by Aer-ki Jyr
1
June 12, 4812
Orlero System (Devastation Zone)
Tauntaun
Esna jolted upright in bed, her head sluggish from the deep after-workout sleep she’d been in but the repetitive and unfamiliar alarm had spiked her adrenaline enough to sit her up in zombie mode immediately. It took her a few seconds to remember where she was, but the sound of the alarm was still not registering for the simple reason that she’d never heard it before…and it wasn’t from her chrono. That alarm was different and much softer. This one was blaring over the comm.
Esna swung herself out of bed and wobbled through the few steps it took to get her to the comm terminal in her personal quarters. She found the mute button a few seconds later, cutting out most of the sound as she realized it was also being broadcast from outside her door. Frowning and blinking her eyes to clear them from sleep haze, Esna walked over to and pressed the button on the wall that retracted the sliding door only to hear the much louder sound still repeating from outside.
She stepped into the hallway and looked around, seeing it mostly deserted but with a couple of people running. A few seconds later and they were gone, but the alarm continued to blare.
Not knowing what was going on, she walked to the next set of quarters that belonged to Rammak and pressed the ‘knock’ button that would sound a chime inside to let him know someone was waiting for him. She hit it three times with a few seconds in between each, then when he didn’t respond she input the code the Calavari had given her and opened the door herself. She walked in and had a quick look around, finding he wasn’t in his quarters, and the tingle of worry from the alarm blossomed into full blown spike of fear.
She’d been living in the Star Force colony/base for four months now waiting for transport out of the Devastation Zone, and while she had been getting used to the location and people here she was still very much an outsider despite the fact she was Human. What little comfort in her surroundings she’d gained had just disappeared as the unknown sound kept blarring from the hallway and Rammak’s comm terminal, the latter of which she also muted.
Esna didn’t know what to do, so she stayed in Rammak’s quarters near the door and watched to see if someone else ran by. It was another full two minutes before someone did, and when the Bsidd came crawling through on its seemingly infinite number of legs Esna also didn’t say anything, but managed a few blurted words when it brushed past her.
“What’s that sound?” she asked.
The Bsidd spun around, it’s 18 appendages alternating as legs and arms as it chose to flip head over…whatever as it turned to face her with its insect-like head that had a number of gaping holes in it that allowed her to see clear through and out the back, though that was about the most intact part of its body. Its chest was little more than a mess of branching tubes with no center of mass, making it look like an ugly plant when it held still, though right now every bit of it seemed to be twitching.
The Bsidd looked her over quizzically. “You are the lost Human?”
“I was, yeah.”
“The alarm is a warning. The V’kit’no’sat are in the system.”
Esna froze, her entire body going rigid with a deep seated fear she’d only learned months ago when she was nearly killed by an Era’tran V’kit’no’sat. This base was supposed to be hidden and a safe place for her to stay while transport was arranged to get her out of the dangerous area known as the Devastation Zone. It had once been the heart of the Star Force empire spanning thousands of star systems, but the Viks had destroyed it all, leaving it barren and lifeless save for one world. They called it Terrax, she had learned, but Star Force refused to. To them it was Earth and the capitol of their empire…as well as the first planet the Viks had taken from them.
Now it stood in the center of the Devastation Zone and functioned as a V’kit’no’sat world and staging base for their continued fight against Star Force. They’d come here to exterminate the Humans and their many alien brothers, one of which were the Bsidd along with hundreds more races woven together into what was Star Force, but the Viks hadn’t been able to completely wipe them out and a more or less stable border had formed. The Viks couldn’t gain much ground now, but they were continually pushing and Star Force was continually defending, trying to hold onto the worlds they still had as they struggled to grow powerful enough to go on the offensive and one day take back the Devastation Zone…and Earth.
But right now the region was empty save for scavengers and nomads that had entered after the fall. Esna had grown up on such a world before being rescued. Her Human heritage had been hidden for a long time, but once it was revealed the Viks had come to kill her, not caring about the other people who now lived in the Devastation Zone. They weren’t Star Force and primitive by comparison, which apparently was why the Viks ignored them, but a Human drew their attention like an emergency beacon and they’d come for her. Had it not been for Rammak she would have been killed by the locals even before the Viks got to her, but he’d kept her safely away from both long enough for Star Force to pick up on the Vik activity and follow them to her, allowing both the Human and the long lost Commando to be rescued.
“What should I do?” Esna asked the Bsidd.
“Stay in your quarters and monitor the feeds until you get orders,” it said, spinning around and crawling/running on at least 8 of its appendages down the hallway to wherever it was going.
Esna watched it go, then looked down at her bare midriff, legs, and feet as they were sinking into the soft carpet of the hallway.
“Clothes,” she told herself, walking a few steps back over to her quarters. If there was an emergency she needed to get dressed, especially considering this entire planet was one giant ice cube. It was warm enough inside the base, but she’d be lucky to last 5 minutes outside. Her home planet of Forso, whose actual name was Mace but she still hadn’t gotten used to that considering she never expected to set foot on it again, was a dry, almost desert planet in the region where she’d lived and even the climate controlled interior of the Star Force base seemed a bit cool for her after 4 months, but she’d taken that to be a luxury and had been training herself to get used to it.
That was one reason she only slept in underwear, though to be honest Star Force didn’t have anything like the ‘underwear’ she used to have. Each garment Star Force made was intended to be worn alone if needed, rather than designed as a layer not meant to be seen. In fact, most of the people in the residential areas of the base wore almost nothing at all if they were off duty and that still seemed a bit odd to Esna, who had been confined inside a suit of armor for most of her life to hide her racial identity. She’d never known why until the fact that she was Human had been discovered in a firefight, merely complying with her father and adoptive parents’ wishes that she not show any skin in public.
That caution had kept her alive as long as it had on Forso, but here there was no threat from the other inhabitants…all of which were incredibly fit no matter what their race was. Esna still blanched a bit around the Human males, for aside from her father and brother she’d never seen another Human up until being rescued by Star Force. Since then she’d gotten an education in sexuality, Star Force fashion, with many volunteers helping her in that regard while treating it as training, but while she wasn’t so nervous around the guys now, she still couldn’t help feeling overawed when she passed by some of them that were far more fit than she could ever imagine being.
They’d encouraged her to walk around naked to help her adjust the fastest, but she hadn’t felt comfortable doing that. Just wearing her skintight shorts and jog bra to the cafeteria was taking some time to get used
to, but right now with the Vik alarm blaring she felt more exposed than she could imagine, wishing she still had her suit of armor but knowing that even that wouldn’t do much good against the weapons and power they had.
Esna ran back inside her quarters and pulled on a full length uniform that covered her ankles to wrists then pulled on a pair of shoes, feeling slightly better knowing that she’d be able to run faster that way than barefoot, but without Rammak here to tell her what to do she didn’t even know where to run to.
The Bsidd had said to watch the feeds, so after going back and shutting both Rammak’s door and her own she turned on the comm terminal and brought up the holographic depictions of the base, the surrounding area on the planet, and those few that they had of orbit. Rammak had said they didn’t have much info on the system because active scans could give them away, but when she pulled out the sensor data to its largest screen she saw contacts marked as V’kit’no’sat in near the huge white star at the center of the system.
So the Viks were here, but not at the planet yet. Were they just passing through and hadn’t noticed them?
There was no way to tell from the images she was seeing, for the ships were just waiting at their jumppoint as more continued to enter, coming from another star system labeled as Endocor. She didn’t know anything about it, but it was probably just another dead system like most of the others and not anything important. She really hoped they were just passing through, and wondered how many times in the past the Viks had moved by without spotting the base far out on the distant snow covered planet.
Esna sat at the comm terminal for a long time watching as some 263 ships arrived and began to move around the star like any ship would passing through as they headed for an outgoing jumpline, but the dot that represented the microjump out to Tauntaun would be the telling mark and Esna watched closely to see if they would stop at it or keep on going by.
Minutes later when they slowed and reoriented their fleet in a matter of seconds her breath caught in her throat, then when their fleet accelerated rapidly along the jumpline to Tauntaun her hand came up to her face and covered her mouth as her teeth began to chatter. In fact her whole body started to shake despite the fact that her mind seemed to be calm. Maybe it was just in denial and her body knew better, because the Viks were coming straight here.
How did they find them? Esna had been told this was a hidden base, and in fact it was buried beneath the ice with nothing on the surface to give them away.
Had they somehow followed her here? That had been months ago and a few other ships had come and gone since then…
Suddenly heavy footsteps pounded into her room as the locked door opened and Rammak came inside to Esna’s great relief. The towering four-armed, orange skinned, muscle ripped alien was her best friend and mentor, and whatever they needed to do he’d know.
Right now he was dripping with sweat and wearing only a short pair of black shorts, probably meaning he’d been doing an early morning workout, but he didn’t look one bit fatigued as he walked over a put his lower left hand on her green generic civilian uniform’s shoulder as he looked at the sensor feed.
“There is a small chance that they are only here to investigate and do not know the location of our base, in which case we will continue to hide, but something has obviously brought them here. This is bad.”
“What do I need to do?”
“Stay put for now. If fighting does break out, you and I will hide like we did before.”
“Hide? Isn’t everyone going to fight?”
“This is a Clan base, Esna. The Clans are the most elite combat troops within Star Force. Even I can’t keep up with them. We’d only get in the way.”
“You helped kill Zen’zat before,” she argued, referring to their last few minutes on Forso before running from that planet onboard their rescuing Star Force ship that she’d been told at the time had lost their Vik pursuit.
“And if necessary I will again, but only as a last resort. If they require our help for something they will ask. Otherwise we need to stay out of their way, and there won’t be fight too soon. So we have some time.”
“They’re coming straight here,” Esna said, pointing to the hologram where the sensor images had gone all wonky…which indicated that the enemy ships had made their jump and were moving too fast to track. In fact it meant they were probably almost here given the sensor lag times.
“If they know where the base is, they will try to attack from orbit. We have strong planetary shields covering a small portion of the surface. They are not raised yet, because they will give away our location, but if they go up the Viks will have to break through. That will take time even if they have enough ships and we’ll be able to fire back and hurt them in the process. If they do that and succeed then this base will be vaporized and there’s nothing we can do about it but run.”
“Run where?”
“There are emergency evacuation routes to other areas of the planet in case of orbital bombardment. We can get out through those if we are quick enough, but I do not think they will attack our shields directly and waste the destruction of some of their ships. More likely they will stay out of our anti-orbital guns’ range and land troops on the surface. It’ll take time for them to get here.”
“And when they do?”
“They’ll try to destroy the shield generator and defense batteries from the ground so their warships don’t have to take damage. Then they can either attack the base with troops or pull back and pummel it from orbit. If they’re here to kill us they’ll choose the second option. If they’re here looking for information they’ll have to come inside.”
“Can we keep them from destroying the shield generator?”
“Depends how many troops they land and how many we’ve got here. I took a quick look earlier and we have a sizeable mech force, but I don’t know the particulars.”
“I thought there were an army of Commandos here?”
“That won’t do any good protecting the shield generator unless they try to infiltrate the base and sabotage it with Zen’zat. They’ll probably try to destroy it from the outside, and Commandos can’t fight most of the V’kit’no’sat races. They’re too big.”
“Yeah,” Esna said, remembering the Era’tran that she’d seen in person, and it wasn’t the biggest Vik race they had out of the 193 that made up their empire. “I know I haven’t earned it, but will they give me a suit of armor? I feel naked right now.”
“Given the circumstances I don’t think that will be a problem. I’ll grab you one myself when the time comes. They should have plenty of spares for Humans.”
“How about now?”
“There’s no need yet. Trust me, this is going to take some time to play out,” he said as the hallway alarm finally shut off and the normal quiet of the residential areas resumed, though it no longer felt tranquil to Esna. More like imposing doom.
“So what now? Just wait in our quarters?”
“Did the alarm wake you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you need breakfast. I’ll shower then we’ll go to the cafeteria and get something to eat. We can watch what’s going on from there.”
Esna looked up at his giant head oddly. “They just had an alarm. Doesn’t that mean we need to do…something?”
“Others yes. Us no. We’re guests here, remember?”
“You’re not,” she reminded him.
“Clan,” he reiterated. “I’m nowhere near their league.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“You’re not hard to impress.”
Esna wrinkled her nose, thinking of something sarcastic to say but letting the notion go as she decided now wasn’t the right time. “Can we survive this?”
“I don’t know,” Rammak answered honestly, “but our odds here are a lot better than on Mace.”
“We’ll still have to evacuate, right?”
“If they know where we are, yes. These won’t be the only ships coming. They’ll send as
many as needed to kill us now that they know where we are. The only bases in the Devastation Zone are hidden ones, and if this one has been discovered we’ll all have to leave.”
“How? Do we have enough ships in the hangar?”
“Probably not.”
“Then what? We just…”
“This is Star Force, Esna. There are Archons here. Trust they’ll know what to do. They wouldn’t have built this base without an evacuation plan.”
“You know them better than I do. I’ve only met four, and not for very long.”
“The two you saw on Mace should be enough.”
“They’re not here though, are they?”
Rammak squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “Unless they can breach our shield, this is going to be a fair fight. We do as we’re told, but otherwise stay out of the way and stay alive. You and I both have some experience doing that.”
“About the only experience I have.”
“Food,” Rammak said, letting go of her shoulder and heading for the door. “10 minutes.”
“I’ll be here,” she said as he left to shower in the quarters on the other side of the wall behind her.
Esna looked back at the hologram, not seeing any updates yet but a highlighted line that anticipated the Viks arrival point in orbit. Staring at it didn’t help, so she stood up and began pacing back and forth across her small quarters as a whole host of bad memories and new worries flooded through her mind.
2
When Esna and Rammak got to the cafeteria there was almost no one there, but the room could have held hundreds. Esna had been in this cafeteria more than most on the base, but it felt very strange coming here alone. The racks of foodstuffs, both packaged and fresh, were displayed along three walls but the workers that kept replenishing them as needed were not visible. They could have been in the back area, but Esna guessed that they were responding to the alarm in whatever way they were supposed to. Maybe the pair of Protovic and the Urik’kadel didn’t have anywhere to be either, or they just thought this was a good place to watch what happened while they ate.