First Contact Fallout by Aer-ki Jyr (novels for teenagers .TXT) 📗

adjacent sweeping campaigns. Right now he’d just have to tolerate it, but now that he was here on the ground it wasn’t going to be an issue.

“What are you hiding from me?” he asked no one in particular, already having sent the new arrivals out on various missions with a few mental orders. “What does a healing center have that is so important to waste Zen’zat defending, only to lose it in the end?”

Gon’zu didn’t get a direct answer, but he did get an indirect one a few minutes later when one of his new search teams discovered an intact genetics lab…with all the databases wiped of recent information. Not all information, just the recent years. In fact, the length of the omission was equal to the length of the war. So what exactly were they working on here? And why was it so important to die defending empty databanks when the planet was short on defensive units?

Something wasn’t right, and Gon’zu wasn’t going to leave here until he figured it out. Not even if it meant canceling upcoming assaults in his given combat region. His instincts told him this was massively important to the Era’tran, because if it had been anything less they would have just destroyed the facility and moved on, or relocated whatever it was.

But they stayed to defend it. If he could figure out…or rather when he figured out why they had stayed he would know how to proceed. For now he was just going to walk, listen, and learn. The Era’tran were cunning, and he had to be even more so, for if they were trying to hide something they were going to do a good job of it…unless they’d been caught off guard and had to buy time with their lives.

If that was so, maybe they had gotten sloppy and missed something. He certainly hoped so, but only time would tell, and he wasn’t going to leave anything this sensitive to the Bo’ja. This required intelligence and wisdom, and those two assets were the primary reasons the Zak’de’ron had chosen the Pak’lem long ago from millions of other races in the galaxy…that, and their physical size gave their wisdom the backing of considerable muscle, now augmented with psionics. If Gon’zu needed to fight he could, and well, but right now this was a game of wits. Him versus the Era’tran, and he had to prove to be the superior.

This invasion was too important to the Zak’de’ron. They had to succeed, and the Era’tran had already put up far more resistance than expected. A special project could tip this conflict, perhaps even alter the course of the war in other systems. But what was it they could have been working on in a healing facility? That currently stumped Gon’zu, but he was going to find out. He had to. The Zak’de’ron were depending on him, as was Itaru and the rest of the newly reformed V’kit’no’sat. And the Era’tran were now the primary obstacle from them reclaiming the rest of the races and ending this destructive war sooner rather than later. For the longer this reclamation took, the closer the Hadarak came to Itaru and the other major systems that were finally back in their rightful claws…

5

May 6, 128800

Jamtren System (Era’tran capitol)

Holloi

Mario’topa flinched as he heard the explosion behind him. He stopped running and turned around, seeing his armor’s guesswork putting the explosion several miles away…but that was far too close out here in the jungle. There wasn’t supposed to be anything else out here.

He found the largest nearby tree and climbed up using the grip points on his armor until he could get a clear view above the canopy. He was still cloaked, using passive sensors only and not even using his Pefbar in case someone nearby might brush up against it. He was as stealthy as he could get, but he immediately got a warning as a tiny bit of Mushgu’vu radiation washed over him.

It wasn’t enough to get through his cloak and was easily absorbed, but had he been closer to the source it would have highlighted him immediately. Mushgu’vu was a very rare and expensive technology, useful only against cloaking devices that operated in atmosphere. Naval ones were structured differently and could stay hidden, but there was so much that a suit of armor had to deal with other than vacuum that that the matrix was less than perfect. Mushgu’vu exploited that weakness, but aside from some ultra secure facilities he had never known it to be used, let alone in the field.

His passive sensors could at least zoom, and what he saw were two gunships pummeling a piece of jungle from very close range and drifting slightly as they appeared to track separate targets. They were identical to the gunships the Zen’zat used, but these were not transmitting the proper codes. They weren’t transmitting anything that he could pick up, so that probably meant they were not Era’tran. The ‘new’ V’kit’no’sat used a lot of the same technology, he thought deliberately so, rather than relying on foreign tech, though there was a lot of it on planet already in the invasion force. But these two gunships…

Mario’topa took the risk to deactivate his cloak, allowing his full sensor array to function and link in to any nearby units. The gunships didn’t register as allied, but there was someone on the ground that did. Two actually, and both Zen’zat, but they weren’t from his quartet, for he’d met and then dispersed the others farther from the facility as they searched for Tu’vac. These gunships were behind them and further to the east.

He reset his cloak into a null field, which turned him completely black and absorbed whatever radiation hit him rather than reflecting it in a convincing manner. It would absorb the Mushgu’vu as well, but if someone did a check against the