by Aer-ki Jyr
Hanniena had been a fleet commander before her capture. It was doubtful she would ever be one again after suffering that humiliating defeat, but she could appreciate what she was seeing. The movements were so complicated that she couldn’t follow them all, but the end result was always the same…dead Li’vorkrachnika ships, even as the ship count increased furiously as the massive assault fleets outnumbering Star Force 5 to 1 gradually worked their way out to the jumppoint. Not all of the Star Force fleet was here yet, and wouldn’t be for some time, but the Li’vorkrachnika were losing and losing badly.
What surprised her the most was how fast ships were lost. Star Force always had to whittle away at the larger V’kit’no’sat ships and often let them retreat if they abandoned their objective. But there was no mercy being shown here. No retreat. No withdrawal. No damaging ships to take prisoners later. There was just utter carnage with Star Force destroying all wounded ships as quickly as they could. They let nothing get away...not that the Li’vorkrachnika were trying. They were fighting to the death, and the ships that lost weaponry were making suicide runs along with fully operational ships that had decent positioning to do so.
Hanniena had never seen anything like it before, and it sent a chill down her spine all the way to the Saroto’kanse’vam spike on her tail. She didn’t understand why, for they’d been fighting Star Force for so long there was nothing about their combat style that hadn’t been documented and analyzed intimately. The inclusion of the Uriti had altered the status quo greatly, but there was no Uriti here, so what was the difference? It wasn’t just the ship size.
As she watched more and more Li’vorkrachnika tanks being destroyed under her Kaeper’s guns, taking satisfaction at each bit of vengeance, it finally dawned on her what was happening.
Star Force had a code of conduct, one that often seemed counter-productive. Even when fighting the V’kit’no’sat to retake planets claimed from them, they had been the defenders. Rescuing their people had been the priority, and beyond that, defeating the V’kit’no’sat had been the objective.
But not killing them. She’d been captured because Star Force chose to do so. They didn’t have the luxury of taking too many prisoners, but they still took some. From what the trailblazers had told her, the Li’vorkrachnika could not be taken prisoner. They’d fight to damage or destroy you every waking second, and when put in a position where they couldn’t do that, they’d kill themselves rather than be complacent.
When Hanniena’s fleet had been defeated, she couldn’t understand why she’d lost. Then the Wass’mat had a long time in prison to figure it out, but during all that time she had never been afraid of Star Force. They were dangerous and always had been so, but they were inferior and timid, except when backed into a corner. Then they fought more freely, but it was always in defense, one way or another.
But not now. They were here to defend the system, which now technically belonged to them per the deal she’d struck, but the Star Force fleet wasn’t acting like a defender. They were acting like an exterminator, and that truly scared Hanniena. She had never seen them fight like this, when they had the advantage in technology and essentially even ship size. They were so aggressive and unrelenting that even the V’kit’no’sat seemed lethargic in comparison.
Their drone movement was so complex, so coordinated, and so numerous she couldn’t understand how they were managing it. This wasn’t a cluster of vessels targeting a single opponent, moving around it and essentially sitting still firing. This was active ship to ship combat on a scale the Wass’mat had never known possible before, and even as she watched the small amount of damage her own ship was doing, she could barely keep her eyes off the sensor readings the Star Force fleet were transmitting out across the system.
And it seemed the Li’vorkrachnika knew what they were facing, for they were throwing every ship they had at them as quickly as possible…and were destroying many drones in the process, but they couldn’t get to the jumpships, even when those ships engaged in the combat. The drones screened for them so much that they couldn’t be damaged enough to be pinned in place, and their larger weapons were savaging the Li’vorkrachnika ships…especially the Star Force command ships. They looked like Brat’mar vessels smoothed on the edges, and they were not holding back, rather pushing forward with the drones despite the fact that they contained crews.
They rarely did that against the V’kit’no’sat. For all the time she’d spend in battle with them, Hanniena had never gotten a single clean shot at a jumpship or command ship. But now, here, they were using them to fight, at times in very close quarters, but the Li’vorkrachnika couldn’t destroy them and when they tried the drones counter-swarmed them while the heavy shields on the jumpships soaked up damage that otherwise would have killed more drones.
She felt she was getting an advanced lesson in warfare just by watching, and realized that the larger ship sizes of the V’kit’no’sat allowed for dominance through…admittedly…lazier combat. Moving a 36 mile wide ship around was extremely easy compared to moving around a fleet of thousands of drones equal in mass on individual attack patterns.
Hanniena didn’t know how Star Force was doing it. Even the Li’vorkachnika’s movements were damn impressive, but they all had living crews onboard. And the fact that Star Force didn’t seem to care about that was what scared her the most. She didn’t know the full history of the Star Force/Li’vorkrachnika conflict, only what they’d allowed her to learn as a prisoner, but the bad blood between them was undeniable. After all the V’kit’no’sat had done to Star Force, they had never fought like this against the invasion meant to wipe them out.
The trailblazers had said the Li’vorkrachnika must be destroyed, and Hanniena assumed that they had never gotten to that point with the V’kit’no’sat, though why not she didn’t understand. Was it because the Li’vorkrachnika would not be taken prisoner? Was it because Star Force was, in some way, part of the V’kit’no’sat, even in a heretical sense, and they saw the V’kit’no’sat as kin?
Honestly, she didn’t know what she was witnessing, but it was clear that Star Force hated the Li’vorkrachnika on a level they did not share with the V’kit’no’sat…and vice versa. She couldn’t attest to the hate level of the Li’vorkrachnika, but the way they moved their fleet and hit them with maximum speed and firepower suggested they knew better than to give them an inch.
The battle at the jumppoint was still escalating and would go on for hours, but Hanniena couldn’t stay here and watch it. The Kaeper had to keep using its advantage as the only starship in orbit to help the embattled ground troops as they continued to lose territory and more shield generators were at risk of falling, but she didn’t need to be here. The ship’s crew could follow commands from the surface. Her presence was unnecessary, and while her strength was fleet command she was a Wass’mat, and had psionics tailored to close combat.
So Hanniena boarded a drop pod and headed down to one of the combat zones, dawning her armor and taking part in the battle to save what was left of the planet while Star Force fought the naval war to save the Wass’mat from eradication.
The irony was evident, but this is what fate had brought them to in the wake of the empire’s unwillingness to defend them. Hanniena didn’t know what the future brought, but she was going to stay here and stick it out regardless, even while others would be running back to the empire that had abandoned them, for the trailblazers had already told her that those not wanting to stay would be allowed to leave once the system was secured.
And after what she had just seen in orbit, and her own experience in losing to them in naval combat, perhaps joining their empire wouldn’t be as bad as she was expecting. Never in her life would she have expected the V’kit’no’sat to be pushed back on its heels by unknown rim races. But then again, she had never expected the Terraxis heresy in the first place. So many things had changed in recent years that she wondered if the V’kit’no’sat were really V’kit’no’sat anymore.
&nbs
p; Where was the dominance they lived and breathed? Certainly not here, abandoned to die against a race of vermin too numerous to count. The fact that they could openly attack the V’kit’no’sat and live was beyond what she would have expected even a few millennia ago. Now they were freely taking worlds and Itaru was doing nothing to counter it.
The only dominance here was Star Force’s, and with what she was witnessing here, Hanniena had no doubt they would cleanse the system of all Li’vorkrachnika presence with a vengeance, no matter how many enemy ships there were. They were showing the level of dominance that the V’kit’no’sat had identified as their birthright, yet they were showing mercy to their enemy by coming to the Wass’mat’s rescue. How they would deal with the survivors remained to be seen, but the fact that they were not letting them die or killing both the Li’vorkrachnika and the Wass’mat was different from how the V’kit’no’sat would have responded.
Hanniena understood times had changed and were continuing to change fast, and she wasn’t sure where this would end up, but if the galaxy was coming alive with multifaceted warfare, joining with the dominant empire was the most prudent means of survival, and between being defeated herself, their possession of the Uriti, and what she was witnessing here, there was little doubt in her mind that Star Force was now the dominant force in the galaxy and not the V’kit’no’sat, no matter how much larger her former empire was. They were on the decline. Star Force was on the rise.
And if Hanniena lived through the next few days, she had no idea what the future would look like. Everything was upside down now, but her race was under attack and she had her tusks to offer in assistance, so she put any other thoughts aside and dove into battle, shooting, cutting, and stomping the little Li’vorkrachnika on the surface along with the others…and hoping they wouldn’t nicked to death by their tiny weapons as wave after wave flowed across the terrain to oppose them.
There were literally too many to kill without naval assistance, but there were many other Wass’mat refugees in the ‘safe’ zones behind them, and the longer they delayed the Li’vorkrachnika’s advance the more there would be alive when Star Force made it to the planet.
Sadly, Hanniena would not be one of them, for two days later she would fall in combat multiple times, with her Kich’a’kat reviving her each time until her armor was so damaged that she died for the final time, surrounded by scores of Li’vorkrachnika, and unrecoverable by the other Wass’mat as they were pushed further and further back, leaving her body to be trampled on by the enemy reinforcements as they surged forward in unending numbers.
8
May 19, 4917
Ohson System (Tamprani Region)
Stellar Orbit
Thrawn’s fleet came into the system amidst a major war. Paul and the other trailblazers’ fleets were wrapped around one planet in the system and nowhere else. Lizard fleets, however, were everywhere, including his incoming jumppoint, but not in enough numbers to be a problem. The first few jumpships took some serious hits, but none were destroyed prior to releasing their plus-shaped drones that mimicked the hulls of the lizard cruisers.
They launched from the underside rear of the jumpships, whereas the lizard cruisers stuck into all sides of the hull on their carriers, looking like ticks rather than having a protective bay for them. None of their jumpships were near…Thrawn could see them positioned elsewhere in the system in large clusters, staying out of the fighting along with the transport ships, leaving only cruisers waiting at this jumppoint and 13 others.
That meant they didn’t know the Paladin were coming, else they would have had far more here. It almost felt like a token gesture, for most of the lizard fleet was blockading Neonni and engaging in sporadic combat. There were more than 2 million cruisers in play, and debris fields from far more at various points around the system…including this jumppoint, suggesting that there had been a much bigger fight here when the trailblazers had arrived.
Thrawn’s fleet made quick work of the few thousand cruisers waiting for them and secured the jumppoint before other lizard fleets began to race across the system towards them. Had he only been bringing a few ships it wouldn’t have mattered, but he had a long train of jumpships coming that stretched out more than a day long, meaning the lizard cruisers had plenty of time to get here before the last of them came out.
He had many minutes to contemplate the lizards’ next move as sensor images and comm telemetry raced both ways across the system. They could hold position around the planet and get caught between Star Force ships on both sides. They could force an all-out assault on the planet before the Paladin fleet could arrive, or they could abandon the planet and hit the Paladin full force before they could fully arrive. Then again they could always run away, but they weren’t going to do that. They were expendable, and doing damage to the Star Force fleet was worth their deaths even if they couldn’t take the planet.
So the question was, how could they do the most damage?
Thrawn knew what he would do in their position, and just as he expected, the blockading fleet began to rapidly withdraw and head for the star…and from there, he knew, they would be coming straight for the Paladin, even as the last of the cruisers here were blasted into oblivion.
“So be it,” he said to himself as he watched the belated sensor images of the ships making microjumps away from Neonni towards the star. They appeared as blurs on the sensor bounces, and when combined visually it looked like rain falling through space from the planet and combining into a river that then snaked around the star in droplets headed for his fleet’s left flank.
That occurred over a matter of hours as Thrawn waited, fighting the first elements to reach him as more and more of his jumpships arrived to reinforce the jumppoint, which had to have an open space protected inside a cup-shaped formation. If any of his incoming ships had engine trouble they would overshoot that gap and potentially ram the defending ships, so a jumppoint hold wasn’t an easy way to fight a battle. In fact it was damn hard, for aside from the navigationally issues and coordinating with the ships coming in using only small blurps of messages sent out to the rapidly approaching ships, they had to protect against the lizards backdooring the jumppoint and hitting the newly arrived ships before they could deploy their drones.
That’s why the cup kept stretching further and further back into a tube around a region of space only 12,000 miles wide. That might sound like a lot of room to maneuver in, but when jumping from another star system it was a damn precise target to hit, and a little finagling with other gravity wells in the system at the last moment allowed for some minor corrections, but the tightly spaced jump intervals between ships made it even more tenuous.
But Star Force was well practiced in such maneuvers and Thrawn had the Paladin ready for the lizards before the first reinforcements arrived into the grinder. The lizards came in solo to begin with, throwing themselves into the fray with no hope of survival in order to do some damage and disrupt the incoming ships, but they couldn’t get through. They tried, running some cruisers past the Paladin drones to try and get through to the jumpships but they didn’t make it. The incoming firepower was too strong along with numerous dampening shields thrown up in their path.
So after the first few attempts the lizards began to arrive just short of firing range, pooling their ships into greater numbers before launching another attempt to get through, not even bothering to stop and fight it out normally. They rammed every ship that got in their way, attempting to blow a hole in the formation for others to follow through, but Thrawn knew how they thought, for he had once been one of them. The Paladin’s genetic memories had been altered, but not his. His memories were still Li’vorkrachnika ones, though he thought of them as lizards now. His base skill set was that of the enemy, but his loyalty and advancement were completely Star Force, and that gave him a huge advantage.
The lizards were going to do damage, they always did, but they were not going to get at the vulnerable ships arriving at such high speed t
hat normal collisions turned fatal. Nor were they going to catch a fully loaded ship in a kamikaze run. Thrawn had enough drones now to prevent that, with more arriving faster than the lizards could destroy them. He had the jumppoint locked down and enough ships coming to handle what was before him, but the trailblazers weren’t going to let him fight alone.
The fleet defending Neonni was breaking up, with part of it engaging the lizards as they fled through a single jumppoint. That forced them to jump away at multiple points that did not allow them to directly approach the star. Some went to other planets, but most just jumped off slowly into null space. Those ships had to then curve back towards the star at slow speeds because they didn’t have a solid gravitational base to push off of. Forcing that maneuver would delay their arrival at the Paladin jumppoint by hours, and those ships that did not quickly get away from Neonni were caught in combat with the trailblazers’ fleets.
Not many did get caught, and Thrawn understood why. Sometimes lizards shot the closest enemy regardless of numbers, but there was a mastermind in this fleet…perhaps several, which meant they were going to operate on a higher tactical level. The lizard technology, while obviously more advanced than what Thrawn had when he served them, was not up to Star Force standards. That meant grouping was essential and getting split apart was not going to see the trailing ships do much damage at all. Mathematically it was better to run and regroup to hit harder later, which was why the lizards were abandoning the planet with such haste.
During the fighting Thrawn got an update from Paul, informing him that the Wass’mat on the planet were now reluctantly part of Star Force, though more than 90% of those in the system were dead. They hadn’t gotten here soon enough to save the other two worlds, and the one that still stood was in tatters.