Gauntlet Wars: House Phoenix (Star Force Gauntlet Wars Book 3), page 4
Mak’to’ran knew Star Force had contingency plans for everything, including if the enemy got footholds early, but he knew they had to hold them now or it would get exponentially worse going forward, which was why he was pushing so hard to hold Zatria.
Right now it was a question of how badly did they want it, for he’d made a choice not to blink, and dozens of V’kit’no’sat were now dying in combat due to his choice.
3
EG29
May 28, 158438
MILKY WAY GALAXY
System 208337 (Hadarak Zone)
8th planet
Ard Ri Esna-58321JOR-18 toggled the mental interface on her command armor, sending out orders to thousands of Clan Kai’Sa commandos and mechs on the plain before her as she hovered in the air near a cliff face. Up on top of that cliff was a landing zone with even more troops, but on the lower plains ahead of them was a Hadarak city…and for once, they weren’t going to have to kill them all.
Working with Reignor Plausious and the Jedein, Star Force had finally been able to figure out a way they could do to the Hadarak what the Jedein could do in person…that being assert control and remake them into something other than Hadarak. In the case of the Wardens, that was to turn them back into their genetic predecessors, which were Jedein, but in the case of the minions they often had none, or none that would have been much of an improvement.
Unlike the Uriti minions…of which there were now millions of on this planet guarding the converted Hadarak ones…the enemy before them were all people. People trapped in bodies with highly controlled minds and instincts encoded to destroy any of them that deviated from their programming. Uriti minions were just biological machines and far less effective than putting people into battle. And since the Hadarak creators saw people as expendable, the T’fen or whichever of their servants had done the biological conversion had gone with the most efficient and effective measure possible.
Enslave an army of people to your will and genetically trick them into killing each other if anyone disobeyed.
So the army of monsters before Esna were also victims, born into this nightmare with no control over it, and she’d been having to kill so many of them that some days it made her sick just to think about it…but they weren’t leaving Star Force much choice, and mercy was a luxury of the dominant.
She was glad they were back to being dominant.
Though Esna wasn’t planning on using it at the moment, across her back a rifle was slung…but it wasn’t the standard Star Force battle rifle, stun or otherwise. This was an anti-Hadarak weapon with multiple settings that fired a bolt of cloying energy that stuck to their bodies like glue before soaking in over a few seconds. Within that energy was a stun charge laced with nanites…and within the nanites were the recent advancements her allies had helped Clan Kai’Sa develop.
Shoot a minion enough and it’d go down…then as it gradually bled off the charge and began to wake up, the nanites would travel throughout its body and put it into a state of hibernation while working to prep the individual for the first stage of a lengthy metamorphosis.
Bottom line was, the ‘Candy Poppers,’ as they were called now, allowed Star Force to neutralize Hadarak threats without having to kill them, after which collection teams consisting of people and drones would go around gathering up the comatose individuals who were having their cardiovascular system and base brain functions reinforced with the nanites to ensure they’d survive what was to come.
Esna had been on this planet for over 3 months now, and that was far longer than most. This one was heavily infested with Hadarak, and since there were no Jedein around to do the conversion for them, she was going about it the hard way rather than sweeping out to catch all the smaller systems as they had been recently doing. With the invasion of the Deep Core by the Jaeggers and the Outer Rim by the Asferja, the mass of Hadarak territory stood out as a major problem for Star Force, because the Hadarak hadn’t ceased their attacks on the Grand Border and the forces pushing in from there. And if troops were pulled away to fight the new invaders, the Hadarak would run wild in their absence.
This was already a 3-pronged assault on the Milky Way, it was just that this prong had been here long before Star Force even existed and was so damn entrenched it couldn’t be easily taken out short of a Neofan ship showing up in orbit and killing everything on the planet with a single attack.
That sounded both wonderful and horrible at the same time, but there was a catch. Using their formidable Essence weaponry across an entire planet came with a high price, and there simply wasn’t enough Essence to waste on the Hadarak when more powerful enemies required it to be used against them. The Jaegger baseships practically couldn’t be touched without it, so the Neofan were not going to be helping out against the Hadarak using the very weapons they’d designed for just that task. At least not much, and had she requested it of Plausious, he would have made an exception for a world as dense with Hadarak as this…but Esna wasn’t going to pull resources away from the other two invasion points that were badly needed when she could handle this the old-fashioned way with a slow grind of surface combat.
The problem the Neofan had, and why they hadn’t easily overrun the Hadarak in all the galaxies they’d touched, was because the Hadarak could regrow from surviving infrastructure…if there was any…or just reseed the planet and regrow, so killing everyone here didn’t fully solve the problem. The planet had to be secured afterwards, and the only effective way to do that was to colonize it…but Star Force wasn’t going to put people in harm’s way on planets with no defensive structure.
Hence, they were using the fast producing Uriti minions as the ‘colonists’ as well as the defensive measures that were capable of hunting down and destroying any ‘seeding’ incursions by the Hadarak later.
So Star Force was slowly replacing the hordes of Hadarak across the Outer Core with hordes of Uriti minions…and the Uriti weren’t even here to control them. Star Force did using Wranglers, and even putting one on each planet was stretching their numbers thin. Imagine playing a videogame with billions of units under your unilateral control, and that’s pretty much what the Wranglers had to do once one of these planets was captured, for the minions were not quite smart enough to always know who to shoot and who not to. They were just machines, even if biologically constructed. All the lights were on but nobody was home, or so the ancient phrase went, so Star Force didn’t want to leave a planet of living machines to mind itself. Hence at least one Wrangler was left behind to oversee them in case some wayward ship from who knows where thought about landing on the planet to explore, colonize, or was just out for galactic spring break.
She didn’t really understand that reference, but the Archons used it enough that she’d gotten the gist of it. Problem was the galaxy was huge and dense with population, even after all the people the Hadarak had murdered in their blunted purge. And sooner or later someone other than the Hadarak would come into contact with the Uriti minion swarms…and those swarms were Star Force’s responsibility, so they couldn’t just send them out to battle the Hadarak and leave them to their preprogrammed responses.
As Esna hovered in the air with a hand against the rocky wall behind her, she studied in depth how the battle was going before choosing where to get more personally involved…then she shot off from her silhouette cover and flew out across her advancing armies. Her armor was not very good to fight up close, for a lot of its bulk had been replaced with the anti-grav necessary for flight and additional comm and sensor gear that made it ‘command armor,’ decorated in the base purple color of her clan, as were all the troops and mechs below her, and the aerial craft above. She was gliding across the ground between them as an occasional shot of acid or energy weapons made its way towards her, though nobody was actually targeting her from this far back. There was just that much carnage happening ahead and some of it was passing all the way back to her.
Esna flew up nearby a mech that was firing much larger globs of the energy goo out like mortars into the sea of melee minions rushing her armored troops. When the mechwarrior was able to hit a group he could knock out a dozen or more with each hit, or take down one of the larger Hadarak minions instantly, whereas the Commandos would have to shoot it hundreds of times to get enough stun energy into it.
Her troops and weapons were damn effective, but as always with the Hadarak they spammed massive numbers at you, and already the piles of bodies ahead of here were forming small mounds that others were crawling and racing over, perhaps crushing them, but the nanites inside would try to repair critical damage and keep them alive if that happened…but nothing on a battlefield like this was perfect, and many of their newly rendered prisoners were going to die as they were stepped on by other Hadarak…or even a mech that had nowhere else to move, though they were damn nimble in the giant machines if they had a spot or two that was clear to step on, plus ‘jump jets’ to allow them to make a short anti-grav hop.
And even as they fought the Hadarak here, in the city ahead they were rapidly growing more. That’s why they had to get to the city and destroy the living infrastructure. Fortunately not all of it had people inside the ‘bodies’ of the buildings, but some did, and the Jedein had found a way to reform them as well. As long as Kai’Sa didn’t come up against a form of Hadarak creation they hadn’t encountered and cataloged the genetic code of, she could slowly convert any of them into a number of pre-selected ‘safe’ races that the individuals would wake up as with no memory of being Hadarak, coming out of cocoons after spending a lot of time inside acclimating to their new brains’ instincts and genetic memory.
In a way they were like the Paladin, and a lot of knowledge had been taken from that race’s genetic memory encoding procedures. Clan Kai’Sa wasn’t converting the Hadarak into soldiers of their own to use, but rather worker ‘bugs’ that would help mine and build infrastructure on the captured planets in concert with the Uriti minions. Those ‘bugs’ would also be encoded to be able to ‘Poki-evolve’…another Archon term she didn’t fully understand the origins of…into more advanced forms, some of which could talk and interact as citizens of Star Force if they earned those upgrades. If they didn’t, they’d just remain as workers and forever be protected by the Empire. Prizes snatched from an enemy that wanted to make everyone fight the darkside way they did. And while killing an enemy that’s attacking you is not darkside, the temptation always was to turn their tactics back on the attackers and fight expendable swarm with expendable swarm.
Star Force would rather be defeated and wiped from the galaxy than fight that way, and finding a method to rescue the Hadarak attackers from their genetic enslavement, born to fight and die without any say in the matter…well, that was the ultimate revenge against the enemy, and every single one of them they preserved was what the Archons called ‘bonus points’…and that was a reference she fully understood.
Two Hadarak minions so large they appeared to be uglier cousins of Godzilla crawled over the boundary wall of the Hadarak city and Esna immediately retasked most of the mech units to them, with missiles beginning to rain down immediately from distance, delivering small amounts of energy goo onto them that did little to slow their advance…which actually had them stepping on a few of the smaller minions that didn’t scurry out of their path fast enough.
“Shit,” Esna said, flying over and sticking onto the back of one of the Madcat-class mechs with the grip pads on her armor and the mechwarrior extending the shields above her to share the protection.
“What do you want us to do about them?” he asked over the comm.
“Those bastards must have had them in subterranean caverns,” she complained, for the aerial scans had showed nothing that large there.
“They’re always learning new tricks.”
“I doubt it. Not like this. I think they have a helper here,” she said coyly, referring to the extra-galactic controllers who had the ability to give orders to the Hadarak. One of which Plausious had stolen the ability from shortly after he’d killed him. They were called the ‘Dotra,’ and were not a single race, but a collection of individuals the T’fen had allowed to control the Hadarak after they’d constructed them out of captured Jedein long, long ago.
“If he’s here, he’ll try to run.”
“Probably long gone through a tunnel,” Esna said, mentally waving off the idea of focusing on the jerk. “He’s irrelevant now. I want to bag those big guys.”
“It’d be easier to have the starships kill them,” the mechwarrior said, though by the tone of his voice she could tell he wasn’t suggesting it, just pointing it out for reference sake.
“Clan Kai’Sa doesn’t do easy. Too boring,” she lectured him. “Try for their left legs.”
As she said it, she also loaded that targeting priority into the battlemap system so all the mechs involved would get it.
“Peg leg it is. You riding all the way in?”
“Making it up as I go. If you get any ankle biters I’ll deal with them. Hop ahead, I want us up front.”
“Well, can’t say you’re not a fun date,” the mechwarrior quipped, running his mech forward several steps then hitting the ‘jump jets’ and flying it through a long hop forward to come down inside a mess of Commandos and Hadarak, but just on the far side of the conflict. A quick ‘puff’ of Jumat from the mech legs cleared his landing zone so he didn’t step on anyone, then his smaller Candy weapons began firing on the nearby minions as he resumed his slow walk forward as other mechs fell into a loose formation on either side and pushed out into the hordes that jumped up and clawed at the mechs’ shields while others shot them with acid or energy weapons that were produced biologically, for none of the minions carried anything with them. Everything was produced inside them.
Esna had one such biological weapon of her own, but if she used her Fornax here to momentarily disable the surrounding minions she’d hit the pilot too in an area of effect burst, but if she needed she could narrow it down and send out a directional pulse, but as it was they couldn’t get through the shields and were sliding off them like a slick glass wall when they tried to jump on the mech.
The two ‘boxes’ that came up over the central body of the machine-like shoulders pumped out more and more glowing missiles that raced forward and up…then came down to hit one of the two gigantic minions known as Kaiju-class. Star Force had encountered them before, but rarely, so they had the right nanite programming to permanently disable them and prep for the conversion that would happen elsewhere with other equipment, but the biological armor on these things was enormously dense, and patches of it were the same as the Hadarak Wardens carried…Yeg’gor.
The nanites would take hours to find a way through that, but it was so stiff that it couldn’t cover the entire body of the Kaiju. Which meant the mechs had to hit the creases between it, and the water balloon-like impacts of the missiles meant even a partial miss would still get some of the charge and nanites on the weaker, flexible armor between the massive battle plates.
The Madcats kept firing missiles while other mech types got in closer and used more direct methods, including a firehose in the case of the Thor-class mechs. It had a long recharge time, but it could drench the larger minions or spray more widely into the groups of the smaller ones. She saw one of them hop forward to get in range of one of the Kaiju as the monster turned on it and shot a bath of acid over the mech.
The shields held, but the ground underneath did not…liquified by the acid, with the Thor slipping in the quicksand that resulted and fell face down, then the Kaiju began to glow on the chest as one of the Yeg’gor plates peeled open…then it fired a red energy orb into the downed mech.
The shields were penetrated with a single blast, but the armor held up enough to keep it from penetrating into the interior…but the lingering acid was now able to start eating into it, and the surrounding smaller minions turned and fired on it with what ranged weapons they had, including smaller acid spitters, but refrained from actually running across the acid pools to claw into it.
Before Esna could even order any help, a pair of Neos sprinted through the minions, not even bothering to try to keep from stepping on them. They plowed through them like an asteroid through a nebula, spraying up the smaller ones from the collisions as they got up to and in front of the Thor as it struggled to rise.
Both extended their shields over it in two umbrellas as another red energy orb eventually came their way, blocking it but leaving little shields left as more and more missiles sailed over them and into the left leg of the Kaiju, which was continuing to step ponderously closer to the Thor.
“Come on, come on,” Esna complained, knowing that leg couldn’t take much more before going numb…then she finally saw it start to stiffen, though it didn’t stop walking as the Neos fired at the smaller minions swarming the Thor and their own legs rather than at the Kaiju. All the other mechs were firing at it and ignoring the other one which was further away at the moment.
A flock of skeets flew in and hovered near the first monster, peppering its leg with even more shots as it fired back from its shoulders with anti-air weaponry, hitting their shields and driving a few of them back while the others held position and added more firepower to the left leg…which eventually gave out and the Kaiju fell to a knee, but was otherwise upright as the Thor had a huge gash taken out of its own left leg as it stood back up with the acid below having run its course.
“It’s pinned,” the mechwarrior reported, “but it’s going to take a lot to knock it into slumber land and the Commandos are getting hammered.”
Esna had already diverted a few mechs back to assist, but decided to add a little more help.
