by Aer-ki Jyr
He was wearing armor. Fully body armor with a gash across his helmet exposing part of his nose…which stung like hell. He was wounded, and soon other aspects of the scenario made their way into his mind…along with a ‘drunkening’ agent that made him loopy enough to believe this was real.
Puar forgot where he had been, about the training and Cal-com’s message. He thought he already was a Varkemma and deployed on the battlefield, with a huge swelling of pride in him as his mind crystalized and he realized where he was, along with his duty.
There was a bunker to the northeast that had been giving them all kinds of trouble the past three days, and many of his fellow soldiers lay dead beside him. Somehow he had survived and was now left for dead by both Star Force and the enemy…which was now fighting on the other side of the bunker a mile or so away. His team had tried to backdoor them and failed. They’d been ambushed and slaughtered…but he was still alive, and now the troops that had jumped them were gone to the northern conflict, leaving his objective open.
The bunker held an anti-orbital cannon, a small one, but it was enough to shoot down any of the evacuation ships attempting to leave the nearby Kleevan cities. Puar didn’t know what a Kleevan was, but his brain was in such a state that he didn’t question the little knowledge implanted there. It felt right so he went with it, and he knew that the Kleevan could not hold their defense lines against the Versarrin, and within a few weeks tops they would be overrun.
The Versarrin had brought in and secured this bunker closer enough to the cities to prevent aerial evacuation, but far enough away from their own limited defenses not to be contested. The Varkemma had been sent in to take out the heaviest of units while Star Force regulars helped the Kleevan hold onto their cities long enough to evacuate them…but so long as that bunker was in play they couldn’t take off, or they’d be dead before they left the atmosphere.
Puar didn’t ask why there were no orbital warships capable of taking out the bunker, or any other possible strategy. His mind was focused on this mission only, and he was determined to finish it no matter what. His fellow Varkemma and their support units lay dead around him. He was the only one left. But one was enough to get the job done.
He climbed to his feet, finding his body sore and stiff, but otherwise intact. The gash on his nose had not fully healed, but it was no longer leaking blood, though his nostrils smelled of it. The Trigorma walked past the dead, looking and listening for threats without using his active sensors. If they had left him for dead, he needed to stay that way, but there was no way to hide out in the open if someone was watching, so he didn’t waste time and took off at an awkward run towards the bunker partially hidden behind a field of tall rocks.
Puar dashed this way and that to get through them, then found the spot where the Varkemma had already damaged this side of the bunker. There was a huge hole in the armor in one location and one location only, and there were no enemy troops here at the moment, but the hole was obscured by a trio of indigenous pack animals that roamed the planet and stupidly didn’t avoid the fighting. Nothing would move them other than physical contact, and they were currently licking up some of the rubble that had come from the bunker. Something in the construction must have been tasty, or perhaps it was a side effect of the Essence attacks they’d used to break through the heavily armored wall.
Puar moved closer, enough to see the main generator through the hole. It had been off center so the initial attacks missed by half a meter, but he could get to it now. All he had to do was wedge himself inside the hole and tear up as much as he could…
Suddenly the Versarrin appeared around both sides of the bunker, a few hundred meters away to the right and another 400 to the left. The wolf-like enemies were half Puar’s size, but they were numerous and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to defeat them all. Some of their ranged attacks were already pinging off his shields and draining them of energy. If he fought them he’d lose his opportunity to take out the bunker’s power generator, and he didn’t have enough time to go down and slither through the breach…he had to take it out now from range.
He summoned up most of his remaining Essence, just shy of enough to kill him, and charged a Fruc’zo. The invisible energy in front of him pooled into a ball that he increased in size as his shields finally went down and his armor then began taking the hits, but he didn’t waiver. The mission was to evacuate the city, and with this bunker up that mission would fail. He had to take it down, even if it cost him his own life.
But he was not going to fail the others. If he was going to die with them, he’d ensure they all left the field of battle with a victory.
Puar held the charge as much as he could, not sure how much it would take to get through the gaps and knowing what hit the bunker’s shell would not penetrate, then just before his armor became critical and the Versarrin on his right got within melee range he launched the Fruc’zo as accurately as possible and had just enough time to see it blow apart the stupid animals in front of the breach. Their bodies disintegrated, as did the pieces of armor around the breach, but the part that slipped through got to the generator and tore a massive hole in it.
The giant gun on top, whose hum was unmissable, fell silent and depressed, now out of power. The Star Force troops in the city were now clear to get the evacuees out…at least until the bunker was repaired…and that meant Puar and his unit were successful. He braced himself for the attack from the right and turned into it, but justbbefore they got to his Essence depleted body everything froze in place.
The sounds of war stopped. The secondary explosions inside the bunker were frozen, as was the advance of the troops and even the far off combat in the cities. Everything just stopped, then Puar’s drunken mind heard a tone he knew and disliked immensely. It was the mission failed klaxon.
He didn’t understand. He’d just succeeded in their mission, and while his brain wasn’t operating enough to question how there would be a klaxon in the middle of a war with everything just halting, he got the impression that he had done something wrong…and as that settled in everything changed and his mind blanked again.
Puar woke up with a gash on his face amidst the bodies of his fallen Varkeema, left for dead with the bunker that was their mission exposed ahead of him and the Versarrin troops nowhere to be seen…
Puar replayed the same scenario over and over again, failing each time until his 77th attempt. When he got up to see the gash in the bunker with the pack animals in front of it and saw that he had no time to wait, that he had to fire on it now, something inside him held back. As if this was not the right way to do it.
He didn’t have time to think, but that feeling caused him to pause ever so slightly. His target was ahead, but it was obscured. Puar didn’t think the animals would soak up too much of the attack, but better to move them aside to maximize the damage. He reached out telekinetically and pushed them from the side. When they didn’t move he changed his wide ‘push’ into a needle-like ‘poke’ and that jolted them out of the way, though they didn’t move more than a handful of meters.
The Varkemma jabbed them again before charging a Fruc’zo and launching it into the bunker just before he got overrun by the Versarrin. His body tumbled as they ran into him and clawed away with energy cutters, burning gashes into his armor and he twisted and shot two of them with his paw-mounted weaponry, but he had no Essence remaining to defend himself with. That left him with regular combat, which Star Force had trained him well in, and if he was going to die here he was going to take as many of these enemy troops down with him as he could.
They twisted and rolled, firing weapon shots at pointblank range with several getting through to Puar’s body before he was yanked free of the scrum and tossed on the ground clear of them before they all dropped dead to an Essence effect that attacked their hearts directly, bypassing armor and shields, and it would have done to the same to Puar had he not been pulled free first.
He looked up from the ground at his fellow Varkemma Nostr
a, who was missing his entire right arm and part of his chest, but somehow he was still alive and had just saved Puar.
“Thank you, brother,” Puar said, dragging himself to his feet even as his body screamed out in protest. He had holes all over him, but his suit’s limited regenerator was at least sealing them up so he wouldn’t bleed to death.
“Well done with the bunker,” the Tidor said, standing still and looking as if he was about to die anyway. “I saw you move the critters aside first. It looks like a couple of them survived the explosion. Bonus points for that.”
“Should we call for pickup, or will that alert the enemy to our position?”
“I think they already know. Call them. My transmitter is down.”
Puar activated his comm with an automated request for pickup…then his mind lost cohesion again and he woke to freefall high in the sky above a desert planet, dropping fast towards the ground with a series of aerial enemies swirling around him and others in his unit, trying to pick them off before they could get to ground…
5
Cal-com had received word that a special courier was coming in, one carrying something too sensitive to transmit, so he left his hidden command center in one of the Elcee’s flying cities and walked down to the vertical terminal the ship was sending a dropship to. He stood in front of a real observation window looking down at the surface of the Temple below and out across the curving horizon that never truly ended, though banks of clouds often tricked the eye into thinking so.
He was able to monitor ongoing events through his retracted armor, to which he kept a mental link, but most of his work in the Temple was done in isolation. He was still vulnerable to a Vargemma attack, or a Caretaker one, and while he had abandoned his shipbound isolation far above the range of the Temple’s mega turrets, he was still cautious about revealing himself. The Elcee cities were Star Force construction and the brainchild of Greg-073, though they didn’t see nearly as much activity here as they did in the other Temples.
Out of the 2934 Vargemma-occupied Temples, only 18 were in a peaceable state. All the others were ongoing wars against the Caretakers as Star Force had to continually struggle to keep from being removed while the Vargemma were perfectly happily sacrificing parts of their population so the rest could live. This was why they hadn’t been tagged for complete eradication when Star Force had been. Thankfully Kappa had not gone that route, but most of the others had and Star Force hadn’t backed down from a single fight.
As he waited, Cal-com reviewed the updates flowing into him, including the first Trigorma to discover the LITrpg, which was a relief. They had a lot of them stuck in limbo in their training because they were too regimented in their outlook. Part of it was a byproduct of old instincts, the rest was lack of proper training by the Vargemma. When they got a target lock on something they had the habit of excluding everything else and focusing on that objective alone. Analyzing the situation, let alone the justification for the action, had been evading them more than other races, so Cal-com was glad to see at least one had made it through. Now he’d have a successful template to use to better tweak the others’ training, and he was having to do the same for each one of the myriad Vargemma races they were pulling recruits from.
A one size fits all approach did not work here, and while he expected individual differences to have to troubleshoot, he did not expect such a wide array of racial peculiarities when they’d been living with each other in the Temple under the same Founder guidance for millions of years…yet these races were very different from each other, and bringing them up to Star Force standards was a massive task that he’d been whittling away at for decades. One more success today was welcomed, though the mystery courier had his full attention.
What would require secrecy so much that it couldn’t be transmitted over the secure battlemap comm network was a riddle, for very few things were that sensitive. All of the Vargemma Temples were now in Star Force hands, and other than the Caretakers persistent efforts to remove them, the war was over. The Vargemma were pinned down and unable to strike at Star Force systems, let alone leave the Temples. Naval supremacy was what allowed Star Force to keep them bottled up, though none of the Vargemma had been fully annexed. They were too powerful, in most cases, and even the weaker races could not be brought into the fold given the Essence powers that most of them possessed, for turning your back on them for even a second could mean your death…and in a situation like that it wasn’t safe for the Star Force handlers and trainers.
So a different method had to be utilized, and Cal-com had been working on that above and beyond the Varkemma, which were the first line solution. Meanwhile the Vargemma races sat, contained, out of the way as Star Force slowly sent ships back out into the galaxy as Paladin forces grew to replace them inside the Temples.
But the Paladin couldn’t use Essence, so Greg had come up with a shortcut. The Temples had the ability to cause an individual to gain Essence abilities, to break the barrier the first time, and the trailblazer had been using it in mass quantities in the Liona Temple, where a local Vargemma race called the Zevquen were actually helping him utilize the machinery that Star Force still hadn’t earned its way to yet.
From Liona, Greg was creating an army of Star Force troops that could utilize a tiny bit of their Essence, then he was sending them off to the other Temples to train and develop their skills in these Elcee flying cities. It hadn’t taken long for Cal-com to discover the meaning behind the name, for it was literally the pronunciation of two letters. ‘L’ and ‘C.’
Knowing their penchant for old school naming, he’d done a search and had come up empty until he tried variations, eventually arriving at ‘GLC’ which stood for ‘Green Lantern Corps.’ The old fictional story was surprisingly accurate when matched up against Essence technology, including the use of personal wells.
To overcome their rookie status, the Elcee wore a ring that contained a reservoir of Essence far greater than their body could hold on its own. This gave them the ability to train 1000 times faster than naturally, for they wouldn’t have to rest up to recharge. Each Elcee city, in addition to roaming the uninhabited regions of the Temples, contained a central well…or in this case ‘Lantern’…that was periodically recharged by Magicite tankers coming from the Uriti. The Essence inside it was used to power the city defenses, including a large Essence defense shield and some juiced up weapons in addition to the regular ones, but it was also used to recharge the Elcee’s personal rings whenever needed.
The goal of the Elcee was to create a force that could counter the Vargemma inside the Temples without having to wait millions of years to catch up, and secondary to that, was to advance their skill levels enough to unlock the various technologies inside the Temples that only the Vargemma could currently use…and some that even they could not.
Currently it was Elcee that were used as handlers for the Varkemma recruits, due to the fact that they could defend themselves. To date only two had died, but even that was too many. The Vargemma coming in were rough, and some of them were not convertible. A few had joined in the hopes of finding and killing some Star Force personnel, which the rest of the Vargemma had no physical access to, and they’d been able to evade mental scans on entry, meaning they’d practiced a long time in preparation.
Most of those attempts failed to kill the Elcee, but two had succeeded amongst hundreds of injuries. That only underscored how dangerous the Vargemma were, and how there was no way to take control of the Temple surface as long as they were here. Not through any quick means, anyway, and that meant Cal-com had to play the long game.
It also meant he couldn’t let the Vargemma know where he was, so he lived in one Elcee city or another as they roamed Kappa Temple and he ran all of Star Force’s affairs here remotely. After this special courier arrived he would switch again, just in case the Vargemma deduced that it was coming to him out of all the other traffic, most of which did not come to the Elcee cities.
The dropship coming in was a
larger Dragon-class, and ironically what came out of it was just that…a dragon. Or more specifically a Les’i’kron. They were the rarest amongst the Knight races in Star Force, for none had voluntarily come over to the Rimward half of the combined ‘empire’ rather than face execution for their V’kit’no’sat crimes. They’d rather die than join Star Force, and the only way they’d been included in the Knight races was by the smuggling of some Les’i’kron eggs out to them.
It hadn’t been theft on Star Force’s part, but an act of the V’kit’no’sat in an underhanded fashion that Cal-com was never told the full extent of. The end result was that the Les’i’kron had joined Star Force, and from what he understood their inclusion had not been a pleasant process. Their minds had been so mal-configured to make them useful servants that undoing all that genetic twisting was an ongoing process.
These weren’t the same as the V’kit’no’sat Les’i’kron, and they weren’t the same as the Zak’de’ron. These Star Force Les’i’kron were slowly becoming something else, and were reliable to a fault…which was part of the problem. They didn’t think as much for themselves as they should, and Star Force needed more than just loyal servants.
Yet Cal-com had been told they were reliable enough for defensive duty and paired attacks, but not enough to operate as an independent faction yet. Their healing would take a great amount of time, though the individuals already within Star Force were judged on their own personal status, and some of them had overcome the limitations of their genome…just not enough to warrant group privileges.
The one stepping out into the city hangar was not known to Cal-com, but his Star Force blue skin and large winged body made for an intimidating sight, and that was probably an additional security mechanism. Who would expect one so large to be a courier? And who would try and take a message packet off of one so lethal, for the Saroto’kanse’vam on the Les’i’kron’s tail had not been removed by Star Force, and their ability to enact a scorpion-like attack with it made them a formidable opponent against large scale and heavily armored opponents.