by Aer-ki Jyr
Once there the task wasn’t done, for the Hobbits were still following and appeared to be going to mount a full assault on the wide ravine where the camp was. Donn grabbed some ammo from a small stash of Star Force supplies there and headed back out, climbing up a small ridge and taking a sniper position, more to see from than shoot, and plotted out his next ambush.
Six hours later the camp was overrun and the survivors were forced to retreat on a Dvapp cargo ship that came in to pick them up, but overall more than 2,500 Hobbits lay dead throughout the ravine along with a few dozen Dvapp, though their bodies literally melted away upon death, leaving only a puddle of pure liquid goo behind.
When the transport brought the three Archons and some 211 Dvapp back to a city that hadn’t yet come under attack, Donn was flagged down by a newly arrived detachment of some 22 commandos and the ranger that had come with them. The striker jogged over to his fellow Archon who exchanged a wrist clap, which had both men shaking hands by grabbing one another’s wrists in a firm binary grip.
“Nice work out there,” the ranger commented. “Saw the results on the way in.”
“Glad to have some more help,” Donn added, releasing the Archon’s hand.
“Actually we’re your relief. Paul needs you in orbit ASAP.”
Donn frowned. “What’s up?”
“He didn’t say, but knew you wouldn’t want to leave the Dvapp on their own so he sent us to replace you…immediately.”
Donn had mixed feelings about that. The region was still far from secure, and no matter how many Hobbits they killed there always seemed to be more to replace them.
“We’ve found a series of subsurface caverns that the Skarrons are moving through. I wouldn’t recommend going down there again, but we haven’t fully mapped out their tunnels. They’re using them to pop up where we aren’t expecting them.”
“Peachy.”
“Any chance of air support?”
“Not yet, but we’ll do what we can to hold down the fort.”
“Alright,” Donn said, having a bad feeling about leaving. Ranger or not, Donn’s higher level psionics were going to be missed in the swap out. “Good luck.”
“Likewise,” the Archon said, with the pair parting and Donn heading for the nearby dropship that had brought the commandos in along with a good pile of supplies.
He ran up the ramp and into the hold, then found the pilot conversing with a couple of crewmembers.
“I take it you’re my ride?”
“As soon as we get the rest of the cargo off, yes. We’re supposed to take you directly to a ship waiting in orbit.”
“What ship?”
“A transport.”
Donn frowned again. “Can you get me a comm to the Excalibur?”
“Just a minute,” the pilot stalled, finishing up his conversion with the crew before they moved off to help unload crates, then he moved into the cockpit and got a link to the command ship in orbit.
“There you go,” he said, giving Donn his seat.
A brief conversation via audio with the bridge crew quickly brought about a small hologram of Paul’s torso appearing above the cockpit control board.
“Sorry for the pullout,” the trailblazer apologized.
“What’s going on?” Donn asked, pulling his helmet off and swiping at the sweat on his forehead with his armored fingertips.
“Not my idea,” Paul floated, “but Davis needs you. There’s a situation brewing with the Lacvamat and with all his special teams deployed to the front he wants you to come back to head up the investigation.”
“Me or all of Crimson Team?”
“Just you, as far as I know.”
“I trust this can’t wait?” Donn wondered aloud.
“53 million dead with the count rising by the day,” Paul said flatly.
“What the hell?”
“There’s an information packet waiting for you, I’ll let you sort through it without any commentary from me. The transport you’re heading towards is leaving the system within 2 hours and will get you back to Iona. From there you’ll have to make your own way.”
“Diverting even a transport for me is reckless with as bad as we need supplies out here.”
Paul smirked, but it was a humorless smile. “I’m not. It’s a scheduled return. Davis’s message came in 13 days ago. No point in pulling you out until your ride was ready.”
“Thank you,” Donn said, realizing that Paul wanted him down on the surface supplementing the Dvapp as much as the striker did.
“Figure this out. We’ve got enough on our plate as is.”
“Understatement of the century,” Donn said as Paul’s transmission cut out. He wondered just what the hell was going on back inside the ADZ, but without Paul giving him any hints he was just going to have to wait till he got to orbit to find out.
In order to make that happen sooner rather than later Donn went back into the hold and helped with the cargo offloading, cutting a few minutes off their schedule. Once the dropship was empty it took on a couple more passengers, all Dvapp, and lifted off…flying first across the surface to another landing zone in a major city where the crystalized aliens got off, then the dropship headed straight up to orbit and into the hangar bay of a large cargo transport.
Once onboard Donn was greeted by the Captain and taken to temporary quarters where he could get out of his armor and cleaned up in the interim before the transport left planetary orbit and met up with a distant jumpship tucked safely away from the Skarron fleet far out in the system where they couldn’t easy go. Donn ignored the shower and fresh set of clothes waiting for him and sat down in his armor at the comm terminal and logged in, pulling up the message packet that Paul had promised would be waiting for him.
There were several files of data, but the striker went first to the personal message from Davis which became a small hologram set in front of the flatscreen monitor and hovering over the keyboard.
“I apologize for interfering with your efforts on the front, but I need an experienced hand in this situation,” the Star Force Director said without preamble. “Whether or not you need to pull more of your team in or others is a decision I’ll leave to you. What we know as of now is that on June 24th a ship exploded for no apparent cause in the atmosphere over the Lacvamat world of Leerbot. Within a day a number of illnesses began to register, followed quickly by a planet-wide epidemic. A bioweapon is suspected but as of yet it hasn’t been identified nor who used it. The planet is in lockdown and the Lacvamat are gearing up to start a war with whoever they think did it.”
“They don’t know, but with more people dying by the day they’re ready to blow a hole in whoever did. I need you to find out what’s going on and take whatever steps are necessary in dealing with it. There’s no time to bring you back to Earth to discuss this in person, so I’ll leave the details to your discretion so you can get onsite as quickly as possible.”
“I don’t know where this investigation will lead, but I get the feeling that it’s an inside job…and by that I mean another faction within the ADZ. I have no proof of that, but with as much attention and resources being focused on the war fronts there is still a high level of animosity and competition between the races and without the ability to fight conventional wars against each other due to our edicts and the Protovic and Hycre backing us up, the belligerent ones may be reaching for secondary means of conducting warfare.”
“The ship in question was a standard commercial transport, no racial affiliation and belonging to an independent shipper that apparently died in the explosion, though that hasn’t been confirmed. It appears like a dead end attack with no way to backtrack to the source. We can’t have that, or we’ll start to see more popping up and the interior of the ADZ could end up turning into a third front. As you well know we don’t have the resources to deal with that, so find out what’s going on and bust the appropriate heads. I’ll deal with the backlash and fallout later.”
“I’ve attached all the data I
have at present and will send updates as they become available, but the Lacvamat are keeping a pretty tight rein on this. They’ve agreed to allow us access, more as an unbiased witness to legitimize their payback when they find out who’s to blame, I imagine, than interested with any real help, but we’ll work with it none the less. I’m told the bioweapon is race specific to the Lacvamat, given a number of offworlders on planet that haven’t been infected, but they’re not allowing anyone to come and go for fear of a second detonation. They’re quarantining the various regions of their planet to try and keep it from spreading, and with a local population of 4.3 billion the death toll could climb much higher if those quarantines are breached…so expected resistance regardless of any permission you’re given.”
“Beyond that I have little more to say. This is a very bold attack, and one that I hadn’t predicted was coming. The races are constantly making various moves against and with one another, but nothing this overt. This is a game changer and I need information as to what’s going on if I’m going to get back ahead of the curve. As you know, our guests in the ADZ are here because they have nowhere else to go, not because they like each other. Push things far enough and twist the right arms and things could get very nasty very fast.”
“But above all else I need to know the truth about what happened. Faster would be preferred, but I can’t operate off of guesswork. Figure this out, Donn, before we start fighting a civil war that will giftwrap the ADZ for the Skarrons and lizards.”
The striker let out a slow whistle as the hologram finished and shut down. Now he understood why Davis would call him back from the front. He’d originally thought the Director had crossed a line, but he should have known better. The man was a civilian and knew not to get involved in military affairs, but he was quite right in saying that if the races in the ADZ started fighting each other it would take so many resources to stop that they’d be handing the Skarrons an easy win, Voku help or not.
The Lacvamat had the largest military that wasn’t currently involved in frontline warfare…and the fact that they weren’t meant they’d essentially been piling up warships and resources to protect their own systems against invasion. That was useful, because it meant Star Force and others didn’t have to worry about them so much, but it also meant that if they wanted to misbehave they could do a lot of damage.
An exploding cargo ship as the means to deliver a bioweapon to a planet’s atmosphere was very odd…not to mention that a single detonation could cause such a widespread contamination. Donn sifted through the data Davis had sent but in it was not a chemical or genetic profile on the ‘weapon,’ which confirmed his suspicions as to why Paul hadn’t mentioned such…the trailblazer wasn’t entirely convinced it was a bioweapon, and Donn couldn’t disagree with so little data, most of which was just speculation on the Lacvamat’s part.
What he did have were casualty numbers and travel logs, both the Lacvamat’s copies of the passage of vessels through the system in question and all of Star Force’s logs for the surrounding systems and the now exploded ship.
Davis had already backtracked it to several locations, all of which Donn quickly put into a file as places of interest. The owner was an independent shipper that possessed only the single vessel, which had been modified three times in varying shipyards, none of which were Star Force. It was a Lemickas large-scale hauler, capable of carrying large pieces of machinery or a vast amount of cargo, making this independent shipper in a league with those that possessed a dozen or so smaller vessels. The Scionate in question apparently wanted all his eggs in one big, decently armed basket…for one of the modifications made to the vessel were light defensive weapons that included some beefy missile racks that would keep most low level pirates at bay.
Nothing unusual had happened, as far as the official logs were concerned, at any of the previous port calls for the ship, leaving as Davis suggested a ‘dead end’ that basically meant this was a free attack. Without an enemy declared the Lacvamat would have no one to strike back against…legitimately, though they might just pick one based on suspicions or circumstantial evidence so they could appear to be doing something. If that happened Star Force might actually end up fighting them in order to prevent the injustice.
But Donn knew he couldn’t let whoever did this get away with it or, like Davis had so pointedly commented, it would most likely lead to other races or factions seeing an opportunity to strike at their enemies under the radar and turning the ADZ into a clandestine war zone.
The truth about what had happened had to come out, and it looked like whoever had done this had covered their tracks well. Donn just hoped his skills were up to the task to ferret this out, regardless of whether or not their mysterious attacker had made a mistake. Hopefully he had, but if not there were other ways, Donn knew, to find answers…especially when you had the ability to read minds.
But he couldn’t do anything here, so he was glad that Paul had left him in combat up until the last moment so he didn’t have to sit and wait in orbit. Shortly after Donn got out of his armor and into the shower the transport made a microjump in a convoy under escort out to the waiting jumpship where the smaller transports all attached within the exterior hold and were encased in the big ship’s IDF, making their piggyback ride into the star effortless as they floated in place and were attached to the jumpship’s superstructure by flimsy pylons that never would have been capable of the stresses of the ship simply turning to starboard without the IDF holding them all in place.
Donn stayed in his quarters reviewing the data that Davis had sent him for several hours before transferring over to the jumpship and indulging in the sanctum there, splitting his time between training and data analysis as he waited out the journey back deeper into Beta Region where he was going to pick up a few old friends and make some new ones along the way.
This mystery was a huge one, and he wasn’t about to tackle it alone.
4
October 2, 2552
Vannsep System (Beta Region)
Leerbot
The Rover-class jumpship braked against the Lacvamat planet’s gravity well, coming out high enough to avoid the orbital blockade of the avian race’s warships that had the quarantine still firmly in place. The jumpship was only three times the size of a Star Force heavy cruiser and fell within the ‘scout’ family, with the exception that the rovers were armed warships designed to function as both transport and escort for personnel transfers when a full warship wasn’t an option…and with every one needed on the front the rover had been the obvious choice of transport for Donn and his adhoc team, given that they didn’t know how many different worlds they would be needing to visit.
He’d picked up his ride at Iona along with a third of his crew, two of which were medtechs, four Archons that he personally knew, two more that he didn’t but that were insystem with skill sets he wanted, three Kiritak crewers and a Human Captain for the rover, and an eight member special ops squad from the Kiritas. The others he had accumulated at two other stops enroute to Vannsep, including a Knight he’d come across accidentally while in a spaceport, who was transitioning back to Earth for extensive medical work on battlefield injuries…including a severed arm.
Donn had gotten permission to pick up a regenerator in Iona, so having that with him he grabbed the Knight and added her to his team while giving the 7 foot tall woman as many foodstuffs as she could eat over the following days with the regenerator using the additional biomass to slowly begin regrowing her arm and mending her other battle damage. Star Force now had tech to regrow limbs that didn’t require a regenerator, but those devices were huge and located almost exclusively on Earth or elsewhere in the Solar System, requiring transport back ‘home’ to deal with such injuries save for a handful of very expensive medical ships that were floating around the ADZ that could accommodate the same.
The regenerators were reserved for special circumstances and this Knight had gotten wounded in the wrong place at the wrong time with none available. Had
she been critically wounded she would have been moved to the closest planet with one, which would have been Horizon in Iona that had four…or now three since Donn had borrowed one. Given that she was stable she’d been assigned to recovery work on Earth, which would have involved recalibration training for the new arm and an overall break from combat to reset herself.
After two minutes of talking with Galia Donn knew that wouldn’t be necessary and had pulled her into his squad, realizing that mentally she was good to go and would rather get back into some sort of action rather than sitting back on Earth while others were still fighting.
She stood beside him on the bridge, a full head taller with both warriors outside their armor as they looked at the mass of Lacvamat warships corralling the orbital infrastructure traffic into very tight lines, but it appeared that they were letting some traffic come and go up here at least, but there was nothing moving to and from the planet’s surface.
“Find me someone to talk to,” Donn told the Captain who was seated nearby. “Start with those warships.”
“Any one in particular?”
“Start with the big ones.”
The Captain motioned to one of the Kiritak who got on the comm and started chatting in the trade language…and didn’t stop for some 10 minutes before he finally turned and gestured back to the Captain who activated his holographic communication display with the image of a fleshy winged Lacvamat seated on a perch with its folded wings angling up like points bracketing its double-skulled head.
Donn walked up beside the Captain so he would be in transmission view, but put a hand on his shoulder when the man tried to get up to give him his seat.
“You are the investigators?”
“We are,” Donn answered evenly. “We require passage down to the planet, both to the origination point and anywhere there is currently the illness. We do not need access to uncontaminated areas.”