Star Force: Death Knell (SF26) Read online

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  Dozens of cleansing beams shot out from the Star Force ships, punching straight through the Nestafar command ship’s physical shields almost as if they weren’t there, making surgical cuts on the hull that increased in accuracy as the ranges closed. The white beams slashed across the thorn-like pylons protruding off the massive ship first, taking out the command ship’s most powerful weapons while leaving the jumpships completely alone, save for a few smaller warships flying out to physically corral them in, forcing them to either stay in place or ram through them in order to make a microjump out of planetary orbit.

  Like a pack of patient wolves, Morgan’s fleet crept up on the command ship as the heavy cruisers picked apart its defenses from range and the rest of the Nestafar fleet, which was still approaching the Kvash battleship in pieces from around planetary orbit, suddenly had a moment of indecision. The ships assaulting the battleship were finally starting to poke through its shields, but they were far from killing it, meaning they either had to remain where they were and let their command ship and jumpships die…or pull back, letting the Kvash recharge their shields, at which point they’d be able to resume the attack with a lot less Nestafar ships in play, having been previously destroyed in what would have been a futile defensive effort.

  They chose neither option, which surprised Morgan as she saw their jumpships and command ship began to slowly maneuver away, some of which were actually headed for the corvettes and frigates blocking their paths.

  “Damn it,” she all but yelled on the bridge. They were going to make sure they killed the Kvash battleship while diverting their incoming reinforcements towards her fleet in twos and threes as the larger ships spread out, meaning her ships would have to do likewise, diminishing her available firepower or else some of them would get away. “Focus on the command ship. Let’s see how bad they really want the Kvash.”

  “Archon, we have incoming,” the Red Ranger’s Captain Wilkinson.

  Morgan turned her attention to the holographic map the man was adjusting and half a dozen Nestafar ships not yet engaged in the battle were highlighted. Their previous tracks to the Kvash were being diverted and heading towards the four Star Force warships sitting back and out of the way of the fighting.

  “Continue the attack,” Morgan ordered. “We’ll deal with them here. Keep the pressure on the command ship,” she said, jogging off the main section of the huge bridge and into an adjunct. There she passed through an open doorway into a short tunnel, then through another open doorway and walked into the ship’s command nexus and powered it up with the touch of a button.

  The four warships appeared around her in holo, spaced well apart from one another with her point of view centered on the Red Ranger. Tiny icons on the ship’s hull began powering up as the Captain readied the warship’s weapons. Morgan sent out a similar order to the other three via the control podium in front of her and soon their little icons started popping up as well.

  With the flick of a switch the hologram shrunk until her drone ships and the enemy jumpships came into view. The Archon zoomed in on the command ship, seeing its damage statistics popping up as holographic tags noting the systems that had gone offline with various glowing colors. A plethora of red splotches covered the near side of the giant ship, but the reverse side was mostly intact, including one of the primary weapons that was partially shielded from the incoming cleansing beams.

  Morgan tagged it with vector approaches, then sent a signal out to her pilots onboard all 4 warships to begin moving the smaller drone ships in, meaning cruisers on down, into plasma range and hitting the intact claw along with a host of other targets that she was tagging with rapid fire keystrokes. A brief interruption in the cascade brought up a secondary hologram on her right that showed the ongoing battle with the Kvash battleship, which was now smoking in several locations, but most of the ship was still showing its impressive shields holding, meaning the enemy only had a few vulnerable spots to probe.

  They were doing just that, however, and she honestly didn’t know who was going to come out on tops there, but her fleet had an objective that the Kvash were bleeding for, not to mention the Calavari down near the atmosphere that were still engaging the Nestafar fighters and keeping them away from the other two engagement zones.

  And Morgan was going to make damn sure that Star Force came through on their part. The command ship was already retreating back down towards the planet…the only direction available given the bowl-like formation of her ships around both it and the jumpships. In order to keep it from getting away she needed to extend that bowl into a sphere and completely surround it, though the outbound vectors were the most dangerous, given that it had the planet to push off from with its gravity drives.

  Heading towards it was requiring partial pushes other gravity wells in the system, which took a lot of fuel given the little traction it had, but the ship couldn’t attain any significant speed anyway without hitting the planet…but it could get low enough to flank the assaulting ships and open up a jumpline, which Morgan knew was their plan.

  Her ships were far faster, but there was that nasty primary weapon still in play and if they got out in front of that they’d be smoked with little effort, so she needed her ships to engage the Nestafar at close range and pick off that weapon before they could run out in front and block their escape route.

  On the holographic map she saw one of the jumpships wink out as it found a hole in their lines and escaped, but the others still appeared to have herders with them. Those were being repositioned constantly as the jumpships moved trying to flank their limited pursuit using partial pushes from the moons to get them moving laterally.

  Morgan knew she didn’t have enough ships to hold them, but then again she hadn’t expected them to run either. Both her and the Kvash had expected them to pull back their fleet and fight it out around the command ship, using its heavy weapons to tackle the Kvash battleship. The tactics they were employing now didn’t make any sense…but this war, and Morgan didn’t have to only make plans for what made sense but for what the enemy could do, and her fleet wasn’t well set up for this. She’d made the surprise attack play rather than going for containment.

  The command ship was going to die though, that much she was sure, and it was a far more valuable target than a jumpship. Those they could hunt down later, or at least scare off if they wanted to play cat and mouse around the system. The Nestafar military leaders for the Brokal invasion were reported to have still been aboard the command ship, and taking both them and the weaponry onboard the behemoth out of the equation would be a major victory for the Alliance.

  Morgan wanted more, however, and dispatched a handful of destroyers off from the main group with orders to pin down a single jumpship. The others might eventually get away, but she was going to snag at least one if possible.

  All around the hologram of the command ship the smaller Star Force blocks began clustering, first on the rear side where most of the ship’s weaponry was tagged in red, with the remaining intact batteries soon blinking out as the ships picked them off the exposed hull. From there they moved up the length of the ship, bypassing the still shielded shipyard bubble at the center of the warship and moved up and under the bow where the intact ‘thorn’ lay.

  The first few came in so low they almost scraped the hull, making sure they stayed below the firing range which, oddly, was limited to mostly the forward arc. A scattering of other defensive weapons targeted them, which the more distant heavy cruisers targeted with their cleansing beams, making it look like the destroyers were backlit by a lightning storm.

  The destroyers began firing on the backside of the ‘thorn,’ chewing into the thick armor and structure covering it, intent on taking it out without entering its firing range. That was going to take time, however, for it was well embedded within the pylon.

  A fireworks show ensued behind them as the rest of the Star Force ships caught up and began picking off the command ship’s weaponry with a hail of blue plasma orbs counte
red by a lesser amount of red coming back up at them. Morgan saw several of her ships suffer significant damage but the overall trend was positive…and more importantly they were making good time, for so long as the command ship was mobile there was a chance it could still escape.

  The pylon was slowing going, however, and she was tempted to order some of the ships around into its firing arc so they could get some clean shots at it, but long term that wasn’t a good idea, knowing that she was going to need as many warships as possible for future campaigns.

  Morgan forced herself to be patient, keeping her warships in the less dangerous areas around the command ship, adding more and more to whittle away on the backside of the thorn as the command ship began to move more laterally, with two of her cruisers actually kissing the hull on the port side when they failed to reposition fast enough. That told Morgan that the command ship was desperate, as it should be, and she wasn’t going to assume they wouldn’t run over one of her ships and accepting the damage that would ensue if escape were possible.

  To that end she repositioned several more ships over to the port side, intent on seriously damaging the command ship if it decided to go bulldozer.

  The cleansing beams kept coming down on the back side of the command ship, carefully targeting around the other Star Force ships as they bathed the hull in plasma, nicking away at the giant but unable to get at its gravity drives that were located well inside the hull. According to intelligence from the Alliance the Star Force remote pilots knew the approximate location of the drives and the cleansing beams were now probing those areas, hoping to burn deep enough to prick one of them into malfunction. The command ship had 6 set along the length of the hull even though one was enough to move the ship about within the system, but all six were necessary to achieve maximum jump speed for interstellar travel.

  And in order to truly clip its wings Morgan’s fleet needed to damage all six. That would take more time than they had, so physically blocking off its jumplines was the only viable option available to her.

  To that end more and more ships began clustering behind the ‘thorn’ and chewing into the pylon, now blasting out internal components as the armor over the target area was completely obliterated. They could see the firing aperture rotating around trying to get them into its sights, but the battlemap system all the Star Force ships were using had a clearly tagged no-go zone around its firing arc that all the pilots were holding their ships to with a decent margin to spare.

  As the blue plasma cascaded into the armor breach like coalescing blue raindrops there was a sudden backwash of red as the containment chamber in the weapon was breached. The plume radiated out through the breach and the firing aperture as it melted through the weaker components and was shaped by the intact armor. The plume impacted several of the destroyers and frigates nearest the pylon, washing over their shields and sucking the energy out of them with the sudden overload. The red plasma soaked into the Adamantium armor, vaporizing the outer inches before dissipating into the surrounding space as it quickly cooled.

  The hulls on the affected ships glowed fiery green for a moment before the Herculium upgrade cooled back down to its normal faint green…now visible since the Star Force grey paint had been burnt off. Even before the glow faded the ships began moving forward, shooting past the now dead weapon and drawing fire from other smaller plasma cannons. The larger destroyers and cruisers moved into engage them while the smaller frigates and corvettes shot ahead down the length of the command ship and took up position in front of it as the long warship continued to accelerate perpendicular to the planet with its port side now facing back towards the jumpships that were still scattering in an attempt to escape the tiny warships trying to block their path.

  A flashing light appeared on the edge of the hologram, indicating weaponsfire on the Red Ranger. Morgan zoomed back out from the Nestafar command ship and in on the four Star Force warships as a scattering of Nestafar cruisers and destroyers began assaulting the extremely large warships. Their shields were weaker than she would have liked, given the sheer size of the ship they had to cover, but the weapons batteries returning fire should be enough to hold off the small number of attackers so long as they were coming in piecemeal.

  Like the Nestafar command ship, the newer version Star Force warships had super-sized weapon systems onboard, two in fact…one covering the top of the ship and the other the bottom. Both were capital ship-sized plasma streamers in lieu of cleansing beams, for which the ship didn’t have the power for when its shields were running at maximum deployment.

  One of the plasma streamers on the Red Ranger fired off a compressed, long range beam that lost a bit of cohesion and spread out from its 2 meter-wide departure width to 15 meters by the time it hit one of the Nestafar destroyers. Like the Kvash versions it continually sucked the strength out of the target’s shields until it breached them and burned into the hull…then the capacitor drained and the beam abated, leaving the enemy ship crippled.

  The super weapon began rebuilding its plasma charge, unable to fire again for 34 seconds. While it recharged the conventional plasma orb launching cannons exchanged fire with the three Nestafar ships harassing it as a fourth came in from afar and began throwing its weaponsfire at the warship’s shields, which for all intents and purposes were a delaying mechanism rather than an effective defense.

  Morgan didn’t know if they’d kill them before they did hull damage or not, but the Captain had the defensive effort under control and the other 3 warships seemed to be in a similar situation so she turned her attention back to the command ship and adjusted the hologram…finding the ship and her fleet having moved off a considerable distance, nearly an eighth of the way around the planet.

  “No you don’t,” she said, ordering a pair of her ships pacing the command ship to disengage and move up into higher orbit to act as relays for the control signal that was allowing the pilots onboard the Red Ranger to fly the drone ships. If the Nestafar got them out of line of sight that multi-tiered signal would cut out and the ships would revert to computer control, executing previous assignments or, if none had been logged, simply stop fighting and drift through orbit until communication was regained.

  By using the ascending ships as relays they could extend the range around the curve of Sri’ka, though the lag was beginning to mount already. Given that their target was a huge, slow jumpship it wasn’t an issue, but had they been manually targeting incoming fighters or missiles it would start to become problematic, which is why they had backup automated targeting systems onboard each of the ships that could handle such things if instructed to do so.

  Speaking of fighters, she saw that a group of Nestafar ‘vipers’ had broken off from the ongoing engagement and were rapidly approaching the command ship while the Calavari had sent a handful of Valeries in pursuit while the rest of them were busy killing the Nestafar with a better than 4 to 1 ratio. Morgan did a circle search on the map and the computer counted 39 vipers, which she knew could be a hazard if they still had their missiles onboard, but in general they wouldn’t be more than a nuisance if/when they were able to catch up. The command ship was screaming along now, and with their tiny gravity drives the fighters were having a hard time eating up the distance.

  The computer tagged their ETA at another 8 minutes, though that number was fluctuating with every adjustment the command ship made in its course. It wasn’t regarding the Star Force ships as serious obstacles and was nudging them aside to get pointed the direction it wanted. The smaller ships had to back off or risk a collision but they didn’t move off the jumplines, just retreated along them to prevent a massive acceleration of the jumpship and stall for time while…

  Just then the command ship lurched and 9 of her drone ship icons winked out. The rest moved rapidly to counter the sudden burst of acceleration, falling behind momentarily then losing all contact as the ship executed a microjump using the planet’s gravity well to launch itself sideways off into space.

  “What the h
ell?” Morgan said, blinking in confusion for a moment before she pulled up a sensor replay to see what had just happened. Upon closer inspection it showed the jumpship ramming the ships in between in a very low powered jump to get clear before making its full escape jump.

  Three of her ships shredded on impact with the debris being knocked clear in explosive fashion…but the other six actually imbedded in the hull of the ship. They completely disappeared inside the command ship, doing untold amounts of damage, leaving Morgan surprised that the ship could still jump at all after that.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said, ordering her fleet to turn around and head back home, not only to deal with the three Nestafar jumpships that hadn’t managed to escape yet, but also to assist the Kvash battleship that was now in serious trouble. They wouldn’t arrive for quite some time, but every second counted and she needed to get them underway as soon as possible.

  When she finished she took half a step back from the podium and clenched her fists…then forced herself to relax and blew out a long, slow breath.

  “Ok, focus. That ship is seriously screwed up now. We can hunt it down later. First things first,” she said, switching back to warship mode and seeing several spots in the Red Ranger’s shield that were almost breached…along with the debris from three of the Nestafar warships nearby. Two more were still engaging, but it looked like they were going to be able to deal with them without reinforcement.

  The Kvash, however, were another story entirely.

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  A hefty salvo of Nestafar missiles launched from one of their battleships and flew in towards the Kvash, swinging around several closer destroyers and cruisers until they reached the narrow clear zone immediately around the tri-sphere ship. There they encountered none of the ‘blips’ as before, for all the anti-air devices had already been expended during the fighting, though there was a growing debris field around the huge battleship that was accomplishing much the same thing, which was probably also why the Kvash were no longer maneuvering…they didn’t want to rack up any collisions on the already damaged hull.