Star Force: Unification (SF39) Read online

  1

  February 21, 2452

  Solar System

  Earth

  70 miles off the Virginia coast where the underwater Norfolk Canyon cut into the edge of the continental shelf that significantly shallowed the Atlantic Ocean prior to making landfall, a large bulge of water pushed up into the cold winter whitecaps, forming a small tsunami that would dissipate before reaching the coast. Underneath the quickly rising dome of water was a Star Force aquatics battleship transitioning into ‘airship’ mode and heading towards the Unites States on anti-grav, but it wasn’t alone, for alongside and behind it, coming up from the submerged canyon, 18 additional battleships took to the air, leaving the ocean beneath them a churning mess as they quickly disappeared from view.

  Flying together like a pack of aerial whales the warships crossed the 180 mile stretch up to the American capitol coming under fire from squadrons of US F-834 fighter jets, but their missiles and plasma cannons couldn’t penetrate the battleships’ thick shields, nor could the anti-air turrets on the ground. The aquatics warships bullied their way through the defenses up to Washington DC, then spread out across the sky over the city, picking off automated defense batteries with their onboard plasma cannons as they one by one flew low over the small Tidal Basin that sat between the Potomac River and the White House.

  There each battleship dropped large chunks of machinery into the shallow water before cycling off to form a slowly drifting formation in the sky over the panicking local population. When the last of the battleships deposited its cargo it held position, modulating its shields away from the underside hull and extending them down like a dome over top of the lake-like basin.

  Once that protective energy barrier was in place, thin as it was, scores of personnel began dropping out of the hull and down into the water. The aquatics specialist Archons rode their wrist and ankle jets, spreading out to the perimeter of the Tidal Basin where they held position just under the water’s surface, waiting to act as a defensive line should any local troops come over ground and poke their way through or under the shield.

  Behind them engineers came down and boarded the large chunks of equipment, some of which sprouted construction mechs than stepped down into the 3 meter deep water and began pulling the large pieces of equipment apart or repositioning them into the proper arrangement that the battleships more or less laid them out in. Using their large mechanical arms, the mechs put the giant ‘Lego’ pieces together over the next hour while the city streets quickly emptied, leaving the capitol more or less a ghost town.

  No soldiers or police approached the Tidal Basin, for they were either bunkered up inside the city buildings or running away with the hordes of road vehicles packing the highways and the already scattered hovering vehicles that ignored traffic regulations and zipped off across the cityscape in whatever direction they thought would get them to safety.

  The floating battleships ignored them, holding position while the one over the Tidal Basin hurried through the construction of a city-sized bubble shield generator. With a fixed geometry, unlike the battleships’ shields that could modulate their matrix and form multiple shapes as needed, the bubble shield was Star Force’s most robust and efficient shield. The amount of equipment needed to build a proper surface generator was massive, which created a problem for mobile units by limiting their size and strength.

  By using a bubble shield they minimized the volume of equipment needed, but the tradeoff was they couldn’t get a surface seal, meaning the shield would cover the sky but not come down to touch the ground as the battleship’s shield currently was surrounding the Tidal Basin. It would be low enough to block aircraft from entering the dome, but not ground troops, meaning a land assault was still possible…but in this case it was actually preferred, making the bubble shield the perfect tool for a quick city grab.

  When the generator was finally assembled beneath the low hovering battleship, it set up a hemispherical cap over the city, stretching out to a diameter of 12 miles and covering the US capitol building, the White House, the Pentagon, and many other key governmental buildings in the never ending cityscape that stretched hundreds of miles along the east coast. The edge of the shield dome hung in ghostly blue hue just over the building tops, visibly marking the barrier so no aerial traffic or high floating anti-grav vehicles would mistakenly ram it…as well as to symbolically mark Star Force’s new turf.

  Once the primary shield was up the other 18 battleships settled down to the ground in various locations and began disgorging troops, Archons, Knights, and Regulars in large numbers, each with their own objectives and armed with a massive amount of stun weapons, for their objective was to capture the city, not to destroy it.

  Amongst those troops were Senpan-142117, who had the honor of dropping down onto the White House roof along with a team of other adepts while a pair of Star Force combat mechs were set down on the south lawn, drawing most of the attention from the secret service and other limited defensive staff that were wisely staying inside the building, though a few did stupidly fire their sidearms at the mechs, with the tiny plasma spurts doing little more than scratching the paint on their armor.

  The ineffectual attack did grab the attention of the madcat pilot, who twisted his mech around on its bird-like legs until its arms faced the windows where the fire was coming from, then it unleashed what looked like a shotgun blast of pink energy shards into the building, blanketing multiple windows in stun energy, some of which saturated the walls so much that it actually numbed the shoulder of a man leaning against one on the inside.

  After that no more return fire came, and the madcat and thor set up in guard positions out front while Senpan’s team broke in at multiple points and began neutralizing all personnel they came across with green stinger paint splatters, most of which ended up on the unconscious personnel rather than the walls…though the same couldn’t be said of the secret service’s return fire that set pictures and other accoutrements hanging on the walls on fire.

  Senpan had come in from the north side of the west wing, eventually making his way across the office spaces where the President’s staff did most of their daily work, finding only a few of them present and hiding while secret service and an assortment of other guards occupied most of the Archon’s time. Room by room he cleared the wing, ending up in the oval office that was likewise empty.

  He walked around the curvy perimeter, checking all three exits/entrances before making his way out onto the porch and exiting through the southern greenhouse where he got jumped by three more guards. After stunning them into submission he tagged the west wing as ‘clear’ on his battlemap and retreated into the office area where he took up a roaming patrol in case personnel from other areas of the White House might migrate back in response to the other members of his team pushing through the rest of the building or in the unlikely case of a counter assault occurring, though with DC’s network of subterranean structures it was possible that there could be reinforcement coming from underground, bypassing the mechs outside.

  To that end the adept kept on guard, roaming around the west wing and gradually policing the bodies, which eventually ended up in the Cabinet Room, while the other adepts on this small portion of the overall assault on the city cleared the main residence and east wing, including the subterranean bunker complex…but the President wasn’t among them, nor his family. Apparently they’d gotten out prior to the attack.

  That wasn’t Senpan’s team’s concern though, for they didn’t need the politicians, just the real estate.

  Back in Atlantis, Kent was overlooking a large holographic map of the United States in a much larger operations center than the White House sported. This one was the size of three basketbal
l courts, with the centerpiece of it all being the main holoprojector, which currently showed an image of the continental states along with non-geographical cutouts for the remaining 5 states on the uncharacteristically flat image.

  Kent had it displayed that way, rather than showing the curve of the Earth, because the board was monitoring the 23 incursion points, each of which had numerous objectives that he wanted to be able to be advised of at a glance.

  A flashing icon over Washington DC indicated an update coming in, one of hundreds over the past few minutes, and Kent glanced down at the flat topped worktable he was standing at to see the ‘White House secured’ update, with that tiny piece of the city filling in with a blue highlight on a secondary map along with a scattering of others, but most targets had yet to be neutralized given the sheer size of the city and the limited number of personnel Kent had assigned to it.

  Simultaneous ‘capture and hold’ assaults were taking place at New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, San Antonio, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Columbus, Denver, Portland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Seattle, San Juan, Detroit, and Dallas as Star Force was choosing to hit the United States first out of the six countries that had been tabbed for annexation, hoping to convince the others to simply submit rather than face similar assaults.

  Personally, Kent didn’t expect China to submit, but they were going to get a chance to think it through as they watched the US assaults, for Davis had chosen to keep the media outlets in the loop during this invasion, letting everyone across the Earth and Solar System monitor it live as the assaults went down.

  They didn’t know it was coming, nor did anyone, for Kent had hidden his troops well, but the declaration of the forfeiture of sovereignty had been issued by Davis three days ago, with all six nations issuing adamant refusals…who were quickly backed by almost every other nation on the planet when the Director went on to explain the ‘verification testing’ that all countries would be subjected to in the coming years. Only four stood by Star Force in their silence, with the others banding together with such a unanimous decrial that many pundits were suggesting that Davis had finally gone too far and would have to submit to the will of the planet and back down from his demands.

  Kent imagined they were having a moment of epiphany right about now as the news vids caught up with what was happening and fed images of the assaults on the American cities out to billions of people in the neighboring countries. Political opinion was useless against physical equipment, and as the American military began to respond to the invasion, it being the largest and most powerful of the now rebellious nations, most of whom had no military whatsoever, Kent was monitoring the deployment of their combat units away from their bases and towards the besieged cities.

  All 23 sites now had their shield generators in place and operational, keeping the American air assets out of the equation. A few had launched light assaults against the shields, testing their strength, but they eventually abandoned the attacks given the calculated ordinance necessary to penetrate the energy barriers and the collateral damage they would do if they broke through and fell on the city below.

  Now turtled up inside the shields, Kent’s assault forces were securing buildings and rounding up stunned personnel while allowing the fleeing citizenry out if they wished. They weren’t in a hurry, but were establishing a safe zone inside each city and expanding it out, street by street, intent on working their way out towards the shield barrier and making the captured cities theirs.

  Or that’s what it appeared to be. With local media allowed to continue transmitting without being jammed or captured, the American military and the rest of the Solar System watched in detail as the efficient and overly armored Star Force troops made quick work of securing key installations and spreading out their containment zones. As they did that the Americans were organizing counterstrikes on a handful of cities, intent on walking their ground troops underneath the shield edge and engaging the invaders underneath their own protective dome.

  Which is exactly what Kent wanted. His troops could handle the Americans with ease, and had been equipped with special weapons to handle the mechanized troops without killing them, and the same went for their vehicles while the shield would keep their aircraft out of the equation. For the coastal cities the American water navy was in a bad position, for Star Force owned the oceans and could take them out at any point they wanted.

  They made the mistake of assaulting the shield dome over San Diego from the water, and succeeded in temporarily penetrating the energy barrier, dropping several shells onto their own people within the city before the ships sitting off shore suddenly saw a mass of mechanical tentacles popping up out of the water and wrapping around the American ships. The tentacles snapped off their weapon batteries, gouging out cuts and scrapes all over their armored hulls, then released them, disappearing back underwater and reappearing beneath other ships.

  Some of the American ships had subsurface weapons, which the source of the tentacles had to disable, which resulted in hull punctures. Automated seals popped into place, keeping the ships afloat, but Rikku, who was overseeing the aquatics operations from the same command center that Kent was working out of, didn’t take the chance of one of them sinking and ordered the Kraken-class cruisers to remove them from the ‘bathtub’ altogether.

  The mass of tentacles reappeared along the sides of those ships, with a few wrapping around the top as they took hold of them from below and lifted them up into the air via anti-grav, exposing the mechanical monsters lurking beneath the water.

  The cruisers looked like sea creatures, each with six legs and two massive arms that ended in a bouquet of tentacles that were wrapping up the elongated American ships that were about a third smaller than the kraken. Both floated low over the waves, with the Star Force aquatics warship bringing the American ship to the shore and depositing it on the beach more or less upright as it landed in the water alongside. Gradually its tentacles withdrew, pushing here and there to position the ship correctly, then it walked back out into the Pacific and sunk beneath the waves as its twins deposited the other damaged American ships up and down the water’s edge.

  Kent rather liked those visuals, which the news vids were blasting across their networks. They didn’t know Star Force possessed such ships, let alone could own the American navy in such an impertinent way, which made the irony of the attacks that much sweeter. All across the coverage that more and more people were becoming glued to were instances of Star Force coming in and taking what they wanted, seemingly unstoppable, but without them killing a single person and in many instances, such as the grounding of the water ships, deliberately preserving the life of those who were fighting them.

  That point, Kent knew, was critical, for even before the nations could hope to spin the events to their favor the people were getting the raw footage and seeing the care Star Force was taking to secure their targets even as the American military deployed to counter them.

  Which was where the next phase of the plan was taking place…this one off the news vids. As the American military bases sent out their counterattacking forces, Archon teams preplaced nearby were moving into position to quietly hit those bases and neutralize their refueling/rearming capability. Red and Blue teams were among more than 1300 high level Archons split up into small teams to conduct their sabotage that was scheduled to begin in a matter of hours.

  Once they took out their targets, nipping at the bases rather than trying to capture them, the American troops already deployed in the field would have a time limit on their battle readiness, after which this invasion would essentially be over. Without the ability to refuel and rearm, the mechs and vehicles would run dry and grind to a halt, while their infantry would end up as target practice for Star Force’s own mechs and ground troops as they stunned them en mass.

  Their aircraft would expend their fuel and land…only to find no operational refuelers, essentially grounding the craft without
them taking any damage. The military would try to secure civilian supplies to compensate, but Kent had taken that into consideration and had tertiary teams already staking out those supply depots, ready to secure/disable them when the time came.

  Until then his forces simply had to hide out underneath the bubble shields, taking their time securing their target cities and holding off the ground troops when they arrived, which Kent was confident they could do without problem. While Star Force’s military power was unquestioned by Earth, the planet hadn’t seen them in action for centuries. What happened out on the lizard front was ‘covered’ by the media in the form of basic reports Star Force sent them, meaning Earth had no idea how powerful the Archons and their troops really were, though they were getting an education at present.

  As he watched, more tiny sectors in the cities flicked over to blue as the Americans clumsily assembled their troops and sent them their way from exterior military bases, with those bases inside the target cities having been hit a matter by saboteur squads moments before the main assaults began.

  Those attacks had been the most tenuous, with Kent assigning his best troops to them, and to their credit they’d completed their missions without incident, keeping the aircraft on the ground and disabling many of their mechs and vehicles before they could take to the city streets.

  Everything was going as planned, with what would end up being two weeks of attitude adjustment on the part of the Americans as Star Force demonstrated time and again how outmatched they were. Eventually it was the city mayors who began surrendering, followed by a handful of states while the President kept organizing the national government’s resistance to the Star Force invasion from a series of hidden locations around the country.

  He soon became little more than a talking head as more and more cities surrendered, most of which hadn’t seen a single Archon within their borders, followed up by a handful of military units that hadn’t yet been captured/engaged. Over the following month a landslide of surrenders came forth as the previously unseen divisions within the country fragmented and the often rebellious Americans started making their own decisions once the President and Congress were seen to be out of the loop.