Star Force: Relocation (SF44) Read online

  Kamalat only had a split second’s warning as he rotated both rifles around to the left enroute to pulling back and heading to assist where the trouble was when his holographic tracking markers picked up the Cajdital flankers’ body head, flashing quick targets across the tiny displays as he turned.

  “On the left!” he yelled, pointing the barrels back to where he’d picked up the signatures and opening fire as quickly as his thick fingers could pump the triggers, eviscerating the greenery in between him and his targets.

  In response a much larger storm of green plasma orbs came back, blasting into tree trunks and branches, setting them on fire or simply blowing them apart, with what plasma didn’t hit coming through hitting the Calavari line and Kamalat in the head. Fortunately his shield covered his face and held up to the hit, but he flinched so bad on impact that he tipped over backwards and fell to the ground with several more plasma orbs passing through the space where his body had just been.

  Cajdital infantry then came into sight, and Kamalat aimed at them from the ground with no time to get up, simultaneously resetting his power levels to a low medium so that he could be sure to take them down with one hit each, then he fired off thicker lances at two of them simultaneously, using the advantage of four arms and superior rifle tech to cut down those enemies closest to him.

  The thin chest armor the Cajdital wore didn’t fully stop the Calavari plasma, leaving each shot with enough plasma to cut deep into their flesh. As he’d come to expect after weeks of ground combat, the two dropped to the ground wounded or probably dead, leaving four more coming out of the greenery behind them. The Cajdital had let their other infantry get mowed down crossing the creek as a diversion, buying time for this group and probably one on the other side to flank them, and now they were about to get the payoff.

  The Calavari next to Kamalat took several hits, with at least one of them penetrating his shields. He heard his scream as the green plasma burned into his leg, but he didn’t dare look back as he fired more and more shots off against the enemy infantry while he struggled to get back up on at least a knee. He didn’t want to get shot dead sitting on his ass.

  Kamalat shot another one dead before two more plasma orbs hit his chest shields, weakening them to the breaching point, then as more Cajdital infantry worked their way out of the brush he saw a tiny blur of fur jump up from the ground and cling to one of their heads, whereupon the Urik’kadel fired a tiny wristbound pistol into the Cajdital’s skull when the short barrel made physical contact.

  The Cajdital dropped to the ground, dead before it landed, with the little rabbit-like alien jumping off and heading for another as several dozen of them came out of the forest and ambushed the flankers.

  “Move Calavari!” one of them yelled at Kamalat as he slowly got himself back up on his feet. “More are on their way. Follow us.”

  Kamalat glanced down the line, seeing that most of his fellow soldiers were dead, with two firing at something off to the right as they retreated towards him. Taking their cue he turned and backpedaled in the direction of the Urik’kadel, shooting at Cajdital targets out of sight with his rifle’s sensors while glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he didn’t trip over anything, get ambushed, or lose sight of their diminutive allies…who were quickly outpacing him as they jumped a few more enemy infantry that were popping through from the creek bed.

  Eventually he just turned and ran, hoping the faster Cajdital wouldn’t catch him, and followed the Urik’kadel through the woods on a nonlinear path…with Kamalat not having a clue where he was by the time they finally stopped in a crater-like hollow. The little aliens crept up to the top edges to stand watch while Kamalat and a few other Calavari took cover in the center, with their heads just below the height of the surrounding ridges.

  “Where are we?” one of the other Calavari asked.

  “Northeast of the mining site,” one of the Urik’kadel said, running up between the huge aliens. “We can follow trail back to base once we make sure Cajdital are not coming.”

  “What trail?” Kamalat asked. The base they’d been operating out of had been built underground in a clearing that had four roads leading out of it, with the intent being to deny the Nestafar the use of their walkers in assaulting it and making them come down inside with infantry and protomechs, while the Calavari’s own tanks would fit through the entrances, giving them the vehicular advantage for once. But as far as he knew, other than the roads, there were no trails leading to the base.

  “Scent trail we leave. It’s how we know to get here.”

  “Thank you,” one of the five Calavari said, kicking a stone half buried in the dirt and dislodging it enough to pop it up two meters into the air. “How did they beat us this time?”

  “I don’t know,” Kamalat said, equally angry. The ambush should have worked. How the Cajdital had gotten across the creek and flanked them without being seen didn’t make any sense.

  “Enemy transports,” the Urik’kadel said, pointing at the sky. “They fly behind and drop troops.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Mining base, far side. We saw from trees.”

  “They must have gone pretty far out of their way to get around us,” Kamalat said in disgust. “Why didn’t you signal us with comms?”

  “They no work near base.”

  The Calavari beside Kamalat checked his, finding it marginally operational.

  “Damn it. They’ve got a jamming field set up. That means they were waiting for us to strike.”

  “Why?” Kamalat asked.

  “Because we’ve been hitting too many of their precious convoys, that’s why,” he said, stomping on the ground so hard the little Urik’kadel visibly bounced. “They need resources to feed their invasion of Varasiss and we’ve been disrupting their output, so they set a trap.”

  “By letting us set a trap for them?”

  “They’re devious bastards, I’ll give them that,” the Calavari said, looking down at the Urik’kadel. “Did anyone else make it out? Have your scouts seen anyone else?”

  The little rabbit-like creature twitched and looked to the perimeter around the hollow, conversing in its native language for a few seconds before staring back up at the high Calavari head above it.

  “No one. Just you here.”

  Kamalat took a knee, angry and depressed. “That was a fourth of our troops.”

  “So long as one of us remains we’re gonna make these bastards pay, I promise you,” the elder Calavari said, dragging Kamalat to his feet by his left upper elbow. “We need to get moving…if it’s clear?” he asked, glancing down.

  “No pursuit. Trail is open,” the Urik’kadel said, moving off to the edge. “Calavari follow.”

  “Go ahead,” he said, bumping Kamalat as he passed. The Calavari naval officer fell into step behind the mechanic, with the other three doing likewise as they walked up and out of the hollow and off through the forest on a random path following their little guides, alert for more Cajdital ambushes.

  None would arise by the time they got back to base, whereupon a subsurface structure lifted up to expose an entrance cupola towards the edge of the grassy clearing, but not so near as to give the enemy cover in the tree line. There were a mass of weapons turrets currently hidden below ground that could pop up and give covering fire if needed, thus the entrances had to have a clear radius around them, though Kamalat and the others certainly didn’t feel like running across the open any more than the Urik’kadel did.

  The little ones went first, racing across the grass with their bodies being mostly obscured by it, and attaining speeds the Calavari couldn’t match. They got to the entrance and hopped down into the stairwell long before Kamalat and the others arrived. When the five of them had entered, barely two steps inside, the whole assembly began to lower down, closing off the entrance and leaving only a thick chunk of armor on top surrounded by dirt for the enemy to shoot at if they so chose.

  The base had been attacked twice
already. Once by air and once by ground, but both times the Calavari defenses held and the Cajdital seemed unwilling to lose another cruiser, with the remains of the dead one sitting upended in the forest several kilometers off where it eventually fell. The base defense turrets had been designed to shoot and kill Nestafar walkers, meaning they had to be very potent weapons, which proved sufficient to penetrate the shields and armor on a Cajdital cruiser in short order, though they had lost three turrets in the process.

  That victory had kept the base in Alliance hands, with them gathering every survivor they could find to them…which was extremely few, given the lack of population on the moon. Kamalat and his crew had been the biggest fine, with most of the workers in the nearby facilities having been evacuated to the base before the first Cajdital arrived.

  The Calavari had then been divided into 5 teams, each of which had enough troops to conduct round the clock operations, with the base commander insisting on such. He and the others knew there would be no escape for them, for the moon’s orbit was fully under Cajdital control. The Alliance still held Varasiss orbit, more or less, and the base was in constant contact with them, but they weren’t in a position to assist any of the moons, for the Cajdital had taken over them all and begun harvesting their on-hand resources immediately to set up bases.

  Those bases had started their own mining efforts recently, with at least some of the produce being shipped off the moon and sent down to Varasiss…meaning that the moons were the industrial base that the Cajdital were going to use to feed their invasion, even if the Calavari troops on the capitol managed to contain the enemy’s footholds and not allow them to expand to the point where they could harvest their own resources, either from salvage or directly from the planet’s crust.

  The Alliance had determined this and informed Kamalat’s base that they needed to do as much as they could to disrupt the Cajdital’s efforts there, and to their credit the Hycre had been assaulting the moon’s orbit and on occasion strafing surface targets, but they’d been unable to drive the Cajdital off, leaving it to Kamalat’s ragtag band of conscripts to fight a guerilla war against their enemy’s resource gathering operations, most of whom were not infantry trained.

  The Urik’kadel had come to the moon the same way Kamalat had, having been onboard a carrier when it crashed on the planetoid. The pilots it’d been servicing had mostly been killed in the battle, but a few had made it to ground in their miniature Valeries, ironically giving the base more Alliance pilots than Calavari, which was a mark of shame to the piloting specialists, but at this point any bit of military hardware and personnel was of extreme value, and they were grateful for the tiny pilots…especially given their high skill level.

  The carrier they’d been based on was Calavari, and a few of its crew also survived the crash, having been brought back to the base after the Cajdital strafed the survivors. Fortunately that hadn’t happened to Kamalat’s cruiser, but then again the carrier was a greater threat, and even crumpled on the surface it still could have had useable aircraft…which it had.

  The Urik’kadel had been on the Calavari carrier because their own starships were pathetically primitive, and even though it had been the Kvash that had brought them into the Alliance, they and the Calavari had quickly become close friends, given the innate piloting skill that both races seemed to possess. For that reason the Urik’kadel had offered to help defend the Calavari capitol, though in truth they didn’t belong here, for some of their own worlds were being overrun by the Cajdital, and those conflicts were little more than organized slaughters.

  Kamalat knew this because he was naval, and the Urik’kadel lived on naval carriers. Perhaps they were better off here than getting destroyed on their own worlds, but it seemed that it wasn’t going to matter anyway. Here or there they were going to die at Cajdital hands, and if Varasiss did fall, then the Calavari empire was doomed as well. Things already looked bleak, but if they could hold the capitol then some hope remained…and if they were going to do that, Kamalat and the others on the moon needed to give their troops fighting over there as much assistance as possible, meaning hampering the Cajdital here in whatever way they could.

  To that end, as soon as Kamalat arrived at the base he was put back into the field on another mission, and would continue to do so round the clock with adequate breaks for sleep and food, but little else. Time was the object of the game here, for they knew they couldn’t beat the Cajdital. They were too many and had naval air support, which aside from over their base they couldn’t hope to touch.

  No, their objective was to slow the Cajdital down and steal from them as many resources as they could, whether by destruction or relocation. Every pallet of ingots they took away from them here was one that wouldn’t be delivered down to Varasiss, so even though their own fate seemed sealed, all of the Calavari worked diligently to do what they could for their brothers down on the planet below.

  5

  February 23, 2471

  Pagalis System

  Varasiss

  The Hycre cruiser, recently arrived insystem, glided across the Calavari landscape of tulip-shaped buildings capped off by an invisible defense shield enroute to the Cajdital encampment some 132 kilometers away. A ring of destruction surrounded it, marking the location of intense naval bombardment from the grounded enemy cruisers that now sat underneath their own defense shield, shooting at any Calavari ground troops stupid enough to assault them…and many had tried before abandoning the effort short of a new idea arising.

  Likewise the Cajdital stayed bunkered underneath their own defenses, burrowing and building as the Calavari likewise dug tunnels toward them, creating an underground war zone where the tunnels met up that favored the Calavari up until the Cajdital began producing mauler variants. Their forearm blades and thicker build allowed them to get up close and go hand to hand with the larger aliens, cutting through their energy shields as if they weren’t even there and causing a considerable amount of wounds where their plasma wouldn’t penetrate.

  The Calavari countered this with more conventional body armor, which the Cajdital then countered with det packs in the low numbered battlefield that kept the high population of the planet out of the fight and reduced the conflict down to numbers the Cajdital could handle. While they would gladly take any advances the tunneling could provide, for the enemy it was yet another delaying tactic as they brought down more transports through the aerial blockade and supplemented the troops they were now growing on the surface with additional materials, foodstuffs, and armaments.

  The Hycre couldn’t get through their cruiser stacks, with more than 100 in each of the now 7 foothold locations, all of which were close enough to one another that they could disrupt the Alliance’s aircraft, making them zigzag their way through the area to avoid the growing number of wisps on patrol that were no longer allowing the Valeries to fly free around the defense shield, not that they were going to penetrate it with aircraft weapons anyway.

  The bases were close enough that the wisps could easily come to the aid of the others after a short delay, with the Calavari and Urik’kadel working to thin those numbers, but the Cajdital kept producing and importing more to replace their losses, enough to create a lingering standoff that favored the enemy.

  The Hycre cruiser was about to break that standoff, flying through atmosphere towards a rendezvous spot with six destroyers already on station outside the effective plasma range of the Cajdital cruisers…which was significantly reduced in atmosphere compared to the vacuum of space. The Hycre cruiser, however, was a recent model, fresh out of the shipyard and yet to see any combat. It appeared to have the same hull specifications as the others of its class…save for one tiny spot on the front that held a different, large weapon battery.

  The destroyers spread out when it arrived and moved into holding hovers more than a kilometer out from it, ready to intercept the hornets’ nest they were about to poke. The warships were 78 kilometers away from the closest Cajdital base and well outside
of weapons range of the plasma that the enemy relied upon.

  They were also outside of Hycre plasma range, but thanks to the gift from their Star Force allies, this cruiser had a weapon that could far exceed that range.

  With its nose pointed towards the base, the Hycre cruiser spat out a perfectly straight white cleansing beam that passed underneath the elevated shield arc and slammed straight into the tower producing it. That tower also had a secondary shield wrapped around it, but the cleansing beam sucked power out of it quickly, then shut off. The capacitor inside the cruiser quickly refilled, then the Hycre warship fired again, hitting the weakened shields and punching through into the armored exterior.

  By the time it fired a third shot the cruisers underneath the shield were already beginning to lift off, with the Hycre beam drifting sideways and slicing through the tower. Several dozen meters later, but still well shy from reaching the exterior, something vital within the tower was hit and the protective cap over the base disappeared in the blink of an eye just before the beam abated.

  The next shot went for one of the cruisers charging out of the base towards the Hycre ship, puncturing its shields in short order, but not causing enough damage to destroy it with a single shot. The recharge rate on the weapon was significant enough that the single weapon wasn’t going to do much against the dozens of cruisers heading their way, with even more coming out from the other bases as backup.

  But they weren’t sending all of them, for they correctly presumed that they needed to keep units in place to protect the infrastructure they’d been building. From several positions within the Calavari cities a mass of Valeries took to the air as more Hycre ships in orbit suddenly dropped down and headed for the now exposed base.