Star Force: Extirpation (Star Force Universe Book 56) Read online

  Tik’ti’s MCV was one of the first assigned in the Castle One System, with his Kiritak crew being sent to a semi-habitable moon with an icy but breathable atmosphere. The gravity was low, which mean the atmosphere had to be quite deep in order to get necessary pressure, and it was through that atmosphere that landing pods were dropping down to the surface and impacting with gentle thuds onto the ice sheets over the most prime areas the survey team had previously located.

  Tik’ti didn’t like staying onboard the MCV itself, so as normal he went down with the first crews as they began to melt their way through the ice, lowering the landing pods below horizon level all the way down through the newly formed shafts to the bedrock below. It was covered with a few meters of sand, into which the landing pods extended boring rods that drilled down some 12 meters and affixed themselves firmly, after which the pods began to unfurl into a makeshift camp as Tik’ti and the other 62 crewmembers in this pod continued to melt away the surrounding ice in their flight capable envirosuits.

  They used gun-like apparatus that vaporized the ice and channeled it through clear shield-crafted tubes up to the surface where it was collected into one master shaft that sent the vapor several miles away to where it was released upwards at an angle into a shower of quickly freezing snow that began to pile up on top of the ice sheets.

  That process continued for hours until base camp was carved out of the ice and the landing pod was fully transformed into temporary housing for the ‘carving’ crews. Tik’ti oversaw the dropship transfer of larger pieces of equipment down from the orbiting MCV and into their storage berths in the half mile wide structure, then he took the third digger to arrive and boarded it with two other Kiritak and began slowly driving it down into the bedrock and producing a torrent of sand behind it as a byproduct.

  Other crew would be collecting the sand and either using it to feed fabrication machinery if desired, or depositing the worthless material elsewhere, but right now he and his two crewmembers were digging the first ‘road’ down more than a mile into the bedrock and making sure they avoided weak areas that could collapse. These initial tunnels were critical, because they needed to get to the desired pockets of material that would then be used to build the reinforcing structures for future tunnels.

  Without imports available, they were having to do these first constructs in old school fashion, and it required a great deal of skill and experience to see the limited sensor readings available through sheer rock and be able to know where to go and not go, and since time was ample but not unlimited, he had marching orders from Project Leader Nom’ron to proceed as fast as reasonable possible, for a lot more work crews would be arriving in the coming months and they didn’t need to be sitting in their ships waiting for work. They needed job sites up and ready to plug into when they arrived.

  So it was up to Tik’ti to get Moon #73 set up for mining duties while other members of his MCV unit were clearing locations for bioharvest facilities, due to the fact that they were going to have to support all the workers where with what they’d brought with them for the following year or two, but after that they’d have to completely supply this system-wide project with every bit of foodstuffs, clothing, and assorted items the workers would need. So they weren’t just here to construct a space castle. They had to create the infrastructure to house and feed the workers, while they then harvested the raw materials, processed them into useable products, then used those products to produce the high end technology that would finally be used to create the anti-Hadarak defense position.

  As wasteful as that all sounded, it was actually the most efficient way to build something of this size. Shipping in resources from outside the system was costly and time consuming beyond measure, and with so many resources going to the war effort, there was no way they had the luxury of doing that here. So while the first stages of the space castle construction wouldn’t be occurring for a long time, once they got the ball rolling and output began to spike, the final phases of construction would go lightning fast compared to them having to ship in everything from outside the system.

  But the basic building blocks were here, in the bedrock of the moon, and Tik’ti’s job was to start getting them out. They were the food that the factories would eat, and his job in this massive project was to provide that input. He had his little piece of the project to see to and knew everyone else would be taking care of theirs. Over the coming years he wouldn’t know what they were doing, nor hear much of any news from the Hadarak front or the other war breaking out in the Rim. He and the others would be focused on their jobs day in and day out, working frantically to build up the industrial base necessary to build the finished product…

  And that product was far larger than Fili Veroni had thought when she’d first arrived 6 years ago. Originally they’d been tasked with creating a massive central reactor sphere with conduits stretching out like a spider web to far reaching relay nodes, but by the time the trailblazers had finished with the blueprints the Human Master Builder realized their plans were much more ambitious.

  Her job was creating the technology for the relays, and even though they had no structure yet to attach them to, her MCV had already built four production facilities on the 9th planet and was steadily building up a reserve of sensitive components that were being stored in warehouses she was having to build along the way. In approximately 12 years she’d be able to start assembling them in space. Until then it was fabricate and store, all the while doing a little research here and there with some test applications in space just to see if this theoretical technology would actually work.

  The project was based off Ysalamir designs, and it had a limitation of arcing range, so the space castle had to extend that range via relay nodes that would extend out like tethered sentinels and would bounce the centrally created energy cocktail further and further away from the generator…which would be protected by immense dampening shields larger than any ever created by Star Force before, but those were not her concern.

  The relays had to receive and then shoot off the energy arc again, and based off the trailblazer’s blueprints, the actual width of the space fort was going to be larger than a gas giant. The internal space would almost all be a void, with very thin strands connecting it all and giving the weapon the ability to relay its damage everywhere in a spherical firing arc while keeping the enemy far from the actual weapon at the center.

  That meant it had a radius of some 68,284 miles across which multiple relays would have to work in conjunction to shuffle the beam out to the final emitters. And given how many relays a spherical area of that size would need, Fili could not make anything more than a wild estimate to completion time on her part of the project, which she pegged at no less than 63 years. How fast or slow the other parts of the monster castle would take, she didn’t know, but the trailblazers had added a lot of stuff to the spider web that hadn’t been there before.

  There would be internal transit conduits that could shuffle people and supplies from any point in the web to anywhere else, and many random points were going to be used to house shipyards, warehouses, conventional weapon systems, recycling facilities…meaning those that took whole starships, chewed them up, and spat out useful ingots for use in other projects. As Fili looked down the whole list her mind began to come to grasps with what the trailblazers actually had in mind.

  They couldn’t protect a planet, but they intended to move everything they needed on a planet inside the defensive perimeter of the space castle. The outer layers would be barren, with only emitters and relays to keep the Hadarak at bay. Many of those would be lost in combat, guessing by the redundant nature of them, but the further you went into the interior the more ‘fixed’ structures there were, telling her that the trailblazers did not expect the Hadarak to get that far.

  But the wealth of conventional weapons suggested that they did fear that minions could. Dampening shields would work well against the larger threats, but they could only be focused on a single place with that mu
ch intensity. The power required to stop a small planet from ramming into you was immense, so it couldn’t be covering the entire perimeter of the project. Furthermore, dampening fields didn’t completely negate your movement, just gum it up so much that it slowed you down to the point where you were easy target practice.

  They couldn’t hold off a Hadarak forever if the firing mechanism didn’t scare them away or destroy them, meaning the trailblazers were gambling on the fact that they could protect the interior indefinitely…and that meant her relays had to work, or this entire project would be for naught.

  She wasn’t the only one tasked with a critical system, she knew, but if any of them failed this entire project would. All had to succeed, and all had to finish before a Hadarak arrived. Given their current rate of progress they would be completed well before that, but if one came here early there was no way to stop it from wrecking everything they’d built up on the planets and the tiny amount of structure they’d begun assembling as the armored cradle for the main reactor.

  She knew the trailblazers had a reputation for asking the impossible, but this was far beyond anything she had personally encountered before. The Grid Points seemed insane on their own, yet they had been built with a lot of time and continual effort. This, however, was going far beyond that, and she knew this was not the only one they’d ordered to be built. There were at least 13 others already starting setup work, and there were rumors of more in the works.

  That told her there was a time crunch, because normally you would pour all your available resources into a single prototype project, build it, test it, and make sure the blueprints actually meant a damn before you commissioned others. Given the size and local resources production this project required she could understand the time constraints and the need to simultaneously start buildup, but this was all highly irregular and rushed. She didn’t know how bad the fighting was getting, and for the most part the construction crews were under a black out with very few updates getting through. The fleet of warships protecting them had gradually been increasing, and she was beginning to wonder if they were under threat of attack prior to completion, hence the need to start all the projects at the same time.

  But she didn’t need to know any of that until a warrior told her to move out of the way or transfer here or there. Her focus was rightly placed on her work, with the rest of what was happening in the galaxy being a distraction. She and the others had a space castle to build, and it was the most ambitious project the galaxy had ever seen, as far as Star Force records went. Fili wondered if someone else, in the far past, had tried something similar and failed against the Hadarak. But then again, they probably didn’t have a weapon that could blow miles deep crates into their hulls in a matter of seconds.

  And once this beast of a project was finished, it would be able to fire multiple shots in sequence with 2812 capacitors each capable of powering a single shot before recharging…and the recharging rate would be in the matter of hours, not days.

  And while the main weapon was no more effective on regular armor as it was on Yeg’gor, those powerful blasts could be tuned down and used to target large conventional ships in addition to all the ‘normal’ weaponry that was going to be clustered along the outer and middle web. Roger-009 had decided to name these things ‘castles’ rather than giving them a more catchy title, but to Fili this was the closest thing to an actual Death Star, and while it couldn’t blow up a Hadarak in one shot, let alone a planet, it was starting to get within that ballpark, and that was something that she had never thought would be possible.

  She still remembered seeing Star Wars as a child, on Wednesday Throwbacks, and trying to imagine what kind of power source the Death Star would need to produce that much energy to be able to just penetrate to the core of a planet, let alone destabilize it enough to cause it to detonate.

  Now, she was literally seeing the extreme low end of those calculations, and that terrified her. Namely what someone could do with this scale of power if it fell into the wrong hands. But so long as they were facing unstoppable planet-sized killing monsters, they were going to need to build a monster to kill a monster.

  But at least their monster couldn’t move from system to system, making it a defensive weapon rather than an offensive one. Yet still, take it a step further and someday, maybe another 100,000 years or so, and you could probably find a way to move something like this.

  She didn’t even want to think about that after seeing how the Uriti could destroy some type of planets from within. They, at least, couldn’t be ‘built’ by civilizations. That shouldn’t comfort her, but it did because it was an organic threat, not a technological one. But now here she was working on a technological terror, and fervently doing so, because they had to have some piece of this galaxy safe from the Hadarak. Even if it was just a pocket of space inside the defense perimeter.

  The implications of what she was doing still chilled her, but there was no going back. If they didn’t find a way to stop the Hadarak, there wouldn’t be anyone left to misuse the technology later. But when one showed the galaxy that something could be done, others would try to duplicate it, and she reluctantly felt that this was ushering in an age of superweapons.

  But then again, dead was dead, no matter how you ended up that way, so what was she scoffing at? And if it was going to be the age of superweapons, then she was damn well going to work towards giving Star Force the best ones possible.

  5

  August 12, 128534

  Virik’tidan System (V’kit’no’sat Coreward Border)

  Stellar Orbit

  Though it wasn’t necessary, every time they entered a system that they were passing through Kara came to the bridge. Doing so would be necessary later, so she figured she might as well get into the habit on the way to the Core, meaning she had to cut short an obstacle course workout to be here when the Hail Mary came out of its breaking maneuver.

  Greg had suggested the name just before she’d left Hlem, and coming from his football background the term made perfect sense to him, though he’d had to explain it to Kara, since she’d never taken to that sport. It wasn’t played now, and had been lost to history, but the concept of a long range throw that had only a small chance of being caught seemed appropriate for this mission.

  The system they’d just entered, while in the V’kit’no’sat domain, was not inhabited by anything more than their tracking beacons. They were set there to monitor for Hadarak activity long ago, but the presence of the enemy minions not too distant from the border made them all the more important, and the V’kit’no’sat had aggressively seeded all the systems around the galaxy on the their border. They made a giant detection net with patrol fleets traveling along them, ready to act if a breach was detected.

  As far as she knew none had during this war, but it was just a matter of time until they got here. How long depended on how well the triumvirate was in killing minions and Hadarak, and already they had managed to kill two more Hadarak with the Ysalamiri while the location of Keychain was being constantly updated into the Urrtren and passed around the galaxy far faster than Star Force couriers could manage. They were still necessary to reach the fleets within the Hadarak Zone, but they could get word to the nearest Ysalamir far faster than Keychain actually moved, and so as long as someone with Essence skills and a fast ship didn’t lose track of the Lurker, it wasn’t going to surprise attack anyone.

  So the hunt was back on, and she expected to hear word of more Hadarak kills before she left behind the Star Force units in the region and dove into the heart of the Hadarak empire. There were still two bases she was going to pass through before being beyond communications range, but this was the last system in V’kit’no’sat territory she had to pass through, and once she jumped out she would be in the no man’s land between the continually fortifying border and the ever creeping Hadarak army with its tendrils reaching out in multiple directions only to surround and then later consume the systems inside their perimeters.

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p; Kara expected the tendrils to reach the border before the surrounded systems fell, and that kept the Triad guessing as to when the first incursion into V’kit’no’sat space would occur. Kara didn’t know if she would be back before then or not, for if she could get in deep she wasn’t going to turn around and come back with a few snippets of information. She was going to take the Ring to Mordor if possible, and with her ship set up to resupply itself from natural resources if given the opportunity, the Hail Mary gave her virtually unlimited range.

  That was, assuming she could find a system with the necessary natural resources and the Hadarak wouldn’t be there to stop her. She had no clue what she was going to run into, but it was going to be a solitary mission with only her crew of Irondel with her. Kara expected it might be worse on them, but they’d all volunteered for the extended mission eagerly. Hopefully they hadn’t made a stupid decision, for even as big as the ship was to such a small race, their crewmates and Kara were the only people they were going to see for a very, very long time.

  Kara stayed on the bridge during the hours as they transited around the star to their outgoing jumppoint, with her itching to get back to the sanctum, but when in the danger zone she was going to have to spend every minute between jumps on the bridge or nearby with a link into the sensors so she could get instantaneous updates. That meant no training insystem, because she couldn’t take the risk of something happening when she was distracted or asleep.

  She hadn’t expected any trouble here, but as they were nearing their outgoing jumppoint a ship decloaked in front of them, blocking their path, as a holographic transmission was sent to the Hail Mary.