Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) (3 page)

This time he didn’t try to soak in the feeling, but
instead deployed a series of bioshields along his legs and moved them down
towards his feet, disengaging them there and deploying another at his hips
simultaneously…his version of a crude jet engine. He had done this sort of
thing in the water, but the loose air was another matter entirely.

He used the multiple shields to push the air down away
from him, adding to his upward momentum while throwing fins off his back and
arms to guide his movement. The shields had to be locked to his spine, rather
than independently deployed, but that only made them easier to generate. The
trick was in creating multiple ones simultaneously, as well as moving them
relative to his body.

Once getting a feel for the air and remembering his
rhythm rate, for he had no visual reference to judge his speed off of, Paul
just focused straight up and put himself through a workout, able to seemingly
fly in any direction for an infinite distance, for he couldn’t detect the far
walls, let alone the ceiling. He also wasn’t moving very fast, for the
propulsion he was providing was now having to fight the gravity without his
upward momentum.

When that transfer happened his gut settled slightly,
for he was no longer ballistic and the gravity was tugging on his insides a bit
more than his fall rate allowed. It wasn’t much, but Paul knew he was on his
own power now and intended to stay aloft for quite some time, throwing in a few
aerobatic maneuvers while he was up there.

He gradually increased the gravity as he progressed,
making it harder and harder for him to counter the pull, with him eventually
coming back to ground when he hit 9%. Pedal as hard as he could, he just
couldn’t move the bioshields fast enough to get enough air underneath him to
counteract his weight.

Tired from the effort, he switched the gravity up to
20% and created a telekinetic plate beneath his feet, then split it in half and
spread it out like an inflatable bag, pushing him up into the air by forcing
distance between his feet and the floor. Paul launched up and slightly forward,
pulling a quick flip and coming back down again, using the same tactic to
create a ‘
crashbag
’ underneath him to help slow his
descent.

That one failed, badly, for instead of crunching down
it merely stopped him cold up until the point his feet overloaded and breached
the weak field, bringing him down to the ground with Paul catching the rest of
his momentum on his legs with ease.

“Damn it,” he said in the dark, with the tiny circle
of lights so far away now that he could barely make them out. “How the hell
does Morgan do that?”

Paul set himself and launched upwards again, trying
multiple times to get the ‘cushion’ effect and hoping to learn from the
succession of failures.

3

April 19, 2741

Daxmet
System (Old
Calavari Region)

Cjom

Heema walked down the long hallway onboard the
Alliance jumpship, following a row of other Reen that were making their way to
the hangar bays to leave the ship. Almost the entire complement of passengers
on the Star Force vessel were Reen, with
Cjom
now being
the furthest endpoint of the ADZ transit grid into the region that had once
been dominated by the Calavari, though this system had never belonged to them.

Two years ago it had been infested with lizards that a
Star Force fleet and army eradicated, freeing the former transitional system
that had been used to funnel Calavari and other survivors away from the lizard
advance and into the ADZ. Now that they’d returned to reclaim it, the new
Alliance that Star Force essentially controlled was giving the
Reen’s
former system back to them.

It was something that Heema and others had been
pressing for relentlessly in their efforts to grow their race’s dominance
within the ADZ. Already they possessed two planetoids of their own within those
borders and numerous pieces of others that
defaultly
belonged to Star Force and operated under their limiting, but fair code of
conduct. However, this was the first opportunity they had to reclaim what was
once theirs and to establish a foothold outside of the ADZ, whose climate was
stable, but overly populated with any type of expansion requiring considerable
skill and resources.

The worlds outside the ADZ were another matter, with
plenty to seek out and colonize now that the lizard threat had been pushed
back…except that Star Force wasn’t allowing any such colonization to occur
except with their express permission, and the Hycre and Protovic were backing
them on that. The mysterious Voku also seemed to be in their pocket as well,
for that overly powerful race had just set up its first embassy within the ADZ
and was beginning to make civilian contacts with what they referred to as Star
Force’s wards. The Reen didn’t like that term very much, but in truth Heema had
to admit it was accurate.

The Reen had been sucking off of Star Force and the
others defending the ADZ against both the lizards and the Skarrons for so long
that a lot of his people had never known life outside of it. Heema was one of
the few that had, though he owed his life to Star Force as well, thanks to
their wisdom in regards to training to attain self-sufficiency. It was a new
concept for the Reen, but a small portion of the population had heeded the
Humans’ help and even requested personalized tailoring of their training
programs.

Heema had been through one of those himself, and had
found that his greater size was not such a disadvantage as others had deemed.
Star Force knew ways to work around their weaknesses and give them access to
the high intensity workouts they needed. As a result Heema and many others
onboard this jumpship had formed a guiding core to Reen society, reducing the
turnover of new leadership and allowing their race to begin focusing on larger,
grandiose goals above and beyond pushing their reproduction to acquire new
territory from Star Force Alliance World regional allotments.

Gone now were the days of driving the purely civilian
angle, with the Reen having rebuilt their military fleet to respectable levels,
though not yet up to a strength that could confront the lizards on an even
playing field. The radical advances in Star Force technology were not being
shared with the Alliance, save for some key pieces that had gone to the Hycre
and Protovic…and those two races had guarded those gifts closely, leaving the
rest of the races having to work with their own tech or what they were willing
to share with each other.

That tech level had gradually increased with the
ventures that were being pursued in the ADZ interior, given that it had been
almost exclusively free of lizard incursion and both races and corporations had
been able to develop to a level where they could begin funneling resources into
endeavors above and beyond mere survival. The Reen had absorbed what new
breakthroughs they could, buying others and researching a few of their own, but
their warfleet looked much the same as it once had, with numerous green scarabs
floating in orbit nearby that welcomed the Alliance jumpship when it arrived
via unnecessary escort formations.

It was true that the lizard border was close, but
Heema and his colleagues had known that reclaiming
Daxmet
would require a significant level of defensive forces that they couldn’t yet
field. When Star Force had approached them with the offer to return one of
their former systems to them, free of charge no less, for the Reen had played
zero part in the invasion that had cleansed it of the lizards, they had also
offered a deal for protection if the Reen wanted. That, or they could go it
alone and hope the lizards didn’t hop the line and hit them, given that they’d
be the one weak link in the Alliance reclamation zone, for no other race had
been given a world in this region aside from the Protovic, who’d expanded out
colonizing a few new systems and adding to what had become a relatively
isolationistic empire on their part.

They interacted a fair amount within the ADZ, but now
that both the lizards and the Skarrons were no longer on their doorstep they
were not pushing the war fronts, merely staying put and building up their
defenses while Star Force continued to be the aggressor. In addition to the
Voku, a race called the H’kar had sent a huge fleet to the ADZ and the small
colony they’d been allowed to establish as basically a resupply base. Heema
knew little beyond the public news releases, but it was said that the H’kar had
come here specifically to fight the lizards, and their technology level was far
beyond that of the Protovic or the Hycre, so their replacing of one of the
former cornerstones in the Alliance combined operations was apparently an
upgrade that Star Force was comfortable with.

He hadn’t heard a word of malcontent about the
Protovic turtling up, and rumor was that Star Force had simply outgrown them,
with differing objectives in sight now that the immediate threat was no longer encroaching
on their mutual borders. The Protovic were pursuing their own internal agendas
while Star Force was growing by leaps and bounds, both inside the ADZ and out,
with several new regions being added to the general public knowledge. Already
there was the Achkor Zone that was coreward of the ADZ, but now this huge new
swath of territory that was being opened up around
Daxmet
was loosely being referred to as the Calavari Region by a handful of Star Force
people Heema had regular contact with.

Then there was an even larger third region out beyond the
Alpha and Delta Regions, as of yet not picking up any identifier that he was
aware of, but he knew the majority of Star Force troops there were Bsidd and that
they were planting a lot of colonies for that rapidly expanding race in the
area while returning a slew of small worlds to their former owners…but in the
Calavari Region only the Reen had been singled out, and no one yet knew as to
why.

That had made quite a few races very mad, for other
systems had been reclaimed that they had owned a piece of previously, but Star
Force wasn’t yet returning those. In fact it was rumored that they were
colonizing them for themselves, though without the transit grid extending out
to them yet there was no way to be sure. Most races within the ADZ relied on
the Star Force run grid for most of their movement needs, and as such didn’t
have the jumpships needed to go snooping around the region to see for
themselves what Star Force was up to…plus the threat of being jumped by the
lizards was ever-present, even in the reclaimed areas.

That was why Heema and several other senior Reen
leaders had argued for making a deal with Star Force to have a permanent
presence in the system. At first there had been pushback on that, for a lot of
the young Reen wanted to get away from what they felt was an overbearing empire
denying them their sovereignty, and from a certain point of view they were
correct, but as Heema and others had taken a long time to understand, Star
Force’s control was limited to only a few areas of society, and so long as you
operated within those requirements you were essentially free to do whatever
else you wanted.

They always reserved the right to intervene anywhere
they wanted for any reason, which made a lot of people, Reen and otherwise,
more than leery when reading such proclamations, but Heema had come to
understand that was simply a caveat to insure that if something bad happened
they’d have an established avenue in to deal with it rather than them trying to
control the
Reens
’ daily lives. A big, yet underrated
part of Star Force philosophy with running the affiliated portion of its empire
was with giving races the freedom to experiment and grow, yet requiring them to
gain a certain level of aptitude before dealing with them on more than a
caretaker level.

Heema knew many viewed that attitude as a slap of
disrespect to the races that were not members of Star Force, but the Reen
leadership had come to understand early on, at least in part, that it was
actually a subtle test and challenge they were laying down, allowing a path for
peerdom if a race proved themselves worthy of it. The Reen had been pursuing
that agenda in various forms for nearly 200 years, and now that they had a full
system of their own to do with as they pleased, with no Star Force presence
watching over them, many Reen didn’t understand why Heema and others insisted
that they strike a deal to bring them in.

The obvious reason was security, but it was more than
that. The rebuilt Reen empire was intrinsically linked with Star Force, and
rather than try and go their separate way, which was virtually impossible given
that Star Force was expanding so rapidly that systems like this were quickly
becoming engulfed in new controlling regions outside the ADZ, they should make
use of the advantages that gained them in order to take their civilization up
another order of magnitude and rise above their competition that was still
stuck inside the ADZ.

Heema had been part of the negotiating team with the
Star Force representatives, and he was almost sure that they had been hoping
for this response from the Reen, for they came up with numerous detailed
options that heavily favored the Reen without requiring any sort of payment
from them, which was highly atypical for Star Force interactions, but which
suggested that the
Reen’s
status had risen to a level
above that of the other races and now they were starting to see the perks of such
a status.

Heema didn’t expect them to be on the same level as
the Protovic, but then again if they were retreating within their own borders
and attending to their own needs there was an opportunity there that the Reen
weren’t about to pass up. While their warfleet was miniscule in comparison,
their economic base was about 1/3rd that of the Protovic and growing with every
year. That put them as the number 1 race within the ADZ, economically speaking,
that wasn’t a member of Star Force, but Heema and others saw the opportunity rising
to leave that peer group behind and take a step towards the Protovic, and even
the Hycre.

Right now the Reen were in a league of their own,
somewhere between the big powers and the peons, and how
the
they
developed this system was going to play a big part in where their
race went in the power structure. Heema had no expectations to ever get beyond
Star Force’s influence, though a great number of their former worlds had
existed on the other side of Calavari territory where Star Force had never even
ventured to date. Whether or not they’d ever get to them again was unknown, but
if they did he fully expected it would come on the heels of Star Force pushing
out that far, not in the Reen going there themselves, for as it was they were
no match for the lizards.

And such long travel times would break apart the
well-knit little empire they were building here.
Daxmet
was the furthest stretch, but with the ADZ transit grid extending out to it
that kept a link that the Reen didn’t have to build…which was yet one more of
the reason to have a Star Force presence in the system. The Reen were a very
different civilization now than they had been pre-ADZ, and that civilization
was better, in his opinion, compared to the far flung loose alliance of worlds
they had previously commanded.

The current Reen were united with a common focus and
working towards a series of goals, growing rapidly in both population and
material, with this system going to add to the latter almost instantaneously.
The key to that was in getting their high population here, and this jumpship
transfer was just one of many that would be forthcoming. The Reen had hired out
a specific portion of the ADZ fleet at great cost to begin bringing them here
in droves, with this being the 13th ship to arrive in the past month.

When Heema got to the hangar bay there were a number
of Reen transports already inside and loading up passengers, ready to take the
large, six-legged ‘giraffes’ down to the surface and come back up again to pick
up more. According to the ship’s sensors, there were already thousands of the
craft making the round trips, having been brought in here some 8 months
previously with the main transitional fleet that was busily rebuilding a tiny
spec of civilization on the planet even while Star Force crews were still
deconstructing the lizard infrastructure elsewhere.

Heema climbed onboard the transport and walked to a
nook-like depression in the floor of the giant craft, settling down there along
with many others nearby him in an egg-crate fashion since the Reen didn’t use
chairs. He waited there until the Reen ship was filled with 62 of them, then it
lifted off the deck and flew out into space, transitioning down to a lower
orbit enroute to the excessively thick atmosphere of the planet.