Star Force: Shame (SF59) Read online

  1

  March 1, 2655

  Unnamed System (lizard territory)

  High Stellar Orbit

  Kara’s Ma’kri exited the very slow interstellar jump at full repulsion, draining its capacitors in order to slow the jumpship far away from the star where the gravity field was weaker. That left the ship vulnerable, for it would take time for the gravity drive capacitors to recharge sufficiently to make another jump, but the benefit of it was that the lizards wouldn’t know where to expect them. Even if they picked them up on sensors it would take time to get ships out to their location, and without the lizards possessing binary drives it would be a difficult bit of navigation for them to do so.

  Which was why Kara was willing to risk the jump. The system in question was on the edge of the lizards’ core region, with the journey to get here being extremely difficult. Over the past few years she’d been raiding one world or another, blowing up or otherwise sabotaging important pieces of infrastructure or ships, and data mining every computer system she could get her Vorch’nas plugged into…as well as mind melding with a few Mastermind variants she was able to track down.

  Little by little she gained information on the lizards, their territory, and their inner workings…but only in piecemeal for most didn’t know anything other than what concerned their local affairs. In fact, she probably knew more about their empire than most of them did, and that knowledge had led her here.

  What ‘here’ was she still wasn’t sure, but it was a level of system far beyond anything Star Force had encountered before. Those systems surrounding it were nearly impossible to enter without being detected and swarmed with ships, and on more than one occasion her ship had to bug out almost immediately when scouting the area became impossible.

  Kara desperately wanted to probe deeper into the core of lizard territory but to do so she’d needed more engine power…and now finally she had it. The Ma’kri she was commanding was a prototype, or rather the first model out of prototype finishing. It carried Star Force’s newest gravity drive, which now put them at 1/10th the strength of the V’kit’no’sat’s basic drives. That was no small feat, and the ship had to be redesigned with most of the internal space going into more jump drives and leaving little more than a skeleton crew onboard, but the Sonic was now by far the fastest jumpship in the ADZ and probably the entire local segment of the Orion galactic arm.

  That made her trips between systems ultra-fast, but that wasn’t the point. She needed the enhanced engine power so she could jump off the star’s gravity field but far enough out from it to miss the stellar detection network the lizards, or others, would have set up. That was the only way she had been able to scout out the surrounding systems, and it was the only way she’d been able to make it this far into the interior.

  The Ma’kri also had the best sensor plating available, which would hopefully make it a ghost to lizard sensors at range, but there was no way of telling until you got there to find out.

  “How do we look?” Kara asked her Captain, standing behind his command chair with her hands on the backrest.

  “Nothing local, but there are…oh my,” he cut off as the passive sensors began to pick up slight reflective signals from the lizards’ own detection grid as they bounced off of various objects, with the biggest ones being the first the computer analysis could pick out.

  “We knew there was something special here,” Kara said calmly. “Let’s have a thorough look.”

  “Please tell me you’re not going in there?” the Captain pleaded.

  “Not today, no,” she said, seeing more detail forming on both the main hologram and the Captain’s readouts that she was snooping on. “We’re just going to take a peak from range, but let’s make sure we see all that there is to see. Bring us in a lazy slingshot around the planet, but keep it high,” she said, seeing the closest of the planets in the system not too far off from their current position. It was larger than Earth by about a third and was covered in green according to the visual scans that were being enhanced and shown to the bridge, along with so many ships in orbit that they appeared to be solid globs on the sensors until they were able to sort out the tiny dots for what they were.

  They appeared as schools of fish, with varying sizes. The Ma’kri couldn’t give numbers or makes from this range, only detect the mass of them, but that wasn’t what had shocked the Captain. Also in ‘orbit’ around the planet was a solid, giant ring some 10-15 miles wide and by no means a natural occurrence. As the Ma’kri began moving a bit closer the sensors were able to get more detail, but it appeared that there was a massive, artificially constructed ‘halo’ around the planet, and one with lines running down to the surface.

  The closer they came the more detail they got, up until they’d ventured as near as they dared yet still in high orbit, but it was close enough to get ship counts and see the construct for what it was. The previously smooth ring was not so pristine on inspection, but rather a lumpy jumbled assortment of niches and pylons that housed partially constructed ships of massive size. As they lazily flew by the closest approach in their slingshot orbit they saw several invokers under construction, along with slots that appeared to be building assault pillars and their massive cargo ships.

  Others were constructing their jumpships and no less than 7 additional models that Star Force had not seen to date, nor had gained intelligence on from Kara’s computer and memory raids. There was no way to tell if they were warships or not, but it was clear that the lizards had constructed a mindboggling shipyard that ringed the entire planet and was no doubt the source of the swarm-like fleets sitting nearby.

  The lines that connected the ring down to the planet were obviously orbital tethers, something that Star Force had experimented with early on then abandoned in favor of dropships. It seemed the lizards had found a use for them, and if Kara’s instincts were right they were hauling massive amounts of resources up from the planet round the clock, and given that each one was nearly a mile wide there had to be multiple shafts inside to run who knew how many lifts.

  Other than the Nexus grid points this was the biggest feat of engineering Star Force had ever seen, and the fact that it was the work of the lower tech level lizards only underscored how innovative, bold, and devious they were…not to mention industrious. This ring shipyard had to be capable of producing more warships than all the slips in Star Force combined.

  Kara guessed that the cruiser slips were interior ones, for the bulk of the ships in orbit were of that make, but there was also a disproportionately high number of battleships, dreadnaughts, and other larger vessels, with facilities like this no doubt being their primary source of fabrication. Already Kara was thinking of ways to attack or sabotage the thing, but it was so massive that there was literally no easy way to do it. Even if she smuggled several dropships’ worth of explosives onto it she’d only make a dent in the thing, leaving virtually all of it intact and operational.

  She had no clue how she was going to mess with it, but right now that wasn’t going to happen anyway. This was a pure recon run and they’d already got further than she’d thought they’d get, so it was time to move on, look some more, then get the hell out of here before they pressed their luck to the limit.

  Keeping well clear of the planet the Ma’kri made a light jump across to the next planet in the system and traveled around the full circuit, always going slow and braking high up where there should have been no trouble. They found several other worlds fully inhabited by the lizards, including three airless ones that were no doubt mining operations to assist in feeding the shipyard ring. Kara wished they could turn their own active sensors on, for she knew they were missing a wealth of information, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Already the planetary
tracking sensors were hitting their hull lightly and being absorbed, but any closer or even a twitch from their own actives would give them away.

  But they didn’t need actives to see the ship counts around each of the planets they passed near. There were literally millions of ships in the system, a mix of warships and transports and who knew what else with all the unfamiliar designs, but it was clear that this system was on a development level far beyond any they’d come across before, making this a whole new ball game and confirming the fears the trailblazers had had about the strength of the lizards…with Kara only now beginning to understand how patient their enemy was.

  With the exception of the Skarrons the lizards were almost lazily conquering their tiny slice of the galaxy, picking off easy targets and working over those more difficult ones with successive hikes in ship count and resources, but not overwhelming targets with the gigantic hammer of a fleet before her. They were biding their time and expanding while keeping their true power held back and out of view of others, giving them perhaps a hope of surviving when they had none. It was simply a matter of time and a waiting game, with the lizards watching, learning, and growing stronger as their second and third tier troops did all the fighting.

  Star Force had noted that the lizards were not taking that strategy with the Skarrons, and from the intel reports they were getting, which they knew were incomplete, there was a steady flow of ships coming out from the core and ramming straight into Skarron territory…and now Kara knew from where they were coming. There was no doubt in her mind that there were other ring shipyards like this one in the other core systems, which numbered about 40 as far as she’d been able to deduce, and for every fleet they monitored heading for the Skarrons there must have been ten times that going in that they were unaware of.

  Already the lizards had carved out a huge chunk into the Skarrons’ expansion region in previously Nestafar space, but instead of pushing out laterally the lizards were driving forward like a spear in the giant empire. Kara thought she now knew why, for the lizards had to have learned from captured ships or recovered debris of the size of the Skarron empire and realized that this was a foe they could not overrun nor play the waiting game with.

  Up until now she didn’t think the lizards had a chance of beating the Skarrons, not on the whole, but now she wasn’t so sure. Granted, lizard territory was still vastly smaller, and that meant less resources available for them to use, but with the aggressive way they were going at the Skarrons and pretty much ignoring everyone else, figuratively speaking, she got the feeling they sensed a worthy opponent and were going at them hard before they had a chance to realize the threat from the rim for what it was.

  Then again this was the lizards, who always seemed to have something up their sleeve that you didn’t know about, but the spear of systems they were attacking and taking away from the Skarrons hadn’t made any sense to her until now, and she would have bet a million credits they were pushing towards a high level Skarron system further inside their territory, intent on knocking it out and weakening the entire region around it so they could move forward and gobble up the pieces.

  Hit the stronghold and the systems that relied upon it would wither, and now Kara saw that the lizards had the might to possibly pull that off. She didn’t know for sure because Star Force hadn’t probed into Skarron territory to see what their strongholds looked like and they weren’t going to. Heading further towards the galactic core was banned because they didn’t want to increase the odds of word getting back to the V’kit’no’sat of their existence. That meant Beta Region was as far in as they were willing to go, or maybe out to Achkor where the Voku were, but no further.

  The Hycre had been going though, and monitoring what they could of the lizard/Skarron war, and from that Star Force was getting most of its intel, but in order to get to the ‘spearhead’ the lizard core fleets had to pass through or around what used to be Calavari territory, and that’s where Star Force was monitoring and ambushing what they could, though they weren’t stupid enough to try and hit one of the mega-sized fleets moving through.

  Kara’s Ma’kri made it through seven planetary peeks before their luck ran out at the 8th, and as soon as they came out of their microjump in high orbit they were hit with a much higher intensity sensor scan than the other planets had had, with their armor not being able to absorb all of it. After only 9 seconds there was activity in the nearby ship ‘clouds,’ making it obvious that they’d been noticed.

  “Full sensor scan for 20 seconds then run like hell,” Kara ordered, wanting to get a quick peek as long as they were here. “Capacitor charge?”

  “23%,” the navigator replied.

  “Damn.”

  “Hop around or try a stellar run?” the Captain asked.

  “There’s no time to play games, they’ve got too many ships in play. Take us to the star, indirect route, but make it quick…and go dark when we make the jump,” Kara said, tapping her short fingernails against her teeth in frustration. They shouldn’t have been detected because the tracking systems around the planets were nowhere near as powerful as those around the star. Why this planet was different she didn’t know, but they’d jumped right into the beams like a bunch of newbs and now they had to run before they were hunted down, and with so many ships available that wouldn’t be hard to do.

  They could hide in the system, for sure, just by using their binary drives and going out beyond the furthest planet where the lizards couldn’t follow, but they couldn’t make an interstellar jump from out there. That meant they had to come back in in order to jump out…and give the lizards time to set up ambushes for them and you were as good as dead in a system packed this full of warships. That meant Kara had to get her ship out of here before they had a chance to set up, and with the ship’s capacitors not fully charged they couldn’t make the same sneak jump as before because they needed more gravity intensity to make up for the less available power…and that meant getting a lot closer to the star.

  “Damn,” she whispered a moment before they made their emergency microjump, pulling on multiple planets to get the necessary line given how they were out of position for a natural jump. With the active sensors engaged briefly the hologram of the planet they were fleeing gleamed with detail, most of which Kara missed as the two massive rings around the planet caught her attention, previously obscured in the mass of ships and stations surrounding a world that was half ocean, half land…with that land covered with lizard infrastructure from shore to shore.

  Then the active feeds cut out as they made their jump, moving over to another planet and pulling a similar navigational feat to come out of it near the stellar jumpline. They didn’t bother opening up the active sensors again, for if there was a chance they could make a quick bounce off the planet’s gravity without being detected then Kara wanted that advantage. The sensor intensity was not so strong here so there might have been a chance they’d accomplished that bit of sneakiness, but the Ma’kri didn’t stick around long enough to find out, making a second microjump at much greater speed 3 seconds later, just long enough to store up a bit of energy without lowering the main capacitor charge.

  Doing the math en route, they determined how close they needed to get in order to make the interstellar jump at decent speed and picked their destination system…an empty star that was on the other side of a diffuse nebula, but one that she knew the Ma’kri’s shields could protect them from. It was the best option without taking the time to bounce around the system to a preferable jumpline, and Kara had the feeling that if they stayed any longer than necessary their odds of surviving this were going to diminish drastically.

  When they came out of their microjump they had to position around the star slightly, meaning lateral movement that wasn’t speedy. Kara had them dip into the main capacitor a bit to reduce their time in the system, but when they came around to their jumpline they could see a cluster of lizard ships forming up in blockade formation across it, with many more hurrying in on different
trajectories.

  Luckily they were further in on the line than where the Ma’kri was heading, suggesting that for the moment they weren’t being picked up on sensors…or at least the lag hadn’t transitioned back yet to the receivers, and from the receivers to the lizards in charge who then had to issue new deployment orders. They didn’t know the Ma’kri could make jumps further out, so from their point of view they were quickly bottling up the system along all available jumplines so they couldn’t get out.

  Kara cursed herself for burning this new advantage right off the bat, but there was no other choice. They had to make this outer jump, and when the lizards saw them do it, even if on replay weeks later when they scanned every bit of sensor records they had, they’d learn Star Force had a greater jump range and not make the same mistake twice.

  As the Ma’kri got into position the capacitors that held an enormous amount of energy for nearly instantaneous release into the gravity drives opened up and channeled their power into producing the repulsion necessary against the somewhat weaker field to get them up to speed, accelerating and shooting them out of the system on what would otherwise have been a normal/slow jump. That wasn’t altogether a bad thing, for it would reduce the power required of the shields to protect them from the thin nebula by decreasing the collision speed with the widely spaced molecules.

  But they wouldn’t get there for days, during which Kara was going to go over every bit of the sensor recordings they’d collected. She didn’t think they’d be back here anytime soon, nor did she think they could assault the system unless the lizards left it underdefended, and even then it’d be one hell of a battle if Star Force brought a massive fleet of drones with it.

  No, right now this system was beyond their ability to hit, let alone take, but at least they knew where it was, and potentially someday down the road that would allow them to set up a backdoor attack on those ring shipyards to knock out a significant part of the lizards’ ship production capability…if she could figure out how to take them down.