Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (21-24) Page 16

  One came in directly at him while the other two pulled up, exposing their wide undersides. Boen held his skid, blowing apart one of the ones that pulled up, then accelerated forward and into the Gnar lines, taking down the second one a moment before his fighter’s starboard engine disappeared in an explosion and his skeet tipped over and careened into the ground.

  Boen flinched, then saw a short-lived score in the blackness of the pod before it restarted him again in an undamaged and fully shielded skeet far away from everyone else, with the score now reading 8/4. With him so far off the Gnar started to reengage the Calavari, which Boen didn’t like.

  He switched his comm over to open broadcast so the Gnar could hear him.

  “That’s one for you, 6 for me. Looks like letting the arrogant twit play was a mistake. Is this all you’ve got, Gnar? You’re not even making this hard.”

  To Boen’s satisfaction he saw half the little blips on his sensor board turn and head towards him.

  He switched back over to his squadron’s frequency. “That got their attention. Double up on the others while I keep these busy.”

  “Are you sure? We need you racking up kills,” Gonstan asked.

  “I’ll get a few before they take me down, go pick on their stragglers.”

  There was no response from the Calavari, which was a sign of compliance from them. Boen didn’t have time to worry about it as he lined up a long distance shot and fired off his lachar until he finally got a hit on the lead death glider, then he broke off and led the Gnar over to the other side of the map, pulling them further and further away from the Calavari.

  They eventually realized what he was doing, with half of them turning around and reversing course. When they did Boen flipped over and did a direct reversal, flying straight into their now thinned lines, darting down and to the left to try and shoot through a slightly wider gap, from which he angled up towards one of the rear fighters and fired away with rapid fire single shots, one for each trigger pull on the control bar in his right hand. He exchanged plasma with the fighter, but again his smaller cross section worked to his favor and he downed the fighter before he lost shields, then he pushed forward with as much thrust as his ship could manage, dragging the Gnar behind him for a few seconds before their greater speed brought them back into plasma range.

  Knowing he was about to get spanked he went erratic, literally flying like he was out of control, spinning around his axis while weaving to and fro, making it difficult for the Gnar to predict his path and shoot him…all the while his shields continued to recharge. It was a stalling tactic, but the more time he bought meant the more likely the Calavari were to rack up some more kills given their numerical advantage.

  “Come to us,” Morshav said, with Boen coming out of his spin and weaving side to side as he headed toward a group of three skeets coming from the right, apparently having respawned in that portion of the map.

  He glanced at the score again…15/9.

  “Up or down?” the Calavari asked.

  “I’m going down,” the Archon said, getting his aft shield clipped by a bit of simulated plasma. “Three, two,” he counted down, cutting off his forward thrust and spinning his skeet around again, “one, mark!”

  He dropped his anti-grav down to 10% and fell level towards the ground, tipping his skeet’s nose up slightly and firing back at the approaching Gnar. They followed him down, depressing their angle of flight and showing Morshav and his wingmen their upper sides…which they then stitched with lachar fire. Two of the ships veered off, but one reversed its dive too far, coming up and exposing its underside which quickly took the brunt of Morshav’s plasma as the trio of skeets came within range.

  After that Boen couldn’t see what happened, so busy he was with just staying alive. He took down two more before the Gnar’s numbers finally caught up with him and he found himself respawning along the perimeter again.

  From that point on four of the Gnar stuck to Boen while the others intentionally steered clear, focusing on the Calavari or just getting out of the Human’s way, deeming him too dangerous to go head to head with. Near the end of the engagement the Gnar had finally learned to break off when he flipped over, swing around and reset for another attack run at an angle that didn’t allow for a slow-down. The death gliders had superior speed, which made them especially deadly when they paired up and attacked from different angles, but Boen managed to keep their best pilots at bay long enough to secure their victory, 48/41, with him racking up a kill count of 26.

  When the final kill was registered by one of the Calavari he was relieved, knowing that the Gnar had learned a lot from the battle and that the tactics they’d been practicing wouldn’t work so well in a second match…which he hoped wasn’t going to happen, at least not until the Calavari got more seat time in the skeets. Then again, he doubted they would be cornered into using them instead of their Valeries again.

  Boen popped the canopy after going through the stats, curious as to which of the Calavari had done the best, and choked as the repugnant smell of ammonia drifted into him from the open pods the Gnar had been using.

  “What is wrong?” Gonstan said, placing a hand on Boen’s shoulder as he coughed.

  “That air…is nasty,” he said, pinching his nose as the Gnar stomped off, not bothering to stick around long enough for the Calavari or Boen to gloat.

  “A bit of defiance,” the Calavari said, unaffected by the fumes. “They exited before recycling the pods’ atmosphere.”

  “The air processors are going to take care of that, right?”

  “They should be already,” the four-armed alien said as Mark walked up to the pair, scrunching his nose.

  “Who taught you to fly anyway?”

  “You did,” Boen said, coughing one last time.

  “I taught you not to get shot. You died 5 times.”

  “It was a tradeoff.”

  “Well don’t make a habit of it,” the trailblazer warned, then looked up at Gonstan. “Nice work.”

  “Our thanks for your instruction. Your fighters are difficult to learn. Boen has proved they are effective, but I must say, I thoroughly hate them.”

  Mark laughed. “To each his own. Thanks for upholding the integrity of our design. With you flying and winning in them I think we’ll get a little more respect for the skeets.”

  “I do like your energy weapons, limited in power as they are. Would you be willing to trade for the technology?”

  “Would you be willing to help us modify our skeets with your scattergun?”

  Gonstan smiled with his wide jaw. “I think so. Without it your ships are not nearly effective enough against the lizards’ swarm tactics.”

  “Our gunships are,” Mark countered.

  “Only in atmosphere…but I think we have much to discuss on this matter, and this isn’t the proper place.”

  “Agreed,” Mark said, lightly slapping Boen in the gut. “Come on, youngling. We’ve got some diplomatic swapping to do.”

  7

  August 4, 2397

  Jartul System

  Daka

  Mark sat in the small passenger compartment directly behind the cockpit in the falcon-class dropship that was carrying him up to orbit, watching the ascent up through the atmosphere on a small datapad as he simultaneously ran through the latest batch of simulator tests. With the addition of a plasma-based scattergun to the skeets their kill power against the lizard fighters had increased considerably for their weaker pilots, but less so for Mark. His skill with the standard plasma cannons afforded him better accuracy, whereas the scattergun allowed a pilot to damage a target by simply shooting near to it like a fighter-sized shotgun.

  ‘Damage’ was the word though, because most of the time the simulated lizard ships wouldn’t go down because only a few plasma shards would hit their armored hulls. Put a square shot on one and it would shred the ship nicely, but the whole point of the weapon was to enable less accurate kill power, causing Mark to have mixed feelings about t
he upgrade, especially since they’d had to remove one of the standard cannons in order to make room for it, leaving him without the ability for linked or rapid fire.

  The recycle time on the weapon was about half a second, which meant if you got on the tail of an enemy fighter, even for just a moment, you could pump loads of the tiny plasma pellets into the target, which in the case of the lizards would take them down, sometimes two at a time if they overlapped into the same firing cone during their massed assaults. But when Mark had tried out the weapon against other non-lizard craft the damage was not so spectacular. Even weak shields soaked up a lot of the plasma splinters, then regenerated if the target could get clear. The lizards had no shields, thus any hits were for keeps, but Mark knew Star Force couldn’t afford to make a permanent change to their weaponry because it’d leave them weak against other enemies.

  What they really needed was a modular swap out, but the new weapon was tricky enough that his limited techs hadn’t been able to work out the dynamics of such a design, though he had sent the specs back home via a passing Hycre ship. It wasn’t a jumpship, so there was no way of knowing how long it would take to pass the data file back to Star Force territory, but since the Alliance communications network hadn’t been extended out to the Humans yet couriers were still the only way they could keep in contact, and with being so far away sending Star Force jumpships was out of the question, leaving the Hycre as their only link back home.

  The communication delay was still monstrous, with no Star Force updates having reached Daka, which meant Mark was going to have to make modifications to their aircraft using his local resources only…that were about to be augmented, which was what had prompted this trip up to orbit. Another Hycre jumpship had arrived carrying Star Force freighters with supplies and additional personnel, the exact specifications of which the trailblazer didn’t know since the reserves had been sent without his consultation, given the communications problems.

  In fact, the ships had already been unloaded given that he had no forewarning of the arrival of the jumpship. With the Hycre’s advanced gravity drives they’d arrived in the system and diverted to Daka before any signal of notification could have traveled the intrasystem gap. He’d been notified that the Hycre would be sticking around for a couple of days to pick up messages from Star Force and other friendly races within the Alliance then heading out again, given that they didn’t have any assets of their own in system to deal with aside from passing along some additional fuel to the planet’s two guardian warships.

  Mark had grabbed the cargo pilots on base and got three dropships into the air immediately, his being the first up on the way to the partially constructed Canderian seda where the reinforcements had gathered.

  Located in semi-synchronous orbit, the spherical station had a large chunk missing from it that hadn’t been built yet, making it look ominously like the Death Star from Return of the Jedi, only colored green. Had this been one of the earlier seda designs it wouldn’t have been operational as yet, due to the dynamics of the rotating central gravity cylinders, but now that Star Force had artificial gravity plates coupled with containment fields to shape and concentrate the effect, the completed part of the seda had full life support and functioning sections that Baron Keller and his engineering crew were now living out of.

  They had a small army of Sparrow and Eagle-class dropships that they’d built in system running cargo up and down from the 6 surface outposts they’d constructed. Initially the factories to produce various items had been onboard the freighters, then they’d expanded them onto the surface, but now that the seda was partially operational those facilities were being dismantled and shifted up to orbit, allowing more personnel to transfer back into space.

  About half of those workers were Canderian, and as such preferred living in space opposed to on the ground. The others were Star Force regulars who didn’t care one way or another, they were just here to get the seda built then they’d be transferring out of the system along with the Baron. They’d been assigned because Star Force didn’t trust Canderous to set up on their own in a new star system, let alone one so far away from support. Davis’s legion of mini-mes were specially suited to that sort of startup work, which was why Mark had brought Keller along.

  His rate of progress was nothing short of amazing. From day 1 he’d had boots on the ground, setting up resource outposts where the Calavari had allowed, and from there they’d worked like an army of ants digging materials out of the ground and building additional equipment to do more of the same thing. Once those operations had snowballed they’d begun assembling construction supplies and storing them in the holds of the now empty freighters in orbit, from which the construction crews began drawing as they built the superstructure of the seda.

  With that in place they began filling it out, section by section, like clockwork. Keller had given Mark a projected timeline that he’d nailed to within 3 days so far, and the trailblazer doubted it would vary any until completion…unless the newly arrived supplies and personnel sped up the timetable.

  As the wannabe Death Star grew on his screen Mark spotted the docking bay they were headed to as the doors began to open, revealing a blue energy field just inside that was holding in the atmosphere. The bay should have been evacuated, just as a precaution should the shield fail, but containing the valuable gasses was worth the effort and inconvenience. When the dropship hit the specially designed physical energy shield it breached under the pressure of contact, but only those points under duress.

  The rest of the field stayed intact and flowed to fill in the gaps, maintaining a crude seal around the ship as it passed through before completely reforming behind it. Once all three dropships were inside the bay doors ground closed and the shield deactivated, maintaining the atmospheric integrity and allowing instant debarkment as opposed to having to vent and repressurize the bay had the containment field not been in place.

  When the doors did finally close a group of people entered the bay and met Mark at the foot of the dropship’s ramp, with one of them grinning ear to ear.

  “Oh, who let you in here?” Mark mock grumbled at seeing Sandra-255.

  “Blake says hi,” the hotshot pilot said, referring to the trailblazer that led Clan Star Ranger. “And that you could use some help, so he sent his best pilots and a bunch of Canderian whelps out to this…frontier world.”

  Mark crossed his arms over his chest and stared her down. “You’ll find this frontier world is the hottest place in the Alliance for fighter pilots.”

  Sandra smiled. “Which is why I volunteered. I read your report.”

  “So it actually got back?”

  She nodded. “Still no word on when we’ll get hooked up to the Bsidd comm grid, but the Hycre are keeping us informed of Alliance activity. So, what have you been doing to the skeets?”

  “Experimenting with some upgrades. I’m not completely sold, but they are helping in the simulations against the lizard fighters.”

  “How’s our cred?” she asked as they began to walk out of the bay side by side with a group of other Archons following in their wake.

  “Increasing. We’re not top dogs, but we’re gaining ground and we’re doing it with the skeets.”

  “How are you with their Valeries?”

  “We don’t spend enough time in them to get on par with the others, but our flight experience gives us an edge. We’re average when we do joint operations in the Valeries, and they’re decent craft, but not something we’re going to mass produce.”

  “You don’t like them, why?”

  Mark hesitated a moment as they passed out of the bay and into the station’s interior hallways. “They’re good against the lizard fighters, but they’re not built for our fighting style.”

  “Expendable?”

  “Not so much. They’re built primarily as an anti-fighter craft, modified for limited fire support.”

  “We have the gunships for that,” Sandra pointed out. “How have they been working out?�
��

  Mark smiled. “We’ve been tweaking them in private while using the skeets in our skirmishes. I’ve got a partial design change worked out, but I don’t have the engineering support I need to flesh it out.”

  “We brought a design team,” she said with a wink.

  “Thank…you,” Mark said emphatically, glad his report had made it back in time.

  “So who’s tops now?”

  “New bunch, came in about a year ago. In the Kvash camp. Reflexes off the chart…almost as fast as mine.”

  “Name?”

  “Urik’kadel…but we just call them the ‘rabbits.’ They’re not fluffy, but they’re only as tall as your knee and have a twitchy nose.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. They’re not tops in space, but in atmosphere even the Calavari have a hard time keeping up…and they don’t use the Valeries either. They say they’re too big, so the Calavari are working on miniaturizing the design. Vornac says they’re too valuable of pilots to waste on their native technology, which is lacking. They don’t have a lot of kill power, but they’re extremely nimble and dangerous when they attack in packs.”

  “Armor and shields?”

  “Neither. Hit them and they’re dead. Their pilot corps is huge, so they just replace their losses with new pilots. Survival of the fittest, or luckiest. Another reason we call them rabbits. How many losers did you bring with you?”

  “122 Star Rangers, 0 losers…unless you mean the Canderians, which we brought 5000 out.”