Star Force: Empire (SF58) (7 page)

“That was fast,” one of them said, his attention
focused on the displays.

“The ceremony is still continuing, but the younglings
have been born and I didn’t want to delay things here so I hurried back.”

“Good, because we lost one harvester already.”

“What happened?”
Naru
asked,
activating the controls to one of the full growth pods.

“One of the tines snapped. First one I’ve had in years
do that.”

“What did it hit?”

“I don’t know. We couldn’t find anything in the pod.
Must have just been a freak thing.”

“I don’t like that. How far behind are we?”

“Enough,” the other Nestafar said, taking a brief
break to move his harvester from one pod to another.

“Let’s get to it then,”
Naru
said, passing her armature that was attached to the ceiling down through the
open top of the pod, which now only had a thin energy shield keeping the
concentrated CO2 environment inside. The
Tanazi
bushes within were stacked thick against one another, but with just enough of a
gap that
Naru
could push the harvester down between
them, bending aside some of the supple branches. Using camera relays she began
cutting off certain branches and leaving others, with the severed pieces going
into the harvester and being transported up a conduit and into the ceiling.

The trick of it was to cut the right branches without
killing the
Tanazi
, and to date computerized
harvesters had a less than stellar success rate than guided ones. It was labor
intensive, but the
Tanazi
branches provided three
major foodstuff components used across Star Force and were grown virtually
everywhere. This bioharvest facility was different in that it only grew
Tanazi
, with the intent being to export the products off
planet after all local needs were met.

Those needs were exceeded by other facilities, with
this one and others like it being the
Nestafar’s
means of contributing to the empire on the whole. They were ill-suited for
combat, at least when armored up to Star Force’s standards and taught to fight
in honorable ways that didn’t involve massive risk and sacrifice, but in truth
most of the Nestafar here weren’t interested in fighting. Those few individuals
that were had left long ago, to where
Naru
didn’t
know, but virtually all of the others simply wanted to be left alone and live
in peace, with foodstuff production allowing them to help repay Star Force for
all they’d done and were continuing to do for them.

And Star Force seemed happy with the arrangement, for
they made no demands on the Nestafar. They expected them to produce what they
claimed they would, but beyond that there was no pressure put on them to do
more or other things. Regular shipments of the
Tanazi
components would be seen leaving via dropship almost round the clock, but other
than the cargo ships there was virtually no orbital traffic. The Nestafar and
the other wards on the planet were kept isolated and secure, with
Naru
and the others glad for their little bit of
tranquility in an otherwise chaotic and violent galaxy.

7

August 3, 2652

Solar System

Ganymede

Arvil
Netherson
was walking
down one of the main promenades in the Clan Saiyan capitol city, heading to
catch a few friends at the theatre for a newly released vid when he passed by
the 9 foot tall statue of
Vegeta
that marked one of
the city’s status boards. More like a wall, the glowing panels held up to date
information on the Clan and its rivals and Arvil swung over to it, knowing he
had a few minutes to spare. He worked in the fabrication division of the Clan,
building structural components that techs would later use to create new
infrastructure, and their output was continually monitored along with the rest
of Clan activity.

On the status board he went to the fabrication panel
straight off, knowing its location by habit rather than reading the tiny icons
on display, for there was a huge amount of data being presented with everything
from naval ship count to the latest trials results on display…all of which was
translated into points that made up the power ranks that the Clans obsessed
over. It was friendly competition, but it drove them to be better than the
rest, keeping the Clans ahead of the rest of the empire despite their smaller
size.

Arvil saw that in overall fabrication rank the Saiyans
were still sitting in 36th position, but their lead over Clan Mantle had
diminished, due no doubt to the new production facility the rival Clan had
built in the
Istar
System. Numbers from outside Sol
were always
laggy
, but the small jump in their output
score was no coincidence. The new facility must be up and running, adding a bit
more industrial muscle to Mantle, but the question was, was it fully
operational yet?

Arvil didn’t like the idea of them slipping any
further than they had. 8 years ago they’d held the 31st position and were 18th
in infrastructure production, which his division directly fed. Saiyan
operations hadn’t lessened, in fact they’d slowly been increasing both the
efficiency of the facility that Arvil worked in and were adding a handful of
others, bumping up their score but falling behind a few other Clans that were
growing faster than they were.

Some were doing it, he knew, simply by building a slew
of new facilities. On Ganymede that wasn’t an option, given that most available
land space on the moon had already been exhausted. It was mostly one endless
cityscape now shared by several Clans and a few others, with any building being
done requiring the upgrade of existing facilities or the demolition thereof to
make room for larger, newer models.

The Saiyans had been upgrading their capitol in such a
way for centuries, choosing to stack as much of their powerbase here and a few
other locations rather than going for the shotgun approach and spreading
throughout the Core Region and even the ADZ as other Clans had. That was both a
matter of defense and pride, for the Saiyans wanted one central location that
they could call home and one that would serve as a stronghold upon which the
rest of their Clan could center.

Arvil had been working long and hard to help his Clan
build up their production rates, even though he was only involved in a tiny bit
of it…but that was true of everyone, for while the Clan was nowhere near the
size of, say, the Calavari, it was a large, interstellar civilization of its
own with considerable resources, not to mention military assets.

Those were displayed on another panel, with Clan
Saiyan being ranked 84th in naval power, but with a skill score of 56th. The
skill score came from the Trials, in which both Archons and other military
personnel participated. They were challenges and war games meant to test and
hone one’s skill absent actual combat, and the Clans took them very seriously,
even more so than the sports leagues that had the Clan competing against each
other through civilian tournaments. The Trials were watched by virtually
everyone in the Clan, with Arvil rooting on the Saiyans whenever he could.

The Clan was like one giant team, no matter what you
did, and they all had each other’s back automatically. That was the culture in
the Clan, and as such everyone wanted to know how their ‘team’ was doing, hence
the status boards, which were constantly changing. Some trends held true, such
as the Sabers always being in the top 5 in the naval categories. They had the
most skilled fleet on a regular basis, but they would burn off a lot of drones
in real combat, diminishing their fleet strength scores and dropping them in
rank.

That didn’t affect skill scores from the Trials, but
how much a Clan had in terms of resources was also tied to how much it lost,
and the Sabers were more involved in defending the front lines than most Clans.
That was due, no doubt, to Archon Paul being the mastermind behind the current
war plan, but his Clan was getting hit with losses sufficient to knock them
down to the 3rd spot presently. Arvil knew the Sabers had a huge industrial
base that would replace the ships that were lost quite quickly, but with other
Clans not getting so hard hit with the brutal combat their fleet numbers were
increasing, and hence their rank was eclipsing the otherwise dominant Sabers.

There were thousands of ranks displayed on the board,
some in broad categories, but more in the breakdowns of those categories,
letting each individual be able to track his or her own contributions and see
how others were doing, both in their own Clan and others. Some of the board
panels were mutable, with a touchscreen that would allow more detailed
information on other Clans to be brought up, but at the moment Arvil wasn’t
interested in those stats…his eyes were drawn to the news panel, which was detailing
various current activities that his Clan was involved in.

A breaking news beacon was flashing, indicating that
the status update was less than 60 seconds old. Arvil and the others nearby,
including those just walking and not paying any attention to the numbers, all
stopped and looked at the flashing lights that also were accompanied by a small
chime that quickly disappeared. Someone near that panel touched it and amped up
the volume, with a reporter standing inside a holographic map detailing the location
of a system within the ADZ near the border.

“We’ve just received word that a Clan Saiyan fleet
stationed at
Oxion
has responded to a lizard
incursion of the ADZ. It was detected early by the stellar monitoring system
and relayed through the
comm
grid, allowing the
Saiyans and two Axius fleets to respond before they could gain a sufficient
foothold. The following images come directly from the Saiyan flagship involved
in the fight, and as you can see there was orbital bombardment of multiple
surface sites on the uninhabited planet.”

“The images you’re looking at now are without context,
for we’ve only just received them, but what we can tell you is that the lizard
incursion was successfully uprooted and their base destroyed. No word yet on
numbers of casualties or ships lost, but the Saiyan fleet we know to have been
comprised of at least 20 Warship-class jumpships in addition to the Command
Ship. That underscores that this was not a small incursion, and is to date the
furthest inside the border the lizards have attempted to jump.”

The reporter went on, with multiple battle footage
displays popping up giving those watching views of both orbital and surface
combat, all without tags or context, but it was enough to make
Arvil’s
skin crawl with a mixture of fear and anger. Star
Force and its allies maintained a neutral zone around the ADZ where they kept
back lizard forward bases through a nearly continuous cycle of battles. Clan
Saiyan was involved in some of them, from time to time, though the Clans were used
more as defensive emplacements within the ADZ while the mainline fleets were
the ones taking the offensive.

But for the lizards to have bypassed the neutral zone
and the border worlds to set up an attempted foothold inside the ADZ was a very
bold attack. Star Force obviously squashed it, with them unable to resupply
that far inside without their convoys getting picked apart on the way in, but
the mere fact that they’d tried and had gotten as far as they did was ominous
and Arvil had to remind himself that the front wasn’t an armored wall, but
rather a collection of tiny dots…and there was nothing keeping the lizards or
anyone else from moving between or over those dots.

Any system in the ADZ could theoretically get hit, but
with monitoring systems around most of the stars any attacking fleet passing
through would be detected and the word would spread, albeit slowly due to the
lag, but that meant the enemy couldn’t sneak inside and set up a base with
years of anonymity to work with. Arvil didn’t know how many systems still
lacked the monitoring devices, but he knew there were regular patrols going
through them to prevent just such a thing and give Star Force a heads up if
someone was trying to grow a forward base behind their defensive ‘lines.’

There was no way the lizards had more than a few
months to get set up before they were confronted, meaning that they must have
smuggled in a huge fleet as opposed to the single ships that were reportedly
conquering entire systems elsewhere, planting a colony somewhere out of the way
and growing the troops and building the ships that would then conquer it over
subsequent years. That couldn’t happen here, so the lizards had to take another
tactic, but what the hell had they been thinking?

That incursion was doomed to failure…or was that the
point and the whole thing just a test of the ADZ defenses?

Arvil didn’t know, for while he followed the
activities of his Clan closely military matters weren’t his specialty. He stuck
around long enough to see if there were any kill counts given, with a stats
sheet popping up a few minutes later. A murmur of approval whispered through
the crowd as they saw that the Saiyan fleet had a 19/1 kill count against the
lizards, though with varying ship sizes that wasn’t always an accurate measure,
but it was enough to get the point across that it had been a major beatdown.

The two Axius fleets were marked with a 13/1 and a
15/1 count, which garnered a sense of pride in Arvil that he left the status
boards with. The Clans were better than the rest of Star Force, maybe not by
much in some cases, but their accused ‘obsession’ with training and rank had
pressed them to a higher level, from warriors down to techs, making the Clans
superior across the board.

Now granted, it had been Axius troops and not the
mainline fleets involved in the battle, and a lot of Clan personnel made up the
mainline fleets, or rather ex-Clan, but Arvil took it as a positive regardless
that the Saiyan fleet had outperformed the two Axius ones, and he wasn’t alone
in that analysis, as most of the rest of his Clan, spread across the Core
Region, would utter similar sentiments in the coming days.

When Arvil arrived at the theater he spread the word,
with the recent news consuming the chatter until the lights dropped and the vid
began.

Just beyond the edge of Beta Region Clan Meteor had an
even larger fleet of warships, with some of their best naval crews hammering
the Skarron defenses over one of their strongholds left isolated by the
Voku’s
semi-blockade of the region around Achkor. It wasn’t
the first Skarron-conquered world that Star Force was taking back from them,
but it was one of the largest ones they’d tried to assault and required a
significant force above and beyond what the Meteors could field alone.

No other Clans were with them, nor were there any
mainline troops, instead this was the first real test of the Bsidd military.
Clan Meteor was taking the lead in the assault and doing the heavy hitting,
both in orbit and soon to be on the surface as well, but given that this was a
‘safe’ assault and it was highly unlikely that the Skarrons were going to get
any sizeable reinforcements past the Voku, especially when all available ships
were being diverted to counter the knife blade that the lizards were thrusting
into Skarron territory, it had been deemed the best opportunity for the Bsidd
to get their feet wet…or whatever you wanted to call the ends of their various
appendages.

Their military was new and green, but it was large.
They had 5 times as many ships here as the Meteors did, and even more so in the
way of ground troops. Larissa had even come out to personally lead this assault
and make sure everything went smoothly, for it wasn’t going to be a walk in the
park. They’d brought sufficient force with them to take the planet, but it was
going to be a hard fought victory like everything else, for they didn’t have
enough available ships and troops to just spam the enemy out of existence…not
yet anyway.

Larissa knew the Bsidd had to get combat experience so
they could pass it on to those coming up in the ranks behind them. A huge yet
green military was a really bad idea, and so long as they had a mostly
predictable assault like this available for them to fight and genuinely
contribute to without risking the entire operation, Larissa was going to make
use of it and deployed herself here to counter any unforeseen surprises.

She was not going to take the Bsidd up against the
lizards yet, for they were too devious and her Bsidd too inexperienced. While
they could still win, no doubt, she could end up losing thousands of them and
that wasn’t a risk she was going to take. Her Clan Meteor was going to take it
to the Skarrons and the Bsidd were going to play backup, with her channeling as
much responsibility their way as she thought viable, with an ongoing
reassessment taking place in her mind starting as soon as the first Bsidd-controlled
drone entered combat.