Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial (25 page)

If a nest was discovered, the princess could be whisked away, and the nest complex collapsed in the usual manner. Then if the eggs weren’t destroyed, Naero and the rest could still come back for them at a later time and relocate them.

28

With Ra’s seven brides situated and hidden, they started producing eggs and preparing large numbers of Shai to be born, mature rapidly, and be placed in their dormant, hibernation mode.

It took only three weeks for an adult Shai to mature and be fully educated. They were extremely intelligent, yet completely obedient to the parents. The seven brides and Ra could command them without question, even to the death. Shai were communal and very chummy and affectionate with each other, and they adored their mother and father.

The task of feeding them became a major issue. Then more Shai were kept active to assist in the task. They even had the fixers make them underwater suits and submersibles to farm the oceans for foodstocks. That quickly solved the manpower issue.

Naero kept herself extremely busy. By then she was creating ten Shetanna level replicants each day. And when she slept, she dreamed and sang among the KDM nodes of knowledge in her Kexxian form and immersed herself in that endless sea of wisdom and information, just beginning to scratch the surface of it all.

Before the end of the first month, they conducted their first attack on one of the four continental capital gigacities for the Dakkur and their minions.

She wanted to send the enemy a message.

As usual, she began with a massive Cosmic gigablast that rocked the entire region and split the ground around the gigacity wide open, leaving fused black glass and burning craters and chasms throughout the ground zero area, for tens of kilometers in every direction.

Such a detonation of power vaporized all enemy troops and personnel exposed out in the open. And that meant tens of millions of enemy casualties.

The foe meant to hunt Naero and her allies down and destroy them. Well, that put the enemy within that same trap, and also made them vulnerable.

Naero fully intended to teach them a very hard lesson concerning those facts.

When the gigablast effects cleared, Naero and her troops struck pre-selected military command and control, information centers, labs, and research facilities in order to gather important data and Intel on what the enemy was up to.

These hit an run tactics after the shock and awe of the gigablast proved very fruitful, after the allies thoroughly raided and hacked enemy information systems.

Then they melted away once more, to assess all the info that they had gathered.

Yet the enemy response stunned even Naero.

The enemy seemed to go insane. They executed many of their own, including military commanders. Next, because the attack occurred on the continent of Shurog, they pulled all of their plasma borers off the other continents and concentrated on going after every Cosmic energy site that they could on the one. Which was more than half.

Naero and Company spent the next few days muddying the waters further by creating many more fake sites under that continent to serve as decoys. They decided to do the same thing on the other continents, before they made another attack.

The enemy increased searching for Naero and her people worldwide, but because they were transporting, the Allied forces became virtually impossible to trace.

A week later Naero and Company hit a gigacity on the continent of Kolf in the same exact fashion. Cosmic gigablasts could strike suddenly and without warning, even though they quickly exhausted her energies.

Then they fled to a completely different continent, to sift through the stolen data files they added to the others.

Disturbing patterns began to appear. The Dakkur were rapidly expanding their influence in that area of the Gamma Quadrant–as well as five other far flung regions just like it, if not larger.

And here Naero and her people were struggling to contain and defeat just one of the enemy’s points of expansion and subjugation. The enemy plans for conquest were industrious and robust.

What’s more, the enemy were also working on advanced upgrades for their existing shields, weapons, and tech. And completely new super warship designs and devastating weapon systems–many of them based on using highly destructive and unstable Darkforce energy.

To make matters worse, there was repeated mention in their secret files, documents, and coms concerning
The Armada
, an apparent numberless horde of enemy fleets that were being prepared in the next closest galaxy over.

This was one of the galaxies once completely controlled and almost destroyed by the G’lothc in their hey day.

Projections had this overwhelming wave of fleets being ready within the next one or two decades. Once they crossed over the vast space between the two galaxies, they would bring so much force and firepower with them that all resistance would fall before their might.

The enemy felt absolutely certain that they could defeat Naero’s galaxy with these countless hordes. Neither were they happy being idle. Their will to conquer and destroy was restless and could not be suppressed.

While they waited for the Armada, the Dakkur and their minions would continue to soften up the other sentients and do their best to keep them worn down and on the defensive.

This was definitely terrible news, but it was also one to two decades away and could be possibly be prepared for. For now, the problems Naero and the Alliance currently faced were quite daunting enough. These enemies had always planned and plotted both for the short term and the long term.

The only way to stop them was to destroy them.

The next day the Alliance forces hit the continent of Gronet.

The day after that, they struck the largest gigacity on Uldren. Yet this time, the enemy were buttoned up and expecting them. The gigacity there was armored and shielded like a fortress. They still endured heavy damage from the blast, but they did not have as many troops out in the open.

Naero chose not to send in any raiders, and that proved to be a good thing.

As soon the gigablast was clear, enemy armies converged on that city.

Naero wished she had enough juice to zap them again.

She only had to wait until the next day, as all of those troops began to disperse. Naero took out most of them by using two divided blasts, spread out to obliterate more exposed forces across a wider expanse.

After they had acquired most of the information that they could, the data grew repetitive. Naero changed strategies, committing  a variety of attacks at random, all designed to keep the enemy guessing, never knowing where she would strike next.

Naero made the lives of the enemy on Naggoth a virtual hell over the next four months.

There were also unavoidable setbacks and disasters for the Alliance.

Troops and replicants were cut down or lost in unexpected explosions from enemy booby-traps and remotely detonated ordnance. There were always chance losses that could occur during raids.

One dark day they lost sixty troops in an op where the enemy went so far as to set off an atomic at one of their own bases.

Naero and the rest of her people swore vengeance to make the enemy pay the highest price for every person the Alliance lost.

Naero grew increasingly worried that the enemy was going to discover one of the Shai secret bases. Therefore, the dormant Shai were spread out over multiple areas in other hidden pockets to better hide their rapidly expanding numbers.

The raiders mixed things up. They boarded and captured an enemy heavy cruiser, modified for ground assault. Then they used it to strafe exposed enemy armies and fleets of starships on the tarmac.

Then as other enemy fleets converged to shoot them down, Naero transported her people away, set the jump drive to activate, and ploughed it into yet another enemy gigacity to explode. The blast took out half of the city.

After that, the Alliance raiders focused on taking out the enemy fleets that were stationed onworld. Cosmic blasts, explosives, booby traps, and stolen ships.

These concentrated Alliance attacks were so devastating, that within three months, they wiped out almost eighty-percent of the enemy fleets on Naggoth. The others escaped further loss when the enemy hid them in the oceans or concealed them by burying them near the poles, or at other remote locations underground.

Next, Naero turned her wrath on Dakkur industry and manufacturing. They degraded that as well, but half of the enemy production capacity was concealed in underground factory bunkers. The enemy even had two underground naval shipyards.

Naero decided to put the emphasis on had.

The Alliance infiltrated those shipyards and blew them straight to hell.

By then Naero and her people had three months to go, before Naggoth came back in sync with the normal timeline. The enemy was starting to believe that perhaps it had not been such a great idea to try to take Naero out, and trap her with them in Time on a single planet for an entire year.

Naero had lost about five hundred troops by that time–about a third of her original raiders. She had many more replicants, and she was up to making eighteen of them each day, but each time she and her forces lost someone else. It was heartbreaking.

Finally, Naero was poised to turn the heat up on the enemy once more, and actually make a serious attempt at stripping the planet from them and wiping them out.

Her main concern was facing down any Dakkur Queens on the planet at the very last. The enemy’s slaves would die by countless millions defending them. Naero was counting on that part.

The Dakkur queens remained the wild blade in the fight. Naero had never fought one. Her Uncle Baeven said that they were huge and incredibly tough. She had Ra’s help, but what if all four Dakkur Queens came at them at once? Or worse–what if they had a Dakkur King on Naggoth? How many kings were there? Did each Dakkur Homeworld have one, or just Queens?

These were major uncertainties, going into an uncertain war that they could not escape from. Was Naero leading her people to victory, or certain death?

Even if Naero died fighting the queens–and or king of the Dakkur, the Shetannas would save as many of the others as they could. They could even go back to hiding out and escape once the Time dilation went down.

There was only one way to learn for certain what they were truly up against. And to do that, she couldn’t send replicants. She couldn’t send any of her people in. They had risked and lost enough all along.

Naero’s Cosmic abilities remained the most advanced available, despite the fact that she had yet to fully develop them all completely.

Never mind that.

But she knew very well that it was her task, and hers alone, to sneak into the lairs of those fabled monsters and scope out the situation for herself.

Eye to eye.

Monster to monster.

29

Naero planned to do her monster recon work through the Astral Plane over several days, while the Allies positioned their forces for the next phaze in the strategy. Instead of exploring the KDM, she separated her Astral form from her body in her dream state. But once again, she found that she could not enter the Astral Plane. Therefore, instead of trying to do that, she sent her spirit form off through the Prime Material Plane like a ghost.

She did all of this while Ra and her people thought that she was getting a normal night’s sleep.

The first night she went to the continent of Shurog, and the battered gigacity capital of Nazol. Fortunately, an astral spirit form could not necessarily transport, but it could move from one place to another at fantastic speeds, bordering on the instantaneous.

Other Cosmic beings and entities, however, could still be sensitive to creatures moving around in Astral form, or on any plane. They could even detect their presence. Naero knew that much from her little-big, Kahn-dar dragon friend named Womi.

Naero was already out of phaze with the Prime Material Plane. An astral form already had that much going for it. Now, she was going to attempt something new–something never attempted before by any Mystic.

She was going to use psyonics in astral form to phaze while she was still in that form.

As soon as Naero did so, a horrible, ear-splitting buzzing sound filled her mind and made her head pound.

But as far as she knew, she was out of phaze, and completely undetectable to any entity on either plane of existence.

She passed into the depths of the central fortress of Nazol.

She saw entire armies sealed within a complex that was much larger than anything the Allies had imagined or discovered during their surface raids.

There were even armies in stasis and Ejjai freeze troops, complete with weapons and gear.

She saw hordes of Dakkur drones, with and without combat armor. Layers of physical defenses and blast shields.

Naero’s spirit form passed right through them, without triggering any defenses.

The only problem was that her head was killing her. It felt as if it were going to explode.

How long could she maintain this form and endure such pain?

That might have been good to determine beforehand.

Too late for that now.

More Dakkur. Bodyguards now, all of them from the champion caste, twice the size of the drones. And like the drones, over half of them were infested with the G’lothc possession wyrm, giving them the potential to transform into even worse monsters than what they already were.

Then the heavily guarded, heavily protected inner palace, the huge playground and quarters of a Dakkur Queen.

Naero explored the complex birthing chamber where the Dakkur Queen pushed out millions of eggs each day–much like the Shai, actually. Despite the differences in species, the Dakkur were hyper dense reptilioids that were part carbon based, and part silicon based lifeforms. Dakkur were amazing hybrid lifeforms.

The G’lothc could sure pick them. Dakkur were supreme warriors and servants. And like their former masters, the Dakkur shared the same mindset, and worshipped The Great Destroyer of the Cosmic Prophecies with a devotion that was beyond fanatical.

Finally in the deepest lair, fit for such a regal beast, Naero beheld one of the rare White Queens of the Dakkur species.

She was white everywhere, like an immense swirl of new fallen snow. When her eyes flicked open in her slumber, they were the deepest jet, lit from deep within, not only by the Darkforce–but of unlight itself–the deepest, most intense form of the Darkforce.

She was well-over 30 meters long and serpent-like, nearly a snake at first glance, except for her powerful forelegs ending in vicious claws, and her atrophied, vestigial hind legs. The hardened spines on her back were also as sharp as swords, and her lethal tail blade was one quarter of her full length.

Despite her serene slumber, this was a creature of great power who was born to kill and destroy and lead a nation of warriors that she gave birth to.

From the looks of things around her palace, the Dakkur Queen fed each day upon all of her living subjects, even her own spawn. Naero spotted husks and corpses, bones, exoskeletons, and shredded remains from nearly every sentient creature known, and some that Spacers had not yet encountered.

The queen feasted upon them all, sometimes just the heads. She ate them alive, and threw the remains away like garbage. Periodically, the trash probably needed to be swept away–by her other slaves.

This queen was an eater of souls.

A thousand slaves from numerous races waited in a shallow feeding pit nearby, all of them wearing flickering control collars around their necks or whatever. Like droning, mindless fools, they softly sang to the queen, soothing her in her deep sleep.

A fresh meal awaited her, whenever she chose to wake up and dine upon them.

They praised her name softly and spoke it with reverence as if she were some kind of twisted deity.

“Bazretul…Bazretul…Bazretul…”

Naero could only imagine the intellect and Cosmic and psyonic abilities this huge creature might wield.

Baeven was certainly correct. The Supreme Dakkur were indeed quite formidable.

And a Dakkur King was even larger than the Queens, and with greater Cosmic powers and abilities. She could not repress a slight shudder and even experienced a twinge of fear.

One of those things had nearly slain her uncle–it nearly killed Baeven. Baeven. He fought it to the death and barely won, and was nearly left for dead himself. Only his battle brother Gaviok had revived enough to help save him.

Eventually, Naero knew that she was going to face foes greater than herself. She would meet threats that surpassed her abilities in one way or several. That was only a matter of time.

Yet like her uncle, she also had powerful friends allies, and it was not required that she face each an every threat alone.

And, Naero’s own strange powers had yet to reach their full limit or potential.

The pain in her head grew unbearable, almost immobilizing.

Naero had seen what she had come to see.

She raced back to her own body at top speed, unphazing as soon as she was clear of the enemy gigacity of Nazol and its mighty queen, Bazretul.

The debilitating headaches nearly crippled Naero for the next day and night until she was able to fully regenerate and heal.

On the next night after that, she went exploring once more, in phazed astral form, moving faster this time to cover two more gigacity capitals, Grux and Dunt, of the continents Kolf and Gronet.

As Naero fully suspected, each capital and continent had its own queen and perhaps something more. But there was, as yet, no exact signs of a Dakkur King.

She did learned the names of the two new queens. At least they were new to Naero. The Queen of Grux upon Kolf was Memetok, and it was said that she was fatter than the others because she was a glutton, and feasted too much.

Akathri, the Queen of Dunt upon Gronet, was almost just the opposite. She was sleek and slender, and dined exclusively only upon the heads of her foodstocks, soaked in special sauces that she found tasty…not unlike grim meatballs.

Naero recovered slightly faster from her second recon ordeal, but she still waited another full day before going to spy out the gigacity of Riyok upon Uldrun.

She did not know why she had such a sense of foreboding about that last enemy capital. If there was a Dakkur King, perhaps she would find him there.

She descended into another Dakkur royal palace. Yet this one seemed even larger and more elaborate. Naero took that as a bad sign.

Naero located the queen’s chambers and found her–Queen Golanta, another snow-white ruler, who from the signs of destruction and repeated reconstruction, had a particularly nasty temper.

But perhaps it was not all her doing. Golanta herself regenerated from multiple wounds and grim injuries. What could harm a Dakkur Queen? What could assault and ravage her in such a fashion as this?

Was it even possible to rape such an immense creature?

Yet there were even larger chambers beneath that of the queen, and what appeared to be a vast underground lake.

But it was not a lake of water.

This was of unlight and Darkforce itself.

Something huge, living, and malevolent slumbered beneath the surface of all of that raw, destructive power.

This was a lifeform unlike any other–a creature that did not feed upon mere flesh. Naero could sense it somehow. This thing dined upon raw Cosmic energy. That was its daily food.

And it was filled with lust and violent hunger.

Naero recalled what the Dakkur Queen Golanta had apparently endured.

Then part of a massive, reptilian Dakkur head surface and gazed up from that lake of death. And it thundered in Naero’s mind with terrible power.

I cannot locate you, insect. But I know somehow that you are here. I know that you can hear my words. Why has it taken you so long to spy us out? Have you seen all that you have come to see?

Naero had. She fled immediately. If this creature located her, it might be able to attack her. And if it slew her, her people would be at a severe disadvantage.

Armed with this new knowledge, Naero spoke with Jan, Ra, and all of their forces. They had over two standard months before the time dilation effects came to an end.

They would take another month to adjust and further their plans. Naero would take more time to get them ready for the all-out war they were preparing to unleash.

She wanted to be more certain that they could finish such a war, and defeat the threats that they were up against once it started.

Naero wasn’t about to die, and she did not have any wish to lead her people to their deaths, either.