Star Force: Baron (Star Force Universe Book 43) Page 8

  It was going to be a challenge Megan had never faced before, fighting with green troops that had the memories of veterans. That gave a mirage of competence that evaporated when they had to deal with new things, and Megan wasn’t making that rookie mistake. Paladin needed experience same as everyone else, but when they didn’t get it they were vastly superior to other races.

  Hopefully this operation wouldn’t devolve to that level, but one thing was for sure. Paladin didn’t surrender, and Paladin didn’t back down. Punch them in the face and they went for your throat. That was their natural instinct, and the alterations in their genetic memory hadn’t changed it. They weren’t vicious or violent in an aggressive way, but they did respond to attacks in that fashion.

  Megan didn’t fear them. In fact she rather liked them. And as a warrior, Megan was more comfortable working with aggressive races than meek ones, for she was insanely aggressive when she chose to be and the Paladin couldn’t hold a candle to her in berserker mode.

  But that was because she didn’t lose her mind when angry, she became focused. Most aggressive races were the opposite, and she could train individuals how to focus a lot easier than to teach a meek person to be aggressive. So she was happy with the Paladin and their potential while recognizing the inherent dangers if she wasn’t here to keep them on track.

  And the more experience in the field they had, the more solid they would become and the more new memories could be isolated and incorporated into future generations.

  Megan leaned back in her elegant command chair, in which she sat far too much. Before her were a wide array of holograms and a telepathic interface that she switched between with such ease that she didn’t even register the difference anymore. There were so many new colonies that needed planning, and she wasn’t going to let the Paladin design most of them. Even small tweaks here and there could have an effect on the snowball that was forming, and she was trying to squeeze out as much productivity as she could.

  And in truth she wasn’t going building by building except for the very small startups. Instead she was doing zoning and allowing the local Viceroys to fill them in, saving her the effort while allowing her to put her personal touch on all the construction taking place. Eventually there would be too many worlds for that, for the plans for expansion in the territory she had been assigned were insane. Originally they had planned to take only uninhabited planets, but the devastation she was seeing out here had changed that.

  Now she was planning on taking control of many that were dying. She wasn’t going to negotiate or even ask their permission. They were failing and most had lost more than 90% of their population. Megan was going to sweep up and save what was left, but she was also going to claim those more valuable worlds for the Paladin. If she didn’t they’d die out anyway, or mostly, and a handful of primitive survivors weren’t going to lay claim to a planet. Not in her book anyway.

  But before she could start doing that she needed the foodstuffs and other supplies necessary to inundate these worlds, and her production was still a far cry from what it needed to be. Right now it was tied up with the population surge, for feeding the trillions of Paladin came first, and the more she had birthed the more supplies they would need.

  But once Megan got ahead on the production curve she was going to start grabbing up the most valuable planets that didn’t have a functional civilization on them. When that happened the partial anonymity the Paladin had would disappear and the threats in the region would start taking shots at her forces, if only to feel them out. Her naval commanders were already spoiling for a fight, but the numbers weren’t to her liking yet. She knew a massive fight was coming from a lot of smaller threats, but Megan was not going to go into it half prepared with her forces spread across such a large region.

  When the appropriate time came she was going to drop the hammer so hard no one would challenge her a decade later. But in that decade, all hell was going to break loose.

  And that’s when the big players would take notice. There were four just beyond her new borders, beyond what had been The Nexus. How they would respond she did not know, but if they chose to get militarily involved this was going to get nasty.

  That was why she was biding her time now and focusing on growth. Megan and Thrawn were not going to get reinforcements from the rest of Star Force. They had to grow whatever forces they needed out here, and it was critically important they didn’t move too fast.

  But standing by and building while other people were in need was not something Megan would ever be comfortable with. It had to be done in order to save the most people down the road, but it was disgusting to see the updated scouting reports of the Paladin who were cataloging every world within their zone. They weren’t even close to finished yet, there were that many systems out here, estimated to be approximately 3.5 million in number, and with each new batch sent to her for review, she saw planet after planet that was wrecked or dying. They had become so dependent on The Nexus that its absence, even in small ways, had wrecked large tracts of this entire region.

  But not all of it. Some systems had not interacted with The Nexus and some of them were still intact. Others had fallen when the predations had increased after The Nexus patrol fleets had disappeared. All in all there were pieces of civilization out there, though in some cases that term was stretched to its limits, but more often than not there was devastation where there had once been civilization.

  It was too late for many worlds, but once Megan got the Paladin up to sufficient strength she was going to start saving what she could. Until then, she had to make do with the few exceptions the trailblazer had allowed and remind herself that without her and the Paladin they too would be lost. So she wasn’t being totally apathetic. She was sitting by, helping a few, but that was only a fraction of the many that needed help.

  She hated this part of her mission. She hated this part of being an Archon. But someone had to face the ugliness of the galaxy in order to clean it up, and that was a duty she wasn’t going to shirk, no matter how distasteful it was.

  9

  June 11, 4878

  Unnamed System

  Stellar Orbit

  The V’kit’no’sat scout ship exited one of thousands of jumps it had been making searching beyond the frontier looking for the Knights of Quenar, but it wasn’t alone. There were 6 Les’i’kron ships working together and arriving in sequence, so if the first vessel was destroyed it could warn the others and the possibility of at least one of them surviving and reporting back what they found would be worth the effort. Otherwise, sending a single scout out to look for advanced hostiles would more than likely just mean the death of the scout.

  Normally the V’kit’no’sat did not operate in such a fashion, but the heavy ass kicking they’d gotten when they lost the Uriti had made them rethink their standard protocols. They needed to find the Knights of Quenar worlds, and if they did they didn’t expect to leave peaceably with that knowledge.

  The V’kit’no’sat had been doing more than just looking. They’d been inquiring of their many contacts for word of the KoQ, and what they’d found was shocking. Many people knew of and feared the KoQ, but they were not a traditional empire. They were ghosts, moving about where and when they wanted, but no one knew where they came from. There would have been no information about them at all except that they kept in contact with the rest of the galaxy, ostensibly to look for information on the Uriti.

  But at the same time they also operated as a police force for the region where the scout ships were now searching, knocking down threats in an area that the V’kit’no’sat were able to outline thanks to the stories of the locals. Where in those 300,000 star systems were they? Well, it was just a matter of looking through them all, assuming their facilities weren’t well hidden.

  Sending 6 ships per scout group also allowed them to search systems 6 times as fast, but today that was not going to be necessary.

  When the first Ti’mat exited its jump it didn’t last 30 seconds be
fore cloaked vessels appeared around it and opened fire. Thankfully it wasn’t a smaller Kaeper, otherwise it would have been destroyed immediately, but the Ti’mat was able to hold up long enough to send a signal back up the jumpline warning the others before it was quickly cut to shreds by the swarming KoQ vessels.

  The next Ti’mat in altered its jumpline, curving into a skid around the side of the star with the others doing likewise but not following the same exact path. One of them was destroyed when it happened to run through an asteroid field, but the other four survived long enough to get down to reasonable speed where their sensors would function and allowed them to avoid obstacles. They had their cloaking devices running, but soon two of them were intercepted and a running battle begun, with them sending out messages to the others across the system.

  The last two dropped their cloaks, realizing they were useless, and engaged active scans as they flew evasive courses towards other jumppoints. As they did so they picked up passive scans of the nearest planets…where they saw a massive civilization utilizing Knights of Quenar technology. The worlds were so packed with it they had no natural landscapes, just seas of various shades of black glinting in the sunlight.

  The Les’i’kron weren’t going to stay around and look, for they needed to get the location information back to the fleet, and the two intact ships did make it to jumppoints and left the system at partial power, for they didn’t have enough time to fully recharge their jump capacitors. One of the two under attack also made it out, but with damage, and all three flew at reduced speed to different systems…where the KoQ were waiting for them when they emerged.

  Two of them were destroyed on entry, but the third never arrived. It was the damaged one, but it hadn’t malfunctioned and hit the star. Rather it had altered its slow course slightly so that it slingshotted around the star without slowing down. That didn’t allow much of a course correction, so the choice of destination stars further on was limited and the ability to accurately pull off such a maneuver was questionable, but it was a navigational trick the V’kit’no’sat had learned well navigating the core of the galaxy where jumplines were so short and the constant stopping hindered travel.

  The Knights of Quenar had no such use for it out in the more sparse Rim, and they hadn’t expected the tactic. So the damaged Ti’mat coasted on for just under two weeks before it came close enough to a gravity well to stick a landing. It did not arrive on a direct jumpline, so it had to brake hard, pushing it sideways as it did so, then it pulled on the gravity of the star as it passed in order to latch on and swing around it until they finally came to a relative stop out in middle orbit.

  Thankfully they hadn’t collided with anything, but they arrived in a system without the Knights of Quenar, though it was not uninhabited. There were three planets with a primitive race the Les’i’kron could not identify, but it didn’t matter. They weren’t going to stick around long enough for them to report to the KoQ where they were, but the ship was damaged and their speed was limited due to the destruction of one of their gravity drives. The rest had been repaired during the coast phase of their jump, but there wasn’t enough spare parts onboard to replace the one that had been 85% destroyed.

  But V’kit’no’sat ships had multiple gravity drives, meaning the loss of one only slowed the ship by a fraction. It did not stop it, and the Ti’mat continued to bounce from system to system until it got back to the rendezvous point where the scout ships had been refueling. There was a large V’kit’no’sat fleet of cargo ships and warships, which the Ti’mat immediately transmitted its information to, warning them that if they were followed they may come under attack.

  The V’kit’no’sat fleet immediately sent out courier ships to rally the kill fleet that was waiting on the V’kit’no’sat border while the rendezvous point held position so they wouldn’t abandon the other scouts who would not have enough fuel to get back to V’kit’no’sat territory if they left.

  By the time the kill fleet arrived 4 months later no KoQ ships had shown themselves, with the long train of warships from virtually all the races in the V’kit’no’sat passing through with the leading elements jumping out before the bulk of the convoy even arrived in the system. The train of ships made their way all the way out to the target system but did not arrive in it. Rather they spread out around to the neighboring systems with a countdown clock, timing their final jumps so they all arrived in the target system simultaneously, coming in on multiple jumplines.

  The leading elements were Kafcha, the largest ships the V’kit’no’sat had, so they could weather the initial attacks of ambushing ships, soaking up the damage and sparing those coming in behind them, but to their surprise no attack came. They entered the system from all directions unmolested and dispersed scout ships throughout the system to get a good feel for the battleground only to discover that the KoQ were gone.

  There were no ships here, not that they could always detect them if they were, but none were visible and the planets that had been identified by the original Ti’mat showed no presence of any habitation…but they did show the scar marks of its removal. All of the planets were scraped clean of buildings, leaving the bedrock showing their footprints and the signs of mechanical removal.

  It was all gone. To where the V’kit’no’sat had no idea, but the Knights of Quenar had just picked up and moved planets’ worth of infrastructure. Not even the V’kit’no’sat could do that, and it left the kill fleet with no target to hit and fruitless searches of the planets for anything useful…other than the debris of the V’kit’no’sat scout ships that had been left drifting in space where they had been destroyed.

  “Moved?” Mak’to’ran asked Hamob, whose ship had come out to the Hadarak Zone to find him and was communicating via hologram. “Explain.”

  “Their planetary structures were removed, leaving only sculpted bedrock behind. There was no debris to be found. Either they build their structures with the ability to fly, or they somehow removed them all and transported them outside the system before our fleet arrived.”

  “All of it?” Mak’to’ran asked, having seen the initial scouting report months ago.

  “All of it,” Hamob confirmed. “We are dealing with a very formidable opponent.”

  “Yet one who runs,” Mak’to’ran said disapprovingly.

  “They cannot match our might if they are forced to suffer attrition. Their evasion bespeaks wisdom rather than bravado.”

  “Yet we still do not know how many they are.”

  “I would suspect far less than us, but the problem remains. Itaru has no target, save for those that are already visible.”

  “The truce will not be breached,” Mak’to’ran said firmly.

  “Itaru may strike despite your order. You need to return. I cannot hold them back.”

  The Era’tran growled. “My time is best spent here, making Hadarak kills. Are they so incompetent that I have to oversee them constantly?”

  “They seek blood and dominance. They have no blood, and their dominance is challenged. It is not a matter of incompetence.”

  “It is,” Mak’to’ran differed. “And I do not refer to the inability to locate the Knights of Quenar. Dominance requires patience at times, and this is one of them. If they cannot produce that patience, then they are incompetent.”

  “That is something they need to hear from you.”

  “Will that be enough?” Mak’to’ran asked, suspecting the answer.

  “Perhaps not, but I know that my influence is not enough. There is already a call for volunteers for the first invasion wave against Star Force.”

  Mak’to’ran flared his claws and raked the glowing talons through a nearby console in frustration, cutting it as easily as a lightsaber would.

  “A useful application,” Hamob quipped.

  “Have they learned nothing?”

  “Their leader is absent. They forget the lessons learned in recent history.”

  “The arrogant have resurged?”

  “No
. This is mere frustration. There is an enemy that they are not allowed to strike. This does not sit well with them.”

  “Or you?”

  “I am weighing the costs of multiple options.”

  “The truce was agreed to. We will not renege.”

  “Star Force was foolish to agree without leverage.”

  “Are we to become liars?”

  “Many already are,” Hamob said honestly. “The arrogant were not our only problem.”

  “Do we have this problem with the Era’tran?”

  “No. I have made sure of that. They are loyal to the mission, and to you. The problem is the other races, most notably the Oso’lon, but even the J’gar are wavering in light of our inability to find the Knights of Quenar.”

  “May I travel on your vessel? I do not want to diminish the capabilities of this fleet.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we will leave immediately.”

  It took nearly 4 months to reach Itaru, for the Hadarak were sitting on the best routes through the Core and the V’kit’no’sat had to take the long way around through very short jumps, even considering the curved routes they availed themselves of when appropriate. When they arrived they came into a dense star system that had been fully repaired since the recent civil war, with a defense fleet larger than any elsewhere in the empire by a factor of 20.

  It was overkill as far as he was concerned, but there was still a lot of distrust between the races and none of them wanted to be caught in a bad position here should another civil war break out. The losses from the recent one were still felt in terms of personnel, for a lot of the very old V’kit’no’sat had been lost. Some of those were beneficial losses, for most of the arrogant had been purged, but there was still a skills gap that left Itaru less the jewel it had once been, and it seemed those that lived here were trying to compensate with more ships.