Star Force: Rescue (SF71) Read online

Jackson’s eyes widened. “An X-wing? Like, from Star Wars? That X-wing?”

  “Case in point,” Paul said as a blip came up on his sensor board indicating a short range beacon. “There we are. Gotta get close to pick it up…and have the access code.”

  Leona saw him type a series of numbers into a keypad, but other than that nothing happened as far as she could see, though they were still a ways off the seafloor. “Is anyone down there?”

  “I doubt it. Just a big storage locker we stuff stuff in.”

  Leona and Jackson remained silent for the rest of the short trip, watching on the display screen as they approached a small crack in the seafloor roughly four times the size of their mantis in width. The depth was deceiving, for when they entered it they realized just how big it was…and saw the hangar built into the sidewall. Paul flew them inside the open doors and through the energy shield holding back the water, finding a nautilus also sitting on the otherwise empty deck.

  “That’s a spare,” Paul said before they could ask about the hybrid aquatic/aerial craft. Like the mantis it could travel through both but was suited more for the water than the air. “We’re the only ones here. And I must remind you that all visitors are required to keep their hands to themselves and off the exhibits, we wouldn’t want to get nasty fingerprints on the cool toys.”

  With that Paul got up and headed out of the mantis, leaving the pair of padawans a bit perplexed at his attitude. They weren’t sure if he was messing with them or what, so they just followed him out and across the empty bay to the only door into the facility. When it opened they were hit with an ambient white light that shown from the smooth walls, making the hallway look telltale Star Force but something out of the future…or maybe distant fictional past.

  “Follow me,” Paul said as he walked down the long hallway, bypassing many side doors until he came to the unmarked one he wanted. With the press of a button it retracted into the wall and allowed them to enter a gallery of display cases that held a variety of exotic weapons.

  “No way,” Jackson said when he saw a series of Covenant firearms. “You built Halo weapons?”

  “As you can see we built a lot of stuff. It all works but most of it is inefficient crap, otherwise we’d be using it in the field.”

  “Gunblade?” Leona asked.

  “Only has 6 rounds, which is pretty useless,” Paul said as she looked at the sword that doubled as a rifle. “This is one of the more recent ones,” he said, picking up a short stick and holding it in his hand laterally. With a press of a button a neon white blade materialized over his knuckles, giving him a Covenant energy blade.

  “I thought you said you didn’t have any narrow cutters yet?”

  “No reliable ones,” he said, swinging it through the air a few times just to get the feel. “This is plasma contained within an energy shield, same as the stun swords, but the more you swipe it across a target the more damage is done. It’s more like a tactile bomb than a cutter, and the recharge rate, while very fast to make it effective, drains the battery so quick you get maybe a minute of decent damage. And you can’t parry, because the blade is just energy. It’s more like a plasma paintbrush. Plus this handle hold is crap when you actually try to work with it. Hence it gets thrown into the cool relics storage you see here.”

  Paul deactivated the sword and tossed it to Jackson. “Don’t blast yourself,” he said as he walked down the row until he hit a cutout and crossed over six more, coming to a specific display case. “As far as throwing knives go, I think this is about as close as we’ve gotten.”

  Leona looked where he pointed, seeing a deck of cards. “I don’t understand.”

  “Jackson, you get it?”

  The padawan stopped swiping the energy sword through the air and glanced over, looking at the thick deck. “Afraid not.”

  Paul smiled and picked up the deck, holding them in his left hand while sliding a control ring over his left ear. “Mentally activated,” he said, whipping his arm around and releasing a single card through the air toward the nearest wall some 30 meters away. It flew straight with a neon red glow then impaled the wall and stuck there.

  “What the hell?” Leona asked.

  “It takes a lot of practice, but you can chuck these pretty fast,” he said, spinning around in a tornado twirl and releasing a card with each rotation. They impacted forming a pretty damn level line on the wall, all still glowing red while the deck in his hand were not luminous. “With a thought I can make them discharge, but I don’t want to blow up the wall,” he said, recalling the cards to him from across the room. They flew at him one at a time and returned to his left hand, settling into the deck.

  “How?” Jackson asked.

  “They’re not rigid. The material bends into a clinging goo on impact,” Paul said, chucking a glowing red rectangle at the padawan and having it seemingly impale his chest, but the material had simply mushed around the impact point instead. A second later Paul recalled it, then held it up for him to see that the rectangle had reformed itself.

  “They’re grenades?” Leona asked.

  “Can be. We’ve also been able to load them with stun charges, chemicals, even surveillance equipment. Their flight is kept level through a little telekinetic control, as is the recall. My arm strength gives them most of their speed and they need a decent hit to trigger the melting and sticking process.”

  “Where did you get the idea for these?” Leona asked.

  “Same place we got the ideas for most of this stuff. Movies, TV shows, video games, books. We tried a lot of stuff, just to see if we could, and some of it panned out. We use it now as standard equipment, the rest is stored here for nostalgia sake or just in case we find a use for it…or think of a way to tweak the design and make it viable.”

  “So give me that,” Paul said, motioning for Jackson to return him the energy sword, “and have a look around. We’ve built just about everything we could think of. If you still have any ideas for melee weapons afterwards please feel free to share. As you can see, we don’t have a problem stealing ideas.”

  “And then can we see the X-wing?” Jackson asked.

  “I’m not taking you through every room, but we’ll hit the aircraft hangar on the way out.”

  “Cool,” Leona said, walking down the closest row of display cases. The room was huge and there were literally hundreds of handheld weapons here, some of which she recognized from lore, but most were unfamiliar to her. After about a minute of searching she stopped when she saw an actual knife, or rather more like a dagger. “I thought you said you didn’t build any knives?”

  Paul walked over to her position and saw the green/gold/black/silver dagger and smiled. “That’s one of Morgan’s and is still a work in progress.”

  “What are the buttons on it for?”

  “One is to activate the plasma sheath, because it works like a plasma sword, but its main function is a…car key. The buttons are what you would call an input code.”

  “Card key for what?” she asked while Jackson was half a football field away looking through other items.

  “I said ‘car’ key. Before you were born there were physical keys that had to be inserted for a vehicle to operate. This one doesn’t have to be inserted, it’s just a metaphor,” he said, passing his hand through the static field meant to keep dust off the displays and picking it up. Paul raised it to his lips and blew into a slit on it while pressing a series of buttons that resulted in a music tone.

  “Audial recognition?” Leona asked, not understanding.

  “No, just a bit of theatrical awesomeness. When you hit the right tone a signal is sent out activating your…car, which is what we’re still working on.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “When we get back to Atlantis do a search for ‘Power Rangers’ and ‘Dragonzord.’”

  “Ok,” she said, walking on while Paul wiped a bit of spit off the Dragon Dagger and put it back in its ornamental resting place.

  After Paul got back
to Atlantis and finished his day’s training he returned to his quarters and logged onto his comm terminal to check his messages, finding one from Jason and a rare one from Cal-com. He opened the Voku’s first, for he hadn’t heard from him much since he’d redeployed himself to the middle of lizard territory and outside the relay grid. Any messages coming to Paul had to be carried via courier ship, meaning there wasn’t a lot of communication between the two nowadays. They’d handled their planning phase in the past, with events going forward holding course and not requiring any major overhauls or meetings.

  Normally messages from Cal-com were short or contained attached files, but as soon as Paul opened this one he saw that it was incredibly long in addition to having attached files. The trailblazer read through it quickly, seeing that his Voku counterpart was setting up the foundation of a defense pact on the far side of lizard territory. The difference between this pact and a formal alliance was that there was going to be no interconnectivity other than shared intelligence on the lizards, making it a shared mission rather than any bonds of unity.

  Star Force’s relationship with the Voku was a great deal more than that but Cal-com wasn’t interested in gaining friends, only organizing the locals to better defend against the lizards. A lot of what he was proposing was intelligence based, with the lesser races pulling scouting missions rather than combat so they could detect where the lizards were so that they could be contained. A few of the races he mentioned were capable of fighting the lizards and winning battles, but there was one in particular that he went into great detail on.

  They were called the Preema, and were arguably stronger than the Voku. That piqued Paul’s curiosity immediately, then went even further when he detailed their placement and numbers. They had a huge empire spinward of Star Force and lizard territory in the same galactic arm, with attached files of what little Cal-com had learned as of yet. Most important thing was they recognized the long term threat of the lizards and wanted to aid in their preemptive defeat…but they didn’t want to be responsible for claiming territory beyond their own.

  That was a bit odd, but understandable given the additional information Paul ran through. Cal-com’s intelligence indicated that the Preema were solitary and that their empire was extremely dense, preventing others from having any clue what was going on inside it. They operated with fixed borders and rightly understood that defeating the lizards meant denying them the ability to colonize new worlds or to recolonize those they had been kicked off. You couldn’t do that from afar, so it seemed that they were going to offer their services in the ass kicking department while relying on the Voku and others to hold and deny the lizards territory that they cleansed them from.

  That was a huge task, as Paul and Star Force well knew, for they were already monitoring a lot of empty systems that they had no immediate wish to colonize. Putting relays in each system was necessary, but that was a slow process because they had to be properly defended. Lesser systems were being used to link the conquered territory and provide some surveillance, but patrols had to be routinely sent out to every system to check on them and the local monitoring drones.

  The best way to deny the lizards territory was to inhabit it after they kicked them off, but there were so many lizard systems that that wasn’t going to be feasible, and just handing out planets to anyone who came looking for them was problematic for a number of reasons. It seemed that Cal-com was organizing the locals on the far side into holding their own territory and being responsible for patrolling the immediate region around it, constructing a puzzle piece border zone to stop the spread of the lizards, or at least to detect their incursions so they could be targeted and destroyed by the Voku or Preema once they eventually arrived.

  It seemed they were setting up a semi-permanent staging base in the new Voku territory and would be spamming their navy out of there. He said that given their strength they’d be able to kill the lizards with reliable certainty, it was the aftermath that was the challenge. He intended to secure his new border region first, then press across the middle of lizard territory up to the border he’d negotiated with Paul, leaving Star Force the task of conquering the remaining lizard systems up to that.

  But the most important part of Cal-com’s message was the fact that the Preema were telepathic and had raided his mind briefly before he got outside of range. During that moment they had found the memory of Humans and reacted to it with keen interest. They wanted to meet with Star Force and Paul had a sinking feeling in his gut that quickly manifested itself into an epiphany that had him pulling up the Star Force copy of the pyramid database and going through the V’kit’no’sat race list.

  The location of the Preema empire was beyond the old borders but not by much, and some races that the V’kit’no’sat knew of or had contact with had been plotted in an auxiliary file due to the fact that they were rumored rather than confirmed locations. Paul’s mind told him he’d come across the Preema before, but it took him more than three hours of searching before he finally was able to find a link.

  The V’kit’no’sat had another name for them, but the biological files were a match. The Hamach were a race that had made diplomatic contact and had not been deemed worthy of eradicating. They were fairly advanced and not interested in more than greeting their neighbors. The V’kit’no’sat exchanged information with them then wanted no further communication, which the Hamach had obliged. The location of the Hamach was within the current borders of the Preema according to Cal-com’s map, which is why Paul thought he’d remembered them. He’d done a search through the database before looking for races in this galactic arm with a certain technological level and had come across them before, only the name had changed since they’d made contact…which was well before the fall of Earth.

  So it was likely that they knew what the Zen’zat were, and from Cal-com’s memories had identified Star Force as being Zen’zat…but Zen’zat that were not part of the V’kit’no’sat. If they knew anything about them they’d know that that was not tolerated. The question was, did the Preema still have contact with the shrunken empire and could they tip the V’kit’no’sat off to their existence?

  Paul had to find out one way or another, so he skipped going to bed and instead headed over to find Davis to fill him in, then he transferred to a warship in orbit and left Sol heading outside the ADZ to cross lizard space and find Cal-com so he could arrange that meeting the Preema wanted.

  After that Paul didn’t know. He’d have to play this by ear and hope their luck held out.

  4

  June 28, 2827

  Shaleth System (Voku territory)

  Inova

  Cal-com walked up to the guards outside his private oracle only to have them tense up when they saw the Human behind him. He put a dissatisfied look on his face and shook his head. “Relax. If this one wanted to kill me he would have done so long ago.”

  The guards shrank bit as Cal-com passed them a step and opened the door, with Paul looking up at the much bigger Voku with a stern expression on his face. “Don’t relax too much. I could still try to kill one of you.”

  That resulted in a stare down for a moment until Cal-com walked inside and Paul followed, then the door sealed and the two warlords had a secure location to themselves. “What’s so urgent to bring you out here in person?”

  “The Preema,” Paul said as he casually walked around and took in the layout. It wasn’t much different than what Cal-com and him had worked in before, save for the displays were concerning a different section of the galaxy with unfamiliar starmaps. “I think they know who we are.”

  “What do you mean?” Cal-com said, leaning against a wall as Paul stopped near a table sticking out of the bulkhead that had numerous holographic icons representing ship placements suspended above it…and the remains of one of the Voku’s snack bars. Nasty stuff. Tasted like coffee.

  “The enemy in the core that I never told you about. They’re called the V’kit’no’sat. My race is part of them. We’re called
Ter’nat, or rather the low breeding stock are. They recruit elites out of the Ter’nat and transform them into Zen’zat. Warriors who serve the overall conglomeration of an empire whom your elders created and were subsequently kicked out of.”

  When Paul saw Cal-com stiffen he waved a hand through the air dismissively. “Yes, I probably should be keeping this secret but at this point I don’t care. My home system was one of the most distant colonies of the V’kit’no’sat that was lost during a rebellion by one of the member races. The empire shrank thereafter and it was abandoned along with a lot of other worlds in this galactic arm. All were presumed dead in the fighting that took place, I assume, but apparently a few Zen’zat were left behind. My race are the descendants of those Zen’zat, and if the V’kit’no’sat ever learn of our existence they will stop at nothing to annihilate us. No one can leave the empire. When your elders did they fought a war that all but killed them off.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “We have a very important piece of V’kit’no’sat tech on Earth that contains their database as of the time of the planet’s abandonment. History, tech, training, almost everything they had save for their closest secrets. Your elders, who are called Zak’de’ron, or we just call them ‘dragons’ because that’s what they are, helped us unlock the restricted files a while back as a favor for waking them up. Seemed there was only one left alive, in stasis, watching over a bunch of eggs. We found them during a battle, revived him without knowing what he was, and got the story thereafter. The Zak’de’ron were defeated by the V’kit’no’sat, with this being a backup plan in case that happened. That’s why your elders went missing for such a long time. They were all dead save for one.”

  “I hope that will impress on you the gravity of the situation,” Paul emphasized. “Your elders founded the V’kit’no’sat with a handful of other races to battle an enemy at the heart of the galaxy, to keep them in check because they cannot be defeated through conventional means. They are called the Hadarak and live within gravity wells where the V’kit’no’sat cannot go. Without them keeping the menace in place, it would spread throughout the galaxy doing lots of unknowable damage, yadda, yadda, yadda. The V’kit’no’sat developed a bit of an ego, necessitating the equal submission of every member race to the collective, which your elders did not hold to. That rift eventually led to a war that destroyed them. Backstabbed by their own creation. The V’kit’no’sat tolerate no deviation. Anyone who does is dead, which is why it is imperative that they do not find out that we’re alive or they’ll come for us en mass and with far greater technology than we now wield,” Paul said, finally finishing and crossing his arms over his chest.