by Aer-ki Jyr
So he wasn’t rushing, but rather sending the now significantly smaller Star Force fleet in groups on varied trajectories…some out of the way…that would bring them all together at the closest of the three jumppoints while his ships already in stellar orbit he had pull back and hit the opposite one with light, harassing attacks to make sure the V’kit’no’sat ships stayed split and made them defend both sides.
At the same time he dispatched his Mak’ri into a separate fleet of their own, then had them engage their stealth fields and head off on a long, roundabout trek that would bring them in over the middle jumpline to cause more havoc, but the biggest hammer Paul was going to drop was on the closest jumppoint in the hopes of doing damage as they retreated, with them being the most vulnerable near the end when they had fewer ships remaining insystem.
Paul brought his command ship up into the swarm of drones, as did Morgan and the others in the fleet while the Warship-class jumpships kept their distance while controlling most of the drones and giving detail to Paul’s general orders. If the V’kit’no’sat wanted to counterattack to go after the command ships he’d let them…then slaughter those that remained as he backdoored their jumppoints and cut off their easiest route of escape.
He didn’t think that would happen, so he was bringing the command ships with their heavy weaponry into the fight to do more damage as well as soak up hits with their shields that would otherwise kill the drones, preserving more of his fleet while continuing to knock down chunks of the enemy.
Still, their decision to retreat was odd. After Morgan had arrived the V’kit’no’sat had gotten three more large reinforcement fleets and 17 smaller groups to add to their numbers. Either there were no more coming or they didn’t want to lose the amount of ships necessary to finish off the Star Force fleet…or maybe they were worried about Paul getting more reinforcements. The base on Tauntaun had already been recaptured by other Archons after the V’kit’no’sat trashed most of it on exit, and about half of the survivors in the ice fields had made it out, meaning technically there was nothing here to keep the V’kit’no’sat engaged.
But engage they had for weeks after the base had returned to Star Force hands…though now it was worthless. It had been a hidden outpost, and now that it was exposed there was no refurbishing it and Star Force couldn’t keep this many ships here permanently, else the V’kit’no’sat would strike at the front worlds in their absence.
Paul wondered if that was happening now, with this being a massive diversion, but no word had come through the hidden relay network yet, though interstellar communications still had a considerable lag effect that stretched out into weeks when going from one end of Star Force comm territory to the other…assuming the relays weren’t hit and eliminated, breaking the comm lines and blacking out entire regions.
And the V’kit’no’sat were good at finding them, with Paul doing a lot of replacement relay drops in previous years to keep the grid operational, else the only way they’d be able to get reports between star systems would be to send courier ships back and forth. Paul was still getting periodic updates through the hidden relay in this system, so the connection back to the front hadn’t been cut as of yet, but there was some reason the V’kit’no’sat had played here as long as they had above and beyond the base assault on Tauntaun.
Paul had to consider all options and keep a look out for things he couldn’t predict, but nothing radical happened over the following two days as heavy combat ensued to protect the jumplines, at the end of which the remaining V’kit’no’sat ships had to go evasive and scatter across the system. Paul sent the Ma’kri after them, for the knife-like ships were specifically designed for intercept and disable missions, but he doubted many of the fleeing vessels would be caught as they ran for other jumplines at various altitudes. Right now even a slow jump out of the system was preferable to staying here and getting run down.
Once the three major jumplines were secured Paul relinquished command to others to handle the chasing as most of his fleet stood down from combat and began recovery operations on their own debris while finishing off what remains of the enemy were still around. It was work that Paul wasn’t needed for, so he disconnected from the command nexus and turned around, stumbling half a step as his legs were stiffer than he’d realized.
A half empty container of water that sat on the floor nearby flew up into Paul’s hand and he sucked down the rest before telekinetically flying it back down, then he walked out the short alcove and onto the bridge with small steps. He hadn’t slept the past two days, with crew bringing him food and water where he was, and right now his mind was so fried that he had to focus just to walk. As powerful as he was, being a Goku-level Archon and arguably one of the strongest and fastest Humans in the galaxy, he was so out of it right now a strong elbow to his gut would take him down and he knew it.
Fortunately there were no enemies here. His crew were beyond trustworthy and looking a bit ragged themselves. He would have checked on them with his telepathy but right now his head was urging him insistently to shut down and go into recovery mode and he wasn’t going to argue with it at this point.
“The ship is yours,” he told Admiral Baeren. “Well done, everyone. I have to crash now.”
“Paul,” Baeren said, standing up from his command chair and facing him. “That was the most impressive display of naval skill I’ve ever seen. Given their strength and numbers we should not have won that fight. It’s truly an honor serving onboard your flagship,” the Protovic said, throwing a seldom used salute.
Paul nodded his thanks, then other bridge crew members also stood with the rest soon following. They all saluted…something that in Star Force was not standard protocol…and Paul pushed past the ache in his head to telepathically scan some of them. Most of them were Human, with the built in Ikrid blocks that prevented him from reading their minds, but he could still sense a bit of surface emotion that suggested they were genuinely in awe of what just happened…in addition to being fatigued.
The few that weren’t Human he could read, with him realizing that they saw this as an impressive moment in Star Force history…but to him it was just a major battle that he’d lost himself in, working every second as hard as he could to gain as much advantage as possible and to diminish their losses, which had been huge in terms of machinery. However, no control ship had been lost, meaning the only ships that had been destroyed were unmanned.
That was a feat worth remembering, but there had been casualties when control ships had been damaged. Twenty six people had died of wounds too great to be healed, and those 26 stood out in Paul’s mind as a failure and always would, but he wasn’t going to linger on it. His job was to take action and do what he could, not feel guilty about the losses and waste time with pointless recriminations. He’d never be ok with the losses, but he’d learned long ago to just label them as failures and move on…else the carnage of this war would overwhelm him, and if that happened far more would die without his skill and knowledge being applied in the most effective way and at the most effective times.
Which meant he needed to rest now before they were potentially thrown into combat again, with that being the foremost priority on his mind, but he took note of the crew’s awe and dismay in what had occurred and allowed himself a moment to reflect. He’d been involved in so many large scale battles against the V’kit’no’sat that he treated this no differently, but in retrospect it had been different in that there wasn’t a planet that they had to defend. It was just one fleet versus the other in a throwdown…and one that Star Force had been outnumbered in.
And they’d won…or had they? He got the feeling the V’kit’no’sat may have gotten what they needed out of it, if not what they wanted.
“A group effort, to be sure,” Paul announced honestly. “I can only control so many systems simultaneously. We kicked ass today. Never forget that…and don’t forget we still have V’kit’no’sat in the system. Kill what you can, cleanse the debris, and recover as much of
ours as possible. We need to be out of here in a few days tops.”
“We’ll take care of it, Archon,” Baenen confirmed. “Get some sleep.”
Paul saluted back with a sloppy smile. “As ordered.”
The crew relaxed and went back to work and Paul slowly walked off the bridge, heading through the ship that had taken a fair amount of hull damage, but the 7 mile wide Melee-class command ship had a lot of internal mass between the fighting and the crew, leaving the center plug of habitation in the giant jelly donut-shaped ship pristine as he walked to a nearby lift and headed back to his quarters.
When he got there he was about to walk into a quick shower when a comm prompt lit up on his terminal that sat just past the foot of his bed nestled up against the wall.
Paul frowned and telekinetically pressed the accept button from across the room, wondering what was so important to interrupt him, but as the hologram appeared he saw it wasn’t from the bridge, but rather another ship in the fleet.
“Hey, Paul,” Morgan greeted tiredly. “You look like crap.”
“Better than I’m feeling then. I haven’t slept since the pullout began.”
“Worried they had something up their sleeve?”
“Yeah. I’m glad we had a chance to chew them up, but this battle made no sense.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about before you crashed. I’m not seeing any signs of a diversion, but I think they got beat here worse than they expected.”
“I got that impression too.”
“I think they were here after you,” she said bluntly.
Paul frowned. “Me?”
“Look back through the replays later, but they showed a little more tenacity trying to get at the Excalibur than they did the Star Saber. More than usual, anyway.”
“They’re always trying to get us,” he argued. “And I was baiting them a bit.”
“I noticed. Still, they were going harder at you.”
“I’ll check later. I’m fried right now.”
“Not just yet,” she warned. “Sit down.”
Paul did as suggested, feeling a wave of relief as soon as he did with his eyes rolling once as he refocused on the full body hologram of his long time peer/rival for top Archon rank, though both of them had fallen behind Rio-058 just prior to the start of the war and that hadn’t changed with him devoting more time to training and digging out the tier 4 psionics buried in the dream tests that he’d first discovered. To date they’d uncovered 6, with Rio reporting that he was sniffing at a 7th, but no one knew for sure how many of them the Zak’de’ron had hidden within the Zen’zat genetic code that they’d inherited from the V’kit’no’sat, for the Dragons hadn’t even told their own empire how many were in there. Rather they waited until individuals of merit unlocked them on their own…and there had been a lot that Star Force had found that the V’kit’no’sat had never stumbled across.
Part of that was due to the fact that the Archons had found a way to share psionics after one of them had unlocked one and triggered the flash growth of new psionic tissue in their bodies, but another part was the way Star Force handled their ranking system. Training was key to everything, even more than within the V’kit’no’sat, and the trailblazers had worked long and hard to meet and surpass the standards of Zen’zat equal to them in age. Somewhere in all of that they’d found a knack for unlocking the hidden genetic gems, and Rio had dived into that challenge more than anyone else once his proclivity for the elusive dream tests was discovered.
Ever since then Paul and Morgan had to take a back seat in the rankings, and while they wanted Rio to get as powerful as possible, they both resented his success a bit. Had it not been for the war taking so much of their time and effort, they’d have buried themselves in training as well…but that wasn’t an option now, and so long as they both kept improving the strength and skills that was sufficient. Losing levels was not, and juggling their schedules between fighting and training was not always easy, such as today. Paul hadn’t gotten a really good workout in for weeks and his body was going to pay a price for that, but he’d make up for it later during travel or other downtime, for they weren’t fighting this scale of battles everyday out here. Quite the reverse, actually, with both empires usually chasing each other around in a game of cat and mouse rather than going in for outright slug fests aside from when the V’kit’no’sat assaulted another Star Force planet.
Which was why this battle was appearing so odd to both trailblazers.
“What did I miss?”
“I took a nap the past 2 days, you didn’t, so I’m not laying blame,” she said honestly. “Just look at this.”
A map appeared beneath her holographic feet and she pointed with her toes to several locations. “See it?”
“When did those come in?”
“About 8 minutes ago.”
Paul sighed. “So they are coming in heavy.”
“And I think they wanted to draw you out and hammer your fleet, at the minimum. I think we surprised them with how many reinforcements we were able to draw in…not to mention our effective kill rate. Even I was beating them this time.”
“You’ve been taking lessons from me,” Paul joked, rubbing his eyes as he looked back at the map with fleet movements picked up by quiet scouts they had spread across the Devastation Zone. There were major enemy fleets arriving from the core of the galaxy in odd locations, as if they wanted to sneak them in rather than sending them directly to Sol, with Paul assuming there were more in play than what had been discovered to date.
“The Preserve?”
“I know they want it bad, but strategically it gains them nothing.”
“Unless they’re still worried about us using the Uriti offensively.”
“No,” Paul said, shaking his head and immediately regretting it as his vision swooned. He really needed to sleep. “This is a numbers game. They’re not going to bleed ships there while we have inhabited systems to hit. They’ll save the Preserve for last until we start to use it.”
“That was my gut feeling too. So where are they going?”
“Lots of possibilities. They haven’t taken a system in decades, and based off of this,” he said, pointing beneath her glowing feet, “I think they’re going for more than a few.”
“Any idea how they found Tauntaun?”
“No, and that still bugs me. Our other bases could be at risk, which is why we have to spread our fleets again. It doesn’t take this strength level to wipe them off the map.”
“If it was me I’d have hit them all at once if I knew where they were,” Morgan pointed out.
“Same here…and see how much of a response it drew. Could be a security slip on only Tauntaun, but I still need to know what it is.”
“Nothing from the survivors?”
“No…and they’ve been debriefed thoroughly.”
“What about the evac ships?”
“We got three out. They might know something more, but I’m not hopeful. Anything obvious they would have reported before the base fell.”
“Any suggestions beyond warning them?” she asked, referring to the other hidden bases spread throughout the Devastation Zone that serviced the scouts and other sneaking units moving about like mice that the V’kit’no’sat were continually trying to track down and squash, protecting their conquered territory that they intended to keep barren and nearly lifeless save for their growing colony on Earth, which Paul rarely got updates on, given how well defended it was. Getting even a probe into the system and out again was problematic, but it was clear they’d set up more than a forward base there. They’d reintegrated it back into their empire just as before, adding insult to injury as if taking it and the entire ADZ wasn’t bad enough.
“Nothing comes to mind. Maybe after I sleep. How long you staying up?”
“A few more hours then I’m crashing too. You did well, Paul. Glad you’re on our side.”
“Ditto, Morgan. You took a load off when you arrived.”
“Probably didn’t expect it to last long enough to be worth the trip…that or they had trouble to deal with elsewhere.”
“We need a rotation. Both our fleets are wrecked now.”
“I know. We’ll deal with that after we clean up here. Let’s hope those other V’kit’no’sat groups take their time.”
“I’m sure Kara is poking at them. Might be why they’re so hesitant.”
“Hesitant?”
“Just a gut feeling. They should have stayed around and fought here longer. Felt to me like they were playing a safety margin.”
“You might be right, but I’m so dopey I can’t confirm 2+2=4 at the moment. Can I sleep now?”
“Sure. I’m used to outworking you,” she said with a smirk. “And since Riona isn’t here…” Morgan added, blowing him a sarcastic kiss. “Night, night.”
Her hologram cut off before he could respond beyond the frown on his face. Archons didn’t date, but Riona had been labeled as his girlfriend long ago and a lot of the trailblazers continually teased him about it. She was second gen and almost as strong as them, and one of the few non trailblazers that he was as close with, due in part to the time they’d spent together figuring out the bioshield psionic, given the fact that they’d developed it before everyone else did. The two of them had trained, experimented, floundered around until they’d basically written the book on the psionic for others to learn from, but she still wasn’t a trailblazer.
And that, more than anything, is why they felt like teasing him...but also because there was a shred of truth in it. Archons didn’t date because there was a disadvantage in it, combat wise, and they were too good to tolerate anything slowing them down, but Riona and him had a little bit of a connection beyond the others.