Gauntlet Wars: House Phoenix (Star Force Gauntlet Wars Book 3), page 5
“Keep on the big guy,” she said, seeing a small Star Force relief transport fly up to a nearby Madcat and swap out its right shoulder box for a new one, then fly back behind friendly lines as it was being targeted with energy lances from far too many minions. The reload was necessary, otherwise the Madcats would quickly run out of missiles and have only their arm cannons to use against the Kaiju, and eventually the nanites in those would have to be reloaded as well, but they had far more duration.
Esna detached her grip pads and leapt through the shields…or rather the gap in them momentarily created to let her out…and flew back along the lines to a knot of Commandos that were getting swarmed but still holding. She dove into the minions just ahead of them and dropped to the ground between them, taking shield hits instantly…then she used her Fornax to render all of them within a 30 meter radius twitching uncontrollably as the control signals to their muscles were scrambled.
It didn’t last longer than a moment, but the Commandos took advantage of it as Esna likewise pulled out her rifle and began shooting a few of the minions as they began standing back up. She walked backwards into the Commando cluster and kept fighting with them for a few minutes before the situation stabilized, then she flew off again behind friendly lines and kept an eye on the overall battle.
More than 20 minutes later, the first Kaiju was finally rendered catatonic.
4
Eight hours later Esna was still out on the battlefield. The city defenders had all been rendered catatonic and the city defenses had been destroyed. The rest of the biological buildings were being searched and the living components identified for removal and transformation. Esna was perched atop one of the taller buildings with a wide view of the area while she checked up on the rest of the planet through her helmet’s HUD and the battlemap system.
This wasn’t the only place assaults were being made, but it was the largest. Smaller settlements were being plucked off the map simultaneously while Hadarak air units continued to scour the battlefields and attacking wherever they saw an opportunity. Her pilots were keeping them away from here, and many of those Hadarak landed so hard they broke their bodies on impact. Fortunately their biology was highly resilient and most survived, but not all. Esna would have preferred a clean sweep, but in a war against a formerly unbeatable opponent, she was still proud of how far they’d come.
And it wasn’t like the aerial Hadarak were making it easy to capture them alive. The pilots’ first job was to protect the ground units, and right now there was an army of Uriti minions that looked like tall spiders with tree trunk-sized legs walking around everywhere picking up the comatose units and carrying them out of the city underneath their torsos like cargo. She could see long lines of them heading over the horizon to a nearby field base that was growing rapidly as other units there would take the sleeping Uriti and start putting them into ‘eggs’ that were being grown by the minions prior to arrival.
In truth they were half eggs, and when the various Hadarak minions were set inside the half eggshell would begin to grow up and over them, eventually fully encapsulating them and beginning the transformation process. They obviously had to be fully unconscious for this to happen, but the brain wasn’t something you could just shut off. It was always at least somewhat active, and it had been a hard job figuring out how to keep the person inside from suffering as almost their entire body was rebuilt into something else, as well as their mind being altered as new brain material was grown to augment or replace pieces that were already there.
After all, they had to get the Hadarak instincts out of them, and that meant reworking the brain with the person still in it. The ‘Core’ that was that person was still undetectable by science, though its interaction with the body was not. Thankfully the Neofan had far more experience with such matters, and could see the Core using Essence. Change too much too fast and the Core would disconnect from the body and the person would die…which meant their Core would move into the Essence Realm and off to who knew where it went. The Neofan could see that much as it happened, and they also had a lot of darkside experiments in the past to draw knowledge from. The kind where they didn’t care about the person undergoing changes, to put it mildly.
House Atriark was beyond that now, officially, but old habits died hard and it had taken a while for the Neofan researchers assisting them to realize how much they’d buried their own consciences over the course of their lifetimes…some of which were measured in the millions of years. Your conscience was your moral compass, and not a product of culture or religion…but those two things could modify, twist, or bury it. It would always be there to be found again, but these Neofan had theirs buried under what was a mountain of amoral crap and they didn’t understand in the beginning why it was necessary to keep the Hadarak minions so suppressed, citing they wouldn’t remember the pain later anyway.
Esna had been tempted to beat some sense into them, but that wouldn’t have worked because they could have squashed her flat in two seconds even without using their Essence skills. She could understand why the Vargemma considered them to be gods. They were the most advanced race she’d ever encountered, but they were still as blind as anyone else when it came to morality. You’d think they’d have better developed consciences after so many years of experience, but sadly that wasn’t true. Your conscience was an ability, and it seemed everyone, no matter what the race, started out with a level 1 skill rating. In order to get to level 2 you had to use it, and then 3 and so on.
If you didn’t use it, it didn’t level up, and it was just a general sense of something being good or something being bad without a lot of useful information. And when you taught yourself to ignore that small sense, you were essentially walking around blind with only logical, logistical, emotional, or other factors registering in your mind.
Wake up your conscience, and a lot of things started to make sense that you previously did not understand. It was truly a sense of its own, and by now Star Force had mapped a minimum of 12 senses in Humans, the conscience being one of them. Some of the universe’s puzzles you couldn’t solve if you had one of them numbed up or underdeveloped. And even a race as old and advanced as the Neofan was not immune to this basic foundational reality the universe had developed.
You might start out in a really advanced body and mind, but you still had to earn your way beyond that. And if you didn’t, impressive individuals in the lesser races would pass you up in no time.
Which was why Star Force trained people as individuals rather than groups, knowing that some things just couldn’t be done for you by others. But in the case of the Hadarak minions, Star Force had figured out a way to do them a HUGE service. And it was in no small part to a single avian Hadarak that had decided to disobey its instincts and deviate from the group. Esna had actually met it multiple times, for it went everywhere Plausious did. He’d found it being pursued by other Hadarak intent on killing it for its deviation from the programming put into them, not by the universe, but by the T’fen’s servants.
Plausious had saved it and they’d been best friends ever since, with it usually riding on his shoulder like a copilot on his massive body.
Esna had come to learn as soon as she’d found Star Force as a child, that a lot of the impossible tasks in the universe were actually doable if you advanced yourself enough to be able to figure them out, and how to save the Hadarak from themselves was the biggest one she knew of. Nobody in the galaxy had even been able to effectively stand up to them and survive. Those that advanced had to hide or they’d be pursued and wiped out. Even the Neofan and the Bond of Resistance hid in the Rim and their Temples where the Hadarak were hard pressed to get.
No one thought the Hadarak could be saved…and the one Plausious had found had saved itself by breaking away from their programming. It would have died shortly thereafter had it not run into the marooned Neofan, but the point was that the monsters in the center of the galaxy were not just the enemy. They were also the victims and prisoners of this barbaric transformation. All of these minions had been born this way, true, and most of the Wardens had as well, but their basic genome had not come from the lifesprings…not that that was always a good thing…but it had been designed to make them barbaric servants.
And what one super-advanced race could mess up, another could potentially fix.
Right now there were field camps running across a third of the planet with egg-like cocoons protecting and feeding the transformation with vein-like cables grown from Uriti biotech linked back to main processors much like a computer system. Each egg was monitored and any troubleshooting was done if a transformation wasn’t happening as planned while nutrients were also sent where there wasn’t enough biomatter already in the rescuee’s body to be recycled.
All of these fields were covered by shield generators to make sure they weren’t hit by the other Hadarak, and after several months of conversion they’d start sprouting new races with the same Cores inside them, and they’d immediately know what to do, for Star Force had decided to use Paladin genetic memory templates to guide them through this first stage of their new life as they had to figure out who and what they were.
But when you had billions of eggs to grow and process, you couldn’t do one on one training sessions, so the genetic memory had been one of the many keys to making this endeavor work. Keys that Star Force had collected over the millennia, but those hadn’t been enough on their own. The Neofan had others, as did the Jedein. Combined, they had enough knowledge to make this work, and the superior moral compass of Star Force had made sure it didn’t slide off into a horrific science experiment, for the Jedein were basically highly advanced life seeders. Once they put races into place, they didn’t care for them that much, though they had been instrumental in rescuing the single Nightcrawler that still lived from the Progarren era.
Looking out for the best interests of others wasn’t something the Jedein or the Neofan were good at, but Star Force had made a specialty of it. And thanks to the efforts of all three races, each of these fields, when hatched, would lead to a new army of workers that were already constructing brand new cities on the areas of the planet that had been conquered and converted while the troops kept the rest of the Hadarak on the defensive.
When Clan Kai’Sa eventually left this world, it would not be empty and available for the Hadarak or anyone else to claim again. There would be a mix of Uriti minion and ‘Flud’ minion populations on this planet continuously building and arming it. If the Jaeggers or Asferja ever got this far, each one of these worlds would be a bump in the road for them rather than a smooth acquisition. And left to build long enough, the Flud would make the road bumps into full grown thorns.
The Uriti minions, while they looked and moved a lot like people, were still just biological drones and expendable. But the Flud were not, which was why the Uriti minions were the ones handling security for the new colonies sprouting up. The Flud…deliberately misspelled by the Archons…were the ultimate answer to how Clan Kai’Sa could remove the Hadarak from the worlds they’d taken and keep them. Cleansing a world and leaving it barren wouldn’t work unless she left troops behind to guard it.
Now the Hadarak were providing her the ‘troops’ to do it, for she was stealing theirs, converting them, and using them to build anti-orbital weapons, aircraft, shield generators, and they were either constructing it using Star Force tech, or growing it using new and constantly upgrading Flud biotech that a group of Star Force Mastertechs were absolutely giddy about experimenting with. It had to operate on the same rules as the Uriti minions…no Cores inside the biotech so you weren’t using people…but as it was, there were anti-air turrets a few hundred miles to the south being grown out of the ground like trees at an accelerated rate, and Esna had to admit the Mastertechs’ playtime was turning out some very impressive results.
The Jedein were taking any captured Wardens and freeing them of their transformation, turning them back into the Jedein genome that they still carried buried under all the alterations. Esna had fleets of her Clan out tracking and monitoring the slow moving moon-sized Hadarak, for if they rammed a planet like this there was little she could do to stop it. But she could catch and capture them after an extensive battle using the Spaceball technology, and her Clan had gotten very good at using it and developing strategies to lure in and pin the Wardens before they could run to the safety of a nearby star and dive inside.
Once captured, the Spaceballs would fly the Wardens inside their cage to a location where a Jedein was, or a Jedein would come to them. Then the squid-like space creatures would start their own transformation of the Wardens, not forcibly, but by talking to them. The Wardens immediately obeyed the Jedein once they made contact, and actually triggered the conversion process themselves, for they had the ability to alter their own bodies as needed based on any genetic code given to them. The Jedein largely just had to point out where it was in them, and in some cases help in other ways.
Regardless, that conversion was not up to Star Force or the Neofan. And the more Wardens got transformed into Jedein, the more Jedein there were to transform others.
As for the Lurkers, they were so damn fast that you couldn’t really pin them down to a location to get a Jedein to them. So most of the Lurkers had to be destroyed in combat, and only a few classes of ships in the Star Force fleet could even try to take them on. Their Essence weaponry was too damn formidable, but most of the known ones had already been killed. How many more were out there, aptly lurking and waiting to strike in ambush, nobody knew. But her Clan fleet had standing orders to run and run hard if they spotted one, otherwise they’d get destroyed in a single attack without Essence shields.
And her Clan had no Essence shields. All the ships that did were off fighting the new invaders, and the inherent value of Essence charges had skyrocketed. The Uriti were invaluable in this regard, even if they never fired a shot in a battle, but they couldn’t keep up with the demand, and the Temples only had so much stored in them. Eventually it would run out and they’d have to rely on what the Vargemma inside could produce on a regular basis.
Reignor Plausious was in charge of most of that, even for the Star Force Temples. House Atriark had unofficially become the Essence wing of Star Force in this galaxy, though the Uriti were not taking orders from them. The Neofan were, however, taking over tanker duty for Essence shipments from them…which pretty much made it impossible for anyone to disrupt those shipments. Even if a Lurker jumped one of their ships, the Lurker wouldn’t stand a chance.
That’s how damn superior the Neofan were in Essence abilities, knowledge, and technology. But once the stored Essence ran out, it was back to conventional weapons, both for this galaxy’s defenders and the invaders.
A status updated pinged as Esna was reviewing a battle taking place in real time 1418 miles to the north, and she saw it was from the Deep Core, which was far from here. They were still about midway between Core and Rim and had only peeled the Hadarak back away from select chunks of the interior, with a lot of their territory still touching the Grand Border and attacking it as the V’kit’no’sat continually defended and held the line there.
But the V’kit’no’sat were also in the Deep Core guarding the massive black holes that the majority of intergalactic travel entered and left on. And the update was from one of those.
The entry point of the Jaegger invasion, Megatron 12, had not been secured by either side. The Jaeggers still had clear passage through it that neither Star Force or their allies the Veloqueen could stop, but the planetary outpost in that system, called Zatria, where Mak’to’ran were defending, just reported back that they had held the planet against the Jaeggers…and the enemy was no longer trying to take it. Their baseships had moved on elsewhere, leaving only one intact one to guard the two that were repairing and disrupt any more ambush attempts at the incoming intergalactic jumpline like the one Star Force had initially set up.
Those two damaged baseships were the result of that ambush, and while Star Force really needed to block off that line of entry, the fact that they’d held the planet against the bulk of the Jaegger forces was damn good news.
Except for wherever those ships were now heading.
Still, it was a huge victory. The unstoppable Gauntlet Wars had just been stopped on that planet, and the enemy had moved on to softer targets.
Esna copied a bit of the data she was reviewing and added a short message in her own words, then sent it out over the battlemap to everyone in the city…and soon a rumble began of combined cheers, and somehow even the Uriti minions began wailing some sort of siren-like call. That had to be the Wrangler’s doing, but it did add to the moment considerably.
Star Force was not going to be run over like the Progarren and all those before them had been. Win or lose, this was going to be at the minimum a fair fight. And when the Dotra learned of this victory, she expected them to be quite panicked no matter how many more races were on the way to back up the three already present.
Zatria had held, and the V’kit’no’sat were the ones to notch the first clear planetary victory against the Jaeggers…how typical. When she’d been born, they were the monsters everyone feared, having destroyed Star Force on many worlds left barren, and the scattering of population left behind was where she had originated before being located and rescued by Star Force.
And now, the V’kit’no’sat were part of Star Force, but no less dominant. In fact, they’d been scared of the Hadarak back then. Now they’d just stood up to the Jaeggers and their planet-sized ships…and scared them off.
She’d never forgive the V’kit’no’sat of long ago for killing Rammak, but the V’kit’no’sat of today were an entirely different story, and she was damn glad they were part of the Star Force team.
Check that…the Star Force family. As insane as it sounded, they were a civilization-sized family, and there was no doubt whatsoever that they’d always have each other’s backs.
