Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) Page 3

  “Are they really that impressionable?” Ginsi asked.

  “Very. And insulated. As a ward they haven’t had the commerce traffic coming to and from them. It’s restricted to keep them safely anonymous for the most part. That’s going to be a shock, and I want me to be the intermediary that brings them through the transition. Not 50 different ones that might be telling them opposing things, even if it’s just with your body language during off hours. You can let your hair down in private, but do not take any Hepcha as close friends. You need to keep a professional distance while you are working here. After the fact is your prerogative. The first step for them has to be at my sole direction.”

  “We’ll keep our distance,” one of the techs assured her.

  Taryn nodded. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, ambrosia is going to be tricky to develop for these guys given that they’ve already got a hyperactive metabolism that requires near ambrosia levels of sustenance in their food anyway. For their ambrosia we’re doing the opposite and making it an endurance boost, and how we’re going to do that I’m not quite sure. Just one of many things we’re going to have to figure out going forward.”

  3

  March 1, 2848

  Aphat System (Veliquesh territory)

  Dmak

  Kip zipped his skeet past a Veliquesh building and delivered a pointblank mauler burst into the last of the anti-air defenses the city had, melting through the light armor casing and junking the interior. There was a small spurt of debris that flew out the other side, but the turret’s death wasn’t dramatic. He circled back around to confirm that he’d hit it, and the lack of fire when he raised up above the rooftops told him everything he needed to know even before he got eyes on the damaged turret.

  A quick check of the battlemap confirmed that the city had now been fully plucked of defenses.

  “All fighters pull back. Admiral, send in the presents once we’re clear,” he commed as he accelerated towards the perimeter of the Veliquesh city. It’d been 17 years since this invasion began and to date they hadn’t lost a single man. Some of the Veliquesh had managed to get themselves killed, but none of Kip’s troops or any of the other Star Force armies had suffered more than bodily injuries, and those were far and few between…largely due to a change in tactics they’d made after the first few years.

  The Veliquesh cities were huge and widespread, not making use of their volume and relying mostly on low level buildings, as far as Star Force standards went anyways. It took Kip and the other pilots some time to get into the clear, and when they did he set and traveled out to a waypoint where the others would eventually gather with him. Once they were all out a virtual marker appeared covering the entire city and out past the edges like a golden blanket indicating the no-fly zone that was now in effect. The Admiral had set that in place, not Kip, and soon the first of the bombs became visible on the upper edge of the battlemap as they fell from orbit.

  Or rather flew, for they were actually missiles rather than rail gun slugs or just chunks of matter. They came down in a spread, one wave after another and each bomb targeting different locations within the city where it would pop just prior to reaching the buildings or the surface. When they detonated they created a huge plume of green that washed across and through the buildings, then turned pink when it expanded out far enough. The clinging stun energy saturated the area and would hold its charge for several minutes while more bombs fell nearby and onto the same locations, blanketing the cityscape and rendering anyone caught out in the open unconscious on contact.

  Originally Kip and the others hadn’t been able to use area of effect weapons for fear of overloading their targets and killing them, but subsequent research into Veliquesh physiology and some sneaky techs had found a way to lace the energy with a regulator that would actually repel additional stun energy past a certain concentration. As a bonus it wouldn’t only resist that energy, but push it away until it hit something that wasn’t already saturated. For that reason one bomb could cover a lot of city if the buildings were small, while others required multiple hits to soak through and saturate the large ones. Everything from person to bulkheads got a bath with the residue rippling across already hit areas and traveling, in some cases, kilometers before it found a fresh area to soak into.

  The energy was configured to be matter hungry and lightly susceptible to gravity, meaning that the bombs were effectively water balloons that would spread out across the city rather than blowing back into the air. It’d taken years of tweaks to get them to where they were now, but they were more than worth the effort for they could neutralize a city far faster with the bombs than going in on foot and shooting them one person at a time. It also meant there was little risk to the ground teams, though on occasion there would be a handful that the bombs would miss.

  To Kip it felt fitting, for while they were almost forced to use such weapons against the lizards they were using them now to take down an equally bad enemy but without having to resort to the bloodshed that the Veliquesh lived and breathed. That was a snub to them in and of itself, for they weren’t just defeating them militarily, but culturally as well.

  And there was nothing the Veliquesh could do about it. Star Force’s weapons and tactics were far superior to the lizards, whom had finally been winning out against the Veliquesh when Kip and the others had arrived. They’d driven them off then set about the methodical destruction of the sick culture without killing the people in it. It was a crusade that he and the others here were fully behind with no mixed feelings. Had they been sending down lethal bombs that would have been another story, for you never knew who was down there and if they deserved killing or not.

  By taking away that question mark Star Force could be as aggressive as it liked, and the number of bombs coming down certainly testified to an appetite for destruction. None of the buildings were so much as scratched, but with every detonation swaths of the sick race were taken out of the equation and would wake up later as prisoners in an isolation that would only end if they effectively switched sides. So Kip knew that every bomb detonation was taking down the number of Veliquesh permanently, for if any of these did see their freedom again it would be as Protovic, with the Veliquesh in them dying here with every beautiful green explosion.

  But as always, this was just one piece of a very large puzzle. The other four systems the Veliquesh had owned were now barren and under watch by Star Force, but not inhabited. Their cities were slowly being dismantled by an advance team, but most of the techs assigned to this mission were busy building new prison habitats to keep up with the demand. When they eventually worked through those they’d be redeployed to reclamation duty that would wipe the Veliquesh stench off those four systems and add them to the unoccupied territory list that Star Force was accumulating from its conquests throughout lizard territory.

  The Aphat System was different. It was too valuable to pass up with 18 habitable planetoids, whereas other systems were lucky to even have 1. That meant it also had the bulk of the Veliquesh population in it, with this world being the second major one they’d hit. They’d started with the ones that the lizards had invaded and worked their way through the Veliquesh survivors there while a group of them also tracked down and destroyed the lizards on the ground. As usual they refused to surrender, but after all this time Kip only felt a tiny pang of regret. He knew they had genetic ‘brain boxes’ on them that would resist the isolation technique they were using on the Veliquesh prisoners, but he still hated having to kill them all…a little bit.

  By now that it was clear that it was either their race in dominance or their deaths trying to accomplish it. If there was another way to deal with them he and the others would find it in time, but for now it was offer them surrender and when they didn’t accept it, blow the hell out of them.

  Kip was glad they weren’t doing that to the Veliquesh, even if some of them deserved it. Star Force wasn’t interested in punishment, only neutralizing threats, and once these bastards were taken p
risoner they wouldn’t be sacrificing anyone else again…not to mention what other horrors they might have wrought had the lizards not boxed them in. According to their interrogations of the ‘diplomatic envoy’ that Mike had brought back with him, they seemed to have galactic domination as one of their long term goals, and if they had no qualms about killing their own younglings for not maintaining 100% compliance he doubted they’d be any more merciful to other races.

  Kip waited with the other skeets on the perimeter until the bombardment ceased and the no-fly zone restriction disappeared. When it did he and the others headed back in as a flock of dropships came down from orbit carrying cleanup teams that would begin collecting the captives and transporting them back up to the holding ships. Several combat teams were coming down as well, for the bombs didn’t always penetrate deep enough to catch all the subsurface structures. Kip was going to be flying patrols in case there were any hotspots that needed hit and organizing the teams from the air while staying on guard for any more of the suicidal Veliquesh fighter squadrons that seemed to be interested in doing damage to the transports carrying their own people rather than to Kip’s troops.

  For whatever their reasons they were targeting them with ambushes wherever they could, so Kip was staying in pilot mode for these operations just in case he needed to intercept some more of their fighters springing up from concealed hideaways. The Veliquesh might be crazy, but they weren’t totally stupid, and Kip could see now how they’d held the lizards off for so long. They were innovative within their strict strategies, which were focused around causing damage regardless of the strength of their opponent. The lizards happened to be weaker than them, technologically speaking, so it had paid off, but Star Force was not and the Veliquesh were essentially throwing themselves at them trying to do what damage they could.

  They’d changed targets now, but the methodology was the same. The switch to hidden hangars spread across the planet had been an effective move for the fact that Star Force hadn’t been able to locate and eliminate them all initially, but the Veliquesh pilots still fought in the same manner. Again, as he’d noted on numerous occasions, these bastards showed some potential along with the crazy in them. How the two could coexist Kip wasn’t sure, but they did. And that meant he always had to stay on his toes just in case they showed another spark of adaptability and tried something new.

  Today wasn’t going to be one of those days, and the now predictable fighter squadrons appearing from outside the city and rushing the filled transports as they headed back to orbit with prisoners were intercepted and destroyed. Those pilots that survived the crashes would be recovered, but there was no way the skeets could go easy on them when there were troops on the ground and ships in the air that were vulnerable. The Veliquesh weapons were better than what the lizards used, and had they got to one of the transports they could have brought it down with sustained weaponsfire from 6 or 8 of them.

  They sent over 300 towards the city this time, meaning Kip and the others had to take them down quickly. Some of the pilots would die, but so be it. These were actively attacking their ships, which was considerably different than some Veliquesh sitting in a building minding his own business.

  So after the fighters were destroyed and he sent recovery teams out to the crash sites Kip continued his aerial patrol for several hours until his bladder called it quits and he cycled back up to orbit while replacement patrols took over for him. They came from firebases on the surface but he headed back up to his command ship that was sitting next to Greg’s in a low parking orbit. The other three were spread out around the same planet with their fleets in blockade formation to keep any remaining surface ships from escaping and to prevent any ships from the other Veliquesh planets in the system from interrupting this planetary assault.

  For the most part they didn’t try anymore, given the number of ships present, but when the transports finished filling a jumpship with prisoners and that ship would leave the system they would try and intercept it if they had an opportunity. Usually they didn’t, given the speed of the Star Force vessels, so the naval front was pretty much mundane up until they got around to finishing with this planet and would assault another.

  Right now Kip was in the bad guy farming business, harvesting the citizenry from planet after plant and shipping them off to a nearby Star Force system where others would deal with the aftermath. As long as this crusade was taking, he wouldn’t be involved in the non-combat assignments, nor would the other four trailblazers. When the last prisoner had been collected their work would be finished and they’d return to other duties, leaving what happened to the Veliquesh in others’ hands.

  And that was for the best, because after so many years of dealing with these guys Kip thoroughly hated them. Even now they were conducting sacrifice rituals on the other planets in order to try and stay Star Force’s inevitable march against them. He couldn’t stop them all and had to just turn a blind eye to it and focus on one planet at a time…but he never could, not completely. And even on a planet like this that was crawling with Star Force units there were still Veliquesh killing each other, whether it be a public ceremony or younglings that didn’t measure up.

  Sometimes they’d find bodies of individuals in the buildings after a stun bombardment that had been eviscerated through a number of sick means with no clue as to why or how it’d happened. The depth of this civilization’s corruption was something Kip didn’t care to figure out, given that he was here to destroy it. To that end he did his job and ‘harvested’ as many living Veliquesh as he could get his hands on, but the trail of bodies left behind from their internal affairs made it clear why Veliquesh didn’t typically live past half a century.

  That was another reason why Kip preferred organizing assaults from the air, so he didn’t have to see what they’d been up to in person. Every time he did it made him angry, and after a while that anger drained you of energy. The same was true of his troops, so he made sure to rotate them in and out of duties that had them on the front lines to give them a chance to recharge physically and emotionally.

  For Kip, he didn’t give himself time off. When his skeet slid into one of the many bays on his command ship he first headed to the bathroom, then over to the sanctum to get in some training and work off that anger in a beneficial way. After that he’d get some sleep then head back down to the planet again to oversee another city assault while this one and four others were still being cleaned up.

  Once a city was ‘harvested’ they had to put down surveillance gear around the perimeter to make sure no Veliquesh snuck back in, with some inevitably trying. It was a good tactic, for it would give them an impregnable base of operations for the simple reason that Star Force thought it was empty, but Kip and the others were too shrewd for that. They had teams assigned to patrol and hunt down any reclaimers that made their way inside, and with psionics they weren't that hard to locate.

  Day in and day out this would continue, as it had for some 17 years now. Kip had seen so many cities that he could literally replicate the Veliquesh architecture from memory, but that wasn’t an issue for him or his troops. They fought the same way they trained…with an eye on the current trends and maintaining themselves indefinitely. The 3 trillion population of the Veliquesh wasn’t going to be an impediment against them, for they’d simply take it one mission at a time, slipping in training blocks here and there so they didn’t grow weak, and work through the entire number of the sick bastards over the course of time.

  It was work that needed to be done and Kip didn’t feel like being anywhere else, but when the day came and it was completed he was going to be glad to see the galaxy rid of the Veliquesh and say goodbye to this region of space…at least until the cities were deconstructed and something worthwhile was put in their place.

  Most of his troops felt the same way, with all manner of public countdowns being recorded from the jumpships to the firebases. They were doing good work here, but they’d all be glad when it was eventually finished. />
  4

  April 9, 2853

  Aphat System (Bsidd Region)

  Jmry

  Rafa climbed up a ladder and out of one of the Veliquesh buildings, coming onto the rooftop and leaving the collection team below to pick up the stunned prisoners. When he got to the top he scanned his battlemap looking for more targets but every building around him had been tagged with a ‘green’ marker indicating that it had already been checked and cleared.

  Numerous units were dotting the map, but all of them were Star Force and most were collection teams. The others were combat units that, like Rafa, were looking for stragglers that had escaped capture. The building below him had held a group of holdouts, but the trailblazer had made quick work of them using his Ikrid, putting them all to sleep without a shot even needing to be fired.

  Four high priority dots were also spread across this Veliquesh city, with those being Kip, Oni, Greg, and Jason. This was the last city on the last planet that hadn’t yet fallen. A few others had actually gone ahead and surrendered, seeing that they stood no chance as they witnessed the fall of every other city across Jmry, but this one and a few others had remained defiant to the end…and now it looked like it was finally over.

  Rafa double-checked the battlemap to make sure it was really done, then he allowed himself to sit down and rest for a bit as he looked out over the Veliquesh city. The plaza where this had all began with Mike was about a kilometer to the northeast, and they’d specifically left this location for last. It’d taken 22 years for the five of them to conquer the three trillion Veliquesh, and slow as it was stunning and taking them prisoner, Rafa knew it had been the right call. Kill the culture but spare the people, for as bad as these psychopaths were none of them had chosen to be born into this sick place. Had they been born into an Axius colony he doubted they would have ended up the way they were, and that was why the Veliquesh civilization had to be destroyed…so that the next generation would be spared this horror and have a chance at a real life.