Star Force: Resurrection (SF84) (Star Force Origin Series) (3 page)

Right now the targets tagged were orbital ones, with the
battlestations being divvied up but not all claimed yet. Paul ignored them and
decided to tackle two of the minor planets that were orbiting each other. The
binary pair wasn’t equally balanced, though the larger one was reading less
mass than the smaller, with it swinging in a more robust orbit as the two
danced around one another.

Paul also included the handful of orbital
installations and battlestations there, completely claiming those two locations
for his fleet to handle while the other 11 fleets went about taking down
varying pieces of the lizard defenses and infrastructure. That was one of the
advantages of having other trailblazers here. He could totally depend on them
to get things done and Paul didn’t feel that he had to watch over their shoulders
in the slightest. Had he assigned Riona to such a task he could have trusted
her to get it done without him worrying, but with the other trailblazers he
knew they might well come up with ideas that he wouldn’t, making them more than
just replacements for him in those other engagements, and perhaps even his
superior in some circumstances.

He’d make sure to review what they did later so he
could steal any good ideas, but right now he was going to focus on this pair of
minor planets and find out what was hollowed out inside both, for even the more
massive one was reading less of a gravitational field than it should have. Even
if he wasn’t curious, everything in this system that was lizard had to be
checked out and cleansed of inhabitation.

It was going to take some time to clear the mine
fields and neither Paul nor the others wanted to start bringing in their ground
troops until that was done. While there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else
arriving here he was worried that Cal-com might show up anyway. He’d originally
planned to help Paul with decapitating the lizard empire, but a priority target
had been discovered just on the other side of the coreward boundary line where
Star Force wouldn’t go and Cal-com had wanted to knock it out before it could
help strengthen the surrounding systems.

Paul had agreed, knowing that even if they allowed a
tiny piece of a shipyard ring to get established it would flood cruisers to the
surrounding systems and begin to snowball once it got a big enough supply fleet
established to keep the raw materials flowing. Symbolism of taking the capitol
aside, the more of these big targets in the region where Star Force wouldn’t go
that the Voku could take out would see a significant impact going forward. Maybe
not for Star Force, but for others fighting against them…or those just trying
to survive a little longer before they were annihilated.

Paul hated to say it, but maybe if this dragged on
longer the Skarron
empire
might get their head out of
their ass and send the type of reinforcements to fight the lizards that he
guessed they were capable of. They might have been in a situation like The
Nexus, with so many threats they couldn’t focus on just one, but Paul had to
believe that an empire so large that it dwarfed what the lizards had built
could squash this invasion if they put their full force behind it and for some
reason they hadn’t been willing to do that yet.

Regardless of their situation, the lizard capitol was
going down and Paul knew Star Force had assembled more than enough drones to
make it happen, so he’d told Cal-com to go hunting elsewhere with the ships
he’d been gathering for this invasion. The Voku were currently invading other
lizard worlds, almost as many as Star Force was, with more and more troops
flowing out from their home territory to assist in the massive lizard cleansing
effort and the patrolling and holding of the territory thus liberated from
them.

But it would be just like Cal-com to send some ships
to help mop up the lizards after the big push and he didn’t want any of them
running into these mine fields. To him, getting these moved was the first
priority, and several of the other trailblazers had already begun dealing with
theirs in a hope to clean out the ‘highways’ before anyone could accidentally
stumble upon them or the cleaning crews…which was why all the ships were keeping
a keen eye on incoming stellar reflectivity. If there was a ship incoming they
might be able to warn them off just in time, and if not they still needed to
get out of the way themselves…and with a sky full of debris they couldn’t just
zip out of there in a straight line in any direction they wanted.

Mine field
first, pair of planets second
, Paul settled on.
Lizard homeworld we’ll save for last
.

3

June 29, 3202

Krachnika
System
(lizard capitol/homeworld)

Hemratik

With his fleet split up dealing with multiple targets
in the minor planets, Paul stood in the bridge nexus as the command ship
scanned the planet they’d just rid of orbital defenses. Now that they were able
to get in this close they had a better picture of what was below the
surface…and it was showing enormous caverns within the lighter of the two
planets that were reading gaseous atmosphere and water in different sections.

That was about all their sensors could tell them, for
the outer crust of the planet was still solid rock. He saw the water and could
think of only a few possibilities, then found
Riona’s
presence within the battlemap network and sent her a direct question through
the mind-linked computer systems.

Thoughts?

They probably
hollowed out the planet mining then repurposed it for habitation. The water
could be storage reserves or maybe living space for a pocket of their aquatic
variants.

They can breathe
air too,
Paul pointed out.
This may
be some sort of training facility.

Lizard
challenges?

Maybe. They have
to figure out what the hell they’re doing somewhere to develop the genetic
memories, and I doubt they have that many veteran survivors to pull information
from. Everything they’ve built seems to be localized, so if they do have a
training zone, or maybe a full-fledged experimental planet, it would make
sense.

You mean having
lizards fight each other to study new tactics?

Paul cringed.
No,
and I really hope you’re wrong about that. I was thinking more along the lines
of prototype testing. Their aquatics variants are latter editions, so where did
they develop and refine their biological abilities?

There are plenty
of lizard planets with oceans on them. You want to go down and have a look?

Any reason I
shouldn’t?

They might blow
up the planet.

We’ll be
careful.
Wanna
come with?

Normally I’d say
yes, but you’ll feel better if I’m up here running things so you can go
explore. If the lizards have secrets they want hidden from us, better to go
find them before they have a chance to destroy them.

Point taken,
Paul
agreed.
Bring as many ships down as
needed for an intense scan. Find me someplace to knock.

Will do. How
many are you taking?

I think 20 ought
to do it.

For an entire
planet?

For a scouting
mission. I’ll call in reserves if needed, but I don’t think there’s any reason
to wait for the troop ships to get here.

Have fun
storming the castle.

Paul laughed, but that didn’t transmit through the
system.

As you wish,
he answered in kind before releasing his hold on the control sphere and backing
out of the nexus. With a few words to the bridge crew, he left the ship in
their hands and his fleet in
Riona’s
as they
continued their more or less mundane orbital sweeping activities and headed off
into the ship to armor up and grab a team of Archons from the ship’s crew and
the limited ground troops contained within the central plug of the ship, though
the TF wouldn’t be needed today.

When Paul got into a dropship with 19 other Archons
and set off from the command ship, Riona already had him a target and a handful
of drones ready to escort them down. Unlike on other worlds, this one wasn’t
defended at all. The now destroyed battlestations had been all the obvious
weaponry either the worlds of
Hemratik
and
Hegrasil
had to their name, hence the exhaustive look for
concealed emplacements or machinery that could be coopted into explosive use.

There were other drones literally hovering hundreds of
meters off the airless surface of this world, pulling detailed scans down
inside the planet looking for things that went boom or just trying to give him
a localized schematic of the facilities they contained. On the surface there
were structures, but only at a handful of sites, one of which was still getting
an up close look by several drone corvettes and one big cruiser.

Paul’s dropship slid down between them to a docking
facility that had checked out, but the Archons didn’t try to blast in the
hangar doors or hack their way into the system. Rather they set down on the
rocky ground nearby and the 20 of them left the dropship at a run across the
airless surface. Paul led the way while half the others carried cargo with
them.

As soon as they left, the dropship took off leaving
the Archons running in their assorted colors of armor across a couple hundred
meters of surface and up to the wall of one of the buildings that had no
surface entrance. There they set up their equipment, cutting through the flimsy
yet thick building material and installing a temporary airlock of their own
make, through which they all entered the lizard building and got their armor
out of airless mode and back to breathing the local interior atmosphere.

There were no lizards nearby. No troops waiting for
them to fight through. In fact there were no minds within detection range,
which seemed odd given that this facility was only some 19 miles wide on the
surface and Paul could sense a decent fraction of that distance.
 
Undeterred by the emptiness, the Archons
quickly made their way through what felt like a ghost town and over to the
hangar facility that they had bypassed and commandeered it. They placed a local
hack into the system via a small transmitter device that they were able to then
link to the ships above, allowing Star Force to send in dropships at any time
without having to blast their way through the bay doors.

Paul opened them experimentally, seeing that they
functioned and the energy fields holding in the atmosphere were working
properly, then he closed them again just in case there was a power failure…the
kind that could happen when Archons got to shooting things and the lizards went
about blowing themselves up in the process.

After less than a minute
Riona’s
voice entered his helmet.

“Paul, we got a schematic from their computer. There’s
a single shaft running from your location to the planet’s interior,” she said
as an updated map file was sent to his HUD.

“Any idea why there’s no one around?”

“Mothball protocols are showing. Whatever they used
this place for in the past, it’s no longer relevant. And there’s no computer
link to the planet core.”

“Old mining base?”

“Something like that.”

“Alright. If we lose
comms
expect a check-in within 48 hours. If you don’t hear from us send in a
retrieval team. If these guys can shut down the lifts we’ll need you to get
them back working again.”

“48, check.”

“Orbit still quiet?”

“As a tomb. Our other operations are progressing
normally and I’m not picking up any alerts from the other fleets. You’re good
to go exploring.”

“Later,” he said, cutting the
comm
and leading the Archon team across the empty complex to the lift shafts that
ran down deep inside the planet. They were all located at the same place, but
there were hundreds of individual lifts clustered together like a fiber optic
bundle, save for each little line was the width of a several dropships. There
were no smaller ones to be found, so his team walked out onto one of the football
field-sized chambers obviously meant for bulk cargo transfers and began to ride
it down using the small cupola attached to the side that had operating
controls.

The entire chamber was self-contained, so when they
began moving an energy field snapped over the open side of the big box as the
lift tunnel wall replaced the view of the facility interior and quickly began
flashing by as the lift gained speed. It took them more than an hour to make it
to the bottom of the route, with the giant car slowing gradually and the first
lizard minds popping up on the periphery of Paul’s senses.

“Contacts,” he advised, knowing the others wouldn’t
pick them up so soon. “Let’s keep this quiet until we see what’s going on.”

And by quiet they all knew meant mentally disabling
the lizards from range. Two mages stood ready to assist him with that and
battlemelds
as needed, but there were only a few lizards
nearby when the lift finally settled in place and he was able to put them to
sleep himself without incident.

The group walked out of the now shieldless entrance
and onto a small loading dock that didn’t match the massive nature of the lift
cars. There was ample room to offload cargo, but it appeared to Paul that the
structures he was seeing now were add-ons after the mining endeavors had run
their course, for there was no way these small docks could have handled the
massive amounts of raw ore that would have been funneling up to the surface.

In fact these were mainly storage areas with much
smaller access points into the rest of the facility, able to be offloaded with
supplies that would then be moved to the interior by hand or small mechanisms.
If all of the lift shafts were so equipped it suggested that there was still
cargo transfer occurring, but not of the nature that the lift shafts had been
designed for.

But then why the ghost town above? Maybe the cargo
transfers were sporadically spaced and didn’t require an onsite maintenance
staff.

Whatever was down here looked to be fairly low
key.
Maybe it was the star system’s version of a closet. If
that was the case then they could make use of it. Most lizard infrastructure
was recycled when Star Force took a planet, but given that this was the
interior of one they might be able to use it with only some minor redecorating.
If and when they got the six major planets cleansed of lizards there were going
to be a huge amount of recycling efforts ongoing, and assuming they still
controlled the 5 rings they were going to need a place to store the raw
materials being produced by them.

Paul could definitely make use of a planet-sized
locker for that, knowing that in other core systems they’d taken that they’d
had to scale back the planetary recycling efforts due to the fact that the
rings would fill up with material that couldn’t be used fast enough to produce
products…and then those products had to go somewhere. As big as the rings were,
when the recycling teams really got up to steam they could move an insane
amount of material.

Given how much there would be to process here, this
planet might come in handy and give them a place to store either the raw
materials or the finished products without having to ship them out of the
system or back down to the surface into newly built warehouses or even out on
massive plains of bedrock where they were just stacking cargo cubes up for lack
of places to put them until transport convoys could arrive.

So little could be transported between star systems
that they needed local options for just about everything, and having a lift
system already in place with a potentially planetary core empty for their use
would be a really nice prize to snag.

Paul led his team over to the first of some 30 lizards
that Paul had detected from afar and knocked out with his Ikrid, then as the
others waited he knelt down beside it and retracted his armored glove. He
pressed his pale skin against its green scales to pull a deep scan that would
easily bypass the sleep state and give him access to the lizard’s memories.

Sorting through it all was always a pain in the ass,
but he was familiar enough with lizard minds to know where to begin his search…their
recent memories. From there he could link to anything like following an old
school internet pattern, finding one site that would link into another or another.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a search engine involved, but he could process the
links so fast that it almost looked like there was to outsiders.

“It’s residential,” he said aloud rather than
transmitting what he was seeing to them telepathically, preferring to use his
full power to root out secrets, “but not for lizards. This is a giant prison
facility.”

“For who?” a striker asked. “They kill everyone they
come across.”

“They coopt a few,” a mage reminded him.

“Are these some that they double-crossed or a slave
labor force?” a ranger asked.

“Experiments,” Paul added. “Not labor. They have
pockets of races kept here and forced to reproduce so they don’t run out.”

“What kind of experiments?”

“Research. This one doesn’t know what, but I’d guess
genetic. We know the lizards developed their aquatic variant not that long ago,
and they probably did the same with the others as well. If they’re
experimenting on other races long term they may be developing new ones or
making tweaks to existing ones.”

“Who do they have here?” another striker asked.

“Races that I’m not familiar with, but this one thinks
they were all conquests. Races that the lizards defeated,” he said, pausing as
he made a connection and quickly sought out confirmation. “Trophies. In
addition to the research, this is the galactic trophy case.”

“Of those they’ve defeated,” the mage commented. “How
sick.”

“The water pockets,” Paul said with a silent curse.
“How stupid can I be?”

“What is it?” another mage asked with concern.

“I’m trying to find a memory, but this one hasn’t
worked in any of the water sections. He does know that some of the prison areas
are for aquatics.”