Star Force: Rescue (SF71) Page 7

  The jumpships stayed in formation as the drones shot off towards the lizard fleet and Greg let them go, mentally keeping aware of what was happening but letting the striker in command of that group handle the chase. Meanwhile the Veliquesh fleet was stirring, seeing more and more of the huge Star Force warships jumping into orbit. Did they know of what had happened in the other Veliquesh System? He would have thought so after 5 years, but there was no way to know for sure other than to ask.

  Greg activated the comm and accessed the language translation system and linked it to the Veliquesh package that would ensure that their computer systems could understand the transmission. They’d spent the past half-decade preparing for this invasion and finally had all the pieces in place. Now it was time to put it to use and the opening move was Greg’s to make.

  “Attention Veliquesh. I am Greg-073 in command of this Star Force warfleet. The lizard threat to you is now over. We are here to secure this system permanently, but I need you to stand down your forces and surrender to us. We are here not only to save you from the lizards but to save you from yourselves. Your civilization has gone to the darkside and it must be cleansed. There is no need for anyone to die if you’re willing to cooperate, and even if you do not we still won’t kill you. We will be taking you prisoner whether you like it or not, and we’ve brought enough firepower to break through whatever defenses you have.”

  “We know you have a prophesy that has told of our arrival. We come from a region of space known as the ADZ and have 7 of your people there teaching us of your ways. We also have your purple-skinned kin there, which you will be reunited with once you are fit to do so. The barbarism of the Veliquesh must end, and it will end here and now, one way or another. I do not expect you to surrender, but I am offering it none the less. You have one hour to respond, after which time we’ll begin taking your planet from you the hard way. If after that point you change your minds you will always have the option of surrender, all you need to do is say so. We’re here to save you, after all, but seeing as how you’re currently a bunch of crazy ass holes I don’t expect much sanity from you.”

  “So, you have 1 hour. Reply on this frequency if you want to chat. Meanwhile we’ll be destroying or chasing off the lizards. If you’re very confused right now that’s ok. You’ll learn. We’re the good guys and this is how we roll. Your purple-skinned kin understand and respect this, and are valued allies. You will be too, one day. That day can be today if you choose. If not…get ready for a beatdown. We haven’t come all this way to bluff, and there are a lot of lizards closer to home for us to kill. This system now belongs to Star Force. You have 1 hour to come to grips with that. You may respond earlier than that if you wish.”

  Greg cut the transmission then keyed in a recorded message from the Protovic Chancellor. Kip had asked him to make it in the hopes that they would identify Star Force with their kin and maybe some of them wouldn’t fight back. Greg didn’t know if the odds on that were very good or not, but even if one person chose to surrender it was worth the minor effort. The message would run about 7 minutes and give them some history and context on the Protovic, as well as outlining the reasons why the Veliquesh civilization could not be reunited with them in its current state.

  Greg had heard it before so he didn’t bother to listen to it, rather sending out deployment orders and scattering his jumpships to multiple orbital coordinates to set up for the coming assaults on the Veliquesh battle stations. The Archons weren’t going to assault them one or two at a time, but rather hitting all of them simultaneously. That would cause chaos with their defense fleet as to which position to reinforce as well as making it abundantly clear that the Veliquesh were outmatched.

  As Greg’s ships dispersed so did Rafa’s fleet, with the other three still coming in through the jumppoint and making it even more intimidating to those on the planet before them. There was a chance that they’d see the force involved and come to take it as a fulfilment of their prophecy given the fact that they were going to kick the lizards out of the system. To that end Greg keyed in a relay that would send some of their battlemap data to the Veliquesh so they could see the engagements with the lizards as they progressed. This whole affair needed to be as open and truthful as possible, but deep down Greg knew that these people literally were insane. There might have been a few reasonable ones that were able to slip through their purging cracks, but the restoration of their race was going to come from the next generation. These, after they captured them, were pretty much going to be babysat and contained unless they could bring themselves to reject everything they’d lived by up until now.

  The odds of that weren’t good, but with a total population of around 3 trillion there might be some in that mix…and if they’d made it this far without going fully to the darkside then they deserved a chance to climb into the light.

  Which was why the assaults on the battle stations were not going to be destructive affairs. They were going to have to disable them and then board the technological monstrosities. They were built more out of raw material than anything, forcing the lizard plasma weapons to peel away layer after layer of armor and superstructure to take them out, and even with their new phaser weapons they would still take quite a pounding before they went down…which no doubt was why they’d survived so long in this never ending war.

  His bridge crew would be monitoring all frequencies just in case the Veliquesh responded, so Greg didn’t worry about it and focused on arranging his fleet for the coming assault as he noticed a few lizard cruiser kills reported back from elsewhere in the system where his ships were hunting them down. They were doing so remotely, and even with the signal lag they had still been able to ambush a few after they’d made their emergency jump away from the planet and had not yet aligned for their next jump.

  Star Force ships were faster, so the lizards had to run and keep running to have any chance to get away. If they delayed for any reason they were dead, and his troops were too good at this to let the opportunity slip away, so when he received a request for one of the jumpships to peel off and follow the drones to reduce the signal lag he gave permission for it to break ranks and head out to a different location where they expected some of the lizards to run to next prior to trying to get back to the star. Without a jumpship they wouldn’t be able to leave the system aside from a very slow jump to a nearby star system, and their jumpships hadn’t been able to load up prior to the Star Force fleet spooking them when they arrived.

  They were probably trying to play ping pong with the system’s gravity wells to find a rendezvous point to collect the cruisers and then try to make a run for the star, meaning the warship that he’d just let go after them was going to have a challenge on its hands. Greg didn’t expect they’d get them all, space was just too big for that, but Star Force had gotten good at running down and disabling ships, though in this case they’d have to be destroyed rather than captured.

  He hoped the same thing wouldn’t be necessary with the Veliquesh fleet. While they could board the battle station and take them over from within, a starship was another matter entirely. There were too many to snag first off, and those they couldn’t get an IDF gel packet on could run or, in a probable scenario given their sacrificial society, go lizard and ram the drones. If that happened they wouldn’t be able to capture all of the Veliquesh as was their goal, but there were only so many opportunities they could give these bastards to live. If they were truly determined to die fighting, some would probably find a way to do so.

  Yanaris stood in his battle armor alongside four other security guards onboard one of the Veliquesh’s orbital battle stations. One of the Li’vorkrachnika’s best tactics in taking them down was to blast a hole in the hull then send suicide squads into the interior and try to disable them from within. Yanaris and the others were here to prevent that from happening, but it was not the Li’vorkrachnika that were attacking. Another unknown adversary had arrived and was overrunning the orbital defenses, but beyond that Yanaris did n
ot have any knowledge of what was going on, nor did the others with him.

  They knew they had a duty, but the breach point had already been lost. Right now he was standing with the others behind a closed door heavy enough to stand up against considerable firepower. It was blocking the most critical section of the station from the attackers and Yanaris was here to insure that they did not make it through. Any cuts would have to be made into the material of the door itself, for it would not open no matter how much trickery you allowed. It was a big, fat wall and would have to be dealt with as such, and any holes cut into it would allow his team to shoot back before the attackers could come through, making it very costly to them and perhaps enough to stop them entirely.

  Yanaris’s armor didn’t cover his entire body. It exposed his hands and face, but had an otherwise full ornamental helmet that came up to the underside of his chin and was designed to be flexible yet resilient. He could turn his head as much as he liked and it wouldn’t interfere, giving him the situational awareness necessary in battle that a full helmet would have hindered. Around his left arm was coiled his weapon, a Shas’tik cannon that he would use to shoot through the cutting holes if they manifested, though he knew that if they got to his position the rest of the battle station was essentially lost. He and the four with him were the last defenders protecting the critical systems and operational crew and they would do their duty no matter what the outcome.

  Even if they died there was a chance that others would come to the aid of the station, so he planned to do everything he could to stop or slow the attackers, even though he had no idea what they were capable of. During the time of waiting he cycled through a light, standing prayer pose mentally uttering a venatra when a bright blue light poked through the door. It shook him enough that he jerked his arm up and took aim automatically, as did the others, but the brilliant dot didn’t expand. It barely moved at all, tracing upwards ever so slightly.

  Yanaris held his aim, but as the minutes ticked by the snake-like weapon began to bob and his head began twitchy. The waiting was unbearable as a tiny line was made forming a half circle, giving him nothing to shook back against. There were no explosives going off, no plasma holes being chewed out, just thin, tiny, precise dot of light ever so slowly cutting a path around a section of the door.

  When the Veliquesh beside him fired his weapon Yanaris did likewise in reflex, with a dozen or more yellow energy beams sizzling against the inside of the door and barely scratching the surface. Yanaris glared at the other trooper, angry at himself for the breach in protocol, but there was no time for recriminations. He held his aim again, steady as he could manage with the others doing likewise as they waited, and waited.

  When that bright blue dot finally finished its circle it went out, then the attackers began to pull the circular plug towards them, at which point Yanaris and the others stepped backward and took up positions alongside either wall in the short hallway that led to a not so reinforced door behind which were the personnel responsible for maintaining the critical systems.

  Yanaris took a knee in front of one of the others, letting him have a clear firing line over his head while using his own body to block the lower half of his while keeping the center of the hallway clear for hopefully some of the attackers’ weaponsfire to miss through…but when the plug of the now useless door was rolled clear there was no one to see on the other side.

  The Veliquesh held their ground and waited for a few seconds, then Yanaris realized he had frozen up from panic, unable to do anything more than stand still and breathe. He cursed himself but was unable to do anything about it, even his eyes wouldn’t turn, but they were still open and blinking though he couldn’t move a single muscle of his own accord. Somehow his fear had turned him into a living statue.

  Then a figure appeared in front of that hole and ducked down to step through, with Yanaris trying to pull the trigger on his weapon but unable to. He expected the others to fire but when the black-armored attacker walked through casually and sustained no hits Yanaris didn’t understand why the others didn’t shoot him. He couldn’t turn his head to see what they were doing, but he could see the attacker draw a weapon from behind his back and fire a pink burst of energy to Yanaris’s left, followed by two more shots as the rage and confusion swelled inside of him a moment before the attacker took aim at him and the Veliquesh was hit and fuzz filled his head a split second before he blacked out.

  The striker shot all five Veliquesh with his stun pistol, then free of the effort to freeze their minds he extended his psionics beyond the next door and felt a group of personnel taking refuge there, maybe 20 or so within his range. He used his Pefbar to examine the door, finding it was a simple latch, then he telepathically told two of the commandos outside to come in behind him.

  As soon as their dirty white armor stepped through the hole he ran forward and kicked the door open, throwing a Fornax blast ahead of him that took all of the Veliquesh down to the ground for a moment, but that was all he needed to come through and begin firing stun blasts on their fallen bodies, with the commandos fanning out to either side in the room and doing likewise.

  The striker ran forward, scanning more of the room and the surrounding hallway connections and finding a single individual behind a locked door. He stopped and focused hard on that one, hacking into his mind and rendering him unconscious directly. Tagging that door on the battlemap with a retrieve icon he moved on further into the station’s interior as an army of armored Kiritas followed them up and began collecting the prisoners, binding them up and administering patches to their exposed heads that would keep them unconscious until they wanted them otherwise.

  Once their prizes were wrapped appropriately in a tiny anti-grav harness they were floated a half meter off the ground and dragged back out through the cut doors in the massive station one or two at a time as the Kiritas took them to the captured hangar and handed them over to the dropships. Once full they’d make a trip over to the cargo jumpships waiting nearby in orbit, unload, then come back again to pick up more in a cycle that would continue round the clock for most days in the years to come.

  8

  December 11, 2831

  Ghav System (Veliquesh territory)

  Umbralsht

  Jason ran hard to keep pace with the mech star as it approached the Veliquesh army guarding a reclusive facility on the third southern continent’s expansive barren plains. There wasn’t so much as a blade of grass amongst the dirt and gravel his golden boots were racing across, but at the same time there wasn’t a lick of elevation change either, making for a very flat battlefield that had a pair of orbital defense clusters that were likewise keeping aircraft at bay. The facility covered less than 2 square miles but it had several hundred thousand Veliquesh troops guarding it, including what looked to be at least 200 tanks based on what had come outside and into view of orbital scan thus far.

  Jason had several options for dealing with the facility but had elected for a brute force, simplistic approach. Rather than send a group of highly skilled infantry to take the Veliquesh on in a widespread brawl he had tagged 5 mechs to accompany him in and subdue the defenders for a cleanup team to collect and remove. That put a lot of emphasis on those five mechs, but the Veliquesh tanks didn’t have enough firepower to seriously threaten them unless they could focus their firepower on a single target and pound it for a few minutes.

  That wasn’t going to happen, for this star of mechwarriors had fought together enough times to be able to feel where each other were and come to their aid even without use of the battlemap. All were Archons and were using a watered down imitation of battlemeld in that they kept an Ikrid link between each other to coordinate their combat. That meant they couldn’t get too much spacing in between them, but spread them over a kilometer or so and they acted like a single mind, with one able to communicate with another with no comm delay.

  The Veliquesh would never be able to isolate one of them, leaving Jason the ‘weak’ link here. He could have c
ome in a mech himself, but they needed an infantry component and no one aside from the other 4 trailblazers could keep up with him. They were busy with other campaigns across the planet so he was handling this one solo…or rather in tandem with the mechs with him being their tiny little brother in his golden titan armor.

  He was using the powered enhancements to augment his running in order to keep pace when the Veliquesh fired the first shots. Their tanks used the same yellow energy beams that their infantry weapons did, with thirteen hitting the first of 3 neos and being absorbed by the mech’s shields. Each beam persisted for nearly a full second, making the mech look like it was the central hub in a brilliant spider’s web of energy that began to oscillate as the Veliquesh tanks continuously repositioned, floating over the ground and moving out to engage the mechs as their infantry followed behind, intent on fighting them with their tiny personal weapons.

  That kind of stupidity had been seen throughout the invasion, for the Veliquesh had no qualms about wasting personnel. It was strange, for against the lizards they used considerable caution to preserve most of their forces, but against the drastically superior Star Force troops they were fighting almost in kamikaze fashion, as if they would rather die opposing the ‘heretics’ than run away to live and fight another day.

  Jason had used that to his advantage many times to draw the Veliquesh troops out into easy takedowns. These savages had some skill, but it was so mixed in with craziness that they were easy to manipulate even when he wasn’t inside their heads. A proper soldier went into battle without internal struggles to fight, so that the only opponents they had were exterior. These Veliquesh, like their brothers across the planet, felt they had something to prove in combat, namely that their sick religion was legit and their prophecies would fulfill themselves over the course of events no matter how differing the facts appeared at present.