Star Force: Zealot (SF87) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  A holographic tag popped up on a map, showing the location of an uninhabited system that lay partway between the active front and the Calavari region, one that had been captured and cleansed of lizards more than a century ago.

  “I’m asking that you send all available ships there as well. If we succeed in our mission, we will possess one of the most dangerous weapons in the galaxy and once that information spreads, despite our efforts to keep it quiet, it may invite other players, perhaps unseen ones, to make a move to acquire it or to deny us its use. I have no intention of using this weapon, for reasons I’ll outline shortly, but please mobilize as many naval resources as you can from the local region. It’s going to take time to pull them from the ADZ and its rumored the Trinx have built up a large navy in secret that could be extremely troublesome if it catches either of us off guard.”

  “In addition to that, I need a favor.”

  5

  February 21, 3255

  Interstellar Space

  Mid Jump

  Riley sat next to Nefron in the chamber built onboard the Zeus to house him and the control interface with the Uriti transmitter. The Archon couldn’t use it, nor could anyone else save for the Chixzon, but so long as he was using it the trailblazer could eavesdrop through the equipment tie-in that was linked to both the command nexus and the small sphere in front of his lap that his hands were placed on, establishing a firm mental connection.

  His mind swirled along with Nefron’s, both of them pathetically small compared to the mind they were touching. It mostly ignored them, save for when they issued the specific commands it had been conditioned to respond to automatically, but every now and then they could provoke a response…a mere twitch in its mind, as they probed for some way to establish true communications.

  It wasn’t so much a matter of establishing a common language, but rather trying to wrap one’s mind around the perspective the Uriti viewed things through. It literally didn’t think like a Human or a Chixzon did, and crossing that chasm was something that Riley was adamant about trying to do during what was going to be a very slow journey to get the Uriti to the destination system. Right now the ships accompanying it were keeping their distance, but traveling at a jump speed so slow lesser races could actually have caught up to and passed them if there were any moving through the area.

  Though with this being lizard territory, that wasn’t likely.

  The transmitter allowed them to communicate at a range that could encompass a star system, but the lag was still a factor that made getting closer to the Uriti necessary for the work that Riley needed to do. That meant his command ship was the closest to the Uriti as the fleet accompanying it coasted along silently. Nefron had said the Uriti would not attack them once it had identified the ship as the source of the control signals, but just the same, he had the Zeus’s Admiral standing by to move them away at all possible speed if something did happen. In the doldrums of interstellar space there wasn’t much gravity to work with, but his ship was far more powerful than the Uriti was, so if they could get moving they could outrun it with ease.

  Hopefully none of that would be necessary, but Riley didn’t like the idea of everyone on the command ship being sitting ducks while he poked the thing with a telepathic stick.

  “This is pointless,” Nefron said in defeat, but still maintained the link for Riley’s sake. “There is no way to communicate short of the genetic routes installed, and we don’t have the option of inputting new ones. The Chixzon wanted point and click capability, not dialog, and all we’ve got to work with is what they devised.”

  “That’s what makes it a challenge,” Riley said as his eyes were closed and most of his focus on the Uriti’s mind. It was so large and powerful it had a beauty to it that made you either run in fear or become transfixed, unable to tear your attention away as it droned out the rest of your senses…if you were a newb.

  “I don’t even know how to approach this one. If you can’t fail and learn from it, how do you adapt? I can’t even get a score on this, if you could measure it. It’s completely obtuse.”

  “Not completely, just close,” Riley differed. “I think we have to develop a different mental signature. It’s like it sees standard light and we’re trying to talk to it with radio waves. Language isn’t the issue.”

  “My signals are no different.”

  “Yeah, that’s what threw me initially. I’m speculating that it may only be conditioned to listen for those specific things and blind to everything else Chixzon. We have to appear, at least in a small way, to be Hadarak.”

  “And you have a plan how to do that?”

  “Working on it.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Nefron said skeptically.

  “If Aaron can learn to talk to ants, I should be able to find a way to talk to a Uriti.”

  “Ants?”

  “He’s spent a lot of time in the sanctums helping them interface with the denizens, and we’ve got a few ant colonies too…in addition to the ones elsewhere on the planet that we don’t control. You know what ants are, right?”

  “That was covered in the maturia training.”

  “Thought so.”

  “What did he talk to them about?”

  “Basic stuff. Directions. Needs. Danger. Their minds are so simple and preprogrammed there’s not much to work with, so in that respect this should be…easy,” Riley said with a wince.

  “I thought the sanctuaries were designed to bring in native lifeforms out of the wild so they didn’t have to kill and eat each other to survive.”

  “Partially. We also weren’t going to kill them to make room for more colonies. Some die anyway, like the ants. They’re just too small and everywhere. You step on them by accident.”

  “I would guess you found a way to deal with that. At least partially?”

  “Psionic sweeper teams. They go through and shoo away critters before we start digging. If there are anything the size of mice they make sure to dig them out and remove them from the site before the big machinery kicks in, but with ants, grubs, and other tiny insects the best we can do is warn them off.”

  “Or not build there,” Nefron pointed out. “Not that I share your concern for the ants.”

  “We don’t like to be sloppy. And we really don’t like the universe telling us we have to be.”

  “What I know of this galaxy from the Chixzon differs greatly from what I’ve learned and observed in Star Force. It is a savage, messy, chaotic place. You’ve created the nearest thing to a utopia…and you’re worried about ants?”

  “Don’t ever say ‘utopia,’ please.”

  “Why not?”

  “For starters, you’re going to jinx us. Secondly, when you get that in your head you blind yourself to all the injustices that still remain. With freedom comes the opportunity to misbehave, and even if every single individual didn’t harm another, there are still environmental dangers. A piece of wall falls down and crushes someone’s skull. Is that a utopia? It happens, and can happen every day. Life is never without risk, and no matter how much of this galaxy we clean up there’s always more to get to. We’ll never get it all, annoying as that is, so that’s why when we take on a new world and start cutting away the wilderness we don’t stop to avoid stepping on the ants.”

  “I don’t entirely follow your logic.”

  “If we do nothing, they are still dying every day from a myriad of causes. Same with the other critters out there. The wildness is too chaotic and robust with life trampling other life for us to be able to keep from killing anything, so we stick to fair game rules and do what we need to.”

  “What rules are those?”

  “If it’s big enough to move, move it. If it’s too small and there are too many, shoo them away, given them a chance to get clear, then come on in and get to work. If they’re burrowed down in the dirt and don’t leave, then they’ll have to take their chances with the digging equipment. We don’t ever intentionally kill them. Sometimes they just get in th
e way and we can’t afford to stop and look for another way.”

  “Sounds counterintuitive, inefficient, and all around ridiculous. Star Force builds so fast that you must have some other factor in play?”

  “If you’re building on lifeless planets you have nothing to worry about.”

  “That’s a partial explanation.”

  “Our sweeper teams have gotten to be very good over the years.”

  “If you’re building in dense jungle, that has to take forever just to clear a square kilometer. And they have to have somewhere to go eventually. Building a sanctuary to hold an entire planet’s population of, as you said, ‘critters,’ is crazy.”

  “Mitigating factors.”

  “Such as?”

  “A lot of the smaller ones don’t live very long anyway. They expire of other reasons, and the larger ones that we put into sanctuaries we keep separate along gender lines so they can’t reproduce. This gradually decreased the population over time and we can rid a planet of all native critters if we want without killing even one of them.”

  “The larger ones anyway,” Nefron amended. “You can’t separate ants by genders. They reproduce by queen, correct…ah, I see. You pluck out the queens.”

  “If we want to go to that extent, yes. But most ants are so small and widespread we don’t worry about them after the initial sweep. If we find a colony location we’ll move it, but individual ants running around isn’t something we can worry about. It took me a while to get that through my head without stopping caring about killing them, but it became obvious later.”

  “What happened later?”

  “I got my ass kicked by the Black Knight in a training challenge. Afterwards it dawned on me how little I actually have control of. The galaxy is so diverse and choked with life in some locations that if you move even a step you end up killing something. Do you stand still, a prisoner of the situation indefinitely? Or do you act and just let the chips fall where they may? We don’t intentionally kill anyone, but sometimes people are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s why Axius is split between large and small races, and there are still plenty of accidents anyway simply because of the size differences between a Human and an Irondel. Ants are far worse.”

  “So you don’t approve, you just acknowledge the futility of it?”

  “The universe has so many battles to fight we can’t even begin to start them all, let alone win them. We have to pick and choose, and size does matter. The little stuff we can’t get overly concerned with, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to knock someone on their ass if I see them going around and intentionally stomping on ants.”

  “Coming from some of the greatest warriors in the galaxy, what you’re saying sounds incredibly odd. Especially when you’ve killed so many lizards.”

  “They had a choice. An ant in your way doesn’t.”

  “Orbital bombardment?”

  “Their leaders had a choice. Those under our guns were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You pick and choose your fights,” Nefron echoed. “And if a group of people are acting as one, and their leader chooses for them, they all suffer the consequences.”

  “Mercy is the luxury of the dominant. The tougher our opponent is, the less options we have when we fight them. And we’ll only go so far to safeguard our enemies. Bystanders are another matter entirely.”

  “And these ants are bystanders?”

  “You’ve never seen one, have you? Outside of pictures.”

  “No.”

  “Visit the sanctuaries sometime. It’ll give you some perspective.”

  “As to what?”

  “How helpless you can be, and how easy it is to turn a blind eye to those so much smaller than you. Most people don’t even give a second though about ants, let alone a first one. The idea of talking to them is something only a handful of people have come up with, then found a way to do.”

  “And what have you gained from those talks, aside from ‘perspective.’”

  “We’re trying to see if we can upgrade them through training.”

  Nefron stared at him for a moment. “You’re serious?”

  “We prefer that to genetic meddling.”

  “You’re trying to upgrade all the sanctuary races, aren’t you?”

  “It’s sort of a quiet hobby for Star Force. We don’t try it with all of them, but those we allow to reproduce we do work with.”

  “To what end? There are far more other races out there to incorporate into Star Force if that is your aim.”

  “We do it because we care. If we get a tactical or logistic advantage out of it, that’s just bonus.”

  “Your caring seems overdone.”

  “I truly hope Nami doesn’t share that sentiment, because to her we are ants.”

  Nefron hesitated a moment, suddenly in a logic checkmate he hadn’t seen coming. Score one for the Archon.

  “I wondered if you had a point floating around in there somewhere. You’re suggesting that the Uriti simply doesn’t care about us because we are too insignificant? And by us, I mean you. It will listen to me when necessary.”

  “Only because the Chixzon forced it to. What does Nami think we are, from her point of view?”

  “It has no gender.”

  “Then I can call it whatever I want. What would an ant have to say or do to get your attention?”

  “Something above and beyond its kin. There are so many of them that…”

  Riley opened his eyes, having the same epiphany that Nefron was. “We need a bigger transmitter.”

  “Our telepathic signal is so weak it’s disregarded unless specifically encoded. You said Aaron talked to ants. He did it because he chose to, not because they got his attention?”

  “Like enthralling other races. The Uriti can take notice if it wants to, but if it doesn’t it just ignores all of us.”

  “Ships are different,” Nefron pointed out. “But telepathically speaking, despite even your strength, we’re tiny. And your strength doesn’t translate through the transmitter. We are the size it makes us, so we need to build a bigger persona.”

  “We’ve been whispering at a rock concert,” Riley said, taking his hands off the sphere and putting his palm against his forehead with a muted ‘whack.’ “It’s so obvious I don’t know how we missed it. How they…missed it. Or did they,” he said, whispering to himself.

  “They?”

  “Your evil twins,” Riley said, referencing the subject that Nefron knew they couldn’t talk about.

  “Sometimes I think you’ve invented them just to mess with me.”

  Riley smiled. “Damn, that does sound like something we would do. I’ll have to remember that for later.”

  “The next Chixzon you find won’t be so talkative.”

  “Dude, you really got to work on the jinxing thing.”

  “Are we finished here?” Nefron said stoically.

  The Archon visually brushed off the equipment around them. “Yeah. This stuff is no good aside from letting you steer. We’ve gotta get back in hardware mode.”

  “The Chixzon tech isn’t easy to produce, and we’re not set up for it on this ship.”

  “No, but we can get there. Give me a shopping list and I’ll see what we can pull from the fleet. If we have to send for parts I’ll send a courier off at the next system, but I’d rather build this inhouse if needed.”

  “It’s going to have to be a large transmitter.”

  “Yeah, I know. But going all the way back to a primary shipyard is a waste of time, and all we’re doing right now is sitting and twiddling our thumbs while we wait for Nami to get up the steps with her granny walker…and no, don’t ask. Old, old reference.”

  “I think I got the gist of it. We lose nothing from trying…aside from some equipment.”

  “We got plenty of that, so let’s get to shopping.”

  Nefron disconnected from the Uriti and took a moment to flush his mind of its overbearing presenc
e. “Very well. I instructed techs how to produce this equipment the first time. I can bear the tediousness again.”

  Riley glanced over his shoulder at him as they walked out of the chamber. “Play nice,” he warned. “We put in a lot of tediousness trying to get your sanity back, remember?”

  “That they did. You weren’t there.”

  “My point stands.”

  “If the techs that helped me build this were here, I wouldn’t have to instruct newbs a second time.”

  “Then blame your Chixzon intellect for not anticipating we’d need this, and get to work on that list. I’d rather get to know Nami before the Trinx try and pull something.”

  “A valid point, but I wouldn’t wager on the timing.”

  “All the more reason to get this moving pronto.”

  6

  April 30, 3255

  Targish System (lizard territory)

  Stellar Orbit

  Jarod Vermon woke up in bed suddenly as the ship’s alarm blared, half kicking off the covers as his mind snapped back into waking mode. He was only three hours into his sleep cycle, but a shipwide alarm meant that no longer mattered. It was one of several distinct, repetitive tones that had been drilled into him over 200 years before during his basic naval training, but this was the first time he’d ever been awoken by one.

  The Human kicked off his covers and grabbed his shoes, not bothering to waste time changing into a proper uniform. He ran through the hallways in T-shirt and shorts until he came to a lift, took it four decks below, then ran some more until he eventually came to one of the large theater-like control decks onboard the Excalibur. Most of the seats were filled, but he hurried to an empty one and sat down, quickly logging himself into the station and awaiting orders as he pulled an auxiliary headset on and popped up a small regional map to see what the call to battlestations had been about.

  “Shit,” he said a moment before a task was prioritized to him, seeing thousands of enemy vessels engaging the leading elements of the convoy as it came out of the jump ahead of the Uriti. There was a considerable delay between their arrival and it, then another delay back to the main group of escorts, meaning that Star Force didn’t have that many ships in the leading group as it seemed the Trinx had come back for round two in far greater numbers.