Star Force: Extirpation (Star Force Universe Book 56) Page 6

  He ordered them to evacuate, then had drones come in to block the hangar bays from enemy attack as the dropships were loaded, but none were able to get free. The burrowing ships deliberately targeted the hangar bays and when they didn’t get there in time they used another disintegration attack to wipe out everything between them and the bays, resulting in such a massive explosion it ripped more decks out of the ship and sprayed so much high speed debris out that the nearest drones were destroyed in the process.

  Kurt maneuvered Fishbones around to one of those external wounds and fired a Tar’vem’jic through the gap in the armor and in to one of the enemy ships, with him able to sense their position via the numerous Essence rushes even when the internal sensors failed. The first Tar’vem’jic burned through deck after deck with ease, then hit one of the ships and seemed to stop for a moment…then the beam continued out the far side, skewering the ship and stopping it dead in its tracks.

  Kurt continued several more such attacks, shooting the Ysalamir itself in order to get at the internal parasites as they deliberately targeted the crew, soon killing every last one of them with no survivors.

  The enemy ships outside the Ysalamir were all destroyed, though most had found their way in through the burrow holes. Their sabotage of the vessel lasted more than 20 minutes, then they all just vanished from the sensors. Kurt saw them all begin to glow…but they didn’t disappear. Not to his ‘eyes’, but to sensors they were all gone.

  The Black Pearl was trashed, but a few gravity drives were still functioning so he took remote control and had the ship move off slightly, with him guessing correctly when the now very faint Essence rushes did not move other than some outward drift. They were hiding beyond the ability of physics to touch them, including the star’s gravity, and beyond the ability of both weapons and sensors to affect them. But Kurt could see them. He just couldn’t do anything about it.

  The Ysalamir was all but destroyed. The major superstructure was mostly intact, but all the vital systems had been targeted. The weapon itself was toast, and the entire crew had been destroyed along with all the command and control systems. Kurt had backups running to some of the gravity drives and a slew of isolated systems, but most of what had previously been up and running on the battlemap was gone. It was literally a ghost ship now, trailing behind a nebula of disintegrated material that was continuing to expand out in rings and spurts, marking the spot of the great ship’s death.

  And the attackers were right there, sitting beyond vengeance’s grasp, and there was no way for Kurt to shoot them. He couldn’t even touch them with his own Essence, for he didn’t know how they transitioned beyond this realm. All he could do was see the Essence rush that was probably keeping them there, like bubbles floating to the surface from something hiding underwater. If he got further away he wouldn’t even be able to pick up that much, meaning that if he left he’d lose them entirely…but if he camped on this spot, how long could they stay hidden?

  These were not Hadarak, unless the Hadarak had masters that used technological ships inferior to what Star Force had. The weaponry used that wasn’t Essence related was less than what Star Force had when the V’kit’no’sat war began, and was no match for them now. The alien ships had an absorptive hull, but he had a gut feeling that was being Essence enhanced. He couldn’t review Essence on the battlemap records, so he had to compare them to what he had sensed, and he was kicking himself for not paying more attention.

  He moved the corpse of the Ysalamir far off, around the star to the far side in fact, while he kept his warships and Fishbones out of regular weapons range. That still meant his Tar’vem’jic would work, but he didn’t want those enemy ships getting a shot at more vessels that had crews onboard as all the drones pooled around the ‘sunken’ enemy ships, waiting for them to come to the ‘surface.’

  Kurt waited for hours, then it became two full days before it finally dawned on him that one of the other ships out there shadowing them might be a scout. He remembered what little the Knights of Quenar had told them about the transport tactic was that the carrier was totally dependent on the two beacons for movement…and maybe that also meant they were blind to what was happening in the physical realm, since no particle or energy emission could transition to it.

  So they were either waiting a predetermined amount of time or they had someone waiting to tell them when they were clear to reemerge…or Kurt was just totally wrong in his assumptions.

  He transmitted a warning to all shadowing ships, telling them to leave the system immediately or they would be considered hostile, and he backed it up by dispensing warships with large enough drone escort fleets to run down and destroy any ships that remained. Some tried, but they quickly realized they could not outrun all the drones when they converged from multiple sides, so they headed towards a number of jump points that Kurt had told them to leave from.

  Those that didn’t were pursued vigorously, some of which were actually faster than Star Force ships, but that only meant catching them was a challenge, for they weren’t running away, just around the system, trying to keep eyes on what was happening.

  Kurt was fairly sure at least one of them was Zak’de’ron, despite it not returning any messages sent on their preferred frequencies. The other 8 he couldn’t be sure of, but once they got all the way out into the farthest reaches of the system he tried something.

  Mimicking the intensity of the first tiny Essence rush he’d felt, and mangling it badly, he tried to see if that signal might bring the sunken ships out…and it did, but only two of them.

  Those two were fired upon instantly and destroyed within seconds, but before the final shots fell something happened. A huge Essence rush was detected, and suddenly all the other faint images shot off rapidly in one direction and disappeared from his view.

  “Damn it,” Kurt said, tracking their trajectory and taking Fishbones along it, hoping he could reacquire the faint Essence rushes, but he never did. He couldn’t use the computer to track their exit velocity, for it couldn’t calculate what it couldn’t see.

  Those two ships had sacrificed themselves to get the others out, whether by intention or they’d just reacted quickly to Kurt’s baiting. Either way, the bulk of the attacking fleet was gone and he had no idea who they were…but there was some debris left, and several damaged but mostly intact ships remaining. He hadn’t boarded them earlier because of the unknown situation with the sunken ships, but with them gone it was now time to get some answers.

  He knew better than to send a crew onboard, or even go himself, for whoever this race was, they had Essence skills beyond his, so he sent tiny man-sized exploration/combat drones into the damaged ships and remotely observed what they found, including the last moments of several before they were destroyed by the crew or internal defenses. Most of the enemy crew were missing, but a few bodies remained to confirm this was an unknown race with crab-like biology.

  Those that were still alive fought long and hard, but they would not surrender and, Kurt guessed, when their Essence reserves got too low they had only one option remaining…that being to kill themselves along with as much of their damaged ships as they could. Kurt saw little disintegration bubbles pop up inside each ship all at once when they finally got to that point, and the resulting explosions from the molecularly unhinged material did a damn good job at destroying most of what was left…but not all. And some large ship sections remained where the crew onboard had died for other reasons.

  The shadowing ships eventually left, save for two, and neither of them could be caught. Kurt traveled out in the Fishbones to try himself, and finally succeeding in winging one enough to confirm it was a Zak’de’ron ship under heavy cloak. A none too pleasant conversation followed when it finally identified itself so it didn’t get destroyed, then once it learned of the Essence attacks and the possibility of an enemy scout in the system the tone quickly changed. The Zak’de’ron ship shot off after the other unidentified vessel along with Kurt’s ship, and they both pu
rsued it up until it had to use an Essence rush of its own to get enough speed to escape to the star and out through a standard jumppoint.

  The Zak’de’ron ship chased after it, but Kurt stayed with the debris as his fleet was still working on dissecting and analyzing the technology, a lot of which was a new version of old ideas, but some of it was unknown and rather quirky. He wanted as much information as he could get, and now, so he didn’t pack up the debris and carry it off elsewhere. Rather he stayed put, almost hoping for the enemy to return again, for he wasn’t sure how those sunken ships could have gotten out of the system and he didn’t want to prove that nothing Star Force possessed could monitor Essence rushes.

  That didn’t stop him from sending several couriers out with a warning to other ships, and by the time one of them came back he learned that this hadn’t been an isolated attack. At least one other Ysalamir had been targeted and destroyed, and Kurt guessed it was just a matter of lag time before word of the others in the field also being taken out made its way to him.

  The trailblazer didn’t know who this was, but his gut said it was ‘the others’ the Knights of Quenar had talked about, though he admitted this level of Essence use and the community of people who were capable of doing such things was beyond his knowledge. There could be ten times the number of these ‘others’ out there hiding just the same way. Some could even be allied with the Hadarak for all he knew. But whoever this was, they really didn’t like Star Force being able to kill Hadarak in an efficient way and they’d stepped in to take away their ability to do so.

  But that said, Star Force would just make more in time, so was this a delaying game or something more sinister in the making. The cat was out of the bag now, with Ysalamiri blueprints spread across secure databases throughout Star Force territory…but did this enemy know that, or…

  Ice filled Kurt’s veins when he realized that the Ysalamiri might not be the only targets, for if you wanted to eliminate a class of superweapon you didn’t just destroy the weapons, but the yards in which they were built. And if you didn’t understand how redundant Star Force was, you might mistakenly assume, if you were bold enough, that you could take out Star Force’s ability to make more with a single strike at the only system presently producing them.

  Epsilon Eridani.

  7

  February 18, 128535

  Epsilon Eridani System (Home One Kingdom)

  Corneria

  Mastertech Tennisonne was making his rounds between the various research projects when a rare alarm sounded throughout the scientific complex. Originally it had been the tone meant to indicate a V’kit’no’sat invasion, and he still remembered the shock and horror he’d felt the first time. Some of that instinctively ran through him now as he stopped in the hallway for a moment, eyebrows lowering.

  The V’kit’no’sat had a contingent here helping them with the Ysalamir Project. The odds of them invading were slim, and Tennisonne knew that since the war with the V’kit’no’sat had concluded the alarm had been repurposed as a general ‘invasion’ alarm, but did that mean the complex was being infiltrated or the planet?

  He didn’t have a comm device on him, for he preferred that people had to chase him down with the important tasks and his roaming kept him somewhat isolated from the next to meaningless complaints, so he had to jog for several minutes before getting to a comm terminal where he could get news updates.

  When he did a hologram of the entire system popped up with warning markings and his jaw dropped. There were unidentified fleets all over the system. They hadn’t come through the primary jumplines, and it looked like they’d avoided low stellar orbit defenses entirely. His frown deepened as he saw their entry points and the video of them arriving. Their geography was all wrong, with most of them not even being on a jumpline within 250 lightyears of here. And they didn’t decelerate. Rather they just popped into existence, entire fleets arrayed in overlapping fashion and in close proximity.

  Tennisonne knew that would be next to impossible during an interstellar jump, but they were here and attacking multiple shipyards…with him seeing immediately that they were going after the Ysalamiri under production. Yet they were inferior ships, medium sized at best, using antiquated weaponry by Star Force’s standards…along with several weapons that he couldn’t positively identify, but they were eerily similar to what the battle records of the Lurker detailed.

  And more were coming. He could see another fleet just pop into existence further out into the system, then immediately break apart and head out on dozens of different vectors. It was different from some of the others, and Tennisonne suddenly realized these weren’t different ship varieties of the same fleet, but different races altogether.

  And Star Force was having none of it. The bulk of the fleet situated around the most likely jumppoint exits was racing further out in the system as the planetary defense fleets were engaging the attacks with a ferocity that made the Mastertech proud. The majority of them were Human ships, but there were several Knight races also stationed here and the Raptors were going berserk, spreading out and hunting down the invading ships individually…and with a little playback Tennisonne was able to figure out why.

  One of the fleets had popped into existence nearby a Raptor fleet and exploded a third of the Star Force vessels immediately. No weaponsfire was visible, they just exploded into atomized shrapnel that created nebula with each detonation. Rather than retreating, the Raptors were heading into the fleet and tearing them to shreds once they found out that the enemy’s defenses sucked. Their shields were low rated, their visible weaponry was as well, and their hull armor was not even what Star Force used for commercial shipping, but a few of the enemy vessels were able to turn back the Raptor fire as if it didn’t even exist. Those that didn’t the S-shaped Raptor ships were tearing apart in a frenzy even as the attackers tried to slip past the drones and get at the control ships.

  Some of them were destroyed by the trackless weapons, but that seemed to only infuriate the Raptors more, and the same was true of the rest of the Star Force fleets. They were not backing down, and Tennisonne suspected he knew why. Had this been a battle in null space, Star Force would have backed away and played for time, or tried to engage with their long range weapons in a poking war, but here they were defending fixed positions. Numerous stations, shipyards, and large transports hauling material from site to site. If the fleet backed off all of them would get hit, so the fleet was uncharacteristically going all in and the carnage was far greater than any Tennisonne had ever seen.

  This wasn’t like the war against the V’kit’no’sat where Star Force was at a disadvantage. The Star Force ships were superior and destroying so many of the enemy he didn’t understand who these people were or why they were attacking this stupidly, but they were doing damage, and it wasn’t until a small group of ships raced through the battle and got within close range of one of the shipyards did he realize what was truly going on.

  Tennisonne wondered briefly if he should go somewhere else, but defense of this compound was not his responsibility and there was nothing he could do to help, so he stayed put and watched as those few ships were hit by the perimeter defenses on the shipyard itself. The construct didn’t look like it could defend itself to the casual eye, but the shields were up and numerous weapons batteries were popping out of concealed niches and opening fire with a combination of beam weaponry and Star Force’s rarely used missiles.

  The tiny projectiles were self-guiding and did huge damage when they got through the counter fire, but they weren’t efficient enough to be carried by the warships because they took up too much space. Here though, when you needed the most bang you could get immediately, they worked wonders, but before all the ships were destroyed another fleet suddenly popped into existence right behind the surviving ships with one very large vessel with them.

  It was shaped as an 8 sided star with the upper and lower points extended. It also had smaller protrusions off the front and back, but the silhouett
e was clear on the 72 mile long mass, tip to tip. And when the shipyard’s defenses fired on it, nothing happened. The beams just disappeared into some type of shield that the sensors couldn’t pick up as the points on the starburst began to glow blue/green and slowly stretch out towards the center mass. It didn’t happen quickly, and the escort ships engaged the Star Force fleet as it doubled back to cover the shipyard, but they were too late.

  Some kind of discharge was emitted from the almost totally glowing ‘starburst,’ then a massive beam shot out and hit the station, going right through the shields and soaking into the structure. It didn’t do any damage at first, but a quick toggle of the battlemap by Tennisonne brought up a wide swath of diagnostics from that station and he could see some of the anomalies just before the impact site began to fall apart like ash from a burned log.

  That effect began to travel throughout the shipyard slowly, like a contagion spreading, and before it was even a tenth of the way finished the giant ship disappeared along with most of its escorts, leaving behind only a few small ships that were quickly destroyed…but there was nothing that could be done to help the shipyard. The people onboard it, all 72,391 of them, were collapsing in the hallways and turning to the same type of black ash slightly before the corridors they were in did. Tennisonne watched as the entire shipyard disintegrated along with the partially built ships within it, turning the entire area into a flood of particles that mushroomed out as there wasn’t enough space to hold them all.

  And it didn’t stop there. Throughout the battlefield, when the fleets were engaged with other fighting, multiple starbursts would pop into existence by their targets, and always with a few lead ships getting there first to act as some sort of beacon. Tennisonne didn’t know the mechanics of how Essence worked, but just watching the battle made this part clear and the Star Force fleets immediately began going after any stray ships. The Mastertech thought that was going to work, but more fleets began popping in at a distance with no lead ships to summon them, and added more firepower to the battles that saw Star Force losing a fair amount of drones, but rather than being defeated the defending ships were overwhelmed with targets heading in multiple directions.