Star Force: Rajamal (SF97) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  1

  April 3, 3593

  Unknown System

  Unknown Planet

  The standard variant lizard in command of this cruiser didn’t have a name. His operational identity was ‘captain’ and he was the primary of the two ships assigned to this mission. The other captain would follow his orders where necessary, but both of them would primarily follow well-established protocol regarding expeditionary missions such as this.

  He’d been born some 18 years ago, having fought in three separate ground battles before being reassigned to ship command crew. He’d spent the past 8 years there, partaking in a total of 29 space battles against various primitive civilizations that the Li’vorkrachnika were conquering as well as a wealth of mundane patrol, escort, and guardian missions as crew before being assigned to a newly constructed ship as its captain.

  He’d then engaged in a defensive battle over a moderately developed Li’vorkrachnika world that a local power was contesting. His experience there was what had given him the lead command on this mission, for the other captain had no combat experience in full command. Neither of them had expeditionary command experience, but the protocols regarding such things were so well defined that there was no need to specialize that heavily.

  Their assignment was simple…travel into a lightly scouted region and put down infrastructure roots on a planet owned by someone else and take control of the planet. The cruiser he’d been given had been configured for expeditionary missions, meaning the necessary startup equipment was buried inside along with the genetic material to grow more Li’vorkrachnika as needed. As for how to conduct a mission such as this, well that was easy. A combination of data files, genetic memories, and adaptation was all that was required, and given the single existing small colony on this planet, a pair of cruisers should be enough in the way of assets to plant the industrial seed.

  The tech level of the colony in question was uncertain but guessed to be high, thus two cruisers had been sent to spur the growth faster than normal. That said, he was not to engage the colony directly. That was ingrained into his genetics in such a way that neither he nor another mission commander would make that mistake. His two ships were meant to land and build an army that would later attack, meaning his insertion to the planet was going to occur on the far side and out of view of the single city that had no orbital constructs or ships visible. It was simply a few small structures spread over no more than 3 square miles, but trails into the surrounding area and what looked to be auxiliary structures/sites placed around the perimeter indicated that whoever owned this world had been here a while.

  Their identity was one item on the captain’s list of things to discover, for if these inhabitants proved to be too powerful to conquer then it was his responsibility to relay that information back, then a decision would be made whether or not to follow up with more assets or to avoid this location until regional strength increased. Only on the odd chance than the local owners were far more powerful would the Li’vorkrachnika pass them over, and if it took the death of a couple of cruisers to figure that out then so be it. Exploration was necessary in order for them to expand, and simply taking scans from orbit did not tell you enough about new races being encountered. Battle would tell far more.

  So the captain brought both cruisers down to the surface next to one another in a jungle region where the trees grew so tall they came up halfway on the starships. Nestled down in between nearby ridges they were hidden from all but overhead scans and the first thing he ordered was for additional camouflage measures be enacted on the upper hull to match the surrounding foliage.

  To accomplish that they uprooted many of the trees beneath their landing zones before they touched the surface and relocated them up top. It took several weeks of work, but by the time they were finished his command cruiser was almost completely buried beneath a thin layer of dirt with living trees spreading out their pink/green foliage over top the site. Nearby the second cruiser sat much more in the open and ready to take flight for operations across the planet or into orbit as needed, but if someone did see this location it was more than likely they would only spot the one ship, thus allowing him to hide the second in plain sight beside it for few would expect camouflage of one right next to the exposed other.

  It was an old trick, and while the crew of the exposed cruiser scurried across the jungle floor scouting and prepping the immediate area, shafts were being dug beneath the command ship going out laterally and down into the bedrock where they would begin mining ore deposits scanned upon approach.

  Other resources would be harvested in close proximity, then trails and tunnels would extend out further to establish secondary sites as the infrastructure web began to grow. When sufficient foodstuff production was established new lizards would be grown and the workforce increased, and from that point on his operation on this world would snowball so long as they were left alone.

  He didn’t probe the city or surveil it at all for several months, but eventually he began sending out scouts in small transports to establish listening posts across the planet, slowly creeping their way around until they could observe the city from afar. Not underestimating their sensing capacity, he gave orders to stay hidden and bring no flying assets within line of sight over the curve of the planet, meaning his scouts had to travel by foot for hundreds of miles just to get in position to plant automated surveillance devices that could monitor aerial traffic from afar.

  But there was none for a very long time. It was two years before he saw the first ship arrive, slightly bigger than one of his cruisers, and it moved straight down to the colony, landing there and staying for 8 days before leaving again. After that he saw no more ships, nor any planetary aerial craft flying over the colony, which emboldened him to send scouts in for a closer look. The acceleration profile of that ship indicated very powerful gravity drives, suggesting that this race was more advanced than the Li’vorkrachnika. If that was the case, then this mission had greater importance than just claiming the planet. He had to engage them in effective battle in order to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses.

  The jumpship that had dropped off the two cruisers in this system didn’t return for another year, at which time he submitted his report and it carried it off as it cycled from one expeditionary site to another delivering a few needed supplies, in this case corovon, and keeping a link between worlds that had not developed the invading presence to the point of building interstellar communications or jumpships. The captain’s mission here would remain off the grid unless visits were made to update the rest of the Li’vorkrachnika as to their progress, but per his orders the jumpship never arrived when the far side of the planet was visible in order to hide its approach.

  With the corovon supplements the captain was able to advance their construction rate by adding more specialized equipment fabricated from mostly local resources harvested, and in turn that allowed them to seek out and utilize more of the planet’s natural wealth. Meanwhile data on the planet was continually expanded. Local areas were intricately mapped by patrols with surveillance devices cleverly hidden in the terrain monitoring the local wildlife and anything else that moved. Such devices were also extended up near to the colony where they began seeing small activity of the local inhabitants…

  Which is where everything started to go wrong. After the first automated report of concealed bipeds about twice as tall as the Li’vorkrachnika being spotted in the evergreen forests around the colony, the devices began to go offline and the living patrols he had around the perimeter failed to check in. Before he could mount a stronger reconnaissance the supply encampments between the colony
and the long hike back around the planet started disappearing.

  There was no sign of aerial craft, nor any ground vehicles detected, but one by one the encampments dropped off the grid and the surveillance devices around them shut down before they could register anyone nearby. All the captain knew of was the loss of sites on his information grid, and as the weeks went by the loss of assets passed by the midline mark between their landing site and the colony with the implication of the outages eventually backtracking to their primary base. How they were tracking and identifying every hidden outpost he didn’t know, but whoever was on this world with them was demonstrating abilities beyond his current understanding.

  He needed to get eyes on them, whoever they were, before they got to his two and a half cruisers, for a shipyard with a partially constructed hull was sitting next to the pair and ready to churn out more with necessary expansions as resources allowed. So far the losses to his operations were minimal, but if this blackout continued to get within 1/8th of the planet’s curve from them his major mining sites would be jeopardized…and he couldn’t allow that to happen.

  So he assembled a significant army of standard variants, producing enough small arms to equip them and assuming he’d lose them all, and sent them out through the network via small troop transports and deposited them well short of the blackout line. From there they moved out on foot and took up position at one hybrid supply/hunting camp and dug in, planting numerous surveillance devices as well as having distant observers that would run away on foot the moment they saw what was happening. The captain had to know what it was he was fighting, and this recently constructed army of over 4,000 was going to be the bait in order to get at least one message or messenger back to him with some reconnaissance so he would know what he needed to adapt to.

  It worked. For while the entire force was wiped out and the automated surveillance was shut down before it could even send a diagnostic ping through the network, three scouts looking through basic telescopic cameras observed what should not have been here. Two bipeds, and only two bipeds, assaulted the army in a clearing established so they could have good lines of sight on them, and the images the captain were looking at pricked his genetic memories.

  He had never seen an Archon before, but the strength, speed, body type, and bizarre abilities these were displaying matched them perfectly. He knew what they were, with the knowledge bred into him that he could not beat them with so few assets. Even if there were only the two on the entire planet that would be enough to stop his limited development, and there was no way of knowing how many more they had in that colony.

  They shouldn’t have been here. This expeditionary mission was on the coreward side of Li’vorkrachnika territory opposite that from the Star Force border. If this altered armor, buildings, and ships were a means for them to conduct surveillance of regions far from their region anonymously then that was a vital piece of information that the templars needed to be made aware of.

  But the captain didn’t think his forces would last long enough for the next jumpship to arrive, and if it did it might very well be destroyed if Star Force was now alerted to their presence. He had to get the information back himself, and that either meant building an interstellar transmitter powerful enough to reach the closest link in the chain…which wasn’t possible given the ranges involved…or he had to take a cruiser back at the highest jump speed it was capable of maintaining and suffer through the long, slow coast phase and hope to rendezvous with the jumpship prior to its arrival here.

  Either that or get to the next closest expeditionary location, which as far as he’d been informed was some 83 lightyears away. That’d take his cruiser 17 years unless upgrades to the engines were made, and that was assuming their supplies would last that long, which they wouldn’t.

  So the captain began cannibalizing his two intact cruisers while pouring all available resources into the partially constructed hull, increasing its number of gravity drives while configuring it for as small a crew as possible. Meanwhile everyone else began prepping the base for the eventual attack and establishing all manner of traps at the surrounding bases in the hopes of slowing down or perhaps even killing one of the Archons.

  That was unlikely, but the progression across the planet suggested that they didn’t have too many of them and that they were eliminating every instance of Li’vorkrachnika invasion rather than heading straight to the primary base. At the very least they should have been making a more direct route, assuming they were tracking communications links or raiding the memories of his troops, but they weren’t. They were taking down everything in closest proximity to their colony and working outward methodically, giving him more time to build.

  To that end he also established a lot more little bases out there, spread as far as he could, and made sure to interlink them all so they could be found. If this clearing methodology was going to continue to hold, then he could use it to his advantage to buy himself more time to build.

  And it worked, for the little bases did draw attacks that spared the others for more days, though the rate of them falling suggested that there were more than 2 Archons in play. No matter, though. However many there were they were coming here and the race was for resources and construction, the latter of which wasn’t possible on many fronts that required more infrastructure than he currently had, namely the production of jumpship-caliber gravity drives.

  So what he did was pull drives off the two existing cruisers and add them to those being built fresh, using bulk rather than quality of design to trim years off the journey and even foregoing the placement of weapons on the new ship. If Star Force was here and had naval assets in play, then it wouldn’t matter whether it was armed or not. It would be easily destroyed, so there was no need to waste materiel or weight on them, and the lighter the ship was the faster it would go.

  Using every industrial protocol and genetic memory available to him, the captain succeeded in getting the third cruiser built before the closest perimeter bases fell. He assigned the other captain to the ship along with a crew of 6 and stuffed as many supplies into it as they could, both fuel and foodstuffs, then launched the ship along with the second cruiser that accompanied it up to orbit ready to run interference if necessary, but no ships emerged. The messenger ship made the microjump out to the star and eventually signaled back that it was in the clear before it made its long interstellar jump carrying the vital information back to the templars…assuming it would make it.

  That was beyond the captain’s ability to control now. His duty to the message was now complete, but his mission here was not. He was to conquer the planet, which was now totally unlikely with the presence of Star Force…yet they only had a small outpost here and an unspecified number of Archons. If they could be eliminated then it was possible that his forces could at least damage their colony, depending on what other defenses they had. It was a long shot, but one thing his genetic memory made clear was that whenever you had an opportunity to kill an Archon you took it. No matter what the cost.

  He had two ships left, but he wasn’t going to risk flying them into hidden weaponry at the colony. On ground reconnaissance would be required first, and that wasn’t going to happen with Archons hunting down and eliminating every scouting party and base he had. They had to be the target, and he only had one weapon capable of defeating them.

  His cruisers. But if he brought them in and bombarded the next location they hit, assuming he could get them there before the Archons wiped out the next camp, there was no way to guarantee close range bombardment would be able to destroy them if they couldn’t pin them to one location. He didn’t want to lose a cruiser, but with Archons you couldn’t give them an out and expect them not to find a way to take it. He had to attack them in a way they couldn’t defend against, and that left only one option.

  So he arranged another camp, a fresh one in a geographic location that was in a wide, shallow depression and he had his people build up fortifications that would slow and pin the Archons
down once they invaded, even if they attacked from stealth. When the captain’s ranged scouts reported that the blacked out base was under attack, the second cruiser flew out to it and gained altitude, climbing up to just above the atmosphere before reversing course and accelerating through as fast of a microjump as it could manage while maintaining its course.

  The resulting fireball of a cruiser, slicing down through the atmosphere thin edge forward, impacted on top of his own troops...whatever was left of them anyway…and punched them and everything nearby down into the ground in a massive kinetic explosion that was amplified slightly by the concave nature of the landscape.

  The resulting mushroom cloud of dust and debris was visible on the horizon from the main base within minutes, and the captain hoped that whatever Archons had been attacking that base had been delayed long enough to have been caught in the blast. And if he was very lucky it would have been the only ones on the planet, leaving him with a narrow margin for victory if all that remained were secondary troops and a handful of their workers.

  So with his one remaining buried cruiser he began pumping out infantry as fast as he could grow them and he sent scouts back to establish a network of limited camps across the planet to begin scouting the perimeter of the Star Force colony again. If they didn’t go dark then he’d know that the primary threat had been eliminated and he had until another enemy ship arrived to do what damage he could to this outpost.

  Him and his men surviving this mission was not a possibility. They were going to die here, but he intended for them to hurt Star Force as much as possible before then, even if it meant a single enemy soldier or building of theirs being damaged. Li’vorkrachnika were expendable. Star Force troops were not. And any wound inflicted on them would be a victory.

  And he still had one more cruiser to use if needed, though he was going to see how much he could accomplish with ground forces first.