Star Force: Augmentation (SF22) Read online

  The Gnar pilot turned the other way, heading for a Calavari at higher speed than the skeet was capable of. That annoyed Boen, but they’d worked out the flight dynamics of the enemy craft in multiple situations and he knew it was up to the Calavari to bring the enemy to him if they didn’t seek him out to begin with…which they weren’t. The pilot to his right was another Calavari who turned away from him, clearing Boen’s aft arc and allowing him to focus ahead.

  Within 10 seconds a kill marker went up for the Gnar, meaning they’d already shot down one of the skeets.

  “Focus, guys,” Boen reminded them. “Bring them to me.”

  Without a vocal response the nearest Calavari turned and dragged the opposition behind him, staying evasive by spinning around on his anti-grav and thrusting off a different direction rather than trying to fly in a conventional path. During their training they’d discovered that the death gliders’ rate of turn was much higher, meaning the only way they were going to survive was by making direct momentum changes rather than turns, either forcing the Gnar to do the same or fly off in wide arcs to change their direction.

  The one closest to Boen was caught off guard and overshot the Calavari as the two fighters exchanged plasma fire. The skeet caught one hit but the shields didn’t go down as the ships passed, with the Gnar banking to the right to come around on the skeet’s tail again.

  Boen fired off his lachar at range, hitting the death glider in its thicker cross section as it came around head to head. The energy blast passed through the physical-only shields and knocked out one of the death glider’s three plasma cannons located just above the cockpit, but it didn’t knock the fighter down.

  Knowing that leaving the ship wounded was better than having it regenerate with full firepower, Boen flew off, heading towards the next closest Gnar and taking pot shots with his lachar at distance. When he took one down, as it stubbornly stayed on the tail of one of the Calavari, three others suddenly broke off their pursuit and turned to intercept him, realizing that the Human was the priority target rather than the liability.

  “Here we go,” he whispered, switching over to plasma cannons. Even having to punch through the enemy shields they were the quickest way to take down one of the enemy fighters if he could get in successive shots and not allow their shields to regenerate in between.

  He set his pair of cannons to linked fire and reversed his engines, bringing his fighter to a stop with the three enemies coming in at him within his forward hemisphere. Boen kept the engines burning at full power and began flying backwards, narrowing the firing arc between the three targets as they came closer together, falling in on his ‘tail’ while overcoming his inferior speed and quickly catching up to him.

  As they did he started firing back at them, causing them to break off momentarily. Apparently they weren’t used to having someone shoot backwards at them, at least not at this comparatively slow speed. Head to heads usually flashed by, but with his motion subtracting from theirs the catch was drawn out, allowing for multiple shots from both sides.

  The narrow, flat profile of the skeet made it hard to hit, while the triangular hulls of the death gliders gave Boen a solid target head on. He splashed plasma against two of the targets before one finally went down, then he got through the shields of a second before his own defenses dipped below 20%, which prompted him to stop firing and hit his anti-grav thrust and rocket his ship straight up into the sky while its nose was kept level to the ground, throwing off the Gnar targeting.

  Boen dipped his nose down as the death gliders began to slip underneath him, then fired into their much wider top sides, killing a second with three paired salvos hitting already weakened shields. The third fighter nicked his skeet’s hull, punching through the rest of Boen’s shields, before the proximity warning for the outer wall prompted both ships to break off.

  The death glider turned away, but Boen simply reversed thrust and flew away directly, drifting backwards briefly until his acceleration compensated for the drift, which put him on the tail of the death glider at distance. He switched back over to lachars and winged the fighter before it stupidly pulled up, showing Boen its wide top side. He peppered it with lachar blasts, blowing apart a wing which resulted in it slowly spiraling down to the ground as another skeet crossed over it from the left, finishing it off with a short range heavy plasma salvo that popped it into shrapnel on impact.

  “Nice assist,” he said over the silent teamcomm. The Calavari, as he learned, kept talking to a minimum, only sharing essential information.

  “Four for you,” Morshav said, flying off towards another target as that Gnar pilot restarted far away along the wall on the opposite side of the map. “And they know it. Beware, they’re coming for you.”

  “I know…ow,” he said, seeing that virtually every death glider on the map was heading his way.

  “Oh shit,” he said, diving down towards the ground, knowing that would give the other skeets at least a peak at the upper sides of the Gnar fighters. “I’ll play bait, you guys hit them when they’re not looking.”

  Boen took a quick peak at the score before he ramped up his anti-grav to keep from smacking into the simulated ground. 5 to 3 good guys, but he wasn’t going to be adding to that right now as he started juking left and right as he streaked across the landscape only meters off the ground, dodging incoming plasma. Readjusting his hands on the various controls he executed a combined turn/swivel, skidding his skeet wide to the left while swapping front for back and bringing him into firing range of three of the death gliders closest to him that were also skimming the surface…meaning they had limited maneuvering options.

  One came in directly at him while the other two pulled up, exposing their wide undersides. Boen held his skid, blowing apart one of the ones that pulled up, then accelerated forward and into the Gnar lines, taking down the second one a moment before his fighter’s starboard engine disappeared in an explosion and his skeet tipped over and careened into the ground.

  Boen flinched, then saw a short-lived score in the blackness of the pod before it restarted him again in an undamaged and fully shielded skeet far away from everyone else, with the score now reading 8/4. With him so far off the Gnar started to reengage the Calavari, which Boen didn’t like.

  He switched his comm over to open broadcast so the Gnar could hear him.

  “That’s one for you, 6 for me. Looks like letting the arrogant twit play was a mistake. Is this all you’ve got, Gnar? You’re not even making this hard.”

  To Boen’s satisfaction he saw half the little blips on his sensor board turn and head towards him.

  He switched back over to his squadron’s frequency. “That got their attention. Double up on the others while I keep these busy.”

  “Are you sure? We need you racking up kills,” Gonstan asked.

  “I’ll get a few before they take me down, go pick on their stragglers.”

  There was no response from the Calavari, which was a sign of compliance from them. Boen didn’t have time to worry about it as he lined up a long distance shot and fired off his lachar until he finally got a hit on the lead death glider, then he broke off and led the Gnar over to the other side of the map, pulling them further and further away from the Calavari.

  They eventually realized what he was doing, with half of them turning around and reversing course. When they did Boen flipped over and did a direct reversal, flying straight into their now thinned lines, darting down and to the left to try and shoot through a slightly wider gap, from which he angled up towards one of the rear fighters and fired away with rapid fire single shots, one for each trigger pull on the control bar in his right hand. He exchanged plasma with the fighter, but again his smaller cross section worked to his favor and he downed the fighter before he lost shields, then he pushed forward with as much thrust as his ship could manage, dragging the Gnar behind him for a few seconds before their greater speed brought them back into plasma range.

  Knowing he was about to get spanked he w
ent erratic, literally flying like he was out of control, spinning around his axis while weaving to and fro, making it difficult for the Gnar to predict his path and shoot him…all the while his shields continued to recharge. It was a stalling tactic, but the more time he bought meant the more likely the Calavari were to rack up some more kills given their numerical advantage.

  “Come to us,” Morshav said, with Boen coming out of his spin and weaving side to side as he headed toward a group of three skeets coming from the right, apparently having respawned in that portion of the map.

  He glanced at the score again…15/9.

  “Up or down?” the Calavari asked.

  “I’m going down,” the Archon said, getting his aft shield clipped by a bit of simulated plasma. “Three, two,” he counted down, cutting off his forward thrust and spinning his skeet around again, “one, mark!”

  He dropped his anti-grav down to 10% and fell level towards the ground, tipping his skeet’s nose up slightly and firing back at the approaching Gnar. They followed him down, depressing their angle of flight and showing Morshav and his wingmen their upper sides…which they then stitched with lachar fire. Two of the ships veered off, but one reversed its dive too far, coming up and exposing its underside which quickly took the brunt of Morshav’s plasma as the trio of skeets came within range.

  After that Boen couldn’t see what happened, so busy he was with just staying alive. He took down two more before the Gnar’s numbers finally caught up with him and he found himself respawning along the perimeter again.

  From that point on four of the Gnar stuck to Boen while the others intentionally steered clear, focusing on the Calavari or just getting out of the Human’s way, deeming him too dangerous to go head to head with. Near the end of the engagement the Gnar had finally learned to break off when he flipped over, swing around and reset for another attack run at an angle that didn’t allow for a slow-down. The death gliders had superior speed, which made them especially deadly when they paired up and attacked from different angles, but Boen managed to keep their best pilots at bay long enough to secure their victory, 48/41, with him racking up a kill count of 26.

  When the final kill was registered by one of the Calavari he was relieved, knowing that the Gnar had learned a lot from the battle and that the tactics they’d been practicing wouldn’t work so well in a second match…which he hoped wasn’t going to happen, at least not until the Calavari got more seat time in the skeets. Then again, he doubted they would be cornered into using them instead of their Valeries again.

  Boen popped the canopy after going through the stats, curious as to which of the Calavari had done the best, and choked as the repugnant smell of ammonia drifted into him from the open pods the Gnar had been using.

  “What is wrong?” Gonstan said, placing a hand on Boen’s shoulder as he coughed.

  “That air…is nasty,” he said, pinching his nose as the Gnar stomped off, not bothering to stick around long enough for the Calavari or Boen to gloat.

  “A bit of defiance,” the Calavari said, unaffected by the fumes. “The exited before recycling the pods’ atmosphere.”

  “The air processors are going to take care of that, right?”

  “They should be already,” the four-armed alien said as Mark walked up to the pair, scrunching his nose.

  “Who taught you to fly anyway?”

  “You did,” Boen said, coughing one last time.

  “I taught you not to get shot. You died 5 times.”

  “It was a tradeoff.”

  “Well don’t make a habit of it,” the trailblazer warned, then looked up at Gonstan. “Nice work.”

  “Our thanks for your instruction. Your fighters are difficult to learn. Boen has proved they are effective, but I must say, I thoroughly hate them.”

  Mark laughed. “To each his own. Thanks for upholding the integrity of our design. With you flying and winning in them I think we’ll get a little more respect for the skeets.”

  “I do like your energy weapons, limited in power as they are. Would you be willing to trade for the technology?”

  “Would you be willing to help us modify our skeets with your scattergun?”

  Gonstan smiled with his wide jaw. “I think so. Without it your ships are not nearly effective enough against the lizards’ swarm tactics.”

  “Our gunships are,” Mark countered.

  “Only in atmosphere…but I think we have much to discuss on this matter, and this isn’t the proper place.”

  “Agreed,” Mark said, lightly slapping Boen in the gut. “Come on, youngling. We’ve got some diplomatic swapping to do.”

  7

  August 4, 2397

  Jartul System

  Daka

  Mark sat in the small passenger compartment directly behind the cockpit in the falcon-class dropship that was carrying him up to orbit, watching the ascent up through the atmosphere on a small datapad as he simultaneously ran through the latest batch of simulator tests. With the addition of a plasma-based scattergun to the skeets their kill power against the lizard fighters had increased considerably for their weaker pilots, but less so for Mark. His skill with the standard plasma cannons afforded him better accuracy, whereas the scattergun allowed a pilot to damage a target by simply shooting near to it like a fighter-sized shotgun.

  ‘Damage’ was the word though, because most of the time the simulated lizard ships wouldn’t go down because only a few plasma shards would hit their armored hulls. Put a square shot on one and it would shred the ship nicely, but the whole point of the weapon was to enable less accurate kill power, causing Mark to have mixed feelings about the upgrade, especially since they’d had to remove one of the standard cannons in order to make room for it, leaving him without the ability for linked or rapid fire.

  The recycle time on the weapon was about half a second, which meant if you got on the tail of an enemy fighter, even for just a moment, you could pump loads of the tiny plasma pellets into the target, which in the case of the lizards would take them down, sometimes two at a time if they overlapped into the same firing cone during their massed assaults. But when Mark had tried out the weapon against other non-lizard craft the damage was not so spectacular. Even weak shields soaked up a lot of the plasma splinters, then regenerated if the target could get clear. The lizards had no shields, thus any hits were for keeps, but Mark knew Star Force couldn’t afford to make a permanent change to their weaponry because it’d leave them weak against other enemies.

  What they really needed was a modular swap out, but the new weapon was tricky enough that his limited techs hadn’t been able to work out the dynamics of such a design, though he had sent the specs back home via a passing Hycre ship. It wasn’t a jumpship, so there was no way of knowing how long it would take to pass the data file back to Star Force territory, but since the Alliance communications network hadn’t been extended out to the Humans yet couriers were still the only way they could keep in contact, and with being so far away sending Star Force jumpships was out of the question, leaving the Hycre as their only link back home.

  The communication delay was still monstrous, with no Star Force updates having reached Daka, which meant Mark was going to have to make modifications to their aircraft using his local resources only…that were about to be augmented, which was what had prompted this trip up to orbit. Another Hycre jumpship had arrived carrying Star Force freighters with supplies and additional personnel, the exact specifications of which the trailblazer didn’t know since the reserves had been sent without his consultation, given the communications problems.

  In fact, the ships had already been unloaded given that he had no forewarning of the arrival of the jumpship. With the Hycre’s advanced gravity drives they’d arrived in the system and diverted to Daka before any signal of notification could have traveled the intrasystem gap. He’d been notified that the Hycre would be sticking around for a couple of days to pick up messages from Star Force and other friendly races within the Alliance then headin
g out again, given that they didn’t have any assets of their own in system to deal with aside from passing along some additional fuel to the planet’s two guardian warships.

  Mark had grabbed the cargo pilots on base and got three dropships into the air immediately, his being the first up on the way to the partially constructed Canderian seda where the reinforcements had gathered.

  Located in semi-synchronous orbit, the spherical station had a large chunk missing from it that hadn’t been built yet, making it look ominously like the Death Star from Return of the Jedi, only colored green. Had this been one of the earlier seda designs it wouldn’t have been operational as yet, due to the dynamics of the rotating central gravity cylinders, but now that Star Force had artificial gravity plates coupled with containment fields to shape and concentrate the effect, the completed part of the seda had full life support and functioning sections that Baron Keller and his engineering crew were now living out of.

  They had a small army of Sparrow and Eagle-class dropships that they’d built in system running cargo up and down from the 6 surface outposts they’d constructed. Initially the factories to produce various items had been onboard the freighters, then they’d expanded them onto the surface, but now that the seda was partially operational those facilities were being dismantled and shifted up to orbit, allowing more personnel to transfer back into space.

  About half of those workers were Canderian, and as such preferred living in space opposed to on the ground. The others were Star Force regulars who didn’t care one way or another, they were just here to get the seda built then they’d be transferring out of the system along with the Baron. They’d been assigned because Star Force didn’t trust Canderous to set up on their own in a new star system, let alone one so far away from support. Davis’s legion of mini-mes were specially suited to that sort of startup work, which was why Mark had brought Keller along.