Star Force: Retribution (SF60) Page 3

  If the abandoned systems were going to survive they were going to have to do it on their own merits, and if they could, then some day they might reunite with the rest of the empire, but the writing on the wall said otherwise and the Skarrons here had already known their time was near even before the lizards arrived. With Star Force and the Voku showing up to kill their mutual enemy then offer a surrender option that would keep them alive rather than being wiped out by the new arrivals, they’d decided to take it…given that they didn’t have any warships left to fight with and the number of walkers remaining on the planet would be insufficient to stop the orbit bombardment that they knew would be forthcoming.

  Already abandoned by their empire, the Skarrons made the choice to officially cut ties and not fight to the death. It wasn’t a matter of them being disloyal, but in not having any options left. Star Force had offered them one and they took it, simple as that.

  Morgan still wasn’t totally convinced and kept her troops operating on a tight lockdown and constant patrols, with her doing her own little snoop recon on occasions…but there was no misbehavior to be found. There were many Skarrons who didn’t like being taken prisoner, but just as many who were mentally subdued, clearly having given up any resistance. Both complied with orders, and Morgan made sure her people paid them a certain amount of respect and didn’t needle them. If she wanted to try and provoke a reaction she’d do it herself.

  Slowly the transports came down from orbit, having disconnected from their carrier jumpships, and landed their massive hulks on the surface. It took some reworking of the interior to accommodate the Skarrons, for she’d been expecting Hobbits and maybe some Engineers, not the larger race. This wasn’t their first evac though, so the ships had been built with considerable flexibility and adjustments were eventually made. The Skarrons were put into separate ships than their slave races, and Morgan made sure that split was maintained from here on out so that the Hobbits and Engineers would never have to see them again.

  She kept expecting an individual or two to lose it and go rogue, but none of them did. Once they saw that they were being treated well there was no resistance at all and the now prison ships were loaded to the brim, given that there were far more people being picked up than expected. Morgan made sure they could fit them all in, despite the discomfort of the close quarters, and confiscated a lot of the Skarron foodstuffs from their cities to bolster their own supplies long enough to get the prisoners back to the ADZ. She’d expected to hit several systems on this tour, but now that wasn’t going to be an option.

  Nor was keeping the planet, which the Skarrons had expected them to do. According to the Star Force Aronsic, to whom the other Hobbits had taken to immediately, when the surrender offer had come down they’d expected this world to be annexed by either Star Force or the Voku, as had been rumored to have happened on a few other worlds the Skarrons previously owned. When word was spread around that they were leaving the planet uninhabited there had been confusion as to why Star Force had even come in the first place.

  The Star Force Aronsic had explained that it was to rescue their kin. That didn’t get accepted at first, but as Morgan’s little emissaries continued to talk and explain their own lives and how they’d come to be in Star Force there was a shift in attitude and more than a bit of awe that anyone would care enough to come get them, let alone fight to free them.

  The Engineers were indifferent, content to serve whoever was in charge. Such had been their role since before they could remember, and they simply switched from taking Skarron and Aronsic orders to taking Star Force ones. They expected to be put to work when they returned to Star Force space, trading one master for another, and no matter how many discussions the Star Force Aronsic had with them they couldn’t shake them from this self-assigned fate.

  The Skarrons refused to believe that Star Force had come for the Aronsic, and Morgan didn’t spend much time worrying about what they thought. They were being taken back as straight up prisoners, while the Hobbits and Engineers were being treated a bit differently. They wouldn’t be free upon arrival, but would have to earn their freedom and place within Star Force, with a well-established procedure already in place for the Aronsic.

  It took a while for the fleet to get back to the ADZ, with the Voku peeling off at Achkor and not returning with them, but eventually Morgan brought them to an airless world in Beta Region known as Tartarus. It was one of six planets in the system that Star Force inhabited, all of which contained overseeing colonies for a number of wards that made up the bulk of the system’s population.

  Tartarus was not a ward planet, but a prison one. Rather than keeping the individuals in isolation as typical prisons were, when Star Force offered a surrender and enemy troops accepted they were treated with a different status than ‘criminals.’ What they were was involuntary guests, with Star Force building small cities for them to inhabit. Foodstuffs and other materials were provided to maintain the population, with them making nothing for themselves and being left more or less alone so long as they didn’t start misbehaving with regards to the other prisoners.

  This was by far the largest haul of Skarron prisoners ever taken, with most of those already in possession having been captured against their will at the very end of engagements where strays were being hunted down. More often than not Skarrons and Hobbits would be stunned and captured, though that no longer happened for the lizards, knowing how much of a pain they were to keep prisoner, with most of them killing themselves as soon as they saw there was nothing they could do to hurt Star Force.

  The Skarrons were a bit different, and not just because of their elephant-like size. While they weren’t agreeable prisoners, to say the least, typically they didn’t offer up much trouble moving them around and they didn’t try to commit suicide…nor did they have the claws to do so. Previous prisoners held considerable animosity towards their captors but it was more in the form of spite. They didn’t think they were still in the fight, and acted more like prisoners than the active combatants that the lizards always were.

  This lot was even more subdued, given the fact that they saw this as a way to stay alive rather than being captured against their will. They had to be kept onboard their transports for several weeks after arrival in order for appropriate accommodations to be made, for there weren’t enough Skarron facilities to hold them all. The Hobbit facilities were much more massive, given that they expected to bring a lot of them into the fold. Those were located on a different planet and used as a holding/testing facility. If they didn’t take to Star Force they’d eventually be relocated over to Tartarus, while the ones who did would be added to the Aronsic ward that had a colony in this system and several others.

  The Engineers were sent to Tartarus as well and held as war prisoners along with the Skarrons, though in separate facilities. Those also had to be enlarged, or rather other standby facilities had to be reconfigured to hold them all. Each race had different requirements, and while some were universal amongst similar body types there were usually little tweaks that had to be made to get it right. Star Force didn’t ascribe to making prisoners suffer in any way, they were simply denied their freedom and nothing else, with no punitive philosophy involved. They’d been taken out of the enemy’s arsenal, and that was what mattered most.

  It was true that Star Force was devoting a considerable amount of resources to keep them fed and housed, but that was just one of the responsibilities of a proper civilization. Others would execute prisoners rather than spend resources on them, or put them to work as slave labor…along with other nastiness that even involved eating them for some races. Star Force was going to have none of that and dealt with races that did harshly, so it was no wonder the Skarrons and their slave races entered Star Force territory with some trepidation.

  What they found was none of that. They were treated as guests…strictly confined guests, but no shackles, subdermal tracking chips, restrain or punishment collars, or surgical subduement. The food wasn’t to t
heir liking, for it was Star Force produced, but they’d get used to it in time. The guards were virtually never seen, leaving the Skarrons to live quietly alone with each other and unaware of what was transpiring in the outside world. They were completely cut off from their former empire, but then again they’d already been when the lizard invasion had robbed them of their supply lines, so mentally it wasn’t such a huge transition, though it did take some time to fully adjust to.

  The Engineers adapted instantaneously, though they quickly became bored and soon began asking for tasks to do when they weren’t being used as slave labor as they’d expected. They really didn’t want to be left with nothing to do, and that at least was something Star Force could sympathize with. It wasn’t long before a training/work program was established to allow them to both keep busy while helping to contribute to Star Force…and in the process begin a long path to earning their freedom.

  Freedom, however, wasn’t something that they desired. They simply wanted to work, and given that their treatment by Star Force as prisoners was better than their treatment by the Skarron empire as ‘forced’ members, they didn’t want to leave. They kept to themselves and their assignments, with an Archon and an Administrator being assigned to begin developing a place for them in their empire as a ward, soon to begin filling with those that earned their way out of prisoner status…with a discrete mental check to make sure they were on the level and not just playing nice so they could get in a position to sabotage something else later.

  The Skarrons’ mentality was completely different. They were the masters of their own empire and weren’t interested in being anything but that. These wanted to live, but identity wise they had no interest in changing, let alone sides. Star Force was content with that, merely keeping them contained and alive, but they weren’t going to subject all of them to that fate and kept a route of ‘escape’ possible for those wanting more than to just exist in captivity.

  There were a fair number who fell into the escapist category, which began with physical training missions. Once they learned to train and follow orders they were moved into a third nearby facility, already having been taken away from the areas when they first declared their intentions to ‘rebel’ a bit further. The move was both for their own safety and to mentally disconnect them from the others, into which they went from a group system into the seclusion similar to a normal Star Force prison.

  The difference with the third stage was that this was a work assignment and when they made the second transition they were given provisional status and a bit of access to the data grids, allowing them to learn about Star Force and outside events. It was during this period that they were discretely visited by an Archon or other psionic-capable Human that did a check of their intentions, with about 2/3rds of those claiming to be working towards a place in Star Force having no intention of helping their captors. They were playing ‘friendly’ in order to get out, gather intelligence, or find a way to sabotage something.

  Those individuals were then dumped back into the primary group with no word as to why, other than that they weren’t serious about their commitment to working their way out of the prison. They were told that they’d have another opportunity to begin again 6 months later, and in that way Star Force enabled their prisoners to work their way to freedom without running the risk of unwittingly creating an internal resistance group in the process.

  Not that there was a significant threat from that. The ADZ was full of malcontents that Star Force had been dealing with for decades, not to mention people in Axius and even Humans in the Core Region that were anti-Star Force. They weren’t a real threat and were looked on as little more than children playing make believe, but even if they were a threat Star Force wouldn’t have condemned the Skarrons or others to permanent imprisonment. The sovereignty of the individual wasn’t just a high flung concept that you abandoned out of necessity, it was an acknowledgement that people didn’t get to choose where they were born or into what civilization, and Star Force wasn’t going to give up on anyone.

  That, and Star Force had learned long ago that the fakers couldn’t take a long string of training and would eventually crack and eliminate themselves, leaving only those willing to work hard to earn their place left behind to exit the prisons and take a place in Star Force. Challenges were the best way to ferret out who was worthy and who wasn’t, but when you needed answers more quickly an Archon mental probe was definitely the way to go.

  Morgan didn’t stick around to watch all this go down. Once she delivered the prisoners and resupplied her ships she returned to Achkor and picked up another Voku escort, then went back out hunting more Hobbits on the Skarron worlds that had been cut off by the lizards razing the regional capitol.

  Not all of them surrendered, in fact most didn’t. Some hadn’t been visited by the lizards yet and Morgan had to conquer the planets in order to get to the Hobbits, killing many in the process before they could be convinced to surrender. Most of the Skarrons fought to the death, but like in Quixva there were some who didn’t see the point in further resistance and accepted the surrender offer. Some were individual cities, others military bases or even individual walkers. No full planets surrendered until they were reduced to scraps, with Morgan not needing to make a one and done campaign to head back with a full load of prisoners.

  One by one she went around to the weakened or under attack systems, catching one in the very end of a lizard attack and only able to rescue a few thousand individuals after her fleet kicked the crap out of the invaders. The trailblazer made use of the transitional nightmare in the region, picking up survivors where she could as the lizards methodically chewed apart withering pieces of the Skarron supply lines and claiming the worlds for themselves with infantile colonies, some of which she destroyed when she came across them for good measure.

  But even with several large Skarron fleets roaming the region and hitting targets there were too many lizard startups to eliminate, meaning that no matter how many big fights the Skarrons won the lizards were taking territory…and with every year that passed those little seeds grew, making them even harder to eliminate down the road up until the point where they were no longer vulnerable and full-fledged strongholds.

  The collapse of the region didn’t happen quickly, taking decades to accomplish, but by the end of it all the former Skarron border with Achkor would completely disappear, leaving nothing but lizard colonies and the systems they chose not to take interest in, with the ADZ being further swallowed up by the lizard advance.

  4

  February 7, 2675

  Gravis System (beyond Protovic border)

  Hampric

  Paul watched from the command nexus onboard the Ma’kri as the ship’s Ka’sevron cannons fired off their own projectiles along with the nearby drone fleet’s rail gun rounds. All fell to the planet’s surface and the small lizard colony there, with only one shield dome left to penetrate. The rail guns were going there, but the Ka’sevron rounds were falling on one of the exposed cities.

  The hollow rounds hit buildings and sunk through the infrastructure, using their kinetic mass to punch through before the internal energy cocktail reached overload. It never happened at exactly the same moment, but within a few seconds of impact each of the imbedded rounds exploded from within, creating far more damage than the rail gun slugs or even the cleansing beams could manage. Right now those were pinpoint targeting lizard structures in a number of exposed cities, while Paul was reserving the Ka’sevron rounds for where he needed to level a given area.

  They were also useful in naval warfare in select circumstances, but because they wouldn’t detonate on contact they were virtually useless against shields save for their kinetic value. If fired against a warship with sufficient shields to hold up to the physical assault the rounds would hit and either deform or deflect, sending them off into space where they would then detonate with little or no secondary damage done to the ship.

  Then again if a ship’s shields were down and
you landed one inside their hull…pretty much instant confetti. Down side was their casings weren’t quite strong enough to survive the pass through an invoker’s energy arcs, but give the techs another 50 years or so and that little problem would be remedied. Right now the Ka’sevron cannons were more useful in assaulting larger enemy ships and stations, but like the rail guns they had limited ammunition that had to be stored before charging. Once the charge was set the round was ‘live’ and had to be fired, else it’d explode inside your own ship.

  That made for a volatile weapon, but in the right hands and the right circumstances it was highly effective, such as at the moment where each Ka’sevron round was saving some 100+ rail gun slugs with each detonation within a shipyard facility that Paul was slagging on the surface. There were two partially constructed cruisers there, and while the cleansing beams could have cut them up at range, the Ka’sevron rounds made the job oh so much easier.

  At present only the Ma’kri had the weapons, and that would remain the case, for the other weapon systems coming their way from techland would be implemented on the drone fleet and would take them to a whole new level of badass. Those weren’t out of prototype stage yet, so it’d been decided to give the Ma’kri some extra bang in the interim with the Ka’sevron cannons…which otherwise would have been reserved for specialized assault craft rather than the fleet standard.

  The Canderians also really liked the weapon system and were implementing it large scale. To each their own, Paul knew, but useful as it was now the weapon wasn’t going to fit in with their long term plans for the mainline fleet, nor for Clan Saber. A few of the other Clans might dabble with the Ka’sevrons, as they’d done with other weapons that Star Force had built and subsequently decided not to use large scale, but Saber and the mainline fleet were pretty much one and the same as far as tech went, due in no small part to the fact that Paul was the primary architect in both.