Star Force: Retribution (SF60) Read online

  A few of the Gfatt did make it and jumped out, signaling the H’kar to do likewise. Meanwhile the end of the shipyard ring hit the surface and its crumpling mass pulled the next closest section down with it…and like a giant noodle running the entire circumference of the planet each piece yanked down the part next to it, dropping a 12 mile thick ‘rope’ down to the surface, crushing the orbital tethers underneath that were partially keeping it erect as they were pulled sideways then snapped off in a domino-like effect that the Gfatt didn’t wait around to see the finish of. They knew physics would take care of the rest and burned hard for distance away from the swarming enemy fleet that was even more out for blood now than they had been before.

  A fair number of Gfatt ships made it back to a stellar jumppoint, but most did not, having been whittled down by inconsequential plasma fire throughout the engagement only to have the pathetically weak enemy cruisers make kills against the larger warships. They didn’t die in massive explosions, but rather were picked apart when their engines failed and they were left helpless. There was nothing their fellow ships could do, for now that the objective had been accomplished and their fleet wrecked, it was every ship for itself and they were running as fast as they could.

  Yren’s battleship was one of the lucky ones, surviving to the end of the engagement with only partial gravity drive loss…but enough remained for the ship to make a slow jump away from the system.

  The same couldn’t be said for most of the others desperately running away from the planet.

  2

  October 13, 2674

  Quixva System (Skarron territory)

  Quixstan

  Morgan watched the reconnaissance reports coming in from her bridge command chair along with the rest of the crew. The warship she was commanding was sitting with six others in stellar orbit along with a partial Voku conglomerate as transmissions were returning from a handful of their scout ship ‘pieces’ that had gone on ahead to the one inhabited planet in the system. They’d known it would only be a matter of time before the world fell, and thanks to the Hycre’s tireless efforts to track enemy fleet movements the trailblazer had been able to time their arrival accordingly.

  The planet’s orbital paths were already overrun with lizard ships, the naval battle having been previously fought and won, but the surface action on the moderately developed Skarron world looked to still be in its infancy. As she watched, Morgan could see multiple cruisers already in atmosphere tangling with Skarron walkers and the Archon was tempted to sit back and watch a bit, but they already had a prime opportunity as it was and she didn’t feel like waiting for their luck to change.

  The longer the fighting continued the less ships the lizards would have, but Morgan’s fleet already outmatched the 794 cruisers and two battleships in orbit…plus she wanted to hit their jumpships immediately, and right now they were sitting in planetary orbit virtually by themselves while the rest of the fleet was either in atmosphere or clustered into three other holding groups. It looked like some of the jumpships were troop transports as well, for they were already beginning to send small streams of kirbies and larger dropships down to the surface.

  The captain of the warship turned and gave her a questioning glance, with Morgan nodding as she stood up and headed over to the side room where the command nexus was located. They hadn’t known what to expect initially for all they’d known was a lizard fleet was spotted in this general area, but with the reconnaissance coming in telling her pretty much everything she’d hoped this mission could avail it was time to get to work.

  Stepping around the wall and into the nexus she contacted the Voku and worked out the basic battle plan, which would have them going after the jumpships while Morgan’s fleets deployed and engaged the cruisers. The Voku were faster and better armed for their size, which meant they’d have slightly better odds of hitting and disabling them before they were able to jump out, but the troop transports sitting at the lowest altitude were all Morgan’s.

  Working out the best approach jumplines the trailblazer began issuing orders to her warship and the others while setting a countdown clock that she shared with the Voku, then all of them broke up and made microjumps out to their preplanned positions. Morgan’s ship made a lazy jump towards the planet then hard braked to come up short and outside both lizard and Skarron sensor range, which was no small feat for a vessel of that size.

  With the planet being the size of Morgan’s fist on the holographic viewscreen, she waited until the countdown clock passed their departure mark and the crew made their final microjump, pulling on the planet’s gravity for most of its acceleration. The fist-sized planet grew visibly larger until it filled the viewscreen, with Morgan shifting over to a tactical view and the realtime camera images moving to auxiliary positions around the edges of her little battle nook.

  Lizard contacts began popping up on the map everywhere, slightly updated from the passive scans they’d just been monitoring from range, as did the other Star Force jumpships as they all came in at once along with the Voku, leaving little time for any of the enemy craft to maneuver. Morgan signaled through the nexus for her jumpship to begin firing immediately with its bloon launcher at one of the troop jumpships that was now sitting a handful of kilometers in front of them while the Star Force carrier dispersed its drones as quickly as possible. The little black bricks began spewing out as the first glowing energy balls were launched, with the lizard cruiser formations beginning to move to intercept.

  The first of the energy-filled bloons splashed against the transport’s hull, with it not even raising shields in time to block it. The bluish/red orb spread out an IDF-saturated energy goo that clung to the ship and isolated an area of it with the effect…and the placement hadn’t been random, for within that region of the vessel was one of their gravity drives, now currently disabled by the field and limiting their movement options. The next one to hit was the same variety, and the next, with the Star Force warship trying to pin the enemy jumpship in place while its drones came out.

  They needn’t have bothered because the lizards were taken completely off guard, thinking they’d just won control of the system from the Skarrons. Star Force had never been known to operate this far away from the ADZ, with them being past the ‘no-go’ line and on the coreward side of Achkor. Also the precise jump in had given the lizards no warning, not to mention they were still offloading kirbies full of ground troops.

  The shields on the enemy jumpship finally raised, but the goo was still inside them and would last more than a minute before it depleted its charge. The hits that came next had the goo sticking to the shields and accomplishing the same effect, though the bloon strikes that followed were stopped by the barrier.

  Those were orange orbs containing mauler energy, which savaged the shield strength and opened up gaping holes in the defense field for the few drones that had already deployed to shoot through, landing Ta’lin’yi columns against the hull in explosive fashion and trying to damage enough key systems to disable the big thing. There were four other jumpships nearby, and two of them began to bug out a few minutes after Morgan sprung her trap, though they started getting peppered by cleansing beams in an attempt to knock out their gravity drives directly as more and more drones got into the field.

  It was a race to critically hit the big ships and one that saw some losses. Three of the lizard ground troop transports managed to jump out, but the others did not. Likewise the Voku made 16 jumpship kills, two of which came at the star as they pursued them on their way out. The others had successfully managed to flee the system, but a few of the stragglers were not so lucky.

  Meanwhile the lizards threw their warships against the Star Force fleet, knowing they were outmatched and going to die but as always trying to do as much damage as they could in the process. Even some of the cruisers in atmosphere began to come up to assist, though most of them came too late to do anything more than just make themselves easy kills. A pair of them tried to make a kamikaze jump against Mo
rgan’s jumpship, but the crew spotted the lineup in time to deploy acceleration dampener shields. They didn’t surround the entire ship, but rather put up a wall against one approach vector that stretched out into a square column of invisible energy.

  That energy acted like a crash bag, collapsing and resisting the physical momentum and forcing a braking maneuver on the ships that left them trying to push through the field with their gravity drives still active less than a kilometer away from the hull. Weapons batteries all over the jumpship opened up and tore the cruisers apart before they could push their way through and lightly ram the ship, ending the threat in what would have been a facepalm moment for the lizards had they still been alive.

  If the ship’s crew hadn’t seen it coming it would have been another matter entirely, or if the warship had been surrounded by an assaulting fleet then they would have taken hull damage, for the power charge flowing to the main shields had to be diverted to the ‘cushion’ in order to inflate and reinforce the already existing capacitor charge. The sheer amount of energy needed to stop physical momentum on that scale was staggering, which was why it made for such a useful last ditch technique and any power reactor that didn’t use at least arc elements didn’t stand a chance of providing enough juice to pull off the defensive block.

  As it was, to shield a vessel the size of a jumpship with a sufficiently wide and deep wall of collapsible shield energy required not only the output of the reactors, but a huge amount of energy prestored in a special capacitor…though rare moments like this proved the engineering feat more than worth the over-burdensome design.

  Once the threat was gone the power generators switched back to reinforcing the decaying primary shield as a handful of enemy ships were still taking potshots at it. Those vessels were eliminated from the battlefield in a handful of minutes, leaving only a few other scattered engagements still occurring in orbit away from Morgan’s group.

  She checked on them with a few mental prompts and glances, pulling as much information directly into her mind as she saw with her eyes. It was a technique that no newbie Archon could achieve, but one that she’d grown accustomed to over time. Her mind acted like a part of the computer system and she’d learned to receive information in the same way, with it playing out in mind’s eye…or at least as much as she’d learned to handle. Paul’s skill in this department was far beyond hers, though Bo had both of them whipped with the sheer amount of information his Sav allowed him to process.

  The other fleets cleaned up shortly thereafter, with the raid having been a smooth victory given that the lizard fleet had already been heavily reduced in number given the previous battle with the Skarrons. That was the moment of opportunity that Morgan had hoped to catch, but they hadn’t come all this way out from the ADZ just to kill some lizard ships, for there were plenty closer to home to go after had that been their aim.

  This system was in the large region surrounding the fallen Skarron capitol, and according to the Hycre the lizards were sweeping up the systems in the area even as the Skarrons mounted a series of counteroffensives in selective spots. The problem was there were too many systems and the lizards were hitting most of them like a tidal wave with smaller fleets, knowing that the Skarron colonies wouldn’t be getting reinforced from their capitol now that it was no longer there.

  That was literally handing the lizards a huge chunk of territory on a silver platter given the widespread number of ships and resources they were committing to take it. The Skarrons weren’t making it easy on them, but systems like this one that weren’t of high population density or importance were basically on their own now, with no hope of reinforcements coming and the lizards knowing this. Rather than let them stand, the lizards were hitting them fast and hard, deploying what forces they thought were necessary to take them then starting their own colonies in their place.

  But that also meant that they weren’t coming in with overwhelming numbers, and while the Skarrons might not have been in a position to reinforce this system Star Force and the Voku had been, making for a load of easy kills given the lizard fleet’s weakened state. And now, without the mass of troops on their destroyed/fled jumpships, their ground invasion was beyond hopeless, even if there had been some cruisers remaining to deal with the Skarron walkers…which there weren’t.

  Once the naval battles were completed Morgan and the Voku began searching the orbital rubble, not only from this small battle but the larger Skarron/lizard one from the previous days, or weeks. They couldn’t be sure when it happened but there were a lot of hulks left in orbit with some of them beginning to degrade and fall towards the atmosphere. They intercepted and moved them into safe orbits while searching the remains for survivors. Those lizards they found they killed on the spot rather than let them slowly starve or freeze to death, but it was the few Skarrons they found still alive that they went to the bother of rescuing and taking prisoner.

  Meanwhile the Voku sent a tiny piece of their conglomerate back to the star where it made a jump towards a nearby system where the rest of Morgan’s fleet was waiting. It would deliver the all-clear message then return with the cargo ships, for the second half of this mission was about to begin.

  Throughout her recent years Morgan had tasked herself with recovering and rescuing as many Hobbits from their Skarron slavery as she could manage, sometimes in ones and twos on solo missions and others in large scale battles where, with a little nudging, she could get groups of them to switch sides before they were destroyed. The reason she had brought this raiding fleet out this far was because of the unique situation that it presented…and the hopelessness of the reality that these Skarron worlds were doomed to fall to the lizards without the necessary help that she knew they wouldn’t be receiving.

  Morgan didn’t care for the Skarrons much, but their slave races were another matter. The jumpships the Voku were going back to pick up were configured as personnel transports that she hoped would be filled with new ‘rescues’ on the return trip to the ADZ, for this was the first of some 6 systems on her list that she was going to try and pick up recruits from, one way or another.

  Already there was a growing free Aronsic ward within Star Force, and she even had a few of them with her onboard her warship to assist in the negotiations on the planet, either by comm or sneak missions to get a direct conversation with the Hobbits down there. With their Skarron masters still in play it was going to be tricky getting to them, and in this case they were probably going to have to assault the planet for themselves and kill the Skarrons before any of their slaves would be able to choose freedom.

  But there were many cities on the planet, some with more Hobbits than Skarrons, and Morgan begin looking at those as first choices for invasion points all the while the Voku began making preparations for mech drops to deal with the walkers the lizards hadn’t gotten around to destroying yet…and there were still many. Morgan was in a conversation with the Voku about coordinating cleansing beam fire on some of those walker targets when she got an interrupting prompt from her captain.

  It was flagged urgent, so she politely asked the Voku commander to hold for a moment and opened the comm line to the man sitting in the room only a few dozen meters away on the other side of the wall.

  “What is it?”

  “I issued the standard offer for surrender as usual, and we just got the Skarron reply. They’ve accepted.”

  “What?!” Morgan asked, shocked. Star Force always offered a surrender to their enemies, but only on some very rare or bizarre occasions had the Skarrons ever accepted…and to this day the lizards never had.

  “I just double checked with them, and they’re surrendering. The entire planet is surrendering to us.”

  3

  October 28, 2674

  Quixva System (Skarron territory)

  Quixstan

  Morgan rode a dropship down to the landing zone her ground troops had just set up, still not believing that this was a legit surrender. Her mind kept expecting an ambush or some form of d
eceit, but in the couple of weeks it took for her troop ships to arrive the Skarrons had complied with every edict she’d sent down. They’d sent their walkers out away from their bases and abandoned them there, and their elites had removed their armor and likewise piled it and all their handheld weapons up in large piles out in the open.

  They’d even begun relocating as specified, but it didn’t feel right to Morgan. The Hobbits she could understand, and the Engineers with them…but not the Skarrons. Never the less the surrender offer was legit and she was going to keep them alive so long as they didn’t try anything, but something deep down inside said that they would, though what it would gain them at this point she didn’t know. She’d parted them from their weapons and the few ships they had, including their fighters and even their ground transports, so if they were going to do some sort of mischief how they were going to accomplish it was beyond her.

  When she finally landed on planet she brought with her several Star Force Aronsic who’d previously switched sides, and through them she began to get some answers. They knew the Skarron empire better than she did and quickly put pressure to the points where needed, without rubbing it in the Skarrons’ faces…on Morgan’s orders.

  It turned out that after the recent lizard invasion and overall buttwhipping that Star Force and the Voku had just interrupted, the Skarrons didn’t have the stomach for any further fighting. The recent invasion had been the last gasp of their defiance, for it turned out that they knew they’d been abandoned by the empire along with a lot of other systems in the local region. With Skillion gone, the regional capitol that directly fed and controlled this region, there was no longer any oversight. This world and the others were categorized as losses, with any fleets coming in from other regions going straight towards vengeance rather than reinforcement.