Blood on the Stars Read online

  “You need to let go.”

  “Of what?”

  “The Mantle of Responsibility. Star Force can take care of itself now without you being personally responsible for every single life and outcome. Enjoy the success, and realize that other people can fight too. Help them become better, but don’t tie yourself to their fate. Don’t let them be your Padme.”

  “You think I’m going darkside?”

  “I think you’re losing your focus by trying to be the puppet master rather than just being you.”

  “That’s kind of what Reclaimers are, little one.”

  “Temporarily,” Elena emphasized. “Then you walk away and let them handle their own end for a change.”

  “I’m trying to stop the fall of the Jedi Order here, and you’re suggesting I just accept it and fight to my fullest in the war to follow.”

  “How would relaxing hurt you?”

  “Same way a day off would.”

  “I said relax, not stop training. How about you trust in your Apprentice on this one and go visit Kent and your mini-mes? You’ve done the hard work here, and I’d like the challenge of finishing up on my own. Save you the effort and gives me some more experience.”

  “You read to the bottom, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah I did. Go play with your kids and get us some heavy hitter reinforcements for this war to come. I can handle things here. As can other people elsewhere. You go do what only you can do. We’re a team. Start acting like it. You’re varsity, not the coach.”

  “Who is the coach?”

  “Davis, and he’s setting up a game plan for us to follow. He’s kind of smart. You might want to start trusting in him rather than feeling the need to check his homework.”

  “Then why do I get the feeling that if I ease up someone will die?”

  “Probably because in the past that was true. It’s not now. We’re an Empire. And we’ve grown strong enough thanks to you that we’ve got your back this time.”

  “How long have I been like this?”

  “Since we met, only it’s been getting worse. Today you’re totally brooding.”

  Jax sighed. “It’s hard to be depressed around you.”

  “I know. It’s one of my powers.”

  “Maybe we should clone that one,” Jax said, waving a hand at the scores of ships out the window. “All yours.”

  “Thank you, Master.”

  “Don’t screw it up…for their sake,” he said, turning around and taking a step towards the door.

  “Would I ever intentionally? Would any of us?”

  “Figure of speech,” he said, not turning around.

  “Get a new one.”

  “Keep this up and you’ll get your own Clan. Then you’ll be the one brooding.”

  “Why not give me yours and save you the trouble?” she asked as he walked out of sight.

  Elena turned back to the window and clasped her hands behind her back as she looked out at the workload before her.

  “All mine now,” she said with a grin. “Time to repaint...”

  11 months later…

  Jax arrived in Itaru unannounced and let himself into the Temple where Kent said they were attempting this crazy project. He interfaced with the first terminal he came across and got the layout, as well as the current location of both the Terrans and Furyans, with him deciding to check out the latter first.

  He headed over to their wing and into one of the training centers where he could feel their presence at a distance. It was an odd sensation, sort of a constant hum of activity in his telepathy that didn’t match anything he’d encountered before, and the closer he got the more intense it became.

  The trailblazer walked towards a set of closed doors that opened automatically on approach, pulling apart laterally to reveal a training chamber where the younglings were doing sparring drills against each other in pairs, holding a simple padded stick that was long enough to count as a double blade.

  They continued for a few seconds, then everything died down and they all turned to look at him…and feel him, as he could feel them, and he wasn’t even trying to.

  “You’re another one,” one of the males said, dropping his stick and running over to him. “You’re like Kent.”

  “Only better looking,” Jax quipped as he soon had a crowd gathering around him, though he could feel his brother behind them all. “Well, you’re all tall enough to be Furyans, but you’re so scrawny. What’s he been feeding you?”

  “A lot of cardio,” Kent said as the younglings parted to let him through. “Glad you came.”

  “I got kicked out, actually.”

  “Who’d Davis put in your place?”

  “I put Elena in my place.”

  “You get a lecture?”

  “Set myself up for a good one without realizing it. She’s quite eloquent when she wants to be.”

  “Well they’re not. Can barely string three words together,” Kent said, drawing looks from the Furyans.

  “Did Jared come with you?”

  “No, I’m here alone. Didn’t know how long this would take, and he was ready to cut his braid off anyway. He should be in the Core by now.”

  “And you think they’re a bigger priority?” Jax asked bluntly.

  “The potential is here. If they can rise to it. The prerequisites are damn high though, with no training wheels. That’s why we had to go with Project Terra. Our bodies are just a bit too high charged for the average Joe.”

  “How many of those do we got here?”

  “All of them, before I showed up. Seems they needed an example to follow. Now they’ve got two.”

  “Are they any good?”

  “No. But neither were we at their age.”

  Jax looked around at them and their eager faces. He felt like a rock star surrounded by groupies.

  “Well, what now buddy?”

  “Can’t spar with myself,” Kent said with a smirk. “Let’s give them a little demonstration as to what it’s supposed to look like,” he said, telekinetically grabbing one of the dropped padded sticks and tossing it to Jax while summoning another to himself.

  “Stand back, younglings,” Jax said, with them immediately scurrying out of the way. “The entire room just became our sparring ring.”

  Kent spun his stick around with ease, then took up a pose with it tilted down at an angle with the back side rising above his head. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Take notes,” Jax said to the group, then he lunged forward and started a flurry of attacks so fast it took the younglings nearly a minute for their eyes to adjust to the speed, but when they did they drank in the experience, every moment a precious drop, with their heads moving this way and that in sync as the two trailblazers moved around the room engaging each other in what looked like play, but with furious blows that broke Kent’s stick after only 6 minutes…with him grabbing another and continuing where they left off as the two veterans enjoyed the opportunity to have a real sparring partner that wasn’t a drone.

  Half an hour into the ‘demonstration’ and both had completely forgotten about the onlookers as they danced around the training room with liquid grace until they upped it to Saiyan mode, after which the younglings could not keep up as the two turned blonde and moved so fast they both became a blur…followed shortly by two more broken sticks.

  10

  January 28, 154980

  Solar System (Home One Kingdom, Star Force Capitol)

  Earth

  Director Davis paced in his office, as he often did after sitting for too long, reviewing information as it came in from across Star Force. He had some displayed in holograms, others in walls of text, while some he took on a direct mental feed that he could manipulate and browse while distractedly walking around.

  Right now he was reviewing 4 different recent data dumps simultaneously, switching back and forth seemingly at random…but it was never random. The man had a method to everything, and a system that let him keep track of it all. That sy
stem included priority rankings, with a brand new message coming in that immediately got shuffled to the top of the stack.

  This one was from Ariel, someone he hadn’t heard from in a long time. He’d given her a chance at an ambitious project of her own choosing, doubtful that it would succeed, but he’d expected to learn quite a bit from the failure. Today he was going to learn something even more important.

  Neverending Seas is now predation free. High maintenance required, but the oceans are now calm. The darkside can be defeated, Director. Those born here are now free from its trap. I await your next challenge.

  Davis saw a hefty data packet came with it, and when he mentally opened it his office filled with schematics, maps, detailed microbiology, and mental frameworks. It appeared to be all of her notes without an easy summary…which he didn’t need, because he would have requested the raw data anyway, which she had just given him.

  Neverending Seas was the name of the star system he had given her, full of water worlds, some 26,000 years ago. And from the data she was showing him, they were all moderately to heavily populated with creatures ranging from the advanced to the primitive…and she was claiming they all now lived in some form of harmony without the predatory instincts many were born with as default.

  No, she had gone much further than that…and hadn’t updated him on her biggest success. Ariel had somehow found a way to hack into the instincts and rewrite them into the purpose of maintaining the planets they were on. Every creature had a task born to them, large or small, and they were drawn to it rather than to self-preservation at all costs.

  That was dangerous, but he also saw that she kept and modified the ‘run away to live another day’ instincts as well, keeping the best parts and modifying the rest. But the basic kill or starve to death instincts were now obliterated from the genome of thousands of races, making them dependent on the system she had created to survive.

  Without that system they’d all die. Every last one. But she stated it was better to die lightside than to live darkside. Davis agreed personally, but taking away that possibility for others, many of whom could not even talk, was a bold step. One he had wanted to take himself, but he could never see a way to make it work. The oceans were somewhat different, which was why he let Ariel experiment benevolently, but she seemed to have no qualms about interfering with the natural genetics.

  Davis was always wary of it, and sought to upgrade through training and infrastructure. But what Ariel had done went far beyond that.

  As Davis was reviewing the information that would have encompassed several bookcases if put into physical form, he ordered a starship be made ready for his immediate use. If Ariel had really done this, he needed to see it for himself, for he still didn’t believe it was possible without causing massive unintended problems.

  Yet Ariel was certain, and hadn’t reported in until she had a lengthy history to document.

  “My little mermaid,” he whispered to himself as he absorbed the treasure trove of information she’d sent him. “You’ve really worked your tail off this time.”

  Steve-004 was still kicking himself for losing so many ships to the Hadarak blockade trap, now two years after it had happened and he’d extracted his vengeance on the Lurkers who’d laid it…not to mention backtracking the biotechnology to where it was being produced. One very exclusive planet beyond the Web Wall that now was reduced to char after his fleet got through bombarding it from orbit.

  He couldn’t take control of it, not so far from his little oasis of systems, but he didn’t want it regrowing anytime soon, so he left behind a few ships with a Wrangler onboard, and with that Wrangler were Uriti minion seeds that began to grow an army of biological drones.

  They’d slowly spread across the planet, searching out any last bits of Hadarak infrastructure or survivors as well as defending against a light incursion. A moderate assault they couldn’t handle in the near future, but given enough time they’d grow large enough and strong enough to defend the system…if left alone that long. And if they weren’t, and they were all destroyed, that was acceptable, for they weren’t people, other than the Wrangler and the few ships that could leave when needed.

  Right now Steve was back in his 13 systems trying to reinforce them with local materials harvested from the corpses of the destroyed growths and what was left of the planets as he kept the conduit through the Web Wall clear for his ships to move through, as well as for others to come out of the Core and into the rest of the galaxy that had been denied to them.

  Three races had been brave enough to request passage, and since they were enemies of the Hadarak he had let them through while tagging some scout ships to follow them and see what they did. Once outside the shell of heavily infested systems surrounding the Deep Core like a prison wall, they traveled a few weeks away from it, then picked a system they liked and invaded it. Killing all the Hadarak there, more or less, while spending most of their time in the star or stars in the system, for they were Megaloids and not planet-dwellers.

  When asked why they wanted passage, they told of many horrors in the Deep Core, and how only those strong enough to press back against the Hadarak were able to survive there. They were tired of constantly dying and reproducing more to die in the never-ending war. They wanted to be free, and didn’t seem to consider the high level of Hadarak troops on this side to be an issue…which made Steve wonder what else the Hadarak had further in that would make this war zone look preferable.

  He still didn’t have comms up yet between the systems, so all the Megaloids passing through had to be escorted by some of his ships. There was a light, but constant train of spacefaring lifeforms the size of ships passing through this system in spurts so common now that he barely noticed it. One thing he’d learned about the Deep Core was that it was teeming with high populations, so he expected this conduit through the Web Wall to be busy indefinitely. He’d even got one of the races to leave guards here to help defend the passageway, and they were camped in and around one of the gas giants should there ever been a need to respond to a Hadarak counterattack. Other than that they kept to themselves and didn’t interact with Star Force, and Steve liked that arrangement just fine.

  He’d been gathering up enough reinforcements from the Grand Border that he was nearly ready to leave and assault another neighboring system, widening the passageway through the Web Wall a bit more, with him camping out onboard his Borg vessel as it went through final refueling from a long train of tiny cargo ships in comparison to the 327 mile wide mass that had everything they’d seen so far in the Hadarak fleet outclassed.

  A comms alert interrupted him during training, with him flying out of the water course he’d been swimming and through the hallways until he got to a nearby holo terminal, for another convoy was coming through, but they were escorting only three Megaloids, and they weren’t that big. Only a few miles long each, but these he’d never seen before in the Deep Core. He’d only heard about them in stories.

  Steve pulled on his uniform shirt that he’d grabbed on his way out of the pool as his flagship drifted its way around the central star towards the point where the three newcomers had just ended their interstellar braking maneuvers not far from here. He could have delayed and gotten to another part of the ship, but the fact that they were here now instilled in him a need to know why immediately, for never before today had the Veloqueen made contact with Star Force, let alone been spotted in this galaxy.

  Steve accessed the ship’s systems, linking to the main comm lines and queried the escort ships as to how the Veloqueen were communicating. They responded with the common language of the Bond of Resistance, and not the more esoteric telepathy that the Megaloids were known for.

  The trailblazer linked to those language files and input them into the translation program, then hailed the three Veloqueen as they got within range for realtime communication, identifying himself and asking why they were here, for they had told the other ships only that they needed to speak with the leader.


  “Steve-004. I am Harkeem of the Veloqueen. State your purpose here.”

  “We are here to begin taking the Core of the galaxy away from the Hadarak,” he said flatly.

  “Why are you letting the Heidoor pass?”

  “They requested it. Should we not be?”

  “Where are you sending them?”

  Steve frowned. “We’re not sending them anywhere. They asked to be let through the Hadarak perimeter defense systems, and we’re letting them through. They go where they want afterwards. We watch them, and so far they’ve not traveled far, and are claiming systems from the Hadarak for their own use.”

  “What arrangement have you made with them?”

  “None. We informed them of our distant systems and they said they would respect them. Other than that, we have no arrangement. They want out, we’re letting them out. Is that a problem?”

  “You seek to dominant this galaxy, correct?”

  “We do.”

  “What will you do with the Heidoor if you succeed?”

  “Our intent to dominant the galaxy doesn’t mean we own all of it. If they behave themselves we will have no need to fight them. We can coexist, as we do with the Uriti already.”

  “You control the Uriti through genetic command. You do not have this command over the Heidoor here. They are a threat to you.”

  “We’ll worry about that after we deal with the Hadarak. It’s a big galaxy, and there’s no reason to keep them bottled up in the Deep Core if they want out.”

  “What does it gain you to allow this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why have you done so?”

  “Because they asked,” Steve said, almost stupidly. “If there is a problem, state it please.”

  “Why do you not see them as a threat?”

  “They haven’t attacked us. You seem to suggest we should.”

  “The power base in the Deep Core is far greater than the rest of the galaxy. The Heidoor are superior, and many will seek to destroy you.”