Star Force: Essence (Star Force Universe Book 51) Read online

  The attacker has the advantage of surprise, the defender the advantage of planetary defenses. You have created an empire that is very hard to defeat, but easy to attack given its widespread size. Vengeance is not the Zak’de’ron’s ultimate aim. Not against you. They wish to resume dominion, and to do that they must not just hurt you, they must totally destroy or absorb you. I can see no way to do this given what you’ve built.

  Neither can I, but they’re working on something. If they thought we were unbeatable, they’d ally with us before going after the V’kit’no’sat. They started to do so long ago, but veered off when we weren’t developing as they liked.

  Did something happen between you that I have not been made aware of?

  Kara, Paul admitted. She’s safe now, but they left programming in her Vorch’nas to kill her if she ever disconnected from it. To the Zak’de’ron, you are a servant or you are dead, there is no other choice. That showed their true nature to us, as did their theft of a Uriti and their slaughtering of the Knights of Quenar to do it and keep us from knowing it was them. They figured out we knew something and the relationship grew cold, and the fact that they have not tried to develop a new one tells me they’re coming after us eventually. They have a plan, I just don’t know what the hell it is.

  Perhaps the Voku will offer a clue.

  Maybe he will. He’s not one to make casual talk, and if he’s come to Star Force territory then there’s something going on that he specifically needs me for.

  2 months later…

  When Rubi entered the Beewoo System Paul arranged to have Cal-com transported up to him from the guest quarters he’d been given while waiting. He hadn’t told anyone why he was here, citing it was a matter between himself and Paul, so the trailblazer figured it was best to bring him up to his personal ship so they could have a meeting in private with Virokor politely not being there when Cal-com’s dropship flew into the hangar bay.

  Paul frowned immediately when he saw his friend come into view of his Pefbar and he saw he had no visor…nor implant for that matter. The Voku’s three small eyes were visible, and Paul had only seen them once before when he specifically asked Cal-com to see them. Otherwise the Voku wore their visors round the clock save for hibernating/sleeping.

  “Save us both the effort of talking and look into my mind freely,” Cal-com said gravely.

  Paul immediately did as his friend requested, using his Ikrid to access the strong mind, yet one with absolutely no defenses against such invasion. The Archon’s face went through several changes from curiosity to disgust to anger and back again as he searched through a great deal of material, including some things from long, long ago.

  When he finally finished he was frowning hard. “Art of waiting my ass. He discarded you because you had outgrown pure servitude and were starting to become an equal. I’m glad he didn’t kill you though. You are most welcome in Star Force.”

  “I am broken. I do not know what to do.”

  “That was intentional. He made you feel like a failure, but the Zak’de’ron set you up. There was no way to do what he asked. Either you would fail and he would get rid of you then, or you would have to blindly accept whatever order he gave you, including stupid ones, and you’re too wise for that. Trust is one thing, but allowing stagnation to tear you apart because they say so is crossing a line and I’m proud you had the bravery to resist that.”

  “I am a servant of the Elders. Now I cannot serve them. My mind can logically analyze, but my inner being is damaged in a way I cannot explain. I do not know if I erred or…”

  “No,” Paul said firmly. “You did not. The Zak’de’ron want tools, not peers. You succeeded more than they expected, so they had to get rid of you. They are very clever manipulators pretending to be interested in your well being, but at the end of the day you are nothing more than servants. If you grow beyond that you become peers, and to the Zak’de’ron, I think, peerdom means a threat.”

  “Why then did they not kill me?”

  “They did kill you…by taking away your purpose. They figure your death will be a slow and torturous one now. They do not think you can accept freedom, so they gave it to you so you could kill yourself with it.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “It’s obvious from an outside point of view. They also put a message for me inside your memories. Something you can’t access, and only someone pulling an Ikrid scan could. They claim I corrupted you, and now that you are no longer valuable to them I can have you.”

  “Why would they do that? To assist Star Force?”

  “Hold on a moment before I answer that,” Paul said, procuring a device out of his pocket and using the scanner on Cal-com. He pulled a full body scan, linking the results to the ship’s computer, and got back a negative result. “You’re clean of any transmitters, so they’re not using you as an inadvertent spy. We’ll pull a genetic analysis just in case they added something that shouldn’t be there, but I’m glad I can finally speak with you freely. The Zak’de’ron are our enemy, and one day they’re going to invade us. I don’t know when or where or how, but that war is coming and they know that we know, hence the message that is a taunt.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “They once gave me a gift. I rejected it, for there was a chance it was a means for them to control me as they tried to do with another Archon. The fact that I didn’t fall for it seems to be a sore spot for them, and they’ve come to regard me as an opponent that they like to play games with. This is the first obvious taunt, but they’ve done other things that required a high level of intelligence to understand, and were plausibly deniable, but I’ve got their messages for some time. We’re their prey and they’re toying with us to see how much of a threat we truly are. Them sending you has escalated this greatly.”

  Cal-com considered what he said, but that offered him very few answers, and those spawned yet more questions, but despite his ‘deer in the headlights’ mental state, the wise leader was able to ascertain his own weakness and address it.

  “Tell me everything you can and help me to understand, Paul, for right now I am lost.”

  “I know,” he said, walking beside him and putting a hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Come with me and I’ll show you what’s really going on…but if I do so you won’t be able to share this information with others.”

  “I have nowhere to go and no one to share it with. Your secrets will not be voluntarily revealed by me.”

  “That’s all I ask. This way,” Paul said, pointing to the doorway out of the hangar, and from there he took Cal-com to an empty set of quarters that were now to be his own.

  9

  “Easy,” Paul said, raising his hands for emphasis as he sat on the end of his bed and Cal-com in his desk chair. “This has hit you hard, and I know you can’t see it yet, but this is not as bad as it seems. It’s going to take time, because they outright backstabbed you, but tell me this, why did you serve them? I know your entire race has, but for you, personally, why did you? What did it mean to you? Why them and not some other race?”

  “They were responsible for the elevation of my race,” the now exiled Voku explained. “We owe them everything.”

  “And?” Paul pressed.

  “They are wise…” he said, almost choking on the word. “More powerful than us. And just.”

  “Obviously not, or are you questioning whether you were in the wrong?”

  “You can see inside my mind, so why ask what you already know?”

  “You need to work this through, so answer me. Are you doubting yourself and wondering if they were not correct in kicking you out?”

  “I am so unsure of what happened that I am considering that possibility, but I cannot reconcile it with the facts.”

  “Because it’s not true. Why did you believe the Zak’de’ron are just? Their interactions with you have been very few.”

  “They wrote our legal code. Taught us to work together, value others’ lives, and helpe
d us build a stable civilization where our ancestors had been savages.”

  Paul nodded. “Perhaps they taught you to behave better than they behave themselves. Often times doing the wrong thing gives you short term gains. Many unscrupulous people see an opportunity and take it, not caring whether it is right or wrong but in how it is advantageous to them. Now, if I were in the Zak’de’ron’s position and didn’t care about anything other than my own people, I wouldn’t instruct yours to be dishonest, insidious, or reckless. I’d teach you to be solid, reliable, and honest so that you would make the best servants.”

  “You infer they are hypocritical.”

  “I know they are. And I think I have a pretty good sense of their position, though I’ve had far less personal contact than you, but their fingerprints are everywhere on the Voku and the other servant races we’ve identified. They do not think any other race is their equal, but that assessment is not based out of fact, rather out of fear.”

  “Fear?”

  “I am superior, Cal-com. I don’t have to imagine,” Paul said, lifting a hand, palm-up, into the air and subsequently having everything in his room levitate a few inches off the floor or shelves. Even the Voku’s chair lifted up with him in it, then Paul calmly set everything back down where it had been. “My superiority isn’t something I have to protect. It can be challenged and tested. I do not fear testing because I actually am superior, but here is the key point. I want to find people superior to me so I can learn from them and improve myself further. The Zak’de’ron do not behave in this way. They want to assert that they are the top race, the Ultra race, and they seek to destroy or suppress any other competition for that title. This is done out of fear of losing their position, and they’d rather have less skills and be tops than be more skilled yet inferior to someone else. Can you understand that distinction?”

  “I am intimately familiar with half of it. We have long sought to learn from the Elders, mimic them, glean anything we could from their superiority. We eagerly welcomed any knowledge or technology they offered us, for we knew it would enhance our race.”

  “You seek improvement, just as I do. But do the Zak’de’ron if it meant learning from someone else? Could they handle being an apprentice, let alone a servant? I don’t think so.”

  “You speak as if they are all the same and not individuals? Doesn’t that run counter to the foundation of Star Force?”

  “Not counter, just an advanced application. Individuals are always present, but if you deliberately eliminate dissenters you end up with a homogenous group, more or less. And though you’re not a Zak’de’ron, that’s what they did with you. I am very glad they didn’t outright kill you, as they have done with others.”

  “He said it was a reward for my service. It was not contentious, just a dismissal.”

  “But you had to be gotten rid of one way or another, and based on the emotions in you now, they are torturing you by ripping away everything that you had based your life on rather than allowing you to become a frontier agent for them…but I’m telling you that they miscalculated, and they did so because of their ego. They think they are the entire reason you exist and don’t realize you saw embodied in them some fundamentals of the universe, and part of your loyalty is to those fundamentals, such as justice, order, self-defense, self-improvement. The rest is a massive wound, because they did rip away your own race and the heritage of servitude, but you’re feeling like everything is gone because you mentally packaged everything around the identity of the Zak’de’ron, and now you must go through the long, hard process of unpacking it.”

  “How would you feel if Star Force exiled you?”

  “I’d be royally pissed, but my associations with the empire are only part of who I am. The other part is an individual. A loner. And the loner part of me would be empowered by the exile. The Zak’de’ron did not want Voku to develop this ability any more than they wanted the Zen’zat to.”

  “You still believe we are their replacement?”

  Paul nodded. “It’s even more obvious now. Ter’nat do not fight. Ter’nat do not build. Ter’nat sit and breed, and the Voku are obviously an enhanced version of this. You can defend yourself, you can provide material resources and take limited military action as needed, but your purpose is to breed and supply the Zak’de’ron with new Zen’zat. That’s why they didn’t want you expanding, or helping me fight on the Rim. Your purpose is to sit, maintain, and produce. You began to realize this so they got rid of you rather than just telling you the truth. Why do you think they didn’t?”

  “If they had I could have understood the mission. It’s as if they deliberately refused to inform me because I failed in some way.”

  “Succeeded in some way,” Paul corrected him. “They needed you to fight and grow early on when they had nothing. Then they change your mandate without telling you. You can’t ungrow, Cal-com. So they either had to let you grow further or remove you, and I know why they didn’t promote you.”

  Cal-com’s brow furrowed. His three eyes had no lids, and were always open, but he could crinkle the skin around them to all but closed over the eyes to protect them when needed, and he nearly did so now, leaving only a thin open line to look through.

  “Why not?”

  “Zen’zat,” Paul said simply. “They need to be smart, but not independent. You operated independently for so long, you would not make a good Zen’zat because no matter how loyal you are, you were away from their control for too long. You grew too large to be confined back into that smaller role. Basically, you outrank Zen’zat in a way that even if you chose to become one, you could not any more than I could become a Star Force Commando. Even if I had my psionics removed, I would always think like an Archon. Archons would be my peers, never my superiors. I can’t go backwards, Cal-com, and neither can you. They groomed you into what they needed at the time, but they no longer need Dafchors. They need guardians to protect their breeding grounds. They may use the same term for the new Voku leader, but he won’t be a real Dafchor. Only you are.”

  “When they made me Dafchor they said I would be the first. Did they alter their plans or were they duplicitous from the beginning?”

  “I’d guess duplicitous, or they thought you might die in battle and would have to replace you long ago.”

  “I cannot understand how they can do so much to help us and then do this now.”

  “I help people because they need help. The Zak’de’ron help people because they view that help as a tool to use to accomplish a mission. Once the mission is accomplished, they have no further need of the tools. To put it simply, they use justice when it’s useful to them and abandon it when it’s not. You deserve better than exile, but giving you what you deserve would work contrary to what they’re building, so justice no longer matters in your case…although, ironically, they have done you justice without realizing it.”

  “How so?”

  “Because they sent you to me. They put you down in Star Force territory, and because of our relationship they knew you’d probably come find me or I would find you. They did it as a taunt to me, but we’re going to turn the tables on them. You are a warlord, and if you can no longer be one in the service of the Zak’de’ron, then I will turn you into one within Star Force and allow you to continue to grow beyond the limits they imposed upon you.”

  “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “Voku territory exists within our domain. If the Zak’de’ron move against us, do you truly think they won’t have the Voku attack at least some of our worlds?”

  Cal-com was hesitant for a moment. “If we are to be breeding stock, they would not.”

  “Tools,” Paul corrected him. “Tools that can be used to attack and be breeding stock simultaneously if we’re on the defensive. Or, tools that can be expendable. If you really are to replace the Zen’zat, then they will most likely create multiple Voku civilizations around the galaxy. They may have started others already.”

  Cal-com suddenly grew angry. “
If those who went to serve them in battle were sent to become colonists on new worlds, then I am not the only one betrayed. They did not specify what the volunteers would be doing, but taking warriors and turning them into laborers is a betrayal of purpose. We sent only the best to analysis, and the ones they chose deserve better than founding new breeding colonies. They would have to retread paths already taken,” the Voku said, referencing the fact that ‘breeding’ referred more to training and experience than it did reproduction, for Voku did not ‘breed’ in the traditional sense.

  “Possibly. And some day they may order them to attack me. How do you think they would fare in that battle?”

  Cal-com’s anger spiked, but in a cold and very lethal manner reaching down into a deep, dark pit inside him.

  “We would do you damage, but you have grown beyond us. What would you do if the Voku attacked you?”

  “That should be obvious, as we have done with many other races. We would fight, win, and annex you. We would not obliterate Voku worlds out of anger or vengeance. Doing so would be the easy path, but we choose the hard path because it is the right one.”

  “I cannot fathom what that war would be like, but it would be eviscerating. We are inherent allies. The Elders ordered me to protect you so you could grow stronger. Now that you have, it is inconceivable that they would order the Voku to attack.”

  “They sought to use us, maybe just to irritate the V’kit’no’sat a bit, maybe to become another of their tools. But we’ve outgrown them, and like you, we cannot fit into the parameters they wish, so we must be eliminated. And they cannot exile us.”

  “I do not understand their animosity. You should be natural allies against the V’kit’no’sat.”

  “We’re not the issue. It’s them. They don’t want peers, only servants. And based on what they taught the V’kit’no’sat, they will not tolerate any civilization that rivals their own power, for they fear losing their superiority. They would rather be weak and rule than be strong and live in the shadow of another’s domain. I’d bet ten planets that I’m right about that assessment.”