Star Force: Dominance (Star Force Universe Book 50)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Duke Charri was an Ari’tat, having come to them from one of the Star Force Knight races that were beyond even the Factions. The Nestafar and others often dreamed of rising to that level, but the requirements were so high only 6 races that had not originally been V’kit’no’sat had made that transition.

  Those Knight races were given the combat assignments, but every now and then one of the Factions or Sub-Factions were included, and even the Nestafar naval forces had been able to assist with the primary combat out in the frontier, but most of their combat experience came from hunting pirates, smugglers, and other malcontents that operated in the cracks of Star Force territory, and there were many. The Nestafar fleet spent part of its time guarding Nestafar systems, and part of it assigned to various task forces led by High Admirals assigned to patrol duties.

  If not for those patrols a large black market would have existed, and was continuously trying to develop, where people could behave badly in all manner of horrors where Star Force couldn’t see them. They often tried to set up clandestine bases in asteroid fields, nebulas, and on uninhabited planets. They couldn’t make any real traction on Star Force worlds, for the security forces would shut it down if it grew large enough to become a significant problem…but there were crumbs of problems everywhere that could not completely be eliminated.

  Star Force had cameras everywhere in their cities except private quarters. This made it very hard to commit crimes and get away with it, and that fact discouraged a lot of bad behavior, but for others it just gave them a challenge and some twisted minds rose to meet it. Small stuff happened all the time, but the key to it going unnoticed was there being no report. If there was no report, then no one would review that particular piece of surveillance footage, and in that fog of mass population the criminal element existed.

  But it could not thrive under such scrutiny, which led those with bad intentions to collaborate and plan within Star Force cities, then go out into space where they could get the anonymity they needed to behave badly. They still had to work hard to get the resources to operate ships and stations of their own, but those that were skilled enough were able to elude Star Force here and there within their own systems, but it was the uninhabited ones where the criminal element showed its true colors.

  Those systems had to be patrolled and routinely cleaned out, and the Nestafar had participated on many such hunts, but they never got much of a naval threat to deal with except on those rare missions alongside the Knight races. But when they did, they realized the truth of the galaxy…and how without Star Force, things would be drastically different. Despite the bits of criminality living within the cracks of Star Force territory, it was peaceful compared to what lay outside the empire’s borders.

  The Nestafar weren’t discouraged by this, as many others had been and declined future cooperation with the Knights. No, the Nestafar saw the threats beyond as a reason why they needed to grow stronger and provide the empire with yet another weapon to use against them, and that’s why today there was a small convoy of Knight vessels entering the Vborati System.

  They were Ari’tat, and thanks to the Nestafar’s Monarch they got a few extra missions with that particular Knight race because they were purposely trying to match the avians with them. Ari’tat were small, and had to rely on mechs in combat the other Knight races could accomplish with personal armor, but they did well enough on their own. However, they liked to incorporate others with different attributes, and Duke Charri had taken a personal stake in making the Nestafar into a significant aerial asset to complement the Ari’tat.

  Today was the beginning of another mission to the frontier, and the ring-shaped Ari’tat warships were here to pick up the smaller Nestafar vessels. Most Knight warships were traditional Star Force design…elongated and smooth, concentrating mass while allowing for a narrow silhouette in one direction, useful for both attack runs and interstellar jumps where you could heavily reinforce your shields over that smaller area.

  The Ari’tat were one of the few who had a different design. They built huge vessels, each more than 50 miles wide, that could carry others inside the donut-hole cavity via IDF fields and clear shields. They could also carry drones there if they wished, and carry a whole lot of them. The Ari’tat ships were more like mobile battle stations than attack vessels, but for the work they were doing that strategy worked out well, and it made it easy to bring along smaller ships that couldn’t jump quite as fast.

  Star Force didn’t withhold technology, and the Nestafar ships had the newest gravity drive designs available, but the Ari’tat had designed their dreadnaughts with less firepower and more speed/shields. As such, they could move around the galaxy much faster and get to threats quicker than the other Knight races. Right now there were 4 such vessels here to pick up the Nestafar ships, with some 36 of them moving out now to dock inside the partial openings, for clusters of drones were already packed around the edges of the donut holes.

  The Nestafar ships carried their own drones inside, but half of them were troop ships carrying an army of Nestafar aerial assets, both craft and the infantry in their powered suits. They would be the biggest asset to the Ari’tat once they blew an access hole in the planetary defenses of whoever they were going up against.

  The Nestafar didn’t know yet, but they’d be informed enroute as they always were. But whenever the request came from one of the Knight races for assistance, the Nestafar always eagerly responded. These battles helped give their race more experience and was a way to help pay back Star Force for their immense generosity they had bestowed upon them in not only saving their race from extinction so long ago, but in allowing the Nestafar to live off of the empire’s success for so long without earning their place.

  No longer. The Nestafar would always be in Star Force’s debt, but they would earn their keep from here on out, and if they had it their way they’d do more than that. A lot more. They had their sights set on the impossible goal of becoming a Knight race, and they were committed to doing the work required to get there, no matter how long it took. They just wished for more of these Knight cooperation missions so they’d have an chance to advance their position faster, not knowing that in the near future they’d have more than they could possibly handle.

  And then they’d see if they were really cut out to be a Knight race or not as they struggled to help the galaxy survive.

  6

  May 18, 128439

  Nemo System (Uriti Preserve #8)

  Maanna

  Poallo sat on a ledge, hanging his Humanish legs over the edge of the dirt bank as the Verreti took a break from his routine scouting mission to check on the army of minions deployed on the planet. He reached a very flexible arm backwards and pulled out a food bar from his backpack, held between the two gelatinous fingers at the end of his arm. Both were wide, looking like playing cards, but could curl up into a roll that allowed for a considerable amount of dexterity that gave the Verreti the ability to hold the bar and chew on it at the same time.

  Paollo’s skin was translucent, soaking in the sunlight at various spots of green that contained chlorophyll. He’s wasn’t a plant, but his body was capable of absorbing energy rather than just burning it from digested food, giving him far more endurance in long term missions where supplies were limited.

  That wasn’t the case here, for the planet was a Star Force one, but because it was in one of the 12 Uriti Preserves spread across the galaxy, there were a high number of worlds that contained almost all minions that mined valuable materials out of the planet’s crust with which to feed the Uriti in the form of creating monster cubes rather than having the Uriti tear up the planet by landing and feeding on it directly.

  Those minions were not people, but biological machines, and they had to be watched to ensure they were doing what they were supposed to do, just like you would do periodic maintenance on mechanical machines looking for malfunctions. There was a telepathic function that allowed the Uriti to interface and check on the status of ever
y minion in existence, but the ability of the Wranglers to do that was much more limited due to their small brain size and infantile telepathy. Also, you didn’t want to preoccupy those extremely important individuals with routine checks, so Poallo and other Wardens were commissioned to maintain and direct the minions.

  Poallo wore a gauntlet that would let him interface with and issue orders to the minions, but not the Uriti. It also had a very short range…no more than 6 miles with clear line of sight. He’d need a booster to go beyond that, but most of his work was up close and personal, so the range was more than adequate.

  The Verreti’s job was to roam the planet, tend to the minions, and ensure that the flow of monster cubes continued. Most were not produced here, for there simply wasn’t enough resources within the Preserves to feed the Uriti indefinitely, and there were many mining sites elsewhere in the galaxy that produced the bulk of the monster cubes, but this planet in particular had a high concentration of valuable compounds in the deep core that most other worlds did not.

  Rather than have the Uriti travel down into the planet and suck up the widely spread material slowly and inefficiently, Star Force had decided to only harvest what bits came up into the crust slowly over time, and there was enough volcanic activity to ensure a thorough shifting of material high enough for the heat-resistant minions to be able to harvest it from mine shafts that actually ended in molten lava.

  It required some specialty buildings grown at those spots, but the minions could actually siphon material out of the upper magma so long as they didn’t go too deep. They were resistant to heat, not immune like the Uriti were, but that meant they could mine the very lower edge of the crust where most races in the galaxy could not.

  Poallo was not inspecting those areas, but rather the huge amount of surface operations on the planet. Minions moved over the huge world’s high gravity surface like ants, gathering resources and processing them into useful compounds, some of which were for the Uriti and some that were used by Star Force within the star system. Altogether there were 3.9 trillion minions on the planet, and they had to eat too, so there was a huge supply system established that had to be looked after, and that’s where Poallo and the other Wardens factored in. The minions were pretty good at doing their jobs without oversight, but every now and then something would go wrong and the stupid machines would make trouble snowball because they could not adapt to new parameters.

  Poallo liked his job, which was a lonely one. He was able to roam the planet wherever he wanted to go, doing random spot checks until he got a heads up that he got assigned a mission to a detected problem. Usually it was just a defective minion, which he could fix using the other gear in his pack. A combination of a regenerator and a complete genetic makeup of a functioning minion meant he could attach a device to a broken one and it would fix it within a few seconds.

  Other problems occurred within the hive mind, and those were more complicated to spot and correct, but he was an old hand at this, having spent the past 783 years on the planet doing this very task on his own for most of that time.

  Today he was on a hike which would last 9 days before he got to a Warden outpost, which was a little city with training facilities, a few ships, supply crates, and anything else they needed from civilization to recharge themselves and refill their packs…then they were off roaming the landscape amongst the swarms of minions who didn’t bother them at all. They just kept going on their business like the machines they were, making the crowded planet a very lonely one.

  Above the planet was another story, but down here it was calm chaos as the minion industrial machine churned out a wealth of supplies for the Uriti and the Star Force facilities that dotted the Preserve, giving Poallo his own little corner of the galaxy to lose himself in, as opposed to the crowded Verreti world where he had been born. It was too much metal and synthetics. Here the planet was raw and alive, with all the minion facilities being alive themselves. Everything was biological here aside from the outposts and a small city on the southern pole, and if Poallo had his way, he’d never leave. This was his sweet spot in the galaxy, and the fact that he was providing Star Force a service made his job a perfect fit for him and many other Wardens scattered across the planet that he hardly ever ran into.

  In orbit it was different, for there were more minion facilities floating in the void soaking up sunlight and using it to charge biological slush that worked as a battery. Those batteries were then supplied like blood into nearby facilities that served a variety of purposes, including defense, and Star Force had advanced the minions far beyond what the Chixzon had ever dreamed of in that regard. To them they had been crude instruments of conquest, but Star Force had turned them into a refined biological technology that had a mix of strengths and weaknesses compared to standard synthetic tech.

  The biggest advantage was that everything could be grown from a few ‘seed’ capsules. Star Force had similar technological devices, but they were starship sized as opposed to a mass equal about to a Brat’mar that could be deposited onto a planet’s surface and then slowly expand out into every bit of minion technology ever designed.

  It had become so useful that the Paladin had incorporated some of it for their own uses, but here it was just the minions synthesizing some key compounds that were then handed over to mechanical machines that operated similar to the minions. These worker ‘drones’ took the compounds to nearby standard Star Force stations and put them into mechanical processes that worked more efficiently than the biological ones.

  Some of those resulted in artificially produced solari, which otherwise was only present within stars. A few curious quirks of minion biology allowed for the production of pieces of the stellar process to occur in a mundane way, then Star Force handled the rest of the conversion in specially created facilities, cheating nature and allowing the solari production to occur artificially outside a massive gravity well.

  But that was just one of many things happening in orbit around Maanna, and hidden amongst that throng of production were two special and highly classified processes. There was no obvious security around them, but the system defense fleet monitored them closely and if anyone even drifted in their direction without permission they’d get intercepted immediately. Anonymity of those factories was their first and best defense, for those factories were producing the extremely complicated and costly spawning fluid use to produce new Uriti.

  Within each of the 12 Preserves there was a planet-sized biological construction in its own orbit, guarded with more ships than anyone in their right minds would ever approach, and located within a star system that was off limits to everyone without the highest classification. This system was one of those locations, which was also why so many minions were used instead of traditional workers, for the less people involved the less chance of a security breach, and the ability to produce new Uriti was arguably the most sought after secret that Star Force had, with even the Zak’de’ron having tried to steal it, unsuccessfully, at a previous point in history.

  They hadn’t come in with a battle fleet, but rather a number of stealth vessels that they probably thought Star Force couldn’t detect. They’d gotten closer than everyone else, but sensor technology had also advanced over time and the strong Zak’de’ron telepathy had been their undoing, for a telepathic sensor had picked up their presence before the ships were discovered, and when they were the Zak’de’ron had not fought, merely fleeing to avoid a confrontation, but the incident had underscored how valued the Uriti were…as well as indicating that the efforts to purge the galaxy of the dormant Chixzon coding within the Protovic had been successful and the Zak’de’ron had not been able to acquire their own Nefron.

  The process to create new Uriti was not a Chixzon one, but during the course of study it had been determined that the part of Nefron’s mind that had been preserved by the Archons during his transformation also meant that some data had been lost. Within it was the process used to create the Uriti in the first place. Star Force had redis
covered it on their own, but rather than use the horrific methods of capturing a Hadarak and forcing it to spawn a Uriti, they’d figured out how to clone the existing ones.

  The process still required extremely high gravity, which was the primary function of the biological planet-sized spawning ‘cradles’ that used artificial gravity concentrated inward and onto a very small volume of space to spur the reproductive process. That process had to use some Hadarak genetic material recovered from some of the V’kit’no’sat kills to create the reproductive chambers that Uriti did not possess in their genome, but now that Star Force had it they did not need the Hadarak themselves. What they needed was the original Uriti, which would take the place of the Hadarak and physically bind to the cradle and take control of it as if it were a part of its body.

  The process was not easy to teach them, and there were so many failures in the beginning that the Uriti almost told the Wranglers to go screw themselves, but their desire to increase their pack kept them at it until they got the correct protocols established, then they made their first attempt at actually spawning a new Uriti.

  Bahamut had insisted on being the first, and after 137 failed attempts he was finally able to spawn a tiny replica of himself. Bahamut then became known as Bahamut Zero, with the newly born Uriti becoming known as Bahamut One.

  It was only 14 meters long, whereas Bahamut Zero was now over 600 miles wide and restricting additional size increases to focus on training adaptation. If not regulated, the Uriti would continue to grow in size like the Hadarak did, yet they were not built for that, especially Bahamut with his winged shape. When you were round and lumpy like the Hadarak it truly didn’t matter, but for the Uriti it did and when they started to have problems with movement Star Force responded with the enhanced training programs.