Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) Read Free Page A

seemed they thought they could and were
actually trying, and potentially succeeding if Morgan couldn’t beat them. That
meant this combat would give her troops far more experience than any other
front, and that fit right into her plans. She just hoped the lizards didn’t
come so hard at her so fast that she’d have to retreat and pull back to a
couple of systems. If they were playing the probing game then she had time, and
that was what she expected to get. A few systems here or there didn’t mean a
damn to the lizards. They were focusing here for other reasons, and she
expected them to give her just enough resistance to see how much her Clan could
and couldn’t do.
    Keeping her hand concealed so they couldn’t push her
past that limit was the trick, and the longer that time went on the harder it
would be to do that.
    Morgan went through all the recent reports then shut
down her terminal and slid into bed. This wasn’t a game, and it certainly
wasn’t a walk in the park. She knew she was going to have more difficulty here
than on any other front…which meant this was exactly where she was supposed to
be.
    Twelve hours from now she’d be back down on the planet
hunting more lizards being dropped from orbit, but for right now she let
herself disconnect from everything and just rest. This was going to be a long
war, with her ability to sustain herself and her Clan being the key to victory.
Get wore down, even a little, and it would snowball into defeat.
    Rest was a weapon, and one Morgan had learned to make
full use of a long time ago.
    After seven minutes of pillow time she slipped into
sleep, her mind quiet and her body numbing to the regenerative process. When
she woke the next morning she’d snap back into action, with that polarity being
a skill that most Archons never fully mastered.

 
 
    2

 
 
    February 2, 2848
    Anivia System (Delta
Region)
    Frostbite

 
    Busy? Taryn’s mental voice asked.
    Come in ,
Ginsi answered a moment before the trailblazer walked through her quarters’
door, though she remained at her comm terminal
reading.
    “What are you working on?”
    “Nothing,” the newly minted padawan said as Taryn
walked up behind her chair and scoped out the flatscreen display. “Just reading a message from Mina.”
    “You two still keep in contact?”
    Ginsi nodded. “She’s a friend and I’m feeding her
workouts. You’d be surprised what kind of nonsense is floating around out there
despite people having grown up in a maturia.”
    “You have no idea,” Taryn said patiently while Ginsi
finished up. Her apprentice typed back a short reply and sent it off, then spun
around and looked up at her.
    “What’s up?”
    “Something big.”
    “I like big.”
    “The reason we came here for training wasn’t for the
view,” Taryn said, referencing the frozen wasteland that was Frostbite. “We’ve
been given a long term assignment, and I’m going to want as much input from you
as possible. You’re not just here to tag along.”
    “What is it?” Ginsi said with a frown. The ‘long term’
part threw her.
    “We’re going to uplift a ward.”
    The padawan’s eyebrows
raised. “A ward?”
    “The Hepcha, actually. They’ve been climbing in status
for a long while and we felt it was time to bring them fully into the fold.”
    “Do we need to? I mean with the Protovic we’ve already
got a huge upgrade to our lineup underway.”
    “We can multitask. The Hepcha have earned this, and
it’s up to us to incorporate them as best we can.”
    “What’s there to do? They already have a Star Force
society.”
    “We have to make them independent and combat capable.”
    “They’re avian, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “How many of them are there?”
    “Right now there are only 1.2 billion, but we’ve been
keeping their population low by choice. They’re egg layers so it’s not an
issue, save for now we’ll be boosting those numbers considerably.”
    “Aren’t there other races better