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  Bhanno didn’t use it much, but when the need arose it was damn useful in a myriad of ways that the Archons had taught them beyond what the V’kit’no’sat had learned over millions of years. It was something the Humans did not possess, yet they figured out how the Voro’nam could use it better than they already were, and they had done the same for every race within Star Force until their own biological limitations blocked their insight, after which they had to wait for one of the native race’s individual to advance to the point where they could carry on the development further.

  All of Star Force’s identity was routed in the Archons, and by creating the Mavericks they had given Archon-level responsibilities to those who were not of their race, if not the name itself. And that was wise, for Bhanno was not an Archon. His body was too different, and in many ways he was superior to them, but their agility and specifically their ability to rotate in place without a tail to drag around gave them some advantages he would never have. Each Maverick race was a bit different, but they all were based on the Archons and extrapolated out from their culture.

  Basically the Voro’nam Mavericks had learned everything they could from the Archons…and were still learning in some cases…then added to it through their own unique perspectives. That meant all Mavericks were slightly not Archons, yet each held their own racial identity as well. The Monarchs held no such distinctions, but that was because their work was that of the mind, not the body, and in commando combat it was all about the body.

  So now Bhanno didn’t resent not being an Archon, for he was something better in some respects, namely his size and his Jar’gu’ta, and he shared the same responsibilities for the empire, though it would always be the Human trailblazers that led the Archons and Mavericks, unless they fell in battle, and he did not want to see even one of them lost.

  They were family now, not outsiders or leaders in legend only. His limited interaction with some of them had only confirmed what he had learned from his lower ranking Archon teachers…for it was the Archons that finished the training of all Mavericks, in order to keep the bonds between them strong and focused on the Human core of the empire. They were all in a race to improve the most, and anyone who wasn’t equally obsessed with such improvement would be left behind rapidly.

  There was an energy around them, in a metaphorical sense, and in the presence of a trailblazer it was elevated even further. Their movements were so smooth and refined, even down to their simple gestures. All redundancy and inefficiency had long been eradicated to the point they almost looked robotic when they didn’t have something to occupy their attention…but when they did, he saw their personalities emerge, and recognized that they were the same as him, just in different bodies.

  Becoming a Maverick out of a Knight race was rare, even rarer than being selected out of the Human population. He’d been told that was because the pattern of identifying those with the ‘knack’ for it was more refined over the years in the familiar races, and those more recently added to the empire were not going to err on the side of inclusion, thus the requirements were more stiff until the Archons finessed the benchmarks for Voro’nam further.

  That meant he hadn’t just been chosen to meet Archon standards, he’d been slightly above that, much like the original trailblazers. Once they had established what an Archon was, they had been able to loosen up requirements in certain areas to pull in people who were borderline and just needed a little kick in the tail to get them going rather than those that hit the ground running immediately. Bhanno was one of the latter, and it gave him an extra sense of pride that had never left him, though such things were of little concern now. He wasn’t an outsider dreaming of reaching the top ranks of Star Force…he was already here and realized the monumental challenge they had accepted in taking on the Hadarak.

  In order to face that challenge, more Wranglers had been needed to control the Uriti minions and not the Uriti themselves. A new division had been created, referred to only as ‘anglers’ in short hand, referencing the fact that the gauntlet technology built into his armor wasn’t configured to communicate with a Uriti, but rather issue orders to their minions…and right now there were getting close to a billion of them in this system.

  There were no Uriti here, no people here other than Bhanno. He was alone in this system, behind enemy lines, and had been here ever since Star Force had deposited a minion factory on this world and moved on. The Voro’nam Maverick had accepted the solitude as he oversaw the growing army of minions and kept them from wrecking the native critters that covered three of the planets in a system so remote that it had never been scouted by the V’kit’no’sat.

  This system was in the 1st ring of the Hadarak expansion zone, with thick corridors of conquered systems bracketing it at a distance and expanding inward. Fighting was occurring in spots all over the rings as Star Force burned Hadarak minions from worlds and left their own behind, then the Hadarak would return to remove them and put them own in their place. It was insanity, but an insanity that was delaying their forward momentum considerably.

  Bhanno wasn’t here for exactly the same reason. This system was far from the corridors and hadn’t seen any Hadarak presence yet, not even a passing courier minion, and the Maverick had plenty of organic sensors spread across stellar orbit to watch for them. It was strange using all organic technology, but it was effective when you knew you were going to lose it and didn’t have to risk people’s lives in the combat.

  The problem was that the Hadarak minions were more effective in combat because they were people and not biological machines…but what the Star Force minions had in their advantage was the advanced Chixzon weapons technology added and the Wrangler leadership where applicable. Some systems had not even one Wrangler in them, for they couldn’t afford to deposit one in every system, so they just left minions behind with orders to grow more and more and fight the Hadarak when they came.

  But not here. Bhanno’s mission was to grow this system into a fortress that could hold off any attack short of a Hadarak itself and to become an exporter of minion forces to surrounding systems. Already there were 18 systems in his little kingdom, of which he was the only person involved. He was avoiding the inhabited systems…at least any that were inhabited by people large enough to pose a threat to the minions and trigger their defense programming. There were some on this planet that could, which was why he remained here to make sure they didn’t accidentally go on a slaughter fest, but in other multi-planet systems he would put seeds down on the uninhabited ones with orders to protect the others…to some degree.

  There was a limitation to how complicated you could make the orders, and there was a lot he couldn’t do with them, but this was the situation Star Force and the allied Triad was faced with. Too many systems and too few ships to defend them when you could potentially face a Hadarak coming your way. If they didn’t have that threat this war would be easy to fight, but without the ability to create fortresses from which to operate out of with impunity, you had to be ready and able to abandon any position, including this system.

  Bhanno had several starships stashed away to use in his escape in case one or more was destroyed, for if a Hadarak came here he couldn’t stay and he knew it, but short of that he was going to make this small area of the first ring a thorn in the Hadarak’s plans for galactic conquest as long as he could, but he knew at some point the surrounding corridors would creep in further and further and choke him out. Thankfully Star Force engine technology was faster than anything the Hadarak had, so as long as he got a little head start he could move through their territory all the way back to V’kit’no’sat space on his own without need for rescue.

  The planet he was on now was actually a nice one, full of lush jungles and rivers. He resisted the urge to name it, knowing that it was going to fall eventually, but he was actually enjoying his time here playing builder and solo scout while the Hadarak arrogantly pushed further out without first devouring the neighboring systems to their prime territory that was
so dense with defenses that even Bhanno and his fast little ships couldn’t get through. It would take an eternity for the Hadarak to button up this region that tightly, and he wondered if the Hadarak would even bother. Were they really going to lay claim to the entire galaxy in that manner, or just torch it all and then return to their prime zone?

  He didn’t know, and probably no one else did either, but out here in the majority of the galaxy, Star Force held the mobility advantage and they were using it to damn good effect with Bhanno and other extreme scouts being able to insert into the holes in the rings to build up entire armies from scratch…but they were cancellation forces only, and it was only a matter of time before Bhanno’s forces came into contact with the Hadarak minions and were destroyed in the biological carnage this war had quickly become famous for.

  Across the planet was a communications grid linked into his armor’s gauntlet systems, so he could monitor everything from wherever he went. Those comm systems were biological as well, and linked from planet to planet and all the way into the star, so when something entered he would know about it as soon as the signal lag elapsed. Every now and then there would be a rogue ship pass by, usually of unknown origin, but today something much larger arrived on a jumpline from the Deep Core side of the galactic plane.

  Bhanno was on one of his daily foot patrols through the jungle when word reached him of a significant mass entering the system, but once he got the first visuals of it he was confused. It was of Hadarak size, but the shape was wrong. It was elongated into a chubby knife blade some 201 miles long but only 47 high. It was a bit wider, at 78 miles, though the outlining Yeg’gor armor was not rough as Hadarak were. There was a glossy band along the edge of the knife, with the rest of the interior looking almost smooth as it was covered with tiny lumps giving it the equivalent texture of carpet.

  That was not how armor was supposed to work, for the more surface area you gave it the quicker weapons could eat into it while spreading out. This configuration would allow it to soak up more energy at a faster rate, but when the point of overload came the surrounding armor couldn’t suck off some of it, meaning that more advanced weapons would do more damage…yet inferior ones would do even less.

  Bhanno ordered all his stellar assets to monitor, and some to reposition, to get as much information as he could on the new contact, not sure if it truly was a Hadarak or not. The galaxy was vast and he had seen some truly weird stuff come through this area already, but the fact that his minion sensor stations were confirming that the contact was covered in Yeg’gor suggested this was some type of Hadarak or some race that had patterned their technology after them like the V’kit’no’sat had.

  But no, for as more information was gathered he was able to confirm it was true living Yeg’gor armor, not a similar artificial copy, and the large telepathic presence of the Hadarak was also registering on the minions. This thing was alive, and while it wasn’t shaped right, Bhanno had the sinking feeling that this was a different kind of Hadarak.

  “Please be a transport ship. A nice, big, fat, helpless transport,” he said to himself as he stood in a creek consumed with the myriad of data being transmitted directly into his mind via his armor. To his eventual relief, the Hadarak didn’t leave the star nor go into it, rather it just orbited around it until it got to another jumpline approximately on the other side as those minion facilities nearest it winked out of existence as it passed.

  Bhanno looked for sign of enemy minions being dropped from the Hadarak, but he couldn’t find any. The Hadarak was just passing through the system, and when it did finally jump out the Maverick counted himself lucky but immediately went to one of his ships and raced in towards the star to where the dead beacons were. He hadn’t seen any weaponsfire coming from the Hadarak, and he truly hoped this version wasn’t built like a Uriti.

  The minions he’d already tasked to check on the dead ones had located the debris…except it wasn’t debris. They were intact but dead, which meant Bhanno was going to need to take a closer look personally.

  When he got there he could find nothing wrong with them from the exterior, yet there wasn’t a trace of activity in them. It wasn’t until more than a day later, after he had to climb out of his ship in his armor and insert a regenerator-like analysis kit that sent nanites throughout the mass, did he realize what had happened.

  The biological hearts within the minion sensor station had all simultaneously stopped pumping. No damage to them was detected, they had all just stopped…and the lack of blood flow to the minion was what had killed it.

  But that shouldn’t have happened, for there were backup systems installed in case that occurred…but those backup systems had not been used and the minion ‘brains’ had been starved to death along with the rest of their tissues. The reserve nutrients were still sitting in their bins ready to be pumped out to sustain the minion while healing occurred in the hearts, but none had been activated.

  Bhanno couldn’t understand it. It was like the entire minion had just shut down. But since it was only a machine and not a person, the Maverick could revive it, and when he did everything functioned normally…well, normal as far as a mostly dead minion was concerned. Entire sections of it had to be cannibalized to regrow others, and the ‘brain’ sections were a total loss. Basically Bhanno had to grow a new minion out of the old, but thanks to the resilient Chixzon design that was a fairly quick process using the original structure.

  The Maverick had already sent a flurry of courier minions off to alert Star Force, as well as more couriers back along the jumpline the new Hadarak had come in on, hoping to get some forewarning if more would be coming, but whatever this was it wasn’t a transport. It had destroyed these minions somehow without laying a mark on them, and the best guess Bhanno had was something the Archons and Mavericks had long feared.

  A Hadarak that had a kill switch for the minions. Star Force had gone over the coding again and again, but they had never found one in the genetics. Yet the Uriti could stop Hadarak minions in their tracts. Maybe this type of Hadarak could just order them dead on command.

  If that was the case then Bhanno’s entire army would be useless…but the Hadarak hadn’t even bothered to notice them. It was heading somewhere else, and looking on the galactic map Bhanno couldn’t guess where. There was nothing of value ahead, so either it was going somewhere in the first ring that made no sense to the Maverick, or it was heading further out and not bothering to travel on the main corridors like the other Hadarak did.

  Then on gut wrenching impulse, Bhanno did an analysis of its entry and exit from the system, finding the limited sensor contact with it at those times indicated a faster rate of deceleration and acceleration than Hadarak normally had.

  A lot faster.

  That meant his couriers might not get to the nearest Star Force outpost first, so he activated one of his other hidden ships and set it on autopilot with a message onboard in addition to all the data he had gathered. The empty ship jumped out of the system on its own, racing to get across the Hadarak expansion zone to the nearest outpost with a proper comm network before this new threat made it to wherever it was heading.

  4

  December 23, 128528

  Epsilon Eridani System (Home One Kingdom)

  Corneria

  “What have you got?” Tennisonne asked Belo’chat as he made his rounds amongst the various sub-projects stemming off the 1st successful line of Ysalamir.

  “A probable solution,” the I’rar’et said, shaking his folded wings momentarily in a gesture that the Mastertech had learned was a sign of excitement.

  “Probable? I said not to use that word unless you were damn sure,” he said, walking around to the far side of the holographic platform and using his pair of anti-grav boots to fly up next to it where the avians would be sitting on perches. He’d found that the boots made things a lot damn easier when dealing with the larger races, and the I’rar’et really didn’t like standing on the ground when they could get their feet l
ocked around something sturdy.

  “I am damn sure,” Belo’chat said, using the English term. “The capacitors will hold a minimum of 78 days before bleed-out begins. I believe our warfleets will be able to make use of weapons that could endure half that time.”

  “Promises, promises,” Tennisonne cautioned, waving his hand and scrolling through the holographic data as Belo’chat and another Pterodactyl assistant watched along with some Zen’zat…who were standing on the floor and having to crane their necks up to see the subject matter. “How small?”

  “1.6 times the mass of a Kafcha, with only a single attachment pod for Zen’zat when remote operation is untenable.”

  “I told you no suicide missions, Vik.”

  “It won’t be unless necessary, but we don’t want to get into a situation where an enemy can jam or hack our own weapons away from us in battle. We need the option rather than wasting far more blood in a losing battle.”

  “There is this thing called retreating, you might want to look into it sometime…” Tennisonne said, falling silent as his eyes narrowed. “Pyretic?”

  “It’s the only way I have found to make them small enough to mass produce.”

  “That’s just a waste, Belo’chat. A one shot Kafcha is too much material waste, let alone one larger…no way.”

  “Yes way,” the V’kit’no’sat confirmed.

  “There is no way the numbers are accurate. You can’t generate that much energy without a relay tube twice as long as the ship.”

  “You can if you bounce it through the structure multiple times before releasing.”