Star Force: Quenar (SF88) (Star Force Origin Series) by Aer-ki Jyr

least.”
    “Though that could be camouflage as well,” Riley
noted.
    “Whatever their abilities are, they are invisible to
Pefbar, Rentar has no effect, and they can pass through our shields. I didn’t
try bioshields at the time, but right now we need to figure out how they’re
doing this.”
    “Scans of the room detected nothing,” Davis said,
having confirmed as much as soon as he got back to a terminal.
    “We’re in a bit over our head here,” Riley said
regretfully.
    “Which means our first order of business is to catch
our breath and start learning,” Davis said as calmly as possible. “If they want
to negotiate I can handle that. The rest of you work on learning what you can
and implement as many security procedures as necessary on the Zeus to keep them from sneaking onboard.
    “Already working on that,” Riley assured them. “This
ship is going to become the Alamo so long as Nefron is onboard.”
    “That didn’t really end well,” Paul reminded him.
    “But they did do a lot of damage before they were
taken out, and that’s what they’re going to have to do to get to Nefron.”
    “You follow up on that obsessively,” Davis ordered.
“Paul, Jason…short of picking a fight with them, work on the psionic and naval
angles for any tidbits of information you can gather. I don’t know how long it
will take them to assemble and transmit their historical records but…what?”
    Paul and Jason were both smirking, but waved it off.
“You made a joke without trying to,” Paul told him. “Go on.”
    “What did I say?”
    “Historical records.”
    Davis thought it through, with no bells ringing.
“And?”
    “Old movie.”
    “Send it to me later,” Davis said, curious to see what
was so hilarious. “In the meantime we play as nice as we can and stall. There
might be a beneficial arrangement to be hammered out with regards to the
security they offered. I’m not accepting that or anything else on a whim, but
with their cloaking technology no one would ever know how many of them were here
or not. That could be an invaluable deterrent against interlopers if word got
around.”
    “Or are they just playing nice up until they get an in
to Nefron and try to either take control of the Uriti,” Riley warned, “or to
destroy them.”
    “They should be able to do that if they’re half as
advanced as they seem,” Paul pointed out. “I think we could, if we really gave
it our all, and I’m not talking about using Nefron’s cheat. If they were really insistent about their Oath, whatever it actually is,
they’d be killing the Uriti one by one in order to keep them from falling into
the wrong hands. The fact that they watched this one while The Nine fought with
it indefinitely feels odd to me.”
    “Maybe they are as understaffed as they suggested,”
Jason floated.
    “And maybe they’re being honest,” Davis finished. “We
have too many questions and too little data to work off of. So long as nothing
is blowing up yet, let’s see if we can’t scrounge up some data or at least
confirmations of our own while I ask a few direct questions and see if they’ll
give us some freebees.”

 
    9

 
 
    January 23, 3258
    Alamo System
    Inner Zone

 
    Davis sat in his quarters onboard the Sanguine Blade , sunk deep into a lounge
chair as he stared aching eyes at a datapad trying to get a little bit more
reading in before he went to bed. Per his request, the Knights of Quenar had
supplied him with historical records. They were very shallow on detail, barely
summaries of events, but there were over 6 million years’ worth of records and
Davis was having trouble getting through it all. He’d already spent a couple
weeks on it and was barely a third of the way through, but he was starting to
understand these Knights a bit better.
    The records dated back to before their founding,
detailing the war against the Uriti from yet another perspective, as well as
giving insight into the chaos and barbarism that