Star Force Perseverance (SF81) (Star Force Origin Series)

Star Force Perseverance (SF81) (Star Force Origin Series)

Aer-ki Jyr

1 

May 19, 3101

Shangri-La

System (Cygnus Arm)

Inner Zone

Count Jeyron stood on the bridge of the Mammoth-class cargo ship that he’d spent

the last 2 years and four months on, for the most part, as this supply convoy

of 284 jumpships made its way up the tether from the ADZ. They’d stopped off at

a few ports along the way…Lothlorien, Mandalore, Dakara…but most of the

breadcrumbs of systems leading out from the ADZ and into the Perseus galactic

Arm they’d skipped over, either flying through them or bypassing those star

systems entirely.

They weren’t all arrayed on a straight line, meant

rather to be quiet outposts that most people wouldn’t notice. They weren’t a

secret to the locals, but there was no map in the ADZ that had them included,

save for the ones the Archons and the Monarchs had, and up until he’d been

assigned this mission by Davis he hadn’t even known about the Tether’s

existence. He’d been a Baron for some 83 years without hearing so much as a

whiff of a rumor, which he attributed to the Director’s ability to keep secrets…and

this one was a doozy.

Star Force had quietly stretched a string of oases

across the local Orion arm and into The Nexus’s domain, then hopscotched across

it with even greater distances between Tether outposts. They’d actually

established a link across the entire Nexus, through the Perseus Arm, and out

into the very big Cygnus Arm that made up the fat edge of the galaxy.

Cygnus was more than twice the width of the Orion Arm

and even bigger than Perseus. It stretched out through thick star clusters and

technically even contained the much thinner dispersion of stars that bled off

into the galactic void. There was no fixed edge to the galaxy, and those border

systems were technically still part of it, though their relative location to

each other would make travel impossible unless you had very strong and accurate

gravity drives.

Star Force hadn’t made it out there, not even close

yet, but the fact that they had not only left the Orion Arm but were all the

way out in Cygnus had astonished Jeyron when he’d been let in on the secret,

along with the destination system that they’d recently colonized that he was

going to be tasked with grooming and growing even further.

Then the bombshell of the V’kit’no’sat had been

dropped on him and suddenly Star Force’s history and actions up until this

point had crystalized into understanding and trepidation. If the dinosaurs ever

came back they’d wipe Star Force out, not quickly, but assuredly. Meaning that

unless they wanted to die when that happened they’d need someplace to retreat

to that was off the V’kit’no’sat maps.

The system that the Count was looking at now was one

of those systems. The primary, as it was now. It wasn’t part of the Tether so

much as it was the first of the new territory that Star Force had built the

Tether to connect the ADZ with. The goal had always been to reach Cygnus, and

now that they had they’d been doing more reconnaissance and scouting missions

than they’d done before establishing that line of breadcrumbs across the

galaxy. They’d essentially mapped a corridor out here, now they were doing a

much more thorough survey of this region.

Which was still a drop in the bucket compared to how

much raw territory there was. The Nexus had no public maps with information

this far out, and Star Force hadn’t made contact with any of the local races so

they were essentially flying blind as they sent out hundreds of scouting

missions to add to their map while looking for a place to put down their first

permanent colony.

Not that the breadcrumbs weren’t permanent, but they

were never intended to be built up as large or as fast as the primaries. If

Star Force lost its industrial muscle on Earth and the ADZ entirely, it was

going to need something to fall back on for ship production. And small yards

weren’t going to cut it.

Luckily Star Force had quickly stumbled onto a region

that was virtually uninhabited. For all they knew it bordered a major power

that they’d end up being enemies with, but right now it was essentially a dead

zone full of systems but no races that could leave their own worlds. Nearly all

of the systems were uninhabited and they were continuing their mapping missions

to expand the perimeter of that area…in which Shangri-La had been found.

That was the name given to it upon discovery, and even

while the mapping expeditions hadn’t progressed as far out as he and even the

Director would have liked yet, they knew they could not pass on this system.

They’d colonized it like the Tether systems immediately, then had been sending

additional support to further build it up to a manageable starting point. An

Archon had been in charge thus far, but now there were enough pieces in play to

warrant a Monarch be sent to put down the firm roots that the Director wanted,

and Jeyron had been his choice.

With the promotion to Count he’d been sent out here

along with another supply convoy, taking the long road that bypassed The

Nexus’s transport grid. They’d used traditional grav jumps between stars and a

handful of black holes, following the trail blazed by others until they’d

arrived at this destination point moments ago with the map being updated with

current sensor readings and transmissions from the limited infrastructure

already in place.

That gave them laggy connection to the battlemap, but

it instantly filled up with new facilities built in both orbit and on the

ground of the single planet that had been colonized…out of 306 total, not

counting moons. Of those 306 planets situated around a giant white star, 57 of

them were habitable and 16 marginal. The rest were airless but none the less

had good amounts of gravity, including a few that topped 2g. That meant there

was a wealth of raw materials buried in them, not to mention the fact that Star

Force didn’t need atmospheres to colonize planets.

This one system was the equivalent of dozens, if not

hundreds of others back in the ADZ, all confined into orbits around a single

star. This was where Star Force had to put down roots, and it wouldn’t need to

look beyond this location for some time, for there was plenty of worlds right

here to build up to a level that even Sol or Epsilon Eridani couldn’t begin to

reach.

But that was far down the road. This system had

potential…and that was about it right now. The colony had a population of

394,000 prior to this convoy arriving, which would add another 126,000. Not the

smallest starting point in Star Force history, but without even a million

people to work with this was considerably smaller than Jeyron’s last

assignment.

Though his mandate here was far bigger than anything

back in the ADZ and he had to make it work, for literally everyone’s lives

could be riding on it someday in the future. Shangri-La was to be the invisible

backup to the ADZ, and right now it could barely throw spitwads militarily. He

was going to have to change that, and do it almost entirely with local

resources. More convoys would be coming regularly, but with the massive

distance involved both he and Davis knew this had to be an independent

operation. The convoys were just a shot in the arm to get the process started.

After that Jeyron would be the lone Monarch out here, with orders to build an

empire within a single star system…the most important star system on the Star

Force maps.

He’d asked the Director why a Duke wasn’t assigned, and

he said that if Jeyron was able to pull this off he would have gained the

experience and skills necessary to warrant that title. So he had assigned a

Duke to this, in the sense that this is what it took to become one aside from

going through the Clans, but he also pointed out the fact that managing such a

small colony at this point would be a waste of a Duke’s skills. They were

needed on much larger fronts organizing existing infrastructure and

populations, not building new ones from scratch.

And right now, seeing the updates flowing in via the

battlemap transmissions, he heartily agreed. For there was nothing here worth

mentioning.

A single city had been established on planet A, which

hadn’t even been assigned a name yet. The city itself was more than just a

startup and had been here a while, so he was glad he didn’t have to start entirely from scratch, but there were

only a few auxiliaries on this planet and a few other locations around the

system. Mining sites and such, without even the smallest of shipyards having

been built yet.

That was like a gut punch to a Monarch, for without a

shipyard you might as well have been back in the Stone Age. He’d hoped the

Archon in charge would have built, or at least started to build one by the time

Jeyron got here, but no such site was being listed on the battlemap…though

there was a large new section of the city on planet A that hadn’t been there

before.

Jeyron used a console to zoom in on that area as the

ship continued to soak up more battlemap signals across the system-wide

lag…which would be even worse considering the size of that star’s gravity well.

Planets orbited at distances that would have put them outside other star

systems, giving this one a very large volume of space to move around within.

Fortunately the battlemap signals were constantly transmitting, though he

wouldn’t be able to retrieve specific information without querying for it and

that would require and out and back from the comms systems.

But right now he had position and status data on every

facility and ship, noting a decent grouping of military vessels in orbit of the

planet. 6 Warship-class jumpships

full of drones were already here, with another two having arrived in this

convoy. They would have absolutely nothing to do in this deserted region of the

Cygnus arm, if the scouting reports held true, but there was no way Davis was

going to let this system be established without immediate defenses.

The Archons he was bringing with him told him that it

wasn’t a big deal so long as they had a sanctum to train in. Boredom didn’t

exist for them, and a lack of missions and fighting just meant more time to

increase their skills. That was a very positive spin on it, and in their case

he actually believed them, based on his somewhat limited knowledge of Archon

customs and culture, but the fact was this was out in the middle of nowhere so

far away from home that they were essentially lost in space save for a few

convoys coming now and then.

But that’s why a Monarch had been assigned. Operating

independently was what they were good at. And if he really was going to someday

warrant the Duke’s title he was going to have to prove it here first…and by the

time he did this system would no longer be nowhere. It’d be somewhere, the somewhere in Cygnus, from which everything

else in this doomsday territorial expansion would flow.

The cargo ship he was riding on sat in stellar orbit

and waited for the rest of the convoy to arrive before they transitioned over

to planet A…which would be getting a new name as soon as Jeyron got around to

it. He wanted something special, so he was going to wait and give it some

thought. He should have been doing that on the trip out but he’d expected

someone to have assigned one by now and he hadn’t planned on undoing whatever

moniker it had already gotten.

But it seemed that this system was an entirely blank

slate for him to get around to naming. One of the few perks that was usually

reserved for mapping expeditions or Archons, and he had a whole list of planets

here that he got to label as he liked.

Putting that on his eventual to-do list, Jeyron stayed

on the bridge and got a better view of planet A when they microjumped into

orbit. He’d seen records of it previously, but watching it here in realtime was

an entirely different experience. This was live, not some data file, and if he

didn’t do his job everyone out here could be put into jeopardy. Not because he