Star Force: Persistent Ravage (Wayward Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  When Esna was heaving after her last one, the trainer waited by patiently for her to catch her breath then jerked along with her as an alarm sounded. One Esna had heard before on Tauntaun…and one that she would never forget.

  “The Viks?” she asked, still breathing heavily.

  “Damn it, yes,” the trainer said with a snarl as the other people on the track suddenly stopped their workouts and headed for the nearest exit as a second alarm followed, one that Esna had learned about during her lessons between workouts where she had to fight just as hard against her fatigue to stay awake and absorb all the knowledge…and the knowledge told her that alarm was a call to battle stations. “Relevance point, now.”

  “Going,” Esna said as the trainer took off ahead of her as soon as she’d confirmed the order. ‘Relevance point’ was where everyone who didn’t have a critical function went in case of the seda coming under attack. They’d then be organized and put to use as necessary, and even with Esna’s limited training she could still fire a weapon if necessary so she ran on her tired legs through corridors that were known to her and others that weren’t until she got to the nearest Relevance Point and slid inside the open doorway along with others.

  They didn’t mill about in an unorganized fashion, rather they all headed towards empty booths that were little more than squares on the ground and only a couple of inches high. Esna knelt down and interfaced with the data pad built into the floor. She identified herself and input her status as ‘standby’ then sat down, as did the others, waiting as they watched the main hologram that was repeated several times down the length of the room as thousands of people arrived.

  There was a system hologram detailing the star and both the fleet and the stations, sedas included, surrounding it in multiple locations. The jumpline to the Grid Point was also marked, with many ships heading towards it to avoid the danger zone marked on the far side of the star where V’kit’no’sat warships had begun to arrive in great number, pouring in three or four at a time as they were staggered to avoid slamming into each other during the massive deceleration that occurred at the terminus of an interstellar jump.

  The Canderous fleet, along with the rest of Star Force, was already repositioning across the system, but most of what was here was in low stellar orbit and relatively very close to one another. That kept travel times to within an hour for the most part, and would allow the fleet to get to the arrival jumppoint before all the Vik ships arrived…but they weren’t all going. Some were repositioning to the jumpline to the Grid Point, which did not make any sense.

  Even though time passed slowly with naval ships repositioning, it didn’t seem slow to her. Dread filled her, for the Viks wouldn’t be here unless they had an advantage, but she also wanted to see Canderous kick some ass as she’d been told they had the capacity to do.

  Esna didn’t have to wait long, for both the Canderians and the rest of Star Force hit the incoming jumppoint immediately before the mass of Vik ships could arrive. The drone warships that every faction in Star Force used were different from what the Canderians had, for they were small compared to the Vik ships but numerous. The Canderians also had drone warships, but theirs were much larger and did not require carriers to get them from system to system. They weren’t as large as most of the Vik ships, but they dwarfed the rest of the Star Force drones.

  They were being controlled from command ships nearby, but could also be controlled from the sedas if close enough. Esna had been taught how to operate one of the gunnery slots, though she doubted she’d get the chance unless almost everyone else on the station was killed. Still, it was her job to report here and make ready to assist in whatever way was necessary.

  But battles of this scale could take weeks to run their course, so once everyone was on station in the Relevance Point and logged in, they began getting dismissed in stages to return to other duties while keeping a balance in reserve for fast implementation. Esna was released with the third group two hours in, but her handler wasn’t so Esna had some time of her own to work with. She needed to sleep but couldn’t with the Viks so close.

  She instead sat down at the terminal in her quarters and activated the holographic display, seeing the huge battle continuing at the jumppoint while more Vik ships were continuing to pour in as the others defended their position to keep Star Force from poaching them on arrival. The Viks were taking huge losses to hold that point, but already the tide was turning and the enemy line was pushing out wide of the jumppoint. That meant they were making it impossible to stop the incoming ships, and if they were doing that it meant they far outnumbered the Star Force fleet.

  They couldn’t keep up the fight there, even Esna could see it, but they stuck around and sniped at the edges of the Vik fleet without heavy engagement for several more hours, then they abandoned that attack and conceded the enemy’s arrival point as they reformed around the sedas…all of which had moved to the jumpline for the Grid Point and stood as a huge impediment protecting the ships coming in and out.

  Ships coming out from the Grid Point were escorted to other jumplines so they could leave the system, and those coming in were also so escorted, but the traffic out of the Grid Point soon stopped. Incoming traffic from outside the system didn’t end until a few days later, but the Viks weren’t in a hurry. They held their jumppoint and pooled their ships, in the hundreds of thousands, until they had all arrived. Then they sat there, waiting and watching, before sending out several groups to shut down other incoming jumplines in the hopes of catching a ship or two.

  Then horrifyingly they did, with a ship group coming in on an odd jumpline. The ships were Gfatt, a member of the Nexus, and were horribly outmatched. They knew it instantly and ran, but the Vik ships pursued and were going to catch them. Esna could see that clearly, as could everyone else, which was why a huge group of Star Force ships shot out to get there first…and that triggered the huge fight that everyone saw coming.

  It happened quickly, and Star Force did get to the Gfatt in time to save them. They took damage but survived as the drones swarmed the V’kit’no’sat as their massive fleet followed up their interceptors and chased the retreating Star Force ships back to the sedas. They hesitated only slightly to allow the rest of their fleet to assemble, then in one massive wall of weaponry they went after the assembled Star Force fleet completely ignoring the sedas.

  But the sedas didn’t ignore them. The battle alarm sounded again and Esna was pulled out of her training along with everyone else to get to the Relevance Point. She was dripping wet when she arrived, having just come out of the lap pool, but the equipment didn’t care about the water and neither did she.

  Watching the holograms Esna’s breath caught in her throat. The scale of the attack was beyond imagining…and the response from the sedas was just as impressive. The miles and miles of acreage on the surface of all the sedas spilled out so much weaponry that the black of space became so brilliant the holograms had to diminish the illumination in order for the ships to become visible as they weaved in and out around them, both Star Force and Vik, as they fought one another.

  At first Esna didn’t understand why they weren’t attacking the sedas, then she realized that if they did that the drones would be given free shots back at them. They had the superior maneuverability the sedas didn’t and the lesser masses, meaning they could be destroyed quickly while the massive space stations could not. Thus the Viks were trying to reduce the amount of weaponry being fired at them as fast as possible, which meant picking on the small ships first.

  But that was at great cost, for the sedas had been built specifically to fight the Viks and did the Canderians proud as they released huge streams of energy that Esna knew were Dair’me. She wasn’t a tech, but she knew they were a weapon taken from Vik designs that was a shield drainer, and within all the confusion of moving ships and firing weapons she could see those strikes on the enemy ships being followed up with coordinated strikes by the drones. The sedas would strip or weaken the Vik shield
s on their largest ships, then the fleet would pound them and run, reducing the time they spent soaking up damage with their own shields, armor, or hulls.

  There was so much going on she couldn’t follow it, and the sedas had so many different types of weapons they could hurt and kill the Vik ships in many different ways, but in the hours that followed one general trend was arising…and that was that the Star Force fleet was dropping like flies even as the sedas savaged the Vik fleet.

  Esna didn’t know what was going on, but soon some of the smaller sedas also began to get targeted and that’s when her seda and the other Battlemoon-class station began to reposition to the head of the formation with all the other sedas falling in behind them along with the surviving ships as they repositioned along the jumpline to the Grid Point.

  When that happened, Seda JOR began taking shield hits, as those Vik ships that were out of position to shoot anyone else began unloading onto them. Meanwhile the Viks tried to flank the reforming Star Force formation as they realized they were beginning to make a fighting retreat. The Canderians also knew it, with them sending sedas out to the edges of the jumpline so the ships could have a somewhat protected interior corridor, taking hits and targeting Vik ships that jumped the gap, then the first ships in the surviving fleet began making slow jumps out towards the Grid Point.

  Bit by bit they pulled back, leaving the sedas as the primary targets as they hammered back at the Viks. There was so much carnage that Esna’s seda lost shields and began to take hull damage…at which point she was assigned a task and the trainee took off through the interior of the station to a prep area. There she assembled and geared up with others for search and rescue operations, waiting without view of what was going on outside for when and where they told her to go and look for survivors in the exterior layers of the seda that were now getting hammered hard.

  18

  Esna waited on standby for a long time, then when the word came she and dozens of others in envirosuits followed their team leader into the lift system that took them up towards the surface, stopping at level 89. That was 89 levels below the armor level, and when they stepped out they saw normal corridors that looked slightly odd. It took her a moment as they began to run through them to realize that they were askew, warped slightly out of their normal exaggerated octagonal shape. She didn’t see any cracks in the material, but something had put so much pressure on the panels that they had bent slightly.

  They hit a nearby stairwell and ran up it, then laterally for a few hundred meters before they saw the first major damage. Her atmospheric readings were steady, but filled with trace gasses that her envirosuit filtered out so she didn’t have to breathe them as her team ran down to the first blockage, with the leading pair being ordered to stop and move the debris aside while the rest of them slid past.

  That continued until Esna was deployed along with two others on a beam that had skewered the ceiling and poked all the way down through the floor.

  “We’re not moving this, but we need to patch the hole in the floor,” another Canderian said, pointing a few steps behind them. “Take off that wall panel.”

  “Got it,” Esna said, heading to the intact bit of corridor and finding the nearly invisible seams. Pulling a small tool out of her envirosuit’s belt pouch she slid it in and flicked the activation button. It cut along the seam in a straight line, with her repeating the incision and cut four times until she was able to pry loose a huge square panel that another of her three man team came over to help with as they dragged it towards the giant beam.

  “Trace and cut,” the other said, drawing a crude line on the panel that the one next to Esna began burning through with a different tool while she waited and watched. When they completed the cutout she helped leverage the C-shaped piece up to the beam…but it wouldn’t fit.

  “We gotta dig the other side out further.”

  “I got it,” Esna said, sitting down and kicking across the hole and dislodging a bit of torqued panel. She popped out part of it, then used a plasma torch to slowly tear away enough that they were able to slide the panel in around the beam and cover most of the hole that led down to the chamber below. There was still a few gaps, but nothing big enough for more than a foot to slip through. Her three man team used sealer to glue the panel in place, then they ran on ahead and back up to the team leader where he assigned them another job as they slowly cleared or fixed enough of the corridor to make it easily passible up to a section that was totally trashed.

  They couldn’t get through there, so the team leader had them cut into the ceiling and they had to step on each other’s bodies to get up higher while they commed back to another group to bring a portable ladder and marked the location on their shared battlemap.

  On and on the recovery team progressed, weaving this way and that as they gradually headed somewhere Esna was not made aware of, but she was just glad she could help with something as she listened and felt for more explosions, detecting only a few distant ones. How the battle was progressing she didn’t know, so she focused on the tasks assigned to her as they cut a path up and up until they were at the half mile thick armor layer that surrounded the seda.

  Esna’s breath caught in her throat as the team walked across a pile of junk and into a large blast crater that allowed them to look up and see stars. There was a half mile deep crater burned straight through the armor layer that should have been sucking out the atmosphere and them with it, but her HUD marked the location of an atmospheric shield up near the surface that was containing the interior air supply, though a lot of it had to have escaped previously when the damage had occurred.

  There were already other teams down in the crater, with portable bridges set up across the 2 mile wide chasm. They were tethered on rope lines and suspended beneath, but the artificial gravity here wasn’t working properly and only the mass of the seda itself was holding them to the ground lightly so. It felt like they were walking on a tiny moon…which was about the truth…and the bridges had additional hand wires that had many people pulling themselves across on with their feet barely touching the narrow walkways that were spreading out across the chasm like spider webs.

  There were no ships in the black sky above them, only distant stars. Esna hoped that meant the Viks had pulled back, otherwise they’d all be target practice out here if the defense fields were breached again…and an atmospheric shield wouldn’t do crap against weaponsfire.

  Within a minute she and the rest of her team were assigned to debris removal, which had them taking what tech teams had deemed unsalvageable and carrying the bits of junk by hand over to makeshift landing pads where dropships were actually flying out and across the surface and down into the breach to remove the debris. Esna was given a contorted piece of something she couldn’t identify that was bigger than she was, but in the extreme low gravity she was able to lift and slowly walk it across the junk heap and up onto one of the one-way bridges. It took her nearly 20 minutes to get it to the nearest pad, then another team took it from her and loaded it into a nearby dropship.

  Esna then took a different path to return so there was no cross traffic to slow the whole process down and ended up at another collection point. From there she followed the waypoints assigned to her and got to a different pad to deliver it, followed by a complex routing that had her going almost everywhere over the surface of the crate in concert with everyone else moving around like very efficient ants pulling damaged bits of junk away from what was salvageable beneath.

  She spent several hours doing that before her shift was canceled and another team replaced her, then Esna returned back to the deeper levels in the seda and told to take a rest period of 6 hours in her quarters before returning to a Relevance Point. She did as ordered, cleaning up and getting something to eat before sleeping the remainder of the time, then got back into the mix and was assigned a different point on the surface that was a smaller crater with the same type of junk removal assignment.

  The difference here was she could see an
other seda in the distance, barely more than a spec, but she could see the rounded edge of it. As she walked Esna checked her HUD, knowing it would identify which one it was, but it turned out it wasn’t a seda at all. It was the distant Grid Point, now much closer than it had ever been before, and now just becoming visible. It wasn’t a sphere, but it did have sections that were curves.

  Esna looked ahead of her on the path she was walking, predicting her footsteps, then looked up and activated the zoom on her helmet. The image increased in size and she could just barely make out the short, stubby cylinder between the two giant discs that were set partially sideways to her current position. That made the whole thing look like the center of a big circle with both sides darkened, but in truth the whole construct was far larger than her seda and not constructed by Star Force. It had been built by The Nexus, an ally from far rimward she’d been told, and it had been moved here from one of their systems, given to Star Force to link in their territory and allow The Nexus to set up their own nearby worlds with private shipyards that their enemies couldn’t get to.

  That meant it wasn’t Star Force tech, and this was the first live image she’d gotten of it…along with a range counter with the distance measure in millions of miles that were quickly counting down. That meant they’d made a jump and were leaving the Tarric 3 System behind, but where were the other sedas?

  As soon as she thought that the stupidity of her question hit her. During a jump you couldn’t get too close to each other, so even if they’d accelerated 30 seconds ahead that would be thousands of miles distant…which still should have been close enough to see the biggest ones.