Star Force: Keyholders (Star Force Universe Book 61) Read online

  “Even if we survive it to become stewards in the aftermath?”

  “It would still be failure, and far worse damage than the Uriti could ever inflict, even with their minions spreading across the galaxy. Do you seek to explore the depths of potential failure?”

  “No, I simply do not like our mission success or failure relying on the will of others. I wish to earn it for ourselves and control our destiny. Allegiance is…unreliable.”

  “We work with what we have available,” Jorwan said as the first ship cleared the bubble, only to be replaced by the front end of the next one so very close behind the first. Dangerously close. How tightly packed was Star Force bringing them in across space? “Do you notice the separation?”

  “They mean to launch their attack as soon as possible. I would not expect them to thin their convoys.”

  “It is almost reckless.”

  “Perhaps their navigational abilities are better than we estimated?”

  “Possibly. Or they are desperate to stop the attacks on their empire. The Vargemma will soon surpass the damage the V’kit’no’sat had done to them, and their value of life must be making them even more impatient. How helpless do you think they feel, unable to save the lesser lives we would simply write off as acceptable losses?”

  “It would be maddening. I do not understand their full mindset. I only know that they will exact sufficient vengeance on the Vargemma and I intend to be there to witness it.”

  “Do we have ships coming through?”

  “I am told no. There is too long of a waiting line, and Star Force does not wish us to have access to this Temple with them.”

  “They said as much?”

  “They said we have done enough in Alpha. The brunt of this battle is theirs to bear.”

  “That is not them distrusting us. It is them being uncomfortable of being in our debt. It seems they dislike relying on others as well.”

  “Then that we have in common, except they can field far larger numbers than we can.”

  “We are an Order, not an empire. Know your role.”

  “We are all that is left of our race. Our true race. Perhaps some should revert to what we once were in order to expand and leave the Order to the delicate work while they deal with…”

  “No,” Jorwan said firmly. “We cannot go back. Forward is our destiny, and Star Force would be far more reliable an empire than our people would be. We only need look back at history for that lesson.”

  “Why do you believe so?”

  “The greater the size of an empire, the more difficult it is to keep bound together. The Order survives because of our focus and training. The mission drives us. An empire has no mission. It will diverge, and with that divergence it will fracture. We cannot…we will not repeat the mistakes of the past. We cannot do everything, but what we do we will be superior in. Let Star Force have the empire. We now have access to the mysteries of Essence, and in that lies the true power. The power to kill Uriti with a single ship, if need be. Let the commoners handle the obvious matters. Our path lies in the darkness beyond their vision.”

  “So long as we have a path I am content. Star Force seems to be making us redundant.”

  “Your commitment waivers?”

  “Perhaps it does. We are no longer masters of our own fate and I seek to reestablish control.”

  “We have not lost it. Do not fear, for Star Force is our weapon against the Hadarak and the Vargemma. We must make sure our weapon does not become compromised or blindsided. We must shield them, and in that we have our superiority. They do not think like a fiend, and as such can be taken off guard. We must protect them against what lurks out there, on the flanks, and make sure it does not strike a fatal blow. The Vargemma have been such a threat, and now we must make sure Star Force is able to land the killing blow. You must make sure. The Vargemma are not to be underestimated in their treachery…or their stupidity. The truly stupid can surprise even the wisest.”

  “Especially the wisest. I take your meaning. Are you certain you will not come?”

  “I wish to go, but my duty is here and I will not delay it.”

  “Very well. We are off then. You will be the only one remaining here.”

  “As is right. We gain nothing by redundant learning.”

  “Farewell. I doubt we will be returning here, regardless of the outcome.”

  “Leaving the Temples is far easier than entering. Do what needs to be done, then return to the galaxy. I will seek the knowledge here and pass on what I learn.”

  “I leave you to it then. We will be on the first ships to go through.”

  “Guard them well,” Jorwan warned. “They do not understand the Vargemma mindset as we do.”

  “They learn quickly,” his counterpart said, then broke the transmission as he set off to join the fleet as more ships continued to slowly move upward from the surface and that seemingly small black orb on the upward lifting horizon.

  It would take time to bring in even a small fleet, but he doubted that flow would cease even for a few minutes if he had tagged Star Force’s intent correctly. The meant to defeat the Vargemma in all the Temples, and to do that they were going to need an insane number of ships…and to do it with non-lethal weaponry made the task all that more difficult.

  But if there was one empire that was comfortable with non-lethal warfare, it was Star Force that was aptly suited to this task.

  And if the Vargemma chose to fight back lethally and force a three way war in all the Temples, well, Star Force could handle that as well. Here, at least, there would be no confrontation with the Caretakers, which was also why Jorwan had to stay in Beta. All the others might end up contaminated with endless warfare, and he needed to devote his full attention to unlocking the secrets of the Founders…before they returned and became another threat to contend with.

  Paul had been waiting on the surface in one of Beta’s Star Force colonies to see what reaction there was from the Caretakers when the surface exit was exposed, and like clockwork a number of patrol drones were sent to the location and disappeared inside. While he couldn’t see through the null field any more than they could, he did have a subsurface data line that gave him the sensor images from inside that dome, and he could see the defense units there, both mobile and imbedded on the ring of the aperture, take down the Caretakers almost as soon as they crossed the barrier.

  If even one of them turned around and made it out again to sound the alarm then things would go badly here in Beta, but there were enough mooring beams set up to snag the fleers that he didn’t expect any problems…but one didn’t know for sure until you tested your theory, and he was glad to see everything was working as planned.

  After the first few dozen ships came through Paul took a dropship up to one of the warships and took command from there. Unfortunately the Excalibur and the other Borg vessels were too large to come through the spacial tap or the portals, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t bring an astromech along to plug into. He’d had one specially built into a standard warship hull, and that’s the one that came through first in line along with the other command ships for the trailblazers here and waiting.

  Some were donut shaped, but Paul had chosen a regular warship to take command from, because without his Borg vessel to protect him he was going to have to rely on anonymity, and he wasn’t too comfortable taking a command ship. They stood out too much, and they didn’t have any shielding yet that could stop an Essence attack. Designs were in the works, and already deployed on the Avengers, but they didn’t have time to build extra stuff, and those ships would be going to the front of the line where he couldn’t go.

  He had to be the spider in the center of the web controlling his fleet, and the same was true of the others, for they weren’t all going to Alpha. They were splitting up and heading to different Temples once they got enough ships here. Paul had the privilege of going first, but he wasn’t going to Alpha either. It was no longer exporting assault ships to hit Star Force worlds,
but Gamma was, and since he was the Keyholder to get there, that’s where he’d chosen to start his campaign against the Vargemma.

  But first they were sending some ships and Essence tankers to Alpha, and those would be going as soon as the ships arrived. No waiting for a massive fleet. And since they’d had months to just sit and wait, he and the other trailblazers had been practicing the dialing technique, and most of them were now able to manage it in a crude way. Enough to get it to work, though not always on the first try.

  When the others left to get to the new Temples they would be sending back new Keyholders that would spread around to all the Temples, just like the Vargemma pilots did, but Paul was going to be busy in Gamma for a long time. That was, unless they chose to surrender, which he highly doubted. And priority number 2, after stopping ships from leaving, was capturing existing Keyholders to the small number of other Temples that the Dotaramin did not have access to.

  That would be the quickest way to safeguard the empire, but regardless of whether it was a long or short fight, as soon as he arrived in Gamma they wouldn’t be sending out any more raiding parties from there. Once more ships arrived in Beta his peers would be doing the same elsewhere, and thankfully Star Force had the ships to spare.

  And they were already being summoned to Beta from across the galaxy, flowing through the spacelanes like little rivers heading for the waterfall that was the spacial tap. So long as the Essence barrier didn’t go up, that waterfall was going to be the end of the Vargemma.

  If it did go up, then they were back to square one, and he didn’t think the Vargemma would be caught off guard again and let him steal access to the shield controls in Gamma. They’d lock them down or trigger the Caretakers to do it again, just like in Alpha. And the Responders were still refusing to teach them how to unlock those controls, despite the fact that they’d learned to open the portals from the inside. They were still insisting that all lesser skills must be learned first.

  Star Force now had an opening, and the trailblazers intended to make use of it. But there were a lot of ships that had to come through the tap. Months worth. And they had to come through one at a time. Fortunately the Vargemma didn’t know about this Temple, or have any way to access it. This might work, but it was going to take them a long time to get enough ships inside to assault all the Temples.

  Fortunately Paul wasn’t going to have to wait as long as the others.

  7

  March 22, 128551

  Krichkraw Nebula (Novatis Kingdom)

  Alpha Temple

  Steve-004 jumped from a rocky ledge, landing below some 18 meters just as the explosives blew. The blast wave sent a shotgun of rubble over top his head and out into the jungle beyond, missing him as it overshot the ledge, and mixed in with the natural material were bits and pieces of Caretaker drones.

  The hangar he’d just destroyed had been a gathering place for them as they came up from subsurface factories. Those he couldn’t get to so easily, but the hangar was one of thousands of soft targets around the Temple that he and the others were seeking out and destroying before they could spew out cloud formations that could do a lot of damage. The Caretakers had figured out isolated units were pretty much going to be lost on contact with Star Force troops, even against single individuals, so they were hoarding the new replacements until they could release a group together…and that’s what Steve had just blown up with a backpack-sized satchel of Det-blocks.

  The Paladin had been manufacturing them and a lot of other little toys that were allowing the Archons to do an increasing amount of pinpoint damage in this forever war. As many as they destroyed, more would be built and sent out on search and destroy missions, including some major attacks on the Paladin colonies. A few had been lost, but Steve had enough naval power now to cover for most of them, and the longer time went on the more the Paladin reinforced their aboveground strongholds…all the while expanding their subsurface ones.

  But the shipyards were beyond reach. Without Essence refueling, the Avengers couldn’t get at them as the Caretakers rebuilt what had been damaged and continued to send ships out of their hidden spacebound facilities in near the center of the Temple. Everyone knew they were massing more ships for a bigger push, just as the Paladin were prepping to defend against one. This would continue to go on indefinitely until Star Force succumbed or managed to cut off the Caretakers’ supply lines…but that wasn’t happening. The Temple was a giant depot of material they could draw on, plus they had interstellar logistics to back that up. No, they couldn’t starve the Caretakers to death, but they could force them to keep devoting resources to replacing their smaller units.

  What worried Steve the most wasn’t their conventional weapons. It was the Olopar and any other Essence weapons they had. The mountain turrets had been getting targeted ever since the end of the major fighting, but when it became clear Star Force had been able to locate them before they rose up and activated, the Caretakers had been sending troops to guard those locations. The Paladin and the Knights were still taking some of them out, slowly, and now they had a nice field of safety over several regions where naval vessels could operate without risk of getting one shot out of the sky, but most of the Temple surface was still off limits to the warships.

  Steve was in one of those areas now, as were others flying around on dropships or even speeders beneath what would be the firing range of the mountain turrets, though it was unlikely they’d have used such enormous amounts of Essence to kill a single person even if they could. And as it was, they had a lot of smaller turrets using conventional weaponry spread out at key points, plus the patrolling Caretaker units, and the aerial hunters, and the Beast Wars wannabe prowlers with a host of other newly discovered assets the Caretakers had been rolling out to counter them.

  Steve doubted they had seen every trick in the Caretaker bag yet, but if and when they got another Olopar up and running, and the Avengers couldn’t strike it down, then nowhere on the surface would be safe…and with the Vargemma supplying the Temple with all the Essence needed to fuel them, well, things didn’t look good in the coming years, which was why most of the Paladin construction efforts were in bases deep underground where some of the Essence effects couldn’t reach…although some could if they were able to locate them.

  Which could and couldn’t wasn’t known yet, for no such attacks had been launched, but he figured the heart attack weapon could be modified to get through a lot of rock rather than cling to the surface if it could already pass through the armor on starships. Every Star Force unit in play in Alpha Temple wore a regenerator at all times to counter such an attack, but without a full list of Olopar abilities they were playing dangerously in a field they did not completely understand.

  The trailblazer hugged the ledge as the explosion debris rained down and then the rumbling stopped, leaving a dust cloud lazily migrating towards the east. He jumped into the sky and flew under his own power southwest, seeing if he would draw any fire from surviving units as he circled around to get more altitude. Once he got high enough he scanned where the hangar had been, seeing that it had totally collapsed with a sunken mound of broken rock now covering it.

  The Caretakers would dig it out and rebuild, but that would take time. Until then this access point was off limits…now on to the next one. He needed to seal up all the routes from the subsurface factory in order to truly cork the bottle, and there were a minimum of 7 exits already found, with Steve having probe droids quietly out looking for more at the moment.

  He wasn’t cloaked. There wasn’t any point now. If there were units nearby he needed them to find him so he could destroy them, and with single man assaults occurring everywhere, he’d prefer drawing the strongest enemies to him in order to keep them away from others. But right now there was nothing below him or in the surrounding area, so he flew off from the demolished hangar and headed over the 387 miles to the next closed one after swinging to the south to pick up his speeder that would get him there a lot quick than his own Y
en’mer or his armor’s limited anti-grav system.

  He slid onto the bike-like craft and accelerated for a few seconds before receiving a priority ping on the battlemap. It wasn’t anywhere near him, but Star Force relay drones were flying all over the interior of the Temple and getting shot down regularly in those doldrums of space, but in doing so they were allowing the battlemap signals to be passed everywhere within the Temple, and the Paladin had no trouble making more to replace the losses.

  So even out here far away from any Star Force base, Steve still had access to comm and updates…including the notice that a portal had opened. He knew it probably wasn’t something originating from here, because the control tower was still protected behind the Caretakers’ carrier ship and not even the Vargemma had been allowed back inside. That meant it was probably a Vargemma ship coming in, as a few had in the recent months. Most were scouts relaying information back to the other Temples. He wondered if the intra-Temple communications system had been denied to them or if they never truly had access to it in the beginning. Star Force didn’t rank high enough to utilize those systems, nor did they have access to those Caretaker facilities anymore either, but for some reason occasional scouts would come in, look around, then bug back out within a few hours.

  He assumed they were delivering messages at the same time, but they hadn’t been able to crack the new Vargemma encryption yet. The old ones had already been broken using intel from prisoners, and a lot of regular comms data was still getting to the Paladin because of that, but the higher level stuff had altered their codes and procedures, so whatever the scouts were saying was being kept private.

  Then he got the update from the battlemap that showed a Star Force vessel coming in and he almost jumped off his speeder in excitement as he gave a war whoop yell.