Star Force: Mastermind (SF32) Read online

  1

  September 15, 2429

  Retari System

  Atlantica

  Kyler hit the water in his arrowhead late, well behind the other Archons who were already outside the hangar bay, and locked the flat topside panel in place by means of a switch on the right side control stick. It retracted down into place and sealed itself flush with the rest of the small craft, fully concealing the trailblazer’s armored body inside, then the control jets fired up and began pumping water out behind where his feet were set against a pair of foot pedals, allowing him to adjust the thrust levels and skillfully arc a curve through the bay and hit the first containment shield at decent speed.

  The shield, designed to hold back water, allowed the arrowhead through once sufficient pressure was applied, causing a jolt in the craft that did not have inertial dampening technology. It was little more than a water mongoose and barely twice the length of the land version, flat like a knife and light enough that Kyler could have picked it up out of the water using nothing but his bare hands.

  That light weight and angular design also allowed it to be very fast, so after he suffered through another jolt exiting through the second shield in the waterlock, he was able to punch the throttle and accelerate up to near torpedo speed as he tore off from the side of Manaan towards the infantry battles occurring at now three points inside the perimeter fence…the third of which had prompted him to abandon the command nexus and get into the fray himself, given how outnumbered they were.

  In the six days since the initial attack on the city’s defenses, all 6 defense towers had been taken down and the littered remains of the lizard ships that had accomplished it were spread out on the seafloor next to the Star Force debris. Kyler had been both amazed and intrigued that the lizards could bring as many ships to bear as they had, with more continuing to arrive via water from locations unknown.

  The Nautilus, Highwind, Dutchman, and Black Pearl were all tucked inside the perimeter fence, guarding over the 110 square miles of seafloor as the bulk of the lizard fleet was stationed outside. They’d made several raids over the past few days, some up the gauntlet approach where the fence overlapped, others through breach points they’d created in the gigantic metallic monstrosity, but none were successful in doing damage to either the city or the battleships given their shield column plasma cannons.

  Had the fence not been in place that would have been another story, but since it was forcing them to attack piecemeal the assault had essentially come to a standoff, with the lizards circling around the besieged city and continually probing the defenses, trying to find a way to either bring the fence down or to damage one of the battleships from range, which they’d attempted to do with onslaughts of torpedoes fired through the gaps in the wire-like barrier. The Dutchman had taken hull damage from one of those assaults when it ran out of PDM, but given the amount of damage the shields soaked up before breaching, too few torpedoes remained to seriously hurt the gigantic ship.

  But give the lizards an inch and they’d try to take a mile, and once the Dutchman was wounded they began to try and repeat the effort, getting resupplied from underwater convoys carrying ammunition and bringing more ships into the fold, as well as some aerial drops that made it through the city’s limited defenses. Manaan still had skeets to deploy in response, but when anything large came their way and naval warships weren’t in range to intercept, the lizards would get their supplies through.

  Some of those supplies came in the form of infantry pods delivering thousands of the swimming lizards into the campaign, and although the enemy hadn’t given up on taking out the battleships through coordinated torpedo strikes through the fence, they were circumventing the battleships’ primary advantage by exploiting its weakness…which was their inability to track small targets with their plasma cannons, meaning a mass of infantry could literally walk right underneath one of the battleships and only lose a few in number to lucky shots.

  In fact, that seemed to be their choice of attack now, for they were launching the largest infantry invasion to date. Thousands of the little swimmers were crossing the perimeter fence at now 3 locations, all intent on getting into the city’s auxiliary structures and doing what damage they could. Whether that meant external explosions or actually boarding the city Kyler didn’t know, but with so many in the water they needed all the Archons they could get to thin their numbers that were quickly overwhelming what interior turret defenses the city had left.

  Once outside of the main building Kyler followed a group of arrowheads that were already halfway to the eastern boundary where a pair of frigates were trying to stop the flood of infantry coming through at a point more than a kilometer inside the fence line, otherwise the Star Force ships would draw too much weaponsfire from the surrounding lizard ships eagerly awaiting a chance to get to the interior. They’d lost several ships over the past few days when they’d responded to breach attempts, and while they’d been successful in stopping those ships cutting into the fence, they’d taken significant losses of their own, resulting in several wrecks of ships having to be abandoned.

  On the battlemap Kyler saw that part of the lizards were taking up residence under some of that debris on the seafloor, using it as a shield against the pair of frigates that were pumping out PDM at everything they could see. The tiny missiles were in high demand right now, with the factories inside Manaan producing replacement ammunition as fast as possible to counter the lizards’ attempts to disarm Star Force by weapon attrition. Once again they didn’t seem to care how many lives they lost, so long as they could do some damage in the process.

  A flashing light on his battlemap, which was located inside his helmet rather than in the craft itself given the tiny confines, indicated that another link in the fence had been cut, opening up a slightly larger hole for reinforcements to come through. Kyler knew that it’d take a square of four being removed to allow a corvette through, and even then that was a squeeze.

  In response to the flashing, a tiny sliver of a shield column extended out to that point on the fence from the Nautilus, then several flashes of plasma passed through it, lighting up the ocean in tiny blue streaks from Kyler’s point of view, and impacted the lizard frigate on the other side that had been blasting away at the fence with a series of short range torpedo strikes.

  The enemy contact went out after some additional pounding, but the small damage to the fence remained and Kyler knew the enemy was playing a long chess match towards the destruction of the city, with every little nick in the fence putting them one step closer to attaining their penetration goals.

  Kyler wasn’t going to let them play that game, however, and as he watched the continually updating battlemap as he zipped his way across the large internal ocean space that the fence had sectioned off from the rest of the waterworld, he saw the Highwind rise up and disappear from the map, leaving the other three battleships to patrol and protect the base from the inside.

  A few minutes later it came back down outside the fence, dropping in on top of a fleet of lizard ships in the southeast…where none of the infantry were coming from. It hit a section of the enemy armada that had thought it was safe, and one that contained many transports. When the giant battleship began to submerge into the water overhead, the lizards had a choice…stand their ground or run.

  Given how many ships there were at that location and nearby, the lizards opted to fight, as the Captain had hoped. Kyler hadn’t ordered him to make the maneuver, but he’d encouraged all the battleship Captains to be aggressive in their defense and to not let the enemy get to feeling as if they owned the perimeter.

  Even as the Highwind had barely gotten submerged Kyler knew it was going to come away damaged…but ther
ein lay their advantage. Though it moved slowly, the battleship was also an airship and could retreat from an underwater battle by going up into the air and flying away, making it very hard for the lizards to kill one unless they had aerial support, which at the moment they did not. In truth, Manaan would already have been lost if it hadn’t been for the presence of the 4 battleships, but so long as they were on site and the perimeter fence was holding off an onslaught, it was going to be very hard for the lizards to destroy or captured the Star Force city, and that was one advantage that Kyler intended to milk as much as possible.

  The battleship Captains knew it as well, which was why Kyler was glad to see the Highwind redeploying outside the fence to land another gut busting blow to the enemy and eat up more of their ships to compensate for those reinforcements still coming in. After the first two days of the engagement he’d sent Vander off on a reconnaissance mission, hoping that he could quietly backtrack where the lizards were coming from, and he hoped that as long as the besieging forces continued to receive support that meant Vander was getting closer and closer to pinpointing at least one of their transitional bases nearby.

  Let the lizards get too many ships on site and they’d be in for a nightmare of problems, thus it was necessary to thin their numbers when they could, just as the Highwind was beginning to do now. Kyler watched the battlemap briefly, then turned his attention to the engagement ahead of him as he approached the location where the other 13 arrowheads were zipping about across the seafloor and tagging what infantry they could as what looked like a mass of ants was swimming its way further inside the perimeter.

  The column of ‘ants’ broke up at the ship debris, pooling underneath it before branching off in multiple strands and small groups, making it hard to pin them all to one location. These lizards, fortunately, weren’t wearing stealth suits, so they showed up on sensors from a considerable distance, allowing Kyler to pick out a small group ahead of the others and zoom in towards it, with a jet of high pressure water propelling him and his arrowhead through the dark depths where the sunlight couldn’t reach.

  Given that he was the only arrowhead near this lizard group he didn’t turn on his exterior running lights, nor had the lizards powered up their plasma rods or legionnaire shields, but he could clearly see them on sensors, giving him an advantage. Maintaining a high speed he flicked on the V-shaped band around the arrowhead’s front edge and charged it with stun energy, then adjusted his heading as he picked out a single lizard amongst the 8 ahead of him.

  He rammed it less than a second after it flicked on its plasma rod, apparently having heard him coming. It careened off the side, doubled over at the midsection as the impact simultaneously broke its back as well as stunning it unconscious. Kyler turned to the right and clipped another in the arm before exiting out the back of the group. He flipped the arrowhead on its side then bent the machine at the waist, arcing it back around and searching for his next target.

  The other lizards’ lights suddenly flashed on, both from their plasma rods and the forearm length shield gauntlets that they held out in front of them. They swam together and huddled up into a group, extending their plasma rods out between their shields to zap the arrowhead should it try to ram them again.

  Kyler slowed his speed as he programmed the autopilot to make a simple out and back maneuver, then he hit a button that sucked out the air in the compartment into a container while flooding it with seawater. Inside his armor Kyler didn’t notice the change, other than seeing it on his faceplate, then when the indicator panel informed him that there were no longer any remaining bubbles to give away his presence he cracked the cover partway open and pushed himself out the back near to where his foot pedals were, hand climbing/propelling himself out as the arrowhead continued to move forward under its own power, compensating for the drag of the half-open compartment.

  The Archon got caught in the jet wash and shoved back away from the arrowhead even as he activated his own much smaller jets on his legs and forearms, lowering himself in the water while he moved forward, intent on coming up at the lizards from below as the arrowhead passed over top of them. As he closed he reached his hands inside the cover on his back and pulled out one of two needler pistols and powered it up, but kept his arms tucked against his sides to maintain a smooth trajectory.

  The arrowhead succeeded in buzzing the 6 lizards, getting their attention and keeping it as it executed the preprogrammed U-turn and started heading back towards them to make another pass, thoroughly distracting them enough that Kyler was able to swim up underneath them and fire up at their webbed feet.

  He held off until he was only a few meters away, then put a laser dot on one towards the center that was holding a shield up high to cover their topside and fired straight up into the mess of legs, seeing a puff of compressed water move out to obscure the group as the water was explosively knocked away to produce a short lived vacuum/vapor sphere that the 5 remaining lizards got pulled back into after having their formation knocked apart.

  One of them was injured from the explosion, having been next to the one that was now missing its pelvis. Kyler cringed at the gruesome damage, but pushed the thought aside. He didn’t like messy kills, but he didn’t have much choice at the moment…though in two more meters he would.

  The trailblazer didn’t fire again, but instead jetted his way up into the midst of the lizards, grabbing one’s plasma rod out of its hand in the confusion and jabbing it into another. The green plasma glowing in its tip discharged into the water lizard’s head, burning out a section of its brain in less than a second, though a plume of bubbles disguised the point of impact briefly.

  Two down, four to go.

  As Kyler spun the rod around as quickly as he could considering the water drag, the green tip reformed and he jabbed it towards another lizard, but the thing got its shield moved in time and the plasma impacted it, discharging on contact and weakening the shield considerably.

  Another PDM from the needler blew apart what coordination the other lizards were regaining as it detonated again the leg of one to Kyler’s left. During that disruptive compression sphere Kyler got knocked slightly askew, but was able to jab the plasma rod into the shield of the lizard on his right a few more times, fully breaching the energy field.

  The tip of the rod slipped past and poked the lizard in the chest, though no plasma was present. Kyler did a double tap and got a little bit to discharge as it built back up, enough to painfully distract the lizard. The Archon dropped the plasma rod and jetted forward, wrapping his arm around the lizard’s neck and spinning it around…right into another plasma rod jabbing towards him.

  Using the friendly fire to his advantage, Kyler pushed the now dead lizard back into the others, using his armor’s jets to provide more leverage than the swimmers could, then he shot another PDM in between the group and saw it pop against the center one’s midsection before his view was obscured. When it cleared that lizard was dead and the two nearby were injured, one missing both an arm and a leg.

  Kyler grabbed one of the floating and still glowing plasma rods and finished off the survivors with a couple of taps rather than waste his own ammo, then he located his arrowhead, which was floating in place 40 meters off where he’d told it to wait. He swam out to find the remaining unconscious lizard and tagged it once in the chest, then discarded the plasma rod and tucked the needler into the fold on his armor’s back. Kyler jetted over to his arrowhead and climbed inside, sealing himself in then evacuating the water to reduce the craft’s weight. That produced a bit more buoyancy, but once he got moving the shape of the arrowhead would keep him in line due to the deflection angles.

  8 lizards down…who knew how many thousands more to go.

  Kyler checked his battlemap as soon as his body got back into the arrowhead, looking for his next targets with several to choose from, none of which were nearby…at least not within 30 seconds anyway. The arrowhead was fast, allowing it to cover a lot of water quickly, but the lizards were doing
well to scatter past their bit of cover near the downed warships, which was making it difficult for the other 13 arrowheads to get after them as well, though they were mostly focusing on the main flow, trying to take them out while they were still bunched together.

  Kyler would have preferred to be there doing that, but right now someone was needed to knock down some of the groups getting past…and there were many of them, too many for him to get them all.

  He glanced at the fuel cell gage, which indicated that he had enough power for at least 30 minutes of heavy combat, though it would vary depending on how many stun charges he used and how many little breaks like this he took. Guessing that the other arrowheads were in a similar position, he knew they were going to have to make several round trips, utilizing their speed to move to and from the city while the lizard infantry progressed forward slowly.

  He’d just have to whittle down as many as he could, then let the point defenses around the structures thin them down further. To that end he randomly picked another group and jetted off, hoping to ram at least some of the lizard groups out of commission so he wouldn’t have to suffer the delay of getting out and dealing with them hand to hand.

  2

  Paul replayed the battlemap data from the previous day’s battles in his quarters, just back from a lengthy training session in the Excalibur’s sanctum. The lizards were getting more reinforcements coming in and Star Force had attempted to mine the jumpline from the star with a few heavy objects. They’d delivered them far out in mid orbit and sent them drifting in, with their internal engines keeping the house-sized lumps of metal directly on the line whereas orbital paths would have moved them laterally out of position within minutes.

  Star Force had thus tagged that jumpline off limits, with a beacon informing all ships entering the system to avoid that route stationed in orbit around the system’s star. Greg’s fleet was stationed there, escorting incoming convoys and trying to poach lizard ones whenever they entered the system. The beacon was set up as a small space station that transmitted constantly, rather than having one of Greg’s ships do it. That way his ships could move about at will, rather than having to guard a fixed point.