Star Force: Axius (SF47) Page 10

  The beams were not plasma, but a type of energy known as Sa’mo’shtat to the V’kit’no’sat, which was a derivative of mauler energy, save this form was less powerful and able to hold cohesion, for its repulsive nature had been stripped away. That allowed it to be delivered in beam format, but with an intensity and destructive capacity far greater than that of lachars, as well as better range.

  Each of those beams were being targeted by a central control team that fed information out to all of the ships, giving them targets to hit and allowing the individual crews to pick which ones out of the possibilities given to them. As a result you saw multiple beams converging on precise points and persisting for upwards of 10 seconds before a recharge cycle. Each Dvapp ship had 12 such beam weapons, making the confrontation with the Skarron fleet look like a spider’s web of energy coming into contact with a rainfall of white plasma.

  While that heavy battle got underway, for neither side blinked and redeployed, preferring instead to slug it out with their new enemies whose battle strength was untested on both sides, the ground attacks continued with none of the Dvapp ships making it down to the surface to assist, which they were more than capable of doing. Instead the Skarron walkers were free to shoot and pillage to their liking while their ground troops assembled behind them at makeshift landing zones, depositing Skarrons and Hobbits into the hot, humid, ashy environment that still hadn’t completely recovered from the moon’s impact.

  The workers deployed there ran and hid inside structures, not having anything to defend themselves with aside from personal firearms and the defense turrets…which had already been smoked by the Skarrons. The ships in the bowl-like shipyards were not operational, leaving them sitting ducks for when the enemy got to them, having first to blast through the underside of the ‘bowls’ to get a clear shot at the ships. Huge plumes of liquid drained out onto the ground, covering the rocky surface with a blue/white sparkly soup that the needle-like legs of the walkers stood within as they opened up yet more holes, finally firing through them to hit the partially formed ships.

  When the infantry finally caught up the liquid pools had been drained and spread out across the landscape, leaving nothing but puddles behind for them to trudge through enroute to the crystal buildings, whereupon the Hobbits entered first in search of the occupants while the Skarrons patrolled the streets, establishing a perimeter and laying claim to the structures.

  When the first Hobbit team got to the buildings they couldn’t find the doors, or rather they couldn’t open them, for there were no switches or handles. Eventually they blasted through the crystalline structure with their plasma rifles and went inside single file, finding triangular hallways with the narrow peak up top, realizing there was no way their Skarron masters would be able to fit inside…but that wasn’t uncommon, for many of the races they conquered built equally ‘small’ infrastructure, which was the primary reason why the Skarrons had annexed the Aronsic into their empire.

  The first of the Hobbits came through and stopped to the left, letting the next come in and join up beside him so they could form a 2-man wide column that slowly proceeded down the hallway and up to an intersection, passing by a door that was equally closed off, with some of the Hobbits in the back stopping to blast it open, knowing that they couldn’t leave any portion of the building unchecked.

  When the first Hobbits moved into the intersection, the one on the right saw a giant white fist/glob swing around in front of it and smash into its face. It dented slightly as his face broke into a mess of blood and his body was knocked back into the group, bowling several others over in the process. The Hobbit beside him fired at the bipedal mass, blowing out tiny crystal shards as a plasma blast hit its midsection, making a small crater that disappeared as the thing took a heavy step towards him and punched it with the other handless arm, splattering it against the wall when the smaller alien got caught between the two.

  More rifle barrels came up and opened fire, with the Dvapp screaming a high pitched sound and ducking off down the other side of the intersection and out of view. The Hobbits ran after it, turning the corner and firing as they saw it lean forward in the distance and dive onto its belly…only to melt into a long, snake-like pylon that whipped down the hall and turned the next corner, gripping the far wall and pulling the rest of its body out of firing range as quick as possible.

  The Hobbits chased after it, with the third pair forward getting ambushed as a different Dvapp came out a side door that was closed until the first pair passed it, then the material melted and pulled aside, with another bipedal form stepping out and hammering both Hobbits with a massive jab that took its arm all the way across the hall and splashed its hand against the far wall…whereupon it melted and dropped to the ground in a splash, only to reach out two tentacles and wrap them around the nearest Hobbits.

  With a crunch it constricted their thick chests, breaking ribs before tossing one each way to knock down the others as it took a few rifle shots. With the distractions it slithered towards the front few, of which only one was now standing, and tripped it up from underneath. The Dvapp caught the Hobbit as it fell, reforming its bipedal form underneath as it stood up, Hobbit in ‘hand,’ and threw the thing towards the others before running ahead and ducking out of sight around the next bend.

  The remaining Hobbits held their ground and waited, calling for reinforcements that arrived a few minutes later. Then, as a more combined group squeezed three wide to get more rifles into play, they moved up over the bodies of their dead and down the hallways, making extra sure to shoot open any doors they came across to avoid another ambush. They got through an entire level of the building with no contacts, then came to an opening in the roof that was the Dvapp equivalent of stairs, with no way to get up…other than to stand on top of each other and lift.

  The first Hobbit they sent up made it through and onto its feet on the second story, as did the second, but when the third went up the other two were missing…and suddenly it was grabbed and pulled up the rest of the way, disappearing through the hole and causing the Hobbits below to pull back, not wanting to get grabbed themselves.

  They fired up into the next level, blasting out a bit of crystal around the edges and making the hole bigger, but there was nothing they could do but go up there and get taken out one by one so they pulled back out of the building and called for support…which came in the form of heavy plasma blasts hitting the building itself from a nearby Type-3 walker.

  With the infantry clear the white rain fell, busting through the outer layers of the building and continuing to core into the interior without pause. There were so many plasma cannons on the Skarron walker that they continued in sequence, firing nonstop and pulverizing half the building until they finally readjusted their aim skyward as a topaz beam hit the machine.

  That beam was followed by three others, all impacting on top where the anti-air cannon was blasting away at the warship descending from above. The walker’s shields went down quickly under the linked fire, with the lachar cannon getting slagged almost instantly as the glowing green warship descended out of the ash clouds at higher altitude and drew fire from numerous walkers…but other green spots appeared in the clouds, faint at first, then turning to bright crystal as they dropped down as well, crisscrossing their beam cannons, which the Archons referred to as ‘Sammies,’ and melted through the Skarron armor like a hot knife through butter.

  Holes were cored into their interior in less than a minute, slagging and vaporizing internal components as the Dvapp probed their enemies, finding out where the vulnerable points were and taking out the walkers as their cruisers soaked up the enemy plasma storms with their potent shields.

  The enemy infantry scattered, wanting to go back to their landing zone but it was also coming under attack, with the Skarron transports that had remained on the surface being targeted as well. Once destroyed, the Dvapp warships moved on to other targets, methodically and efficiency burning their enemies out with their sustained beams that
put Star Trek phasers to shame.

  When the walkers finally went down over one location, the other warships save for one moved off to hunt down other enemy groups, leaving a single cruiser behind to hit the infantry. To do that it came low to the ground, so low that the Hobbits almost felt like ducking as a number of much smaller beam weapons broke out, throwing hundreds of little streaks of yellow down to the ground and precisely targeting each enemy soldier, whether they be Skarron or Hobbit, though the Skarrons required more than one beam in most cases, especially the armored ones.

  Having nowhere else to run, the Hobbits went into the remaining Dvapp structures, blasting through doors and trying to get away from the pointblank naval bombardment…but they didn’t last long inside, as the Dvapp workers stalked them throughout the buildings, killing them one or two at a time in a bloody game of cat and mouse, with only a handful of the denizens carrying their own weapons. Those looked more like a Star Trek phaser, firing a quick, continuous beam from a shard-like crystal weapon that the Dvapp carried around inside their bodies until they needed to use it, but it was quickly evident that they didn’t need it, for they were doing just fine slaughtering the Hobbits hand to hand.

  Within a few hours the Skarron invasion of the planetary structures came to an abrupt halt, with their ground assault force unexpectedly annihilated and their naval force fleeing for their lives as the lesser number of Dvapp warships proved too lethal to survive. 23 Skarron vessels got away, not including transports, taking with them the combat recordings and news that this potential weak link in the ADZ was not so weak at all, and in fact was more lethal than the Protovic and Star Force had been prior to their Sentinels showing up.

  But then again, there had been a reason the Bsidd had worked so hard to bring the Dvapp into the Alliance, and why the lizards had targeted them so aggressively once they had them at a disadvantage. They were a formidable race, and even given their egregious losses and having to rebuild in an entirely new environment, the Dvapp were more than capable of defending themselves against the Skarrons…and now that first blood had been drawn, the vendettive race was not going to sit back and wait for them to strike again.

  The other two system assaults would end in similar failures for the Skarrons, which ultimately gave them what they wanted…an assessment of this new race showing up in droves to colonize the front lines of their widespread push throughout this galactic arm. Intelligence they’d gathered told them that the Dvapp were part of the Alliance, but little more than that. Now they knew, despite their hope they could have established a beachhead straight out.

  But that wasn’t too significant, for there were lots of empty systems out there to set up shop in, despite the Alliance’s constant patrols that kept detecting them and responding with swift attacks to keep them from building up a forward base inside the ADZ. Two such attempts had been made in earnest, and repelled with hard fought campaigns, while more than a hundred smaller ‘sneak’ attempts had been made and easily driven off, prompting the Skarrons to try even more systems further out from the Protovic worlds, attempting to flank the enemy patrols.

  With this latest attempt failing so spectacularly, the Skarron regional commanders called a halt to major combat operations against the Alliance while keeping up probing skirmishes, searching for weaknesses and harassing them as much as possible to gain intelligence and do what damage they could. Without having been able to secure Protovic territory and the mounting losses, the Skarrons now wanted time to reassess their enemy’s strength, for they’d been upping their attack forces in what they’d thought were conservative numbers to overcome what had previously been defeats…only to have the Alliance do the same, most notably with the deployment of the Sentinels.

  With confusion over how many ships and troops would be required to secure a foothold against the Alliance, the Skarrons reverted back into planning mode, not having given up their attacks at all, just retooling their strategies as they let their reinforcements pool to significantly larger numbers.

  Star Force took this as a good sign, for it gave them more time to build ships and Sentinels, and the Protovic agreed…but the Dvapp were of another mind and struck back at the nearest Skarron-held worlds with a vengeance, putting them on the defensive for a change and giving the ADZ its first good breather since the Skarron front first opened up some seven decades ago, as well as inspiring a new wave of confidence for those races who had fled to the ADZ ahead of the Skarron advance.

  No longer was it a fools gambit, for now the Alliance had proven teeth, which word of mouth quickly spread through the surrounding regions as the Dvapp made no efforts to be sneaky in their attacks, preferring smash mouth tactics that just annihilated the weaker Skarron outposts then left their rubble behind for all to see as they moved onto other targets, eventually retreating back to the ADZ.

  That alone upped their credibility, which invited a whole new slew of races seeking to join ranks with them or flee behind their defensive lines…as well as making other rimward races rethink the Alliance’s odds of holding out against the lizard juggernaut as it made its way inevitably forward.

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