Star Force: Liberation (SF56) (7 page)

BOOK: Star Force: Liberation (SF56)
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“Yes.”

“What you don’t know is that there are other queens,
hatched the same time as you. 11 others in fact.”

Nadei’s
eyes widened. “There
are?”

“Yes. We kept you separate so we could observe you and
your development and see if there would be any differences...and there were.
Some of them have chosen to return to the other Bsidd, while some are going
into Axius as civilians. You are the only one who wants to remain in Star
Force.”

Nadei was taken aback. “They’re leaving?”

“It’s their choice.”

“But why? Why would they go back to those…
traitors.

“Traitors how?” Larissa asked, curious as to why she
would use that term.

“Star Force saved them, saved us, and all they do is
work against you.”

“Against us, you mean,” Larissa corrected. “You’re a
part of Star Force and have always been. Stop thinking you’re one of them.”

Nadei bowed her head. “Thank you.”

“If we are going to bring back the Bsidd, as a race,
we can’t let this happen to them,” the Archon said, pointing to the live
holos
of the fighting on the planet below. “And while we’ve
removed the hive influence from your genetic code, there is still a lingering
influence from the queen that spawned you. Negative characteristics that you
and the others have as default. I believe that’s why the others want to return
to the Bsidd colony. Those that are going to Axius have overcome that and are
choosing the lifestyle they want, and good for them, but you’ve gone a step
further. You’ve overcome that subtle influence and, based on everything you’ve
told me, have a typical Star Force mindset, not because it was implanted into
you, but because you find it to be best.”

“I do.”

“So what if we can take your mindset and put that as
the default for the Bsidd. They would still be able to choose their own path,
but the ones not strong enough of mind to make their own choices, the ones that
just go with the flow, would go with your flow rather than that of the
original, corrupt queens…who themselves were most likely influenced by those
that spawned them and constricted by their hive mind programming.”

“You want me to produce eggs?” Nadei guessed, feeling
a bit disappointed.

“You don’t like that idea?”

“I will do so gladly.”

“But…”

Nadei dropped a few inches in height. “I want to make
a difference.”

Larissa smiled. “Do both.”

“What do you mean?”

“The characteristics that you will pass onto your
offspring are variable. In order to pass on the good traits you have to possess
them yourself. As you change during your life those traits will change, so we
need you to be as Star Force as you can get in order to give your offspring the
best start we can give them. That means you need to be an active part of Star
Force, not an ‘egg factory,’” Larissa said, pulling the term from the
Bsidd’s
mind.

“How can I do both?”

“We only need you to get the ball rolling. A few eggs
here and there, with no imposed programming. You’ll have to make a conscious
choice to do that.”

“I’m not sure how.”

“We’ll help you figure it out, but it’s probably
something that you won’t understand until you start a reproductive cycle.”

“I’ll miss my workouts,” she mildly complained.

Larissa laughed. “And that mentality right there is
exactly what we need passed on.”

Nadei looked from the Archon to the holograms, now
realizing the importance of the task being asked of her. To shape the Bsidd
away from this needless destruction and chaos without having to lead them. She
could just be herself, no responsibilities other than what she earned through
merit, and make a difference where she chose. All they needed were a few eggs,
and that was something she would try to do. She owed them that much and more.

But she still didn’t like the idea of going sessile
and missing workouts.

“Tell me what I need to do.”

“First thing is to find your place in Star Force.
You’ve had some time to think about it. Where are you leaning?”

“I want to be a builder. An engineer if possible.”

“That’s a lot more training ahead of you.”

“I know, but I want to try. I’m not afraid of a
challenge…and with all the destruction going on, building just feels right.”

“Then that’s where you begin. Down the road we’ll
tackle the egg laying thing, right now we need you becoming as strong and
skilled as possible so you will have plenty of good habits to pass on.”

 
 

7

 
 

May 4, 2583

Zerus
System (Alpha
Region)

Char

 

Larissa sat in her office, feet up on the clear desk
as she read a datapad containing Paul’s most recent report on the assault of
Tarania
…the last Skarron foothold within the ADZ, or it was,
because now Star Force, with the help of the Dvapp and Hycre, had finally rid
the planet of enemy troops. Paul indicated that there were still enemy ships
insystem that had to be hunted down or forced out, but the planet was back in
Dvapp hands and the incursion was, after so many decades, finally repulsed.

“About damn time,” she said aloud, tossing the datapad
on her desk and sliding her feet off. She stood up and looked out the window
behind her, running her fingers through her pink hair and staring down on the
colony that was building rapidly below. Her office was tower top in the center
of the city, sitting right below the primary shield generator in a huge spire
that had been the first bit of infrastructure completed on the ugly moon.

It was low
grav
, dirty, but
with a habitable atmosphere and moderately high temps. Larissa knew it was a
fixer upper, with plans to start terraforming when they had the necessary
resources and workers, the latter of which were beginning to pool back on Venus
as they completed their basic training. There was already a Kiritak colony
insystem, set up on the planet below that contained no atmosphere whatsoever,
and was feeding Char the materials it needed to build the Star Force Bsidd
infrastructure that Larissa was tasked with overseeing.

Already she had a few hundred thousand Bsidd here, but
they were all young and inexperienced. Her core of Humans, a handful of
Calavari, and a lot of Kiritak were in charge of building the colony and giving
the Bsidd their secondary training in a hybridized work/training environment
that the trailblazer was having to juggle. With Star Force’s empire continually
growing faster than its Human population adequate leadership was hard to come
by, but fortunately several other races were contributing experienced people to
the project so it wasn’t entirely relying on Humans to keep it progressing
forward.

It was operating on a thin budget, both in terms of
resources and personnel. All the Bsidd in Star Force were essentially
younglings, with none of their own to lead or train others. Until they elevated
to the point where they could themselves become trainers and handlers the
amount of Bsidd population they could grow was going to be limited, but like
all good trailblazers Larissa was pushing the limits and cover the slack
herself.

The number of eggs even a few queens were capable of
producing was staggering, so Star Force was never going to be limited in that
regard. All reproduction was controlled through the maturias, however, so there
was no fear of a runaway birth rate such as with the Kiritas. Larissa could
‘produce’ as many as she liked and feed the maturias exact numbers of keyed
eggs with whatever variant was needed. It was then up to the individual Bsidd
to complete their training and choose the course they would take, either
staying in Star Force or leaving…with a good number heading to Axius, which
while part of Star Force was essentially free man’s land where they could
disappear into civilian life and do whatever.

Those that chose to stay in Star Force were being
shipped out to
Zerus
and deposited on Char. Rather
than be incorporated into Star Force’s mainline organizations they were being
crafted into a splinter division much like the Kiritak, but given their biology
and sheer size, not to mention their variants, it was a splinter division that
Larissa was going to shape into a full-fledged entity…including military
capability.

That would put them on par with the Calavari, but
before that happened Larissa had a lot of work to do.

Most of the Humans on Char were Clan Meteor, with
Larissa having recruited them from her own ranks. They were going to be the
transitional crew until permanent recruits could be obtained.
Thing
of it was, even a lot of her own Clansmen were mere
rookies, some not even 70 years old. She was here to overcome that weakness and
keep everyone in line and basically create the new Bsidd civilization from
scratch, though there had been a lot of prep work done previously on Davis’s
part. Now it was time for the padawan to make it all work…and to adapt as
things progressed, making what alterations were necessary on the spot.

Still, having Dvapp territory reclaimed was a burden
lifted from her mind. Protovic space had already been reclaimed and their
allies were beginning to lick their wounds and regrow…while making a few raids
across the border to keep the Skarron outposts from developing too much. The
Voku were doing most of the leg work there, and admirably, while the lizards
and Skarrons contributed more and more resources to battling each other in a
war that no one could predict the outcome of. Whenever one seemed to have the
upper hand the other would pour more troops in, and vice versa.

For the moment they were more or less ignoring the
ADZ, but there were skirmishes happening constantly, especially on the lizard
border. As they’d shown previously, they were more than capable of
multitasking, and even though they were being held back by a wall of Sentinels
that was growing with each year, Star Force didn’t have the number of troops
necessary to really lock up the ADZ…which was where the Bsidd came into play.

Or hopefully would, for right now they were still in
learning mode and small in number, unlike the original Bsidd who were growing
quite rapidly now that they’d secured a decent resource base. They hadn’t taken
up a part in the ongoing civil war, but were trying to gain as much of a
foothold in the power struggle as they could and becoming a bigger and bigger
thorn in Star Force’s side given that they felt the only way to return to their
previous dominance was to play adversary and pick up allies that held similar
anti-Star Force sentiments…with the ‘free’ Bsidd being a huge sticking point
with them.

If Larissa had her way, it was going to go from
‘sticking point’ to full-on insanity producing angst, because Star Force, even
stretched thin, had far more resources to throw her way than the Bsidd had, and
as soon as she got enough second tier maturias up and running here they’d
easily be able to out-populate the ‘originals’…after which the real work would
begin.

But maturias didn’t work if you didn’t have experienced
handlers, and to accommodate the massive numbers to come those handlers had to
be mostly Bsidd…not to mention the engineers, soldiers, builders, medtechs,
etc. Getting this first batch off on the right foot was key, and to do that
Larissa had searched long and hard for as many skilled and experienced
individuals from across Star Force to provide the leadership necessary.

Her top tech was actually a Kiritak, a position that
normally would have gone to a Human, but the little guy was more than 200 years
old and was as big of a gear head as anyone she’d ever met. Right now he was
out in the southern construction zone tweaking the controls on the construction
mechs
to better suit the Bsidd physiology.
Adaptations had already been made in the basic designs when they’d been built,
but as the crews got some more experience with them problems arose, with
Navvi
jumping on them as they arose, pun intended, and
making adjustments to fully customize them to Bsidd needs while updating the
schematics that would be used to create new models in coming years.

Little things like that were crucial and consumed most
of Larissa’s days. While the Bsidd spoke English and had been trained in
maturias like everyone else, their mentality was different, as it was for all
races. The Star Force cultural vibe was there, and allowed them to connect easy
enough, but the Bsidd weren’t eager beavers like the Kiritak were. They were
hard workers when given a task, but give them free time and they would pretty
much stand in place doing nothing.

Larissa hoped that would go away with time and
experience, but she also wondered if it didn’t have something to do with the
hive mind programming being stripped out of them. There had been no detected
problems noted in the files she’d been given and practically memorized by this
point, but there was definitely a vain of laziness in them that seemed to come
more from not knowing what to do next rather than not caring. In a maturia that
wasn’t a big problem because you had tasks given to you nonstop, but curiosity
and exploration were two big elements missing in most of the Bsidd, though as
always there were exceptions where individuals were involved.

Larissa had been sorting through her Bsidd to find
those oddballs and advance them up through the ranks as she threw them into
various new situations and waited to see how they’d respond. Experience
couldn’t be underrated here, and she was going to goose along their learning
curve as much as possible because she needed visible examples for the future
Bsidd coming her way to see. Looking at other races was one thing, but when it
came from your own it was a much more effective way of communicating than
making instructional vids.

And the trailblazer had been making a lot of those.
All the Bsidd coming out of the maturias knew who she was, for she’d been
lecturing them since birth via the recordings. Like Randy was the patron of the
Kiritas and Kiritak, Larissa was becoming the same for the Bsidd. That’s
actually how Davis had put it when he’d asked her to take on this never-ending
assignment.

A beep from her desk caught her attention and broke
her stat-laden haze as she was running recent figures through her head while
looking out at the dwindling light of the nearly nighttime cityscape. With a
glance she telekinetically pressed a few buttons and brought up a holographic
itinerary, showing a number of recent assignments and one that had gone awry.
There was a mining operation underway, more of a learning tool but useful in
city construction none the less, and one of the digging machines had
broke
while active and caused a cave-in.

Larissa frowned, wondering if it was a pure accident
or a misuse that had caused the incident. Didn’t matter at the moment as she
ran for the door, needing to get down to the city substructure as quickly as
possible…with only a short detour to the armory to grab her second skin.

When she got down to the tunnels there were hundreds
of Bsidd standing around, all made up of two varieties, known to Star Force as
gammas and epsilons, or ‘
eppies
’ for short. The
gammas stood twice as tall as a Human and were heavy lifters, though still low
mass themselves. The
eppies
were smaller and looked
like bushes given their many appendages. Both were standing around and waiting
for orders, with Larissa moving through them with a telepathic ‘out of my way’
warning sent ahead of the trailblazer.

When she got through them she saw others working to
remove rubble in the low gravity, given that they were below the city’s IDF
field, both with tech assistance and their appendages. She spotted the few
non-Bsidd minds nearby and moved to them, twisting and turning to get through
the crowd in the packed tunnel.

“What happened?” she asked the lead miner, who was
sitting on the side of a mining walker with a bloody right arm.

“I think one of the drills missed and hit the shield
generator.”

“That holds the rim rock?” Larissa asked, knowing that
the tunnel she’d just come through had been braced and walled off, with the
area just ahead of her being pure rock with a shield that held it in check to
keep any chunks from falling down. Had they been digging through sheer rock
that wouldn’t have been such a risk, but what they were moving through now was
a mix of rock, gravel, and empty pockets of air that would shift and fall when
breached…hence the need for the containment shield overhead.

That said, there were a number of shield generators in
use for varying applications of the mining process, with the rim rock being the
trailblazer’s best bet as to what could have caused the debris field she was
seeing around her.

“Yeah,” the miner said. “Took it out with one hit then
boom. I got hit by a small piece, but there are people trapped under the
rubble.”

Larissa turned and looked at the mountain of dusty
rocks and peered inside it, seeing several crumpled Bsidd underneath the rocks
but detecting a few active minds…meaning there were still some alive.

“I count six still alive.”

“My fault,” the miner said. “They’re too green. I
should have handled point myself.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she said, touching his good
shoulder with her armored hand. “But we can’t hold their hands forever. And if
they can’t miss a big fat pylon then that’s hardly your fault.”

“I don’t know…but this shouldn’t have happened.”

“Sort it out later. Move rock now,” she said, leaving
him behind and shoving her way through the Bsidd working to move the chunks
away to a shield conveyor that was taking them off overhead down the wide
tunnel. The Archon hopped up on top of one of the walkers and replaced the
Bsidd at the controls, using an auxiliary panel with Human-style controls to
reposition it to the side and start pulling out chunks near to where she felt
the closest minds, playing a giant
tetris
game and
trying to keep from creating a second collapse.

The shield generators were back up, but the material
within the tunnel could still shift and fall on those buried underneath.
Larissa worked as much as she could with the walker then pulled it back and got
off, going into the rocks and activating the powered function of her armor and
digging her way down to one of the trapped
eppies
.
She wedged herself into a gap, kicking a small boulder out of the way near her
right knee, and making herself a living arch to create an escape route.

BOOK: Star Force: Liberation (SF56)
13.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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