Star Force: Liberation (SF56) (4 page)

“Alright, with the Bsidd it seems like their
programming is shipped in after the fact. If we block that shipment can they
still function?”

“That’s your priority question?”

“Yes.”

“I would say maybe, at this point.”

“How long to find out?”

“Give me an hour, maybe two. Can’t guarantee anything,
just have to follow my instincts as I sift through all this.”

“How many staff you need to make this go quickly?”

“Right now just
me
until I
figure out what the tedious work is going to be.”

“Fair enough.”

“What else do you want me to look into?”

“How are the keys produced?”

“Oh, already know that,”
Trell
said, bringing up another hologram and physically dragging it across his
primary view and over in front of Davis. He highlighted one module and zoomed
in, pulling up pieces of what Davis didn’t know, but he suspected it was
important.

“This is the queen’s genome. They have a special line
connection running from the base of their brains down to their egg sack. The
keys are produced in the brain and secreted down, bathing the eggs until they
take.”

“How big are these eggs?”

“Microscopic at that point. They don’t begin growing
in earnest until the keys are delivered.”

“And if they’re not delivered?”

“There’s a null line code that renders them inert. I
suspect they’re expelled in the fluid if the keys don’t take.”

“How big do the eggs get before hatching?”

“Um…not sure, but I’d guess about yay big,”
Trell
said, holding his hands apart about the distance of a
football. “They don’t stay within the queen for long, or, well they can, but
based on the few rumors floating around I’ve deduced that they use an
artificial birthing pod filled with nutrient fluid to grow the eggs outside the
queen’s body.”

“So they can reproduce faster?”

“Way faster. Like factory line faster.”

“Growth rate?”

“This one matured within 4 years, physically
speaking.”

“You said something about an immunity?”

“Yes, here…”
Trell
said,
adjusting the holograms again and showing Davis something equally
unintelligible. “It’s something they added, I think, because it stands out. Shoddy
work, if you ask me.”

“Genetic engineering?”

“Pretty sure, and since I sent you that message I’ve
determined it’s a toxin. One that would be lethal to many races…including the
lizards.”

Davis’s face tightened. “They fought them with a
chemical weapon that they made their own people immune to?”

“They tried, I think, but the immunity isn’t complete.
The toxin won’t kill them, but I think it will still make them sick. Not sure,
haven’t gotten that far on it yet. Been cherry-picking inroads to give you some
options.”

“And the reason I need to be here in person?”

“These holograms won’t transition through our
computers,”
Trell
said, altering them again into a
much more detailed view, making Davis think he was looking at star charts at
first, but with angles to the shards that made it look a bit creepy. “If you’re
up to it I can give you a primer. If not I’m going to have a headache trying to
translate all this for you. If you really want to find a way to strip the
queens’ influence we’re going to have to have a back and forth regularly about
how that might be possible and what you will or will not allow. Not that I’m
going Dr. Evil on you, but with genetics there are always a lot of bad ideas
available that we have to sort through…and if you can’t read the lingo you’re
going to be out of the loop.”

“I cleared my schedule, so let’s get started with the
basics,” Davis said, wasting no time jumping into the challenge. If there was a
way he could strip the hive mentality out of the Bsidd he was going to go for
it, both for their sakes and the power balance within the ADZ.

4

March 1, 2556

Orica System
(Nestafar Territory)

Inner Zone

The Hycre jumpship came out of its interstellar
braking maneuver with its sensors transitioning back into the readable range,
immediately picking up several contacts near to the central stars in the
trinary system. At first they expected the contacts to be Skarron warships,
given that they were in the process of devouring the Nestafar
empire
in leaps and bounds. After the annihilation that the
old Alliance had laid down in their capitol system, the Nestafar had begun
rebuilding heavily as the Cajdital had taken away what opposition remained…up
until the Skarrons had attacked.

The Hycre had kept tabs on the Nestafar, along with
many other regions outside the ADZ, but such scouting trips were sparse and
there hadn’t been one to Orica in the past 8 years. Then there had only been
Nestafar there, so when new contacts that didn’t match Nestafar profiles were
detected it was assumed, for a few seconds at least, that they were Skarron…but
immediately that was dismissed as soon as the sensors began to get better
resolution as the last of the momentum canceled out and the passive signals got
some computer work to increase clarity.

The ships were larger than the Skarrons, but clearly
not the wing-shaped Nestafar designs. They were, however, familiar enough that
the Hycre computers spat out a match with little additional data required, let
alone active sensors that would make the scout ship stand out to everyone even
remotely close by.

What they were detecting were unescorted
jumpships…Cajdital jumpships sitting in the null gravity gap between stars. Not
an orbit, but the tug of war center of their gravitational pulls that
effectively hid them from most of the rest of the system. The jumpline the
Hycre had come in on happened to be lateral to the three point line, allowing
the stellar radiation reflecting off their shields to make the contacts
literally glow on passive scans given their immense size.

As the minutes passed no further signals were detected
around the stars, so the scout ship moved around the
larger
of the pair to a jumpline that would take it out further into the system to
Orica B, the system’s third star, where they began doing their survey of the 93
formerly inhabited planetoids. At last count only 18 had been repopulated by
the Nestafar, and lightly so, but after finding the outer star devoid of any
ships or tracking satellites the first planet they jumped to, a formerly barren
one after the Alliance’s ‘cleansing,’ showed both orbital and surface activity.

There were Skarron ships in orbit and even from the
distance that the Hycre ship was spying from they could pick out their larger
walkers on the surface…along with several small cities. The Skarrons also had a
handful of orbital facilities, but nothing Nestafar was remaining, at least
from the mid orbit view of the scout ship.

Two more planets showed similar results, one with more
infrastructure and one with barely any at all, but both with a Skarron
presence. The fourth planet the scout ship visited was the Nestafar capitol
world of
Nestarraffa
, and as soon as the Hycre ship
came out of its microjump the orbital map lit up with thousands of contacts.

None of them were Nestafar, but there were Skarron and
Cajdital ships seemingly parked in orbit next to each other…until the tiny
flashes of weaponsfire began registering on sensors.

The Hycre ship kept its distance but didn’t move on,
sticking around and recording the battle as the two sides hammered each other.
The Skarron ships were larger and had plasma-resistant armor, while the
Cajdital mostly cruiser-class fleet used primarily plasma weapons but had
greater numbers by about a 3 to 1 margin…making for a very even fight.

But not just in orbit. As the scout ship stuck around
it also pulled as detailed surface scans as it could manage, picking up
reflections from the enemy ships’ own active scans and finding four Cajdital
LZs on the ground with hundreds of Skarron walkers surrounding them. The Hycre
were very interested in seeing how that was progressing, but other than their
approximate placements they couldn’t get any useful information.

Judging by the positions of the battling fleets, which
were grouped together in various clusters in specific places around orbit, the
Hycre had some open lanes to approach through and, knowing that they could
outmaneuver both enemy ship types, moved down into low orbit to get some better
scans figuring that they’d already been spotted in the system anyway with all
the active sensor beams flashing around the planet. But with both sides heavily
engaging one another they probably weren’t going to care.

As the ship came down near to the upper atmosphere the
resolution of the ground campaigns increased exponentially…showing that the
Cajdital had landed clusters of cruisers looking like bees on a hive and were maintaining
a free fire zone around them as they were setting up shield towers inside.
Those outside corridors had some of the Skarron walkers on approach and
exchanging plasma fire with the Cajdital cruisers…which weren’t all that much
bigger.

Though the Cajdital landing clusters were intact there
was no movement out from them…and there was a trail of broken ships littering
the ground nearby, a testament to the anti-air fire the Skarron walkers were
capable of throwing down, not to mention several discarded gravity grapples
that had apparently yanked others out of the air. The Cajdital did have their
LZs and they were presently intact, but they’d paid a heavy price to establish
them and at the moment it looked like they weren’t able to push out at all,
with more and more Skarron walkers slowly transitioning towards them to tighten
the noose.

The Hycre stuck around a while, inspecting all four
surface battles and cataloging as much of the Skarron infrastructure and troop
counts as they could reasonably get before retreating to a higher orbit and
jumping out to the next planetoid on their search list, finding
Skarron/Cajdital conflicts on 6 different worlds and no sign of the Nestafar
anywhere within the system.

That reconnaissance data would eventually be brought
back to a Hycre world outside the ADZ, then transition through a series of
couriers until it got to a world that was linked into the Star Force relay
grid. Once there it made its way into the ADZ and eventually over to Dvapp
space where Paul was poaching a few ships in orbit of
Veernad
with the
Excalibur
and adding a few
more dings to its already damaged hull. He didn’t have many drones to work
with, but with him in command and the Skarrons’ limited resources it had become
obvious that they weren’t going to be able to kill the big ship so he was
bleeding them as dry as he could knowing that a trip back to a shipyard for
repairs was in the near future.

He didn’t get the
intel
from
the Hycre until a day later once the
Excalibur
had pulled back to an anonymous position in the system that still had the Star
Force relays in operation. Either the Skarrons didn’t know where they were or
hadn’t bothered to destroy them, but the formerly Dvapp system was still on the
grid allowing Paul to stay linked in while he singlehandedly poached ships with
his small fleet of warships elsewhere hunting down convoys.

When he got the priority message packet he read
through it intently, with one big piece of the current puzzle falling into
place. The Skarrons had pulled most of their attempted reinforcements away from
the ADZ in order to fight the lizards, and he knew well how much of a handful
they were. He welcomed the distraction, which was already giving Star Force and
the Protovic a chance to rebuild and press the pair of worlds the enemy held in
their territory while Paul used what scraps he had to poke around Dvapp space.

Paul spent the next six hours reviewing battle data,
both that occurring in orbit but also that on the ground…and he was keenly
interested in seeing how the lizards handled the Skarron walkers.

The ultimate answer to that was, they weren’t. They
were getting beat up on the ground and spamming cruisers to try and counter,
and doing so effectively, but at great cost. It didn’t take him long to guess
their theory, for by now he knew the lizards weren’t stupid, and they were
using a strategy that Star Force never would.

They were sacrificing ships and troops in order to
bleed the Skarrons dry of their missiles.

Most of the ground battles that were ongoing in Orica,
or probably over by now given the time lag, were in the early stages, but two
had progressed to the point where the lizards were actually winning, and they
were doing so by using their cruisers to counter the walkers in hover mode,
essentially making them walkers in and of themselves and using their single
plasma streamers to great effect. Trouble was, the Skarron armor was resistant
to plasma and it required a lot of chewing on to take them down.

But instead of developing a different style weapon to
counter the armor, the lizards were just hammering them until they fell. It was
costing them cruisers left and right, but they were making gains on the ground
where the Skarrons hadn’t thrown too much resistance their way. That was one
advantage the cruisers had over the walkers…they could move around much more quickly,
but put 20 cruisers against 20 of the big walkers and the lizards lost badly,
even when their missiles were depleted.

That left the lizards with a tough but winnable fight
so long as they had the numbers to keep pouring into the engagement. Paul knew
the Skarrons did as well, and wasn’t sure who would come out the victor. If
neither received additional support he’d put his credits on the Skarrons, but
knowing both enemies he knew they’d each have support coming their way.

He just wished they had a permanent recon post in the
system, because he expected the battle for that highly valuable piece of real
estate to be one stretching out a decade, at minimum, unless one side rolled
insane numbers in.

But what else was in the report, or rather missing
from it, was the Nestafar. Nothing had been heard of them in quite some time
and Star Force had had no assets in their territory since the Elarioni pullout.
The Hycre and a few other races had pulled scouting runs in that area and
beyond, for some of the ADZ races still had contacts out there on worlds that the
enemies had no interest in. None of them had reported sighting the Nestafar
within the past 3 years and now their capitol system, though decimated earlier,
was now completely lost.

He didn’t know if they were still fighting elsewhere,
had evacuated, or were wiped out, but it seemed karma had kicked in for their
backstabbing of the original Alliance and they wouldn’t be a concern for the
ADZ going forward. Paul didn’t know that for a fact, but he could read the
writing on the walls. Whatever had gone down they’d got their asses kicked, and
their territory was in the hands of the Skarrons and, apparently, now the
lizards as well.

Paul hoped that the lizards would also start pulling
reinforcements off the ADZ border to fight the Skarrons, but knew Star Force
had to keep reinforcing it or the lizards would find a way in. They were too
devious to just go away, and he knew the ADZ couldn’t just turtle up on the
border and hope to be ignored. They’d have to keep hitting them, with Greg and
others continuing to do that in earnest razing worlds and maintaining a neutral
buffer zone around the border that the lizards were constantly trying to reestablish
themselves in.

Their pesky enemy knew how to creep well, something
the Skarrons didn’t bother with. They went with more blunt force attacks, even
if in small numbers, with the lizards adding sneakiness to that trait, for they
also could drop the hammer when they chose. So far the ADZ had avoided that
hammer multiple times, a lot of which was due to Kara preemptively hitting them
in key areas, but aside from a few feel-out attacks the lizards hadn’t used
their big toys to try and break open the front as of yet.

Paul wondered why that was, for their own scouting
reports suggested they had a huge surplus of troops sitting back inside their
deeper worlds. Maybe they were just being patient, or maybe they had some other
plan in place. Regardless, Paul knew to never take them lightly. They would
take easy targets if offered up to them, but he feared they were a more
dangerous enemy than the Skarrons, despite the huge size of the other’s empire.

And they were dangerous because they were cunning and
adaptive…but they also held to a consistency of tech and tactics that they made
work rather than altering it to fit the current circumstances. Their ships were
essentially the same as they were when they first attacked Star Force, save for
small upgrades here and there. The one big change was the addition of a plasma
streamer, though while still holding to the plasma theme of the majority of
their weapons was an upgrade that they’d reverse-engineered from the Kvash
who’d they’d managed to roll over without breaking much of a sweat.

That weapon upgrade alone, spread throughout their
entire territory, gave them considerably more naval power, not to mention the
occasional tweaks in their shield generators and plasma composition that the
trailblazer was continuously following. While Star Force tech was now
considerably more advanced, the lizards were doing well with what they had and
maintaining a consistency across their territory that bespoke impressive
organization and unity.

Paul had been studying them intently over time, even
as his priority focused on the Skarron threat, and he was keenly interested in
learning from this new challenge they were facing, for it would show more of
their hand given the numbers and tech the Skarrons would bring to bear. If they
didn’t find a way to counter them the Skarrons could slowly chew into their
territory and push back towards their core worlds, for the trailblazer knew how
hungry they were for new territory.