Star Force: Upgrades (SF41) Read online

  2

  February 25, 2465

  Krichjan System (Protovic territory)

  7th planetary orbit

  “Beacon active,” Shannist confirmed upon Kip’s request as yet another Star Force warship jumped into planetary orbit and immediately began to disgorge its full complement of drone warships. As it did it reoriented its axis slightly, launching a bloon towards the leftmost of the two Skarron juggernauts that the Tassadar and its battle group had pinned down from range.

  Another flash came from the other juggernaut as its shields continued to be painted by IDF saturated energy ‘goo’ as the enemy ship targeted Kip’s flagship with its long range weaponry. The powerful energy beam crossed the distance between the ships in the blink of an eye as the smaller ships in both fleets were continuing to creep closer towards each other over the gap.

  Kip noticed the shield impact on his tactical hologram of the ship, which sat to his left beside the main hologram of the battlefield. When the battle had started his crew had analyzed the weaponsfire and confirmed that it was an extremely advanced version of heavy lachars…well beyond Star Force’s own capability to produce. The jumpship’s shields held up, being a hybrid matrix that could protect against both matter and energy, but with both juggernauts beginning to isolate their firepower on the Tassadar it was just a matter of time before Kip would have to jump his ship out of range and let the others continue the fight…at least until the shields recharged, then they’d come back in and relieve the others.

  So long as there was one control ship on station it could handle all the drone warships in play, else the longer ranges would result in signal lag. Given the telaris comms they now used, that lag would be significantly reduced, but Kip didn’t want his gunners to have to try and work through even a split second’s worth as they remotely piloted the warships. Their firing accuracy would nosedive, and in an engagement like this, where they were not easily the strongest, every shot counted.

  That said, he still expected to win this fight. The two juggernauts were massive, and would take a while to take down, but so long as they kept the bloons popping on them they weren’t running away, and the rest of the Skarron fleet, which had quickly come to their aid, seemed reluctant to leave them, making this more of a standard battle that was about to start heating up.

  The Tassadar’s fleet had already been deployed, with the heavy cruisers tagging the juggernauts from range and penetrating their shields with each shot, but they were so massive that the damage being incurred was akin to small cuts. Had Kip had an internal schematic for the ships they could have been making surgical attacks against key systems, but since this was a largely unknown enemy they were reduced to targeting weapons batteries as they could see them and, largely, just poking holes in the big ships.

  Right now they were acting like battle stations, and Kip knew from the Protovic intel that if they got much closer their other weaponry would come within operational range. That’s why Kip had his fleet screening for the Tassadar relatively close, but still intending to engage the incoming Skarrons at a distance from the jumpship. About half of their fleet was coming his way, with the other half going after the next closest jumpship, the Aiur.

  Fortunately the juggernauts were so large that Star Force could hit them from this extreme range with the bloon launchers, and as soon as Kip got a few more jumpships involved he was going to order a change of ammunition, for the IDF laden ‘bloons’ weren’t all that they could fire.

  Keeping the ships pinned was the primary objective, and they were so large that keeping all of their potential gravity drives, which they didn’t know exactly where they were inside the ships, was requiring a thorough blanketing of their shields. Some of the bluish/red goo was being blown off by plasma cannons, but enough was being kept in place to hold the pair of gigantic ships in place, though they were maneuvering slightly on conventional engines.

  Just then the Skarrons’ smaller ships, which all outmassed their Star Force counterparts, opened up on the Tassadar’s drone warships and all hell broke loose. They didn’t stop their approach, intent, it seemed, to get to the jumpship and knock it out of commission even as more heavy lachar blasts crossed the distance and peppered its forward shields…which Kip saw dip as low as 18% after one combined salvo, then the recharging generators ticked it back up to 19% and continued to climb the numbers, which were then lowered again by incoming weaponsfire.

  “Captain, let’s get a few shots off before we have to run. Switch to plasma bloons.”

  “Already standing by.”

  “Fire…and prepare calculations for a short range microjump out of their lachar range.”

  On the front of the Tassadar the defense shields dropped momentarily, allowing the passage of the green plasma bloon out of the thick firing tube as it shot off at incredible speed towards the distant juggernaut. Unlike conventional plasma that dissipated over distance, the bloon’s energy matrix acted as a containment vessel, inside of which the plasma glowed fiery hot blue. The color combination of the matrix made the bloon appear green up until it smashed against the juggernaut’s shields, spilling an amount of plasma equivalent to a fourth the volume of a cutter against its already weakened shields.

  From inside the green ‘skin’ of the bloon the blue plasma burst forth, washing over the shields and wicking away some bits of IDF goo as it overloaded and breached the shields, pouring a third of its plasma onto the hull, burning through the armor plates despite the fact that they, like their ground walkers, were made to be resistant to that type of weaponry.

  A few second later a second bloon hit the approximate spot, taking out a chunk of shield matrix to the left and washing the overlapping target areas with unchecked plasma, which burnt through the armor and exposed the interior of the ship to space. Air vented out in explosive decompression as more IDF bloons hit the Skarron ship, coming from the other jumpships, and insuring it couldn’t run.

  “Are we in mauler range?” Kip asked.

  “Barely.”

  “Send them one, then jump us out. Arrange to transfer drone control to the other warships prior to jump. Let’s not give the enemy an opening,” Kip said as the forward shields dropped to 7% as the heavy lachars continued to wear them down with repetitive hits. Thankfully Star Force’s shield technology had improved by leaps and bounds over the past century, and was due for even more upgrades according to the research staff reverse engineering a myriad of V’kit’no’sat designs…or rather, their obsolete designs whose blueprints were held in the pyramid database.

  After the last green bloon launched, the Tassadar began powering up its gravity drives, intent on making a reverse jump out of planetary orbit, but before it did it launched one more bloon…this one was neither bluish/red nor green, but a fiery orange. It had the thickest bloon containment skin possible, which was necessary to hold the mauler energy in check. Once launched, the two fought an internal battle, with the mauler energy eating away at the bloon to the point of bursting, giving the weapon a more limited range than the plasma or IDF varieties.

  The orange bloon spouted a tiny gush of blue energy out the side a split second before it slammed into the juggernaut, with most of the contained mauler energy making it to the target. The Tassadar’s gunners had done well to land it on the damaged and unshielded piece of juggernaut hull, and Kip had the satisfaction of seeing it literally melt through the Skarron armor and into the ship’s interior, completely disappearing as the sensor feed went wonky as the Tassadar jumped away from the planet.

  That only lasted a few seconds before the jumpship’s binary drives started to pull against the gravity well it had just pushed off, stalling its momentum and bringing it to a stop far above the planet where it began to clearly pick up the Star Force comm signals again, although this time on a delay.

  Kip brought up a diagnostic display and checked the gravity drives’ capacitor charge, seeing that it had barely drained them, despite the hard turnabout they’d just run. They’d be able
to jump back in immediately if needed, but right now recharging the shields was the priority.

  “We go back in at 50%,” Kip ordered so the bridge crew would be ready when that happened. In the meantime he continued to watch the battle on the tactical holo, with the Skarron ships that had been engaging the Tassadar’s fleet now breaking off and going after another of his jumpships, but it was going to take several minutes for them to reposition, during which time the drone warships would be hounding them.

  Kip sent off an order telling the remote pilots on the other jumpships to leave several of them in place for when the Tassadar jumped back in, so that they’d have a screen, and tagged the appropriate ships, letting the others reposition, though they were now two less than they’d just been. A frigate and a corvette had been destroyed by the Skarrons since he’d last looked, with several others having had their shields go down, including a destroyer with a sizeable gash in its armor, but it was still firing away as it trailed a Skarron cruiser across the wide gap between jumpships.

  Kip didn’t like losing ships, knowing that it would be a long time between replacing them, given how far away from Star Force territory they were, but it was all but unavoidable given the type of combat they were engaged in. They had to pin the juggernauts in place, and in doing so likewise pinned themselves down to a point, taking a lot of maneuvering options off the table.

  “Thirty seconds,” the Captain eventually noted, with Kip tearing his eyes off the tactical holo for a moment.

  “Jump when ready,” he ordered, then turned his attention back to the battle just as a slew of new contacts were picked up jumping in. It took the computers a moment to sort it out, then Protovic icons began popping up on the ships, with more than 100 of them coalescing around a generous jump point slightly higher up than the Tassadar had been.

  “Looks like they got the message,” Kip commented as their own countdown was about to expire. “Open a comm after we make the jump.”

  “We already have an incoming signal, Archon,” the comms officer reported.

  Kip glanced at the countdown, which read :08.

  “Put it through and continue with the jump. Resume IDF bombardment as soon as possible,” he said, sitting down on his command chair and seeing an image of his counterpart materialize before him.

  “My apologies, hold for a moment while we reposition,” he said, raising a hand of apology just as the Tassadar jumped, screwing with the transmission that was already delayed, overly so because the Protovic didn’t have telaris comms and they were having to communicate through lightspeed transmission.

  The jumpship reemerged only 8 kilometers off from its original position, further back along the jumpline, leaving the heavy cruisers and other escorts ahead of them as Captain Shannist goosed the engines and brought them back into a more favorable position as several cleansing beams shot out across the gap to the juggernaut and continued to rack up damage on the ship that was already showing multiple hull breaches. It was continuing to get pelted from the other jumpships, though they were showing signs of shield depletion as well, with one already absent, having had to jump out to avoid hull damage of its own.

  “Sorry about that. Had to recharge our shields.”

  “How are you holding them in position?” Tel’nash’gi asked.

  “We’re temporarily disrupting their gravity drives, but we have to keep hitting them to maintain the effect. My fleet can take out the juggernauts from range, can you run interference with their other ships?”

  The Protovic nodded his helmeted head. “Gladly.”

  The transmission cut out and Kip returned to his feet, walking through the deck space where the Protovic’s hologram had just been and coming up on the tactical hologram again as the Tassadar resumed bombardment of the nearest juggernaut with IDF bloons. On the battlemap, he saw the Protovic’s hammerhead-shaped ships break up into multiple groups, deploying towards the clusters of Skarron capital ships that were still doing their best to chase off the Star Force jumpships, all the while engaging the drone warships, 12 of which had been lost already, with another 18 showing hull damage.

  Tel’nash’gi hadn’t brought his entire fleet out, but the ships he did bring ranged in size from corvettes up to battleships and even a carrier, which immediately disgorged a flood of Valeries that zipped across the battlefield far faster than the capital ships, all of which had the same hammer-head design motif, but with an X-wing-like aft split that held cylindrical pylons. Kip knew they contained both gravity drives and weapons, all plasma-based, including their missiles.

  The Protovic were solid across the board, with no major strengths or weaknesses in their fleet. Each of their ships had one primary weapon, located in the hammerhead, that was a plasma streamer. Secondary weapons across their hull were orb-style plasma cannons, anti-air plasma shredders, similar in design to lizard plasma shards, only more numerous and shorter ranged, and missile banks which were also located in the hammerhead. Their ships carried good armor and decent shields, built in binary, with a primary physical shield backed up by a secondary and weaker energy shield, giving them a comprehensive defense.

  And their crews were experienced vets, which Kip noted approvingly as he saw them maneuver in amongst the Skarron ships with obvious coordination rather than a typical ‘free for all’ approach that many races employed. The Star Force warships adjusted firing lines to give the Protovic ships preferred attack angles, shifting from primary defense to a support roll, and soon the Skarrons saw the writing on the wall and began maneuver towards the edges of the melee, looking for jumplines out.

  But the Protovic weren’t keen to let them go, and cut them off at every opportunity. The Skarron ships were bigger than theirs, mostly, but the Protovic’s were slightly stronger. Add in the fact that their battleships were in play, along with their fighters that zipped about targeting exposed weapons ports and dancing around the Skarron anti-air fire, which was considerable, and you quickly had an ongoing rout, with Star Force stepping in and blocking any advantage the Skarrons could get in ship to ship engagements. The cleansing beams, especially, caused the enemy considerable trouble, given the range at which they could be fired, and of the 8 Skarron ships that managed to break free, only six managed to jump out, for the other two were skewered by the CBs, knocking out their ability to jump before they got fully in the clear.

  Meanwhile the jumpships continued their bombardment of the juggernauts, along with fire support from some of the heavy cruisers. They alternated between IDF and plasma bloons, with only the Tassadar getting close enough to chance firing the mauler versions. Her shields dropped down to 11% again before the bulk of the heavy lachar counter fire ceased as the CBs picked apart their batteries, after which it was a bloonfest, with both Skarron command ships being torn apart chunk by chunk until nothing salvageable remained.

  The Protovic fleet then moved in and further trashed the ship debris as Kip reassembled his fleet and began recovery operations on his own debris, after which he brought his bloon-capable jumpships back to Eshwan where the older versions were holding position. Not all Warship-class jumpships had the new bloon launchers, and only a small percentage of Clan Protoss was currently equipped with them, and most of those he’d brought with him.

  Unfortunately the weapon couldn’t be installed on the older models. It was just too damn big and required a different internal hull design. That said, the older models carried with them the most up to date drone warships Star Force had, making them still combat viable, but Kip preferred having his jumpships capable of adding to the battle rather than just sitting back and controlling the drone fleet.

  When they returned to orbit, along with the Protovic, Tel’nash’gi informed him that they’d detected 6 outgoing jumps from the system’s star, meaning that the Skarrons had retreated, as well as indicating that their ships contained more powerful gravity drives than most, giving them the ability to jump between star systems individually rather than having to rely on jumpships to carry them.
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  That, or they’d been desperate enough to get away that they didn’t mind a long coast phase to the nearest star. Kip guessed the former was the case, given that they hadn’t seen any Skarron jumpships within the system, and the information the Protovic had given them on their new enemy hadn’t included any either.

  That was one ability that he knew Paul wanted for their fleets, but as of now they were going to have to stick with jumpship transport. It seemed the Skarrons and Star Force were going to make for an interesting conflict, given that each had advantages over the other, which brought Kip to the main problem within the system…that being the supersized walkers the Skarrons had on the surface that the Protovic simply could not stop, and who were leading a path of widespread destruction across Eshwan.

  Time for Kip to see if Star Force could do anything about it, aside from knocking off some of their smaller walkers and infantry.

  3

  February 25, 2465

  Retari System (Alpha Region)

  Atlantica

  Paul watched on the bridge hologram as the Excalibur executed its braking maneuver against the planetary gravity well last in line, dropping out behind his fleet of 15 jumpships. Two were Mammoth-class cargo ships, each more than twice the size of the 13 Warship-class jumpships forming up alongside them. The Excalibur, now the 4th ship to bear that name as Paul took it with him from flagship to flagship, was neither. It was the 16th jumpship in the group, but of a new class entirely, something that Clan Saber and Clan Sangheili had been working together to produce, and as such they’d gotten the first few prototypes off their own shipyards, while the main fleet production centers back in Sol were only starting to produce the new Melee-class jumpships.

  Back in the early days Paul had developed a ‘Command Ship’ that had never been quite agile enough for their purposes, and had been relegated to a giant chess pieces to be moved around from point to point that would allow them a mobile stronghold from which to remote control their fleets, but when jumpship technology had come around the Command Ship design had outlived its usefulness, with the Warship-class jumpship taking over the role of primary control center in addition to being a carrier for the drone warships.