Star Force: Mastermind (SF32) Read online

  The beacon was using a new communications technology, one built from the V’kit’no’sat database rather than reverse engineering the lizards’ interstellar comm tech, that used telaris energy. Star Force was still working on the sensor package, but it had already started to build new ships and facilities with telaris comm systems, as well as producing upgrade packages for the others. The key value in telaris energy was that, unlike an accelerating signal, it naturally traveled at 3.205 times the speed of light.

  That wasn’t instantaneous communication across a star system, but it was a considerable improvement over systems that had been relying on various forms of electromagnetic radiation for both communications and sensors. Telaris energy was emitted from riol, a tier 3 subatomic particle that was only present in corovon-bonded atoms. It would pool around the corovon in the gaps between attached protons, then would be dislodged fairly easy, resulting in huge bursts of energy that was very repellant to other matter.

  That gave it a huge spring capacity coming off the corovon, resulting in its 3.205 lightspeed instantaneous acceleration. It also meant that the telaris energy would be deflected rather than absorbed by most substances, making for some very fast and very powerful sensors. Paul and others hoped that it would overcome the lizards’ sensor dampening armor, but to date the techs hadn’t got a viable sensor array prototype worked out, though they were getting close.

  The comm system was crude, but functional, and was allowing Paul and Greg to exchange information faster. If the lizards were quick they could still enter the system from a specific jumpline and get to Atlantica before Greg could send word if the navigational angles were favorable, given that the planets were continuously rotating around the star and changing their relative positions to the incoming stellar jumplines the lizards seemed to favor.

  The other day Paul’s fleet had got a heads up that another lizard convoy was incoming, one that Greg’s fleet hadn’t been able to intercept. With the kinetic ‘mines’ in place in low orbit, where they were essentially hovering on their gravity drives, Paul had moved some drone warships into more favorable positions to intercept the convoy once it arrived.

  The lizards came out of their jump early, decelerating most of their momentum away before they crossed through the mine field…which only contained 119 objects. That was a very diffuse net, but given the size of the lizard jumpships it was probable that at least one would get hit.

  Two had, punching deep into the hulls on 2 out of the 16 that had arrived. At least part of their gravity drives had been damaged, for the last bit of their deceleration was delayed, pushing them out ahead of the others, and fortuitously for Star Force saw one ramming another on a deflection angle, sending both damaged ships spinning about on a descending route down towards Atlantica’s atmosphere.

  To the lizards’ credit, they managed to stall out their fall and keep the damaged ships in space, though the wounds were extensive. With all three jumpships out of the position they had expected to be, Paul’s fleet, which was technically all ships in orbit despite which Archon’s warship they came from, had pounced on them in their damaged state and killed all three, but not before the other lizard ships could respond, including one of the newly arrived jumpships that was a carrier containing a slew of cruisers and a pair of battleships.

  It was that battle that Paul was now reviewing, not to mention the cleanup effort the lizards made on the other mines. They couldn’t vaporize them, and breaking them up into bits was hazardous to navigation as well, so after locating the others…which had been sensor stealthed…they used some of their jumpships to capture and remove them from the jumpline, as well as shooing away battle debris down into a lower orbit that was even now starting to tickle the atmosphere and drop into the oceans below.

  The chess match in orbit was getting more and more complex. While Paul and the other trailblazers were learning more about their enemy, the lizards were doing the same with them in a punch/counterpunch timeline that saw both fleets improving their strategy while the lizards and Star Force continued to run supplies down to the war taking place on the planet below. Every now and then Paul would be able to catch a lizard supply run and disrupt it, forcing them to either turn back before they got to the atmosphere or destroying them as they attempted the insertion.

  Those that did drop down consistently went to the backside of the planet where Star Force had no infrastructure…then the supplies/reinforcements would make their way beneath the waves where the Humans’ sensors couldn’t track off to who knows where, then it would eventually end up on Kyler’s doorstep, as it was doing right now.

  Paul had forced himself to stop watching the live battlemap feeds from below, focusing on the naval confrontation and his training. Kyler had told him he’d request evac if they needed it, otherwise there wasn’t anything he could do to help other than trying to keep more lizard resources from reaching the planet.

  He had insured that the airspace over Manaan stayed clear of enemy warships, keeping small capital ship groups close in orbit that could drop down if/when needed, and so far the lizards had respected that threat and kept their assault subsurface where Paul couldn’t get at them. That way, at least he could provide a secure evacuation route for the city. Thankfully Manaan didn’t contain any colonists, but there were thousands of Star Force personnel inside, and if the city was going to fall they would be hard pressed to pack them all into the battleships and would need the aerial route kept open.

  The orbital situation was less strenuous, mainly because Paul was successfully chewing up the lizard reinforcements as fast as they could send them. Earth was supplying them with new fleets as soon as they came out of the shipyards, all with upgraded weapons technology, primary of which was the mauler cannons, but they were also fielding better plasma and lachar batteries along with higher densities of adamantium armor. Paul never knew what the next convoy would contain, but Davis had yet failed to disappoint him.

  With those incoming resources, part of which were meant for the aquatics front, Paul was overseeing the construction of a 4th battle station in the shadow of the other 3 where the lizards couldn’t get at it, though they had attempted a few hit and run raids which the fleet had successfully blocked. Right now he had 1 strong point in orbit and he intended to spread that out to two, but whether he could do that by splitting the stations into pairs or not was still up in the air. Most of it had to do with the lizards’ capabilities, of which he was trying to get a handle on.

  In some respects he understood them very well…in others, they seemed almost like the Borg from Star Trek, in that they would adapt to whatever he threw at them. Their commanders were probably from the strategic class, though with lizard naval crews he could never be sure. Sometimes they were comprised totally of the standard variant, which were devious enough, but he knew they also had the ability to grow specialized commanders when needed.

  There were 11 known variants, of which they’d personally encountered 6, now that they’d met their swimming version, but Star Force had the genetics profile on all of them, thanks to the battles on Corneria and the copycat version of lizard infrastructure they’d produced from the technological ‘seeds’ they’d recovered. They hadn’t grown any new lizards to study, though they maintained that capability. Rather, they had medtechs pouring through their genetic code trying to learn what they could.

  One thing they’d learned was that they were all sterile. Not one of the lizards could reproduce, for that ability had been genetically removed from them. They now reproduced totally through technological means, which also gave them the ability to increase their numbers rapidly if they had the resources to do so, as they were doing now on Atlantica. Their achilles heel had always been having enough raw materials to build ships, but somehow they were also overcoming that hurdle, given the numbers Kyler was facing at Manaan.

  The lizards had tried setting up other bases in the system, given that there were 18 planets. None of them were habitable, but most were minable, and s
everal small engagements had been fought to weed infant lizard bases off those worlds before they could gain a foothold. At present Sam’s fleet was patrolling the system, scanning every planet and moon periodically and dealing with any new infrastructure popping up, for they knew from experience that they had to keep the lizards resupplying from outside the star system. If they gained a resource base from within, it would be very difficult to overcome their growth rate.

  The lizards had succeeded in building their own battle station in orbit, though they’d had to cheat to do it. One of the less recent supply convoys had brought a jumpship variant they’d never seen before. This one was covered in weapons and appeared to have few bay doors. It didn’t match any schematic in the known lizard tech tree, and after some careful prodding Paul had determined that it was essentially a mobile battle station.

  The lizards used it like Star Force had used the seda copies, establishing a foothold that their fleets could base themselves around…except that the lizard station didn’t have the firing range of Star Force’s cleansing beams. After a two week period of cat and mouse engagements, Paul had succeeded in destroying the jumpship/base and removing the lizards’ strong point from orbit, costly as it had been.

  Even now, as he watched the replay of yesterday’s battle, he could see the weapon strikes against his ships deliberately targeting their weakest points rather than just blasting away at their shields and armor as the lizards had once done. Likewise his gunners were targeting the critical systems on the lizards’ ships, now knowing exactly where to hit them, not just because they had their schematics available, but because both sides were now well experienced with their opposition.

  Star Force, Paul assumed, had more of an advantage due to the fact that they weren’t cycling personnel like the lizards were, for every ship they destroyed required a new crew being grown, whereas the drone ships in Paul’s fleet had the same pilots flying them no matter how many were destroyed…so long as the lizards didn’t knock out a warship, which to date was something that Paul had not allowed to happen here, though he had heard that Morgan had lost one fighting the Nestafar.

  Some of the regular crew had begun to label this conflict as the forever war, for they couldn’t see an outcome on the horizon…other than Star Force capitulating and abandoning the system. Paul and the other trailblazers had an entirely different view. Where others saw an insurmountable and unrelenting enemy, the Archons saw a challenge…and the bigger the challenge the more they wanted to face it rather than run away, making this just the situation Paul wanted to be in rather than guarding Namek as it continued to grow its infrastructure oblivious to the lizards.

  Well, not totally oblivious, for the supply convoys running to Atlantica were coming from there and the lizards had backtracked them, but they hadn’t done more than scout the system, seeing that Star Force was well dug in on the planet. Namek, though, was less close to existing lizard colonies, with Atlantica practically on their doorstep. Paul and the others had planned on defending both locations, though they’d hoped the lizards would focus on the waterworld.

  Now that they’d gotten their wish, the enemy wasn’t disappointing. They were drawing an unbelievable amount of resources off from their main territory, resources that could have been sent to fight their allies. That said, Paul knew what they were facing here was merely a drop in the bucket compared to the total military might the lizards possessed.

  The sheer amount of their warships was mindboggling, but what Paul had learned early on is that if you had a lot of territory to defend, you had to spread your fleet out. That meant the lizards couldn’t just pick up their massive fleet and pound it all against a single world. Given the distances involved they had to leave defenses in all their systems else risk losing them to a handful of enemy ships. Even with their considerably quick gravity drives, getting from one end of their territory to another could take more than a year, depending on the route.

  Paul wished that Star Force could one day possess that amount of territory, not just for the resources and capabilities it would afford them, but for the challenge of managing it all. Their allies all had far greater realms than the Humans did, and they didn’t all do the best in managing them. It was hard to think of an entire planet being lost in accounting, but when you had thousands of them spread out across this piece of the galaxy with little communication between them…it wasn’t all that uncommon.

  Which made the V’kit’no’sat’s much larger empire all the more impressive.

  Paul finished watching the replay, seeing nothing new tactically, but he always preferred studying his enemy directly rather than being handed a spec manual, especially given the lizards adaptive abilities. Those in this system could very well behave differently than those in others, based solely on what they were learning here. Paul didn’t know how much they’d transmit that knowledge back to the rest of their empire, given that they’d have to do it in the form of couriers, so really his fight wasn’t with the whole of the lizard empire, but this local branch of it.

  He flipped back over to the realtime battlemap and checked the position of the lizard fleets, noting that Oni-081 had repositioned some of her heavier warships further out. It took Paul all of four seconds to figure out why, then another two seconds to deduce the lizards’ probable countermove.

  This was how their chess match was usually played out on a day to day basis. Both fleets would reposition, attempting to pull off supply runs, catch incoming convoys, or draw the enemy fleet into a formational weakness they could exploit. Paul had come to nickname his lizard counterpart Thrawn, and saw that it/them were breaking up their largest fleet and spreading it out into multiple appendages, each on a different trajectory.

  “Here we go again,” he whispered, knowing that this was standard practice when the lizards wanted to run a convoy down to the surface. Each of the tendrils had cargo ships in them, and picking which one to intercept was mostly guesswork, unless they knew which ones had the goods and which ones were empty.

  He had no clue in this go around, and very possibly they were all full given the recently arrived reinforcements…but Paul sensed that Thrawn was being cagey again, expecting Star Force to see their move and likewise reinforce their extreme low orbit fleets, readying themselves to make intercept runs at anything heading down to the surface.

  Thrawn should have kept the rest of his ships stationary, but several of them were creeping into new formations, tipping their hand. Paul saw that he had no choice, given their current locations were outside of effective range from a hit and run on the outermost defense fleet that Emily commanded.

  Oni saw it too, which was why she was moving her heavy cruisers out further, not all the way up to Emily’s orbit, but close enough to cut down the response time should the lizards make the move.

  Paul looked at the hundreds of ship icons on the small hologram in his quarters like pieces on a chess board, then let a smile creep across his face as he saw a move that he was sure Thrawn was trying for. Ever since they’d launched their main underwater assault they’d been getting bolder in orbit, for what he hadn’t known, since the two campaigns were more or less separate entities, but if Paul’s instincts were right, in a few hours time their partially constructed battle station was going to get blasted.

  Paul opened up a comm channel to the three battle stations and delivered a text message.

  Prep for incoming assault. Probable target is the 4th station. Quietly bring up to full battle readiness. We have a counterattack possibility that I don’t want to waste.

  3

  A group of 3 lizards swam along the polished seafloor inside the Manaan perimeter fence headed for the large underwater mount that was the Humans’ shipyard. It was totally contained inside an armored shell, with the unfinished battleship obscured from view, but the det pack one of the lizards was carrying was about to make a dent in it.

  The trio swam along lazily, along with more than 10,000 others already inside the perimeter fence and spread
ing out on so many different routes that the Humans couldn’t get to them all. They all had their preferred targets, with secondary options if they couldn’t reach them, but so far this group hadn’t so much as even seen a Human craft near them.

  They swam up towards the base of the shipyard where the slightly angled wall met the stone seafloor, with the escorting pair drifting laterally and falling back as the det pack carrier eyed his spot on the dark wall. It didn’t know if the explosion would breach the barrier or not. If it did they would move inside. If it didn’t, they’d wait until another group came their way and added to the damage, defending their entry point as more lizard groups pooled outside.

  As the lizard with the det pack swam up to the base of the building it pulled the explosives off its back, intent on setting them in position and triggering a delay timer, but it noticed a faint line in the silt a meter out from the building just before passing over it…then it smashed head first into the defense shield surrounding the shipyard.

  Unaware that the building had been shielded, the lizard reached out its webbed hand and ran it over the odd surface of the invisible energy shield, but without enough pressure to make it visible from the disruption. For that it had to bring its plasma rod forward and jab it into the invisible wall, discharging its green load into the shield matrix and producing a meter-wide patch of momentary static.

  It wasn’t nearly enough to penetrate the defenses, but it did confirm the fact that it existed.

  Unsure how to proceed, the lizard used the small comm device strapped to its head to report the presence of the energy barrier and ask for instructions in a water dialect of their native language that adjusted for their inability to use their vocal chords without air, instead having to rely on a genetic modification inside the roof of their mouths to modulate sound within the water.