the mass of space in between. Paul guessed this was due to their need for a very specific, and somewhat rare, set of planetary conditions for them to inhabit, and given that a lot of other races were not happy or capable of living in gas giants they probably didn’t see them as an equal threat to the others.

  That’s what he thought, anyway, until he was studying a race of flying bat-like creatures and saw that the Hycre had a colony on a rocky planet much like Corneria, save that it had no vegetation. The atmosphere was thick, but not of the type they needed to survive, never the less they had infrastructure on the ground, of what type the probe’s data didn’t say, but Paul had the feeling that it was a mining colony, probably going after resources they couldn’t get down in the cores of their gas giants.

  That suggested to him that they were accomplishing through technology what they probably couldn’t do through muscle. In fact, he mentally kicked himself for dismissing their potential strength so quickly. Yes, their technology was far superior to Star Force’s, but just because they were physically…odd…didn’t mean they couldn’t work their way around the problem.

  With that thought in mind Paul started searching through the map for any other terrestrial Hycre colonies, finding a few. Not many, but every now and then one would show up almost at random, but always on an uninhabited world, not only by sentient life forms but also with a lack of plants. It looked as if they wanted absolutely nothing around them on the ground, possibly out of fear, or maybe an aversion to those types of life forms.

  It was impossible to say, he knew, but it was worth thinking about. Despite the fact that they’d tipped them off to the lizards’ bases he didn’t automatically assume the Hycre would be allies. There was a very good possibility of that occurring, and he definitely wanted to pursue that agenda, but he knew they had to prepare for the opposite eventuality, and their helping Star Force could end up being an ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ sort of deal. If they drove the lizards out of this region they could see the Hycre coming after them next.

  There were too many possibilities and not enough data, even with the gem of information floating before Paul. They needed to do their own surveys, but with their jumpships tied up in cargo runs that wasn’t an option. They needed every bit of equipment they could carry in from Sol to have a chance of locking down this system. Until that happened, if it happened, exploring the galaxy was a moot point all around.

  Paul reached for the crystal that would zoom the map back out to full view when a chime sounded. He frowned, thinking he had hit the wrong crystal as his eyes darted over the various pieces half hidden behind the hologram. He shut it down to get a better view, then found one of the spikes on the other side glowing red with the last section flashing off and on.

  When he touched the piece a new hologram jumped into place, this being the familiar geography of the Epsilon Eridani system. It was the same map he’d looked at multiple times over the past weeks, comparing the Hycre map to their own, but now there was a flashing icon in deep space, further in towards the star.

  Paul glanced back at the now clear spike and turned the map off, then touched it again. This time it brought up a section of the database as Paul had expected it to do the first time.

  He shut that off and brought the map section back up, then zoomed in to their system and found the same map again, including the flashing icon.

  “So we can get updates too,” he said, wondering if that was another incoming jumpship. He ballparked the angle in to the star then backtracked to see if there was a nearby system along that path…and sure enough there was, but at some distance. He pulled up that system and saw that it was uninhabited, making him wonder if the other races avoided each other’s star systems or used them as gravitational way stations, just passing through on a whim to bounce off their star in another direction. Star Force couldn’t stop anyone from doing that here, but he wasn’t totally convinced that someone else couldn’t if they tried hard enough.

  If this was another jumpship that meant reinforcements would be incoming…or it might have been the same one that the Hycre were now tagging for them. Either way, he needed to get a scout ship out there to find out.

  Touching his earpiece he cycled through an audial menu until he got to naval control in the main Star Force colony where
he now sat.

  “I need a mouse prepped for interplanetary deployment, full fuel load.”

  3

  October 8, 2264

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  The tiny drone reconnaissance ship drifted toward the set of coordinates that the Hycre had given Star Force at high speed, intent on blowing by the location so as to make it harder to be intercepted by the enemy. Last time they’d sent ships out they’d barely gotten close enough to see the lizard jumpship before they were intercepted by its cruiser escorts, and Paul hadn’t sent the ship all the way out into the system just to get shot down prior to seeing what was actually at the coordinates.

  As usual nothing showed up on the ship’s sensors, but the external cameras were trained on the area specified by the remote pilot back on Corneria so when the ‘mouse’ passed by its target without incident it had a variety of wide field and zoomed image captures that it transmitted off to the nearest unmanned receiving stations strategically placed around the system. There it was recorded and retransmitted through the network back to Corneria with several minutes of lag. Both the original signal and the stronger one were received, with any discrepancies rectified between the two, then the results were shunted down to the command center in the main colony where Paul, Jason, and Greg were waiting.

  “There it is,” Jason commented as the first object in the data stream appeared as a small reflective dot on the visuals.

  “There’s something,” Greg argued. “Is it the jumpship or have they brought something new to play with.”

  “The size fits,” Jason said, doing some quick calculations. “And it looks like it’s exactly in the right place. No movement in 4 days?”

  “Could just be a parking orbit,” Paul noted as the image slowly enlarged. Due to the time lag they couldn’t order a focus of the cameras on that particular spot, because by now the mouse would have already been past its target, so they just had to wait and hope it had gotten some closer pictures.