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Which meant all the other Ysalamir out there were in jeopardy, which was why Jason had given orders with the courier to recall them all from battle and hide them until he could figure out what sort of new beast this was.

  And that meant he was heading into a confrontation with it, assuming it was still in the system. He had a gut feeling it wouldn’t be, but at least they’d be able to recover their ship debris and bodies, hopefully before anyone else would be able to scavenge them. The last thing they needed now was a weak enemy learning from their technology only to use it against them later, so Star Force had strict ‘no littering’ policies in place…but beyond that, Jason wasn’t going to let their dead just lie out there. Not if he had a choice.

  Everyone else was in as bad a mood as he was, but they all had a job to do and any insight into what had happened was critical, so he and the others were going to try and glean everything they could from the records before they arrived, but Jason had a dark feeling inside him that he couldn’t confirm from the records. It was one that only he could confirm or deny once meeting up with the new Hadarak, assuming he lived through the encounter…

  The Sanguine Blade came out of its jump well short of the star, decelerating hard to get the extra distance and hopefully get a good look at the system before making contact with anything.

  Jason was already plugged into his astromech with the rest of the ‘small’ crew of some 8,249 all at their stations on the largely automated Borg vessel. It could carry far more than that, but Jason had it currently set up in full Hadarak killer mode, not as a transport for ground troops or even ship killing operations. He had as many Tar’vem’jic packed into the hull as he could fit, along with a lot of large secondary weapons rather than numerous smaller ones that would be necessary for fighting minion swarms or other large numbered fleets that had low individual ship mass.

  He also had 82% of his drone count attached to the ship in a long cubical column that matched his ship’s dimensions exactly, though where there were some missing from losses in recent battles he left a few strands sticking out the back rather than stack them all in tightly and lose a little deployment speed…which he was right now utilizing as the entire mass of drones moved away, shedding one layer at a time and becoming a nebula-like cloud around the cubical ship that continued to expand and expand into a huge picket sphere.

  Jason had sensors on ‘screaming’ mode, sending out the most compact beams they could, not carrying that they would light up on even the most rudimentary receiver anywhere in the system. Subtlety was not needed here. Finding the new Hadarak was.

  But the only one that registered was burrowed into another planet, with the first planet being mostly destroyed with the remainder infested with minions. He hated just leaving whatever people were down there to the Hadarak, but he wasn’t configured for a rescue operation and he wasn’t going to try one so long as the new threat lurked nearby.

  Jason spent more than 6 hours scanning, but nothing showed. Maybe that was because he didn’t have a Ysalamir with him, maybe that was because it had moved on already in search of the others, but as he brought his ships into the expanding debris field with drones rushing out to collect all the wayward pieces, he also had some travel out to the tier 2 to get better sensor scans. They had to evade the minions in orbit there, but that wasn’t too difficult, for Riona had already killed most of them.

  A single tear leaked from his closed left eye as felt a deep pang of loss and anger for her death, now that he was here where she had died along with everyone else. He’d gone through the manifest in less than a second, identifying 6 other crewers in her fleet that he had known and one other Archon, but they were all young and barely acquaintances. Riona he had known ever since getting out of basic training, for she’d been in the first class to follow them.

  Her body was nowhere to be found, but that wasn’t because she’d made a dramatic escape. The portion of her command ship where the bridge had been was gone…hit with a disruption weapon that had turned it into confetti while leaving the rest of the ship more or less intact, though cracked from the explosion that occurred inside it.

  The same was true in other ships where the initial survivors had been. Jason had hoped someone was hiding out somewhere, maybe a dropship having gotten away and hiding elsewhere in the system, but he’d sent out recall signals so loud nobody would have missed them and tiny, fist-sized search drones into the wrecking to search every corridor and room in the remaining pieces. No one was found, but many rotting bodies were where there was still pressurization.

  The others were frozen where life support had failed, but they hadn’t died of the cold. Autopsies were hard to do after so many months’ decay, but there was no obvious signs of damage to any of them. Much like the biological minions that had been killed when the new Hadarak passed them in other systems before it went dark and began hunting.

  Which was exactly what it was doing. Hunting. And its prey was the Ysalamiri.

  What the hell were the Hadarak still hiding in the Core? Was this war even winnable, or were they continually being toyed with as some sort of training exercise?

  When the drones around the planet got enough data on the Hadarak’s injuries, Jason finally let loose, sending his pent up rage out in an Essence Rush around his body after having taken a break from the astromech. Now that he was back in, he wasn’t just going to sit here and collect debris. If the new Hadarak was in the system he was going to draw it out. And if it wasn’t, he was going to finish the job Riona had started.

  Like clockwork the Hadarak on the planet sensed his Essence Rush and began disengaging, soon to climb into space and come after him…but his Borg vessel was already waiting in high orbit by the time the Hadarak got free. No sign of the other was here, and Jason was pretty sure that his sensors could pick it up even when cloaked using backlight tracking. Even if it absorbed all forms of light, it wouldn’t be able to reproduce the starlight it was blocking, and Star Force ships had long been equipped to pick out such subtleties from range. If the new Hadarak was going to make a run at them, Jason would see it coming long before it hit now that they knew what to look for. And a Borg vessel was far faster than a Ysalamir. Just let them try and ram the Sanguine Blade…

  But the other Hadarak didn’t show up, and Jason surged his Essence again to make sure the tier 2 kept coming, with Jason pumping Tar’vem’jic shots into it all the way up, some of which dug deep into the holes Riona had punched, but the Hadarak tried to keep them out of range by rotating around out of the firing line. Jason’s drones swarmed the minions escorting it, quickly winning that fight and tasking them to probe the two holes and add to the damage already done.

  Jason kept it distracted with Essence rushes while staying out of grapple range, but eventually, after many hours, the damage added up to the point that the Hadarak had to either win the fight or disengage, Essence presence or no, and it tried one last desperate ramming maneuver that Jason was waiting for. He used it to sideslip around it and pour 7 simultaneous Tar’vem’jic blasts into one of the wounds, going deep enough to tickle its central brain…at which point it turned and ran hard for the star, but it was never going to make it.

  Specialized drones went kamikaze down through the hole, being battered to the side by the Hadarak’s grapple fields in a desperate last attempt to save itself, but the countermeasure packages they were running allowed just enough immunity for some of them to make it through and plow into the exposed bit of brain…where they then detonated the kind of explosives few had ever seen, for they were rarely used by Star Force or even the V’kit’no’sat.

  They were solari fusion warheads, which was just a shorthand way of stating that the rare elements were being compressed while simultaneously having their corovons removed…and without that incredibly powerful bonding agent, the resulting mass interacted in ways it naturally never would, starting a cascade reaction that literally shredded the atoms into tier 3 subatomic particles.

  It was the equivalent of taking an atom
and turning it into pure energy, more or less, with the resulting pieces being so small and unstable that they overloaded whatever they came into contact with. It was a mass-killing explosion, not so good when used in a near vacuum, but down deep inside a Hadarak, it had all the mass it could want, and when the solari fusion interacted with it, other secondary reactions occurred…all of which resulted in huge chunks of the Hadarak vaporizing and flowing back out the wound so furiously fast it looked like the Hadarak was undergoing a directional nova.

  Jason had to let each one expire before sending another kamikaze drone down, but after 8 such hits the Hadarak lost all propulsion and began to coast towards the star.

  He maneuvered the Sanguine Blade around into flanking position, then sent Tar’vem’jic beam after beam down the very narrow tunnel, further destroying what remained of the brain before finally accepting it was permanently dead and letting it ram the star as his ship and drone fleet circled back to the ship graveyard.

  Thanks for the head start, he thought to Riona, knowing that this wasn’t vengeance. The Hadarak that killed her was still out there, and he and the other trailblazers were going to have to hunt it down first before they could use the Ysalamir again. Only then could they truly say Riona was avenged, and right now Jason didn’t know how they were going to do it.

  He had the drones pull all the pieces into an impromptu cage grid made up of the drones themselves linking into chains and using mooring beams to hold the salvage in place as the remainder of the drones formed a blanket wall around the cargo, completely encasing it in the column that extended back off the Borg vessel, making it look like it was carrying far more drones than it actually was.

  When Jason had every bit of Star Force technology that he could find picked up, he did a flyby of the planets and torched every minion he could find from orbit, saving the few cities of survivors and leaving a few drones behind in sentinel position to defend them until a fleet of evacuation transports could arrive.

  And with that he said good riddance to the system and left. What he needed to do he couldn’t do here, and when he left the astromech he went straight to the nearest med lab, altering his normal blonde hair back into the shiny silver/chrome that he’d worn during the V’kit’no’sat war. Each of the trailblazers had, until the job was finished, and now they had a new job, a personal job, to complete and neither he nor the others would rest until that bastard of a Hadarak was dead.

  And if this was just a precursor to more and more difficult Hadarak opponents that would eventually kill them all no matter how much resistance they put up…then so be it. Star Force wasn’t going to back down. They’d find a way to beat the Hadarak or die fighting.

  Run, hide, strike back, evade…they’d do whatever it took, but they were never going to accept the Hadarak as others had. At the end of the day, when you put a Jedi and a Sith into one room and shut the door, only one would come out. And that’s what this galaxy had become. One room with the door shut. And only one of them, lightside or darkside, was going to come out.

  6

  June 28, 128530

  Outreach 39 System (V’kit’no’sat/Hadarak border)

  4th planet

  Paul-024 was sitting in the cafeteria onboard the Excalibur when word of the destruction of Riona’s fleet reached the system. He got a ping on the telepathic transponders, prompting him to mentally link into the nearest relay and pull a limited, but useful amount of data without having to get up from his three trays of food that he had only just begun eating.

  He stopped midway through a spoonful of mashed potatoes, then calmly set it down and got up, walking out of the cafeteria to the nearest comm station where he could properly interface with the ship’s computer. His jaw was set firm, teeth clenched as he ducked into a corridor alcove and pulled out an inset stool, then he sat down and placed a hand on the interface terminal, allowing the computer to transmit directly into his brain the same way his armor would, though he wasn’t wearing any at the moment.

  He pulled up all the data the Valkyrie had brought back, along with Jason’s message before the other trailblazer had left to track down what was left of her fleet. Riona was one of Paul’s closest friends, and now she was most likely dead. There was a small chance she had survived along with a few others in the wreckage, but Paul doubted it. Her ship had taken a direct hit on the bridge from a disintegration weapon that neither he nor Jason fully understood, nor did it appear to emanate from any particular place on the Hadarak’s body. There were no weapon ports at all, just solid Yeg’gor without any tentacles orifices. It looked more like a ship than a Hadarak, but a very alien ship at that.

  Riona had run into it without knowing anything about it. It had targeted and destroyed the Ysalamir, then killed almost everyone in the fleet in an instant…then finished off the others by destroying the portions of the ships they were on before they could manage to run away. She had no chance against that. She’d been totally blindsided, expecting it to fight like a Hadarak rather than…whatever it was.

  It wasn’t fair. She’d lived for more than 100 millennia, only to die like this…and not just her. Everyone in the fleet had been killed, and that added up to 682,139 people, most of whom were at least 1,000 years old. Hopefully a handful were still alive out there for Jason to find, but that wasn’t Paul’s concern now. That thing was still out there, and maybe more than one of them, and he had to find a way to defend against those unknown weapons.

  While he was going through the data he got a personal call, which he routed into a small hologram no bigger than the size of his hand popping up over top the console he sat at.

  “You heard?” Kian-093 asked, with his own Borg-class ship also sitting in orbit around one of many fortified Star Force staging bases located just inside V’kit’no’sat territory feeding the assault fleets supplies and replacement drones, the latter of which both trailblazers were waiting to top off on before returning to Hadarak hunting.

  “Just,” Paul confirmed. “We’re in trouble.”

  “I know. Essence?”

  “I’m not sure, but whatever killed the crew was counteracted by regenerators…after the fact. I’m issuing an order for all fleets to mandate their crews wear them at all times in combat zones.”

  “Agreed. Sensors showed nothing to create that disruption effect. Any guesses?”

  “Whatever it is, it has to have a massive amount of power to do that. Not to mention the speed of the…we need a name?”

  Kian twisted the corner of his mouth for a moment as he thought. “Any chance this is your Unicron?”

  “No. The profile doesn’t fit. I can’t explain what it looks like, but I know that’s not it.”

  “Alright then…Lurker?”

  Paul nodded. “Fits. We’re going to have to probe this Lurker with drones from extreme range. Jason ordered the withdrawal of Ysalamir, and I’m adding the Uriti to that, so what do you think it will go after if they’re not in play?”

  “I’d guess it came specifically for the Ysalamiri, but it was probably pacing the other Hadarak waiting for one to show up. My guess is it’ll be lurking near another small Hadarak in wait.”

  “Well that narrows it down a bit. One of us has to find this thing…and it has to be one of us. You understand?”

  “If it is Essence, we have to see it coming. Why didn’t Riona?”

  “Maybe she did. The Ysalamir moved partially before the first impact, and before it popped up on backlit recognition. My guess is she did, but not in time to realize what was happening. We won’t know for sure unless Jason can recover part of her ship or the Ysalamir for order confirmation.”

  “Damn, I missed that,” Kian admitted. “I was focused on the acceleration profile. I think the Lurker’s hull is specifically designed for ramming and it has the engine capability to match.”

  “Ship or Hadarak?” Paul asked.

  “Mass indicates it’s solid, though that doesn’t entirely rule out ship, but my credits are on Hadarak. How do you wa
nt to play this?”

  “We need to find it first, then poke it with a long stick. We don’t let anyone near it until we have a better understanding of its combat profile. Specifically its speed.”

  “If it’s hiding in a star, we’re not going to be able to find it.”

  “It has to sense a Ysalamir, and mass won’t cut it. Not at any appreciable range if it’s that deep in a star. The stellar material mass signature will outweigh it.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Fairly, though it’s just speculation. I think they can only detect faint gravity pulls if nothing is in between. Put a planet there and the faint traces gets mixed in with the greater pull.”

  “So it can’t detect…oh,” Kian said as a thought hit him, and as soon as he said ‘oh’ Paul got the same idea.

  “The Hadarak is a sensor buoy for it.”

  “So it can hide from us unless we draw it out,” Kian said, pounding one fist into his open palm. “Clever bastards.”

  “I think it’s clear that the Hadarak are more advanced than we already assumed. So let’s just go all out and assume they’ve got a dozen more scaling options hidden in the Deep Core for when we warrant their attention.”

  “We wait them out,” Kian answered Paul’s implied question, “except we can’t without sacrificing large chunks of the galaxy.”

  “So the ‘others’ hide and avoid provoking them?”

  “Typical cowards. Riona would be alive if they’d just warned us what the Hadarak were capable of.”

  Paul’s teeth clenched again, for that little epiphany hadn’t occurred to him. “Have Davis wring it out of the Knights of Quenar.”

  “I’ll explain it to him,” Kian promised. “So do we wait here for one to pop up, or do we go looking?”

  “If Jason doesn’t find it waiting for him, we go looking. Time is not on our side if we can’t use the Ysalamir.”

  “Then we should use one as bait.”