Star Force: Aquatics (SF31) Read online

  Their underside shields fell before they got into position, but their hull armor soaked up most of the weaponsfire, with the rest being absorbed by the hull. The ships were so big they could take the damage and keep on fighting…though that wasn’t their intent.

  Almost in unison the elongated starships dropped down on top of the smaller turret islands and pancaked them with their mass, crushing the weapons batteries on top while damaging their own hulls in the process. The weight of the cruisers pushed the islands back down into the water, leaving the starships partially submerged and firing at the nearby corvette and last remaining turret island with their topside weaponry as Paul’s frigate and trailing destroyer were approaching firing range, with the destroyer slightly in the lead and both coming in from different angles.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kyler swore, both in anger and frustration at getting their defenses owned by such a tactically brilliant maneuver. If he didn’t know better, he could have sworn Paul was on their side directing the naval attack.

  He tagged the incoming transports as priority targets for the remaining turret island, knowing they needed to knock down as many of them as possible before they got over the fence…and the corvette pilot obviously knew the same, because it’s smoking hull pulled out of its fight with the cruiser and diverted, ramming into two of the transports and taking a third down with what was left of its weapons batteries before the mostly intact cruiser finished it off and dropped its hulk down into the ocean perilously close to the approach of yet another lizard aquatics fleet that hadn’t shown up on city sensors yet.

  The other transports moved on and ducked down into the water just on the far side of the fence, some 19 in total, and began releasing their contents even as they began the submersion process. One of the largest 3 remaining took a hit from the topside by a heavy lachar from the approaching naval destroyer, followed quickly by a low powered rail gun slug from the frigate who had a better firing angle.

  The slug breached the shields and dented the hull, then the transport dipped underneath the water’s surface even as plasma lances from the destroyer targeted it, blasting plumes of steam up into the air marking the position of its descent…only to be followed by another rail gun slug that didn’t seem to mind the water, for it punched straight through it and into the topside of the transport delivering a lethal kill shot.

  Two other transports were damaged by plasma before they all disappeared beneath the waves, leaving the two starships with only the 5 sitting and 1 flying lizard cruisers as targets…and firing on them with rail guns was problematic because of what lay in the water beneath them should they miss.

  The destroyer flew straight in towards one of them and started blasting away with plasma, lachars, and missiles all at once while the frigate dropped as low to the water as it could and set up a rail gun shot that wouldn’t jeopardize any buildings if it missed or passed through the target, then started spitting out metal slugs at one of the bastards…only to have it rise up off the crushed turret island along with the others, all damaged, and start running away...following the one that had already been in the air.

  The two Star Force warships, each smaller than the lizard cruisers and not normally a match for them, peppered them with weaponsfire as they fled, trying to do as much damage to their shieldless hulls as they could, but even if they’d wanted to they couldn’t have pursued more than 2 of the 6 ships. Instead they stayed over the city, guarding it against who knew what, while the 6th turret island streamed smoke into the air, a visible sign of their utter defeat as it had only 2 plasma cannons left operational.

  That didn’t matter now, for the purpose of the aerial assault had been to deliver transports to ground…and they’d done just that. But if those transports thought they were going to fly off after they deposited their troops they were severely mistaken, and the destroyer and frigate were floating over the submerged city just waiting for them to poke up above the surface to offer them viable targets.

  Up in one of the orbiting warships the pilots of the drone frigate sat at their stations, controlling its weapons, shields, propulsions, comms, and every other system it had, spreading out the responsibilities between three people to maximize efficiency, as were most of the drones in the fleets, a lot of which were now engaging the lizards in an even larger naval battle.

  The three pilots, all regulars, sat and monitored their sensor feeds, waiting for one of the lizard transports to come up but otherwise had nothing else to do while those pilots sitting at nearby stations were busily working their consoles as they pursued the naval battles occurring in orbit.

  Then something they’d never had happen before caught all three off guard. Their control interfaces suddenly lost connection, though they were still able to observe all of the ship’s systems, as a strange, dark voice spoke through their headsets.

  “Assuming direct control.”

  It was followed with an ID tag, indicating that Kyler had remotely taken over their frigate.

  “What was that?” one of them asked aloud, glancing to the man beside him.

  “Never had that happen before. What’s an aquatics specialist doing overriding us? Even if he is a trailblazer?”

  Another pilot sitting opposite them behind their backs overhead and turned around, given that his drone ship wasn’t currently engaged in combat. “Did it say ‘assuming direct control?’”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t a regular voice.”

  The other regular smiled. “Had that happen once to me. It’s an Archon joke. A reference from an old video game.”

  “But what’s he doing with it?” one of the three pilots asked. “There’s nothing left to shoot.”

  “They always have a reason,” the other pilot said, glancing back at his own console to make sure nothing new was happening there. “Wait and see.”

  All four pilots ended the conversation there and put eyes back on their readouts, with the three dispossessed pilots watching as Kyler flew the frigate well outside the perimeter fence and brought it to a halt again…then it began to pivot, tipping the front end over so that it faced straight down.

  “No way,” one of the pilots said in disbelief. “There’s too much water.”

  “Yes way,” another one said in a whisper over their linked headsets. “Though there’s no targeting system to handle that. He’s going to have to do it old school.”

  “Here we go,” the third said as the diagnostics indicated that a fresh slug was being rotated into the barrel from the ‘on deck’ position, with one from storage being rotated over to replace it. “Oh shit, he’s powering it up to full!”

  “Splish splash,” the other said, guessing as to what was about to happen.

  With a small enemy fleet inside the perimeter fence engaging the internal defenses and the few ships that remained, who were already busy hunting down the rest of the det pack carrying infantry, along with a massive battle brewing outside and several more looking to crop up at different positions around the perimeter, most commanders would have gone into panic mode…but not Kyler. Like all the trailblazers and most of the other Archons to some degree, when the intensity ratcheted up he got calmer…icy calm, with his adrenaline channeled into boosting his focus rather than fraying his nerves.

  He knew he couldn’t get the troops inside the fence back out, so a battle was going to have to be fought there and they did have assets to counter the threat, though he knew it was going to be messy…but it was going to get even messier if the approaching fleets threw down with the perimeter defenses. A third had just popped up on sensors, with the second now coming into weapons range of the targeted defense tower, with it reaching out its shield columns and tagging the largest enemy ships as their armada pressed forward as fast as possible to close within their own weapons range.

  Thinking ahead, Kyler took control of the now useless frigate hovering overhead and brought it into position just ahead of the path the 3rd lizard fleet was taking, knowing he needed to take out as many as he could whi
le they were well away from the city, because he couldn’t risk doing this close to his own ships or infrastructure…for he didn’t know for sure how much of a concussion wave it would produce.

  When the spot he’d staked out via coordinates showed lizard ships passing under he fired, using battlemap telemetry given that the frigate’s sensors couldn’t detect the aquatics ships below. The pointed rail gun slug flashed out of the front of the frigate, passing through a couple hundred meters of air before slicing into the water and parting it with kinetic overload.

  The slug’s momentum created a cavity in the water, pulling air down behind it like a tornado as the water walls spread out in a concussion wave that tunneled down deep into the ocean…then the back pressure of the collapse shot a geyser up out of the impact point that splashed the shields on the lowest point of the frigate. A few seconds later it fired another slug, and kept firing as fast as it could reload, sending deadly metallic spikes down into the water, fighting the friction to get deep enough to hit the enemy aquatic fleet.

  The first shot missed its target by 50 meters, but the concussion wave knocked it and a dozen other ships askew before the slug eventually floated down and settled on the seafloor. Kyler eyeballed a correction, adjusting the aim of the weapon inside the hull of the ship by a tenth of a degree, coming closer with the second shot but still missing. Its concussion wave buffeted the ships around, and with the third shot and miss he actually succeeded in causing two of them to bump into one another, though the damage was little more than cosmetic.

  He finally made contact on the 5th shot, though it was more by luck than skill, given that the turbulent water he was creating with the shockwaves with each shot was throwing off the slug tracks, some of which appeared to be skewing laterally as they dropped. The ship he did hit was a destroyer…following the cruiser he’d been aiming at. The metal bullet, the size of a bathtub, hit the ship’s shields and punched through, scratching the hull beneath. Normally it would have passed clean through, but the amount of water it was traveling through was killing its kinetic punch, making it less effective the deeper the lizard ships were.

  And they knew that too. After the first few shots all of them began sinking deeper, getting more and more water between them and the rounds that kept falling. Unfortunately for them aquatics ships didn’t move very fast, and with each shot that the frigate fired Kyler got better at guessing where the slugs would fall and began racking up hits with every other shot, or so, against their aquatic cruisers and a few others that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on some of his misses.

  What had been a long convoy of ships scattered in all directions, trying to put more space in between their ships rather than running directly into the impact zone that was a mass of water and air being mixed up like a blender as each shot dragged more air pockets down with it, and the effect was accumulating…allowing each shot to get a little deeper, because passing through rising air pockets was a lot less drag than the water.

  Kyler kept up the attack, damaging their ships in limited fashion while managing to kill only two until the Highwind arrived and he let the ironically larger aquatics ship take the place of the smaller naval vessel as it dropped down directly on top of the last few bubbles coming up from where Kyler had been raining metal down into the water.

  The battleship reached out with its shield columns as soon as the underside hit the water, with some of them stretching out more than 2 kilometers to hit medium sized targets that were running hard, knowing that if they could disable a few of them they could deal with the closer ships later as they futilely began attacking the larger ship’s heavily armored and shielded hull.

  Kyler tilted the frigate back up parallel to the ocean and had it gain some altitude before he relinquished control back over to its naval pilots, then turned his attention to the other three ongoing battles…and was galled to see that a fourth lizard fleet had been detected on approach.

  How many ships did they have to throw at them?

  He put that fleet out of mind, given that it wouldn’t be here for some time, and checked in on the internal city defenses, seeing that they were slugging it out with the invaders admirably…then he followed the lizard ships, seeing what it was they were targeting. To his surprise it was the internal defenses themselves, all the while deploying hoards of infantry into the water that were heading down to the seafloor.

  Inside the nexus a side map flashed a warning, indicating that the mark 5 defense tower had started to take damage, and Kyler knew that the lizards had enough ships assembled to take it down, but it would thin their numbers enough that the Black Pearl should be able to finish them off after it got done blasting apart the first lizard fleet.

  Kyler took a moment, eyes darting from spot to spot on the overall battlemap, evaluating their standing. This was winnable, he determined, but it was going to stretch their defensive capability to the limits…and even if they won it’d leave them vulnerable for another round of attacks.

  That was, if there weren’t more than 4 lizard fleets on approach…and he wasn’t going to put money on that.

  10

  “We have incoming,” Jess Walker said from her seat on the four man bridge of the Star Force destroyer leading the cargo convoy away from besieged Manaan as fast as the bulky freighters could move.

  Commander Carver, sitting in the middle of the back edge of the triangle made up by the three control stations stared at his personal hologram rising up in front of his chair and behind the backs of the three bridge crew. Jess made an alteration for him to see, detailing a pack of lizard ships angling towards them from considerable distance away…and yet they were coming from ahead, not from the battle occurring behind them.

  He opened a comm channel to the other destroyer, with a short image of Commander Rena popping up over his armrest.

  “Looks like our troubles are ahead of us. Suggestions?”

  “Going back is a really bad idea,” she said, getting the most obvious question out of the way.

  “Fight or run?”

  Rena hesitated. “If we send the transports off we could be sending them to their deaths. We don’t know how many lizard ships are out there, or in what direction. I’d divert to station 4, that’ll delay this group’s arrival and give us some more guns if we can get there.”

  “Agreed. Tom, get them turning,” he said to his comm officer…who also handled several other duties, given the multi-tasking, low crew bridge layout.

  “Back door still looks clean,” Rena continued. “Do want us to move up?”

  “No, we’ll come back to you as you drift out on the turn, and keep our spacing wide. We can’t let them slip by us.”

  “Bit of a gamble, but I agree,” she said, seeing dozens of targets building the snake-like sensor swarm of approaching dots. “We need to hit them early while the angles are to our favor.”

  “Looks like hammerheads and smaller. We can handle this so long as they come in stages. If they get tricky we’ll disrupt them here while you fall back.”

  “Agreed,” the commander’s hologram said as the large transports on the battlemap began altering course to port like a school of fish swimming in a long line…save for they didn’t stay in line, with all of them turning at once to maximize distance over the enemy. Carver’s destroyer turned with them, but at a less sharp angle, drifting out further north to insure that there weren’t move enemies on their doorstep.

  “Happy hunting,” Carver said, ending their brief conversation. Rena nodded and her image blinked out, leaving him with his bridge crew as they powered up the weapon systems and reconfigured the shields into the most advantageous settings. “400 more meters, then stall out. Bring the bow around to face the enemy and get me a shield column as far out as we can. We’ve got to destroy or damage them at range or they’ll be able to slip by us.”

  “Depth?” Kevin Smallee asked, manning the helm controls.

  “Match them,” the Commander said, steepling his fingers in fr
ont of his face and leaning his chin against them as he watched both the convoy’s sluggish turn and the lizards’ far more agile approach. The closer they got the more information the computer had, with Jess helping to ID the types where the automation was confused.

  He saw more hammerheads get tagged first, for they were the largest ships with the biggest sensor profile, given their forward hulls. After that came a slew of corvettes, followed by the larger frigates, who’s stingray-shaped leading edge gave the sensors little to lock onto from straight ahead, but from above or below they made for easy targets…which meant their crews would try to keep them on edge as much as possible relative to the Star Force ships.

  Smaller dots began popping up in between the larger contacts, which the computer quickly tagged as sharks, given their size…then a larger contact appeared in the back, which Jess felt like vocally announcing.

  “Light destroyer,” she commented, even though the battlemap already had it tagged.

  “All stop,” Kevin announced. “Adjusting attitude.”

  “Standby shield column. Put it on the destroyer and stretch it as much as you can.”

  “We don’t have a straight shot,” Tom said, already making track plots even though the battery wasn’t fully rotated around yet. It sat on the top/front edge of the ship, giving it a good field of fire, but typically the destroyer crews like to fire it straight on ahead, though the mechanics didn’t favor one angle more than another.