Star Force: Mantle (SF92) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  As for the carrier ships, Star Force didn’t own any of them. They were a mix of Nexus contracts and privately owned vessels that business arrangements had been made with, though producing their own ships was on Star Force’s to-do list. Right now though everything was operating smoothly, for while The Nexus was falling apart its people were very good at their jobs. They couldn’t have held together a mechanical wonder such as this if they weren’t, and the professionalism on both sides was allowing an adequate transfer of command and ownership…though Star Force was going to go through every nut and bolt here to both catalog it and find ways to make improvements.

  For what no one had said out loud regarding this handover was the transfer of technology. Star Force was getting access to even more high level Nexus tech than they’d gotten from the H’kar, thanks to the Tolsoi, who had rated a higher trust and therefore more secrets granted to them, but the grid point constructs themselves were as advanced as Nexus tech went and now Star Force had their own people inside learning to maintain them and in position to reverse engineer whatever they came across that was new and/or useful.

  Add that to what they’d already recovered from the Trinx and Star Force had a lot more tech to work with. Granted, most of it was duplicates of what was cataloged by the V’kit’no’sat from other races across the galaxy, but there were enough new deviations or even outright new technologies that Star Force was gaining that would give them a small advantage over the V’kit’no’sat. Not so much in firepower or performance, but in being able to have a slightly different playbook to work out of instead of just copying everything that their nemesis had.

  And one very big upside to this crazy deal to annex all of this new territory was that the member races changing sides from The Nexus to Star Force were huge. Geographically speaking the amount of territory was about double what Star Force currently had, but this expansion was far more populated and the tech level of those populations was considerable. The trailblazers and Davis had a lot to work with out here, and even if it wasn’t up to Star Force standards it was impressive in its own right, especially this grid point.

  Riona watched for a long time as the small convoy of ships crossed from one construct to another, passing by and through enormous stations that housed all types of industries befitting an interstellar crossroads. She could get lost here if she wanted and be able to hide out for the rest of her life. It was just that damn complex and crowded, and bringing proper order to it all was going to be an ongoing headache for Duke Herrington, especially since he had to keep everything functioning while he started to make changes.

  Fortunately Riona wasn’t here to help with that, and after she retreated from spectating to get back into her normal training schedule the ships waited out the arrival of their next carrier. Given that they now owned the place they got priority slots and didn’t have to wait more than 3 days, after which they were carried across to Grid Point Irren where there was only one construct, similar to what H’kar territory was…the end of the line, or web, in this case.

  That said, there was still a large amount of buildup around it. The grid points were in and of themselves a separate civilization from the rest of The Nexus and people lived and worked here simply because it was on the grid rather than due to any connection with the local region. Here there were shipyards that built the massive carrier ships, along with every other piece of industry needed to support and grow the interstellar commerce, for it was common knowledge that the safest place to build infrastructure within The Nexus was at the grid points, for they were the most well protected of any locations save for perhaps the capitols of the major members.

  There were no Nexus guardian fleets here, though. Only ships from the local races along with a scattering of Star Force warships and one command ship. The strength level was impressive, but far less than Mankla. She didn’t think this site was going to come under attack though, especially because it wasn’t in a star system. There was one way in and one way out, that being a direct line from the nearest star system to the light gravity well of the construct itself, and there was an impressive amount of weaponry attached to that side of the construct, meaning that anyone coming in that wasn’t supposed to be here would be running into a buzz saw, not to mention the waiting guardian fleets around the flanks of that jumpline.

  A star offered almost unlimited access, for one could come in from any angle and it was guesswork as to where to lay in wait. Also, with the greater mass you could come out shallow and avoid traps in low stellar orbit. Here the mass was so low you had to creep over from the nearest star, and with the watch station that Star Force had implemented, which now only consisted of a group of ships and a touch of a space station under construction, the grid point would be alerted to any incoming hostiles with enough of a head start to prepare a very nasty welcome.

  All together that meant the grid points were the fortresses of The Nexus and of the Rim Region, speaking from a naval perspective.

  Riona’s group of ships made the much faster jump from construct to nearby star, then began bouncing through the nearby star systems until they came to the Vedran capitol. It was located in a binary system in very high imbalance, with a massive central star and a much smaller one that orbited it in a wobbly tango that caused the big one to swivel around rather than holding center position. Fortunately Star Force navigational systems had no problem targeting either star or even the center of mass between the two to decelerate on, with Riona’s ship coming out into the orange glow of the smaller of the pair.

  From there they made a microjump further out into the system that contained over 200 planets with 6 of them being heavily populated. She didn’t travel to any of those, though, for Clan Saber had set up shop on one of the tiny lumps of rock in the inner zone that had been mined out long ago. Now those hollowed out chambers were being expanded upon and repurposed as Paul had his Clan building a proper colony of their own in the Vedran capitol system from which to direct them and the surrounding region.

  The Vedran were the second largest former Nexus member after the Tolsoi, with Paul and Hightower taking up residence here while trailblazers and lesser monarchs were being dispatched to the others and even to some of the other supportive races that had not been part of The Nexus but had lived under their protective shadow. All together there were 38 trailblazers here, along with Director Davis and Arch Duke Hightower. After that there was a long string of monarchs and Archons heavily involved in taking command of the region, and that now included her as well.

  She took a dropship over to the small planet that had been renamed ‘Pocket’ and flew past the parked Excalibur along with several hundred other Clan Saber warships out of the thousands that she knew had been dispatched here already. With the flagship being here she assumed Paul still was, and with a little computer searching she narrowed down his location inside the airless planet after she landed, then picked up his mental signature coming from a chamber very near to the surface.

  “Hey,” Riona said casually as she walked in on some sort of meeting between him, a half dozen Humans, and three times that number of Kiritas under an outcropping of rock that had numerous holes drilled into it and wiring coming out of most of them.

  “Hey,” he answered back as all heads turned to look at her.

  “Busy?”

  “Just sharing notes. Did you bring my new toys?”

  “Fresh off the docks.”

  “Excellent,” he said, drawing out the word slightly. “We can use the extra firepower. Things out here are deteriorating rapidly, which we were discussing.”

  “Again,” one of the Kiritas added, drawing a few nods of disgust from the others.

  Riona frowned. “Bring me up to speed.”

  “The Vedran are…” the Kiritas said, searching for the right words, “…difficult to work with. They’re not being disobedient, but their culture is not compatible with our own and we’re discussing ways to tackle that challenge.”

  “What’s your major hea
dache?”

  “Their techs follow procedure adamantly, even when it’s the wrong thing to do. The only people who do the thinking are a central sect and everyone else feels it’s their duty to carry out their orders and procedures exactly as issued…which is insane when dealing with technology. They are against improvisation entirely.”

  Riona cringed. “Do their warriors fight like that too?”

  “No,” Paul answered hesitantly. “They have a thinker assigned to each unit so they can adapt to field situations. Everyone else follows them and standing protocol exactly, even if they make a discovery that it is the wrong call. They will report it, then jump off the cliff with the rest of the lemmings if protocol isn’t altered.”

  “How the hell have they survived this long?”

  “Their leaders are quite smart.”

  “Not smart enough to implement a different system,” a Human tech noted.

  “We’re making some small changes,” Paul continued, “but they’re being resistant. Not deliberately so, but they just don’t know how to think for themselves. They’re the polar opposite of the lizards. Might as well be battle droids, and we’re comparing notes trying to find some way of getting through to them in order to increase their battle efficiency. Until then we need as much Star Force firepower as we can get to do the heavy lifting.”

  “How are we set on maturias?”

  “One experimental unit, about 6,000 strong.”

  “So nothing…great,” Riona said, taking a seat on a crate next to two Kiritas. She wasn’t Clan Saber, but spent enough time with them to have been unofficially granted member status. “But they will follow our orders in battle?”

  “To the letter.”

  “Well that’s something then.”

  “And we’re already putting it to use, but the scouting reports coming back are grim. Everyone seems to be in a frenzy and making power grabs for anything they can get their hands on. Little planets are at war all over the place and we’re tracking down the worst offenders, but we don’t even have a single full survey yet. There’s simply too much territory to keep track of, let alone patrol.”

  “What’s the status of the Paladin?”

  “Growing and patrolling a short list of systems. Thrawn’s boys are handling most of the scouting and I’ve got them set up as far from the grid points as you can get. They’re doing their thing and we’re stretching out comm relays to them now, but we’re going to be out of contact for another year and a half save for couriers.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I had them build a lot of them before then came out here.”

  “So we’re dropping the relays off without protection?”

  “No. There’s a small lizard presence at each system sufficient to scare off scavengers and the curious, but not enough to defend them if they’re seriously targeted. But we know if one goes down because they have orders to run away and tell us if they can’t get an alert off.”

  “Alright, what do you want me to do?”

  “Right now just help us troubleshoot. How’s Mankla look?”

  “Big,” she said, understating heavily.

  Paul smiled. “Told you so.”

  “Still, I didn’t expect that much. The Nexus must be desperate to be turning all this over to us.”

  Riona saw several of the Kiritas frown, then she picked up on a disturbing emotion running through most of them. “What?”

  “It seems The Nexus isn’t very popular around here,” a Human mining chief said. “The Vedran were about to rebel before the swap occurred.”

  “Really?”

  “Rumor says they could see the writing on the wall and knew they were going to be abandoned against all promised to the contrary. They were going to take their fate into their own hands before that happened, and apparently that isn’t something unique to them.”

  “We’ve been getting similar stories from a lot of the regions out here,” Paul added. “People privately confiding in us things that were never made public, and not just coming from the leaders. The average workers are thanking us and telling their woes now that they have someone to vent to. The Rim Region has been a mess for a long time. The Nexus didn’t give up much that they weren’t already going to lose.”

  “They gave up the grid points.”

  “Did you notice who was defending them?”

  Riona raised an eyebrow. “The Vedran were going to seize Mankla?”

  “Them and the Tolsoi. We’ve heard that from both sides, though there was never any official plan put down, even in their private files, and we’ve had an extensive look. Davis has an army of data miners dispatched to all the Clans so we can feed him the data once we have it…”

  “…and he wants it yesterday.”

  “Bingo.”

  Riona sighed. “So, we’ve got a race of by the book even if it kills you loyalists unable to adapt to save their life…literally…and we don’t really know much about them yet, but we’re still in the position of giving them orders and putting back together a region that was on the verge of rebellion and threatened by how many rivals?”

  “Four big ones.”

  “Four. Well, then. Please tell me you’re going to assign me to kick at least one of their asses?”

  Paul shook his head. “Sorry, not just yet. Right now we’re in training mode. We’ve gotta get these guys headed in the right direction before we start looking outward too much, and the big question is how to teach these guys to think without putting them all into full scale indoctrination programs that we don’t have the infrastructure to field. We have to make use of these guys in the here and now, so if you have any ideas speak up.”

  “Tell me what you know about them…all of you,” she added, “and maybe I can shove this conversation in a different direction given the fact that I’m just arriving and taking this in fresh.”

  Paul gestured to a Kiritas on his left and the commando began speaking, reiterating all the stories he’d heard from the Vedran troops he’d been working with, and the rest of those in the group did the same, giving Riona a quick rundown that left her with one unavoidable conclusion.

  “We give them the option of thinking for themselves, without penalty, but don’t expect them to. We just make sure they have leadership onsite that can do the thinking for them and rebuild this civilization through the maturias. I don’t see how we have the resources or time to do otherwise.”

  “That’s been our continuing analysis,” Paul confirmed regretfully, “but we keep swapping stories and trying to think of something else.”

  4

  February 11, 3459

  Megatron 18 System

  Middle Zone

  The Sanguine Blade came out of its jump well shy of the black hole, easily braking against its higher mass from the star they’d jumped off of. They’d been able to travel the last 22 lightyears at a very fast speed thanks to the size of that star and the fact they didn’t have to worry about stopping power here, nor did the other ships that Jason was observing all across the system’s inner zone. The Megatron 18 System was no different than any other, save for where you normally had a hot, glowing beacon in the center, here you had a pit of nothingness as far as sensors and your eyes were concerned.

  Or rather most sensors. This was a small black hole and some of the command ship’s tech was able to penetrate the darkness…or would as soon as the return signal came back. Right now all Jason could see was the light and other forms of natural radiation in the system bouncing off the ships and a scattering of rocks here. There wasn’t much to work with, given that there wasn’t a star to show them off, but most ships put out energy signatures that could be picked up and the ones Jason was seeing now had been transmitting out from their distant locations prior to his arrival. He was seeing the laggy signals as he waited for his ship’s active sensors to send out theirs and get a return bounce back.

  As time went by new icons on the battlemap popped up noting additional rocks, but not the planet he knew
was here. Right now it was on the far side of the black hole and out of sight, but the smaller chunks of rock he was seeing now were floating in a lazy orbit and a threat to navigation…those closest to the jumplines anyway. The rest could sit where they were, but he’d have to remove those near to all the local jumplines and there were plenty of stars within reach of this black hole to funnel traffic here.

  Or there would be if it wasn’t for the Zargor raiders that were attacking whatever traffic was reckless enough, or ignorant enough, to pass through this system. There was one short link to another local black hole and two long ones possible, given Star Force’s grav drive power and accuracy, but there was far too little traffic here to account for even the short route. Black hole to black hole was the fastest way to travel if you didn’t have access to the grid point system and there was only a single link to the Belladeir that he and Clan Sangheili were tasked with overseeing and reworking.

  And in order to get to the other grid points within the Rim Region he actually had to leave it, bouncing off The Nexus’s grid point Dagran and then back through another link to one of Star Force’s new holdings, if not through yet another one in their territory to make the eventual connection. Relying on someone else’s grid points to move through your own territory was risky, but right now they didn’t have much choice unless they wanted to go the ‘long’ way, as far as time was concerned, or to go to the expense of building more grid points. That was preferable, but those resources were badly needed elsewhere, even with the ADZ funneling convoy after convoy of support to the region now that the lizard war was over and the production that had been sustaining it was being reworked into other projects.