Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) Page 9

  So as usual they’d just dropped in where they wanted, for no one could stop them anyway and it was better to keep away from the locals altogether.

  “They’re waiting on something,” Jack finally said, standing up and taking a step away from the Grom that massed twice what he did…in armor. “I think we’re going to stick around and see what shows up.”

  “How long?”

  “Soon.”

  “Stay here or go after the others down the trail?”

  “Trail…after I get them out of sight,” Jack said, walking over to and grabbing one of the Groms to drag off the crude dirt landing pad. “I get the feeling we’ve stumbled onto a network, and the more links we can smoke out the better.”

  “So not a one day mission?” Ikra asked, still circling above him on the invisible cushion beneath her wings. She cocked her head, twisting her helmeted beak to the side and pausing her flight.

  “I hear it too,” Jack said, noting the telltale whine of inefficient anti-grav approaching from a distance. “Go take a look.”

  Ikra flexed her wings, mentally triggering them to increase propulsion in combination with a talon button press. She flew up out of the partial gap and into the open air, immediately dipping back down again and surfing the low gaps between the uneven treetops to keep out of sight. She flew wide of the direction the sound was coming from and spied one of the taller trees in the area. Ikra approached it from the opposite side and grabbed hold of the upper branches, pushing herself inside the leaves and then climbing through it far enough to look out but still conceal her. A few blue patches in the sea of green would most likely go unnoticed.

  “Convoy. Not Grom transports, but definitely built for overland travel. Nothing the locals could build.”

  “How many?”

  “I count 3. I don’t think more than one will fit on the landing pad at a time.”

  “Damn…our timing super sucks on this one. Looks like we start taking it all down and sort through the pieces afterwards.”

  “I don’t think the transports are shielded.”

  “Show me.”

  Ikra sent the visual link as they came within a half mile of her position.

  “Take the last, wait for the first to land.”

  “Gladly,” she said, waiting impatiently until the three box-like hovering transports passed her by. When the first one dipped into the gap underneath the trees where Jack was waiting she pushed hard out of her perch and flew across the distance like a slow missile, coming up on the back transport and landing on top of it. It only took a moment to find the hatch, which she grasped with her talons and pulled up. It flipped open on a hinge, then she released and let it bang down on the top of the metallic box as she dove inside and went to work on the crew.

  These might not be lizards, but this was still combat and she was working one on one with an Archon taking down targets far larger than her small frame. That was due to the armor, weapons, and training that Star Force had given her race in addition to sanctuary when their homeworld had been destroyed. She’d gone from being a helpless victim to a hunter, a moral hunter, and Ikra appreciated the irony in that as she got battered around inside the transport by the Groms as they flailed panickly to no avail.

  After a long 40 seconds all 13 of them were unconscious and she was still unharmed, though her shields had gone down from the physical blows. With a satisfied beak pucker she drifted back over to the hatch when the transport hit something and came to a sudden stop. Ikra bounced off the wall then righted herself, flying up through the topside entrance and having to pull her way through tree branches that the pilotless transport had rammed into.

  With them sliding harmlessly over her armor she pushed through and into clean air again, just in time to see the second transport turning away to run.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said with grim determination and took off after it.

  10

  November 19, 2888

  Palma System (Preema Invasion Corridor)

  Hefisti

  Riona-111 looked out through the command nexus interface at the graveyard of lizard ships in orbit around the oversized planet that they’d recently been defending. It was a monster of a world with three times the surface area of Earth but only a 1.2 gravity rating. That made it a very valuable piece of property, but one that neither the Preema, Voku, nor Star Force would be laying claim to. This was going to be yet another world/system added to the list of purges and monitored to keep the lizards or others from coming back.

  The purging process was already underway on the planet, with a fleet of 6 Preema Beta-class warships and 10 Alpha-class sitting in tranquil position just inside the orbit of the debris field that they’d been responsible for before Riona’s fleet had arrived. She had 12 Warship-class jumpships, one of which she was onboard, escorting a fleet of some 42 cargo/transport jumpships carrying Star Force aquatics troops. Hefisti housed a single body of water, but one that was bigger than all the oceans on Earth combined. The lizards had colonized it as well as the land, and digging them out of it was going to be a pain in the ass.

  Which was why the Preema had asked for Star Force’s help on this one. Riona could see that they were already doing heavy damage on the land as they were given access to the Preema’s own version of a battlemap that displayed the location of all their units, but nothing was in the water as of yet. She didn’t know if that meant they were going to let her handle all of the aquatic warfare or they’d be joining in later, but either way the cleansing of the ocean was her responsibility.

  According to intelligence reports from the Voku, this world had been a major lizard stronghold and it looked like they’d fought hard to hold onto it based on the space debris, which could easily have accounted for over 100,000 cruisers. Riona didn’t know how many there had been, nor how many ships the Preema had used to destroy them, but she got the feeling that those left in orbit were just here to guard the planet while their ground troops went into action. If these 16 alone had done this much damage then she was considerably underestimating their firepower.

  The Alphas were their smallest ship, battleship size, and they scaled up from there. Star Force had tagged them all Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons, and jumpships. The Epsilons were so large that two of them squeezed together around a jumpship and took up all the available space on it, for they each easily outmassed the spindly frame. Riona knew of only five that the Preema had brought with them out of their home territory to the staging outpost and had never seen one in person, but knew they were the most powerful warships Star Force had ever come across given their sheer size and technology.

  The Preema warships also doubled as troop carriers, for there were no ‘civilian’ ships within the system. Riona also assumed that there had been a much larger fleet here previously because the amount of troops showing on the planet was far greater than what the handful of ships in orbit could carry. They’d landed and set up a huge ground offensive, with their obvious intent being to destroy the lizard colonies as quickly as possible so they could check off this system and move on to the next.

  But they couldn’t do that until the ocean was clear as well, and Riona knew there was a bit of a time competition in play. How much infrastructure the lizards had down there was unknown, but she intended to destroy it before the Preema got finished with the land-based colonies if at all possible.

  One of her bridge officers got a line to the Preema commander and patched it through to the nexus with the winged quadruped appearing in holo, resplendent in its armor that they seemed to wear just about everywhere, though this one’s helmet had been retracted, which she knew was a measure of respect they were granting the Humans during communication.

  “I am Riona-111 and have an army of aquatics troops ready to deploy into combat, with your permission,” she said, with the computer translating her words into the Preema’s native language. She and the other Archons had gotten out of the habit of learning new ones, relying instead on translators unless
there was a significant reason to do otherwise. She’d learned lizard, obviously, as well as the old Alliance trade language, then more recently added Voku given their ever growing relationship, but unless something similar was going to happen with the Preema she wasn’t going to bother to add theirs to her personal list.

  “Thank you for responding to our request,” the Preema said, his tone artificial due to the program being responsible for his words and therefore stripping them of all subtext. “There is a large lizard presence within the ocean. We have not probed it beyond light reconnaissance. We will transfer the appropriate files to you, but we suspect that there is much more down there that we do not know about. It will be a long, hard fight.”

  “We came prepared for a hard fight.”

  “Permission granted, and a request.”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you give us access to your communications protocols so we may monitor your efforts in realtime. We’d like to learn how the enemy fights for a time when we are required to fight them under the water as well, whether it be on this planet or another.”

  “I can set up a relayed feed without linking you into our grid. It will provide you with a viewable datastream, but one that you won’t be able to interact with. We keep our comm systems’ intricacies a closely guarded secret.”

  “I did not mean to pry. We only wish to watch and learn. Please do so in whatever manner you can that is not intrusive.”

  “I’ll have it set up before we make planetfall.”

  “Thank you, and good hunting.”

  “Likewise,” Riona said as the brief conversation came to an end. She’d heard they weren’t overly theatrical, and this one seemed to be entirely down to business…which is something she could respect.

  Using the mental control interface she sent the order to the bridge crew to set up the data transfer as well as picking their first landing spot and ordering the ships to begin heading down to low orbit and start unloading. The jumpships were not going to try to go in-atmosphere, even though it was technically possible, but rather get right on the border and drop the anti-grav equipped aquatics craft off there.

  While she had some time to spare she zoomed in their surveillance equipment on the ground battles and took a look at what the Preema were up against. The land was full of lizard colonies, all of which had been stripped of their anti-orbital batteries from above. They had large craters where they had been, but the rest of the cityscape had been untouched and Riona knew why. The Preema ships had a variety of weapons at their disposal, but the largest one was a plasma orb the size of a football field that was generated within their U-shaped hulls.

  That plasma was highly energized matter, the same way Star Force rifles were, and required physical material to generate the plasma in addition to the energy from a reactor or capacitor. That meant ammo limitations whenever you had something that big in play, though the plasma weapons were a lot more economical than rail guns. Preema plasma was extremely advanced and dense, but it was still just ionized gas. They were putting it to good use though, and looked to have probably dropped their warships down into the atmosphere and pummeled the batteries up close from a few miles above.

  Staying put and vaporizing the city bit by bit would undoubtedly bleed them dry, and she didn’t think they wanted to do that and probably didn’t have enough supplies enroute to feed that kind of a campaign. If the lizards saw you systemically tearing a city apart they’d probably run and hide and you’d have to come down on foot and kill them up close anyway, so why waste the ammo?

  Though by ‘foot’ she meant wing, for the Preema were avian and she could see swarms of them over a few sites. The resolution wasn’t great from their altitude and angle, plus some cloud cover obscuring straight visuals, but they were operating not in tight formation, but a widespread grouping that suggested non-lizard swarm tactics…more of a strong-man formation. They had armor that could take a pounding, she’d heard, so she was as interested in seeing them fight as they were to see the Star Force aquatics in action…though this wasn’t the first joint mission to date, but it was the largest.

  It was also Riona’s first in conjunction with the Preema and on this side of the boundary line between the Voku and Star Force claimed ‘harvest’ zones, for the mage often thought of all the lizard systems like a forest on the map that they had to clearcut. Every other mission she’d gone on had been on the Star Force side, with this campaign having brought her clear across lizard territory to the far edge where the pushback was occurring. The Preema had jumped ahead a bit to get to this planet, given its significance, but there was definitely a huge sea of lizard systems between her and friendly territory, meaning her resupply options were nil.

  Riona had to make do with what she had, and she’d brought along a lot of equipment and troops for that reason. When the jumpships hit the lowest comfortable orbit they could, they began releasing the aquatics battleships, destroyers, and frigates to coast down on their own to the water, or in the battleships’ case fly around the planet at will, for they were actually designed for the air as opposed to the water craft that could limp around on their anti-gravs that gave them propulsion underwater.

  The smaller Star Force vessels were carried down in bunches inside larger transports that disengaged from the jumpships and ferried them, aquatics mechs and troops, and prefab modules that would be used to construct Star Force firebases, supply depots, and even a repair yard once they got them situated. This was going to be a multi-year campaign unless the lizards had really scrimped on their aquatics footprint, and Riona knew she was going to have to take her time and put down some temporary roots in order to hunt these bastards down properly.

  In the meantime she was going to stay in orbit and observe both the underwater and ground battles, learning how the Preema fought and seeing how many surprises the lizards had in store for both of them. They were definitely going to lose this planet and system, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t take a few of the invaders with them and knowing the lizards as Star Force did, Riona knew to be constantly on guard for an innovative attempt at doing so.

  She hoped the Preema wouldn’t get overconfident and be caught off guard just as her ship orbited around far enough to get sensors on the back side of the planet…where the crashed remains of one of their Alpha-class warships was visible at the base of a still present smoke plume.

  “Damn,” she whispered, guessing it was from the efforts to take out the anti-orbital guns. “So much for our invincible ally.”

  Riona took another look at her drone placements, which had disconnected from the warships to cover the cargo ships during offloading and once back up into holding orbit. They were where they were supposed to be, and she made a mental note not to trust the Preema for their security at any time, merely to count them as a luxury backup. She didn’t know the circumstances of the loss of that Alpha, but the lizards had managed to take one down in the face of what should have been an overwhelming assault fleet.

  Paul has said the Preema might be newbs as far as their isolation saw them doing more watching beyond their borders than fighting, and she had a gut feeling he was right. But newbs or not, they were getting the job done and now with her here she might be able to spot a few ambushes before they went down. If not she’d keep her own people protected and see what happened to the Preema, for it was still unclear just how ‘close’ this alliance was to be.

  Paul plopped down in the chair at his quarters’ comm terminal in Atlantis after another 29 hour training stint. He was due for a badly needed shower, then some food and downtime before heading to bed for 13 hours before getting up and repeating his 45 hour day. It was by far the heaviest workload he’d ever tried, but that’s what the advanced training group looked like now for all of the veterans. Paul spent more time here than most of the trailblazers, cycling to and from it between missions to the front or master builder duties within the ADZ.

  He could feel the stress on him from the past 8 months that he’d
been holding this insane cycle, for the workouts he was doing were not skill-oriented, for the most part, but effort-based in order to push his body’s power generation capabilities to new heights across the board. He was hanging in there well, having already gotten past the worst of it, he thought, and was now settled into the grind.

  Right now he was delaying the shower in favor of checking for map updates…and finding one had come in through the relay grid. He downloaded it to his personal map and brought up the hologram of the war zones, seeing tiny colored dots representing star systems and a few with pulsing ‘update’ highlights. Wanting to know how things were going out there at all times, especially with regards to Cal-com and what the Voku and Preema were doing, he searched through and made himself aware of all the changes, most of which were small when compared to the overall battlefront.

  But Paul was a details man for a reason, and his moniker of ‘The Admiral’ had stuck to this day partly for that reason. Star Force was engaging on a level of warfare that no one could have imaged back when the organization had been in its infancy, and with each upgrade they went through Paul and the others had to basically write the book on how to do these unprecedented things…and managing an interstellar war across thousands of star systems was more than a 1-trick pony for sure.

  Though his time was best served in the advanced training group for the moment, he didn’t want to be out of the loop and made sure to keep himself in it with these constant checks, that way he wouldn’t have to waste hours going through new information if he only delved into the updates every week, or month.

  It took him about half an hour to get through them all, but as he did so he began to feel a tingle of a headache. That wasn’t uncommon, for his body complained in any number of ways when going through training this intense, but this headache was a little bit different. It was an internal pressure that stuck around until he was in the shower, then it altered into something else, still light and in the background of his mind, with him not truly paying attention to it until he was about to hit the drying sequence and stopped with his hand midair.