Star Force: Paradigm (SF35) Read online

  Scouting was another issue entirely, but the same direct approach was taken. Like their warships, they favored diminishing sensor range rather than hiding altogether, and not even the Zak’de’ron had seen fit to develop even an active camouflage system for themselves or their Zen’zat, but fortunately they did allow for color alterations, as well as for sensor dampening technologies within the armor. That allowed Kara to both change her scales to a null-like black that would soak up excess light and take away any glare the normally shiny scales would reflect.

  It didn’t make her invisible, but rather a shadow amongst other shadows…so long as she stayed out of the lizard lights, of which there were many, so when she got to the edge of the forest she began hopping from one structure to another and sticking to the shadows they made, set against orange flood lights.

  She didn’t have the area to herself, for the construction crew continued building round the clock, but with a few Jedi mind tricks here and there she was able to slip by them, ducking from cover to cover and making her way across the construction zone so long as she was patient and waited for her openings.

  Kara got stuck once when a flock of kirbies came in with several large beams suspended by lines beneath them for the building directly next to her. She had to camp out in a shadowy crevice between pillar and wall for half an hour before they eventually flew off, then she was able to dart across the dirt streets and continue to make her way in towards the city wall.

  When she got there it looked a lot less solid than it did from a distance. There were roadways breaking through at multiple points, and the buildings weren’t arranged in a straight line, but were sticking out like blocks in random fashion, making what had looked like a smooth boundary really a mottled mess of incoherent infrastructure.

  The roadways did switch over from dirt to stone-like paving as Kara crossed the blurred line between new city and old, and the shadows that had been present in the construction side now vanished with street lights that made it impossible for her to walk about unnoticed…so she went up to the rooftops where there were still some shadows to be had and began jumping her way from one to another, trying to avoid the low ones for fear of being seen out a nearby window, few as they were on lizard buildings.

  Finding a path in through the city was tricky, for the rooftops were not all flat. A lot of them were teepee shaped or slanted, meaning she either had to bypass those or go Spiderman on them. Kara did both as needed, working her way several kilometers into the city before finally going inside one of the larger buildings through a roof entrance.

  She shifted her armor over to the color of the lizard interior hallways, giving her a yellowish look that would stand out less than pitch black, but with her psionic advantage she didn’t plan on relying on her visual camouflage, limited as it was. Moving down into the building she pried what she could from several passing minds, then ambushed one with an angled head that she knew to be a higher level coordinator variety they referred to as ‘librarians.’

  Kara took the librarian down on its way through a hall with four other lizards within sight, but through a little psionic trickery they didn’t notice when the librarian veered into the wall and slumped halfway down to the ground, only to have a pair of armored hands reach out from a doorway and drag it inside.

  When the Archon got the door shut she released her Ikrid link to the others, having had to juggle four different sets of senses simultaneously, not to mention knocking out her target. That had strained her, but she’d managed to pull it off, based on the lack of reaction from the minds of the others as they continued on with their duties on the other side of the walls from where she and her captive now rested.

  It was a large room, with two other lizards already napping in it. Those she’d knocked out when she’d come down from the balcony above. The two story room held an obelisk in the center that was some sort of data device, or so she’d gathered from the two users. It was low priority and sparsely used, which should give her a bit of privacy in which to conduct her ‘interviews,’ though she still had to keep her Ikrid radar alert for others coming in on either level.

  She pulled the librarian over to a bench and got to work on his head, finding his mind more complex than the standard variants across the room. This type of lizard was used to deal with data, and as such should provide her with valuable intel…specifically where in the city the higher ranking lizards were.

  That information wasn’t hard to retrieve, for the lizard’s mind was segmented like a computer database, with the hierarchy well established. It served a command variant, which Star Force already knew about. They labeled them ‘administrators’ due to the fact that they didn’t command anything in combat, but ran large scale operations from a logistics angle.

  It was its superior that Kara was interested in, and the librarian gave her not one, but three others, two of which were on planet. Images were fuzzy, but she got the location of one of them on the lizard’s mental map of the city, giving her another building to get to.

  Not wanting to overstay her welcome, she let go of the librarian and jumped/flew up to the second level, heading back through that level to a maintenance shaft that led to the service area directly underneath the roof, distracting a few minds along the way. When she got back outside she ran across the rooftop to the edge and jumped across the street, angling up to the wall of a much larger building, this one shaped like a teepee.

  Kara hit the side and clung to it, then flew up the side keeping her body pressed as close to the building side as possible to reduce her silhouette until she reached the peak. It had no entrance, but a dome-like cap that glowed orange that she sat down upon, making her armor go reflective so she blended in with the massive light as she looked out over the city, trying to spot her next target.

  Star Force cities had buildings of various size, but none clustered together in the center like the nations of Earth used to have. This lizard city seemed like a throwback, with the tallest buildings all located towards the center, including three massive ones that stood more than twice as tall as the others.

  Those weren’t where the librarian had unwittingly directed her. Instead, the location it’d tagged was a massive building alongside those, but only 1/3rd the height. It was a fat teepee that dwarfed the one she now sat upon, but looked small given how far away on the horizon it was. She guessed it was at least 20 kilometers away, and her armor sensed her mental question and popped up a rangefinder in V’kit’no’sat measurement units, which she mentally translated into approximately 42 kilometers.

  Kara sighed. She’d wanted to probe a big lizard city, and that’s just what she’d got. Resigning herself to a lot of indirect building hopping she eyed her next target, quashing the urge to just fly directly over there. She didn’t want to tip off the lizards to her presence, and this close in it would be unlikely that their sensors couldn’t detect her if she got up into the air…and it would be almost impossible to avoid being visibly spotted if she flew low over the streets.

  She really hoped she wasn’t wasting her time, but so far no troops had been whistled up to come after her and she didn’t want to risk squandering whatever opportunity she had, so she slid off the top of the building, switching her armor back over into null black as she fell…then kicked off the side of the wall and crossed to another building top, coming down in a crouch as she looked around both with her eyes, her armor’s sensors, and her psionics.

  No one was on this rooftop, despite the various protrusions sticking up that made her feel like she was standing inside a giant, inverted ice cube tray.

  “One down, 50,000 to go,” she said, working her way over to the opposite side of the roof and picking out her next target, feeling for all the world like she was playing Frogger.

  Wanting only to travel in the dark, it took three Star Force days and one and a half night sessions for her to make her way across to city center in zigzag fashion, camping out inside the buildings during daylight and catching a bit of sleep when she
could, but she was reluctant to completely nod off, for she wanted to keep a watch on any nearby minds that came within her proximity.

  Kara then found herself clinging to the outside of her target spire in the cover of night looking for a way inside. There was no roof, but only a lighted dome, meaning she had to either find or make an entrance…and it was looking like it was going to be the latter, unless she wanted to go down to the surface and try the front door.

  After scouting around she finally decided to go in through one of the windows, but finding a room without occupants was difficult and took her the better part of an hour to locate, with her knowing that it might not stay unoccupied for long.

  Looking like a Garfield car toy, she stuck to the outside of the triangular window and used her Dre’mo’don to melt through the surface, carving a wobbly circle and pushing the plug inside as it clung to her right palm. She crawled through and dropped to the ground on her head, rolling out into a somersault to bring herself back up to her feet.

  She set the glass plug down on the floor just inside where she’d cut it, not sure what the lizards would make of it when they saw it but having little other choice. She needed to find this higher level lizard and to do that she had to get inside the building.

  Kara crossed the small room, hopping over some sort of bench/chairs to get to the door, outside of which she felt several minds nearby, all of which were standard lizards. She accessed one of them and pulled what situational information she could, getting the basic layout of this level and those that that individual frequented…then it passed out of her Ikrid range and she tried another, and another, and another, picking up additional data and piecing together what she needed to know.

  The off limits region of the building was only a few levels up, and having learned of secure check points inside, Kara decided to go back out through the window and climb up. When she did she couldn’t find a room without occupants, though she went the entire way around the spire looking for one. Settling on making some waves, she picked one and systematically picked off the minds inside, rendering them unconscious even as the others sprang up in panic and alarm.

  She got to them before they could signal for help, she hoped, then climbed up onto the window and cut her way inside. All of the 9 lizards were librarian variants, and she pried the closest one up off a data console and set it back in its chair, delving into its mind and pulling out the location of its boss.

  With a clear target set one level down on the other side of the building Kara set off through the hallways, distracting and blanking the minds of those she couldn’t otherwise slip past, hoping they didn’t have internal camera surveillance…or at least if they did that they weren’t actively monitoring it.

  Boldly walking down some of the hallways that she had no choice but to go down, Kara worked her way over to an altogether separate complex that appeared to be a mix of command center and residential…all to serve the lizard variant that inhabited it.

  Kara had to take a group of lizards down with a Fornax sphere when she entered one of the control nexuses, then she picked off a few minds, rendering them unconscious before Fornaxing the others again as she worked through them a few at a time. When she was finished she crossed over their unconscious bodies and headed for the one mind she sensed nearby that was slightly different from the others, entering a small elevator and moving up to a living center larger than any quarters she’d ever seen, Star Force or otherwise.

  Inside she disabled a pair of guards and six attendants, then telekinetically yanked the comm device out of the larger lizard’s hand as it pulled the device from beneath its dark green robe.

  Kara then hit it with a Fornax blast, taking the 7 foot tall lizard down to its knees before worming her way into its mind and sending it into sleep mode.

  It slumped over, with its thick tail sticking up underneath its robe from the face plant it was doing. It was by far the largest she’d ever seen or heard about, literally dwarfing the maulers they used for hand to hand combat. Why their leaders were bigger she didn’t know, but she was glad Star Force wasn’t having to face down these in the field, for while they stood as tall as Knights, she guessed they outmassed them by 50% or more, especially with that muscular tail.

  “I don’t have much time, big boy,” she said, peeling back the armor from her hands and placing her fingertips on its brutishly wide head, “so let’s see what you know.”

  6

  The structure of the lizard’s mind surprised Kara, for it was far more advanced than the others, not just in processing power but in complexity, and after only a cursory look through its recent memories she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the variant of ‘Mastermind’ that Paul had speculated to be operating on Atlantica.

  Like the trailblazers, this lizard was tasked with overarching strategy and troubleshooting, leaving administrators to handle repetitive and mundane oversight duties. This one in particular was overseeing the infrastructure expansion on this city along with dozens of others on the planet, escalating up to what it labeled as Tier 9. Information on that was hard to retrieve, for it was buried deep within its mind, in such a way as it was considered common knowledge and didn’t need to be spelled out in cognitive thought.

  From what she could pull from it, Tier 9 was another leveling up of the lizard infrastructure of not just this planet, but this star system. Once reached, it would give them more capabilities…capabilities that this mastermind needed to extend the dominion of the lizards in this section of the galaxy.

  That meant this guy wasn’t just in charge of this system, but multiple ones. Meaning Kara had definitely found one of their big guns.

  She followed memory to memory, unable to ‘search’ for specific information. It was like bringing up the most recent web page the individual had been to, then following the links on that page to other pages, then following more links from there. It was an indirect way of sifting through memories, but the only one available to her short of bringing the lizard partially back to consciousness and interrogating it with questions intended to jog specific memories.

  Kara didn’t feel like going that route, so she just kept searching, following any connected memories that seemed pertinent. It took her a while to get used to the way this lizard categorized data, but once she did she was able to jump from ‘page’ to ‘page’ rather quickly, allowing her to soak up a wealth of data, tricky as it was given that it was all stored in visual, audial, or language formats…and her knowledge of the lizard language wasn’t that great.

  Her armor had a translation program that the lizard language had been uploaded into, so she could hear what they were saying around her without having to try and think through the translation herself. She could even speak it back to them, allowing the armor to synthesize the appropriate sounds and pitches that her own voice had trouble with, but in this mental digging it was completely unhelpful, for it couldn’t connect to the lizard’s mind, only hers, and asking for a translation of individual words was tedious…so Kara did the best she could with her own knowledge of their language and pulled on visual memories as much as she could.

  Numbers were much easier, especially when it came to strength assessments. This lizard had an enormous number of ships under its command, spread out across 28 star systems and 78 inhabited planets Tier 4 or higher. Not just cruisers, which seemed to be the lizards’ preferred ‘do it all’ starship, but battleships, dreadnaughts, carriers, assault pillars, and invokers…all of which took higher tiered colonies to produce.

  The last two versions were new to Star Force, and Kara dug into the memories of them deeply, discovering that the ‘assault pillars,’ which was her best translation of the lizard terms, were massive siege weapons, one of which could utterly rip apart a seda with a single shot from range. That scared Kara instantly, knowing how much Paul and the others relied on the sedas as strongpoints in orbit. She had to get this intel back to him as soon as possible so he could upgrade their defenses, otherwise they could r
un right over Atlantica’s defenses with ease…or even Namek’s.

  So why hadn’t they? Kara started to get the sense that the lizards had only been playing with the Humans so far, or the Alliance for that matter, because these assault pillars had never been mentioned in any of the tactical analysis briefs she’d read. Nor the invokers, which operated like a gigantic mobile battle station that used area of effect weapons against attacking fleets.

  Kara didn’t understand that straight off so she delved deeper, horrified by the tactical clarity that the lizard’s mind then provided. The invoker looked like a huge black spider, with arm-like pylons jutting out at numerous angles. They ‘invoked’ what looked like a space storm, with energy cascades similar to lightning stretching out into nearby fleets and savaging them with a single discharge. One memory she pulled showed a H’kar fleet engaging one of them with upwards of 1000 warships and being torn asunder within minutes.

  A chill ran down Kara’s spine, but she pressed further. She needed this intel badly, no matter how much it creeped her out. These invokers were fleet killers, and judging by the approximate size were bigger than a seda. She got the sense that they weren’t easy to build, but rather were used like chess pieces on the galactic playing board, reserved for the truly large engagements and densely defended worlds. Apparently the Alliance didn’t rate that high on the lizards’ enemy list, but the H’kar did…that was something the Alliance had told them from day one, along with the fact that once they were done killing the H’kar they’d turn their full attention on the Alliance.

  That was before the Nestafar had backstabbed them and made an Alliance victory even less likely…but with technology like this?

  Kara knew what Star Force had to do…they had to get to the invokers first and take them down before they could be deployed against them. To do that meant excessive trickery, and she was sure Paul would come up with something. If not, she might have to go in alone and try to mess one up from the inside.