Star Force: Endless Crusade Read online

  1

  May 13, 3638

  Titamin System (Voku Firewall territory)

  Shamash

  Ra-jor dropped from the shield square he was standing on inside the Voku transport and immediately went into freefall, using his flight harness to slow his descent as he and his 15 brothers were thrown into a losing fight. His feet hit tree branches after a few seconds, tripping him up as his forward momentum caused him to roll while the transport accelerated hard above them to escape the Skarron fighter swarms hounding it. Voku attack shards operating off a control spire countered them, but there were so many enemy craft in the air no one was safe, hence the not so gentle drop-off of Ra-jor’s elite phalanx as what was left of the planet was evacuating as fast as possible.

  Between the impacts with the plants and his flight harness, the Voku eventually broke their fall and landed on the dry, dusty ground beneath the yellow leaves that obscured the sky. Almost as soon as they touched down they were on the run, and it only took 18 seconds before they encountered the first of the Aronsic ground troops assaulting the last holdout on the planet.

  Ra-jor didn’t fire when he saw them, rather maintaining his forward left position in their 4x4 formation. He wore various pieces of equipment over his black body suit, maintaining his agility without having armor on and relying on sturdy energy shields for protection, but given a situation like this his phalanx needed extra defense. Thus he and 7 others were carrying physical shields, his over his left shoulder and extending almost all the way to the ground. It was heavy but necessary, leaving the other 8 Voku free to fire while he and the rest of the shield bearers protected the unit.

  Those free to fire did so without hesitation, mowing down the small, but thick creatures with shots from their forearm weaponry and a few larger blasts as they worked their way out of the trees onto the plains around the besieged city where there were tens of thousands of the Aronsic attacking in the other direction.

  They were accompanied by many Skarrons, mostly scattered amongst their ground troops as commanders, as several walkers fired from range on the city buildings while the Voku fought a desperate fight to hold out long enough to evacuate those left on the planet. This wasn’t a civilian world, rather a formerly uninhabited one that the Voku had colonized along the border in addition to others taken from the Skarrons prior to the Crusade. They formed the Firewall territory that was taking the hit from the Skarrons and delaying the assault on the Voku’s original worlds.

  That meant everyone here were combat troops or logistics personnel, and they were all fighting hard to buy time and slow the seemingly unstoppable Skarron advance, for no matter how many the Voku killed ten times that should show up and keep pushing through the losses. They’d already taken the entire planet save for this last refuge, having to blast through extremely strong deflector shields to do it, and right now the only thing saving the remaining Voku was the massive conglomerate overhead.

  And not just overhead, it was literally blocking out all of the sky save for a sliver of horizon, and it wasn’t even in atmosphere. It was the largest Ra-jor had ever seen, and there was an even larger Skarron fleet beyond the umbrella-shaped ship that was cradling the evacuation craft all the while fighting an insane naval battle with most of its weaponry moved to the outward curve.

  But beneath it, with the city’s shield generators already destroyed, was the last bit of ‘safe space’ left, except that was a bad name for it. There was a ground and aerial war taking place here of epic proportions and his phalanx had just been dropped on an apparent suicide mission along with numerous others spread at intervals as they counterattacked the Aronsic swarms from behind…with their only avenue of escape being to fight through them to the evacuation transports in the center of the city.

  It was a mission that he and the others hadn’t hesitated to take, for they were here to kill Skarrons and their servant Aronsic to delay their advance into true Voku territory as long as they could. They’d been fighting the Skarrons for the past 18 years in heavy combat, and lesser so before as they created the Firewall in preparation for the Crusade that could be seen coming across the stars. It was here to fight the Li’vorkrachnika, but as long as 90% of the Skarron Empire’s military was in one region, they were going to clean house on all their enemies, including the Voku.

  As bad as this was, and as numerous and powerful that the Fourth Crusade was proving to be, even the Skarrons weren’t touching Star Force and their fight against the V’kit’no’sat. That battle was beyond even their arrogance and the Skarrons were staying out of it, but everything else on their to-do list in this part of the galaxy was now getting a dose of overkill.

  Ra-jor continued to hold his physical shield steady over his left shoulder as the phalanx ran out into the open, shooting their way into the masses until they were literally surrounded by the short infantry that was less than half their 8 foot height. Being that tall they drew fire from hundreds of the Aronsic simultaneously, but the heavy energy shield being produced by Ra-jor’s physical shield in conjunction with the other 7 gave them as much protection as a ground transport so long as they stayed within the necessary range.

  And they did, bouncing around a bit as Aronsic passed through the energy shield like it didn’t exist. Ra-jor punched and kicked as many as he shot with his free hand when they got between him and his fellow Voku, for they were spaced far enough apart to allow hand to hand combat without running into each other as they plowed through the inferior Aronsic along with other similar phalanxes nearby, but Ra-jor couldn’t see much of them.

  His focus was on his unit and what was ahead, with several of the Skarrons moving towards them. They were even bigger than the Voku, standing taller but massing far more. They were heavy quadrupeds with four insect-like arms arching off their back and capped with heavy weapons that began to track their way.

  The lead of this phalanx, Bi-tor, altered their carnage direction towards the nearest one, with all 16 Voku running up on it and splitting up. The huge shield covering them all ended and Ra-jor was free to move more. He switched his shield from ‘emitting’ mode to ‘encapsulation,’ making him almost impervious to incoming damage as it enhanced his own personal shields exponentially.

  With that protection he ran towards the Skarron’s front right leg and grabbed hold of it, pinning his right forearm against the yellowish flesh firing into it nonstop as he clung to it. Likewise the other Voku took similar positions around the exposed legs, for this Skarron was not an elite and fully armored, but its flesh was thick and resistant to weaponsfire on its own…yet the Voku weaponry was too advanced. The Skarron was damaged greatly even before two of the fighters in the phalanx jumped up on top of its flat back and shot down between the shoulder joints where the thing’s brain was, for it had no head, only a mouth and eyes inset into the thick torso.

  Within a matter of seconds the phalanx had killed and overran it, reforming on the other side with Ra-jor switching his shield back to ‘emitting’ mode and covering his brethren who had their own shields now diminished from the Aronsic shots continuing to come in from all directions. There were so many blue plasma blasts coming towards them the neon flashes overwhelmed the sea of grey muscle, but for the moment the phalanx was alright, for their shield generators were far more advanced than the enemy weaponry.

  The Voku continued to punch, kick, and blast a path through the sea of infantry at rapid pace, heading for the closest of the buildings ahead that was already overrun, but before they got there one of the smaller walkers to the far right turned its spherical blue mass and fired on another phalanx. Ra-jor’s brothers split up and went evasive, reforming soon thereafter and continuing forward, but that salvo seemed to get the attention of the o
ther walkers ahead as some of them turned around and started to come out from between the Voku buildings to target the phalanxes.

  They didn’t seem to care that they were killing their own infantry with almost every shot, for the Voku were up to their knees with the little Aronsic that were literally jumping over each other to try and tackle the larger aliens, but the Voku were so strong they could flick them off with ease. Many were killed by the blows, but others were literally vaporized by the heavy plasma coming from the walkers. It was blue in color, unlike the white and green the Voku had fought against in the past. Each Skarron region/faction had its own coloration, and no less than 12 of them had shown up in Voku territory thus far.

  But their equipment was all the same, despite the color changes, so the Voku knew what they were up against and even as the phalanxes were grouping, dispersing, and grouping again trying to mitigate the ranged walker damage, several Voku fighters zipped in and fired on the nearest one. They shot it enough to get the shields down, then several dark drops were deposited on it…with Ra-jor realizing there were other Voku physically assaulting the mechanized assault craft.

  That was even more reckless than what the phalanxes were doing, but at this point there was no good way to fight this enemy. The Voku were hopelessly outnumbered, and if they didn’t delay their advance long enough the landing zones would be overrun and everyone left on the planet would die. So really it didn’t matter where they died, so long as they fought well enough to buy some more time for the others to get out.

  Ra-jor didn’t know if he’d make it or not, but he and the other Voku were so incensed at what was happening they truly didn’t care. There were enemies all around them and their mission was to destroy as much of them as they could as a diversion, and that’s exactly what they were doing leaving a trail of dead Aronsic and a few Skarrons behind them while getting some help from the enemy walkers that were killing far more Aronsic than they were Voku.

  But Voku were going down, and Ra-jor’s phalanx lost one directly next to him when they had to split. His shields were already down, then a direct hit from the thick blue plasma hit him in the head, burning it off completely in an explosion of superheated body parts that knocked Ra-jor to the side. There was nothing left of Bo-sec to go back for, so he and the others kept moving on until Ti-sov got hit in the leg, with it being blown off below the knee and him dropping to the ground in a roll that had him come up in a stranglehold on an Aronsic that he used to snap its neck.

  Ra-jor turned around even as Ti-sov told the others to keep going, but he wasn’t going to listen. The Phalanx moved on, as they should, but Ra-jor wasn’t going to leave Ti-sov. They’d been fighting together for hundreds of years, and if they were going to die in this Crusade then they’d go down together as well, so Ra-jor shot the Aronsic nearest him then dove on top while reconfiguring his physical shield to emit a binary barrier that would cover both of them.

  “Leave!” Ti-sov yelled as he continued to shoot and punch from his position on the ground despite the intense pain.

  “Why?” Ra-jor asked almost calmly as both of them were fighting so fast and hard it was almost comical with them batting Aronsic out of the air as they jumped at them while having a conversation. “This way I help you kill more before you go down.”

  “You fool,” Ti-sov said, using both forearms as Ra-jor shielded for him to shoot, then while standing behind him he took a shot from the nearest walker. His enhanced shield protected them, but it drained it heavily and he knew they couldn’t take very many more of those despite the Voku’s tech advantage.

  “Get out of here!”

  “Not happening!” Ra-jor said as he saw out of the corner of his eyepiece the walker suddenly fall to the Voku ‘tics’ tearing into it and finally getting inside to kill the crew, so at least they didn’t have that one hammering them. “Skarron on the left!”

  “Throw me!”

  Ra-jor didn’t argue, leaning over and picking up his fellow warrior by the arm and swinging him halfway around a circle before launching him over the enemy infantry. The jump harness on the Voku helped, launching him up and over a wall of Aronsic to the topside of the Skarron that batted him out of the air with one of its massive arms.

  Ti-sov wasn’t defeated that easily, grabbing hold of the arm as it hit him and not letting go. He was flung back and forth, but before the Skarron could remove him the weapon gauntlet on that arm was destroyed by Ti-sov’s forearm gauntlets, and in the distraction Ra-jor pulled an enhanced jump over the Aronsic and got just in front of the Skarron, landing on one of the wide infantry heads and jumping again up on top of the Skarron’s back where he grabbed Ti-sov’s arm and pulled him down there as well, with both of them firing into the hard back skin until the brute went down.

  The two of them stayed on top of it, forcing the Aronsic to climb up to get to them, and that was where they held their final defiant battle. Their shields eventually succumbed to the little infantry’s weapons, with no walkers or aerial craft bothering to intervene. When their shields went down the two Voku fought hand to hand until the plasma stings added up and the Aronsic climbed over their dead to get to and finish off both of them…but only after the Voku pair took out over 2,000 of the pathetic enemy infantry.

  Bi-tor and 6 of their phalanx did manage to fight their way through the enemy army back to the failing Voku defense line, hopping over the barricades and adding to the defenses as the last few evac transports landed and transformed, opening up into huge chambers that made them look like inflated balls that then lifted off again with as many troops inside as possible.

  Bi-tor got into the second to last one, having to kick Aronsic out the door as it closed, then the bloated transport ascended under fighter attack up through the atmosphere and into the void beneath the cover of the massive conglomerate. There were a few weapons batteries on this side that swatted away the fighters that got through to chase them, then the transport was the in the clear and moved through space until it got to the underside of the giant umbrella as it too began to transform.

  The far edges began to pull in as the last transports and the Voku fighters were making their way up from the atmosphere, with the weaponry on the outside of those edges rolling under so they could fire on the planet. A curtain of energy fell all around them in a giant ring that was slowly collapsing on the evac site, blasting into the Skarron forces below and deleting them from existence…but along with that pullback of the edge of the conglomerate came the Skarron navy, and they were even more numerous than their ground forces.

  Their large and clumsy ships tried to scoot around the edges and get underneath the conglomerate, punching through the waterfall of energy to come through partly damaged, but they were too far away to catch the transports that slipped inside various cavities in the conglomerate and were now ‘safe’ within the hangar bays…so long as the conglomerate didn’t get destroyed.

  Bi-tor and the others exited quickly with the help of melting walls as they stood on the floor of the transport that was now the floor of the hangar. He ran off it and further into the massive ship as it continued to transform, with him having to stop twice as he received holographic warnings to hold position while corridors ahead were shifted around him as the giant umbrella slowly became an lengthy orb that was fighting its way through the Skarron fleet on its way to a jump point away from the planet that the enemy did not want them to access.

  In the end they couldn’t stop them, with the Voku killing and physically pushing through the enemy ships and sacrificing the outer layers of the conglomerate to get in the clear, then they made the microjump out to the star and from there left the system that was now fully in Skarron hands.

  The damaged parts of the conglomerate rotated as it reformed during the jump, then the ship split into 18 different pieces during the coast phase, with each decelerating on their own at the next system. From there they split up, with Bi-tor riding on one piece to another Firewall system under assault and the surviving Voku troops f
rom Shamash being flung back down into a surface fight that had not progressed as far. The Voku still held more than half of Viioran, but the Skarrons had just as many troops here as they had on Shamash, meaning there were plenty for Bi-tor to kill.

  And kill he would, along with the rest of his brothers, until they were dead or the enemy ran out of troops.

  And no one knew which eventuality would occur first.

  2

  May 30, 3638

  Bavrenti System (Voku Regional Capitol)

  Hakibi

  “Titamin has fallen, along with Sokuzu and Varetiv,” Renimar Noru-sar said, summarizing the reports as they came up in hologram for Cal-com and his small oracle staff to see. “Six new assaults have begun and 28 worlds are set to fall within two weeks. At this rate, the Skarrons are likely to penetrate the Firewall in no more than two years.”

  “Less, I fear,” the Dafchor said, staring at the holographic pinpoints on the starmap of the buffer zone they’d created on the orders of the Elders, and which was the only thing right now protecting his people’s territory from the Skarron Crusade…but for how long?

  “We have to disrupt the flow,” Noru-sar repeated. “We can’t stop these numbers if they’re allowed to arrive and the navigational blocks will not be enough. We have to hit them before they get here.”

  “All our vessels are tied up in defensive operations. Where would you pull this raiding force from?”

  “Everywhere else. It is pointless to guard against other threats when one of this magnitude is before us. Strip the defenses elsewhere and assemble as large a fleet as we can, then pick an appropriate spot in their supply lines and hit it. At the minimum it would delay their arrival, and if we could get them chasing us through their backwater it could prove far more helpful than fighting them directly.”

  “I don’t disagree.”