Vargemma Read online

  They’d been hit with a heart attack weapon, now tagged as Lian’no, and too few had been close enough to regenerators. But beyond that, every single living being on the planet was now dead. Since the message had been sent by courier, it hadn’t come immediately after reception, so updates had stacked with it and Morgan could see images of the Earth’s oceans with new land formations visible from orbit…except they weren’t land. They were corpses of whales, fish, octopi, crustaceans, and the myriad of other wildlife on the planet, most of which were now floating dead on the surface.

  On land the dead were not so visible, but they were everywhere. Even down to the ants in the ground. Everything was dead save for a few personnel that had either evacuated the planet before the attack made it around to the far side, or those that had been wearing their armor and were repaired afterwards.

  The casualty lists for Epsilon Eridani were far worse, with the majority of the population in the system having been killed, along with their Ysalamir production facilities. Part of the scientific team working on the anti-Hadarak weapons were dead or mentally incapacitated as well, but the majority of them had survived. They’d been hit with a Lian’no, thankfully, for if their facility had been hit with the same weapon that hit Atlantis they would have been all wiped out as well.

  But it seemed that disintegration weapon, known as a Fruc’zo, had only been used on Atlantis…at least at that discharge level. Morgan had known something like this was possible after seeing the Lurker do it, but the damage inflicted on Atlantis was still jaw dropping. It had taken out the entire city in a matter of seconds, then penetrated all the way through the Earth’s crust to the magma layer, creating an instant super volcano that was still erupting and forming an island where the city once was.

  The ocean would eventually seal it over, and if it wouldn’t Star Force would, but the amount of power the enemy had to put into that one attack was more than every bit of Essence Star Force had accumulated to date in all their Magicite.

  Morgan was scared, for she didn’t know how to fight this and realized how vulnerable Star Force was…but the Essence, it wasn’t unlimited, and the more she thought about it she realized this was an intimidation attack. That’s why they’d gone with such overkill on Atlantis. To send a message that there was nowhere in Star Force that was safe from them.

  To others that would have worked wonders, forcing them to cower away for fear of becoming the next target, but that would have the exact opposite effect on the Archons, and from the timestamp on the alert she saw that Davis had sent it out that same day. It was a call to battle, and a recall order for her, but how many ships she would be bringing with her was left up to her discretion, for they didn’t know yet where the enemy was or how they would be attacking them.

  But the enemy now had a name…Vargemma. Davis’s rundown on them, thanks to info from the Knights of Quenar, said they were basically the Covenant from Halo. A bunch of different races bound together with a common purpose and a fear of the Hadarak. They hid from them to avoid drawing their wrath, though they had the power to kill some of them.

  Morgan ran through the other things Davis had learned, then deduced that her fleet would be of no use in this endeavor, so she ordered the Oso’lon to stay and finish the cleansing of this system while she headed back to the Rim. There was no point in pulling the badly needed combat fleets away from the Hadarak War zone until it was proven they were needed…and from what Davis was saying, there might not actually be that many of these Vargemma.

  But she had to go. That was clear, even if Davis hadn’t sent out the recall order. So Morgan ordered the Captain to get them under way at maximum speed back to the Rim. By the time she got there, hopefully they’d have a few more answers. And maybe a few more dead planets too.

  Davis needed the trailblazers in the Rim, but he wasn’t waiting for them. As soon as he got situated inside a Mach’nel that became his mobile base of operations with a massive escort fleet, he roamed the star lanes while sending out orders…and the empire responded. There weren’t a lot of combat fleets left in the Rim, but he hadn’t made the mistake of sending them all away. Star Force always operated with reserves, and from them massive fleets emerged as coalitions of many factions headed for the known Stargate locations.

  Knowing that Essence weaponry was involved, he made it abundantly clear that no manned ship was to go near them, but Star Force did most of its fighting with drones anyway, so that wasn’t an issue. Hundreds of thousands of drones were knocking on the Vargemma’s doorsteps within weeks of the assault on Earth, and even more in the following months as word spread around the galaxy. The Vargemma were not concentrated in one area, but were likewise spread around the Rim, and Davis had given orders to assault them all.

  If the Vargemma acted as one civilization, then he wasn’t going to bother trying to identify which races had attacked them and which hadn’t. Typical surrender offers went out when the drone fleets arrived at the hidden Stargate stations, then when no response came they opened fire…but with disruption weapons only. They didn’t want to destroy what was there, only to expose it.

  The shield and field disruptors tore through the general area where they knew the Stargates to be located, taking away their cloaks to reveal the stations beneath momentarily…then they disappeared again with an Essence enhancement.

  Davis didn’t go there, but he read the reports as they filtered back to him. The Neo-level Archons on site identified the augment and probed it continuously with no luck. Eventually they fired conventional weapons until they did enough damage to drop the cloak. The return fire from the stations was standard weaponry save for a few Fruc’zo that destroyed drones in single shots…but that didn’t persist. Davis guessed it was an intimidation gesture, but Star Force had so many drones it didn’t matter and they kept attacking without hesitation.

  The Essence attacks stopped and massive breaches were torn into the hull of the stations, into which micro drones were sent in lieu of living troops. Many of those were destroyed before they could send back intelligence, but eventually some got inside and obtained minimal data before Essence signatures were detected leaving the stations…just before they exploded.

  They all did. None would be taken intact, and Davis had information confirming that at least some of the crew stayed behind sacrificing themselves rather than surrender, but two of the stations didn’t completely pop with their Essence-laden destruction. It was surmised that they had depleted their reserves too much previously, for some of the attack forces poked first before bringing in massive waves of drones, and it seemed those stations had expended more trying to scare away the smaller amount of ships.

  Whatever had happened, Star Force now had chunks of the stations more or less intact to analyze, and what they were finding was amazing. Most of their technology had Essence residue in it, indicating that it was designed to operate in conjunction with it…yet not their standard weaponry, oddly. Some of the components were altered in such a way that they maintained an Essence charge that did not appear to dissipate, but no containers were found. Whatever had been holding their reserves was probably at the center of the self-destruction cascade that had petered out in these two stations.

  No fleet of ships showed up to defend any of them. It was like the Vargemma thought if they hid Star Force would go away and forget them, but that was not going to happen. Davis kept waiting for another of his systems to get hit, and six weeks after the first of the Stargate stations fell it happened again.

  The Vargemma emerged in Uriti Preserve #4 and went after a trio of Sivirs there, but the defending fleets managed to keep them alive, though one got hit with some type of Essence acid that ate a chunk out of its body. It wasn’t enough to kill it, but it was horribly painful and the Uriti almost didn’t respond to retreat orders. They wanted to turn and fight…but thankfully they obeyed and survived long enough for the fleet to turn the Vargemma away.

  Davis felt they were trying to hurt Star Force at the most vis
ible ego points they could, and them missing the Uriti must have hurt theirs incredibly. They weren’t going to be able to assault any mobile targets effectively. Not now that Star Force knew something of the threat they posed. He didn’t have any Ysalamiri left to protect, and the Castles wouldn’t be building those components for years to come as they focused on structural work first, but they would become targets later, if and when the Vargemma found out about them.

  They were still secrets within Star Force, more or less, and he didn’t know how good the Vargemma were at intelligence. And if they truly hid most of the time, he wondered how they got any at all. Obviously there were some ships coming and going through the Stargate stations, or had been anyway. He knew he hadn’t got them all shut down, and finding the others would be difficult unless they drew attention to themselves, but a big part of how these bastards operated was still evading him, and would be, until the trailblazers started popping back up on the Rim and heading to the ultra secret rendezvous he had hinted at in his recall order.

  Once they’d had enough time to come back, some of them at least, he ditched his own escort fleet and had them continue moving around the galaxy as if he was still onboard the Mach’nel while he took off in a tiny Valkyrie counting on anonymity for his protection. He took with him all the data they’d accumulated to date and traveled to the Repository System, which officially was called ‘Nephestus’ because they didn’t want anyone else knowing where they’d stashed all their cool stuff.

  The trailblazers used to have stashes all over Earth, and when the V’kit’no’sat invaded they had gotten some of it out prior to the planet falling, then recovered the rest after they took the planet back years later. Their hiding places had been so good the V’kit’no’sat hadn’t found them, mostly, and afterwards they’d quietly moved them off Earth to a system that wouldn’t attract as much attention.

  Davis knew about it, along with less people than he could count on his fingers aside from the trailblazers, and the planet in question was little more than a rock covered with seas of green sand. Unfortunately the green didn’t come from Corovon, but a mostly worthless compound known as Berronickzon. Because of that nobody had bothered to mine it, and it was located far out in the system, so far out it was actually a cold sand world. Nephestus had a small hot planet near the central star that had a Star Force outpost on it for navigational purposes, but other than that the system was uninhabited and off the major trade routes.

  The people in the outpost didn’t know about the outermost planet other than it being off limits along with the rest of the system to outside development, as many systems had been tagged within Star Force’s domain. This was a little corner in the middle of nowhere with watch guards on it that would make sure to report if anyone went nosing around…which nobody ever did.

  Davis’s ship checked in with the outpost without identifying himself, but since it was a Star Force vessel it could travel to the planet or anywhere else in the system without having to explain itself, so he went far out on the periphery and dropped into orbit, looking down on the miles high green sand dunes as he mentally mapped out the position of the primary repository. No beacons were used, so he had to go off memory and get close enough to find the physical markers, and he had to start by taking his best guess…the problem was sand dunes migrated over time, which kept the surface constantly reworking itself.

  All the better to hide a subsurface facility that actually crawled along with them deep underground, but it did so in predictable patterns off the markers…

  “Alright, let’s start…here,” Davis said, inputting his best guess at the coordinates and letting the ship’s autopilot bring them down into the planet’s thin atmosphere. There was enough to breathe, barely, in the trenches between dunes, but go up to the peeks and it was too thin for Humans. It didn’t affect his ship, and soon he was hovering in one of those valleys searching for a marker.

  It would take an intense sensor beam to find one, for they were stealthed and beneath the sand, but they altered the pattern of the dunes above without being obvious about it. Davis flew around for more than an hour before he spotted a little rivulet of sand on the surface giving away the location of an obelisk-like marker beneath, and as soon as the Director flew over top of it his sensors pinged a faint silhouette below.

  From there it was just a matter of searching out the others nearby off a hexagonal pattern and seeing which directions they were pointing. Those were constantly changing and offering very crude datapoints that others would miss, for their movement was so slow to go unnoticed, but those 6 markers gave 6 digits that detailed the current position of the repository as it crawled across the planet.

  It wasn’t here, but rather a third of the way around the horizon. Davis flew there before the crawler had a chance to meander off, and once he got within proximity the faint sensor trace pinged the starfish shape that the primary repository had been designed around.

  “Gotcha,” he said with a smile as he sent the very lengthy recognition signal down to the complex that was more than two miles deep in the sand…then that sand began to move as if a mole was coming up from below. It took a while, better than 10 minutes, for a tube to shoot up into the air, then Davis flew his Valkyrie down through the tube as it retracted behind him while spreading out the sand with a series of shield ‘fins’ to mask its location again.

  When his ship set down in the hangar bay he saw several others of similar size on the deck, but no one was waiting for him when he walked down the boarding ramp. That was typical, for the facility was more than 80 miles wide and had no sensors to tell it what was going on outside. They were blind to the battlemap as well, and nobody would know he was here until he found them and told them himself.

  Davis whistled, hearing the echo of the distant walls in the hangar. It was a ‘small’ hangar by Star Force standards, but it seemed a lot bigger when nobody else was in it. Things had seemed kind of empty ever since Atlantis had been destroyed, but even when he was on the run he was surrounded by people. It had been a long time since he’d been truly alone, and this place was about as alone as anyone could get.

  Which made it the perfect hiding place…as well as reminding him just how big everything out here was. His job required him to work things from afar rather than going into the field and getting a firsthand perspective on it…but not now. The big and strong worlds were the highest potential targets, meaning he had to reverse everything and get back to his roots. One person alone in the galaxy was very hard to find, and after nearly being assassinated he wasn’t going to give the Vargemma or anyone else another chance at him.

  He walked with his booted footsteps echoing all the way up to the far off entrance which opened before him automatically, with no one on the other side.

  Davis kept on walking, letting the emptiness soak in, until he finally caught the attention of the trailblazers that were already here and Kerrie-057 was suddenly standing still in the hallway ahead of him when he rounded the corner.

  He flinched, for he hadn’t been using his Pefbar and he hadn’t felt anyone else’s Pefbar cross him. “How do you do that?”

  “Practice,” she said straight faced. “I’m glad that worthless Knight finally did something right.”

  “As am I,” he said just as evenly, then Kerrie walked up and wrapped him in a warm hug.

  “Give him a kiss for me,” she said deadpan.

  “No…” Davis said as she let go. “Right now being Director is too dangerous. I’m just an Archon until we can reestablish a stronghold.”

  “Likewise. I don’t like letting other people take the hits, but if we don’t know where they’re coming from we can’t risk ourselves being taken out. So don’t sweat it.”

  “Brainstorm anything yet?”

  “Bits and pieces. This is going to be a tough one, because I don’t see how we can avoid losing more people with this fog of war.”

  “If we can’t save them, then we make sure we avenge them.”

&nbs
p; “I’m just glad we don’t have to avenge you,” Kerrie said as she started walking. “Come on. We need your brain cells...”

  4

  July 23, 128536

  Nephestus System (Repository System, Terraxia Kingdom)

  Ittalika

  By the time Paul arrived with the last of the others more than a year had passed since the attack on Earth and in addition to the destruction of the Ysalamir, two more attempts on Uriti had been made by the Vargemma, with one unfortunately being successful enough to cripple Bahamut Zero. Somehow he’d survived what should have been a fatal wound, yet he was regrowing as if he was more plant than living rock.

  His chest now had a cavity in it that would not reform for a very long time. Estimates were in the hundreds of years at minimum, but thankfully his central brain had been missed by the piercing Son’tar ‘blue’ attack that was essentially a coring drill rather than an explosion. One of the Vargemma’s Olopar, which was what they called their starburst-shaped Essence-laden ships, had gotten into decent range of Bahamut and fired a pair of beams that twisted around each other as they traveled like a DNA helix. One was deep blue, the other bright blue, and somehow it acted like an actual drill because destroyed material flowed up the bright blue side and was released behind the Starburst.

  When drones had flown into the beam to try and break it, they had simply bounced off as if it were solid. Paul still couldn’t make out what it actually was, but it had drilled a hole into Bahamut while delivering an IDF field that prevented him from running away. The Son’tar, when finished minutes later, had cored a hole all the way through his central body, but apparently the Vargemma didn’t realize his brain was actually in the base of his neck.