Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) Page 8

  Regardless of their thinking, or lack thereof, Paul knew the opportunity he had and pressed the engagement to the point of risking the loss of a significant portion of his drones. The spacing between his ships spread out, taking on a much more aggressive posture and figuratively taunting the lizards to come at them now that they weren’t turtled up into a defensive alignment. When the enemy continued to press the attack Paul new it was game on and that he had a chance of destroying the entire fleet now on sensors…though discounting whatever else they had in the system.

  That was a wild card right now and he’d keep an eye on it, but so long as the lizards were going to take the bait he was going to make them pay for their lack of vision. He frowned as the term ‘lack of vision’ stuck in his mind and he realized it was something the Emperor had said.

  Whatever…the point was valid. The lizards would learn what the ravagers could do going forward and adapt to it as they always did, but in the next few minutes at least he had caught them by surprise and was going to milk it for all he could.

  15 days later…

  Paul’s seven ship fleet flew into planetary orbit at one of their frontline system naval outposts, which was comprised of a repair yard and supply depot sitting near a Sentinel defense platform. The planet was uninhabited as of now, with the facilities having been built specifically to aid in the warfront expansion by giving Star Force a stepping stone forward without having to put down another significant colonization effort.

  Another warfleet, one much larger than Paul’s, was already on station and he recognized Taryn’s flagship a couple of seconds before her hologram appeared beside his command chair on the bridge.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked, seeing the armor damage across all of his ships and the onboard drone count being at 43% capacity.

  “Picked a fight and won,” Paul said pithily as he motioned to the Admiral to go ahead and get the repair work ordered, which is what he’d been on the bridge to do rather than being down in his sanctum trying fruitlessly to find the trigger to the Ubven ability that Rio had been continuously flaunting in their sparring sessions, preventing Paul or anyone else from beating him even once in hand to hand when he could essentially freeze his opponent for a few seconds whenever he wanted.

  “Kind of looks like you lost,” Taryn commented.

  “Took more damage than I planned, but I had a limited opportunity to do some significant damage and I took it. The lizards didn’t know what to do with the ravagers.”

  “Define significant damage?” she asked curiously.

  Paul smiled. “Kill count…232,721 cruisers.”

  Taryn’s eyes went wide. “What the hell?!”

  “I told you the Dre’mo’dons would be worth the effort.”

  “No way,” she said disbelievingly. “I’ve seen the numbers. They shouldn’t be that effective. What else did you do?”

  “I admit, we’re not going to get that kind of a landslide going forward, but they didn’t know how many ships were necessary to mass against the ravagers for longer than I expected. In their moment of uncertainty they didn’t retreat and I made them pay for it.”

  “How many ships did you leave them with?”

  Paul cringed. “They had well over a million insystem. We got a decent scouting survey, but never got a complete ship count.”

  “Damn, they are serious about holding that trade route. Mostly cruisers?”

  “All cruisers. I think they know using bigger ships is just making it easier for us. And now that we can pretty much kill one with a single hit I doubt we’ll see any larger varieties used, save for chess pieces if and when they think there’s a need.”

  “Don’t you think they’ll keep those far away now?”

  “It’s possible, but they now have data on the defenses the ravagers had and they can see they’re nothing special. If I was stupid enough to hold position, they could run an invoker up on one and take it down before the Dre’mo’dons could do enough damage to disable it. That much mass has its advantages. The capital ship tonnage is their liability, with us anyway. Skarrons are a different story.”

  “Yeah, they just keep hemorrhaging territory,” Taryn said, referencing an intelligence report passed on by the Preema, who were now officially allies with the Skarrons and assisting them in a few engagements past the Star Force coreward no-go line in an attempt to slow or stop the lizard advance in some key sectors. They knew they needed the Skarrons on the offensive, not the defensive, but so far the lizards were owning them…though the Skarrons had so much territory that their empire hadn’t been seriously weakened thus far, though it did have an ever expanding chunk bitten out of it on the map.

  “Where are you headed?” Paul asked.

  “Yechmo then Deerma. Should be able to clear out both fairly easy. The lizards never put down serious roots, and I’m curious as to why.”

  “How’s the new padawan working out?”

  “He’s no Ginsi, but we gel well. No arguments or bristling like with Supergirl, and he’s actually interested in more than just level upgrades.”

  “Couldn’t talk Ginsi into becoming a builder?”

  “Nope. She’s choosing to go straight-up weapon. Useful in her niche, but she’s no trailblazer. Take away our training notes and her progression will tank, I’ll guarantee it. Might happen anyway now that I’m not around to hold her hand. She’s very quick when something is explained to her, but her adaptational skills aside from hand to hand suck. Well, that’s not fair. She’s slightly below average for Archons. Compared to us, she sucks.”

  “And the new guy?”

  “He’s a grinder, but intelligent. He’ll make a solid mage when I get finished with him. Are you out of the padawan business?”

  “For now. The stronger I get the more of a hindrance they become.”

  “I felt the same way too until I started looking on them as a tool rather than a ward. I give them more space than I did before and I’ve found a useful balance.”

  “How soon you leaving?”

  “Got another task force I’m waiting on. Probably a week at the earliest.”

  “Then get your butt over here and we’ll discuss padawans during a long run, and I promise I won’t slow you down.”

  “Heading over,” she said with a smirk. “And have the holos of your battle handy. I want to see how your new toys earned those beauty marks.”

  9

  October 2, 2888

  Unnamed System (Backwater Region)

  Unnamed planet

  Jack-809506 stopped walking suddenly, pausing in the forest underneath the partial canopy as rays of sunlight came down onto the ground like strobe lights.

  “What’s wrong?” Ikra asked as she sat perched on the Archon’s back rack. The Hepcha had been riding there for several hours as the scouting pair had been quietly pushing their way north over hilly terrain in search of the bandits that had been ambushing convoys coming though the region. The planet’s population was primitive in that they hadn’t mastered anti-grav tech yet, but they were part of a small alliance that had and their trading partners had set up a number of spaceports on the planet to facilitate the economic interlinking.

  One of those spaceports was 230 miles to the south and had been getting its cargo shipments hijacked, both those coming into the spaceport over ground and those flowing out from it. The local Venats hadn’t been able to find those responsible, but a handful of investigators from the Uframon Alliance suspected Groms and they’d asked Star Force to confirm it if possible.

  Jack was out in the middle of nowhere as far as Star Force was concerned. He was in the Backwater Region, which was a loose term referring to all the territory beyond Epsilon, Gamma, and Delta Regions that the lizards had not gotten into yet. Most of where Star Force had outposts was between the ADZ and the original Voku territory, but even at that those were single systems out of thousands of others…and Jack was far beyond those bastions of civilization.

  Per Director Davis
’s wishes Star Force had been making diplomatic contact with as many races as it could and establishing some level of relations with them. The Uframon Alliance was on the very fringe of Star Force’s reach and was on good terms with them, with a single enclave having been positioned on their capitol. It was the most heavily defended world Uframon had, but it was weak by ADZ standards. The idea of having Star Force put a tiny foothold down there was centered around trying to prop up Uframon and give them both legitimacy and military threat, for if someone invaded the planet they’d also have to attack Star Force as well…and word of their almost magical technology had gotten around the region despite the lack of interstellar communications.

  That Star Force outpost was where Jack and a few hundred other personnel were stationed. The ranger was one of 7 Archons there and split most of his time between solitary training and going out on simple missions to aid Uframon. Some of them involved helping to teach their military new tricks, evaluating weaknesses in their security, or often tackling the unknown that they couldn’t. This current mission fell into the latter category, and as a courtesy he had volunteered to check it out.

  The planet he was on was so primitive that it didn’t even have an official name yet, nor did the system as far as Star Force was concerned. The native’s had a name for it, but their language was so bizarre that it couldn’t be used. Assigning one to it and others in the region was still on the to-do list, as were many other systems that were being scouted out, but for now it simply had the identification number of TX-7839, with the planet having the same designation with a ‘-04’ being added. It had been a small member of the Uframon for the past 43 years and had benefited enormously from the economic activity, but it was still legitimately backwater as far as Jack was concerned.

  Apparently someone else thought so as well, for they’d been launching convoy ambushes and getting away with it. Enough supplies and personnel had been lost that Uframon command had taken notice and sent their investigators…who could find nothing. A lull in the raids occurred during their arrival then they began again after they left. A second trip had found, again, nothing, so Uframon had asked Star Force if they could discovery who was conducting these raids and Jack had been sent with his scouting partner here to find out.

  He’d come via an Explorer-class starship/jumpship hybrid. It was small, but given Star Force’s engine tech it could travel faster than most other races’ jumpships and was sufficient to hop around the local star systems. It was approximately the size of a heavy cruiser but could be operated by a crew of 1 if needed. Jack had brought two more crewers, one for the starship and one for the dropship that had brought them down to the planet and was parked a good ways back, leaving him and Ikra on their own as they hiked through the forest headed nowhere in particular.

  “Something’s wrong. I can’t sense anyone, but the wildlife is behaving different over there,” the Archon said, raising his left arm and pointing to the northwest. “Check it out.”

  “On it,” the Hepcha said, spreading its four wings out across the ranger’s back and lifting off her travel perch with a flurry of alternating wing beats that gave her race a snakelike appearance in the air as her head and hind quarters bobbed up and down alternate of each other. The cat-sized avian flew up through a gap in the treetops and hovered in place, letting Jack pull camera feeds from her armor so he could see what she saw.

  The Hepcha saw the rolling terrain covered in trees but nothing out of the ordinary, then when she started to angle in the direction Jack had indicated and gain some altitude, a line in the greenery became visible. Ikra flew lower as she approached it, searching for any anti-air turrets or ships in the sky that could spot her. When she found nothing she eased into a hummingbird-like hover that had her feathered wings stoking the air unbound while the rest of her body was covered in very thin, but still strong light blue armor that looked like scales. Those scales scraped over top of one another, preserving her flexibility while still protecting her body from all angles.

  “See it?” she asked through the comm in her tiny helmet that covered her round head and long beak.

  “Yeah,” Jack replied, watching via his helmet’s HUD. “Sneaky bastards. They cut into the trees to make a landing pad underneath the canopy. The hillside to your right will block view of it from the ground save for the nearest half mile, and all the orbital scans will show is untouched forest.”

  “Ships should still be visible from the sky?”

  “Not when there’s cloud cover, and most of the raids have occurred in bad weather.”

  “This isn’t that well hidden,” the Hepcha argued as she flew around in casual circles, keeping her distance but giving the Archon multiple angles to work with. There wasn’t any infrastructure visible, just a flat piece of ground with a few trunks missing and an intact canopy above stretching from the nearby trees.

  “You have to remember we’re playing in a very low league here. They don’t think about hiding things the way we do. The locals have very bad sensors, so I can imagine these guys operating out of this location with ease. Hold position, I’m coming to you.”

  “No sign of activity yet.”

  “Lay low just in case.”

  “How low?”

  “Stretch your wings if you like, but don’t get any altitude.”

  “Buzzing as ordered,” she said as the Archon began to run, visible on her battlemap as a speedy dot moving through the forest. He was fast for a ground pounder, but couldn’t match her flight speed even on his best day and her worst. They’d been working as a scouting pair for the past 3 years, and even though she’d wanted to be posted to the front lines where the heavy action was, Ikra had come to realize that out here in the ‘safe’ territories there were still all kinds of dangers, but most of them were well within Star Force’s ability to dominate, leaving her and Jack as a very powerful pairing that she’d come to relish. Had they been fighting against the lizards that would have been another story altogether.

  “Contact,” Ikra warned, seeing movement near the pad.

  “I know, I can feel them now,” Jack said, heading in that direction on the battlemap. “They’re definitely Groms.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “The locals can’t handle them, so we are.”

  “How?”

  Jack hesitated, knowing what Ikra meant even without her having to say it. This wasn’t a defensive mission, it was offense. Different standards applied and even if these guys were going to have to be killed he couldn’t get too over the top. When an enemy attacked you it was obvious how to respond, but when you were attacking them there were a lot of unknowns as to who you were shooting at and whether or not they deserved it. When they shot at you that was clear enough.

  “They aren’t conducting these raids on foot, so we’re depriving them of their toys. If they make a big fuss over it we take them down as well, but their deaths aren’t the mission.”

  “Gotcha,” the Hepcha said as she swooped down low to the treetops as Jack was nearing the clearing, making a big looping turn as she activated her shields and triggered her armor to extend out over her wings, taking away her main lifting capability but replacing it with light anti-grav. Ikra flew across the treetops, a blue scaled four-winged bird floating on her technology as she timed her arrival to coincide with Jack’s as he put up four waypoints on the map for her, marking the location of the hostiles.

  When she flew over the last of the treetops she came up on an incline that put the clearing partially above the rest of the forest, allowing lateral access while still being covered by the branches. This left a bit of cover for her to emerge from, but as the Groms finally noticed Jack she coasted into the clear and underneath the higher set trees and dove down a couple of meters onto the nearest of them.

  The bulky biped was wearing a bandoleer of ammunition and boots, but little else. Its grey hide was thick and it had a pair of short horns protruding from the top of its head that she centered on. With her right talon
she trigged a charge just before she landed on its head for a split second, delivering the stun energy on contact for she didn’t have the weight luxury of carrying ranged weapons.

  Ikra bounced off its head as it fell to the ground and got a couple of meters of altitude back as Jack shot the other three with ease, leaving the pair momentarily alone.

  “Where now?” she asked, coasting on an anti-grav cushion but keeping moving. She wasn’t heavily armored enough to soak up a lot of damage and staying put was a good way to become an easy target. Jack, however, held still and silent for a moment, with Ikra knowing that meant he was focusing on his slowing growing psionic abilities.

  “These are sentries. There’s a group of minds down that trail,” he said, pointing to a lightly mashed bit of brush. “They’re not moving yet.”

  “No vehicles?”

  Jack chewed on his lip. “No,” he said, taking his right gauntlet off and walking over to one of the unconscious Groms.

  “Got your back,” Ikra said, beginning to fly a small circle around him to keep an eye on the area while he did his mind to mind thing. This wasn’t the first time they’d dealt with Groms, and she knew it’d take several minutes at least if he was able to get anything from them. They were aggressive and pack minded, but apparently their mental structure was very different from what Jack was used to, plus he didn’t know their language. There were so many different ones out here there was no way they could hope to learn them all, so he was going to have to wing it and hope to pick up on something.

  Even the locals they were here to protect couldn’t be communicated with. They had to use an intermediary from the Uframon that could speak the language, and then communicate with him through a translation program only a few years old. It was a mess, so when the pair had come here they hadn’t bothered to inform anyone about it. They didn’t expect to coordinate with anyone, and even if they did the raiders might get tipped off and disappear.