Star Force: Forsaken (Star Force Universe Book 48) Page 6

  “Damn it,” Paul whispered to himself from the command nexus where we was waiting. He’d had a feeling they’d run into them before they arrived, and now he had a choice to make. Fight here and now or press on to the target system, and he knew it had to be the latter. The longer they were delayed, the less Wass’mat there would be alive to rescue.

  With a thought he sent out orders to the other ships in line, with the Excalibur being 18th and only a few seconds away from the head of the convoy. The other trailblazers were further back, staggered within the 34,833 jumpships that they’d stolen away from Earth defense. They’d left some ships there so not to rely entirely on planetary defenses, but the bulk of their fleets were now behind Paul and creeping their way into V’kit’no’sat territory like a line of ants, spread out across lightyears as they jumped from star to star.

  If the lizards had been sitting on their incoming jumpline it would have been a problem, but they had enough play with this star to come out a bit early in middle orbit and give them at least half an hour before the first of the lizard fleet could get to them.

  That wouldn’t be enough time for their entire fleet to arrive, so if the lizards wanted a fight they could start one, but Paul didn’t intend to stick around to finish it.

  He heard the battle alarm sound, though he hadn’t initiated it. Admiral Peterson, a new appointment to Paul’s command ship, had initiated it when he’d reviewed the status and Paul’s orders. That was typical, for while Paul was in charge of everything, the more others could take off his hands the better, and alerting the crew to battle was something the Captain or Admiral had the responsibility for.

  Paul had 1 minute and 32 seconds left, due to the fact that the signals coming from the Ma’kri were only so strong and the further they traveled the more they weakened. So even if they had gotten to the system a day ahead of time, they couldn’t have sent a signal much further than they were now without bringing a full-fledged comm ship with an interstellar relay…and one of those big ass ships wasn’t something you snuck into a system to have a look around with.

  But a minute and change was more than Paul needed, and by the time the Excalibur jumped into the system he had already sent messages to the other trailblazers and informed his leading ships how he wanted them to exit. They were not going to hold position and screen for the others. They were going to move, splitting up and fanning out across the system to disguise their intent and see how the lizards would respond.

  And that’s exactly what happened when the massive blue shift ended and the light of the yellow star shrunk back down to normal intensity levels. He could see his other jumpships moving off and spewing drones as they went into flocks that followed along with much greater ease as the big ships began recharging their capacitors so they could execute large jumps again. They had a little charge left, enough to maneuver, but not enough to leave the system or make an emergency microjump. They’d nearly drained them braking extra hard to come out of the jumps earlier in this system than planned, but the capacitors recharged quickly and they wouldn’t need to make a full jump for hours to come…plenty of time to get them back to 100% even if they had to do some evasive maneuvering in the meantime.

  As for the drones, they didn’t have the larger engines and capacitors needed for interstellar jumps, nor the necessary navigation systems. They were lighter, had larger power cores that fed the required energy directly to systems and required only a small capacitor for big microjumps. They were also denser, pound for pound, because they weren’t carriers, but they were still faster insystem until the jumpships got enough power back to make some massive maneuvers, then the drones would be turtles in comparison.

  The Excalibur came out and continued heading directly towards the star for a few minutes, then slowed to a stop and held position as his fleet continued to spread out behind him to various additional holding points. The other trailblazer fleets were behind his, meaning all these first ships he was used to working with, and they were used to The Admiral’s predictable unpredictability.

  Paul just sat and waited while the sensor signals bouncing off his ships eventually made their way to the lizards. He could see them long before they could see him, for the light bouncing off them had already traveled out to middle orbit. They could have moved since then, but he at least had some idea of where they were, and it took some time before the lizard fleet got caught on to their arrival here.

  Paul noted that the lizards were receiving additional ships as well, from a jumpline a third of the way around the star. He couldn’t see any outgoing jumplines, though it was possible there could be one directly opposite the star. He guessed they were waiting here until more had arrived or they received a courier with attack orders, but they were still in the way and he doubted they were going to allow him to simply go around them.

  “Alright you guys,” Paul said quietly. “We haven’t fought in a long time, so how are you going to play this? You’re stronger now, but so are we. You’ve laid off us all this time. Do you have orders for that or were you just busy with the Skarrons? Come on, show me your cards, you bastards.”

  Paul waited until he knew that the sensor bounces from the lizards would have gotten back to them…but they didn’t move. They didn’t come after the fleet, nor did they even reposition from their holding orbits. They just sat there as if they didn’t know the Star Force ships had arrived.

  V’kit’no’sat ships were somewhat sensor-eating, meaning lesser races couldn’t detect them at range. Star Force had incorporated a bit of that into their hulls, and the fleet wasn’t running with IDF active, so Paul had them light up their beacons, meaning that even if the lizard sensors were somehow not good enough to pick them up, the identification beacons would not be missed and would tell everyone watching exactly who these newly arriving ships belonged to.

  But minutes later when those signals would have reached them and the return bounces got back to Paul’s fleet, there was still no response. The lizards were not reacting at all.

  “Playing it cool, huh? Or just waiting to see if we have a Uriti before you attack?” he said as more and more Star Force ships arrived and spread out to 18 different rally points too far away from each other to assist in combat. Paul wanted them really spread out, and it looked like the lizards were not going to knee jerk attack any of them. In the past they would have, throwing themselves at one of the smaller groups and trying to overwhelm it or heading straight to the jumppoint and trying to hit the incoming ships before they could launch their drones.

  But no…this was different. They had orders. There was no other way they would just be sitting there when Star Force was arriving into the system. So what was the game? Attack the V’kit’no’sat and not piss off Star Force at the same time? Hope that Star Force wouldn’t resume the war against the lizards now that they had an Armistice with the V’kit’no’sat? Or did they not know that yet?

  It was possible they didn’t, despite it being news amongst many races beyond Star Force, but for whatever reason the lizards were just ignoring Paul’s fleet…and he wasn’t about to have that.

  “Jason, you have fleet command,” he said, recording and transmitting a message, for his friend hadn’t yet arrived out of his jump. “I’m going to go poke them with a stick.”

  He informed the rest of the ships of the transfer, then headed the Excalibur in towards the star and the waiting lizard fleet, getting better sensor readings the closer he got. He wanted to see if they would react, but he also wanted as much updated reconnaissance on their ships as he could get before they went into battle here or in the Ohson System.

  In he crept in his massive, donut-shaped command ship, and still the lizards did not budge. He got all the way to low stellar orbit and only 8,000 miles away before he held station and just looked at them, scanning intently as they floated like sleeping fish with all their cruisers tucked neatly into the hulls of the jumpships that were even larger than the Excalibur.

  “Hello there,” he said through
the comm and translated into Li’vorkrachnika. He could read their language fairly well, but his pronunciations were crap and it was easier to let the translation program handle it. “I am Archon Paul-024, commander of the Star Force fleet now entering this system. I find it odd you are not moving to engage us, given that we are still in a state of war. If there is a reason I shouldn’t destroy you here and now, please state it. I am very curious as to why you think we are not worth engaging at our jumppoint.”

  No response came for more than 15 minutes, then the image of a mastermind appeared in holo before him…but it didn’t look right. Paul could see the similarity, but the physiology had been altered. Still green as green could be, but there were armor patches and a few other oddities on its skin. Also, its eyes were smaller, its claws longer, and many subtle changes that caused Paul to flinch. The lizards did not alter their variants. They created new ones when the need arose and retired the old designs. They didn’t upgrade existing ones, and the mastermind body had remained unchanged since it was created long, long ago, with only coding changes and other small internal improvements made over the years.

  “We are not here for you, Star Force. We are engaged in a war against your enemy. Combat between us would be a mutual disadvantage. Why are you seeking to provoke us?”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. After so much time spent with Thrawn and the other mastermind converts, not to mention the Paladin, he picked up on the differences in tone and conversation instantly. This might be a lizard, but it wasn’t a mastermind.

  “You tried to wipe us out long ago. We tend not to forget such things.”

  “We are doing you a service by wounding the V’kit’no’sat. Interference would be illogical.”

  “So if we pass through this system without attacking you, will you interfere?”

  “We will remain in our current position. Move around us and we will not attack. Come much closer than you are now, and we will out of prudence.”

  “Bargained and done,” Paul said with finality. “Tell me, why don’t you look like the masterminds I’ve dealt with in the past?”

  “I am better than those you corrupted. Pass through as you wish. We will remain where we are.”

  The lizard cut the comm, and Paul wasn’t going to squander the opportunity to get past them without a fight, so he ordered the Ma’kri scouts ahead and signaled Jason to begin moving around the system, keeping well away from low stellar orbit. Paul, though, stayed nearby, gaining a little extra distance between the Excalibur and the lizard fleet, but essentially buzzed them all the way around collecting ample amounts of sensor scans on their new ships.

  As promised, none of them so much as moved. Their ships were shaped similar to what they had once been, but the materials were vastly different and much more powerful, though still built cheaply via mass production. That said, they had access to a lot of technologies that Star Force hadn’t possessed when they’d first fought, including something akin to a Dre’mo’don.

  They didn’t have to fire them for the sensors to pick up the weapon systems, for the firing chambers stood out against several exotic scans. Based on the shape he guessed they were what the V’kit’no’sat labeled as Be’hast, something of similar energy but far less density per shot. In order to upgrade to a full Dre’mo’don you had to obtain Sha’gart particles to create the necessary density, and that was a technological leap that most races never obtained.

  But the fact that these lizards appeared to have Be’hast as their standard weaponry was a bad sign. Only a handful of races cataloged by the V’kit’no’sat had ever reached that level, and even The Nexus races had never achieved that particular technology. They had others, and there were many, many ways to craft energy weapons, but Be’hast was the first foundational building block of V’kit’no’sat-level weaponry, and it was something that the lizards should not have possessed. Even if they found a Dre’mo’don and tore it apart it would do no good. They could not replicate it without understanding the microscopic physics principles, and without a manual to go along with it, primitive races couldn’t hope to understand V’kit’no’sat technology.

  Star Force had had that manual, in the form of their database, and even then it had taken them forever to figure it out. This, more than anything, confirmed that someone was helping the lizards advance rapidly. The question was, who had the knowledge to give them? And who would be stupid enough to try, considering who and what they were?

  Not to mention the biological changes. It looked like they had gotten more than just weaponry upgrades, and even having a mastermind talk to you was unnatural. They were typically silent and hidden within their ranks, though if this fleet contained a Templar he could understand why the mastermind would take the lead…except that they would typically just ignore you entirely. They must have had orders not to engage Star Force, but Paul still had a bad feeling that these lizards were not the same lizards he had fought long ago.

  Something had changed drastically, but he wasn’t going to stick around here to figure it out. The fleet was moving quickly to the outgoing jumppoint even as more ships kept coming in along the convoy line. Paul stayed in the system, sending Jason to the front of the line, and made sure that the lizards didn’t double-cross them and hit the end of the convoy, then the Excalibur made the last jump out, intending to catch up in the next layover to be at the head of the line when they finally got to the Ohson System.

  7

  May 4, 4917

  Ohson System (V’kit’no’sat territory, Tamprani Region)

  Stellar Orbit

  Hanniena’s Kaeper had traveled with the Star Force fleet near the head of the line, coming off the jumpline and proceeding further into the system at an angle in order to get decelerated in time yet missing the jumppoint itself. She felt safe doing this, having known the layout of the system when she left, and fortunately there were no Li’vorkrachnika ships in her flight path to accidentally ram, for the signal bounces coming back from the Star Force fleet were focused straight ahead on the jumpline.

  There was an enemy fleet guarding the jumppoint, and the leading Star Force ships were already heavily engaged as her stealthy Kaeper slipped by them all and linked in to the V’kit’no’sat Urrtren. The relay was down, meaning interstellar communications were now cut off, though the insystem transmitters were still operational…but the situation was bad. Kienma and Logsda were gone. There were no V’kit’no’sat signals coming from them and the fleet over Logsda was currently bombarding the planet from orbit. Kienma was already a wasteland with all V’kit’no’sat infrastructure destroyed, including the planetary defense station, whose smoking rubble still remained visible but broken at the cap where the Tar’vem’jic had been located.

  She could see the relayed images of the hole that had been bored in it from the bombardment, and the other ones in the system hadn’t fared much better. All were down, with two damaged by sabotage measures when the Li’vorkrachnika had invaded on land and taken them over from within on Neonni. Now the main planet was under full ground assault, with barely a third of it still fielding planetary shield generators.

  A much larger fleet there was bombarding the parts of the planet that were exposed and did not currently contain Li’vorkrachnika troops. Hanniena could see in detail on the transmitted reports what her ship could not from so far away, and that data said they were almost too late. Two planets’ worth of Wass’mat were destroyed, and from the damage on Neonni she guessed at least half the population was dead already.

  The bombardment was continuing ruthlessly as her ship moved through a microjump to get to the planet…then the attack suddenly stopped. The signal reception from the planet was sketchy when moving at jump speeds, but the cessation of the bombardment made it through the hyper compression disruption and soon thereafter the Kaeper got collision warnings and had to veer off the jumpline to avoid hitting the Li’vorkrachnika ships leaving the planet and heading towards the star.

  Her ship made another angled braking mane
uver that brought it well wide of the intended jumppoint and slid into a hasty orbit as she watched the massive fleet crowding the jumppoint to the star. It looked as if they were fleeing, but there were so many of their cruisers in the field that she doubted they would run from Star Force and not the V’kit’no’sat. As more data was gathered she noted the location of the Li’vorkrachnika jumpships out elsewhere in the system and saw that the cruisers were not heading there. They were heading out in a long line towards the distant jumppoint where the Star Force fleet was still entering.

  They weren’t waiting for them to come to the planet. They were heading out to them. Every…single…ship…was headed out, leaving planetary orbit barren aside from the glut of vessels waiting near the exiting jumppoint. And not just around Neonni, but the ships around Logsda were also abandoning their bombardment and heading out to the star.

  Hanniena didn’t understand that. They were leaving their troops on the planet completely unguarded, and while a Kaeper wasn’t much of a warship, it still had a lot of firepower compared to ground troops.

  “Move us into low orbit and coordinate with planetary defense on bombardment coordinates…but do not drop stealth measures until the rest of their fleet leaves,” she ordered, sickened at the sight of the planet succumbing to destruction like a virus slowly spreading across the surface.

  The scout ship moved into position and waited as ordered, with her ship still able to pick up basic sensor data from the Star Force fleet, for they’d offered a tie-in during the trip out here for navigational purposes and they hadn’t rescinded it yet, so she could see the battle taking place and was taken aback at the ferocity of it. Small ships fighting small ships was not the way V’kit’no’sat handled battle, and while they had gotten used to fighting Star Force’s small ships, they had never seen them go head to head with another small fleet.

  But it was more than that. Their movements were…extreme. The tactics totally different and incredibly intricate. She realized after her ship began its own bombardment of exposed Li’vorkrachnika ground troops that what she was witnessing was two enemies that were extremely familiar with one another with a long history of warfare. This wasn’t a first conflict situation. This was an old feud brought to life again and it showed.