Star Force: Nexus (SF57) Read online

  The lag made it tricky, with his own ship being in null space between the planet and star but close enough that a low speed microjump would get him there within a few minutes. He needed to be close to monitor the fleet positions without them being able to see him, for the sensor dampening hull plates that Star Force now fielded made the long range lizard sensors virtually useless unless they knew where to focus their attention.

  The reverse was no longer true, for it had been Star Force that once had difficulty tracking the lizards’ own stealth plating, but right now their ship hulls were literally gleaming in reflectivity that Liam’s passive sensors were registering and giving him half a planet’s worth of orbital signatures to gather information from. He had another jumpship on the far side, and between the two of them and others relaying the signals, he was looking at a low detailed position map of everything the lizards had in orbit around Vani.

  Beside him he had two more holograms for the other inhabited planets in the system, but neither was a tenth of the density of this one. The others were start up projects, further deepening this system’s resource base and defenses, but a little orbital bombardment would fix most of that while the bulk of Liam’s fleet was going after Vani…or to be more precise, the fleet surrounding it.

  They had some 28,000 cruisers or better in orbit, clumped together into various formations with others moving about in patrol. The other two planets were virtually barren of orbital defense ships, with these just being a short microjump away if needed. Liam had 6 jumpships in his fleet, plus two Ma’kri, and unless the lizards fought extremely stupid there was no way Star Force was going to beat them.

  They were here to do damage and pull out, a quick poke to bleed off some of their strength, though depending on how the enemy responded it might turn out to be three or four pokes. Liam was used to running circles around them, and if he could do so here he was going to make the trip pay off as much as possible.

  There was a ninth ship that had come in with the Star Force fleet, an observer from the Gfatt that had been tagging along on two previous missions studying the lizard threat in this region of the galaxy and how Star Force was fighting them. Today Liam intended to give them quite a show, for the ships under his command were all top of the line models, right down to the support drones that two of his jumpships were carrying.

  The trailblazer waited another 20 minutes, patient to get the positioning right with the bit of movement occurring in orbit. Nothing much, just a handful of lazy patrols moving about, but every ship counted and there was no rush. So far their arrival in the system hadn’t been detected, at least as far as the reaction from the defense fleet was concerned. They’d overbraked to come out of their jumps well out from the star in the hopes of evading any stellar detection grid the lizards had set up and it appeared they’d been successful.

  The Gfatt had come with them, easily making the maneuver given their ship’s superior drives. Just how superior was a matter of question, as was the rest of their technology, but according to Kerrie they were a mid-level race within the Nexus and extremely formidable when it came to military engagements. They’d been brought in to deal with the lizards when the H’kar had been unable to handle them, even with the Nexus upgrades bestowed upon the new member.

  When the Gfatt hadn’t been able to stop the spread of the lizards either more attention had been placed on the matter. They were able to win every battle they fought, but the enemy’s growth rate was something they were unable to counter without devoting a lot more resources to the ‘low level’ problem. What other threats were high level Liam didn’t know, but the Gfatt were wisely here to study how the ADZ was surviving and now thriving against the lizards.

  At least as long as the Skarrons kept their attention, anyway. Right now Star Force was building like crazy to secure their borders and raids like this one were intended to keep the lizards from doing the same. At first the Gfatt had not seen the wisdom in harassing the lizards without taking planets away from them, but after their first observance coupled with an analysis of Star Force battle history they were beginning to come around to the idea of just racking up ship kills rather than securing ‘wins.’

  How many Liam was going to get today was up in the air, but seeing the positioning in both holo and minds’ eye he knew he’d get at least a couple hundred. How the lizards reacted would determine how much higher that number went.

  With a single thought he sent the ‘go’ command and his sensor feed vanished as the jumpship accelerated too fast to keep a clear lock. The signals coming in from the other ships were likewise distorted until they reemerged into ‘normal’ speeds in middle orbit, with another jumpship coming in beside them while the others entered at various points around the planet. Liam’s position was to be the major one drawing attention, with his two coming out and into view some 45 seconds ahead of the others.

  Both jumpships immediately began deploying drones, fast releasing them on mini slingshot docking arms that allowed them all to get clear within a minute. Rather than stay with the jumpship they shot off immediately on multiple trajectories, some in groups, some solo, while the two jumpships pulled closer together and charged ahead into a ship formation of some 834 cruisers. No larger enemy ships were present at this location, but as soon as the jumpships appeared they began redeploying from elsewhere in orbit along with their flocks of additional cruisers, with many heading to higher orbit to try and block their escape jumplines.

  Both jumpships opened fire with cleansing beams and bloon launchers, then added point defense maulers as the cruisers swarmed to them, not intending to survive the engagement but committed to do as much damage to the two big ships as they could and potentially set up kills when the others arrived. It wasn’t the sort of play Liam would make, but the lizards fought a different type of war and it was one version of combat that the trailblazer had become intimately familiar with…enough so that he could often predict their movements before they made them.

  As the pair of jumpships tore apart the much smaller and weaker cruisers, their shields were bathed in plasma but were virtually unaffected by it. Only once the number of incoming hits scaled up drastically did they begin to weaken, with Liam not ordering the secondary armor deployed until they finally dipped below 80% and additional groups of enemy ships began to arrive to reinforce the others.

  Across the hull numerous openings appeared, exposing specialized internal cargo bays from which a flood of tiny blocks flowed like water out over the hull, using each other as grip points as the 2 meter wide segments laid out a carpet of ‘replicator’ blocks across the standard armor and stacked three thick at the thinnest, with several mountains of blocks positioned over key areas for quick redeployment later if/when the shields were breached.

  It took a long time for all the tiny blocks to get out onto the hull, but the shields held up admirably as the secondary armor covered everything aside from weapons batteries and other key systems that needed line of sight. Every now and then some enemy plasma would slip through the momentary gaps in the shield where it had to be opened to let the jumpship’s own weapons fire through, but those tidbits barely kissed the secondary armor, a mere prelude to what was to come.

  Liam kept the jumpships in the fray, knowing that his shields would go down and expecting them to. He was here to cause damage and he couldn’t do as much as he wanted if he played too clean. Likewise the drones he had deployed were fighting harder than normal, engaging other groups as they moved in towards the jumpships but not sticking around to join them. They were skirmishers in this engagement and they needed to keep moving, but didn’t have the luxury of pulling back and recharging shields else they’d lose part of their surprise attack effect and give the mass of enemy ships time to reposition and drop the hammer.

  Before that happened they’d have to pull out, which was why Liam was pushing beyond normal protocol in order to get more kills. It wasn’t a risk as far as he was concerned, for he knew well what his own ships and those of the e
nemy were capable of, and even while he was drawing the majority of the enemy attention the other ships were coming out of microjumps at precise positions and engaging smaller fleets while they were isolated, some of which they were catching en route to the growing main brawl.

  Those intercepts were being executed by the Ma’kri, which were specifically designed to hunt down enemy ships. Liam monitored them and all others engaged around the planet while letting his captain handle most of the immediate battle. It was necessary to give him the ability to improvise, but in order to do that he needed to be aware of everything that was happening and not get tunnel vision on one particular part of the engagement.

  The Ma’kri were big ships, but their design had them overpowered with engines, meaning they could move their mass around far quicker in small scale maneuvers than they appeared capable of doing. In addition they were equipped with three types of weapons, long range to snipe with, short range to ravage with, and disabler Nami-class missiles to ‘stun’ with. As Liam glanced at their progress he saw tracking markers for the big missiles being launched one each at cruisers far outside of cleansing beam range.

  Each missile was the size of a Skarron fighter and was equipped with sufficient engines to get it to target and decelerate before impact, with it landing on or near the ship and emitting an IDF bubble that surrounded the target. The nami had its own shield generators, for it had to survive in order to be effective, and the ones they were currently using were plasma-resistant varieties knowing that they were going up against the lizards.

  The missiles would track towards their targets, then suddenly the enemy ships became ballistic and unable to maneuver. Using their faster and more agile binary drives the Ma’kri would race out to them and make the kill at close range, hovering over top while the IDF gradually ran out of capacitor energy, and blow them apart with multiple Ta’lin’yi cannons before the charge ran out. With the kill made they’d move onto the next one, stunning one or two at a time and gobbling them up at close range or launching multiple namis and using the ballistic trajectories they created for easy long range targeting with their cleansing beam, destroying or disabling the ships quickly as the Ma’kri moved around orbit like predators.

  Liam knew they had to engage small groups or they’d be overwhelmed, for their shielding and armor wasn’t anything like what the jumpships had. The Ma’kri were crewed, so they had to take care not to lose those ships by being overzealous, but they were very good at cleaning up stragglers and racking up an impressive kill list until they ran out of namis, after which they were still good in a fight but lost their main function.

  Liam’s attention flicked from the Ma’kri to one of his drone fleets that was flashing warning symbols, indicating that their defenses were weakening to the point of breach. Before one of his crew could get to it he assumed priority command over one of the support drones pacing them and not firing, for it had no weapons aside from two backup plasma cannons that were currently powered down. The drone wasn’t meant to fight, but to assist the other ships, and now it was time to do so.

  Liam spotted the two destroyers that were nearest to getting wrecked and brought the support drone in, which was three times as big and heavily shielded. He ordered the destroyers closer together, then brought the support ship down right in between them and extended a bubble shield around all three, blocking the incoming fire on them while they lowered what was left of their existing shields while their emitters began to recharge.

  With their shields down the support ship shot over a stream of secondary armor blocks in packets, with them splashing against the drone hull and spreading over key areas of it. Had they already taken hull damage the blocks would have filled in and covered over those weak areas, but right now Liam just wanted the secondary armor there so the destroyer pilots could use it instantly when their shields did go down.

  Before the support ship became vulnerable itself it lowered the bubble shield and redirected power to its own redundant emitters, hardening up its skin-tight barrier and moving ahead while blocking a bit more fire with its bulk before pulling out. It headed back between the other drones and into a waiting position while the destroyers, now with slightly recharged shields, continued to fight and would put the secondary armor to use mere minutes later when the lizard cruisers finally broke through with mounting plasma storms as more and more reinforcements came into the fight.

  Liam kept that support ship and others moving, sometimes controlling them himself, sometimes letting the remote pilots handle it, but he made sure to reinforce his drones prior to them taking serious damage rather than after, extending their battle life and keeping their weaponry more or less active nonstop, though some lucky shots by the lizards were taking out a few batteries here and there, which was why you never wanted a ship with just a single weapon. Too easy to render useless with pinpoint fire.

  Liam kept his chess pieces moving, waiting for the right moment in several locations, then when it looked like the lizards had them outnumbered with far too much plasma pouring into his ships for them to sustain much longer, a few specialized drones that hadn’t been contributing much firepower to the fight opened up armor panels, revealing concealed storage compartments while the rest of the nearby Star Force drones pulled back in close to the support ships, which created large shield walls in front of them that began soaking up plasma…but that wasn’t their purpose here.

  The shield ships put everything they had into the walls, dropping the rest of their shields and leaving themselves vulnerable to flanking shots which the other drones tried to block as the specialized ships spewed forth a swarm of tiny, self-guiding objects out through the gaps between the shield walls as they too ducked behind any nearby.

  The seekers were each the size of a small dropship, but as they flew out towards the closely packed lizard fleet they split up into smaller pieces, each moving out on their own trajectories but linked together by a remote timer. Liam held the detonation trigger himself, assuming priority control and detonating each cluster when it got into prime position. Over the course of the next 30 seconds the space surrounding the turtled up little cluster of drones became a fireworks display of explosives that put the old style nukes to shame in an area of effect attack that resulted in a lot of damaged ships.

  Suddenly the overwhelming enemy numbers switched over to being targets of opportunity, with the support ships pulling their remaining shield energy back into defending themselves while the drones shot out on one final attack run before retreating, hammering the wounded cruisers and making a lot of easy kills in the face of the incoming reinforcements that were going to be minutes too late to the party.

  Just as Liam issued the recall order to one drone fleet he got a ping on his battlemap, alerting him to something he had not expected to happen. The Gfatt warship, sitting high up in orbit and observing the battle, had just jumped into low orbit and was headed towards one of the lizards’ massive Atlas-class battle stations.

  4

  The hourglass-shaped warship moved in towards the lizard station, being barely a tenth of its size and only half the mass of one of the Star Force jumpships, with its flat top pointed towards the incoming plasma storm. No other ships were in the area, with the battle station being left unguarded as the fleets chased the Star Force ships, and it looked like the single, oddly shaped warship wasn’t going to stand a chance on its own but once it got within short weapons range it flipped over, exposing the narrow band around the center that held most of its weaponry, and unleashed hell at nearly pointblank range.

  Multiple points of light appeared around the midsection of the Gfatt ship, then they leapt out in series at the lizard shields in squirt gun fashion, showing that whatever the weaponsfire was it was partially matter but not plasma. The warship flashed six different attacks every .68 seconds, creating a rapid fire torrent that built up on the stations’ shields, sapping them of strength and quickly breaching as the Gfatt hourglass was likewise covered in plasma hits.

 
Liam watched off and on, still leading his own battles, but it wasn’t long until the lizard battle station was showing heavy damage with scores of ships heading to reinforce and, fortuitously, drawing them away from his fleet. He did a quick mental check, not seeing any advantages to exploit, and continued the fighting withdrawal as he watched to see how much damage the Gfatt would do. He hadn’t expected them to fight at all, but suddenly now they were and he wondered why.

  The slugging match wasn’t over quickly, and Liam had to keep turning his attention elsewhere as he had his hands full making as many ship kills as he could but he kept watching, hoping the Gfatt hadn’t bitten off more than they could chew…up until the ship finally pulled out from the station, which was showing a huge crater in its center but otherwise still intact and returning showers of green plasma fire, including a few streamers that were really hammering the Gfatt’s still intact shields.

  The squirt guns ceased as the ship paused several kilometers out, not firing back at all as the plasma continued to flow, dampened by the range a bit but still doing damage to the shields when a huge blast emitted from the warship and sailed into the crater on the station.

  The next thing Liam knew the battle station was breaking apart into chunks amidst a huge debris-riddled explosion that for a brief moment appeared like a mini nova down in low orbit.

  “That’s one hell of a finishing move,” he commented dryly as he continued to issue mental commands to the ships he was linked in with, keeping an eye on the Gfatt in case they needed support, for he really didn’t want to have to relay the message that the ‘observer’ got itself killed in combat.