Star Force: Resistance (SF75) Page 8

  All assets forward, close formation. Deny the swarm its area of effect and punch a hole straight into it. There weren’t any assault pillars, invokers, or jumpships nearby to go after, so he wasn’t sure where Paul was taking them exactly, but the movement had drawn all the lizards off their pursuit of the still incoming convoy…with them all heading towards the seda and closing in around it like a giant beehive hand with dozens of fingers comprised of the tiny yellow/tan warships.

  To his chagrin he saw the starfighters being recalled into the seda, approaching from the back side and told to park inside rather than take the fight to the enemy. The Archons never did like using starfighters, even unmanned ones, but this battle was Paul’s to command and Remmington wasn’t going to second guess him, though he had never fully understood their dislike for the tiny, agile ships that could fly rings around a lizard cruiser.

  He checked their kill stats, seeing that they’d already knocked down 13 enemy ships during the ‘light’ skirmishes, though a few of those were probably cleanup runs after the warships knocked them down a peg. Didn’t matter now, he’d have plenty to review later if/when he got the chance, for he could already see from the system-wide battlemap displayed in holo beside his command chair that this system was active and he didn’t expect it to ever settle down, given the size and scope of the conflict happening here.

  A secondary warning flashed on one of his personal displays, indicating that seda OEG had been engaged at the head of the convoy as it entered planetary orbit. Remmington pulled up another holo of that location and set it to his left so he could keep a wandering eye on it, seeing that the Mainline fleet was there with them, so he assumed they’d get into position without delay, though maybe taking a few scratches in the process.

  Just then all the secondary weapons on his seda opened up, firing directly ahead along with the command ships as a tendril of cruisers flew right at them. Many of them were shredded, with the debris continuing to move forward on a ballistic trajectory, but the intact cruisers didn’t alter or slow their approach. Instead they stayed on the same course as the debris and suddenly the shields were being rammed by both at considerable speed.

  Not a few collisions, but a deliberate pounding by the enemy fleet. The sheer audacity at seeing hundreds of warships flying suicide missions directly at his seda shocked him, but then he understood the need for additional shield power. Paul had known this was coming, and even now Remmington could see their defensive power lessening under each hit. The debris was forced aside, with the giant sphere acting as a snowplow against it and clearing the path for the warships to follow…and not just the Canderian ones, but the Mainline drones as well.

  “Evacuate outer hull, collision protocols,” he ordered, not knowing how much of this pounding was going to occur. “Lock down the Keema batteries, full shell mode, but leave the other guns operational. If we take hits I want them to be bee stings only. He’s using our mass as a shield, so let’s turtle up as much as we can. Shunt all outer ring systems to automatic and cancel any damage repair teams until I order otherwise,” he said, finally rising up out of his chair and choosing to stand as they dove into the enemy horde. “Expect a pounding.”

  And a pounding they got. Like bugs to a bug zapper the lizard cruisers came, feeling they had an opportunity to damage or destroy the massive station…and they did, had the crew been inept, but his people weren’t anything but skilled combat veterans and they had a trailblazer personally leading this battle, meaning the lizards weren’t going to do squat. That said, Remmington conceded the fact that his seda might be significantly damaged in the process, but if that was the case so be it, for it would take that damage away from the drone fleets that were much more vulnerable.

  Paul had them plow directly into the center of the hundreds of thousands of cruisers ahead of them…something that he didn’t think the lizards expected. They poured in on them like sand collapsing into a sink hole, with his seda and the 3 command ships taking the heaviest of the pounding, most of which came from collisions. But the genius of it all was the fact that the incoming lizard ships were moving slower than even his seda, and they couldn’t ram it en mass without making tiny microjumps. Those jumps couldn’t happen through their own fleet, so they had to ram it at slower speeds in groups that also had to adjust to the forward momentum that somehow Paul was succeeding to randomize with constant gravity drive adjustments to not only the seda but the entire fleet simultaneously.

  They moved left, then up, then down and through a variety of small, yet mathematically significant alterations that did not allow the lizards to anticipate where they were going to be in order to set up more damaging assault runs. He was lessening their damage potential with navigation and forcing the lizards to act more spontaneously…which with their limited life expectancy kept them from having any veteran commanders, Remmington suspected. Such newbs, no matter how much genetic knowledge they were gifted with, would react with less efficiency than commanders who had been in tense combat multiple times before, not to mention relentless training simulations that honestly made this level of insane combat feel…familiar.

  Once the seda and the command ships made it through the entire lizard fleet, punching a hole clear through to the other side, the seda’s shields were down to 12% and still taking additional hits, but rather than run Paul had them come to a dead stop and the command ships move out like extending flower petals as they turned back on the chasing enemy that the drones, that had been taking shelter in the mass shadow of the bigger ships, were now attacking in a frenzy like a bottle of soda that had been shaken up and held in check up until now. Those tightly packed fleet formations were exploding outward into the the lizard fleet and began to eat away at it from the inside as more and more cruisers continued to pour into the seda’s shields.

  The enemy had a choice to make, with it seeming to want the big station dead. Remmington held his teeth firmly together, knowing what this would mean. They were the anvil on which the lizard hammer was going to fall…all the while the smaller fleet of warships were going to devour that hammer from the handle on up. The only question was how much of his seda would remain once the shields fell, and how well had Paul calculated the potential damage.

  A quick check of the larger battlemap indicated that there was no immediate lizard reinforcements coming. This massive fleet they were engaging was to be their only opponent so long as this didn’t drag on hours…which it very well could. Right now though the lizards had either been caught off guard or they were confident that they could do what was necessary on their own without additional ships.

  Remmington didn’t know if they could or not, the numbers involved were so large he didn’t have the ability to glance and assess the dangers involved. He hoped the trailblazer could, but regardless of the outcome Canderous served the Archons and would follow them into any battle anytime, anywhere. If they did die here, which he thought would be unlikely given how much mass this seda held and the bunkers at the center that would preserve them against almost any pounding, then so be it. It wouldn’t be a waste. He trusted the trailblazers enough to insure that, but found it much more likely that Paul’s cunning would win out today as it had numerous times throughout Star Force’s history.

  And the bastard was probably going to do it with the starfighters parked in the hangar bays.

  9

  January 4, 2936

  Gvaris System (lizard territory)

  Planet 13

  Jasmine-CT294-17 ran into the hangar bay along with a few other crewmembers and up the ramp onto the Pantheon III-class dropship and took her seat, allowing the others to get situated in quick fashion and clear the narrow hallways allowing the copilot to come forward after securing the rear hatch and insuring that all were onboard. They lifted off from the RTL’s hangar deck and flew out the containment shield and into space accelerating heavily. Though born and raised in space, Jasmine still took a long, deep breath, knowing how vulnerable they’d just become.

&n
bsp; But then again the pantheons had been designed for just this type of hazardous duty, carrying more armor and engines than Mainline dropships to get crews and cargo up and down from a planetoid faster and more reliable under combat situations. The tradeoff was that they carried less cargo, but as Jasmine agreed that wouldn’t matter if they didn’t make the trip in one piece.

  Planet 13 had never been inhabited, by the lizards or anyone else known, hence it didn’t even have a name and in the two days since she’d got here she hadn’t been informed that anyone had given it one yet. That seemed rude, for both Star Force and the lizards were paying the world a lot of attention right now with the sedas ringing the small planet like a necklace and orbiting over the construction site constantly with the lizards trying to send cruisers down into the gap to catch some of the thousands of dropships transiting to and from the surface.

  Both the Canderous and Mainline fleets were repelling them, but she’d previously seen one or two make it through and the dropships had to go evasive to avoid it. They were smaller and more maneuverable, but even with their armor and shielding they couldn’t stand up to much pounding from a cruiser. That danger wasn’t deterring the flow of supplies and personnel, though the lizards had made much more of a fuss about it yesterday, the debris from which was still visible in orbit.

  The monitors in the passenger area showed the RTL as a wall of green metal at first, slowly expanding to encompass the curves of the giant sphere. The damage on the surface was obvious, with huge chunks having been torn out by ship impacts. Jasmine knew that repairing such damage would take years, and as long as they were in this system the wounds would simply be patched over and contained while all available materials were being sent down to the construction site that she had been assigned to along with a host of other Canderian techs.

  All of them were also trained soldiers, but they wouldn’t be needed in that role in the coming days. Still, it felt comforting to know that she would be working with other Canderians and not just the Mainline techs. They had some combat training in their maturias, but it wasn’t anything compared to what Canderians had to endure. Jasmine was a solider, but one who had chosen to focus on tech duties in order to fight the enemy by other means…means that were being relied upon heavily here to gain Star Force the true foothold it needed to conquer this system.

  Her pantheon zipped down from their fairly high orbital position to the airless planet’s surface where some 18 Mainline drones were sitting on the rocky ground acting as temporary defense batteries around the construction site, which on the surface stretched about 2 miles in diameter, but she knew it was much more sizeable underneath where there was already well over 50,000 crew working on harvesting resources from the planet, as well as to construct the makeshift colony that was centered around the planetary defense battery that was still under construction.

  When the pantheon got to ground it floated down into a rocky, rectangular hole until a lateral bay became visible with two other Canderian dropships coming back out. They gently passed each other by as more came down behind Jasmine’s ride, then hers set down on a crowded deck and the passengers jogged out much like they had coming in, saving a few seconds here and there that would amount to a full round trip eventually. A little prudence now could have an effect down the line, and all Canderians had been taught from birth not to waste time or resources, for both could be critical in combat and survival operations.

  She hadn’t brought any gear with her, not even a datapad, but everything she needed to work was already on station, sent ahead by other Canderians, and Jasmine immediately joined the work crews that were helping the Mainline techs construct the massive weapon. It was housed well below ground with the corovon-laced armored doors being the first items that were constructed. Those covered what would be the surface of the battery, though even they were encased beneath dozens of meters of rock so the lizards wouldn’t be able to see what they were building and strike it before it was completed. Shield generators were already up to protect the site against kamikaze strikes, but the enemy had more than enough ships to overwhelm them if they so chose.

  Anonymity was the defense here, and it was her job to help get the battery operational before they realized it existed. The technology was the same as the smaller models within the seda she had been living the past 52 years on, though it wasn’t her origin. That seda was CT and located back in Sol, one of the permanent stations that could only be moved around by cradle, for it didn’t have its own interstellar-capable gravity drives. It was also a lot smaller than RTL, but it was where she had been born and gone through her maturia training, hence it was a part of her name and her memories.

  She hadn’t helped build RTL, but she had assisted in the maintenance of the Keema batteries and was familiar enough with the tech to be assigned to one of the teams working directly on it while most of the others were going to the mining or construction sites that were expanding on the war colony. Living space was nil, with the Canderians having to be shuttled back up to the seda after a few days of long hours and brief naps to recharge and refuel. Other than bottles of water and snack rations, Jasmine was going to have to make do with her current energy reserves, for until ample living quarters could be established they were all going to be migrating to and from the sedas on a regular basis along with the supplies, for there was almost no industry present down here either…at least not compared to what they now had in orbit.

  Already the amount of raw produce coming back down from the seda had exponentially increased the construction rate of the battery, and the more raw materials that could be harvested from this planet and others throughout the system would only snowball it further. The sedas were the Canderians’ homes, and with them came everything they needed to survive and flourish in the harshness of space, including the industry to produce every bit of technology that weapons and ships required.

  Some duplicate facilities had already been built underground by the Mainline techs prior to their arrival, but they had little to work with. Jasmine was mildly impressed with how much they’d been able to build without even an MCV-class jumpship to work from, but when she got to the battery itself her feelings plummeted. There was a massive chamber dug out of the planet’s bedrock, inside of which there was very little weapon constructed. There was, however, a flow of Canderians moving about the place in nothing but their black/green uniforms that appeared to be getting a more robust effort into motion.

  Jasmine had no construction armor either, for there wasn’t enough for all of them. This chamber was pressurized and heated, but they all wore a small armband that held an emergency shield generator that would encapsulate them should the pressure drastically fall off, giving them a few minutes of life and oxygen recycling during which they could hopefully find their way to safety…though if a warship came crashing through the armored doors above she knew there would be little point in that.

  The skeleton of the weapon was partially complete, and she was directed to head to the ever growing barrel to join an all Canderian crew that was receiving structural segments and attaching them Lego-style into place and forming what looked like a crane ladder. It would stretch nearly the full length of the spherical battery when completed, but barely looked like a stub protruding up from the floor at this point.

  When Jasmine got down to there, being flown over on a small, four-man anti-grav sled, she realized that they were going to be working in natural gravity. The hangar where they’d landed and the facility they’d walked through had been AG equipped, but in this chamber there was none, nor an IDF field to give them a 0G environment for construction. It felt like .3 or under to her legs, and while that would make lifting things easier than normal, it was going to slow things down. An IDF was preferable and she wasn’t sure why one hadn’t been built here yet.

  Maybe it was also on the work schedule, or maybe they were prioritizing resources to the battery itself. If that was the case she could agree, for getting this thing built as soon as possible was
key to this campaign, and if that meant some awkward construction environment then so be it. She and the other Canderians were up to the task, and she didn’t doubt the Mainline crews would be either.

  Jasmine climbed off the sled and onto a catwalk network that had been built up around the growing barrel, found a tool set and was given a post waiting for another segment to come down on the western side. A much beefier sled carried it overhead and lowered it into position while more than a dozen Canderians climbed up onto it and guided it in, setting it into exact alignment using some calibration brackets while the sled continued to hoist the majority of the weight.

  When she got the word, Jasmine found one of the seams and began sealing it with an injection filament, which looked like a straw the length of her arm. She slid it into a hole on the new segment, with it inserting at an angle that brought it down into the base piece. Once in place she activated it with another device and the rod melted, with the liquid disappearing down the hole. Had this been a 0G environment the tool would have pushed it in, but in this case gravity was helping as the temporarily liquid material filtered down through smaller and smaller passages and settled into the microscopic gaps between segments.

  The top segment had a hole in the base that the plug on the bottom fit into, and that would hold the majority of the sheering stresses, but this Syfonate would allow the minor positioning that the size differential from plug and socket allowed. With everything in place she used her datapad and sensor to confirm adequate levels across all bonding points, then realized she needed to insert another half rod.

  That was odd, so she did another scan and realized that the segments were cut wrong. The plug was too small by a fraction, then she realized it was probably due to an unanticipated difference between Canderian and Mainline molds. The new piece was probably one of the first built by the sedas over the past day and a half, with the one she was standing above having been built on site by the makeshift factories.