Star Force: Paradigm (SF35) Read online

  Kara pushed on, getting away from all but two of them who managed to catch a bit of a sensor image and redirect her way with the others turning to follow, lagging far behind. With the mountains just ahead of her Kara kept low and headed for the first jut of terrain popping up from the flat terrain and swung around it, blocking her from their sensors.

  Then she began swerving, hopping, and mimicking the ups and downs of the increasingly rough terrain, tricking the fighters into going the wrong direction, only to reacquire her sensor silhouette again. After several minutes of cat and mouse they lost her altogether and she was able to fly deep into the mountains while they pulled up to higher altitude in search mode, now too far away to pick her up while she was sensor dampened.

  Kara flew well away from them, curving to the south while they held a westerly vector, then she gently slowed to a stop and ducked down through the yellow forest canopy as the sun was beginning to rise. The branches and leaves scraped against her armor, now that the shields were down, but they didn’t scratch the black material. Like a rock sinking through water, the forest seemed to part for her as she dropped down to the dark interior, with her armor scales returning to their normal red after she confirmed that there were no lizard foot patrols nearby…or giant wildlife.

  Kara retracted her armor from her head, pulling in a fresh breath of forest air and almost choking on the moisture. She hadn’t seen it from above, but now that she was down on the ground she realized she was standing in a cloud that had formed below the treetops, covering the area in a thick mist.

  She could see just fine with her Pefbar, and otherwise it was still night anyways, or would be for a few more minutes. She took in several breaths, getting used to the vapor, then looked around with her second sight, finding the nearest ridgeline. Retracting her armor all the way back into her forearm jewel, Kara hiked up the hillside and found a small, level spot on top where she pulled her pack off and sat down, resting against one of the massive trees.

  “Well that’s done,” she whispered to the not so quiet forest, for there were chirps and creaks galore. “Don’t suppose they’ll settle down soon enough for me to go back and have a chat with the templar, so I guess it’s down to camping out the next few days.”

  Kara didn’t like that at all…the idea of just sitting and doing nothing. So after a couple of hours to let the wisps get bored with looking for her, she ate a snack and pulled her pack on, then headed down the opposite hillside on foot, managing a decent paced run without slipping and falling on her face on the way down to the bottom of the ravine. Once there it leveled out enough for her to make a go at a cross country run, for no other reason than to give her something to do and to keep her body from stagnating in lieu of the workouts she was missing.

  So Kara ran and rested the remaining days until her pickup was scheduled to arrive. When the countdown in her armor was getting close, she pulled her pack off and dropped it on the forest floor, glad to be free of its weight. With a mental twitch her scale-like armor reformed over her body and she summoned up another green orb that she used to blast apart her pack, leaving only bits and pieces of debris along with a hole in the dirt, a lot of which had sprayed up on her in the explosion.

  She shook and it fell off, cascading back to the ground as the construction of her armor resisted the grime. Now clean and lighter, she started mentally plotting the rendezvous point in orbit, adjusting for her current position and expected flight path…which told her she had another 22 minutes and 18 seconds to wait.

  Kara hopped up into the treetops and perched herself on a branch tall enough that she could look out through the leaves into the sky. Off in the distance she could see the edge of the lizard city, but it was far from her current position and the anti-air weaponry was well out of range. Some of the other defensive weapons weren’t, but there was no way other than sheer luck that they’d be able to hit a moving target as small as her, even if they could pick up her sensor-stealthed armor.

  Forcing patience, Kara waited until the timer counted down to 00:00, then she jumped out through the leaves and flew through a sharp arc heading straight up into the air for a few kilometers before pulling back into an angle that gave her both height and lateral distance as she needed to accelerate up past orbital speeds to make her rendezvous, which even now should have been pushing past the lizard defense ships on a high speed approach to extreme low orbit.

  With her sensors in stealth mode she couldn’t pick it or most of the lizard warships or stations up as she ascended, so she had to rely on position data alone…but when she reached the upper atmosphere the target materialized on her passive sensors, along with the lizard ships racing to catch it.

  They weren’t going to, for the cutter had apparently got the jump on them again. It was moving too fast for them to overtake, but it did have to slow down somewhat for Kara to rendezvous with it, meaning it had to have a gap on the enemy whereas upon delivery it hadn’t. That said, it did have an ample head start on the pursuit, so as long as Kara could get up to speed and meet it at the proper height and time there shouldn’t be a problem.

  Such a hot pickup was extremely complicated, but the math was easy enough for her armor’s computing systems. It gave her the appropriate vector, speed, and timing she needed to make the intercept, so as long as she followed the prompts she didn’t have to concern herself with anything else.

  And that’s just what she did. Using the anti-grav in her armor she rose up above the atmosphere, gaining more and more lateral speed until the cutter was only 100 kilometers behind her and closing fast, at an altitude 2 kilometers above and on almost the exact same directional heading. Following her navigational prompts she continued to accelerate as it went through its own braking maneuver and the closing speed dropped smoothly.

  When it got within 5 kilometers their speed differential had almost nulled out, allowing Kara ample time to get the proper altitude and wait beneath where the cutter would come across. With the lizard ships visible on her now active radar, she flew off the tracking program directly over to the cutter who’d entered a coasting phase rather than braking as it dipped down towards the atmosphere on a trajectory that would not sustain orbit, for both it and now Kara were moving too fast laterally to maintain a natural orbit, and only she could maintain an unnatural one, meaning the cutter was going to be leaving the planet one way or another when it bounced off the atmosphere, giving her only a brief window of opportunity to get aboard.

  As she approached she confirmed that the drone warship’s shields were down, then she came up underneath it and latched onto the smooth hull with her adhesive grips, locking her toes, knees, and hands to the hull before signaling to the computer-controlled ship that she was aboard.

  With that prompt the cutter altered its course prematurely and missed the atmosphere entirely, pushing off against the gravity well fiercely as it made a microjump away from the planet, shooting through the lizard orbital infrastructure and fleet and heading off towards high orbit without Kara feeling any of the acceleration now that she was safely inside the extended inertial dampening field of the drone.

  From her perspective everything was still and her grip on the ship was almost unnecessary…but float up a meter or so and that’d change greatly, so she kept herself tucked low to the hull and rode the warship out away from the lizard planet as it pushed against neighboring gravity wells to get some course and speed adjustments enroute to a rendezvous in extreme high orbit where the jumpship was passing by.

  Both ships had lizards tracking them, with the jumpship only having returned to planetary orbit a few hours ago. It had been hiding elsewhere in the system until the appropriate time, now it was making an orbital insertion to pick up the cutter, much as the cutter had to pick up Kara, only on a greatly exaggerated scale.

  With the lizard fleet closing from a distance, Kara rode the cutter up to the jumpship then leapt off as it maneuvered to slide back into its parking slot alongside the other drones this warship/cargoship hy
brid was carrying. Where half of the normal drone ship complement would have been were interior cargo bays, one of which Kara flew to, arcing her way through open space as if she were Ironman, completely independent of gravitational physics.

  Her armor produced no physical thrust, as the drone was having to do in order to align itself with the docking slot, but she was still able to curve her way around the hull and fly into one of the open bays, passing through the containment field and into the ship’s artificial gravity, which her suit was then able to push off of for flight dynamics. Kara flew halfway across the bay and came down midway into an open area of the deck, dropping into a smooth walk and peeling off her armor by the third step as she casually strode across the hangar as if she’d been there all along.

  With her inside, the bay doors closed and she headed over to a comm terminal, informing the bridge that she was aboard so they could micro-jump out of planetary orbit as soon as possible. After that it was a short rendezvous with the system’s central star, then the beginning of a 3 month zigzaggy trip across multiple star systems back to Namek, where she was going to have that long chat with Paul on Star Force’s strategy against the lizards.

  8

  October 8, 2432

  Retari System

  Atlantica

  Kyler watched from the bridge of the Black Pearl as it floated its way across the sky looking down on the world-spanning ocean. The churning water ahead was finally settling down, which prompted one of dozens of skeets circling far overhead to make a diving run towards the surface and release another warhead.

  It fell straight and cleanly entered the choppy waves as the fighter pulled off. Underneath the surface the turbulence was stiff, but the lengthy torpedo steered a course through it, dropping down towards the seafloor where a carpet of plants covered the watery landscape.

  Except they weren’t plants, but rather tower-sized lizard defense tendrils, copied from Elarioni tech and produced in massive numbers to protect the subsurface base set beneath. They had similar defense tendrils at their other bases, but nowhere near this number. With the battleships’ shield columns they could take out the tendrils one by one, but it was a slow process, and given how many were situated below it would take days at minimum to break through, if not weeks.

  There was also a huge lizard aquatics fleet below, swimming in and around the tendrils ready to strike out at any Human fleet that dared to hit the base. Kyler knew it would be a nasty fight, even with all 9 of their battleships committed, so he’d decided to change the game and hit them from the air, keeping his fleet right next door but out of the water and out of both the tendrils’ and lizard ships’ reach.

  The wreck of a lizard cruiser and dozens of wisps lay on the seafloor now, with the wisps having come from carrier ships that rose up to the surface, but neither they nor the starship were a match for 9 battleships, even if they were in airship mode. Their maulers had torn the cruiser into shreds with only the Triton taking damage in the fighting.

  It was patching itself up at the moment, still holding its anti-grav hover over the ocean as the battleships moved into position over the city that the skeets had been bombing for some time now. The most recent torpedo followed the track of the others, heading straight down into the mess of defense tendrils and detonating against one of them…taking out 6 of the huge constructs with the resulting blast/concussion wave.

  The bomb wasn’t a nuke, but rather something far more powerful…powerful enough to push around an enormous amount of water and turn it into a weapon of its own, for while 6 of the intact tendrils were ripped apart, many more were damaged, leaving yet another wide crater of damage on the tendril carpet below.

  The lizard fleet had thus scattered rather than risk getting caught up in the blasts, having retreated within the base itself or scurried off to the fringes, passing beyond the boundaries of the tendril field and putting as much distance between them and the bombing as possible. Star Force rarely used bombs, preferring more surgical strikes, but that didn’t mean they didn’t make them nor knew how to use them, which the lizards were learning the hard way right now.

  Kyler was glad to see it was working, having half expect them to have some surprise defense against the attack, but aside from the almost panicky cruiser/wisp counterstrike the enemy hadn’t been able to touch them above the water and now looked to be on the defensive, though for how long that would last he didn’t know.

  A massive bulge in the ocean rose up like a dome beneath the battleships, then sank back down into a depression with the walls of water rolling in and twisting about in a violent vortex as the liquid water and flash vaporized gasses sorted themselves out chaotically. Once the ocean settled down the skeets dropped another bomb at a slightly different location, mowing the grass, so to speak, on the seafloor below one strike at a time.

  The craft carried only one torpedo each, and after the drop each skeet took off heading for the upper atmosphere and the long trip back to Seaquest, the nearest Star Force city, some 2,490 kilometers away. They had more than enough fuel to get there, but it was a long turnaround to get reloaded and fly back out, which was why Kyler had planned on only the one assault, having assigned multiple flights of skeets to accompany the battleships out so he’d have all the ordinance he’d need on hand.

  “No response to communications,” Captain Voru said, stepping up beside Kyler as he looked at one of the video screens of the ship’s exterior. “Looks like they want us to come down and get them the hard way.”

  “In time, Captain. Let’s see how many of their toys we can break first.”

  Voru cleared his throat. “We could take the opportunity, while we wait, to eliminate some of their fleet, given how scattered they are right now.”

  “You won’t get many unless they turn and fight.”

  “Why not take a few now when we can?”

  Kyler sighed. “Alright, but I don’t want any of the ships near the shockwaves. What targets do we have furthest out?”

  “The Waverunner is currently tracking a small group that got clear before the first blast…they appear to be undamaged and holding close formation. They should be able to drop on top of them and kill or disable half of the ships before they can flee outside plasma range.”

  “Save the squids,” Kyler ordered, “then tell them happy hunting. What else do you have?” he asked, knowing Voru already had a plan of attack in place before he’d brought it up for discussion.

  “Four other groups well outside of the blast range, none of which are a match for one battleship.”

  “Dispatch four of the others, but keep us here.”

  Voru nodded, then walked off leaving Kyler next to the vid screen. He was right about taking the opportunity to eliminate some of their ships before they saw them again on another battlefront, but Kyler wasn’t wholly convinced that Star Force had the upper hand here. If events continued to follow form it appeared that he’d found their achilles heel…but that just didn’t feel right, especially given all the tactical headaches this smart lizard had been giving him and Paul.

  He watched as another torpedo dropped and swam its way down to the tendrils, blasting more apart and pushing the water surrounding them back so far it formed a huge void that caused the surrounding water to vaporize due to the nonexistent pressure once it began to collapse. That bubbled the new air up through the debris in a pyre that marked the detonation point on the holographic battlemap beside him, with only a small amount of the destructive energy reaching the surface to be seen on the exterior cameras.

  A few more drops and they’d be clear to head down themselves and begin taking out the tendrils around the entrances to the base, of which there were many. This main base of theirs had been under surveillance for quite a while now, even as Star Force hit and destroyed the smaller ones scattered around the ocean closer to their own cities. Once they’d gotten their first breadcrumb of a trace, they’d followed it to a transitional base, and from there out to several others.

  One
find led to another, eventually leading them here, to a mid-level section of the ocean deeper than the Star Force cities were located at, but shallower than the great depths where neither side seemed inclined to go just yet. Kyler had been keeping their strikes conservative, focusing on disrupting the lizards’ growth rather than seriously cutting into their numbers as he forced most of his resources on repairing the damage done to Manaan and building more battleships, which he knew was the key to their victory, for the lizards had no viable counterpart as of yet.

  Their surveillance of this base had indicated multiple shipyards somewhere beneath the tendrils, for resources would come in and new ships would come out. How many lizard ground troops were down there was unknown, as was the actual size of the base, but the tendril field covered over 130 square miles and massed more than all three Star Force cities combined, having consumed an enormous amount of resources to build…which suggested that whatever was beneath it was vitally important to the lizards’ operations on Atlantica.

  Which was why Kyler didn’t feel confident about the bombardment, nor his 9 battleships being enough to take this mega base out, but so far he hadn’t seen any brilliant masterstroke on the part of the lizards to combat them…but then again, they weren’t in the water yet either.

  Then one of the bombs took out a section of tendrils, simultaneously breaching what looked to be a concealed entrance to the base, giving the sensors onboard the Black Pearl a good view of a very wide shaft heading straight down into the bedrock. No massive amount of air came up from the site, meaning it had already been submerged…probably a navigational tube, suggesting the base itself wasn’t right beneath the tendrils, but buried deep underground where the bombardment couldn’t follow.

  “Captain, redirect the next torpedo on this shaft and run a telemetry feed up here.”