Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) (4 page)

For Kip, he didn’t give himself time off. When his
skeet slid into one of the many bays on his command ship he first headed to the
bathroom, then over to the sanctum to get in some training and work off that
anger in a beneficial way. After that he’d get some sleep then head back down
to the planet again to oversee another city assault while this one and four
others were still being cleaned up.

Once a city was ‘harvested’ they had to put down
surveillance gear around the perimeter to make sure no Veliquesh snuck back in,
with some inevitably trying. It was a good tactic, for it would give them an
impregnable base of operations for the simple reason that Star Force thought it
was empty, but Kip and the others were too shrewd for that. They had teams
assigned to patrol and hunt down any
reclaimers
that
made their way inside, and with psionics they weren't that hard to locate.

Day in and day out this would continue, as it had for
some 17 years now. Kip had seen so many cities that he could literally
replicate the Veliquesh architecture from memory, but that wasn’t an issue for
him or his troops. They fought the same way they trained…with an eye on the
current trends and maintaining themselves indefinitely. The 3 trillion
population of the Veliquesh wasn’t going to be an impediment against them, for
they’d simply take it one mission at a time, slipping in training blocks here
and there so they didn’t grow weak, and work through the entire number of the
sick bastards over the course of time.

It was work that needed to be done and Kip didn’t feel
like being anywhere else, but when the day came and it was completed he was
going to be glad to see the galaxy rid of the Veliquesh and say goodbye to this
region of space…at least until the cities were deconstructed and something
worthwhile was put in their place.

Most of his troops felt the same way, with all manner
of public countdowns being recorded from the jumpships to the firebases. They
were doing good work here, but they’d all be glad when it was eventually
finished.

4

April 9, 2853

Aphat
System (Bsidd
Region)

Jmry

Rafa
climbed up a ladder and
out of one of the Veliquesh buildings, coming onto the rooftop and leaving the
collection team below to pick up the stunned prisoners. When he got to the top
he scanned his battlemap looking for more targets but every building around him
had been tagged with a ‘green’ marker indicating that it had already been
checked and cleared.

Numerous units were dotting the map, but all of them
were Star Force and most were collection teams. The others were combat units
that, like
Rafa
, were looking for stragglers that had
escaped capture. The building below him had held a group of holdouts, but the
trailblazer had made quick work of them using his Ikrid, putting them all to
sleep without a shot even needing to be fired.

Four high priority dots were also spread across this
Veliquesh city, with those being Kip, Oni, Greg, and Jason. This was the last
city on the last planet that hadn’t yet fallen. A few others had actually gone
ahead and surrendered, seeing that they stood no chance as they witnessed the
fall of every other city across
Jmry
, but this one
and a few others had remained defiant to the end…and now it looked like it was
finally over.

Rafa
double-checked the
battlemap to make sure it was really done, then he allowed himself to sit down
and rest for a bit as he looked out over the Veliquesh city. The plaza where
this had all began with Mike was about a kilometer to the northeast, and they’d
specifically left this location for last. It’d taken 22 years for the five of
them to conquer the three trillion Veliquesh, and slow as it was stunning and
taking them prisoner,
Rafa
knew it had been the right
call. Kill the culture but spare the people, for as bad as these psychopaths
were none of them had chosen to be born into this sick place. Had they been
born into an Axius colony he doubted they would have ended up the way they
were, and that was why the Veliquesh civilization had to be destroyed…so that
the next generation would be spared this horror and have a chance at a real
life.

That next generation was going to be in the hands of
someone else, for as soon as they tidied up here they were leaving. This system
was remaining in Star Force hands, but it was going to be under the direction
of a mage while the trailblazers cycled back to the ADZ.
Rafa
was going to spend some badly needed time with the advanced training group and
he wasn’t sure about the others. They hadn’t talked about what they were doing
next, rather focusing on the task at hand and maintaining their training
throughout.

It had been a long war, but in some ways it didn’t
seem like it. Once you got past a certain span of time everything blurred
together and you just went with the grind.
Rafa’s
sense of time was linked to planets taken, not days on the calendar, and this
one finished the set. Five systems conquered, zero casualties, and a prisoner
count exceeding 3.07 trillion. What they picked up here would be added to that,
but the bulk of that number had already been shipped to the
Broj
System, leaving
Rafa
and the others with a small pool
of waiting cargo ships to carry these last few off. When they went, so would
Rafa
, and he could wash his hands of this place.

The building he now sat on and all the ones in his
vision would be gone if and when he ever came back. Every last bit of infrastructure
was going to be torn down and replaced, erasing the Veliquesh from existence.
After this it was back to fighting the lizards and that even longer war, which
made
Rafa
laugh. When were they not at war? First it
was with other Humans on Earth, then the lizards, followed by the Skarrons and
a lot of little confrontations that didn’t even make the news. Archons were
always fighting someone, somewhere…he was just glad the battles were taking
place on the enemy’s turf rather than the ADZ being invaded. At least now they
could pick their battles, more or less.

“All done?” Jason’s voice asked inside his helmet.

“Looks like, but there could always be a few
stragglers.”

“The sweeper teams can finish those. I’m heading back
to orbit. Want a lift?”

“Sure,”
Rafa
said as he
stood up, with Jason sending him a waypoint across the city. “Be there in 20.”

When
Rafa
finally ran up to
the position where Jason had given him the waypoint he saw a
Falcon
-class dropship squeezed onto a
road between two fat buildings and a trio of golden-clad Archons standing at
the foot of the open boarding ramp. The trailblazers slowed to a jog as he came
up on them, then stopped just a foot short of Oni’s armored shoulder.

“Greg’s on his way,” Jason told him. “We were
discussing where we were headed after this.”

“Now or when we get back to the ADZ?”

“Right now,” Oni clarified, “I’m heading to a sanctum
for a nice long run, after that is the question. Do you want to head back to
the ADZ on the same ship or are you going somewhere we’re not?”

“I’m headed to Earth,”
Rafa
said. “What about you?”

“
Mordor
. I’ve got Clan stuff
to take care of.”

“I’m going to pay Morgan a visit,” Kip added. “Her
reports are indicating some heavy lizard activity in her region and I want to
see what they’re up to personally.”

“Well, I’ve got some rounds to make in Beta Region,”
Jason finished, “but I can transit through Sol, so I’m up for a group trip if
you are.”

“I’m in no rush,” Kip mentioned as Greg came floating
down to them from one of the nearby rooftops. “So I’m game.”

“Game for what?” he asked as he walked the last few
steps to them after deactivating his jump pack.

“Heading back to Sol on the same ship so we can get
some workouts in together before we head our separate ways,” Oni said.

“I’d like to, but my I’m going to meet up with a task
force heading deeper into lizard space not far from here. I’m not heading back
home for a while.”

“Sucks,” Kip commented.

Greg’s golden armor shrugged. “Lots of lizard systems
to take and this little detour put us behind schedule as it is.”

“We have a schedule?”
Rafa
asked.

“I’d like to be knocking on their
homeworld’s
door in a couple hundred years, if that’s alright with you?”

“Fine with me, but don’t you want a break from combat
to get in some decent training?”

“Nope. I’m good as is.”

“Can you stick around a few days?” Jason asked.

“We need to babysit the tail end of this operation
anyway, so sure. I’m up for a few days of kicking your asses in challenges.”

“Your ship or mine?” Oni asked.

“Mine,” Jason said, thumbing towards the dropship.
“That’s where this bird is going.”

“Settles that,”
Rafa
said as
he brushed past Jason. “Let’s get to it.”

Brad-050 arrived in
Aphat
4
months after his fellow trailblazers left, bringing with him an army of techs
and a few combat ships to replace the majority that had cycled out to lizard
hunting duty. He still had a decent defense fleet under his command to protect
the system, but coming with him were a flotilla of Sentinel pieces that would
combine into two of the newest versions full of Keema batteries and the most
advanced defense shields to date. With those in place it was going to be damn
hard for the lizards to displace them, and nowadays they didn’t seem to be in a
rush to try.

Since the initial invasion the lizards hadn’t been
back to
Aphat
or the other four systems that Star
Force had taken from the Veliquesh. Those were being patrolled with their own
guardian fleets while techs disassembled what was left of their infrastructure,
then those fleets would eventually transition to
Aphat
,
leaving nothing but monitoring equipment behind to make sure the lizards didn’t
move in and claim them.

Aphat
was an entirely
different situation, for the reclamation effort here was going to take far
longer. Brad had picked the planet of
Nym
to begin
his work on and had redirected all techs to cleansing a section of its surface
and subsequently building a small Star Force colony in its place. As the techs
progressed further across the planet the Star Force infrastructure would
follow, at a much slower pace, but as time went on the Veliquesh stain would be
erased and a new piece of Star Force would grow in its place.

The facilities on
Broj
where
the Veliquesh prisoners were being held also had the maturias for the children
recovered. Those children were then sent into the transitional colony where
they could prove themselves worthy or not of being full citizens. Already some
had moved into the ADZ, but the ones coming out to Brad were another group
entirely.

When prisoners had been taken a fair number of the
Veliquesh females had been pregnant. When they gave birth to the fleshy egg
sacks in isolation, those as of yet unhatched younglings were taken offworld to
a separate maturia located deeper in Bsidd space. Brad had been working with
them for a while, but most of the maturia regimen was a copy of the Axius
Protovic program so he didn’t have much to do there. His work was going to
begin in earnest now that those maturia were starting to produce graduates.

They weren’t in vast numbers, for the Veliquesh
prisoners weren’t mating in isolation and the handful that were in the
transitional colony weren’t adding all that many. That meant Brad had a limited
window of opportunity to get a Star Force Protovic civilization set up and
functioning before they ran out of younglings to grow it from. He had
specifically said that none of the transitional Protovic would be allowed to join
in the early stages, for he wanted to form it out of those who had known
nothing but Star Force maturia, but intended to open it up to them a few
decades down the road once the tone of the civilization had been set.

That meant he had a lot of green personnel to work
with, so he’d recruited a variety of individuals from across Star Force to
assist him in forming the core of the new civilization. Few of them were
Protovic, but rather a mix of Calavari, Kiritak, Human, Bsidd, and Elarioni,
for this world did have a large ocean on it and Brad wanted to get the aquatics
division started right away. There were around 1200 of them in total, meaning
that aside from the construction crews building the colony everything was going
to have to be staffed by the maturia graduates and overseen by the ‘elders.’

That wasn’t the most preferred situation, but given
that Brad didn’t have a native population to babysit and he was able to start
from scratch he felt it was a good place to start. Wisdom took time to build,
and the more hands-on activity these younglings could get, the faster they
would learn…though he was having a transitional support team in place to
actually run the startup colony during the integration of the younglings.
Things like food prep and maintenance weren’t something you wanted to hand them
right off their first day, but the support team would cycle out gradually and
within a year or two be fully replaced by locals.

When Brad’s jumpship arrived he took a dropship down
to the half-built colony with his elite staff and got to work right away
setting up the necessary programs needed for when the younglings started to
arrive a month later. A lot of that planning had already been done, but it
wasn’t until they actually got on site that they were able to get a feel for
the place and set up shop. There was a full sanctum in place for Brad’s use, so
he intended to stay planetside for the foreseeable future rather than living
out of a jumpship.

When he got to the surface he essentially staked his
claim and started micromanaging everything in order to make sure things were in
order for when the first batch of 5,000 younglings arrived. He’s specified that
number and would have exactly that amount coming in every month for the first
year while the balance would be moved into other locations within Star Force to
await their turn. Nearly all of them wanted to come to Brad’s new addition to
the empire, for they’d been hearing of it throughout their maturia training,
but the trailblazer knew he couldn’t overload the limited infrastructure and
staff with too much new blood, hence a staggered approach was used.

He spent a lot of personal time with that first 5,000.
So much so that he eventually knew them all by name. He pushed them hard in
training, got them acquainted with limited but essential duties, then relied on
them to carry them out when the next batch came in and he saw to their
indoctrination into the new order…save it wasn’t all that new for them, for all
they’d ever known was Star Force. The few wrinkles that Brad put into the
Protovic civilization took some getting used to and developed over time, but
after that first year the trailblazer felt he had a sufficient core of
personnel to open up the immigration doors and allow an additional 10,000 per
week.

The Star Force engineers gave him plenty of
infrastructure to use and kept right on building as he incorporated more and
more Protovic younglings into his new civilization. Some of them even began
working with the construction crews to learn hands-on and begin creating their
own branch. They weren’t given anything critical to do, just some basic work to
gain experience on with the prime crews as they expanded the single colony out
into a network of cities across the northern continent.