Star Force: Ringworld (SF80) Read online

  It was clear to Megan what the lizards were attempting to do, aside from poaching the jumpline…they wanted to encircle the jumppoint so that the Star Force ships would get bottled up and block each other’s firing lines. To be most effective they needed to spread out in a tight blanket and use their weaponry to shoot down the cruisers as fast as possible, not stand in line and take turns getting focused on and damaged before cycling back behind the front lines. They needed everyone on the front lines, and Megan was about to make a new one for them.

  Moving her command ship to the head of her little formation she took the brunt of the incoming firepower as she ordered the drones to tuck in behind while the warships held the flanks as they pushed out from the jumppoint and curled back around to form a corner on the incoming swarms that was to their advantage, bottling them up a bit rather than the reverse. Megan dove her command ship into the fray and punched straight into the cloud of ships while leaving the rest of her task force to form the new front and hold it.

  She knew her ship couldn’t stand up for long against that many ships at pointblank range, not to mention the slow speed collisions occurring against her shields, but the command ship was fresh and that afforded her the luxury of such recklessness. Plowing into the hoard of ships that had not yet come under Star Force fire, she cut a path through them with every weapon system on the ship activated and shooting in all directions now that there were no friendly ships nearby. Setting a curving course that would bring the ship back out of the swarm, Megan rammed as many ships as were shot down and left a trail of debris in the lizard backlines that was a far cry from what was accumulating around the jumppoint and interfering with both fleets’ abilities to fight.

  Paul was having his hands full keeping that debris away from the jumppoint, but now the lizards would have their own navigational hazards to worry about before they even came within firing range on a Star Force ship…not to mention the brief disruption in ship flow that would get to Paul soon.

  When Megan’s ship came out of the swarm and into mostly clear space its shields were down and she had a trail of lizard cruisers chasing after her that she led back into her waiting drone fleet. They didn’t seem to care, wanting to get as many hits into her hull as possible and she was willing to make the exchange in order to draw them out to their quick deaths.

  The drones parted to let the command ship through, which then took up position behind them and the warships as it continued to snipe with Keema batteries as the shield emitters recharged. As they did Megan’s mind was with her drones, tweaking their positioning and giving them priority targets within the edge of the swarm that was pushing out to try and flank them again. The enemy desperately wanted to encircle them, but had to do so in significant numbers or else they were just giving up easy kills.

  That was the trick of it all, and Megan kept working them into situations where they got stretched out and her drones could rip them apart with more aggressive assaults while the bulk of her line was in cycling mode to keep ships from being destroyed. The lizards knew well the tactic by now but had no real way to counter it. If they dived the retreating wounded ships the nearby drones would turn on them and take them out before they could get to their targets, meaning the only way to beat the cycling strategy was to cause more damage than it could counter.

  And the best way to do that was to flank the ships so they didn’t have much of a backline to retreat in to.

  It dicey, because Megan needed her ships spread out to do maximum damage, but with lines thick enough to accommodate the cycles else she’d be wasting drones. Fortunately she had the perfect point of view to orchestrate the battle from while the lizards seemed to be fighting in an almost chaotic frenzy that she was often able to manipulate to her own advantage through baits and faints.

  But for every small victory she had there were more lizard ships arriving, with it becoming clear that this was the battle for the system and everything else after this point would be secondary…though if the lizards did enough damage here and now there wouldn’t be enough ships left to take on rest of the system’s defenses. This was the lizards’ best chance of success and they were taking it before all the Star Force ships could arrive and really put the hurt on them.

  “Oh shit,” Jack said as his command ship arrived and he got his first look at the scene. Coming in third in line with his task force he’d expected to come in hot, but the sheer carnage around the jumppoint was beyond anything he had seen before. There was literally a dome of debris encircling them, and it wasn’t all lizard ships.

  As soon as he arrived he got waypoints from Paul and didn’t bother distracting him with any chitchat. He could tell the situation was dire and there was no time to delay. A third of their fleet was still in transit and a tendril of the lizard fleet had broken through and was nearly in to the jumppoint with only a scattering of drones and a pair of warships engaging them in a losing effort not far away.

  One of Paul’s waypoints was there and it was obviously the highest priority, so Jack diverted his command ship directly to it while sending the next few warships to come in behind him to plug the other holes in their lines. As he did so he saw/felt Megan’s presence within the massive space battle and took that to be a bad sign, for she was supposed to be drawing ships away by making feints against the shipyard ring. If she was still here then their plans had been shot to hell and they were in a scrap just to keep their heads above water.

  Which was exactly where an Archon wanted to be, on the front lines in the thick of it, where they could make the most difference.

  First priority was to get to those warships and ensure that they weren’t destroyed. Drones were crewless but the big controlling jumpships were not. Heavily armed and armored as they were, they could and would go down under enough pressure and these two didn’t have the luxury of pulling back to survive, for they were nearly backed up to the jumppoint itself and falling back there would put them in danger of collision while running out to clear space through one of the remaining gaps in the shroud of ships around them would leave the jumppoint exposed for the lizards to intentionally do just that.

  Jack drove the Middle Claw directly into the swarm of ships surrounding and pounding on the two warships while their drones held the backline to keep the lizards from slipping past, taking a moment to transmit an incoming audio clip that every fleet controller on those ships would hear, using a familiar movie quote from the X-men character Wolverine whom his Clan was named after to let them know that help was on the way and who it was coming to their aid.

  A few seconds later his command ship rammed the lines of lizard cruisers, plowing into them with altered shields to accommodate such a task as he ordered the two warships closer together and put the Middle Claw directly over top of both of them, giving them some blocking mass and using his far superior weaponry to chew apart the lizard swarm around them as some of the drones now coming off the warships following him up arrived to bolster the lines. Jack pulled some of them forward and positioned them around the two heavily damaged warships to aid in the covering fire.

  He held position there for the few minutes necessary to cut through the bulk of that lizard swarm tendril and preserve the pair of warships until enough of his own task force had gotten in to the system to make them obsolete. Jack ordered them back to the small holding area where the other badly damaged and noncombat ships were clustered, then took his growing task force out of the battle entirely, save for the few holes that still needed plugging, and began pooling his ships outside the brawl but in a position where he could look down on it with the backdrop of the two stars making for an eerily silent, yet epic cinematic.

  Needing to wait for enough ships to arrive, he didn’t like sitting out here and just watching but he trusted Paul enough to not argue with the battle plan as more and more of his warships caught up and redirected out to him before they even released their drones. There was so much debris in the area now that both sides were having a hard time navigating around it
and finding each other to shoot, with the lizards more than happy to simply push that debris into the jumppoint using their own cruisers to nudge it forward or to make sacrificial microjumps at extreme short range to plow it forward in shotgun style.

  As soon as the rest of Jack’s task force arrived they could leave the debris field behind and start fighting this invasion the way they wanted, but until then they had to hold this position and protect the incoming ships.

  But then something happened that changed their plans and Jack immediately jumped part of his fleet away from the battle, racing out far from the stars to a group of lizard ships that had just made their own microjump further out. The first few ships were being followed by a new swarm that was so far away from the battle it made no sense at all…except that they were continuing to drift on their momentum and brake against multiple gravity wells in order to get to a null point where no planet, moon, or even asteroid existed.

  They were trying to get to the jumpline far out from the jumppoint and mine it with the hulls of their ships.

  Jack immediately transmitted a signal back along the jumpline to the incoming ships telling them to alter their arrival path. They didn’t have much wiggle room off the jumpline, but with two stars to push off of they had more options than normal. The message indicated which direction from the line he wanted them to veer, with them having to make a second hard maneuver at the end of their jump to hit the designated jumppoint else they’d fly into the waiting lizard fleet around the perimeter.

  Normally they could have told them to brake harder and come out further away from the star, but the entire convoy had had to pass through a lizard occupied system to get here, though they’d timed it so that the rotation of the planet would give them a few hours head start before the lizard interstellar transmitters could come into alignment and send a warning ahead.

  To make better time the entire convoy was coming in at almost maximum sustainable speed, which was part of the reason why they were exiting so close to the star, in addition to the strategic value of that position. That meant they literally couldn’t brake much harder and were locked into this jumppoint. Had the lizards not surrounded the jumppoint he could have had them go off it and dip closer to the star in a curving brake line, but that wasn’t an option. A little wiggle was all they could manage right now, and with that message sent he knew he had to get to those lizard ships before they could align themselves in the precise spot to die and take the incoming ships with them…which would also spread ship-sized debris into the jumppoint and damage/destroy even more of the Star Force ships already fighting there.

  Had there been a gravity well near that position the lizards would have beat them there, but since there wasn’t and it was just a null point in space, ships coming in from a lateral angle had to use the weaker side gravity to decelerate against. Star Force engines were still superior to the lizards, but Jack also had the advantage of coming out almost in a direct line from the stars, meaning he could use their gravity to get near to that position far faster than the flankers coming from elsewhere in the system.

  He could also use that gravity to brake against while the lizards had to essentially coast in, and he did so without putting his own ships on the exact jumpline, but coming far closer to it than he would normally have liked. He had to get between the lizards and the line and the numbers were coming out in his favor, but beating the lizard ships there and stopping them were two entirely different things, for they were fanning out and obviously going to attempt to sprint past them and get at least some ships in the way…and daring the Star Force vessels to follow them into the oncoming traffic.

  “Like hell you are,” he said to himself in the command nexus as he tagged individual targets for his drones to go after…but not to destroy. He had all of them that were capable of it reconfigure their shields into dampening mode and had them fan them out like umbrellas, including the Middle Claw, and go after the spreading ships in a blockade formation, intending to stop their momentum and hold them in place.

  Some of his drones that were capable of it he sent on ahead to piggyback on the lizard cruisers and wrap an IDF field around them, essentially neutralizing their engine power and allowing them to be towed away even as they fired nonstop into the belly of the drones, with their shields taking the hits as they yanked them away from the jumpline and sent them on slow microjumps in other directions before releasing them and coming back to pick up more.

  There were too many to do that with in every case, but for the ones that did manage to slip by Jack had his hunters go in and snag them and send them careening away while his command ship and others slowed or stopped hundreds more like they were pushing their way through an invisible wall of glue…but so long as their engines were active they were making headway, and once they realized this the lizards upped their engine power and tried to punch through via force alone.

  Meanwhile Jack had a few ships flying around killing the stuck ones desperately hoping to reduce the strain on the dampening shields. Fortunately most of the lizard ships were too consumed with trying to run that they didn’t bother firing on the more distant targets, for like his command ship they had no convention shields, having put everything into the dampeners and leaving their hulls exposed in order to buy time and protect the incoming convoys.

  That’s what had to be done, and Jack made sure to use every trick he knew of to hold the lizards in place long enough for their weapon systems to snipe them down, with his command ship killing many at range with its Keema batteries where the Dre’mo’don wouldn’t reach. It was dicey for a long stretch of time, but eventually Jack got the situation under control as the number of enemy cruisers dipped down into manageable numbers with no more seen to be incoming.

  He destroyed them and made sure their debris wasn’t going to float into the jumpline before taking most of his ships back to the main battle, leaving a few behind just in case the lizards tried this again, but for the moment sensors were clear and his ever growing task force back in the main fight needed his assistance and guidance, with his command ship crew and himself picking up priority control over them as they came back into the thick of it and the three trailblazers worked their way through the swarms, gutting them and protecting their own at the same time.

  5

  As soon as the last ship arrived Paul had the fleet retreat away from the jumppoint, breaking up into small groups and scattering across the system. The lizards did not follow, instead choosing to hold on to stellar orbit for the time being as they picked their way out of the debris field they’d been fighting within. Paul didn’t wait, however, and immediately had the fleet begin attacking the edges of their formation and any other exposed ships across the system.

  They did not hit the battlestations, or the ring shipyard, or any other facilities. Their targets were simply the cruisers, and now came the tricky part where skill and navigation were more important than sheer firepower. A lot of lizard cruisers had been destroyed already, but it was a small percentage of what was in the system and unless Paul wanted to destroy his own fleet taking them down he was going to have to go about this in a roundabout fashion.

  To that end he personally led several raids, jumping a handful of drones in to snipe down a cruiser or two then pulling back before their shields could be breached. With the Dre’mo’dons it didn’t take much time to kill a cruiser, so all they had to do was get in and out very fast and they would have some clean kills.

  But it wasn’t just Paul doing it, for his entire fleet was doing the same and making hundreds of raids simultaneously at different locations and picking away at the enemy fleet in annoying fashion. The lizards did what they had to, bunching up even further to try and mass firepower on the ships when they did jump in and even attempting to ram them, but with dampening shields successfully deployed at the right times those could be blocked and the attacking ships preserved.

  Not all were, for there were some slipups and times when the lizards got lucky. Some drones escap
ed damaged while a handful were caught and destroyed over the coming weeks but the kill counts were decidedly one sided. It was going to take a very long time to chew through the enemy fleet like this, but it would take even long to build new ships if Paul wasted them here. This one system wasn’t his target, for there were others to hit after this and he needed to preserve as much of his fleet as possible, especially for when they got to the shipyard, for it was going to take a whole lot of firepower to destroy that much mass.

  But first things first, they had to remove the cruiser swarms and stop the incoming convoys, the latter of which were being received and escorted by the former as they arrived and exited the system. Rather than go after them and take the obvious bait, Paul gave the fleet orders to ignore them and keep hitting the lizard swarms where they were weak and slowly diminishing their numbers.

  “My men are nearly ready,” Braskon said, with the Calavari crossing both sets of arms over the chest of his Clan Rwby uniform. “Another couple months and we should have a full 6,000 tested out.”

  Rio nodded as the pair looked out over the open air training fields on the planet of Heshor, capitol of Clan Rwby and located on the outer edge of Alpha Region. It had once been a lizard occupied world laid empty after their removal, but Rio’s Clan had won sole possession of the world in a previous trial and had decided to move most of their assets here to develop it, though there were another two planets in the system that did not belong to them. One was a mainline Star Force colony and the other was Scionate.