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  It was its superior that Kara was interested in, and the librarian gave her not one, but three others, two of which were on planet. Images were fuzzy, but she got the location of one of them on the lizard’s mental map of the city, giving her another building to get to.

  Not wanting to overstay her welcome, she let go of the librarian and jumped/flew up to the second level, heading back through that level to a maintenance shaft that led to the service area directly underneath the roof, distracting a few minds along the way. When she got back outside she ran across the rooftop to the edge and jumped across the street, angling up to the wall of a much larger building, this one shaped like a teepee.

  Kara hit the side and clung to it, then flew up the side keeping her body pressed as close to the building side as possible to reduce her silhouette until she reached the peak. It had no entrance, but a dome-like cap that glowed orange that she sat down upon, making her armor go reflective so she blended in with the massive light as she looked out over the city, trying to spot her next target.

  Star Force cities had buildings of various size, but none clustered together in the center like the nations of Earth used to have. This lizard city seemed like a throwback, with the tallest buildings all located towards the center, including three massive ones that stood more than twice as tall as the others.

  Those weren’t where the librarian had unwittingly directed her. Instead, the location it’d tagged was a massive building alongside those, but only 1/3rd the height. It was a fat teepee that dwarfed the one she now sat upon, but looked small given how far away on the horizon it was. She guessed it was at least 20 kilometers away, and her armor sensed her mental question and popped up a rangefinder in V’kit’no’sat measurement units, which she mentally translated into approximately 42 kilometers.

  Kara sighed. She’d wanted to probe a big lizard city, and that’s just what she’d got. Resigning herself to a lot of indirect building hopping she eyed her next target, quashing the urge to just fly directly over there. She didn’t want to tip off the lizards to her presence, and this close in it would be unlikely that their sensors couldn’t detect her if she got up into the air…and it would be almost impossible to avoid being visibly spotted if she flew low over the streets.

  She really hoped she wasn’t wasting her time, but so far no troops had been whistled up to come after her and she didn’t want to risk squandering whatever opportunity she had, so she slid off the top of the building, switching her armor back over into null black as she fell…then kicked off the side of the wall and crossed to another building top, coming down in a crouch as she looked around both with her eyes, her armor’s sensors, and her psionics.

  No one was on this rooftop, despite the various protrusions sticking up that made her feel like she was standing inside a giant, inverted ice cube tray.

  “One down, 50,000 to go,” she said, working her way over to the opposite side of the roof and picking out her next target, feeling for all the world like she was playing Frogger.

  Wanting only to travel in the dark, it took three Star Force days and one and a half night sessions for her to make her way across to city center in zigzag fashion, camping out inside the buildings during daylight and catching a bit of sleep when she could, but she was reluctant to completely nod off, for she wanted to keep a watch on any nearby minds that came within her proximity.

  Kara then found herself clinging to the outside of her target spire in the cover of night looking for a way inside. There was no roof, but only a lighted dome, meaning she had to either find or make an entrance…and it was looking like it was going to be the latter, unless she wanted to go down to the surface and try the front door.

  After scouting around she finally decided to go in through one of the windows, but finding a room without occupants was difficult and took her the better part of an hour to locate, with her knowing that it might not stay unoccupied for long.

  Looking like a Garfield car toy, she stuck to the outside of the triangular window and used her Dre’mo’don to melt through the surface, carving a wobbly circle and pushing the plug inside as it clung to her right palm. She crawled through and dropped to the ground on her head, rolling out into a somersault to bring herself back up to her feet.

  She set the glass plug down on the floor just inside where she’d cut it, not sure what the lizards would make of it when they saw it but having little other choice. She needed to find this higher level lizard and to do that she had to get inside the building.

  Kara crossed the small room, hopping over some sort of bench/chairs to get to the door, outside of which she felt several minds nearby, all of which were standard lizards. She accessed one of them and pulled what situational information she could, getting the basic layout of this level and those that that individual frequented…then it passed out of her Ikrid range and she tried another, and another, and another, picking up additional data and piecing together what she needed to know.

  The off limits region of the building was only a few levels up, and having learned of secure check points inside, Kara decided to go back out through the window and climb up. When she did she couldn’t find a room without occupants, though she went the entire way around the spire looking for one. Settling on making some waves, she picked one and systematically picked off the minds inside, rendering them unconscious even as the others sprang up in panic and alarm.

  She got to them before they could signal for help, she hoped, then climbed up onto the window and cut her way inside. All of the 9 lizards were librarian variants, and she pried the closest one up off a data console and set it back in its chair, delving into its mind and pulling out the location of its boss.

  With a clear target set one level down on the other side of the building Kara set off through the hallways, distracting and blanking the minds of those she couldn’t otherwise slip past, hoping they didn’t have internal camera surveillance…or at least if they did that they weren’t actively monitoring it.

  Boldly walking down some of the hallways that she had no choice but to go down, Kara worked her way over to an altogether separate complex that appeared to be a mix of command center and residential…all to serve the lizard variant that inhabited it.

  Kara had to take a group of lizards down with a Fornax sphere when she entered one of the control nexuses, then she picked off a few minds, rendering them unconscious before Fornaxing the others again as she worked through them a few at a time. When she was finished she crossed over their unconscious bodies and headed for the one mind she sensed nearby that was slightly different from the others, entering a small elevator and moving up to a living center larger than any quarters she’d ever seen, Star Force or otherwise.

  Inside she disabled a pair of guards and six attendants, then telekinetically yanked the comm device out of the larger lizard’s hand as it pulled the device from beneath its dark green robe.

  Kara then hit it with a Fornax blast, taking the 7 foot tall lizard down to its knees before worming her way into its mind and sending it into sleep mode.

  It slumped over, with its thick tail sticking up underneath its robe from the face plant it was doing. It was by far the largest she’d ever seen or heard about, literally dwarfing the maulers they used for hand to hand combat. Why their leaders were bigger she didn’t know, but she was glad Star Force wasn’t having to face down these in the field, for while they stood as tall as Knights, she guessed they outmassed them by 50% or more, especially with that muscular tail.

  “I don’t have much time, big boy,” she said, peeling back the armor from her hands and placing her fingertips on its brutishly wide head, “so let’s see what you know.”

  6

  The structure of the lizard’s mind surprised Kara, for it was far more advanced than the others, not just in processing power but in complexity, and after only a cursory look through its recent memories she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the variant of ‘Mastermind’ that Paul had speculated to be operating on Atlantica.
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  Like the trailblazers, this lizard was tasked with overarching strategy and troubleshooting, leaving administrators to handle repetitive and mundane oversight duties. This one in particular was overseeing the infrastructure expansion on this city along with dozens of others on the planet, escalating up to what it labeled as Tier 9. Information on that was hard to retrieve, for it was buried deep within its mind, in such a way as it was considered common knowledge and didn’t need to be spelled out in cognitive thought.

  From what she could pull from it, Tier 9 was another leveling up of the lizard infrastructure of not just this planet, but this star system. Once reached, it would give them more capabilities…capabilities that this mastermind needed to extend the dominion of the lizards in this section of the galaxy.

  That meant this guy wasn’t just in charge of this system, but multiple ones. Meaning Kara had definitely found one of their big guns.

  She followed memory to memory, unable to ‘search’ for specific information. It was like bringing up the most recent web page the individual had been to, then following the links on that page to other pages, then following more links from there. It was an indirect way of sifting through memories, but the only one available to her short of bringing the lizard partially back to consciousness and interrogating it with questions intended to jog specific memories.

  Kara didn’t feel like going that route, so she just kept searching, following any connected memories that seemed pertinent. It took her a while to get used to the way this lizard categorized data, but once she did she was able to jump from ‘page’ to ‘page’ rather quickly, allowing her to soak up a wealth of data, tricky as it was given that it was all stored in visual, audial, or language formats…and her knowledge of the lizard language wasn’t that great.

  Her armor had a translation program that the lizard language had been uploaded into, so she could hear what they were saying around her without having to try and think through the translation herself. She could even speak it back to them, allowing the armor to synthesize the appropriate sounds and pitches that her own voice had trouble with, but in this mental digging it was completely unhelpful, for it couldn’t connect to the lizard’s mind, only hers, and asking for a translation of individual words was tedious…so Kara did the best she could with her own knowledge of their language and pulled on visual memories as much as she could.

  Numbers were much easier, especially when it came to strength assessments. This lizard had an enormous number of ships under its command, spread out across 28 star systems and 78 inhabited planets Tier 4 or higher. Not just cruisers, which seemed to be the lizards’ preferred ‘do it all’ starship, but battleships, dreadnaughts, carriers, assault pillars, and invokers…all of which took higher tiered colonies to produce.

  The last two versions were new to Star Force, and Kara dug into the memories of them deeply, discovering that the ‘assault pillars,’ which was her best translation of the lizard terms, were massive siege weapons, one of which could utterly rip apart a seda with a single shot from range. That scared Kara instantly, knowing how much Paul and the others relied on the sedas as strongpoints in orbit. She had to get this intel back to him as soon as possible so he could upgrade their defenses, otherwise they could run right over Atlantica’s defenses with ease…or even Namek’s.

  So why hadn’t they? Kara started to get the sense that the lizards had only been playing with the Humans so far, or the Alliance for that matter, because these assault pillars had never been mentioned in any of the tactical analysis briefs she’d read. Nor the invokers, which operated like a gigantic mobile battle station that used area of effect weapons against attacking fleets.

  Kara didn’t understand that straight off so she delved deeper, horrified by the tactical clarity that the lizard’s mind then provided. The invoker looked like a huge black spider, with arm-like pylons jutting out at numerous angles. They ‘invoked’ what looked like a space storm, with energy cascades similar to lightning stretching out into nearby fleets and savaging them with a single discharge. One memory she pulled showed a H’kar fleet engaging one of them with upwards of 1000 warships and being torn asunder within minutes.

  A chill ran down Kara’s spine, but she pressed further. She needed this intel badly, no matter how much it creeped her out. These invokers were fleet killers, and judging by the approximate size were bigger than a seda. She got the sense that they weren’t easy to build, but rather were used like chess pieces on the galactic playing board, reserved for the truly large engagements and densely defended worlds. Apparently the Alliance didn’t rate that high on the lizards’ enemy list, but the H’kar did…that was something the Alliance had told them from day one, along with the fact that once they were done killing the H’kar they’d turn their full attention on the Alliance.

  That was before the Nestafar had backstabbed them and made an Alliance victory even less likely…but with technology like this?

  Kara knew what Star Force had to do…they had to get to the invokers first and take them down before they could be deployed against them. To do that meant excessive trickery, and she was sure Paul would come up with something. If not, she might have to go in alone and try to mess one up from the inside.

  But that could wait till later. She didn’t know how much time she was going to have with this one so she didn’t want to waste what she did have speculating. Kara searched for more high level tech, coming up with a slew of different ship variants, some combat capable but most were mission specific, such as dedicated mining vessels, couriers, and whatnot. It was their infrastructure tech that blew her away, with so many ground-based weapon systems that she literally blushed from embarrassment at having thought Star Force might one day make an excursion into the lizards’ home worlds and knock them out of contention before they could destroy the Alliance.

  It was the Tiers…it was all about the Tiers. Each level up they progressed they opened up more tech options, meaning the longer you left a lizard world alone the more powerful it would become.

  As soon as that thought hit Kara’s mind it triggered a strategic memory within the lizard, and a galactic battle plan emerged like a mental map…and she suddenly realized what the lizards were doing.

  “Oh shit,” she whispered, realizing how much trouble they were in. The lizards weren’t aggressive brutes…or, well, they were, but that wasn’t what was driving them to expand. They were builders, engaging in frontier wars while they strengthened their core worlds. Their entire fight against the Alliance was to keep them preoccupied, which was why they were sending lower tech forces out to face them.

  If they lost, they’d gain information on the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, then send another assault force to experiment with modifications. The fighting would keep the enemy on the enemy’s turf, not the lizards…and the lizards had so many midrange worlds surrounding their core that even if the enemy pressed in they’d have star system after star system to hack their way through to get to the prime lizard defenses.

  And the lizards were adding midrange worlds. What was once frontier, if left unchecked, would grow new lizard colonies. Those colonies would push out, planting outposts and probing the surrounding systems as a distraction of their own while they advanced to the next Tier, adding yet another line of defense to the overall lizard empire.

  If the lizards won worlds in the frontier wars, so much the better, but either way they gained time to strengthen and grow their core…and it was a strategy that they’d been employing for millennia, going all the way back to their original homeworld when they had to fight against three other races across 5 continents.

  The lizard’s mind flashed back to those stories, seeming to cement the strategy into the very fabric of their race. They’d only had one variant back then, one that they didn’t even use now. All the others had been genetically engineered over time as needed, with the aquatics version being the most recent addition.

  Following that thread Kara pulled the identity of this lizard’s s
uperior, discovering that it wasn’t one that was grown. Almost as soon as she made that realization the mastermind’s memories linked all the way back to its beginning and Kara could see the flash of light as its development cocoon was opened to air and it stepped out into the cold fully mature, driven by genetic knowledge and a singular sense of purpose as it worked its way through basic orientation drills and exercises, then within only a few weeks it was given control over this world’s strategic workings, learning and growing along with the colony.

  But now it wasn’t in full control, for a higher ranking lizard had been brought in…not grown, but brought in from the lizard core. It was one of the ruling brood that, unlike the rest of the lizards, was part of a bloodline. Kara loosely translated its title as ‘templar’ and dug into the mastermind’s assessment of the one on Albo.

  It was not the intellectual equal of the mastermind, and the lizard knew this, but it did serve a purpose…a very important purpose. Whereas mastermind had been grown on this world, never having seen the core worlds or anything else of the lizard empire, the templars were the glue that held their vast interstellar empire together. Like Star Force’s Archons, the templars were all family, and viewed each other as such…not as competition.

  That was key, Kara knew, for otherwise it would have been very easy for one region or system to break off and go rogue, given the travel times and comm lag between one part of their empire and another. All the genetically grown lizards had a purpose in serving the mission needs of the local region, while the templars functioned as their link to the commonality, focusing on empire-wide concerns.

  The templar here had a purpose, as did the mastermind, and ironically there was no clash between them. Sometimes the templar would need resources to be dispatched back to the core, which the mastermind would supply, or specific systems to take, guard, or abandon…all according to the overall strategy of the empire, which the ruling brood kept to themselves. The masterminds were the warmasters, and the templars were the ones who moved them around the galactic chess board assigning missions, leaving the genetic constructs free to micromanage as they saw fit, for the templars knew they were not as brilliant as those they commanded, and kept to their designated role within lizard society.