Star Force: Galactic Empire Revealed (Star Force Universe Book 63) Read online

  The orb continued to expand, traveling thousands of miles before its interference waned. Ships and stations hit were momentarily disrupted, then came back online quickly as the visual effect continued, but whatever energy was doing the disabling was growing so dilute as to not have the desired effect any longer.

  However, while it wasn’t immediately known, the crews onboard those disabled ships were no longer alive. Their bodies had been liquefied to the point where their Kich’a’kat had no chance of repairing them, though the farther out ships had enough tissue left for them to linger on in a horrific state while their armor’s regenerators tried to put them back together. Most that were able to be reassembled were in body only, for their minds were reduced to nothing but new tissue, making them hatchlings once again. Millions of them, reduced to nothing or worse than nothing in a matter of minutes.

  “You need not submit to me. Only recognize the truth of the situation. The V’kit’no’sat must survive. You do not want to die to the Hadarak, and I only kill some of you now because you force it of me. Without my guidance all of you will die. You have suffered far more losses in combat against the Hadarak already. Do not force any more from me. I am acting for the…”

  The arrogant words were cut short as a Tar’vem’jic blast slid between several of the disabled ships and hit the Zak’de’ron squarely in the torso, but this time it got through his Essence shields, penetrated his technological ones, and burned through enough armor to draw blood, but little of it…

  “Run, run, run!” Anders said, also mentally giving the order after firing the Materia and seeing the dragon immediately turn and chase after them.

  Her Mach’nel shot off in a microjump, with Eldorat following in his own, ignoring all of the V’kit’no’sat ships that fired on him and his seemingly impervious shields as he pursued the only Essence enhanced weapon in the system…and one that had not killed him. That same weapon system had put a hole straight through a Lurker, meaning whatever shields this dragon had, they were extremely badass.

  The Archon watched on the tracking as the pursuit unfolded. They had a slight lead, having anticipating this response, but Eldorat was fast even without his ship and was gaining as the Mach’nel’s navigator played a game of cat and mouse with constant redirects trying to get the Zak’de’ron to overshoot. He kept accelerating faster than the Mach’nel, but his course corrections had so much power to them that he was getting away with it and closing in.

  But then he hit something…rather several somethings as a fleet of Rit’ko’sor ships made microjumps directly into his path, managing to collide with a few of them, which destroyed the ships instantly. Eldorat survived, but quickly became bogged down with the suicide attacks, for they were jumping at interstellar speeds and unless he wanted to leave the system he had no way to outrun them.

  Another orb appeared, this one more intense, and it moved out vaporizing everything it touched even as more ships slammed into him. It was so large it looked like a second sun as Anders slowed their escape as the Zak’de’ron was no longer pursuing them.

  But that didn’t stop the V’kit’no’sat. They were purposefully diving inside the sphere and destroying themselves on contact with it, but the momentum of their debris pushed on inside towards the center. After a few of those kamikaze attacks the rest of the fleets that were pursuing from all locations in the system and massing millions of ships got to and formed a growing perimeter around the location where the Zak’de’ron had been…for when the white orb dissipated, he was gone.

  The V’kit’no’sat ships that had Ghostbane sensors immediately started pinging them, looking for a cloaked signature, but nothing was found. There was small debris everywhere in the area, but nothing large enough to identify, and the hopeful suspicion was that the ramming ships had succeeded in killing him, but no one truly felt that confident.

  Yet, with nothing to track, shoot, or be heard mouthing off, the V’kit’no’sat ships clustered around the area and started doing low powered, wide beam attacks on the area, sweeping it for physical signatures that would show up, cloaked or not, but they were not coming up with anything.

  “Damn it,” Anders said with a cringe. “Take us back there.”

  “Are you sure he’s gone?” the helmsman asked while slowly carrying out her order.

  “I’m guessing he’s not, but we’re too far away. Get me inside that detonation region, and do it fast.”

  “There’s a lot of traffic in there,” he pointed out, beginning to zigzag around V’kit’no’sat ships in their 202 mile wide pyramidal Mach’nel.

  “Attention V’kit’no’sat fleet,” she said in their language on wide comm. “Move aside and let me through. If he is hiding I can find him.”

  A Hjar’at immediately responded to her, and through the Urrtren she could see that he was the primary fleet commander for this system.

  “What can your ship see that ours cannot?” he demanded.

  “Essence,” she said simply. “I don’t think he’s dead. I think he’s hiding beyond your range, but I have to be close to see it. Move your ships aside so I can get there quicker.”

  “Does your weapon still function?”

  “I have another few shots if needed, but not an unlimited amount,” she answered as the ships before them began to drift away from a central corridor, giving her ship a direct shot to the devastation area, which it jumped through in a matter of seconds then slowed down inside the spherical halo of V’kit’no’sat ships sitting back a few thousand miles…though that made them look very close considering the size of everything involved. And they were looking for a dragon that was tiny in comparison.

  “There!” Anders shouted, pointing to a tiny bright spot, barely detectible. She mentally gave the Mach’nel her heading, and it flew towards the V’kit’no’sat ships as if to collide with them. “He’s here and drifting clear of the battlefield. Move aside before I lose him.”

  “Give us a target lock,” the Hjar’at demanded.

  “My ship can’t lock on. I’m tracking him with my eyes, Essence enhanced,” she said as the Mach’nel began to pick up speed as the V’kit’no’sat fleet appreciably moved out of her way while Grand Admiral Neofenn kept his Mach’nel beyond the gaggle of ships and simply observed. “You won’t be able to hit him anyway. He’s in the Essence realm, which is beyond anything we have can affect. I can only see him because he is expending Essence in order to stay there, and that Essence is making a ripple here. You can pass right through his position with no interaction. It is how the Vargemma hid their ships from us when we were near to destroying them.”

  “You believe he is weakened?”

  “He is definitely weakened, I just don’t know how much. He can’t fight and kill all your ships, that much I can promise you. But he can run away when he gets low on energy and live, because you have no way to track him. That last spherical attack was meant to hide his acceleration. He can’t navigate in the Essence realm, as far as I know. He can just drift. So his last movements are carrying him beyond your fleet. He is calculating how long it will take to get clear, then he will reappear again, either to attack or flee.”

  “How then do we kill him?”

  “While he’s submerged, we can’t. But I don’t think he can see us from the other side. Not unless we use Essence,” she said, getting up close enough now that there was no mistaking his Essence signature. She kept her Mach’nel back a few thousand miles then marked the position as close as she could estimate. “When he comes back there should be a momentary lapse, I hope, when he doesn’t have his shields up. Not sure about that, but he isn’t going to expect us to be here. Trouble is, he can go right back under again and wait us out for a while.”

  “Indefinitely?”

  “No. Not unless his Essence recharge is greater than his expenditure. More than likely this will drain him over time. If he stays down there, he’ll die when his Essence runs too low. His body will return, but he won’t be in it. That may take days, even months
depending on his skills that I can only guess at.”

  “Continuous fire through the target then,” the Hjar’at said, with the V’kit’no’sat fleet beginning to do just that a few moments later, including some Tar’vem’jic beams from the V’kit’no’sat Mach’nel in the system, a few of which had already caught up to them, but several dozen more were coming from elsewhere in the system.

  “Yes, that might work,” Anders admitted. “But I have another idea, if you’re willing to give up one of your larger ships?”

  “Given what we face, a single ship is immaterial. What do you require it for?”

  10

  Anders had to take her best guess, because all she could see was a soft glowing spot with no way to tie sensors or any other form of measurement to it. She had her helmsman maneuver in an orbit around where she indicated the submerged bastard was so she could continually tweak her positioning, which was being transmitted out to the V’kit’no’sat who were remote controlling an empty Kafcha to fly directly over that spot.

  A mile long dragon and a 36 mile wide ship should have been easy to make the overlap, but her line of sight on the dragon was just that. A glow ahead that had no depth to it, hence the spin her Mach’nel was making around the Kafcha…with the rest of the V’kit’no’sat fleet even further out and swarming around the moving location like a lot of angry bees, all with their targets locked on the Kafcha as they gradually approached the central star.

  That’s where she assumed he would come out, in low stellar orbit. If he went all the way into the star he’d either die or he had a way to push away the matter around him. If that was the case then the Kafcha wouldn’t affect him, but as soon as it exploded every gun in the V’kit’no’sat fleet and on her Mach’nel would fire on that location and hope to catch him before he could submerge once again.

  Anders was still with the Materia so she could use it if needed, but she’d given orders to fire on the target while fleeing. She had no interest in dying here, but she was also the only one that could see him and was in the only ship with an Essence enhanced weapon, so sticking around near to Eldorat was not a good idea…yet she had to in order to fine tune the positioning and make sure this bastard came back out inside the ship.

  He waited a long time to do so, some 2.6 days, then suddenly the glow was gone and the Kafcha didn’t move for a moment, then it exploded as the fleet’s weaponry hit it en mass when they saw the internal cameras go out in a large section with a few others seeing internal explosions and bits of armored dragon sticking out of places they shouldn’t be.

  Anders heard him scream telepathically, and she assumed the V’kit’no’sat did as well. But then the weaponsfire came and the huge ship was torn apart within minutes...but somehow a piece of him survived behind what shielding he had lashed out in one final defiant move before succumbing. That move was an incineration blast that tore a hole out of what was left of the Kafcha and freed him from the wreckage.

  His body was bisected in several places, but with all of it still visibly intact. Walls, floors, and whatever else had been in the spot he reemerged were now fused inside his body and emitting radiation as at least some of the atoms were smashed together so much they began to fuse together.

  But then the incoming firepower tore through his armor and into his body, and there was no surviving multiple Tar’vem’jic blasts that were arriving with pinpoint accuracy on his torso. Anders saw one tear clear through him and out the other side before the rest of the firepower chewed his corpse apart so much you couldn’t recognize what it had been. She didn’t even need to fire the Materia again. Eldorat was no longer a threat to Itaru. He was thoroughly dead at this point, though the V’kit’no’sat kept firing for good measure until there was nothing left of him larger than a football.

  At that point the Hjar’at fleet commander called them off, and everyone looked at the now quiet rubble field that was mostly Kafcha debris with a little dragon corpse added in.

  “Is it over?” the Hjar’at asked Anders.

  “We got him. He didn’t escape back into the Essence realm. It’s over,” she confirmed.

  “Then Mak’to’ran is avenged. I still cannot believe he was so easily assassinated through all our defenses. Are all Essence users so powerful? I cannot believe how impotent our empire has become.”

  “Not the ones I know. But when his Master or his master’s race comes back, we’re going to have a huge problem. Hopefully they won’t show up for another million years.”

  “If we do not harness this power, we will not stand a chance against them. Can Star Force not even teach us the basics of how to defend ourselves? Mak’to’ran was wise to summon you here. We thank you for your assistance, without which he would have escaped to harass us with impunity, but please, do not leave us helpless to this threat.”

  “Not my call to make, but this definitely changes the paradigm. We’ll respond accordingly, I can promise you that. What happens now that he’s gone?”

  “I truly do not know.”

  “What’s your name?” Anders asked, for it wasn’t on the hologram label.

  “I am Seno, Itaru defense commander, and I have failed poorly this day.”

  “We lost Terrax in a similar manner, but now we’re kicking the crap out of those Essence users that did it, and most of the fighting is not with Essence. Eldorat did not die from an Essence attack, he died from your weapons. I only wounded him with one, and that was because you had already weakened his shields. I think he could have withstood one of my shots entirely if I engaged alone. Had I done so, my Mach’nel would have easily been destroyed. You are not helpless, just lacking a crucial tactical component.”

  “Another of his kind can come into this system and do the same. We are helpless against them if they can retreat into this Essence realm at will. Is that also how he bypassed our planetary shields?”

  “Yes. A short jump in and out, with his momentum carrying him across the boundary.”

  “How am I to defend against that?”

  “We can’t either. Not yet, but the knowledge in the Temples is going to help us catch up fast. It’s just a matter of time as we access and absorb it.”

  “Is there no technology that can defend against Essence?”

  “If there is, we’re going to find it. Essence is far too expensive for mass warfare. That’s why the Hadarak rarely use it. I know it does not help, but the amount he used he could not recharge within days, perhaps a month. If you can outlast them through the losses, they temporarily lose their power and must retreat until it can be regenerated.”

  “I will remember that,” Seno promised. “You have my personal permission to remain in Itaru as long as you wish. Permanently if possible.”

  “I’m not going anywhere in the near future if it helps return some stability to have me here on watch.”

  “It will help immensely even if another threat does not appear. Our people are panicked. We have never in our history faced a foe such as this. We do not know how to respond,” he admitted.

  “If what Eldorat said is true, his Master is not here and will not return for a very long time. The races he spoke of that are hiding from the Hadarak will not emerge. Both the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force have a decent amount of time to figure this out before we have to face someone like him again. In all probability, unless he has a check-in that he is going to miss, the Veloqueen won’t even know he’s gone until someone comes looking. And if they’re waiting for millions of years until this galaxy is ripe for resistance, I think we might have millions of years to prepare…so long as we can survive the Hadarak.”

  “We are being pushed back by them as it is. My people are already speaking of this as the end of our empire. I beg you, please do not let that come to pass. Give us a chance to gain Essence powers and we will have hope. Without them, we will be lost one way or another, and civil war may be the most likely without Mak’to’ran here to unite us.”

  “I thought things had gotten better on that fro
nt?”

  “Until now they had, but take away our ability to fight our true foes and some lesser minds will seek any opponent that they can fell just to fight off the madness of facing an impossible one.”

  “I wish I could disagree with you, but I’ve seen the same thing happen before. That’s why we always give our opponents an honorable path out of combat.”

  “Do they take it?”

  “Some do. Not all.”

  “And when they have no honorable path?”

  “They tear each other apart blaming one another for their demise.”

  “Or strike out at another?”

  “If one is available,” Anders said cautiously.

  “A Zak’de’ron killed Mak’to’ran. Are we to believe his race is not complicit?”

  “The fact that Itaru isn’t already under their control suggests they are not.”

  “Unless Eldorat came here as a favor to them.”

  “I can’t rule that out.”

  Seno nodded. “And neither can anyone else. The most basic fact is the most obvious. A Zak’de’ron has killed our leader. I do not believe we can let that pass.”

  “So you weaken yourselves further by attacking them?”

  “If we are to die by the Veloqueen or the Hadarak, then at least we can finish one fight before then,” he said regretfully.

  “You think the others will come to this conclusion?”

  “I have already heard whispers of it before now. It may not be wise, but as you said, faced with two unbeatable foes, the winnable fight becomes the priority.”

  “If you do that, do not expect us to help you,” Anders warned. “We’ve got two wars to fight already, and even if one looks impossible that doesn’t stop us from tackling the challenge.”

  “You have Essence and the hope for much more from the Temples. We have neither. Only our old hatred which Mak’to’ran wisely had us cast aside to focus on the Hadarak. Now a Zak’de’ron has assassinated him. What would you do if it were your Director?”