Star Force: Paradigm (SF35) Read online

  The lizards weren’t going to get the chance to plan and launch an assault of the planet, for the Humans had their own warfleet in system, and it was heading straight towards them.

  2

  “Sensor contact made, Captain. Two lizard Carrier-class jumpships, 52 cruisers, and six jump-capable transports with kirbies enroute.”

  “Very well,” Captain Jamke said, studying the battle hologram on the bridge as enemy data was being updated both visually as well as verbally. “Deploy the fleet. Target the cruisers, and give me attack lances headed for the jumpships and transports. I don’t think they’ll stay long, but just in case I want ships in position.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the first officer said, relaying the appropriate orders in more detail.

  The single Warship-class Star Force jumpship began disgorging its drone warships as it accelerated through as low of an orbit as it could, trying to close with the lizard fleet before it had a chance to bug out. That said, the odds were relatively even, and keeping ships contained in orbit was almost impossible, so if the lizards wanted to leave there was little to keep them from making a micro-jump out of planetary orbit…save for the chance to fight the Humans.

  As the approaching fleet began braking maneuvers using a pair of repulses strung out between Endor and one its moons to get the right vector, the lizard jumpships zipped off, jumping out from the planet and quickly leaving sensor range. The cruisers, however, stayed behind setting themselves to receive the Star Force fleet while the transports ducked down to a slightly lower orbit to pick up what kirbies had survived the surface ambush.

  Jamke didn’t know if the cruisers were buying them time or if they wanted to fight it out, but either way he intended to do them some damage. With the Meteor hanging back and remotely controlling the attack fleet made up of a quartet of heavy cruisers on down through a mix of cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and cutters, the Captain watched as the leading ships of both formations crisscrossed and began exchanging fire…the lizards with their potent green plasma and the blocky Star Force ships with their mixed assortment of weapons ranging from missiles to maulers.

  Each ship potentially had a different layout, given that they were partially modular, and Jamke had configured his fleet for close up combat, using a large number of the new mauler mods that gave his ships shield disrupting capability, in that the weapons severely messed with the lizards’ shields on impact, allowing them to punch through far quicker than normal and letting even his smallest ships inflict hull damage before the lizards could take them out.

  As per his standard alignment, he had his warships clustered up into trios that picked on individual lizard targets. Whether it be a destroyer and two cutters, or a threesome of corvettes, each little battlegroup worked together to maximize its collective weapons package, hitting the lizard cruisers hard as the fleets continued to close with one another and start the main melee.

  Two of those battlegroups sidestepped the heaviest fighting and went lower in orbit, headed for the transports. One of the enemy cargo ships jumped out immediately, but the others remained, still picking up kirbies coming back from the surface. Those began taking long range lachar hits, which also penetrated their shields, putting small pot marks in their hull armor…which quickly started to add up, forcing another to jump prematurely leaving some 6 kirbies behind as it made an emergency micro-jump away from the planet. The line it took lead nowhere, meaning it was going to have to do some serious navigating to find the star or another planet to land on before drifting off into interstellar space.

  But the tradeoff was that Star Force would be hard pressed to follow them out, and Jamke didn’t intend to. He wanted to do what damage he could and run them out of planetary orbit, which happened some 10 minutes later when the transports decided they’d picked up as many kirbies as they could before turning away and jumping out of sensor range.

  As soon as that happened the cruisers, who’d been trimmed down from 52 to 39, also made micro-jumps away from the planet, but with much slower acceleration given that they didn’t have the massive drive cores that jumpships carried. Still, it was enough to get them away from the Human fleet, whose continually developing weapons and shield tech was beginning to outclass theirs.

  Suddenly low orbit was clear, save for the remaining kirbies that didn’t really have anywhere to go. Some accelerated on their tiny gravity drives and tried to leave the planet the same way the other ships did. A few made it past the Star Force fleet, though most were gunned down by the ships’ lachars, leaving a handful of kirbies heading back down to the planet to try and escape the orbital guns.

  “Get me course plots on those outgoing kirbies and potential intercepts…and a line to Canderous,” Jamke ordered, with is crew carrying out his last order in a matter of seconds, generating a hologram of a Legat just off his bridge command chair.

  “The enemy fleet has been run off, but there are a few kirbies returning to the surface,” the Captain explained without preamble.

  The Legat nodded. “We’ll take care of them, one way or another. Can you remain in orbit for an active sensor trace?”

  “As long as you need,” Jamke offered, knowing that most of the Canderian sensor outposts were passive, so as not to give away their locations. “We’ll be cleaning up ship debris for a few hours at least.”

  “Will you call in the salvage ships? I’d rather not send out that strong of a signal, given that there are still enemy ships in the system.”

  “Next item on my list,” Jamke said, glancing at his comm officer, who nodded his understanding of the indirect order.

  “As far as I know, none of the kirbies that got away contained any Ninkari, so do not concern yourself with capturing them.”

  “I wasn’t,” the Captain admitted. “Most of them hadn’t even made it to the surface.”

  The Legat seemed to bristle at that, but he didn’t voice his feelings concerning the Captain’s sloppiness. If one of the kirbies had taken a Ninkari onboard and was then destroyed, that would have been a mission failure…one that could easily be avoided by the Canderians tagging the ship with a ‘no kill’ marker. They hadn’t needed to, but the Captain’s explanation made him wonder if he would have even double checked before blowing them all away.

  “We will need at least one transport on the surface. Two or three if you can spare them.”

  “You’ll get at least 2. Surface cleanup takes priority.”

  “Thank you. What are your plans concerning the surviving lizard ships?”

  “We’re not taking their jumpships unless they make a mistake, and I don’t think they’ll be coming back without a larger fleet, which they’ll probably be needing over Atlantica.”

  “Back to hide and wait then?”

  “Seems so. We’ll stay close for a week or so, just in case they have other plans.”

  The Legat nodded and ended the commlink.

  “Where are we with those traces?” Jamke asked, standing up from his command chair and taking a step up towards the main hologram that was detailing the slice of orbit that they were currently located in. None of his officers answered him, but the holo did zoom out with 9 lines indicating where the kirbies were making their slow jumps out from. Only now were they actually approaching the speed of the ship’s sensors and dropping off their active scans, but due to the ballistic nature of space travel between gravity wells they had a good idea where they would be heading in the near future.

  The lines on the holo connected at their origin with dotted lines indicating the quickest intercept routes to get to those jumplines with the closest of the Meteor’s drone warships. By his visual inspection, Jamke had enough cutters and corvettes operational to pursue all of them.

  “Go after them, boomerang protocol,” he ordered.

  Situated within the widely spaced fleet and now drifting debris field from the battle, a Star Force cutter received new orders, using both its differential gravity drive to push off the nearby moons and planet
to reverse its orbit course, along with convention thrust engines to diminish the time to target as the smallest of the rectangular warships headed for one of the jumplines. After six minutes of heavy acceleration it coasted for another 2, then likewise decelerated until it came to a stop on the exact jumpline, hovering over the planet below on its gravity drive now that it no longer had any orbital speed.

  Ramping up the repulsive field while obscuring the pushes from the nearby moons, distant planets, and star, it launched up the jumpline, accelerating in a fluid motion that quickly shrank it to a dot that was traveling well faster than the kirbies could manage, but not so fast that it would overshoot.

  Soon the cutter passed out of communications range with the Meteor, given that it was traveling faster than the control signals, meaning that it now was operating on preprogrammed instructions. First among those was to continue up the jumpline with active sensors scanning ahead until it found the target or a certain amount of distance/time expired.

  The kirby showed up as a hazy signal at first, due to the signal lag and range, but it was enough for the computer onboard the cutter to start plotting an intercept course, reaching out to the star and planets to give it some small amount of deceleration by combining those various trajectories and playing them off at one another. It didn’t offer a lot of thrust potential, but it did save precious conventional fuel, as well as allowing for course corrections where ships without differential drives were forced to sit through a coast phase.

  The lizards had differential drives, which was how they maneuvered around in atmosphere without having to expend a great deal of conventional thrust, meaning the kirby had the ability to move off its jumpline slightly if it wanted, though it hadn’t. Once the cutter made contact and got it in a sensor lock it was only a matter of time before the intercept occurred, given the larger ship’s more powerful engines and navigational capability.

  Many more minutes passed until the cutter closed within weapons range, at which point the kirby did try and alter course, pushing itself to the side and hoping the cutter would pass it by, but the computer program recognized the altered trajectory and corrected itself, staying on the kirby’s tail as the enemy contact accelerated, pushing forward and gaining a bit of ground on the cutter before it again corrected and started to eat up the gap.

  Once within a predetermined range the drone began sniping with its lachars, stitching the kirby with immediate hull breaches, given the size of the weapons on the warship. The kirby’s thrusting ended almost instantly, allowing the cutter to close even further and douse the chewed up hull in plasma, burning the corpse in a delude of blue fire in successive blasts that was clearly overkill, but the computer didn’t recognize that, for it was only following its programming.

  It continued to batter the remains until the sensor signature diminished to rubble, which then triggered the computer to tag the target as ‘dead,’ at which point the boomerang programming kicked in and the navigational computer took note of the positions of the planets and star, then started pushing off their weak gravity wells to move it into a trajectory that would lead it to one of them, in this case the 3rd planet in the system.

  It took it some 29 hours to reach its destination, upon which it easily and quickly braked against the gravity well and settled into an orbit that would bring it around on the jumpline back to Endor. That jump took all of 38 minutes, at which time it returned to the short range control signals from the Meteor once the warship orbited its way around the curve of the planet…or more accurately, one of the Canderian transports orbited around the edge of the planet and relayed the straight line signals to the drone, acting in lieu of a Star Force communications grid that typically would have had orbital or surface installations to relay the signal around the sphere.

  A pilot onboard the warship took the drone back under direct control and flew it into the ship’s external carrier bay, sliding it up into an empty slot along with most of the others. Those missing were either on patrol alongside the gigantic craft or had been damaged/destroyed during the battle.

  The damaged ones still capable of flight had been sent off while those not capable of movement had been towed back to the Meteor, which would deliver them in person to the repair yard some 9 days later. At the moment four Canderian transports were harvesting the battle debris from the lizard cruisers, already having gotten to the Star Force debris first.

  With it being a full day past the battle, the cleanup of the dead kirbies on the planet’s surface had already been completed, with the battle scars in the Ninkari villages being patched over with new construction, tilled soil, and new seedlings where appropriate. The hidden Canderian turrets were also being resodded, so as to take root as soon as possible to conceal their locations, though it would take time for new trees to replace the burnt ones. The grassy clearings would have to suffice in the meantime, but with each day that passed the concealment would literally ‘grow’ more effective.

  After Jamke’s fleet finished watching over the transports as they cut and picked up battle debris, leaving orbit clean of any trace of either lizard or Human presence, he took his escorts back inside the jumpship and made a micro-jump out to the 15th planet in the system, which was only a short hop away from Endor. There the Meteor stayed, so as to be in close proximity should the Canderians call for support again.

  The Captain lingered there for more than a week before making another micro-jump out to the 73rd planet in the system, one of the furthest away from the star on the very edge of the system. The Meteor braked against its small gravity well then redirected towards its even smaller moon that was about a tenth the mass of Luna…though that mass had been reduced greatly, requiring a specially built gravity drive to nudge it back into a stable orbit, for it had started to spiral out from the planet a bit as the Canderians had gradually hollowed it out to build their concealed seda inside.

  It was the largest built to date, surrounded by a rocky exterior miles thick that made for better armor than anything Star Force had produced to date. It was so large, in fact, that they had included an internal shipyard where they could both build new ships, including the salvage transports they used to clean up the lizards’ mess whenever they sent ships into the system, and repair the damaged ones, both those drones already having traveled to the moon under their own power and those the Meteor was now releasing from its grasp to be towed inside.

  The jumpship had repair facilities onboard that could rebuild the drones if necessary, but a lot of that construction had to happen on the ship’s exterior rather than in a full slip cradle. Bringing them to the seda would yield both faster repairs and more efficient ones, which was why the Meteor was making a stop at the moon. Otherwise it normally camped out around random planets in the outer zone of the system, bouncing around so as to keep out of sight of the lizards as it waited for recall.

  Once it offloaded its wounded ships it maneuvered back over to the planet then jumped out, not wanting to draw attention to the secret seda, who had opened its massive rock-covered bay doors over the space of 6 hours to allow the damaged ships inside, followed by another 6 hours reclosing them…not because they lacked the necessary torsion power, but because they were moving a rocky exterior miles thick as the doors pushed out then flowered open, reclosing the same way to maintain the seda’s camouflage.

  From the seda other ships would come and go, servicing the Canderian bases on Endor with supplies and rotating field deployments, all of which was designed to keep the system clean of Human presence so as not to draw the lizards here with a target to hit, for their mission wasn’t their destruction, but the defense of the Ninkari. The trailblazers had been convinced that a stealth defense could be successful and evacuation of the Ninkari to another planet would not be necessary, and if their efforts on Atlantica bore fruit, the lizards would probably be so busy fighting there or at Namek to not pay much attention to the Ninkari…or barring that, not be able to produce a large enough fleet to outmatch both the Meteor and the Ca
nderian bases on the surface.

  If the worst case scenario came to pass, a courier ship docked within the seda would be dispatched to whistle up reinforcements, after which the Ninkari could be relocated, but so far the plan was holding to form and Star Force intended to keep it that way and the Ninkari on the world the lizards had deposited them on, if for no other reason than to thumb their nose at them and their barbaric food supply chain.

  That was something the Canderians could appreciate, and they reveled in their responsibility in the system, as well as their zero failure record to date.

  3

  February 23, 2432

  Karmena System

  Epipo

  Sara watched from the bridge of the Hawkeye as the drone warships in her fleet took out the remains of the lizard defense fleet and then began pounding the orbital infrastructure around the planet. It was the less developed of the two inhabited planets in the system, and the location where she’d chosen to stage her raid. Her fleet of 5 warships had easily overwhelmed the planetary defenses, then reinforcements from nearby Iradon jumped in as she’d expected.

  That battle had been more lengthy, but the outcome had never been in doubt. While both planets were heavily encroached with lizard bases/cities, their naval defenses were limited compared to the fleet she’d brought with her. Rather than get coy, the lizards had thrown everything they had at the Human fleet up front, leaving her forces with little now to do other than blow up their orbital infrastructure, including a handful of battle stations that her cleansing beam-equipped warships were sniping apart from range.

  She didn’t like the slaughter, but time and again the lizards had refused to surrender, and now was no exception. The trailblazer had sent out the customary offer, and as usual there was no response…not from the lizard commanders, the planet below, or any of the ships or stations in orbit. The lizards were determined to either dominate or die, with surrender not being an option on the table. Sara kept waiting for the time when one of them would make another call, but so far neither she nor any other Archon had encountered an independently thinking lizard, making it even more apparent that they were bred for purpose, with any singular concerns, such as staying alive, having been hardwired out of their biology, or more probably suppressed.