Gateways by Aer-ki Jyr (world of reading txt) 📕

kill to remove it…unless the Jedein could convert it, and they would where possible, but this battle meant that the offensive strands had to be neutralized, and there was only one way to do that.

The Hadarak forced this coming slaughter by the way they fought and built. There was no surrender, no technology to destroy and crew to capture. All of their ships and infrastructure was living people born into a collective of powerful instincts that compelled them to act, and compelled them to destroy any who did not act as predetermined. The Reignor’s Ren’mak was the only living example of this, but Roger knew there had to be many more killed for they had nowhere to flee to, especially the infrastructure. It was a type of prison that Star Force would not let the Jedein construct and bind others to, but strategically it was effective, and the trailblazer could see why so many galaxies had fallen to the Hadarak and how they’d managed to put down future insurrections once they were able to lay infrastructure such as this.

It was impossible to beat unless you operated on a very high level of warfare, and the Hadarak had all the Gateways in this galaxy so guarded, but this one was worse than the others due to those polar jets feeding more defenses than normal. This was going to be the biggest Gateway assault by double the count of ships, and Star Force had purposely taken on the weakest first, meaning every one they attacked into the future would get harder and harder.

And without the Rim fueling their fleets, this would never have been possible.

Roger watched the clock, as well as the heavily delayed battlemap transmissions from elsewhere in the system, faint as they were at this distance. All the fleets were spread out and eager to engage minions that came out to them…which didn’t last long. The Hadarak figured this out early and pulled them back, unable to get their wardens that far out given their slower speeds, and their Lurkers couldn’t assault that many ships without proper cover, so they were also obviously missing, and probably purposefully concealed in the black hole or behind the minion clouds that were larger than planets.

And they were everywhere Star Force needed to go. There was so much empty space in this system it was anything but crowded, but the number of living Hadarak here was impossible to accurately calculate, exceeding 500 quadrillion at a minimum, and only a tiny fraction of that would be able to be taken prisoner. Yet even one being able to was once impossible. Star Force had overcome so many hurdles that Roger wanted to rest on those accomplishments, but the lives that could not be saved were what weighed on him. The Hadarak were born into this nightmare not of their choosing, and were mostly victims because of that fact, but there was no way to save them and protect the galaxy, which meant they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and Star Force had to go through them.

That was the nice version. The truth was probably a lot darker than that, but Roger didn’t care to delve that deep into Hadarak minds. Their twisted nature was destructive to interface with, a fact that the Jedein had echoed. Whoever had done this to them had corrupted them so greatly it was beyond suppression. It was vile and it was intentional, making the ‘gods’ of the biological into savage monsters in both a physicality and mentality that would rip apart a person’s Core had they not been born into it.

Each of the Jedein here had once been a Hadarak Warden, save for one who had been a Lurker, and that one…#187…was dispatched from the others to hunt down and try to find the Lurkers in order to hopefully capture and rescue them. To this end the Uriti were here to help, but they would not be killing any Wardens or Lurkers. It was not in their nature to do so, but if need be it was in the Jedein’s, and they had already on multiple occasions when the Wardens would not back down and tried to kill those minions who were submitting to Jedein authority.

What was about to go down here was so complicated it was beyond any one commander’s ability to control, even a Borg-level Archon linked with an astromech. Roger could only control a small piece of the battle, and right now he was watching the results of another as their opening gambit played out now that all the fleets had arrived and were holding around the distant gravitation periphery of the system daring the Hadarak to come out to them where they couldn’t maneuver as well.

All fleets save one, and that one had already driven hard into the system and was engaging a smaller section of the Hadarak defenses attempting to draw reinforcements from around the system to it in order to open up pathways for the rest of the fleets, including Roger’s, to get to their priority targets without having to fight through the minion clouds first.

And that smaller fleet that the Hadarak were stubbornly trying to ignore was under the command of Paul-024 with his Clan Saber at the forefront as they dodged and evaded the obvious attack trajectories and made the Hadarak dance to their tune as they harassed rather than made a full frontal assault against the planet in that sector that had so many growths coming out of it that it was no longer a sphere.

The local defenders there could not use their superior numbers and weapons to stop Paul…not that Roger had expected anything less…but it was taking him more time than usually to whittle them down and he wasn’t sure why. Paul could have gone a little harder and dropped their outer skirmisher lines by now, but he was being uncharacteristically cautious and there was