Star Force: Extirpation (Star Force Universe Book 56) Page 8

  Tar’ange didn’t have time to look at the battlemap as he ran around the complex, reviving as many people as they could. Fortunately there weren’t that many elite scientists within Star Force, and there were enough of their V’kit’no’sat peers and Archons around that Tar’ange eventually ended up running around empty hallways looking for more until word was passed over the V’kit’no’sat comm channels from armor set to armor set that they’d gotten them all inside the complex, but there were still more people outside that needed assistance.

  The Pas’cha didn’t hesitate, finding an exit and heading out to the areas being highlighted by other V’kit’no’sat ahead of him on their own battlemap-like system. They didn’t have access to the Star Force one via their armor aside from some basic public information, but he could already see numerous bodies tagged in the surrounding area and ran out to them, pounding the ground so hard it felt like small earthquakes as he and the other large V’kit’no’sat ran to the nearest targets.

  Most were small ones, but Tar’ange came up on a Wass’mat that was not V’kit’no’sat and firmly planted his foot on his chest…but when the Kich’a’kat did its work the hexped woke all wrong. It was thrashing violently, spilling bits of words in a way that made no sense, and Tar’ange had to use his Ikrid to take control of the alligator-like dinosaur to settle it down. Only then did he realize the problem…for parts of its mind were missing and parts were intact, and the intact pieces were trying to function without their complements.

  The Star Force Wass’mat had spent too long without blood flow to its brain and large sections of data had been lost. The physical components of the brain were all there, just empty where the worst damage had occurred.

  Tar’ange regretfully put the Wass’mat into a deep state of unconsciousness. He had no time to care for this one now, and the future it would have to endure to recover would be insulting. Had it been a V’kit’no’sat he would have considered killing it here and now to end its misery…but he was glad it was not, for a part of him did not want to do the enemy’s work for them. He left it sleeping and twitching as he ran off to the next target, hoping to find more that were recoverable without brain damage, but as time went on fewer and fewer were…and eventually he got to a Human on which the Kich’a’kat would not work. That meant the woman was beyond recoverable.

  Tar’ange kept looking, finding a few more who were able to be revived but with massive brain deletion. He was so sickened by it he almost wanted to stop and just let them die, but he steeled his stomach and kept saving whatever bit of life was left in them until there were simply no more left to revive.

  He stood looking out at the sea of bodies in the buildings nearby, using his Pefbar to see through the walls. Too many hours had passed, and too few V’kit’no’sat or Archons were around to revive them. He saw some medtechs running around, so maybe the Archons had gotten to them first so they could assist with wider spread revivals. That would be logical, but it was becoming clear that the enemy’s attack, while not killing many of the elite scientists who were here to work on the Ysalamir Project, had done what no other enemy could even dream of doing to Star Force.

  They’d wiped out the majority of a planet’s population in a single attack, penetrating their defenses without having to take them down. Right through the planetary shields, and that was something even the V’kit’no’sat had never been able to do. Tar’ange felt a pang of anger at that inferiority, but his rage was at the deaths of the Star Force personnel, and it surprised him. They had always been the rogue element in the Rim, but now he realized that to him they were still V’kit’no’sat, and an attack on them was an attack on the empire at large.

  Suddenly he stood tall, threw back his long neck and head into nearly vertical position, and roared…a howling, long, painful sound that was picked up by other V’kit’no’sat who emulated and added to it. Some of the other dinosaurs that were formerly V’kit’no’sat or born into Star Force joined in, and then some of the other races did so as well in whatever format they could.

  It was a roar of loss, but moreover anger and frustration. They’d been caught vulnerable without them even knowing they were vulnerable, but this would not stand. The V’kit’no’sat empire would not stand for this. Whoever had attacked Star Force here was now at war with two empires, or rather the two halves of the one galactic empire. And Hadarak threat or no, this was not going to pass without a large payment in blood.

  Tar’ange didn’t know who these vermin were, but they would find them and they would kill every last one of them…and this time he didn’t think Star Force would argue that point. At least not until victory was assured, and then Tar’ange wouldn’t care what Star Force did with the scraps. Whatever civilization this was that had attacked them was going to come to an end, no matter what it took.

  It didn’t matter whether large or small, irrelevant or rival, if someone attacked the empire, their existence would be ended. And by the howling of V’kit’no’sat and Star Force alike, Tar’ange knew they were of the same mind.

  A new war was about to be fought. A war in the Rim while the Hadarak devoured the Core. And it was going to be unlike any either the V’kit’no’sat or Star Force had ever fought before.

  9

  Admiral Naerden didn’t know who these bastards were, where they came from, but he was killing a large amount of the attacking ships despite the damage they were doing. This was not a conventional invasion, and he suspected the enemy knew they couldn’t beat Star Force head on, so what this was was a massive razing of the system and he was having a damn hard time stopping it.

  Whatever engine system they were using was not scannable. These ships were not making conventional jumps, and it seemed they had some form of cloaking device that could not be penetrated and it had to use ‘pilot fish’ to navigate by. Those pilot fish he could track and intercept, for their cloaking devices were not so good, and an attempt to run into the planet of Optimus was thwarted by his Human fleet. He expected another massive super-ship would have followed had those pilot fish got through, but he was in a good position to defend this world, and with the reports of massive deaths on the others there was no way he was going to budge from this position.

  He wanted to. For there was combat going on across the system and the enemy had left Optimus when they’d failed to get to low orbit, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t come back. Some of them had moved off, trackable, but Naerden suspected that was bait to get his ships momentarily out of position and he wasn’t falling for it. More than a third of the surviving attacking ships had disappeared beneath their super cloak, for lack of a better term, but if he was right about it navigationally requiring other visible ships to navigate to, then those now invisible vessels wouldn’t be coming to the planet.

  He didn’t know why you couldn’t just mark your position then drift blind until your navigational clock ran out then pop back up again, so maybe this super cloak wasn’t quite that, but he had his ships spread around the entire planet of Optimus in blockade formation and he was interlinked with the planetary defenses, having the surface guns and launchers locked into his fleet’s firing control as well as the orbital platforms and Sentinel stations.

  The Admiral had to hold position, but that meant sitting and watching the casualties elsewhere. The shipyards especially were being savaged, and the pursuing fleets were not numerous enough to defend them all against the kind of weird weapons the enemy was launching with only a moment’s opportunity. They needed his fleet out there, but he couldn’t leave the planet undefended and the static defenses probably would not be able to destroy approaching ships before they could get within summons range of the big weapons.

  And with this super cloak, they could bring an entire assault fleet into low orbit in the blink of an eye. That meant he had to knock down every single ship that came within range of the planet, and for that he needed his fleet to act as skirmishers heading out far away and running down ships making microjumps into the planet befor
e they actually arrived. Thankfully he had a lot of capture drones equipped with mooring beams and IDF generators, for without those some of the enemy ships would have gotten through and Optimus would be suffering the same fate as Corneria and several other planetoids.

  Naerden knew his duty, but it was hard to just sit here and watch. He actually hoped they tried to hit Optimus again, but that wasn’t going to be the case. The assault lasted for hours more, stretching into the next day before the enemy was either satisfied with the damage or they’d calculated they couldn’t do much more, for they simultaneously bugged out, disappearing from view and leaving behind a few ships that were quickly captured rather than destroyed.

  But those ships either self-destructed or the crews killed themselves before they could be captured…and they did so in such a way that they couldn’t be revived afterwards.

  The Admiral kept his fleet around Optimus for the weeks that followed, not knowing if they were going to return to try again the moment he left it, for at the end of the day the other four primary planets in the system had all been hit with the heart attack weapon that left some 88% of the population dead…though that would have been far higher if it had acted faster and not given the far side of each planet some prep time for the medtechs to save themselves. They had no way of stopping the attack, so they all had to suffer through it, then wake up when the regenerators they’d attached to themselves beforehand restarted their hearts…then they went around reviving as many others as they could, with groups of them stationed outside the medical bays so there would be less lag time tracking them down.

  But even with those groupings, people within sight of a medical bay died because there weren’t enough regenerators available and they didn’t work fast enough. Then add to that the hundreds of thousands of people who lived, but had suffered partial or near total brain wipes. They couldn’t even walk on their own, in most cases, so the survivors were being overrun with babysitting duties that they couldn’t take care of.

  Once the attackers were gone, though no one could say for sure since their arrival and departure methods couldn’t be ascertained, relief teams based out of Optimus began collecting the brain wiped survivors and bringing them back to the intact planet to free up the other survivors that needed to man the still intact defenses and other vital operations as Epsilon Eridani tried to pull itself together. They didn’t know if this was just the first wave or a one off attack, but if it was a prelude to an invasion, wiping out almost all the people on the planets in such a quick and unexpected attack would mean very little resistance once they got past the planetary shields.

  Naerden didn’t know if they could insert them to the planet through the shields or not. Their weapons obviously went right through them, even the visible ones that had turned the shipyards to ash. The analysis on that one, which was a bright blue/green beam, indicated it was a form of plasma…but one that tore a hole in the shield rather than draining it. It was like the plasma somehow cheated the energy barrier and the sensor data could not shed light on why.

  The heart attack weapon, which the Hadarak Lurker apparently also could use, passed through shields and armor like it wasn’t even there, yet it seemed to cling to the surface of the planet, for the distribution of the deaths could be calculated to see where it went and when, and it did not appear to be passing through the planetary core, merely spreading out across the surface.

  That’s the weapon that did the most damage to the people, but it was clear this enemy wasn’t just here to kill, but to destroy the means they had to produce Ysalamir. That meant they had to be an ally of the Hadarak, or someone who wanted to use the Hadarak to destroy Star Force and they saw the Ysalamir as a potential solution to the galactic problem.

  But if Star Force couldn’t stop the Hadarak, everyone in the galaxy was likely to be destroyed. So were they really allies with the Hadarak, or just fools shooting themselves in the foot to kill the ant that had walked up on top of their shoe?

  Naerden now wore combat armor round the clock, taking only brief sessions out of it to shower, and the bulk of his crew were as well, but they didn’t have enough for everyone. At least not enough that had regenerators built in. The combat fleets in the Hadarak Zone had been ordered to have their crew wear regenerators constantly, and they’d had to build a lot more to supply them, but out here in the Rim there wasn’t any perceived threat from the Hadarak yet so they didn’t have them. Someone had just exploited that blind spot, though it hadn’t done them much good in the fighting, for the drones were not stopped by their pilots’ deaths, only diminished in ingenuity for the short period of time before control was rerouted to other pilots on nearby ships or planets.

  But right now there was no way to protect an entire planet from this weapon other than to keep the ships away from it, for it they managed to fire the invisible heart attack pulse, or whatever it was, the entire population would need regenerators on them to survive…and that didn’t just mean Star Force citizens, but all the wildlife as well. Corneria had none larger than some insects, but the other planets did, and even Corneria’s insects were now all dead. Anything with a heart, no matter how small, was murdered in one fell swoop, and the thought of that sent eerie shivers down the Admiral’s spine every time he thought about it.

  Yet he had to think about it, for he remained onboard his command ship and saw nothing directly. He was insulated from the damage, and no one on his ship had been afflicted. He was glad for that distance, and the fact that he was not on the cleanup crew that had to go around and collect all the dead across 4 planets and 8 small moons.

  Reinforcements would begin to arrive in the coming days, but not before word of another attack reached him from the next door system to Epsilon Eridani…that being Sol.

  Admiral Pro’lec was a Bsidd fleet commander with a wealth of combat experience and fresh out of a campaign against Hadarak minions that had lasted 6 years. He’d been cycled back to Earth as a form of rest period that also kept the Star Force capitol with the skill level of system defenders that it deserved. No combat ever happened here, with the only incidents being a rogue ship crossing into areas it shouldn’t and having to be intercepted, and when the first ship arrived in Sol along a rarely used jumpline and failed to check in with one of the customs stations, he assumed it was another sightseer from a random race thinking it could come take a look at the capitol without permission.

  This happened a fair amount, and the Admiral was on station when it occurred, but he didn’t need to give any orders. The captains in the area responded immediately and sent out drones to intercept…then the ship sudden made a microjump and tried to race them out of stellar orbit.

  The Bsidd flexed his mandibles in irritation. Engine profile on the ship wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t up to Star Force standards. Did they not understand they weren’t getting anywhere? He’d seen stupid before, but this was more bold than usual.

  The intercept happened out beyond Mercury’s orbit in null space, with the drones catching and disabling the ship in an IDF field as they all coasted out towards nowhere. The ship hadn’t been headed for one of the planets. Must have just been a random trajectory trying to evade the system defenders.

  Pro’lec thought that was the end of it as he tried to identify the ship’s hull design. It was familiar, but not identical to anything in the database, and it wasn’t responding to hails, so a boarding action was going to have to happen.

  Before he could issue any specific orders on that the drones he had sent to capture it, all 6 of them, suddenly disappeared as a mass of contacts materialized around them and opened fire.

  The Admiral stood up from his command chair as alarms went off around the system, or would once the signal lag worked out. Somehow a fleet of 3,290 ships had bypassed their defenses and were now inside the system.

  Pro’lec was in Mars orbit at the time, but he and a chunk of the planetary defense fleet immediately broke away from their parking slots and accelerated through microjumps towards the e
nemy fleet, as did several others from the inner planets and orbital stations. Whoever this was was about to get overrun, and yet they still would not identify themselves.

  They didn’t linger for long, heading on a course towards Mars with Pro’lec having to slam on the brakes before they flew by him. He brought his fleet backwards and spread out in anticipation of the arrival of the enemy, but right before they slowed down to engagement speed more ships popped up along with the enemy fleet. Two large ones with some smaller escorts. Both were starburst shaped and larger than the rest, with Pro’lec assuming they were heavy hitters while at the same time trying to figure out how they got here without being detected.

  The two big ships made their way to the front of the formation when the drone wall was in firing range, hammering their shields but doing no discernible damage, then they both started glowing yellow, first at the tips of the angular pylons, then it soaked on further towards the central mass.

  The Admiral knew this was some form of a charging attack, and as the drone wall extended around the flanks into a bowl-shaped formation that could attack on multiple angles, the two large enemy ships shot yellow beams, laser straight, towards each other, connecting them somehow and allowing a mass to form between them. It looked like a tiny star and grew quickly as the enemy’s other ships stayed behind them and fought the drones on the perimeter…but they would not go in front of the larger ships.

  Pro’lec altered the drone wall, pulling ships out of the forward arc without giving the enemy a clear path to the planet. Additional fleets would be arriving within the hour, and if the enemy progressed forward they’d run into the planetary defenses. He was about to withdraw in that direction to bring the Sentinels in range, but that linking up worried him so he decided to draw out whatever weaponry they had here and now…and when they fired the Bsidd’s jaw dropped.