Star Force: Intimidation (SF17) Read online

  Before his rifle ran out, though, Kali appeared behind him, fighting back up the stream of incoming lizards as Harrison ran up behind her and tossed him a spare ammo pack. Paul caught the narrow container and quickly knocked the butt off his own rifle, slamming the new pack back in its place and dropping the empty one to the ground. The rifle was designed to use the rear ammo first, and he didn’t know how much remained in the forward compartment, but now that didn’t matter. With three of them forcing their way up the lizard wave the creatures didn’t stand much of a chance.

  This hoard was considerably thinner than those attacking at other points on the perimeter, making him wonder how late to the party he’d gotten here.

  “Inside?” he asked Harrison.

  “All clear, Knight at the entrance,” the Archon said, firing away rapidly as the seemingly suicidal lizards continued to try and run past them with only 1 in 3 actually firing back.

  “Kali, hang back,” Paul ordered as he ran up ahead, shooting wildly and letting a few slip past in order to gain ground. “Harrison, on my left. Let’s backtrack these bastards and see where they’re coming from.”

  “Already found their LZ,” Harrison said, jogging forward to his Clan leader’s left firing at every lizard that came within range, two shots minimum on each with him often cycling back around to add fire on the downed ones. “Four kirbies on the ground. Called in an airstrike and it got hammered from orbit. They either brought in more or picked another LZ.”

  “All these from kirbies?” Paul asked, gunning down one and smashing the face of another with his left fist as he ran past. In his peripheral vision he could see Kali following them several dozen meters back cleaning up the stragglers with impunity.

  “All that I…saw,” Harrison said as he got knocked aside by a lizard that, focused on Paul, ran right into the Archon’s legs. He shot it in the head as it bounced off, but it caused him to veer into a tree in the process.

  Three dozen lizards later and the stream ended, but the tracks in the ground didn’t so Paul sped up and followed them back through the forest more than a kilometer before they saw a pair of kirbies lifting off from another makeshift landing zone with the trees having been knocked over by either the descending craft or close in weapons fire.

  Behind them they saw four more kirbies on the ground, each taking their turn to rise up through the hole that’d been punched in the canopy. This wasn’t the same LZ that Harrison had tagged, but it was eerily similar. Knowing they couldn’t be detected on sensors, the lizards were using the trees as cover, having stashed at least 9 transports here by Paul’s count as they lifted off.

  No more came in to land, but by the time the Archon trio actually set foot in the clearing it became obvious that they’d had more than nine landed at one time. Paul ran around the area, taking a basic survey of the site and, based off the smaller trees that had been felled underneath the larger ones, he guessed that there’d been at least 20 here.

  That explained their number of ground troops in play, but where on Earth were they hiding all the cruisers.

  “Control, do we have skeets in the air?”

  “We lost two, but the rest are in pursuit of a flock of kirbies leaving the engagement.”

  “Ground status?”

  “We’re clear, for now.”

  “Have the det packs recovered from the corpses.”

  “What about the survivors?”

  “Do we have the claw restraints ready?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Have them rounded up then. Makeshift prison in the surrounding woods. I don’t want them inside again.”

  “Copy that. Lead skeets are reporting a pair of cruisers on the ground to the northeast, range 220 kilometers.”

  “Are they running?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Order the skeets to shoot down as many kirbies as they can, but to stay clear of the cruisers. We can tackle those beehives later if they don’t run.”

  “We’ve got help coming from the Star Foxes. You want me to tell them to turn back?”

  “Yes. If we can keep those cruisers on the ground then at least we will know where they are. Mark their location and we’ll send in a reconnaissance unit later.”

  “Copy.”

  Paul turned to the other Archons. “Head on back. If it twitches, it dies. We’ll round up any unconscious ones when security teams get out here, until then we can’t take any chances. Grab as many of their weapons as you can and work your way back to base.”

  6

  May 6, 2262

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Paul was in the Clan Saber sanctum when the attack began, holding a handstand pose in the otherwise quiet training chamber. It was one of his meditative drills, forcing calm against sustained effort, and unlike most Archon workouts totally silent.

  He heard the faint rumbles all the way inside the colony, and after two seconds of running through all the possible sources for the sound he bent his knees and came down out of his handstand and took off running out of the chamber and the sanctum, headed for the armory.

  “Paul, you there?” a voice asked through his earpiece, which he now wore nearly round the clock.

  “Where are we getting hit?” he asked back, running down a staircase and taking the opportunity to double step it down at the end of each section as he descended four flights.

  “No kirbies this time. We’ve got a cruiser on our front door and it’s pounding the prisoner camp.”

  “And our turrets?”

  “We’re hitting it with everything in range, but they don’t seem to care.”

  “Target the kirbies coming down to the surface,” he said, jumping off the last four steps and running down towards the room where his armor was kept. “Don’t let those bastards get their people back…and hit the detach points when they come off the ship, their shields will be temporarily weakened or lowered at those points enough to get a few shots on the hull.”

  “No, Paul, you don’t get it. They’re not freeing the captives, they’re targeting the captives.”

  For a second Paul didn’t respond, a sick feeling creeping up into his stomach. The few prisoners they’d captured earlier, first with a downed kirby before he arrived insystem, then a scattering of others left behind after other raids, had tried to kill their captors every chance they got. The few that escaped into the forest but were left behind by their transports would wait and watch for an opportunity to strike, meaning they had to clean out the forest after each attack to make sure there were no more lurking about.

  Those that were captured and failed to find a way to strike back at them had committed suicide, slicing their own throats with their retractable claws. Paul didn’t like to be burdened by prisoners he couldn’t even communicate with, but they weren’t just going to go out and smoke all the ones they’d stun during combat. Recently they’d developed a lock-like hand guard that would cover each of the lizard’s claw extraction points like gloves but otherwise wouldn’t inhibit their movement. Most of the prisoners they’d taken in the assault on the colony had been contained in this manner in a confinement area to the west, hacked out of the forest just days ago.

  They’d installed prefabricated walls in a large square, floor plates covering the dirt so they couldn’t dig their way out, and set prefab buildings on top of them. One third of the large square, along the near side, was sectioned off by an inner wall that separated guards from prisoners…as well as holding several concealed turrets. Paul had expected the lizard’s to come back to pound the Sabers again for their recent success in defending the colony and had sought to deflect that attack by putting their prisoners in a somewhat vulnerable position that they could be rescued from so they could ambush the rescuers.

  He hadn’t expected them to come to kill their own…but then again the fact that the lizards wouldn’t eat or drink anything in their captivity and their willingness to kill themselves should have told him that ‘prisoner’ wasn
’t in their lexicon.

  “The guards?” Paul asked, quickly punching the access code into the console on the doorjamb to gain entry.

  “They got a lot of rockets off, but the cruiser’s cannons are ripping the entire place apart. Our defense turrets and skeets just took part of their shield down but they’re not moving off. They’re razing the prison to the ground.”

  “Keep hitting it,” Paul said as he ran over to his locker and pulled out the pieces of his silver armor, some of which had to be replaced after suffering plasma damage in the recent battle.

  “Should we try an orbital strike?”

  “No. If someone is holed up in the prison or escaped into the forest we’re not going to risk killing them. If the cruiser moves off more than a kilometer fire away, but shoot wide,” he said, snapping on his forearm gauntlets. “Is it just the one cruiser?”

  “As far as we can see, yes.”

  “Does it have docked kirbies?”

  “No…not on the underside anyway.”

  “Damn it. Stay sharp, there may be more in play,” Paul said, pulling on his chest piece and snapping it tight over the light training uniform he was wearing. He continued to suit up as fast as he could, listening to updates as Control provided them. By the time his acolyte armor was completely on he received word that the cruiser, badly damaged and smoking from a severe hull breach thanks to the colony’s defense turrets, was retreating back the way it’d come.

  “Keep an eye on the perimeter,” Paul said, walking into the colony’s control room in full armor, helmet and all. “Do we have orbital tracking on the target?”

  “Yes,” a woman dressed in Clan Saber security force blues said, looking down at her terminal.

  “Standby orbital bombardment…what’s its current track?”

  “It’s on a direct line to alpha point.”

  Paul nodded. “Let it go.”

  “Sir?”

  “A hunch,” he said, pulling his helmet off. “Find out where those kirbies got off to.”

  “Lookout says all clear, no movement.”

  “They’re playing us,” he said, looking across the main holographic map. Several pinpricks out in the forest were spread around a ground zone claimed by the lizards. They had at least 3 grounded cruisers there and had been staging raids out of them for weeks. Paul had expected them to run when they were discovered but they hadn’t, which he expected was some type of a goad. In response they’d ignored the lizards’ base, not firing so much as a missile against it, but quietly setting up surveillance posts kilometers away to keep an eye on them.

  They’d gotten a few heads ups before attacks thanks to the intel, but they still couldn’t track where the ships were going unless they predictably flew a straight line. Sometimes they did, other times they didn’t. Paul had a feeling that the enemy commander was feeling them out, giving them various looks to see how they responded, and he wanted to thwart that effort as much as possible.

  The lizards killing their own troops this way struck him as wrong, but it also made a bit of sense. They’d deliberately walked their cruiser into their field of fire to get at the prisoners. Maybe they didn’t know how bad they were going to get hit…which might also have been a test of the colony’s defenses…but they didn’t retreat or attack the towers once their shields had been breached. They arrogantly held their position, blasting away at the prison until they were satisfied then turned to leave without so much as firing a single shot back at the towers.

  It was arrogant, cruel, and a demonstration of their strength to show that they could walk right up to their door, do what they wanted, then leave as if the damage done to their ship was inconsequential. But it also suggested one other thing to Paul.

  The lizards didn’t take to failure.

  The more he thought it through the more he began to feel that this prison razing wasn’t about hurting them, but rather an internal matter. The assault force had failed, with a good number of them captured. It almost seemed like they were ashamed of having to come out here and clean up the mess, taking the licks for destroying those who should either have been victorious or died fighting.

  Paul couldn’t be sure, but he was starting to get a feel for their psychological profile. It could very well be that all of these raids and attacks were training missions to assess their own people, which would explain why they weren’t hitting them in force, though the raids had been gradually increasing in scope.

  Then again, it could be that the enemy was just cautious, not wanting to waste resources against an opponent they knew nothing about. If they were testing Star Force, then a larger assault could be right around the corner…which was all the more reason to keep them guessing.

  “Confirm coordinates of alpha point and how many ships are on target.”

  It took a moment for the control room staff to contact their scouts and retrieve the information, but when they did Paul saw that nothing had changed since the last report.

  “Dac…power up the cruiser’s rail gun,” he said to one of the remote pilots for Clan Saber’s orbiting fleet.

  “Target?” the man asked, eagerly working the controls of his ship, which had been hovering over the colony out beyond the atmosphere on gravity drives for the better part of 2 days. It and a destroyer were on station, with one ship rotating out each day for another fully fueled and armed warship, keeping close range orbital bombardment capability available over the Clan Saber colony and adjacent areas, including alpha point and the Clan Star Fox colony.

  “Poke the bee hive…single round. Then stand by. Inform the spotters. If we miss I want calibrations.”

  “Heavy or light?” Dac asked, referring to the two different rail gun mounts on their cruiser.

  “Heavy. I want this to sting.”

  “Lookout reports ready.”

  “Firing,” Dac said, hitting a button to target the designated coordinates…though from his console there was nothing on sensors down there to shoot at.

  Paul waited a few heartbeats, then the report came through. It was a miss.

  “Again,” Paul prompted.

  The rectangular cube that was the Clan Saber cruiser in low ‘orbit’ readjusted its firing reticle to the left about 250 meters on the surface, using the internal alignment modification that the weapon possessed for less than 2 degrees of firing arc rather than adjusting the entire ship’s attitude. Gyrostabilizers kept the ship locked into place for the micro-realignment then another metallic slug fell to the surface like rain, kicking the cruiser back upwards slightly from the recoil, which required a slight puff of thrusters to correct for as it set up for a third shot.

  “Shield impact. No penetration.”

  Paul nodded, but said nothing, merely waiting for more than a minute.

  “Movement?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Another round.”

  Paul waited as it fell to the ground, seeing the sensor track of the slug but not its targets. The wounded cruiser was still registering, but it was still far away from alpha point making a lazy return to those surface coordinates.

  “Still no response.”

  “Shield penetration?”

  “Negative, but Lookout reports they’re overstressed.”

  “Two rounds this time,” Paul ordered.

  On the hologram he saw the first one fired and fall down towards the surface, then a second launched a few seconds later. When it hit the ground a small contact took its place, telling Paul they’d hit and damaged the hull on one of the ships enough for sensors to pick it up.

  “Tagged it,” Dac reported.

  “Good work. Movement?”

  The woman conferred with Outlook on the other end of a private comm line then shook her head. Paul studied the map for a moment, admiring the lizards’ resolve. Were they just going to sit there and keep getting hit? If they were he could bring down enough firepower to destroy them all…

  His eyes glanced to the orbital tracks around the planet, seeing what
other ships he had nearby.

  “Dac, ten more rounds as fast as you can send them, then pull back. Nate, you too. Head to these coordinates,” Paul said, tagging a rendezvous point in orbit a few hundred miles higher in altitude via the map controls. “Everyone else with a ship nearby get there ASAP.”

  On the map the first of the cruiser’s additional ten slugs began to fall on the target while the destroyer icon began to creep up in altitude. All across the moving orbital tracks ships began to redeploy, but it wasn’t going to be enough.

  Paul walked over to another section of the control room, this one was an adjunct that held an open doorway between them, but otherwise was self-contained. He walked inside and stepped up to the podium, powering up the command nexus. Suddenly the room’s walls and doorway were overshadowed by a holographic display, blocking out everything save for a few silhouettes behind him.

  The glowing images represented a tactical map of the star system, with Paul located somewhere inside the orbit of the third planet. He zoomed in to Corneria, seeing the tracking data for all their ships popping up as the size of the holographic planet increased. Star Force had dozens of orbital facilities, including three shipyards, which the bulk of their fleet was protecting.

  Taking off his armored gloves he input his designator code, which would give his identification tag along with any orders issued from this terminal, then assumed priority command over all naval assets within planetary orbit, giving those within range orders to transfer to the rendezvous point as quickly as possible.

  All across the map Star Force and Clan ships responded almost instantly, readjusting from their current orbits and beginning to make the fuel expensive trek on plasma engines alone for most of them, given that they were descending towards the planet’s gravity well rather than repelling from it.