Star Force: Retribution (SF60) (7 page)

“
The task is not
straightforward, nor simple. If it were a Dafchor would not be required. I will
teach you what you need to know, and guide you from time to time, but you and
you alone will be in command of the 9 races I am entrusting you with, including
your own, though your people are more than capable of handling their own
affairs. You will not be remaining here, for this is too distant from the
conflict. You must go to the heart of the problem and solve it from within
.”

The galaxy map shrunk again slightly, with the ADZ
almost disappearing off the edges as lizard space expanded.

“
These are the
strongest lizard worlds
,” the dragon said, highlighting a region that was
not in the center, as Cal-com already knew, but further
rimward
in the lizards’ current territory. “
You
will avoid them. Here is where you must go,
” he said as a single star
system was highlighted up closer to the edge of the galactic plane and more in
the center of lizard territory but still askew to the ADZ side. “
This system you will conquer and claim, and
from it you will establish contact with the races I am entrusting you with.
With the gifts I am granting the Voku you will build a stronghold here that the
enemy will not be able to touch, but you cannot share those gifts with those
you will protect.
”

That last sentiment was emphasized telepathically as a
line that could never be crossed, even if it meant risking their demise.

“
You must use
them and their abilities to defend as you see fit. You can place your strengths
within them, but they must never possess them. I trust you understand the
difference?
”

“
I do
,”
Cal-com said solemnly.

“
They will obey
your commands, retool them as you like. If you put them astray of the path we
wish of them I will correct you. If I say nothing proceed as you will. Be wise
and wary, but do not delay. Once the lizards consume their holdings they will
pose a threat your races cannot withstand on their own. You must strengthen
them before the storm arrives on their shores
.”

“
What of Star
Force?
”

“
They are not
one of our servants, but they are more valuable to us than the Voku. You need
no longer safeguard them, but they are a common ally against the lizards and
others. Let them grow on their own accord, but keep close the ties you already
possess and continue your planning work with the one called Paul. Modify it to
act as a bridge to your target system
.”

“
How much time
do I have to prepare my wards?
”

“
Even we do not
know that for certain, but the storm is coming. There is no guarantee of your
success, nor will we intervene if you fail. I may be giving you an untenable
task if our time estimates are overly generous. You are to work the problem,
not be consumed with the outcome. You are a Dafchor because we have no doubts
as to your loyalty or skills. This is not a test of you, you are proven. Apply
your skills and let fate make what it may.
”

Cal-com crossed both arms over his chest and thumped
them twice in a Voku gesture of pride and eagerness that signaled he was
willing and able to accept the challenge.

The holograms suddenly disappeared and the dragon’s
wings returned to his sides as his front legs came down and he went back to
being a quadruped, but from behind the low wall that obscured Cal-com’s vision
of what lay on the other side floated a small object that came up over the
Elder’s back and hovered beside its head.

“
Remove your
eyepiece
.”

Cal-com did as ordered, taking the artificial
enhancement off and revealing his natural eyes to the dim, unfiltered light of
the Elder’s chamber. When he did so the tiny, shiny object flew up into the
inserts in Cal-com’s head and suddenly his face became numb. The next thing he
knew the old implants came out and fell to the floor, then feeling returned to
his head and for the first time he sensed a new facet to his mind.

“
I have added a
component that you will carry unseen beneath your eyepiece. No one is to
attempt to examine it, or it will destroy the machines attempting to do so.
Within it is knowledge that I am granting you and I will update it as needed
going forward. This is how you will receive my commands at a distance, but you
will not be able to respond. Replace your eyepiece
.”

Cal-com pushed it back up and slid the short pylons
into the new receptacles, returning to his advanced vision.

“
Return to
Achkor, Dafchor. Every day delayed from this point forward is a waste
,” the
dragon said, climbing back up over the low wall and disappearing from view as
Cal-com turned about and walked off, taking the Elder at his word and not intending
to waste a single moment of the time that he knew was going to be in short
supply. He doubted he had more than 200 years, based on the knowledge now
creeping into his mind, before the lizards overran the
Daswa
…and
he wasn’t about to let any servants of the Elders perish on his watch.

7

August 20, 2680

Banner System
(Core Region)

Loki

The elder H’kar walked across the soft floors of the
command deck slowly, with an aide at his side ready to support him if necessary
but the old war leader wanted no assistance with movement and per his orders
the larger H’kar at his side merely paced him as he moved towards his oversight
position on the dreadnaught’s observation platform. When he reached the small
stair steps that led to it Vedja nearly stopped, taking each step with care,
but with three contact points at all times he was in no danger of falling and
mounted the four rises with precision before walking over to his stool.

There he sat against the backrest and spun it around
through a complete circle, noting the position of the displays, control boards,
and the view out over the rest of the command deck where the ship’s commander
would be handling all the normal functions from his pod except when Vedja
decided to step in, as was typical of a fleet commander. What was not typical
was the dreadnaught, or rather the prototype that had just arrived from back
home along with a slew of additional reinforcements…with the blessings of
multiple Royals.

All pretense, he knew, but the troops were real
enough. Vedja was nearing the end of his life and it was much simpler for the
Royals to give him what he wanted in the short term than risk an uprising. The
fools were so determined to maintain tradition that they couldn’t see the
continuing threat the Li’vorkrachnika posed, though after so many centuries of
war no H’kar should doubt their power or ingenuity. Joining the Nexus had
bought the H’kar a new life, but that was a far cry from victory…and their
enemy was knocking on the door once again, trying to slowly advance their way
into a position to take the
H’kar’s
empire from them a
second time.

Vedja would not live to see it, and would have
remained in quiet isolation during his remaining years had the former fleet
leader not sent their ships on a suicide mission that had drawn the ire of the
Li’vorkrachnika. Their attention was now centered on the H’kar, with far more
enemy vessels migrating towards their worlds and snatching up the surrounding
systems, making it clear that there would be a price to pay for the shipyard
they had destroyed along with the Gfatt.

The
H’kar’s
only saving
grace was the other Nexus races, or he was sure that the Li’vorkrachnika would
be mounting a killing blow right now. Their backing would buy the H’kar time
but he didn’t think it would prevent their demise. Tech upgrades were one
thing, but there was no substitute for the sheer numbers the enemy commanded
and would command in coming years as their territory continued to grow. That
should have been obvious to all, but rather than use their advantage to its
maximum potential now, they were sitting and waiting for the enemy to grow
stronger.

Vedja did not want his legacy to have been only a
short reprise for the H’kar before their eventual defeat, thus he had returned
to prominence and asserted his reputation to take command of ships that
technically he had no authority over. That technicality did not matter in the
slightest now that he was here, deep inside Li’vorkrachnika territory and the
small oasis of tranquility that Star Force had somehow managed to carve out. He
was in command and no one here questioned that, and given the task ahead of him
Vedja doubted he’d live to return to the empire, so he did not care what they
had to say of the matter.

The dreadnaught he was taking possession of orbited
about the moon named Loki that Star Force had graciously given half of to the
H’kar and was one of a handful of the newest ships built by his people. Star
Force design elements had been incorporated into the standard design, which
Vedja did not approve of, but it was the largest warship in the fleet available
to him. The behemoths that he possessed were not as formidable, given that they
were mobile battle stations rather than a proper warship, and had this been a
standard dreadnaught its smaller frame would contain slightly more
firepower…though with this new prototype Vedja did not know for sure.

The primary weapon had been diminished in strength
down to what the battleships carried, with
the destar
being tripled into separate weapons. The combined strength was less than a
single typical dreadnaught destar, which Vedja thought was a grave design
mistake. The upside was being able to target different ships simultaneously,
and with the Li’vorkrachnika preferring to use cruiser swarms against the H’kar
they might well kill more with this design, but the larger enemy ships would be
a different matter and Vedja wished he’d had a proper dreadnaught under his
command, but he was going to make do with what he had.

His mission here was twofold…learn and teach a new fighting
style against the Li’vorkrachnika to the troops that would return home to fight
there, and to kill as many of the enemy here as he could. All combat would be
joint operations and he would still be operating under Star Force command,
something that normally he never would have allowed, but their war record was
undeniable and his willingness to submit to their authority only further
ingrained that there were lessons to be learned here, with his troops opening
their eyes further and taking a peek outside of tradition.

He intended to take that peek and stretch it as far as
he could here and now before he was gone, for their sakes, but Vedja was just
as interested in killing enemy ships for his own. The H’kar was 254 years old,
having retired just as the Nexus upgrades were being implemented in the fleet
and their position as a member secured them against the Li’vorkrachnika with
the Gfatt fleet positioning vessels to safeguard them until they could hold
their own. Figuring his task was done Vedja stepped down and let others build
as he attended to personal matters, a hero amongst the H’kar and with far too
much attention placed on him.

He’d taken seclusion as his reward and stepped away
from the public, rarely making an appearance other than on a few occasions that
he chose to nudge events to his liking. That nudging had made him somewhat
aggravating to the Royals because of the influence he maintained, but they
allowed him his due and didn’t interfere, knowing that he’d return to seclusion
again soon enough.

Vedja had kept a link to the fleet, monitoring the
Nexus upgrades and how they were implemented, with various officials coming to
him for advice or with problems to solve. He attended to such things quietly,
behind the scenes, but had never had the fortunate of commanding one of their
upgraded vessels in combat…but now it seemed he was going to get that chance
after all.

In the past the Li’vorkrachnika had even tech with the
H’kar, or approximately so. Both races used plasma-based weapons and other
similar motifs but with different applications. Now the H’kar didn’t use plasma
at all, having upgraded to far more powerful weapons that the enemy could not
stand up against head to head. It was their numbers that they were using to
continually defeat the H’kar, this time by surrounding their new worlds with
too many conquests for the fleet to adequately prevent.

But the battles the raiding fleets were engaging in
were not lopsided affairs. More often than not the ship count that Star Force
would bring to bear would be nearly even, with the tech advantage allowing the
H’kar to utterly destroy their opponents during battle…and that was something
that Vedja wanted to experience firsthand after so many decades of hard fought
retreats just trying to keep his people on the move and alive.

The elder H’kar had been reviewing the stats ever
since they’d started returning to the empire, and he was amazed at how the Star
Force commanders were deploying the H’kar so effectively. They were very rarely
losing a ship, and that fact coupled with the tech advantage meant that a low
number of H’kar vessels could do an immense amount of damage to the enemy
fleets. If that strategic wisdom could be learned and duplicated throughout the
entire H’kar fleet then Vedja had no doubt that they would be able to repulse
the Li’vorkrachnika from their assigned Nexus territory without the help of the
Gfatt or anyone else.

Which was why Vedja was willing to take command of the
dreadnaught, giving Star Force and the H’kar designers that they’d worked with
the benefit of the doubt. He intended to learn what wisdom they had melded into
the design and hoped there was something here he wasn’t immediately seeing.
That said, the ship was still vastly stronger than a battleship…and there was
no way a proper war commander would oversee a fleet from a behemoth.

While his aide stood quiet watch behind Vedja the
fleet commander settled in and got himself acquainted with the new design. It
was mostly standard H’kar, but there were a few tweaks here and there that he
thought might have come from Star Force…or some overzealous H’kar designers who
liked to change things simply to put their own stamp on them.

Never the less the design was sound and he adjusted
his mind to it accordingly as the final preparations were made amongst the
fleet sitting alongside his new flagship in orbit of Loki. He was the last
major piece to arrive, and after the last few minor checks were attended to he
ordered the dreadnaught to the head of the fleet and they began their
microjumps over to system’s center, some 1,394 ships in all that would be
traveling to a rendezvous point in Zeta Region before splitting off into three
separate groups that would meld with Star Force fleets and constitute the
newest raiding groups heading out.

Already there were H’kar ships out there, fighting and
presumably winning battles. They were due back over the coming two years, with
Vedja leaving instructions on how to restructure them when they arrived so they
could be dispatched with additional fleets comprised in his absence. He didn’t
have time to train a new subordinate, so he was just going to work with posted
orders. The elder H’kar didn’t have time to do things properly, so the others
were simply going to have to adapt on the go and earn their marks.

Vedja remained on the command deck for many hours,
mostly silent and learning about the ship and crew through his displays but
vocalizing commands and questions to the crew when needed as any commander
would. He would have preferred taking a tour of the ship once it was mid jump
but he didn’t have the strength, so instead he stayed put and soaked in the
feel of being in command again before finally heading off to his personal
quarters where he put himself into a nutrient bath to help reinforce his
weakening exoskeleton.

Soaking in the supplements he studied holographic
schematics of the Star Force ships in detail, working off of scans the H’kar
had taken given that they had never been trusted with blueprints. That wasn’t
uncommon, for allies were only allies to a point, and even the H’kar had never
given full blueprints for their warships to Star Force when co-designing the
new vessels in order to maintain security and the Nexus edicts about sharing
technology.

The Star Force vessels were curious, and now that he
was here he had access to a great deal more information than had made its way
back home. Vedja studied their drone system intently, for it was completely
foreign to H’kar philosophy and he all but knew therein lie an advantage, but
at the moment he couldn’t see it. For as radical as he was a commander within
the H’kar, he was still tightly bound by tradition. He might loosen the strings
on occasion, but his mind was very firm when it came to how to go about doing
things, as were all H’kar.

But he would learn, slowly, as he studied reports
during the jumps out to the rendezvous point and then even more so when he
finally engaged in combat alongside Star Force, who also had a Voku vessel with
them. Its technology was mind-baffling, in that Vedja never knew how many
vessels it truly was. They broke apart and reformed into many hull varieties,
offering them plenty of formation options without him being able to figure out
just how they were able to accomplish it.

Their battle strategies were likewise fluid and even
more alien than those used by Star Force, but the orders given to
Vedja’s
fleet were straightforward enough. Wisely he
followed them all even if he disagreed with them, and while Star Force passed
up many an opportunity to make kills they succeeded in preserving all of the
H’kar ships during their first system raid…which was when Vedja had his first
epiphany.

Star Force wasn’t fighting in a way to destroy enemy
ships, but to weaken them so that they could kill them later while preserving
their own vessels. Moreover, they were seeking to do damage to the enemy while
only losing shield strength. That was why they appeared to be so hesitant and
often ordered H’kar ships to withdrawal when they were undamaged.

What would have taken an Archon all of 5 minutes, at
most, to figure out, the elder H’kar had finally saw…and when he did he
connected it to reports that had come back from previous raids in which Star
Force had tried to explain what they were doing to the H’kar commanders. Their
words had been farcical then, but now they appeared to crystalize into perfect
clarity in retrospect.

So strong was the H’kar urge to lock onto a target and
destroy it that learning to engage and disengage as common practice was
something that was going to take a fundamental shift in H’kar psychology to
accomplish, but Vedja knew it had to happen. He wasn’t going to be able to do
it on his own and began drafting a series of messages to his former students
that now commanded the majority of the fleet back home, outlining in better
terms what Star Force had been trying to tell them all along and imploring them
to begin making alterations in the training programs immediately to make the
upcoming recruits more open to the new combat philosophy.