by Aer-ki Jyr
“Move the ship overhead and extend shields down. They’re getting friendly fire. Deny their snipers shots,” he ordered the dropship he had come in on.
It rose up smoothly and silently, blocking out the sun for a moment before parking over top of the melee and extending shields down all the way to the ground around the perimeter. They didn’t stop anyone from moving through, but they did stop the lachar shots.
Beny spent the next 20 minutes fighting and accumulating a large pile of bodies so high that outsiders couldn’t see what was happening inside. Eventually reinforcements stopped coming in and he got a moment of peace as he surveyed the damage.
“Get me a regenerator out here. Some of them are dead and I really need them up and walking again.”
He didn’t wait for the others to come out, instead jumping up and over the pile of unconscious bodies haphazardly stacked 3 meters high, then walked out in front of the others still behind the barricades, but they were no longer shooting since their rifle shots weren’t penetrating the shield perimeter. Apparently shooting the ship had lost its appeal when a little enemy was out of the ship and on the ground…and they couldn’t shoot him, so they were finally just standing and watching.
“You shot your own people,” he declared angrily. “We’re going to save as many as we can, but if they took a head shot then there’s not much we can do. We are here to help, that’s why I didn’t kill any of them. You are in danger, and we are here to help you. Those that came before, they are not us. I know who they are. They don’t care about your lives, but they stole those 14 people so the Hadarak can’t wipe you all out. They left the rest of you to die here, but we’re not. We’re here to get you all out, if we can, but we can’t do that if you keep shooting us.”
He reached a hand up and pointed to the sky, producing as large a hologram as he could from his armor, and showed them an image of a Hadarak 4 meters wide over top of his head but still beneath the hovering dropship. Then the dropship doubled up his transmission and made an even larger one above it, 10 times as big as the dropship itself was.
“This is a Hadarak. They are the size of planets. A small one is nearing you. It is attacking all planets and it will get here sooner or later. We can’t stop it, so we came here to evacuate your people before it gets here. Our weapons can barely hurt it, and there are many Hadarak out there attacking planets. Our fleet is spread out delaying them while our other ships evacuate people to safe zones. We are here to save you,” he said, well timed, as one of the visible dead Vicon stirred and came back to life thanks to a regenerator under the care of a Protovic Commando.
“If we came here to fight you, you could not defend yourself against us. But we didn’t come here to fight. We came here to save you. And if you stand no chance against us, you have absolutely no hope against the Hadarak. If you remain here you will die. We cannot protect this planet from the Hadarak, but we can move you off it. I have three massive ships in orbit ready to take the first of you to a different planet, and many more ships are coming here soon. We will keep moving people as fast as we can until you are all moved out of danger, or until the Hadarak arrives and kills you all. We don’t have much time, so please listen to me and stop wasting it. We are here to help. Please send someone to talk to me.”
“Go away!” one of them shouted, then the others joined in and repeated the sentiment in a chant. “Go away! Go away! Go away!”
“Oh please,” Beny whispered to himself. “You can’t be that stupid.”
Then he remembered reports from other Archons when they had to deal with new races and he sighed.
“Alright, you can be that stupid,” he said, turning around and motioning to the Commandos attending to the wounded. “Pick a dozen of them and take them up to orbit. Give them a tour. Show them the Hadarak records, the whole deal. Then get them back down here inside 3 hours. I’ll wait here.”
“On it,” one of the Protovic Commandos said as they began picking up unconscious bodies and one of the recently revived…which had to be restunned as he resisted…and took them back to the dropships…which prompted the Vicon to start firing on them again.
The one overhead stayed put, as did two others, with only one dropship eventually racing back into the sky at such a fast pace it made a short-lived tornado as the air vortexed in its wake, tossing around a dozen or so of the troops on the western side of the courtyard.
“Line them up, face up, into rows. Make them comfortable, but keep them unconscious for another half hour. Then we’ll wake them up and let them go,” he said, sitting down on the grass cross-legged as the dropship’s shields around him were continually lit up with weaponsfire, including several more missiles that, if they got through, would have killed the Vicon inside as well.
“How uncivilized,” the Archon said, sitting in his meditative pose in stark defiance for the attacks happening. He felt the Vicon feel the insult, so he was happy to patiently sit and defy them as they continued with their impudent attacks. Within a few minutes he got a report from the Commandos that all the Vicon had been recoverable…no head shots…and he was glad for that. Not only for their stupid asses, but because a death here would hurt his chances of getting through to them. He needed to be seen as powerful, unbeatable, but not a threat, and even if they shot one of their own, that would still be a person dying because he was here, and he didn’t think the Vicon would have the wisdom to notice that distinction.
“I really hate the Viks,” he said to himself. “Those blunt snouted, reckless, egotistical morons. Couldn’t you have just taken them during the night when no one would see you? You just had to come down in full daylight and make a show of it. Bunch of bungling idiots.”
9
April 20, 128484
Vianfra System (Hadarak Zone)
Muon Ti Vicora
It had been almost two months, and while the Vicon were now talking, Beny had only convinced a few thousand to board the Star Force ships waiting in orbit to haul millions away from the doomed planet. The two planets held a combined population of more than 12 billion Vicon, and it was going to take many round trips to get everyone off, but they simply did not want to go.
That said, Beny had already sent two transports back of non-Vicon that he’d been secretly scooping up from the planet. Namely the larger native animals too primitive to speak and whom were roaming the wilds of both planets. They would be going to sanctuaries back in the Rim, but he had held off taking the domesticated ones yet because that would kill what little trust he’d been able to build up with the Vicon so far if he started taking their ‘property’ from them.
But when a Star Force courier arrived with word that the Hadarak they’d been monitoring had just jumped towards this system and would arrive in an estimated 46 days, there was no more time to play nice. In two months from now, maybe three, everyone on the two planets would be dead or soon to die, and now he had to grab up the Vicon against their will, because there was no way to show them what they didn’t already know. Those that he had taken up as witnesses and showed them what was coming had been convinced enough to tell the others, and that had garnered some willing evacuees, but unless they saw the Hadarak for themselves the majority were not going to believe…and by that time any chance of saving 12 billion Vicon and billions more natives would be gone. Even now there was no way to get them all out, but Beny wasn’t going to waste another minute on trying to get them to voluntarily leave.
“That’s it people,” he announced to his bridge crew when he finished reviewing the message and corresponding data packet. “Time to scoop and dump. All hands on deck. We don’t have a minute to waste. Launch as soon as you get to the hangar bays,” he said as he too headed for a dropship that would join the flocks of others heading down to the planet from the transports along with escort aerial craft that immediately began to down the Vicon defenders.
They couldn’t endanger the dropships when they began to load and unload, so the Vicon military had to be neutralized first, and hun
dreds of skeets began hunting down and disabling the opposing aircraft with a combination of stun blasts and mooring beams, allowing them to essentially catch them in the air then drag them off to a landing zone where the pilots would be yanked out and tossed onto the dropships.
Beny specifically ordered the aircraft preserved, because when the Hadarak arrived he didn’t want to deny the Vicon the ability to fight back, ineffective as it would be, though they’d have to use replacement pilots, for these being captured were taken up to the transports in orbit as soon as each dropship was filled.
The same went for the tanks, jeeps, and other varied wheeled land craft that had to be disabled, though thankfully the Vicon didn’t have any armor or shielding capable of stopping stun blasts, so if you loaded up enough hits to even a tank, it would soak through and get to the crews, clearing the way for the Star Force gunships to fly over populated areas and douse the largest crowds with area of effect stun weaponry.
The reptilians went down by the hundreds, falling on the ground or within the buildings they quickly fled to, then an army of Bsidd collectors escorted by Protovic troops went around picking them up and the additional ones the Protovic stunned, clearing cities section by section and loading up the bodies onto the bee hive of dropship activity that had thousands of the smaller craft constantly flying up to orbit and back down again to wherever the collectors needed them to go. There was no point in establishing landing zones, so the dropship pilots put them down wherever they could find an opening, whether it be a courtyard, street, rooftop, or in some cases just hovering over rocks or trees and lowering their ramps down near enough to the ground for the Bsidd to climb in on.
Beny started off going after the military personally, but they didn’t last long and he was left to either help hunt down the Vicon or go after the primitive races. After so much refusal by the Vicon in recent weeks, he chose the latter and personally started collecting the domesticated ‘animals’ and loading them up on dropships that would take them to transports configured for their containment, and some of the critters were downright huge. They had elephant-like hexpeds that stood 4 stories tall and were used to carry heavy cargo or even some houses on their backs.
Beny freed them of their cargo then carefully stunned them in a way that didn’t have them falling on and crushing other people, including the wolf-like pets the Vicon favored. Those were much easier to round up, except that they could run very fast and gave the Archon some target practice, but he could carry three or four at once back to a dropship, and making those hunting runs occupied most of his time in the coming days.
He didn’t sleep much, barely two hours a day as he spent most of his time saving people that didn’t want to be saved, and kicking himself for not doing this earlier. Why the Hadarak was coming straight here he didn’t know, and he’d gambled on having more time to get the Vicon to come voluntarily, but now his mistake was weighing on him. A lot of people were going to die because they refused to come when offered, and he knew now that he would never make that mistake again. Caring about people’s feelings didn’t matter when their lives were in jeopardy, and he knew that, he just thought he’d have more time than this to work through it.
His mistake was going to mean billions of deaths, but it was also the Vicon’s mistake. Beny had offered and they had refused, and even now over the airwaves the Vicon were chewing out Star Force in elicit fashion for what they were doing, not understanding that this was a mercy mission. Beny could just take the animals, or he could leave and go to another system that would voluntarily leave, but he wouldn’t. He’d messed this up and he wasn’t just going to wash his hands of it. He was going to save as many as he could, and damn his bad judgement.
No one scolded him within Star Force, and he wasn’t sure if they were even thinking that or not, but it didn’t matter. He was the Archon and it was his job to lead, and he’d put too much emphasis on volunteers. Now he had to scramble to save as many as possible, and he wasn’t going to leave hundreds more to die because he took an extra hour of sleep.
But he had to get some, for he wasn’t strong enough even with his Inas psionic, but he was skating along on as little as he could and sucking down as much ambrosia as he dared. He knew he’d regret it later, but he had to get as many as he could, especially the primitives who had no choice in the matter one way or another. Their ‘caretakers’… using a very loose version of that term…had stupidly refused to leave, and while he didn’t want anyone to die, those who had refused got pushed to the end of the line…though at the moment he was basically stunning anything that moved near him, for he couldn’t waste travel time going place to place and being picky.
The Bsidd were marvelous, moving about in long lines like ants and carrying far more people and critters than he could have, for they were able to load up multiple mandibles like shelves and walk dozens of the smaller ones back to the dropships while also working together to carry the huge elephant-like animals on their backs. It didn’t look like they could with their toothpick limbs, but they were far stronger than they appeared and groups of them were moving across the ground with the stunned and unconscious captives floating above the carpet of Bsidd that shuffled slowly beneath them. They carried them for miles in some cases to get to the super-sized dropships that were actually small transports that were landing capable.
Those small transports could leave the system on their own, but they were being used to carry up large amounts of people to orbit, or smaller numbers of the larger critters. No food or equipment was being taken. No personal belongings. No heirlooms. Nothing but stunned bodies being stacked up uncomfortably five or ten high with the artificial gravity being lessened so they didn’t crush the lowest ones in the stacks under their weight.
And they had to do it, otherwise the travel time up and down from orbit would mean more people got left behind, though nobody realized what was going on until the Hadarak finally showed up.
By that time Beny and many others were operating as zombies. They desperately needed a full night’s sleep, but they weren’t going to stop grabbing people, for after 45 days of round the clock evacuations, only 1.2 billion Vicon and 2.3 billion critters of varying sizes had been recovered. The full transports had already left and more had arrived when the emergency order had gone out. Thankfully Beny didn’t have to send it, for the scouts that were monitoring the Hadarak did before they sent the courier to inform him.
That meant he had both Kiritak and Calavari transports showing up from nearby assignments with their own limited collection crews, but Beny’s Bsidd were successfully capturing people faster than they could load them, so the newly arrived transports were depositing more dropships on the ground and they were being filled as soon as they touched down.
As per his orders, which he didn’t even bother to check on given how busy he was, his fleet monitored the tier 2 Hadarak as it entered the system and broadcast it to the two Vicon planets using their own form of primitive communications technology, and they continued to do it constantly so they could see what was coming.
When that happened, some Vicon started showing up voluntarily at the dropships…but the Bsidd stunned them anyway so they could stack them like cargo. You couldn’t do that with conscious people, for they’d panic and squirm and take up a lot more space and waste time dealing with them. But the Vicon didn’t seem to care, for they kept coming in steady streams up until the local government finally confirmed with their own satellites what Star force was showing them.
And that showed a massive, planet-sized object approaching and spewing forth clouds of smaller objects that Star Force was attacking and failing to stop. They were killing a lot of the smaller objects, but there were so many all they could do was hit and run around the star, and do the same now when the Hadarak first appeared in high orbit over the inner planet where Beny was.
When it finally arrived the Archon got an alert ping, and he took a rare brake and looked up into the sky where his battlemap tracker indicated it was
. He didn’t even need magnification to see it, for the baseball-sized blot in the sky was unmissable…and soon thereafter was when the Vicon started flooding towards the dropships begging to be taken away.
Beny had to time this right, for he wasn’t going to get any of his people killed by staying too long. He calculated approach speed and the best guess at a landing spot on the planet, for the Hadarak was behaving like it was going to smash down rather than linger in orbit.
“27 minutes,” he said to himself, setting a countdown timer for the entire planetary evacuation that went out to everyone’s helmet HUDs and began to tick down in unison. Then he ran off towards the nearest pet store he could find and busted inside the locked doors to find an abandoned facility with all the pets still locked in their cages or tanks.
He called for a dropship to land directly outside as he began going around and stunning all of them save for the ones in fish tanks. The dropships had special containers for those and the water had to come with them, for the dropships weren’t wasting space by bringing their own. Within three minutes an army of Bsidd arrived and began collecting the stunned pets, including several carrying the collapsible containers that they then began pouring the aquatics critters into, making sure not to mix the various kinds that might eat each other during transit.
By the time the store was clear there was only 11 minutes left and the dropship was only a third full, so Beny went back outside with the Bsidd and started rounding up anyone nearby, but a tendril of the panicked crowds made its way to the newly landed dropship and Beny didn’t need to go looking for more. He stunned them on approach and the Bsidd loaded them while the Archon kept the crowd from forcing their way onboard in a panic.