Star Force: Mak'to'ran (5) Page 5

  He didn’t have enough ships in this group to move yet, and waiting for more while the minutes ticked away and the Hadarak crept closer to their target systems was beyond frustrating. Normally there would already be large fleets stationed nearby ready to respond, but they’d been stripped down or entirely removed during this insane civil war. The Hadarak had caught them off guard without even knowing it, and now they were going to get routed in several systems before Mak’to’ran’s forces could intercept the Hadarak and force a fight in space.

  It was going to take another week at least to get the necessary ships here, but an unexpected group of arrivals appeared on the system sensors as Brat’mar and Tido’cor ships started appearing by the dozens, none of which were part of the reforged V’kit’no’sat, and they were sending hails requesting a direct conversation with Mak’to’ran.

  The system defense ships pinned the new arrivals in low stellar orbit without resistance, then Mak’to’ran’s Kafcha moved out from the planet to get within realtime comms range where he accepted a holographic communication from four individuals simultaneously. One was a Brat’mar, one a cat-like Tido’cor that had a knife-like tail and was barely larger than a Zen’zat, but the other two were from different races. There was an I’rar’et and a Kar’ka that did not belong on any of the ships, procing Mak’to’ran’s curiosity.

  “Speak,” he said simply once all were looking at him.

  “We seek terms,” the Brat’mar said.

  “For what?”

  “Immediate reabsorption into the empire without repercussions for past actions.”

  “On behalf of what faction?”

  “The Non-Aligned Confederation.”

  Mak’to’ran’s eyes narrowed. “All of them?”

  “All,” the Brat’mar repeated. “There is no time to do anything but fight the Hadarak, and if we can get terms from you will not just send ships to the fight, but will fully reintegrate with the empire so we can present as strong of a united front as possible. You know the Hadarak will not turn back for anything other than overwhelming strength.”

  “Quite right. What terms are you seeking?”

  “We wish to reserve the right to independence if it is discovered that either the Oso’lon or J’gar are responsible for Terraxis. We wish no association with them, but now that the Era’tran are sharing leadership it is not clear where the empire stands.”

  “Then let me make it clear. If I can find evidence of anyone responsible for Terraxis I will move against them immediately. So far I cannot find the sponsor, in any form, and I will not penalize our brothers based on suspicion alone. Until proof of treason is found, I will treat them with the respect that all our races deserve.”

  “Optimistic,” the I’rar’et commented.

  “Necessary,” Mak’to’ran countered. “If we allow ourselves to be torn apart over mere rumor, then we deserve to be destroyed, for we are fools. My people are on the lookout for any information regarding Terraxis, but we may have to find a path forward without an answer. I choose to default to the common bonds between us. I will trust until given reason not to. Not the reverse.”

  “We do not agree regarding the Oso’lon and J’gar, but we believe you are worthy of the trust. If you can promise us that we will be free to split apart again if the Oso’lon or J’gar are found to be guilty, then we will rely on your trust.”

  “What will you do if one of them is implicated?” the Tido’cor asked.

  “They will be culled,” Mak’to’ran said flatly. “As will anyone who is responsible for that heresy.”

  “Even if it fractures the empire?”

  “Bonds of trust cannot be poisoned by sanctioning betrayal. If I can find those responsible, I will deliver the justice required. You have my promise of that.”

  “And what if both the Oso’lon and the J’gar are responsible?” the Brat’mar asked.

  “They will not be absolved. That is a scenario that I do not like considering, but if it should come to pass we will cull them both.”

  “Even if it releases the Hadarak?”

  “We cannot function by sanctioning treachery. If the Hadarak are to be released, we will face that scenario while holding to our honor. We will not compromise it to contain them.”

  “So you would forfeit the purpose of the V’kit’no’sat to pursue the traitors?” the Kar’ka asked.

  “Never. We will fight the Hadarak until all are destroyed, and if we must retreat to the rim to rebuild and push back later, then so be it. I do not want to face that scenario, but treason will not be ignored. The only chance of one day defeating the Hadarak and cleansing their stain from this galaxy is to be united. I will not forfeit that destiny in exchange for a temporary hold. We fight with honor or we die with honor. The honor is non-negotiable.”

  “Can the Era’tran live up to that burden absent your new peers?”

  “Only time can tell, but I personally do not believe the Oso’lon or the J’gar are responsible. They have too little to gain. Terraxis is a mystery that will lead to unexpected conclusions if we are able to discover it, but I do not have the luxury of looking now. The Hadarak are the primary concern.”

  “Would you delay evidence of the Oso’lon or J’gar’s treachery until the threat is repulsed?”

  “At this point I do not care. The empire is fractured and the Hadarak sense our weakness. I will fight both the Hadarak and the traitors, but I do not know who the traitors are so I will waste no time on them.”

  “Nor should you,” the Brat’mar agreed. “We wish a promise of peaceable severance should the traitors be found and are not able to be culled as necessary, perhaps out of concern for the threat of the Hadarak.”

  “It will not come to that, but I give you my promise. Should I fail in my duty, I give you now permission to leave without penalty for the severance, but no promise of further actions dependent on possible misbehavior.”

  The four representatives exchanged glances, then the Kar’ka spoke.

  “We had wondered if you would add that stipulation. Had you not, we would have questioned your sincerity. Formalize what you have said with the necessary credentials and we will rejoin the V’kit’no’sat as quickly as possible. There are still issues to work out with our respective races, but those are internal matters. Supply chains and shipping lanes will be reestablished immediately.”

  “Done,” Mak’to’ran said with a nod of his giant head.

  “Then we immediately detach the arriving fleet to your command.”

  “How many are coming?”

  “26,938 ships, minus those we are on. We will return and confirm in person what will be sent out over the Urrtren. The reunification must take place with haste.”

  “And so it shall. Go. With your incoming ships I will be leaving shortly for the front. Waste no further time with talk,” he said, cutting the comm and sending numerous mental messages through the ship’s computer to the crew and others more distant, arranging for the reintegration as well as for the trickle of reinforcements to be directed to follow them.

  Then Mak’to’ran took his Kafcha to the outgoing jumppoint at the head of the line and his reinforcement fleet began making their jumps out even before the last of the NAC ships had made theirs in.

  Moving 218,000 ships through a single jumppoint took time, so Mak’to’ran’s fleet was in reality a long convoy chain moving from system to system until they arrived at Iesclak where the pair of planets were currently under assault by the giant Hadarak implanted onto their surfaces. The third Hadarak was no longer here, having jumped out of the system days ago with impunity as the fleet that was here was busy pestering the swarms and not making much progress on the tier 3, but having broken through most of those protecting the tier 1.

  Mak’to’ran immediately assumed command, though kept his distance as his relief fleet came through the jumppoint at a relatively slow pace. That gave him time to get updated on the situation on the ground as he also took notice of the messages waiti
ng for him coming through the Urrtren from numerous people in other systems warning him that he was too valuable to risk and that he should not be in this system or any other with Hadarak actively in it.

  Mak’to’ran huffed with disgust. V’kit’no’sat were warriors meant to lead, and this was a fight he was going to head up from the front regardless of what anyone else thought. He needed the realtime information here, but he wasn’t going to take his ship into direct combat against the Hadarak…though the swarms were another matter.

  Mak’to’ran’s ship held off with a few escorts as the rest of the ships were sent to reinforce the other reinforcement fleets that had arrived previously, often having to fly through the debris fields of the V’kit’no’sat ships that had already been destroyed while the swarms made a habit of recovering their dead biomatter so it could be recycled and grown into new minions. It was a weakness he had often exploited in the past, but right now the pitched fighting was in too localized a place to worry about recovery on either side.

  With the influx of ships the wall of V’kit’no’sat began to press a little harder against the tier 1, with Mak’to’ran sending most of their ships to fight it. Those above the tier 3 were just trying to thin the swarm there with no chance at successfully assaulting that Hadarak. It was too big, and Mak’to’ran needed to do as much damage as possible, meaning he had to strike hard at the ‘smaller’ target that still measured 108 miles in diameter.

  His fleet far outmassed it, but the weapons on his ships were almost comical when hitting the Hadarak…which was why he didn’t try targeting the Hadarak. He had all his ships over the tier 1 focus on the swarms, and after two days of pitched fighting he finally had clear skies and an opportunity to shoot the Hadarak directly…but he didn’t. Instead he sent ships down to bombard the surface and assist the ground troops. If he laid into the Hadarak it would withdrawal, probably over into the star, or perhaps even dig itself down into the planet and that would make matters worse.

  There was no good way of going about this, so he had to rely on his previous experience fighting these monsters and buy time. That meant keeping the minion swarms over the tier 1 beat down, even as they grew more of them, while fighting the ground war tunnel by tunnel and avoid hitting the Hadarak directly. A few more months and the number of V’kit’no’sat ships here and elsewhere across the front would increase exponentially…until then they needed to slow down the feeding of the Hadarak.

  So Mak’to’ran kept a fair amount of ships over the tier 1 for aerial/orbital suppression and ground support bombardment, then sent the rest to try and reduce the swelling numbers of minions over the tier 3 that was soon to reach critical mass where the reproductive efforts within the Hadarak had enough incoming raw materials to spawn so many so fast that there was no way to stop them save for throwing an enormous fleet into the maw and have them cancel each other out.

  If Mak’to’ran tried that now he’d lose all his ships, so he kept them on a leash and chipping away at the number of minions even as they grew on this side of the planet, but on the other it was a different matter. The ground and aerial minions were trying to spread out and were being blocked by the ground troops and intact cities as a far smaller number of orbital minions were preceding them to provide cover.

  Those were targeted heavily, forcing the enemy ground forces to push forward under Mak’to’ran’s orbital bombardment or dig in and wait while more were sent out around the curve of the planet to get to them.

  Time. It was all about time. These two worlds were lost and he knew it, but how long he could delay them here would determine the fate of others. Also, how many minions were lost did affect the Hadarak in a strategic sense, for they were in constant telepathic contact with them all. It couldn’t extend from one system to another, but all those here were felt and guided by the Hadarak and in past battles Mak’to’ran and others had learned that if you could rack up an insane number of minion kills it would sometimes cause them to withdraw prior to them becoming heavily damaged. It seemed to annoy them more than anything, blocking their progress, though technically they didn’t need the minions to feed off of planets.

  The minions made it much more efficient, but either of these Hadarak could force themselves down through the crust into the molten cores and absorb some of it directly, though it was far inferior to the process they used within stars. In fact Hadarak rarely dug that far into planets, so if Mak’to’ran could keep frustrating these two without prompting them to leave he could win some badly needed days.

  But during those days the infrastructure of the enemy would literally be growing across the landscape and below ground, and with every mile of advancement more and more resources would flow in and the biological factories inside the Hadarak would spew out more minions until they reached a point of development where the Hadarak would actually spawn additional factories on the planet.

  Neither one had reached that point here yet, but if they did the minion population would explode shortly thereafter, though it would be much worse coming from the tier 3. Tier 1s were a nightmare of their own, but a tier 3 was just too much to handle save for the largest of V’kit’no’sat fleets.

  And this one he had encountered before, when it was slightly smaller, but even then they couldn’t stop it. Just scratch it over and over and over until it finally got bored and left. They hadn’t done serious damage, and why each of them pulled out was up to speculation. They never knew for sure, other than the fact that if they weren’t hit hard they would continue to spread out further and further rimward until all the territory the V’kit’no’sat had won back from them over the millennia would be lost again…and when a planet was broken in half, they rarely were able to be put back together.

  There was a long list of those that had been lost before the V’kit’no’sat pushed them back, and it looked like these two were going to be added to the list if he couldn’t get enough ships here fast enough to counter the minion explosion that was so certain to come that there were countdowns visible on the command deck detailing the progress of each Hadarak’s deployment and growth, with the well documented ‘doomsday’ lines marked and the time to reaching them estimated and counting down with looming certainty.

  6

  May 3, 3695

  Itaru System (V’kit’no’sat capitol)

  Bradsho

  “They are pulling massive numbers of ships off their uncontested worlds,” Nim’so said eagerly as he paced around the Oso’lon council chamber. “They haven’t yet withdrawn from our current conflicts, but they are leaving themselves no reserves. They are open to a debilitating counterattack.”

  “Because they are moving to blunt the Hadarak,” Ma’set said angrily. “As we should be.”

  “And waste this opportunity? Have you gone mad?”

  “If the Hadarak are not stopped, nothing else we do will matter.”

  “We will hold our own worlds, beyond that we have no responsibility to fight the Hadarak,” Nim’so said, drawing shocked looks from most of the other 18 Oso’lon in the chamber. They weren’t the lead Oso’lon in the system, who were located on Wendigama near the Elder Conclave, but they were the leaders on Bradsho, the third largest planet in the system that contained over 2 trillion inhabitants made up of the land dwelling V’kit’no’sat races.

  “What are you saying?” one of them asked, displeasure evident on his face.

  “I am saying we take this opportunity to hobble them and reestablish our dominance. Not a single strike, but a coordinated assault that will strip them of all power they claim to wield. They have left themselves vulnerable. If they were truly dominant they would not make such an obvious mistake. We will enlighten them as we reclaim their worlds.”

  “And force them to either come back and fight us or fight the Hadarak?” Ma’set all but spat, looking across the wide plaza where the long-necked Oso’lon were mingling inside an anti-surveillance canopy.

  “Exactly. But by the time they could return we will have hurt the
m so badly that even if we have to withdraw it will be worth it. We must destroy the illusion that they are the V’kit’no’sat and reestablish our dominance.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Ma’set said, looking at the others. “Our empire was founded to fight the Hadarak. They are invading and you want to ignore them!”

  “If they come into our territory we fight them viciously, but we no longer control all of V’kit’no’sat territory. We have no obligation to defend what the others have claimed unless they submit to our rule once again.”

  “If the Hadarak break through anywhere they will spread,” another Oso’lon added. “The line must be held unbreached everywhere.”

  “Not true. If they expand elsewhere it will take millennia before they can come to us. We will have time, though I admit parts of the galaxy will have to be sacrificed…but if we cannot reunite the V’kit’no’sat and purge it of the traitors then the whole of the galaxy will be lost. We must fight for the future, even if there are unpleasant short term losses.”

  “I can’t believe you are uttering those words here,” Ma’set said angrily.

  “We must make the hard choices where others will not. What is it you fear happening, Ma’set?”

  “If we attack Mak’to’ran’s forces, we will lose many of our own along with destroying theirs…who then will hold the Hadarak back? We are weak enough already. Grow too weak and they will surge forth in numbers we have not seen since the beginning of the empire. We cannot afford to lose all of those gains.”

  “Which is why we must strike quickly while they are vulnerable. Hit them so hard and so fast that they have no choice but to submit. We can reunify the empire within a handful of years.”