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  Allegiance

  1

  July 3, 2331

  Gadre System

  Inner Zone

  “Microjump in three, two, one, mark!” the helmsman of the Chimaera announced to the bridge crew of the warship-class jumpship before it pushed off from Gadre’s central star with limited power enroute to one of the planets in the system.

  Liam sat a few stations behind him in the Admiral’s chair studying their position on a system-wide holographic map that encircled him. The dot that was the Chimaera accelerated up to speed within a pair of seconds then drifted along a straight line trajectory towards the planet tagged as Iracet. A second dot that had been coexistent with the Chimaera’s remained behind near the star, glossing over as realtime sensor tracking of its location became impossible at the speed the warship was traveling.

  Within a minute the Chimaera arrived at Iracet, braking hard against the planet’s gravity well but not completely overcoming its forward momentum, exiting the jump well above low orbit and coasting inwards at a comparatively low speed, but one that would bring the massive ship down into low orbit within half an hour and slam into the planet’s surface a few minutes later if unchecked.

  Five minutes after arrival the Chimaera’s sister ship jumped in behind them at a stagger. The Sebacean followed their approach vector with a slightly higher speed so that the pair of warships would rendezvous with one another again before reaching their target in low orbit.

  That target appeared on Liam’s holographic map as another dot orbiting about 400 miles above the surface of the brown, grass-covered planet. Less than a minute after the Sebacean’s arrival he received updated coordinates which his map adjusted for, moving the point slightly to the right from where it had been as the Hycre transmitted the data to the Human ships.

  Another hologram appeared on Liam’s right, this one of the Hycre symbol that they used in lieu of a flag. Along with it came a vocal transmission that the ship’s computer transcribed into Hycre text, then underneath which it translated the message into English as closely as it could. The program usually did well, but on occasion the Archons who could read the alien language would spot an inconsistency, which is why they’d deemed it necessary to display both the original and the translation in order to give the receiver the ability to troubleshoot any breakdowns in the translation.

  Liam read the message and hit the reply button on the arm of his Admiral’s chair. “Target confirmed. We stand ready to engage and will do so upon arrival unless you have a reason for us to delay?”

  A screeching reply came back in the negative, along with a promise that they’d be in position to attack prior to the Humans.

  “Be aware, there will be some delay while we unload.”

  The Hycre responded that they understood and would hold off their assault until they were in position.

  Liam nodded satisfactorily as the dot that was the lizard orbital occupation station began breaking apart as it deployed cruisers and two larger battleships upon seeing Star Force’s arrival. The beehive grew on the hologram but stayed close to the station, waiting for the enemy to come to them.

  Also on Liam’s map was the dot that marked the position of the Hycre warship in system. It was Destroyer-class, and accelerating out of its parking orbit at a rate no Star Force ship could match. The Hycre navy was far more powerful than the Humans’ and even more powerful than the lizards, but what they lacked was any type of effective ground troops, given that they lived in gas giants and were wholly incapable of surviving in a ‘normal’ environment. They did have some limited mining exoskeletons for use on rocky worlds, but nothing even remotely military.

  That hadn’t been a weakness with regards to their self-defense, for the lizards were equally unable to assault the Hycre in their gas giants, and with their rival’s naval superiority the lizards got few chances to try. However, as time passed the lizards were growing more and more powerful, and while the Hycre could dominate them in space they couldn’t assault any of the lizard worlds. Yes, they had some orbital bombardment capability, but once the lizards established a suitably sized based on the ground it was next to impossible for the Hycre to root them out.

  The other races that fought the lizards didn’t have much success in that department either, meaning that if they were to penetrate your orbital defenses and land on your world in sufficient numbers, then your planet was as good as doomed.

  Iracet was one such instance, home to a race known as the Darlestik. 12 years ago the lizards had conquered their planet along with their inhabited moon, Kitla. Rather than annihilating the stocky bipeds they’d enslaved them in exchange for limited independence. There was speculation that this was due to the lizards not having enough available resources at the time to hunt down and destroy all of the 15 billion Darlestik on the pair of planetoids while others suggested that using them as a source of slave labor had always been their intention.

  As it was, 2/3rds of Iracet was under the control of the lizards, while the other third was in contention by rebellious factions. The ‘pacified’ regions were working to supply the lizards with a massive amount of raw materials, most of which were being shipped outside the system as exports. Over the past 2 years the Hycre had been harassing those shipments and dropping aid packets to the rebels…but they hadn’t been able to dispatch a fleet large enough to take control of the system, only a ship or two at best and often only for a limited amount of time before it was needed elsewhere.

  Unlike most other races the Hycre warships had gravity drives capable of jumping them from system to system without the need of a jumpship. This gave their fleet much greater deployment capability, but at the cost of speed. Though still faster than Star Force’s jumpships, the Hycre warships were slower than the lizard jumpships for the most part, with only a few specially equipped courier ships capable of outrunning the enemy.

  The destroyer they had insystem had been on station for 8 months harassing the lizards in orbit as much as it could, but given their fleet strength it couldn’t assault the occupation station, which was a battle station in and of itself. The lizards had numerous bases on both Iracet and Kitla, as they had set up on Corneria, but this invasion had grown past what Star Force had seen there and the occupation station in orbit was apparently another step up the playbook as far as how they took control and subjugated one of their target worlds.

  Their battleships were another addition that they hadn’t encountered at Corneria. They were considerably larger and more powerful than their cruisers and had no kirby docking points. They were also not sensor stealthed, nor was the station, suggesting that these were defensive/regular line forces rather than their expeditionary ones. About half of the cruisers weren’t stealthed either, probably because they’d been built on site after the planet had been subjugated.

  There were similar occurrences happening across multiple star systems as the lizards continued to push their borders. The difference with this one was that the Darlestik rebels were fielding a legitimate counter-insurgency. They weren’t in a position to overthrow the lizards as of yet, but the lizards hadn’t been able to wipe them out despite their stronghold over the planet’s infrastructure and the developed state of their own.

  The Darlestik were stronger than the lizards, hand to hand, and they also favored subterranean structures. This made them great miners, a fact which the lizards were gladly exploiting, but it also made it difficult for the Darlestik to be found and killed when they were constantly digging new tunnels. Far underground the lizards’ airpower couldn’t be brought into to play, nor could their vehicular army, meaning the only way to get at them was to go in and fight hand to hand…and the lizar
ds had been expending millions of troops in order to do so, but after a few initial gains the ground war had morphed into a very active stalemate.

  The Hycre were convinced that if they could weaken the lizards’ forces from space then the Darlestik might have a chance of mounting an effective counteroffensive…which is why they had asked Star Force for assistance, not only because they could spare only one ship to the system, but because the Humans had proven time and again how effective they were at orbital bombardment.

  The Gadre System was 48 light years from Sol, located in quadrant three and well beyond the perimeter of Star Force’s territory, but with the upgraded gravity drives that they’d recently put into service it’d taken them no more than 2 months to zigzag their way across the stars from Epsilon Eridani out further rimward to the target system. This marked the furthest expedition by Star Force out into the galaxy, including their scouting expeditions. If something were to go wrong they would be getting no help from Star Force, and probably none from the Hycre either, which was one reason why Liam had insisted on sending two warships rather than one.

  Both warships were about half the size of one of their cargo or carrier jumpships, designed for the soul purpose of delivering a fleet from point to point as well as acting as a control ship. Aside from the crew compartments and limited storage, the entire spine between nose cone and engine bank was made up of egg carton-like slots that held the rectangular cubes that were their drone warships.

  They were stacked together tightly, maximizing their basic design to fit as many as possible within the volume dictated by the size of the nose cone and the inertial dampening field that kept them all snugly stable within the larger ship. The slots they fit into were actually docking arms that could reconfigure to hold whatever set of the giant ‘legos’ they wanted to squeeze aboard, but with these two jumpships they held mostly cruisers stacked in four rows around the thick central spine.

  “Captain, take us in,” Liam said calmly, watching his displays.

  “Begin braking maneuver,” Captain Leslie said from her own command chair just ahead of Liam’s. “Begin power up on all drones. Helm, coordinate with the Sebacean to keep us as close together as possible.”

  To either side of the command platform in the center of the huge bridge were rows of stations containing 226 seats for an army of remote pilots. The Chimaera didn’t have them all filled, nor did they have 226 warships to control, but it had become common practice to assign more than one pilot to a warship, given the various weapon systems they contained. Computer controlled firing was useful if you were shorthanded, but Liam preferred to have each weapons battery manned by a live person, meaning that each cruiser had several pilots working as a group to fly and fight it. Some had more than others that would reposition to other ships when theirs was damaged or destroyed, meaning that the longer the battle continued the more operational control each ship would likely gain.

  On the hologram Liam noticed that the lizard ships were beginning to drift out away from the station in the direction that they were incoming…as well as in the direction of the Hycre ship. All of their ally’s impressive warships took on the persona of sea creatures for some odd reason, especially given that there was no water on their gas giants. Whether or not they intended to copy the marine aesthetic Liam didn’t know, but the destroyer headed in to engage the lizard fleet definitely looked like a flat shark.

  It even had fins coming out from three angles, plus two more that formed a sort of tail off the elongated aft end. The body of the ship was taller than it was wide, giving it a flat and narrow motif when viewed from the top or bottom. At the front of the ship, however, it jutted out considerably to either side, giving the ‘shark’ a bulbous head that increased the intimidation factor.

  Then again, maybe Liam only thought it looked fearsome because he’d seen one of the ships in action before.

  The Hycre destroyer was approaching the station at a good pace…with some fluctuations. Apparently they were trying to time their arrival to coincide with the Humans and had succeeded in dividing the guardian fleet into two groups, though the lizards didn’t let themselves get very far from the station.

  The dots on Liam’s screen kept getting closer and closer until they suddenly stopped moving altogether as the Chimaera finished its deceleration in one final lurch that left it 8,000 kilometers away from the station. The Sebacean joined it a minute later, slowing to a stop some 60 kilometers away.

  The Hycre destroyer did not slow down, however, until the last possible moment. Using both the planet and the moon’s gravity wells like giant tethers it yanked hard on both and ground to an almost stop 120 kilometers out from the rightmost defense fleet and drifted directly into their lines on an insanely fast strafing run. It activated its engines only twice for small course corrections as it passed into and through the lizard lines, blasting away at one of the battleships as it passed, gouging large portions of its shield matrix in the process with its white plasma streaks.

  It took down the shields on two cruisers before it passed outside of weapons range, then took a solid hit to its own shields as one of the more massive plasma cannons on the station fired a well-timed shot at the shark-shaped ship. Its green plasma orb was caught and collapsed on impact, with a great deal of the plasma being diverted along the length of the ship rather than soaking it all up on the forward shields. Somehow they had the technology to choose how much to deflect and how much to absorb, but that was one secret they hadn’t included in the introductionary probe’s database…and it wasn’t something they’d shared since either.

  As forthcoming as they’d been about many technological matters, the Hycre had been mum on their more impressive naval technology. That was to be expected, despite the close working relationship they had established with Star Force, given that their naval power was their sole point of power. That said, while the Humans’ tech was inferior in comparison the Hycre had noted on several occasions how impressed they were with Star Force’s rate of advancement.

  When Paul had then let them in on the creation of a new weapon that could penetrate even the Hycre shields they began to forcefully inquire where they had obtained such technology, but the Archon had quietly and politely refused all such attempts to ferret out their source, citing that they also had secrets to keep.

  If there had initially been a few ruffled mohawks over the revelation they passed after Paul had let them participate in a weapons testing exercise, during which both races exchanged data and defensive technology. They gave Paul the specs on a stronger physical shield than Star Force currently had, though nowhere near as powerful as those used by their warships, while Paul showed them the basics of how to create an energy shield, also more primitive than those deployed on Star Force’s warships in conjunction with their physical shields.

  With that gifting the Hycre then had the ability to block Star Force’s new weapon…or at least dampen it somewhat, making both fleets stronger for the exchange. Lizard ships, they knew, only operated with physical shields, which was why their heavy lachar technology had been able to partially penetrate them. The new energy weapon, designated as the ‘Cleansing Beam’ in yet another homage to Halo, was a pure energy weapon and thus impervious to the blocking power of physical shields.

  They were extremely expensive to make, power hungry, and didn’t like to be jostled…which meant the smallest ship on which the smallest version of the weapon was currently fielded was a heavy cruiser.

  That said, those heavy cruisers were more than a match for the lizard cruisers. The trailblazers had been right in predicting that if they could survive against the lizards long enough that their rate of technological advancement, thanks to the V’kit’no’sat database, would close the gap. While it was true the lizards still held many advantages over Star Force they were no longer as great, and in some areas there had been a reversal of fortunes, with the Humans now the stronger. Overall the lizards still had a technological edge, but it was dwindling with every deca
de that passed…yet their territory was continuing to expand and the more systems they occupied/annexed the stronger they became.

  Which was why the Hycre had been so animated about the need for this counterstrike. The Humans had been the only race in recent memory to have thrown the lizards off a world where they had successfully grounded and established a surface base. Word of this, spread to other enemies of the lizards by the Hycre, had instigated a more determined resistance to their previously indomitable advance and now they wanted to use the Humans’ skills for more than just defensive applications.

  Because of Star Force’s ability to effectively resist the lizards, and their newfound popularity amongst usually disparate races on the lizards’ hit list, the Hycre had virtually adopted the Humans as an apprentice race, protecting and teaching them in the hopes that they would grow into a powerful ally capable of one day pushing back against their common enemy.

  This mission was the first piece of that extremely complicated puzzle…and the first time the Hycre had ever asked for their assistance.

  “We’re in position,” Captain Leslie said, waiting for the final go order.

  “Detach,” Liam said without hesitation, glancing to the side to catch the attention of the Chimaera’s comm officer. “Inform the Sebacean to do likewise.”

  2

  Up and down along the central 4 kilometer stretch of the Chimaera’s hull drone cruisers began undocking in staggered sets, pulling away from the spine and filling the space around the jumpship. In the rearmost portion destroyers and heavy cruisers followed until all 64 warships had detached, leaving the Chimaera looking like the skeleton of a dead fish with nothing but thin ribs sticking out along its central spine connecting the nose cone to the engine compartment.

  Likewise the Sebacean was disgorging its 72 warships, which included smaller cutters, frigates, and corvettes in some cases. Both ships had equal hauling space, it was just a matter of stuffing the slots full with as many of the cube-like ships as they could. It had jokingly been said amongst the fleet that in order to gain command of a warship-class jumpship a Captain had to have a high proficiency in Tetris.