by Aer-ki Jyr
But Kara needed every bit of engine power she could get, for there was no way of knowing what she was going to find in the Deep Core or how far she’d be able to get. The Banwion didn’t have to alter the designs they had on file much, though they did have to add an Archon Sanctum, because there was no way she was going on a multi-decade mission without the ability to properly train. As for the crew, they wouldn’t take up much room, because they’d be all Irondel and would barely stand higher than her ankle. They’d help her maintain the ship and particularly the bioharvest facility inside, leaving her free to train and explore, but most importantly troubleshoot their way through Hadarak territory and keep them alive while gaining what would hopefully be badly needed intel on what the enemy had waiting to spring on them next.
Losing Riona had been a gut shot to her as well as all the other Archons, which was why Kara was willing to take the risk. Lack of information had gotten Riona killed, and if they didn’t figure out what the Hadarak had waiting for them more would probably die that otherwise shouldn’t. Paul almost had, and she was very glad Roger had been there to pull him out, but while they continued to hound Keychain and figure out what additional powers it had, Kara needed to figure out if they had more Lurkers waiting in the Deep Core…or perhaps something even worse.
At the minimum they needed a crude map of what was in there, so Kara was going to have to go on a long, quiet journey sneaking around where others had not gotten before. She’d have to be patient. Very patient. Not even the V’kit’no’sat or the Zak’de’ron had gone where she was planning to go, and when push came to shove she was going to have to outrun these bastards, so every bit of speed could end up being vital given that she didn’t know what she was going to come across in there.
But even as fast as the Banwion worked, it was too slow for Kara. They’d fast tracked this build for her, but that still left her waiting for months. They were about 3 weeks away from completion, then they’d have to do a few trial runs around the system to make sure everything was set up properly before loading up all the necessary equipment, plants, and crew, at which point she’d sneak off and try to find an entry point the Hadarak weren’t expecting.
Her ship had no cloaking device, because the Hadarak could feel gravity silhouettes that the cloaking devices could not mask, so she’d decided a touch more speed was preferable to carrying around the equipment that would only work on minions. And when her mission was to collect data, she needed to be pulling active scans, and that was something you couldn’t do with a cloak running.
Kara was flying a couple miles high, seeing the city-like construction slip surrounding the soon to be chrome needle that would be her ship. She hadn’t named it yet, and felt like not doing so. If she was supposed to get through this mission she needed to not exist, so how could you name something that wasn’t supposed to be there?
She had plenty of sneaking experience with Clan Ghostblade, but this was going to be different. The ability to accurately sense gravity was a technology beyond Star Force, so the normal means of hiding wouldn’t suffice. However, get close to a natural body of gravity and she should blend in from range. A cloaking device would help then, but she couldn’t afford the extra tonnage. Her ship had the beefy shields necessary to protect her during jumps, but no weapons had been included other than a few pea shooters. She hadn’t even wanted them initially, but if something got stuck on the hull or that goo weapon came close, she needed minimal weapon capability.
That said, she knew that the biggest weapon her ship had was her own powers, both psionic and Essence, though if they did get into a fight they were probably going to end up dead anyway. Not engaging the enemy was the key to survival, and she expected to be flying through systems so fast that nobody could catch her, picking up what data she could on the flyby. Her preference was to go slow around the edge of systems, but that was unlikely to happen all the time and once she was spotted she guessed they would signal others to look out for her, and if she could stay ahead of that news she would have to be running fast and hard the whole way.
But what was going to happen was up in the air. She’d have to figure it out as she went, which was why she and not some lower ranking Archon or Admiral had been pegged for this mission. Wisdom and experience were her best weapons, and soon she’d have a ship that would allow her to use them effectively…she hoped.
Kara turned and headed towards her ship, but at an angle up so that she slowly rose above it and crossed over the top as hundreds of thousands of Banwion were carrying tiny bits of hull plates over to the ship and assembling them on site with molecular aligners that allowed them to take tiny bits of material and create one seamless hull out of it. Normally you’d bring in bigger sections to attach then bond the seams, but the Banwion preferred the incremental approach and had enough workers available to make good time at it, though the Kiritak would have been finished by now if she’d brought the project to them.
The trouble was, the Kiritak were already maxed out with war production and the resettlement of refugees. That resettlement meant thousands of new planets needed to be colonized, with the cities fabricated before the people arrived. The Kiritak were working nonstop to accomplish that along with the Bsidd and many others, including the Paladin, though they were mostly engaged along the edge of the Hadarak Zone and spamming temporary colonies there to deal with the logistical nightmare this war was creating.
Kara wasn’t going to pull any of them off construction, so the Banwion were the best choice, for few others had the industrial capability to put together a ship like this in short order. However, the Banwion weren’t sitting idle, and off across the horizon the Archon could see many other grounded ships under construction, many of which were warships that were not meant for the Banwion, but for others elsewhere. The Banwion fleet, per faction status requirements, was large and very capable of defending their own worlds, but this race didn’t have the temperament to be warriors. They did well enough as defenders, but not many Banwion had proved themselves worthy for normal fleet status.
They didn’t have a mindset for combat, for they were geared for production and building came naturally to them. This was a form of challenge craving that fit well into Star Force, but made them about the last on the list of fleets to call for offensive duties.
So the Banwion would build ships for others when their own fleets got to capacity. They did not expand them, rather replacing ships with upgrades as they came along and recycling the existing ships into new raw materials. Everything here was shiny and new, and had an elitist feel to it that stood in stark contrast to the many dark and dirty worlds in the galaxy. This was civilization at its finest, and the Banwion took great pride in their craftsmanship, which was why many individual customers came here to get custom work done for them, though all those orders had been put on hold when the war began.
The Rim didn’t like that, for the war wasn’t here and wouldn’t be for a long time, but the Banwion knew that every ship would matter, especially in combat with the Hadarak minions. They saw it as a race of production, Star Force versus Hadarak, with those who built or ‘grew’ ships faster winning out, and with that mindset firmly in place the Banwion had ignored the rest of the galaxy and focused entirely on war production. It had killed their local economy, but in Star Force the economy was for luxury items only and all natural resource production was done in house so it would never be in jeopardy of being tied to credits.
However, them closing up their public access shop had a negative effect on their previous customers, who had to go elsewhere for their orders. Some smaller subfactions and corporations still supplied large vessels, but the waiting lines were incredibly long now due to the demand and lack of suppliers. Star Force wasn’t going to let people die in the Core when more ships could move them out of harm’s way, but those races and individuals here that relied on Star Force for their day to day needs beyond the empire’s borders were getting hit pretty hard.
Self-sufficiency on an empire
scale was critical, and too many lazy civilizations had come to rely on the Star Force markets despite warnings to the contrary. So right now the Rim was having a sorting out of who was who, with the more respectable client races being well set and the others having to scrimp and save what resources they had as the Hadarak war was sucking just about everything else away from the public markets.
Just about everything…for Star Force wasn’t ignoring the people on the Rim, many of which needed rescued just as those in the Core did. Star Force didn’t control the entire rim, and while the expansions had been scaled back considerably, they had not been ended. There were still some Star Force fleets fighting in the Rim to spread civilization, and Kara knew Ginsi was out there rather than fighting the Hadarak, and she envied her that. Naval combat was the way of the Hadarak war, and those Archons who had focused on the Commando pathway had little use for those skills in the Core.
It was a war on a massive scale, but elsewhere in the galaxy you saw the more personal wars that came down to one person versus another, and that’s where Ginsi and some others were the most effective. They wanted to fight the Hadarak, but until there was a way to do so other than naval combat or short term surface missions that could be erased in a matter of seconds by a drone’s weaponry, the Commando specialists knew their skills were best used elsewhere.
And the same was now true of Kara, for her skills were needed for exploration rather than combat. Right now, though, she was on a break from training for the next 6 hours and just wanted to get some leisurely flying in as she snooped around her nearly complete ship. She’d been inside many times before, but today she just wanted to feel the atmosphere on her skin, force once she went inside with the crew they’d be stuck there for years unless there was some opportunity for a planet visit in the Deep Core, which she highly doubted. And even if there was, running and continuing to run was best way to stay safe, so Kara figured once she took possession of the ship it would become her second fortress of solitude and she wanted to soak in as much planet-side mojo as she could before that happened.
After she crossed over the ship to the north side, Kara flew down lower again then picked up speed and headed for the strip of greenery running through the cityscape like a river…and at the bottom of it was an actual river, with several miles of trees on either side. She zipped down to the half mile wide shimmering water, then skimmed the surface until the elevation changed and the calm water turned into rapids and waterfalls.
She stopped just short of the edge of one of the larger waterfalls, seeing a group of Banwion at the bottom sunning themselves on rocks along with a large number of visitors from non-flying races. Kara went right to the edge of the falls and landed on an outcropping with the water rushing by it a few inches lower on either side.
She touched down on the misty rock in her bare feet, then sat down on the edge and dangled her legs over, kicking her feet back and forth as the spray from below wafted up and cooled her down from the intense sunlight above, for this system was a binary and had twice as much light as others.
Kara ignored the people pointing up at her from below, and they were too far down and too small to make out what they were saying, giving her a ‘public yet private’ spot on the waterfall with the cascading waters making so much noise she could have yelled and nobody would have heard her.
“Yeah, I’m going to miss this,” she said to herself, dipping a hand to the right and diverting a bit of water up onto the rock…then into the air where it pooled into a ball hovering over her lap. She played with the water telekinetically, then shot the ball out forward until her Lachka let go of it, then it deformed and fell as heavy rain to the reforming river below.
And that’s exactly how the galaxy worked. With the proper influence you could shape it into something beautiful, but let go and it would quickly fall apart into anarchy. Though in some ways anarchy was even preferable to eradication. The thought of every planet being conquered and cleansed of all life except the Hadarak minions that would replace it seemed impossible, but that’s what was happening in the Core and slowly creeping its way outward. It wouldn’t get here forever, but one day forever would come and this world would also burn under their attack. All these people here would die and minions would replace them…and then what?
Would the Hadarak leave them in place, or pull back once again? She didn’t know, but at that point she didn’t care. The galaxy had to be saved, even the bad parts of it, for what was coming was, in some ways, even worse. It wasn’t to the people suffering and dying out there in their own little hell holes, which was why Star Force wasn’t ignoring them and only focusing on the Hadarak, but most of those place were low level threats that some of the strong individuals could deal with on their own…but the Hadarak were so massive it seemed unsporting. As if there was no pathway to victory, even under the most unlikely of circumstances.
Star Force, the V’kit’no’sat, and the Zak’de’ron were the only known empires strong enough to even fight back, and without them the galaxy was doomed. Kara didn’t see the point of it all. If the Hadarak wanted everything gone and replaced with minions, why wait until now? Something didn’t add up, and her mission was going to be to gather more data so that hopefully Star Force could figure out what they were up to, though Kara wasn’t too confident about that outcome.
Right now they were grasping in the dark, and even a tiny nightlight would make a big difference finding their way forward.
Kara took in a deep, moist breath and let it out slowly as the heavy sound of the waterfall filled her senses. She was going to miss the natural world, but if living in an elaborate tin can for years on end was the way to shed some light on this menace, then so be it. But as long as she had to wait to get going, this wasn’t a bad spot to do it in.
Kara laid back on the rock and let her hair soak up the water as she looked up at the sky that was too pink to see the stars beyond, almost as if they didn’t exist. She let that sink in for a moment, almost wishing the Hadarak away, then she realized that most people in the galaxy didn’t know the Hadarak even existed, and they wouldn’t until they showed up in their sky on the day they would die.
“Kara, you dumb bitch. This is why you became an Archon. Duty calls and Riona needs avenged. And more than just killing Keychain. You’ve gotta figure out how to end the Hadarak before they show up in this sky and a billion others.”
4
November 19, 128533
Castle One System (V’kit’no’sat territory)
Stellar Orbit
Nom’ron stood onboard the Ironman-class MCV looking out the observation deck at the other identical ships pouring into the uninhabited system…well, soon to be uninhabited anyway, for the natives living on the 8th planet were not totally evacuated yet. Their removal had not been preplanned, for their proximity to the Hadarak Zone was minimal at some 329 lightyears away from the edge of the V’kit’no’sat border.
They were still in jeopardy, but there were a lot more people closer that had priority for evacuation, including V’kit’no’sat worlds, yet this one had been reprioritized for immediate evacuation by Roger-009. Simultaneously the trailblazer had commissioned this massive construction project that Nom’ron and an army of builders were about to begin work on. He’d been given the immense honor of project lead, but this was not to be a Calavari-only project. Too many tasks had to be accomplished elsewhere, so units from the Calavari, Humans, Kiritak, Bsidd, Paladin, Protovic, and 18 other factions had been assembled and given to him to command.
This was by far the largest responsibility Nom’ron had ever been tagged with, but he was one of the oldest Master Builders in Star Force and had worked on 17 different Grid Point Constructs. What they were going to build here was going to be just as massive, perhaps more so, for the trailblazers had not given him final blueprints to work off of. Just the first few pieces that would take years to construct, during which he’d been promised to get the final proofs on the rest of the new trailblazer project designat
ed loosely as a ‘space castle’ that could hold its ground against a Hadarak.
Nom’ron had jumped at the offer to work on this project, not expecting to be offered the lead, but now that he had it there was an immense amount of work to do and it would take months before all the MCVs enroute would arrive. Already there were 12,934 here with that tally ticking up periodically as the active jumpline continued to spill more into the system. There was a small contingent of 34 warships here for system defense, meaning he wouldn’t have to watch his back as he worked, for the navy would take care of that. No, what he had to do now was begin setting up the mechanisms to feed this massive project, for there was no way they’d be importing what they needed. This was going to have to be on-site production.
The system had been chosen for its proximity to the Hadarak Zone, knowing that over time this ‘safe’ area would be consumed by the Hadarak, giving Nom’ron plenty of time to build it in the hopes that it would offer a safe haven for battle fleets to retreat into and potentially bait Hadarak to their deaths. Unfortunately it wouldn’t do anything to protect the 28 planets here, which was why the natives had to be evacuated, but in their place Nom’ron’s workers were going to be inhabiting all of those planets plus the outer nebular that stretched in a band around the entire system like a thin donut.
There were no asteroid belts here, so all ores would have to be mined from the planetoids, which included the 1278 different moons of various sizes, and already he had dispatched the first group of MCVs to 6 prime locations. His own ship would be deployed when necessary, but for right now it was acting as traffic control as the system got busier and busier, and from here on out this would seem tranquil as the work was only beginning to start…