Star Force: Evasion (Wayward Trilogy Book 2)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  14

  Esna and the others ran for more than an hour before the speeders came back. Rammak and the other fighters trailed them so far behind sometimes she couldn’t see them on her battlemap, but for the moment they were just within range. As the others began loading the cargo she looked back but had to activate her zoom just to catch a bit of their armor getting around the slight curve in the ice.

  They were still there, but they wouldn’t be taking this ride. They’d have to wait for the speeders to come back again and Esna got a sinking feeling like she might lose Rammak if she left him now.

  Her brain told her no, that they were ahead of the Zen’zat and would stay ahead of them, but still…

  “Get on,” one of the Kiritas said, snapping Esna away from her zooming stare and focusing her attention on the here and now. They’d loaded more quickly than she’d expected, with only a couple techs left stepping on. Esna ran two steps then jumped, floating up and over to her single empty spot at the back of one speeder with a stack of cargo behind her nearly reaching to the ceiling, but when they accelerated off it missed by several inches with the guiding energy fields making sure there would be no impacts so long as the tunnel remained smooth.

  And just like that Rammak’s icon on her battlemap disappeared as they got out of range. She didn’t have anything to look at except the backside of a mechwarrior’s armor and the ice walls to either side that were nothing but a blur, so she just stood still with her feet pinned under holding straps as the group traveled further and further away from the Zen’zat. Esna chewed on her inner lip a bit as what Rammak had labeled ‘claustrophobia’ started to twitch inside her head again.

  A few minutes later she retracted her helmet, getting a blast of cold air on her face for the few seconds that she could stand it, then closed up again. She did that twice along with tapping on her leg armor as time seemed to blur into one long and pointless ride without Rammak here. When she was with him Esna knew she was accomplishing something, but split apart from him now she felt a little…

  Well she might as well face it. Star Force had Humans in it and a lot of other crazy, wonderful people that she was starting to fit in with a bit, but without Rammak she was totally lost. She didn’t expect the others to leave her behind to die or anything like that, but they probably didn’t understand just how slow and weak she was when even the weakest person in Star Force was still a badass. Even the techs she was traveling with could defeat her in hand to hand combat with ease, and that wasn’t their focus in training.

  Well, not all of them. The Irondel couldn’t. She’d just kick them into a wall or something, but they didn’t count when they didn’t even stand as tall as her knee. But why then, she wondered, were they in a Clan at all? Rammak had said everyone here was the best of the best, so what did they have to offer?

  There were none of them in her second group, for they’d gone with the first, but it did beg the question of what their usefulness was. They couldn’t move crates around…even Esna could do that…so how skilled did the little furballs have to be in other things to warrant their inclusion?

  It was a valid question and Esna sunk her mental teeth into it as a distraction up until she half lost her balance when a flash on either side popped out of nowhere, then the speeder suddenly decelerated.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Cross tunnel,” the driver of the speeder said over the comm. “You’re getting off here and running again. When we get the last ones up to this point we’ll move the first group on to the outpost, then you.”

  “Alright,” Esna said as they slowed to a stop and everyone got off, with her feeling better just by taking a step of her own down onto the ice…as well as knowing Rammak would be picked up sooner than planned. Looking back on her battlemap she saw the location of the tunnel crossing which was now etched into the battlemap’s memory rather than just being a faint line yet to be filled in. She saw it now stretched out either direction as far as the sensors on all of their armored suits could detect, and fortunately there were no Zen’zat in range.

  That meant if they hadn’t snuck ahead in this tunnel, the evacuees now had them squarely behind them…meaning ahead meant safety so long as the Viks didn’t drill down another access shaft. But they couldn’t do that without knowing where the tunnel was, so Esna assumed they were safe, save for the Zen’zat catching up with them from behind.

  Now she knew why it had been so damn important to keep the speeders away from the base. They were what was keeping the evacuees ahead of their pursuit. If the Zen’zat had got their hands on even one of them she and Rammak would be dead by now no matter how hard they fought.

  But Rammak wasn’t here yet and there was still a chance for him to get caught between two groups of Zen’zat with nowhere to run. That said, she wasn’t out of danger either if Zen’zat came down either side of the cross tunnel and caught up to them without the Archon and Commandos here to defend them from behind.

  “Hurry,” she urged the speeder driver as he switched ends once it was fully unloaded.

  “Don’t worry,” he said with a mock salute. “I’ll get your boyfriend back to you.”

  “He’s not…” Esna said as the speeder accelerated down the tunnel with the others following seconds later, “…my boyfriend.”

  “Help,” the Kiritas beside her said as he grabbed one of the handles on a crate sled and began to pull.

  “Sorry,” she said, grabbing the other attached to a rope. Together they got moving at decent speed again, though they were the last in the line of evacuees. A lot of them were pulling cargo by themselves, and Esna was grateful for that because it meant she wasn’t going to fall behind with two of them dragging the same one.

  But still, when she glanced back behind them at the empty tunnel now that the speeders were well out of sight, she felt an odd, dangerous chill knowing that there was nothing between her and the Zen’zat if they came up the side tunnels. And if they got close enough to pop up on her battlemap then she was already as good as dead, for she’d never outrun them.

  That thought made her work a little harder, digging her toes into the grooves cut into the floor and keeping her crate and Kiritas tucked in behind the next dragging sled and glued there for the remainder of their trek through the seemingly endless ice tunnels.

  Kiev-428119 stood in the command nexus onboard his flagship, mentally tied into his fleet and able to issue orders at such a fast pace that no verbal or button pressing combination could ever match a single thought through the interface he was using, though at the moment there wasn’t much to do aside from watch. The Star Force fleet had pulled back from the planet after damaging 19 V’kit’no’sat vessels and destroying 2 others. He’d lost some 392 drones with another 84 requiring significant repair, but the crews onboard the warships were already busy seeing to that as those ships had been recalled and docked while the others free floated ready to engage if the V’kit’no’sat came out to them.

  But they didn’t, happy to just hold position over the prize they’d stolen from Star Force. Kiev didn’t understand their atypical behavior and was trying to deduce what was going on from both their orbital position and what little he could make out on the ground when their purpose suddenly dawned on him.

  Tied into the fleet’s battlemap he saw the data from the incoming stellar jumppoint the same time as his bridge crew which were just on the other side of the wall the separated the command nexus in a little privacy nook, for when in the heat of battle even the awesome power of the battlemap interface and the Sav psionic weren’t enough to micromanage everything in a largescale battle and the less physical distractions around to eat up attention the better.

  Kiev saw dozens of new V’kit’no’sat ships emerging from their interstellar jump and knew they were too soon to have been summoned by the current enemy fleet. Travel between stars took time, even for comm signals, and there was no way one could have gone out and precipitated this response…meaning that the V’kit’no�
�sat had intended to bring in reinforcements from the beginning.

  That or this was just another roaming fleet happening to cross through this system, but the odds of that were so low Kiev didn’t waste two seconds considering it. V’kit’no’sat ships didn’t travel in such large numbers without a specific target to smash, and however they had discovered the location of the Tauntaun base, their typical method of attack was simple and straightforward…come into the system and blow up whatever they could find.

  They might throw some variation in there, such as capture the base, loot it for prisoners or computer information, then blow it up along with the prisoners once their usefulness was extinguished after multiple mind raids. Regardless of the wrinkles, the end result was always the same. Everything in the Devastation Zone got obliterated with prejudice. The V’kit’no’sat did not want Star Force operating here or anywhere else, and they were particularly sensitive to backline incursions behind the front where they were constantly probing and hammering any weakness in the line of Star Force systems that had proven strong enough to hold out this long.

  Star Force had been on the defensive ever since the first V’kit’no’sat invasion, though in recent years it had become more of a draw when the enemy was no longer sending massive invasion fleets to bleed their way into victories, but Star Force still hadn’t been able to take back any worlds. Tauntaun and other covert bases had been established before the invasion, for the most part, and that’s why they’d gone mostly undetected.

  How the V’kit’no’sat had learned of this one was important, but the epiphany Kiev was having lay around the fact that the V’kit’no’sat didn’t send all their ships in one attack. If they’d expected heavier resistance they either would have sent more or sent in a scout to determine how much was necessary. There was no way they’d assault with a partial fleet, because that meant Star Force could kill more of their ships even if they ended up losing the battle and the V’kit’no’sat were not so stupid to waste ships and personnel…unless they had a reason to do so.

  And that reason had become crystal clear now. The V’kit’no’sat could have destroyed the base, but they hadn’t. They were still chasing escaping personnel through the tunnels, which Kiev could see via the drops onto the ice fields that individual ships were flying low to assist with and digging conduits down through the ice with their weaponry, but why bother? Why not just bombard everything around the base constantly for 2 or 3 days and then leave any scraps of survivors to freeze while the fleet held onto orbit and dared Star Force to try and get past them to search for their people?

  The V’kit’no’sat wanted to kill the Star Force personnel on the planet, but they didn’t want to do it in a way that made Kiev think that they were all dead. If he did he’d retreat when outnumbered, like he was now and getting even more so with every ship that entered the system, now up to an additional 63 with more continuing to arrive. They knew Star Force wasn’t going to fight if they had a disadvantage and let the V’kit’no’sat murder them, and the hit and run attacks the Archons had been orchestrating across the Devastation Zone only underscored that philosophy.

  Star Force deliberately made themselves a nuisance out here in a way that made them very hard to pin down and kill…but now the V’kit’no’sat had a way. They had prisoners that Star Force would try to rescue rather than destroy, for when captives had been taken in the past and their rescue had been deemed impossible the ships they were prisoner on were targeted and destroyed if possible to avoid the torturous deaths the V’kit’no’sat were famous for.

  But if the people down on Tauntaun weren’t captive yet, the V’kit’no’sat knew Star Force wouldn’t abandon them.

  Hence this was a trap. A big fat trap designed to pull the fleet into a fight they couldn’t back away from without sacrificing the people on the ground. The V’kit’no’sat wanted to draw this out in order to bring in more opposition, whereas a huge initial fleet might have scared Star Force away.

  Kiev expected this reinforcement fleet to be the first of many for the enemy, and until the distress call from Tauntaun was marked as ‘completed’ with confirmation signals flowing out across the Devastation Zone, Star Force ships and fleets would continue to come and investigate even if they thought they might be late.

  And with enough V’kit’no’sat ships in the system they could start attempting ambushes around the star that the incoming ships might or might not be able to run from in time. There were only so many jumplines in from surrounding systems, and the stronger one’s engines were the more systems there were in jump range, but get enough ships to camp out all of their jumplines and you’d have some single ships or small fleets running into a buzz saw if they came in low to the star.

  If they came in high, braking hard early or traveling slower to target they’d have some forewarning, but the V’kit’no’sat had millions of years experience with running down starships, and as good as the Star Force fleet was they could still get caught out, especially if the V’kit’no’sat started mining the jumplines.

  There was no indication of that yet, but Kiev had a gut feeling that this was just the beginning and unless he could defeat the V’kit’no’sat fleet and get a couple of good hours to evacuate the surface survivors before more enemy ships arrived this system, this planet was going to become a hotbed of action. For no matter how bad the situation was, Star Force wasn’t going to turn a blind eye to its people trapped below.

  And he was sure the V’kit’no’sat were counting on that very fact.

  That was one big downside of fighting a war over a thousand years long. Both sides figured out the other very well and surprises were hard to come by, though it seemed the V’kit’no’sat had arranged one here. Fortunately they weren’t the best at strategy. They were damned good, and Kiev knew to never ever underestimate them, but their go-to strategies were standard practice and they only adapted when pushed to…whereas Star Force had the improvisational masterminds of the trailblazers. They’d not only built the Star Force military from scratch, they’d done it in a way specifically to fight the V’kit’no’sat even before the galaxy-spanning empire realized that Star Force had erroneously been allowed to exist.

  That hadn’t stopped the V’kit’no’sat from smashing Earth and everything else in what was now the Devastation Zone, but it had kept Star Force alive long enough for them to even the odds and hold onto a good chunk of territory rimward. The V’kit’no’sat never let up, always pushing to eradicate them with Star Force taking heavy losses and constantly pulling back, but every now and then a trailblazer would find a way to take a bad defeat and turn it on the enemy by outthinking them. They understood war better than Kiev ever would, constantly finding new ways to fight and pushing technology and tactics to never before seen applications.

  And of all the trailblazers, Kiev’s Clan leader was arguably the best at naval combat and not too far away inside the Devastation Zone. With a heads up he would find a way to get the people off the surface before this escalated too far…or he’d find a way to avenge them in short order.

  With a thought Kiev activated the comm system and sent a beam transmission to the location of the hidden Gondor relay on the far outskirts of the star system where it was hiding from the V’kit’no’sat. It wouldn’t respond with an information ping unless directly querried, and now that the base had been taken it probably hadn’t been checked since, but he wasn’t interested so much in any updates as he was in sending a message out.

  He recorded a brief holovid and added all tactical data on the current state of the system and send it out to the satellite in a single pulse. When it arrived it returned all its updated transmissions on the same line of sight so only the querrier or anyone else along that line would detect it. All of it was encoded, but keeping the location of the relay satellite secret was important, for Star Force didn’t have communications systems strong enough to reach between stars without the relays.

  When Kiev got the comm dump back he knew his message ha
d been sent out, and reading through all the updates with the speed that only a mental interface would allow, he saw multiple notations of ships around the area signaling to the network that they were heading to reinforce the base on Tauntaun, so he knew he’d have help coming and based on the distances involved he had some idea of when they’d be arriving.

  But it didn’t look like he’d be outnumbering the V’kit’no’sat fleet any time soon, for their combine ship count had risen by another 271, and that meant the survivors on Tauntaun were going to have to hold out on their own into the near future.

  15

  Esna’s legs were burning even before the empty speeders passed them by, but at least she got a quick break when everyone had to get down and out of the way. She actually laid flat on the ground as the speeders elevated as much as they could with their pilots ducking down to make the pass. At first she was confused as to why they were empty, hoping to see Rammak on one going by, but then she realized the fighters had to stay at the rear.

  They weren’t on her battlemap and Esna worried that something might have happened to them, but without even a single passenger on any of the speeders that seemed unlikely, for they probably would have pulled a wounded body or two out of a fight…unless the Zen’zat had gotten to them first and the speeders had just turned around.

  No. If that was the case then they would have stopped and picked up Esna’s group in order to get them as far ahead of the pursuit as possible. Passing them by meant they were going for the first group that had been running longer than hers had. They’d get them to the next outpost then come back, meaning that everything was going as planned.

  That bit of logic settled her fears as she got to her feet and grabbed the handle for the cargo sled and started pulling again, intent on doing her part as long as she could, though it was obvious that even the techs had far more endurance than she did. Hopefully when her legs gave out she’d be able to at least keep up with them absent the cargo pulling, but she didn’t want to let it go that far. Esna was tired, but she wasn’t done yet and was getting really sick of being a piece of cargo herself. Right now at least she was doing something useful and she intended to stretch out that usefulness as much as possible.