Star Force: Aquatics (SF31) Page 6

  The weapons, colored pink in Halo homage, contained the pen-sized anti-personnel PDMs that the towers and streaks carried, only in much smaller numbers. He had 10 per weapon, each of which would kill a lizard on contact, though their legionnaire shield gauntlets would hold up to several detonations before going down.

  The weapons had a targeting laser that could be used to paint targets for them to swim to, otherwise they were just point and shoot with an optional proximity detonation setting, though if they didn’t actually hit the target the odds of them doing sufficient damage were slim, given their low yields.

  The PDM on the streaks were slightly larger, as were most of those in the towers, but in a pinch the Archons could use the needler to shoot down incoming minnows…if they were a good shot.

  Cryson and Ariel swam up to the most viable breach point on the hull…a massive blast point where plasma had triggered some sort of internal explosion, opening up the dark brown hull to the ocean water, though in the depths it appeared nearly black, save for the scattering of lights the patrols were carrying.

  Cryson had sensor telemetry overlaid on his helmet’s HUD to navigate by, but he also had lights on the exterior of his armor, one of which was on and glowed a dull orange, marking his position along with those of the other Archons and regulars out swimming about. Otherwise it was a dark, empty graveyard of hull fragments surrounding the bulk of the dead lizard ship, with the giant blast crater making it look even more intimidating.

  Ariel didn’t seem to mind, and could see quite well on her own, given her bioluminescent eyes. They glowed golden, while tiny patches of skin along the length of her body provided aqua-colored lights depicting her location alongside Cryson’s orange marker.

  The Archon swam into the breach point first, flicking on the rest of his armor’s external lights and bathing the area in a white glow along with the help of a regular who was already swimming about inside the ship. Ariel stayed right behind him, whipping her tail back and forth to provide thrust while using her arms as rudders to control her orientation and direction of movement. Her normally loose green hair was tied back in a sleek ponytail, a sign that she felt excessive speed might be necessary, thus the additional streamlining.

  “Guide me,” Cryson prompted.

  “Right,” Ariel’s computer processed voice said, sounding identical to the Disney version, thanks to whatever joker had done the programming. Most of the other Archons hadn’t noticed, but he’d had a younger sister who’d been a Disney fanatic growing up, and as a result he’d become knowledgeable in a lot of movies and TV shows he’d otherwise never have watched on his own.

  Cryson swam around a corner and down a corridor that looked like a hamster tunnel. It was totally different from the lizards’ typical interior designs, indicating that this ship had been built with water-filled interiors rather than air-filled ones.

  “New model,” he commented.

  “A good sign,” Ariel’s cartoon voice said in his helmet. “It increases the likelihood that the equipment will still be functional.”

  “Point,” the Archon said, coming up against a section of tunnel that was sheered in two by some type of bulkhead that was now blocking their way.

  “Left,” Ariel prompted.

  Cryson pointed his right arm away from his body and reversed the flow, using it to push rather than pull, while leading with his gun-wielding left around the corner. They moved through several more sections, having to backtrack twice around damaged areas, before they finally got to a main corridor that led them to the area where Ariel wanted to go.

  They passed by a piece of lizard hand floating in the corridor, with the webbing between the four fingers clearly visible…yet one of the many genetic augmentations they’d made for their water-breathing variant. A little further ahead they turned a corner and came to another damaged section, with more bits and pieces of lizard and machinery floating about.

  Ariel bypassed them all, swimming ahead of Cryson to a nook in the large room they’d come to and trying access a particular console. She got some function out of it while the Archon merely waited and watched, then the Elarioni swam to the side and pointed to a section of the wall.

  Cryson swam forward, using his body rather than his jets, and latched his armored fingers into the grooves on a wall panel, then planted a foot beside it and lightly pulled, popping it off with Ariel swimming into the gap before he even had it halfway removed. Clearly she was eager to find something, because this was above and beyond her normally energetic mood when out in open water.

  Cryson waited again, not sure if he could even squeeze into the passageway with the width of his shoulders. He was visibly sizing it up as he pulled his needler back off its hook and into his hand, knowing there were lots of places in here were a survivor could be hiding out, though they usually preferred the frontal attack or suicide charge to laying ambushes…but it wasn’t unheard of.

  A few minutes later Ariel came back out head first, having somehow turned around in the narrow shaft. In her hand was a small component, a type of control node by the look of it. The Elarioni held it up in front of Cryson’s helmet for him to see clearly.

  “This is what I was looking for. It controls one of their defense tendrils, seeking out nearby targets and differentiating between friend and foe without crew input.”

  “An upgrade?”

  “More than that. This was made from Elarioni technology. Reverse-engineered, for this isn’t our construction. The materials are lizard, but the design is not.”

  Cryson frowned. “How bad is it?”

  “I’ll need the techs to analyze this in detail, but it’s not good. Even if the programming is half as effective as Elarioni technology, this will be a problem. We can disable these batteries on their ships from afar, so that’s not significant, but if they implement it large scale…”

  “I’ve never seen the real ones, so you’ll have to fill in the blanks for me.”

  “We won’t be able to use any of our direct contact weapons. The tendrils will take out our ships with ease. Even the streaks could get caught, depending on the speed of the mechanics, because this,” she said, tapping a blue finger lightly against the control node, “will help them predict the movement of incoming objects, increasing the odds of intercept. Even if all they have them armed with are plasma nubs, they will be effective against our technology.”

  “Are you done here?”

  “Yes, though we need to recover the tendril pinned beneath the ship, if it’s salvageable. Tell them to be careful, this one still has power. I wasn’t able to deactivate it from here.”

  “You want me to carry that?”

  “I have it,” Ariel said, swimming by him and heading back through the ship fast enough that Cryson knew he wasn’t going to have a chance of staying with her.

  “Showoff,” he muttered.

  Two weeks later…

  “They’re making another drop run,” Captain Ender commented as he watched the tactical hologram from the bridge of the Hawkeye.

  “Who’s got it?” Sara asked via the comm.

  “We do.”

  “Do we have an angle?”

  “Slim. They’re coming in hard.”

  “Damn it,” Sara said, tossing aside her towel and hastily pulling on her uniform over a still shower-wet body. Her earpiece was the only thing on her that was actually dry. “What have we got moving?”

  “Two corvettes. They’re running three cruisers, two of which are transports.”

  “What do we have for an atmospheric intercept?” the trailblazer asked, pulling on her shoes sockless and running out her quarters’ door.

  “Nothing. They’re headed for the backside of the planet.”

  “How is that in our zone?” she asked, running through the warship’s corridors, dodging personnel on the way.

  “The lizards are being creative in their approach vector. Looks like they’re going to aerobrake pretty hard, so even if we did have surface assets we couldn’
t give them a decent prediction of where they’re going to come down.”

  “What’s the corvette loadouts?”

  “Maulers both,” he said, referring to the section of each ship that was modular and could be swapped out for different weapon systems.

  “How long till we get a shot?”

  “12 minutes.”

  “Copy that,” Sara said, ending their conversation as she ducked into a stairwell, bypassing the elevators in favor of running. She knew she didn’t have to be on the bridge for the intercept, and could have left Ender in command and not given it a second thought, but the lizard fleets in orbit around Atlantica were constantly playing games with them and a gut feeling said she needed to get up there and follow this live.

  In addition to her fleet, which consisted of 6 warship-class jumpships, there were five others in orbit, along with 3 Star Force battle stations in close formation, mere kilometers apart so they could overlap their defenses. It was those seda copies that had allowed Star Force to retain a presence in orbit, for when the lizard counter offensive began 6 years ago they’d arrived with a fleet 4 times as large as theirs and had immediately set upon clearing orbit of anything alien.

  They hadn’t been able to remove the battle stations, which gave the Star Force fleets a fixed point to retreat to. That first assault had lasted 3 weeks, during which the lizards lost half their fleet trying to take them down. The surface damage to the stations was extensive, but between their numerous cleansing beams and the backing of the warships, they systematically tore apart the lizard ships when they came at them, enough that they hadn’t tried to assault the trio of stations again…despite the fact that their insystem fleet now numbered twice what it had been during that first assault.

  Star Force had lost a lot of ships in that first defensive effort, but with that little piece of orbit secured Paul had been able to work his naval magic and keep the lizards continually frustrated. Both sides maintained orbital presences around the planet, attacking whenever they saw an opportunity while their surface forces vied for possession of the planet.

  Paul had managed to secure the low ground…which in orbital terms was the prime zone around the planet within a few hundred miles of the atmosphere. That gave their ships the ability to maneuver around to different latitudes faster than the higher orbits, making response times better, as well as positioning themselves between them and the lizards, as hilarious as that notion was, given how much open space there was around a planet that simply couldn’t be shut off to ships wishing to pass through to the surface.

  Like their basic training had first taught them long ago, getting down to a planet from orbit was easy…so the only way to stop someone from doing it was to get to them first, which the pair of Corvette-class drones were attempting to do now.

  Sara arrived on the bridge with a few minutes to spare, shaking water droplets out of her short hair as she walk/jogged across to the Admiral’s chair and slid in, using the control interfaces to get up to speed rather than have the Captain talk her through it. He was seated nearby in his own command chair, monitoring the catch attempt.

  The trailblazer pulled up an assessment program, which calculated the various trajectories of the 5 ships in question, seeing the difficult angle the corvettes were having to come in at and the speed of which they were going to pass by each other given they were travelling one two different lines that were about to cross.

  “Ahead or follow?” she asked Ender as to which orders he’d given.

  “Follow…given we don’t know their exact arrival point. We can go atmosphere if we have to when trailing.”

  Sara nodded, then her eyes switched to the large hologram directly in front of her chair that detailed the orbital situation around the entire planet, though at the moment it had been zoomed in on their quarter of it. Touching a button she zoomed it back out, knowing that the people who needed the close-in data would be able to access copies of it on their individual consoles.

  “A faint?” Ender asked, catching her line of thought.

  “When’s the last time they only sent three ships?” she countered. The rest of their warships were split up into 17 different fleets occupying various points around middle orbit, some of which were very far out, essentially parking themselves for use later. Others were set up strategically on various jumplines, both from the star and the other planets, hoping to catch incoming Star Force jumpships while simultaneously protecting their own on arrival.

  But again, a planet was huge, so with a little work, finding pirate jumplines past the entrenched fleets wasn’t difficult, but it did keep one on their toes, especially with lizard ships deployed elsewhere in the system trying to ambush incoming and outgoing convoys. So far they hadn’t succeeded in doing more than scaring Star Force ships into short delays as they circumvented the threats, but given the lizard ships’ ability to remain undetected at long range, a napping officer on duty could lead to a nasty surprise attack.

  Fortunately, no one in Star Force’s military was even remotely lazy, given that most of them were over 100 years old and had achieved self-sufficiency long ago.

  “I’ll be in the nexus,” Sara said, all but jumping out of her chair and jogging across the large bridge to the open door annex that held the Archon-only control chamber. She walked up to the control podium and activated the encircling holographic display, pulling up the telemetry from one of the corvettes and watching from its perspective as its twin was running slightly ahead of it and to the right.

  Three closely spaced contacts, highlighted by ID tags, were crossing from left to right ahead of them, and the corvettes turned slightly as they continued to accelerate, causing the enemy ships to move back left again, before proceeding to creep to the right towards the planet’s atmosphere.

  A line suddenly was drawn, emanating from her corvette, marking the line of a lachar being fired. The camera display that the holograms were being created from didn’t see it, given that there was no glowing trail to see, which was why the computer tagged the long range weaponsfire…and the impact on the leading ship.

  “Good shot,” she said, putting it down to luck until several more blasts were fired, all missing with one additional hit, suggesting that it was more than luck. Sara hadn’t expected anyone to be able to hit from this range, not that it was doing much good. The heavy lachar blasts would penetrate most of the lizard shields, but unless the pilot got really lucky, it wasn’t going to do much more than chew up a little armor. They’d have to get considerably closer to be able to target key hull structures.

  As if in response to the attack, the three contacts spread out a bit as they accelerated again, causing Sara to frown. They were already moving at crazy speed for being this close to the atmosphere, but now they were just being reckless. Shields or no shields, come in too fast and they’d burn up in the friction.

  The trailblazer typed in a quick set of orders to her two ships to not try and match their speed, just keep in close. Due to the corvettes’ smaller size they’d be able to decelerate faster, but even they were approaching dangerous speeds.

  A few moments later the lizards finally decelerated…hard. Sara was happy to see the corvettes match their maneuver while cutting the distance between them to a fourth of what it had been. Both ships opened up with their lachars, poking small holes into the ships but too far away for plasma fire. As they fought to get within range to use their more powerful weapons the lizards began to enter the atmosphere, creating huge plumes of disruption as they tore into the gas layers as if they were liquid, given the speed they were still carrying.

  The shields on the corvettes elongated into spikes, helping to decrease their friction, but Sara could see their power levels begin to continuously drain as they fought to stay close to the lizards. The enemy’s shields must have been likewise deplenishing, meaning if/when they caught up to them they’d be able to break through with only a few shots…but the same would be true for the lizards’ weapons.

  No intercept
was to occur, though, because the lizards kept up their insane speed, forcing the corvettes to lag behind. Should their shields fail, the friction of the atmosphere against their block-like hulls would knock them askew and tear them apart. Either the lizards knew this or they were taking a gamble, because all three ships managed to escape their pursuit and get to the lower atmosphere ahead of the Star Force warships.

  They weren’t free and clear yet, Sara knew, because they had to get into the water first, and the corvettes were still coming. As she watched the fiery disruption clouding the camera view, and likewise disrupting any potential lachar fire, clear she could see blue ocean below…along with three orange blips. With a touch to the controls she zoomed in the view and saw all three lizard starships heading down to the surface, their hulls aglow from friction damage and the kirbies on the escort cruiser having been torn off in the descent.

  The glow died out quickly, and soon the ships stopped their fall just above the water…then they lowered themselves into the ocean, throwing up pillars of steam as their hulls superheated the water. The two transports began to lower down into the ocean, halfway submerging before blue plasma blasts from the corvettes hit their hulls and the water around them, trying to do what damage they could before they sunk beneath the waves.

  Sara saw several hull breaches pop up, in addition to the friction damage already done…then the transports were gone, covered by a protective layer of water as they gained more and more depth. The escort cruiser, however, wasn’t submerging, but rather releasing other, smaller aquatics ships from its cargo holds while its upper surface shielded them.

  Plasma blasts ripped into its topside, blowing out chunks of armor but the cruiser held position, returning fire with about half its plasma cannons, for the rest had been damaged during the descent. There was a brief exchange as the corvettes came in closer, then both opened up with their single mauler cannons, adding a baseball bat to the plasma bee stings.

  The maulers were more than the cruiser could take, and it reluctantly lowered itself down into the water, with the waves flowing over and into the damaged areas of the hull and flooding several internal sections until they got them locked down, killing a number of the crew in the process.