The Powers That Be Read online

  “In that we are alike, but unless you can punch a lot harder than I think, you’re not taking down a Warden on your own.”

  “Do we need to?”

  Esna’s head came up again, this time with a stupid look on her face. “Obviously.”

  “No…I don’t mean the Empire. I mean do you and I need to? It’s not the Wardens that threaten the Founders, it’s their swarm of minions. Why can’t we fight them the normal way? No more tricks or special technology. Star Force has always fought the swarms with superior units that can last indefinitely while the enemy has to keep replacing its lost forces because it chooses to build them fast rather than strong.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many we kill in the field when a Warden can come crashing down on your head and erase all your gains. Naval is where we have to find a way to win this.”

  “Sometimes, but are the Hadarak gaining all their territory by Wardens?” Bren asked, leaving the question hang in the air until Esna was forced to answer.

  “The hard battles are, but not all.”

  “They’re picking up planets with no Wardens. They’re sending carrier ships with minions, and minions alone are conquering more than half of their gains. Far more, actually. The Wardens are there, like the Lurkers, to do what the minions cannot. But it’s the minions that Founders fear. It’s the minions that conquer. The big ones that cannot be touched without Essence or Ysalamir are really to support the swarm, the swarm doesn’t support them.”

  “Go on.”

  “If there’s a way we can fight the swarm, and let the Elcee or others handle the big ones, can we beat the Hadarak the other way around?”

  “By depriving them of the swarm? I don’t have any idea how we can do that if we can’t hold territory to deny them from using it to produce more. And if we can’t protect our most heavily defended worlds from a pair of Wardens, one going kamikaze to break through and the other to land and conquer, then how do we defend worlds without even a shield generator?”

  “Are they growing Wardens faster than we can kill them?”

  “I don’t know,” Esna said, never having thought about that. “What’s in the Core is unknown, plus what they can bring in from other galaxies. Might as well assume they’re unlimited.”

  Bren snapped his fingers and a Fornax jolt hit Esna, shaking her concentration and causing her mind to reset as she glared at the Golden Knight.

  “Unlimited?” he said as though he was spitting ice with every syllable.

  “We can’t know, so we might as well assume they are,” she growled, resisting the urge to throw a bigger Fornax blast back at him.

  “And what does a warrior say to unlimited enemies?”

  Esna blinked, suddenly understanding his reprimand. “Bring them on.”

  Bren nodded, and put his fingers down. “So why are we not facing them as warriors? We are looking for tricks, cheats, and whatever we can to avoid the head-on fight. Why have we given up on it?”

  “Because they’re too many and they reproduce too fast.”

  “So did the lizards, though that was before your time and mine, but I have studied those wars closely. We defended as we are now, until we grew to the point we could start pushing back, system by system. We didn’t run from the direct fight.”

  “I’ve studied them too, and that war was based off taking systems, stacking them with defenses, and holding them. We can’t hold anything against the Hadarak if they want it badly enough.”

  “None of the Fortresses have fallen, and they’re trying hard to take them.”

  “Those aren’t planets. And they’re built to be modular so that when the Hadarak do damage them the outer layers can be expendable. Our people are not expendable, and we will not fight that way, even if it will win the war.”

  “The Viceroy is willing.”

  “They all are. They’ve been programmed for it.”

  “Doesn’t a part of you want to see them unleashed on the enemy?”

  “Yes,” Esna admitted. “I crave a way to hurt them, and having to pull punches frustrates me. It’s why I chose to fight in the Rim rather than the Core. I want targets I can crush, or at least attack directly. With the Hadarak we’re always retreating and I’m stuck in a seda giving orders.”

  “Then let’s stop trying to run from them, evade them, or cheat them. Let’s find a way to fight them head on, as warriors should. The Archons can pull the sneaky stuff, but to cleanse the galaxy of these vermin we’re going to have to do this the conventional way, so help me figure out how to do that.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you have seen from the outside. You were weak once, afraid, confused. Tell me from the outside, how can Star Force fight these monsters?”

  Esna punched the bed next to her right hip. “I don’t know.”

  “Ignore the Wardens and Lurkers and all the stuff that requires Essence or Ysalamir. How do we fight the rest if they’re not protected by the others?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Bren. If we can’t hold territory we can’t deny it to them. They just re-infest it…unless we blow up the planets, and even then they can probably feed off their remains.”

  “We’re taking worlds, not destroying them. We’re not going to be tricked into destroying our own prizes.”

  “Prizes? We’re in a war for our survival and you’re talking like this is…” Esna cut off, bringing her hands up in front of her and staring at her palms. “What have I become?”

  “Lost,” Bren said firmly. “Now find your way back.”

  Esna stared at her hands, but her vision was directed inward. Rammak had died saving her, not because it would benefit the empire, or him. Had he not come for her he would have survived on Mace until the V’kit’no’sat war ended and the world was recolonized. He would have made it back even if nobody found him there before that, and even though he didn’t know that would happen, he chose to come out of hiding for her. Because she was Human.

  Because he thought she was worth fighting for, regardless of what happened.

  He wasn’t trying to merely survive, he was trying to live.

  “This is the way of the warrior,” she reminded herself.

  “As a child, you would wait,” Bren said, reciting an ancient song that immediately began to bring tears to Esna’s eyes, for she’d never heard it on Mace, but once she got into Canderous it was required learning…and somehow it seemed to have been written specifically for her, though she knew that was impossible. “And watch from far away.”

  “But you always knew,” Esna said between sobs, “that you’d be the one that work while they all play.”

  “And you…you lay awake at night and scheme, of all the things that you would change, but it was just a dream.”

  “Here we are,” Esna ground out, finding a fire in her heart again with the words, “don’t turn away now. We are the warriors that built this town.”

  “The time will come, when you’ll have to rise…”

  “…above the best, improve yourself, your spirit never dies.”

  A brief moment of silence followed, then Bren asked, “So why aren’t we?”

  Esna stood up, flexing her arms up halfway and staring at her muscles and her quaking hands. “Leave the Wardens to the Archons.”

  “Yes. Now how do we earn our victory against the minions?”

  “We can’t hold territory, which means we can’t stop them from reproducing.”

  “Then we have to kill them faster than they can make them,” Bren said firmly. “Is that a problem?”

  Esna turned slowly and locked eyes with him. “Not for a warrior. Not when they’re all offense, no defense, and mostly stupid.”

  “They’re brutes designed as killing machines, and less smart than the lizards. We beat them, why can we not beat the minions?”

  “We can, it’s just a matter of numbers. But if we can’t deny them planets, they can…”

  “What? Send in a few ships and hope to be left alone to grow into an army?
We’re not a small empire anymore, Esna. If we can detect them landing, we can get to them before they can grow out of control.”

  “If we’re fast enough, and strong enough.”

  “I can do it single handedly,” Bren said, and she knew he wasn’t overestimating his abilities.

  Esna’s mind raced, feeling a path here but slipping from it. Without a single secure world in the empire, how could you fight a war without sacrificing people wherever the enemy chose to hit?

  “Holy shit,” she whispered, sitting back down on the bed again as her life radically changed in a moment of epiphany.

  “You thought of something?” Bren asked insistently as he gently rose to his feet without a sound.

  “We’re warriors, and we’re going to stand our ground and fight,” she said, volume returning to her voice. “I don’t know about the Founders, but we’re going to beat the Hadarak the hard way. No cheats. We’re going to earn dominance.”

  “How?” Bren pressed.

  “The way you and I are drawn to. Hand to hand, face to face, skill against skill. One planet at a time, sweeper teams, grunge work. No orbital bombardment other than the initial strikes. Send the fleet to own the spacelanes. To keep reinforcements from arriving. They will secure our victories while we make sure every last bit of infestation gets burned off the planets.”

  “How does that change our current situation?”

  “The Grand Border will hold. The Archons and the V’kit’no’sat won’t fail. When the expansion is contained, and no more evacuations have to be protected, we will have to hold indefinitely or take the war to them on their side. That’s what I’m thinking about, and now I know how to do it, if we’re only talking minions.”

  Bren knelt down on one knee so he could look her in the eyes again. “Please share.”

  “We have to rise above them, and by we I mean Canderous. We’re the anti-Hadarak faction. We have to become the anti-Hadarak faction.”

  “Why you?”

  “Our homes aren’t on planets, and they can’t be rammed by Wardens.”

  “Your seda are a little faster, so you can evade them. How does that help us fight?”

  “It means we have strongholds that can’t be hit by Wardens, and with proper upgrades even Lurkers won’t be able to. Big upgrades.”

  “But you’re still running. Where’s the ‘stand your ground’ part?”

  Esna smiled cruelly and placed a hand on the right side of Bren’s face.

  “Which direction do you think we’ll be running?”

  “I don’t understand, Esna. What can Canderous do that it isn’t already doing?”

  “Evolve,” she said, kissing him hard once. “Thank you for kicking my ass into gear. It’s like I’d forgotten how to really fight. It’s not about winning, it’s about engaging.”

  “Better to die a warrior than live a coward,” Bren echoed another lesson taught in Canderous to its younglings.

  “This is our time, and I need your help.”

  “Name it.”

  “Help me convince Davis to allow Canderous to develop Knights. Full Knights, with psionics and whatever Essence help we can get. And not to assist the Knight races. But to become minion mashers…because we’re going to need a lot of them.”

  “I still don’t understand your plan, but if you can bring this fight to the surface you will have my eternal backing.”

  Esna smiled, slapping him on the face playfully. “Let’s go, big guy. I’ve got some explaining to do, and might as well do it to everyone at once.”

  Bren turned and went out her door so fast it almost didn’t open in time, then he began running down the hallway with Esna sprinting to keep up. She finally knew how to beat them, and Bren could sense it in her.

  No point in walking now, the sooner they found Davis the better, for rebuilding Canderous wasn’t going to happen overnight, and time was already against them.

  But this would work. She knew it in her bones. Now she just had to convince the man who had built the Empire to let her break a lot of his rules…

  8

  The doors to the briefing room where Davis’s special team had been working opened with a nearly inaudible ‘swoosh,’ then closed again as Lord Daegan entered, the last of the team to arrive as Esna waited near the holo pedestal with the others as Davis looked across at all of them from the far side of the room.

  “Alright, we’re all here now,” he said calmly. “What have you two come up with?”

  “Esna,” Bren said, waving a large hand towards the Director.

  “Sean,” she said, for once not having to force his first name past her lips, “give me the full technological and genetic power of Star Force, and I will destroy the Hadarak for you.”

  Everyone’s eyes widened, except Bren’s, and Davis noted that fact with a quick glance towards him…along with a brief telepathic exchange that no one else suspected.

  “How?” he said simply after a moment of awkward silence.

  “By fighting them as warriors, face to face, hand to hand, world to world. No more tricks. No more running. No more fearing these bastards. You beat the swarm tactics of the lizards long ago when everyone thought it was impossible, so why is everyone convinced it can’t be done now?”

  “Star Force was able to hold territory then,” Kirritimin interjected, for he had the unique position of having been the mastermind behind the lizards’ war against Star Force, and despite his forced genius helping them, Star Force had still won the war. “If you cannot deny the enemy the world you take, you face a never-ending carnage. We must have a mechanism to protect worlds in order to stop the Wardens from ramming them, or no world is safe. Let alone empty ones we take with nothing but rubble and corpses left behind.”

  Esna leaned on the deactivated holo pedestal with both hands, then twisted her head to look down at the smart bug.

  “That’s what I thought too, until Bren reminded me what it is to be a warrior. We want to win, but more than winning we want to fight rather than run. We want to stand our ground because the fight is worth it, but we’ve been bullied into defensive thinking because our civilian population is vulnerable. No world is safe…that’s what you said,” Esna all but accused as she switched her gaze back to Davis. “And because of that we’re building expendable worlds along the Core border, hoping the Hadarak can’t jump the defenses and get behind them to our people.”

  “There are going to be V’kit’no’sat on those ‘expendable’ worlds,” Davis lightly growled.

  “But you’re expecting them to get hit, and putting them there because, as you said, there is no safe world against the Wardens’ mass ramming. And the V’kit’no’sat are volunteering to go, because their empire’s former existence was based on fighting the Hadarak. It’s in their blood, and they want to fight…and so do I. But not defense. That won’t win the war. We have to go on offense.”

  “How do we hold worlds that we take?” Kirritimin reiterated.

  Esna slammed her fist down on the pedestal, inadvertently breaking it when the casing cracked as she applied more force than expected.

  “That’s still defense. We’re all so bullied into submission that we forget how weak the Hadarak are. Most of their worlds are easy pickings, but because they have the swarm moving forward nobody can take advantage of it because everyone is on defense. It’s half a bluff that nobody is calling.”

  “How do we call it?” Lord Daegan asked.

  Esna turned to look at him, then made eye contact with the other 8 people in the room before turning back to the Protovic. “As a team. I don’t know what to do about the Founders, and I’m leaving the Lurkers, Trons, and anything else that’s Essence to the Archons or some other faction. But give me what I need and I can turn Canderous into an offensive weapon specialized for killing Hadarak. Star Force is so large we don’t all have to be multi-taskers. You have so many other true factions for that, but the aquatics requirement you made us take on to become a full faction,” Esna said, lookin
g now to Davis, “is going to come in damn useful now.”

  “Assume I give you everything you want, what will you do with it that hasn’t already been done?”

  “You all made a mistake,” she said bluntly. “You said no Star Force world is safe from the Wardens ramming it. But you forgot that not all Star Force worlds are planets.”

  “You are suggesting we move part of our population into the Temples,” Lord Daegan guessed.

  Esna snorted. “No. While it may be hard for the Hadarak to get there, the Temples can be taken down by them, correct?” she asked, looking directly at Tennisonne.

  The Mastertech’s head came up slightly. “The Temples have been designed to defend themselves against a Hadarak attack, but other than their mass they are more vulnerable than our Castles. Once their Essence reserves are expended…great as they might be…the structure of the Temple has no defense against ramming. They are better than anything we have right now, but they are not impregnable.”

  “No they’re not,” Esna agreed. “But there are two factions in Star Force that are not vulnerable, and Canderous is the only one with civilians that are not threatened by ramming Wardens…because our worlds can move faster than them and dodge the attacks.

  Davis’s laser eye lock went to Bren, who lightly smiled as he too saw the implications of this, though previously he hadn’t known where Esna was going with it.

  “It is of limited value,” Kirritimin noted. “I have considered this tactic, but the amount of infrastructure Canderous has is tiny in comparison to a fully developed planet. In theory, if we had eons to build sedas and slowly moved our population into them, we could have a mobile civilization, but it will not help us in the near future. We simply cannot construct enough sedas for it to help us hold the Grand Border, let alone push beyond it.”

  “You wouldn’t need genetic modifications for that,” Bren noted as he looked down at Kirritimin with an intelligence challenge.

  “No it would not. Genetic upgrades are only useful in physical endeavors unless they are for brain capabilities regarding drone control. Since sedas are defensive stations the only logical assumption is that Canderous needs stronger minds to control more drones per person.”