Star Force: Augmentation (SF22) Read online

  As soon as he powered it up the holographic display filled the entire cockpit, making it appear as if the skeet was invisible. Mark could see the deck beneath his skeet, which appeared as an outline before he flipped a switch and returned his viewing option to opaque. The flat T-shaped nose returned, along with the floor underneath his feet, making him feel more like he was in a fighter than a simulation. Other pilots preferred the wider view, but Mark liked to be able to see his engine pods and fuselage during flight, unless they were on a bombing run or other ground support role.

  Visible over the ‘T’ of his ship were another pair of skeets, one blue and another yellow/chrome. The blue one belonged to Clan Saber, with Kara as its pilot. There was also a white/gold from Clan Mantle, an entirely orange from Clan Firestorm, two black/green from Clan Star Claw, and a dark brown from Clan Croft. The rest of the skeets were Star Force grey, both those for the regular pilots and the spares that they’d brought along. Mark could also see the pair of Canderian assault shuttles on the deck next to two gunships, two mantises, and a scattering of dropships that had remained on station rather than returning to orbit.

  Sliding his left hand back into the spherical joystick he doubled up his fine-tuned control of the craft by activating both sticks…that way each directional motion was halved and if he wanted a full motion he would have to perform the same twist with both hands. This allowed him to fly one handed and manipulate the control board with the other, or to use both for precision control, such as driving around the flight deck.

  Each joystick was a solid cylinder crossing from one point on the inside of the sphere to the other, allowing him to wrap his hand around it while burying his fist inside the compartment. On the outside of each there was a thumb notch with a trigger button. When using the weapons his thumb would rest there, when not his thumb would cross over to the other side and lay against the solid portion of the joystick to keep it from accidentally hitting the trigger during hectic maneuvers.

  There were no other buttons on the stick, but it did roll, allowing him to turn left or right. The entire ball-like fist chamber also moved forward and back, allowing Mark to tip the craft up or down, while twisting his wrist to the side would roll the ship around on its axis. Opposite commands from the other joystick would cancel out and each one automatically recoiled to center position, with both deactivating when tactile pressure on the sticks was released.

  There were other buttons inside the sphere, however. If Mark reached his fingers out from the stick they’d find four floating triggers that could be tasked with a variety of functions. That gave an available button for each digit, one of which Mark had tagged as a comm button. When he pressed his left middle finger down it changed the other 7 buttons over to preset comm channels, and deactivated when one was selected so the other button functions could be used while chatting.

  Mark powered up his skeet’s anti-grav engines with another one, then brought his propulsive engines to an idle, insuring that all were functioning after their trip in the belly of a dropship. Retasking the roll of his right joystick over to anti-grav control, the trailblazer lifted his skeet up off the deck a few inches and retracted the landing get up inside the fighter, then pivoted around using minimal propulsion from his wingtip engines until he was pointed back towards the open bay doors and staring at the side of a dropship.

  Triggering the comm, he hovered in place for a moment. “Report any problems.”

  “Good to go,” Kara reported, followed by similar sentiments from the other 8 pilots Mark was taking up with him.

  “Take it slow and watch out for traffic,” he ordered, rising his skeet up above the altitude of the top of the dropship then accelerating at minimal speed across it and over to the distant doors. On his sensor board he saw all the ships on the deck, along with the ones rising up behind him. They were tagged with ID signatures for his pilots along with damage statistics, all of which showed full green bars beneath. The ones on the ground showed no data at all, given that they weren’t currently powered up.

  Mark pressed his right foot pedal harder and his skeet zipped across the mostly open deck and out of the mountain hideaway, upon which he pulled back on both joysticks and tipped the fighter’s nose up into the air and climbed with the anti-grav automatically adjusting to the change in altitude. Once he got up to 2km he held position and waited for the rest of his squadron to come out along with one of the dropships carrying their targets.

  Once everyone was aloft Mark led the group out 50 kilometers from the base where they staked out their training ground and began to go through basic maneuvers, getting themselves reacquainted with their skeets after such a long trip out on the jumpship. As the dropship began dropping floating targets a few alien fighters began to come out of the base and head near to the Humans’ position but they kept a respectful distance, Mark thought, probably so they could relay sensors and visuals back to the base.

  “Kara, you’ve got Deuce. Jenna, David, Wade, and Peter are with me,” Mark said, flying a lazy arc so the others could rendezvous and form up around him. “Standard formation drills, lachars set to tickle.”

  “Copy that,” Kara said, flying off to another rendezvous point where the rest of the pilots would join her flight group.

  “Wade, take point,” Mark said, setting himself in the center of the five skeet line. The fighters flew side by side parallel to one of the targets until they got a few degrees shy of perpendicular to it, whereupon Wade cut hard left, followed a few seconds later by David, then Mark and so on, setting up single attack runs from multiple points, each with their own firing line and a bit of a stagger.

  Mark let David flash over the target, a large floating metallic sphere, before firing one shot from his lachar that splashed against the energy shield, which registered the hit that appeared on his skeet’s HUD along with the others being fired by the rest of the fighters in both groups. When he flew past the target he pulled up slightly then made a hard right turn after he was well past and accelerated to catch up and reform their side by side line, now heading back in the same direction they began after going through the S-shaped maneuver.

  Once back together they made a long looping right turn and came back at the target from the opposite direction, making a reverse direction mirror attack of their first with each pilot easily landing their hits. Mark’s group went through several more runs before switching formations 5 additional times, with multiple attempts at each.

  “You ready for playtime?” Kara asked after her group completed their scripted runs.

  “Hunters and hounds?”

  “Which are we?”

  “Your choice,” Mark offered.

  “We’ll take hounds.”

  “Ha, your funeral,” the trailblazer said, toggling his control board and sending commands to one of the targets. He barely had time to configure the team protocols before Kara’s skeet broke off after the now moving target.

  “Move it guys,” Mark said, pulling a tight turn and accelerating hard after her, “before she gets an easy one.”

  Suddenly all the fighters snapped out of their lazy maneuvers and accelerated into combat mode, with half of them pursuing the erratically maneuvering target and the others pursuing them. The hounds scored points by shooting the target, while the hunters scored by shooting the hounds.

  “Jenna and Peter, take Alex. Wade and David, Kevin or Liara, your choice. I’ll keep the rest off the target,” he said, firing off a few long range shots at Kara with his skeet’s lachar hoping for a hit that would knock her weapons offline for a few seconds.

  That didn’t happen until she pegged the target, scoring a point for Deuce team, then she flew off before Mark could get close to her.

  Once she was clear he turned his attention to Silas, a Star Force regular, who was also making a strafing run on the target, but the anti-grav unit in the device kept it bobbing up and down randomly as its conventional engines moved it across the grasslands in a zigzag pattern, causing Silas to miss
his first few attempts before Mark hit him at moderate range, which knocked his weapons offline and took away the immediate threat to the target.

  That left Liara as the only wild card. The other two pilots were occupied enough just trying to keep from getting shot by the pairs chasing them that they couldn’t mount an assault on the target, and soon a point for the Primes came up as Alex was hit, evening the score. Liara was trying to unbalance that by making a run towards the target from the opposite side, firing away repeatedly hoping to get a lucky shot in before Mark could get to her. Liara missed up until the point where Mark was almost in range, then he had to pull up hard to avoid Kara coming up at him from below.

  That he hadn’t expected. Normally she would have gone in after the target, which was doing a good job of making itself hard to hit. Instead she had come over to cover for Liara which, now that Mark had to divert, was closing in on…

  The score counter kicked up to 2 for the Deuces as Liara found her mark and swung off, suffering through the weapons deactivation that kept one pilot from sitting in place and racking up a high score in a matter of seconds.

  Mark had to act quickly to get in close to the target before Silas could nail it. The trouble with going 3 on 1 meant they were likely to score several points, but at the same time his teammates would be racking up a lot of kills on the two weaker pilots they were picking on. He hoped that this way the burden of the victory would be on him, and he knew that all he had to do was buy time and the match would be won.

  The trailblazer successfully got to Silas and killed him again before he could get to the target, but then Kara got in a lucky hit that knocked out his weaponry and allowed both her and Liara to make a move to score, but the pesky target only allowed them one hit before Mark’s weapons came back online and he shot Kara, whom he’d been trailing. She hadn’t gone evasive, hoping to get in a score before his weapons reactivated, but her gambit hadn’t paid off.

  Suddenly the Prime’s score jumped to 3 as both of the weaker Deuce’s went down, but their aerial display didn’t stop. As soon as the brief pause expired the pilots would be live again and the Primes knew better than to let them out of their sights. Going 2 on 1 wasn’t exactly fair, but Kara had chosen hounds and Mark was going to make her regret that choice.

  He took a short rest from guarding the target so he could track down Liara and take her out of the picture for a bit, then drove off Kara and Silas as the target ducked under him closer than he would have liked. The drone had non-collision protocols written in to it, but every now and then it came close enough to the fighters with a last second juke in one direction to spook them. That unpredictability made it difficult to target, but also kept the pilots on edge because it had enough mass that even a little bump would cause major problems.

  Mark continued to guard the target, allowing only two more hits on it before his teammates brought the Primes’ count up to 10, which was standard for a short match. As he swung around in a victorious loop he spotted the alien fighters in the distance, suddenly remembering that they had an audience. Almost as soon as the skeets stopped their maneuvers a comm prompt lit up in Mark’s cockpit, which he activated using a series of button presses within the joystick spheres.

  “You fly better in real air than you did in the simulator,” Lorsar’s voice said with a touch of approval.

  “We fly better in our own ships,” Mark countered.

  “As most do. What is your drone’s defense?”

  “It has an energy shield that registers our low powered hits.”

  “How low?”

  “Barely enough to scratch the paint if it did get through.”

  “If I restrict the Valerie’s plasma to its minimal level, will that be too much?”

  “Not sure what the minimal level is, but it’d probably be alright. You want to take a try at the target?”

  “A simple demonstration of targeting efficiency. Perhaps you can use two drones and a time limit to compare one of the Valeries to your own ship.”

  “We call them ‘skeets,’ and yes, we can do that. How long a timespan do you want?”

  “43 seconds will be sufficient,” Lorsar said, referring to the basic unit of time in the trade language. Many races, he’d discovered, gave time estimates either in their own familiar units in translation or used the trade language ones. Mark always used minutes and hours and just translated them into the exact conversion mentally rather than trying to guestimate in terms his brain wasn’t used to using. So far Star Force had resisted converting over to the trade language units for their daily use, and Mark didn’t think that was going to change anytime soon.

  “Alright, you ready?” he asked Lorsar.

  “I will not be the one. Hesar, one of our junior pilots, will demonstrate.”

  “Standby,” Mark said, switching comm frequencies. “Kara, take this one. I want to watch.”

  “No pressure,” she said, flying over to the nearer target which was still zigzagging around.

  “Begin on my mark,” the Archon said. “5, 4, 3, 2, 1…go!”

  As soon as he gave the word the Valerie, which was already tailing the drone, dropped in altitude and got below eye level with the target, firing small plasma spurts that fanned out into a cone-like spray. The golden glow mitigated by the time it reached the target, but enough of it was still active plasma to register a hit right off the bat, with subsequent attacks hitting the mark about 50% of the time.

  Mark saw the Valerie’s hit counter roll up continuously before topping out at a score of 64. Kara, meanwhile, had succeeded in scoring a decent 16.

  “Damn,” the Archon whispered as she flew off from the target. “That’s one hell of a cheat weapon.”

  “As you can see,” Lorsar’s voice cut in on Mark’s comm before he could answer Kara back, “the Valerie is a superior craft. Our engineers and pilots have worked hard to develop it into the premier anti-Cajdital fighter so that it can strengthen all Alliance races.”

  “I’m impressed,” Mark admitted, “but we’ve got a lot of testing to do before we think about adopting it.”

  “Of course,” the Calavari said genuinely. “No pilot discards their familiar craft quickly or easily, but in time I think you will see the wisdom in making the switch.”

  “You’ve got an interesting weapon system there,” Mark said, putting a halt to the Valerie love fest. “Now let’s see how well it maneuvers. Are your pilots willing to play target so we can see how hard they are to hit?”

  “How many do you wish?”

  “Let’s start with one and work our way up from there. If ten of us can’t hit one of yours we’ve got problems.”

  Lorsar laughed. “Very well, we will humor you with a small victory to begin, Human. Then we will see how effective your little ships are.”

  “Good,” Mark said with a mock positive tone as he remotely deactivated the targets so they wouldn’t be dancing around the battlefield. “Do you have energy shields on the Valerie?”

  “The shields are a combination of energy and physical shields, and I will play scorekeeper until our techs can interface our computer systems with yours. I assure you I will not falsify the numbers, to do so would be an insult to the Valerie.”

  “Terms accepted. Let’s get at it.”

  4

  May 25, 2395

  Jartul System

  Daka

  Mark pulled up out of a steep dive, firing off a plasma orb partway through his redirect and nailing the shielded target on one of the ranges to the east of the base with the small blue glob of plasma before flashing across the target then leveling out over the grasslands far beyond it, watching his altimeter closely. He had to stay under 50 meters or he’d be disqualified from the run and there were holographic obstacles ahead that he was going to have to weave his way through.

  He was piloting his skeet, as usual, while he’d encouraged his other pilots to try out the Valeries. Over the past 2 weeks they’d started to get acclimated to the alien design and began
making progress in the simulators vs. the scores of the other race’s pilots. Mark figured it’d be less than a month before they’d adjusted enough to hold par, then they’d get to really see who could outfly who.

  As for the future of Star Force’s aerial forces Mark knew they weren’t going to use the Valeries to replace the skeets, even if they proved to be a better craft. With the wealth of data from the V’kit’no’sat pyramid he knew that they’d grow beyond the Calavari tech eventually so there was no point in making an overhaul to their forces, though he did admit that they might be purchasing some of the craft for limited use given how his pilots were responding to them. Their allies had done well in designing the craft, but Mark still preferred his skeet.

  He was a trailblazer, after all, and if the skeets were underperforming the Valeries or any of the other alien craft on base then he was the one that was going to ferret out the weaknesses and make them stronger. First among those that he’d discovered were the exotic weapon systems the Valerie had, all of which were designed specifically to down the lizards’ lightly defended and highly agile fighters. He didn’t decry their designs, for they were highly effective, but Star Force’s true enemy was another matter entirely, and while they did need to make adjustments to fight the lizards they also needed to keep the bigger picture in mind, and the V’kit’no’sat fighters were heavily armed and shielded, meaning you were going to need a lot of firepower to take them down.

  That was one reason why the skeets had powerful weapons on them designed for one shot delivery, another was the fact that Mark and the others didn’t like the idea of spraying the battlefield with wild shots hoping to hit your target. In a cluttered melee you could end up hitting friendly targets, not to mention it was just downright sloppy. Given the swarm-like nature of the lizard tactics he could agree that such weapons were effective, but Mark preferred precision to mass tactics and was never going to get comfortable with anything but a clean kill shot.