Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial (24 page)

The Dakkur would continue to pursue and hunt down the Allies to the death.

Yet she did discover a way to confound them.

Then Naero and her people could go on the offensive, and take the fight to their enemies.

Whether they would prevail or not against so many powerful foes was not certain. Yet if they were trapped on the planet with the enemy, the reverse was also true.

27

Naero opened her eyes and immediately stared at her arms and rubbed them with her hands.

Part of her thought to see green scales and lizard flesh, and dexterous clawed hands, delicate and yet strong. But she was only Orean inside the KDM itself, in her mind. Outside of that experience, she still retained her own form.

Yet another key, another secret that unlocked her advancing understanding.

Only a Kexx could even begin to perceive their intricate and expansive body of knowledge. To learn anything further from them, she needed to become one of them.

Naero sighed. So much knowledge. So very much. It always seemed as if she were stuck in beginnings–going from one to the next. Always beginning, never ending. But perhaps that was best. Beginnings went on. Beginnings started something and kept going.

An Old Earth saying once said to count your blessings.

Endings did not go on. They just ended.

Jan came to her. She heard alarm in his voice. “Naero, I’m sorry to bother you, but the enemy has discovered our hiding place once more. And they’re getting better and faster at finding it each time that they do.”

Naero nodded. “I understand, Jan. We can’t stop them, but I think there is a way that we can confuse them and throw them off.”

Jan blinked and raised both eyebrows. “That’s great, sib. Let’s try it. They’ll break through and attack us again in less than two hours.”

“Get everyone ready to bug out. Here’s what we do.” Jan leaned in to listen, right as Naero remembered something else.

“Wait. Jan, what did the troops decide?”

Her brother grinned. “What do you think? If they’re all going to die anyway, at least they want to go out fighting!”

She nodded again. “Good. I feel the same way now.”

They fled once more, within the hour, before the foe could fall upon them again.

The tyrants of the Dakkur were tracking them by their Cosmic signatures. There was no way to conceal that.

Yet those same signatures could mimicked, and duplicated many times over.

Naero sent out her replicants, over a hundred of them now, each one following her instructions.

She and Jan also went out.

Each of them found a pocket beneath the hardest bedrock of the planet’s crust, kilometers thick. There they left behind a flux wave of Cosmic energy, trapped within an infinite, self-replicating loop.

Each decoy would last for several weeks. And each day, or every few days as needed, the Allies could make a hundred more decoys. They would make whatever number it took to keep the foe confused as to their real whereabouts.

Within a week the enemy would be on a wild goose chase, pursuing hundreds of decoy signatures, never knowing which one was real.

Let them bore holes into the planet until it resembled a ball of spotted cheese.

And if they ever did get too close, the Allies could still flee to another. Sometimes the Allies even set traps of water, gas, magma pockets, or even explosives.

Naero could create more replicants each day.

Now they had a chance.

Now they had a way to outlast and avoid the foe. And that gave Naero and the Allies the power to pick and choose when and where they would engage the enemy.

They began to make plans. They analyzed the fixernets to determine where they should strike at the enemy first. Much of the enemy’s defenses were still shielded and jammed on all four continents: Shurog, Kolf, Gronet, and Uldrun.

As the data continued to pour in and they actually had a chance to analyze it, several things became very clear.

The enemy had many more forces on world that even Naero and their original intelligence had expected. The rulers of Naggoth had packed it full of armies.

“I’m having second thoughts about all of this,” Naero said. “We would need several hi-tek armies just to begin to take all of these forces on.”

Unexpectedly, Ra spoke up. “Naero. I have waited to say this, now that we know more about what we’re up against. If you recall, long ago, Naggoth was once one of the primary homeworlds of the Ku-Shai. Our people here were wiped out and supplanted by these foes. We have never forgotten that loss; Allondatharru lives in our legends and our memories.

“My father wanted me to eventually take this world back for our people, once it could be liberated by the Alliance Navies. But now that we are trapped here on this planet, and we have no choice, why don’t we go for it?”

Naero blinked at and then stared at the mantid prince. What was he yammering about? “Ra, I don’t understand. Go for what?”

“Taking over the planet. The enemy is limited to the forces they have on this world. For the next year, they can’t call in any help, either.”

Naero looked around. “And neither can we, Ra. Look, our current estimates are that the enemy have twelve billion forces on this planet: not population–that’s troops. And that number keeps growing. How can we possibly match that?”

Ra grinned. “I admit it’s not optimum, but I still have have an entire Shai colony in stasis with me, ready take back our lost homeworld.”

Naero blinked again. “Say what?”

Ra took her literally and was about to repeat himself entirely.

“Okay, I heard what you said. Just tell me one thing that is going to make anything like taking over the planet possible.”

“Very well,” Ra said. “Once I awake my seven fertilized brides, they can produce hundreds of millions of Shai warrior offspring each month.

Naero’s jaw did hit the rocky ground. The sounds that came out of her mouth next were generally unintelligible.

“Given a proper food source and clean water supply,” Ra added.

Naero’s brain still hadn’t caught up with her stammering mouth.

“And our offspring can be placed in a dormant state until needed, to conserve food and energy. They can awake for battle or general construction projects.”

“So…we could have an army of billions of Shai in four months. Billions more in eight months.”

“Given enough food and water.”

“Yeah, yeah. Ra, I think it’s time that we wake up these brides of yours and get to know them. We’ll send teams with them, and find secluded, underground areas where they can spawn, and where food can be collected. During the High Crusade, I learned that huge quantities of food could be taken from the oceans without attracting much attention. The enemy has even bothered to exploit their oceans here. I suggest we get a bit of that going.”

Naero’s strategic and tactical mind ramped up and began to race.

“Each bride will need her own separate territory for their hive,” Ra noted.

Naero nodded eagerly. “There are four main continents and several large island groupings. We will pick the most isolated areas that we can and try to keep them secret until we are ready to bring them online. Like I said, we’ll try to feed them all from the oceans.”

Ra. Jan, and others started bringing in the other seven stasis containers, similar to the one Ra had emerged from.

Since Shai could compress and expand their size and density. It made transporting a potential nest of them relatively simple.

Each of Ra’s brides had a slightly varied coloration pattern, but when they emerged from the stasis fields they looked to be shaped almost identically, like Mantids. Yet even so, with her trained eye and biomancy, Naero noticed subtle differences that could also be used to tell them apart.

Not to mention smell and pheromones. With the highly developed Shai olfactory system, they could no doubt be differentiated solely by scent alone.

Although, until they moved, Naero smiled, musing that they all looked like white and orange ice cream, ready to be dipped up.

Then they stirred, and awoke, tumbling forward out of the compact stasis chambers, unfolding and shaking themselves slightly as they came around.

Ra jumped forward and caught each one lovingly as they awoke in the order he had set. He stood them on their feet and caressed them briefly, obviously very affectionate with his seven brides.

He was very proud, and rightly so, as he announced and introduced each one of his new wives–all sent with their prince on what could only be seen as a very dangerous task.

“This is Shiival; this is Kunali; meet Ishidar; she is called Cliiofarah. Next I want you to meet Pavija; this is Shiibrana; and she is known as Jahenna.”

The female Shai mantids were mighty and powerfully built, much like their male counterpart. Their heads were just a smidge larger than Ra’s, and their big, blinking mantid eyes were all shades of bright blue or green. Yet for all of their insectoid qualities, they were far from unlovely. And they all moved with the grace and beauty of the most accomplished dancers. Shai were exceptional athletes, unlike any other species known to exist.

The brides all complained to their prince of being famished after their long sleep and even seemed to be in some distress.

Fortunately, Shetanna company returned from the depths of the sea at that moment, with nanonets filled with fresh tuna and a bounty of wiggling, succulent fish stocks.

Everyone looked on in wonder, as the seven brides rushed in and made short work of all of that fresh seafood. Some even pulled back a bit a the sight. Naero had seen Ra eat before.

Even Jan quipped to Naero, “Good thing your replicants brought all that seafood back, sib. Otherwise, these Shai gals would have cleaned us out, and maybe even made a few of us disappear.”

Naero laughed. She and her assistants, in their heads and on their comps, and on the fixernet were already trying to find the best places for the seven Shai brides to be squirreled away with enough available food and water to allow their numbers to flourish over the next few months.

The rest of the Alliance personnel would hit the enemy at numerous other points, in order to hold the enemy’s attention and keep the Shai from being discovered until it was too late.

Meanwhile, Naero learned a great deal about Shai in a very short amount of time, both from biomancy and observation.

The Shai were an amazing species in so many ways. Not only did they have an extremely healthy appetite, but because their digestive systems were so empty from stasis, they processed their food rapidly. Ra warned Naero and their people about this fact, and a special chamber was prepared and located well out of the way from the main group, allowing the seven ladies to do their business in relative privacy. Then they collapsed that chamber and sealing it all away forever.

Shai poo, as it turned out, was both highly compacted and hyperdense–the consistency of a metal, actually. The smell was also magnified, somehow. Haisha, did it stink. Even the Shai themselves did not enjoy the strong odor.

No wonder Ra always made a big deal about burying his wastes deep onworld, or expelling them out into space when they were up in the black.

The seven brides cleaned themselves up in an underground pool, and after breaking their fast, and having made their toilet, they shifted slightly to an orange, white, reddish coloring combination and followed their beloved Ra around like a shuffling pack.

They were all somewhat shorter than Naero, just like Ra, yet there was some variation to them. Ra informed Naero that a group of Shai was know as a
klath
.

The princesses moved quickly among the Alliance forces, with Naero, Jan, and Ra. They were introduced to all of the troops, and Ra said that they could indeed remember each individual by smell.

The seven Shai females had at the very first taken great pains to imprint Naero and Jan on themselves and their minds as family. They were extremely intrigued by Jan talking later about his wife Vejjah’s impending birth back in their main timeline.

When Ra explained to them that Jan’s Spacer wife was going to have a single male child, they were all excited, assuming that the single child was being groomed and prepared to be a great prince among the Spacers.

Ra laughed, and a brief explanation was made, about how Spacers were very different from the Shai, and as mammals, they only had their offspring one or two at a time in most cases.

For a moment this revelation stunned the seven young brides. Then they burst out laughing so hard that they could not right themselves or even remain standing for a good long while.

To an insectoid species that gave birth to possibly many billions of offspring an a lifetime, the birthing of one or two children was apparently quaint and completely hilarious to the Shai.

Then Ra began to explain to them where they were, their dire situation, and what their mission was. The seven brides grew quiet and their intelligent eyes fixed and did not blink so much. An intense concentration quickly settled over them, bordering on what Naero could only define as near fury.

Naero had sparred both with Ra, and his mighty sire, Gaviok. Shai were an incredibly dangerous species. She would not want to fight an entire nest or planet of them.

A joy they soon hoped to inflict upon their foes.

It took them all of the next week to find suitable, concealed nesting sites for each of the seven brides. Alliance forces were kept with them underground to help protect and assist them with food collection. One princess was concealed on each of the four continents, and three on tropical island networks or archipelagos.