Star Force: Intimidation (SF17) Page 9

  “Did we get the tower?”

  Brad shook his head. “It was shielded.”

  “Damn,” Irene said, looking down at the floor as the medic applied a medicated patch to her forehead.

  10

  December 5, 2262

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  The first gout of green plasma hit the station’s hull armor, melting through half a meter of Herculium but failing to penetrate as the launchers above and below the impact point poured thousands of small, short range missiles towards the laser tracking points being emblazoned on the lizard cruiser’s shields by the two defending Star Force warships. Both were tasked with guarding the materials processing station and heavily outmatched…a frigate and corvette had no chance of squaring off against a lizard cruiser and surviving, but the banks of missiles hastily upgraded to the station added another dimension to the fight with the ships playing taggers rather than being responsible for the brunt of the defense.

  Both Star Force ships added their plasma cannons, missiles, and small rail guns to the fight, as well as a load of attack drones from the frigate that were next to useless while the cruiser’s shields were up. None the less they circled around on individual flight plans and attacked the ship’s rear with lachars, flying on computer commands rather than having remote pilots for each of the tiny cubes.

  Another plasma blast from the cruiser hit the station, impacting to the left and hitting fresh armor, missing a potential hull breach if the shots had been lined up. With no shields and the nearest reinforcements half an hour away, the orbital station’s survivability hinged on the massive missile wave it had just launched, emptying every rack it possessed intent on delivering a counterpunch that would at minimum take the cruiser’s shields down.

  Paul hoped it would do more than that as he watched from a command nexus, surrounded by holograms being generated from the sensors on the two warships and station. Following the laser dots on the ship that otherwise was invisible to sensors the first of the missiles met up with a wave of anti-air plasma shards flying out from the cruiser towards the attack and, belatedly, towards the drones attacking from the rear. Dozens of missiles were shredded each second, but the mass fire and the missiles’ small size allowed a great deal to get through and smash into the cruiser’s shields, hammering them with successive hits as the long river of guided warheads flowed into the target with surprising force.

  The ship’s shields endured through half the barrage, then collapsed on the forward arc, allowing the rest of the missiles, some of which the anti-air fire was still thinning, to slam into the hull and chew away at the armor plating and forward weapons batteries. Before the last third of the missiles hit most of the anti-air cut out, though that fact wasn’t visible inside the growing debris cloud covering the hull. The laser tracking dots were also obscured, with several of the missiles altogether missing the ship, though the rest simply slammed into the mass and detonated on impact.

  Meanwhile the drones in the aft arc were dropping like flies while the two warships added their firepower into the newly breached shields as another plasma orb fired out of the maelstrom and hit the station, impacting one of the now empty launchers and blasting it into oblivion, along with a good portion of the hull armor beneath it.

  The lizard cruiser thrusted forward, punching out of the debris cloud with part of its bow missing and damage scars reaching back towards the midline as it closed on the two warships and opened fire with its remaining lateral weapons, two drones trailing in its wake stinging the still intact rear shields ineffectively.

  Paul redirected them to attack the forward arc, for what little it would do.

  The three ships exchanged fire, with the Star Force warships having the upper hand briefly as their thin shields held of the first exchange of plasma. Once down on the second hit for the corvette and the third for the frigate both ships were tearing into each other’s hull armor, and while Star Force didn’t suffer from so much of a technological deficit in that category, the lizards’ protective hull covering was still superior, and in this case far thicker given the cruiser’s mass differential.

  The corvette did manage to knock out the last of the cruiser’s shields with a nearly pointblank rail gun hit, then the pair targeted the remaining plasma batteries as their own hulls were being breached. They managed to take out one, which gave the corvette a bit longer lifespan as the frigate was the more heavily targeted and the first to go. Both ships did as much damage as they could, and in the confusion of the battle Paul was able to directly pilot the two drones in close and damage another of the plasma cannons before the small attack platforms were noticed again and quickly destroyed as the cruiser accelerated to get them away from the hull and into their anti-air firing arcs.

  With them destroyed Paul was out of weaponry to defend the station with, and the cruiser, heavily damaged as it was, still had two rear-mounted plasma cannons operational. It flew over the station and began blasting away with impunity as Paul watched the feeds, seeing his reinforcements too far off to get there in time, but maybe at least they’d be able to get the cruiser, now that it was showing up on sensors thanks to the hull damage. With a few button presses he ordered the Excalibur to send the faster of the reinforcing ships ahead to strike the cruiser before it had a chance to put too much distance between them, given that its engine tech was superior to equally massed Star Force equivalents.

  From the few camera mounts he had remaining Paul watched the cruiser rip the station apart mercilessly, then the hologram went blank and was replaced by an orbital tracking map showing what was left of the station and the small target alongside it. Glancing at the approaching warships he did a quick guestimate as to which direction the cruiser would flee and diverted more distant reinforcements along that line. The lizards might have other cruisers lurking around to assist, but Paul wanted to get this one while it was visible even if he did have to lose a few ships in the process to a potential ambush.

  As Captain Evinson handled the particulars of the intercept Paul blew out a resigned breath, closing his eyes for a moment and calculating the effectiveness of the missile barrage. As he’d hoped it had evened the odds considerably, but the two warships hadn’t been enough to finish the cruiser off. Upgrading the missiles to heavier versions would adjust that balance, as would adding more defending ships…unfortunately he didn’t have enough of the latter, though subsequent shipments via jumpship would be bringing in additional ordinance en mass.

  Star Force work crews were already pulling double shifts trying to get additional defenses installed on all the orbital stations in orbit around Corneria and the few others scattered across the system. Paul had known it was only a matter of time before the lizards began making assaults in space as well as the planet’s surface and today had been the first. It was a test run, he knew, on their part. Seeing how much resistance they would put up. He was happy with the results, even though the station had been destroyed. Fortunately he’d had it evacuated months ago, along with most of the others, only bringing the secondary ones online periodically as needed, surrounded by a fleet of warships that were pulling escort duty for Star Force’s cargo ships.

  Those workers necessary would come over on the ships, power up the factory and stay aboard for several days or weeks as needed, load up the freighters with the products and power down again, then leave under the protection of a fleet sizeable enough to mass fire on any ambushing cruisers. Their combined fire rail gun attack was the only viable means of quickly taking down the enemy ships before they could get in close and tear apart Paul’s fleets, but he didn’t have enough ships yet to accommodate very many defending armadas, though he was receiving reinforcements with every jumpship run and the local shipyards were building additional ships as fast as they could, surrounded by the largest defense fleets he could muster.

  He didn’t figure the lizards would hit them just yet. Their MO seemed to be to hit the weaker targets, which they’d just done, and s
ee what kind of response they’d get. This attack had also served as a test for Paul as well, and now he had a benchmark to work from in further designing his orbital defense plan.

  That plan, previous to this impromptu war, had always been predicated on seeing the enemy coming from range and moving his defending fleets to intercept, allowing him to safeguard multiple installations with a handful of superior ships. This time around his ships were the weaker, and he could not see the enemy coming, making every orbital station a target that he had to defend with assets on site…and he simply didn’t have the assets needed for that.

  Even 10 times the warships he had now wouldn’t be sufficient, given the number it took to equal one of their cruisers. The missile launchers had been an experiment of his, and now he had test results to work off from. Hit the cruisers hard and fast with a mass assault using targeting date provided from nearby ships and he had a powerful deterrent to future attacks…but at the cost of an insane number of missiles, all of which had to be produced and their launchers installed on a total of 56 stations, not including the 3 shipyards or the one they’d just lost.

  Using the controls in front of him he minimized the realtime holo, moving it aside to his left and bringing up a nearly identical map. He zoomed in on one station in particular and amended the defense schematic he had laid out for it. It already had a trio of cutters defending it, along with an identical missile package to the one just used to take down the cruiser’s shields. He quadrupled the number of launchers on a new work order, bumping up the installment priority so that he could have a harder target to work around a few months down the road. Upgrading all the stations’ defenses simultaneously would leave him having to keep his fleet spread out, but if he hardened a few targets he could keep less warships on station, perhaps even reduce the guardians to lancers just for the sake of laser tagging targets.

  That was a good idea, actually, and Paul decided to amend the local shipyards’ production schedules accordingly. The Lancer-class warships were almost just a large drone or fighter, incapable of standing up to moderate damage. What they were good for was patrol work as a mobile weapons platform, easy to build in large numbers, given their small size, and something that Clan Saber had been producing for years.

  In addition to the work order he put a requisition request in to Star Force to send out what lancers they had available in the next jumpship run. It would take weeks for the request to get there, and then more weeks for it to be fulfilled and the ships sent back but therein was the basic problem of interstellar travel and communications. The distances were vast, which is why Star Force needed to establish as much local infrastructure as possible to see to their needs and why they’d established the three current shipyards. It was just bad luck that the lizards had shown up before they could have established deeper infrastructure roots in the system.

  Paul flipped the realtime map back up to normal size, filling the entire holographic environment around him, and saw that the intercept was going to take some time. The lizard cruiser was running, as expected, and his smaller ships were closing in but at a rate that was going to make the chase interesting. At best it’d be another hour and a half before they got to the ship and Paul didn’t feel like standing around watching for that long.

  Leaving the chase to the Excalibur’s crew for now, Paul powered down and exited the nexus, returning to the Star Force command center buried within the heart of their largest colony on the planet. Prior to this attack he’d been reviewing manifests with Duke Hightower and refining their economic plans in light of the constant attacks. They both knew that the enemy wanted to disrupt their growth, which was something they couldn’t allow if they wanted to survive. Resupply from Sol would only get them so far, and it was unknown how many resources the lizards had in the system or what kind of resupply they had available to them.

  They’d agreed not to expand to any new sites, but rather to enlarge those they already possessed, visibly expanding their perimeters for the lizards to see while secretly expanding into the bedrock below, building additional factories and habitats that would be difficult for the enemy to hit even if they discovered their existence.

  They already had some equipment on hand to do that, and the colony Paul now stood within had multiple subsurface levels, but to move as much rock as was needed to quickly establish subterranean building room would require a great deal more burrowing equipment, as well as bringing in specialized crews from Sol. That is where they’d left their planning when news of the attack had come through, and that was where Paul returned to it, seeing that Hightower hadn’t been wasting time in the interim.

  “Here,” he said, handing Paul a datapad when the Archon returned to the conference room that he’d reconfigured into a planning center. Displays and datapads were everywhere, along with half a dozen chairs and several half eaten plates of snacks. The pair of men, along with Greg, Rafa, and Morgan had already spent many an hour here working the problem in between fending off raids and seeing to Clan duties.

  “Where’d you find these?” Paul asked, walking the perimeter of the room as he read.

  “They came in on the last jumpship, stuffed inside the top hollow of some of the crates. Looks like someone was trying to maximize cargo space.”

  “Good for them,” Paul said, reading through the amended supply manifest. “When?”

  “The unpacking crews found them ten minutes ago,” Hightower told him, “along with that note.”

  Paul read the brief message with Jason’s identifier attached.

  Thought these might come in handy. Barely had time to get them aboard before the jumpship left. There are two complete sets of parts, in case you lose any. Blueprints and tactical suggestions included. Happy hunting.

  Paul thumbed through the blueprints eagerly. “Any word on the lizard tech?”

  “Nada,” Hightower said dejectedly. “The intact pieces appear to have no function, and the broken ones are too messed up for our people to analyze. I was planning on having them shipped back to Earth for further analysis.”

  “Keep some here, just in case they’re modular components.”

  “Are those going to be of any help?” Hightower asked.

  Paul smiled. “I think so. Get the pieces assembled as soon as possible. If these check out, I want us to start producing the designs locally.”

  The Duke raised an eyebrow. “That important?”

  Paul nodded. “Jason did his homework. These should plug a hole in our aerial defense nicely.”

  “Glad to hear. How bad was the damage in orbit?”

  “We lost two warships and Factory 6…though we might get one of their cruisers in exchange. We wounded it and are chasing it down now.”

  “Damn…that complicates things. It was empty?”

  “Of people, yes.”

  “Good, but we’re still going to have to shift our supply lines around. At this point, would you agree we’re better off moving our infrastructure underground?”

  “Given that we don’t have naval superiority, I’m forced to agree except in the case of the shipyards. Putting them on the planet would be a mistake.”

  “Whatever we build from this point on has to be for keeps. We can’t put it out there for the lizards to smash or we’ll lose our economic net due to attrition.”

  “We’re working on shoring up what we’ve got, but in the case of replacing the factory station we lost, I agree with your suggestion to put it underground. I just don’t think we can build very fast down there.”

  “And you don’t like conceding orbit,” Hightower pointed out, knowing him well.

  “I haven’t yet.”

  “Let me worry about how fast we’re building,” he suggested. “I’ll make it work subsurface if you can keep the supply lines from Earth open.”

  “Deal.”

  “Now, next item on the list,” Hightower said, sliding Paul another data pad over a clear portion of the long table spanning the room.

  Paul caught it befo
re it could slide off the edge and turned it right side up, setting the data pad with the blueprints for the new gunship aside.