Star Force: Retribution (SF60) Page 4

  The planet that he was current chewing up was yet another lizard expansion into the neutral zone around the ADZ, this one just above the Protovic region on the border between Beta and Zeta Regions. No matter how many Star Force killed, the lizards kept trying to sneak others in, meaning that Paul and others had to keep mowing the grass or face an overgrowth, with the lizards hoping they’d eventually grow tired or lax and allow them to creep up on the fortified region.

  But that wasn’t going to happen so long as the trailblazers were in command. The lizards were used to rolling over rookies, and they were anything but. These missions were tedious, and Paul had several other systems he had to raze/check on, but it was necessary work, bloody as it was. This one though had to be eradicated completely, for it was too close to the ADZ to leave anything standing. That was why Paul was willing to waste the Ka’sevron rounds, because he needed as many dead lizards as buildings before he sent his ground troops down to clean up, literally.

  Not only would they be hunting down the surviving lizards they would also be removing their infrastructure…and that was always easier if it was rubble rather than just sliced up segments. Paul needed to erase this colony from the neutral zone entirely and not leave anything remaining for the lizards to return to. Had this planet been deeper into lizard territory he’d have been content just to wreck it and force them to rebuild, but unfortunately this one had to become a blood bath…which he never liked.

  The demolition from orbit continued until the last city was shieldless and devoid of anything looking like a standing structure, after which Paul took a skeet down from the Ma’kri and joined his ground troops as they scoured the rubble fields looking for lizards…and finding many still alive, most of whom were moving around looking for and setting up ambush locations. Paul flew over them, close enough to scan with his Ikrid and spot potential traps, but eventually when the surface survivors were taken care of he had to come down to ground and help the infantry make their way underground.

  Some of the subsurface infrastructure had been pulverized by the Ka’sevron cannons, but a lot was too deep for them to hit, meaning some nasty fighting was still underway for Paul wasn’t going to turn the machines loose on the rubble with living people still in it…even if they were enemies trying to kill them at every turn. He also wasn’t going to try to take any prisoners this go around, knowing the futility of it, but he could at least give the lizards a fighting death and saw to killing many of them himself as he took point to ferret them out with his Ikrid.

  Every last one fought viciously to the death, like always, but in the end it didn’t matter. Star Force lost no personnel and only a few aircraft/mechs in the ground combat, most of which was due to hidden explosives. Weeks later, when Paul was sure the cities were clear, he had the ‘chewies’ brought down from orbit and turned them loose on the rubble. The anti-grav platforms grasped pieces with tentacle-like arms, scoops, nets, and several other contraptions, all of which were designed to move it up and into compartments on the exterior that would funnel the junk to interior factories that would mash it up into the equivalent of dust.

  That dust was then dumped back onto the ground, either directly under the chewie or off to another location via a boom, eventually leaving a dune field where the cities had been, or in the case of the subterranean structures a massive pit filled with the sharp sand. In other situations Star Force would have recycled that debris, but out here on a planet they didn’t intend to retain possession of, this was as far as they were willing to go.

  With the dunes marking the planet like scars Paul eventually closed up shop and jumped to the next system on his list, but not before swinging back into the ADZ to hook up with the grid and get caught up with events, for these purging missions took a considerable amount of time. With Protovic territory being the closest his Ma’kri swung by while the rest of his fleet traveled to a standby point near the next target, which he would be at with only a few days delay thanks to the superior gravity drives that the newer Ma’kri possessed.

  But when Paul arrived and connected his ship to the relay grid he didn’t jump back out immediately, for there was a flag on a message that came from Roger. Knowing that he might need to respond to it he kept the Ma’kri sitting in place rather than swinging back out to an exiting jumpline as he read the message regarding the Nexus raid on a lizard core world.

  Roger’s sentiments were dark and mirrored his own, with Paul physically pounding the arm of his command chair as he read them…drawing the attention of the ship captain and the rest of the bridge crew.

  Paul ignored them and read on. According to the reports the ring shipyard had successfully been destroyed, which was a huge victory and would reduce lizard ship building production by a significant fraction, but the H’kar had lost 73% of their fleet and the Gfatt had lost 88% in the assault…and those weren’t drone warships. They had crews on all of them, and their lives had just been sacrificed in order to achieve a strategic victory. It wasn’t a last ditch effort to hurt the enemy or to save a planet. This was a planned assault, undertaken by choice, and they’d just traded away those people’s lives in order to knock out the lizard shipyard.

  From the way the H’kar report read, which they’d translated and sent to Star Force as a FYI, they saw this as a huge victory and payback for all the defeats they’d suffered in the past, and the Nexus saw it as a key strategic victory. Neither faction saw it as anything but positive, though there was a subnote that indicated that hitting another ring in the near future wasn’t an option for lack of available ships.

  Roger obviously had a problem with that, as did Paul and Star Force in general, but the Nexus was completely oblivious to the horror they’d just committed, trading away people’s lives as they had. Each one of those deaths was a defeat, a loss, but like the lizards they just saw those crews as replaceable assets rather than prizes to be safeguarded. They’d just handed them to the enemy in what arguably was the biggest tower dive Paul had ever read about. Even the V’kit’no’sat were never this sloppy, despite the drastic lengths they sometimes went to achieve objectives.

  The Nexus had sent those troops in without any intention of them surviving. They simply wanted the shipyard dead and knew their superior technology would allow the ships to survive long enough to accomplish their objective if they went full bore against it and didn’t get distracted with anything so trivial as defending themselves.

  Paul pounded the armrest of his chair again, this time standing up and walking around to the back of it and gripping the top of the cushion with both hands in a stranglehold.

  “What’s wrong?” the Captain asked, spinning around in his own chair to face him.

  “The Nexus has taken out a lizard ring in one of their core worlds.”

  The Captain’s eyes widened in surprise, then just as quickly narrowed again in suspicion. “What’s the bad news?”

  “They sacrificed almost all of a combined H’kar and Gfatt fleet in order to do it…including several of the commanders we’ve been training to avoid that kind of stupidity!” Paul finished with a half yell.

  The Captain was silent for a moment, as was the bridge crew, and he let the Archon have a moment before he spoke again, seeing that he was clearly fuming. “How many?”

  “18 million H’kar, and around 12 million Gfatt,” Paul said, squeezing his eyes shut at the horrific numbers. Those were all soldiers who had trained long and hard to develop their skills, serving their races for years upon years…and now they were gone, not because the enemy had surprised them or overwhelmed them, but because their leaders had decided to trade their lives away in exchange for a damn shipyard.

  “No matter how powerful the Nexus is, they can’t afford to lose that many ships.”

  “No they can’t,” Paul agreed, “but it’s their typical bluff. Hit the enemy hard and in place that really hurts them and hope they back down or submit. We know that won’t happen with the lizards. The H’kar should know that won’t happen with the
lizards, they’ve been fighting them longer than we have.”

  “How vulnerable do you think this makes the H’kar?”

  Paul shook his head. “I don’t know. If they expected to lose the fleet then they should have more than enough to hold their territory without them, but it’s going to seriously inhibit their ability to push back on the creep advance. This was stupid no matter how you slice it, but all they can see is the big prize they bagged.”

  Another moment of silence followed before the Captain spoke.

  “Do you need to go somewhere else?”

  Paul sighed. “I want to beat the brains out of the H’kar, but that’s already being handled by others. No, go ahead and get us moving. We’ve got a mission list to complete.”

  “Do you have all the data you need?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to go through it more closely before I send any messages, so there’s no need to wait. I’ll be in the sanctum hitting something,” Paul said, spinning around and walking off the bridge.

  “Get us to the Jaxvot jumppoint,” the Captain told the helmsman after he’d left. “And be glad you were born Human and not H’kar.”

  “Very glad,” the helmsman muttered, plotting the course and goosing the gravity drives enough to get them moving around stellar orbit.

  Taryn stood in the V’kit’no’sat pyramid watching as the medtech took several of her Clan Croft adepts through the ‘genetic carwash’ and unlocked their 7 basic psionics from the ‘rust’ that had rendered them dormant from so many generations of illicit Zen’zat breeding. Normally Taryn wouldn’t have brought them here herself, but today was a special case.

  As a brand new acolyte stepped out of the chamber Ginsi stepped in, taking his place with Taryn throwing her a wink when their eyelines crossed. It had only been some 14 years ago when the trainee had graduated from basic training and the trailblazer had luckily been able to bring her into her Clan. Her scores had been impressive but not groundbreaking going through basic and she’d been highly sought after, but even Taryn had no idea what a monster she’d become after being ‘released’ from the group training and allowed to fly free as all adepts did, more or less.

  Previously Morgan had held the record of the quickest elevation to acolyte, both in age and in years training. She’d been 74 at the time and had spent 49 years after graduating from basic training, from which Archons emerged at a variety of ages. That record had been eclipsed a few decades ago by an Archon named Mathias-489220 who’d squeaked in at 48 years training and an age of 110, with him being one of the ‘slower starters’ who didn’t pass Archon testing during the last phases of the maturia training but had volunteered to give it another go years later after some further development (often along with a host of other tests) and found that he’d improved to the point of trainee candidacy.

  Some of his physical skills were head of his classmates, which some had argued gave him a head start, but Taryn had looked up his scores at the time and while they were strong they weren’t record setting. She and the others, Morgan not included, had pretty much agreed it was time that someone had reached acolyte faster than the slow troll that most Archons progressed through simply because the process had been so polished since Taryn and the others had literally been making it up as they went along the first time.

  The Archon trials were a huge boost, as were the various training methods and equipment that had been established, not to mention the peerdom available within the Clans that gave you stronger trainer partners to work with…all of which the trailblazers never had. That said, even the ‘inferior’ Archons should have been reaching acolyte faster than they had been, and when one finally beat Morgan’s training years mark it had generally been accepted as something that had been very long overdue.

  But Ginsi was totally different. She’d accomplished in 14 years what had taken Morgan 48, and she was only 41 years old. Her rapid rise had caught the trailblazers’ attention, and even Davis was keeping a close watch on her, prompting the discussion as to how fast Taryn and her classmates would have leveled up if they’d been born into this generation and had all the advantages afforded to trainees and adepts today.

  Even when they had that discussion there was a lot of doubt as to if they could have achieved what Ginsi had, so as Taryn watched her get her psionics the trailblazer wondered what was laying in store for her in the future…and knowing that nothing was automatic. Ginsi had been busting her butt in training ever since graduation, but 14 years was a far cry from 600, and there were some side bets going as to how long she could keep this up. Many thought she’d plateau eventually, as many other Archons had, but so far Taryn didn’t see it happening, though with the inclusion of psionics into the level requirements there was no knowing how she’d progress.

  On one level Taryn did resent her a bit, though that was little more than competitive envy. She could snap her like a twig if she needed to, but the look in Morgan’s eye whenever her name was mentioned was more than worth it, for her fellow trailblazer didn’t like losing records, of any kind, and had gradually worked her way back up to top Archon status after being at a decided disadvantage to those who’d camped out in the advanced training group while she was off on field missions.

  But this was different, for she not only lost the record but had it literally blown off the map. The trailblazers weren’t quite sure what to make of her, and despite that fact that she was so young and weak compared to them Taryn and the others looked at Ginsi like a little sister, wondering just how long this hot streak would last and if she was truly in their league…or perhaps even better.

  Taryn didn’t know, for a big part of being a trailblazer was figuring things out for yourself or with your peers and Ginsi was having everything fed to her. That’s what the trailblazers had worked to build, so weaker Archons could gain greater strength by following their example and using training programs and drills refined to perfection before they were even born. It was a very good thing, but there was a higher level for those who managed to do it on their own, which left Ginsi in ambiguity as to what her caliber was as far as Taryn and the others were concerned.

  So they were in wait and see mode, with Taryn keeping a very close eye on her little sister and fellow Clansmen heading forward.

  5

  December 28, 2679

  Pooovalla System (H’kar territory)

  Ratchniva

  Gavra walked down one of the long, curvy corridors that typically made up H’kar infrastructure, coming to a dead end and stepping on the elevation pad that lowered him down to the next level. The four-legged armored ‘crab’ walked on, finding another pad nearby and moving down a second level, then another 8 until he came to a guard post with a pair of fellow H’kar soldiers with weapons strapped to two of their six arms.

  He was known to them, so with a nod of recognition he passed through the checkpoint and into one of the off limits areas of the command complex where only a few high ranking H’kar were allowed to enter. There he walked through a few more corridors, traveling from memory rather than the navigational markings on the ceiling, until he came to the main receiving chamber where a small assembly was ongoing.

  The Royal halted their conversation the moment he saw Gavra, clicking a welcoming tone on his mandibles and getting the crowd to part ways to allow the senior military commander access to the central slot in the approach bank. The H’kar formerly standing there backed away, leaving two other niches in the narrow, curved table occupied by non-military personnel but otherwise high ranking officials with the H’kar. They faced the Royal, situated inside the shallow arc of the approach bank and surrounded by control boards and display screens/holos.

  Gavra ignored them all, along with the tidbits of conversation he had heard upon entry. Without a word he began pressing buttons and accessing a secure file that even the Royal didn’t have the access codes for, bringing up a map amendment that changed the regional holo that was centered on Pooovalla and showed the scattering of H’kar systems butting up
against the Li’vorkrachnika border.

  When the update was applied, several new dots interspaced between the H’kar systems changed color, indicating new acquisitions by their enemy. None of the systems were previously H’kar owned, but it was clear that they were failing in their Nexus mandate to control the local region.

  “The situation has worsened far more than we anticipated,” Gavra said sternly, his respect for the Royal present in his tone but it not masking his anger and frustration. “We wrongly assumed the Li’vorkrachnika would strike back at one of our worlds in retaliation for the strike on their core worlds. To be truthful we hoped they would, for such an attack would be to our advantage by consolidating a large percentage of their fleet into a single location for us to destroy in our greatest place of strength.”

  “The Li’vorkrachnika have not been so stupid. They continue to strike us where we are weak, but they are retaliating. The number of expansions we’ve previously noted have increased by 23% since the combined strike with the Gfatt, but the latest survey numbers indicate a much larger increase…in the realm of 340%. They are devoting far more resources to this region, all without any large fleet action. The loss of the majority of our strike fleet had diminished our ability to hunt down and eliminate these expansions, but do not mistake that as being the primary cause of this onslaught. The enemy has increased its attention here, and we are unable to stop them.”

  The Royal remained passive, then held up one of its pointy, fingerless arms. “Have we lost an engagement?”