Star Force: Nexus (SF57) Read online

He needn’t had worried, for the warship ignored the incoming cruisers and made another microjump back up to high orbit and waited there, returning to its altitude perch and watching as Liam finished up his combat assignments one by one and eventually pulled his ships out of orbit, jumping to a rendezvous spot elsewhere in the system where he began to consolidate reports from the ships dispatched to the other two planets.

  They didn’t arrive until later, but their laggy telemetry did and Liam watched as they quickly and efficiently pounded several orbital and surface sites, using their drones’ rail guns on the latter and knocking out several lizard mining colonies that had been funneling resources over to the main planet. The enemy would rebuild, of course, but the damage would slow them down a bit and right now that’s all Star Force was trying to do.

  Some might say what they were doing was recklessly violent and wasteful, that without even trying to conquer the planet they were just wasting their time and resources, but Liam had long ago learned that the lizards thrived off of being left alone. They were builders, and in order to knock them out of their mojo you had to come in and wreck what they’d built randomly to keep them scared and cautious, otherwise they’d just creep right up on your doorstep and then start hammering your door from very short resupply lines.

  That was essentially the problem the Nexus had, for winning battles wasn’t the problem, it was holding territory. Not their own, which was more than secure, but the other systems in between that they didn’t care about or were inhabited by others. The lizards were devouring them and spreading, steadily growing stronger even without conquering a single Nexus system. They didn’t have a strong world to be targeted, and even ‘small’ ones like this, given enough time, would escalate to the point of being formidable strongholds.

  The trick was that one was not more important than another. Liam didn’t know about their homeworld, but every other planet they’d come across was built up in the same way using the same tech and strategies, so if you hit and annihilated one well established planet or system others would grow to replace it, often multiples ones for every one you took out…and the larger the lizard territory grew the more that math snowballed.

  Every ship they killed here reduced that snowball by a fraction, which was why Star Force and the Hycre were continually hitting them near the ADZ and elsewhere where they were weak, denying them more strong worlds by getting at them before they were built up. They couldn’t get to all of them, obviously, but the region directly around the ADZ was of high priority to keep ‘weeded’ while worlds like this a bit further out were prime targets when and where they had an opportunity.

  Even this attack was designed to go after the ships in orbit so they wouldn’t be available to reinforce other systems when they were hit. Taking out the reinforcements before you began the assault was another tactic that Liam, or more accurately Roger, had come up with long ago and worked well against the lizards so long as you had good intel data, most of which the Hycre were providing.

  Liam was glad the Gfatt had taken out that battle station, for it was one more chess piece the lizards didn’t have to work with, though this one was immobile and could only be used to defend this planet unlike the fleets surrounding it that could go anywhere. Those, after all was said and done, were reduced by 384 kills with an additional 392 damaged. A good tally for this mission, with him having only lost 3 drones in the process.

  54 more were damaged, but all of those were able to return to their jumpships and could be repaired later. He didn’t like losing the 3 and would review the battle records later to determine why they’d been lost, but overall they’d put yet another nick in the lizards’ empire. Liam wanted to do more than that and watched the surveillance intel from the monitoring probes they’d dropped off before leaving, but as predicted the lizards had restructured their fleets into larger groupings without leaving any targets of opportunity for him to hit with a second attack…at least not without losing a chunk of his own fleet.

  That wasn’t an option given how many more ships the lizards had than the ADZ. Each drone they had was worth multiple lizard cruisers, both in armor and armament, and as that fact continued to snowball with subsequent upgrades it was imperative that they not get into a trading war, for the enemy would always have more to throw at them given their production capability that stretched across thousands of worlds by now.

  No, Star Force had to engage and retreat, engage and retreat…preserving its own ships while taking out some of the lizards. That was the only way to fight them, which he hoped the Gfatt were now realizing.

  After everyone had reached the rendezvous point and Liam saw there were no more opportunities for easy strikes he took the time to contact the Gfatt and ask them why they had hit the station. They responded by stating that they saw an opportunity and decided to take it, which he thanked them for, but then he inquired why they weren’t fighting with them the entire time, to which they said they were merely here to observe.

  The two things didn’t jive and he wouldn’t get any more of an answer from them before they left the system and headed back to the ADZ, but after they returned to their staging base he pushed the issue with their commander and learned that similar battle stations in the H’kar region were never so exposed and that the Gfatt had been targeting them specifically. Biggest chess pieces in the game, hence they drew the first attention, so far as the Nexus thought.

  It seemed the lizards had been using that to their advantage and using the battle stations and other large ships as bait, getting them to drop the hammer on them and potentially losing them in the process, but doing decent damage to the attacking fleet by having flanking units nearby. With having to fight long and hard to take out similar stations the Gfatt were not going to miss the opportunity for a clean kill, despite that fact that the system in question was far from their borders and no threat to them.

  That gave Liam an inkling as to how the lizards were countering the Nexus, or rather surviving it and learning from the engagements. They had plenty of ships and resources, with the ability to grow additional personnel at will, to throw at an enemy that seemed unwilling to take the fight directly to them in a wide campaign. They’d hit a target and obliterate it, but the lizards could always rebuild elsewhere or even in the same location after they’d left. The Nexus wasn’t yet serious about fighting the lizards because they were fighting out of a defensive mindset.

  Star Force was as well, but only out of necessity. Liam and Paul had long talked about going after the lizards’ core worlds but they never had the fleet strength necessary to do it. They were fighting defensively to preserve the ADZ because they had to, but because they knew and wanted to eliminate the lizards on the whole they went about their defensive efforts much differently than the Nexus.

  Liam was wondering why, with the long experience the H’kar had of fighting the lizards, had the Nexus not wised up earlier. Kerrie’s notes had guessed at troop strengths and that they didn’t have a lot to throw around the H’kar front, superior as they were, which basically gifted the lizards a permanent presence there. One had to go all in when fighting them, gruesome as that might be, because so long as one of them lived they would continue fighting with no surrender and no mercy.

  Star Force had learned that the hard way after centuries of trying to make inroads against the lizard hive mind. To this day they still took some prisoners, but they always tried to kill themselves when it looked like there was no way for them to escape or harm their captors. Those taken were for specific reasons and often dumped off at another lizard world when Star Force tired of them, but in general when Star Force attacked it was to kill the enemy for there was no other way to deal with them when they were coming at you with the numbers they possessed.

  Mercy was a luxury of the dominant, and with the lizard empire slowly creeping its way around the perimeter of the ADZ it had become a ‘shoot and move on’ scenario, though the trailblazers still hadn’t given up the idea of one day breaking the genetic lock
that the lizards had on each other. Until they found a way to free them as they had the Bsidd, the lizards were a threat round the clock no matter how many of them there were or the circumstances, and had to be hunted down and destroyed in order to secure targets.

  The raids weren’t meant to secure territory, but diminish resources. Star Force wasn’t targeting their population but their ships and infrastructure. Without those their personnel numbers hardly mattered, so when Liam bombarded a planet he wasn’t interested in killing the people down there but their equipment…though with the lizards he wasn’t going to hold off because they were next to or inside the infrastructure. Other races he would, but with no other options with the lizards he wasn’t going to let them act as living shields to protect their assets.

  That was a hard choice for him and the others to come by, but at the end of the day it came down to a matter of offense and defense. If Star Force was attacking someone else they’d use more controlled tactics and not target population centers, troop ships, etc. They had a respect for life, even that of the enemy, and would only go all-in if one of their own worlds was under assault, with any enemy present there essentially declaring their ill will when they came into the system.

  Enemies sitting on their own worlds minding their business were completely different, and Star Force had dealt with the Skarrons, and the Hobbits especially, in a different manner. The Humans weren’t going to become destructive monsters and were smart enough to find ways to defeat the enemy without outright slaughtering them…but with the lizards there was catch.

  The creep factor. All the lizard colonies near the ADZ hadn’t originally been there. They were recent and growing fast with the pure intent on expanding further by defeating enemies and consuming their worlds. The lizards there weren’t minding their own business, they, as a collective civilization, were bent on conquering others, making all of them active enemies attacking the ADZ and others even if they hadn’t set foot inside their territory.

  Liam and the others couldn’t respect their worlds and ‘citizenry’ because they were essentially firebases setup on the galactic battlefield, and in order to fight back they had to look at it as such. No other race that Star Force knew of held themselves to the same standards of combat as they did, but when it came to the lizards they knew that if they didn’t fight them all-in in every engagement that the creep effect would eventually surround and strangle them, at which point they would, in obvious defense, go all-in…but at that point it would be too late and the enemy would have the overwhelming advantage.

  It was a fine line Liam and the others were walking and he was ever aware of it, but he’d never cross it and become a butcher. The needs of the many DID NOT outweigh the needs of the few and he wouldn’t sacrifice individuals that were noncombatants in order to get a victory.

  But the lizards had no noncombatants and they were all out for blood and more territory. Liam didn’t like making that assumption for trillions of individuals but after dealing with so many of them as prisoners and not finding so much as one who acted differently he’d cautiously put that concern aside. If he ever found even the slightest deviation in their behavior he’d reassess everything, but for now, with regards to the lizards, he and the others were in full blown berserker mode and killing as many of their ships and colonies as they could.

  And it was that fine line that he was working with that prompted several long conversations with the Gfatt, not just to teach them some of the tactics they’d learned to fight he lizards but for them to understand why and how they were doing it, for someone unaware of the situation it would look like Star Force didn’t care about anything other than destruction, which was far from the truth and he needed the Gfatt to understand that…as well as why they too had to take a ‘cleansing’ strategy with regards to upstart lizard colonies near their worlds and take them out with preemptive strikes following up an insane amount of recon patrols so they could find them before they got rooted in place.

  The Gfatt weren’t stupid, but they were used to fighting in a certain way, just as Star Force and most other races were. Star Force fought the way they did for legit reasons, while others did so out of tradition and doctrine. Liam knew he wasn’t getting through to the Gfatt instantly, but their jumping in and destroying a station when they had the opportunity was a good sign…but also a wary one, for while Star Force was capable of walking that fine line Liam wasn’t confident that others could and, faced with the way the lizards fought, would either be overrun or become bloodthirsty in response.

  Liam had 600 years of experience to learn and understand the bounds of honor, which today was no longer a murky issue for him, but others would have their own learning curve and couldn’t get to his level of ‘righteousness’ overnight, and he was afraid the example they were setting would be misunderstood and inspire bad habits in their growing list of allies.

  But being the tactician that he was he knew there was no way to avoid that. He had to be true to the lightside even if the lightside wasn’t obvious. With enough scrutiny others would be able to see what he was doing and figure out why, but for those who didn’t look so closely…well, he couldn’t control them and wasn’t going to restrict himself from actions that were in the right just because someone else might misunderstand. If they did it was on them, not him, and the example he set was merely a byproduct of action, and so long as he was in the right that was enough. The stupid of the galaxy weren’t going to shackle him into inactivity by their misunderstood observations.

  But while he had the chance he was going to try to make the Gfatt understand, and with each subsequent observed mission he hoped they’d begin to get the gist of it.

  5

  March 8, 2638

  Hamma System (lizard territory)

  Inner Zone

  The Watchman-class probe was sitting in an off orbit that kept it away from the major jumplines heading in and out of the system, as were several others that Star Force had quietly dropped off into position around the star of the otherwise empty system. There were planets nearby, but all uninhabited and mostly gas giants. The few that weren’t the lizards hadn’t seen fit to take interest in, leaving this system one of several ‘stepping stones’ within their territory that they commonly passed through en route to other locations.

  In lieu of running constant patrols through enemy systems Star Force had begun dropping the little probes off and coming back later to pull data dumps from them, allowing them to see a record of all traffic and activity within a system whereas a patrol would only get a snapshot. With the lizards expanding to so many systems it was determined that a heavier surveillance was required, with the added benefit of the ability to belatedly track convoys and other ship movements.

  The probes didn’t have the ability to transmit to the relay grid and were little more than stealthy little cameras operating off of passive scans. The stellar radiation reflecting off ship hulls and shields usually gave enough of a signature to pick up at range, though some stealthier and smaller vessels could pass through unnoticed, especially if they were using an irregular jumpline, so the detection grid wasn’t perfect, but it was clandestine. So far the lizards hadn’t found any of the probes that Star Force was littering the space around the ADZ with and gathering a large amount of information on the enemy’s movements…as well as how much other traffic there was moving around ‘occupied’ space.

  The incoming fleet however were all lizard and too large and numerous to possibly be missed. They were just passing through headed coreward, but this was the first location where they would pop up on the surveillance grid, though a patrol wouldn’t be through for another 8 months to pick up the data and belatedly register the thousands of jumpships moving through the system.

  They would register in three more systems, culminating in a line headed towards the Skarron border where the lizards were devouring system after system, but only small targets. The Skarrons were winning the big fights and claiming the key prizes, but in overall numbers the
lizards were taking 4 systems to every Skarron 1.

  Never before had a fleet of this size been registered or even rumored of, and the approximate track that Star Force recognized and passed onto the Hycre was headed in the general direction of the Orica System, former capitol of the Nestafar and by far the largest Skarron stronghold on the border.

  “I don’t think so, but it’s possible,” Paul told Cal-com as he got a message ping on his earpiece. “Just a moment,” he said, accepting the com from the Star Force warship that had just arrived in the Achkor System where the trailblazer had been camped out the past 2 months working on planning sessions with their ally.

  Paul’s expression turned hard, with him pointing at the bigger Voku a few moments later. “Incoming data packet. Pull it up.”

  The deep black muscled warrior worked the Voku controls and accepted an incoming transmission from the Human ship, then passed the control function over to Paul’s side of the holoprojector so he could do with it what he wanted.

  “It’s finally happened,” Paul said, bringing up the Hycre intel report that hadn’t yet hit the grid network and was only now being sent out through it as the warship connected to and transmitted the fresh data back to the ADZ, soon to return to reconnaissance/courier duty in concert with the Hycre. “The lizards dropped the hammer and hit Orica.”

  “How many?” Cal-com asked.

  “36,783 jumpships,” Paul said, feeling his gut tighten up.

  The Voku was silent for a moment, then crossed his massive arms over his chest as he stared at the visuals the Human was bringing up in holo with his wide crystalline eye. “We knew they were capable of this.”

  “If that fleet came here they’d overrun any system in the ADZ aside from Sol and Epsilon Eridani, and I’m not totally confident we’d win those battles in any appreciable way. I don’t think you’d be able to hold out here either.”