Star Force: Death Knell (SF26) Read online

  1

  February 27, 2405

  Brokal System

  Sri’ka

  “Are you ready?”

  Morgan nodded towards the slightly delayed hologram of the Kvash commander. “We are.”

  “I wish you luck,” the rocky biped groaned in the trade language. Its various joints clicked as it raised its squat, flat head higher. “Commence countdown.”

  Morgan glanced to her right, making sure her people activated their end of the highly synchronized attack they were about to pull off. To answer her question a holographic countdown clock appeared over the bridge of the warship she was commanding. Three others were nearby in high orbit around Sri’ka, a major Calavari world and capitol of this system’s micro-civilization.

  Seven planets, all highly industrialized, made the Brokal system one of the Calavari’s economic linchpins, making up a significant portion of their starship and starfighter production line. The Nestafar had hit it hard a little over a year ago, but like Sol with so many inhabited planets, stations, and populations it couldn’t be captured in one fell swoop. An ongoing mini war had been occurring in the system ever since the first Nestafar attack on Sri’ka, with mixed results. The Calavari were holding on to it with a vengeance and even the Kvash had dispatched a battlegroup to keep the Nestafar from taking the valuable industry and turning it to their advantage…not to mention the Valerie starfighter line.

  The fighting had been heavy and hard from the get go with both sides throwing reinforcements into the system, but as the available reserves dwindled the system commanders had begun to scale back combat to what they could manage without overcommitting their forces. A partial stalemate had occurred, with some planets in the system seeing lesser conflicts as a giant chess match played out with the Nestafar making small gains as the weeks rolled by.

  Star Force, on its juggernaut roll through the list of small Calavari worlds the Nestafar had taken, had been requested to come in and break the stalemate before the Nestafar could summon up additional reinforcements of their own. Morgan had already split up her forces at that point into 3 groups assaulting nearby systems while progressing along a common line. She’d pulled off four warships from normal operations and used a Hycre jump cradle to interlink the four and make the much longer trip out to the Brokal system to drop the hammer on the Nestafar there.

  The rest of the jump cradles had already been repurposed elsewhere, as the Hycre helped move around troops from other ‘slower’ races to more opportune locations, essentially stranding the Star Force troops in Calavari territory…but that had been part of the plan all along. This side mission had been on the spur of the moment as conflicts all across the region tied up more and more fleets in combat while lizard attacks continued further out towards the rim, splitting the Alliance forces and stretching their resources thin, allowing smaller worlds to be swept up with minimal effort while the major population centers were being vied for.

  Which was why it was so important for Star Force to remain loose in the region as a purely offensive force…while the other supporting races deployed into defensive rolls to protect key systems. If all of them did likewise then it would give the Nestafar the advantage, and the Archons definitely weren’t going to allow that to happen. They had been hitting the Nestafar occupation zone where they were weak for the past 2 years, forcing them to devote additional troops and ships to defend them or lose the little ones that they themselves had taken in a similar manner, exploiting the Calavari’s weakness.

  The distances between systems were also problematic. It took at least a week to transition between inhabited systems, even with the Hycre jump cradles. The galaxy was vast and this small corner of it was no exception. If a system was caught off guard it was most likely to fall, given that alerting others to its plight, let alone getting reinforcements sent out, was problematic. This definitely gave the attacker the advantage if they came in with sufficient forces to overwhelm their target.

  Likewise it favored the more developed systems that had multiple worlds that could reinforce one another. Those were extremely hard to take, and as such favored the defenders…meaning that assaults on Brokal and others were vast affairs that could take years to resolve, meaning that the entire Alliance war effort was really dozens of individual wars being fought simultaneously, often without knowing what was happening elsewhere. Communication was an Achilles heel for the Alliance that the Bsidd were trying to counter with their relay network, but even messages passing through it were significantly delayed.

  Morgan and the other trailblazers had already learned a crucial lesson in space warfare…the victors were those who were prepared. Territory grabbers were notoriously weak, and it was those that could hold what they took and develop those planets up into ‘fortress worlds’ that would eventually dominate the overall war.

  But where there was chaos there was opportunity, and a bold race could take dozens of minor systems and hold them with a few ships if they knew the enemy wasn’t in a position to respond, such as Star Force had been doing with the Nestafar occupation zone, except that Morgan’s troops weren’t holding anything…they were returning it to the Calavari and leaving the holding to them.

  In war there was much opportunity for the wise to exploit, but part of wisdom was knowing your enemy, where they were, how strong their fleets were, etc…but this war, or rather this regional conflict with the Nestafar, was essentially occurring blind. Both sides were slugging it out, guessing at target strength and reinforcing where they could, which was resulting in a yoyo effect that had seen territory taken, then retaken…only to be lost a second time to another batch of reinforcements.

  Morgan poured over every bit of detail she could get her hands on, constantly shaking her head in dismay at how events were progressing. This whole Nestafar/Calavari theatre was playing out like an unorganized free for all, and she knew she had to keep her fleets moving or else they could get caught on the wrong side of one of the mini pushes. Their best defense was to keep mobile and the enemy unaware of where they were, because by now they had to have poked their way onto the Nestafar radar as more than the minor threat that most races in the Alliance had initially considered the Humans to be.

  Part of that had been the fact that Star Force territory was on the edge of Alliance ‘territory,’ which was actually bits and pieces around the perimeter of the lizards’ holdings. The Human piece was one of the furthest outliers, so the Alliance races, including the Nestafar, hadn’t had much interaction with them nor knowledge of their worlds. This was advantageous because Star Force could hit the Nestafar without having to worry about them hitting back…anytime soon, anyway. They had their hands full with the Calavari and the rest of the Alliance, though if Star Force’s allies fell, to either the Nestafar or the lizards, Morgan expected their enemies to have a good enough memory of events to come looking for payback eventually.

  But for now Morgan was on offense, as she preferred, and this current mission that her four warships were just wading into was the biggest opportunity to stick it to the Nestafar to date, as well as being the most risky, but the fog of war was on their side given that they knew from the others fighting in the system where the enemy was and how strong they were…while the Nestafar had no idea her strikeforce was incoming.

  When the timer reached 3 minutes Morgan saw no change, but down on the surface of Sri’ka, in one of the Calavari-held regions, 583 Valeries lifted off from one of their major airfields and burnt hard for space, heading for the position of the main Nestafar fleet in the system that had been interdicting the planet for months, cutting off any large scale hope of resupply and keeping possession of low to middle orbit while they either destroyed or captured the insta
llations around the planet. The part of the blockade the fighters were heading up to was the thickest, and even as impressive as 500+ Valeries were, it was an insignificant force against the Nestafar warships…even if they didn’t have a fighter screen of their own.

  Which they did. As the Valeries shot up through the thinning air the Nestafar carriers began deploying squadron after squadron of their own fighters, supplemented by a number of Valeries they still possessed, all of which raced out ahead of the wing-shaped warships in order to intercept the Calavari before they could get within range.

  Instead of trying to fight their way past and go after the enemy warships the Calavari pilots halted their advance and engaged the fighters directly in a massive starfighter fur ball just above the atmosphere. Hundreds of dots swirled around each other on the Nestafar sensors, cancelling each other out in ones and twos with the Calavari maintaining their traditional edge. The formation of capital ships just sat and watched the battle until a pair of destroyers on the right flank suddenly turned off, accelerating away.

  As if oblivious the rest of the fleet held position in clustered rows…then a cruiser went off, followed by a squadron of corvettes until the sensor ghost they were picking up finally resolved itself into a single, massive warship as it dropped its sensor stealthing matrix so it could fire on the destroyers.

  Like a cloaking device, what had been black, signal dampening panels suddenly turned stark white, picking up the sunlight and reflecting it back like a dull star in low orbit that had somehow snuck up on the Nestafar formation. Capital ship grade plasma streamers shot out a deep maroon-colored plasma from the forward two sections of the ‘tri-sphere’ ship, which looked like 3 golf balls mashed together into a solid lump that was one of the most notoriously well-defended ship designs in the Alliance.

  Two plasma streamers hit the leading destroyer, sapping its shield strength for several seconds before they broke through and hit the hull on the starboard wing as the Nestafar ship fired off a salvo of glowing green missiles. It emptied its hold of the weapons before the plasma streamers cut the ship in half and diverted to the incoming cruiser, with the missiles flying in an evasive spiral in towards the port sphere on the Kvash battleship.

  No anti-air batteries opened up on the missiles, for the battleship had none, but a few seconds prior to impact the Kvash capital ship opened up several ports beneath its shields, with gaps forming in the protective barrier as hundreds of thousands of tiny little, pebble-like ‘blips’ shot out and curved toward the missiles, homing in on their location and interposing themselves between the incoming weapons and the warship.

  The Nestafar missiles got swallowed up in the clouds spewing out, detonating prematurely and scattering the blips from the concussion…but the little white dots resisted the scattering, slowing to a stop then gradually returning to their swarm and filling in the gaps where the missiles had detonated. They lingered there shortly, then like a dinner call a signal was sent out and the little white dots retreated through newly opened the gaps in the shield and back into their storage compartments just beneath the surface, clearing the firing line for the ship’s main weapons…all of which were streamers.

  All of the corvettes that approached got tagged with an individual streamer, one of which was a heavy. It cut through the shields within 2 seconds, while the other smaller models took more time, but none of the Nestafar ships lasted long. The small amount of plasma orbs they threw at the Kvash battleship smashed against their crystalline shields as if hitting a solid wall of wrinkled glass, barely draining away their energy, which was quickly replaced by the hundreds of redundant shield emitters positioned around the surface of the irregularly shaped hull.

  The Nestafar knew immediately what had to happen. The Kvash operated with a rock mentality to warfare…meaning they planned all battle strategy around fixed strong points like chess pieces that they could then move around the map. They weren’t accustomed to losing ships, due to the size they produced them as well as their impressive shields, which were by far the strongest in the Alliance and heads above what the lizards brought to bear. The only way to counter such strong assets was to bring overwhelming force to bear on them, thus when the ship appeared on the Nestafar sensors nearly every capital ship within range diverted towards it and started throwing whatever firepower they had against its shields, even if that meant they’d be taken out within 30 seconds of arrival.

  They had to weaken and disrupt the shields by hitting it continuously, then pick off the emitters below when they could, otherwise the shields would reform again. That was a tactic best employed by their fighters…which were currently engaged with the Calavari lower in orbit.

  The Kvash battleship, nearly 10 kilometers wide and functioning as its own jumpship, didn’t retreat in the face of the wave of Nestafar capitol ships heading its way, numbering over 600…and that was just the ones in range. They had more than 2,000 in orbit around the planet and over 10,000 spread out across the system. If allowed to isolate the enemy down to a few dozen at a time the battleship could work its way through those 10,000 on its own, which was why the Nestafar knew they had to take it out as quickly as possible.

  The main Nestafar fleet group the Calavari fighters had flown up towards now splintered, with the jumpships and a few escorts holding position while the others moved off to confront the Kvash. One large ship also stayed behind, nearly half the size of a carrier jumpship, and armed to the teeth. Its weaponry was the most powerful the Nestafar had in the system but it was electing not to confront the Kvash, rather staying behind and repositioning in between the enemy and the jumpships just in case the Alliance somehow broke through the overwhelming numbers they were throwing at them.

  Ironically, it was also the only Nestafar warship that didn’t have wings. It was pointed like an arrow and had three talons sprouting out of the hull and curving over, each of which held a super weapon, which in this case was an enormous plasma orb generator. The command ship looked like a long, gnarly stick with three thorns sticking out, save for the center, which was pushed out to form a ring with the center open and housing a small shipyard/repair center for their smaller warships. It was protected by a secondary bubble shield underneath the primary, with one of the thorns sticking up over it from the prow, literally daring anyone to approach from the topside.

  A large gap formed in between the command ship and the rest of the fleet as it coalesced around the Kvash with more ships coming into firing range faster than they were being destroyed, though the rocky aliens were racking up an impressive kill count in the process and their shields had yet to go down even briefly. The command ship organized and recalled more and more ships from planetary orbit and diverted them to the battlefield, knowing it would take them minutes, if not hours to get there, but if not dispatched now the delay would be even longer.

  All across the planetary orbit Nestafar ships moved, some taking advantage of the planetary alignment and getting microjumps in off the star or nearby planets, others using the three moons to propel them inward where they then easily braked against Sri’ka to drop them in nearby the Kvash, where they then had to approach at a much slower pace else risking running into one of their own vessels and annihilating both ships due to a navigational accident.

  Back out in high orbit where the Nestafar couldn’t detect them Morgan waited patiently, not knowing about the battle going on in low orbit for lack of sensor data. The four Warship-class jumpships had their active sensors turned off so as not to betray their position, not that they would have given them much information other than approximate locations if they knew where to place a direct sensor scan. A typical spherical scan would have been too weak to reflect back anything of worth other than maybe one of their jumpships, which was why they’d had to position themselves so far out into high orbit to keep themselves off the enemy’s sensors.

  So all Morgan had to work with was the countdown clock and trust the Calavari and Kvash were holding up their part of the plan…otherwise her
ships would be microjumping into a world of hurt.

  “Go,” she said simply when the mark came well over half an hour into the battle.

  The four warships, lined up laterally with several kilometers in between one another, shot off towards the planet one by one, accelerating rapidly but not so fast that they couldn’t be see with the naked eye. They were pushing off a combination of the system’s central star and one of the moons around Sri’ka, using a precisely balanced combination to head them directly to towards the planet with an ETA just over 6 minutes.

  Once they were up to speed, which occurred within 30 seconds, each jumpship began detaching the warships they were carrying with the outermost two pushing theirs wide while the central 2 sent theirs above/below the plane that contained all four massive carriers heading in towards the planet. They detached as fast as possible, then aligned into deceleration lanes so that no one ship would be eclipsing another in case something went wrong with an engine or if a decel sequence was a microsecond delayed.

  Almost as soon as the first jumpship had all its remote-controlled drone warships released and aligned it hit the brakes and disappeared off the back, then a few seconds later all the small warships did the same, blinking out of formation within three seconds and using their own gravity drives to brake hard against Sri’ka’s gravity well.

  In what appeared to be a shotgun of approach signatures, more than 60 ships appeared on the Nestafar’s sensors along with a jumpship further back…then a few seconds later another group appeared, followed by a third and then a fourth as Morgan brought her battlegroup in a few hundred kilometers away from the Nestafar jumpships while the rest of the enemy fleet was occupied with the Kvash.

  From the Red Ranger’s bridge Morgan watched the sensor data update, with a big smile crossing her face when she saw their command ship exposed. “Well hello there.”