Star Force: Shame (SF59) by Aer-ki Jyr Page B

as to why the weaponry malfunctioned
the way it did, but as Sherlock Holmes had once said if you eliminate the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. With that
in mind Roger felt he knew what had happened, but he needed to know why before
he was going to say anything.
    In addition to learning about the Dsevmat and a lot of
their battle history, for his assistants were very willing to let him peruse
the database even when it didn’t appear to tie in directly to the
investigation, he dug into the history, culture, and society that was the
H’bat’i and tried to get a feel for the way they thought and built. They were triped , twice the size of Humans, and very introverted.
They usually didn’t interact with other races outside of warfare and kept their
economy self-contained. They did seek to expand their territory, and that
expansion is what had got the Nexus’s attention in a bad way.
    They had conquered several primitive worlds and
essentially turned them into a slave labor force, growing a small empire that
had crossed one of the Nexus’s minor spacelanes. The H’bat’i basically shut it
down, claiming ownership of the system and insisting that he traffic flow be
rerouted elsewhere which had sparked the first conflict with the Nestaw .
    The Nestaw were a race
within the Nexus a bit higher level than the H’kar and they’d been tasked to
deal with the disruption in the spacelane and the freeing of the subjugated
worlds. When they failed horribly, finding the H’bat’i were far more resilient
and tech savvy than intelligence had estimated, the Dsevmat took over and sent
a proper recon team. They deduced the strength required and waited several
years until they could muster the necessary fleet, drawing ships from various
other assignments as they became available, then launching them at one of the H’bat’i’s main worlds, intending to inflict a crippling
assault that they could then dictate terms from afterward.
    Such tactics were standard practice for the Dsevmat,
who liked to bloody an enemy’s nose then force them to submit out of fear,
though in most cases it was a bluff and the Dsevmat didn’t have the
reinforcements they needed to go a second or third round. Their opponents
didn’t know that, so they’d been getting away with and heavily favored the
tactic in a lot of their peacekeeping assignments, which also told Roger that
they were desperate to figure out how the H’bat’i had bested them else they
wouldn’t be sharing this and other things so openly with him.
    But as he ran through the data something bothered him,
and that was the cultural fingerprint of the H’bat’i being introverted not
fitting in with their taking slave races. There wasn’t a wealth of data on the
subjugated and the H’bat’i’s activities there, for
the intel had come primarily from the Nestaw and a
few independent analysis teams prior to that, but there was enough geographical
and population statistics for him to see that on the conquered worlds there
were virtually no H’bat’i present.
    That was odd, for usually when you conquered a planet
you moved in, but the H’bat’i didn’t aside from what looked like overseers and
some military personnel. The planet was shipping resources off it that were
going back to the H’bat’i worlds, but as for on-site occupation there virtually
was none. That made him wonder what exactly the circumstances of the conquests
were, but that information wasn’t available.
    There were tidbits that Roger was slowly able to
string together, and with those he was able to conduct some searches through
other Nexus records and found two of the conquered races mentioned in survey
files that predated their annexation. Those records were the first concrete
data points that Roger had, and from there he began narrowing his search of the
intelligence reports the Dsevmat had available to them prior to the assault.
    There was a lot of military-related data, for