Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (21-24) Read online

  “All ships are away,” Leslie confirmed from her bridge station. “Ship’s weapons on standby.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Liam commented as he stood up and hit a button on his command chair’s armrest. The seat broke apart into segments and disappeared into compartments underneath the floor while a podium rose up in front of him, converting his Admiral’s chair into a command nexus from which he assumed control of both fleets from the pair of Captains.

  Along with the icons for their 136 drone ships he also had larger ones for both jumpships, which were armed to the teeth for defensive purposes. They also had some long range weaponry up front for use in limited offensive operations but for the most part the huge ships were designed to be mobile command and repair posts that doubled as a control ship in lieu of a battleship that they hadn’t brought with them. The triangular design of those ships made them volume hogs for transport, which was why the drone ‘bricks’ were the only warship designs incorporated into this attack fleet.

  The two lizard fleets combined had 2 battleships and 18 cruisers…numbers that heavily favored Star Force even if they didn’t have Hycre support. That said, the lizards weren’t coming out after them, preferring to stay within weapons range of their station.

  That was a smart play, because the station had a considerable amount of weaponry and if they intended to do as much damage to the attackers as possible they needed it involved in the battle…which is exactly why Liam held his fleet back outside of its plasma range.

  With a flurry of key strokes he sent out orders to the pilots of the various ships, reforming them into a large, flat plane that stood vertically facing the station. Along the center he had the 8 heavy cruisers clustered together with the mass of cruisers surrounding them, then the smaller support ships scattered around the edges. When they were all in position he ordered the heavy cruisers to open fire.

  8 dull white streaks shot out from the Human fleet and hit three separate lizard cruisers at the front of their lines, penetrating their shields with minimal disruption and burning into their hull plates with a violent white light. The beams lasted nearly a full second, with the relative motion between the ships causing the cleansing beams to drift on the lizard cruisers’ hulls tearing deep gashes into them, one of which crossed over an anti-air battery, destroying it immediately on contact.

  Liam gave the heavy cruisers orders to hold position and fire at will, with more beams shooting out, but looking far less intense than they really were. The original design they’d pulled from the obsolete tech in the V’kit’no’sat database was for an invisible beam, given that it was pure energy and not energized particles that would glow on transit. Like a laser, the cleansing beam technology would only appear visually when it hit something. Paul had insisted on a minor design alteration to add the ‘tracer’ glow to the weapon discharge so one could visually track the weapons fire…as well as making it look more like the Halo version.

  Liam agreed that invisible energy weapons didn’t set well with him either. There were ways to detect them, but that technology was so far beyond Star Force’s current understanding that it could take well over a millennia before they even scratched the surface of being able to replicate the designs. For the time being they were going to stick with tracer elements for their own weapons and make do against their opponents. Nearly all of the neighboring races happened to favor bright plasma weapons, with only a few utilizing lasers or laser variants, like their own lachars.

  Though he knew they’d run up against one someday, the idea of a sensor stealthed ship firing off untraceable energy weapons was a recurring nightmare for the Archons, because energy weapon impacts didn’t behave ballistically and therefore their line of attack couldn’t be traced back to its source like, say, a rail gun slug could. Analyze the impact data, regardless of whether you detected it upon approach or not, and you could guestimate the route it came in by…but with energy weapons, they just heated a point on the hull to destruction, making it impossible to know where they were coming from within a given hemisphere.

  Liam knew that attack technique could be turned around and used in Star Force’s favor, but for the time being they didn’t have any stealth assault ships and didn’t plan to. Paul, Roger, and Liam had mutually agreed that their fleet design was going to be open contact…meaning all offenses and defenses would be based around the enemy being able to track your position.

  See, be heard, and ready to throw down at a moment’s notice…much as Star Force’s political strategy had been back in Sol from the beginning when they made their military program public knowledge.

  Liam preferred it that way, knowing that they’d earn more respect, trust, and fear by being bold rather than sneaking around in the shadows. That was best left to reconnaissance ships, not line warships who needed to tailor every aspect of their hull design to maximize combat efficiency rather than minimize signal traces.

  The lizards didn’t wait long to respond. As soon as the second salvo fired off they began to retreat back towards the station while the Hycre destroyer continued to make strafing runs in and out of the second fleet formation, frustrating the other lizard ships by its superior maneuverability and speed. Already three of their cruisers were damaged and the battleship was showing significant shield loss.

  Liam typed out an order for all their attack ships to begin creeping forward in formation while the heavy cruisers continued to fire. As the lizards moved out of effective targeting range some of the beams missed while others scorched their hull having become slightly more diffuse, but the main problem was keeping the dot on their hulls in the same place in order to burn all the way through. That said, they continued to rack up at least some damage until all the lizard ships in the nearer fleet turned and ran back over to join the other, hoping to ambush the destroyer and knock it out of the battle before the Humans got any closer.

  Easy, Liam thought to himself. They know what they’re doing.

  He kept their formation moving forward, eventually drawing some extremely long range plasma fire from the station. The defense cannons on it were more powerful than those they’d encountered on the lizard jumpship, but no matter how well their plasma held together after leaving their weapons batteries it still diffused over distance, sucking the energy out of it before it hit the first cruiser.

  More cloud than orb at this point, the first of the station’s shots to hit washed over one of the blocky warships, partially draining its shields but not penetrating or collapsing them. Liam pulled a sensor focus on the incoming plasma, which was coming in repetitive waves from at least 3 batteries, maybe 4, Liam couldn’t be sure at this range. Based off of visuals alone he guessed and drew a line across his map where it appeared the plasma was losing the bulk of its cohesiveness, then confirmed his estimates with sensor data being reflected back by the orbs…which actually suggested they were weaker than they looked.

  Liam moved the line up a bit, then transmitted it out to his fleet for them to move up to. His own ships would be well outside of their plasma range, but the heavy cruisers would be able to tear into the station with their cleansing beams along with the heavy lachars scattered throughout the rest of the fleet. They weren’t nearly as powerful, but had far greater range than any of the plasma weapons in play, including those of the Hycre.

  “Your move,” he whispered as his ships got into position and began hammering away at the station. More plasma started coming in from another pair of batteries, but most of it wasn’t strong enough to penetrate any of their shields, even with repetitive hits…and a great deal of it was going by their formation in clean misses.

  Meanwhile the two lizard fleets merged into one awaiting the return of the destroyer which wisely slowed down its approach and angled off to the right, pulling a lazy curve that even the lizards could follow and headed off towards the Human fleet, pulling its pursuit with it.

  Liam smiled, wondering if the lizards were being uncharacteristically stupid or if they didn’t ye
t comprehend how strong the Star Force fleet was. Either way they were coming straight at them, and about to get owned.

  As he watched them accelerate to try and catch up with the destroyer, which was only going as fast as it needed to stay ahead of them, Liam suddenly got a sinking feeling in his stomach, which was confirmed by the speed indicators on the lizards which were gradually ticking up higher and higher.

  “They’re going for an overshoot,” he warned the bridge crew as he typed out new orders to the fleet. “Prime defenses and fire as soon as they come within range…just make sure you don’t accidentally hit any of our own ships in the backdrop.”

  “Yes, sir,” Leslie acknowledged, then started barking out orders to the Chimaera’s crew.

  All of the Human ships in formation began reversing course, but thanks to their unique design they didn’t have to turn around to do it. Using their forward facing engines they accelerated to negate part of the lizards’ already accumulated momentum as they opened fire, first with the cleansing beams and lachars, then with their plasma as the lizard cruisers shot through the gaps in their formation.

  A hail of blue spheres shot out from the Star Force ships, blanketing the lizards and knocking down half of the ships’ shields and doing some light hull damage before they blew past. The pair of battleships, curiously, had broken off and returned to the station. Liam hadn’t noticed when, but that made it abundantly clear that they were trying to make a run at the jumpships, probably knowing by now that they were controlling the fleet, and if they knocked out their transmitters they’d still have a chance of winning this fight.

  A few moments later the computer tagged the deceleration profiles of the incoming 18 cruisers, all of which were heading towards the Chimaera.

  Make that 17…the Hycre destroyer had just taken out one of them and was slugging it out with two more at close range as the others continued to decelerate up to the jumpship, intent on making a slow flyby as they blasted away at the ship’s shields, which were considerably weaker than Liam would have liked. Their shield technology had improved greatly over the decades but it was still weaker than that of the lizards, and the jumpship’s shields were weaker still due to the power requirements to generate a barrier large enough to surround the massive ship.

  “Permission to dip into our fuel reserves?” Leslie asked.

  “You’ve got 5 minutes worth to work with, no more,” Liam said, knowing that while they needed to defend the ship they also needed enough fuel left to return home…which was several jumps away, which meant several accelerations and decelerations, each of which burned a massive amount of energy that had to be generated and stored in capacitors for such a quick release. Those capacitors were nearly full again, despite the microjump, and Captain Leslie was about to dip into them for the second time.

  On Liam’s monitor the shield strength for the Chimaera started ticking up, gaining about 10% every 1.5 seconds as the capacitors poured energy into the hundreds of shield emitters spread across the ship, which then took that power and transformed it into more of the thin energy matrix already spread around the jumpship. That energy matrix progressively thickened the as the seconds went by until the first green plasma orb was fired off from the approaching cruisers and hit diffusely across the forward shields, draining them of some of their energy as the plasma canceled out against the matrix.

  The sudden boost to shield strength ended as the capacitors shut down, despite still holding a significant amount of power. The 5 minutes Liam had instructed the Captain to use was the amount of power created by running the power cores at 100% for 5 minutes, which was less than a full capacitor charge. That said, given the shield strength currently deployed, it was going to take a lot of hits to get through.

  Unfortunately the lizards had a lot of hits to give. As the cruisers came up to pointblank range and flew along the length of the ship they pounded every cannon they had into the upper shield, swarming over it with a cascade of green plasma going down and a lesser amount of blue plasma coming back up as the Chimaera’s own defense cannons targeted the attacking ships. Unlike the old model weapons, Star Force’s new plasma cannons were able to concentrate and contain their plasma into a brief orb before it diffused, not unlike the lizards’ weapons, which Star Force had extensively studied and copied into part of their design.

  Their plasma cannons were still inferior to the lizards’, but not by a lot. Two of the already shieldless lizard ships were destroyed on their first pass over the jumpship by concentrated firepower as the Captain tagged the weaker ones for the ship’s gunners to pick on. Nevertheless three sections of the Chimaera’s upper shield went down after the first pass, leaving the hull of the ship exposed.

  The lizards didn’t hesitate to pull a 180 and come back over for another attack, hammering away at the ship’s plasma cannons and the portion of the shield that was still covering the main transmitter. One by one the icons on the jumpship holo displayed before Liam began to wink out, meaning less and less defensive options for the jumpship, though the lizards did lose another cruiser to the mass of plasma fire coming up at them before they created a semi-safe zone around the transmitter that made it hard for the surrounding cannons to depress far enough to target them.

  They got that section of shield down just as the Hycre destroyer made a slow strafing run over their position, careful to shoot down at the enemy ships without missing and hitting the Human jumpship. The lizards ignored it and hammered away at the transmitter, knocking it out just before the smaller Star Force ships made it back and dove into the engagement.

  It didn’t last long. By the time the trailing heavy cruisers arrived the 18 lizard warships were nothing more than debris…as was the Chimaera’s main transmitter, though most of it was still attached to the ship. Fortunately it wasn’t the only transmitter on the warship, but by losing it Liam had lost his ability for longer range control of his fleet, such as from one side of the star system to another. Fortunately even the backup transmitters had enough power to reach across planetary orbit, so this mission wouldn’t be affected, but once again the lizards had found a way to cause more trouble than Star Force expected them to, even if they hadn’t been able to deny them their objective.

  The hologram of the Hycre symbol appeared again as an incoming transmission was translated into text.

  STATUS OF SHIP DAMAGE?

  “We’ve lost one of our transmitters and some weapon batteries, but we’re still operational,” Liam replied. “We’ll hit the station and their battleships as soon as we get our fleet back in range.”

  WE WILL ASSIST.

  Liam typed away at his podium inside the holographic nexus, reforming his fleet back into its vertical plane formation then advanced it towards the station, targeting it again with the heavy cruisers and their cleansing beams while staying out of effective plasma range. Once they’d racked up a significant amount of damage to the station the two battleships turned and fled the engagement, heading back down towards the planet’s surface.

  “Damn it,” Liam swore, typing in pursuit orders then jabbing the transmit button for a line to the Hycre. “Stop them.”

  He needn’t have bothered. By the time he transmitted his message the Hycre destroyer was already accelerating out ahead of the Star Force fleet and gaining ground on the battleships, which then split as they saw it was incoming. It pursued the one going to the right and intercepted it just before it reached the atmosphere and started to exchange green and white plasma between the ships with the first wisps of the planet’s air starting to drag on their shields as they were both headed on a trajectory almost straight down to the surface.

  The battleship’s shields went down first, with the torrent of air flowing in and causing a portion of the hull to glow from the friction of descent, but the ship kept on fighting all the way down, finally punching through the destroyer’s forward shield that was also being stressed by the atmospheric friction. It stayed with the battleship until it had torn a huge hole in its hul
l, then it finally broke off and angled away into a long braking maneuver as it fought the planet’s gravity.

  The more massive battleship wasn’t so fortunate. As it attempted to slow its own descent one of its gravity drives overloaded from the damage the Hycre had done to the ship and exploded, knocking out another small chunk of the ship and leaving it with less propulsive force than necessary to overcome gravity in the little time it had left.

  The lizards tried to angle away as the destroyer had, but only managed to avert their head on collision with the planet by turning the impact into a long, scraping crash across the flat landscape. The underside dragged on the ground, digging out a deep furrow until the friction was too much and the ship’s nose caught and flipped the entire battleship head over heels, breaking it apart when the aft end smacked down in a shower of ship chunks that went twisting and twirling in all directions, plowing out smaller furrows of their own.

  Liam monitored the impact site, noting the fact that there were at least 3 Darlestik cities in the area and doubting it could have missed all of them.

  Meanwhile the second battleship got away, dipping into the planet’s atmosphere in a more controlled fashion and heading down to one of their surface bases and taking refuge beneath its shields. Liam tracked its position, noting that the lizard base was far larger than any they’d been able to establish on Corneria.

  One thing at a time, he reminded himself, turning his attention back to the station that his ships were thoroughly chewing apart from range. He could have ordered them closer to finish it off faster, but he also knew they’d probably take some damage in the process which would limit his offensive capability for later. That meant his best bet was to take this slow and knock the station out from a distance, no matter how long it took.