Star Force: Relocation (SF44) Read online

  2

  May 7, 2470

  Pagalis System

  Inner Zone

  With the Alliance fleet still in control of Varasiss orbit, though having been reduced in size by three fourths, the Cajdital had abandoned the mass attacks and resorted to smaller tactical assaults focusing on a select group of ships, eliminating them, then pulling back out with whatever ships they had left. Most of those assaults were cruiser groups led by a battleship or two, and the Hycre figured that the Cajdital were setting up for another attack with their invoker. To combat this, the Alliance had spread out their fleet across orbit, which made the Cajdital attacks even more effective at eliminating specific ships.

  With that fact in mind and expecting the big attack to come eventually, spread out or not, the Hycre chose to hit first, having located the invoker in a shallow orbit around the huge orange star in the binary pair where the stellar winds nearly hid it from sensors. Farther up was the Cajdital fleet, still receiving a steady flow of warships into the system via jumpship, with well over a thousand of the carriers parked in a slightly higher orbit.

  It was those carriers that the Hycre jumped on, despite the huge Cajdital fleet of warships nearby. Their binary drives added to their already higher agility, allowing the Hycre to make strafing runs on the jumpships, blowing by with 15-25 destroyers/cruisers and puncturing the shields on one with a single pass. Another group would follow through and take advantage of the temporary weakness even as the swarm of Cajdital cruisers moved in to try and block their path.

  Of all the fleets that had been hard hit by the invoker, the Hycre had lost the least ships. Most had pulled back to their outer weapons range when the attack began, expecting the furthest portions of the energy field to be the weakest…and then pulling back outside it when their expectations fell short and they lost ships they’d expected to be safe.

  After that they made short runs into gaps in the field, firing off their high yield plasma weapons and then ducking back out, hoping to survive any incidental hits, for it seemed that the energy arcs were at least partially targeted rather than completely random after a few moments of study. Normally some plasma would deflect off the Hycre shield matrixes, but unfortunately the invoker’s energy didn’t work the same way, though it did skip a bit across the shield perimeter, impacting on multiple spots before breaching through and hitting the hull.

  The Alliance races that didn’t have energy shields had no protection at all aside from their armor, which the energy arcs were very good at melting/vaporizing.

  The Hycre ships quickly learned how much invoker energy they could take…which wasn’t much, but it allowed them to make quick attack runs in that initial assault that had hurt its shields badly, while most of the firepower from the rest of the Alliance fleet didn’t make it through in the case of missiles, with the plasma being reduced to spit as they tried to stay out of range save for those ships brave/reckless enough to charge forward.

  Both tactics had left the other fleets decimated, with the Kvash being the best to withstand the invoker attacks…though their slower speed had been disadvantageous. They were used to being the immobile power that others would play against, but with their starbase being taken out of the fight they had quickly been taken out of their element, and that shift in the tactical situation had cost them a significant number of ships before they’d adjusted and started to pull back.

  Fortunately the invoker had started to take damage and retreated before it could pursue them, but still the Kvash had lost a high number of ships, leaving the Hycre with the defacto command of the crumbling defenses, which had already seen a few of the smaller races’ ships abandoning the effort and jumping away.

  The Hycre knew if the invoker came back in the fleet would scatter, as they should, but that would leave the Cajdital with possession of a piece of planetary orbit, opening up a ground invasion of the planet. Plus, the fewer ships the Alliance could pull together, the less chance there was of taking the invoker down, which was why the Hycre had decided to take the fight to them, and were doing so in spectacular fashion.

  The Cajdital jumpships, heavily armed as they were, were sitting ducks against the Hycre’s fleet, with many of them beginning to scatter and turning a once orderly formation into navigational chaos. The Hycre used that to their advantage, maneuvering through the gaps where the Cajdital cruisers couldn’t follow with as much ease. Like schools of deadly sharks the Hycre moved around and through the mass of Cajdital ships, but only hit the jumpships, forgoing the easy targets the cruisers made.

  Thinking ahead past this invasion, the Hycre knew the less jumpships the enemy had the less ships and troops they could move around in future years, meaning that even if they couldn’t hold the Calavari homeworld they’d be slowing down other invasions by taking these sitting jumpships down while they were clustered together and vulnerable.

  The mass of cruisers, battleships, and even a few dreadnaughts that the Cajdital were holding back moved to defend their jumpships as the big behemoths ran for wherever they could get openings, but the Hycre had come in from numerous angles, blocking the jumplines to the surrounding planets and making the Cajdital move laterally, giving them extra time to poach their targets given the Hycre destroyers’ greater speed.

  As that ruckus was underway another group of Hycre ships was waiting on the jumpline they’d determined the Cajdital were arriving by and hitting new jumpships as they came in against the other star. Simultaneously a group of much larger Hycre ships…cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships…jumped from one star to the other and began circling around its orange mass at low altitude enroute for the position where they knew the invoker to be hiding.

  Given the Hycre’s natural habitats within gas giants and their navy’s ability to fly into and through the massive atmospheres that they contained, the Hycre dipped lower into the star’s orbit and pushed through the thin, hot gasses there, weathering the damage to their shields until they came up on the invoker from below and made an initial strafing run against it at considerable speed intended to deliver their plasma at nearly pointblank range so that it wouldn’t be disrupted by the stellar winds.

  The Cajdital saw them coming and began rising in altitude, but not before the Hycre got to them. The energy cascades didn’t manifest, which the Hycre had been hoping would be the case. The Cajdital would have to move clear of the star’s highly charged, thin upper atmosphere to use their primary weapon, and the Hycre were going to hurt them as much as possible before that.

  The invoker’s shields had already been up and weakened by the sustained effort to ward off the star’s continual light damage, meaning that when the Hycre hit them they had less shields to punch through than normal. As soon as this and the fact that the ship wasn’t powering up its primary weapon became evident, the Hycre aborted their strafing runs and moved up in between the invoker’s arms and blasted away at the ship as it desperately tried to climb out from the star without creating too much turbulence.

  Given the choice of getting blindsided by the Hycre or jumping too far in, the invoker’s crew decided to go with the later and made a very light microjump away from the star on no particular jumpline. The friction of the very thin stellar atmosphere popped what was left of their shields and sandblasted the massive ship’s hull, tearing through the outer layers of armor and damaging some of the emitters on the arms.

  The Hycre followed easily, though it took them a moment to get back within firing range. When they did the primary weapon lit up and the invoker was once again encircled with cackles of multi-colored energy as it continued to run, though laterally this time, trying to get to a jumpline where it could escape.

  Meanwhile the Cajdital fleet trying to defend the jumpships split in two, with half running back the other way to try and get to the invoker. Over the minutes between that happening or the invoker getting to a decent jumpline, the Hycre ships braved the energy field and continued to attack the invoker with short strafing runs led by the lar
gest of their ships.

  The Hycre battleships would punch a hole in the energy arcs, taking the brunt of the storm while the others would follow them through taking less hits than otherwise, but after the first pass was made the Hycre discovered that some of the emitters had been damaged, leaving a few holes in the invoker’s ever fluctuating energy field.

  The Hycre moved instantly to exploit the weakness and flew very difficult navigational routes to keep their ships tucked up inside those holes and directly over the hull of the invoker as it altered its trajectory and speed regularly, trying to shake its pursuit. They managed to break through the armor and get at the Cajdital ship’s interior, eventually sheering off one of the emitter arms and creating a much larger gap in the field around where it had been.

  The Hycre packed ships inside that gap, but the Cajdital finally got to a useable jumpline and bumped their way free, ramming four of the cruisers at low speed and taking additional damage from the collisions as the energy arcs disappeared and the massive black ship disappeared in a blur.

  The Hycre went after it, sending some of their ships out on the same jumpline while the others laid down tractor beams onto their own damaged ships and pulled them away on slow jumps after extending their IDF fields to cover the energy tethers, else the surge of acceleration would have torn them apart. They managed to do so just before the swarm of Cajdital ships caught up to them, and the enemy knew better than to try and pursue, given the Hycre’s better navigational capability.

  The fleet attacking the Cajdital jumpships didn’t stay around long either after the other ships came into play. While the enemy couldn’t stay with them, give them enough numbers and all they had to do was blanket the approaches with plasma and the Cajdital would rack up enough hits on the Hycre ships to take them down.

  Still, they persisted a bit longer, expertly navigating through the hoard and hitting a few dozen cruisers for good measure before pulling out, taking shield and armor damage with them, but without losing a single ship.

  They left 86 damaged Cajdital jumpships behind, some of which were so torn up they were near to snapping in half. That number was small compared to how many were present in the system, with more still arriving with fresh warships and troops, but anywhere else that would have been a massive catastrophe and the Hycre knew it. Plus, two of the 86 had been the Cajdital’s largest jumpship models, capable of ferrying around their battleships and dreadnaughts, if not upwards of 1000 cruisers.

  One of those massive jumpships, along with several ‘small’ ones were falling into the star, having been trying to escape in that direction when their gravity drives were hit, with the Cajdital fleet of warships swarming around them and trying to physically push the larger craft into a stable orbit, but in the case of the big jumpship the math wasn’t in their favor, and soon the Cajdital figured that out as well, for a plethora of smaller craft began abandoning it in a hurry as it began to kiss the star’s upper atmosphere.

  The Cajdital’s plan of rendezvousing close in to the star to help mask long range sensors was now coming back to bite them, spectacularly so, as the mammoth jumpship began to burn in a huge plume of atmosphere it kicked up on the way down, then it fragmented as it hit a lower layer within the star, with each piece breaking up and further disintegrating as it sank lower and lower into the star.

  Once again the Hycre’s naval mastery had stuck it to the Cajdital, but they had so many ships in the system they could overcome the losses and continued to do so, immediately jumping the bulk of their fleet out, intent on assaulting Varasiss while the Hycre were absent.

  They left behind a significant force to guard the damaged jumpships, but the rest of the huge Cajdital ships were dispersed throughout the system, making it impossible for the Hycre to locate and exploit any clustering of vessels. That said, the Hycre also saw this as an advantage, for their ships were good at hunting others down, and the larger the ships the easier it was to track and intercept them…which was one reason why the Cajdital had chosen to press the attack now, forcing the Hycre to make a decision.

  Over 2,000 cruisers, 50+ battleships, and 6 dreadnaughts surged their way back towards Varasiss in a stream, holding off high above the planet until their numbers pooled, then they dove towards low orbit, heading towards the nearest cluster of Alliance ships which was pathetically small in comparison, given how spread out they’d become in case the invoker came back.

  The Hycre ships still in orbit, few as they were given they’d devoted nearly everything they had to the stellar assault, issued orders to the rest of the Alliance fleet, and regardless of what the other races thought about their arrogant presumption, they complied with the ‘suggestion’ and moved off on specified courses that the Hycre had not deigned to explain.

  That explanation was given in the arrival of handfuls of Hycre destroyers, frigates, and corvettes that had been sitting in ambush positions across the system coming back on specific jumplines and intercepting the Cajdital with calculated precision that was typical Hycre. The other Hycre smaller ships were still bouncing around the system chasing errant jumpships and making a few kills, though most were playing a wounding game, eliciting damage where they could until their little stings could eventually get through, which in the case of a jumpship was more about mass than shield strength, with their gravity drives buried deep within the hull.

  Seeing the Cajdital counterattack a lot of those ships had to be recalled, but enough were left to keep the enemy jumpships busy, and with the Alliance’s coordination with the Hycre the massive battle the Cajdital was looking for didn’t arise. Rather, it was broken down into smaller engagements that favored the Hycre ships when backed up by other Alliance vessels.

  The enemy wasn’t stupid, and they saw this immediately. Instead of trying to abort the attack they pursued it and fought the Alliance on their own terms, all the while calling for some of their jumpships to return. They picked their jumplines carefully, and as the fighting entered its 3rd hour across low to high orbit, a group of 16 jumpships plus escorts arrived in an empty region above the low orbit defense grid of Calavari battle stations.

  Before the Alliance could get enough ships back over to intercept them, the Cajdital launched a wave of cruisers that blew past the battle stations, taking numerous hits as they went, mostly from missile impacts. A few ships were lost, but the cruisers were clumped together so tightly the Calavari stations couldn’t down them quick enough, letting some 88% through to the atmosphere…where they were met by swarms of Valeries that exploited the damage the stations had made in their shields and hulls.

  They followed the cruisers all the way to ground, losing many of the fighters in the process, but even more once their descent slowed and their anti-air plasma shards became more effective at range with the air no longer blowing them apart as soon as they left their batteries.

  The Valeries were forced to withdrawal and watch the cruisers land, staking out four different locations on the second largest southern continent, whereupon the cargo cruisers began disgorging huge numbers of hover tanks and infantry protected by the cruisers’ guns that held back both the Calavari air and tanks. They were used to getting their asses handed to them on the ground by the Nestafar, but the Cajdital didn’t have walkers and in that regard they were even…both had tanks, both had infantry, both had aircraft…and the Calavari liked the matchup, but not the Cajdital cruisers’ ability to influence the ground campaign.

  And as they always did, the Cajdital began burrowing and building within their cruiser ring, with a portable shield generator going up within the day, covering all the cruisers in the ring with a much stronger shield that also protected the surface structures being assembled, giving the Cajdital their first footholds on the Calavari capitol.

  3

  May 9, 2470

  Pagalis System

  Outer Zone

  The invoker made another microjump, braking against a significantly-sized planet on the outskirts of the system…and right into a group of
Hycre warships waiting for it. They were waiting just to the side of the jumpline and ended up within 40 kilometers of the massive Cajdital ship, guessing with incredible accuracy where it would end up. The smaller Hycre ships, who didn’t show up on sensors as soon due to their limited cross-sections and which were pointed straight onto the jumpline to further decrease the sensor image and give the Cajdital less warning to alter their braking point, accelerated quickly and got into firing range before the invoker could spin up its primary weapon.

  Smaller Cajdital plasma cannons fired back, but they were few in number, capable of defending against a handful of ships, but it was readily apparent that the invoker had been designed for one purpose and one purpose only. It was a tool designed to be used in concert with a fleet of warships, but as it was fleeing from point to point within the system it had no escorts, and the Hycre had been nipping at it for two days, with the largest damage having been done when it tried to get back to the pair of stars to make a jump out of the system.

  The Hycre had been waiting in ambush and pounded it to the point that its hull armor was punctured and a serious internal wound became visible as the ship vented both atmosphere and debris out the small hole…but due to the invoker’s huge size even that amount of damage was trivial, and it had microjumped back away from the stars, hoping to bounce around to one of dozens of jumplines that would bring it back into the primary gravity wells where the Hycre weren’t waiting.

  But nearly every jump it made saw at least a few Hycre ships that usually got in a good salvo or two. By now the invoker had limited shields, unable to secure enough time to recharge them, and the one time they’d tried to make a slow jump to buy them time the Hycre jumped ahead and were waiting for them with even more numbers than it faced now.