Star Force: Resurrection (SF84) (Star Force Origin Series) (4 page)

“That makes sense if they developed an aquatic
variant.”

“Do any of you know who Ariel is?”

“The Archon?” one of them asked.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he said, releasing the
lizard and resealing his armored glove over his hand as it transformed back to
match his exact dimensions. “They’ve got a decent-sized staff on planet, but no
combat troops. We need to clear them all out.”

“Just us?”

Paul smiled. “We could if we took our time, but that’s
not what I meant.”

“And what about this one?” a ranger asked.

The trailblazer lifted the lizard off the ground and
floated him out in front of him. “I hate killing these guys when they’re
asleep, but I don’t want them running off and sounding an alarm that might
result in them killing the prisoners. We need to find some place to stash these
guys while we find a control center and figure out if they have any booby-traps
in place.”

“I’ll take this one,” a mage offered and Paul gave him
the silent telekinetic handoff.

“Should we collect the others?” a striker asked.

“Can you sense them?”

“A few.”

“Alright, split up and grab all the ones I knocked
out. If you sense any more at distance leave them be. If they see you knock
them out. I’ll look for some place to stash them while we go exploring.”

With that the twenty Archons split up and headed in
different directions, with Paul pointing out the locations of all the lizards
on his battlemap just to make sure they didn’t miss any of the now unconscious
minds.

4

It didn’t take Paul long to find a control room, set
off the entrance facility that was designed as both control hub and barracks
for the prison guards for the immediate area. After disabling the lizards in
the chamber he stood over top one of the lizard control panels and accessed the
system, having gotten fairly good at it over the years and seeing that their
computer systems remained virtually identical to those they’d first encountered
on Corneria. There were doubtlessly upgrades to the computer power and
abilities, but the interface was the same.

It took him a while, but eventually he was able to
access the other regions that this hub didn’t oversee, getting a schematic for
the entire hollowed out moon. From there he dug into personnel files, both for
the prisoners and the guards, finding that there was barely a skeleton staff of
lizards here and no troops anywhere in the planet. As far as the prisoners
went, there were over a million of them.

Paul wondered how they were being fed and soon
discovered internal processing factories that made foodstuffs and a delivery
schedule for additional raw materials. A lot of stuff was being recycled
locally, but there were still steady deliveries being made to supplement what
was being grown here and…yeah, they had internal livestock farms as well. Those
weren’t included in the prisoner list, but apparently they were raising them
here as well then chopping them up and feeding them to the prisoners.

Bastards.

What he needed to know was whether there were any
doomsday mechanisms in place, either for the facility or just the prisoners.
Worming his way through the lizard system took time, a lot of time, in fact,
with the other Archons all cycling back to his position before he had an answer.

“Prisoners are rounded up and stuffed in a barracks
compartment,” a mage reported. “All are napping.”

“If they have any precautionary measures against
invasion, they’re not easily accessible,” Paul said, still working through the
systems. “I’m starting to think there are none.”

“Doesn’t mean they can’t kill the prisoners by other
means,” another mage pointed out.

“Get somebody back into
comm
range and get a message to Riona. Have her get me as many Archons and troops as
she can from the fleet and send them down here. We’re going to need to purge
this facility of lizards quickly.”

“It’s a planet,” a striker questioned. “How fast can
we manage that?”

“With a lot of running, it’s manageable. The personnel
are clustered into specific areas and only go out into the prisoner realms
occasionally, so there’s a lot less territory to cover than it seems. We’ll
need at least 10,000 to make this work, and we’ll hold position here quietly
until we get those numbers.”

“Ship’s crew?”

Paul shook his head. “No. Ground troops on the command
ships and as many Archons, Knights, and Commandos as you can strip off the
others. I don’t want anyone down here without armor.”

“I’ll relay the message,” the mage said, turning about
and running back through the facility in the direction of the big lift shafts.

“And by quiet you mean?” a striker asked.

“We hold position and knock out anyone who wanders
into this area while I keep digging. Other than that, make yourselves
comfortable. We’re going to be here a while.

‘A while’ turned into 17 hours before Paul had his
10,000 and then some troops assembled on the loading docks and beginning to
file out through the facility towards individual targets that he’d given them.
Some were heading to horizontal lifts that connected various sections of the
facility while others were going to smaller vertical ones that accomplished the
same thing. The core was a hollowed out sphere where the habitats had been
constructed, all with artificial gravity, so there were thousands of cubic
miles to search and neutralize lizards on.

Some of that space was made up of rock forming
structural columns that kept the thick crust of the planet from collapsing in
on the structures, but most of the internal space were the preserves. Park-like
areas where the prisoners lived in a more or less ‘natural’ habitat like a zoo.
There were even observation platforms set up for visitors to look out over the
lizards’ conquests, and when too many of them died or were expended in various
experiments or other activities they’d be compelled to reproduce…either
naturally or forced via more medical ‘treatments.’

There wasn’t a lot logged now, but occasionally across
the planet there were scheduled abductions from the preserves where the lizards
would go in and capture who they wanted, then take them to facilities where
they did whatever it was they wanted…including eating them. He’d found evidence
that some higher ranking lizards were allowed the privilege of consuming the
prisoners. Not enough to threaten their population numbers, but they were
considered a delicacy.

Recently there had been no such consumptions, dating
back for nearly 13 years. To Paul that told him the lizard leaders were long
gone from this system, having evacuated prior to the invasion and took who knew
what with them. There were still masterminds in the system, Paul knew that from
how the fleets had fought, but the templars and sovereigns were obviously gone.

He’d expected as much, but it seemed they hadn’t been
able to take their living trophies with them, and he hoped there was a lot more
they’d been forced to leave behind…though he expected most of it to be loaded
up with booby-traps to kill interested Archons.

That was why he’d spent so much time digging through
the lizard computer systems. If there was a failsafe mechanism it would
probably be manually triggered, meaning that the lizards in this facility would
need to have a quick way to activate it. That meant it should have been easy
for Paul to find, but there was nothing he could locate. There was still the chance
that there were hidden automated triggers, but nothing he’d found even hinted
at there being destructive mechanisms built into the preserves.

His skills were decent, but he’d also had some
software techs brought down in armor to take over the job from him. They’d stay
here under guard in combat mode just in case the atmosphere suddenly vented
from the facility. If they secured this place he’d be able to bring down people
in a shirtsleeve environment, but he wasn’t going to risk that yet. The lizards
had known they were coming here for years and had plenty of time to prepare all
kinds of subtle surprises for them.

So Paul left the hackers, which were commonly called
‘slicers’ when it involved alien computer systems, to their task and headed off
with a small detachment of Archons to one of the internal lifts after releasing
their prisoners. He woke them up himself and the Archons had telekinetically
held them in place as they instructed them to go and tell the others here that
they had the option of surrendering and living, but that if they didn’t they’d
all be hunted down and killed shortly.

Part of those lizards tried to attack the Archons,
humorously, without being able to lay a finger on them. Eventually they gave up
and left with the others, running off into the facility as Paul made an
announcement to everyone via the
comms
and internal
computer systems that he had the slicers keep sending out.

He had no doubt those lizards they’d released would
fight to the death, but Star Force didn’t kill prisoners and they’d at least
have a choice in their own fates. That said, while Paul gave them a head start,
any lizards they ran into from this point on that didn’t surrender to them were
going to be killed on sight.

The trailblazer had a renewed anger at the lizards
after reading through some of the things that had been happening here, so now
that he had the terms of engagement set to his liking he wasn’t going to hold
back.

With teams spreading throughout the planet’s interior
heading to very distant locations where there were clusters of enemies present,
Paul took his 12 Archon group over to the water regions. He’d called for and
received his aquatics armor from the ship, as had the eleven others with him.
He’d swapped it out back in the control room and was now
clunkily
running through the facility, but that sensation would disappear when he got in
the water.

But first he had lizards to kill, and when they got to
the end of the last lift transit the doors opened to reveal lizards waiting for
them with weapons drawn. They opened fire immediately, but there was no chance
of them getting through the Archons’ shields in the few seconds it took the
superhumans
to cross the floor to get to them. A handful of
seconds later the lizards were dead and the Archons were moving on, noting that
these had been aquatic variants, and eventually split up and hunted down all
the lizards in this area, after which they regrouped in the local control room for
a quick look through the database.

Some of the logs were identical to what he’d accessed
remotely, but some were only stored here and dealing with the various aquatic
races they held, each in a separate preserve. This control hub oversaw 6
different ones, with others being services by other locations. Paul would get
to those eventually, but as he reviewed the basics of the security measures he
found no booby-traps or defensive weapons aside from around the entry hatches.
Beyond that there was nothing for the inhabitants to attack, with the solid
walls around the chamber leading to nowhere even if they had somehow dug
through them.

“Let’s go,” Paul said, leading the Archons out to one
of the observation platforms that existed above water level. Most were beneath
the artificial lakes and accessible via clear tunnels that would take them in
amidst the denizens but safe from any potential threat by the thick, clear
material of the tubes, but there were a handful above the waterline where the
lizards could look down on the surface where some races would poke up for air or
even on small bits of land for those that were amphibious.

The preserve Paul was heading to
did
not contain any of those, nor were they air breathers, but they had open air
access anyway in addition to the subsurface entrances and exits.
 
When he got to one of the decks that existed
only a few meters above the calm lake he punched the safety glass and cracked
it. Several more hits reduced its structural integrity, then he summoned up a
distortion around the armor on his right arm and held it out towards the glass,
barely inches away, then released the Jumat blast.

The glass shattered and blew out over the lake,
falling into the water as the Archons jumped through the gap and followed it
down into the previously tranquil reservoir. Paul could already sense the
disruption in the minds below, but he also felt something sickly about them and
knew it wasn’t his imagination.

He swam through the water using his armor’s jets with
the other Archons following in his wake as he headed towards the nearest group
of prisoners. Many swam away, knowing they couldn’t escape but not wanting to
submit to whatever was coming, but a few stayed put and Paul could sense that
they knew that they weren’t lizards, or at least anything like what they had
seen before.

Paul swam up near them then came to a halt some 20
meters away so not to spook them further, for he could feel their fear and how
it was a common place thing for them, choking and rotting away their minds. He
activated the translation program so that his armor would speak in the
impossible to reproduce Elarioni underwater language and addressed those
nearest to him.

“We are friends of the Elarioni and are not here to
hurt you. We have come to destroy the lizards and did not know you were here.
Now that we do, you will be freed.”

“You…you speak our words?” one asked, with the
translation coming from Paul’s own armor though he could also hear her actual
words as well as all other sounds in the watery environment.

“Yes. Your people taught them to us.”

“Who are you?”

“We are known as Star Force. My name is Paul. I’m
sorry to say that you must stay here a little while longer. My troops are
moving throughout this planet killing the lizards, but we did not bring any
aquatics capable ships with us. We will send for some to come here and take you
away, but it will take time. Right now I need to know if any of you know of any
means the lizards have of killing you before we can take you away. Are there
any explosives in here, poisons, or any other traps they could activate to
prevent us from saving you?”

The Elarioni around him, glowing with bioluminescent
on body patches and their golden eyes, didn’t speak. Their minds were having
such a hard time comprehending this that they were just locking up, with many
of them running through possible horrors that could result from this and others
trying to shut out emotions that were surging to the surface now that it
appeared that there was hope.

Paul gave them time, but eventually another swam up to
them from further away as the rest of the hundreds in this one lake swam nearby
but kept their distance, forming a huge circle around them, then extending it
down below in a bowl shape as what Paul sensed was their leader swam up to
within a few meters of him.

“We do not know much,” she apologized. “All those who
were brought here from the stars have since died. All of those you see here
were born here. We know our place well. There are no devices of which you
speak. The lizards come in and take us when they wish. Only their entry portal
is guarded with a stun weapon. Most of those who pass through it do not return.
Those that do are damaged or carrying fertilized eggs. I do not believe they
want us harmed unless it is done outside these walls. Are there really others
out there, like us, beyond this place?”