Star Force: Probe (SF42) Read online

  And Leona was about to take the bait.

  “Show me all tracks,” she said as she got to the bridge, with her crew throwing up the holographic routes from their present position into the 4th planet and its 5 moons, each of which had a significant gravity well to maneuver off of.

  They’d already prepared several navigational options for her, and she picked the one she wanted within 10 seconds, ordering the ship in without delay. They had to hit fast before the ships could reposition, and given the sensor lag they were pretty much guessing where the Skarrons were going to be in order to jump in as close as possible…which in this case was to the innermost moon.

  The jump took all of 34 seconds, at the end of which they got sensor images of the Skarron ships, which allowed them to make alterations to their course to keep from ramming them if necessary…but it wasn’t, for they were well off, orbiting around the moon with what looked to be a gravity drive assist, for it wasn’t a ballistic course anymore. They were repositioning for another microjump, with Leona’s jumpship considerably out of position for this type of intercept.

  Fortunately the Skarrons were here to fight and settled into a stable orbit, but without chasing the Wildfire. Instead they let it come to them, burning up precious seconds while they sent a message to their waiting fleet.

  “Take us directly in,” Leona ordered. “Let’s give them something else to shoot at. Deploy all enroute and begin calculating exit jumps.”

  With the Star Force jumpship settling into its own augmented orbit, it raced around the curve of the moon spawning drone warships as it went. They drifted off and fell into formation with it momentarily, then zipped on ahead given their greater maneuverability and speed, but they didn’t go in alone, rather waiting to form 4-6 ship groups, the first of which went exclusively for one of the Skarron destroyers.

  Weaponsfire exchanged early on, lachars against lachars, then plasma against plasma as the ships got close to one another. One of the Star Force frigates and two corvettes in the first group of 6 were equipped with maulers, so they closed to pointblank range as the single heavy cruiser that Leona had disengaged and targeted the Skarron ships from afar, letting the jumpship close while it stayed back and peppered the ships with cleansing beams.

  The Star Force drones took heavy shield damage almost immediately, but before they could start losing armor they redeployed, breaking formation and pulling out of the battle almost as if they were on strings that someone was yanking away. One of the Skarron destroyers followed, diminishing their group strength as the Wildfire itself came into the battle. Fortunately it drew a considerable amount of fire while the smaller ships rotated around, with those with full shields going forward and the others dropping into firing support positions.

  The Skarrons weren’t stupid, and continued firing on the damaged ships and repositioning when possible to make it more feasible, but they were both bigger and slower, allowing the smaller ships to get free if they wanted to, some of which came back in from their tiny jumps out, and the Skarron destroyer as well as it quickly realized it couldn’t keep pace with them.

  But that too had been a ruse, an enticement to sweeten the pot, so to speak, and cause Star Force to move on the weaker ship group all the while the relief fleet jumped in to the moon’s orbit above them and began to deploy into blocking positions…or rather, as many as they could. Star Force could pretty much jump anywhere it wanted, but with dwindling fuel reserves the higher cost maneuvers were pretty much off the menu…something else the Skarrons had taken into account.

  But Leona got what she wanted, damaging one of the Skarron destroyers, before she ordered her fleet out. Like little fleas the drones made microjumps of their own, very low powered ones, that curved around onto other jumplines that the Skarrons couldn’t follow, getting them out of the firing lines while expending small amounts of fuel.

  The jumpship was another matter, and it was quickly being surrounded by the Skarron fleet, but Leona had timed it right and while its shields were getting hammered by long range lachar fire and some plasma from the first group of ships, it ducked down closer to the planet where the Skarrons weren’t and zipped off on a high powered maneuver, pushing against moons, planet, and star to get an acceleration line underneath the enemy fleet that put it clear of their blockers, after which it made a casual jump out away from the moon with 23% shield strength remaining.

  Once they were away Leona breathed a sigh of relief, but knew it would take time to recover their scattered drone fleet, and if they weren’t careful the Skarrons could jump them in the process. To that end they organized a rendezvous circuit across planetary orbit, stopping here and there for the little ships to dock with the jumpship and eventually recollecting every one of them…all without hull damage.

  Leona had expended a great deal of fuel, not to mention plasma, but in exchange they’d gutted one of the destroyers, which even now wasn’t maneuvering. Part of the Skarron fleet was surrounding it to discourage a return…but then their ships eventually peeled off one by one, yet another lure for her to take, but one that had the other Skarron warships still in planetary orbit and far closer than they had been the first time.

  It was a question of how bold she was going to get, with the Skarrons clearly challenging her at the same time as they were denying her the easy kill, meaning they would be stationed here for some time, leaving Ettiana less guarded.

  Unfortunately the fleet there was far larger, and any tactical significance of having drawn and temporarily pinned this group down here was lost. She’d managed to do some damage, without taking any of her own, but that’s all she could have hoped for…well, aside from fully killing the ship, which she’d hoped to do, but still, the damage was significant, and she’d given the Skarrons a lame duck to carry or abandon, and if they did the latter she would most definitely finish it off.

  Successfully hitting and disabling the ship felt good, and it was enough to satisfy her for the moment. She might not be able to defeat this superior Skarron fleet, but she could keep them honest and expose any weaknesses they showed her. If they got sloppy she’d make them pay for it, being a gnat that they couldn’t find a way to swat. Her two jumpship fleet couldn’t protect Ettiana, but it was certainly going to avenge it…even if that meant tiny piecemeal engagements.

  9

  July 25, 2467

  Ghanis System

  Ettiana

  Ben flew out of one of the Alpha Site’s underground tunnels, ducking under the chunk of forest lifted up above the entrance and shooting out across the tree tops in a green/brown Star Fox skeet third in line behind two others. A fourth followed him out, then as a group the quartet rose to altitude and engaged their super pursuit mode. With their altered shields elongating them into aerodynamic spikes, the fighters accelerated up to extremely high speed within the upper atmosphere, crossing the landscape with no worry about being intercepted by Skarron fighters…at least not until they wanted to, for this mission was designed specifically to hunt down and kill some of the enemy aircraft.

  Trick was picking a spot where they didn’t have walker support, or drawing the fighters off from where they did. Today was going to be the later, and Ben’s formation flew across Ettiana’s surface towards one of the larger cities that the Skarrons had been in the process of demolishing. It had originally been built to house millions of Kiritak and the processing factories necessary for transforming the raw materials being harvested across the planet into transportable units, such as metallic ingots or crushed grain, to be shipped off planet with the minimum volume necessary by stripping out unwanted materials or dead airspace.

  A part of the cityscape had also been using those resources to fabricate construction materials that were being used to expand the city and build others across the planet. Apparently none of that industry was to the Skarrons’ liking, for they were wrecking all of it and taking down the buildings like dominoes, one by one, section by section.

  Ben didn’t know if they planned to
build anything in its place, but the city was certainly in disarray when he and the other pilots arrived, making him wonder if they weren’t just trashing everything in sight as an insult to Star Force.

  The Skarrons had seen the skeets coming from a ways off and had already redeployed their fighter patrols their way…along with launching more from surface sites nearby, which suggested the enemy had at least encampments set up, even if they weren’t building permanent structures just yet. The skeets were outnumbered 34 to 4, initially, with more fighters rising up on anti-grav at a delayed pace, but that much they’d expected. This mission was a quick hit, engage, and run op, and they didn’t intend to stick around long enough for the sky to fill with their opposition.

  Because they were going to engage the Skarrons at a distance from the city, the skeets slowed down early to draw them even further off and ensure the anti-air defenses on the walkers wouldn’t get involved. The Skarrons didn’t seem to mind the ploy, for they sent their fighters on out after them as fast as the thick craft could fly. Each one was the equivalent of an aerodynamic rock only slightly smaller than a Sparrow-class dropship and easily in excess of 10x the mass of a standard skeet.

  The things were covered in their plasma dampening armor and good shields, but their maneuvering ability was slow and they relied on cluster fire to take down targets which they accomplished similar to the walkers…with multiple small plasma cannons scattered across their hulls, which also allowed them to fire in all directions, meaning you couldn’t drop in on one’s ‘tail’ and expect to be safe.

  They also each had a lachar turret on top for anti-missile operations, though they did use them to target the skeets early in response to the Human’s own lachar attacks that they launched at maximum range on one target. The energy/particle cocktail didn’t do much damage, even though the skeets were using as concentrated a version as Star Force had produced, which literally lit up the sky in a very brief flash of green light, given that these skeets had been produced by Clan Star Fox, and nowadays the color of your lachars matched your paint job, at least as far as the aerial and mech divisions were concerned.

  “Ben, since this is your first time just stay with us and try not to get lost,” Chev-34822 said from the front of their diamond line, which had them in single file but space out around their central axis on four points, giving each a clear firing line ahead. “Concentrate all firepower on a single target or it’ll take us forever to knock these things out.”

  “I’ve already got my share of Skarron kills,” Ben told him, referencing the beginning of the planetary assault. “I know how tough they are.”

  “Tougher now that they’ve gotten use to our craft and tendencies,” Chev added.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Ben said as he crossed into outer plasma range and began squeezing off a few shots, most of which dissipated in the air, but a little bit reached out to the target fighter, which they’d nicknamed a ‘lightning bug’ for the way their entire hull seemed to glow when they began launching plasma…which the 10 or so bugs did a moment after Ben began the primary engagement.

  The other three Archons joined him a moment later when their plasma range dipped into the moderate distance and they began eating away at their target’s shields more fiercely, even as their own craft began to take a few hits…but only a few, for their skeets had a very narrow forward profile, making them hard to target. Most of the hits they took were Skarron lachars, but none of the skeets had their shields go down on the first pass, nor even below 70%, but the lightning bug didn’t lose full shields either…though it had come close.

  The four skeets flew through the other Skarron fighters and pulled back around through a long loop that each of them followed, maintaining their snake-like formation as they came back in at the same lightning bug into a snowstorm of white plasma orbs. Ben hit the target with his own blue plasma spheres, which were considerably larger than the enemy’s, though numerically they had more given the size of their craft and their multiple cannons. For every one Ben fired the lightning bug threw 10-15 back at him, but fortunately their accuracy wasn’t great and only a few hit.

  As Ben’s skeet flashed by the bug he hit it with a mauler blast, with the cockpit computer indicating hull damage to the enemy craft as the Archon flew an evasive route through the other lightning bugs as his shields got bathed in plasma hits, along with a few more lachar strikes. He came out the other side, still maneuvering at high speed with the other three pilots, all of which had avoided hull damage, though Ben’s shield strength had dropped to 24%.

  “One more fellas, spread formation. Let’s knock this guy out before he gets his shields back up. I’m going scorpion, so don’t wait up on me.”

  “Copy that,” Ben said, drifting to the left and spreading out with the others, giving the enemy craft four points of attack to deal with this time while they more or less hovered in place waiting for the Humans to return. The Skarrons moved about, mixing their positions up, but overall their formation held together over the same bit of ground, figuring they had good odds against the stupid little skeets, especially as the Skarrons had a scattering of reinforcements heading their way and getting closer with every second, coming in ones and twos that would add to their numbers even if they lost a few fighters in the engagement.

  But what else could they do? The Skarrons had decent linear speed, though still not as much as the skeets, and their agility outright sucked, so playing aerial turret was their best bet here and they were making the most of it, hitting Ben with a better placed wall of plasma just as he ducked down towards the treetops to avoid it. He knew the enemy craft could carry missiles, but either they were choosing not to use them or only had them for ground support missions…and right now his money was on the later.

  He arced back up, with the fire hose of enemy plasma readjusting towards him with every maneuver he made. By the time he came up on the target lightning bug he only got a few plasma shots off, plus one mauler which added to the other two and blew out a chuck of the enemy fighter’s hull.

  Chev didn’t fly past with the others, but braked hard, throwing off the enemy’s firing lines a bit, most of which were still on the other fighters, and came up right in front of the target, letting his altitude sink as he blasted away with is mauler cannon, getting several shots in that eventually dropped the Skarron craft out of the sky.

  Chev dove beneath it, using it as a block, and rocketed out the far side just before it crashed into the trees. He weaved side to side as the Skarrons decided to chase him, then the other three skeets came around on a flanking run and hit one of the fighters, blindsiding it with a lot of damage given their slower attack speed that offered them more shots per pass.

  Chev eventually broke free of the engagement and got some altitude and distance away from the others, coming away with 3% shield strength remaining…which was a victory. No hull damage and the enemy had lost one of theirs.

  He flew an evasive course as some of the lachars tried to track him from afar, but for the occasional hit his shields recharged evenly while the other three skeets continued to gang up on one of the lightning bugs, but doing so in widely spaced runs, having to let their shields recharge more with each pass or risk hull damage.

  By the time Chev got back to them they were throwing every formation and trick they had at the Skarrons to keep their focus split and their formation changing. At the end the four fighters were going at it solo, flying highly evasive routes through the enemy formation and getting some of them to shoot each other in the crossfire. The skeets managed to down four of the lightning bugs before the Skarrons regrouped and reorganized enough to make the Humans pay more for each attack run, after which the quartet flew off due east, seeing if the Skarrons were going to follow.

  When they did their lines stretched out and the Archons used that weakness to circle around and pick on another of the lightning bugs and kill it before they enemy could resume its ‘bee swarm’ formation. After that the Skarrons didn’t follow when t
he skeets moved off again, which ended the engagement. Ben and the others would have tried to get another, but by now there were well over 100 enemy fighters in the air, half of which were still enroute to their position, making the environment too unfriendly to risk further attacks. Get too many plasma cannons in the air and even with badly aimed shots they’d rack up kills just through sheer numbers.

  So the four skeets regained altitude and transitioned into super pursuit mode, heading back to the Alpha Site with five kills between them…a small victory that reminded the Skarrons they didn’t own the planet just yet, and that the Humans were going to be damn hard to fully exterminate. At least until they found their way into Alpha Site, and with a little luck that wouldn’t happen until Star Force got a relief fleet out to the system.

  A week later Ben was inserted into a ground op at one of the smaller Skarron-infested sites. He and 9 others were dropped at distance by dropship then ran cross country to get to the mining outpost, this one smaller than the facility he’d been stranded at, but like the other it also had a Type-4 walker guarding it. The barracks was built into the main facility, which was located atop one central shaft going down several miles that would eventually branch out and make use of extra infrastructure up top once it was built later on.

  The outpost was just a startup, but a useful one none the less, and that wasn’t lost on the Skarrons who were actively using the Star Force equipment to mine a plethora of minerals, of which they were interested in the Archons didn’t know, but Star Force had been extracting carbon-rich minerals, including diamonds, with loads of unrefined ore stored in cargo containers on the surface landing pads.