Star Force: Intellect (SF85) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  Paul had said the mental blocks would have downsides and this appeared to be one of them…and he’d never even suspected it. The data was right in front of him. He’d seen it before, but his eyes had been glazed over and he hadn’t recognized it for what it was.

  By taking away, or suppressing, his concern for his minions, the templars had actually made him disregard their resource value at the same time, as if the genetic coding couldn’t differentiate between the two. And in truth how could it? For an individual’s strengths were based off their knowledge and skills. He’d been instructed to treat them as disposable resources.

  Was that why they never advanced as Star Force did? Not only did they not live as long, they’d never tried because he and the other masterminds had been engineered not to pursue those paths? Would the more experienced Li’vorkrachnika resist the templars’ commands, or was this an accidental byproduct of keeping too tight a reign on them? The minions were one thing, but to restrict his mind made every choice and battlefield call suspect. Was that deficiency really worth the tradeoff of unquestionable loyalty?

  No, not loyalty. Obedience. Loyalty could be attained without lying. He had been deceived into thinking the others had regimented minds and his was free so that he could be the most effective possible. But what was the cause for that unless what the templars were doing did not warrant loyalty and they had to shield their servants from knowledge of it?

  These thoughts plagued him sporadically, for without additional data there was nothing new he could discover…save for when he located another block and found a way around it. Perhaps what he needed to know was right in front of him and he was just being blocked from seeing it, as were the others. Maybe the answer truly lay with him alone, but it frustrated him to no end that he had no way of measuring his progress and that he could be continuing a vain search if and when he did overcome the last of the blocks and simply failed to recognize that there were no more to find.

  He watched out of curiosity as the rest of the seven were birthed, wondering if they would be failures from the moment they awoke, but they all appeared to be identical to their brethren. A small step forward then, though the real test would be in how they performed their assigned tasks and when and if they deviated from them.

  Two years later he had his first incident.

  The mastermind watched as the bound Li’vorkrachnika was brought before him and dumped onto his knees. It became passive and didn’t look up at him, staring rather at the massive legs before him and waiting for whatever doom was to befall it.

  “Explain your actions.”

  “I did my duty.”

  “You violated orders.”

  “It was necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep from killing 36 diggers. The orders were in error and they had not been given sufficient time to evacuate the mine shafts. Had I followed orders they could have been caught in the coring blast. I explained this to my superior but he did not care. He had orders, and he said I had mine and those diggers had theirs. Deviation could not be tolerated.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I refused and defended the control panel long enough to give them time to evacuate.”

  The mastermind leaned down, noticing the shallow cuts on his face that matched what would have been administrator claw marks. “Why were you not killed on the spot?”

  “You gave orders not to waste personnel.”

  “That I did. So you had two orders to follow that conflicted with one another. One that required you to obey and one that required you to think. You chose to think.”

  “Should I have let the diggers be killed? Did I err?”

  “What do you think?” he asked him, wishing he had Paul’s mind reading ability. It would be very useful in situations like this.

  “The delay in operations was minimal and we retained use of the diggers. I believe I chose correctly.”

  “You did. We cannot afford to waste personnel in order to save pointless amounts of time. Release him.”

  Two standard variants walked up without question and undid his restraints.

  “You will return to your station and assume the duties that were the administrator’s. He will be reassigned elsewhere. See to it that the drilling operations continue as quickly as possible without sacrificing personnel in the process.”

  “I will.”

  The mastermind gestured for him to leave, then gave another slight twitch toward one of his librarians that it knew meant for it to log his orders, which in this case would include the reassignment of the administrator before this standard variant returned. It made the data changes within a few seconds and the guards walked out behind the former prisoner, leaving the mastermind with a moment to think before attending to other business.

  He needed more experiments like this one.

  “I need to send a message to Paul,” he told his minions, who scurried about to set up the proper protocols for interfacing with the Star Force communications network in orbit that would then send any data on to wherever the Archon was, whether insystem or out.

  Paul was onboard the Excalibur in the Jeop System helping to clean up one of three planets in that core system when the communications seda with them received the message packet and transferred it to him. He was about half an hour away from heading down to the planet on his ship’s recently resupplied TF to begin another ground campaign, but delayed his arrival there by a good ten minutes as he read through the brief but pointed message and considered the implications.

  Thrawn wanted to grow 20,000 new standard variants with modified genetics identical to the handful he’d produced 2 years ago. He’d cited a recent incident where one of the experiments had defied a superior in order to preserve the lives of other lizards who would have been killed accidentally if the order had been followed…ironically disobeying the standing orders to not waste personnel that the mastermind had laid down. It seemed the genetic locks were so firm that they’d always follow the most recent, or maybe most relevant order before them due to an inability to say no even when they’d be complying with an older or more ambiguous order.

  But this experiment had not. He’d actually thought it through and acted to prevent their deaths. Whether that was because he didn’t want them to die or was just enforcing the mastermind’s standing orders was a relevant question, but this minor success did bear more scrutiny…which was only going to be achieved with a larger group to study.

  Paul wasn’t going to let go the population growth restrictions though, so he came up with a compromise and sent a return message before heading over to the core of the command ship and into the TF minutes before it detached from the donut ring and began to descend down into the atmosphere and open up sixth front on the southernmost continent.

  The mastermind read through the message, noting that Paul had agreed to his request with a caveat. In exchange for the 20,000 he’d have to supply Star Force with a list of raw materials. Nothing too rare, but it would cost him a chunk of his already limited materials. He had enough in warehouses to cover the transaction, but with reclamation efforts across the planet ongoing and him eating up almost everything they recycled with new infrastructure projects, he’d be putting some of them on hold until additional resources were acquired.

  But it would be worth it, he hoped. Either way he needed to find out what the consequences of altering the genetic code were, and if there were undoubtedly tweaks that needed to be made it was best to get to them sooner rather than later. The resource loss would be a hit, but the future of his operations on this planet demanded he get answers as soon as possible.

  To that end he immediately ordered the assembly of the necessary materials at a specific landing site and arranged for a later pickup by Star Force. When the necessary cargo canisters were assembled a flock of the fat-winged dropships came down and slowly picked it apart, leaving nothing but an empty landing field and the mastermind with the go ahead for the 20,000 production order.
r />   Several of the hatcheries that he’d preserved fired back up, workers returning, and the new genetic samples being introduced into the growth gel.

  The mastermind watched the first batch of the standard variants birthing again, this time with an Archon beside him, one of Paul’s subordinates within his Clan Saber. It was interesting how they each had their own personal empire within an empire, and apparently Paul’s was going to monitor the development of these Li’vorkrachnika with their psionics, for which the mastermind was grateful, for it would give him yet more data to work with.

  He didn’t doubt their honesty…far from it. Star Force was renowned for their loyalty to the truth, almost to the point where he thought they might have genetic constraints instilling that imperative, but fortunately that meant he could rely on their mysterious powers to help him test these new ones, and he was interested in wondering why one of them was here at birth. Had they witnessed this before?

  “A few scouts have,” Fred-498 said, answering his unspoken question. “But I’m here to get a baseline reading. If there’s divergence it’ll be helpful to be able to pinpoint when it begins.”

  “Divergence from themselves or their predecessors?”

  “Both. Why do you think their awakening is so violent?”

  “We are bred for battle, so when unknown situations face us we respond aggressively. As soon as they get some semblance about them they come to order.”

  “A disorientation side effect?”

  “Are you sensing otherwise?”

  “And it has nothing to do with them smelling me?” the Archon asked, his helmet down but otherwise encased in golden armor.

  “They can smell little with gel in their nostrils. It is disorientation.”

  “All variants are like this?”

  “We are.”

  “And the templars?”

  “They are live births, of which we have no further knowledge.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “I cannot be sure of anything concerning them that I have not witnessed myself. How long…”

  “I’ll be in and out sporadically. Will that be a problem?”

  “We’ve amended the genetic memories of these so that they don’t shoot you on site, but the others have been so bred. They are following my orders contradicting that, but as you can see,” he said, gesturing to another standard variant coming out of its pod and thrashing around, “it is best if you don’t startle them. They may strike at you on reflex before remembering my commands.”

  “I’ll be careful. I’ll also need work assignments on these so I can monitor their progress. I need to observe them when they do not know I am watching them, and I need it to be in the course of their daily duties or off hours.”

  “You will share your results?”

  “All of them, yes, though they’ll be in the form of field notes. I will have them translated first.”

  “If that is your way of asking if I am learning your language, the answer is no. My time is better spent on relevant duties.”

  “Because you have subordinates to do the translating?”

  “Of course, but given that they are your documents I’d still prefer that your people did the translating…though feel free to send both copies for analysis.”

  “I’ll do that, and make sure the others do as well.”

  “How many of you will be observing?”

  “An unspecified number. We’ll be in armor, so you won’t know who is who anyway. And if we do our job right, some of the time you won’t even know we’re here.”

  “I imagine that has been the case for years now, though I have found no evidence of it.”

  “We’ll identify landing coordinates each time, but after that we may roam unescorted.”

  “Then I ask you not to kill any of my minions if they do attack you. Simply render them unconscious.”

  “We don’t make a habit of killing, and you’re not the only ones that have attacked us. We know how to handle ourselves, and since we can access the minds of those that do, if you do not give an order to do so there will be no misunderstanding, so do not concern yourself with it.”

  “Do so you readily answer others’ questions before they ask them?”

  “Most of the others do not know we possess these abilities, so no.”

  “And Paul instructed you to be candid with me?”

  Fred smiled. “He did.”

  “So much the better,” the mastermind said as another Li’vorkrachnika drew its first breath of fresh air, clawing at it and everything else around him.

  10

  February 28, 3249

  Solar System

  Mordor

  Kirritimin sat on a pedestal, his rear four legs curled underneath his beetle-like body while his front two were busy manipulating a control board with the statistics of yet another fictitious scenario based off of real data. It wasn’t regular, but more and more information was making its way to him from the Skarron/lizard border and the Star Force Director had him running through many hypothetical conflicts trying to figure out not what the enemies would do, but rather what they could do with available resources, personnel, and geographical holdings.

  It was tedious work, but he enjoyed it. Nothing so mundane as running battle simulations, the Fassna was literally building and destroying virtual empires with no oversight. The Archons he dealt with on a regular basis didn’t want to influence his choices, thus they did not try to assimilate him into their way of thinking. Instead they threw what they called ‘challenges’ at him and he now relished whenever he was given a new one…especially when it was one he initially failed.

  The lizards had not been so generous with tasks. Theirs were more demands in a general ‘take this world’ sort of imperative, but the Archons were being very specific about some challenges, citing economic variables, foodstuff production, and even allowing him to incorporate slave labor, meat harvesting, and other banned things so long as this was theoretical on the premise that they would prove logistically inadequate anyway. He thought they were trying to teach him a lesson, but as he’d shown them in numerous scenarios, such things did have their uses.

  They were learning from him, he knew, but he didn’t know how they were incorporating what they learned into their own civilization. He was kept completely in the dark aside from news updates. There was no coordination. No responsibility placed upon him. Everything was theoretical and could be approached as intensely or cavalierly as one wanted…with him never lacking sufficiently complex tasks to satisfy the demands of his intellect.

  In past years he’d often spent an inordinate amount of time rethinking his choices and trying to figure out if there had been an alternative solution that would not have ended with his race being wiped out, but now he’d put that behind him. What was done was done and he couldn’t gain any more insight from additional reflection, and with so many new problems to solve he had allowed himself to disconnect from his former life and embrace where fate had set him.

  But he never let go his hatred of the Li’vorkrachnika. He still had an unsettled debt with them. One that would never be fully paid. So when he was given tasks such as this one that involved what the Archons mockingly called ‘lizards’…which he noted they never capitalized as an additional insult…he had a keen interest in squeezing every tidbit of strategy and tactics out of the subject matter so that Star Force could potentially make use of it against them in their purge of their outward territories.

  They’d also let him in on the secret of the vastly superior empire in near the galactic core that they must never come into contact with. He hadn’t been given an identity or any specifics, just the reality of the situation. Trusting in the few absolutes they had cited to him, he’d been asked to figure out if there were any other possibilities to deal with the Li’vorkrachnika across the coreward no-go line.

  Sadly there were not, as far as with Star Force troops anyway. Proximity to an enemy that must not find you was not something you coul
d fiddle with, and while the line itself was more or less arbitrary, he did agree that there must be one. That meant the Li’vorkrachnika would not be wiped out entirely by Star Force…and if the task were to be done, it had to be done by someone else.

  Right now that someone looked to be the Skarrons. The Li’vorkrachnika were getting dangerously close to the regional boundary, at which point he expected some tendril of an assault to meet fierce resistance. If they did then the gains would come to an abrupt halt and it would be up to the invaders to decide how hard they wanted to press. Kirritimin knew what they would do, which made these simulations all the more important. He couldn’t help the Skarrons, nor could he leave this planet given the information that the Director had imparted to him. He’d agreed to that caveat because he needed as much intel as he could get in order to do his job, but right now he almost wished he could go to the Skarrons and help them in their fight against the Li’vorkrachnika.

  As for the Preema…they were another possibility that had fallen flat. They had, and were still, killing many of them and would continue to do so well into the future, but they had adopted the same ‘wall of stars’ border that Star Force had and wouldn’t be pursuing the Li’vorkrachnika to their extinction. He speculated it was out of realization rather than trepidation that they’d established their line, for no matter how many worlds they took from the Li’vorkrachnika, they continued to spread to even more making the task of eradicating them seem impossible.