Star Force: Canderous (SF16) Read online

  San sighed. “We might want to let them take a shipment with a beacon hidden inside, set on a timer. They steal it, take it back to base, then an hour or two later it goes off giving us their location.”

  “Now there’s an idea,” Anders agreed. “Trick is knowing where they’ll hit next.”

  “Their hull might block the signal,” Harrison said, dashing the idea. “Let’s look at this from a different perspective. If they have a base out there, where is it likely to be?”

  “Star Force did an extensive survey of the planet,” Jaime reminded them. “If it’s down there then it’s either subsurface or of new construction.”

  “What about the other planets?” Mara asked.

  “All were surveyed,” Jaime continued, “but only the habitable ones were overly scrutinized. These things are air breathers?” the Sangheili asked.

  “Yes,” Raines confirmed.

  “I bet they’ve got a ship in orbit,” Anders said bluntly. “If they’re invisible to our sensors then they could be parked right outside and we wouldn’t know it.”

  Raines neck suddenly twitched and he put a hand up to his earpiece reflexively as he received a message from the seda’s command center. His face screwed up with anger as he looked towards Harrison.

  “They’re hitting us again, same location, multiple ships,” he reported before hustling out of the morgue.

  “Is it the night cycle already?” Mara asked, thinking otherwise for that particular location on the planet.

  “No. They’re hitting us in the daylight this time,” Raines said as he ducked into a nearby elevator. The Archons followed him in and were quickly spirited off towards the seda’s interior.

  “All Clan Samus warships are in high orbit,” Anders said, glancing at the others. “Anybody got anything closer?”

  “We do,” Mara said. “I diverted a corvette to low orbit yesterday.”

  “1st fleet has six warships in low orbit,” Harrison said, referring to the non-Clan Star Force defense fleet, “and Clan Saber has 9. One of them has got to be within visual range.”

  “We’ve got two,” Jaime said, glancing at San.

  The Ninja Monkey shook his head in the negative. “Our fleet is holding in Dxun orbit.”

  “How much did you reinforce?” Harrison asked the Canderian.

  “I’ve got 21 men on site with some heavy weaponry,” Raines said as the elevator arrived at its destination. He followed the Archons out onto the compact walkway ringing a central pit. Along the outside of the ring were stations imbedded into the wall and wedged shoulder to shoulder with about 1 in every 4 currently occupied.

  “Centurion?” Harrison asked the woman standing in the pit looking down on a small holographic map along with three other Canderians.

  “They’re sacking the place,” she said with disgust. “No reports of troop landings. Our people have scattered into the forest while they’re taking the buildings apart from the air.”

  “We need comms,” Jaime said.

  Raines snapped his fingers to get his people’s attention, as well as signaling that they should follow the order in the efficient ‘ditto’ Canderian custom.

  “Where to?” one of the other Centurions asked, walking to the side of the pit and flipping on equipment at an empty station.

  “We need five lines,” Jaime explained, “to each Clan.”

  Two more officers stepped up and began prepping stations.

  “It’ll take hours for air support to arrive,” Harrison pointed out.

  “We can at least get the clock ticking,” Jaime noted, sitting down and accepting an earpiece. “Give the ground troops an ETA and something to hold out for. If the raiders stick around long enough we might even be able to pick up their trail if we’ve got enough birds in the air coming from multiple directions.”

  “I’m sold,” Anders said, setting down at another station and making contact with Clan Samus’s colony on the surface.

  “Star Fox can do better than hours,” Mara said, nudging ahead of Harrison for the next open comm station.

  “Ninja Monkey is closest, by my reckoning,” he differed, “and they’re still 3,000 kilometers away.”

  “We’re 4,500 and we’ll beat you all there,” she said, making contact and holding up a ‘wait’ finger to stall any further questions from Harrison. “This is Mara…get me Brad, Ally, and Ras in the air in the prototype skeets inside of 5 minutes, coordinates to follow. Make sure they’re armed, we’ve got a fight on our hands.”

  Mara used the holographic map for reference and began constructing a crude heading to feed her pilots once they lifted off.

  “Prototypes?” Harrison asked as he sat down at his own terminal.

  “Very fast at high altitude. They can be there inside of half an hour.”

  “You been holding out on us?”

  “We’re still working out the glitches,” she said, unabashed.

  “They will get there in one piece, right?”

  “Did I say glitches? Let me rephrase. We’re summarizing our data before we file a report with Star Force. They’ll get there.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “A little trick with the shield generator.”

  Brad ran across the hangar bay, blinking the haze of the bright lights out of his eyes as he spotted one of the new skeets towards the center with a quick ready crew gathered around. The Archon had been on sleep cycle when they woke him, only just now getting to the bay as the other two skeets were rising up off the deck and drifting towards the hole in the ceiling overhead.

  “Fuel?” he asked, hopping up into the single-seater and throwing his right leg over the pommel that the pilots rode belly down on.

  “She’s full,” a tech said, having just undone the resupply line. “So are the weapons.”

  Brad didn’t waste time with formalities and nodded his thanks, pulling down the cockpit over top of him. Within thirty seconds he had the aircraft powered up and lifted off the deck, following the two pilots out and seeing that they were hovering nearby over the colony waiting for him.

  “Would someone like to tell me where we’re going?” he said over the open Clan Star Fox comm.

  “Heading 243, range 4537 kilometers,” Mara’s voice answered back. “Our raider friends are back, so go say hi.”

  “Gladly,” Brad said, kicking in his T-shaped skeet’s 3 anti-gravity engines and shooting the fighter straight up into the sky. “Pilots on me. Who do we have here?”

  “Ally Laismon, reporting.”

  “Ras Vanderjack here.”

  “Good,” Brad said, watching his altimeter run up, “I thought they’d stuck me with some newbs. Listen up. Looks like you’re going to get your first taste of real combat, but first we have to get wherever we’re going. That means a high altitude run at high speed, just like we’ve been practicing. Keep a kilometer separation minimum, arrow formation.”

  “Copy that,” Ally said, maneuvering her skeet around to drop in on Brad’s left flank as they continued to climb higher where the atmosphere was thinner.

  “What are we up against?” Ras asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brad said, switching back over to the frequency Mara was on. “Got any info to pass along, boss?”

  “We’ve got Canderian troops on the ground, riding out an aerial assault. Reports indicate three, repeat, three raider ships similar to the one that attacked yesterday. They’re bombing the infrastructure and have not yet put troops on the ground…that we can confirm.”

  “Bombing with what?”

  “Stand by.”

  Brad muted the outgoing feed on that comm line while reactivating his current unit’s private comm. “Assume fighter to gunship attack profile. Three bogeys. We’ll improvise the rest when we get there.”

  “What are we waiting for,” Ras said, eager to get moving.

  “500 more,” Brad replied pithily. After he reached the prerequisite altitude his activated his skeet’s shield generator, which began to
produce a second skin around the craft, invisible to the air save for where disturbances occurred. The thin layer of shield matrix began to thicken as more and more power was poured into it, eventually topping off at about 2 inches thick.

  The shield matrix didn’t precisely match the dimensions of the skeet. The smooth lines couldn’t be mimicked, and the more faces a shield had the more complex its emitters had to be, which was why most shields were boxy structures. The skeet, however, had to maneuver through atmosphere so a box was out of the question. Instead a nearly similar silhouette of the ship’s hull had been created out of varying geometric pieces that preserved most of the aerodynamics.

  The aerofighter was equipped with physical shields, meaning that the energy matrix was formatted to resist matter. Had Brad been outside the ship and tried to touch the hull his hand would have been stopped by an invisible wall just shy of it, with the contact point on the shield turning opaque upon touch as the matrix was disrupted, damaged, and had to recharge. If the physical impact was hard enough the matrix at the impact point would crumble and the object would pass through…with the resulting breach in the shield being ‘sewed up’ by addition energy being deployed from the emitters.

  Turn the shield off and the energy matrix dissipated within a second. Turn it back on and a new one would have to be formed from scratch. The types of matrixes used in shields were many and varied, with Star Force only now being able to produce the simplest of ones. Simple as they might be, they were still impressively strong going up against natural phenomena, such as wind in this case.

  Brad flipped a switch that activated the prototype components within the shield generator, creating an addition to the standard shield. This one was a simple cone, stretched out in front of the skeet some 48 meters and ending at a tip smaller than the width of a hair. The adjunct matrix quickly filled with energy.

  “Good to go,” Ally reported.

  “Same here,” Ras added, just as Brad’s skeet confirmed full shield deployment.

  “Ground troops report plasma cannons,” Mara’s voice broke back in. “Some big ones.”

  Brad reactivated the outgoing portion of that line. “Copy that. We’re getting underway now.”

  He shifted it back over to mute, then checked his heading to make sure they were pointed in the right direction. He corrected a few degrees to port, then feathered his propulsive engines.

  “Stay with me,” he told his pair of pilots as he accelerated forward with the air-breathing engines kicking him back in his seat enough that his butt hit the rear guard, checking his momentum. His skeet took off in the normal acceleration arc, with the long needle-like shield breaking the wind for him as his speed increased to debilitating levels.

  As the friction increased he began to increase altitude again using the gravity drive. Doing so decreased the thickness of the air, reducing drag, but it also reduced the amount of air getting to the engines, decreasing propulsion. When he got high enough that his airspeed began to actually diminish he flipped another switch and two more physical energy fields manifested around the pair of engines, acting like sails to collect and funnel the thin air into the intakes.

  The skeet’s speed increased again, rising to a comfortable mach 10. The pressure on the nose cone was within limits and the air feed was nominal, but he didn’t feel like pressing the speed any higher. They’d gone up to mach 11 in testing, but only for a few minutes. He knew the craft could probably take the prolonged duration that this trip would incur, but he didn’t feel that now was the best time to be setting any records. He needed his skeet, and those of his pilots, in working order when they got to target…not to mention for the return trip.

  “You guys still with me?”

  “A few klicks back,” Ras said. “You’re hard to stay with.”

  “I’m done accelerating, so snug up…and remember to stay out of my wake.”

  “Yeah, it’s spraying me a bit at 2 kilometers,” Ally reported.

  Brad checked his tracking display, seeing that her skeet was off to his left, but more aft than she should have been.

  “Go wide and come up, you’re too linear.”

  “Easy for you to say, you don’t have to steer,” she said, making small corrections around the insanely large ‘nose’ of the craft that the energy shield had created.

  Brad watched as she got her fighter repositioned and Ras caught up from behind, coming in well wide then nudging over to about 1.5 klicks to his right and held position there about 500 meters back, parallel to Ally.

  “Looks good, but keep an eye on your trajectory. No time to fall asleep at this speed. Stay with me while I try to get a little more information about our target. Apologies now if I wobble.”

  “Not accepted,” Ally rebuked him. “You can multitask.”

  Brad smiled, but didn’t let his amusement transfer over the comm. She was quoting him from an earlier conversation. “So noted,” he said, readjusting the comm line to talk to Mara.

  9

  “Target sighted,” Brad said from his vantage point high above the mining site. After a stiff deceleration run the trio of fighters were descending down to the designated coordinates and had just passed through a thin layer of high clouds, giving them an unobstructed view of the thick forest below. A bit of infrastructure was visible on the horizon, but only after muffled flashes drew Brad’s eyes toward it.

  As he watched one of the three bulky ships began to rise up above the tree line, as if in preparation for their attack run.

  “They know we’re coming. Stay sharp and dance, let’s see what they’ve got. Ally?”

  “Happy to,” she answered, dipping the ‘T’ of her skeet forward and cutting out the anti-grav engines while kicking in the primaries. Her fighter dropped down and zipped ahead of the other two, with Brad swinging right to get some angular separation before he did likewise and followed her down. Ras picked another angle and set up for third in their initial strafing run.

  A stuttered stream of green plasma shot out from the ship like a search light, bending this way and that trying to track the fighter’s approach but Ally easily evaded it and fired a pair of light blue plasma squirts back its way before turning sharply and cutting across the treetops to the right and away from the target. Her hits ran square into the side of the yellow/tan ship and were buffeted by a cascading shimmer of energy shields.

  Brad saw this and tried to target the same spot on his run, firing off a series of three paired streaks, all of which hit the stable target as it fired back, unable to hit the highly mobile skeets. His first two salvos were absorbed, but the third broke through the shields and kissed the hull, leaving a burn mark but little other damage.

  Ras targeted the same spot as well, making more than a dent. Bits of armor burnt off when his four streaks impacted, tearing an obvious scar into the side of the ship before he too went evasive and flew off.

  By the time Ally came back around for a second pass the lizard ship began to move up and off to the west, firing ineffectively at the fighters from range as the other two ships came up out of the forest and added their own weapons to the defensive effort. She targeted the first one again, but didn’t have a line on its damaged side. Her shots dissipated off of portions of the shield matrix that were still intact, but draining them of yet more energy as the ship’s generator tried desperately to reform and recharge the portions that had been penetrated.

  “They’re running,” Ras said as he finished up his second pass.

  “Stay on them, but keep your distance. Those gunners may suck, but up close you’re a bigger target.”

  “We know the drill,” Ally answered, swinging her skeet around in a big loop to come back in at the retreating ships who were gradually increasing speed. That acceleration made her loop fall long, so she had to readjust and come up on their aft to approach. All three targeted their defenses that direction and the air filled with green shards of plasma.

  Brad swung wide to starboard and came in on their flank, forc
ing them to give him either an uncontested run or swing one or more of their turrets around to track him. They did the latter, lessening the fire being thrown at Ally. He got a single paired shot off before zooming across their formation a few hundred meters over the tops of their ships and flying off to port while Ally came right up and over them from behind, adding four more plasma streaks into the rearmost ship’s shields.

  The three Star Fox pilots kept up this harassing attack for a long time as the enemy ships fled across the surface, to where no one knew, but gradually their shields were wearing down and more and more hull hits were occurring. Meanwhile other skeets were inbound, adjusting toward their heading for a distant intercept, making it appear that unless the lizards got some lucky hits in against the fighters they were doomed.

  About five minutes before that intercept occurred with a group of 9 Ninja Monkey skeets coming up from the south, Ras got in a killing strike on the rearmost of the three ships, sending it careening down to crash into the forest when its anti-grav engine took damage.

  “Nice work,” Brad congratulated, “but stay sharp. I’ve already took a couple nicks and they dropped my shields by 20%. We can’t withstand a direct hit and their gunners are getting better the longer this fight drags on,” he said, pulling up sharply as another line of green plasma shot out like a scythe across the treetops and passed underneath him. “Concentrate fire on the second ship, but stay evasive.”

  “Copy that,” Ally said, delivering another effective run and flashing past the pair of ships, but staying low and shooting the gap between them as the gunners guessed she’d go high like they had been earlier.

  Brad noticed the maneuver, and the fact that it worked, so he didn’t criticize, but that was far closer than he wanted them getting and he knew that in prolonged fights like this people usually got sloppy, predictable, or reckless…and she had just showed a bit of recklessness.

  He followed his own advice and flew way off to port and ahead of the fleeing ships, then angled in for a run that would force the gunners to split their aim between him coming in from an angle to the front or the other two who were still sniping from the rear arc. One of the turrets on the lead ship tracked his way but a corkscrew approach made him hard to zero in on and he was able to deliver a solid triple hit against the front of the second ship as he passed. The leading plasma globs hit the shields in front, the second set slipped back to the flank and soaked up more shield energy there, then the third set hit pay dirt and melted away some more hull armor as that side of the ship lost its protective energy shell.