Star Force: Colonization (SF15) Read online

  The Sabers knew what they were doing, so Paul wasn’t burdened by having to issue orders concerning everything. That left him free to troubleshoot and look out for surprises by the enemy commander…though for this part of the trial it was a computer simulation only. No Clan or any personnel were defending the computer-controlled station, in order to give each attempt at the trial an objective score, whereas an opponent would learn and adapt when faced with multiple runs.

  As the blind spots in the station’s defenses began to manifest themselves Paul highlighted the ‘safe’ regions and uploaded that navigational data to his fleet, allowing them to trust his tagged zones and maneuver inside them as they continued their assault. Once they were all tucked in safely they began trashing the station’s hull and digging further and further into the lateral superstructure as the Excalibur continued to blow through the ‘front door.’

  Paul stood ramrod straight, arms now crossed behind the small of his back as he watched the grinding ensue. It was almost an academic exercise at this point, but with the missiles’ ability to arc around a closed line of sight there was still an element of uncertainty, though his own fleet’s arcing missiles were pinpointing and destroying the station’s launchers and anti-missile defenses one by one, overwhelming the later before exposing and lighting up the former in a textbook assault typical of Clan Saber.

  When Paul’s fleet had systematically destroyed all of the station’s defense systems the trial automatically ended, saving them the time of having to blast every bit of it into oblivion. The holograms surrounding Paul vanished and he looked out at his Clan members on the bridge mockup as they all stared at their floating score number that had replaced the tactical hologram.

  4,589

  Paul nodded. “Good work. That puts us into 2nd behind the Neon Squirrels by…” Paul hesitated, doing the mental math, “319 points. That’s catchable if we have a few good runs or they screw up.”

  “Liam’s not going to screw up,” Levi told him.

  Paul smiled. “Probably not, unless we can make him screw up when we go head to head.”

  The second gen Archon checked his watch. “Three hours?”

  Paul did likewise. “Make it two. I want to run through the other Clans’ results before we get into the melees.”

  “Two then,” Levi confirmed as he and the six other Sabers filed out of the simulator.

  Paul followed them out and clapped Ryan on the shoulder as his 8-man team stood by for their turn. “All yours.”

  “What’d you hit?”

  “4,589,” Paul told him as he walked passed.

  “Alright Spartans,” Ryan rallied sarcastically. “Let’s go for half of that!”

  Paul laughed along with a few of Ryan’s Clan, accepting the compliment. The Sabers always had high naval scores, but Roger and Liam were equally fierce competition, having specialized in that area in order to get a leg up on Paul, whose Clan was more balanced. Their Clans both rated a level 6 in naval, thanks to more than half of their Clan members being devoted to that discipline.

  Even now some of their Clans were traveling to another trial in Atlantis, while Paul had taken his best people out to Titan for this one. Logistically speaking the travel time required excluded Paul or any other trailblazer from competing in all of the trials personally, plus their non-Clan duties also eliminated large blocks of the calendar from their availability, meaning that many of the trials would be contested with second rate Clan members.

  This allowed for a lot of gamesmanship, with Clans picking when and where to send their best people. Any naval trial that Paul attended had Clan Saber with an edge, but when Roger and Liam were also present that edge became so slim that it was almost negligible. Still, he knew, that while they battled it out here, the other Clans would be sending people elsewhere to take advantage of his and the other trailblazers’ absence, since they’d all decided to attend this trial.

  Paul figured they had a 20% chance of winning this one, for which the prize would be a new Viper-class inter-planetary starship. The Sabers had fallen behind a bit after the second of 10 challenges within this naval trial when Clan Neon Squirrel had sunk an incredibly high score and Clan Saber had come through only with an above average mark. The challenge they’d just run had been #5, with the remaining five being versus battles rather than point runs. One would be defensive, another offensive, a third head to head, and the last two would be tournaments, with points awarded for how far each Clan progressed.

  For now though, Paul had two hours to spare…which meant it was time for another briefing session.

  Instead of going back to his quarters in the orbiting sanctum, Paul headed over to a small lounge that the trailblazers had reserved for their specific use where he found Sam, Will, Greg, Erin, and Dan waiting for him.

  “Tear it up as usual?” Greg asked as Paul walked in and shut the door behind him.

  “Pretty much,” Paul said, sliding into an overly cushioned chair.

  “Alright, what’s up?” Erin asked, leaning forward.

  “Something big,” Paul said, dropping his voice out of reflex, though no one in the hallway could have heard them speaking short of a shout. “We’re organizing a Clan-wide project without Davis’s knowledge.”

  Greg raised an eyebrow. “Going behind his back?”

  “Getting the jump on him,” Paul corrected. “We want to start colonizing the outer zone before he can lay claim to it.”

  Dan whistled.

  “That’s…” Erin said, running the implications through her head a couple of times, “ambitious.”

  Sam smiled widely. “Oh, that’s perfect. He did say we were supposed to operate independently.”

  “Exactly,” Paul agreed.

  “What exactly are we looking at?” Will asked.

  Paul got up and walked over to the video monitor hanging on the wall and brought up the system map he and Jason had been using to bring everyone up to speed in small groups throughout the course of the trial.

  “We need to establish on these five worlds,” he said, tagging four small planets in the bottom end of the outer zone and Dysnomia, which was in orbit around Eris at the outer edge of the high zone. “From these we can branch out into these clusters,” he said, adjusting the map to draw mini constellations between other planets, each attached to the five linchpins.

  “They’re all small,” Erin pointed out.

  “Yes, but they’re ours if we can get to them first,” Paul explained. “In time we can transition out to the larger ones, even Mordor eventually, but if we can pull this off we’ll have access to more territories than Davis is making available to us through trials, and we can split it up according to our own terms.”

  “We don’t have the ships to get that far out, do we?” Greg asked.

  “Yes and no,” Paul said, repeating the conversation he’d already had four times with other groups. “We can get there with current inter-planetary starships but it will take a while…or we can refit them with larger fuel stores for enhanced speed.”

  “Which diminished cargo capacity,” Erin noted.

  Paul nodded. “We need to design our own inter-zonal starship to achieve the enhanced range…not to mention put some more forward armor on it to accommodate the greater speeds. We’re going to have to design and manufacture them ourselves, which no Clan is in a good position to do on our own. We need everyone…or almost everyone to commit resources to this. Only the united Clans can make this happen at the speed and volume we want.”

  “What do the numbers look like if we went at it solo?” Sam asked.

  “Randy was already considering that when we stumbled onto his plan. He was looking at snagging one planet using existing ships in an exaggerated supply chain. The plan was workable, but he was going to have to acquire a lot more ships to make it work. We think that fielding new technology will be worth the combined expense.”

  “This was Randy’s idea?” Dan asked.

  “That Jason and I stole, yes.�
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  “Bet he wasn’t too happy about that,” Dan said, snickering.

  “Not really,” Paul admitted, “but that’s his own fault for getting sloppy and trying to buy ships from other Clans en mass. It tipped us off right away.”

  “So that’s what he wanted them for,” Greg mewed.

  “Anyway, he’s onboard with the grand scheme now, especially since it’ll open up more territory than he’d planned to go after. What we need from you is a ‘go/no go’ decision and your help regardless to keep this a secret.”

  The trailblazers looked amongst themselves. “We’re in,” Dan said without hesitation.

  “Same here,” Greg added. “I like the idea of beating Davis out there.”

  “Should be interesting,” Erin agreed. “Clan Alterra is in.”

  “We’re not missing this party,” Sam declared.

  “We’re in,” Will said, finishing the unanimous decision. “But this is going to be on bear to pull off.”

  “I know,” Paul said, nodding. “But a worthy challenge.”

  “How do you want to split up the workload?” Erin asked.

  “Only three of us have shipyards large enough to build the ships we need,” Paul began, pulling up a rough task list he and Jason had put together earlier. “If we have the rest of you fabricate smaller components and ship them out to us…”

  5

  March 3, 2139

  The Way of the Clans left the Clan Croft starport around Titania fully loaded, lazily making its way out of Uranus orbit before altering course and heavily accelerating out towards the periphery of Star Force’s dominion. With the ever changing positions of the planets within the star system there was no fixed map to work from, but with farther distance from the Sun came orbital periods of hundreds of years which gave a semi-permanence to their locations. As such, for their first target for colonization, the Clans had chosen a small planet directly outside the relative position of Neptune to keep from having to cut across the inner zone to get to the opposite side and add even more distance to their first expedition.

  The planet in question had a diameter of 1200 kilometers, making it approximately the same size as Charon but was located at more than three times the distance from the Sun as Pluto’s moon at 105 AU. It had been given the name Raena in a naming lottery, with the winner choosing her favorite singer for the label, but since none of the Archons could stand her high-pitched screeching voice they’d decided to rename the planet ‘Goku’ for their purposes…as well as making an alteration in Star Force’s database to match.

  It took a week of acceleration for the extended range inter-planetary starship to get up to a speed of 4,000 miles per second, whereupon the massive ship entered its coast phase and spun up its quartet of gravity cylinders. Inside the living sections all the modular components shifted from acceleration based gravity aligned with the ship’s orientation to the spinning gravity of the cylinders which was perpendicular in relative direction.

  All seats, walkways, restrooms, beds, etc had to be flipped about and had been designed for just that purpose. For the next 3 weeks the two kilometer long, hammerhead-shaped starship coasted out through the high zone and crossed over into the frontier of the star system where even Star Force had yet to travel. Another week of deceleration brought it to its final destination, entering orbit of the tiny planet on April 9.

  Having expended a small lake’s worth of fuel to carry the ship out to this point, the Way of the Clans opened up its expansive cargo bays and began deploying dropships that travelled down to Goku’s icy surface. The sixteen of them landed softly in the 4.2% gravity, settling their golf ball shaped hulls down at three separate landing zones where they offloaded cargo and began making round trips back up to the ship to unload the entire hold.

  Thanks to the low gravity a pair of crab-like work frames were dropped down to the surface via small maneuvering jets, whereupon they began drilling through the ice until they hit the metallic surface some 745 meters down. Unlike a lot of the other small planets in the high and outer zones, Goku was comprised of less rock than the others, making it more like Mercury in terms of composition and a definite mining hotspot if you could dig down through the ice to get at the true surface.

  Intent on carving out a colony beneath the ice, the workers began enlarging the pair of shafts enough to install a portable lift to get larger pieces of equipment down to the slightly less cold metal/rock. Given the distance from the Sun the exterior of the planet was remarkably cold, but the external ice ‘ocean’ surrounding it allowed a bit of internal heat to remain, but nothing even remotely hot enough to melt the ice.

  While the two coring teams continued their work the third landing zone was overrun by treaded ‘scrappers’ that were plowing out and leveling acreage upon which were placed prefabricated habitats that were interconnected with one another to form a small, makeshift city on the dimly lit world. The small running lights on the modules provided a pinprick of illumination to the Way of the Clans in orbit as a visible gesture of defiance against the great void in which the planet drifted and the first sign of civilization to grace the planet.

  The starship remained on station for several weeks, insuring that the small colony got its footing before it recalled all temporary crews via one dropship, leaving the others on station, and departed back towards the middle zone where it would refuel and load up again, returning to Goku in just under 3 months time.

  By the time it returned the 238 colonists had succeeded in hollowing out a sizeable cavern at the base of each drilling shaft, large enough to accept the heavy mining equipment and additional Clan workers that the starship brought back with it. At one site they began mining operations immediately, while at the other they carved out a footprint into the metal/rock in which they began building the foundations for a permanent habitat using the construction materials brought in the second cargo shipment.

  The Way of the Clans second supply run also brought with it more prefab structures to expand the ice-top city made of living quarters and warehouses. Intended only as a long-term temporary base, the prefab city was intended to be completely dependent on cargo shipments for supplies while they slowly built up a more self-sufficient colony underneath the ice.

  That endeavor would take years to achieve, but the persistence of the Clans made it happen. Using their ever growing resources, the unified Clan project built up Goku into a significant foothold housing more than 3,000 people at the end of its first decade. With the lessons learned there, and the addition of several more Bulma-class inter-planetary Clan starships, they expanded to the other three ‘pentagon’ worlds ringing the inner edge of the outer zone, which included Dysnomia that Clan Saber had succeeded in winning.

  Paul had invited Jason, Greg, and Randy to help him colonize Eris’s moon while Star Force continued to expand their outpost on the planet below at a significantly slower rate. By the end of 2155, Dysnomia had a larger population than Eris did as the Clans continued to pour more and more resources into it and the other pentagon worlds, building them up and establishing more consistent trade routes out to them that culminated in a colonization jump out to a number of adjacent planets from each of the five footholds.

  From Goku, their largest outer zone colony, the Clans expanded to a trio of planets which they likewise named for themselves. Tien was slightly larger than Goku, but made up of more ice and rock and subsequently had a lower gravity at 3.2%. It was a week’s travel away at moderate speed to the ‘upper left’ of Goku, if looking at an orbital map of the star system with Sol at the very bottom and Goku in the center.

  To the upper right, slightly farther out than Tien was Trunks. It was twice the size of Goku and pure rock, sporting a magnetic field that suggested a liquid interior core and a sizeable amount of geothermal energy for such a cold region of space.

  The third expansion planet in the Goku sector was Gohan, the smallest of the four but the only one with a moon that made it more of a double planet, with Krillin being 2/
3rds its size and locked in a fairly close orbit.

  Counting the moon, that was five planetoids in the Goku sector that the Clans had expanded into, though to date they hadn’t set up any infrastructure on Krillin. In the Dysnomia sector another three planets were added, with 4 more in Frodo, 6 in Bond, and 3 in O’Neill brining the Clan holdings to 25 planets in the outer zone(technically Dysnomia was on the edge of the high zone) that they’d acquired without the help of Star Force or Davis, adding to the numerous partial holdings given to them in the more civilized regions of the star system.

  As time passed by, each of the Clans grew into a nation of its own, rivaling many of those on Earth or the colonies that had sprouted up on Luna and Mars. The GDPs of all the Clans combined ranked them 8th in the system, and they’d accomplished that without resorting to trade. As per Davis’s rules they only interacted with other Clans, building everything they had obtained from scratch or winning it via the trials.

  Then, in 2173, Davis announced Star Force’s expansion into the outer zone, tagging six planets for acquisition…two of which the Clans already possessed.

  Greg, being stationed in Atlantis as was usual for him, drew the short straw by default and got to be the one to finally let Davis in on their secret before he wasted resources planning a pair of expeditions that weren’t necessary.

  “Congratulations,” Davis said as Greg entered his office. “Clan Firestorm did surprising well, I’m told.”

  Greg nodded his appreciation. “Thank you. That piece of Titan you put up for grabs was rather generous.”

  “You can thank Tycho,” Davis said, referring to the independent colony on Luna. “They traded it back to us after the allotment in exchange for three new Jaguars. I figured the Clans would make more use of it than selling it off to another nation, given how aggressive your expansion has been.”