“You need weapons,” Mastertech Tennisonne grumbled.
“More than that,” Davis said. “We need a strategy other than scrambling to catch up. I’ve been over this time and again, so have the Archons. Tell me you can see something from your various points of view that we’ve missed. We’ve got the weight of the galaxy on our shoulders right now, so we’re not able to look at it from the outside in. What are we not seeing?”
“Do we know what combat between the Hadarak and Founders looks like?” Viceroy Vintra asked, standing slightly shorter than the Golden Knight, but with a posture that put him even lower as he typically held his Godzilla-like body tilted forward and down slightly to counterbalance his large blue tail.
“Only pieces. The Temples will not show us full combat, and what we got from Eldorat wasn’t very thorough with regards to other galaxies. We don’t know how they’re fighting, but we can somewhat guess. The popsicle Jason woke up has provided a great deal of anecdotal information, but we have no actual battle records. In general they fight with Essence and drones while the Hadarak fight with Essence and minions.”
“And we have mimicked this, although unintentionally,” Grand Admiral Serren said, tapping on her Human chin with a lightsaber blue fingernail that was appropriately bioluminescent, indicating her inclusion in Clan Saber.
“Should we not have?” Davis asked.
“Both the Hadarak and Founders have experience and numbers on us. To fight the same way is almost a guarantee of defeat unless we can do it better. The quicker route to victory is finding another way to fight that they have no experience in.”
“I know what I need to do, I just don’t know how to do it,” Tennisonne said, visibly unsettled.
“Do what?”
“Create real Ysalamir. I know there’s a way. There has to be. I just don’t know how to experiment with what I can’t touch.”
“What are you referring to?” Daegan asked the Mastertech.
“He’s referring to the Force,” Esna said, catching the obscure reference. “The Ysalamir were small creatures whose defense involved creating a bubble where the Force supposedly didn’t exist. That turned out to not be true, in that it was merely hidden from view and without the control mechanism it reverted to its normal unweaponized state similar to how Pefbar is needed to control Lachka.”
Tennisonne blinked. “I hadn’t even thought of a control mechanism,” he said, turning to Davis.
“I don’t know what mechanism there is in formed Essence. It’s more of a fire and forget thing for ranged targets. Close in I’m touching the Essence and there’s a conduit of it that if broken I lose control over and it returns to the Essence realm.”
“I was thinking about making it return to the Essence realm immediately upon passing a shield barrier…but I never thought about a control mechanism. There must be some sort of matrix holding it together that we can disrupt.”
“I think not,” Daegan interrupted. “If the Colony Spore’s Essence Rush is visible out here, then that Essence is persisting for weeks in the void of space.”
“Is that true?” the Mastertech asked.
“I’m not sure how, but it appears to be,” Davis confirmed, for he was the only one in the room that could use Essence.
“Then I’m back to square one,” Tennisonne said with a sigh. “I don’t know how to study something I can’t detect.”
“You’ve given us the Avengers,” Grand Admiral Lucin noted.
“I can study the Essence collected via those who can sense it, but I don’t have any mechanism that can do it on its own. That means I can’t poke around and blow stuff up to see what happens. That’s how most scientific discoveries work. I need to poke it with a stick, and I don’t have a stick to do it with, so I’m left dealing with whatever scraps the Archons happen to stumble across.”
“I happen to like what you’ve done with those scraps,” Bren said. “Otherwise I’d be helpless against Essence users,” he said, tapping on the Ironman-like chest ornament that contained an automatic Essence shield that he could turn on with a thought…though it would only last a few seconds.
“If not for Kara you wouldn’t even have that. I know there is a lot of hidden potential, Sean. I just can’t get at it…and it’s not a matter of time. I’m just not equipped for this. Unless you can give me a Tricorder that can study Essence, I’m not going to be able to give you anything the Founders don’t already have.”
“And even if you did, we wouldn’t have the power supply they’ve got,” Davis said with an understanding nod. “We can’t cheat millions of years of training…although Kara’s breakthrough suggests there are ways to cheat the newbs. But if the Founders have Siphons and who knows what else, I don’t think even the Uriti are going to be able to keep us in the Essence race against them. We need another path. Kirritimin?”
The beetle-like alien mastermind whom the lizards had conscripted into their service and upon which the lizard Masterminds, and subsequently the Paladin Viceroys, were genetically patterned on bobbed his shelled body upon which his ‘face’ was affixed, for he had no true head outside his torso.
“I have studied this from afar for longer than any of you have existed. The problem is the same as has been faced by many civilizations. How do you defeat a superior opponent? You cannot face them in their strength, so you must find their weakness and make it your strength. What is their weakness?”
“Swarm tactics,” Esna said immediately.
“For the Hadarak this is true. And for the Founders?”
“We don’t know how they fight, but we do know who they use,”
