Maty by Aer-ki Jyr (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📗

to scan some of the minds of those singing it and he realized just the opposite.

The Voku wanted war. They wanted a good fight. A righteous fight. They had wanted to become Bo’ja, but so many had been rejected and denied the ability to fight that it was an undercurrent in their psychology that had been silenced…until now. The Voku wanted relevance. They wanted peerdom. They wanted to rise higher than they were now. They wanted to reach the level of the Zak’de’ron, or at least fight alongside them. But they were leaving this galaxy behind, and with their departure also meant the end of their restrictions.

Hightower had just hit on a gold mine that he hadn’t realized was there. The Voku were fed up, as Cal-com had once been, but they had no outlet for it…until now.

The song continued to get louder, and then all of a sudden it seemed to spread everywhere…and not just in this city. But across the planet, and out through the lag to the other systems in the coming days.

The Voku were united in one thing above all else. As Cal-com had said, they were meant to be Protectors. It was literally what they were born for.

And they were answering the call the war.

Hightower smiled broadly, nodding his head in acceptance of their response.

There would be no need for indoctrination here. The Voku were ready to grow now.

Cal-com had been right, more so than he had expected. Now it was up to the Lord to deliver.

And the former Marquis of Clan Saber wasn’t going to have any problem doing that…

2

March 27, 154957

System 19923004 (Hadarak-Occupied Territory)

8th planet

The Elloquim Nevantha, a 284 mile wide living starship, came out of his microjump from the pair of stars in system center and decelerated into mid orbit around the large rocky planet that was infested with Hadarak directly over top of a spire that reached up from the planet and branched out like a firework above geosync orbit, and from there fed spaceborn minions as it continued to branch out into nodules that grew even more of the infestation.

The Elloquim was only half the size of the bulb at the top of the spire, but it ran straight into it with speed as the starship’s tentacles were tucked protectively behind it in a bunched tail. The ship’s shields hit and flared with the impact, then the whole spire top exploded in a debris field that looked like powder being thrown out in an expanding sphere with solid chunks flying within it.

Nevantha came out the other side with only minor hull damage, his shields temporarily depleted, as the spire tipped and cracked along its spindly length, soon to fall back down to the planet that the Elloquim was headed to.

This was enemy territory, far from the Grand Border, and Nevantha had no backup…but then again he didn’t need backup, and as he got closer to the atmosphere his hangar bays opened and a cloud of the most recent PanNari attack drones spilled out and accelerated like a swarm of angry bees towards the larger clouds of Hadarak minions coalescing into tendrils headed their way up from the surface, but even more from orbital facilities larger than Warden-class Hadarak.

Nevantha knew they were warehouses, and the amount of minions inside were staggering, but he didn’t care. His smaller drones flew out to face them heavily outnumbered, but they were not expendable the way the Hadarak minions were. These drones were small, but heavily armored and shielded, and they began to cut through the enemy with little effort as the kill count began to climb rapidly.

Nevantha’s computer mind recorded everything his sensors, and those of the drones, could pick up, and tallying the kill count was a simple task. Coordinating the entire battle was more challenging, but well within his combat parameters. As the drones began their skirmishes with the larger enemy minion clouds forming in the distance, Nevantha’s now grown starship mass came to a hover just above the atmosphere and began firing down onto the planet with several beam weapons to probe the defenses. When no shields were encountered, slower moving blobs were dropped onto the surface in a hexagon grid pattern, with the resulting detonations obliterating everything within a radius of 83 miles at the minimum.

The Elloquim cleared the Hadarak from an area of more than 2.2 million square miles in a matter of minutes, then began boring a hole down through the planet’s singed crust with a vivid blue energy beam that he held constant for more than half an hour as the battle in orbit continued to escalate, with the starship having to defend against some minion strikes that got past the skirmishers, but his battle might was not tested with such exterminations. Though if the full armada of Hadarak in this system was allowed to gather from across this world and the other planets, victory could not be assured. That was why Kyra had a limited time to accomplish her mission, which was launched a few minutes before the cutting beam abated so that her landing ships were near the surface when the debris fountain rising around the base of the blue beam suddenly ended when it was shut down…

The QuipNari was of the same race as Nevantha, but she had not rid herself of her physical body as he had, nor did she wish to become a Craniem in any form…which was considered near treason for her people. All were born with a biological mass, but were integrated with more and more technology as the cyborgs sought to eventually transfer their Cores into a fully machine state. Few were able to, and many died in the attempt, but Kyra and a few others had no wish to go that route and were commissioned as a branch of the PanNari known as the