by Jyr, Aer-ki
The Reen had been sucking off of Star Force and the others defending the ADZ against both the lizards and the Skarrons for so long that a lot of his people had never known life outside of it. Heema was one of the few that had, though he owed his life to Star Force as well, thanks to their wisdom in regards to training to attain self-sufficiency. It was a new concept for the Reen, but a small portion of the population had heeded the Humans’ help and even requested personalized tailoring of their training programs.
Heema had been through one of those himself, and had found that his greater size was not such a disadvantage as others had deemed. Star Force knew ways to work around their weaknesses and give them access to the high intensity workouts they needed. As a result Heema and many others onboard this jumpship had formed a guiding core to Reen society, reducing the turnover of new leadership and allowing their race to begin focusing on larger, grandiose goals above and beyond pushing their reproduction to acquire new territory from Star Force Alliance World regional allotments.
Gone now were the days of driving the purely civilian angle, with the Reen having rebuilt their military fleet to respectable levels, though not yet up to a strength that could confront the lizards on an even playing field. The radical advances in Star Force technology were not being shared with the Alliance, save for some key pieces that had gone to the Hycre and Protovic…and those two races had guarded those gifts closely, leaving the rest of the races having to work with their own tech or what they were willing to share with each other.
That tech level had gradually increased with the ventures that were being pursued in the ADZ interior, given that it had been almost exclusively free of lizard incursion and both races and corporations had been able to develop to a level where they could begin funneling resources into endeavors above and beyond mere survival. The Reen had absorbed what new breakthroughs they could, buying others and researching a few of their own, but their warfleet looked much the same as it once had, with numerous green scarabs floating in orbit nearby that welcomed the Alliance jumpship when it arrived via unnecessary escort formations.
It was true that the lizard border was close, but Heema and his colleagues had known that reclaiming Daxmet would require a significant level of defensive forces that they couldn’t yet field. When Star Force had approached them with the offer to return one of their former systems to them, free of charge no less, for the Reen had played zero part in the invasion that had cleansed it of the lizards, they had also offered a deal for protection if the Reen wanted. That, or they could go it alone and hope the lizards didn’t hop the line and hit them, given that they’d be the one weak link in the Alliance reclamation zone, for no other race had been given a world in this region aside from the Protovic, who’d expanded out colonizing a few new systems and adding to what had become a relatively isolationistic empire on their part.
They interacted a fair amount within the ADZ, but now that both the lizards and the Skarrons were no longer on their doorstep they were not pushing the war fronts, merely staying put and building up their defenses while Star Force continued to be the aggressor. In addition to the Voku, a race called the H’kar had sent a huge fleet to the ADZ and the small colony they’d been allowed to establish as basically a resupply base. Heema knew little beyond the public news releases, but it was said that the H’kar had come here specifically to fight the lizards, and their technology level was far beyond that of the Protovic or the Hycre, so their replacing of one of the former cornerstones in the Alliance combined operations was apparently an upgrade that Star Force was comfortable with.
He hadn’t heard a word of malcontent about the Protovic turtling up, and rumor was that Star Force had simply outgrown them, with differing objectives in sight now that the immediate threat was no longer encroaching on their mutual borders. The Protovic were pursuing their own internal agendas while Star Force was growing by leaps and bounds, both inside the ADZ and out, with several new regions being added to the general public knowledge. Already there was the Achkor Zone that was coreward of the ADZ, but now this huge new swath of territory that was being opened up around Daxmet was loosely being referred to as the Calavari Region by a handful of Star Force people Heema had regular contact with.
Then there was an even larger third region out beyond the Alpha and Delta Regions, as of yet not picking up any identifier that he was aware of, but he knew the majority of Star Force troops there were Bsidd and that they were planting a lot of colonies for that rapidly expanding race in the area while returning a slew of small worlds to their former owners…but in the Calavari Region only the Reen had been singled out, and no one yet knew as to why.
That had made quite a few races very mad, for other systems had been reclaimed that they had owned a piece of previously, but Star Force wasn’t yet returning those. In fact it was rumored that they were colonizing them for themselves, though without the transit grid extending out to them yet there was no way to be sure. Most races within the ADZ relied on the Star Force run grid for most of their movement needs, and as such didn’t have the jumpships needed to go snooping around the region to see for themselves what Star Force was up to…plus the threat of being jumped by the lizards was ever-present, even in the reclaimed areas.
That was why Heema and several other senior Reen leaders had argued for making a deal with Star Force to have a permanent presence in the system. At first there had been pushback on that, for a lot of the young Reen wanted to get away from what they felt was an overbearing empire denying them their sovereignty, and from a certain point of view they were correct, but as Heema and others had taken a long time to understand, Star Force’s control was limited to only a few areas of society, and so long as you operated within those requirements you were essentially free to do whatever else you wanted.
They always reserved the right to intervene anywhere they wanted for any reason, which made a lot of people, Reen and otherwise, more than leery when reading such proclamations, but Heema had come to understand that was simply a caveat to insure that if something bad happened they’d have an established avenue in to deal with it rather than them trying to control the Reens’ daily lives. A big, yet underrated part of Star Force philosophy with running the affiliated portion of its empire was with giving races the freedom to experiment and grow, yet requiring them to gain a certain level of aptitude before dealing with them on more than a caretaker level.
Heema knew many viewed that attitude as a slap of disrespect to the races that were not members of Star Force, but the Reen leadership had come to understand early on, at least in part, that it was actually a subtle test and challenge they were laying down, allowing a path for peerdom if a race proved themselves worthy of it. The Reen had been pursuing that agenda in various forms for nearly 200 years, and now that they had a full system of their own to do with as they pleased, with no Star Force presence watching over them, many Reen didn’t understand why Heema and others insisted that they strike a deal to bring them in.
The obvious reason was security, but it was more than that. The rebuilt Reen empire was intrinsically linked with Star Force, and rather than try and go their separate way, which was virtually impossible given that Star Force was expanding so rapidly that systems like this were quickly becoming engulfed in new controlling regions outside the ADZ, they should make use of the advantages that gained them in order to take their civilization up another order of magnitude and rise above their competition that was still stuck inside the ADZ.
Heema had been part of the negotiating team with the Star Force representatives, and he was almost sure that they had been hoping for this response from the Reen, for they came up with numerous detailed options that heavily favored the Reen without requiring any sort of payment from them, which was highly atypical for Star Force interactions, but which suggested that the Reen’s status had risen to a level above that of the other races and now they were starting to see the perks of such a status.
Heema didn’t expect them to be on the same
level as the Protovic, but then again if they were retreating within their own borders and attending to their own needs there was an opportunity there that the Reen weren’t about to pass up. While their warfleet was miniscule in comparison, their economic base was about 1/3rd that of the Protovic and growing with every year. That put them as the number 1 race within the ADZ, economically speaking, that wasn’t a member of Star Force, but Heema and others saw the opportunity rising to leave that peer group behind and take a step towards the Protovic, and even the Hycre.
Right now the Reen were in a league of their own, somewhere between the big powers and the peons, and how the they developed this system was going to play a big part in where their race went in the power structure. Heema had no expectations to ever get beyond Star Force’s influence, though a great number of their former worlds had existed on the other side of Calavari territory where Star Force had never even ventured to date. Whether or not they’d ever get to them again was unknown, but if they did he fully expected it would come on the heels of Star Force pushing out that far, not in the Reen going there themselves, for as it was they were no match for the lizards.
And such long travel times would break apart the well-knit little empire they were building here. Daxmet was the furthest stretch, but with the ADZ transit grid extending out to it that kept a link that the Reen didn’t have to build…which was yet one more of the reason to have a Star Force presence in the system. The Reen were a very different civilization now than they had been pre-ADZ, and that civilization was better, in his opinion, compared to the far flung loose alliance of worlds they had previously commanded.
The current Reen were united with a common focus and working towards a series of goals, growing rapidly in both population and material, with this system going to add to the latter almost instantaneously. The key to that was in getting their high population here, and this jumpship transfer was just one of many that would be forthcoming. The Reen had hired out a specific portion of the ADZ fleet at great cost to begin bringing them here in droves, with this being the 13th ship to arrive in the past month.
When Heema got to the hangar bay there were a number of Reen transports already inside and loading up passengers, ready to take the large, six-legged ‘giraffes’ down to the surface and come back up again to pick up more. According to the ship’s sensors, there were already thousands of the craft making the round trips, having been brought in here some 8 months previously with the main transitional fleet that was busily rebuilding a tiny spec of civilization on the planet even while Star Force crews were still deconstructing the lizard infrastructure elsewhere.
Heema climbed onboard the transport and walked to a nook-like depression in the floor of the giant craft, settling down there along with many others nearby him in an egg-crate fashion since the Reen didn’t use chairs. He waited there until the Reen ship was filled with 62 of them, then it lifted off the deck and flew out into space, transitioning down to a lower orbit enroute to the excessively thick atmosphere of the planet.
Heema watched via a display screen on the ring of his personal nook, seeing the massive Sentinel station off in the distance. There was currently only the one in the system, but with it was a Star Force warfleet that would keep the lizards at bay indefinitely. That fleet wasn’t situated around this planet, however, but rather one of six moons in orbit. It had been named Brobdingnag, and was the location of a modest construction effort that was building the framework of what would become an Axius colony, but one for the larger races only.
That would bring the Axius Reen with it, giving the independent civilization and their Axius kin a geographical link, as well as the opportunity for the two to exchange individuals when they wanted. It also meant that Star Force would be protecting one of its own worlds in the system against invasion in perpetuity, rather than the Reen having to negotiate some sort of payment deal to keep them here on contract.
The Sentinel had been placed around the planet, both for strategic reasons and a sign that the defensive effort was going to be a mutual one. The Reen had their warfleet now, with most of it present in this system, and over time they hoped to improve it to the point where they wouldn’t have to rely on Star Force, but right now they would back them up however necessary if a reprisal attack from the lizards did come.
The Sentinel acted as an island in orbit that both fleets could run to for sanctuary if needed, and just having one of the massive stations here had a psychological effect on everyone in the system, for it stated that this was permanent territory within the Star Force-led Alliance and any invading race was going to have to pay a very high price in order to take it from them on the first try, let alone the inevitable counterattack to come later.
To Heema that single Sentinel signified that this was home and part of the ADZ whether it was within those borders or not. The planet may be 100% Reen, but the system truly belong to their benefactor, even if they weren’t going to colonize past that single moon. That confidence was what was attracting so many Reen here, for behind Heema’s flight were many more coming with individual citizens that had not been ordered or deployed here in any governmental fashion. They were coming to take part in the colonization effort on their own merits, and it was up to Heema and a few other veterans to make sure they had room for them all prior to arrival.
4
When Heema’s transport got to ground he walked out into the thick atmosphere, taking him and the others a moment to adjust. He breathed in heavily, with the air taking time to get all the way down his long neck and into his four lungs, giving him a bit of a head rush when the higher concentration of oxygen processed through his bloodstream. It passed quickly and he followed the others out across the tarmac, looking around at the partially complete city in which they’d landed.
The green infrastructure was everywhere, which clashed slightly with his blue/green body. He wore no clothes, nor did any of the others, save from foot pads. His skin was hard enough to double as light armor in some places and the Reen weren’t all that sensitive to temperature changes, so the idea of clothing was something that their race rarely used. It had been said that some in Axius had taken up the custom, but Heema saw no need for it.
He walked over to a large entry port that doubled as a tunnel that led into the city. Given the Reen’s native size everything here was built bigger than most ADZ civilizations. They also had no liftcars aside from cargo transfers, leaving people with the responsibility to move themselves around for the most part within any given city.
Heema took to a series of ramps that descended down into the subsurface, then found one of the main ‘roads,’ for there were also no Reen vehicles for transport, given that they were themselves the size of small vehicles. He accelerated up into a six-legged scuffle trot and moved down the mostly empty throughways heading for the distant command complex. Building ahead as they’d planned, the emptyish city was going to be filling up quickly as more transports came down with passengers and Heema wanted to get situated before that organized chaos began.
He traveled for several kilometers before finally reaching his off-ramp and ascending up to the surface, crossing over a street there and entering the command building. It looked like a stubby rock from above, but within it was nothing short of gleaming with polished everything. Most Reen construction was crude and functional, not given to aesthetic concerns, but the command complex was one of the rare exceptions.
Heema passed by the ceremonial guards and moved into the guts of the building, climbing a small ramp spiral up to where he’d been told his pit would be, then walked out into it through an archway, seeing several of his support staff already there and working.
“How do things look?”
One of the other giraffe-like necks turned/twisted around to look in his direction. “The construction efforts are slightly ahead of schedule and the offloading is proceeding smoothly, though we’ve only had a small fraction of what’s in orbit come down as of yet.”
“Get me up to speed,
” Heema said, walking over to his personal pit and settling in. He lowered his main body down over a short, wide pedestal with is legs spread out around it and sank into the cushion, relieving his front legs to use to manipulate part of the controls in front of him. The rest he would operate using his head, teeth, and very supple neck.
“Status reports are waiting for you.”
The Reen jabbed one of its long legs out and triple pressed a button, sorting through a primary display prompt and getting to the preset data packet. He used a nearby set of buttons to scroll through the table of contents and selected the overview, knowing that the rest would be more detailed information of everything summarized here.
Heema read through it slowly, but didn’t double back on anything. A lot of it he already knew, and it was just a matter of getting caught up with the communications transit lag. A relay network hub had been set up immediately following the defeat of the lizards, and ever since this system had been on the grid, but that still left a considerable delay given the distances involved, plus the time he’d spent blacked out during transit.
The majority of the resources being used to construct the city were being shipped in as well, and to facilitate that a series of six depots had been set up on the surface from prefab structures. Heema checked the resource levels within them, finding their stockpiles had dwindled down to almost nothing. The convoy he’d come in with, which was actually staggered over a series of days, was bringing a lot more cargo to infuse those depots with, but the long term development of the planet couldn’t rely on such interstellar shipments.