Star Force: Resurrection (SF84) (Star Force Origin Series)

  1

  June 14, 3202

  Krachnika System (lizard capitol/homeworld)

  Middle Zone

  Paul was standing in the Excalibur’s command nexus as the ship was finishing its hard deceleration into the enemy system when he heard a series of distant rumbles and had a vibration through the deck rock him on his feet. Immediately he saw alerts pop up on the ship’s status display, detailing the fallen shields and the huge hole in the ship’s forward starboard side that ran like a knife blade halfway to the interior.

  Already linked into the system he calculated what had happened and sent an immediate ping backwards to the other ships in the convoy alerting them to the fact that the jumpline was mined. He’d brought his ships in off the line a ways and was right now having to correct for that misalignment with some serious navigational tugs on the system’s planets…though that was made even more difficult due to the fact that the ship had just lost two gravity drives in the damaged area.

  But the Excalibur slid to a halt in the middle zone of the star system, farther in than he’d wanted but still clear of the lizard fleets choking the inner zone to death. The ship’s sensors could pick up the enemy’s own sensor bounce and the light having come off them minutes ago, though they hadn’t seen his ship arrive yet. Paul did see, in addition to multiple smaller holes on his command ship that hadn’t penetrated more than a few hundred meters, that a warship came out of its deceleration further behind the Excalibur and was reporting no damage.

  Another came, then another before his ship’s sensors bounced back from the numerous contacts further out along their incoming trajectory. There were millions of chunks of rock placed in a cylinder along the jumpline far away from the star. The Excalibur, having come in offline, had clipped the nearest edge of that field…

  Paul immediately sent information back to the approaching ships of the field size and placement so they could navigate around it no matter how that would screw up their approaches. They might end up on the other side of the system before they bled off momentum, but that was preferable to ramming another of the rocks.

  A contact zipped by the Excalibur and Paul’s gut wrenched as the sensors recognized the debris of a Warship-class jumpship broken into four segments and falling out of control in towards the star. There were people on that ship, not just drones, and anyone who might have still been alive was either going to ram into the star or run into the lizard ship swarm first and get blown away.

  Paul sent out dozens of orders simultaneously, one of which was to the command ship’s remaining gravity drives, having them enhance the star’s pull as much as possible and jump the Excalibur in towards it at reckless speed. It had to accelerate from a dead stop, but it gradually ate up the speed difference with what had been the Manticore then reeled it back in as the lizard fleet ahead was getting closer in a hurry.

  As fast as it was going, the now dead jumpship had already bled off most of its interstellar speed, which had been further reduced by the slow jump necessary to allow the fleet to come out in the middle zone rather than the inner and avoid the lizard defense fleet waiting there to ambush anyone coming in on the expected jumplines.

  But Paul still didn’t have enough time. Even as the lizard fleet saw the speeding ships coming and graciously moved out of the way so they could hit the star without interference, the Excalibur caught up to one of the four segments and his waiting crew locked onto it with every tractor beam the command ship had, having to abandon the other three, and extended a weakened IDF field out around it. Normally that was something a command ship was built to do with ease in order to disable nearby enemy ships, but a decent portion of the necessary equipment inside the Excalibur had been junked when that mine had dug in so deep.

  The field was steady, but there was only so much stress it could take without collapsing. The tractor beams held the ship segment firm to the command ship, but they couldn’t do squat to move the thing at any decent speed without the IDF. It was what was taking the inertial stresses in the Manticore fragment’s place, and if it collapsed the tractor beams would rip out the pieces of the hull they were gripping and it would break free.

  Paul and the ship’s computer were calculating the stresses as best they could and knew it was going to be close. The blue/white star ahead of them was shifting to the right even as it was growing to fill the forward viewscreens. Stellar radiation began baking the exposed hull, but a few seconds later the shields snapped back over most of the Excalibur, thought the Manticore fragment had no such protection.

  Pulling to the side as much as it could, the command ship brought the chunk of jumpship down to kiss the star’s atmosphere, burning through several sections of hull before they began gaining stellar altitude, but were continuing to get baked from the radiation that close in. With their momentum persevered they passed by the star quickly and the radiation threat diminished as the Excalibur shot between lizard formations on the other side that were fortunately not in the way.

  “Admiral, get rescue crews over there immediately. You have the ship.”

  “Understood,” Admiral Franken said grimly as Paul’s mind directed itself to the rest of the star system. Lag times in signals were increased the further they got away from the convoy, but he was already picking up battlemap signals indicating that two other jumpships had been hit by mines upon entry. Cursing silently he watched the updates belatedly flow into him, noting that no more in his convoy were taking hits thanks to a much wider approach vector. They were coming in somewhere other than planned and much closer to the star than he’d wanted, but there were no lizards waiting for them there.

  But there were other damage alerts starting to make their way to him coming in from other Star Force convoys that were coming into the star system simultaneously on other jumplines. They’d timed their departures so that all 12 convoys would be arriving along different jumplines at the same time, making it hard for the lizards to spot them incoming and rush to meet them before they could get enough ships into play. Simultaneous arrivals also meant they could get the ships here 12 times faster, even if they weren’t all in the same location.

  Paul was reading damaged or destroyed jumpships in Aaron’s convoy, more in Brian’s, and he expected to get more in as the battlemap signals from the more distant ones traveled across the system far faster than the speed of light, but well too slow for anything resembling instantaneous communication.

  Paul was furious at the loss of people occurring, for every one of those ships were manned. The last scout they’d sent into the system had reported no mine fields of any kind, and it’d only been 37 days since it had last been here.

  How the hell did the lizards get mine fields of this size and density set up on multiple jumplines and this far out from the star since then?

  The answer didn’t hit him for some time, namely because it was so big and his focus was on the arriving convoys. All of them eventually stopped reporting dead ships soon after the first ones arrived, for they were all adjusting their incoming trajectories around the fields once alerted. If they hadn’t, or had been coming in straight on the jumplines, just about every ship in their convoys would have been destroyed up until the time when the impacts cleared a hole through the field for more ships to pass through.

  The lizards had walled themselves in good, expecting attack. That meant the scout ship had not been here undetected. Paul hadn’t counted on it going unnoticed, but how had they gotten that many mines in place in such a short span of time?

  His mindboggling answer came when he looked at the status of the six inhabited planets in the system…and saw that one
of them was missing a shipyard ring.

  Paul double checked himself, making sure he was thinking straight, but there was no mistaking the fact that the scout had reported 6 rings, one around each planet, 37 days ago…

  And now there were only 5.

  Paul pulled up a closer look at those mines from the previous sensor readings, as well as what was being transmitted from the other ships, and saw that they weren’t identically shaped. Rather they were chunks of rubble ranging from the size of a tank up to the size of a cruiser.

  The lizards had somehow disassembled an entire shipyard ring and moved the pieces out to all 12…no, make that 23 different jumplines, and mined them all the way out in the middle zone where a wider pattern was needed to catch ships. Normally you’d put a field in close where maneuvering options were less, but they’d probably expected Star Force to come in using slower jumps so to avoid the defending fleet near the star. They couldn’t know where exactly they’d emerge to be waiting for them, so they’d mined all the approaches and sacrificed a shipyard ring to get enough material for it.

  But how had they torn apart one and moved it all in such little time?

  Paul looked at the lizard fleet guarding the star and the updated ship icons around the planets as they came in, knowing he had his answer.

  They’d brought in their cruiser fleet and had it shoot the ring, breaking off pieces that were then latched onto and pulled out to the wanted locations. The scout had reported there were over 12 million cruisers in this system, and apparently they’d put them to good use since the scout ship had left.

  As the Admiral saw to getting dropships over to the piece of the Manticore to see if anyone was still alive, Paul stepped out of the nexus for a moment, disconnecting from the system and balling his fists. He knew it could have been far worse, but he’d gone through entire planetary invasions without losing a single person before, and already they’d lost several thousand minimum to these mines. People who had spent centuries training and improving themselves. All of it wasted by running into some dumb chunks of rubble.

  The lizards didn’t care about dying, or killing others, no matter what the numbers…and that was one reason why they had to be taken out. Whether by dying or being captured, these bastards could not be allowed to leave this system.

  And Paul knew they didn’t care about that either. Every lizard here knew they were going to fight to the death and there would be no escape. It was their homeworld and they didn’t care. They hadn’t bothered trying to evacuate, merely writing off everyone here to their deaths, so why would they care about trying to kill Paul’s fleet? The more Star Force personnel who died here the better, and if they had managed to kill most or all of the fleet with the mines then they probably would have considered the loss of their homeworld suitable compensation.

  Ripples of invisible energy formed around Paul as he let his fury flow out of his mind and into his body. The Jumat energy pooled around him, then in a split second of rage he threw it all at the wall to his left, denting a two meter wide crater into it with a crunch.

  Paul forced a slow breath, transitioning his internal fire into ice. He had a moment to spare while the Admiral worked, but he needed to get his mind into as efficient a mode as possible before he went back at it, which was why he’d allowed himself to bleed off that Jumat blast. There was no way to bring back those who were lost, and they were going to have to kill every lizard in this system anyway, so there wasn’t even a chance for vengeance. The lizards had won the opening round, and there was no undoing that.

  A crewmember ran into view in the short hallway behind Paul, with the trailblazer waving him off. “It’s ok. I just punched the wall in frustration.”

  The crewer looked at the dent and nodded. “We all feel the same way. Make these bastards pay for it.”

  “Unless they surrender, none of them are leaving this system alive,” Paul said firmly.

  “You’re still going to offer…after this?”

  “Yes,” Paul said simply, getting himself back into ‘Admiral’ mode. “They won’t accept it, but if we don’t offer then they will have scored another victory in being able to manipulate us. And if even one of them surrenders, that’ll be a victory for us.”

  “I guess more dead lizards mean nothing to their leaders.”

  “I highly doubt it.”

  “Sorry for the suggestion.”

  Paul shook his head. “Wanting to get back at the lizards is the correct emotional response. How you apply it is the tricky part. The most obvious method is not always the right one.”

  “Point taken,” the crewman said, excusing herself with a nod and disappearing back around the intact wall that separated the command nexus from the rest of the bridge.

  Paul stood there for a moment, thinking. Sometimes you did just need to hit something, immediately. Unfortunately this war was about the lizards expanding, which meant they were actually winning. Lose 1 world, gain 10 more, even if that one was their homeworld. Taking this system was going to hurt the lizards for sure, but they weren’t defeating them in coming here. The lizards would survive as a race, even if these would die, and they would spread and build elsewhere. Already the Voku had identified three systems in the coreward half of lizard territory that had partially operational shipyard rings. They’d destroyed one of them, but it was clear the lizards were just building new, albeit small at this point, core worlds in their new territories even as Star Force was taking their originals down.

  The lizard expansion systems were weak, Paul knew, but damn the V’kit’no’sat for keeping Star Force from going after them when they were done here. Risking detection wasn’t worth it, otherwise Paul and the others could hunt down and kill all of these bastards given enough time. With that no longer an option with their coreward expansion, the victories Star Force was going after were selective. Taking out the original lizard empire, for one, was no small thing. And with the eventual fall of this system and the rest of the core worlds they’d be sending a big message to this part of the galaxy that the lizards were not unbeatable. They might be numerous, but not superior.

  Star Force was the new power in the region, and even The Nexus was going to take notice when the lizard capitol fell, for they knew this enemy was not as small as they pretended it to be. Davis had learned that much from his contacts, and they were relieved they were no longer encroaching into Nexus space in force. One less threat for them to deal with on their very long list.

  But there was no getting around the people lost here. Had Paul or the others even suspected the lizards could set up this type of minefield so fast they would have prepared for it, but they’d never used this tactic before and the idea of them cannibalizing a shipyard ring to do it had never crossed Paul’s mind. He’d always known the lizards were adaptable and innovative, and a part of him was kicking himself for not seeing this possibility. Next time they’d make sure a scout was sent in just prior to the invasion so they wouldn’t have this much time to work with, but their rate of mine laying scared Paul, for he knew there would still be several days gap between when a scout ship left the target and when the attacking convoy would arrive, especially if that convoy was going slow enough to come out in middle stellar orbit or higher.

  He’d have to send multiple scouts and leave some behind to watch for mine laying so they could transmit a warning to the incoming convoy, allowing them to divert like they were now.

  Damn it, why hadn’t they thought of that before?

  Because tearing apart an entire ring around a planet in a little over a month is nuts, Paul admitted. It had probably taken them centuries to build that one ring, maybe more if it was one of the earlier ones in their empire. But if you were going to lose it anyway, why not take it apart yourself and put it to use.

  This mission was already a failure, but Paul and the others still had a job to do.

  He stepped back into the nexus and linked into the system, getting a couple of messages from his fellow trailblazers that were v
ariations on curses and facepalms. None of them were happy, but an initial report from the first boarding party on the Manticore was picking up localized emergency beacons. Low power and long lasting, the beacons were used to highlight regions within the ship to rescue crews to allow them to find survivors in lifeboat-like enclosures or other makeshift sanctuaries.

  That didn’t mean anyone was still alive after the radiation cooking they’d got in near the star, but if they were only half dead Paul had a V’kit’no’sat regenerator onboard that would bring them back. Hopefully they’d be able to pull at least one person back from this ambush.

  In the meantime crews were heading out to do emergency repairs on the Excalibur while they were away from combat. The damage was such that they’d need a shipyard to fix it all, but some band aids could be applied here and there to the massive construct…and that mass was the reason why Paul wasn’t taking a dip in the star himself. That, combined with the higher shield strength, had blocked or dampened enough of the mine hits to allow the Excalibur to survive.

  And judging from the damage reports, she wasn’t just alive but still combat capable. Not 100% by a long shot, but she wasn’t going to be a spectator in this fight.

  As the Star Force convoys were continuing to emerge from their jumps around the system Paul saw the lizard fleets in low stellar orbit begin to detach and race out towards the jumppoints to engage them before they could get all their ships here. The fighting was about to go down in a very heavy way, but Star Force had enough ships in play to keep their footholds while the rest arrived, and at the moment it seemed the lizards were ignoring the Excalibur entirely.

  As soon as the Manticore debris was searched his ship was heading back in. Until then his convoy commanders would be in charge of the fighting, for he was too far away to suffer the signal lag, making him for the moment a mere spectator while his peers were the ones calling the shots as the first lizard ships came into contact and the battle for this system began.