Star Force: Scruples (SF37) Read online

  Unlike Vreen, Nestarraffa was a world covered in one unending cityscape, making landing troops more difficult, which was why the Bsidd had been chosen to hit it. Their battle plans didn’t call for establishing strongpoints and battle forts like the Kvash did, but rather in pouring an insane number of units down onto the planet and overwhelming the defenders with numbers and superior technology.

  Trick of it was, the Nestafar had greater numbers on planet than the Bsidd could hope to counter, meaning they had to pick their targets…which in this case were the primary shield generators.

  While the urban landscape covered the entire landlocked planet, the primary shields did not. Instead they covered large swaths of the city, leaving gaps where the Bsidd transports came down and began spilling out their own mutli-legged walkers while a battle for air superiority was taking place over the 184 landing zones.

  Immediately upon being dropped by advance transports, the walkers skittered off through the narrow city streets in search of weapons batteries and secondary shield generators to hit, with Bsidd troops staying near the LZs and clearing out the surrounding buildings and establishing a perimeter within which to begin unpacking the larger transports. Out of those would come their flying fortresses, which were the equivalent of hovering battle forts shaped like a horseshoe. Tendrils appeared to grow out of the structure, then wrap around it in a bird nest-like motif that held a vast array of weapons, both for anti-air and against ground targets.

  With the walkers leading the way and hitting key infrastructure around the LZs, thousands of the massive flying fortresses, each more than a kilometer wide, took off towards the primary shield generators, being escorted by scores of Bsidd-built Valeries that took on their standard blue/purple coloration. Working in consort, the formations fought their way to the edge of the nearest shield domes and began assaulting specific patches of it with choreographed disruptor strikes, trying to destabilize the shield segment enough to create a temporary opening.

  A scattering of Nestafar walkers came out to oppose them, but they were limited by the geography of the city streets and were met with the powerful underside weaponry of the flying fortresses and gunned down easily. As the Nestafar quickly called off the meaningless assaults and began to pool their local defenses underneath the shield for a more sizeable counterattack, the Bsidd pounded the outer edge until a gap formed…then the disruptor fire spread out to the edges, holding the opening while one of the flying fortresses pushed through.

  With it came a slew of Valeries that immediately engaged the fighters inside, for the dome itself had a radius of several hundred miles. With over 30 flying fortresses hammering the shield and keeping the breach open, dozens more passed through but the walkers and infantry did not. They could have gone underneath the outer edge where it met the building tops, for the Nestafar designs didn’t allow for it to drop all the way to the ground, but they didn’t, instead holding their position and protecting the flying fortresses as they kept the gap open long enough for the others to get inside.

  After that the ones left outside retreated, along with the walkers, and headed back towards the LZ before breaking off and getting a head start towards another distant shield dome, with the walkers skittering rapidly through the streets to get to the target and passing by most of the Nestafar that were in the way.

  As they redeployed the flying fortresses inside the first shield dome accelerated towards the generators at the center, letting the Valeries with them handle most of the anti-air duties, as well as flying ahead and scouting out larger defensive weapons that needed to be disabled before they could prove dangerous to the flying fortresses.

  With a tempered pace the Bsidd fought their way across the interior, knocking out several large defense cannons that were designed for aerial defense against warships or transports had the Bsidd been stupid enough to fly overhead, and eventually got to the dome’s center where the shield generators themselves were protected by a secondary shield, which they began assaulting en mass.

  Once the enemy fighters within the dome had been destroyed the Bsidd Valeries added their small firepower to the attack, flying low on the streets and undershooting the bottom edge of the shield in some cases, but mostly providing support against Nestafar infantry that was deploying in a defensive perimeter. Their scatterguns proved most effective in knocking them down, but killing them had never been the objective.

  Eventually the secondary shield succumbed to the firepower of over 100 flying fortresses, allowing the secondary generators to be targeted and destroyed…thus exposing the well-armored primaries. It took longer to knock them out, but down they eventually came, exposing the city beneath to aerial attack.

  But the flying fortresses and remaining Valeries didn’t stay, instead they too began to retreat, ignoring the valuable infrastructure below them that now lay open to assault. They didn’t even bother to destroy the scattering of other small secondary shield generators that were now popping up in place of the primary over key buildings. The Bsidd simply turned around and flew off, leaving the cityscape exposed.

  They repeated the same process over the coming days, assaulting the shield domes, creating a gap, then sending their flying fortresses and fighters in to destroy the generators, after which they ignored the Nestafar cities, moving about stripping off their defenses one after another. Ironically the Nestafar’s heavy walkers did them little good on the city streets where they were unable to bunch up and concentrate their firepower. They were left scattered and isolated, allowing the Bsidd to pick them off from the air with their heavy weapons on the flying fortresses when they so chose.

  The Nestafar did try and gather their strength to assault the LZs, which quickly became rubble fields. When that happened the walkers regained some of their advantage, crawling over the downed buildings in what eventually looked like a large grained sandbox, but they were unable to penetrate to the center of the LZs with the Bsidd walkers, smaller, faster, and in greater number, chewing apart the heavily armored Nestafar versions after the Valeries and flying fortresses busted them up from above.

  Once again the Nestafar’s aerial weakness came back to haunt them, for the Bsidd were far more capable on the ground than the Calavari, and they had access to the Valeries that complimented the flying fortresses very well. Not even the anti-air defensive cupolas on the ground were able to do much against the Bsidd, for the Valeries flew in low at building height and popped the turrets beneath their minimum depression range where they could, while going after the others with walkers.

  The sheer number of Nestafar on the planet made it a pitched fight, with high casualties on both sides, but the Bsidd clearly had the advantage, merely having to work through every stage of the assault while the Nestafar continually tried and failed to counter them. After several different tactical maneuvers the Nestafar resorted to an all on infantry assault, rousing the native inhabitants to the air on their own wings and rushed the LZs, providing more targets than the Bsidd could fire at.

  That desperate and suicidal tactic actually worked, with the Nestafar getting inside the Bsidd’s defensive perimeter and attacking the staging areas and landing craft on ‘foot,’ though in their case it was flying over the debris, using their wings to avoid the rough terrain and bring their handheld weapons in close to the insect-like Bsidd, whose own infantry met them amongst the grounded ships.

  What followed was wholesale slaughter on both sides. The Bsidd skittered around on their multiple appendages, firing blue plasma orbs from ‘wrist’ launchers and weathering some of the Nestafar’s own red plasma with thorax shields, both physical and energy…but there was so many Nestafar that they quickly wore down and the casualties began to mount.

  The Nestafar got inside every open door they could find, trying to disable or take control of the ships, walkers, and aircraft in the LZ, including some of the flying fortresses that were hovering over the engagement and laying waste to the Nestafar by the hundreds per second as they fired into the clouds of flappi
ng wings with their plasma and disruptors. Body parts rained down on the Bsidd below, making for a landscape of total horror, but neither side so much as blinked, for both were totally committed to the assault…the Nestafar in defense of their homeworld, and the Bsidd out of vengeance for their former ally’s betrayal.

  The Bsidd assault wings out taking down the Nestafar shield domes didn’t turn back, allowing whatever happened at the LZs to work itself out while they stayed on mission. Unlike Star Force or the Kvash, the Bsidd operated off a military strategy that allowed for losing massive amounts of troops to achieve victory. They weren’t so casual about the deaths of their own as the lizards were, but the lengths of sacrifice they were willing to go to in order to achieve their most important objectives was both awe inspiring and gut wrenching at the same time.

  Partway through the LZ counter assaults, which were happening simultaneously across the planet, a few small Hycre warships came down from orbit and punched their way into the Nestafar infantry clouds, ramming some of them into hot goo while torching others with their plasma cannons at pointblank range…but still the Nestafar didn’t flee, instead they were being continually reinforced as more of the ‘civilian’ population kept flying towards the LZs armed with hand weapons, which in some cases were merely blades.

  Up in orbit more Hycre ships were arriving, following on the heels of Nestafar warships that began redeploying from other planets, leaving them undefended in order to come to the aid of their homeworld. The growing fleet in orbit was already engaging the Bsidd and pushing them to the limit, which the Hycre realized and began diverting a scattering of ships their way from other current engagements. That made it harder for the Hycre fleets which were donating some of their ships to win the battles they were already engaged in, but they weren’t going to let the Bsidd over Nestarraffa or any of the other worlds be wiped out, and the same went for the Kvash.

  The Hycre had no ground troops in the fight, which made them almost obsessive about protecting the other races’ fleets in space. They were overextending themselves, they knew, which would result in them losing even more ships, but for them it was a matter of honor, and they countered every unexpected Nestafar naval tactic by pulling the burden upon their own fleets, leaving their allies with the same basic battle plan as they’d discussed prior to the invasion.

  Them sending ships down to the surface was an act of desperation and ego, for while they were a naval power only, that power did extend down through the atmosphere if and when they chose, so when it appeared that the Bsidd might be losing their LZs to the unexpected mass infantry assault the Hycre put it on themselves again to change the course of battle.

  They couldn’t respond quickly, given that they were bringing ships in from other planets, but the LZ assaults weren’t exactly surprise attacks either. They were a Starship Troopers affair, with the Bsidd holding out as long as they could against an unending stream of Nestafar over the span of hours that then stretched into days.

  Rather than sit and watch while their homeworld was being invaded, the native Nestafar from around the planet were being called out to fight and were responding in huge numbers that only a flying race could muster, for as they rose up out of their dwellings they bunched together like a swarm of insects that grew continually larger, then began travelling across hundreds of kilometers, picking up more numbers as they went, turning the skies over the planet into living rivers all emptying out on the Bsidd LZs.

  It got so bad that on the third day one of the Kvash starbases repositioned itself into orbit and began dropping reinforcements down to the planet. Their fighters replaced the Bsidd ones who had run out of fuel and crashed, for they couldn’t access the facilities at the LZs for resupply and they didn’t attempt a run up to orbit because they were so overwhelmed with easy targets all they could think of was point and shoot…and shoot…and shoot.

  The flying fortresses were another matter, with ample fuel to stay aloft for as long as the Nestafar had suicidal troops to throw at them. With the debris-strewn ground now covered with an ever thickening layer of bodies, the Kvash had to land well away from the LZ in order to find clear space in which to deploy their own infantry…each of which was a battle pod slightly larger than a Nestafar protomech.

  Star Force had nicknamed them ‘metroids’ after the power suit Samus Aran wore in the video games, for they had a ‘ball’ mode and a mech configuration. When in ball mode they floated above the surface, acting like a low level aircraft that kept to within 100 meters of the ground. When in mech mode the metroid would sprout a head, arms, and legs that loosely mimicked their pilot’s physiology.

  All Kvash infantry were metroids, making them the most robust in all of the Alliance, even more so than the Archons…though some of the trailblazers would dispute that, given their psionic abilities that could cripple the metroid’s pilot. When they began spilling out of their own landing zone they immediately deployed into ball mode and shot off across the cityscape towards the ongoing battle, diving into the Nestafar flows and shooting them down with the single weapon that ball mode afforded them.

  When they got to the body mounds that were now the Bsidd LZ they dropped to the ground into mech mode, finding the scattering of clean areas where the few remaining Bsidd troops were holding out. They’d been excavating the body parts like dirt and forming them into barricade mounds, using equipment onboard the transports or even the transports themselves to mash aside the piles.

  When the first of the metroids arrived they set their legs down on charred rubble and began firing up into the clouds and drawing the Nestafar’s attention away from the cowering Bsidd. The metroids’ shields absorbed a torrent of plasma all the while the armored infantry shot down many more of their pathetic Nestafar counterparts, taking cover underneath the several horseshoes hovering above whom were all but impervious to the enemy’s infantry weapons.

  From there on out the battles continued, with the Kvash only able to reinforce some of the LZs. Those that they did held out, somehow, while the others were eventually overrun. Some of the transports managed to flee, but others were boarded or damaged during the fighting, with a small percentage of the Nestafar infantry coming to the fight carrying explosives or rocket launchers, though it was nearly impossible to tell who had what in such a massive swarm.

  The LZs that held eventually thinned out the opposition, then pushed back the engagement zone to a perimeter that allowed reinforcements to start coming down again, not in the form of troops but of supplies, in particular ammo replacements, for plasma didn’t manifest itself without a matter component, and those reserves on the flying fortresses had to be refilled occasionally as they continued to puncture shield dome after shield dome while ignoring most of the attacks being thrown at them by the infantry in those areas.

  The battles across the planet lasted for well over a month before the Bsidd had all the shield generators knocked down, after which they began recalling their troops to the LZs that were still under assault by the infantry flowing in from far reaching corners of the planet. The Kvash with occasional Hycre support from low flying warships held the handful of LZs that remained long enough for the Bsidd to pull out their flying fortresses and Valeries that remained, after which the Kvash also removed their troops, seeming to flee the planet.

  Fleeing yes, but not conceding. Once all Alliance personnel was cleared off the surface, numerous Bsidd jumpships moved into low orbit and began launching spherical objects down to the surface by the thousands. Each one of which was a tactical warhead pinpointing a specific surface grid. In horrifying mathematical precision, rows of impact points blossomed on the surface, destroying the tiny buildings in massive concussion waves, along with the Nestafar population still inside.

  When one row of a sector was completed the orbs began stitching the adjacent rows, one after another, methodically carpeting the entire surface of the Nestafar homeworld with impact craters. The Alliance didn’t intend to capture the planet, nor did they invite a surrende
r. They were here for one purpose and one purpose only…to wipe out the Nestafar as they had been attempting to wipe out the Calavari.

  And what was occurring on Nestarraffa wasn’t an isolated occurrence, for the Bsidd repeated the orbital bombardment on every other planet the Alliance was fighting on once their ground troops succeeded in stripping the Nestafar of their defense shields. When the primary worlds were hit and destroyed, the remaining Alliance troops took to the secondary targets, all the while the Hycre fleet fought off the incoming Nestafar reinforcements from other systems as they dribbled in.

  The massacre of the Orica system did not occur quickly, taking more than a year to run its course, and the Alliance fleet that finally left the now dead system was a tiny fraction of what it had been at the outset, but it had accomplished its purpose and the survivors left victorious on their long trip back to Calavari territory, where they split up and began their equally long trips back to their respective territories…all the while the war between the Nestafar and Calavari continued on oblivious in most systems, for that was the nature of interstellar warfare. One system didn’t know what was happening in another as it was occurring, but word of what happened would slowly spread from ship to ship and race to race.

  The name Orica would become synonymous with ‘betrayal,’ ‘vengeance,’ and ‘annihilation,’ but to the Archons it would come to mean something altogether different…putting the final nail in the Alliance coffin, as far as the Humans were concerned.

  4

  March 19, 2446

  Nevarsor System

  Namek

  Paul sat staring at the hologram of the Bsidd jumpships bombarding Nestarraffa and annihilating the population with his jaw clenching in anger. He’d been reviewing the battle data that the Alliance had transmitted to them via the relay network for the past 3 days, massive as it was, and only now had he gotten to the crux of their strategy. They hadn’t gone to Orica to cripple the Nestafar’s shipyards or to destroy their warfleet or to hinder their economy…they’d gone to outright slaughter the enemy.