The Powers That Be by Aer-ki Jyr (best android ereader txt) 📕

them much time to evac…but they had given them enough. Eventually they passed outside the danger zone markers and Oasu’kli continued to swim further away, not sure what was going to happen. They made it to the Garas’tox and slipped into formation with them, swimming back the way they’d came as the countdown reached 10 seconds.

“What is coming?” she asked the long-necked dinosaur scathed in red battle armor alongside the other in identical yellow.

“The ocean cannot shield everything from the void,” the red-clad one said just before the countdown ended and the 6 mile deep water over the spot they’d been highlighting suddenly got slapped from above and parted, all the way down to the seafloor by a shield column.

“Oh,” Oasu’kli said, realizing that wasn’t coming from her aquatics ship…nor any other that the Elarioni possessed. She checked the battlemap beyond the ocean, which required an entirely different view mode, and saw a Clan Cookie Naval battleship hovering in the sky a few miles above the ocean…though when she looked up she saw nothing but black water above her.

It was producing the shield column…which she didn’t think Naval warships were equipped for, though most of them were usually Warship-class and carried drones. The battleship did not, but apparently it had been configured to be able to move the water apart to deliver troops or a drilling team straight down to the ocean floor without them having to swim through all the water…

Then as she belatedly remembered the hazard zone around them that the Garas’tox were fast approached, a blinding white Cleansing Beam shot down from the ship, through the new air corridor, bypassing the water that otherwise would have absorbed the blast, and cored right through the mud into the rock below and blasted down towards the Hadarak tunnel.

The explosion of rock, mud, and what water got through to hit the beam pushed out a mushroom cloud around the perimeter along with an underwater tsunami that obliterated the area around the blast zone…all the way out to the edge of the danger zone where the wave hit the Garas’tox without slowing them too much, though all the Elarioni were thrown back no matter how hard they swam. They were uninjured, but couldn’t catch back up with the Garas’tox at all as the two giant swimmers accelerated and went straight towards the blast zone once the Cleansing Beam ceased and the shield column retreated.

By the time Oasu’kli and her guards got to them, the Garas’tox had already descended through the blast zone and were inside the Hadarak tunnel melee fighting the minions as they came to them from below. The Elarioni swam down towards them to help, then got a redirect behind them from the Garas’tox.

The tiny Elarioni did as ordered, swimming down into the Hadarak tunnel and bypassing the huge boulders that had broken free of the walls and were partially obscuring the travel path. She didn’t know why they didn’t just seal it entirely, then she realized how the two Garas’tox had such a sweet spot here, for the minions couldn’t swarm them…only approach them from one direction…and that gave the two Clansmen the perfect kill zone.

And they’d just ordered the Elarioni to watch their rear for minions coming back up the tunnel from the exit, and to pick up any minions that might get past the Garas’tox.

But that wasn’t likely to happen, because they were savagely cutting down everything that came within reach of their neck, tail, and four energy-blade covered flippers.

Oasu’kli sighed and waited along with the others, hoping something would come through that they could kill, or hoping that something came back up the tunnel from the exit, but for the moment they were just floating in the water and watching as the Garas’tox took all the kills without any signs of tiring…

2

Joor’nak was an aquatic race and third tier member of the V’kit’no’sat Empire…or at least were before the empire’s collapse. Since then they had become far less, with no worlds of their own. The J’gar had claimed most of them, and the Garas’tox had quietly assumed control of the rest without a fight, for the Joor’nak had no limbs to fight with. They were water snakes with a triple tail, but they’d never been allowed Saroto’kanse’vam for their tail tips, making them poor fighters against the larger aquatic races.

But what they did have was size and intelligence, with them being the largest aquatic race by mass, and their Lachka was likewise enhanced by that mass. This made them very good at point defense, construction, mining, and other support duties…but melee combat was not their strong suit, and most of their race’s focus within the empire had been on shipbuilding. They were an aquatic race that had created starships long before they were brought into the empire, unlike most other aquatic races, and it was their warfleet that had given them a position within the V’kit’no’sat above and beyond a slave race.

But that warfleet was long since destroyed in the Zak’de’ron war, and now the Joor’nak had become residents of shared worlds without the ability to leave, making them baggage for the most part, for without their shipyards there wasn’t much they could contribute, and their greater intellect was seen as a threat by the major V’kit’no’sat races…and for that they’d been deliberately suppressed since the old Zak’de’ron had added them to the Empire.

At the time it had been seen as a deliberate slap against the J’gar, bringing in a race with intelligence equal or greater to their own, and once the Zak’de’ron had been thought destroyed the Joor’nak were not rewarded for their assistance with peerdom…but rather barely controlled contempt. They were not given higher status, and were forced to remain in the low level position of a newly added race throughout their membership in the V’kit’no’sat.

When Mak’to’ran took power that had started to