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territory
now gleamed Star Force blue, and ever since the massive pushback at Jafat had failed, barely, the local region had pretty much
been free pickups for anyone that could overwhelm the local defense forces. No
more were there reinforcement fleets perusing about ready to drop the hammer.
Everything was now up for grabs, with Tom and a handful of other trailblazers
pushing to grab up as much territory as they could before the lizards caught
their industrial breath and started reinforcing their systems again.
    Simultaneously the Voku were hitting the lizards hard
in what had been Nestafar territory while Kerrie-057, Larissa-048, and the
H’kar were pushing out from Alpha Region and securing another huge swath of
territory that was slated to become property of the Bsidd as their explosive
growth continued…aside from a few planets that would be returned to the
refugees in the ADZ that had previously fled them.
    Wes-049 was making a smaller push up the galactic
plane beyond Delta Region with Axius, with the intent of adding more colonies
in that region to house that growing population, both from internal
reproduction and immigration. Axius was now tops within Star Force in terms of
citizenry, but it was estimated that the Bsidd would pass them by at some
point. Odd as it was, given how this had all begun, Humans were now a tiny
minority within their own empire, despite a population that had recently passed
10 trillion.
    Democracy would have put Humans in the backseat, had
it still existed, but a beast such as Star Force was such a high level entity
that it simply could not exist with such a simplistic design. Humans were the
glue that held everything together, because they were better than everyone
else. Not in birthright, though the Ikrid blocks and psionics were immensely
useful, but because the most advanced individuals in every division within Star
Force were Humans, from techs up to Archons. They had individually earned those
positions, and acquitted the enormous responsibility for maintaining and
advancing the empire.
    That wasn’t something a popularity contest would
result in. Star Force had to exist based on merit, else it would have collapsed
long ago.
    This next phase of advancement was a huge undertaking,
and as such required an increasing level of skill to pull off, not just in
taking worlds back from the lizards, but in expanding out to the new
acquisitions without allowing Star Force to become too heavy to manage. Some
people believed that a civilization could only expand so far before it lost
coherency in a variety of fashions. Tom knew that wasn’t true, for there were
ways to make it work if you were clever enough, but every empire that grew to
significant size had to know what it was doing, else they’d self-destruct in a
variety of ways.
    That was true of the lizards, Voku, and even more so
the Skarrons. The size of their empire was ghastly huge, and even with the
lizards tearing huge chunks out of it the overall mass was unaffected. It was
simply too huge to kill. Tom didn’t know how that fight would ultimately turn
out, and whatever went down was going to occur on the other side of the ‘no-go’
line so it was probable that Star Force wouldn’t know, unless the Skarrons
pushed the lizards back this far.
    Respect was due to anyone who could assemble and
maintain an empire of that size, and with the path that Davis had set Star
Force on, it wasn’t going to back down from those challenges ahead. It was
already proven that they could do things better than everyone else on a ‘small’
level, and now was the time to prove they could do it on a larger scope. V’kit’no’sat
or no, they couldn’t hide and let the galaxy burn around them, and while there
had been some hesitancy on that issue in the past, that was no longer the case.
    Star Force was pushing hard into the lizards, using
the window of opportunity that Paul had told Tom and the others about from the
Dragon Forecast Bureau. And in