Star Force: Excursion (SF46) Read online

  1

  September 8, 2495

  Fvatt System (Hycre territory)

  Kri’mas

  Iesmena shuttered as he felt the concussion ripples impact his translucent skin, which he then ‘saw’ as his sensory organs translated the sonic signature within the Hycre’s brain. Not needing to turn its body, for he could perceive in all directions simultaneously, Iesmena watched the streak pass through the thick atmosphere of Kri’mas, which had been his home for the past 23 years.

  The object came in high and dropped amazingly fast, passing Iesmena’s altitude and falling further into the planet’s gravity well, burning the atmosphere from the friction and creating the ‘boom’ that he could see from kilometers away. The muted flash of light was almost undetectable given the thickness of the atmosphere at this level, but given the normal blackness the flickering glow stood out…as did the second one coming down from above.

  Iesmena was free floating in the atmosphere and ‘swimming’ as fast as he could while remembering to pace himself. The four internal air atriums that he used for propulsion were rhythmically pulsing as they sucked in air from ahead and expelled it out behind from numerous surface exits on his body that opened and closed as necessary, making his internal body structure look like a spike ball. Most of those spikes were inactive, save for stabilizing squirts, as he forced all the air he could get out his rear ‘jets’ as he raced towards the outpost that was considerably far ahead.

  It was an unmanned outpost, but the closest bit of infrastructure to the Hycre and the location of his parked skip that had brought him this far out from the nearest cluster. He’d left it tethered there before heading out in person to study the nakra flocks that inhabited this region of the planet, as he regularly did. By the time the word of the Cajdital invasion had come through over the communal comms he’d already been out in the field, with the warning sitting on his communication device that he’d left in the skip.

  The first notice he had that anything was wrong was the sound of a very distant detonation. He’d stayed put after that, listening/looking for any further sign of where it had come from, but he hadn’t perceived anything else until the rain had started to fall…and he wasn’t talking liquid variety, for those streaks coming down from above were solids by the telltale way they echoed, plus the disruption trails were an easy sign that they didn’t belong, for the Hycre ships never moved in such a way.

  Iesmena knew that meant this was most likely asteroid bombardment and held his position, for the falling rocks were far away, though he would have definitely preferred to have been indoors. He continued his observations of the nakra for a few minutes until a sinking feeling in the pit of his gas bladder manifested itself as he realized the impacts weren’t random, but rhythmic…meaning they had an artificial origin.

  That was horrifying, for he knew it was nothing of Hycre origin, and he had left the flocks immediately, heading back to his skip as fast as possible.

  Halfway there the closer objects began to fall.

  As Iesmena swam he scanned ahead with his bjovo, a biological organ that functioned as a spotlight sensor that created casendic energy…which his skin could also ‘see.’ Right now it was trained in the direction of the outpost, which was finally coming into view some 1500 meters ahead.

  A much closer object fell behind him and soon the little nakra came swimming by, moving far faster through the dense air than he ever could. Then another object fell ahead, passing within 400 meters of him and creating a huge concussion wave that knocked him and the nakra around…with the little critters turning and the fleeing the other way.

  Iesmena saw the outpost rock slightly from the wave, but it was the impact far below that caught his attention as the object dropped deeper into the planet’s atmosphere and impacted the top of one of the Hycre’s deeper clusters, with the boom of impact clearly audible despite it being some 18 kilometers below.

  After that impact more objects began to fall on an identical track, coming down in a conduit of disruption that forced Iesmena to travel a different direction, fearing for his life but knowing he had to get to the outpost. Fighting the disruption turbulence he swam far wide, making a huge arc up and around the danger area but was still too close, with fear spiking through his body the entire time. Gone were the nakra, leaving him with nothing but an up/down/left/right trajectory as object after object fell down through the atmosphere, knocking him around violently until they eventually stopped when he was within 300 meters of his target.

  It took his senses a moment to recalibrate, then he saw the objects start to come down in a more distant location, giving him a calm swim over the last 50 meters up to the outpost, seeing its shell had been cracked…and his skip was gone.

  Iesmena swam around the outside of the bell-shaped building, feeling a huge relief as the skip came into view. It had been knocked free of the outpost, its tether snapped, but it appeared to be intact.

  The Hycre swam over to the needle-shaped craft and inserted his spherical body into the rearmost section, sliding inside the thin hull and gripping the handholds with its six tentacles, giving his tired atriums a rest as he physically leveraged his body into the pilot’s cradle and opened up a diagnostics program, gratefully finding the craft to be fully operational.

  He started up the engines as he checked the comm, finding the myriad of warnings and sitreps detailing a Cajdital attack on the planet, first a massive orbital assault that saw the Hycre losing their orbital facilities and many ships, then the upper atmosphere combat as the enemy began sinking their warships into the planet and trying to assault the higher clusters.

  As he read the reports he kept his tendrils off the steering mechanism, realizing he was safest right where he was. Several of the upper clusters, which were lightly connected structures clumped together into city-like formations, had been hit by the Cajdital suicide cruisers. The remaining Hycre warships had retreated into the planet’s atmosphere and were defending the upper levels, but the enemy had ran several formations down and succeeded in getting single ships through…which then rammed and detonated against the cluster, destroying or at least heavily damaging it.

  12 clusters had already been hit, with the Hycre making them pay for it by destroying hundreds of escort cruisers that had run interference for the suicide craft.

  Iesmena was much deeper than those clusters, and based on the alerts he figured he was safe from that type of attack so long as the fleet remained in the fight, but the more recent warnings detailed assaults on deeper clusters via orbital bombardment…not by the Cajdital’s traditional plasma, but by a type of mass launcher that was hurling objects on fairly accurate trajectories down towards the lower targets, including some below where Iesmena now sat.

  He was sure the torrent that had nearly hit him had been one such attack, and from the various warnings from individual clusters, or about individual clusters, he knew he couldn’t return to the one he had come from.

  Trolling the skip over to the side of the outpost, Iesmena powered it down and swam outside to check on the condition of the tether mount, finding that only the line had snapped. He slid a tendril in underneath the hook for another and pulled it over to the latch on the skip, detached the broken one, and hooked up the good one so his only means of transport wouldn’t drift off. Then he swam around the perimeter of the outpost on tired atriums inspecting the damage, finding the one huge crack as the only visible disruption from the building’s usually smooth form.

  He poked a couple of tendrils into it experimentally then withdrew and swam around to the entrance, opening up the uninhabited structure and moving inside, again resting his atriums as he used tiny crater handles on the walls as grip points to pull himself along
through a narrow tunnel that emptied out into a U-shaped main room that held most of the outpost’s internal volume.

  Iesmena reached out and grasped one of several vertical poles, swinging his bulbous body around to a control panel where he grabbed hold of a front handle and pulled himself up taught to it, leaving his other 5 tendrils free to operate the controls, powering up the outpost and linking in to the Hycre’s comm grid.

  A holographic map materialized in ultraviolet spectrum, detailing the Hycre civilization on Kri’mas that was present on only a quarter of the massive planet. They had 1,291 clusters spread out through multiple layers, but spaced far enough apart from one another to provide ease of movement for their fleet between them on the prescribed zonal lanes. This outpost existed in one of the ‘safe’ zones where the starships and other large craft would not go, allowing Iesmena and other Hycre the ability to free float without fear of collision.

  The map, which only hours ago had been intact, showed dozens of clusters off the grid, either having been destroyed or having the comm systems knocked out. Evacuations were being ordered and those clusters that were capable of descending were doing so, trying to put more atmosphere between them and the Cajdital ships in orbit, for as fast as the objects were descending Iesmena could see that their acceleration profiles were slowing once they hit the 5th layer, meaning the lower you got past it the less damage they could do.

  He knew others would be heading down there, pressing their biological limits if they were out in the open, or descending in craft where possible into the thicker layers of the planet, but eventually there was a line that only a few of their craft could pass without being crushed from the pressure…and fortunately the enemy’s projectiles didn’t appear to be reaching that far down at speed, though the heavy objects would eventually sink down to the core, but at a lackadaisical pace.

  The currents were also helping to throw off their aim, Iesmena saw, as one of the clusters under attack was seeing many misses, but he knew the shielding on them was limited and couldn’t hold up to very many impacts. He couldn’t tell from the limited data how large the Cajdital projectiles were, but he could see the damage statistics updating as three more clusters were taking hits…one of which suddenly dropped off the map.

  Seeing that his current location was in a region that had already come under attack, Iesmena figured he was safer here than elsewhere, and that the outpost was too small to target from orbit. How the Cajdital were targeting their lower clusters he didn’t know, for the atmosphere should have shrouded them from orbital sensors.

  The map didn’t show their fleet in the planet, but it did show the orbital situation and the ships that were bombarding them. Iesmena wasn’t a soldier, but he did know what their enemy’s ships looked like. All Hycre did, for they’d been fighting them since before he was hatched, and this was not a normal design.

  The ship, or rather ships, were larger than a cruiser but smaller than a battleship. They were thick and blocky, with what looked like squarish pouches poking out at multiple angles…a complete departure from the sleek cruisers and the bulky but smooth larger capital ships. These vessels almost didn’t look Cajdital, save for the same yellow/tan hull coloration, but the 16 of them were the source of the targeted ‘rain’ falling down into the atmosphere.

  And those 16 were surrounded by hundreds of escorts, preventing the Hycre ships from popping up out of the atmosphere and attacking them. None of the defense ships had the new Human ranged weapon, so they were going to have to fight their way through to get at them…which apparently had already been tried and failed, for there were no Hycre warships visible in orbit.

  The cluster Iesmena had been living in was still showing active, now descending slowly as the next closest one to it was coming under attack, leaving him nowhere to run to so he decided to count himself fortunate and remain at the outpost, but he knew he couldn’t stay here forever.

  Moving over to the vertical poles he pulled himself across the room and checked the storage compartments, finding some limited foodstuffs and gear when he heard a whine/thump from outside, quickly followed by several more. He pulled himself back over to the entrance tunnel and saw flashes from outside, prompting him to jet his way back inside and over to the control panel where he brought up the outpost’s sensor array.

  Outside was a small dot, what it was was unknown, for the sensors weren’t very advanced, but it was floating several dozen meters away and it was not his skip, for it was far larger. Then he noticed that his skip wasn’t showing as an intact object, but rather several small ones as more thuds sounded, this time on the outpost hull, along with damage statistics popping up.

  Trying not to panic, Iesmena activated the outpost’s distress beacon then fled over to the area furthest away from the sounds of plasma fire. There were no weapons on the outpost, nor in it, for the Hycre didn’t carry personal weapons except in the most extreme of cases. While this definitely qualified as one in Iesmena’s mind, the outpost didn’t have any, leaving him completely exposed as the pounding continued to mount, with successive damage occurring with each hit, small as they were, given that plasma weapons were far less effective in the thick planetary atmosphere.

  The unprotected outpost only held together as long as it did due to that fact, with each impact from the Cajdital weaponry being small, but it ate through the thin hull plates with ease and began trashing the interior equipment along the outer walls, leaving Iesmena waiting in cover, frantically thinking of a way to survive and deciding that playing dead was his only option. If he swam outside he’d be easy to shoot down, and one shot would be enough to kill him. He couldn’t see what was attacking the outpost, but he knew how susceptible their bodies were to plasma, despite their high heat tolerances.

  It took forever for the Cajdital plasma to break through to the main chamber, which fortunately was on the opposite side from where Iesmena was hiding, giving him a few more minutes. Bits of charred debris flew everywhere, floating about in almost neutral buoyancy before slowly falling to the floor.

  Then the outpost lurched downwards and Iesmena thought he might have a chance. If the tiny anti-grav unit holding the outpost was already damaged and didn’t engage, then the broken bladder that had currently been holding the structure aloft now doomed the structure to slowly sink down into the planet’s core…and if the Cajdital thought it was dead then they might just let it go to its eventual death rather than blasting it apart, leaving an opportunity for Iesmena to escape if they didn’t know he was inside.

  But a glance at the partially functional control board indicated that the bladder was still intact, which didn’t make any sense until a much larger flash/screech sounded outside, followed by an ‘all clear’ vocal transmission.

  Iesmena floated over to the control board and quickly activated the comm, signaling that he was still alive and receiving a response. He turned about, grasping the vertical poles and pulling himself out into the tunnel as fast as he could, then he jetted out of what was left of the outpost, pushing his way around debris and through smaller pieces, which tore into his thin skin but he didn’t care. He had to get outside now before his rescuers left.

  When he got into the clear he saw what had caused the sudden downward lurch of the outpost…a huge and beautiful Hycre frigate hovering over the remains of the small Cajdital scout craft it had destroyed in a single plasma blast. A tiny ring illuminated on the hull indicating the airlock that Iesmena needed to enter through, with him swimming as hard as his air atriums would allow and even adding a little fin ripple to gain some extra speed.

  By the time he got over to it his fin was fatigued to the point of it going limp, meaning he had to use his atriums to steer as it began to pull him off course, but within a few more meters he was able to grip the hull handles with his tendrils and pull himself inside the tiny compartment where he passed through a double energy shield as the outer doors closed behind him.

  Once he was past the shields he felt the crisp and clean atmo
sphere of the ship’s interior as another Hycre met him. Seeing his injuries Iesmena was led to a compartment where he would be attended to as well as being out of the way of the crew as the warship moved off, staying away from the projectiles falling into the atmosphere and looking for any opportunity to exploit. Best case scenario would be the Cajdital fleet moving down into atmosphere to press their attack, but that didn’t look to be the case with the surviving Hycre clusters moving down into the thicker atmospheric levels where the Cajdital plasma would be virtually useless.

  Some of those clusters were hit on the way down, with those that couldn’t descend, or descend fast enough, being targeted and eliminated as the Cajdital trimmed away part of the Hycre’s 2.3 billion population on the planet before settling into a large fleet cluster in geosync orbit, intent on blockading the planet and waiting the Hycre out rather than moving down into what would be their prime kill zone.

  2

  March 19, 2496

  Volnu System

  Jasperion (Hycre Capitol)

  “The Kri’mas System has been retaken. Orbit is secured. Surviving clusters are rising to altitude.”

  “How many ships did we lose?” Arnja’el asked.

  “67,” Bv’en answered, “but we destroyed over 400 of their vessels before they fled.”

  “I am not concerned with how many the Cajdital lost. They are infinite,” the Hycre queen said. “They will wear us down through attrition. It is only our losses that are a concern.”

  “They are many, but they are not infinite. The more we destroy, the more we slow their advance. They may build fast, but they cannot summon ships at will.”

  “They may as well be,” the third Hycre of six in the chamber said to the military commander. “Their numbers grow while ours dwindle. We cannot hold our current territory. We are spread too thin.”

  “What would you suggest?” Bv’en asked, heavy with sarcasm.