Gauntlet Wars: House Phoenix (Star Force Gauntlet Wars Book 3), page 7
EG29
June 18, 158438
ANDROMEDA GALAXY
Interstellar Space
Paul sat at a table in the Gjardan with three separate plates of food in front of him, systematically devouring the 6,000+ calories that were his ‘breakfast,’ though in truth he didn’t have a daily schedule onboard the ship and he barely slept a few hours when he did. His Furyan biology didn’t require more than that, but it did require lots of activity.
He’d just gotten finished with a 2 hour sparring match with Kara on their way back to Thrawn’s base camp in System 339201 on the planet that Paul had recently named ‘Wayland,’ for the Viceroy was apparently not in the habit of naming things and was just using designation numbers. Not surprising for the Paladin, who didn’t even have names except for the Viceroys, and when Paul had noted the need to name stuff in a new galaxy in a recent message exchange, Thrawn had declared that was a skill he did not possess.
So Paul had done it for him, yet going forward Thrawn was going to have to rely on Kara and the other Archons here for naming if he wasn’t going to be doing it, for it was time for the trailblazer to leave.
They were returning from their last sabotage mission, and the Gjardan had a huge crack in its surface from weapons damage it had taken. Paul had pushed things a little too close with the new arrivals. The Bru’son were totally unknown to him, other than what they’d managed to get out of the Asferja comm traffic intercepts. They were not a race that had been cataloged in the Legacy Repository, as Star Force techs had started to call it after moving in a permanent research team, so who and what they were was unknown to Paul until recently.
Their ships were extremely odd in that they were completely clear. You could see right through them, and the clear hull armor barely counted for anything. It was basically just thick crystal and not designed to resist weapons fire. The Bru’son ships were not designed as warships…but they had one of the most complex shield matrixes he’d ever come across, and they were damn hard to penetrate. It was like they had chosen an ‘all or nothing’ approach to ship design and put everything into their shields.
Their ships were long, flat, and looked like glass artwork. Their crews he had visuals of now, thanks to the transparency of the hulls. They were green as green could be, and made up of different forms of bipeds and quadrupeds. Paul guessed that green was chlorophyl in their skin, which would somewhat explain their desire for natural sunlight.
But not putting armor on your hulls was just plain stupid no matter how you cut it.
Their ships had been getting outfitted with the Asferja equipment necessary to ride the Galactic Threads across to the Milky Way, which was a series of patches that looked like scabs they had to apply to the clear hull…which he guessed the Bru’son didn’t really like given that it blocked their view a bit. Those patches were being created at a large facility nearby each Thread location. He’d destroyed the one at Daisy and then just destroyed the one at Donald, but the Bru’son had fought with the Asferja at Donald and while their weapons were not Essence-based, they were operating on some physics that both Star Force and the Neofan were not currently aware of.
As a result, the Gjardan had been damaged. Paul knew he should have pulled back sooner, but he wanted to get that facility knocked out before he left. Kara had been working her ass off in the sculpting chamber to allow him to do it, upgrading multiple weapon systems simultaneously for him to use as Paul flew the Gjardan from the bridge. He hadn’t needed to plug into his astromech to do it since the fleet was not with them. It had been a hit and run attack, and he figure it would take less time to repair the Gjardan than it would to replace that augment station.
In the meantime, the Bru’son would have to move to another Thread station or wait for Donald to come back online for them while the Asferja ships continued to slide down both without waiting, for the Thread-riding technology was built into their ships as standard equipment.
Paul had the first plate of food cleared by the time they decelerated into the Wayland System, knowing that a convoy from the Milky Way had already arrived in the Temple network and had moved to this location to meet him. He’d sent for them, which included teams from just about every division of the Empire, including more Archons to assist Kara and a Xavier to help Vikarathe with any additional cleansings that popped up. They now had technology to do that, thanks to Azoro, so all around it was time for Paul to leave and let Kara take over. Between her, Thrawn, and Vikarathe they should be able to annoy the Asferja here and cause all kinds of trouble to disrupt the flow of troops into the Milky Way, but it wasn’t going to be until much, much later that the Paladin would grow to the numbers needed to actually contend for possession of this galaxy.
That was Kara’s future now, not Paul’s. And while he was a little embarrassed about getting the Gjardan damaged, none of the crew had been hurt and that augment facility had been wrecked so badly they’d probably have to build a brand new one rather than try to put the pieces back together again. It would buy the rest of the Empire time to figure out these Bru’son, for the few that had already gotten through would be there by now or within a few months. But they wouldn’t be coming in as large of groups as they’d originally planned. Paul had successfully bottlenecked two of the six Threads against their massive convoys of ships coming out from the center of this galaxy upon which they had entered via the massive black holes. They had only constructed Threads for the last leg of their journey into the Milky Way.
Paul assumed more races would be entering the same way and traveling down the Threads to backdoor their way into the Empire’s Rim territory that they had almost no worlds in. Whoever had scouted the Milky Way for the T’fen had done a good job, for all the Threads were landing in areas that Star Force had yet to colonize or tame, which left a lot of empty or weak worlds not belonging to them for the Asferja to come out and consume.
Star Force had been stopping most of that, according to the last data dump he’d received via courier, but the more ships that came through, including the Bru’son, were going to make it difficult to detect and defend all of those systems. Sooner or later they’d find a foothold and start building on it, but that was the very thing Star Force knew it had to prevent.
Which was turning the Asferja invasion corridor into a more and more massive war zone as Factions from across the Empire were sending ships to assist in the containment. Only a handful of Asferja ships and start-up colonies had surrendered…and those only had after getting beaten into a pulp…while the rest continued to fight to the death the way the lizards had. Taking prisoners was a pain in the ass when you were being swarmed, but Star Force was still offering it and doing it for the few takers…but most of this fight was straight up carnage and would continue to be for a long time.
He didn’t know how the Bru’son were going to affect it, but it wasn’t like Star Force had played all of its cards early. The ‘bench’ of the Empire was multiple rows deep, and what the T’fen had sent so far, while impressive, wasn’t going to do much more than scratch them.
But scratching the Empire could still see trillions of people dead, so it wasn’t a small issue, but if their intent was to wipe out Star Force, they were going to need a lot more ships and troops to do it.
Which was why Paul was not surprised when the waiting ships ahead of them had delivered the most recent data package…and transmitted it out to a relay for him to get…that the Jaeggers’ baseships had split up and were putting down roots on different planets in the Deep Core…another area that Star Force had only lightly colonized.
They were not going for uninhabited planets, though. They were going for inhabited ones and were enslaving the populations via implants…and there was little Star Force could do to stop it when one of their baseships split up into dozens of fragments and blockaded the worlds in question. Landing troops in that environment would have meant a slaughter, so all the fleets could do was pick away at their baseship segments while they ‘assimilated’ the primitive native populations that, for the most part, had never even achieved space travel and somehow avoided the Hadarak purge mixed in with all the Megaloid systems in the region.
Paul knew the Jaeggers could grow new populations at a high rate via cloning technology within their baseships. Apparently this was a faster way to increase their numbers, which meant all three of the races to hit this galaxy first…including the Hadarak…were races that could spam population, albeit in different ways.
That meant the T’fen knew they couldn’t bring enough troops in from other galaxies to get the job done. They had to grow or otherwise attain them here, and right now the fighting was not to destroy the Empire, but to secure areas of the galaxy where they could do that growing.
And they might have got away with it except for the lizards had taught Star Force the hard way what it meant to fight against a ruthless and immoral spawn race. Paul knew all their tricks and tactics, as did the other trailblazers. They were not going to let them get a foothold to do that, and if the Jaeggers thought they were going to spread out to other systems and do the same with anything less than a full baseship, they were going to be disappointed.
They had their big chess pieces, and the Empire couldn’t take them out very easily, but that would only get them so far. Meanwhile, Star Force had multiple races that could mass produce replacement drones, and if necessary, replacement populations. The Bsidd were already evacuating many of their existing worlds only to grow a new generation on them as the old ones were traveling into some of the regions on the Rim that Star Force had not yet taken control of, but not the Asferja invasion corridor.
The idea was to prevent this from happening again in a new location, so the Bsidd were going to spam colonize those areas while expecting no resistance other than from some upset locals. Building up planetary defenses would take forever, but just getting a comm network and surveillance satellites up in every one of them would be something.
And making extra space on their existing worlds was also a contingency plan for relocating mass amounts of refugees if Star Force couldn’t hold the invaders in check where they were now. Evacuations were already occurring in some systems, but if there was a breakout, they’d have to start draining thousands of them, otherwise The Empire’s populations would be caught in the fighting and slaughtered.
They had to move them out first, and to do that they had to predict the course of events and be very cautious…which meant evacuating some worlds that might get hit rather than just those they expected to.
With the Bsidd suddenly making room for trillions, populations were already flowing and reshuffling everywhere, and not just in the danger zones. The entire Empire was making adjustments and turtling up to what was coming, and the addition of the Bru’son was going to add an unknown element to the mix.
But that wasn’t Paul’s job to deal with now, nor Andromeda anymore. His task was the Deebees, which would end up being their secret weapon when mature. But getting them to that point was going to take a long time, and then they’d have to reproduce multiple generations before they could even make a dent. But their spamming capability was there, in their design. He’d put it there for reasons he couldn’t remember, and like the Paladin they would be born with adult knowledge.
He just had to teach this first generation that knowledge, for they’d been hatched without it, and what they learned from him was what the next generation would inherit.
But before he went back to hide out with them while the rest of the Empire fought the beginning stages of this Gauntlet War, he had another task to accomplish.
Paul finished his other two plates long before they could reach Wayland, so he decided to sleep a little, then get in another 9 hours of solo training before hitting orbit of the quickly growing Paladin planet. Thrawn wasn’t disappointing him in his progress, but it was the convoy in orbit that had arrived from the Milky Way that was his actual destination.
He’d already covered everything with Kara and Vikarathe previously, so there was no need for any more goodbyes…and Paul was reluctant to go as it was. Pulling him away from battle was like taking a fish out of water. You could do it for a short period of time, but eventually it would kill the fish, and the same was true of an Archon. They were meant to be where the danger was and protecting people from it.
But the Milky Way was not the only place people were in danger, and he was taking on a very long overdue rescue mission dating back to the time of the Progarren.
Sitting in orbit were several small Star Force vessels along with a very big one. So big it barely fit through the largest Essence portals in the Temple network. It was a special vessel designed by the Uriti Wranglers to transport the massive Heidoor…and it was what Paul was going to use to bring back the surviving nightcrawlers scattered across multiple galaxies.
The only one they’d found on their own had been very distraught…and very glad to be found again. They’d essentially been abandoned when the Progarren were wiped out, and had just been surviving day to day, no longer with a mission in life. Paul knew what that felt like, especially for someone who started out with a mission and then lost it. It had happened to Cal-com, but at least his friend had known what was happening and had somewhere to go. The nightcrawlers had no comprehension of what had happened to the Progarren. They had simply abandoned them.
Paul didn’t know how many more there’d been that had died. Probably a lot. But the little tracking dots in his mind that Hades had put there were going to lead him to the ones that were still alive, and the Wranglers that handled the Uriti were going to see to their rehab. The nightcrawlers wouldn’t be useful in this war, for they couldn’t even come out into the strong sunlight of a star without taking damage, and this particular carrier had to be modified to be able to carry them in the dark.
The tradeoff for that weakness was that they could travel anywhere they wanted without having to use gravity or Essence to do it. They literally created a carpet of energy for themselves to travel on, so they didn’t have to use jumplines. That meant they could travel the empty places between galaxies where the T’fen’s servants most likely couldn’t go.
As far as combat went, they would be no help, and this mission wasn’t to gain the ability to sneak around elsewhere. It was to save the living starships that were in need, and right now Paul was the only one with the knowledge to find them, so this was a little side trip on his way back to the Deebees. A side trip that would probably last a few years.
But he wasn’t going alone. A crew from the Milky Way was here, along with several Archon Wranglers. Thrawn had offered to send some warships as escorts, but the more mass you took through the portals the more Essence was required and Paul didn’t want to waste it. The carrier had weapons, plus they were heading to areas where there were no planets and people. Desolate areas in the near dark where the nightcrawlers could feed.
The odds of them coming into contact with anyone else were slim other than passing by some interstellar traffic transiting low orbit around destination stars.
Paul caught a shower after his workout, then donned his armor and walked to one of the Gjardan’s hangar bays. He signaled Kara and the bridge crew that he was departing, then walked through the atmospheric shield and into space protected behind the thin layer of his nanite armor and person shields.
He flew out across the void towards the waiting carrier ship, getting a good view of the cities on the planet below. They were spreading like a virus…but this time it was a lightside virus. One that was going to infect this galaxy with the power of true civilization. It was going to be a messy fight…a long drawn out one, just like in the Milky Way, but this one was no longer his. He’d done his part to get them started off on the right foot, and now he had to let them fight it on their own.
Fortunately this was not as hard as some might imagine, for he’d long ago learned to share duties with the other trailblazers. He just didn’t like starting something and not being around to see it through. And he had a mission to accomplish, so it wasn’t like he would just be sitting on his ass watching.
This isn’t the way he wanted to play this, but this was the way the Empire needed him to play it. As did the nightcrawlers. The fact that they were hanging in limbo made transferring ships easier, because every minute he delayed meant their rescue would be delayed, which was another reason he wasn’t waiting for a sendoff. They’d been waiting hundreds of millions of years for rescue, and he wasn’t going to make them wait any more.
Paul entered the ship through another hangar bay, this one of Star Force manufacture, to a receiving committee of some 14 individuals, but only two of which he knew personally.
He landed on the deck and withdrew his armor back into his forearm gauntlets as he looked at one of them. “Saul.”
“Paul,” the Wrangler said with a head nod. “We’re ready to go when you are. Everything you requested is onboard. We just need a destination.”
“It’s in my head, actually,” he said, looking over at Jinni-39102…a member of his Clan Saber and also a Wrangler. Saul-9928 was not, but he was one of the team that had been working with the current nightcrawler they had in their care, which was how Paul knew him.
“From a god, right?” Jinni said, still not fully believing it.
“Hades, actually…and yeah, it’s still a little weird when you think about it. The universe has layers upon layers, and this is just another one. But without Hades, we’d never have known these nightcrawlers even survived, so we owe him for that.”
“Do they chat with you a lot?” Saul asked.
“Rarely, unless they want something.”
“And what did Hades want?”
“An introduction since the Deebees are camping out in his realm. And the nightcrawlers are partly his responsibility due to their construction.”
“Because they’re half voidling?”
“Voidling, darklight, call it what you want, but yes. He can track them because of it. He can’t track anyone who’s not. He actually seemed rather nice. The fiction on him is not accurate at all.”
