Vargemma Page 9

  “We know, Mak’to’ran. What else concerns you?”

  The Era’tran altered the hologram and zoomed in on the donut-like band of the Core that belonged to them, then the contentious zone in between V’kit’no’sat territory and the Deep Core that was totally owned by the Hadarak. The path of the Lurker, which was still being monitored by Star Force, showed an erratic course from system to system.

  “It cannot find any more Ysalamir, so it is seeking out the points of greatest resistance and removing them from the path of the Hadarak. I do not think it will be long before it enters our territory ahead of the minion advance, and we have nothing to counter that level of Essence firepower.”

  “Did Star Force not leave any weapons behind?”

  “No. Even their Uriti have been withdrawn. I am told the Rimward enemies are assaulting them as well and nearly killed one of the originals. They must be hidden, and they cannot build new Ysalamir or they will also be targeted and destroyed. But since Legion is going to be destroyed anyway, we are free to use them, and the Hadarak are now our full responsibility since Star Force has withdrawn its war fleets. We will meet them in battle sufficient to deny them the scale required to swarm the galaxy with unending minions, but we must have the weapons to do so.”

  “We cannot accelerate our progress. We are proceeding as fast as possible.”

  “I do not doubt that,” he said, altering the map to highlight another line, this one only three systems long and much closer to the Deep Core. “But time is not our ally in this war.”

  The latest point on the new line zoomed in and highlighted with images taken at that location.

  “Another Lurker has emerged?”

  “Yes, and I do not think it is the only one. We were fortunate to discover it, for it has not assaulted anything yet. I believe the Ysalamir have drawn them out, and without their prime targets they could become emboldened, or just bored enough to take on our worlds in preemptive attack. Or they may merely wait until the Ysalamiri return, but my instincts say otherwise. They will strike at something vital. Perhaps even here if they are more aware of our empire structure than we have previously assumed.”

  “Why has Star Force not left a Materia behind? What do they expect us to fight with?” the blue Ari’tat complained.

  “They expect us to display the dominance we claim is our birthright,” Mak’to’ran said in mild rebuke. “And they have given us their leave to develop the designs our scientists began. That is no small gesture on their part, for they are granting us both the knowledge and the permission to craft weapons that can kill their Uriti.”

  “It wasn’t the Uriti that damaged the first Lurker.”

  “Do you wish to beg them for more assistance or prove your worth?” Mak’to’ran demanded. “They have a much harder war to fight, against an enemy that has weapons we cannot even see. They have the power of the Lurkers, perhaps more. Star Force must deal with it, and we must deal with the Hadarak and their minions. It is the responsibility of our birthright, and we will hold the line to our deaths. But Legion will give us the power to strike back at the Hadarak and the Lurkers in a way we have not possessed before. You must succeed, and you must keep the project a secret. But even that is not enough. You must multiply the project to more sites than the enemy can strike at if they do discover Legion and send multiple Lurkers after it.”

  “Without a prototype, such redundant sites are useless.”

  “Then you will establish and prepare them for when you do have a prototype. Every day that goes by the Hadarak grow closer to victory. We will not waste the days we have. I want 3000 sites, all under extreme secrecy, prepped for the designs you will be providing. And when that happens, I want the weapons as fast as they can be produced. If the production facilities are discovered, they will be the first hit.”

  “Keeping 3000 sites completely secure will be virtually impossible with the amount of resources we are going to be consuming.”

  “That is why I am trusting you to figure out a way…or has your deviousness been over-exaggerated?”

  “There are logistical limitations we cannot overcome without…odd methods.”

  “Then use your odd methods. I want those sites ready to begin production the moment you have feasible designs.”

  “We will have to go in person. I cannot attempt something like this through the Urrtren.”

  “Make it happen. The fate of the V’kit’no’sat depends on your success. And if Star Force fails to overcome this new enemy, then the entire galaxy will depend on us to fight both wars.”

  The Ari’tat all frowned in sync. “Can the Ysalamiri hurt this Essence-wielding enemy? I though they used conventional-sized ships?”

  “I concur. Which means we must draw their attention off Star Force, and we can only do that with Legion. If Star Force falls, I do not believe we will survive the aftermath. They have the Essence, we do not, so the only path to victory I can see is to keep Star Force alive. And to do that we must lure the enemy into chasing Legion in the field.”

  “And they will eventually backtrack them to the production facilities. So we need to expect to lose some of them?”

  “To the Rim threat or the Lurkers. When we produce Legion, we elevate ourselves to prime targets, and I for one do not wish to be in Star Force’s shadow any longer. This is our galaxy to defend, and it is time we earn our keep with victories rather than death counts.”

  “We will not fail the empire. The Ari’tat will create the weapon.”

  “Be quick,” Mak’to’ran warned as he glanced back at the holographic map. “I fear there may be more Lurkers in our midst than anyone is expecting.”

  10

  May 10, 128540

  Nephestus System (Repository System, Terraxia Kingdom)

  Ittalika

  Paul was sitting in an overly cushy chair, staring at a holographic map displayed over his elevated legs while he lost himself in thought. He and the others had been here for almost 4 years now, managing this war from seclusion as system after system got hit randomly. None of the attacks could be protected against, only damage done to the attacking fleets in response that would cause them to bug out before some of their targets got hit.

  They lost people each time, even with new rules dictating that all Star Force personnel wear micro regenerators at all times. Creating that many had been a headache, but by reducing the number of ailments they could heal they’d been able to cut down on the resources required…but not every system had them yet. Each was producing what it could, and some shipping was going out from systems that had reached their quota, but that only meant the heart attack weapons would be ineffective on a mass level.

  And those were the ones that were inflicting the most casualties, but not the ones doing the infrastructure damage. Yet planets like Earth were now totally lifeless as far as wildlife went, and you couldn’t put regenerators on every person from ants to whales on a planet. Right now the trailblazers were coming up with a myriad of ways to reduce damage, but they hadn’t found a way to stop any of it from happening.

  Planetary defenses couldn’t defend anymore. All they could do was kill the attackers, not block a shot. The shields that Star Force had taken centuries to build in order to blanket entire planets were totally useless against these orbital attacks, and so far no actual invasion had taken place, but if they did the Stargate effect would allow them to bypass the planetary shields, meaning Star Force’s basic defense infrastructure was next to useless.

  That meant every fight was a shooting war, with victories being those that had less people die. No-casualty engagements were not possible in this environment, and even the enemy didn’t seem to care if they lost some ships as long as they got their targets. Only their Olopar they seemed to try to preserve, and Paul knew that was because they were essentially Magicite, holding massive amounts of Essence that would be lost when a ship was destroyed…but as for the lives of their crews, they didn’t seem to give a damn about them.

  He
wasn’t sure if the enemy was stupid, arrogant, or just had misread Star Force completely. They weren’t going to give in to their demands, and while massive numbers of people were dying…too be bluntly honest…Star Force was so big now those losses were minimal when you looked at the empire at large. They could be replaced easily, aside from a few key personnel that had been lost. Davis living had been a huge stroke of luck, and Paul continually thanked the Knights of Quenar in his thoughts for pulling out that save. Now he and the other ultra sensitive personnel were in hiding while the ‘lessers’ were taking the random hits.

  Paul did not like fighting this way, and in truth it was because they weren’t fighting, just rolling with the blows. All efforts to infiltrate the Dyson Sphere had failed, and a second one had been discovered in the vicinity of one of the other destroyed Stargate stations. This one was smaller, with no nebula around it, but further away from its entry system…at a little under 9 lightyears. That made it even harder to get to, and the first robotic scouts had only started to arrive and report back.

  They were impressive strongholds, on multiple levels, but even when they found a way in it was going to be a slaughter. They had massive fleets inside, and with their Essence weaponry Paul didn’t know how they were going to achieve victory. They couldn’t destroy the Spheres, they were far too big, and an invasion was going to cost so many drones he was worried they might not have enough. Some of the Essence weapons could wipe out entire fleets in short order, so unless he knew how much Essence they had in reserve and fought until it was exhausted, any attack they eventually launched could be one giant waste of resources.

  But someone was going to have to be there to control the drones, for they were too damn inefficient on auto-pilot against an enemy they knew too little about. Send them against the V’kit’no’sat and Paul had an idea of how effective they’d be, for he and the others had programmed them for that enemy, but the Vargemma were too much of an unknown. Star Force had to have people there to adapt to the unexpected, and machines couldn’t do that. They could only do what they were programmed to do, so Paul feared if they just sent them in en mass all they’d do is end up losing them.

  The others didn’t have any answers either, but they were getting better at limiting the Vargemma’s attacks and forcing them to bring larger fleets to accomplish their objectives. The destruction of an Olopar had been a major success, and the fact that the enemy hadn’t been able to destroy all the debris was a boom. They’d been able to analyze a lot of inferior technology in it, coupled with some Essence-laden advanced stuff that was being worked on, because Paul and the others had no idea what it actually did.

  It was looking more and more like the Vargemma had inherited or stumbled across a major technological find and were in the process of reverse-engineering the Essence tech and adding it to their existing stuff, creating an odd but effective blend…and that was another reason Paul really wanted inside that Sphere. There was probably tech that the Vargemma couldn’t understand, and if Star Force could get its hands on it then they’d be even more well suited for killing Hadarak and whatever else would be coming out of the Deep Core in the future.

  No word from Kara had come yet, and he didn’t expect there would be this early, but he wondered what she was getting herself into. They needed to know what was in there, and badly so, but the Vargemma were the immediate threat and one that wasn’t going away. They were a bad roadblock that had to be removed, but Paul didn’t know how to do that, so he often sat during his downtime just staring at the simulated stars on the holographic map and letting his thoughts drift until his level 1 Saiyan body began to object to the stillness and he had to get to the sanctum for another workout.

  He knew he and the others would figure this out in time, but they needed more information and what was coming in from Greg was limited, though fascinating. Paul eagerly ate up any updates, and the bits of map from the interior of the Sphere were fascinating. He knew he was looking at the handiwork of an ancient and extremely advanced civilization…and the fact that they weren’t around made him even more fearful of the Hadarak. If these squatters had taken over in their place, what happened to the builders?

  But while he couldn’t figure this out, more people died and high value targets were lost. The Vargemma had finally gotten around to hitting a Grid Point, and fortunately they only did enough damage to the construct to knock out one of the two magnetic dishes. That left one to catch the incoming ships while a message went out taking that jumpline out of order until repairs could be made. And not surprisingly, that particular Grid Point was on the Hula Hoop, meaning the most heavily active trade route in the galaxy had just been severed for clockwise traffic.

  Star Force could have continued to operate it off the one dish, but if that one went down from another attack or malfunction, all the incoming ships would slam into the construct or miss it and be lost in space, traveling too fast to ever slow down again unless they happened to collide with a black hole or massive star with a sufficiently high magnetic field. If they hit one, lucky as that would be, that was too small, they’d smash right into it and die, meaning Star Force had to be very, very careful with the Grid Point System, and operating on one dish only was not worth the risk for incoming traffic, though they were still allowing outgoing jumps at the site.

  A lot of people disagreed, and the traffic backups were massive as they had to pour through connecting systems and little used gravity jumps to get from one Grid Point to the next over the course of months and, for some of the slower ships, more than a year’s delay, but they had to put up with it, because Star Force was not a democracy…gratefully…and important decisions didn’t come down to what was the most popular or convenient.

  The repairs were ongoing, but the huge chunks of the construct that the Vargemma had vaporized…along with the people inside…were not easy to replace and new components had to be shipped in from neighboring systems or further out in the case of specialty equipment or mass orders, now that the Grid Point was not connected to half the galaxy’s primary shipping lanes.

  If the Vargemma hit more of the crucial locations, they were going to cripple the flow of resources for the civilians and non-aligned races. Star Force was redundant enough they could use traditional trade routes, plus the black hole links, and maintain the flow of resources, albeit considerably slower, but others did not take the time to create the backups because they looked at the Grid Point System as being impregnable. Even the V’kit’no’sat had not taken down one of them during their war with Star Force, so the fact that one had gone down now was a huge shock and disruption to the commerce that depended upon them.

  And add to that the fact that the Grid Points were maxed out on traffic anyway. Star Force needed more of them, and the construction projects that were previously underway had been put on hold when the Hadarak war began, because they couldn’t spare the resources when more and more drones were needed. So as the galaxy grew, more traffic was building up and now that further complicated the disruption.

  Paul had to figure out a way to get at the Vargemma, or they’d just continue to go around and poke holes in the empire he’d helped build, and the enemy had already blown past early estimates as to how much Essence reserves they had. Now the trailblazers had no idea how much they had in reserve or how they were replenishing it, so they’d taken the position of assuming an infinite amount until they learned otherwise.

  And if there wasn’t a limit…at least a known limit…how did you plan a battle against that type of weaponry? The personal shields that Wilson were developing wouldn’t work against naval-caliber weaponry, so other than spamming drones what options did they have?

  Waiting wasn’t one of them, but that’s exactly what they were forced to do while others were taking the hits and dying for the empire…or more accurately just dying when they couldn’t get away from the attacks. Paul and the others were perpetually on edge about that, and there hadn’t been a smile cracked in jest in the Repository for longe
r than Paul would care to estimate.

  Greg was at least doing something, poking multiple holes in the Sphere with no reaction from the Vargemma. Those holes were being built as access points for an invasion if/when they figured out how to bypass the Sphere’s defense field. None were large enough yet to get a single drone through, but that was on his to-do list, yet it would be pointless if the Vargemma located the holes and just parked above them, comically shooting the drones as they came through with one shot kills.

  Paul was willing to waste as many drones as needed that way to drain the Vargemma’s Essence reserves, but without being able to measure their progress it would be a waste of their small advantage of not being detected yet, as far as Greg could determine. At least they were getting some long range scans of what was in there…

  A knock on his door brought Paul out of his haze, then he felt Sara-012’s mind on the other side of the door.

  “Come in,” he said aloud and telepathically, realizing after the fact that the knock had been both on the door and his skull with a telepathic echo to make sure he heard it.

  A thin and shapely woman with curves etched of pure muscle and long, pure white hair draping down to just above her shoulders walked in and sat down opposite Paul, with a few locks of gold breaking up the nearly all-white montage when combined with her Archon uniform.

  “I don’t like saying this, but we’ve had enough time to consider alternatives and time is not on our side. If we wait looking for a cleaner solution, more people die and we lose more infrastructure. The infrastructure I can handle, but people are getting killed with no way to defend themselves, and we can’t put regenerators on every critter out there. If people are going to die, let it be those that are fighting.”

  “If it were volunteers I’d still veto it,” Paul countered.

  “This isn’t the way we fight unless we’re backed into a corner, and we’re not…but the empire is. We’re too large to be destroyed, I think, but that doesn’t matter to those that are getting hit. We’re not the attackers here, Paul, but to stop this we have to hit their strongholds and we can’t do it the conventional way.”