Star Force: Benefactor (SF19) Page 3

  “That’s definitely a jumpship,” Jason confirmed. “But the question is, is it the original or a new…”

  He stopped mid sentence as the radar telemetry from the mouse, completely useless up until now, showed a tiny pinprick of a reflection off the target.

  “What the hell…” Greg whispered.

  As if in response to his words the mouse suddenly began sending close ups of the target, having redirected its zoom function towards the sensor contact. Several large images of the elongated dropship seen from an angle appeared in a scattershot of singles beginning with wide shots then focusing down on puzzle piece sections of the hull or surrounding space.

  Paul stepped forward and began using the touchscreen to sort them all out, compiling a mosaic that detailed the huge ship well in the sunlight, but with darker images of the shadows. He highlighted the shadowy pictures and had them digitally enhanced so they could make out the geography on the hull which, like their cruisers, was lumpy and irregular.

  “There,” Jason said, pointing to one of the seemingly random pictures.

  Greg squinted at the wall-sized screen. “Hull damage?”

  “It explains the sensor hit,” Jason agreed.

  Paul pulled up and highlighted several similar photos and circled a set of slots on the hull with his finger. “Docking berths for their cruisers.”

  “Empty docking berths,” Greg elaborated.

  “Redirect the mouse,” Jason suggested.

  Paul flicked the photos off to the side of the screen with a swipe of his index finger and pulled up a command prompt. It was a bit more cumbersome than using a control nexus or dedicated remote terminal, but it functioned well enough. He sent orders for the ship to decelerate and reverse course, then to do a proper, up close surveillance of the ship, tagging its exact coordinates and manually devising a perimeter sweeping flight path for it to follow.

  “It’ll be a few hours before it can get back,” he noted, bringing the photos back up again.

  “Do you think we’ve run them dry of cruisers?”

  “If this is the original jumpship, I’d say that’s a good bet,” Paul agreed. “If it’s a new arrival, then I’d say they’ve already launched their reinforcements and they’re either on planet or on approach.”

  “That’s a cheery thought,” Greg commented.

  “That damage though,” Jason said as Paul continued to sort through the images. “It’s on…well, I’m not really sure which is the aft end…”

  “The gravity drives,” Greg said, cutting him off.

  Paul didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking back to the update signal they’d received pointing out the exact location of the jumpship. He turned around and caught the attention of one of the control room staffers.

  “Begin syphoning off 3rd fleet from the rotation,” he ordered, then turned back to Greg and Jason. “Let’s wait and see if the mouse draws any attention.”

  Four hours later they had their answer as the speck of a reconnaissance ship floated 8 kilometers off the enormous jumpship, taking detailed visual scans of the damage to the hull without drawing so much as a single shot of weaponsfire. Gone were the escort cruisers from the first, brief encounter with the jumpship three years ago. All the cruiser berths on the 22km long ship were empty, multiple weapons ports…or what they thought had been weapons ports…were slagged, along with other pinpoint hull damage leading up to the massive chunk that was missing from one end.

  “How many do you think are on that thing?” Jason asked.

  “Too many,” Greg answered, “and it’s too big to take out?”

  “Even if we had infinite ammo it would be hard to destroy something of that size,” Paul agreed. “But we can turn it into a floating heap if it really is as undefended as it looks.”

  “Someone already put the beatdown on it,” Jason pointed out. “Think the Hycre have a few warships insystem that we don’t know about?”

  “Yes I do. And I think they disabled its gravity drive before giving us the heads up on the location.”

  “So we could come and finish it off?” Greg asked.

  Paul nodded.

  “How many ships is that going to take?”

  “Enough to leave our orbital facilities in jeopardy for a week. Longer if it puts up a good fight and we lose some ships.”

  “They’re leaving the mouse alone, so maybe they really do have their wings clipped.”

  Paul shook his head. “It’s not picking up any debris from fighters or cruisers in the area. That makes me think either the fight didn’t happen here or they picked up their trash, which would mean they’re still active.”

  “Recycling,” Jason mewed.

  “And I’d bet that jumpship has internal factories that can replace the weaponry and maybe even the engine components. The Hycre have given us an opportunity that probably won’t last, and the longer we delay the more repairs they’ll get done. It’s a risk, but I say we hit the jumpship.”

  “I agree,” Jason said, looking to Greg.

  The Archon nodded. “How soon can we get there?”

  “Inside of three days,” Paul said, tapping a button on the screen then painting a rough route via fingertip on the map from Corneria to one of the inner planets, then bouncing off of it in a slow arc around to the position of the enemy jumpship.

  Jason looked at the map briefly and nodded, walking off. “I’ll start packing.”

  Plasma fire coming from the jumpship was sporadic, but the cannons were producing huge blasts capable of punching through a destroyer’s shields with one hit. Fortunately none of Paul’s 43 ship armada had gotten in close to the behemoth and took dissipated blasts at distance before redeploying out to extreme rail gun targeting range. Hitting the ship wasn’t an issue with so much mass in play, but it was the critical systems on the hull that were the target…and hitting those from range was proving problematic.

  Fortunately whatever the Hycre had hit the jumpship with earlier had created a blind zone in the oblong ship’s ‘aft’ section, which Paul directed a group of ships to approach. Upon seeing that they were getting no return fire to speak of, just a few anti-air batteries that were mostly harmless to the capital ships, he redeployed his entire fleet to that sector and had his ships begin creeping along the hull and sniping at the weapons batteries from the side where most of the plasma cannons couldn’t rotate to reach.

  He lost one corvette in two shots as it approached a battery mounted on the side of one of the hull nubs, which gave it a more aft-looking firing arc. The loss wasn’t unexpected, but rather a tradeoff for the two destroyers approaching on the flanks to get in clean shots at the target with their rail guns. Like the kirbies the jumpship had auxiliary shields over each battery that had to be beaten down and Paul’s remote pilots onboard the Excalibur were quickly learning how much damage they could take before collapsing.

  The 2 destroyers in question succeeded in breaching this plasma cannon’s shield in five shots, along with a bit of plasma from the corvette before it was shredded. After the 5th metallic slug partially punched through the destroyers slagged the turret with plasma, knocking the cannon out of the battle. They inched their way forward along the hull, looking like mosquitos crawling over an elephant, as they sought out more weapons batteries.

  Paul watched and guided the one-sided battle from a command nexus on the bridge of the battleship, learning more about the jumpship’s capabilities with each miniature engagement. They were fortunate the lizards’ primary shields weren’t deployed, otherwise this would have been a much more tedious endeavor. Apparently the Hycre, who he was beginning to like more and more, had taken out several key systems with the internal damage they’d done, because Paul’s sensors were picking up multiple shield generators on the hull that were intact but nonfunctional.

  Those got tagged as targets immediately, not wanting to run the risk of them suddenly coming online. The lizards had had days to begin repairs, though there was no way to know for sure just how
badly they’d been hit. They fact that the ship didn’t try to run when the Star Force fleet approached confirmed Paul’s suspicion that the Hycre had either knocked out their gravity drive or its support systems, otherwise it could have zipped off faster than they could hope to follow, even if it had only a fraction of its normal functionality.

  As Paul studied the hull through the intense, close range active sensors being emitted from his fleet he noticed a great deal of surface detail, including hundreds of docking ports, not just for cruisers, of which he counted 28, but a wide range of hull shapes that seemingly fit partially inside the jumpship upon docking, much the way the kirbies fit into the niches on the cruisers. He was also able to identify access bays, probably where the defensive fighters originated from, though they too were absent in this battle, either having been redeployed to Corneria’s surface to protect their bases or killed earlier when fighting the Hycre.

  Then on the ‘underside’ of the wrinkled egg of a ship there were three sets of huge doors, which Paul was almost sure contained internal shipyards capable of building cruisers, for the shape and size were a near fit. Even as his fleet continued to fight their way across the hull of the jumpship his respect for the lizards’ ingenuity was growing. This wasn’t just a cargo ship, or fleet carrier…it was a mobile colony wrapped up in a battle station.

  Whereas Star Force established supply lines to the star systems in their territory, whereupon they’d send shipment after shipment of equipment to slowly build infrastructure on site, the lizards could send this jumpship halfway across the galaxy if they wished and plant the seed for multiple colonies, all of which could produce the material and personnel they needed in short order from the resources on site rather than having to make hundreds, if not thousands, of costly supply runs back and forth from their existing colonies.

  “MCV,” he whispered to himself as he tagged the ship as such on their battlemap, not so much as a name but as a description, standing for the ‘Mobile Construction Vehicle’ found in a number of video games that allowed players to build their entire tech tree at a new colony site, completely independent from their supply network.

  This was a design concept that he was going to look into copying later, but for now he needed to eliminate the enemy’s foothold in the star system, because he knew how truly dangerous this sort of empire building tech could be if given ample time to develop.

  When his leading ships got to the last 3rd of the jumpship they finally did encounter intact shields, the strength of which Paul couldn’t determine. Their sensors weren’t sophisticated enough to map out the energy matrix, let alone assess its strength, but the Archon guessed these would be more powerful than their surface base defense shields, meaning there was little point in wasting ammo to try and punch through.

  Paul issued no flight zones around the ‘front’ of the jumpship and organized the fleet into cleaning off every hull object of value on the back two thirds, leaving the lizards their forward strong zone for the moment. So long as the ship’s cannons couldn’t turn to track them, they might as well not have been there at all.

  Paul rearranged his fleet formation as ships began to run out of targets, bringing the smaller ones to the back while some of the larger ones were redirected to the underside. The rest drifted off into holding positions within the safe zone while those ships tagged by Paul began their assault on one of the three construction bays, targeting the thick doors that were also covered by an auxiliary shield.

  Dozens of rail gun slugs fell within a minute, pounding away and draining shield strength as the Star Force fleet fired with impunity into the ‘dead’ end of the ship. Not long thereafter the energy barrier succumbed to the stress and fell across the entire length of the bay, exposing the armored doors to the kinetically laden assault. They didn’t hold up nearly as long, with chunks blowing out as impact craters formed, then widening and breaking through to the interior. The warships continued to target five distinct spots and poured all their fire into them and, once the doors were no longer sucking up the damage, the unseen internal contents began to take the hits.

  Something inside didn’t agree with the metallic rain, for a large explosive backwash came out the holes in the bay door, then blew out a section of adjacent hull, filling the space around that section of the jumpship with debris. Paul sent out a ‘cease fire’ command and let the explosions settle down, assessing the damage before sending out new targeting coordinates.

  The fleet resumed bombardment and succeeded in knocking out a large section of one of the two doors large enough for a frigate to pass through. With that objective achieved Paul called a halt to the onslaught and had the mouse redirected up and into the breach, the telemetry from which he had routed into his holographic chamber, with him taking on the perspective of the ship.

  There was a mess inside, with ship parts floating around everywhere in the zero g environment but the huge chasm was still mostly empty. Paul saw that it extended well beyond the dimensions of the doors and had what looked like 8 slips capable of building new cruisers, two of which held smoking remains of partially constructed ships. He couldn’t see what had killed them, for they lay well outside the boundaries of the door in the flower petal-like arrangement of the slips around the perimeter of the entryway.

  The inner hull opposite the doors was shrouded in a cloud of dust and debris, having been penetrated by repeated rail gun strikes. Paul didn’t know what had been there, but he guessed that was where the main explosion had come from, given that the damage ran straight over to the two slips as if vein-like internal components had blown out through the wall until they reached the ships, suggesting some sort of feeding lines.

  “Are you sure you want to go in there?” Paul asked. “We really messed up the place. A power surge could kill you before you even see a lizard.”

  “We’ll be careful,” Jason said, standing behind his right shoulder in the command nexus. “We can’t wait around to get enough explosives from Sol to take this thing out while they’re inside making repairs, especially with their partial shield up. If they get enough engine power to limp away…”

  “I know,” Paul said, cutting him off. “Go.”

  4

  Jason sat in the hold of the shuttle, packed shoulder to shoulder with the other Archons of Beta team as the naval pilot flew them into the construction area through the breach point in the bay doors that the warships had just opened up. He didn’t see the sheer thickness of the doors that the rail guns had punched through, nor the debris field inside that was churning about inside. He sat, staring at his knees and those of the Archons seated across from him, waiting patiently for the go ahead as Paul found them an appropriate boarding spot as he coordinated the assault from the bridge of the Excalibur.

  When the go ahead was finally given he flexed his fingers inside his silver suit’s armored gloves anxiously, waiting for the boarding hatch to open. When it finally did he had to wait a few extra seconds for the other Archons to spill out ahead of him, then he set foot on the deck of the jumpship and almost fell to the ground.

  He caught himself in half crouch, seeing others ahead of him doing the same. The gravity was higher here, probably between 1.3 and 1.5, and that was going to slow them down considerably.

  His eye line searched the immediate area. Beta team wasn’t the first to board, so he hadn’t expected a firefight the moment he stepped off the shuttle…which he saw was force docked to a hatch behind them. The inner section of the lizards’ hull was now lying beside the entry point from where it had been cut out, and a new Star Force docking collar had been welded to the hull in its place, giving them the size and fit necessary for their shuttles to board. The door on the lizard hull, he noticed, was extremely small, barely wide enough to fit one person, making him wonder what exactly it had been designed to dock with.

  On his HUD he saw Morgan’s Alpha team moving across the ship with portions of the map being filled in as their suits’ telemetry was being fed back to the Excalibur
for mapping purposes and the updated schematic being sent back to the ground troops, giving Jason a decent idea of what was immediately outside the construction nook they now stood in. The bay was long and small, with a partially constructed ship component stretching nearly the entire length. Behind him, next to the docking port, was a large bay door, ostensibly used for bringing the completed component out into the yard for final assembly, meaning the lizards first assembled it here, in atmosphere and gravity, before attaching it to the rest of whatever ship they were building.

  On his quickly growing map Jason saw Alpha team drop a virtual marker, which Jason quickly added a team waypoint to.

  “Let’s move,” he said to the other 9 Archons, choosing to walk forward rather than run while his body got adjusted to the higher gravity. The other members of his team, all second gen Sangheili and Sabers, spread out into a loose formation around him, plasma rifles ready, as two skirmishers took point carrying shields.

  Jason followed three steps behind them as they came to the doorway leading out of the bay. The ceiling of the connecting hallway was about 8 feet tall, short for Star Force standards, but similar to what they’d found in the lizard surface bases, which was one reason why the Knight teams would be boarding last and assigned to defend the breach point. Their maneuverability would be hampered, but hiding behind their giant shields would make them very difficult opponents for the lizards to fight past and Jason was confident they’d hold their ground while the Archons pushed out into the ship as expeditionary teams.

  When they got to the waypoint they found a bisecting hallway with Morgan’s tag on the left, meaning that was the way the next team needed to go. Jason removed the tag from the battlemap and gestured his skirmishers forward, yet to see any lizard corpses. On a ship this large he’d have thought to encounter droves of them…