Star Force: Mastermind (SF32) Read online

  One of the Star Force battle stations was rubble, along with over 4,000 people inside. He hadn’t completely abandoned the idea of there being some survivors remaining somewhere in the pieces, and he had the Excalibur’s Captain working on organizing the search and rescue operation, but the fighting wasn’t over and he was focused on taking out as many of the damn enemy ships as he could while he had the opportunity.

  He alternated between sending out orders to individual ships and fleet commanders, including other trailblazers, getting their widely spaced battlefield realigned to pounce on isolated pockets of lizard ships that had succeeded in engaging Star Force and pushing hard to take out the battle station currently under construction, going so far as to land a few long distance plasma shots on the weak defense shield it carried.

  But it had all been a ploy…or maybe not, and the enemy commander had simply improvised. Either way Paul had failed and let a kamikaze ship through their lines.

  ‘Thrawn’ was certainly living up to the moniker Paul had given it/them, and the trailblazer was burning with a mix of rage and embarrassment at getting owned in his specialty. He wasn’t going to compound his error by letting the lizard ships within range get free, so he channeled all his rage into his mental calculations and reset his naval chess board into hunter mode, ganging up on several select groups while maintaining defensive pickets around the jumpline between the planet and the battle station cluster so the lizards couldn’t pull the same trick twice.

  Using momentum and ramming a ship into another as a kinetic weapon was a tactic Paul had invented for Star Force way back during his basic training, and he’d been adamant about arraying defenses to protect against someone else doing the same thing to them. That was one reason Star Force maintained a large number of smaller capital ships rather than just building all cruisers and up.

  The smaller, faster ships would be deployed out from a battle station or command ship at considerable range, enabling possible intercepts of any incoming craft on a high speed collision course. They needed the faster speed to increase the odds of catching the incoming kamikazes, or at least to match them. Paul knew the quicker the ships he had and the greater the range he could deploy them gave him the ability to intercept and nudge the enemy off course, which was why the block-like construction of the drone warships was heavily reinforced with a superstructure capable of pushing other ships without completely deforming themselves on contact.

  Then, as a last resort, he could have one of his picket ships kamikaze ram the kamikaze in order to knock it off course so that it would miss the target. He wished that Star Force had shields capable of holding off an impact of that size, but that was far beyond them. In fact, Earth’s defense plan had a number of specially designed kamikaze ships lying in wait for if/when the V’kit’no’sat came back. Paul knew that momentum was the strongest weapon they had, and given the huge size of the their ships it was probably the only chance he had of destroying one, because even as navigational calculations became more and more precise the farther out you made your run, you could always add more speed, and therefore more destructive power if your approach wasn’t challenged.

  Paul had defended the battle stations against such an assault, with numerous pickets in position to deploy to intercept any lizard ship that took up an approach that even smelled like a kamikaze trajectory. That picket line was always subject to the number of ships he had to work with, but during this battle the enemy hadn’t appeared to be attempting such an attack, even given their penchant for suicide missions.

  During the long, drawn out battle that had several ‘engagements’ within the sequence of events, a small group of cruisers broke off and made a run for the planet. Paul sent a few waiting ships in extreme low orbit after them, hoping to knock out at least one before they got into the atmosphere, assuming they were going to reinforce their aquatics forces with additional weapons/troops/materiel.

  During the run down to the atmosphere one of the ships broke off on a spur, looking as if it was heading to an alternative surface site, but it decelerated hard prior to entering the atmosphere and above the intercept Paul’s ships were angling for.

  That one ship positioned itself square on a jumpline from the planet that led straight into one of their battle stations. Paul had recognized the threat moments after it stalled out its descent, but his ships were too far away to do anything about it. In agony, he watched as the stationary cruiser rapidly accelerated up away from the planet on its gravity drives, stretching out its acceleration curve into a streak of motion as it made a kamikaze jump straight into the battle station.

  At the speed it connected the cruiser punched straight through the shields and armored hull, passing into and through the station with the debris pushing out the far side like a shot gun. Fortunately the other two and a half stations hadn’t been caught up in the spray, though Sara’s warship did take a few shield strikes from baseball sized ‘dust’ much farther up in orbit.

  No one else had seen the attack coming, but Paul didn’t excuse himself for making the mistake of letting the lizards pull it off. They’d never used this tactic before, to his knowledge, but that didn’t mean Paul wasn’t aware of it, because he had planned to use it against enemies in the future if the situation merited it.

  He should have had ships guarding that jumpline, though in truth a ship could have used the star or any other gravity wells in the system to make similar kamikaze runs, but the planet offered the closest and strongest push off for an attack, and Paul was furious at not having seen that coming in time to stop it.

  He didn’t let that anger blind him, and had the Star Force fleet picking off capital ships in the double digits as the lizard forces disengaged piecemeal now that their primary objective had been met. What galled him even more was the sloppy retreat they were making that was giving him the opportunity to thin their numbers. An enemy that could pull of a kamikaze strike like that should have been competent enough to make a coordinated retreat…which showed that despite their tactical brilliance they weren’t that significant of a naval power.

  Which meant Paul had got owned by a group of losers. That and the deaths of so many Star Force personnel were really eating under his skin. He hated losing, but he couldn’t stand other people dying because of a mistake he’d made.

  At the same time his calculating mind knew he had to cut himself some slack. Without some means of energy-based deflection, such as a tractor beam to push a kamikaze off course before it hit, there was no way he could put up a perfect defense. He’d simmed against himself so many times in that regard, and no matter how skilled a defensive net he laid, he was always able to find a way to penetrate it when he took on the role of attacker.

  So in essence his current defense against kamikaze ships was half real, half bluff…and required him to predict the enemy’s movements in order to forestall an attack being launched, because once it was, especially in this case when the transit occurred inside of 2 seconds, Star Force had no way of stopping it.

  Paul worked the Ikrid interface skillfully, his anger enhancing his focus rather than distracting from it, and his fleets racked up 17 additional capital ship kills, including 2 battleships that got left behind by their faster escorts during the retreat. Ship for ship, the sum total of the engagement had their kill count at 132 and the lizards’ at 54, though that was skewed given the fact that the lizard ships outmassed the Star Force ones, leaving the adjusted kill ratio at about 4/1.

  A victory, that would have been, except for the loss of the battle station. Include it in the mix and, equipment wise, it amounted to a draw…but Star Force naval strategy, of which Paul had written most of, was centered around preserving crews while expending equipment. Only the largest ships had personnel onboard, and they weren’t used in the direct fighting.

  The battle stations were heavily armored due to the fact that they couldn’t redeploy away from the enemy, meaning that the lizards would have to expend firepower on the shields to get them down, th
en slowly chew through the armor to get at the interior that held the crew, most of which would redeploy to the center levels during battle for additional protection.

  The kamikaze cruiser had blown right through those defensive precautions in a fraction of a second, making today not only a defeat, but a total rout. Never before had Paul lost a battle this badly, and while it wasn’t going to negatively affect his ability to command, it immediately set his mind on a review process of every tactic and protocol he’d come to rely on.

  Paul’s subconscious wouldn’t let him do any less, because he couldn’t accept the deaths of the battle station crew as ‘acceptable.’ Losing personnel was never acceptable, but above all else Paul abhorred the idea of the 1 shot kill, for it meant that those who prepared, who trained, who grew stronger than the rest could be killed as easily as a newb…and his gut told him that was just plain wrong.

  Which meant his defenses were at fault. He’d failed those personnel who’d been aboard that station. They hadn’t gone down fighting, been overwhelmed by a superior opponent…they’d been blindsided and that had been his fault.

  And he couldn’t let it happen again, no matter what the logistics of their available defensive technology were.

  7

  September 16, 2429

  Retari System

  Atlantica

  Kyler hadn’t slept since the infantry battle began, nor had any of the other Archons in the tunnels, and he was beginning to feel the effects of both fatigue and lack of ambrosia in his system, but there was no way to resupply given the fact that he was literally surrounded by thousands of lizards, and even if he’d had an arrowhead bring out a satchel of supplies from the main building via the shipyard entrance, there was no way he was getting over there given the infested nature of the tunnels.

  He had a slight headache buzzing, but fortunately the power cell in his armor hadn’t given out, and he was relying on his four suit jets for most of his movement through the warehouse he was hunting in at the moment.

  Or being hunted. Which was occurring was a bit of perspective, given that the lizards knew his approximate location and the fact that he was isolated. They were diverting troops to hunt him down, given that he’d been raiding their strongholds in the captured buildings. The infantry that were still coming in from ships dumping more of them outside the fence perimeter were carrying more than det packs. The Archons still patrolling around the most popular entry points in the substructure had stopped many of them and done a quick assessment of what they were carrying.

  Which was everything…everything they needed to set up for a long siege.

  Foodstuffs, comm equipment, portable structures broken down into very small pieces, shield gauntlets, bundles of plasma rods, and a bunch of other useful stuff for a long campaign. Leave it to the lizards to show you where you were weak, because they were setting up shop inside Star Force’s own infrastructure because they hadn’t put up enough damn anti-infantry defenses. He hadn’t conceived of that being a problem, given that they could intercept any troop ships well out from the city…nor had, even in his wildest dreams, he considered them deploying this many into open water.

  They were killing so many of them it was literally a slaughter, but they’d sent so many in, and were continuing to send more, that they were overwhelming the defenders with targets. Too many targets to get to before they got past them.

  There had been some brief discussion about building a solid wall around the city, but the amount of resources expended on the fence hadn’t been something they’d conceived of lightly. Given the small net it was constructed of the amount of metal they’d had to mine to construct it was enough to build several more cities, but Kyler and the others had deemed it essential to establish not just infrastructure, but strongholds that would seriously hinder any lizard assault attempts.

  And it was doing just that. Their larger ships couldn’t get through the net and their smallest ones were toast if they tried. The inverted ‘V’ design made it impossible to topple the fence, and cutting out pieces of it for them to get through took time and made a choke point that they’d have to pass through, and given that there already was a huge opening ‘gate’ set in the design, the lizards cutting their own didn’t make a lot of sense, but if they decided to press that angle the guardian fleets could respond before they could get much accomplished.

  Add in the defense towers outside the fence and you had a significant deterrent against large scale assaults. The only reason the towers had gone down was because the lizards were hitting them with an insane scale assault, but even then the fence was doing its job and keeping their ships back…and the battleships were whittling them down, taking turns hoping over the porous barrier and roughing up the fleets outside before jumping back in to recharge shields all the while daring the lizards to make a more frontal assault that they couldn’t do with the fence constricting their approach options.

  So even with their towers busted up outside, the city was more or less safe, not counting the turret island devastation, and then the damn lizards had to go and show Kyler that his carefully designed defenses had a weakness he hadn’t considered…nor had anyone else, including Ariel, meaning this mustn’t have been in their enemy’s playbook until recently. Hell, Star Force had probably prompted them to invent it. Nice how they were always teaching each other new things.

  And now it was his turn, in which he intended to school them in the art of not pissing off a sleepless Archon in close quarters.

  The warehouse wasn’t an area the lizards had set up shop in, which made it an empty zone for them to throw down in, save for the dozens of dead lizards cluttering the water. Given the pressure it was under the lizard bodies more or less floated neutrally, while their slightly more dense weapons sank. Those he was collecting and putting to good use, and though the suspended bodies were a bit hard to differentiate from the living, those he was also putting to use as barricades as he swam about, ducking in and out of the corpses and crates as he wove his way from the floor to the ceiling that still had a few meters of air trapped and compressed there.

  Breathing it was a no go, not that he really had time to try. His armor provided him with all the air he needed, and he was breathing heavy as he fought the dense water, leveraging his arms and legs in conjunction with the jets to maneuver around like a predator hunting the scores of lizards also hunting him. Taking them down was easy one on one, but he’d been having to do it for so long that his fatigue was making his slip up every now and then.

  Fortunately the lizards’ weapons were point of touch only in the water, meaning they had to get up close and personal rather than pound on him in groups from afar. Given he was using their weapons, since his needler ammunition had long since expired in what felt like a lifetime ago, he had to close with them as well to fight, with the key being choosing the moments of contact and not letting the lizards gang up on him.

  That wasn’t the only reason he needed to keep moving about, because he knew that if he got stationary his fatigue would start to assert itself and he’d get sleepy. Without ambrosia to cut into his fatigue he needed his adrenaline at least seeping through, so he had to stay active and the best way to do that was by fighting the enemy…which was fortunate, given they kept coming for him and didn’t seem to feel like taking a breather.

  Kyler jabbed, parried, kicked, and punched his way through more and more lizards, reserving his nearly depleted psionics for select cases of need, until there were too many bodies floating about and he was forced to fight his way into an adjacent hallway. From there he jetted down a long, straight length until he came to another appropriately sized room, knowing from experience that he didn’t want to get cornered in a small one again.

  They’d previously pinned him in one and tried to run a det pack in to finish him off, with him barely distracting the lizard from pulling the trigger. Had he not had Fornax he’d been facing an explosion a meter in front of his face, and even with the water dampening the blast a bit hi
s armor would have at least cracked, and the concussion would have left him unconscious even if he’d been lucky enough to avoid getting any shrapnel in his body.

  So Kyler kept moving after that, from one large area to another with little chance of rest. The lizards had his position and were coordinating to keep him under pressure, unlike the previous day when he’d been more or less free to roam about. The other Archons, when he had the chance to look at his battlemap, had at least paired up, but they were also under assault, being hunted throughout the tunnels and buildings, though a couple had managed to secure safe zones from which to counterattack from.

  Kyler, as he’d hoped, was drawing the most attention, given the amount of infantry he was killing, but he was beginning to hit his limit…and he knew from encountering this level of fatigue in training that his abilities were going to stretch out rather than black out. His speed would slow, his thought processes would fog up, and though he’d still be fighting he wouldn’t realize how debilitated he was becoming until an appropriately sized challenge came up and bit him in the ass.

  Only this wasn’t a challenge, it was live combat. And the ass biting in this case would be lethal.

  That left him two choices…retreat and rest, or go hyper and keep his energy flowing so much that it would fight off the blowback. That was risky, like continually stretching a rubber band…eventually it would snap back on him, but he had no choice. He had to live in the moment and ignore the biological warning signs telling him he had little left to fight with. Those signs had been wrong in the past and he was gambling that he had more in him than he knew…and this was one of those rare times when you got the chance to find out.

  “Kyler, how you holding up?” Vander’s voice popped into the trailblazer’s helmet.

  “Still alive. You?”