Star Force: Penance (SF49)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  That took pressure off the damaged mechs, allowing them to start fighting more effectively as they gradually thinned the enemy troops…but it wasn’t nearly enough, for more were still coming in from the grounded transports until more of Paul’s drone warships arrived and started blasting them to bits as well.

  The free shoot didn’t last long, with Paul eventually relinquishing personal command of the corvette and returning his nexus to fleet view, seeing that the Scionate had now brought down several thousand warships into the atmosphere to combat the drones and protect their troops…but Paul knew they could also be used to hunt his mechs and pound the city shields if uncountered, no matter how ungainly they were in the atmosphere.

  And that ungainliness is what Paul had to exploit. The air itself was aiding Star Force, because it wasn’t allowing the Scionate to maneuver as quickly as normal. They did have their Valeries to aid them, adding weaponsfire where able, but the anti-air batteries on the drones made such efforts risky for the pilots who, like all the rest of the Scionate, seemed to be in a fury that pushed aside reason. That saw swarms of the fighters running against the smaller drones and laying down considerable plasma, despite the cost to them in losses.

  Those fighters could maneuver quickly in the atmosphere, but the warships couldn’t. Star Force’s were a bit different, however, because Paul had designed them for atmospheric combat, though they didn’t look it. The plain bricks didn’t have a lick of aerodynamic design like the Hycre had, but they made up for that with shield geometries that did. Invisible as they were most of the time, the drones became pointy aerodynamic needles or knife blades when needed, allowing them to outmaneuver or outrun the Scionate warships, making it almost impossible for the enemy to make a kill if the drones didn’t stand toe to toe and slug it out.

  Which they didn’t. They employed similar tactics to those used in orbit, cycling in and out of the hot zones to recharge shields. Problem was that the area was clogged with ships fighting in a much smaller region than before, meaning Paul had to have his ships eating away at the perimeter of the Scionate fleet…but he couldn’t, for they were coming down on top of the ships fighting the ground troops, meaning that for several minutes all hell broke loose as ships vied for position and Paul manically reworked their fighting position at a speed no manual interface could handle.

  Using the Ikrid interlink he became the fleet, issuing orders like pressing buttons on a video game controller and doing so many so fast that there was a blur of commands coming out of the nexus to the fleet that 10 controllers out in the main room behind him couldn’t have matched in volume or skill.

  All the while the debris from the fighting was falling like rain over the ground battles, with many pieces hitting the city shields and sliding off down to the edges to land in a ring of trash that the mechs, tanks, and infantry had to dodge.

  Morgan’s view caught the sight of half a Valerie smashing into the topside of the hoth she was pacing besides, hitting it on the head and smashing through its shields. The impact came so fast that it off balanced the big walker, forcing her to scurry out of the way before it fell on her…but the driver was good enough to maneuvering the legs around quickly to catch itself, though the big machine did drop to a knee like a dog taking a drink of water, only to come up firing its cleansing beam again at a none too distant tank.

  There was debris everywhere, mostly in little bits no bigger than a trash can, but if those bits were chunks of warship armor they could do a lot of damage to the mechs…not to mention the enemy troops. Morgan didn’t like it one bit and kept waiting for a ship to fall down on their heads, but there was nothing she could do about it now so she embraced the moment and tried to use the chaos to her advantage, as well as assigning a person in each of the hoths to keep an eye on the sky and mark approximate landing positions for the big pieces coming down to alert the mechs to stay out of the way just in case the main battlemap controllers in the cities missed something.

  That wouldn’t work for the hoths, for they were too slow to move much, but it did give the Tier-1 mechs a chance, with Morgan already having missed three large strikes thanks to the heads up. They basically had to whistle through the graveyard and hope not to get hit, or at least hope the hits were survivable, like the broken fighter that had left a nasty scar on the top of the hoth’s head, digging into the armor and scraping it up something fierce, but the heavy walker was still in the game, now pushing far ahead of the other that was pinned in place, with its two escorts using it as an umbrella and hiding underneath as they shot incoming infantry.

  Those three were far behind the rest, with the walkable hoth now having pushed far inside the enemy swarm and Morgan’s mechs eventually meeting up with another group that had originated from within the city outside the breached gate. They combined what numbers they had left, with Morgan assuming command of the others, and did not hold position. They cleared the entrance that Kara was still clogging up with bodies then turned and headed in the direction of the enemy transports, walking over the carpet of infantry and fighting their way through with what little weaponry they had left intact, with the hoth being responsible for most of the carnage.

  They got about a third of the way out into the enemy formation before the tide suddenly turned and the infantry reversed course, sprinting away from the city with their tanks doing the same on a delay, forming a rear guard that kept firing at the mechs and covering for the infantry as they began to retreat towards their distant transports.

  “Morgan?” one of the mechwarriors asked.

  “Let them go,” she said, relieved. “Get into the city through a working gate and see if you can help out with the cleanup. We’re too chewed up to pursue anyway. Take two stars,” she said, tagging which ones had the most armor and weaponry still working, not including hers. “The rest are on recovery op. Let’s get our people inside before the Scionate decide to come back for a second round.”

  A moment after she said that a pair of tiny white beams struck the surface on the horizon, with barely any longevity. They were little flashes, like straight line lightning. She adjusted her gaze and followed them up into the sky, gulping when she saw the thousands of dark shapes with tiny flashes occurring between them that were the battling fleets. The cleansing beam strikes weren’t coming from them though, they were coming from higher up and another small shape, this one looking like a cigar.

  Morgan checked her battlemap and blanched, seeing that the Sentinel had somehow repositioned directly over them, just holding outside the atmosphere in a geosync pseudo orbit…meaning it was sitting there mostly on anti-grav, something that was hard for a mass of that size to do, let alone have enough power left for weapons.

  But firing it was, sending down what appeared to be 6 or 7 different beams in rotating cycles and skewering the enemy warships with small bits of the energy punching clean through their hulls and falling to the surface. She hoped like hell the gunners were back checking their targets, not wanting one of the beams to hit a city…or her, but still the Scionate fleet didn’t run.

  A warning popped up on her display, and she ran her mech off several hundred meters to the north ahead of a chunk of warship falling nearby. In fact it was heading very near the hoth, which was accelerating as much as it could to get some distance, now pointed back towards the city and nearly galloping, or at least as much as it mechanically could, with Morgan watching the falling object in its last stages on the battlemap and visually, guessing that the hoth wasn’t going to make it in time.

  But then at the last second the bubble shield that was still deployed and touching the top of the perimeter wall expanded, maintaining the shape it was locked into but growing in size and expanding out over top the hoth like an umbrella at the last moment. The Scionate destroyer, or rather most of it, hit the shield and deflected, coming down on the ground some 100 meters past the hoth and creating one hell of an earthquake on impact.

  Dust and debris flew everywhere, with a Scionate corpse bouncing of
f her neo as the cloud consumed her mech, with her losing her balance and falling forwards onto the ground. Morgan caught the mech with her hands forward, digging her stuck blade into the ground like it was hardly even there and waiting out the torrent while watching the battlemap for more falling pieces. The bubble shield shrank slowly as the hoth got closer to the city and Morgan followed it in, glad to have the cover and cursing Paul for his sloppiness. What the hell was he thinking bringing the orbital fight down into the atmosphere?

  She knew it had been to slaughter the ground troops, which she was thankful for, but this debris dodging was downright insane, and she doubted the city shield could take a second hit like that without breaching.

  As she was mentally cussing him out the battlemap saw the first of the enemy transports begin to lift off, apparently fully loaded. It wasn’t targeted by Paul’s fleet, which Morgan knew was probably by design. With the enemy retreating last thing you wanted to do was smoke their getaway car and force them back into combat against the cities…or at least she hoped that was his plan, though she didn’t want to interrupt him now to ask what was up, given the ruckus going on overhead.

  It took a long while for the troops she’d just been fighting to make it back to their transports, but eventually they lifted off as well, with the enemy warships, or rather those still left, finally pulling back to cover the transports…with the Sentinel standing down along with the remaining drones as they allowed the Scionate survivors to pull out and leave uncontested.

  After finding two of her mechwarriors buried under debris and recovering them, Morgan brought her mech inside the hold of one of the dropships that came out to retrieve her and the others, leaving the debris pickup to different teams. Once inside she tapped into the dropship external cams and got a good look at the once blue grasslands…now afire in multiple locations and dotted with what looked like chocolate chips that was ship debris, or in some cases entire ships.

  It was a ghastly sight, but they’d managed to hold. Question was how much damage had been done inside the cities and what the Scionate were going to do now after this ass kicking, for they had far more troops and ships insystem than they’d deployed here.

  6

  July 19, 2534

  Corvio System

  Admat

  Morgan picked up Paul’s mental signature a couple of hallways away before she crossed paths with him, her coming back into the command center and him coming out.

  “We going back?” she asked, with the two of them stopping for a chat in the middle of the pedestrian traffic flow.

  “As soon as you can pack. We have to take care of this now. We can’t wait on the others.”

  “I agree. Just the three of us?”

  “No one else can keep up.”

  “Unfortunately,” Morgan echoed. “Grab plenty of senzu beans and I’ll meet you in the hangar in an hour?”

  “Deal,” Paul said with the pair splitting and going their separate ways. He had to find Kara as well as do a little more homework. He’d already spent a few minutes running through their files on the Scionate, but he needed backup options and hadn’t gotten enough info for that so he eventually stopped by his quarters and downloaded what he needed on a datapad and brought it with him later when he went back to the hangar, this time allowing Morgan to drive while he read up.

  “It seems we’ve greatly underestimated the Humans’ power,” Tem’lan mewed angrily in the audience chamber from his reclining pedestal as he and the other Chieftans watched the battle reports coming in via holo, with each using their own interface and screens to monitor the data streams they wanted with a single large map of the engagement zone displayed in the center where visitors normally stood. It was replaying various points of the failed assault as the Scionate leadership tried to comprehend what had gone wrong.

  “You are repeating yourself,” Pra’nom said dismissively as he studied a personal display.

  “I am reiterating the obvious. We cannot and should not launch another attack until we know the true strength of the Humans, no matter how wounded our pride is.”

  “I concur,” Yen’sor said from Pra’nom’s left. “We lost so many in this attack and their Sentinel still stands. If we escalate this, even if we win we may suffer horrible losses.”

  “And risk starting a full scale war with Star Force,” Jasnet added. “It’s not just the Humans, the Calavari are allied with them now. Our attempt at teaching them a lesson has failed, let us not make more of a mess of this.”

  “What course of action would you suggest?” Ura’bor asked halfheartedly.

  “I do not know the temperament of the Humans well enough to answer that.”

  “Fairly stated,” Ura’bor conceded. “They have hidden many secrets from us, but this supersoldier of theirs concerns me the most,” he said, shifting his personal display to the main holo, showing crude images captured from afar of Kara fighting on the ground and attacking the transports in the air, plus a few images from when she was inside one laying waste to the troops waiting within.

  “Note that,” Tem’lan interrupted before Ura’bor could continue, “this one stunned the troops initially, much like they did when they came here. It was we who escalated this to killing. We made a grave mistake in misreading their intentions. Their hesitancy was not weakness. I believe they were trying to teach us a lesson that we failed to grasp.”

  “Which was?” Car’sem asked.

  “They were warning us, and delivered the message personally so we would feel the effects and remember. We struck back like an arrogant child, not knowing who it was we were dealing with.”

  Ura’bor growled. “I would dispute that if I could.”

  “I still dispute it,” Pra’nom said, unrelenting. “The Humans are stronger than we thought, but their world is still ours for the taking if we act before they can draw reinforcements from other systems. We have far more troops here than they do, we simply need to send them and end this before it can escalate further. Honor demands that we finish what we started.”

  “No matter the cost?” Tem’lan countered.

  “It would be far worse not to,” Oru’ven said gravely. “We will lose the respect and fear of the other races if we walk away from this now.”

  “We will lose millions of soldiers if we press this,” Tem’lan growled. “And I am not confident that we can even take their world. I believe we have been outplayed, and any further hasty action will only make the situation worse than it is now.”

  “We cannot back down,” Ura’bor hissed as if Tem’lan was talking treason.

  “We need a victory,” Tem’lan explained. “If we are unable to achieve one it would be best not to waste resources. What if they invade here after we bleed our defense fleet dry to take their world?”

  “Tem’lan makes a good point,” Car’sem agreed. “They only struck us here to send a message. Now we have split their blood, though very little of it. If they react to that as we would, we may see a Human warfleet overhead in the coming days. I would not waste our defenses trying to destroy their Sentinel, which we will if it can move to intercept our ground troops. If it can hold the Cajdital at bay, we will be blooded taking it down.”

  “Then we should recall more of our fleet to this system, regardless of what transpires,” Pra’nom suggested.

  Several others nodded, seeing the wisdom in that.

  “Agreed,” Ura’bor finalized. “Send courier ships while we study our new enemy in more detail. Our decision on what we do will wait until our blood is less hot with the sting of defeat. If we are to defeat this enemy, we must not underestimate them again.”

  “Wise words,” Tem’lan agreed. “But there’s a possibility that we might not be able to defeat them at all.”

  “We can,” the elder Scionate said confidently. “It’s simply a matter of discovering how best to do it.”

  “A lot of movement,” Kara commented as they quietly reentered high orbit of Vaadsip, seeing warships moving about with a lot
coming into the planet from the other Scionate worlds in the system.

  “They’re not used to losing,” Morgan commented from the pilot’s seat. “I think we spooked them. Paul, you have a location for us yet?”

  “Somewhere on the large southern continent.”

  “There are no continents,” she said, referencing the obvious fact that there were no oceans to outline any.

  “Look at the city distribution. They’re clumped into what look like continents.”

  “Well that’s something then,” Morgan said, glancing up at Kara who was once again seated above them. “Is that enough for you to give me an approach vector?”

  “Give me a minute, then I should have something.”

  “Crowded?” Paul asked.

  “Very,” Kara emphasized, “but there are always holes. It’s just a matter of finding them.”

  Paul nodded, understanding her challenge as he turned his attention back to the datapad in his hand. They weren’t returning straight to the ruling den. Had they been out for blood that would have been the obvious place to go and just kill all the leaders, but that wasn’t the mission here and pissing off every single Scionate in the ADZ was a really bad idea. They needed another option, which Paul was currently searching for.

  It took him another half hour but he was finally able to give Morgan and Kara a destination city situated a third of the distance around the planet from the capitol and only half as large. It took them a few hours to get through the traffic and down to it, once again coming down over the grasslands and creeping up on the perimeter detection sensors, limited as they were. Kara was able to sneak them inside rather easily, with them finding another parking space in the cluttered roofline…but even by then Paul wasn’t finished with his research.

  “What’s the holdup?” Morgan asked after they’d set down.

  “I’ve narrowed it down to two bloodlines, both of which have their central dens here. Picking which one is the problem, along with finding the right contact.”