Gateways, Aer-ki Jyr [sci fi books to read .TXT] 📗

could make what they couldn’t find if they could find things near to it, or wanted to provide the power to fuse or fission down other things.

Metal is what he needed the most, but he hadn’t found any veins yet, just a few weak ores. The ‘explorer’ slot was an addition to the scouts and went looking for various resources so the collection teams didn’t have to waste their collection time, so Darren had multiple sites to hunt for rocks in prior to each day, as did the dead tree hunters.

Their restroom was little more than a cabin with a pit under it, but it was better than just going in the snow. Fortunately the fabricator could use the crushed or chipped wood to create an obsolete tool called toilet paper that was better than using snow once the charge on their personal cleaning items ran out. They weren’t thermally rechargeable, and without electricity they were dead within the first month…deliberately so, they thought, because the database held schematics on rechargeable ones.

So with the reinvention of toilet paper they had a crude luxury they were grateful for, but they longed for real buildings with real utilities, painfully knowing how far away from that they were…but Trevor kept them on task and chipping away at all the stepping stones enroute to that proper infrastructure, and Darren knew they’d get there eventually. They just had to do it the hard way.

Actually, their parents had it the truly hard way, because they didn’t have sifter technology, nor alchemy, or a database full of all these designs. They had to invent it all, and that was a challenge Darren did not want to even think about. This one was a headache enough, and without his brothers and sisters he wouldn’t have a chance of making it out here. But together, they were working the problem and succeeding.

But they had a very, very long way to go, and getting food production established was now their main priority using the seeds that had been packed in the supply crates. Though to grow them in this snowy environment meant an indoor bioharvest facility.

And to that, nearly all of their building materials went. The wood cabins would be home for a very long time to come, but that was preferable to starving or having to hit the panic button and admit defeat.

And if there was one combined sentiment they all held, it was that they would not use that button unless someone’s life depended on it. They were not going to be the first of their bloodline to fail, let alone of all the bloodlines. They were going to not just survive, but own this mission…whatever it was truly about.

7

February 3, 158400

System 299103 (Hadarak War Zone)

Zendi-Zorro Nebula

Amir-060 arrived in the nebula via a scout ship as his Borg vessel was needed in combat elsewhere. He didn’t need it to travel around the war zone, for Star Force ships were faster, and as long as he avoided the Deep Core the congestion of Hadarak wasn’t sufficient to intercept him just outside the original location of the Web Wall, which was now almost completely destroyed. A few chunks here and there remained, but several of the Clans had been permanently assigned to taking it down, and while it was slow going they had accomplished a great deal over the past three millennia.

Most of the war zone, however, was still in Hadarak hands. Their ability to spam and spread had garnered them a huge territory, but it was falling rapidly and everyone knew it. Out here it was more of a cleanup effort, but one that still required a great amount of military presence and resource expenditure…while the battles happening in the Deep Core made everything else look minor in comparison.

That was the scale of the war, which made battles in the outer regions of the war zone that would have obliterated the original V’kit’no’sat appear insignificant to some of the distant spectators, but Amir knew better, as did most of Star Force. Every world mattered, as did every person, and how you won the war was as important as winning…perhaps even more so, which was why he had left his badass warship behind and traveled here via scout ship, for one of the Jedein had asked him to come.

They didn’t do much talking, and whenever they did it was always of great importance. A lot of people wanted to meet them, but they snubbed almost everyone. Archons would usually get an audience just by showing up, but the trailblazers and a few other elite personnel were the only ones truly on regular speaking terms with them…at least as far as the Socani were concerned. The Jedein had more in common with the Megaloids, and conversed more with them as a result, but Amir knew that when one asked for him, they would have a good reason even if they didn’t want to share it remotely.

So he’d broken off from the heavier fighting in the Deep Core and headed back out to the ‘safer’ regions of the war zone, ending up in this nebula that was previously unclaimed as far as Amir’s information went, but when he got to the outer edges of it he met up with the Star Force defense fleet that accompanied the Jedein wherever it chose to travel. There were so few of them that it was imperative that they not be killed, so each of them had minders if they wanted to venture out into the war zone.

And most were, to help rescue Hadarak and transform them into non-combatants or back into Jedein in the case of the Wardens and one Lurker, though the later was becoming quite rare and very difficult to capture. The Jedein here was originally a Warden from another galaxy, and since they didn’t operate on names, Star Force had simply assigned them numbers.