Star Force: Instinct (Star Force Universe Book 49)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Do you know how you triggered it?” she asked meekly.

  “A rough theory at this point, but maybe. Either way, you’ve just gone where probably no Human has ever gone before. Can you feel it?”

  “I feel like shit,” she reminded him. “You could punch me in the face and I wouldn’t notice.”

  “This is more significant than you realize” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder and nearly getting burnt by her heat level. It wasn’t enough to catch things on fire, but her body temperature was running an average of 132 degrees Fahrenheit nowadays. He’d never touched her before, and his mind had been so distracted he completely forgot. “This could be a huge discovery, Lara. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you now, but for us this is…or could be, the greatest scientific discovery ever.”

  “Noted,” she said, making it clear she didn’t really care. Not that she should, in her current state.

  “Are you strong enough to use your psionics?”

  “Tell me what you need.”

  “Use all of them.”

  “Stand back.”

  Vortison retreated away from the chamber and back to his equipment, seeing new data flowing in as Lara activated her psionics one at a time, eventually finishing with a small Jumat blast that blew a hole in the far wall away from any vital equipment.

  “Sorry,” she apologized. “That was bigger than I thought.”

  “No, no…that was just what we needed. You can stop now.”

  “I need my treatment,” she said, her face scrunching up. “I can feel it slipping.”

  “Stand by,” Vortison said, knowing what she meant by slipping. The active state she needed to remain in was satiated briefly by workouts, but if she didn’t at least start walking again soon her cells would begin to damage themselves with the lack of effort, and her psionic tissue didn’t count because those cells hadn’t been altered yet. To the rest of her body they were little more than mundane lumps of tissue that didn’t match the rest.

  “Here we go,” he warned, numbing her body as much as he could, but it was never enough. She had to feel the changes in order for the adaptation to really kick in, and that meant at best he could only partially numb the lightning streaks of pain that were about to shoot through her.

  She flinched when it began, but otherwise there was no visible indicator of anything happening inside her. Lara was so used to this now that she had it all bottled up inside, but as the changes continued her containment slipped and her body was shaking by the time it was finished. When the equipment released her she fell. In the past there had been someone there to catch her, but her bones were so hard from the Mebvat that she couldn’t really hurt herself.

  Lara laid there for a minute or two, then pulled herself up when she was ready. In the past, picking her up had ticked her off even more, and Vortison knew now it was more than ego. She needed to be still for a few moments to collect herself, then she walked with a hand steadying her on various tables and equipment as she went past her clothing pile that the trainer had picked up for her and she laid down straight into the transit tube.

  It auto-sealed over her, then the trainer pushed it out of the lab and back to the training courses where she would start all over again with little more than a crawl as she slowly adapted to the changes and got her strength back over the following days.

  “We have to keep her going,” Vortison said once she was out the door. “We can’t get distracted with this. We need to bring in another team to help.”

  “Get all the Master Medtechs,” Anders suggested. “This is entirely new territory. We don’t have any experts, and we need to make the most of it while it lasts.”

  Vortison nodded. “I think you’re right. Monitor her closely while I send the messages. If this is just a fluke that goes away, I want every bit of data we can get.”

  4

  May 3, 4926

  Astargari System (lizard territory)

  Stellar Orbit

  Six years ago Star Force had resumed their war against the lizards, not counting the perpetual combat in defense of the Wass’mat annex and three other V’kit’no’sat systems that, knowing they were going to be transferred to Star Force eventually and were facing imminent destruction, had requested immediate inclusion. Star Force had sent out expeditions to rescue them, but the main assault against the lizards had begun six years ago in their rimward border that had once belonged to the Skarron Empire.

  The lizards had curiously held to it there while expanding in other directions. Paul figured that was to avoid drawing Star Force’s attention, as well as the V’kit’no’sat, since they were also at war with them and seemingly overlooked when the rogue Human splinter race was discovered. Attracting attention from other side would have been foolish, but it still surprised Paul that they had resisted taking on smaller races rimward during that time.

  What the lizards had been doing was heavily fortifying Skarron territory after they had taken out the huge empire. Full scouting reports had not returned yet, but the incomplete ones indicated there wasn’t a single Skarron, Aronsic, or Jenipar discovered on any world. It was possible that some were still holding out further anti-spinward, but Paul had the sinking feeling that the lizards had completely annihilated their empire down to the last individual…meaning that the Aronsic in Star Force were the only remaining survivors.

  That wasn’t unusual for the lizards. They rarely took on slaves, and total elimination of enemies was commonplace, but the Skarron empire had included 72,912 star systems according to captured navigation systems pre-crusade. How many more they took after that was guesswork, but it was looking more and more like the lizards had methodically conquered all of it and then stopped.

  That stopping was not like them, but Paul was seeing the benefit of it in the layered system defenses they had built up…along with an alarming number of industrial facilities, many of which appeared to be mobile, but now that Star Force was pushing into the interior of Skarron territory like a knife blade on the starmap rather than nibbling around the edges, he was encountering the first shipyard ring thus far.

  Right now Paul was involved in a pitched fight at the jumppoint, thankful he had gone the long way around, for the most direct jumppoint into the system had so many lizard ships stationed there that his fleet would have ran into them upon exit. They had placed themselves as a living minefield, but Paul’s redirect had caught them out of place and the fewer ships located on this jumpline had been unable to prevent a decent foothold from forming.

  But now that they were here, the lizards were swarming to the foothold as Paul’s fleet gradually arrived a few ships at a time…and like before, there were millions of cruisers in the system around the shipyard ring and at least half a million near the other jumppoint, with most of those already enroute if not already here and engaged in the fighting.

  Paul had seen the scouting report on this system, but being here and getting the live sensor data sent a chill up his spine. The power of the lizards had increased greatly, and with their ability to spam production to this level he was beginning to understand why they thought they could take on a severely weakened and distracted V’kit’no’sat empire on its outskirts. Their patience had paid off, and now more than ever Paul was beginning to realize the horrific potential in their enemy and why they had to be destroyed now before they could grow any larger.

  The big question was who was feeding them. The Zak’de’ron or the Chixzon were the two main possibilities, but the galaxy was so large it could have been an unknown third. Whoever it was, they were turning the lizards into a weapon…no, more like a plague they could unleash against their enemies. Paul just wondered how they figured to control them as they grew larger and larger.

  As he kept his growing fleet in a conical formation and fought off the lizards as they tried to backdoor and interpose themselves into the jumplane and kamikaze against the incoming ships, Paul had to kamikaze some of his own drones to keep them away. As it was, he wasn’t going to
be able to hold this jumppoint much longer when the enemy was willing to use themselves as mobile mines, but he had to hold it long enough to get the transport here. After that he could divert the others into arcing deceleration curves around the star, which he was already plotting and ready to transmit once Bahamut arrived.

  That would mean his reinforcements would dry up for more than an hour, but the lizards wouldn’t be able to block the varied jumplines as they splintered off the main line in and his ships utilized their V’kit’no’sat legacy engines that were tuned for just such curved maneuvering at high speeds.

  Most races couldn’t handle that. Their sensors were not precise enough, but the V’kit’no’sat had mastered the art of moving past star systems rather than stopping in them, and using the star’s gravity to slingshot a course redirect. The destination system had to line up properly, so it wasn’t always doable, but maneuvering into long braking maneuvers around the perimeter of a star was easy by comparison given the ‘slower’ speeds involved.

  The lizards weren’t cutting him any brakes, but it looked like he was going to be able to hold out just long enough to get the transport here, though he was losing a lot of drones in the process of blocking the blockers. He knew where in the line of incoming ships the Uriti transport was, and when it came within the window of receiving signals from the system, he began to update the jumpline splinters to the ships behind it, with them then relaying the signals back down the line to the ships behind them.

  And that was all Paul had to do. As soon as the Uriti transport made its braking jump and arrived behind the spherical wall of drones, the other incoming Warship-class jumpships disappeared, leaving Paul a traditional battlefield to operate in so long as he didn’t veer too wide into one of the splinter lines. He knew where they were, the lizards did not, so he was the king of the jumppoint now as the rest of his ships began zipping by and braking far closer to the star, all of which appeared as nothing more than brief streaks of sensor echo that didn’t always make it through the cloud of cruisers surrounding Paul’s position.

  “Wake him up,” Paul told Kacie-2512, who was standing beside him in the Excalibur’s command nexus in a small cupola built specifically for her and her gauntlet that allowed the Wrangler to communicate directly with the Uriti. Paul was too busy to do it himself, as were many other Archons spread throughout the fleet, leaving her responsible for coordinating between Bahamut and Paul for maximum efficiency.

  “Waking,” she said, ordering the transport drone ship to begin cracking open. Bahamut contacted her as soon as he saw the crack opening, for from his point of view nothing had changed during the deceleration, for he couldn’t feel it inside. Kacie was getting tactical directions from Paul at the same time, which she then passed on in the unusual communication that occurred between Wranglers and Uriti, but one that was quite comfortable to her now.

  Go, she said, giving him a heading on which the drones would peel away from and let the 53 mile wide juggernaut move through to engage the enemy directly.

  The yellow-ish Uriti moved out of the opening jaws of the transport as soon as a gap large enough opened up and accelerated forward, pulling on the massive star that filled half the view ahead, and moving at his fastest possible speed, one that had been gradually enhanced with extensive training. It was slow compared to what the drones were capable of moving, but giving the more or less fixed positions of the battling ships the approach rate was clearly becoming ballistic.

  As promised, the drones pulled back and a swarm of lizard cruisers pushed through in the gap, with Bahamut extending his telepathic aura out to maximum and firing his ‘head’ beam into the enemy. The Varot cannon punched through all those it hit, but it was tiny in width compared to what was coming at him. Had they been larger ships the damage would have been much more widespread, but the strength of the lizards in this engagement was their smallness and flexibility in numbers, even as those closest to the Uriti lost operational control and just became ballistic asteroids when their crews were suddenly mind locked.

  As Bahamut pushed through the line of Star Force drones, plowing into many cruisers that couldn’t maneuver out of the way, he tilted his wings up and emitted a one-directional blast forward…with the golden energy wave taking some time to build up, then it moved out in an area of effect attack that swatted away thousands upon thousands of cruisers like they were nothing more than mosquitos.

  “Turtle,” Paul said casually as he had his drones that were guarding the backdoor already repositioning to follow Bahamut through. When they got to the Uriti they began to form defensive wedges around him as he began recharging his primary attack while using his ‘lesser’ weaponry to savage a handful of ships at a time, but that was not going to be enough to deal with the swarm as they attacked both the drones and the Uriti, doing nothing more than scratching his hull with their insignificant weapons.

  But those tiny hits, from millions of ships over the following weeks, could hurt him, and hurt him badly if they didn’t run away to save themselves…which the lizards never did. And the previous 38 assaults Paul and Bahamut had already made to get to this point had seen the Uriti take enough damage that he had to take some time sun bathing and eating ‘monster cubes’ that Star Force had shipped in for the Uriti to eat rather than having them planet dive to try and gather up enough scraps for what they needed.

  The monster cubes were far more efficient, and Bahamut had fully healed his most recent wounds, but the number of lizard cruisers in this system was far beyond anything he had encountered previously, and Paul knew he had to shield the Uriti from some of the damage coming his way. He couldn’t let Bahamut get wore down and potentially killed in future assaults, and he couldn’t let the attack rate of all 74 Uriti deployed for this war be slowed, thus the damage to them had to be mitigated as Star Force drove straight towards the most densely populated lizard worlds…or at least what they suspected were, for their reconnaissance of the lizard empire was woefully incomplete.

  Paul had shield ships flying in close to Bahamut and soaking up some damage while drones were blocking kamikaze runs of bomb ships that had started to pop up in alarming number the past 2 years once the lizards had started to try new ways to get through the aura jamming. The auto-piloted bomb ships didn’t do much more to the Uriti than smudge their hulls, but the energy saturation that they absorbed would eventually build up and make subsequent hits do more damage. Not much more, but the lizards were specifically attacking the same spots on Bahamut, and whenever they could get a kamikaze through at other locations, their ships would immediately target the location and try to chip away a little of the Uriti’s exterior hull/skin.

  Beneath it was also weapon-resistant tissue, but not as good as the exterior. Fighting the Uriti was a numbers game, with attrition being the only way to take them down…and if they could flee to a star whenever they felt like it, killing one became virtually impossible.

  Paul wasn’t going to let it go that far, and Davis was already committing a lot of industry to producing more drones that he had planned for other empire-building activities. He understood how badly they needed to take the lizards out now, along with a lot of other priorities, but this was a problem that would only grow with time, and while they weren’t going to abandon other races in need to their deaths, the top priority in the empire at the moment was this war.

  Or rather, a shared top priority. Taking possession of the V’kit’no’sat Hula Hoop worlds and consolidating what was left of The Nexus were also top priorities, and the Director was definitely capable of multi-tasking, but he knew the loss of drones in this war would be massive, and keeping the Uriti intact was essential. And added to that the fact that the trailblazers intended this to be a ZERO casualty war, and you were going to have to devote a lot of resources to both ship replacement and feeding the Uriti…for they needed a good amount of mass in order to spawn spore colonies.

  And those colonies were being put down in every system taken, after the surface was th
oroughly bombarded, and tasked with hunting down and destroying any lizards remaining. A few ships would be left in orbit along with an Archon trained to interface and give orders to the minions. Fortunately that didn’t require as much experience as a Wrangler had, but it did require Wrangler gauntlets.

  Star Force troops were not being used, except in some very rare circumstances, and the minions were also reproducing to the point where they could defend the planets taken against squatters. For Star Force wasn’t just taking out the lizards, they were laying claim to their territory as well…which was going to be a larger annex than the entirety of The Nexus, part of which was still operating under Sety control.

  It was a huge undertaking, and Paul knew the long term outcomes would be a function of these battles and how much attrition his forces took. The more time that was spent, the more time there was for the lizards to produce more ships and lizards of their own. They needed to move quickly, and the shipyard ring waiting beyond was going to be the first big hit Paul had landed. The others he wasn’t aware of more than from very belated reports relayed via couriers. There were 74 different assault paths and there wasn’t much coordination needed between them yet, but the density of this star system was almost calling for two Uriti to be deployed simultaneously.

  But not yet. Doing so would delay their conquest rate considerably, and Paul thought he could manage this one on his own. Bahamut was one of the best Uriti with regards to fleet coordination, and coupled with the best naval Archon they were a tough combo to beat, though millions of upgraded lizard cruisers was pushing it if they could gathered together at once.