Four

Horde Shipyards

Argolus Star System

10 September 2017

A tall, imposing, dark-haired man stood before a giant viewport. He watched the activity taking place in the nearest assembly dock. 'Nearest' was a matter of perspective as the formation was more than two miles away. The framework of girders marred the view of the gigantic battleship being assembled within. Robotic units swarmed over and within the great ship working at the fastest pace possible without risking damage. Another month and the new Horde battleship Hoscar would be ready for a shakedown cruise.

General Rongar could not wait to get back out into the depths of space again. Normally, admirals commanded battle fleets, but due to the respect he had garnered from both the space and planetary forces, Horde Prime had taken the unusual step of promoting him to command of the Fifth Fleet. Rongar had never given Horde Prime any reason to regret it.

Captain Dragnar oversaw the construction of the new battleship. Rongar left him to the day-to-day management of the work while he concentrated on a more pressing concern.

Not long after arriving at the shipyards, Rongar's chief scientist, Sagan, came to him with a rather strange discovery. All bases from what the Val-kyrie call the Great War had been accounted for, or so they had thought. Sagan discovered a transmission on an outdated frequency dating back to the war indicating a base that, according to Horde records, did not exist.

There were times when the general enjoyed mysteries. This was an intriguing one at that. There was always the probability of lost installations being found out there among the stars. Ancient civilizations have turned up from time to time. Salvage companies worked out beyond the rim of explored space looking for lost tech. Sometimes they made lucky discoveries.

Rongar turned away from the viewport and returned to his desk. The monitor displayed an image of a galactic sector outside the established boundaries of Horde-controlled space. A single unremarkable solar system with nothing of value apart from certain ores and precious metals that make it rip for mining. There was no sentient race recorded inhabiting the system. The projected yield for mining made in unsuitable for the Horde, but other companies had been eying it with interest. Strangely enough, no one had ever acted to scoop up rights to the potential profit the system offered.

However, something about the system nagged at the back of Rongar's brain. He felt as though he had seen the special coordinates somewhere. But where? Sagan, his chief scientist, was working on it, but had yield to discover anything new. The man was dividing his time between digging up more information about this mystery star system and the continuing rebuild of the battlesuit found in a second pyramid several miles away from the one where the six Guardian suits had been recovered. It was called White Knight. While Sagan and Rongar did not know much more about the suit than that, they did know that it was the prototype for the six suits causing other Horde commanders' problems over the past six months.

General Femora entered the room after having been announced by the secretary outside. At five-foot eleven inches, the general was several inches shorted than Rongar, but her workout regiment gave her a physique that could give him a run for his credits in a sparing match. Femora had extended an invitation to Rongar to spar, but he had yet to take her up on it.

"Still fretting over that indicator?"

"Umm," Rongar muttered, transferring the map to the wall display off to his left. "There is something about that system the nags at me. Did you turn up anything in your research?"

Femora shook her head. "Nothing. Not a scrap of information about that location," she answered. Musing, she added, "It's almost as if-"

"As if someone erased the information from the database," Rongar finished.

Femora frowned "How is that possible? The primary archives on Horde World contain all information dating back to the beginnings of the Horde."

"It's quite easy if you know how. My chief scientist could do it in his sleep."

"How?"

Rongar flashes a slight smile. "By infecting a database with a virus specifically designed to seek out the required data destined for deletion. Once a database, like the one in your station's computer, is copied to the archives on Horde World, the virus would activate and destroy all records of the targeted files. The virus would then spread to any computer system tapping into the archive for data."

Femora said, pointedly, "Sounds like you have done that a time or two."

"I can neither confirm nor deny that."

Before Femora could come up with a suitable reply, the comm buzzed for attention. The destroyer Rogan had dispatched weeks ago was finally arriving at the target system. It had taken this long to arrive because other elements of the Fifth Fleet had been in combat recently. The destroyer Rongar tapped for the recon mission was commanded by a man who had accompanied such missions in the past riding herd on specially built survey ships. His ship had taken some damage that had to be repaired before he could safely undertake the mission Rongar had assigned to him.

The main screen shifted to a closer look at the target solar system. It would be updated as more accurate information came in from the destroyer. All Rongar could do at this point was wait and watch.

Origin Point

Destroyer 11734 had dropped out of hyperspace well short of the target system. Survey probes were immediately launched into space, soaring off toward the distant star. Thirty minutes after launch, the destroyer fired up its main engines to follow in their wake, but at a much slower pace.

Captain Vargen had done the routine so many times he could recite the playbook from memory. Survey vessels were much better equipped for this kind of work, but destroyers could be outfitted with the most critical equipment when required. Vargen had done this hundreds of times, but it was never the same way twice. General Rongar had warned him to be cautious in his survey of the system. The goal was to find a lost base, presumably Horde in nature, but that was not a certainty. All the general could relay was that a locater beacon had become active from a Horde base that did not exist in the record database.

Strange, that, the captain thought. All bases, whether active, deactivated, or destroyed were recorded. If there was a base here, and it was no longer on recorded, then someone wanted it to be lost and remain that way.

Vargen tried not to fidget as his ship slowly crept into the system. Waiting was something that did not sit well with him. It was times like this that Vargen wished that bridges of the destroyer warships were larger so he could pace off his excess energy. Cramped as it was, there was just enough room for his command chair in the center, the helm at the front, science station on the starboard side, communications to port, and weapons and engineering behind. Narrow paths from the access hatch to the rear circled around to each station and that was it. Now, the armored ports were open to offer a limited view of the outside world, though there was not much to see. The system's primary was nothing more than a tiny yellow spot ahead; low and slightly left of the destoryer's present course.

Vargen could have pushed the vessel at top speed and made the journey shorter, but that would broadcast their position to anyone on the lookout for unknown spacecraft. Destroyers routinely sent on survey missions were equipped with an added piece of equipment used only for this kind of work. It was a cloaking system designed to mask a starship's energy signature by prying sensors. When it was active, all energy emissions up to a certain point were effectively masked from detection. The drawback was that a vessel could not travel at maximum velocity as the energy output from engines on maximum thrust would bleed through the cloak. At beast, a warship could travel at three-quarters velocity. Vargen ordered robot manning the helm to maintain one-half speed so that he would have a cushion to play with should it become necessary to make a swift withdrawal. Of course, if that were necessary, remaining under cloak might not be an option. Or necessary.

Consciousness returned fitfully to Unit Six Sixty-six. Flickering colors faded in an out as its systems came back online. Hopefully, that would be resolved when the final configuration of the new body was completed. Its world finally into a virtual landscape of icons floating about in an infinite sea of inky darkness.

"Where is my body?"

"It is not yet complete. There are some minor problems with the subsystem interfaces to work out. Then integration can begin," the base computer answered. The unit was thankful the computer had finally learned to exercise volume control. "That is not why you have been reactivated."

"Status of the fleet?"

"The first warship is fully manned and functional. Recent operations have been completed satisfactorily. Modifications and upgrades on vessels two and three are now over eighty percent complete. Unit production is now at five hundred per day. Expected output will reach nearly one thousand per day in the next thirty days."

Six Sixty-six would have nodded if it had a head. "All according to plan. So, why have you reactivated me?"

A window soared out of the sea, darted across the gulf and expanded in front of the unit's awareness. "Numerous objects have been detected traversing the system. They are too small and quick in order to accurately identify them, however."

"Speculation?"

A pause, then, "Probability is another survey mission. Groups periodically investigate this system for the untapped mineral wealth it contains. Much of it was not tapped during the war to not only preserve appearances, but to also have a reserve for a time such as now." The computer paused as it investigated another tentative sighting. "Update. An object has now been identified as a sensor probe consistent with system survey operations. Origin of manufacture identified as Horde Empire."

That got the unit's attention. "So, they have finally come."

"Not necessarily, However, they may have received an activation signal when the base was brought back online."

That was a disturbing development. The unit forgot all about the automatic signaling device that alerted the nearest Horde command base of the activation. Turning it off would invite further investigation. As it was, maybe a fight could be avoided if operations were temporarily suspended. Six Sixty-six examined the sensor logs but found nothing. The probes were too small to travel through hyperspace on their own. That meant there must be a mother vessel out there somewhere. Evidently, the Horde had developed some sort of cloaking system to mask a warship's energy signature. That the sensors had yet to pick up a starship spoke to the experience of its captain.

The unit decided to wait out the enemy captain. There were certain operations taking place in the system that could not simply be shut down and moved. Orders went out to the starships currently under refurbishment to stop operations and redeploy to the far side of the system's star. The vessel commanders were explicitly ordered to use trajectories supplied by the base computer, which had extrapolated the probable entry point of the hidden starship and devised a course that would keep their movements hidden.

The final orders went out to the squadron of retrofitted Batmek fighters, half of whom were armed with anti-ship torpedoes. It was positioned on a space platform in geosynchronous orbit over the innocuous surface building Unit Six Sixty-six had first used to enter the massive underground base. The platform was a sort of X marks the spot, but it could not be helped. Presently, the platform faced toward the system's star, meaning it was hidden by the planet.

Those bombers with their fighter escorts would be the means of destroying the unseen warship when the time came. Now all the unit had to do was sit back and wait for the enemy to reveal themselves.

Survey probes were not meant to scan for space vessels. They scanned planets for signs of life, infrastructure, roads, buildings; anything that indicated intelligent life as well as recording environmental conditions of the planet. They therefore missed the movements of two large spacecraft burning for the blind zone on the far side of the star.

Captain Vargen read the reports as they came in of the conditions of the orbiting space bodies. There were seven planets in all with an inner debris belt where a planet had failed to for just outside the habitable zone. Another more massive belt formed the perimeter of the solar system. Vargen was not sure why there was so much debris out there, but it could indicate another failed planet formation. However, the age of some of the asteroids scanned by the probes indicated that some of them were older than the solar system. Some were even younger. That meant that they had been moved to this system by a means the captain could scarcely begin to guess at. All the oddball rocks were rich in minerals needed for the construction of a civilization. The three outer most planets contained other gases and metals that would also be used in most civilizations.

Conclusion: it was a prime location for a starship construction base and corresponding infrastructure for planetary army units and equipment.

So why had this system gone overlooked for so long? Or was that the point? Was it meant to look as if it had been overlooked as a way of concealing some secret installation?

The destroyer's sensors could not pick out details while under cloak. Vargen would have to drop the cloak and go to active scanning for that. At the moment, he was content to let the probes do the heavy lifting.

Planet three appeared to be source of the signal High Command had picked up. If there had been other facilities in space, they had been long removed. After hours of patiently advancing into the system, the time had come to make a choice. Nothing appeared to be happening anywhere within its boundaries, but that did not mean there was no one here. Probes were closing in on planet three where the signal appeared to originate.

Captain Vargen really had no choice. If he were going to get to the bottom of the mystery, he would have to order the cloak shut down and switch to active sensor scans. At his command, a robot touched several controls that switched the cloaking field to standby function. Sensors were switched from passive to active scan. Within minutes, a picture of the inner four planets began to take shape. The inner most planet was a barren rock with surface temps on the side perpetually facing the star exceeding that of molten lead. Planet Two had an atmosphere poisonous to most carbon-based life. Only number three was capable of supporting life.

Another round of probes was launched. These devices were equipped to detect anything that might be hiding out there from orbital platforms to satellites to starships. It would take time for two of them to orbit the star and see what, if anything, was hiding behind it.

"Launch fighters. We're going in on the third planet," the captain declared.

The destroyer's compliment of six fighters rocketed from the launch bays. Four took up station in a wedge formation in front of their mothership. The last two ignited afterburners and tore off for the planet. The ships were shaped like the traditional Batmek fighter in wide use by the Horde, however, a scaled-down version had been developed to accommodate only a single pilot and all the necessary equipment and systems to make a powerfully compact space fighter capable of being deployed by smaller warships like destroyers.

It did not take long for the lead patrol to spot the platform in geosync orbit. They approached with caution, looking for enemy craft. The platform was fully powered, but there was absolutely no movement in or around it.

Vargen frowned at the report. Something was not right. The locator beacon from the hidden base emanated from a location on the surface in the same area. It was no coincidence that a structure was in orbit over that position. He stepped up scanning looking for a trap. The captain got a nagging feeling at times like this, and that feeling had just gone from nagging to a full-blown red alert.

It came to a head when the lead fighters were suddenly blown apart by defensive batteries that suddenly powered, locked targets and exploded them with devastating hails of energy bolts all in a span of seconds.

Vargen ordered battle stations, got the helm to turn them about and head away from the planet at an oblique angle. Rather than turn a complete hundred and eighty degrees, Vargen chose to head off at an angle to maintain speed once the engines got the warship up to maximum speed.

He should have been a prophet. Two dozen Batmeks boiled out of the massive platform, formed up and tore off in pursuit. The screening force of four fighter that had been in front of the destroyer had altered their course, which brought into a rearguard position. They broke formation, turned and engaged the enemy craft.

Closing rates brought the two opposing forces to the merge in minutes. One pass was all it took for the enemy fighters to destroy Vargen's remaining craft. They gave a goo accounting of themselves by destroying five of the enemy. Three fighters and two torpedo bombers. However, it was not enough.

Enemy bombers ignited booster engines and leapt to speeds no Batmek was previously capable of. Vargen ordered evasive maneuvers while keeping an eye on getting into position for a hyperspace jump out of the system.

Destroyer 11734's maneuvering only delayed the inevitable. With the wing of fighters painting the destroyer's engines with targeting lasers, the ripple-fire of torpedoes launched from the ten bombers had only to follow those beams home.

The first two weapons detonated short of the target, but the boiling cloud of antimatter annihilation damaged the destroyer's main thrusters. Follow-up weapons roared in on terminal runs. It only took three to boil away armor and internal structure to get at the fusion core that was the heart of the warship. The remaining extraneous torpedoes died in the fiery explosion the consumed Captain Vargen's command.

General Rongar's Office

Horde Shipyards

Argolus Star System

The two generals stared at the screen in stunned silence. The pictures from Destroyer 11734 cut out abruptly at the warship's fiery demise. Static snowballed the screen for several seconds, then the computer automatically switched back to a tactical overview of the target system.

Rongar returned to his desk where he began sifting through the data. General Femora opened a touch pad on the right side of the massive screen and started searching through the footage using a smaller window.

Nearly an hour dragged by punctuated by a tense silence broken only by the occasional grunt by either person.

"Got it!" Femora exclaimed, startling Rongar. Chagrinned, the woman continued in a more subdued tone. "I knew there was something wrong with those ships."

Curious, Rongar rose from the desk and walked around to join her as she stepped back from the screen, remote in hand. "What have you got?"

She aimed the remoted at the screen and pressed a button. "Your Captain Vargen really knew his stuff. Even while aborting the mission, he continued to take detailed scans of the fighters bearing down on him until the last moment."

Images of the fighters started papering the main screen. One the far right was displayed an engineering diagram of the standard Batmek fighter showing views from all sides. "One the right is the standard Batmek which is largely unchanged for the past several hundred years. Captain Vargen was attacked by a squadron of Batmeks. Old Batmeks."

Rongar knew Femora had a passing interest in Horde history. "How old?"

"I can't say for sure without a more detailed analysis, but design of those ships appears to be one that hasn't been seen since what the Val-kyrie call the Great War. Those are of a slimmer, more compact design. Simple compared to our current model. Cheap and easy to produce."

"Exactly the kind one would need fighting a galactic war," Rongar observed. "But those don't look like they have been sitting around abandoned for a thousand years." He gestured to the window on the lower center of the display. "Those explosion yields are more efficient with a yield of nearly thirty percent greater than weapons used by us or the Val-kyrie. Even their new quantum weapons don't approach that level."

"While interesting, that is beside the point. Someone out there is using designs from a thousand years ago with upgrades," Femora pointed out.

Rongar took the remote from her and switched to the display on his desk computer. "We may have an even bigger problem than someone trying to set themselves up as warlord." He brought up the galactic map he had been studying when Femora exclaimed her discovery.

The picture was not of the complete galaxy but rather a small slice of it. Red dots marked the image almost like a rash radiating outward from a central point. The radius was not uniform because of the locations of systems with habitable planets. Several were systems where space stations had been set up in leu a suitable planet to set up on. Those systems usually had mining companies working to recover valuable resources needed for galactic markets within, and without, the Horde Empire.

"What is this?" Femora asked.

"It is a compilation of all the attacks on shipping lanes over the past several months. You can see that they radiate out from the system Captain Vargen was investigating. The most interesting fact about all these attacks is that there were no survivors from any one of them. Additionally, it appears that the cargoes some transports were taken while others were left behind."

"Any recordings of the attacks? There had to be something if the hulls were reasonably intact."

Rongar shook his head. "None. Whoever did this made sure that any recordings were destroyed to preserve their identity."

Femora frowned. "The cartel families must be going crazy. Look at all the ships they are losing. Even the Val-kyrie have suffered several attacks." She did not bother counting the number of attacks on Horde shipping. It appeared that the Horde was taking the brunt of the losses.

"I think a meeting might be in order," Rongar mused, walking back over to his desk and sitting down behind it.

"What do you mean?" Femora asked, a sinking feeling settling in her gut.

"Well, several of us seem to have the same problem. It might be a good idea to pool our resources in an effort to identify our mysterious attackers." That was a radical idea even for a general known for such things.

Femora rounded on her friend. "What was that?"

"It makes sense."

"Why don't we just send a fleet in there and clear out that system?"

"Because whoever is there is looking for it. You can't hide the movement of a fleet no matter how hard you try," Rongar pointed out. "No. Figuring out who it is will be the first step. We must know who the enemy is so we can figure out how to fight them. While they are using outdated equipment, it has been upgraded to a remarkably effective level. Not someone to be taken lightly. And," he paused for emphasis, "just because Captain Vargen's sensor readings did not record any capital ships in the system, that does not necessarily mean they don't exist."

Femora nodded. "Weren't hiding in the system. On the other side of the star, for instance."

Rongar nodded, approving. "Now you are getting it."

"Okay. So how are going to set up this meeting? Open invitation?"

"Well, I will tell you what I have in mind, but you aren't going to like it."

For the next several minutes, Rongar laid out his plan to covertly set up a meeting in the Wayfarer system, either on a family space station or at a neutral site on the sole habitable planet, and just who should attend.

Rongar had been correct. At the end of his speech, Femora did not like it.

Not one bit.

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