Star Force: Liberation (SF56)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  There were Skarron ships in orbit and even from the distance that the Hycre ship was spying from they could pick out their larger walkers on the surface…along with several small cities. The Skarrons also had a handful of orbital facilities, but nothing Nestafar was remaining, at least from the mid orbit view of the scout ship.

  Two more planets showed similar results, one with more infrastructure and one with barely any at all, but both with a Skarron presence. The fourth planet the scout ship visited was the Nestafar capitol world of Nestarraffa, and as soon as the Hycre ship came out of its microjump the orbital map lit up with thousands of contacts.

  None of them were Nestafar, but there were Skarron and Cajdital ships seemingly parked in orbit next to each other…until the tiny flashes of weaponsfire began registering on sensors.

  The Hycre ship kept its distance but didn’t move on, sticking around and recording the battle as the two sides hammered each other. The Skarron ships were larger and had plasma-resistant armor, while the Cajdital mostly cruiser-class fleet used primarily plasma weapons but had greater numbers by about a 3 to 1 margin…making for a very even fight.

  But not just in orbit. As the scout ship stuck around it also pulled as detailed surface scans as it could manage, picking up reflections from the enemy ships’ own active scans and finding four Cajdital LZs on the ground with hundreds of Skarron walkers surrounding them. The Hycre were very interested in seeing how that was progressing, but other than their approximate placements they couldn’t get any useful information.

  Judging by the positions of the battling fleets, which were grouped together in various clusters in specific places around orbit, the Hycre had some open lanes to approach through and, knowing that they could outmaneuver both enemy ship types, moved down into low orbit to get some better scans figuring that they’d already been spotted in the system anyway with all the active sensor beams flashing around the planet. But with both sides heavily engaging one another they probably weren’t going to care.

  As the ship came down near to the upper atmosphere the resolution of the ground campaigns increased exponentially…showing that the Cajdital had landed clusters of cruisers looking like bees on a hive and were maintaining a free fire zone around them as they were setting up shield towers inside. Those outside corridors had some of the Skarron walkers on approach and exchanging plasma fire with the Cajdital cruisers…which weren’t all that much bigger.

  Though the Cajdital landing clusters were intact there was no movement out from them…and there was a trail of broken ships littering the ground nearby, a testament to the anti-air fire the Skarron walkers were capable of throwing down, not to mention several discarded gravity grapples that had apparently yanked others out of the air. The Cajdital did have their LZs and they were presently intact, but they’d paid a heavy price to establish them and at the moment it looked like they weren’t able to push out at all, with more and more Skarron walkers slowly transitioning towards them to tighten the noose.

  The Hycre stuck around a while, inspecting all four surface battles and cataloging as much of the Skarron infrastructure and troop counts as they could reasonably get before retreating to a higher orbit and jumping out to the next planetoid on their search list, finding Skarron/Cajdital conflicts on 6 different worlds and no sign of the Nestafar anywhere within the system.

  That reconnaissance data would eventually be brought back to a Hycre world outside the ADZ, then transition through a series of couriers until it got to a world that was linked into the Star Force relay grid. Once there it made its way into the ADZ and eventually over to Dvapp space where Paul was poaching a few ships in orbit of Veernad with the Excalibur and adding a few more dings to its already damaged hull. He didn’t have many drones to work with, but with him in command and the Skarrons’ limited resources it had become obvious that they weren’t going to be able to kill the big ship so he was bleeding them as dry as he could knowing that a trip back to a shipyard for repairs was in the near future.

  He didn’t get the intel from the Hycre until a day later once the Excalibur had pulled back to an anonymous position in the system that still had the Star Force relays in operation. Either the Skarrons didn’t know where they were or hadn’t bothered to destroy them, but the formerly Dvapp system was still on the grid allowing Paul to stay linked in while he singlehandedly poached ships with his small fleet of warships elsewhere hunting down convoys.

  When he got the priority message packet he read through it intently, with one big piece of the current puzzle falling into place. The Skarrons had pulled most of their attempted reinforcements away from the ADZ in order to fight the lizards, and he knew well how much of a handful they were. He welcomed the distraction, which was already giving Star Force and the Protovic a chance to rebuild and press the pair of worlds the enemy held in their territory while Paul used what scraps he had to poke around Dvapp space.

  Paul spent the next six hours reviewing battle data, both that occurring in orbit but also that on the ground…and he was keenly interested in seeing how the lizards handled the Skarron walkers.

  The ultimate answer to that was, they weren’t. They were getting beat up on the ground and spamming cruisers to try and counter, and doing so effectively, but at great cost. It didn’t take him long to guess their theory, for by now he knew the lizards weren’t stupid, and they were using a strategy that Star Force never would.

  They were sacrificing ships and troops in order to bleed the Skarrons dry of their missiles.

  Most of the ground battles that were ongoing in Orica, or probably over by now given the time lag, were in the early stages, but two had progressed to the point where the lizards were actually winning, and they were doing so by using their cruisers to counter the walkers in hover mode, essentially making them walkers in and of themselves and using their single plasma streamers to great effect. Trouble was, the Skarron armor was resistant to plasma and it required a lot of chewing on to take them down.

  But instead of developing a different style weapon to counter the armor, the lizards were just hammering them until they fell. It was costing them cruisers left and right, but they were making gains on the ground where the Skarrons hadn’t thrown too much resistance their way. That was one advantage the cruisers had over the walkers…they could move around much more quickly, but put 20 cruisers against 20 of the big walkers and the lizards lost badly, even when their missiles were depleted.

  That left the lizards with a tough but winnable fight so long as they had the numbers to keep pouring into the engagement. Paul knew the Skarrons did as well, and wasn’t sure who would come out the victor. If neither received additional support he’d put his credits on the Skarrons, but knowing both enemies he knew they’d each have support coming their way.

  He just wished they had a permanent recon post in the system, because he expected the battle for that highly valuable piece of real estate to be one stretching out a decade, at minimum, unless one side rolled insane numbers in.

  But what else was in the report, or rather missing from it, was the Nestafar. Nothing had been heard of them in quite some time and Star Force had had no assets in their territory since the Elarioni pullout. The Hycre and a few other races had pulled scouting runs in that area and beyond, for some of the ADZ races still had contacts out there on worlds that the enemies had no interest in. None of them had reported sighting the Nestafar within the past 3 years and now their capitol system, though decimated earlier, was now completely lost.

  He didn’t know if they were still fighting elsewhere, had evacuated, or were wiped out, but it seemed karma had kicked in for their backstabbing of the original Alliance and they wouldn’t be a concern for the ADZ going forward. Paul didn’t know that for a fact, but he could read the writing on the walls. Whatever had gone down they’d got their asses kicked, and their territory was in the hands of the Skarrons and, apparently, now the lizards as well.

  Paul hoped that the lizards would also start pulling reinforceme
nts off the ADZ border to fight the Skarrons, but knew Star Force had to keep reinforcing it or the lizards would find a way in. They were too devious to just go away, and he knew the ADZ couldn’t just turtle up on the border and hope to be ignored. They’d have to keep hitting them, with Greg and others continuing to do that in earnest razing worlds and maintaining a neutral buffer zone around the border that the lizards were constantly trying to reestablish themselves in.

  Their pesky enemy knew how to creep well, something the Skarrons didn’t bother with. They went with more blunt force attacks, even if in small numbers, with the lizards adding sneakiness to that trait, for they also could drop the hammer when they chose. So far the ADZ had avoided that hammer multiple times, a lot of which was due to Kara preemptively hitting them in key areas, but aside from a few feel-out attacks the lizards hadn’t used their big toys to try and break open the front as of yet.

  Paul wondered why that was, for their own scouting reports suggested they had a huge surplus of troops sitting back inside their deeper worlds. Maybe they were just being patient, or maybe they had some other plan in place. Regardless, Paul knew to never take them lightly. They would take easy targets if offered up to them, but he feared they were a more dangerous enemy than the Skarrons, despite the huge size of the other’s empire.

  And they were dangerous because they were cunning and adaptive…but they also held to a consistency of tech and tactics that they made work rather than altering it to fit the current circumstances. Their ships were essentially the same as they were when they first attacked Star Force, save for small upgrades here and there. The one big change was the addition of a plasma streamer, though while still holding to the plasma theme of the majority of their weapons was an upgrade that they’d reverse-engineered from the Kvash who’d they’d managed to roll over without breaking much of a sweat.

  That weapon upgrade alone, spread throughout their entire territory, gave them considerably more naval power, not to mention the occasional tweaks in their shield generators and plasma composition that the trailblazer was continuously following. While Star Force tech was now considerably more advanced, the lizards were doing well with what they had and maintaining a consistency across their territory that bespoke impressive organization and unity.

  Paul had been studying them intently over time, even as his priority focused on the Skarron threat, and he was keenly interested in learning from this new challenge they were facing, for it would show more of their hand given the numbers and tech the Skarrons would bring to bear. If they didn’t find a way to counter them the Skarrons could slowly chew into their territory and push back towards their core worlds, for the trailblazer knew how hungry they were for new territory.

  The reverse wasn’t true, for even if the lizards rolled over them in their current conflicts and conquered double the territory they current possessed that would only be a fraction of the Skarrons’ current empire, making them an altogether new type of enemy for the lizards to face.

  And the more they fought each other the more resources they’d expend. Paul just hoped that wouldn’t backfire and bring more attention from both to the region and the ADZ. If it did they were pretty much screwed, but as far as the Skarrons were concerned the ADZ was an offensive campaign that they could deal with at their leisure and not a threat to them…and it wasn’t going to be, for aside from some raids Star Force wasn’t pushing closer to the galactic core.

  The lizards were past that point, with both sides knowing what each other were about and going for the throat whenever they could. The only reason Star Force wasn’t hitting them harder was the size of their territory, making an ultimate victory far beyond their current scope…in theory, at least, for the Skarron war had already pushed them to their limits in terms of resources.

  Take the Skarrons out of the picture and the war against the lizards would still be a defensive affair, for Paul knew the key to ultimate survival was the unlocking of the data in the pyramid and incorporating it into their empire. Once that occurred, fully, then they could roll the lizards…but then that would potentially send up a flag to the V’kit’no’sat that they couldn’t afford.

  So no matter which way you sliced the strategic situation the ADZ was a sanctuary that Star Force would defend but couldn’t push out from in any meaningful way. That meant endless war, which was something that the Archons were prepared for given that it wasn’t much different than their endless training. For other races that wasn’t the same, and many that had been beaten by the lizards had made it too easy for them simply because they gave up trying.

  And that ‘giving up trying’ was part of the reason why their surviving factions were sitting in the ADZ and not contributing to the fronts.

  But Paul didn’t care about them any longer. Davis might still be working on them but the trailblazer wasn’t. Star Force and its allies were the key to the defense of the ADZ, and long term it would be Star Force alone given the advancement that he knew was coming. Building up their empire was his focus, and right now that meant protecting it and buying time so they could advance.

  Hopefully this new Skarron/lizard war would finally buy them enough time to get a firm border defense in place, and with any luck they could sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the fireworks.

  Unfortunately he knew that wasn’t going to happen, not with the lizards anyway, and there were still Skarron held worlds on and near the border that had to be reclaimed. The fight may have gone from impossible to doable, but it wasn’t over and it wasn’t easy…not yet anyway. Tennisonne had said it’d be 15-20 years before he’d get Liam’s armor ‘packets’ out to him, but when he did it’d change how Star Force’s naval division operated.

  And even without the weapon upgrades that were coming in the near future, the secondary armor was going to make their ships so tanky that they’d be able to handle the swarm tactics of both the Skarrons and lizards. Until then it was buy time and build Sentinels…and hope that both of the big powers got so distracted with each other that they wouldn’t realize how fast Star Force was advancing and choose to take them out now, with overwhelming numbers, while they still had a chance.

  5

  May 31, 2556

  Trenzalore System (Delta Region)

  Christmas (Alliance World)

  Raven-266 ran through the forest easily, ducking here and there as she made good time from her LZ to the Bsidd colony that was under construction along with the rest of the planet. The 8 territorial regions were empty and unassigned save for the one given to the Bsidd, but it barely had a single city built with most of their people living in their ships or in prefab structures on the surface provided to them by the Star Force markets.

  Those were just getting under way themselves, with only a handful of operational colonies on the planet and not enough to service a full Alliance World as of yet, which was why the planet hadn’t been opened up for colonization to date, but the Bsidd had been a special case and coming in with extremely low numbers. That was changing, however, as the insect-like queens began pumping out eggs and growing new population by the thousands…stressing their limited resources to the limit in order to expand as quickly as possible.

  The Bsidd didn’t know the striker was coming, nor would they if her mission was a success. She was approaching on foot in armor through the forest, knowing that the Bsidd didn’t have any detection nets set up as of yet. Most of the buildings in their tiny city were half built, with only the ‘royal’ section being amicably functional. That was her destination, but first she had to get inside undetected.

  The Archon began picking up Bsidd minds before she could see them, adjusting her path to avoid the closest ones as she came to the forest edge where some of them were clear cutting the trees to make room for construction growth. Raven circled south to avoid them and came up on a partially built structure that had no sharp lines to it, being all curves and twists and the internal structural supports showing were no exception. The Bsidd didn’t care for the square, prefe
rring more exotic designs that made navigating around inside their buildings like riding a twisty turny waterslide.

  Raven found a blind spot along the perimeter and sprinted across the small clearing in full daylight, knowing that coming in night would have made her more visible. The Bsidd didn’t like really bright light, and the planet in question was considerably closer to the star than they would have preferred, making their night shifts more active than their day ones. Coming in midday gave her less eyes watching, and with a little psionic monitoring she was able to get across when no one was looking.

  She stuck to the building exterior and moved laterally until she came to an opening and ducked under a thick support beam and entered a section under early construction. It wasn’t long before she came up on a group of workers, some of which stood twice as tall as her and others that were barely half her height. The small ones were scurrying about bringing parts and attaching bits here and there while the larger ones lifted the bigger pieces into place using multiple appendages to work the curvy lego bricks around.

  That’s what they looked like to Raven anyway. Whatever they were building with was unlike anything Star Force used. Every piece that came in resembled a puzzle piece, with the Bsidd scurrying over the framework like ants assembling the building bit by bit at a good rate. It wasn’t hard to distract them from her presence given the focus they had on the task at hand, so as long as she didn’t get in their way she was able to walk right past them with a few Jedi mind tricks and work her way to the interior of the city to where the completed buildings were located.