Star Force: Ringworld (SF80) Read online

  1

  April 2, 3098

  Menchet System (lizard core)

  Middle Zone

  The Ma’kri decelerated heavily against the twin stars, using both their combined gravities to pull it out of its jump far from the blockade of cruisers choking the preferred zones around the pair. The Star Force ship came to a stop 138 million miles from the center of the system and far from the three inhabited planets, hopefully dropping undetected into the overpopulated system and engaging its cloaking shield immediately upon entry.

  The star’s light bouncing off the hull plates disappeared into a black silhouette, but the Ma’kri immediately repositioned just in case their entry blink had been detected. Coming into the system saw any approaching ship ramming into the solar radiation and bouncing it back faster than light could normally travel, so if the lizard sensors were set up to measure it they could get an indication of which jumpline a ship was entering on.

  With the Ma’kri moving laterally and getting off its jumpline it all but assured that the lizards would lose it even if they did see its blink. Moving anonymously through the empty spaces within the system the Ma’kri began passively scanning the cluttered regions…groupings of ships stationed around constructs situated in stellar orbits, parking zones around the pair of stars, and the three inhabited planets, one of which was circled by a ring shipyard and a beehive of ship traffic.

  Each of the three worlds were packed with lizard cities so dense that they were literally built on top of one another with little or no land space left on the surface. Huge pillars reached up from the ground on the primary to the near geosync orbit of the shipyard ring, providing some structural support to keep it from drifting out of alignment as well as numerous lifts to carry materials and personnel up and down far faster than dropships or starships could accommodate.

  Around their base were huge pits sunk into the ground that were likewise covered by cities. The result of old mining projects, the new infrastructure was built over top of now subterranean mines that probably were laced with even more lizard cities, but the Ma’kri couldn’t get any data on that without active scanning and getting a whole lot closer. Right now it was just here to scout and survey the system ahead of the invasion that was coming, getting Star Force updated intel that would allow their trailblazer warlords to tweak their assault plans accordingly.

  If the ship was discovered it could run, for it was faster than anything the lizards had. It couldn’t fight its way out though, for there were so many ships here the computers were having a hard time counting them all. The swarm-like fleets were overlapping and making it impossible to get firm numbers, so the Ma’kri kept changing positions to get different perspectives and hoped for somewhat accurate numbers to report back.

  It kept clear of the planets and anything lizard, bouncing around in the doldrums and having to execute heavy thrust on odd angles to do it, but that was far better than risking detection. While they might be absorbing most electromagnetic and other energy types, they were not expelling any. That meant if they passed in front of the distant stars their black spot would stand out instantly. Less so for the background starlight, but even that could be used to detect them if the lizards were close and keen enough to make use of it.

  But if the lizards weren’t looking and the Ma’kri kept its distance it should be able to complete its mission without incident, though there were never any guarantees. It had been the only ship sent in, and the Ma’kri had been chosen because of its smaller size and knifeblade profile, which diminished its arrival blink considerably compared to the much larger jumpships Star Force built. One of those could have come in and dispatched a dozen scout drones to look around, though those weren’t typically built with cloaking shields. They were a move obvious means of gathering intel and right now this one needed to be clandestine so the lizards wouldn’t know that this system was the next to get hit.

  The Star Force invasion corridor wasn’t right on their doorstep yet, with more than 120 lightyears of systems left for them to conquer before they got right up next to the core worlds…but the trailblazers didn’t want to be predictable, so they were going to hop over that last little line of defense and go straight for the big targets, hopefully catching the lizards at least a little off guard.

  From what the Ma’kri was seeing though, that wouldn’t be an issue. This system was so well fortified that it might not even need support if it came under attack, but at the least allowing the trailblazers to enter the system knowing where the enemy ships and battlestations were was an advantage that this scouting party was intending on providing them.

  This system has been scouted before, a long time ago, but since then a great many things had changed. The third inhabited planet had filled out considerably, and the first bits of a second ring were being assembled around it. Barely in its infancy and without more than some long structural supports, a few ribs sat in orbit with no connecting pillars down to the ground…and yet, there were no construction crews working on it. The cargo shipments coming in from the outer rocky worlds were going straight to the completed ring, with construction on the other apparently having been halted.

  Building even one of the massive constructs was mind blowing, and with Star Force getting close and close to the lizard homeworld it seemed their plans for the second shipyard in this system had been scrapped in favor of building more ships.

  That had been the rumor…that the core worlds were fortifying themselves with exterior resources rather than spending them on the defense of their other systems that Star Force and their allies had been hacking apart with regularity for more than a century. There were so many of them to go through that even their defeats were buying the lizard core worlds time…and apparently time well spent, for in addition to the millions of starships present in the system there were thousands of new battlestations spread across planetary orbits and even out into the null zones.

  The Ma’kri made sure to get a closer look at those, seeing that they were of varying sizes, but the smallest of them were 54 miles long and 14 miles wide, cylinder-shaped, and covered with weapons, shield generators, thick armored plates, and even a few systems that the passive sensors couldn’t identify. The larger battle stations were bigger than the largest Star Force sedas, with several being truly Death Star size and qualifying as small moons, though mass wise they were but an afterthought compared to the shipyard ring. It was approximately 22 miles wide, with variations at different points, and stretched around the primary planet standing as a testament to the industrial muscle the lizards commanded and their ability and audacity to take on extremely long term projects.

  And for as long as it took to build that ring, and how many planets had to be strip mined to provide the resources, they were now churning out starships at an amazing rate, not to mention more battlestations that were attached to the ring like berries on a branch. The Ma’kri wasn’t going to be here long enough to measure construction rates, but judging by the number of slips on the ring the lizards could be producing thousands of ships per day so long as they had a steady influx of resources.

  It was suspected that the lizards were using core taps to get mining resources from the planet that the shipyard was around. Dig down deep enough and you’d hit the magma layer and could, with proper technology, continuously suck it into processing stations that could filter out the wanted materials and send the rest back into the slurry. Though that wasn’t visible from the surface, there were several facilities within proximity to the connecting columns that Star Force had guessed were the top port access tubes that connected to the ultra-deep mines, and judging by those the planet was covered with magma siphons.

  Take too much material out and you could have plan
et destabilizing issues, but if the lizards were also dumping waste material back down as well as worthless ore from outer planets in the system then the equilibrium could be maintained and a cracking of the planetary crust could be avoided…and based off the huge chunks of the outer rocky worlds that were missing the scout crew assumed that was just the case, especially when one of those chunks was tucked up against the ring next to one of the big slips that were building the battlestations.

  As the survey continued they spotted more and more chunks of planet that had been moved to the ring, and they were almost sure they were waste material being funneled back down to the planet, for most of the incoming cargo was in tradition form. An almost continuous stream of jumpships were coming into all the planet from stellar orbit to deliver what was assumed to be processed materials that the shipyard would then use to construct more starships, including more jumpships, which paled in comparison to the size of the ring itself.

  Their larger slips were also visible, with dozens of tiny cruiser slips tucked in around them and dotting the entire surface of the ring all the way around, both facing in towards the planet and facing out. None of the surface area was wasted, with the miles of internal structure presumed to contain the factories necessary for making the parts for the ships out of the raw materials being delivered.

  And the convoys bringing in those resources were the reason for the swarms of ships guarding stellar orbit. Blockade those and the shipyard would wither, reduced to only those materials this system could provide, and by the looks of it the lion’s share of them were coming from the rest of the lizards’ empire…and that was saying something, considering how much material had to be coming up those support columns round the clock.

  Star Force, in all its infrastructural glory, had nothing even approaching this. This one system alone had to have been built up over millennia, tediously and cautiously, into the ship building powerhouse that it was today…and to think that the lizards had 47 worlds with ring shipyards like these, that Star Force knew of anyway.

  But it wasn’t just the shipyards and defensive fleets that were the draw here, for the Ma’kri was also interested in the three planets’ cities. Within them was housed a massive population, and given the part of it that was visible from a distance there were distinctive buildings that by now were known to Star Force to hold specific industries. Spaceports on the surface were active nonstop, and a lot of these were exporting. Given the surrounding structures the Ma’kri assumed they were troop ships, or at least personnel transports, sending out reinforcements to somewhere.

  Those ships were tracked back to the stars where they were docked with waiting jumpships that then left in convoy clusters. Their exiting jumplines were noted, but where they were going was unknown. In recent decades it was assumed that the non-core systems were basically left to fend for their own defense while sending resources back to the core worlds, so where these ships were going was a curious mystery.

  That said, judging from the visible surface infrastructure, one of the three worlds was geared heavily towards producing more lizards. There were so many hatcheries they appeared like grains of sand dumped across stretches of continents…whose surrounding bodies of water had long since been sucked up. Those lower areas now contained more cities with a Coruscant-like covering to the planets, save these had a predominantly yellow-tan coloration.

  It screamed artificial, with whatever native wildlife or plants having long since been eradicated. Why the lizards hadn’t colonized the airless worlds further out in the system seemed like a contradiction, until you realized they were probably saving them for deconstruction later. The sheer magnitude of the plans at work here was chilling, as well as the fact that Star Force was about to come in and bust it all up.

  How they would do that the Ma’kri crew didn’t know, for the shipyard ring and the battlestations were so massive it would take forever to chew them apart. There was a rumor about the H’kar having taken down a shipyard ring long ago in a very bloody attack that left them with little more than a victory. The story went that the ring had been severed then pulled down to the planet’s surface in a chain reaction that had brought the whole thing down segment by segment…but after several days’ worth of passive scanning the crew noticed large slits in the ring. They were fully connected, but the various slips that were normally scattered about didn’t sit on any of those lines.

  Further passive scanning and some deduction brought about the realization that these were disconnect points, probably instituted as a defense mechanism against a similar tactic to what the H’kar had used. If Star Force managed to cut and push a piece of the ring down to the planet and crash it into the cities below the ring could disconnect from it to minimize the damage, leaving only a tiny bit missing out of the giant ring rather than all of it being destroyed.

  That revelation was also chilling, for the lizards had to have instituted that change within the past few centuries, and given the number of the noticeable slits it was not a simple upgrade to make. The lizards’ ability to adapt was showing even on this scale, and it was becoming clear that any invasion of this system was going to be very costly, either in terms of casualties or the sheer size of an invading fleet that Star Force would need.

  Making those plans wasn’t the Ma’kri’s job, only gathering intelligence was, and it did so carefully and quietly for some two weeks, getting good passive pulls on the shipyards and the three planets before heading out to the smaller sites around the dead worlds and a pair of asteroid fields. From there they headed in as close as they dared to the pair of stars, one white and one blue, to get as good a ship count as they could, taking a full lap around the system to do it, then they picked a very odd jumpline and got as much gravity as they could without alerting those fleets to their presence.

  They dropped the cloaking field a moment before they made the jump, switching back over to shields to protect them as they slingshotted their way out of the system and hoping the lizards didn’t see them leave. If they did their ship placements might change and their data stale a bit, but the bigger pieces weren’t going to move and the majority of the puzzle was set.

  The big question was the ship count, not only in this system but in others…and what if one of the others sent its fleets to augment these? The core systems were not that far apart from one another, and given enough jumpships to haul the cruisers they could reinforce one another in short order, making any assault potentially be up against a number of ships that couldn’t be calculated. Given those uncertainties, in addition to the sheer size of the fleet and defensive infrastructure here, the Ma’kri crew knew this would be the most difficult campaign Star Force had ever undertaken, making the fight in the Gvaris System look like a warmup exercise.

  The Ma’kri ended its jump in a dead system with no planets whatsoever. Just a single red dwarf star and no one there to give them trouble. From there they made a slow jump into a non-core lizard system that itself was built up considerably, though without a ring shipyard and a much smaller stellar defense fleet. It was still more than enough to kill the Ma’kri if it got close, so the ship came out further away from the star than typical and made a run around orbit to get to their jumpline with a detachment of lizard ships futilely pursing while others were headed to the most likely jumppoints to try and intercept.

  The Ma’kri beat them to its jumpline, but had to move further out on it to do so. In close to the star the cloaking shield didn’t work, for there was too much stellar radiation to absorb, but they didn’t need it in this case. With thousands of ships waiting lower on the jumpline for them the Ma’kri just ran up higher and got in position, making a slower than wanted jump out but not having any real difficulty in evading them.

  That was because, with all of the advancements the lizards were continually making in their technology across the board, Star Force engines were far and away superior to what the lizards used, and the Ma’kri had been designed with the strongest engine/mass ratio for a jumpship. They co
uld pretty much go where they wanted when they wanted and the lizards would be hard pressed to stop them, but the crew knew better than to take chances and accepted the slower jump rather than risk diving into a lower stellar orbit to try and grab enough gravity for a standard one.

  The point of this mission wasn’t speed, but in getting the data back to the trailblazers. A little delay was far better than risking a lucky intercept so prudence was exercised, even if the ship and its pilot were more than capable of outmaneuvering the lizards at closer range.

  Another two jumps got them clear of lizard territory and into the occupation zone that Star Force and the Voku had emptied and were now patrolling to make sure no one reentered, which was a task in and of itself so large that both empires were having to dispatch fleets of ships just to that end. There were hundreds of Ma’kri out there on solitary missions, jumping from one system to the other dropped surveillance drones and picking up data from others…all to keep squatters off the territory that the big powers that fought so hard to evict the lizards from.

  What would become of it later on wasn’t known, but after the centuries of hard work to clear out those tracts of space the hardest of all lay ahead of them, and while the Ma’kri crew wanted to see how it all went down, they were more than glad to stick to reconnaissance missions, knowing they weren’t outfitted for a heavy slugging match.

  And the fight that was about to come was going to take ‘slugging’ to a whole new level.

  2

  June 2, 3098

  Trenchet System (Occupation Zone)

  Rennpret

  “Well, looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Jack-020 said as he looked over the holographic map of the Menchet System with his fellow 2s. “Those battlestations look nasty.”

  “Too bad the scout didn’t get any active scans,” Megan-026 said with a frown. “I’d like to know exactly what weaponry they’re packing and how thick that armor is.”