Star Force: Shame (SF59) Read online

  That was a mental exercise she spent a considerable amount of her time on during the return trip to the ADZ and still she had no answers by the time they got back, with Kara filling in the others as to what she’d found before heading back out again.

  2

  June 9, 2657

  Unnamed System (Skarron territory)

  Regional Capitol

  The lizard invoker broke off from its escorts, dipping lower in orbit and carrying its rainbow energy arcs around it like a giant shield that obscured view of most of the massive ship. Leaving the cruiser shield that had been running interference for it, one of the 28 centerpieces of the lizard invasion quickly moved towards one of the Skarrons’ massive orbital defense platforms that was even now targeting another invoker with a mass of heavy lachars and rail gun slugs that were penetrating the destructive cocoon and making hull impacts.

  The other invoker was nearly into physical contact range, with its energy arcs ripping through Skarron ships that had positioned themselves in the path of the big ship to slow it down, for their plasma couldn’t touch the hull given the range of the energy arcs, leaving it little more than spit by the time it reached the ship, and most didn’t, for the fluctuating rainbow scattered the plasma where it collided with them.

  Already massive hull breaches were occurring on the other invoker, but it didn’t pull back. The station it was closing on had already been damaged by an assault pillar that had since been destroyed, with the attacking ship being the smaller of the two. The Skarron double orb-shaped construct was larger than both the invoker and assault pillar combined and was one of six defending the heavily populated Skarron planet. The lizards knew if they could take this one out now it would save a lot of their smaller ships later, hence they were tearing at it and willing to sacrifice their bigger ships if necessary in the tradeoff.

  But they weren’t stupid, and seeing that the invoker wasn’t going to get the job done on its own the other closest nearby abandoned its fleet to destruction in order to join up with the other, making the tiniest of microjumps down to the defense station and moving through a scattering of defensive ships, none of which could do anything to stop the giant chess piece. It came in on the opposite side from the other invoker, which was now close enough that its energy arcs were eating through the outer layers of the station while in turn it was also getting pummeled with plasma that was making it through the gaps where the energy arcs disappeared on contact with the hull.

  The second invoker came in so close it looked like it rammed the far side of the station, but in truth the hulls never touched. The energy field did and vaporized hull plating like a glowing hurricane that slowly moved in closer and closer, consuming more material and literally eating away at the station. Between the two of them the invokers focused on the narrow mid section of the station until their energy arcs finally met up and they cut the station in half.

  The first invoker, now heavily damaged, moved into the gap and began to eat at the upper orb from the interior where there were no weapons to damage it while the other pulled out and headed for the relief fleet pouring towards the station. The Skarron ships had just finished mopping up a lizard formation higher in orbit and were now coming down to hit the bigger ship, with dozens of juggernauts in the mix that began sniping the invoker from range with their lachars.

  If the invoker allowed that to occur it was doomed to a slow death, so it accelerated towards the incoming enemy, buying time for the other one to eat away and finish off the two halves of the station from the inside out. The juggernauts immediately withdrew, knowing they’d be no match for the lizard ship up close, and the other Skarron ships went with them, bullied away by the invoker that could not catch the quicker ships.

  All over orbit there were literally hundreds of naval battles taking place, with the lizards having brought their largest fleet to date to assault the Skarron’s most rimward regional capitol. This was the first time the lizards had assaulted a civilian planet, with all others involved in the war being pure military civilizations. The one below them now was the source of the soldiers that continually kept flowing out to the front, and if knocked out would diminish the Skarrons’ ability to counterattack with any longevity.

  But it was going to cost them greatly, for the system was more heavily defended than any other they’d taken. That was expected, for the lizards had recovered computer data from damaged Skarron vessels that included strength analysis and maps of Skarron territory, highlighting this system as the central strongpoint supporting the rest of the region. Below them there were over 15 billion Skarrons and 120 billion of their slave races, all of which were reproducing regularly to supply them with new troops.

  There were other worlds similar to this one further into Skarron territory, but their troops and resources were being funneled through here en route to the fronts, making this the sweet spot and weak point of this tiny piece of the Skarrons’ giant empire. The Skarrons knew it as well, which was why they’d built the enormous defense stations and had a slew of ship varieties the lizards had never encountered before guarding the system. They intended to hold this strategic point and the lizards intended to take it away from them, resulting in an apocalyptic naval battle that was seeing carnage inflicted to both sides.

  The invoker moved through as many debris fields as it did intact ships as it continuously chased away incoming fleets seeking to aid the still operation halves of the defense station. Less and less weaponsfire was coming from them over time as the other invoker slowly chewed apart their innards, but that was a slow process considering their sheer size and meant the other invoker had to either come in very close to aid or keep its distance to avoid the lachars and, more importantly, the rail gun slugs, both of which would pass right through the energy fields and hit the hull with nearly maximum effect.

  The Skarrons had learned early on that the invokers had a weakness in that their energy fields needed prolonged contact to inflict massive damage, racking up power being poured into a target to superheat and vaporize it, meaning that fast moving objects could pass through with only minor damage. That was why there were hundreds of new rail gun-armed warships in the system that had not yet made their way to the front, but that had been designed specifically to fight the invokers.

  So far none of them had made their way to the bisected station and the pair there, but they were elsewhere hunting the others while they in turn were using their cruiser swarms to corral the Skarron fleets into positions where they couldn’t easily redeploy…then the invokers would come through the masses and run right into them, making almost instantaneous kills on contact.

  The Skarrons were likewise responding with their own monster ships, far larger than the invokers, that were heading directly for the lizard cruiser swarms and peppering them with plasma and lachars with such intensity that they were eating through them almost like the invokers were eating through the Skarrons’ smaller ships, though not with such a spectacle. The Skarrons’ Titans were smaller than the invokers, barely a third of their size, but covered in so much plasma-resistant armor that the lizard cruisers could barely scratch them short of hitting them with thousands of ships…which the Skarron escort warships sought to disrupt long enough for the titans to do their job.

  The outer invoker, doing its job to scare off the small fleets that came nearby eventually was overwhelmed when three groups of planetary defenders joined up and hit it with all ‘small’ scale ships, though for the Skarrons none of their ships were what most races considered to be small. Taking a page out of the lizards’ play book six of the Cruiser-class warships went kamikaze, accelerating up to considerable speed and plunging into the rainbow vortex around the invoker.

  Their shields went down almost instantaneously, with their hulls being stripped off their superstructure before they made it all the way through, but the mass of the innards of the ships survived and plowed into the invoker like slow, giant rail gun slugs. Within seconds the amount of energy arcs dipped by about 20%,
leaving some bigger holes in the field that the other Skarron ships then began trying to target, often with their plasma hitting and being dispersed by the erratic arcs that seemed to defy prediction.

  In order to get close enough for the plasma hits to really register those ships had to enter the kill zone, but when they did they all did, and like a coordinated swarm of bees they all stung the invoker simultaneously and from multiple angles. The mass of ships looked like someone had snuffed out the bright candle for a moment as their hulls ate up and stopped the energy arcs from cascading from one emitter to another, then there was a massive series of explosions as the Skarron ships were ripped apart, sending debris out in all directions like confetti.

  But there were enough ships that didn’t get hit, with the dying ones shielding them from the energy arcs, that they were able to pound the invoker with clear lines of fire, targeting the emitters and crippling the lizards’ primary weapon. Some arcs returned and hit more ships, killing or disabling them but it wasn’t enough. Soon the rest of the emitters were down and the big ship was just a giant target.

  Knowing it was doomed it accelerated, plowing into the Skarrons that didn’t move out of the way. Below it the other invoker pulled back from the half of the station that it was almost now buried inside and moved away, taking some more fire as it came within the targeting lines of the intact batteries on the station’s hull but those didn’t really matter, it just had to get clear as the doomed invoker rushed in on its own kamikaze run and rammed the lower orb.

  The big white structure visibly dented as the invoker buried itself inside, then the concussive force caused that orb to bump into the other drifting nearby, adding to the damage the first invoker had already caused. As that damaged chess piece ran up higher in orbit with defensive cruiser screens rushing down to defend it, the Skarron defense platform showed only a handful of defensive weapons still online, meaning that the severed and now otherwise wrecked but still massive structure was essentially out of the fight.

  The lizards had achieved their objective and now the area where it had held dominance was free for them to move through and engage the roaming Skarron fleets.

  Similar drastic tactics were required to remove the other giant defense stations from orbit, but with great cost to themselves the lizards succeeded in killing them all and turning the rest of the assault into a more or less ‘normal’ engagement. They made sure to stay away from the atmosphere and extreme low orbit, but eventually the Skarron warships retreated there, into the firing range of their surface defenses, and created a stalemate.

  The lizards waited, knowing that going down there would have been needless suicide, so they took possession of orbit and hunted down and destroyed all the damaged Skarron ships and took out their remaining orbital infrastructure in the coming weeks, taunting the remaining Skarron fleet to come out after them but they wisely wouldn’t. Even without the handful of big chess pieces that had survived, the lizards had the remaining Skarron ships outnumbered, so a naval fight to try and save infrastructure that they knew they couldn’t protect would serve no purpose.

  But on the other hand the lizards didn’t have anywhere near enough ships to assault the planet itself and the Skarrons knew it, so they preferred to preserve their remaining ships and see if the lizards were stupid enough to press a surface attack.

  The stalemate that resulted would last 9 months, with most of the Skarron ships entering the system unaware of the assault being hunted down and destroyed before they could make an emergency jump back out or race down to the planet past the blockade, but eventually the second lizard fleet arrived as planned, now augmented with data returned from the initial assault and the ground troop transports that had been missing from the first assault fleet.

  The big chess pieces were not present here, merely jumpship after jumpship carrying an insane number of cruisers that filled orbit with hundreds of thousands of ships that waited patiently. The troop transports stayed back at higher orbits, biding their time, then when the moment was right the cruiser swarms descended into the atmosphere and took on the remaining warships, surface batteries, and anti-air capable walkers all at once, counting on their numbers to give the defenders too many targets to shoot at, leaving other ships free to become slayers.

  It was a tactical move that no trailblazer would ever consider pulling, for the lizards lost almost their entire fleet in the following 6 hours, leaving two assault pillars, a damaged invoker, and a light defensive cruiser screen around the troop transports as all that remained aside from a few hundred of the ships that had descended into the atmosphere and lived to tell of it. Most of those were damaged and only partially operational, but 54 of them had somehow come through the maelstrom untouched and were now in a position of impunity, for all of the Skarrons’ walkers, warships, and surface missile batteries had been eliminated, leaving them with nothing to defend themselves with.

  With those handful of cruisers scouring the planet looking for any defenses that might have been overlooked or quiet, the troop jumpships began disgorging landing transports that brought the lizard armies to the ground, and without any walkers to oppose them their tanks reigned supreme in the ground battles that would follow, with cruiser fire support added where necessary. The Skarrons did have their aerial forces more or less intact, but in those troop transports came the lizards’ wisp swarms as well, which flooded the skies and kept the Skarron fighters occupied long enough for the ground troops to do their work over the coming 2 years.

  The aerial war proved to be a stalemate, but it was a stalemate that gave the ground troops the opportunity to press their advantage. Before all was said and done a few walkers popped up that they had to contend with, either having been incomplete before the initial attack or down for maintenance. Those made things difficult, but with cruiser assistance they were eliminated and the slaughter of the civilian population continued well past the last of their military succumbing.

  During the first year of major ground battles a dribbling of lizard naval reinforcements would come into the system, shoring up the meager defenses there with the assault pillars being redeployed elsewhere. The damage invoker stayed, mainly due to the fact that its gravity drives weren’t fully functional, but in large part the lizards’ hold on the system was extremely tenuous. Unfortunately for the Skarrons this was the regional hub, and there were no other nearby strongholds to reinforce them from.

  The lizards knew the Skarrons might respond with a huge force from further inside their territory, but figured it would take a considerable number of years before that counterattack would come. Instead of building up the defenses of their captured regional capitol they chose to sack it, destroying the entire population and then moving on to trash every bit of infrastructure they could, with that being a tall order given the dense cityscape that covered the planet.

  It would be 3 years before the counterattack would come, and it would come like a hammer blow, easily killing the defense fleet in the system and eradicating the ground troops the lizards still had on planet, but while the invaders hadn’t seen fit to try and keep their razed conquest, they had been devoting incoming ships and resources to the surrounding systems that no longer had their stronghold to receive reinforcements from. Those systems saw heavy fighting and one loss after another for the Skarrons, with the lizards once again focusing on claiming a large number of lesser systems rather than trying for a handful of big prizes.

  The regional capitol was no longer a threat and didn’t interest them. It was now just a wrecked, uninhabited planet, and if the Skarrons wanted to rebuild it they could, but they’d be starting from scratch. The region around that system was quickly falling into the lizards’ hands, and even as the massive relief fleet moved about to target some of those fallen systems it couldn’t get to them all. The lizards would suffer heavy losses where it did go, but would retain so many other new conquests that the tradeoff was worth it logistically down the road.

  3

  July 5, 2657r />
  Aeryn System (beyond the ADZ)

  Point 14

  It had taken them nearly 15 months of travel, but finally the Hevmaj jumpship arrived at the Star Force system and the small race of bipeds were not disappointed with what they found. The system itself was devoid of any habitable planets, but what the grand empire had built here was beyond comparison…for they had created their own tiny worlds. Multiple metal spheres sat in orbit around the native lifeless worlds, cementing Star Force’s hold on the location that was emanating out their power to the surrounding region of space.

  The Hevmaj had never encountered the empire before but word of their deeds had spread far across the galaxy, traveling some 80 lightyears to a cluster of systems known as the ‘Benoid’ to the races that inhabited it. They were a loose coalition of friendly neighbors that occupied 7 systems, all of which were no more than 4 lightyears apart from one another, creating shorter spacelanes than what the surrounding region had and allowing the Hevmaj and 9 other races to stay in contact and trade with one another.

  But word of the huge menace that was gobbling up system after system had also spread to the Benoid, with the warning that they were also in its eventual path. At first the Hevmaj had dismissed the rumors, but then another race with which they were familiar, a more advanced one that they both respected and trusted had confirmed the existence of the Li’vorkrachnika and the unbeatable threat that they posed. Race after race and world after world was being taken and destroyed with no one seeming to be able to stop them.

  This terrified the Benoid, but given that it was still a distant threat they had time to think and worry, looking for something to do and realizing that there was no way that they were going to be overlooked as some others had attested to being. They were smaller races than what the Benoid contained, meaning they had no chance of being passed by when the Li’vorkrachnika spread out to them.