“This complex device net is chock full of data from that far distant time of the Great War,” Jia told them. “The historical value alone is immeasurable!”
Even with their combined teknomancy, it was clearly going to take weeks, possibly months to get past the automatic Kexxian and Drian deep encryption.
Om, have the KDM copy that data. Do it fast. We can decipher it all later, with the KDM’s help.”
“As it stands now,” Zhen added, “I’m not so sure. Think about it. Most of this data is a useless, confusing jumble about matters from long ago that will not make much sense to us now, even if we can decipher it.”
Om noted, I am barely able to make out some cursory Kexxian and Drian references about both Ur-Jahal and Xanathar.
It was clear that communications between those two major allies and other sentients back then were quite common, before the Great War obliterated nearly everything that existed in those regions.
The old base shuddered as if from an earthquake.
Naero had to brace the facility with Cosmic formed constructs just to keep it from collapsing on top of them.
“We’re under heavy attack!” Khai shouted, drawing Yii. The Cosmic Sword of Light blazed to life.
Large, dense blocky creatures charged into the complex, each of them over two meters tall. They pulsed with strange Darkforce energies. They fell upon the GSA Champions by the dozens.
Khai met them head on and drove into them with Yii rising and falling, causing great destruction.
Yii sliced through the creatures. These things did not bleed, and some even reformed after he sliced them deep. But they could be destroyed.
“Be careful,” Naero warned her companions, “these are G’lothc Fulrok battle-borgs, a new variety we haven’t seen before.”
They were very strong and resistant to energy attacks, formed out of new materials that could regenerate.
Naero and Om struggled to determine the right Cosmic flows to best use against them, fending them off at first with pure strength and speed.
The creatures pressed them all close, hemming them in.
Then the battle-borgs melded and fuse together into larger combat forms, attempting to contain and trap them.
Naero considered transporting all of the champions out.
But that would leave the ancient battle computer and all of its data behind for the enemy to seize.
That was most likely exactly what the enemy wanted.
Jia and Zhen suddenly bristled with blazing energy weapons, churning with rapid fire.
That was an eye opener. Driathans themselves continued to be a constant surprise. They were continually adapting to the new situations and challenges they faced. And like the other Champions, they grew more powerful.
Their attacks ripped through these strange new foes and the odd materials they were made of, breaking the Fulroks down into chunks of dark glowing matter that broke down further into ash and dust at extremely high temperature.
Jia and Z mowed most of them down.
“What did you say these things are?” Ty yelled.
“They’re known as Fulroks,” Jia told them all. “G’lothc death machines–silicon-based battle mek cyborgs–heavily charged with Darkforce energies.”
“Here they come again,” Khai shouted, readying Yii, “and in greater numbers!”
“Get that battle comp out of here,” Naero shouted. “We’ll hold them off!”
“We can’t,” Ommo explained. “Not without destroying all of the data in it. If we move it, it will dissolve in our hands!”
Om, did you get that data yet?
Just finished, N.
“Then destroy this device with teknomancy,” Khai said. “We can’t let the enemy take it, and we can’t stay here much longer. At worst, we won’t know any less than we did before.”
“All right, you heard the Enforcer! Wreck it all,” Naero said. “Then we bug out. Haisha, look at the reads. They’re bringing atomics down on us!”
The next wave of Fulroks swarmed in at them once again, pummeling and blasting them all at close range.
Naero, the other Champions, and their fixers struggled to dampen and negate the atomic weapons being brought to bear around their vicinity.
That much destruction could take out them all.
Zhen and Jia stood on either side of Naero, blasting the enemy to bits in their new combat forms.
“It’s done.” Ty shouted. “This system is dissolving!”
Naero flashed them out just as another chain of heavy atomics cut loose.
Huge blasts rocked the surface of Nykur-6.
The Dark Emperor nailed the ravaged planet with one of his most destructive beams for good measure.
Naero and the Alliance Champions leaped into battle, back up into the black.
31
The Alliance Champions hit Nahaxrathrax with the precision and fury of their long planned out attacks. This was the combined arms strategy for their many powers, calculated to be used specifically against the Dark Emperor.
Finally they had the chance to implement it.
Naero swelled up into the actual sphere his primary form inhabited, nearly equal with the great wyrm on his scale. She wheel kicked him several times in the face and head with her colossal flashing feet, her energy form pulsating with golden Cosmic energies.
Khai remained his normal energy being size and went after the Dark Emperor’s gigantic cluster of eyes with the Cosmic Sword of Legends.
Baeven fired Cosmic energy blasts right down the monster’s massive gullet. Janner, Ra, and Ommo automatically destroyed every wyrmhole that their foe tried to open and slip through in order to escape. Shalaen and the others drained the Dark Emperor’s energies a quickly as was possible.
A cloud of spyfixers riddle their target with waves of Ultrium tracking devices designed to function in any dimension, sphere, or reality. If he did manage to sneak away, they would pursue him with a vengeance.
Nahaxrathrax quickly sensed that he was in grave trouble.
He fought back like a titan.
He thrashed and whipped about his great form. His violent reactions scattered his opponents at first. The Dark Emperor unleashed Cosmic Psyonic mind blast waves and several other high level attacks in an effort to break free.
A Darkforce power beam shot from his great maw and nearly slew Baeven outright. It lashed out beyond to cut several Alliance and enemy warships in half.
The GSA fleets were already heavily engaged in a close battle with the Dark Emperor’s many fleets and hordes still massing in the Delta Quadrant.
Naero went on the offensive again and unleashed another spinning series of Cosmic wheel kicks that knocked her foe’s immense jaws shut, cutting off that deadly hyper beam. The she reversed the kicking combinations and flung the Dark emperor back into the black, tumbling in circles head over tail.
She called out, “GSA Champions; close in to finish off this abomination!”
Khai and Yii entered into a higher sphere, at about half the size and magnitude of Naero.
He moved to gut the wyrm from throat to tail with the Cosmic Sword of Light.
Nero transformed into her near Darkbeast form armed with Heartcleaver merged with her Ur-metal short swords within her sphere.
She fully meant to hack off the gigantic head of Nahaxrathrax himself.
Naero was the first to sense the sudden arrival of yet another powerful G’lothc entity, hidden among the spheres they fought within.
“Ware, my friends! Defense 6. Pull back. We have another enemy prime leader nearby!”
At her command, they spread out and shielded themselves.
Some of them phazed out and cloaked.
Even as she spoke the words, Darkforce lightning on an impossible scale exploded and lashed out at them, even as they retreated. Several of them might have been destroyed if they had remained up close.
That violent hyper attack swept through several spheres.
Most of Naero
and Khai’s most powerful shields buckled and collapsed.
Before they could regroup, and fall upon the Dark Emperor once more, a Cosmic maelstrom whipped up, this time from their rear. It scattered nearly everyone it touched.
That attack allowed Nahaxrathrax to pull back and recover.
Naero and Khai struggled to get a fix on the new enemy leader who pummeled them from all sides. They barely had time to react.
Tens of thousands of enemy Fulroks raged within the depths of that maelstrom. Those fierce death machines shot forward and slammed into the entire GSA vanguard, driving them back on multiple levels. The enemy attack waves sought to overwhelm and slay all of the Alliance Champions at once.
The Alliance lines broke, withdrew, and regrouped under the weight of such an onslaught.
These powerful new enemy forces pressed their many advantages, driving into the defenders relentlessly and forcing them further away.
It was several tense minutes, even with the help of the Alliance Champions, before the GSA forces as a whole stabilized the primary battlefront, all along its length.
They took a terrific beating.
But in the midst of the confusion and combat, the wounded Dark Emperor slipped away once more to regenerate, aided by his mysterious counterpart.
Naero and Om also sensed this new enemy leader make good its escape.
Xath the Hidden lived up to its name.
All of their efforts amounted to spilled Jett. That was just the way it was.
No time remained for frustration.
In fact, Naero worried greatly about why they had been lured so far out into this place.
She and her people quickly learned why as tight beam reports flooded in.
Major battles now blazed across many megaparsecs in three of the four quadrants. The fighting erupted in the middle of nowhere at first, but steadily spread toward regions packed with heavily populated systems.
These wars could blaze on for many months to come.
This was an extermination campaign.
But even worse, all of these conflicts would see the enemy converging upon the hapless Alpha Quadrant.
That was clearly the end game.
The death tolls among those teeming systems would be like nothing the galaxy had ever witnessed before, on a horrific scale.
Data came back to them from the trackers they’d covered the Dark Emperor with—before they all systematically went dead.
Jia was especially alarmed when she reviewed the data reads. “We have to go after Nahaxrathrax.”
Even Naero blinked. “Why? We are already minutes into a major fight here, without any back up or reserves. We don’t even know the full extent of the enemy’s forces, and whether they have any reserves in these regions.”
“Because N, our fixers kept some of our bugs on the new Leader for a short time–long enough to note that the two leaders split up very rapidly after escaping. The new one is heading in the direction of what all of us think is Xanathar.”
“Great! Where is the great wyrm heading?”
“Straight toward Ur-Jahal from what we can tell,” Jia said. “This is an end run. We know what they’ve been searching for. They might have very well found both locations, while their hordes keep us all busy in these battles.”
Naero suddenly had a very bad feeling about the situation. “Stop. Let’s think about this. I don’t think so. I think they’re bluffing. They hope we’ll rush ahead of them and actually pinpoint the locations for them by our very reactions. They don’t know that we don’t know where Xanathar is yet–or Ur-Jahal!”
But something else still wasn’t right. Something about the entire situation felt incredibly wrong to Naero. What was about to happen?
32
Naero pulled Jia aside, and spoke to her through a secure, telepathic link while matters continued to unfold by the moment around them.
She revealed her worst fears to the Driathan queen.
Jia, we need to slow down and reconsider this before we rush off and do anything. I know how you feel about your people, but I believe that somehow, the enemy is tracking you just like we can sense and track them. They’re watching you, possibly hoping that you will overreact and actually lead them to Ur-Jahal. I think they really only have a general direction in mind, and we all know that that isn’t enough to find it.
You make a good point, N. If the enemy did know where Ur-Jahal was, it would already be under their massive attack. I agree with you; I think that this is some kind of a deception, a bluff, as you say.
Jia checked what she knew about the secret location against all of the battles and enemy movements that they were already tracking.
For the time being, that secret location of the Driathans remained completely secure.
No enemy forces of any size were even close to it.
Yes, the enemy had ideas about where it was. That much was clear. They could blunder around here or there.
Yet these were still only making vague guesses.
A galaxy, even a quadrant of a galaxy was an enormous area. As the Drians and the Kexx had learned, it was quite easy to hide a single star or planet, if the secret was kept absolutely safe. Unless the actual location was known, any one planet was incredibly, almost impossibly hard to find, like a grain of sand on a beach.
They waited passively to see if the Dark Emperor would come any closer to Ur-Jahal.
All reports revealed that he did not. None of the enemy were even close, according to what Jia revealed. And she only did so to Naero only through their mindlink.
If she was being spied on in some active or passive way, she did not want to give the enemy a negative clue, by making them aware that their current efforts were in vain. Then they would stop looking where they were, and search somewhere else.
With that secret location now secure, they turned their efforts back toward uncovering what Naero felt was some kind of enemy effort or plot to track Jia, and perhaps learn the secret location from her, her actions, or her movements.
All while a major war unfolded.
They, Alliance Intel, their teks, and numerous energy beings kept up a constant watch on Jia of their own in stealth. They waited for the enemy to slip up and expose themselves.
Then one day later, a near human body was discovered out in the black, from one of the worlds they had stopped at the day before.
They went over everything about the body, studying it repeatedly in every possible that they could examine it.
How could this corpse or the living person have gotten out into that area of near dead space? Why did it have residual air and genetic molecules inside it that proved that it had been inside Naero’s flagship, alive and breathing, during the past week?
The frozen body had been completely stripped. It was male. It had no clothing and no tek. Abrasions on the body revealed that this person had been inside of some kind of hi-tek suit.
This person died from starvation and dehydration, but there were no signs of acute suffering.
It was as if this person had no concern that he was slowly dying.
That was usually a sure sign of G’lothc mind wraith control.
Cosmic energy readings showed that the body had been cloaked in some kind of stealth mode that also kept it immaterial, and not in astral form, but somehow in a very narrow interdimensional space.
That was it.
Naero and Ty hit upon it at the same time.
They scanned the flagship for that exact range of residual energy signatures.
Around Jia’s heavily guarded guest quarters with Baeven they uncovered over forty enemy spies in the same special stealth suits. The enemy suits also had fusion bombs installed on each one.
But their primary mission wasn’t to kill Jia or anyone else, but to spy on and watch Jia constantly, in an attempt to learn the locations of Xanathar and Ur-Jahal, as well as any other vital GSA info.
Once the enemy spies did learn as much as they wanted, they would most likely transmit
the data, and then activate their bombs. It was all there, in their possessed minds. Passive telepathic reads uncovered the same thought patterns and commands in all of them. They had been carefully programmed.
Naero and her reps went into stealth mode as well, and coordinated flashing almost all of the mind wraith spies into the nearest star. There was no chance to save any of them.
They froze three of the enemy, after the spyfixers disarmed the fusion bombs. The enemy tek suits were studied, and appropriate counter measures were implemented to defeat such tek from that point on.
Ty, Alala, and Ommo even developed a special energy field that would stun and neutralize any such future spies and related tek, as well as trigger silent alarms.
If they set the field in one mode, it would automatically kill the hosts, the mind wraiths, and burn out the suits and bombs. They could not take any chances.
Baeven even located a sphere where they could track one of the new enemy leaders down to a magnitude of a hundred parsecs.
They couldn’t pinpoint the creature any closer than that, but they could at times detect its general location.
First they took the time to try to study this strange entity from afar, for the first time.
This thing, whatever it was, was not at all like the Dark Emperor.
It was very large–whatever sphere it actually concealed itself in. This Prime Leader was the size of a small moon or planetoid, at about 1,100 kilometers in rough diameter. But it remained extremely difficult to pinpoint and identify exactly what and where this thing was, or what shape of form it actually took.
It possessed what appeared to be a shifting physical and partial energy being form that faded in an out of reality. It could even vanish without a trace for many hours, turning up in another nearby location, if it wished.
At first they thought that it was changing its size or magnitude somehow, but that was not the case. It could not manipulate its size or mass in any way, but it could conceal it.
It could also phaze in and out of reality at will. This made it very difficult to track, if it did not want to be detected. But it was not yet aware that it was being watched, and according to their incomplete scans, it seemed to take a great deal of energy for it to completely vanish.
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