Star Force: Paradigm (SF35) Page 9

  When it ducked in, Kyler could see that it was the same width and shape as the external shaft, but not nearly as long, for it opened up into a much smaller chamber that reminded him of a parking lot with a large building attached, having been dug into the rock face. With nothing there to attack the squids pushed on through to the far side and back into another tunnel, with the battlemap updating and expanding as they and other squid groups worked their way through the other entrances…all of which were headed towards the intact region of the tendril field where the enemy fleet was coming out of.

  Eventually Kyler’s squid, being piloted by a crewer onboard the Loch Ness, came out into a chamber that was not deserted…at all. It was packed full of warships, apparently having been pulled from other areas of the base and awaiting their turn to go up the shaft in the ceiling and exit through the tendril field.

  The trailblazer almost blanched when he saw how many they had built, then his squid accelerated in behind another trio of the drones and headed for a lizard destroyer, bypassing a host of smaller ships and sharks. As he watched the arms, which had been clenched together into a rough arrowhead shape for maneuvering efficiency, split apart just before it rammed into the whale-like hull and grabbed hold.

  Kyler’s holographic screen was filled with hull as it extended its shield column out and started hammering through the lizard hull with blue plasma strikes. He watched it break through and begin slagging internal components, then just as he was about to switch to another squid he saw his get hit by minnow strikes that took down its shields.

  He pulled back from the camera view and went straight to battlemap, seeing swarms of the sharks hammering the squids that had attached to the large ships, all the while more of the Star Force craft were pouring out of the connecting tunnel into the already crowded chamber. It was the equivalent of two boxers being shoved into a phone booth with each other and trying to go at it with only inches of separation, with chaos ensuing.

  Kyler started tagging targets, trying to get his team organized while the lizards panicked and shot at anything that moved. First thing he did was mark the destroyers and cruisers as non-primary targets while putting the most emphasis on the frigates, which carried a disproportionate amount of the lizard’s torpedoes. The larger ships had more and stronger versions, but using them was doing as much damage to their own fleet as it was the squids, so Kyler wanted to trim down the enemy’s precision weapons, given that with the forming debris field the bigger ones would have a hard time getting to their targets.

  The sharks were too fast to easily target, but thanks to the less than amicable moving options the squids were able to catch some of them, not even bothering to hit them with plasma and merely crushing them with their arms…which also helped to keep from detonating their onboard minnows, or rather what they hadn’t already fired off.

  As the melee ensued, the nearest sharks quickly ran out of ammunition, allowing the incoming squids more freedom of movement. The lizard light destroyers, amazingly, had put up their defense trees, looking like swollen puff balls trying to block what little room there was in the water and getting a mess of debris in their defensive netting as a result. That said, they were spitting out hoards of minnows, with the squids hard pressed to get at them through their strands.

  Kyler ordered them to just ignore them and focus on other targets, namely the frigates and the now pesky corvettes that were clamping down and crushing the squids as they held onto other targets. Meanwhile the portion of the lizard fleet that was situated away from the entrance the squids were coming through either held position or moved around a bit trying to get into a position where they could engage the enemy…if they could only get past all the others in the way, plus the debris.

  Most of the lizard fleet kept siphoning out the shaft to the surface, but it was so narrow and the fleet so big that it was like trying to sip up a gallon of water through a single straw…all the while the carnage of the squids was eating into the lizard numbers at a considerable rate, with every drone destroyed being replaced by more coming through from behind.

  Kyler switched battlefields and saw a similar engagement occurring in another chamber, thought that area was only half as congested, with more conventional warfare ensuing. Two other engagements had also broken out, with a third just starting as the other groups of squids rushed through the lizard base in search of targets, and found plenty.

  He knew most, if not all of the squids were going to be lost, but that was acceptable, given that they were unmanned and expendable. The trailblazer didn’t like losing assets in this way, because he knew there were cleaner ways to fight, but time was of the essence and if he had his forces pull back and engage tactically more lizard ships would get out and away, so he did what he could organizing and pushed the fight hard into their fleets, racking up as much damage as possible.

  Kyler pulled back out to the master battlemap of the engagement, seeing the battleships taking hull damage from the ongoing torpedo impacts, but none of them were in serious damage. They’d been built to take a beating and keep on fighting, plus they were returning torpedoes for torpedoes, given that their shield columns were proving ineffective in the tendril field.

  Kyler half smirked, then typed out a message to Voru, reminding him that this was why wasting ordinance on the tendrils would have been a bad idea earlier.

  A minute passed, then a pithy response came back, also in text.

  Savvy.

  10

  November 12, 2432

  Nevarsor System

  Namek

  Paul watched as the lizard aquatics fleet fled their underwater base, amazed at how many ships they had managed to build and content with the number that Kyler was knocking down, both with the battleships up top and the squid armada he’d sent around through the back door. Many got away, slowly moving off in groups on various headings, some of which a few of the battleships were intersecting and poaching, but with thousands of ships to hit there was no way they could contain them, and the lines began arching away from the splash down points, with the battleships’ shield columns stretching out to hit whatever they could before they fully scattered.

  Using the control pedestal in the command nexus, Paul fast forwarded through the long battle, pausing occasionally to see a specific item or encounter, including some ships that hadn’t been on their lizard list before, though they didn’t appear to be warships. A lot of transports had been holed up in the base as well, and most of those had gotten away as the battleships focused their firepower on the armed lizard ships, knowing they were the true threat, not just in the here and now, but down the road as well.

  Eventually the streams of escaping ships coming up from the tendril field thinned out, then a few squids emerged, marking the end of the line as they pursued the last of the lizard ships out from the base. Paul immediately knew that was a mistake, and watched as the nearby tendrils bent over and brushed up against the squids, detonating their plasma nubs against their hulls and blowing them into bits while the lizard ships moved harmlessly through the field.

  After a quick learning moment the remote pilots stopped bringing the squids up and that ended the majority of the fighting. The battleships still sniped at what ships they could, but the lines quickly filed away from the tendril field and base, leaving it in Kyler’s hands as they ran off to who knows where. Fortunately the battleship Captains were smart enough to drop probes and have them follow the lizards at a distance until their limited fuel supply ran out, but it was enough to establish general headings after they left the battleships’ sensor range.

  From those vectors, Kyler noted, they were exposing more lizard infrastructure, but none as large as the base they’d just taken, with his fellow trailblazer suggesting that they may very well have just broken the back of the lizard operations on the planet, assuming they weren’t going to get any more supplies from offworld.

  Along with his battle reports was a thorough analysis of the base, which Kyler indicated they were goin
g to repurpose for their own uses. The tendril field was coming down, given that they were still live and self-powered, and Paul had to admit the technology, stolen as it was from the Elarioni, was impressive. Its ability to discriminate between friend and foe alone made it a significant threat, given that simply by navigating through the field a lizard ship could use it for either offense or defense, and not have to coordinate at all. It was completely automatic, and Paul appreciated that sort of defensive technology.

  Given the lag on these reports, Paul guessed that the field had already been destroyed, though he doubted cleanup would be complete any time soon, given how many tendrils the lizards had built. It put their own construction efforts to shame, as well as backing up Kara’s report of them being master builders that had only been toying with the Humans and the Alliance to date…though they did appear to be at a disadvantage as far as gathering resources underwater.

  That was something he wanted to take up with Kyler the next time they met, for if they could get a foothold on aquatics warfare they might be able to press the advantage on other worlds that were part land, part ocean. As a rule, the lizards didn’t like to take worlds that were fully ocean, with Atlantica being an exception, so the trick would be in keeping their land forces from resupplying their aquatics…or maybe even using the aquatics to draw off resources from their land bases?

  It was definitely an angle to pursue, but that was a conversation that was going to have to occur in bits and pieces over messages for the time being, for Kyler still had a lot of lizard opposition to hunt down and eradicate, even if they had lost their primary base. Paul wondered if the mastermind had gotten out on one of the ships, and figured that he’d give the scale head the benefit of the doubt. It would use what bases and ships it had, which was still a lot of the latter, to wage a convincing war against the Humans, but both Kyler and Paul felt like they had just turned a major corner, and that Atlantica was now theirs to lose rather than the even playing field it had once been.

  After Paul finished going through the battle records and other data he shut down the command nexus and headed out into the city to inspect some of the new construction personally. It wasn’t something he had to do, but he liked being able to overlay virtual maps with actual memories of the layouts. After all, it wouldn’t do for him to design and build a huge city and never to see more than a handful of buildings inside of it.

  He hopped inside one of the nearby elevators and took it down below ground level, then walked a short distance until he came to the terminal of the underground rail network. From there he took a small tram out to the dirt ring that isolated the core of the city and came up inside one of the mech bays where he got into a Starbright-class mech and walked it out onto the city streets.

  Its body was thin with a T-shaped shoulder frame and no head. Its legs were normal jointed and computer controlled, unlike the neo he usually piloted in both simulators and reality. The starbright was a Star Force original mech, rather than one patterned after the Battletech fiction from long ago. It felt to Paul like a walking turret, but it moved nimbly and that was the point. It wasn’t the largest mech Star Force fielded, nor the smallest, but it was one that was totally dependent on plasma weaponry, hence the name, and it had several unique varieties of weapons.

  Paul wouldn’t be needing those today, for he was just on tour ‘driving’ it down the streets that were used to mech traffic as much as vehicles. It was a long walk out to the city’s outskirts, but once he got there the turret-like vantage point was worthwhile and he spent the better part of an hour nosing around the construction and excavation equipment, almost blending in with the fabrication mechs that were lifting and holding components in place while an army of workers buzzed around them making connections and hard seals to lock the new pieces into the frameworks.

  The trailblazer knew how to observe yet stay out of their way, and he was so preoccupied with the construction efforts that he didn’t notice another military grade mech approaching until it was within 100 meters of him off his back quarter. The ID tag registered as Emily-023.

  Paul opened a comm line. “When the hell did you get back?”

  “Nice to see you too,” she replied from the cockpit of a hunchback, which stood slightly lower than his starbright. “About 2 hours ago.”

  “And you just felt like taking a stroll?”

  “I know better than to interrupt your Grand Admiral thing unless something is urgent, so I figured I’d just join you out here and fill you in.”

  “Right, so how are the Ents?”

  “Bigger than our mechs…and now allies, thank you very much.”

  “Bigger?” Paul reiterated.

  “Half again,” Emily explained. “And they’re not plants.”

  “I figured that much. What’s their situation?”

  “Lizards had a small presence on the planet, almost like they were fighting them just to study them and learn new ways to fight beings of that size. I smashed their bases from orbit and the survivors scattered, so I don’t know if we did enough or not, but the Ikrotor are in no immediate danger and are very grateful. We’re going to take stewardship of their planet via orbit in exchange for natural resources, which means building at least 1 seda and having a small fleet stationed there permanently.”

  “What kind of resources?” Paul asked, curious as to what she’d negotiated for.

  “Lots of things…including some massive deposits of corovon that they have no use for.”

  “Jackpot.”

  “No kidding. Last I checked our stockpiles were getting low.”

  “We’re always running low,” Paul pointed out, given how the metallic subatomic particle was used in literally thousands of compounds critical for Star Force’s advanced tech, including gravity drives.

  “Well we won’t be if my scans are even half accurate.”

  “Heavy grav world?” Paul guessed.

  “304,” she said, referring to the percent compared to Earth.

  “Ouch.”

  “You should see their vegetation. Everything is rock hard.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “You didn’t read the brief?”

  “I did, but they didn’t have any close up pictures.”

  “Their bodies aren’t as hard as they look. A lot of the ‘stony’ patches are solid, but others give under pressure. The lizards figured out which were which and strategically targeted the weak areas, but the thing is plasma only tickles them. Their body temperatures are sky high internally, with their thick carapace containing the heat. That’s one reason why the lizards were having trouble with them.”

  “No change of weapons?”

  “Recently yes, which is why I think the lizards were experimenting. They brought out what looks like mini rail guns, both on vehicles and hand weapons.”

  “How effective were those?”

  “Lethal…in large amounts. The Ikrotor are so massive the lizards had to pour projectiles into them to take them down…or hit them with capital ship levels of plasma. The bullet philosophy worked better, but these guys are tough kills no matter what angle you take.”

  “What about an ice gun?”

  Paul heard Emily scoff. “It took three weeks before that thought occurred to me, and you pull it out within three seconds.”

  “Lizards haven’t tried that angle?”

  “No, but I think it could be effective. I didn’t have that discussion with them, though.”

  “What’s the language situation?”

  “Solved prior to my arrival. Seems the Hycre got them schooled in the trade language. We’re still working on decoding theirs.”

  “Are they going to turn into a protectorate, or have combat potential?”

  “If the lizards reestablish on their homeworld, definitely combat potential, but I don’t know how eager they are to expand their territory. Right now they don’t even have computers, let alone spacecraft. Big fingers don’t lend to building tiny parts.”

  �
��But they have some tech?”

  “They’re working on developing machinery to accommodate the size problem, but we can do more to help in 10 minutes than they’ll accomplish in 10 years.”

  “Trustworthy?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily admitted. “Gratitude goes a long ways. We’ll see what happens when it wears off. They did make a point of not wanting us to set up operations on the planet. They’ll do all the resource collecting and processing, then turn it over to us at specified drop points.”

  “Did the lizards know about the corovon?”

  “I’d have a hard time saying no, unless they never bothered to pull a planetary scan. Most of their tech doesn’t require it, so there’s a chance they weren’t looking for it.”

  “I doubt that too…so when they don’t hear back from their people on…wait, what are we calling the planet?”

  “Midgar, and yes, that’s a possibility. Which is why we need a warship put on permanent station as soon as possible.”

  “We can cycle one of the old ones over. I want the newer model gravity drives devoted to the raiding missions.”

  “Anything happen while I was gone?” Emily asked, walking her hunchback to the side to let a pair of construction mechs pass carrying a huge structural rib between them.

  “You hear about Kara?”

  “No, what did you have her off doing this time?”

  “She found and interrogated a mastermind variant.”

  “Where?” Emily asked suspiciously.

  “A planet called Albo on the Hycre charts.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “It’s deep lizard territory. She had to go pretty far to find a world big enough.”

  “Typical…what did she learn.”