Star Force: Resurrection (SF84) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  That was about all their sensors could tell them, for the outer crust of the planet was still solid rock. He saw the water and could think of only a few possibilities, then found Riona’s presence within the battlemap network and sent her a direct question through the mind-linked computer systems.

  Thoughts?

  They probably hollowed out the planet mining then repurposed it for habitation. The water could be storage reserves or maybe living space for a pocket of their aquatic variants.

  They can breathe air too, Paul pointed out. This may be some sort of training facility.

  Lizard challenges?

  Maybe. They have to figure out what the hell they’re doing somewhere to develop the genetic memories, and I doubt they have that many veteran survivors to pull information from. Everything they’ve built seems to be localized, so if they do have a training zone, or maybe a full-fledged experimental planet, it would make sense.

  You mean having lizards fight each other to study new tactics?

  Paul cringed. No, and I really hope you’re wrong about that. I was thinking more along the lines of prototype testing. Their aquatics variants are latter editions, so where did they develop and refine their biological abilities?

  There are plenty of lizard planets with oceans on them. You want to go down and have a look?

  Any reason I shouldn’t?

  They might blow up the planet.

  We’ll be careful. Wanna come with?

  Normally I’d say yes, but you’ll feel better if I’m up here running things so you can go explore. If the lizards have secrets they want hidden from us, better to go find them before they have a chance to destroy them.

  Point taken, Paul agreed. Bring as many ships down as needed for an intense scan. Find me someplace to knock.

  Will do. How many are you taking?

  I think 20 ought to do it.

  For an entire planet?

  For a scouting mission. I’ll call in reserves if needed, but I don’t think there’s any reason to wait for the troop ships to get here.

  Have fun storming the castle.

  Paul laughed, but that didn’t transmit through the system.

  As you wish, he answered in kind before releasing his hold on the control sphere and backing out of the nexus. With a few words to the bridge crew, he left the ship in their hands and his fleet in Riona’s as they continued their more or less mundane orbital sweeping activities and headed off into the ship to armor up and grab a team of Archons from the ship’s crew and the limited ground troops contained within the central plug of the ship, though the TF wouldn’t be needed today.

  When Paul got into a dropship with 19 other Archons and set off from the command ship, Riona already had him a target and a handful of drones ready to escort them down. Unlike on other worlds, this one wasn’t defended at all. The now destroyed battlestations had been all the obvious weaponry either the worlds of Hemratik and Hegrasil had to their name, hence the exhaustive look for concealed emplacements or machinery that could be coopted into explosive use.

  There were other drones literally hovering hundreds of meters off the airless surface of this world, pulling detailed scans down inside the planet looking for things that went boom or just trying to give him a localized schematic of the facilities they contained. On the surface there were structures, but only at a handful of sites, one of which was still getting an up close look by several drone corvettes and one big cruiser.

  Paul’s dropship slid down between them to a docking facility that had checked out, but the Archons didn’t try to blast in the hangar doors or hack their way into the system. Rather they set down on the rocky ground nearby and the 20 of them left the dropship at a run across the airless surface. Paul led the way while half the others carried cargo with them.

  As soon as they left, the dropship took off leaving the Archons running in their assorted colors of armor across a couple hundred meters of surface and up to the wall of one of the buildings that had no surface entrance. There they set up their equipment, cutting through the flimsy yet thick building material and installing a temporary airlock of their own make, through which they all entered the lizard building and got their armor out of airless mode and back to breathing the local interior atmosphere.

  There were no lizards nearby. No troops waiting for them to fight through. In fact there were no minds within detection range, which seemed odd given that this facility was only some 19 miles wide on the surface and Paul could sense a decent fraction of that distance. Undeterred by the emptiness, the Archons quickly made their way through what felt like a ghost town and over to the hangar facility that they had bypassed and commandeered it. They placed a local hack into the system via a small transmitter device that they were able to then link to the ships above, allowing Star Force to send in dropships at any time without having to blast their way through the bay doors.

  Paul opened them experimentally, seeing that they functioned and the energy fields holding in the atmosphere were working properly, then he closed them again just in case there was a power failure…the kind that could happen when Archons got to shooting things and the lizards went about blowing themselves up in the process.

  After less than a minute Riona’s voice entered his helmet.

  “Paul, we got a schematic from their computer. There’s a single shaft running from your location to the planet’s interior,” she said as an updated map file was sent to his HUD.

  “Any idea why there’s no one around?”

  “Mothball protocols are showing. Whatever they used this place for in the past, it’s no longer relevant. And there’s no computer link to the planet core.”

  “Old mining base?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Alright. If we lose comms expect a check-in within 48 hours. If you don’t hear from us send in a retrieval team. If these guys can shut down the lifts we’ll need you to get them back working again.”

  “48, check.”

  “Orbit still quiet?”

  “As a tomb. Our other operations are progressing normally and I’m not picking up any alerts from the other fleets. You’re good to go exploring.”

  “Later,” he said, cutting the comm and leading the Archon team across the empty complex to the lift shafts that ran down deep inside the planet. They were all located at the same place, but there were hundreds of individual lifts clustered together like a fiber optic bundle, save for each little line was the width of a several dropships. There were no smaller ones to be found, so his team walked out onto one of the football field-sized chambers obviously meant for bulk cargo transfers and began to ride it down using the small cupola attached to the side that had operating controls.

  The entire chamber was self-contained, so when they began moving an energy field snapped over the open side of the big box as the lift tunnel wall replaced the view of the facility interior and quickly began flashing by as the lift gained speed. It took them more than an hour to make it to the bottom of the route, with the giant car slowing gradually and the first lizard minds popping up on the periphery of Paul’s senses.

  “Contacts,” he advised, knowing the others wouldn’t pick them up so soon. “Let’s keep this quiet until we see what’s going on.”

  And by quiet they all knew meant mentally disabling the lizards from range. Two mages stood ready to assist him with that and battlemelds as needed, but there were only a few lizards nearby when the lift finally settled in place and he was able to put them to sleep himself without incident.

  The group walked out of the now shieldless entrance and onto a small loading dock that didn’t match the massive nature of the lift cars. There was ample room to offload cargo, but it appeared to Paul that the structures he was seeing now were add-ons after the mining endeavors had run their course, for there was no way these small docks could have handled the massive amounts of raw ore that would have been funneling up to the surface.

  In fact these were mainly storage areas with much smaller
access points into the rest of the facility, able to be offloaded with supplies that would then be moved to the interior by hand or small mechanisms. If all of the lift shafts were so equipped it suggested that there was still cargo transfer occurring, but not of the nature that the lift shafts had been designed for.

  But then why the ghost town above? Maybe the cargo transfers were sporadically spaced and didn’t require an onsite maintenance staff.

  Whatever was down here looked to be fairly low key. Maybe it was the star system’s version of a closet. If that was the case then they could make use of it. Most lizard infrastructure was recycled when Star Force took a planet, but given that this was the interior of one they might be able to use it with only some minor redecorating. If and when they got the six major planets cleansed of lizards there were going to be a huge amount of recycling efforts ongoing, and assuming they still controlled the 5 rings they were going to need a place to store the raw materials being produced by them.

  Paul could definitely make use of a planet-sized locker for that, knowing that in other core systems they’d taken that they’d had to scale back the planetary recycling efforts due to the fact that the rings would fill up with material that couldn’t be used fast enough to produce products…and then those products had to go somewhere. As big as the rings were, when the recycling teams really got up to steam they could move an insane amount of material.

  Given how much there would be to process here, this planet might come in handy and give them a place to store either the raw materials or the finished products without having to ship them out of the system or back down to the surface into newly built warehouses or even out on massive plains of bedrock where they were just stacking cargo cubes up for lack of places to put them until transport convoys could arrive.

  So little could be transported between star systems that they needed local options for just about everything, and having a lift system already in place with a potentially planetary core empty for their use would be a really nice prize to snag.

  Paul led his team over to the first of some 30 lizards that Paul had detected from afar and knocked out with his Ikrid, then as the others waited he knelt down beside it and retracted his armored glove. He pressed his pale skin against its green scales to pull a deep scan that would easily bypass the sleep state and give him access to the lizard’s memories.

  Sorting through it all was always a pain in the ass, but he was familiar enough with lizard minds to know where to begin his search…their recent memories. From there he could link to anything like following an old school internet pattern, finding one site that would link into another or another. Unfortunately there wasn’t a search engine involved, but he could process the links so fast that it almost looked like there was to outsiders.

  “It’s residential,” he said aloud rather than transmitting what he was seeing to them telepathically, preferring to use his full power to root out secrets, “but not for lizards. This is a giant prison facility.”

  “For who?” a striker asked. “They kill everyone they come across.”

  “They coopt a few,” a mage reminded him.

  “Are these some that they double-crossed or a slave labor force?” a ranger asked.

  “Experiments,” Paul added. “Not labor. They have pockets of races kept here and forced to reproduce so they don’t run out.”

  “What kind of experiments?”

  “Research. This one doesn’t know what, but I’d guess genetic. We know the lizards developed their aquatic variant not that long ago, and they probably did the same with the others as well. If they’re experimenting on other races long term they may be developing new ones or making tweaks to existing ones.”

  “Who do they have here?” another striker asked.

  “Races that I’m not familiar with, but this one thinks they were all conquests. Races that the lizards defeated,” he said, pausing as he made a connection and quickly sought out confirmation. “Trophies. In addition to the research, this is the galactic trophy case.”

  “Of those they’ve defeated,” the mage commented. “How sick.”

  “The water pockets,” Paul said with a silent curse. “How stupid can I be?”

  “What is it?” another mage asked with concern.

  “I’m trying to find a memory, but this one hasn’t worked in any of the water sections. He does know that some of the prison areas are for aquatics.”

  “That makes sense if they developed an aquatic variant.”

  “Do any of you know who Ariel is?”

  “The Archon?” one of them asked.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” he said, releasing the lizard and resealing his armored glove over his hand as it transformed back to match his exact dimensions. “They’ve got a decent-sized staff on planet, but no combat troops. We need to clear them all out.”

  “Just us?”

  Paul smiled. “We could if we took our time, but that’s not what I meant.”

  “And what about this one?” a ranger asked.

  The trailblazer lifted the lizard off the ground and floated him out in front of him. “I hate killing these guys when they’re asleep, but I don’t want them running off and sounding an alarm that might result in them killing the prisoners. We need to find some place to stash these guys while we find a control center and figure out if they have any booby-traps in place.”

  “I’ll take this one,” a mage offered and Paul gave him the silent telekinetic handoff.

  “Should we collect the others?” a striker asked.

  “Can you sense them?”

  “A few.”

  “Alright, split up and grab all the ones I knocked out. If you sense any more at distance leave them be. If they see you knock them out. I’ll look for some place to stash them while we go exploring.”

  With that the twenty Archons split up and headed in different directions, with Paul pointing out the locations of all the lizards on his battlemap just to make sure they didn’t miss any of the now unconscious minds.

  4

  It didn’t take Paul long to find a control room, set off the entrance facility that was designed as both control hub and barracks for the prison guards for the immediate area. After disabling the lizards in the chamber he stood over top one of the lizard control panels and accessed the system, having gotten fairly good at it over the years and seeing that their computer systems remained virtually identical to those they’d first encountered on Corneria. There were doubtlessly upgrades to the computer power and abilities, but the interface was the same.

  It took him a while, but eventually he was able to access the other regions that this hub didn’t oversee, getting a schematic for the entire hollowed out moon. From there he dug into personnel files, both for the prisoners and the guards, finding that there was barely a skeleton staff of lizards here and no troops anywhere in the planet. As far as the prisoners went, there were over a million of them.

  Paul wondered how they were being fed and soon discovered internal processing factories that made foodstuffs and a delivery schedule for additional raw materials. A lot of stuff was being recycled locally, but there were still steady deliveries being made to supplement what was being grown here and…yeah, they had internal livestock farms as well. Those weren’t included in the prisoner list, but apparently they were raising them here as well then chopping them up and feeding them to the prisoners.

  Bastards.

  What he needed to know was whether there were any doomsday mechanisms in place, either for the facility or just the prisoners. Worming his way through the lizard system took time, a lot of time, in fact, with the other Archons all cycling back to his position before he had an answer.

  “Prisoners are rounded up and stuffed in a barracks compartment,” a mage reported. “All are napping.”

  “If they have any precautionary measures against invasion, they’re not easily accessible,” Paul said, still working through the systems. “I’m starting to think there are none.”


  “Doesn’t mean they can’t kill the prisoners by other means,” another mage pointed out.

  “Get somebody back into comm range and get a message to Riona. Have her get me as many Archons and troops as she can from the fleet and send them down here. We’re going to need to purge this facility of lizards quickly.”

  “It’s a planet,” a striker questioned. “How fast can we manage that?”

  “With a lot of running, it’s manageable. The personnel are clustered into specific areas and only go out into the prisoner realms occasionally, so there’s a lot less territory to cover than it seems. We’ll need at least 10,000 to make this work, and we’ll hold position here quietly until we get those numbers.”

  “Ship’s crew?”

  Paul shook his head. “No. Ground troops on the command ships and as many Archons, Knights, and Commandos as you can strip off the others. I don’t want anyone down here without armor.”

  “I’ll relay the message,” the mage said, turning about and running back through the facility in the direction of the big lift shafts.

  “And by quiet you mean?” a striker asked.

  “We hold position and knock out anyone who wanders into this area while I keep digging. Other than that, make yourselves comfortable. We’re going to be here a while.

  ‘A while’ turned into 17 hours before Paul had his 10,000 and then some troops assembled on the loading docks and beginning to file out through the facility towards individual targets that he’d given them. Some were heading to horizontal lifts that connected various sections of the facility while others were going to smaller vertical ones that accomplished the same thing. The core was a hollowed out sphere where the habitats had been constructed, all with artificial gravity, so there were thousands of cubic miles to search and neutralize lizards on.