Star Force: Ghostblade (SF67)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

“Watch and learn, youngling.”

  “Damn it, Randy, I’m as old as you. Stop with the youngling crap.”

  The trailblazer just smirked and left it at that for the rest of the ride down.

  “My friends,” Randy said, standing on the floor of the Kiritas High Council and staring up at the 58 members seated around the rectangular floor he was standing on. “Meesa back.”

  Mara, who was standing beside him and a step behind his left shoulder did a visible facepalm, but Randy either didn’t notice or didn’t care to show it.

  “You have not been on Kirit for a very long time,” one of the Kiritas said. “We are very pleased that you have returned to us. Is there something we can assist you with?”

  “Yes there is. Star Force is about to undergo a major revision, with all factions affected. The changes to the Kiritas will be minimal, but I think I’ve found a few improvements to be made.”

  Mara noticed all the Kiritas sit up a bit straighter, and she could feel their curiosity spiking as well.

  “Please tell us what you want us to do.”

  Randy clasped his hands behind his back. “First, the rest of Star Force is being restructured into societal tiers in order to reward those who are working for the betterment of everyone rather than pursuing business ventures or just kicking back and relaxing. That isn’t needed with you, for your race has a work ethic that puts most others to shame. With your permission, I will be making some structural alterations to increase efficiency.”

  “The Randy does not need to ask,” another Kiritas said, almost taking offense by the politeness. “We will do whatever you want us to do without question. Have we given you reason to think otherwise?”

  “No,” Randy said dismissively, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at Mara. “But I have more to ask of you than just this. I need your help.”

  “What do you require of us?” another said with evident determination in his voice.

  “The Clans are changing, more so than the rest of Star Force. We are no longer raising younglings of our own, but are increasing our numbers through recruitment of those sufficient to meet our standards. Such recruits will be volunteers, and may leave the Clan whenever they like, for our internal activities are going to be far more stressful than normal. All the Clans are amping up the intensity in order to make us stronger, and any individual that joins us for even a short time should benefit from the environment and take their upgraded skills back to other sections of Star Force.”

  “As such we will be the elite within Star Force, pushing the boundaries and developing new strategies that we will then share with others. The competition between the Clans is also increasing on multiple levels. Clan Star Fox is one of the largest Clans, but with our new mandate I intend to make it the largest, and by a huge margin. Not just in terms of population, but in industry. There’s a nasty rumor going around that the lizards can out-build us. We certainly take our time and do things right, but are we really slower? I don’t think so, and I intend to prove it by growing Clan Star Fox into a giant.”

  “Do you require additional resources?”

  “Such outside economic assistance is still forbidden within the Clans. Star Fox has to build internally or trade with other Clans only, so no, I cannot accept any help from the Kiritas…at least not in such a way. All 100 Clans are taking their own route towards our new mandate and are diverging more than we ever have before. We each have our own goals and vision of what we want our Clans to become…and then we’ll see who prevails in the Trials and power rankings over the coming years.”

  “Clan Star Fox has been a Human Clan up until now. I’m altering the makeup to allow for individual Kiritas to join the Clan if they meet a very high standard of measurement…and they must continue to meet these standards to remain in the Clan, just as the Humans will have to do. There is no longer any room for true civilians. Everyone has to work and keep working. If someone can’t handle that, or wants to take a long break, they will leave the Clan and land somewhere else, but knowing you as I do, I know that won’t be an issue for most Kiritas. The question is how many of you will be able to make the various standards I set forth.”

  “Furthermore, I intend to experiment with integrating Kiritas into our combat units in addition to your obvious industrial aptitude. I don’t know what he end result will be, but already your advanced units have shown promise and I intend to probe your capabilities even further. Even if the combat angle totally bombs, I still want you guys as part of the Clan to help bolster our supply and transport units.”

  “How many volunteers do you need?”

  Randy smiled. “That all depends on how fast we can build, for I intend to take as many Kiritas that want to join and can qualify. I suspect there will be more willing than we have room for, but like I said, I want to kill this nasty rumor that the lizards can out-build us, and I figure the best way to do it is by expanding Clan Star Fox as fast as we can and literally putting all the others to shame. We have no additional territory as yet to work with, so we’ll have to work with the sites we currently control, but there are plenty of untapped resources there if we devote the necessary energy to go after them.”

  “There will be new territory slots awarded for Trials success, but I’m not counting on us gaining any of them. If we do it’ll be bonus, but I’m planning to work with what we have and expand it rapidly. In order to do that I need an influx of qualified volunteers, and there is no one better at the supply game than the Kiritas. Not even the lizards.”

  “May we volunteer the entire Kiritas race?” one of the High Councilors asked.

  Randy laughed. “I appreciate the sentiment, but my Clan is too small to accommodate even a fraction of your numbers. Plus the standards I’m going to be setting down are going to be a stretch even for you guys in terms of productivity and fitness. Most of you won’t qualify initially and will have to work your way into a slot over the years to come, with more slots opening up the faster we can grow our infrastructure.”

  “Oh, and if the other Clans ask for volunteers as well, feel free to help them if you wish, but I can guarantee you my standards for membership will be higher than theirs, for I know better than them what you’re capable of. And I’d prefer if the best of you tried to get into Clan Star Fox before you accepted any of their invites…especially after we show them what you guys can really do.”

  “Thank you for giving permission for us to entertain their offers, but I can assure you that no Kiritas would choose to work in any other part of Star Force if given the option of joining your Clan, even if it was only for a week. We are humbled…”

  Randy raised a warning finger.

  “…honored by your offer,” the Kiritas corrected himself, “and will supply you with as many volunteers as you can make use of.”

  “Good,” Randy said, cracking a sarcastic smile. “Humble workers are no good. Too lazy.”

  10

  January 3, 2814

  Unknown System beyond Delta Region

  Lizard territory

  Kara crept along the low mountain ridge, staying within the nooks and crannies on the terrain as she magnified her vision of the distant lizard mining outpost. They had over 100 of them set up on the planet, all of which were feeding the development of two small but growing colonies in this backwater expansion. The local population was gone, but their corpses still littered parts of the planet giving Kara an idea of the timeframe of the invasion. She guessed the lizards had been here less than 2 years, with the most recent to have died within 4 months. Had she arrived sooner she would have been able to save them, and was silently cursing their luck.

  That wasn’t why she was here, though. She’d come far out from Star Force territory, traveling directly up on the galactic plane until she reached an unmapped region that the lizards were casually pushing into with what looked like no resistance. She couldn’t be sure, having only lightly scouted a few systems along the way, but this planet only had three cruisers to defend it, sugge
sting that the locals had been primitive pushovers.

  Kara could destroy the entire lizard occupation herself if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the mission. There were a lot of lizards closer to Star Force territory for her to go after if she just wanted to work on her kill count rather than spending 8 months traveling out to this distant lizard border. No, she was here to exploit their weak areas and do to them what they had done to Star Force so long ago…though technically it had been inept civilian contractors. They’d been blindsided by the presence of the invaders on Corneria, and now she was going to turn the tables and hit the lizards where they didn’t expect Star Force to be.

  And she needed to do it quietly so not to draw attention, hence her sneaking around and approaching across land rather than just dropping down from orbit on top of them. The Clan Sangheili warship that she’d borrowed was tucked away safely around another planet and hidden from the lizard sensors, with her and a team of volunteers having come down via a fleet of dropships onto an uninhabited part of the planet. They were staying out of sight miles away while she crept in towards this isolated outpost, figuring out how she was going to play this.

  Most of the complex appeared to be below ground, with several structures sprouting out of the sparse vegetation and marking the location like pillars. Kara could also see several adjacent buildings, but everything was pretty compact…which was to her advantage. She spotted no guard towers or turrets, but she knew better than to assume there would be no guards on station, though from this range she wasn’t going to be able to pick them out if they were concealed behind the scrub brush of ugly trees that were more thorns than leaves.

  Scanning the terrain in between her and the outpost she plotted her course and began moving, walking/running where needed and flying spot to spot inches off the ground whenever possible. It was dark, so her shadow mode made her virtually invisible to the lizard eyes, but she could detect scattering traces of sensor beams reflecting down from the atmosphere, telling her that there was an aerial detection array in place. Kara didn’t know at what altitude it was operating, so she had to go in on the ground.

  It was possible that her shadow mode and other countermeasures might be able to hide her, but there was no point in taking any chances this early in the game. Unnoticed wasn’t something that you could get back once squandered, so she was going to take this slow and easy, working her way up close to the lizard outpost and keeping an eye out for whatever surveillance they might have in play.

  Kara wasn’t expecting much, given how low scale the lizard presence was on this colony, and she wasn’t disappointed. Once she got in close she found three scouts on patrol around the site and another two within. Accessing their minds she secured enough information to know that another shipment of processed ore was coming up from below within the hour and a flight of Kirbies would be here in approximately six to pick it and the others up. Right now the landing platform was only a fifth full of crates, so Kara decided to wait it out a bit longer and took the opportunity to sneak inside the perimeter and do some wall crawling.

  She found the sensor array easy enough and hacked into it, inserting a program that would ignore a certain vector and allow free flight without registered detection, despite the fact that the sensor beams would still be going out as normal. With that built-in corridor established she commed two of her distant dropships and got them on the move, albeit slowly and over ground, much as she’d approached by.

  While they were on their way the main cargo doors to the subsurface structure opened up and allowed an elevator platform rise even with ground level. On it were a few dozen lizards that proceeded to transfer the new crates full of valuable materials off the lift and over to a waiting area on the edge of the landing pad. The lift went down again and came back up three more times before they finally finished, with Kara holding the dropships off back beyond the ridgeline until they were done.

  Reaching out with her Ikrid she scanned the surrounding buildings and started knocking everyone unconscious, having to move around a bit to get within range and doing it in a way that no one would see someone else just keel over and have time to wonder what was going on. She finished up with the perimeter guards, seeking them out and giving them the remote night tap before calling the dropships in at speed.

  Two Falcon-class vessels zipped in over top of the lizard mining colony and landed on the pad with Kara standing watch via Ikrid and ready to subdue anyone that woke up or, more likely, came up from below ground. A crew of techs spilled out of the dropships and began moving the lizard crates inside using their own equipment. They worked quickly and got the two ships nearly full before all the cargo was onboard and the landing platform was clear of crates. Kara signaled them to leave by the same vector they arrived and held position until they were out of sight.

  She dropped down from her perch near the lift and moved out closer to where she dropped the perimeter guards, taking control of their bodies and standing them up so that when she woke them they wouldn’t realize that any time had passed. It was a tricky thing to do, but each one shook off the disorientation and continued on about their patrols, minds focused on the present and washing away the bit of curiousness as to their momentary mental blip.

  Kara kept to her stealth and moved over near the buildings, doing the same with those inside though it was harder, for they were doing more than walking. She tried to disguise their waking up as much as possible, but there was no way at least some of them wouldn’t realize they’d been taking a nap. Still, the more confusion she could sow the better, so she tweaked the waking patterns enough that with a little memory implantation she convinced them that some noxious fumes had escaped containment and rendered them unconscious.

  It wouldn’t hold up to an examination of the facts later, but it would keep them preoccupied with internal matters for the moment, and with the perimeter guards swearing that a group of Kirbies had come in to take the cargo crates early, Kara figured she could cause a lot more mayhem before the lizard planet began to suspect they had unwelcome company.

  Climbing up to the sensor array again Kara undid and deleted her programming cover so that it wouldn’t be around to be found, then dropped back to ground and distracted the scouts’ minds as she crept off into the night and headed back overland to the ridgeline, then from there on back to the rendezvous point with the dropships via direct flight once her sensor silhouette was blocked by the terrain.

  “What did we get?” she asked as she landed inside the open ramp to one of the full dropships as they all sat parked on a dirt-covered plain in the middle of nowhere to the distant north.

  “Nothing special,” one of her new Clan Ghostblade techs answered, “just some iron and carbon pellets.”

  “I wasn’t hoping for special,” she said, retracting her armor back into her forearm jewel with the red scales vanishing to reveal her white with dark blue stripe Archon uniform. “Just useful.”

  “It’s free,” another commented. “And I really like free.”

  “So do I,” Kara said with a smirk. “That went well, but let’s hit a few other locations before they have a chance to think about what’s going on.”

  “You want us to take this load back to the jumpship?”

  “No. Stay here and we’ll all go back together. If we get spotted I’m your only defense, so we can’t afford to split up.”

  “Right. Where to next?”

  “Southeast of here there are a couple of outposts within 50 miles of each other. I want to hit them both. If that doesn’t fill the holds we’ll sniff around the others. I got the impression that there’s a regular shipment pattern and if we start catching them when they’re full we won’t have to make as many raids.”

  “And when they do figure out what’s going on?”

  “We’ll play it by ear, but we’re not tipping out hand and exposing ourselves. We have to be ghosts in this, no matter what they suspect.”

  “Understood.”

  “Give me a head start, t
hen bring four empty dropships with you to the rendezvous point I lay down.”

  Kara turned and walked two steps back towards the open ramp, then her body was covered in the red scales once again as she shot off into the dark.

  “Damn, I really want one of those,” a tech said, with the others nodding their wholehearted agreement.

  Kara and her crew continued to raid the lizard planet for the next 2 months, gaining both resources and information. With a map of the nearby lizard colonies she was able to pick and choose her targets more carefully, focusing on the slightly larger worlds and getting a wide choice of supplies to raid from for the following year then, with a hold full of stolen goods, she ordered her jumpship back to a predetermined rendezvous point on the edge of Delta Region.

  When she returned she found a handful of other ships waiting for her…all of which were running under Clan Ghostblade IDs. None were new constructions, for per operating orders Kara had to build everything herself so there were no records to trace back to, meaning the jumpship she was on had to be returned to Clan Sangheili at some point, and the same was true of the six jumpships ahead that were waiting for her. Those, she quickly saw, were carrying brand new smaller vessels in their external docking holds, and they definitely weren’t drones.

  “Greetings Clan Leader,” Lev-922 said with a smile as his holographic image popped up next to Kara’s command chair.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked with a laugh.

  “I volunteered,” the fellow Saber admitted. “Though you could use some more psionic help with your raids.”

  “I’ll take any help I can get. You with or without padawan?”

  “Without. She was ready to fly solo anyway, and with her being a Firestorm I couldn’t bring her in on this.”

  “What else did Paul send me?”

  “Archon-wise none, but Jason sent along a couple of rangers. As far as the ships go we’ve got prototype Ghostblade industry ships with jump capability within a system. We’re still going to have to ferry them around by jumpship, and these are just on loan until we can build our own.”