Star Force: Capitulation (SF95) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  He’d created their civilization from the scraps of ancestors that Star Force had collected from across the vast expanse of space and now they were a force that no one would take lightly…not to mention they had the best combat record of infantry warfare out of all the factions, Humans included, and that was not a feat that anyone had pegged them capable of given their ‘youngness’ compared to the Calavari or Bsidd, but what they lacked in muscle mass or multi-tasking capability they made up for with telepathy.

  Archons were more powerful, and the Protovic couldn’t take control of a mind given that the structure of their psionic was different, but when all of your invading army had that power it made for a very different type of warfare.

  Right now thought that didn’t matter, for they were in space and not on the ground…yet, but they were going to have to fight their way down through some tough defenses in addition to the defending warfleet and the sure to be reinforcements whistled up and on their way by now. If not, the arrival of the Protovic would give even a fool reason to demand help to safeguard this key system, for without it a significant chunk of the Rim Region was going to be off limits to the Zargor unless they wanted to go the long way through risky jumplines where Star Force and others were prowling and waiting to ambush passing ships.

  From this system there were jumplines going out in six different directions on the ‘safe’ Zargor network, and even as Brad’s fleet had come in they’d seen ships avoiding the fighting with the Sangheili and just transitioning around the star. Take out this system and throw up a decent blockade and the Protovic would be protecting dozens, if not hundreds, of worlds that the Zargor just wouldn’t be able to reliably threaten due to the geography involved.

  But beyond that, the Zargor just needed a bitch slap. They knew they couldn’t fight the elusive Star Force fleet head to head in the massive battles outnumbering them that they sought, and if they pushed into the really well defended worlds such a battle wouldn’t go well for them. They couldn’t bait Star Force out like they’d been doing to other civilizations, so they were just spamming in all directions and not carrying how many troops they lost so long as they were achieving most of their objectives and doing damage. Between the strategy involved and the attitude of the few prisoners they’d taken, the sense of arrogance was overwhelming. Even when shown superior skills they still denied that they were inferior and stuck to the promise that they would eventually be victorious and this piece of what had been The Nexus would be theirs to dominate and rule over from now to infinity.

  Star Force had taken worlds from them already, chipping away at their supply lines and support bases, but the Zargor were still playing this as if they couldn’t be hit back. That their own territory wasn’t an issue and all they had to do was attack until the enemy crumbled. All offense, no defense.

  And pretty soon, having so much of their fleet spread out into attack campaigns was going to get painfully obvious as being a flaw, for Brad was about to hit them in the jugular and wreck a system that had belonged to them for more than 20,000 years, dating back to the very beginning of their interstellar empire. Their homeworld and capitol were not the same, as most races’ were, with the Zargor homeworld only 118 lightyears away from Jec. If hitting them here didn’t send the message, then that’s where Brad would be going next.

  And they’d either have to pull back their offensive fleets to counter him, or let the trailblazer cut a path of destruction across the interior of their empire…which was exactly what he intended to do while the rest of the trailblazers played the defensive game, figuring that he could provide more ‘defense’ by keeping the Zargor distracted. Star Force could only throw so many ships into systems to defend, with the Zargor able to mass a fleet and hit them where they had few because they could choose their targets, but now Brad was choosing the battlefield for them and they were going to have to fight here against the mass of his fleet or he’d simply move from one important system to another and knock them all out.

  Either way, the bulk of the Zargor invasion was coming to an end.

  “Level 4 defense shields deploying, Archon,” his Admiral said from a nearby chair where he was reviewing intelligence data being relayed from Sangheili scouts spread across the system.

  “Where?”

  “Their largest world.”

  Brad adjusted the main hologram and zoomed in to its orbital map. The planet was twice the size of Earth and had a gravity of 1.7 g. That wasn’t too much for his Protovic to handle, but it was more to the liking of the giant wolf-like race. They were bipeds nearing 8 feet tall and had the musculature to match, giving them an advantage in the higher gravity…or so rumor said.

  Right now there were already some defense shield domes up across the surface of the dry planet, giving it far more land area that most worlds. There were only a few pinpricks of lakes on the yellow grassy plains, though more than half of those were full of infrastructure. Those basic defense shields had been up ever since the Sangheili had arrived, but as some had suspected the Zargor were not so weak. They’d been keeping the true power of their worlds hidden, but now that the Protovic had arrived with over 1200 jumpships they were bottling themselves up tight in order to make sure that nothing could get down to the surface to stage a ground assault.

  Brad spun the hologram around, seeing that the new shields were not domes. Rather they were flat and intersected at angled lines, making for a far less aesthetic protective barrier, but a far stronger one. Flat shields were better defenses than round ones due to the way the energy matrixes were constructed, and it looked like these had been built for maximum deflective power.

  “I wonder if they always had these or they built them specifically for us?”

  “There are notable alterations, even if they aren’t new construction,” the Admiral pointed out, throwing a matrix analysis over to an adjunct off the main hologram that appeared beside Brad’s left arm.

  “Hmmn. They have been studying us.”

  “That’ll delay our establishing a foothold enough to be troublesome if they also have the anti-orbital weaponry to back it up.”

  “Agreed. What about the other 3 planets?”

  “Patchwork protecting certain regions. The fourth planet has water access not covered by shielding at all.”

  “Sloppy. Maybe they didn’t expect we were coming.”

  “The Nexus doesn’t have much in terms of aquatic warfare.”

  “Well we do and we’re going to exploit that breach before they get a chance to pop up some temporary shields. Begin drawing up invasion plans for the fourth planet, hot drop.”

  The Admiral didn’t bother even looking at his bridge crew, simply issuing a telepathic order given his ‘yellow’ ranking. All the bridge crew, ship’s crew, and troops were ‘pink’ level, meaning they’d reached their final form and had the complete set of Protovic psionics. Yellow was a color alteration with no additional powers, but it was a very hard skill level to earn. Having it meant the Admiral had a good command of his telepathic powers and the fact that everyone else on the ship were pinks meant they could talk back and forth without comm channels over short range with ease.

  It was something that Brad had gotten used to, so he didn’t call into question the lack of visible orders being given, trusting that the Admiral would get the right people on the job as soon as possible.

  “The Sangheili are requesting immediate reinforcement,” the comm officer said rather than relaying the time delayed transmission, for it hadn’t been sent specifically to Brad but to the Protovic fleet.

  The Archon switched the hologram over to the 3rd world where the Clan fleet was and took a quick glance at their positioning. At first he didn’t see any reason to call for help with the poking/containment formation in no real danger, then he spotted the opening. It wasn’t something the Zargor would see as a weakness because they didn’t know the capabilities of the Star Force fleet or their tactical playbook…and there was a very big opportunity to take advantage of if th
ey acted quickly.

  “Admiral, we have to move. Sound battle alert throughout the fleet that has arrived and leave a message buoy for the others coming in. We can’t wait.”

  “What do you see?” the Admiral asked as he issues orders to the crew.

  “They don’t know we can curve jumplines.”

  The glowing blue/yellow face studied the main hologram as he walked over next to the Archon for a moment, then he tentatively pointed at a cluster of defense stations holding position outside a vast shipyard complex.

  “Here?”

  “No,” Brad said, walking into the hologram so that the shipyard marker was inside his head as he pointed to a spot on the surface of the planet. “Here.”

  “The elevated shield is beyond the atmosphere,” the Admiral said coldly.

  “They think it’s covered with the underlying shield overlap and the defensive blockers in orbit, but they’re using straight line navigation. They want their ships to be able to come and go without opening windows for us to shoot through, but they’ve left a huge hole for us to exploit without knowing it.”

  “Looks like a tiny hole to me,” the Admiral said disapprovingly.

  “You don’t think we can make it?”

  “I’ll defer to your judgement on that, but it’s not something I would attempt on my own.”

  “Their shields can’t reset altitudes fast with that shield matrix, and if they try they’re going to lose better than 80% of the deployed strength in the transition.”

  “Which is why we need the fleet…all the fleet,” he said, suddenly understanding.

  “Bold enough for you?” Brad asked sarcastically as the command ship he was on suddenly made a microjump headed for the planet in question.

  “How sharp a curve can we manage?” the Admiral asked, looking at the navigator this time as he mentally fed him the specifics.

  “With that moon, quite a bit. Running the numbers,” he said as he the glowing face turned back to his work station.

  “We need as far inside as we can get, preferably over the clear zone,” Brad added as he let the entire bridge crew see the plan with a few holographic drawings on the main display. The jumppoint they were headed to in orbit was marked with a dot, then a straight line came out of it in past several defense stations then headed for a part of the planet protected by one of the big level 4 flat ones, but the straight line curved slightly as it passed the stations, angling to the right with a steeper curve as the relative position of the moon changed. It was a guess on Brad’s part, but he had the curve end underneath the elevated shield and over top the gap between the lower side shields where ship traffic was coming up and down at a pedestrian pace.

  “I want this if we can make it work,” he announced. “And I think it’s just a matter of picking a slow enough approach speed. They won’t see it coming, but we’re going to have to move fast before they can react. I need drones released now and put on individual decel runs. We can’t wait to deploy and I don’t want to try and squeeze the jumpships inside. The command ships should fit, but I’d prefer not having to plow through civilian ships in the conduit. We’re sending the drones in and I need safe passage charts ready to go before the first braking maneuver. Use the old data and update enroute.”

  “Archon, I have a cruiser path,” the navigator said, throwing up a line a bit more steep than his arbitrarily drawn one, though it curved much more fiercely at the bottom end to slide under the elevated shield, just skimming the extremely thin top layer of the atmosphere.

  “We’re going to cause a hell of a hurricane,” Brad said, having wanted to come in a little higher than that, but this would work. “Configure drones shields for needle alignment…or any others preferable to individual approaches. Get me lines for the other hull sizes and throw in a command ship just for fun,” he said as the little dots on the system map that stood as a tiny secondary field of view to his right showed the progress of the fleet moving from the star to the planet and the countdown they were under. If the Zargor got paranoid they might lower that shield entirely, and the Sangheili were right to ask for immediate assistance to…

  “Archon, approach to gap in planetary shields requested by the Sangheili commander.”

  Brad smirked. “Gotta love comm lag. Tell him we’re already on it and the hammer will be dropping soon. If he wants to take advantage of the diversion, let him know his window of opportunity will be closing quickly.”

  And with that the bridge dropped into a mediocre silence. People were breathing and moving about, but there was no further talking as the ships continued to coast across the system. Analysts pulled up and sorted data, filing reports that both Brad and the Admiral studied while the navigators worked up independent deceleration plans for each of the drones that were being unpacked from the carrier jumpships. They were sliding out of their parking slots and into space as if they weren’t moving at all, but once they reached the jumppoint they’d have to brake using their own engines and with all the different masses of ships involved you could end up with them running into each other if you didn’t organize it all precisely.

  And above that the drones had to keep some of their momentum as they slid in towards the planet and pulled hard on every other available gravity well, namely the nearby moon, to curve their trajectory in a way that the Zargor had probably never thought was physically possible, let alone seen before, else they wouldn’t have left the side door wide open like it was.

  When it finally happened Brad didn’t feel anything. The artificial gravity was steady and the command ship decelerated whisper quiet. The blue-shifted image of the planet clarified itself upon deceleration, as did the battlemap relay signals, but there was nothing to see or feel on the bridge. Despite that fact Brad felt a little surge of adrenaline, for his brain knew what was happening and how razor tight it was going to be even if his senses were clueless.

  The thousands of drones passed them by in a flash, extending out into a thick staggered line that gradually condensed down into a very narrow stream only a few ships wide and high curving down and under the Zargor battle stations and coming under the level of the upper shield. Brad watched from the point of view of the leading drone, seeing the shield marked with an artificial overlay due to it normally being invisible, but he could still feel the massive barrier that would have soaked up hours or even days of orbital bombardment if they’d had to pound their way through it.

  The drone skidded on the atmosphere right underneath it, bypassing two other ships coming up through the atmosphere and braking to a descending curve as it shot down into the thicker atmosphere between the lower altitude shields. It didn’t open fire, rather it moved down as fast as a meteor with many others in its wake causing such a disturbance that the air caught on fire and the entire column looked like a tube of fireworks reaching down to kiss the planet…only they never got that far. They slowed rapidly and hovered over the surface, oddly not drawing any fire for almost a minute before the Zargor realized the horror of what had happened.

  When they did every surface battery within range started to open fire on the descending ships, but those already hovering low to the ground were spreading out and hunting down those weapons. The nearby shield generators were domes, however, so they couldn’t duck underneath those, but as the giant topside shield suddenly disappeared readying for a lower altitude reset the drones clustered down near the surface getting as many of them under the minimum height as they could.

  When the shield finally did reset at a lower height, some of the descending drones rammed it, breaking apart on impact and weakening the shield. The other incoming ships slowed before they could hit, but the ones already underneath were busy attacking the shield generators and anything else of value within the region. About ten minutes later the shield went down entirely as big anti-orbital batteries from nearby regions depressed and fired into the column of descending drones, trying to pick off as many as they could, but it was far too late.

  Brad had his surface
foothold on the planet, and now that his drones were down and blasting the key pieces of infrastructure in preparation for the ground troops to follow, there was no way the Zargor were going to be able to remove them no matter how many surface armies they sent to counter. The navy was in the sky, and anything they wanted dead ended up so in short order.

  “Admiral, orbit is yours.”

  “Good luck,” the naval commander said as Brad left the bridge heading for the ground assault prep areas.

  5

  June 19, 3545

  Jec System (Rim Region/Zargor territory)

  Lokedd

  “Here we go,” Maddok said, walking up to the edge of the lowering boarding ramp in the dropship. “Give ‘em hell.”

  The Protovic Commandos ran out in their blood red armor and jumped, falling several meters to the ground as their ride took hits on its shields, but they were splayed out in such a way to give the infantry cover as they quickly scrambled out of the ship as it buzzed the ground. As soon as Maddok’s feet hit he rolled forward through a somersault over his right shoulder, smashing the weapons attached to his back but that was ok. It was awkward, but they were built to be knocked around to no end.

  As a unit the 28 Protovic ran up the street towards the battle ahead, linking in with the battlemap system and getting waypoints. Suddenly Maddok was turning right and breaking from the group along with three others, running through the alien Zargor streets and ducking under a low something that was blocking one. It was a giant pipe and he had no idea what it was there for, but he and the others had no problem getting under it and back into a run as they began to feel enemy contacts ahead.