Star Force was not teaching them this, and it was best that only the Reignor and a few others knew of how radical the training of the Neofan offspring was. Problems had been reported, but those were expected based on how the lesser advanced Furyans had behaved, and so far, while the oldest of the young were at full size, the aura readings that were being reported back to House Atriark were shocking.

  Aggression was not being suppressed, it was being drawn out and refined, and reaction times were reported at less than a second…whereas it was imbedded into the young with talismans to be at least 8 seconds. Older Neofan could trim that down with experience, but Star Force was completely undermining everything it meant to be Neofan. These offspring were going to become an abomination that had to be destroyed.

  Or so House Atriark would have thought if they knew. Plausious kept these reports to himself, curious as to how Star Force would confront this problem, for he did not want future Neofan to be amoral, low emotional demi-gods. He wanted them to become Jedi, or some form of it, and while he had gotten to that point via an unreplicateable path, Director Davis had promised him that their training would be lightside-based, as all Star Force training was.

  Yet this was a long term experiment. These Neofan, even if successfully constructed, would never be ready to assist their House…now Houses…in this war. Not in any meaningful way, at least.

  Which meant Plausious had all the Neofan he was going to get at this point. There could be a handful of stragglers that hadn’t shown up yet, and he’d take every one he could get, but most of the exiles were going to House Phoenix for their own reasons. Perhaps they saw it as a future different from the past, and House Atriark had a long past, but it didn’t matter. He’d fight this war with whoever he had available, and right now was the time to start fighting.

  Star Force’s two invasion lines had breached. Not completely with the Asferja. They were still mostly bottled up with some leakage here and there, but the Bru’son were able to slip past them with their cloaking devices. They were not intended to take planets, but to destroy shipping lanes and cause havoc in the ‘safe’ areas. But worse than that was the Jaeggers. Their planet-sized ships were virtually unstoppable by all except Star Force’s most advanced Essence vessels and the Veloqueen.

  The Reignor admired his old allies and their massive Essence potential, but they had to regenerate it slowly from their own bodies, whereas the Neofan could draw from the wells in the Temples. Still, they had done well to disable one of the baseships each, but neither were destroyed, and they were now sitting near their arrival point slowly rebuilding themselves with a third alongside them to assist with the repairs and guard them against further attack.

  The fact that they’d tried to take the one Star Force planet in that black hole system and failed was encouraging…for it would have given those ships raw materials to work with. Denying them that meant those two damaged baseships would remain damaged for a long, long time unless they were able to leave the system or get shipments back to them with repair parts enough to get them mobile again.

  The other baseships that had arrived had simply passed through enroute to other locations where they were assimilating native races…but not the heidoor, curiously. They were going for socani only, meaning those lifeforms that lived on planets rather than in space or in stars.

  They were building up additional troops to invade other planets, but still, why not take control of heidoor to add to your war fleet? Did the T’fen forbid it because they too were heidoor, or was there another reason?

  Regardless, they were spreading out, and breaking apart their planet-sized ships into smaller sections so they could take over hundreds of systems simultaneously…and because of that breakdown, Plausious had decided it was time to take on some of this burden in a way only the Neofan could.

  Three Gjardans had been trailing a Neofan scout ship as it followed one of those baseship chunks, which Star Force had started calling ‘Ice cubes’ despite the fact that their dimensions were not precisely cubical, but their edges were smooth, so the metaphor held up somewhat. The Ice Cube in question could see the trailing scout ship, but the Gjardans were in another system and out of range. When the Ice Cube made a jump, the scout ship would signal the hunters and they would come to the next system, so forth and so on.

  The Ice Cube had finally stopped in System 339281 and had moved into low orbit over a large planet, then it split off another fourth of itself into a smaller Ice Cube that traveled out to another planet, for two were inhabited here by a race of large cat-like quadrupeds that had achieved some level of technology…but not to the level of interstellar travel. The Neofan didn’t even have a name for this race, nor did Star Force, for this system was not on any of their maps as more than just a dot with the number of planets and moons indicated.

  Apparently the enemy had better maps of the Deep Core than they did, and that was most likely due to the Hadarak, though why they hadn’t taken over this system already was a mystery. In a purge they were supposed to destroy everything in the galaxy and let it reset, but there were a lot of primitive races in the Deep Core that were not heidoor that had been left untouched, and it was those races that were being gobbled up by the Jaeggers.

  By the time the 3 Gjardans arrived, tiny little bits of the first Ice Cube had flaked off and landed on the planet to begin harvesting the locals, but it was the big Ice Cube itself that the Neofan were interested in. It far outmassed them, measuring a total of 4,290 miles in length and about half of that wide, with a piece of it missing now out in orbit around the other planet. Before it could have a chance to join up again the Neofan sent to hunt these Ice Cubes by Reignor Plausious raced into orbit around the planet, braking at near maximum deceleration, and emerged just beyond it and began firing immediately.

  The ‘flakes’ coming off it or coming back up were targeted immediately and disappeared with two or three hits each while huge beam weapons, Essence enhanced, tested the strength of the Ice Cube’s shields…but at the same time multiple Essence-only attacks were also launched. Jaeggers had Essence-enhanced shields, but that didn’t mean they’d stop every attack, and the Neofan were quickly cycling through everything they had to see if any of them would get through, or at least be more effective at draining the Essence component of the enemy’s shields.

  As they did, the Ice Cube returned fire, with thousands of hidden weapons emplacements pouring down a torrent of green and blue energy blasts, some beams, other balls and lightning-like strikes, as flocks of their ships that had been riding on parts of the surface of the Ice Cube moved out beyond the shields and began making attack runs against the three white ball-shaped ships that appeared to be at a significant mismatch.

  But the ‘smaller’ ships held their position, ignoring the mobile fleet the Ice Cube had dispatched and kept probing the big base’s shields as their own seemed to impossibly hold up against the onslaught. There were visible rings rising up out of the Neofan ships that met the shield perimeter in a very odd fashion…and it was one technique apparently the Jaeggers didn’t know of, because it boosted shield strength dramatically when you didn’t have to fully project them outside of the defended target.

  Those rings had shields of their own to protect their mass, while the rest of the ship was guarded by the reinforced shields that ate up all the weaponsfire coming in without even having to use an Essence-enhancement. All the Jaegger weapons being used were conventional ones, while the Neofan were hitting them with all kinds of Essence attacks…one of which finally found a way through, and the Kra’ney bolt, a pure Essence weapon, ignored their regular shield dynamics entirely, melting the Jaegger’s Essence barrier at the point of impact only, then slid on through at 83% cohesiveness and impacted their hull with dramatic effect.

  It chewed into it first, then exploded…bit by bit in what looked like a wave that stretched out for miles in radius before the effect ran its course…and in its place was a debris field with matter chunks no larger than a Neofan’s balled up fist.

  As soon as that first Kra’ney penetrated, all three ships started firing them en mass, and suddenly the Ice Cube started coming apart one layer at a time with the debris being held inside its own shields…which was helping to block more Kra’ney slightly, but they still landed on the obscured hull with more than 95% integrity left.

  That continued for several minutes before the Jaegger mobile ships began ramming the Gjardan’s at close range and splattering off their shields to no effect. Then they moved out and started ramming them from further distance…only to pass through harmlessly after a little stint in the Essence Realm.

  The Neofan had long ago learned how to deal with kamikaze attacks and simply set up a portal-like field over a certain area and anything going into it would transition across the ship and out another on the far side, making reversion inside the ship itself impossible. The areas of the ship that were firing weapons couldn’t be covered, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was thwarting most of the attempts to weaken or destroy the Gjardans’ shields, but three of the ships normally considered to be ‘massive’ until the Jaeggers had arrived were more than capable of dealing with the mobile fleet the Ice Cube had been sent here with.

  Soon it was clear that the Gjardans were not going to be removed or destroyed, so the Ice Cube…or the diminishing parts of it…moved up higher in orbit with the Gjardan trailing it and staying in firing range of their Kra’ney most of the time, though the weapon had a more limited range than others.

  The Ice Cube eventually got to the jump point to head back towards the star and disappeared in the blink of an eye…followed by three more little blinks as the Gjardans raced after it, leaving behind some specs of dust that were in fact Neofan landing craft as the Jaegger smaller ships fled along with the Ice Cube trying to defend it.

  That left this planetary orbit more or less open, with only a handful of transport ships rising up or going down. They all went evasive to stay away from the Neofan, who did not chase. Instead they headed down to the surface where there were already makeshift Jaegger bases set up and smaller collectors out capturing the local population.

  One of the Neofan transports set down right next to the largest base as Jaeggers spilled out of multiple buildings by the hundreds and began firing on it with handheld weapons. The few turrets that were operational were on the prefab buildings themselves and were also ignored. Instead, music started playing from the ship as a ramp slowly descended and three Neofan slowly walked out with the transport’s shields protecting them from the hail of dozens of weapon impacts per second.

  Nurso stood in the center of the three Neofan as they stopped at the bottom of the ramp, listening to the dramatic music that they’d adopted from Star Force. If there was one thing their Empire knew how to do well, it was make an entrance, and their battle song ‘Duel of the Fates’ was one of the Neofan’s favorites.

  Jiol, to his right, sent out a telepathic warning to all the Jaeggers in a way that they were sure to understand, for it was in their own language that Star Force had already deconstructed and shared with their allies.

  You have three options of defeat. You can run away. You can surrender. Or you can die. Choose wisely.

  Nurso waited several moments, giving them the required chance to live their Reignor demanded, then he walked forward through the transport’s shield and began taking weapon hits on his own. It appeared like a bubble around him, but appeared no weaker. His two counterparts did the same, making it clear that they were the superior warriors here.

  But the Jaeggers didn’t run or surrender, they just kept firing until one rushed Nurso and jumped up at him.

  The Neofan flicked an arm and batted the smaller biped away with a concussion blast, never even making physical contact with him.

  “Death it is then,” he said, walking forward and gesturing to various individuals…only to have them keel over, explode, or cut pieces by various psionic or Essence attacks.

  Still, the Jaegers would not run or surrender. Instead, they all charged, hundreds of them that were still gathering from multiple locations…including a few that matched the images of the locals that they had taken from orbital surveillance on their way down to the planet.

  The Jaeggers had already converted some of them…and they were now about to fight against their own rescuers!

  The Neofan had no time for theatrics, for more were probably being converted this moment…and when that realization hit Nurso, all three Neofan ran or jumped forward in different directions and started slaughtering the Jaeggers with such ease that it didn’t even appear to be a fight. After less than a minute all of them were dead…except for the converted locals who they had disabled and rendered both unconscious and held within invisible physical bonds. Nurso and Jiol rushed off towards the buildings where the conversions were taking place to free the thousands of penned up locals they sensed there as Viri stayed with the 16 that had been captured.

  She knelt over one, with her larger mass and the cascade of prominences blocking out most of the sky as Viri studied the myriad of implants visible on the black-furred muscular cat. The hair had been cut off around it, and the damaged pink skin around the edges of the implants demonstrated their crude technology. At the minimum that tissue should have been nanite reconstructed within minutes of implementation…and the Neofan had a long history of doing such augmentations to their servants, so she knew these Jaeggers were either crude in technological comparison or they just didn’t care to be neat with their conscripts.

  She touched one of the blocky implants and injected it with nanites from her own armor that covered her hands, forearms, and everything below the waist, plus the crude crown she wore on her head. They were all networked together into one unit while allowing the grey torso skin to show along with the subtle gill-like flaps on the lower chest…but she was well protected by her energy shields, and if need be could extend the armor across her entire body. But doing so would be a sign of a fair fight, and these Jaeggers were nowhere near their equal as a group, let alone as individuals.

  Using her nanites she penetrated the first of the implants, finding its software far more impressive than the implementation process. Viri couldn’t quickly hack it, so she simply had the nanites start physically disconnecting it from the individual…only to find poison nodules deep within the body that were set to detonate if the implants were not removed in an approved process.

  “I will not be denied,” she said, letting the poison burst and start doing massive damage to the captured individual as she pushed Essence into his body to heal him just as fast…except additional mass was needed, so the surrounding ground suddenly started to diminish as dust flew up towards the cat and was being molecularly altered into useful compounds.

  Piece by piece she removed the recently implanted hardware, finding it more difficult than it should have been, leaving only those sections in his brain to deal with…which were beyond her, for pieces of the cat’s brain had actually been removed and replaced with the hardware.

  Viri growled, and simply destroyed the transmitter so it couldn’t network with the other Jaeggers as she saw a stampede of the cats leaving one of the buildings, having been freed before they could suffer the same fate. They could speak, but it seemed they didn’t want to stick around to thank their rescuers, and ran as fast as possible across the grasslands with a speed she could at least respect.

  “A problem?” Nurso asked as he returned to her.

  Viri stood up. “I cannot remove the mental augments. It will take a proper healer to do so. They did not just add technology, they took out part of the brain.”

  “As we have done,” he reminded her.

  “And will never do again,” she countered, citing the command of their Reignor. “If we are to be truly victorious here, we must defeat this augmentation. They all are still under the Jaeggers’ control until we do.”

  “Agreed. They did not get to many here, so we should be able to handle these onboard a single Gjardan. They will not be prisoners for long.”

  “At this rate, if the Jaeggers are not countered, they will quickly double their numbers.”

  “They will not do so here.”

  “No, but there is a greater threat.”

  “Explain.”

  “See for yourself,” she said, telekinetically flicking him one of the implants.

  He studied it with his armor’s nanites as well, unsure what she meant, and then he found it too.

  The implants had a number of preset genetic codes for them to easily interface with. Genetic codes that had been planned to be assimilated at some point with places in their biology engineered to hold specific implants once captured.

  “The Hadarak minions,” he said, crushing the small square plate in his fist. “They plan to assimilate those dumb brutes as well.”

  “So why start with these when there’s a galaxy of pre-made converts?”

  “A good question. Perhaps they prefer technologically advanced races for their natural brain power while the Hadarak would be weapons and labor only.”

  “We have to destroy their baseships as quickly as possible, or their invasion alone will become a nightmare. The Hadarak are formidable enough without technology.”

  “Indeed. We need to inform the Reignor of this immediately…”

  16

  EG30

  November 18, 158439

  THREE MUSKETEERS GALAXY

  Interstellar Space

  Deenat #281

  The Easter Basket had just left the Essence Realm, popping back into a starfield within a portal ring not located inside a Temple, but out in the emptiness of interstellar space. The Deenat were designed for ships not going to the Temples but still traveling on the intergalactic network, so they could come and go without an extra Essence jump to get through the Temple walls. They had also been constructed to further conceal the location of the Temples, so the limited traffic that was moving around wouldn’t be emerging into star systems near their locations.

 

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