Carnage

1
August 18, 154929
Uever System (Grand Border, Oso’lon Section)
Kli’merack
They came in via waves, all through the same jumppoint. Hadarak mainline units clustered together into clumps for the interstellar voyage that immediately scattered upon entry to the system and braked on their own individual courses.
It was a new tactic the Hadarak had developed in recent years to combat the V’kit’no’sat’s ability to blockade certain lines when they had advance warning of a surge coming, and it virtually guaranteed large chunks of their invasion fleets would bypass the gauntlet waiting for them in low stellar orbit.
C’fad watched them pouring into the Uever System remotely, for he wasn’t onboard one of the V’kit’no’sat warships meeting them in battle. He was the planetary defense commander for Kli’merack, the largest of the 7 inhabited worlds in the system. All had Oso’lon on them, and all were lightly populated. No hatchlings were allowed in the Grand Border, and on the odd occasion where eggs were laid here, they were immediately transported back beyond the border to the safe V’kit’no’sat worlds.
The Oso’lon here were volunteers who knew their duty, and C’fad was no exception. The Uever System was one of many navigational points spread across a narrow barrier between Hadarak territory and Star Force territory. Too deep for the Hadarak to bypass in a single jump, but far too thin to suffer the loss of two consecutive systems. If that happened, the Hadarak could long jump through the pair, skipping over the neighboring heavily defended systems and getting into the ‘safe’ Core worlds.
And that was what they were trying to do. C’fad didn’t know how the Hadarak learned what they learned, for they had never been past the Grand Border since the surge began, but they knew exactly what they were doing as some of their mainline units didn’t stay to fight...rather moving around the star and jumping out the far side that would lead them to another Grand Border location. It would be the responsibility of the system defense fleet there to catch and kill them before they could move on, but there were no large numbers getting through. And certainly no Wardens, though there were plenty coming into the system.
They were scattered amongst the Skarron-like flow of reinforcements coming in, and so far there had been 82 show up here in the past 3 days. The Oso’lon fleet had decimated them on entry, but their Essence reserves were getting low and the call for V’kit’no’sat reinforcements from adjacent systems had not yet been answered. It was clear the defense formations in low stellar orbit were going to be insufficient, and that meant the Hadarak would either try to move through or attack the worlds here…and it appeared to be the latter. They didn’t just want to bypass the Grand Border, they wanted to break it permanently.
C’fad stood on a slightly elevated platform inside the planetary command deck on the surface in one of the many small cities scattered across the world as he saw 4 Wardens break through along with swarms of minions and some mainline ships as they got to the jumpline for Kli’merack. Once there they didn’t hesitate, making their slow jumps toward his planet with their arrival calculated at 13 hours from now.
The V’kit’no’sat fleet could move much faster than that, but they had to choose between fighting the Hadarak coming in on the jumpline when they were in a partially compromised state or chasing after the 4 Wardens that had gotten through.
This wasn’t the first time the V’kit’no’sat had faced a situation like this. All along the Grand Border there had been battles fought in such circumstances, and the procedure was clear. Stick with the incoming jumppoints in order to do maximum damage to the Hadarak fleets, and let the planetary defenses deal with the ones that got loose, for the enemy might be attempting to draw the defense fleet away from the jumpline intentionally.
Whether it was intentional or not it was still effective. The Wardens were too large to quickly kill, and the Hamob-class Avengers could not get close enough to do maximum damage when the swarms deployed into skirmisher formations. As much as Star Force had adapted to the Hadarak, the Hadarak were adapting to them as well…though not enough to get the job done. Just to make it harder, and today was going to be a hard day for Kli’merack. C’fad could feel it in the tip of his tail.
He calculated the arrival time of the Wardens and where the planetary rotation would fall, then gave the evacuation order for the slice of the planet that would be facing the jumpline at that time, for if they were going to ram they had to do it off an interplanetary jump, otherwise they wouldn’t have the speed needed to be effective.
Within seconds of his command, the small V’kit’no’sat cities in the danger zone began disconnecting from the permanent infrastructure built up around them, with the elongated diamond-shape city centers eventually activing their anti-grav and floating up out of their berthings, leaving diamond craters in the infrastructure as every person stationed there was evacuated while the bulk of the defenses stayed put, fed by subsurface power lines that didn’t rely on the city reactor cores that were now leaving the predicted impact zone.
Sentinel-class defense stations in orbit also repositioned, some moving out of the way while others moved into flanking positions on the jumpline. They were also diamond-shaped and completely unmanned. Massive remotely controlled weapon platforms that Star Force had developed back during the war between the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force, and now since the merging of the two former enemies and the combining of their technology and ingenuity, the Sentinel platforms had become far more deadly.
Ramming aside, a single Sentinel was an even slugging match with a tier 2 Warden, even when it got into grapple range. Special capacitors would dump energy into