by Aer-ki Jyr
The way the H’bat’i had won was obvious, for the Dsevmat did have the superior force even when you include the orbital defenses of the planet under assault. Both races possessed tech currently exceeding Star Force’s, and the Dsevmat more so than their enemy, but they’d been beaten soundly when their weapons’ targeting systems malfunctioned. It wasn’t a total malfunction, nor was it isolated to individual ships. Across their fleet weapons batteries began to miss their targets, not with every shot, but on average 73% misfired.
During the later stages that amount diminished to 32% when the Dsevmat were losing badly, then it almost disappeared entirely as they were being wiped out. Some ships had higher and lesser accuracy numbers, and the same went for certain batteries. Some hit with every shot and others were malfunctioning. There was no discernable pattern to be found, no computer glitches or attack programing found within the computer systems, and no known weapon system on the part of the H’bat’i that could interfere with the targeting systems.
Sensor records had been gone over so many times by the Dsevmat that they’d literally run themselves ragged with frustration in an endless search. There was no energy or matter being emitted from the H’bat’i ships that could account for this, and their weaponsfire showed no variations from standard specs, nor was there any variation between what was hitting the malfunctioning ships and those with normal accuracy rates…which for the Dsevmat was 99.7%, and that included anti-fighter stats.
Roger resisted the urge to start forming theories, or strong ones anyway, and used the opportunity to study the Nexus race and their adversary, learning that this was truly a mismatch. The Dsevmat clearly outmatched them, but as stated before the higher level empire was spread out maintaining a vast tract of territory where other races lived. They couldn’t focus their might into a single area and had to work with limited fleets and resources while effectively being overstretched. What the reason was for this within the political workings of the Nexus he didn’t know, but it did shed a bit of light on why the Nexus wasn’t rushing to defeat the lizards.
If the other races were likewise as stretched, and he wasn’t automatically assuming so, then they wouldn’t have the numbers to hit the lizards on as many fronts as needed, and to be truthful the H’bat’i and some of the other races they had fought against were clearly higher level than the lizards, if not so widespread. It was a bit shocking at seeing the power gap, but Roger was soaking it all in and getting up to speed with the ‘big dogs,’ though they still didn’t fare well in comparison to the V’kit’no’sat.
That said, if the two ever went head to head it wouldn’t be a total slaughter on the part of the dinos.
With no obvious mechanism detected for messing with the Dsevmat weapons Roger dug into the construction and function of them with his analysis assistants, learning that all Dsevmat weaponry was based off of Ketara energy. The trailblazer played dumb, letting the snakes inform him of what it was and how it worked, but he already knew from the pyramid database that it was a cloying field that, rather than breaking the bonds of molecules created new ones with a rabid appetite.
That meant that a burst of Ketara energy hitting the hull of a warship would effectively condense whatever material it hit like a mini black hole, forming a crater with a condensed nub of matter in it. That meant whenever the Dsevmat attacked something there would be no explosions, which made for odd battle holos because Roger was used to at least a shrapnel spray, but these weapons were very tidy and oh so nasty.
They had several versions from orbs, to beams, to streamers and even some net-like fields they’d throw against a target. All were Ketara-based and worked decently well against energy shields as well, enough so that the Dsevmat had decided to go all-in on the tech and really refine it to potent status. That said, Roger knew the V’kit’no’sat didn’t use the energy because it had a glaring weakness, not to mention it was weaker than their other available weapons. With a special shield modification the energy could be completely neutralized to the point where virtually no amount of weaponsfire could penetrate it, similar to trying to shoot fish in a barrel with a flame thrower.
That type of shield matrix was well above Star Force’s head at the moment, and Roger got the feeling like the Dsevmat didn’t know there was a counter for the technology, which meant that probably no one else in the Nexus or the region they dominated did either.
That counter hadn’t been in play here, for the H’bat’i shields weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated…but they were extremely thick, with more emphasis going into the shields than the hull armor, which was a favorable place to stand when going against the Ketara weaponry, for like a Ta’lin’yi they really racked up the damage when they hit solid matter.
That said, they were almost useless in atmosphere because they’d hit and cause the air molecules to fuse together into solid particles that became pebbles or dust depending on density of the environment. That was going to be an issue during the ground invasion but the Dsevmat never made it that far. They’d been routed in orbit and never even had a chance to call in their troop transports waiting outside the system, which had fortunately spared them from destruction.
As it turned out in a thorough examination of how the Dsevmat military was constructed, they used an almost exclusively drone army system given their lack of limbs. Control snakes would be inserted into the combat zones and would then run operations remotely from outposts or large command centers. They didn’t operate them from orbit, which Roger felt was more tradition than function, but they had multiple variations of mechs and infantry, some which he’d never seen before.
It was side quests like that where Roger was trying to dig up more information, for the Dsevmat were quite correct in their initial analysis…there was no viable explanation as to why the weaponry malfunctioned the way it did, but as Sherlock Holmes had once said if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. With that in mind Roger felt he knew what had happened, but he needed to know why before he was going to say anything.
In addition to learning about the Dsevmat and a lot of their battle history, for his assistants were very willing to let him peruse the database even when it didn’t appear to tie in directly to the investigation, he dug into the history, culture, and society that was the H’bat’i and tried to get a feel for the way they thought and built. They were triped, twice the size of Humans, and very introverted. They usually didn’t interact with other races outside of warfare and kept their economy self-contained. They did seek to expand their territory, and that expansion is what had got the Nexus’s attention in a bad way.
They had conquered several primitive worlds and essentially turned them into a slave labor force, growing a small empire that had crossed one of the Nexus’s minor spacelanes. The H’bat’i basically shut it down, claiming ownership of the system and insisting that he traffic flow be rerouted elsewhere which had sparked the first conflict with the Nestaw.
The Nestaw were a race within the Nexus a bit higher level than the H’kar and they’d been tasked to deal with the disruption in the spacelane and the freeing of the subjugated worlds. When they failed horribly, finding the H’bat’i were far more resilient and tech savvy than intelligence had estimated, the Dsevmat took over and sent a proper recon team. They deduced the strength required and waited several years until they could muster the necessary fleet, drawing ships from various other assignments as they became available, then launching them at one of the H’bat’i’s main worlds, intending to inflict a crippling assault that they could then dictate terms from afterward.
Such tactics were standard practice for the Dsevmat, who liked to bloody an enemy’s nose then force them to submit out of fear, though in most cases it was a bluff and the Dsevmat didn’t have the reinforcements they needed to go a second or third round. Their opponents didn’t know that, so they’d been getting away with and heavily favored the tactic in a lot of their peacekeeping assignments, which also told Roger that
they were desperate to figure out how the H’bat’i had bested them else they wouldn’t be sharing this and other things so openly with him.
But as he ran through the data something bothered him, and that was the cultural fingerprint of the H’bat’i being introverted not fitting in with their taking slave races. There wasn’t a wealth of data on the subjugated and the H’bat’i’s activities there, for the intel had come primarily from the Nestaw and a few independent analysis teams prior to that, but there was enough geographical and population statistics for him to see that on the conquered worlds there were virtually no H’bat’i present.
That was odd, for usually when you conquered a planet you moved in, but the H’bat’i didn’t aside from what looked like overseers and some military personnel. The planet was shipping resources off it that were going back to the H’bat’i worlds, but as for on-site occupation there virtually was none. That made him wonder what exactly the circumstances of the conquests were, but that information wasn’t available.
There were tidbits that Roger was slowly able to string together, and with those he was able to conduct some searches through other Nexus records and found two of the conquered races mentioned in survey files that predated their annexation. Those records were the first concrete data points that Roger had, and from there he began narrowing his search of the intelligence reports the Dsevmat had available to them prior to the assault.
There was a lot of military-related data, for the Dsevmat had been extremely thorough. That too was an additional data point, and slowly Roger collected the bits and pieces of extraneous data, learning as much as he could for Star Force’s purposes along the way, but needing to present solid evidence of what had happened so the Dsevmat would accept it…if he truly wanted to tell them.
He considered not doing so once he found out what had happened in the battle, for right now the Dsevmat were holding off on another assault and if they found out what had occurred it might prompt another and he didn’t want to get involved in a war that he only knew about through a few records from one party involved. Roger weighed his options, looking through all the angles he could conceive of and not really caring about the promised reward. Eventually he decided to tell them, banking on his read of their culture, with him returning to their ship one last time to spell it out for them.
He wasn’t sure how it was going to hit them, and they might flat our refuse to accept the theory he was going to give them, but the trailblazer had no doubts now as to what had happened and in reviewing the battle holos one last time before calling the snakes to him it was painfully obvious what had occurred…and saddening to the point where he almost wished it hadn’t, despite the circumstances.
Hadeem and a group of about 20 other Dsevmat slithered into the room where Roger had been working with a pair of assistants for the past month, all obviously eager to see if the Human warlord had been worth the trip and actually found the cause of their defeat as they transmitted little blips of excitement, curiosity, and doubt telepathically as they entered the room and moved around the small armored biped.
“You have an answer for us?” Hadeem asked skeptically, with the telepathic prodding being to prove the point.
“Yes I do, and you’re not going to like it.”
“Better that we know the truth and learn to counter the H’bat’i’s tactic than to live in doubt and uncertainty,” another said almost as if reading a quote.
“The reason,” Roger began, pointing to a running loop of the battle on the gigantic hologram behind him, “that your weapons’ accuracy was diminished or outright compromised in some cases, and the reason you haven’t been able to find any discernable pattern in the lapses, is because you’ve been looking at things from a technological perspective, and therein does not lie the problem.”
Roger looked around at the various snakes, with no clue how they were going to take what he was about to say.
“Your weapons didn’t hit their targets because your gunners deliberately missed.”
8
Ripples of confusion and disbelief transmitted off the surrounding Dsevmat, creating a telepathic noise that was contrast to the physical silence as none of them spoke an audible word. They stayed like that for nearly half a minute before one finally asked Roger to explain, also using telepathy as if speaking now would have been inappropriate somehow.
“The H’bat’i conquest and annexation of the surrounding worlds that prompted your assault is not what you have told me it to be. I’m assuming your people had access to the same information I’ve had, and there are enough pieces here for the line troops to put together what really was happening on those worlds. The lack of population is the first clue, for when someone conquers a world they usually want to keep it for their own purposes.”
“The H’bat’i have almost no personnel on their annexed worlds, and those that they do have are not sufficient to keep the population suppressed militarily. If you review the intelligence reports on those planets, you will see that the materials being harvested are being transported back to the H’bat’i worlds, but this does not make the conquered a slave race. I believe it to be tribute…and I think your troops figured this out as well.”
“What more there is to find in the reports is the lack of certain things, such as executions, prisons, various forms of maltreatment of the natives. There was very little to be found by the recon team, though those few instances were overly emphasized. The truth is the H’bat’i conquered these worlds to become their caretakers, not to enslave them. The resources flowing back were merely in compensation, with 92% of the local economic produce remaining on planet.”
“Whether or not the locals had a choice in the H’bat’i taking control is unknown, but even if they didn’t I believe your troops deduced that they were being ordered to attack a race that didn’t deserve it…which prompts me to ask you a question. Had they refused to fight what would their punishment have been?”
Roger let the question hang in the air as no one wanted to speak, but finally one did, with the discontentment of the others telepathically visible. “Sedition is punishable by death. Our military must act quickly and decisively. There is no room for discussion and debate. All know and accept this.”
“And what is the role of your military?” Roger asked, already knowing the answer.
To safeguard the Dsevmat and to pacify the region the Nexus has tasked us with.
“Pacify? Or maintain the tenants of justice?”
Both, another snake replied when the one the Archon was talking to refused to answer.
“I think your assault force saw that they were being sent to conquer and kill a race that did not deserve it, but with the threat of death on them if they refused to fight they tried to deliberately lose the battle instead. Not all the troops, but the vast majority of them. This is why the inaccuracy rate spiked so drastically and why you couldn’t find a technological cause. Your troops had to fight, but being in an unjust battle they were trying not to win.”
“Then, when the tide was turning the H’bat’i outmaneuvered your fleet in a brilliant piece of strategy and pinned them down. When that happened and your troops were in danger of being destroyed the inaccuracy began to vanish, and by the time they were fighting for their lives and trying to flee it disappeared entirely. It’s one thing to try not to win a battle of conquest, but quite another to commit suicide. Your troops wanted to live, but with no coordination between the dissenters they threw the battle too much and the H’bat’i bested them.”
“Rather than drive your fleet back, the H’bat’i went for the kill, sacrificing many of their own ships to keep yours from fleeing. The handful of Dsevmat ships that escaped were those that had shown no inaccuracy problems, thus the dissenters were not around to tell what had happened. They all perished because they underestimated their opponent while trying to protect them. You put them in a position where they would either have to defy the purpose of your military or to defy orders and risk execution. They tried a th
ird option and it ended up getting them killed anyway, but at least they preserved the independence of the H’bat’i in the process.”
“I know you do not like to hear this, and the reason you came to us was so you could learn how the H’bat’i had bested you, devise a countermeasure, then go back and finish them off, but what you need to understand is that you were in the wrong and your troops knew this. Rather than commit the treason of injustice they deliberately threw that battle in order to preserve their honor.”
“You couldn’t find the truth because it was something that you weren’t looking for, but it was staring you in the face the entire time. Your leaders were in the wrong and your troops knew better, but had they refused you would have killed them. You failed to follow the course of justice and I don’t care what your reasons were. You probably wouldn’t care to tell me even if you knew, but the point is your troops figured it out and acted in the only way they could without sacrificing their own lives…which they accidentally did anyway by not fighting hard enough to be able to withdrawal against an opponent that had been grossly underestimated twice.”
“So there is the answer to your conundrum, whether you will accept it or not.”
And he knew that they wouldn’t, at least not right now based on the telepathic impulses that he was getting from this group. No one spoke again, but the rage and disgust within one of them boiled over and Roger felt the brush of a consciousness against his own. It couldn’t get past the Ikrid blocks, but him being able to feel even the slightest pressure meant that the Dsevmat was trying to hammer him with telepathic influence.
That was odd, given that they seemed unable to talk to each other directly using telepathy, but he quickly surmised that the transmission ability and the interlink were separate for them and they’d have to get past another one’s blocks in order to communicate privately. If that wasn’t something they culturally allowed then ‘speaking’ omni-directionally made sense. Roger also guessed that with their entire race being telepathic that casual probing was frowned upon, which would make what this one was attempting to do to Roger a full blown fist in the face, despite the fact that it wasn’t using its body or telekinesis to do it.