Star Force: Liberation (SF56) (5 page)

The reverse wasn’t true, for even if the lizards
rolled over them in their current conflicts and conquered double the territory
they current possessed that would only be a fraction of the Skarrons’ current
empire, making them an altogether new type of enemy for the lizards to face.

And the more they fought each other the more resources
they’d expend. Paul just hoped that wouldn’t backfire and bring more attention
from both to the region and the ADZ. If it did they were pretty much screwed,
but as far as the Skarrons were concerned the ADZ was an offensive campaign
that they could deal with at their leisure and not a threat to them…and it
wasn’t going to be, for aside from some raids Star Force wasn’t pushing closer
to the galactic core.

The lizards were past that point, with both sides
knowing what each other were about and going for the throat whenever they
could. The only reason Star Force wasn’t hitting them harder was the size of
their territory, making an ultimate victory far beyond their current scope…in
theory, at least, for the Skarron war had already pushed them to their limits
in terms of resources.

Take the Skarrons out of the picture and the war
against the lizards would still be a defensive affair, for Paul knew the key to
ultimate survival was the unlocking of the data in the pyramid and
incorporating it into their empire. Once that occurred, fully, then they could
roll the lizards…but then that would potentially send up a flag to the
V’kit’no’sat that they couldn’t afford.

So no matter which way you sliced the strategic
situation the ADZ was a sanctuary that Star Force would defend but couldn’t
push out from in any meaningful way. That meant endless war, which was
something that the Archons were prepared for given that it wasn’t much
different than their endless training. For other races that wasn’t the same,
and many that had been beaten by the lizards had made it too easy for them
simply because they gave up trying.

And that ‘giving up trying’ was part of the reason why
their surviving factions were sitting in the ADZ and not contributing to the
fronts.

But Paul didn’t care about them any longer. Davis
might still be working on them but the trailblazer wasn’t. Star Force and its
allies were the key to the defense of the ADZ, and long term it would be Star
Force alone given the advancement that he knew was coming. Building up their
empire was his focus, and right now that meant protecting it and buying time so
they could advance.

Hopefully this new Skarron/lizard war would finally
buy them enough time to get a firm border defense in place, and with any luck
they could sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the fireworks.

Unfortunately he knew that wasn’t going to happen, not
with the lizards anyway, and there were still Skarron held worlds on and near
the border that had to be reclaimed. The fight may have gone from impossible to
doable, but it wasn’t over and it wasn’t easy…not yet anyway. Tennisonne had
said it’d be 15-20 years before he’d get Liam’s armor ‘packets’ out to him, but
when he did it’d change how Star Force’s naval division operated.

And even without the weapon upgrades that were coming
in the near future, the secondary armor was going to make their ships so
tanky
that they’d be able to handle the swarm tactics of
both the Skarrons and lizards. Until then it was buy time and build
Sentinels…and hope that both of the big powers got so distracted with each
other that they wouldn’t realize how fast Star Force was advancing and choose
to take them out now, with overwhelming numbers, while they still had a chance.

5

May 31, 2556

Trenzalore
System
(Delta Region)

Christmas
(Alliance World)

Raven-266 ran through the forest easily, ducking here
and there as she made good time from her LZ to the Bsidd colony that was under
construction along with the rest of the planet. The 8 territorial regions were
empty and unassigned save for the one given to the Bsidd, but it barely had a
single city built with most of their people living in their ships or in prefab
structures on the surface provided to them by the Star Force markets.

Those were just getting under way themselves, with
only a handful of operational colonies on the planet and not enough to service
a full Alliance World as of yet, which was why the planet hadn’t been opened up
for colonization to date, but the Bsidd had been a special case and coming in
with extremely low numbers. That was changing, however, as the insect-like
queens began pumping out eggs and growing new population by the
thousands…stressing their limited resources to the limit in order to expand as
quickly as possible.

The Bsidd didn’t know the striker was coming, nor
would they if her mission was a success. She was approaching on foot in armor
through the forest, knowing that the Bsidd didn’t have any detection nets set
up as of yet. Most of the buildings in their tiny city were half built, with
only the ‘royal’ section being amicably functional. That was her destination,
but first she had to get inside undetected.

The Archon began picking up Bsidd minds before she
could see them, adjusting her path to avoid the closest ones as she came to the
forest edge where some of them were clear cutting the trees to make room for
construction growth. Raven circled south to avoid them and came up on a
partially built structure that had no sharp lines to it, being all curves and
twists and the internal structural supports showing were no exception. The
Bsidd didn’t care for the square, preferring more exotic designs that made
navigating around inside their buildings like riding a twisty
turny
waterslide.

Raven found a blind spot along the perimeter and
sprinted across the small clearing in full daylight, knowing that coming in
night would have made her more visible. The Bsidd didn’t like really bright
light, and the planet in question was considerably closer to the star than they
would have preferred, making their night shifts more active than their day
ones. Coming in midday gave her less eyes watching, and with a little psionic
monitoring she was able to get across when no one was looking.

She stuck to the building exterior and moved laterally
until she came to an opening and ducked under a thick support beam and entered
a section under early construction. It wasn’t long before she came up on a
group of workers, some of which stood twice as tall as her and others that were
barely half her height. The small ones were scurrying about bringing parts and
attaching bits here and there while the larger ones lifted the bigger pieces
into place using multiple appendages to work the curvy
lego
bricks around.

That’s what they looked like to Raven anyway. Whatever
they were building with was unlike anything Star Force used. Every piece that
came in resembled a puzzle piece, with the Bsidd scurrying over the framework
like ants assembling the building bit by bit at a good rate. It wasn’t hard to
distract them from her presence given the focus they had on the task at hand,
so as long as she didn’t get in their way she was able to walk right past them
with a few Jedi mind tricks and work her way to the interior of the city to
where the completed buildings were located.

Actually there were only three, all moderately large.
One was what they thought was the queens’ lair and ‘capitol’ of the Bsidd
colony. The other two were industrial, one for making materials and the other
for making people. The latter was her destination and the striker moved to the
closest entrance and slipped inside, bypassing a foot patrol of what she
recognized as soldiers. They were taller than her but their torsos were almost
nonexistent, with their mass made up of a head and a lots of arms, legs, and
whatever else they had.

The two she passed each walked differently, apparently
choosing which appendages to use to move about, but both were armed though not
armored. She’d spotted a few other pairs out on patrol as well, which she
assumed was standard protocol given that there were no threats here and the
Bsidd couldn’t fight off a stiff breeze right now given how few of them there
were.

It took a moment to work the door controls, then she
was inside and maneuvering her way through twisty, curvy hallways that didn’t
remain on the same elevation. There were ‘hills’ going up and down in no
predictable fashion, with Raven having to navigate with the help of her
psionics and memory as she scouted out the facility where the mind count jumped
dramatically. There were literally thousands inside, all packed closely
together, which she took to investigating carefully, having to backtrack
numerous times to avoid running into someone roaming the halls, but for the
most part the corridors were deserted. It was the chambers that were packed.

The first few she came to were barracks holding
adults, apparently on sleep cycle while the others worked outside, but she
eventually came to chambers with some level of activity and lesser minds…the
first of a new generation of Bsidd maturing in colony fashion, with her
avoiding those areas completely. There was no way she could distract that many
minds, so she had to find other routes through the convoluted building, feeling
very much like Solid Snake as she snuck her way around being careful not to be
spotted so much as once.

She had the ability to erase memories, but had never
tried on a Bsidd…let alone felt one of their minds before today, nor had many
others. That unfamiliarity was a problem she was having to overcome on the go,
but her experience with other races was paying off as she was able to find some
similarities and build off of those, though distraction wasn’t difficult when
the target in question used the same basic senses as you did, namely sight and
sound.

Raven continued to explore the facility and add each
twist and turn to her growing battlemap, giving her a means of backtracking
easily enough and leaving herself waypoints to help orient herself. After two
more steep climbs, then a corkscrew downhill, she came to a large chamber that
had no minds in it at present, and with her Pefbar she could tell it was large
even before she opened the hatch-like door, with the single segment pulling back
inside the wall to allow her entrance.

But the chamber wasn’t empty, it was filled with
maturation vats that contained eggs at various stages of growth ranging from
microscopic to marble-sized. Nothing larger was here, and based off the
information Davis had given her about Bsidd reproduction she knew their eggs
had to get quite a bit larger before the birthing process, which wasn’t quite
‘hatching’ but a waking process as they came out of their gelatinous cocoons.

None of these were even close to that, which was why
she wasn’t able to detect any minds. The entire room reminded her of the
Kamino
cloning facility, only more tightly packed with catwalks
and other narrow passages separating the open air tanks full of sticky, stinky
liquid that her helmet didn’t fully block the smell of. She was glad though,
because that meant she wouldn’t have to actually break into any of the
containers to steal some of the eggs.

Davis had said he needed
unkeyed
eggs, and that was going to be the difficult part. All of these currently
growing were unviable, so she needed to find a vat that hadn’t been keyed yet,
if one existed, or find the throwaways that didn’t take. Unfortunately the
medtechs hadn’t given her some nifty scanner to be able to differentiate
between the two, so she was just going to have to use her Archon ‘wisdom,’ as
Davis had put it, to find what they needed…that or come back for another try
later if she grabbed the wrong ones.

So Raven started looking for the microscopic tanks,
inspecting as many as she could come across and unable to differentiate between
them. They were all pools of goo, and short of just scooping up a sample and
hoping for a hit she didn’t have any way to stack her odds…so she kept looking,
with no one else in the huge chamber to spot her, though surveillance was
always a threat, but she hadn’t noticed any visible monitoring devices.

No one had come after her either, so she felt that she
was still operating under the radar and had time, so she made a thorough
examination of the room and finally came on what she was looking for, though
she hadn’t know it earlier. There were small pods full of a different kind of
goo, sealed, and put in some sort of storage chamber and not growth pods.

And there were a lot of them, all carefully and
respectfully stacked into individual slots on a honeycomb-like wall, and Raven
had the distinct feeling that these were eggs from the queens that were waiting
to be
vatted
. The info packet she’d got indicated
that the queens couldn’t produce eggs nonstop, but did so in bunches. With only
so many vats here to grow the maturing eggs in it only made sense that they’d
store the excess so they’d have them available when other buildings finished
construction and upped their growing capacity. If the Bsidd were eager to get
as big a population as possible the queens would be pumping out eggs as fast as
they could regardless of the number of vats they currently possessed.

And if these containers were full of microscopic eggs
then there were truly a lot of them, for the clear canisters showed a milky
white goo that she guessed was pure egg, though some type of stabilizer liquid
might have been included. She didn’t know, but hoped that these eggs were still
unkeyed
since they were in storage. Knowing that this
was her best bet she began looking for a way to open one of the sealed
containers, having to use her Pefbar and Lachka to find and pick the ‘lock,’
for the opening mechanism wasn’t built for her hands.

A double seal released, then an even fouler smell
caused Raven to choke a bit but she held it together long enough to pull a
sampler out of her pack and sucked up a decent amount of the goo, but not
enough that would be detected as missing, she hoped, then she resealed the
container and put it back in place before quietly making her way out of the
building and city, then back to the forest and her waiting dropship.

Davis had sent
Trell
with
her to Christmas so he could analyze and handle whatever Raven brought him, and
the Archon was pleased when he confirmed that she’d grabbed
unkeyed
eggs and more than 150,000 of them. That meant she wasn’t going to have to go
back for a second run and her mission was completed.

Raven left the planet on the next available flight, as
did
Trell
, but after that they split up with the
Archon heading out on a combat mission and the medtech back to Sol but not to
Earth. He went straight to Venus and the facility Davis had been building there
for this project, should
Trell
be successful. The
future of the Bsidd now rested on his shoulders, with him needing to fabricate
a new key for the eggs and to do so without screwing up a batch of them. Not
because he didn’t have enough, but because once they started to grow they were
on their way to becoming people and he didn’t have the luxury of letting them
mature before figuring out if he’d been successful or not because the failures
would be totally unacceptable.

He and Davis had had many discussions on that front
and had worked out a course of action for his ‘experiments’ that focused
heavily on computer simulation. The geneticist had already done a lot of the
groundwork previously, so he was ready to start his additional
sims
now that he had actual eggs
to analyze instead of just the genetic blueprints for them. In theory that
wouldn’t matter, for they should be structured the same, but reading genetics
was not an easy thing to do and more often than not you needed context to
understand it…which these eggs would hopefully give him.

He didn’t try keying any up at first, merely analyzing
them with some portable equipment from the pyramid in addition to the
facilities Star Force had built for him in one of the many cities on the
planet’s inhospitable surface. It was still hot, dense, and full of carbon
dioxide and sulfuric acid, but inside the cities built to withstand that
hostile environment he felt just as much at home as he did on Earth and dropped
into his research without missing a beat.

He spent two weeks scanning and sorting through the
data, comparing it to his expectations and making a few adjustments where they didn’t
match up, then came the tricky part. He went about fabricating the key that
he’d been working on designing for months. It had been pirate grown from the
adult Bsidd sample he’d previously had, then with modifications made to erase
the hive mind commands imbedded within it. Davis didn’t want him trying to add
anything new, just releasing the genetic shackles on the Bsidd…without screwing
anything up.

There were many keys to choose from, but he’d began
with the one he was most familiar with…that being the variant that the diplomat
had been. The Bsidd hadn’t been so kind as to share that bit of data with the
Alliance but
Trell
was calling it a #4 and worked
hard on it as a proof before even attempting to fabricate keys for the others.

With every possible safeguard in place and more than
adequate simulation he crossed his mental fingers and added the fabricated keys
to a group of 12
unkeyed
eggs and introduced them
into a Star Force version of the growing vats…with a much more aromatic liquid
tailor made to suit their genetic requirements rather than trying to copy the
Bsidd version. Figuring out that need had been easy compared to the keys, but
waiting was in some ways harder as he monitored the growth of all 12
individuals after bombarding them with enough keys for them all to take.