Star Force: Forsaken (Star Force Universe Book 48) Read online

  And he was good at it. Good enough that there was concern he was somehow using his Pefbar to cheat and look at their cards, but it had long been said that Pefbar couldn’t see colors, only physical objects, and unless there was a raised portion on the cards they would just look flat to Pefbar view.

  The H’kar had to take the word of those with it, for only a few H’kar had ever been granted the ability and those were Mavericks and Monarchs, who rarely interacted with the lower ranks. HABDX was the first these techs had ever directly talked to who had psionics, and he’d been more free with information than they’d expected.

  “Raise 20,” the Paladin said, flicking a holographic chip into the holographic container in the center of the table.

  “Out,” another H’kar said, putting his real cards face down on the table, for only the scoring metrics were holographic.

  Before the next player could respond, a small device strapped to the left wrist of the Paladin sounded a repetitive alarm.

  “What is that?” a H’kar asked.

  “I have to go,” the Paladin said, standing up and dropping his cards on the table face up. “We are called to battle.”

  “Battle?” the others said, standing up in a panic. “What are you talking about?”

  “I am summoned to my ship,” he said heading for the door. “If I do not get there in time I will be left behind. This sound,” he said, touching the device and silencing the alarm as he walked, “says the summons comes from a trailblazer, and they are calling us to war. I must go,” he said, running out the door and disappearing from view.

  “I thought the war was over?” one of the H’kar said, looking at the others.

  “Why are we not getting an alarm?”

  “Maybe the fighting isn’t here. Maybe the Paladin are being called to another system.”

  “I knew it was too good to last. The V’kit’no’sat went back on their word, I guarantee you that.”

  “So much for the rebuilding,” another said, throwing his cards on the table.

  “Let’s see if we can find someone who knows what’s going on and figure out how much time we have left before our shore leave is canceled…”

  HABDX-28894 ran out of the H’kar building on the planet’s surface and headed on foot towards the nearest pod car station, for the H’kar were not the best runners and had railways built on the side of their buildings high above their streets that carried passengers around the city at far faster pace than the pedestrians could manage.

  Despite his being a tech, the Paladin basic physiology was much faster than that of the H’kar and he found himself having to zig zag between the pedestrians until he got to the base of one of the vertical tube clusters. Fortunately he only had to wait a few seconds for one to open up, then he jumped inside the chamber large enough for 5 or 6 H’kar and sealed himself in alone, upsetting the H’kar behind him that he’d pushed his way past.

  He input his destination onto the navigation panel and the pod lifted up through the clear tubes for about 40 meters, then hit open air as it transitioned to one of the many lateral rails that were inset into the buildings and jumped the gaps between them. Once his was latched on, it accelerated rapidly with buildings passing by the clear pod every few seconds on his way to the nearby spaceport that his comm device was signaling him to get to.

  All the Paladin wore the devices when they were off ship, allowing the captain to recall the crew and guide them to the closest pickup points. HABDX actually got to the spaceport just as the Paladin dropship was descending through the sky nearby, with the pod stopping and descending through another set of tubes as the ship made final approach and he lost sight of it.

  The Paladin ran out, pushing by the H’kar outside and attracting the attention of the security guards at the entrance to the spaceport. Rather than stopping him they cleared a path, yelling at him and another Paladin a few steps ahead and further to the right to move through. Apparently the fleet had contacted the spaceport ahead of them and explained the urgency, otherwise he would have had to wait more than half an hour to get through this crowded checkpoint.

  More Paladin were arriving behind him, but he was one of the first two out onto the landing pad as the dropship opened its boarding ramp a mere 8 seconds before HABDX’s feet hit it. He and the others ran in and to the waiting seats wordlessly. Other races might talk nervously, but Paladin didn’t. They all knew their duty, and unless it required them to talk they would sit silent and await orders…which is exactly what he did as a little more than half the seats were filled before the ramp pulled back in and they took off.

  The dropship headed straight up, being given priority clearance and cutting through all the traffic of the H’kar civilian ships as they headed up to the Paladin jumpships along with a scattering of other dropships doing the same. Fortunately most Paladin crews stayed onboard, even during peacetime, so they didn’t have a lot of people to recover, but some of their ships were still damaged and sitting inside H’kar shipyard slips.

  But they were moving too, casting off the repair scaffolding probably faster than the H’kar wanted. When the trailblazers called, no Paladin wanted to be left behind, and fortunately only one jumpship had been destroyed in this fleet during combat, leaving the rest of the damaged ones operational even before repairs had begun. That meant they were better off now than before, even if they still had some visible holes in their massive hulls.

  Before the dropship docked, he could see fleets of drones around the damaged jumpships like bees around a hive as they raced to dock in the slots and refill, with his jumpship already being fully loaded, as was standard. Paladin ships did not release drones unless there was a need, so they could be moved immediately when orders came. Only the damaged ones and those on patrol had their drones missing, and right now they were frantically trying to get them onboard as the majority of the fleet was already making microjumps out.

  That meant the combat wasn’t at this planet, at least, and once HABDX got off the dropship and back into the crew rotation he learned the truth. Star Force wasn’t under attack. The V’kit’no’sat were and they were being called to a rescue mission. A rescue mission that would see them fighting the lizards to save a V’kit’no’sat world.

  The idea of saving the V’kit’no’sat meant the Armistice hadn’t been broken, but coming to the rescue of the enemy didn’t feel right. However, the inclusion of the lizards made everything crystal clear. The V’kit’no’sat might be Star Force’s arch nemesis, but to the Paladin there was one of higher priority to them, and that was the lizards. They were their evil twin, and the meaning of their relationship had been encoded in his genetic memory.

  If the trailblazers were calling on them to fight the lizards, then there could be no more important mission for a Paladin. This fight was personal, despite HABDX never having had any contact with them. He was Paladin, and Paladin had a group memory from birth, a portion of which had come directly from the Supreme Viceroy who had once been a lizard before being saved by the trailblazers.

  HABDX also knew the method of that rescue had most likely been safeguarded against by the Templars, meaning the only freedom the Paladin could offer the lizards was through their deaths…and better it be in combat than the lizards suiciding when captured.

  The Paladin hated the lizards, because they were the sworn enemy of Star Force, because they operated opposite the loyalty and duty the Paladin lived and breathed, and because the lizards who had begun the Paladin had been left to die in combat against Star Force while the Templars ran. Paladin understood dying for their duty, but they were Star Force and that had to fall inside the lines of trying to save each other. The lizards threw away their lives…HABDX could remember that vividly…and it was only because their enemy at the time had chosen to save them were they still here.

  The lizards were in the wrong, his people betrayed by the Templars and twisted into evil, and now that he was going to have a chance to get some payback, HABDX was just as eager as the other
s to get out of H’kar territory and into whatever battle the trailblazers were calling them to.

  Add to that the fact that the Paladin had never fought the lizards before, and this mission took on historic meaning as well as procing their professional pride. Star Force had taken the discarded enemy soldiers and transformed them into something better. Something that fought for stability and uplifting the galaxy rather than chaos and destruction. And it was time to prove their superiority over their evil doppelgangers.

  Thrawn had given his fleet in this system 3 hours to gather, and he was pleased to see that most of them had reported ready to jump out within 2. A few of the ships in the yard had taken longer, but all had transitioned with nearly full loads of drones to the stellar jumppoint as five other fleets along the border were doing likewise on Thrawn’s order. Kara wasn’t here, so it was up to him to respond as soon as possible, but he sent her a message that would take days to reach her in the Paladin Zone informing her of what ships he was taking and recommended her sending others to replace them just in case the border would come under attack in his absence.

  The Arch Duke had contacted him previously, asking what the hell was going on, for apparently the message had come to Thrawn only. He took a small measure of pride in the fact that Paul hadn’t bothered to tell anyone else, even an Arch Duke, but he explained the situation to the Monarch none the less and she’d quickly cleared orbital routes to expedite his fleet’s departure from the planets.

  Three hours might have seemed extremely fast to begin leaving the system, but it was just more time added to how far behind the Paladin were to whatever fleets Paul was taking. Most of those in the Devastation Zone were at Earth or the Uriti Preserve, plus the roaming ones on patrol. He had no idea what strength level the lizards were at now, for they hadn’t done much surveillance on them since the war with the V’kit’no’sat initially began, but they’d managed a few scouts over the centuries and they knew their tech level had advanced considerably, as had their numbers.

  The Skarrons were gone now. Probably completely eradicated, though without a serious and comprehensive scouting campaign there was no way to know for sure, but everywhere they had looked the Skarron worlds were now full of lizards, and if they were choosing combat against the V’kit’no’sat and threatening to take their worlds, against their technology, then Thrawn wasn’t going to expect an easy fight.

  In his opinion this fight was long overdue. Star Force had let the lizards go coreward because they couldn’t risk exposing their existence to the V’kit’no’sat. Since then things had greatly changed, and while a lot of Star Force was beat up from the war, the Paladin were ready and eager to fight. They always were. It was one of the primary reasons they existed.

  And Paul knew that, which was why Thrawn was very grateful that the trailblazer was calling on him, despite the fact that the Paladin were the closest reinforcements along with the H’kar, but he’d checked and the H’kar hadn’t been summoned. In the past Paul had said he didn’t want the Paladin fighting the lizards, for the confliction that might ensue, but the Paladin were well past that point now and they would do their duty without hesitation. The lizards were not Thrawn’s people. They were slaves, at best, and slaves he couldn’t free now that the Templars had altered the biochemistry that had allowed him to assume command over the others.

  The few genetic samples retrieved by the scouts had confirmed this, along with a significant alteration in other areas. These lizards were not the same as his had been, and if any of those still existed they would be few in number, for lizards did not live long when engaged in combat. His Paladin, on the other hand, were another matter entirely.

  He privately wished he could go on a campaign of conquest, claiming the lizards as his own as he once had, but without the built in acceptance of his authority he knew they’d never turn. He knew it in a way that even the trailblazers did not. He did not like to admit defeat, but he knew that short of rewriting their mental code there was no way to save them. And to do that would essentially destroy them. They might live, but without their genetic coding guiding them the lizards and Paladin would go berserk. The trailblazers had tried it on some of their prisoners, thinking it would be better than them killing themselves, but they only turned into zombies, for Star Force didn’t have the ability to do more than block their programing at the time.

  Since then they’d come much further, experimenting on some Paladin to see what happened when they were ‘freed’ from the mental order. They’d been born without the coding, and had quickly needed to be altered to include it, for they could not function at all. Even when picking and choosing how much to include, it just wasn’t possible to grow an adult with a ‘clean slate,’ and Paladin biology no longer included a means to reproduce infants, if it ever had.

  Star Force had tried to undo the coding in adults, with disastrous effects. Some had lashed out trying to kill everything around them, others had killed themselves…only to be regenerated and have their coding restored. For whatever reason the lizards/Paladin were hard wired to a communal genetic memory, and there was no way to free them from it…so the trailblazers had chosen to turn it into an advantage while minimizing the downsides.

  Thrawn was proud of what the Paladin had become, but he knew his own ascension to individuality had come at a heavy price that the others could not pay. If not for Paul and the trailblazers he never would have learned the truth…for he had to learn it, rather than being told it. That was a distinction lost on the others, and sometimes he felt he was the only Paladin truly awake and free…which meant he had to use that freedom to guide the others. They relied on him more than even the Archons, and if the Paladin were to truly earn their place in Star Force, they had to be able to operate independently without the Archons carrying them on every occasion.

  The Paladin were far from that, and Thrawn feared they never would reach that point without the necessary experience that their genetic memory effectively blocked. He’d discussed some type of training program with the 2s to recreate what he went through, but they’d nixed that. Thrawn had to go through what he went through because the genetic memory was pushing him in the wrong direction. Now that it had been altered to bring them into the light, they would wait and watch for those curious enough to work their way free of it on their own rather than trying to force them out.

  And they were still waiting. Many had made progress, but none had made it all the way. Going with what they were instinctually driven to do was too easy and too comfortable. No one wanted to completely break free, and Thrawn knew that only when they did would they gain the skills needed to truly lead the Paladin.

  Perhaps the Paladin were not meant to ascend to that level. Perhaps it would undo their strength if it did. That put Thrawn in a solitary position. He existed because he had been in the transition, and as Paul had said, he’d been curious enough to choose to look after considerable pushing. If someone was not curious, the pushing would not matter. And he knew that was true for nearly all of his people.

  And with the lizard genetic memories taking them the other way, he knew he wasn’t going to find any that could work their way out of it. If there were, they would have been executed long ago.

  Gruesome work was ahead, but it had to be done and he knew the Paladin wouldn’t hesitate. Neither would the Archons, but only because they had exhausted all other possibilities. The Paladin simply would because they had been instructed to, and that worried Thrawn. So long as the reigns of the Paladin remained in the right hands things would be fine, but if someone altered them the Paladin wouldn’t care. They’d mindlessly follow orders just like the lizards. Age might temper that a bit, and the Paladin’s longevity was something to explore in that regard, but Thrawn suspected the truth.

  The trailblazers had pulled him out of the trap that the lizards were, yet they were unable to do the same for others. Rather they had taken the enslavement and turned it into structure that would enhance and protect the Paladin, but they would ne
ver be free. Their greatest strength was also their greatest hindrance. Thrawn, for whatever reason, had been given the advantages of both, and that was why he thought Paul felt confident enough to call him to this fight.

  And he would kill every lizard he could find. Not because he wanted to, but because he knew, as Paul did, that there was no other feasible way to deal with them. They had to be exterminated, and Thrawn hoped this would be the beginning of their end, either at Star Force’s hands or trodden under the heavy foot of the V’kit’no’sat.

  But either way, it had to be done, and it was his responsibility more than anyone’s to see that it was.

  6

  May 2, 4917

  Unnamed System (Tamprani Region)

  Stellar Orbit

  Paul was onboard the Excalibur two jumps away from the Ohson System and a few minutes away from entry into another uninhabited pass-through when he got a warning signal from one of the Ma’kri scout ships sent ahead of the main fleet. They had arrived, coming out of their jumps and reporting back on the way ahead via hyper-compressed, brief messages due to the nature of the signal being sent and the relative speeds involved in their reception.

  But it was enough to get vital information back to the fleet, and it was signaling that there was a large lizard fleet in the system ahead, but they were not blockading the incoming jumppoint. They were pooled around the star in what appeared to be a holding pattern…and there were a lot of them. Upwards of 60,000 jumpships.