by Aer-ki Jyr
“Where are yours?”
“I haven’t worn clothes in weeks,” she said, grabbing her ring and slipping it back on while Zander raised an eyebrow. “Elf therapy. Let’s go…I’m not shy,” the Duke asked, softly jogging on bare feet towards the speeder as the Archon protectively kept pace beside her in his armor. “How many people are dead?”
“I feel it,” Belinda said to Tahiri as they ran through The Wood, hopping over a fallen tree and sliding slightly on the mossy ground as their sandal-clad feet hit it, “…but I can’t see it.”
“Same,” the other Wood Elf said, running towards the blankness in The Wood. “I wonder what it is?”
“Maybe an Archon?” Belinda floated. “But we can always see them when they visit. I don’t understand how The Wood can be blind.”
“I don’t know,” Tahiri added, ducking under a branch and making a slight left turn. “Only one way to find out.”
As the two Wood Elves continued to run, they saw what was ahead of them using their Clan’s special psionic. No one else had it, and even Archons couldn’t us it. It was an altered version of Pefbar that not only the Wood Elves had, allowing them to see in the dark and even through some objects, but the trees had it as well.
Not every tree on the planet, but the ones in The Wood did and they shared what they saw with the other trees and the Wood Elves through something like telepathy, but it wasn’t. They had to be in range of their own ‘Wood Sight’ that extended a few meters for the very young and a few hundred for the older Wood Elves, but so long as they were within the ‘sight’ of a tree or another Wood Elf, they acted like relays expanding the coverage.
Belinda and Tihiri could see everywhere in The Wood if they focused their minds, even zooming in on a particular spot if they needed greater detail, but the empty spot moving slowly through The Wood was obvious. It didn’t belong, and the two Wood Elves could feel others more distant heading their way, probably also to investigate, but they were too far away to communicate telepathically. The trees didn’t help with that, but the Elves could see each other and this pair intended to be the first ones to get to and find out what this anomaly was.
They weren’t warriors, let alone rangers, but The Wood was their home and these two brown haired Elves were out on a long walk far from their closest village when the anomaly entered on the eastern border. It was coming further in, but not in a hurry and the Elves were moving with such haste that they were not in danger of losing it…but they still couldn’t see it. It was like The Wood’s sight didn’t exist in that spot.
Sometimes the Archons felt that way, but not always. When they were here the trees could still see them even if they couldn’t touch them, for they also acted like passive sensors and could absorb light, heat, and other things that could then be added to The Wood sight, letting the Elves see beyond the borders without being able to feel what was out there.
But where this emptiness was moving through The Wood there was nothing to see…but it was leaving tracks. Subtle depressions here and there where the ground was soft, and as soon as the emptiness passed The Wood could feel the depressions. These Elves were too young and inexperienced to be able to compare the before and after, but others were not and they were sprinting towards this location from afar but unable to warn these two curious explorers because they were still outside of telepathic range.
One ranger, however, was on the way but unable to see what was happening. She wasn’t a Wood Elf, but a visiting Sky Elf coming out from Tiolla village flying extremely fast above the trees. She didn’t get to them in time, but she did get within telepathic range just before they got to the anomaly.
Do not approach! she warned. There is danger. Turn and run, now!
The two Elves skidded to a halt, but hesitated from turning around. What is it?
Run to me, it comes for you now! Move!
Belinda and Tahiri suddenly felt the blankness accelerate...and in their direction. Not knowing what was going on they took the Sky Elf’s word and began running in the direction she was approaching from with the blankness increasing in size as it sped towards them.
When it finally crossed over them their connection to The Wood disappeared, feeling as if it was ripped from them. Their own little sphere of ‘sight’ was also stripped from them…then their feet were knocked sideways by something invisible and both fell in tandem.
Tahiri looked at Belinda, confusion and worry on her face…then shock as the Wood Elf was pulled backwards, dragged through the short grass and bits of mud.
“Tahiri!” Belinda yelled, but when she tried to get up her legs were frozen in place…but there was nothing touching her.
The other Elf moved about 20 meters before being drawn up in the air, upside down, and hanging by her legs from nothing as she squirmed around trying to free herself.
Belinda could feel her fear and worry, their telepathic bond running strong…but then a poison leapt into it. Tahiri’s mind seized up along with her body and Belinda could feel another mind taking control of her friend.
She did what any good Elf would do, giving her as much telepathic backup as she could, but against this poison their combined strength was useless. If it wanted to take Belinda as well it could, but it didn’t even seem to care that she was there as Tahiri’s memories were being drained and the Elf was interrogated in forceful ways to give up their secrets.
Belinda had never thought the Elvish minds weak, but this was something far beyond them and…
Energy blasts rained down through the wood, burning leaves and branches as they shot into the blankness from the Sky Elf’s Battle Gauntlets as she came into view high up but didn’t descend all the way to ground. Most of the golden blasts hit the ground and exploded the dirt, showering Belinda and Tahiri with hot sprays of vaporized water and burnt mud and grass, but some hit something else and the Elves saw for the first time what was creating the blankness.
It was a person…a huge person nearly 8 feet tall and wearing black/green armor across its entire body. It was bathed in invisibility, but each time the Sky Elf’s shots hit it disrupted that invisibility and let them see what was…
Suddenly Tahiri was dropped and it was the Sky Elf that got dragged down, almost into physical range of the intruder, but the ranger managed to free herself and fly back upward, firing nonstop from both weapons attached to her forearms as her blonde hair free flowed across her shoulders.
Run! she repeated, and suddenly the grasp on Belinda’s feet disappeared.
Tahiri sprinted away a different direction and Belinda didn’t wait either. Both scattered, trying to get away from the intruder, but Belinda was tripped again and ran head first into a tree…but she could feel now, now outside the blankness, and her feet were not locked in place again, so she continued to run as far as she could go while the Sky Elf fought behind her, most of which she still could not see in her Wood sight.
As soon as the Sky Elf demonstrated her Rentar ability the Zen’zat leapt straight up, firing a few Dre’mo’don blasts as he did to disorient her with shield strikes as he got hold of her ankle…then he dragged her down to the ground with him, taking her point blank shots and weathering the storm before punching her once in the gut.
The blow came so hard it penetrate the Elves’ shields, and with her wearing no armor even the slightest hit to the midsection doubled her over, knocking the wind out of her until the following slap to her head knocked her unconscious entirely.
An unnecessary hit, for this Elf had no Ikrid block and the Zen’zat could have taken control of her mind from range if needed, but she was stronger and his domination of her mind might not be instantaneous. More were coming, he knew, from what he’d learned of the other Elf, and he needed to raid this one’s mind quickly…which was easier when she was unconscious and not fighting back.
Ronoken drained valuable information from her, then something that he had not anticipated happened. Several of the trees nearby moved…actually twisting and swinging their branches d
own towards him. At first he thought it was broken and fallen, then he realized it wasn’t an accident as one swept right into him and tried to knock him away from the Sky Elf.
It was slow and he easily jumped over it, but the branch and others pulled over the prone Elf as if guarding her. A few more reached for the Zen’zat and he blasted one of them apart, telekinetically grabbing a shard of wood and drawing it to him as he sensed more minds on the horizon approaching at decent speed. All were on foot, but he was going to have to act quickly or some of them might get away.
He slid the sample of wood into a slot behind his left shoulder and reached down to the Sky Elf, who was now covered with branches that would have made a decent cage to keep others out, but they did nothing to guard against Lachka and Ronoken easily crushed her skull and scrambled her brains inside, killing her and making it impossible for her to be revived later.
After that he was off running through the forest chasing after the two young ones. The trees seemed to defy him, twisting and swatting and trying to keep him from getting to them but he was too fast and his prey was too slow. He caught and killed the first one with a Dre’mo’don shot to her back, then made her unrevivable with a quick telekinetic jerk before running off the other way and tracking down the other one.
She was moving fast, but nowhere near the speed that Ronoken was capable of. When he got close he telekinetically grabbed her, yanking her back through the air towards him then punched into her back, breaking it with a single blow then leaving her dead and unrevivable as well.
More Elves were coming, and he picked one to go after, engaging his stealth field again and trying to flank the approaching heretic, but somehow he knew where Ronoken was and avoided him. The Elf was obviously trying to buy time for others to engage with, but that wouldn’t save him. The Zen’zat let three of them arrive, then he chased down and forced a fight that left two of them dead and the third held in a telepathic trance as Ronoken searched his mind for an answer to the trees…finding that they had been bioengineered to be a weapon and sensor platform these heretics could telepathically access.
They could see his Pefbar field moving through them…which meant he had to leave. This forest could track his movements, and that was no good. He didn’t want to attract too much attention, so he killed this last Elf and took a small tissue sample that he added to his stash, then ran off back towards the eastern edge of the forest. When he got there he reengaged his stealth and disappeared from Star Force’s tracking again…this time knowing to stay clear of this type of trees.
He’d have to do his hunting elsewhere, otherwise a starship in orbit could target his location and scratch him off with ease or aerial fights could strafe his position…assuming they could coordinate these telepathic sensors with their battlemap technology, and Ronoken wasn’t going to assume they couldn’t.
7
March 2, 4827
Tauriel System (Seon Region)
Eoxion
Jessica sat on her ice throne, now fully clothed, surrounded in status holograms monitoring the cleanup and repair efforts at the now 8 factories destroyed. In addition to that ongoing mess a total of 19 Elves had been killed by what was reported to be a lone Zen’zat hunting them…first in The Wood and more recently on the Ice Plains. All the Elves were now in lockdown mode and armored up so the Zen’zat couldn’t kill them with a mere thought, but they were clearly outmatched and a few of the Commandos and Knights on other planets in this system had been dispatched to augment their defenses.
It turned the Duke’s stomach to think of them being hunted down and killed so easily, but she wasn’t thinking of them now any more than necessary. The Archons were out trying to track down both the hunter and the sabotage parties…but in truth it was the infrastructure damage that was giving Jessica headaches. She abhorred the deaths on her planet, but from a management standpoint she wasn’t going to be short on personnel because of the losses.
But the factory damage was starting to add up and it was imbalancing her carefully laid out production schedule.
In order for a Monarch to get maximum production out of a planet they needed exactly the right amount of material resources being gathered to match the number of factories where they processed those materials into components. Then she needed either exports of those components to other systems or the local assembly apparatus to use them…which meant shipyards for the big stuff or alternate factories for smaller items like clothing, hand weapons, food, etc.
She had a lot of mobile construction teams that could build just about anything on site, and some of them were deployed to the damaged factories to rebuild inside the intact shells, but they didn’t work fast. Even the most elite Kiritak team couldn’t match the output of an assembly line set up to produce exactly the same thing over and over again. The construction teams were meant to get odd work down in odd places, not to crank out produce, and attesting to her supply chain problem Jessica had warning holograms floating all around her head indicating disruptions.
The raw materials coming in from the mining sector were piling up, and while she had warehouses to store them in they were not unlimited. She’d already sent a construction team to start building some additional ones, because if she could not get the factories up and running again the mining produce would eventually overflow the current warehouses and they’d either have to stop mining more or start piling it up on the surface of an airless world called Dantolin where most of the warehouses were.
She knew there had to be a V’kit’no’sat stealth ship in the system somewhere, but if they started piling the valuable resources in plain sight all it would take was a little orbital bombardment to waste weeks’ worth of effort…or another clever sabotage team getting to it, though as of yet no planet in the system had been hit other than Eoxion.
Jessica still had a lot of processing factories up and running, so it wasn’t as if her total supply system was shut down, but the backup was building and the sabotage teams were still out and about. So far none of them had been detected, let alone stopped, and the extra security going up was slowing production a tick on its own.
That meant what was coming out of the first tier factories was greatly reduced…currently down 13%...and that left second tier factories operating below threshold. They needed more refined material but they didn’t have it, so a lot of workers were left just twiddling their fingers as they had nothing to do and wouldn’t until Jessica could get the damaged factories back up and running.
She wanted to kick herself for not having backups, but ever since she’d been given this assignment she’d been building out of panic rather than patient planning. The V’kit’no’sat war wasn’t going to be put on pause while she set up proper infrastructure, so she’d been going for maximum production from day 1 and that left no backups for when something went wrong.
Typically, if she’d been able to build freely, she’d have more factories than workers and have them operating at about 60% capacity. The trouble with that was she’d have to build a lot of excess infrastructure that she wasn’t using and that would be wasteful. She wasn’t the only Monarch in the Seon Region, and their combined exports were already far lower than the other rimward regions due to the amount of supplies their client races required.
The first factory to get hit had been one forging armor plating for the warship drones…which was the #1 priority export for all of Star Force territory. Five out of 7 drones produced in Jessica’s realm were sent to the V’kit’no’sat front, 1 was sent to the rimward front, and 1 was kept locally to gradually build up her defense fleets and to deal with local threats that kept trimming that number down occasionally.
The other Monarchs in the Seon Region were maintaining at least a 50% export rate to the V’kit’no’sat front, with hers at 71%, but the more developed ones in the heart of what was now Star Force territory were all in excess of 87% and producing in far greater numbers than Jessica could even spit at. The trailblazers needed as many drones as possible to repla
ce what they were losing in battle, so Jessica had built up her infrastructure to produce as many as fast as she could, balancing her supply chain damn near perfectly and counting on uninterrupted production in this quiet, out of the way system that nobody really cared about.
But now that’d been wrecked and her shipyards producing the drones were grinding to a halt. The Zen’zat had been smart in the strikes they made, and as of now only one drone hull armor factory was still functioning. She’d had 4 originally, and with 3 down that meant she was at…23% production capacity at the moment. Jessica was waiting for that number to tick up a bit when the first section of repairs were made at the first factory hit, but so far nothing was coming through and even if it started there was no guarantee the sabotage teams wouldn’t just hit it again.
The last intact factory was the primary target and the Archons had it buttoned down tight, but there was no guarantee she was going to be able to hold it, and the shipments of raw materials coming in had to be scrutinized, as did the arriving workers, and that was slowing down output and causing the factory to operate at 94% rather than the normal, smooth flowing 100%.
All of which meant the shipyards in orbit where the drones were being built would continue at 100% until they ran out of armor plating, then they’d have to pause all construction in slips that wasn’t receiving that remaining 23%. Jessica could choose to give a little to everyone or route it all into a few slips, the latter of which was the most beneficial, for when those drones were completed the slips could be cleared and new framework started.
But that left nearly finished drones just sitting in the other slips taking up space as they waited for hull armor to get to them, so she’d ordered those unfinished hulks removed so new ones could begin construction, with the 19 Warship-class jumpships in the system emptying their carrying capacity and having their drones free fly while the unarmored ones were moved to and taken in by those vessels for safekeeping…but they’d fill up eventually, meaning it was only a temporary time saving measure.