by Jyr, Aer-ki
For the moment they were more or less ignoring the ADZ, but there were skirmishes happening constantly, especially on the lizard border. As they’d shown previously, they were more than capable of multitasking, and even though they were being held back by a wall of Sentinels that was growing with each year, Star Force didn’t have the number of troops necessary to really lock up the ADZ…which was where the Bsidd came into play.
Or hopefully would, for right now they were still in learning mode and small in number, unlike the original Bsidd who were growing quite rapidly now that they’d secured a decent resource base. They hadn’t taken up a part in the ongoing civil war, but were trying to gain as much of a foothold in the power struggle as they could and becoming a bigger and bigger thorn in Star Force’s side given that they felt the only way to return to their previous dominance was to play adversary and pick up allies that held similar anti-Star Force sentiments…with the ‘free’ Bsidd being a huge sticking point with them.
If Larissa had her way, it was going to go from ‘sticking point’ to full-on insanity producing angst, because Star Force, even stretched thin, had far more resources to throw her way than the Bsidd had, and as soon as she got enough second tier maturias up and running here they’d easily be able to out-populate the ‘originals’…after which the real work would begin.
But maturias didn’t work if you didn’t have experienced handlers, and to accommodate the massive numbers to come those handlers had to be mostly Bsidd…not to mention the engineers, soldiers, builders, medtechs, etc. Getting this first batch off on the right foot was key, and to do that Larissa had searched long and hard for as many skilled and experienced individuals from across Star Force to provide the leadership necessary.
Her top tech was actually a Kiritak, a position that normally would have gone to a Human, but the little guy was more than 200 years old and was as big of a gear head as anyone she’d ever met. Right now he was out in the southern construction zone tweaking the controls on the construction mechs to better suit the Bsidd physiology. Adaptations had already been made in the basic designs when they’d been built, but as the crews got some more experience with them problems arose, with Navvi jumping on them as they arose, pun intended, and making adjustments to fully customize them to Bsidd needs while updating the schematics that would be used to create new models in coming years.
Little things like that were crucial and consumed most of Larissa’s days. While the Bsidd spoke English and had been trained in maturias like everyone else, their mentality was different, as it was for all races. The Star Force cultural vibe was there, and allowed them to connect easy enough, but the Bsidd weren’t eager beavers like the Kiritak were. They were hard workers when given a task, but give them free time and they would pretty much stand in place doing nothing.
Larissa hoped that would go away with time and experience, but she also wondered if it didn’t have something to do with the hive mind programming being stripped out of them. There had been no detected problems noted in the files she’d been given and practically memorized by this point, but there was definitely a vain of laziness in them that seemed to come more from not knowing what to do next rather than not caring. In a maturia that wasn’t a big problem because you had tasks given to you nonstop, but curiosity and exploration were two big elements missing in most of the Bsidd, though as always there were exceptions where individuals were involved.
Larissa had been sorting through her Bsidd to find those oddballs and advance them up through the ranks as she threw them into various new situations and waited to see how they’d respond. Experience couldn’t be underrated here, and she was going to goose along their learning curve as much as possible because she needed visible examples for the future Bsidd coming her way to see. Looking at other races was one thing, but when it came from your own it was a much more effective way of communicating than making instructional vids.
And the trailblazer had been making a lot of those. All the Bsidd coming out of the maturias knew who she was, for she’d been lecturing them since birth via the recordings. Like Randy was the patron of the Kiritas and Kiritak, Larissa was becoming the same for the Bsidd. That’s actually how Davis had put it when he’d asked her to take on this never-ending assignment.
A beep from her desk caught her attention and broke her stat-laden haze as she was running recent figures through her head while looking out at the dwindling light of the nearly nighttime cityscape. With a glance she telekinetically pressed a few buttons and brought up a holographic itinerary, showing a number of recent assignments and one that had gone awry. There was a mining operation underway, more of a learning tool but useful in city construction none the less, and one of the digging machines had broke while active and caused a cave-in.
Larissa frowned, wondering if it was a pure accident or a misuse that had caused the incident. Didn’t matter at the moment as she ran for the door, needing to get down to the city substructure as quickly as possible…with only a short detour to the armory to grab her second skin.
When she got down to the tunnels there were hundreds of Bsidd standing around, all made up of two varieties, known to Star Force as gammas and epsilons, or ‘eppies’ for short. The gammas stood twice as tall as a Human and were heavy lifters, though still low mass themselves. The eppies were smaller and looked like bushes given their many appendages. Both were standing around and waiting for orders, with Larissa moving through them with a telepathic ‘out of my way’ warning sent ahead of the trailblazer.
When she got through them she saw others working to remove rubble in the low gravity, given that they were below the city’s IDF field, both with tech assistance and their appendages. She spotted the few non-Bsidd minds nearby and moved to them, twisting and turning to get through the crowd in the packed tunnel.
“What happened?” she asked the lead miner, who was sitting on the side of a mining walker with a bloody right arm.
“I think one of the drills missed and hit the shield generator.”
“That holds the rim rock?” Larissa asked, knowing that the tunnel she’d just come through had been braced and walled off, with the area just ahead of her being pure rock with a shield that held it in check to keep any chunks from falling down. Had they been digging through sheer rock that wouldn’t have been such a risk, but what they were moving through now was a mix of rock, gravel, and empty pockets of air that would shift and fall when breached…hence the need for the containment shield overhead.
That said, there were a number of shield generators in use for varying applications of the mining process, with the rim rock being the trailblazer’s best bet as to what could have caused the debris field she was seeing around her.
“Yeah,” the miner said. “Took it out with one hit then boom. I got hit by a small piece, but there are people trapped under the rubble.”
Larissa turned and looked at the mountain of dusty rocks and peered inside it, seeing several crumpled Bsidd underneath the rocks but detecting a few active minds…meaning there were still some alive.
“I count six still alive.”
“My fault,” the miner said. “They’re too green. I should have handled point myself.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said, touching his good shoulder with her armored hand. “But we can’t hold their hands forever. And if they can’t miss a big fat pylon then that’s hardly your fault.”
“I don’t know…but this shouldn’t have happened.”
“Sort it out later. Move rock now,” she said, leaving him behind and shoving her way through the Bsidd working to move the chunks away to a shield conveyor that was taking them off overhead down the wide tunnel. The Archon hopped up on top of one of the walkers and replaced the Bsidd at the controls, using an auxiliary panel with Human-style controls to reposition it to the side and start pulling out chunks near to where she felt the closest minds, playing a giant tetris game and trying to keep from creating a second collapse.
The shield generators were back up
, but the material within the tunnel could still shift and fall on those buried underneath. Larissa worked as much as she could with the walker then pulled it back and got off, going into the rocks and activating the powered function of her armor and digging her way down to one of the trapped eppies. She wedged herself into a gap, kicking a small boulder out of the way near her right knee, and making herself a living arch to create an escape route.
“Crawl,” she ordered, with the tiny Bsidd, scared out of its mind, rushing into the light and getting free.
It took Larissa a moment to extract herself without getting pinned, then she went to work directing another walker in pulling a few large sections off another area. There they recovered a very mangled corpse of a gamma along with another that had three appendages smashed and pinned underneath the rock. They got those chunks removed and rushed it off, leaving Larissa and the other green miners to pull out the rest.
After they finished more than an hour later Larissa pulled the vid records from the walkers and saw what had happened, taking the visuals over to the miner in a nearby med bay as he was getting his broken arm attended to.
“Not your fault,” she said, showing him the recording. The mining walker was drilling into a wall segment near the shield pylon, then for no apparent reason the machine veered left and dove straight into it, tearing it apart and releasing the loose material above.
“I don’t understand why it did that,” the miner said, with the guilt weighing heavily on him, for these Bsidd were under his guidance and care.
“Look closer,” she said, tapping a small section of screen that showed a cockpit view. As it replayed again they both saw the Bsidd twitch suddenly, knocking several controls askew.
“What am I seeing?”
“Something rare in the Bsidd, the equivalent of a seizure.”
“What caused it?”
“Allergies. We’ve identified 2 compounds to date that have about a .03% chance of causing a reaction. We we’ve kept both out of this colony. I’m guessing we may have stumbled on a third. Sucks that we had to find it this way, but there was no way of knowing ahead of time. Just the bad luck monkey punching us hard in the head.”
“What compound?”
Larissa shook her head. “Don’t know yet, but finding it is top on my to-do list. We’ll put a hold on all mining activity until we find it.”
“Poor guy,” the miner said. “He probably feels terrible right now.”
“I’m on my way there now. I’ll explain it to him.”
“Thank you. It’ll be better coming from you, but he’s still gonna hate himself.”
“Heal fast. I’m going to need you as soon as I get this figured out.”
“I’ll be good to go tomorrow.”
Larissa nodded and left, leaving the medtechs to continue wrapping his arm up in healing bandages that stoked his cellular regeneration. The bone wouldn’t fully heal in a day, but the head miner didn’t need his arm to give commands and direct the others. While he preferred to do the delicate work himself, he’d hold back until his arm fully healed but wouldn’t take time off. The Bsidd had so much to learn that he couldn’t go awol. They desperately needed him to get back to work as soon as the trailblazer got this allergy figured out. Sitting around and waiting was contagious for the Bsidd, and with them being so young they didn’t need any bad examples to follow.
8
November 2, 2589
Hatten System (Occupied Scionate Territory)
Orril
Paul’s command ship braked into orbit above the mixed fleet of Lacvamat, Gnar, Nammet, and Hesquid that held possession over the planet with colonies of their own growing on its surface. The nearby planet of Rewqt held a similar grouping of Lacvamat-allied races with the Temassi and Brofat added to the mix of squatters claiming bits of the world as their own. There were also others picking over pieces of the system that the Scionate had not inhabited like a pack of rats scurrying over an uncovered plate of food, trying to get their hands on Star Force-free territory while it was up for grabs.
The same was happening elsewhere, in both Scionate and Lacvamat territory, with the bold enough races circumventing Star Force’s edicts and waging a war of conquest that was occurring simultaneously with a colonization boom. Those colonies had also become priority targets in the ever escalating civil war, with many of the planets under assault never having been inhabited by either the Scionate or the Lacvamat, but being technically under their possession.
Today that was going to change.
As the fully functional Excalibur dropped into mid orbit a slew of Protovic warships with their telltale X-shaped silhouettes came in its wake, followed by an equally large group of Hycre, including a pair of their rare battleships, that were escorting an even larger number of Calavari transports. The combined fleet pushed their way down into low orbit with the transports beginning to enter the atmosphere as a previously recorded message was sent out to the entire system, instructing the various races’ warships that they had exactly 3 hours to either leave the system or enter low stellar orbit to await a jumpship. Refusal to do so would mean the forcible confiscation of their ships.
A similar edict was sent to the surface colonies, instructing them that they were to being packing up and leaving and that the Calavari were coming down to help them do it, starting on Orril and then moving on to every other bit of infrastructure in the system. With the Calavari transports coming down into the atmosphere over several races’ colonies there was a hesitation in response and even the raising of some defenses until the Hycre ships began descending into the atmosphere along with them and pumping a few warning shots into the erected defense shields.
It took some considerable intimation on the part of the Big 3 but eventually the colonies on Orril reluctantly surrendered, seeing that they had no alternative. The ‘too busy to intervene’ status quo was apparently over, and though there wasn’t a huge amount of warships and transports arrayed against them, the tech and experience advantage was far more than the combined Lacvamat-allied force could hold out against if it actually came to a fight…plus the repercussions down the road if they dared to face off with the big boys were too chilling to chance.
The slew of whining chatter and diplomatic outrage that followed was not disappointing, but it didn’t matter in the least. The Hycre, Protovic, and Star Force were unified in their course of action and were sending a firm signal to the rest of those involved in the stupid war that it was time to either run or get the hammer dropped on your head.
But they weren’t going to get off easy for complying with the order to evacuate. Now that there were some available ships and troops that weren’t devoted to defending the fronts it was time to start dealing with inhouse affairs and clean up the ADZ. The Hatten System was the first of what would eventually be many systems reclaimed from the squatters, but it would not be returned to the Scionate. Rather Star Force was going to take possession of the formerly ‘independent’ system and create a slew of new Alliance Worlds with the regions going to races that had not been involved in the civil war.
That process would take years, with the Big 3 not getting to the second system on their list for another 4. Meanwhile the civil war continued at an increasing pace, not to colonize, which they’d more or less given up on, but to strike at their rivals and kill as many of them as they could. Some races sought to hold onto what they’d taken, even announcing they were finished fighting and only taking on defensive roles, but it didn’t matter to the Big 3. Slowly, system by system they reclaimed the worlds that had been taken from both the Scionate and Lacvamat.
But Star Force didn’t stop there. For the races that had thrown in and aided both sides there were stiff penalties, each tailored to the actions of the individual races, many of which involved losing regions on Alliance Worlds. Star Force took possession of their colonies, allowing all who wished to evacuate to do so, with those populations that stayed behind becoming Star Force wards and adding even more varied race
s to their growing empire. As they’d done numerous times before, most notably on Earth, they restructured the acquired colonies according to Star Force protocol, both in terms of infrastructure and society.
When it eventually came time to deal with the Scionate the Big 3 brought an overwhelming warfleet into their territory and forced them to abandon all but three systems, each of which would contain at least 1 Star Force or Alliance World, with them retaining their freedom but not without being watched. The Scionate did not relent easily and called the bluff, forcing a short lived conflict that involved the easy disabling of their defensive fleet. For the resistance they put up and the few Scionate lives that were lost in the brief fight, one of the three systems was forfeited, reducing Scionate territory down to only 2.
Like the other races the denizens had a choice…evacuate to the Scionate worlds or stay and live under Star Force rule. With their pride running high most of the Scionate eventually chose to leave, despite the overcrowding that was going to occur on their remaining worlds. That said, a few of the dissentious bloodlines made a separate pact with Star Force, evacuating all of their holdings and moving to what would be the new Star Force Scionate worlds.
The only reason the other Scionate were allowed to retain their independence was because they had been the defenders in the conflict. For the Lacvamat the penalties were much harsher and also enforced by Star Force, the Protovic, and the Hycre.
They lost all of their worlds and their independence. It was a stretch for Star Force to assimilate them all, but the Protovic helped out with transitional personnel and resources and the Hycre provided naval oversight at all times to ensure there were no further dissentions after the short war they had to fight to subdue the Lacvamat capitol. Both the Hycre and Protovic knew how far Star Force was attempting to stretch to digest the populations they were taking responsibility for, and they both helped cover up that fact and assist where they could to prevent dissentions should people realize how tenuous Star Force’s hold was.