Star Force: Scruples (SF37) Read online

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  After the ‘small’ Kvash fleet arrived, the much larger Bsidd force started to pour in. Their gangly ships were as convoluted as their bodies, but the vaguely insectile race was the most technologically advanced within the Alliance, although not the strongest. The Hycre had superior gravity drives, the Kvash better shields, and the Calavari better starfighters…but it was the Bsidd that were overall the most balanced, and where the other three had weaknesses the Bsidd did not.

  What they did have were numbers. Each of their ships were smaller than their Hycre counterparts, and all were manned, unlike Star Force’s small drone warships, which gave them a fleet of nimble, high tech craft that were faster than the Nestafar and equipped with weaponry befitting larger ships, giving them a more potent sting individually and a swarming capability that allowed them to take on more massive vessels.

  With such numbers it took a long time to get all of their jumpships into the system, for they too were smaller than average. The assault on Orica was already 10 hours old by the time the last of them arrived, with the jumpships not disgorging the warships within, but rather jumping off to their target locations to deliver them up close and personal.

  With the Hycre engaging the Nestafar’s mobile fleets, which were still mostly disabled by the Elarioni virus, the Bsidd moved out to 18 planetoids and began unloading their warships into large swarms out on the periphery of planetary orbit, after which they moved down the gravity well engaging the Nestafar battle stations with a mix of plasma and an energy weapon they referred to as a ‘disruptor’ that worked in a similar way to Star Force’s mauler, only with longer range and less effect on matter.

  It did have a similar effect on shields, highly damaging the energy matrixes and penetrating them sooner than other weapons, after which their bright blue plasma would have a straight path to the hull armor. Each of their weapons was small in size, but they had many on each ship and all with decent range, allowing them to engage multiple smaller targets, like fighters, with ease, or they could group their fire together to hit larger targets, giving the Bsidd fleet a highly adaptive battle profile.

  They did take losses, unlike the Kvash whose smallest ship in play was a heavy cruiser, but the Bsidd had so many ships that those that were lost were hardly noticeable. The Bsidd swarms moved methodically from one battle station to another, utterly tearing them to shreds while the Nestafar fleet that normally would have been supplementing the stations’ defense was being engaged by the Hycre elsewhere.

  Halfway through the Bsidd assaults the battle stations were able to overcome the Elarioni virus, allowing their targeting programs to reassert themselves…at which point the number of Bsidd casualties began to climb, but their numbers were so great there was no stopping them as they moved throughout the orbital tracks of the planetoids they were assigned, wiping them clean of Nestafar infrastructure, both military and civilian, along with any cargo ships that hadn’t had the sense to run away when the fighting started.

  The Kvash moved slower over their target worlds, overlapping fire and cycling out ships when their shield strength dipped near the breaking point. They had such a numerical superiority that they didn’t fancy on losing any ships, and set out a slow moving game plan to accommodate that outcome as they picked off more of the Nestafar battle stations with their heavy cruisers and battleships while their starbases offered fire support on the bigger targets, for the Nestafar had a wide range of defensive platforms, some of which were truly massive.

  But they were stationary, which was their defining weakness. They were also scattered around orbit rather than clustered together, which let the Kvash and Bsidd isolate and pick them off in sequence thanks to the fact that the Hycre were doing such a good job engaging the Nestafar fleets elsewhere. In addition to the Elarioni virus, the mohawks were laying out a tactical display that would be studied for years to come by the Alliance member races, for they were single handedly sticking it to the Nestafar navally in more than 200 locations, not allowing their defense fleets to bunch up and mass attack the Kvash.

  They also didn’t let them go after the Bsidd either. At first they didn’t have much choice, because the Nestafar warships couldn’t see where the attacking fleets were, or their own that were trying to reposition, and the Hycre used that advantage to blindside them, destroying more than a third of their defense fleet before the Nestafar computer programmers found and disabled the virus…some individually onboard ships at first, then a master cleansing protocol created and distributed from one of the planets in the system.

  When the Nestafar finally got their ‘eyes’ open they found themselves under assault at dozens of planetoids, not to mention the interplanetary staging bases that were supposed to be hard to get to, given that they didn’t have a nearby gravity well to quickly brake against, meaning ships would have to approach slowly and use weakened gravity drives or convention thrust to arrive at the bases.

  That would have been true of the Bsidd and Kvash, but with the Hycre’s binary drives they were able to push off the stars and head straight towards the outposts the Elarioni-stolen map had tagged and the scout ship had confirmed, traveling at speeds that none of the other races in the system could hope to brake against. All of them would have overshot the targets, but because the Hycre could push against the distant planets, same as the other races could, and slow their approach gradually, they were able to use that repulsion and the gravitational attraction back to the star they had just jumped from to double up their braking speed.

  Only they, and now Star Force, had that oh so valuable ability, and it allowed them to get to the semi-hidden fleet bases and massacre the staging fleets there before the virus was counteracted. That meant the planetary defense fleets they were also engaging didn’t have the backup they expected, allowing the Hycre to engage them head on and tie them up so they couldn’t reposition to assist the battle stations that the other Alliance races were ‘pwning.’

  That left the defense fleets over the worlds that the Alliance hadn’t hit yet as the only free ships to reposition, save for a handful of patrol fleets that the Hycre hadn’t gotten to. After a stretch of hesitation they all began redeploying to Vreen, one of the worlds that the Kvash were attacking with a single starbase and four battleships, plus a cluster of heavy cruisers. The Nestafar’s intent was to isolate it and take it out with massive numbers while the rest of the Alliance was engaged, even if it meant leaving their other worlds undefended, for they could clearly see they were getting overrun, and before long they wouldn’t have the fleet strength to take on the Kvash, after which point it’d all be over in space.

  The winged Nestafar warships rendezvoused in high orbit over Vreen as the Kvash moved from on battle station to another, wiping them off the map with their indomitable firepower and superior defense shields. The Nestafar commanders wisely waited for some two hours to assemble their reinforcements before they moved out, dropping down into the lower orbits and engaging the Kvash battleships and heavy cruisers midway as they moved out to protect the starbase, hoping to make the Nestafar split their forces.

  That didn’t happen, and the Nestafar blew right by the much larger Kvash ships, firing as they passed in a long chain that proved too much for the defender’s shields to handle. All four battleships’ shields fell under a brutal assault of green glowing missiles that were being released from the passing ships, none of whom stayed to slug it out. What damage the Kvash did to the Nestafar as they passed was little, given that they couldn’t target the same ship twice at the speeds they were moving.

  In retrospect the Kvash should have kept their ‘smaller’ ships in close to the starbase, which was where the Nestafar fleet slowed down and began slugging it out at close range. Plasma streamers galore shot out from the Kvash supership, coring enemy warships with single shots, along with clouds of ‘blips’ pouring out from the white hull and moving to intercept the thousands of incoming missiles before they could hit the shields.

  What followed w
as a massacre on both sides, for the Nestafar had the numbers to take the starbase down, but in doing so it cost them greatly. Neither the Bsidd nor Hycre were in a position to assist, for they were engaged with other Nestafar fleets across the system, so as the starbase resigned itself to destruction it launched a flotilla of landing craft out down towards the planet below, carrying the massive number of ground troops and equipment that were onboard, hoping that at least some of them would survive.

  The Nestafar intercepted a few of the ships as they left, but given the almost kamikaze-like speeds they were accelerating at, most of the Kvash transports got away from the battle and down into the atmosphere, picking a position in between the heavily shielded Nestafar cities to land. All across the planet the Kvash sensors showed energy domes going up, marking the positions that would have to be assaulted from the ground in lieu of a massive orbital bombardment campaign that none of the three Alliance races were outfitted for.

  As the Kvash transports began landing on an uninhabited grassy plain and spilling out their prefab construction units, they were able to look back up into the daytime sky and see the blocky star-shaped wedge that was the starbase as an internal explosion sheared off one of the arms and set it slowly adrift, along with a lot of other tiny pinprick explosions across the hull and the gray/black halo of Nestafar warships that surrounded it.

  Knowing that help would eventually be on the way and that the Nestafar warships were ill suited for in-atmosphere operations, the Kvash ground team began implementing the battle plan they’d entered the system with. They picked five locations on the grassy plain, with four directional points around a central fifth, and began assembling the prefab structures they brought with them, using the transports to fly the material out to the various locations.

  The structures came together quickly, given that all the Kvash had to do was move them into position and ‘click’ them together. As they did that, with the transports doubling as flying cranes to lift various pieces into position, Kvash fighters began to deploy from cargo containers and take to the sky in defensive patrol as swarms of Nestafar fighters began approaching their positions, having come from the nearest cities.

  These fighters weren’t Valeries, but rather the Nestafar’s native designs, which the Kvash had battle simmed against numerous times. They were flat and tri-pointed, like a ninja’s throwing star, and moved extremely well on lateral angles, but less so in climbing and diving. They had minimal shields but very good hull armor, taking a cue from their walkers, but it also made them heavy and a touch slow.

  The Kvash fighters were also heavy and slow, but that was because of the large amount of tech they’d squeezed into the confined space of their antler-shaped craft. A short pointed nose cone feathered back into four hull segments splaying out to aft, the middle two of which went high, and the outer two went low, offering weapons on all four to have a forward line of sight. The fighter was twice the size of the Nestafar’s Jennsa, but nearly as fast…which was to say slow by Alliance standards, but the Kvash didn’t like using the Valeries as much as some of the other races did, due to their easy ability to be shot down.

  Or so the Kvash thought. The Valerie was a well-defended, nimble, fast fighter…but sticking to their rock mentality the Kvash version made the Calavari’s look easy to kill. The Kiach had thick hull armor surrounding the pilot’s pod, which like Star Force mech designs didn’t have a window to the exterior. It was thoroughly encased in multiple layers of protection, making for an ‘egg’ design within the fighter, around which the four hulls of the starfighter radiated. With the forward hull nose cone pointing out in front of it, it was almost impossible to directly target the pilot’s cradle, which allowed many downed Kvash pilots to walk away and fly another day.

  But as thick as the armored layers were, the defense shields were extremely robust. From Star Force’s perspective the Kiach was more of a gunship than a fighter, and that’s how the Kvash used them. They didn’t even bother trying to outfly their opponents, preferring instead to arrange situations where they’d trade weaponsfire, with their superior defenses winning out.

  That meant the Kiaches taking to the air over Vreen were worth several Nestafar Jennsas each, and the Kvash had packed plenty of them into the transports. The equally white fighters rose up into the sky by the bunches and fanned out, creating a wide perimeter around the construction field as the 5 outposts were beginning construction. That perimeter thickened considerably, then several tendrils of fighters shot off to intercept the incoming Jennsas before they could get over the landing area, inciting three separate midair battles as Nestafar walkers within the nearby cities and further defense bases began assembling to await transport out to the new warzone.

  The fighter combat slewed to the Kvash side, given that the Nestafar didn’t totally overwhelm them with numbers. A few of the Jennsa got through to make strafing runs on the construction crews and transports, but not enough to stop their progress, for there were so many transports on the ground or hovering in the air that the Nestafar had too many targets to choose from, and any damaged equipment was quickly replaced by others.

  Eventually the starfighter battle thinned, but it didn’t abate, for the Nestafar continued sending reinforcements over from other cities, ensuring a continuing battle until the Kvash eventually lost to attrition…or so it seemed until the central construction site completed a partial power up and the battle fort began pumping out anti-air plasma blasts at the closest fighters and lachar-like beams at those further off.

  That took care of the stragglers getting past the main melee, and soon the central battle fort raised its defense shields, claiming a tiny piece of Vreen for the Kvash and establishing the centerpiece in their strongpoint defense that would soon see four spurs added to it in the coming hours. Each battle fort was equipped with shields and weaponry capable of defending against the Nestafar walkers, including the super dragons, meaning that once the Kvash got set up on a world they were very difficult to remove.

  The Nestafar knew this, which was why ground troops and fighters were being assembled from across the planet and shifted over to the landing zone as quickly as possible, hoping to take down some of the Kvash transports that were now taking cover beneath the battle fort’s anti-air defenses as they waited to unload their cargos. The starbase had been so large it held an insane number of troops, and even with the losses they suffered coming down to the planet there were still hundreds of thousands of Kvash sealed up inside waiting to be deployed…but they weren’t going to do so until they got a proper strongpoint established, else they’d risk losing their troops unnecessarily.

  By keeping them in the transports they maintained the option of redeploying to another location or running away if this landing zone was overrun. So as more of the 5 battle forts came online, additional transports were ordered to unload their personnel and equipment to man and expand them, for they weren’t just stubby blocks of defenses, but rather Lego-like building segments that could be added to over time.

  Take a small battle fort, add fully loaded transports and a healthy dose of time, and they’d see a plant-like growth that would eventually merge the central fort with the four spurs, creating a gigantic fortress whose combined shield power would be equivalent of the bubble shields protecting the Nestafar cities from bombardment.

  If the Kvash got that far, then they will have secured a route of resupply from orbit, allowing even more troops to come down had they more ships waiting. They did not, for the other starbases were doing the exact same thing on other worlds. That said, once the Kvash opened the door to the surface the Bsidd’s weaker troops would follow them down, take up residence inside the mega fort, then begin deploying out with the Kvash to assault the surrounding cities.

  Against one race the Nestafar could hold their own, but with all three Alliance races working together to overlap their strengths the Nestafar were at an extreme disadvantage in skill, tactics, and technology…but what they did have were numbers, for the sy
stem housed more than 8 trillion of the winged vermin, and their millions of cities were well defended, calling into question the Alliance’s ability to take more than one or two worlds.

  And after that what would they do, with fleeing Nestafar ships carrying word out to nearby systems that Orica was under assault? They would eventually send reinforcements to oust the invaders, while the nearest Alliance worlds were months away.

  At the moment that didn’t matter, for the fight that had been long in the making was finally here, with both sides hammering each other across the Orica System on a scale of warfare that had not been seen in millennia.

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  January 16, 2444

  Orica System

  Nestarraffa (Nestafar Homeworld)

  It was the Bsidd who had been tasked with assaulting the Nestafar homeworld, and after taking several days to clean out its orbital tracks of every ship and station the enemy had built up, they began landing ground teams en mass, as they and the Kvash were doing on numerous other planets and moons across the system. The Hycre fleet, or rather what was left of it, was still moving about from planetoid to planetoid engaging the remains of the mobile Nestafar defenses, keeping their attention away from the Kvash and Bsidd while they focused on ground assaults.

  Not every planetoid in the system was under assault, nor could they be given how many there were, but Nestarraffa had been chosen as one of the primary targets, thus it got tagged for the first round of assaults, with the Bsidd devoting more ships and troops towards it than any other location.