Star Force: Relocation (SF44) Page 7

  He commed in and reported that he was airborne and they needn’t be looking for him, then he hovered in a slow spiral over the vehicles until they finally pulled out of the assembly area and floated their way clear of the city in a small, single file convoy. Dre’for flew over top of them, providing a single fighter escort all the way across the grassy plain for some 83 kilometers until they came to a slightly larger city where their starship transports were grounding to pick up evacuees and equipment coming in overland from multiple other locations.

  The Mershak weren’t stupid enough to attack here, choosing instead to pick on the weaker settlements and those that were nearly empty. Once Dre’for’s convoy was safely to the departure site he flew off looking for somewhere else he could help out, but finding no activity within a 500 kilometer radius.

  That was reported, anyway, so he took up an impromptu patrol around the departure city and the surrounding cities, watching over incoming convoys and looking for ambushes, eventually finding one in progress as a Mershak tank jumped a group of vehicles as it came out of a narrow valley just ahead of them and blocked the road, firing on the first vehicles as the others spread out. Those with wheels turned about and headed back on the road they’d been driving along, while those with anti-grav charted their own course and swung wide to get around the tank before heading back to the road and resuming their course…assuming they didn’t get hit in the process.

  Two did and went down, with one digging into the grass and plowing up dirt while the other skidded across the stone-like road, spinning around until it eventually hit dirt, whereupon the edge caught and the whole vehicle flipped over twice, eventually landing upside down.

  Dre’for dropped into a slow strafing run and lit up the tank on a quick pass to get its attention, dodging some late anti-air fire in the process. A quick check of his sensor board confirmed that he was the only starfighter or military asset in the area, meaning the tank was now his sole responsibility and if he got shot down the vehicles would be easy pickings, so he had to work quick, but not carelessly.

  He circled around low to the ground then pulled up into a high arc that brought him back down on the tank like a scorpion sting, whereupon he delivered several small plasma orbs, followed up by the ‘bomb’ orb. It hit the tank and breached its shields, setting up future passes that allowed him to burn armor off its thick hull as it continued to fire at him with its anti-air cannon, but otherwise kept its attention on the vehicles, which it was just as fast as, if not faster.

  Their scattering meant it had choices to make, and it took off after a pair of hovering vehicles, taking them down but not lingering for the kill, intending to disable as many as it could then come back for them later. The wheeled vehicles it went after last, knowing where they would be, given that they were reluctant to try and drive through the grasslands on their small tires.

  The tank disabled one of the wheeled vehicles, then rammed into it as it passed by, knocking both askew but damaging the Scionate personnel transport heavily. It put two plasma shots into its side as it moved on, then focused its fire ahead down the road, slowly closing distance on the next one as Dre’for came back around on a very low angle and hit the tank in the flank with another bomb orb.

  He got hit by the anti-air fire this time, with his shields sparkling as the tiny plasma needles ran into it like a buzz saw. The Scionate fighter passed the tank with some shield strength remaining, then agitated, Dre’for pulled a skid loop that he’d seen the Humans do multiple times at Daka in their own craft, bringing the nose of his fighter around and keeping it on target throughout the turn, firing as fast as he could the entire time.

  He kept the plasma landing on approximately the same spot, one that he’d damaged earlier, and was gratified when he saw a puff of smoke rise up as he finally got through the armor and hit something on the interior of the tank. Another wash of plasma needles forced him to move off, but the tank continued to pursue and fire upon the next closest wheeled transport, hitting it in the rear with plasma ‘spit’ and eventually blowing out the rear wheels with consecutive hits.

  The vehicle slowed but didn’t stop, dragging itself on and keeping away from the tank as long as possible. Dre’for knew he had an opening and needed to take it before the tank got the transport, but his shields were almost gone so he had a choice to make…risk a hull hit or play it safe and lose another transport, with the people inside possibly surviving the hit?

  With only one tank in play he didn’t need his Valerie to survive the encounter, he just needed to take out the tank, so he circled once then darted in towards the wound on the enemy vehicle and lightly strafed it, drawing an immediate response, given that the Mershak knew which direction he’d be coming from. It fired at his fighter with every weapon it possessed, which ironically bought the transport more time, so he made another light strafing run and nibbled away at the wound, increasing the smoke pyre coming from it.

  He kept patiently wearing it down until it finally returned its attention to the transport ahead, catching up to within 400 meters of it, then Dre’for charged up another plasma bomb and ran it right down the tank’s throat, taking hits from the anti-air and anti-personnel turrets on the tank, but managing to avoid the anti-vehicle ones…which would have downed him rather fast.

  When he passed it by his control board lit up with damage indicators, but he was still flight worthy, swerving upwards through a wide turn to disrupt following fire, then turning around to see the tank motoring on…but dragging its left side on the ground. Dre’for set up another couple light passes, needling the spot with plasma fire as his shields recharged slowly, then he went in and landed the killing blow, nearly getting himself blown apart in the process as an anti-vehicle plasma blast clipped his Valerie’s right side, melting off a bit of the fighter and giving him a smoke trail of his own.

  The tank kept firing, for it wasn’t completely dead, but it no longer hovered over the ground, thoroughly stuck in place as its anti-grav no longer functioned. Dre’for flew off, watching the evacuation vehicles gain distance and eventually get outside the tank’s firing range, then he escorted the wheeled versions out back to an intersection and through a long detour of the spider web-like roads. Eventually empty transports came out and picked up the survivors from the ones the tank had disabled, with most of the passengers having survived.

  The equipment was mostly left behind, though a few key pieces were recovered. Dre’for watched over the hasty efforts, keeping an eye on the distant tank in case it came back to life and began moving, but it stayed put and Dre’for paid it no further mind after the last of the Scionate vehicles reached the city. The Mershak could pick their tank up later or leave it to rot for all he cared. They were leaving, and as much as he wanted to kill the thing, the mission was to get his people safely off the planet.

  “Valerie, what’s your status?”

  “Damaged, but operational,” Dre’for answered the comm.

  “Are you spaceworthy?”

  A quick glance at the control board confirmed otherwise. “Negative.”

  “Then this is your ride out. Rendezvous onboard the outgoing transport. We’ll see you at the colony site.”

  “Take care,” Dre’for said in thanks, looking across the skies of his homeworld one last time before heading towards the large cargo ship just now rising up from the spaceport. One of its hangar bay doors remained open and he flew towards it, easily matching the big ship’s course and speed, and ducking inside before it gained any appreciable upward momentum.

  Once inside the hull the ship’s artificial gravity took over and he gently landed his damaged ship in the berth indicated by the hangar controller. The area was designed for small dropships, with three open slots out of nine, each of which was big enough to hold multiple Valeries, allowing him plenty of room to set down, after which a pair of techs ran out to meet him.

  “Do what you can with the ship,” Dre’for said as he jumped down to the deck. “It still has life in it.” />
  “It won’t be scrapped,” the tech promised.

  Dre’for nodded and walked off, retracting his helmet onto the rest of his body armor as he looked out the closing hangar doors at the sliver of planet still visible…a planet now occupied by only a scattering of Scionate that would be following him and the cargo ship out within a few days. Their sensitive technology had been destroyed or taken with them, but everything else had been left as it was, open to looters and nomads until the Cajdital arrived…assuming they would. He didn’t know if they’d still want the planet if no one was on it, for their previous assaults seemed to have been more about killing than acquiring worlds.

  Regardless, Scion was no longer his world. Sad as he was about that, they were abandoning it in order to survive, so with the regret came determination and a wisp of hope. He didn’t know what the Alliance could do against the Cajdital, but by getting out ahead of the invasion path they were buying themselves more time to find a way to beat them…if such a thing existed. Dre’for wasn’t sure it did, but where there was life there was hope, and if his people were to be destroyed it wasn’t going to be today, nor any day in the near future. Abandoning their worlds was buying them time, and they were going to make the most of what they had.

  8

  May 1, 2473

  Numar System (Calavari Territory)

  Sashneo

  Dre’for walked through one of the warrens set up on the Calavari planet specifically for the Scionate, feeling claustrophobic but otherwise at home. The facilities had been constructed by Scionate engineers using local materials, giving the layout of the area a traditional architecture, but due to the limited land space available to them they’d had to build the temporary structures clustered together, causing Dre’for to feel like he was bumping into people every other step he took.

  He was being held over on the transitional world along with a great number of his people, and various others, waiting for transport into the Sanctuary Zone. The initial evacuation of the Scionate worlds had been complicated enough, and was still ongoing on some planets, but there was no way their limited ships could have taken them on a direct route to the promised planets…at least not in time to evacuate them all before the Cajdital got to them. They’d opted for a shorter evacuation to the transition worlds the Hycre had organized, leaving most of the Scionate stranded in transit.

  But between the generosity of the Alliance and the Scionate’s preparedness they were well taken care of here, and what inconveniences they had to put up with were minor in the grand scheme of things. For every person he bumped into was a victory snatched from the claws of the Cajdital, so Dre’for reminded himself every time he had to walk off his directional line to avoid hitting another Scionate as they passed one another.

  He was one of the few wearing armor, for unlike the others he was permitted to leave their warrens given his place in the combined defense force protecting the planet. His Valerie, now fully refurbished, was situated in a combined Alliance hangar that he was headed to now, and he and the other military members had made a point of wearing their body armor when amongst aliens, never knowing when a bad situation might arise. While allies they might be against the Cajdital, not all of them got along with each other quite as well as that moniker suggested.

  When Dre’for got to the entrance/exit he passed by their own guards without incident and joined the even more crowded public streets with all manner of aliens about. Most were civil enough, but many smelled more foul than he liked, putting him in a disgruntled manner all the way to his destination.

  Once he got to the spaceport and was permitted entrance, the crowded streets disappeared and a much more normal environment resumed, with the open air and lack of people running every which way prompting him to stop and stretch out his front legs, then back in a typical cat-like show of flexibility. He shook his head twice, resetting his demeanor before he headed for the pilot-only areas of the spaceport.

  Though still a mix of aliens, these smelled right…at least as much as he’d gotten accustomed to them smelling on Daka. Those smelled like pilots, and now so did these, putting him more at ease as he headed for his Valerie with a Calavari tech giving him the rundown on the maintenance completed before he climbed inside and lifted off.

  He flew high up from the spaceport then leveled out once he was above the tallest building and drifted in place, waiting for two more Scionate Valeries to join him a few minutes later. Once together they flew off, crossing over the vast warrens devoted to multiple races until they got to the boundaries of the city where additional construction was taking place…then they were off across the grasslands that reminded him of those on their homeworld, though more brown.

  They traveled over 100 kilometers before meeting up with a much larger group of Valeries, most of whom belonged to the Calavari, though there were a few tiny versions piloted by the Urik’kadel. Dre’for knew from his time on Daka how skilled their pilots were, so he didn’t take it as offense when the Calavari had brought them into the patrol maneuvers without informing him.

  “We bring three,” he said, tagging the lead Valerie for the direct comm.

  “Good morning, Scionate,” Nangon greeted them. “We have air patrol for the next two hours. Would you like to spar or circulate?”

  “I’ll take the circulation, but my wingmen would like to spar.”

  “Granted,” the Calavari said, shunting a navigational path to Dre’for’s computer.

  As the course came up he pulled off from the other two Scionate pilots and began a wide, ugly circular path around the region they were tasked with ‘defending.’ What they were really doing was keeping some fighters in the air at all times so they’d be available for instantaneous response to any attack, rather than having to rouse pilots from their beds or wherever they were, get them to the hangar, their fighters prepped, and then into the air.

  All of that was valuable time the enemy could use to its own advantage, with Calavari philosophy being to keep a small number of fighters in the air at all times to act as a response unit and to buy time for the rest of their pilots to get into the air when the moment came. That said, sitting in a cockpit doing nothing for several hours a day, every day, got to be tedious, so while some of them kept to a patrol route, the others would engage in dogfights with simulated weapons, honing their edge and keeping them from succumbing to boredom.

  Dre’for had only arrived a few days ago, but he’d sparred with the other pilots every day since, prompting him to take the boring patrol today so others could mix it up…that, and he didn’t want to be the first to go against the Urik’kadel. His wingmen would be good experiments, given that they’d never flown against the little pilots before, then he’d take what he learned from their imminent defeat and adjust for when he did get another chance to go up against them.

  He could have monitored the brawl while on patrol, but he felt that would be a distraction and kept his attention on his duty…not that he felt the planet was going to come under attack today, but just out of a sense of professionality. With his course set into an auto-pilot function, he released the controls and went along for the slow ride with his eyes scanning the regions below and flipping back to the sensor hologram habitually, with any activity set to trigger a small tone once he left the dogfighting fighters behind.

  Dre’for flew from city to city while a handful of other pilots did the same at other points on the circuit, marking the outer edges of their patrol zone while the training dogfights continued at its center. A few of the Calavari cities hadn’t been added to as of yet, but most had grown considerably with the short buildings of the Alliance warrens stretching out around them, but as he progressed through the course given to him he flew over one that was just beginning to get added to, literally only a few days old with the construction.

  As he looked down on it his sensors beeped, drawing his attention to a ship descending from the upper atmosphere. Its plotted trajectory was bringing it down near him, so Dre’for went off t
he autopilot route and manually flew clear of the city, making a giant circle around it for good measure before continuing on.

  Flying low to give himself a better view of the construction, he saw numerous Calavari workers along with a scattering of Humans. That wasn’t uncommon, for the smaller bipeds had been annexing the Calavari, so he’d been told, with many of their projects reaching out into their former territory. Even now they held a considerable fleet in orbit, centered around the largest warship he’d ever seen outside of the Kvash, underscoring how important this planet was to the evacuation efforts and their commitment to seeing them through.

  The Hycre couldn’t come to ground, so it only made sense to see Humans filling in the gaps, with them popping up in small numbers across Alliance territory. Some had even come out to the Scionate, carried by a Hycre jumpship, to negotiate the terms of relocation until both races were satisfied. The Humans were donating a lot of prime colonization spots within their borders to the effort, something the Hycre were ill-suited to do, given their radically different physiology, almost making the Humans an equal partner in this effort, despite their tiny size.

  The Hycre were the glue to the reformed Alliance, now that the Kvash and Bsidd had gone their own ways. While they still shared intelligence across what was left of the relay network, it was clear that they weren’t going to be helping anyone in or on the opposite side of Calavari space. They’d communicated as much to the Scionate, who were on their side of the new dividing line, asking for their allegiance, but without any promise of assistance for Scionate territory when it was hit by the Cajdital.

  The Hycre plan had seemed far more sensible…especially given that they had a plan whereas the Kvash didn’t, other than turtle up and defend themselves on a smaller perimeter than what the Alliance had been attempting to do. Dre’for knew that was only a delaying tactic, which could also be said of the relocation efforts, but those at least would buy decades, if not centuries…whereas the Kvash’s plan might last them years, with them eventually getting overrun anyway.