Star Force: Empire (SF58) (9 page)

Then the Calavari pilot saw the other large contacts
sitting around the star as they waited their turn in the long lines heading to
multiple jumppoints. There were three more assault pillars on the way, plus a
second invoker.

So much for the lizards poking around and
experimenting. The Calavari had wanted to hit them hard, and it looked like
they were counterpunching in the same fashion. Uxtral figured the ground
assault was now permanently off, with his transport and others probably going
to evacuate the system while the navy played with the enemy for a while. They
weren’t going to waste two Sentinels, but he didn’t think there was much of a
chance of them winning out, despite their range advantage with the cleansing
beams.

The lizard cruisers could compensate for that by
running ahead and screening for the bigger ships, and if more than one assault
pillar targeted a Sentinel at the same time it was unlikely that both could be
taken down before it was taken out. Add in the invokers that would rip apart
any drone warships that got within short weapons range, meaning their maulers
and talon cannons were going to be useless against them.

Just as Uxtral was mentally calculating the strategic
advantages that the lizards had his display lit up with a countdown just before
his transport made a microjump down into low orbit. He was so confused that he
didn’t register the deployment orders for several seconds, then blinked away
invisible haze over his eyes as he confirmed that it was telling him that they
were going to drop into the atmosphere and clear the way for the troop
transports to land.

Battlemap data was shunted his way showing swarms of
wisps near the target area and part of his mind immediately flipped into combat
mode while the rest was screaming out in panic, knowing that their naval fleet
was about to get their ass kicked.

He didn’t know what his commanders were thinking, but
he wanted to trust them…he just had no idea what angle they could possibly be
playing with all of this.

Uxtral was ready to fight though, and with the
countdown ticking off the seconds until they were in position for release he
committed himself to his part while hoping this whole thing didn’t turn into a
bloody mess. A few seconds later that bad feeling reversed itself as a rare but
familiar sound played out into his cockpit and every other cockpit and control
station throughout the Calavari fleet as more incoming jumps were registered on
the battlemap.

These weren’t lizard though, they were mainline Star
Force coming out of odd and difficult jumplines directly into
ganking
positions, and they were broadcasting the Imperial
March as both reassurance that they had the
Calavari’s
back and a massive middle finger towards the enemy that was receiving the same
battle song on open broadcast.

Uxtral should have had more faith, and he kicked
himself for not counting on the Archons to have everything covered as the bay
doors opened and his countdown expired. Without hesitation he launched his
Valerie into space and put it into an easy dive down into the upper atmosphere
along with the others in his squadron and the squadrons pacing them. He had new
worries to deal with now, but before he got within the fog of war and focused
entirely on the enemy wisps he glanced back at the battlemap, which still
included the stellar orbit data…and he saw a flurry of Star Force icons there,
hitting the lizard jumpships where they were lightly defended.

The Calavari gritted his teeth in both excitement and
a swell of pride seeing that this was going to be a hard win, but they were
going to own the enemy so long as no one screwed up and he was going to make
sure he didn’t.

Dismissing the extraneous battlemap displays he
brought the local up to full size and got a feel for where his squadron was and
how the enemy was moving below them as they kept to their nose dive, intent on
hitting them from above as the lizard fighter swarm spread out like bees below.
This was not going to be easy, but they had Valeries and Star Force training,
and it was time to give the enemy another lesson on why both were superior.

9

September 3, 2652

Iona System
(Beta Region)

Kirit

Fatti
had a decision to
make, and a big one. The Kiritas stood in front of a display screen in his
maturia quarters, two days from leaving and still he didn’t know what he was
going to do. He had graduated a day ago and was now ready to transition into
his ‘real’ life, but until he chose what his path would be they couldn’t assign
him new quarters or travel plans.

He had two more days before he’d automatically be
punted into the general population, which was a fair option. No
responsibilities and an unlimited amount of time to decide what he wanted to
do…or to just kick back, relax, and do nothing. That sounded horrible to him,
for the Kiritas had so much energy that downtime was literally the worst thing
possible. He wasn’t going
civie
, and like most other
Kiritas he was going to find at least something he could do to keep himself
busy and help out either his race or Star Force.

He wasn’t entering the general ADZ population
independently, he knew. That didn’t appeal to him. He wanted to remain
somewhere within Star Force and had a lot of options to choose from, though all
of them required a lot more training to qualify for. He could stay local and
find some support task to help out with, ranging from personnel relations to
maintenance, but that seemed a bit too low energy. He wanted something bigger.

On the screen in front of him was a list of all the
options available to him, and he’d been running through it for the past 4
hours, pacing back and forth as he thought and weighed his options. In general
there were 3 basic paths available to him, and that was stay with the Kiritas,
go into Axius, or become Kiritak. Axius wasn’t some place that Kiritas went
unless they wanted to get away from everyone else, and while there were a
handful making use of themselves there most of the stories he’d heard were that
they’d gone
civie
and essentially given up on Star
Force.

That wasn’t for him, which left the two main options
every Kiritas had. Work as part of the semi-independent Kiritas empire, into
which he had been hatched, or transfer over to the Kiritak that had no
independence and directly served Star Force as a massive workforce. The Kiritak
reproduced on their own too, with their population being far larger than the
Kiritas, but some of them didn’t want to stay and came over to
Kirit
or one of their colonies to take a different path.
Nobody was locked in to where they began and there was a lot of swapping back
and forth, sometimes with the same person changing more than once during their
life.

For the Kiritas, they were fervently loyal to Star
Force, for in their distant history it had been the Humans that had saved their
planet and race from starvation and utter collapse, but more than that they had
taught them a better way to live and had guided them through stages of
advancement that had led them to colonize multiple star systems within the
ADZ…something that was totally beyond his ancestors, who only had
Kirit
when the Humans first came to them.

The Kiritas were building and expanding along a plan
that Star Force had set out for them, which everyone knew of from their maturia
training. They were meant to be a home guard and resource production carry
while other portions of Star Force focused on tech development, exploration,
and combat. Kiritas troops and ships were rarely ever called upon for frontline
duty, with their purpose being to defend their own worlds and be in a position
to reinforce others if things went bad and the front was lost. To date that
hadn’t happened, and a lot of Kiritas didn’t like sitting back and waiting
while others did the fighting, but faithful as they were they followed the plan
and so far it seemed the Humans knew what they were doing, as always.

While the Kiritas kept to their own systems and were
continuously developing them into outright marvels of engineering capable of
holding an insane number of people in a workable and comfortable environment,
the Kiritak were the exact opposite and scattered across the ADZ. They had no
civilian population and were all business, doing various tasks for Star Force
that heavily fell into the resource collection and processing categories.
Entire Kiritak colonies were established for no other reason than to mine and
ship the materials collected off to other parts of the empire for use, while
other colonies were industrial-based and used those materials to make parts and
products that were likewise feeding the rest of Star Force, not to mention
foodstuff production.

But more than that, the Kiritak were also heavily
merged with mainline Star Force activities, not in terms of military, but the
cargo naval fleet. The Kiritak had their own fleets built for the express
purpose of shuttling resources to and from their colonies, but even the massive
cargo freighter jumpships that had no contact with those colonies were seeing a
good portion of their crews being made up of Kiritak. It was a mix, with Humans
always involved, but no other race had such a presence in the mainline
operations of Star Force as the Kiritak did, and that was a note of pride that
interested
Fatti
greatly.

But making it onto one of those crews would be a long
process full of training and competing against others for who had the highest
marks. Only the best got to crew with the Humans, and he knew that 4 jumpships
even had Kiritak Captains, who were literally a legend to all Kiritas. If
Fatti
wanted to go that route there was no guarantee he
would make it, and to be honest he wanted to start making contributions now
rather than later.

The Kiritak also had a military division, which was
used as security for their various colonies. Those had seen more action than
the Kiritas military had, but only through combat with the Skarrons during the
initial invasion…during which most of them died fighting. That wasn’t the case
anymore, and like the Kiritas they were merely
homeguard
protecting the valuable resource collection infrastructure upon which Star
Force depended, but they too were elite and required years of training and
competition to rise to a level to earn those positions.

Fatti
wanted the notoriety
of a military unit, but feared he’d be bored just sitting and waiting for a
fight that might never come. Crewing on a cargo ship meant he’d be contributing
on a daily basis, which was more to his liking, but it would take so long to
earn a slot that he reluctantly pushed that option aside as well. That left a
slew of possibilities that were less visible, but none the less important, and
he stopped his pacing once again to run down the list that he’d practically
memorized by now.

He’d had enough waiting and thinking and otherwise
boredom and told himself he was going to pick and pick now so he could get
going, so he ran through field after field, ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10,
then going back and eliminating everything below a 6 on a datapad he had
nearby. Then he went through the remaining list, weighing the advantages and
difficulties of those before him and ranking them again, eliminating the bottom
tier and repeating the process.

Fatti
kept it up, feeling
reckless but knowing he had to make a choice for there was no one area that
stood out beyond the rest. Eventually he narrowed the long list down to five
options, then found himself stuck as to how to eliminate another. All were
quick routes, which employed huge numbers of people in a massive workforce and
required less than 2 years of additional training beyond what he already had in
the maturia…and as he looked at the list he realized all 5 were in the Kiritak
rather than his native Kiritas.

Well that bit was decided, at least, but he still
wasn’t sure how to choose between the 5. The first two were mining related,
with one being a vehicle pilot and the other being a cargo loader. They were
simple tasks but very important to keep the flow of materials moving, and they
needed lots of them, meaning the competition for those slots wasn’t as fierce
as it was for others, though he’d still have to prove himself once his training
was complete. If not he’d stay in training until his skills rose to a level
where he could earn a slot.

That was why he didn’t want to go naval, for he could
be stuck in training for the next 50 years. The other 3 options he had on his
short list were also movement related, with a bioharvest loader, warehouse
loader, and an aquatic terminal loader having caught his attention. The last
one was the rarest, with some aquatic mining colonies sending trains of resources
up the sea floor to the coast where they were held in a depot for ground or air
transport to other locations on the planet.

Being that it was rarer than the others
Fatti
reluctantly crossed it off, knowing he needed
something that was widespread and easily accessible if he was to maximize his
chances of earning a slot. With that in mind he also nixed the pilot, figuring
there would be less craft available than crates to move, leaving him with three
choices…all of which were nearly identical.

He went back to pacing again, glad to be near to a
decision but still stuck. Eventually he just said to hell with it and chose one
at random, imputing the numbers 1, 2, and 3 into his datapad and having the
randomized function choose one…with it spitting out #2.

That was the bioharvest loader, which would have him
moving crates of foodstuffs, either grain or finished products, between
segments of the transportation grid, be it from rail to dropship or from
hovertruck
to warehouse. The position didn’t specify, which
was why it had such a large number of open slots which were literally being
updated with every transmission that came through the relay grid and he could
see the numbers changing on his screen. With every slot filled they’d decrease,
then new batches of openings would become available and the number would rise
again.

At present, there were 1.6 million slots available,
though only yesterday there had been 1.4 and two weeks ago when he’d been
lightly perusing the numbers while going through his final graduation
challenges there had been 1.7 million. That meant there was an insane amount of
transition going on, but with a population in the trillions that was to be
expected.

Fatti
couldn’t petition for
one of those slots now, for first he had to go through the proper training. To
accomplish that he needed a slot in a higher level maturia, and a Kiritak one
at
that.
Using his terminal he put in the request and
got an acceptance message within 3 seconds, followed by deployment orders
within the hour.

Feeling the excitement and relief at finally being on
the move again he packed up the few belongings he had and headed out of the
maturia to the spaceport indicated, hop/walking through the Kiritas crowds with
his little duffle over his shoulder and mentally saying goodbye to the planet
that had always been his home. He’d never been offworld before, but now he was
headed for a Kiritak colony in Alpha Region, clear on the other side of the
Human Core systems.

Most of his peers that he’d gone through maturia
training with were already gone elsewhere, with about 15% remaining that would
graduate soon, so it was time to move on and he was glad to be doing so in such
a wild fashion. Transitioning to the Kiritak was going to take him farther away
than any of the home colonies and he liked that. More to do and see and less
chance for boredom.

When he got to a transit terminal he hopped inside and
road a subsurface tram over to the spaceport and came out directly underneath
it along with a lot of other soon to be passengers, most of which carried
duffles like him. They didn’t talk, for the most part, but exchanged glances
and understood that they were all in a similar position and heading out for new
assignments.

He had a
nav
beacon on his
wristbound
comm
/datapad that led
him to the check-in point where he was given his dropship ID and departure
time, with him having to wait only half an hour before it came in through the
open ceiling doors and landed next to some 50 others. He and a large group
boarded it and took their seats, then were flown up to orbit and deposited on a
jumpship.
Fatti
was led to temporary quarters and
left there on what would be more than a month’s journey across the ADZ.

The Kiritas tried to deal with the boredom of transit
through training and games, but
Fatti
was just as
relieved as the others when they finally arrived in Alpha Region and the
Kiritak colony that housed their own maturias. The infrastructure was similar
to what he’d grown up in on
Kirit
, but with a
different feel and coloration to it, enough that he felt at ‘home’ but still in
an alien environment.

There were also a handful of Humans in the otherwise
all Kiritak zone, which was a new experience for
Fatti
who’d never seen one in person before. They were so tall and pale it surprised
him, despite the pictures he’d seen all his life. Especially their heads, which
were so narrow and decorated with different colors of what they called ‘hair.’
Each one he happened along over the coming days he stared at, respectfully, but
didn’t interrupt. It was awe-inspiring to be next to one of them, let alone
several, for he’d counted at least 14 different ones in his first two weeks in
the colony, most of whom he ran across in the cafeteria or the nearby hallways.

Other than those areas it was all Kiritak all the
time, with his training being taken up a notch from what he’d known back on
Kirit
. That was to be expected, for this was higher level
maturia training and supposed to be more intense than basic had been, but it
was still a challenge…though it helped that those going through it with him
were also training for the exact same profession and they helped each other out
whenever they could to maximize their chances of making it.