Star Force: Keyholders (Star Force Universe Book 61) Page 3

  When Bob had successfully entered the activation code, the portal sized up the ship being requested for transit and issued an amount of Essence that would be required. Paul used Bob to order the Vargemma ship to dump enough Essence into the portal to satisfy the request, and once completed it opened up with a shimmer crossing the interior of the circle and obscuring the smooth stone depression beneath it.

  A destination prompt came up, with Paul choosing the new Temple ID that had caused the bridge crew to go berserk. When he did the ship began to move without engines as the portal locked onto it with some form of a tractor beam and began to pull it around and into prime alignment.

  I think that did the trick, Paul said telepathically, for both were still invisible in case their presence might send an alarm off ship and ruin their moment of anonymity. The portal is moving us in.

  Where are we going?

  Beta, I hope. We’ve got enough Essence onboard for several trips if I’m wrong.

  Why not Alpha?

  I’m not sure which is Alpha, but even if Bob knows it doesn’t matter. We’re bringing a fleet with us, and to do that we have to get to Beta.

  You have a plan?

  If this works, yes, he said as they were pulled into the center of the portal but still clear of the shimmering pool. They were steadied in place, then the front of the ship dipped down and touched the energy barrier, sinking in as the start of an Essence bubble began to form around them. Once they got considerably far in, though not entirely half way, the bubble snap formed around the rest of the ship and they disappeared from view.

  The inner workings of the Temple were now visible in Essence form, with numerous flowers around the perimeter and some on the interior. They were stuck on one of them, then several moments later they were thrown at amazing speed off it and into the vastness beyond as the massive Temple behind them shrank very quickly.

  Paul sighed, releasing his cloaking device and appearing on the bridge as he rendered Bob unconscious with a thought. Sara did likewise, with everyone else dropping to the floor as she appeared and peeled back her helmet, smelling the odd scent of the Dotaramin that reminded her of cinnamon.

  “Well that worked beautifully. What’s the catch?” she asked.

  “Don’t know yet, but at least we’ve got our own ride now. Anyone alerted?”

  “Not that I can tell. We might be able to let them ride as they are. How long do you think this jump will take?”

  “If it’s like the Bridge, not long. If it’s less efficient, then we could be looking at days. We can take turns running laps until then.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad we’re not stuck outside this time. What are we going to do with them?” she said, indicating the sleeping ones draped all over the bridge.

  “Keep them napping for a few hours. If this takes longer than that we’ll improvise some holding cells. Or maybe this ship has some already.”

  “I doubt it, with how revered this place is. They wouldn’t think of someone breaking a rule here.”

  “Maybe so,” Paul said, stretching his arms behind his back. “I’m going to do some system hacking from here, and I’ve got plenty of helpers if I run into trouble. Feel free to explore.”

  “Alright, but remember that these guys can kill you with one Essence shot if you’re not paying attention. Don’t get screen lock.”

  “Please,” Paul scoffed. He could fly millions of ships simultaneously and still have enough mental focus left over to watch 100 different movies simultaneously. He wasn’t going to get distracted picking through code.

  “It happened to Roger,” Sara said innocently.

  “I’m not Roger.”

  “I know,” she said with a wink. “Just don’t want to lose you to one of these losers if they wake up early. So watch your back.”

  “Ditto,” Paul said as she left the bridge and he touched a hand to one of the interface ports in the main console. His armor melted into it and made the necessary connections. After that he was in virtual mode hacking along with his armor’s automated systems while he kept plenty of focus on the silent bridge and those sleeping there, along with monitoring the doors and all the visible consoles just in case an alert went up. He released a fly-sized bit of armor from his shoulder that flew up to the ceiling, with the microdrone feeding him images of the consoles he couldn’t see from his standing position. Nothing here was going to catch him off-guard. The only question mark was their destination. He was fairly confident of his deduction, but there was no way to know for sure until they arrived and saw for themselves.

  When Count Gorva saw one of Beta Temple’s portals activate he assumed it was another Caretaker ship coming in. A lot had been arriving and leaving since Star Force had inhabited the Temple, bringing in resources to get the giant complex up and running at full power. They were nowhere close to that yet, but the primary region where they’d set up camp was now fully defrosted along with two more, though most of the Temple was still a giant inverted ice cream cone.

  But the ship that came through was not Caretaker, it was Vargemma, and that immediately put every Star Force outpost and set of armor on alert as the battlemap spread the alarm within a fraction of a second to those closest, and with a reasonably short lag to those further away. It took almost a minute before the Vargemma ship made contact with them on a Star Force frequency, with the call being routed to Gorva rather than the trailblazers in the Temple, for none of them appeared to be available at the moment…which was typical. They were probably training, eating, or fiddling with Caretaker technology. If something was important enough they didn’t mind being interrupted, but the Count was more than capable of taking a comm from the enemy, so he decided to let them get involved when they liked and deal with this himself.

  “Hi there,” Sara said with a smile as her image appeared from the Vargemma bridge, with Paul in the background waving. “Mind if we park this thing here?”

  Gorva let loose a deep belly laugh, one full of relief and admiration. “I had begun to worry about you two. Everyone else came back.”

  “We found a Gamma Temple and took some vacation. Paul figured out how to use the portals, but our skills aren’t good enough yet to operate the equipment. Going to need some long practice sessions, but our friends here did the dialing for us.”

  “They’re assisting you?” Gorva asked incredulously.

  “They have no resistance to Ikrid, so we’re puppeteering. Do you mind calling off the swat teams? We need this ship intact and I don’t feel like getting blown up.”

  “Why aren’t we seeing your battlemap ID sigs?”

  “The hull of this ship blocks them. We’re hacking through the Vargemma comm systems, and Paul didn’t want to ruin the surprise either.”

  “Can you access the battlemap?”

  “We didn’t bother to hack that much,” Sara said, frowning. “What’s happened?”

  “A lot. We’re at lethal war with the Vargemma and the Caretakers. Every Star Force unit in Alpha Temple has been tagged for eradication whether or not they’re involved in the fighting. Apparently word hasn’t reached here yet, but if it does we’re going to have to fight a massive amount of Caretaker troops, ships, and fixed emplacements. We’ve got ambush sites set up already, so when it does happen we can neutralize a lot of it, but there’s no way to keep them from making more units. Alpha is a mess and we’re preparing for it here. Did you have any problem in Gamma Temple?”

  Sara shook her head. “We’ve been getting food and supplies from the Caretakers the entire time. Last was six days ago. They didn’t regard us as hostile at all.”

  “Then maybe it is local to Alpha Temple. I certainly hope so.”

  “How long ago did this start?”

  “Six months, give or take.”

  “Their comm system is faster than that,” Paul said from the background. “There’s no way they wouldn’t know. The eradication order has to be local.”

  “Please let that be the case. Can you get reinforcements
to Alpha, or only travel in the Vargemma ship?”

  “We can use this one to let a convoy through if we have enough Essence onboard. We don’t, so we’ll have to use some of our Magicite. Please tell me you’ve got a spacial tap line set up?” Paul all but begged.

  “We finally have a fleet outside, but we haven’t breached the Temple exterior yet. They only arrived two weeks ago with a handful of ships to set up the beginning of a Grav Jump terminal. There’s too little native gravity to bring in much of anything without it.”

  “Better than nothing,” Paul said, shrugging.

  “Do you have enough Paladin ships to make a difference?” Sara asked.

  “Enough to help, not enough to wage a war. We hadn’t been expecting one, but we can certainly start spamming if you have a way to get them there.”

  “We need special facilities built for our prisoners. We can’t let them kill themselves or we lose their keycards. The Temple network only allows passage through the portals to a Temple that you’ve already been to. That’s why the Vargemma have never been here, and why they freaked out when a new one show up on the portal option list because we were onboard. That’s how we were able to get here.”

  “So they know Beta exists?”

  Sara shook her head. “No, we stopped them from transmitting it out. The bridge crew knows, and the rest of the passengers don’t even realize we’ve taken control of the ship…until they look out the virtual windows and see all this ice. We need babysitters, now,” she emphasized.

  “On it,” the Calavari said with a glance at one of his staff, who immediately got to work on the problem.

  “Are we winning in Alpha?”

  “More or less. Steve and Cora were able to use a Caretaker facility to let ships enter from the outside, but it didn’t last. The Caretakers retook the facility rather than block access, but their defenses are too strong to get through, so the fleet that entered is all they got. Three Avengers and Thrawn got through, some of the Knights of Quenar and others. Enough to win the short fight, but the Caretakers keep making more and we have no way to resupply the Avengers with Essence short of carrying it there in backpacks the way you went out.”

  “Has someone done that?” Sara said with a cringe.

  “No, because we can’t condense it down enough to be worth more than a few shots, but 9 more of your kind left to follow the route that Steve and Cora took so they could get there and assist. The rest are here or out in the hidden network doing stuff. The Caretakers have a lot more missions than overseeing the Temples, some of which are decidedly darkside.”

  “Such as?”

  “Jason went out hunting the hunters. You can catch up on the full details, but the Caretakers are hunting mini-Hadarak, or at least other spacefaring beasts, and harvesting them at special facilities. They’re not using Reapers, but we’ve found a lot of hidden shipyards with them and some other nasty surprises.”

  “Find any people?” Sara asked.

  “No,” the Count said, his eye ridges furrowing. “Did you?”

  “Yeah, a lot of them in popsicle mode getting stashed into a black hole base, we assume. We didn’t want to hitch a ride down there, but the Caretakers are using their network to move races we’ve never seen before from somewhere. Not our major concern at the moment, but it needs looked into.”

  “Indeed, as are several other things your kind found, but the portals take priority. How long do you think it will take to learn this ability?”

  “Weeks, maybe months,” Paul answered. “I know what to do now, I just don’t have the dexterity yet. My Essence touch is too clumsy. And we can only go to Gamma Temple. We need the crew to act as passcodes to get to the others that they’ve been to, and the bridge crew have been to most of them. They travel around to get the experience, because if everyone who has been elsewhere dies they lose the ability to travel between Temples.”

  “How did the first ones obtain it then?”

  “They don’t know. It seems to be lost to time. We also learned that a lot of information is withheld from the Vargemma populations. Only the extreme higher ups seem to know what’s going on, and as highly placed as the bridge crew is on this very exclusive vessel, they’re only allowed to know so much.”

  “What makes the vessel special?”

  “It’s designed for travel back and forth between Temples. I’m assuming an attack fleet will travel with it to Alpha, using it as the pass card. These type of vessels are regarded as amongst the holiest ships the Vargemma have, and the religion aspect is a lot worse than we thought from Alpha. Some of these races are so decrepit they don’t understand what the Temple is, and I think their leaders want to keep it that way.”

  “Essence farming?”

  “That and a lot more,” Sara added. “We don’t know enough, but there’s some major games being played within the Vargemma, with the promise of bringing the Founders back one day as the central theme, true or otherwise. How have the Caretakers reacted to them in Alpha?”

  “Killed many, then let the others off the hook after they backed off. They forced a lethal confrontation to deny us the control room, which we couldn’t allow. They let their offenders be killed, and we obviously did not. Hence we’re deemed more the threat than the Vargemma.”

  “Stupid machines,” Paul mumbled.

  “Can we hold out there indefinitely or are we on the clock?”

  “Thrawn can hold out indefinitely, but we do not control the Temple anymore. They’ve had to go underground for the most part, though we still have partial naval superiority, but not much Essence to wage a big fight with if they challenge us. They need reinforcements, if only Essence Tankers.”

  “Get that spacial tap and I’ll do far more than that,” Paul said with a touch of eagerness.

  “We need the full fleet, Count. I’m assuming you haven’t found a way to let the exterior ships in without blowing a hole in the outer shell?” Sara asked.

  “No. All Essence engine-equipped ships are at Alpha. There was no need to try to bring them here. And we’re so far away from Star Force territory that we’re having to set up a logistics chain with defense outposts. Some of the locals have tried poaching our ships as they passed through.”

  “Who?” Sara demanded.

  “Two we’ve never seen, along with a very ragged Sarquori raider fleet,” Dorva said, referencing one of the original Rim Consortium members that later required conquering by Star Force in a rather one-sided war, but they’d never surrendered and some remnants had escaped into the galaxy. Their technology was decent, and over the past millennia they’d tried taking down Star Force ships whenever they could, and succeeded a few times when they caught one alone with overwhelming numbers. Always cargo ships or transports, never a warship.

  “Those bastards,” Sara sneered.

  “The new route is being secured, but that is also delaying the shipments necessary to build the grav jump link. The ships that have already arrived have done so the long, slow way. We can send more like that if needed?”

  “No,” Paul said. “We need far more than can come that way. I’m not just going to Alpha. I’m going to every Temple in their network and taking away their ability to strike at our worlds.”

  “Wait,” Gorva said, catching onto something he’d missed. “You know where they all are or are you trusting the Temples to take you there?”

  “We now have a full map of all Temples and their locations within the galaxy,” Paul said confidently. “This ship has navigation data that is denied to the rest of their fleets. We know where they are, how many there are, and roughly how many Vargemma are in each Temple.”

  “And how many are there?”

  “A lot more than any of us estimated,” Sara answered. “2934. But they’re trapped inside the Temples with only the Keyholders able to move between them. They can jump in and out to the surrounding systems, but they can’t reinforce each other through the Temple network without this type of ship letting them through. If we take out thes
e, then we can assault each Temple in sequence without having to fight the entire Vargemma fleet coming through in wave after wave of reinforcements.”

  “Very few Vargemma are allowed to travel between Temples,” Paul explained. “So we’ve found their Achilles heel. Kill or capture the Keyholders, and we force them to move between Temples on normal spacelanes where we have the advantage. If they refuse to come out, we go in and wear them down with our unending reinforcements. But we have to have access for the full fleet to come through Beta. Light a fire under their butts and rush that tap. As soon as it gets fully operational, the Vargemma are going to lose possession of the Temple network and we’re going to stop their attacks on our worlds…”

  4

  February 6, 128550

  Unexplored Frontier

  Caretaker Hidden Network Node 18

  Jason-025 laid on his chest in the vacuum of space with his left hand exposed to the surface of one of the ‘space whales’ he had rescued. It wasn’t unharmed, and there were the dead hulks of several others nearby, but this one was still clinging to life and he was doing what he could to save it. He needed skin to skin contact, for his Regenerator wasn’t suited for something a half mile long, and only his Haemra and Dar’dax were allowing him to help patch the scared and angry monster back together.

  The Caretakers hadn’t even bothered to kill the space whales before they started cutting them up, and every single drone he’d come across he’d happily blasted into oblivion. The Founders who set up this place, while extremely advanced, were sick as hell. He’d hoped they’d risen above such evil as they’d advanced, but apparently not. The trailblazer didn’t understand how people could make improvements in one area and go the exact opposite direction in others. Stupid Humans on old Earth boiling lobsters alive was bad enough, but they were pretty much clueless, amoral oafs. Someone who had the knowledge to build the Temples should be able to see that this was wrong.