Star Force: Divide (SF76) (Star Force Origin Series)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  The lizard chess pieces were all gone now, destroyed in previous years and not replaced. Though dangerous in certain situations they had proved mostly useless here and the lizards had opted not to send any more in, relying instead on cruiser swarms that they knew were effective when they reached certain numbers. They had huge supply ships parked around the star feeding them all food and fuel, and though Paul had tried to hit some of those in the past he couldn’t get to them now. The lizards had literally parked walls of cruisers all around them that made it impossible to get through to target them, no matter how inspired of microjumps one made.

  And the trouble was, there were more Star Force ships in this system than even in Sol, warship wise anyway. Even with all that naval might the lizards were the stronger. Only the Sentinels kept them from attacking directly and overwhelming them with swarm tactics. This was a must hold system for them and they were not backing down, with the centuries of other races choosing to run and hide rather than fight now being Star Force’s problem, for the lizards were pulling ships from across their vast territory and Paul could only guess at how many more were coming.

  But right now time was more on Star Force’s side. The lizards had more ships coming in, but Star Force was claiming the planets and had their tech advantage increasing with every year. There was no way to know if it’d be enough in time, and the part of him that relished the challenge of the situation was thoroughly sick of it. He just wanted to win this and move on, and made sure to rotate his personnel when he could to avoid them from getting burnt out as he was on the verge of doing.

  But Paul knew how to refresh himself, so after pulling up a few old reports from the ADZ that he’d never gotten around to looking at he went to bed, detaching his mind from everything and just embracing the moment of rest. When he woke up in the ‘morning’ things would be better with his mindset and he’d get to work again. The lizards were not going to outlast him with suicide tactics. His people were far better because they didn’t die and had time to grow stronger and wiser over the years. Spending lives was a cheap tactic and he was damn sure not going to let it win out here.

  Halfway through his sleep he slipped into a dream, a familiar dream once he was in it, but he couldn’t recall any specifics from the last time. It was a hunt of some kind, but he didn’t get very far before a hand on his shoulder woke him up and the dream disappeared from his mind and his memory.

  “Sorry, Paul,” Evan-993645 said from beside his bed. “We’ve picked up an incoming signal. Big convoy arriving. 32 minutes.”

  Paul sat up, looking at the acolyte. “Why isn’t it on schedule?”

  Evan shook his head. “I don’t know. Liam told me to get you up and into a nexus.”

  Paul frowned and climbed out of bed, slipping on a pair of casual shoes and heading for the door. When he got outside he accelerated into a jog, heading for the bridge as he left the acolyte behind. Wearing nothing but casual clothes that amounted to a loose pair of pants and a T-shirt, he sprinted across the bridge ignoring the Admiral and crew and went directly into the mind link inside his private nook that they could contact him through with any needed information.

  As soon as he was inside he found that the Excalibur was already moving, as well as a message waiting for him from Liam.

  He read through it quickly, his adrenaline rising as he sensed the same potential that Liam did. Apparently Davis had been holding out on them and was sending a huge relief fleet that was due to be here within minutes. It had to have its jumppoint protected, and because no scout ship had come through giving away their position, only a super-accelerated signal had been sent ahead to the system while the fleet was in transit.

  That was risky, but the nature of this fleet was different and could handle warships waiting to engage them…what they couldn’t handle was running into cruisers before they fully decelerated, so they needed the Star Force fleets to signal them what the proper jumppoint would be, in addition to any help upon arrival, for it would take hours for the entire convoy to arrive.

  There were fresh ground troops from multiple factions on the way, scores of naval drones, but more importantly there was a fleet of the newest ravagers, not produced by Clan Saber, but from somewhere else that Paul wasn’t aware of. Mainline had been building them for some time and sending them what they had. Davis must have changed something around somewhere to produce more of them without telling him, saving them up for Christmas day.

  Technically it was a few days early, but close enough.

  When the Excalibur came out of its microjump there was already a small fleet of drones and four command ships, with Liam’s eye sore of a flagship amongst them. It was painted neon green rather than the standard Star Force grey, and was aptly named the Poisoned Donut, though the green was Clan Neon Squirrel’s signature color. There were layers to sarcasm, but Paul had to admit that the odd color did make his ship look a bit meaner than the others.

  More ships were jumping in nearby, coming out of nowhere into short streaks as they decelerated then coasted into formation as the leading elements of the lizard fleet raced towards them, knowing this meant another convoy was about to arrive.

  Paul contacted the Poisoned Donut and appeared next to Liam in holo.

  “You woke me up.”

  “My bad. Figured you’d want in on this…and to be frank, I need you in on this.”

  “Trying for a counterpunch?”

  “Think we shouldn’t?”

  “Oh we’re definitely going to try,” Paul said, eagerness evident in his voice. “I’d just like to know how Davis hid these ravagers from us.”

  “He is a sneaky one,” Liam agreed. “Probably pulled some civilian shipyards off order and rushed these. He can read the numbers as well as we can, which is probably why he didn’t wait for us to ask.”

  “We’ll know more later. That signal wasn’t very dense with information, but I suggest we stow the questions until afterwards. This is going to get intense.”

  “I still want to know what he was thinking. Holding out on us is…something we’d do to him.”

  “He is an Archon. Perhaps he’s been taking notes,” he said as the first super-accelerated beacon signal registered on both their nexus readouts, indicating the convoy was less than a minute out. “Let’s get to this.”

  “You want rover?”

  “Your turn,” Paul said with a smirk.

  “Thank you,” Liam said kindly as he cut the transmission and took the Poisoned Donut into a tiny microjump forward. It blinked back into existence beside the lizard cruiser tendril that was racing towards the jumppoint, then turned hard right and dove into the enemy ships weapons firing. Some of them tried to ram the big ship, but a wall of dampening shields blocked them like bugs while the weaponry on the other side of the command ship tore into the aft of the ships moving ahead, allowing Liam to slice through the tendril and disrupt their forward momentum.

  That left the first piece of a tendril isolated as the trailblazer began a very short-lived battle with the coming cruisers before pulling out the far side and running laterally, dragging another chunk of cruisers with it and further disrupting their cohesion.

  Paul used that thinning of the cruisers to utterly devour them, surging the now 7 command ships and 3000+ drones forward and taking advantage of the disruption before tightening their formation and bracing to hold back the onslaught as the first of the jumpships arrived.

  With his mind segmented between various tasks, Paul still raised an eyebrow at seeing the first three ships jump in side by side. That maneuver was tricky, but doable, and he was glad that they were trying to clump up as much as possible, but it was the design that surprised him, for it was something he’d never seen before, not to mention far larger than any Star Force jumpship ever produced.

  Liam? he said via mind/voice rather than holo.

  I don’t know, he answered, seeing that the jumpships were each more than 30 miles long and carrying huge drones that began to disperse. Paul r
ecognized those, though they were also of an updated design. They were ravagers, and each about 40% smaller than previous models.

  Paul linked into them and instantly had them under his control, finding that the weaponry hadn’t been reduced, but actually increased a bit. He pulled the huge drones away from the jumpships and gave them a rendezvous point to move to as another trio jumped in behind them. A few seconds later as the behemoths began to pull off and the lizards were beginning to overrun the containment ‘wall’ and spill a few cruisers around the flanks as more Star Force fleets from across the system were arriving on odd jumplines to assist, a message was relayed to Paul and Liam from the jumpships.

  The ID signature was that of Davis, and it was text only.

  Payback for Sol’s outer zone colonization. You’re not the only ones who can keep secrets. Now go kick the lizards’ ass please…and Merry Christmas.

  A simple flat screen vid followed as an attachment, and a clip from the movie Diehard popped up in the nexus beside the trailblazers with Hans Gruber reading aloud the writing on a dead man’s shirt.

  “Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.”

  9

  July 1, 2964

  Gvaris System (contested territory)

  Inner Zone

  The Excalibur visibly rocked from an impact that Paul felt all the way into the bridge where he stood in the command nexus. A pair of lizard cruisers had managed a short range microjump into the hull where the dampening shields were down and had penetrated the outer armor layer within half a second. Material had compressed as the two enemy ships were pancaked into flattened bullets now buried inside the hull but the ship was so big even that wound didn’t kill it, though a few weapon systems did go offline.

  The rest kept on firing as the command ship was buried inside a swarm of lizard cruisers along with 38 of its twins. Interspersed among them were the Mk.7 ravagers that Davis had sent him, with the bigger command chips providing them physical cover to reduce the amount of weaponsfire hitting them. Allow them to be singled out and the cruiser swarms would take them down, advanced shields and armor not withstanding, but put them in the right place at the right time and they’d do far more damage than the command ships could.

  That left Paul’s ship playing blocker while doing a lot of damage on its own, and he was glad that the Excalibur had taken the hit rather than one of the ravagers, for they were downing cruisers so fast it looked like the ships were passing through an asteroid field of debris rather than fighting their way inside the strongest bastion of lizard ships within the system.

  Over the past few months Paul had taken the ravagers along with the rest of the Star Force warships and began aggressively engaging the lizards, first taking control of orbit around Thannep, then hitting up secondary positions like the various jumppoints and destroying the fleets there. The lizards had responded by pulling back and grouping up in what eventually became a single fleet in low stellar orbit that they were using to protect their incoming convoys and allow them safe passage through the system, some of which continued to deliver more cruisers to the battle, but most of which were headed elsewhere in their territory.

  Right now Paul was engaging that fleet head on, knowing that he was going in over his head, but that was the plan…take the ravagers right into the densest part of the cruiser swarm where they couldn’t line up kamikaze strikes from range and use the ravagers as their namesake implied to remove this impediment and claim control of stellar orbit. He knew he was going to lose a lot of ships in the process, probably more than half his fleet of drones at the minimum, but now was the time to do it before the lizards could amp up their reinforcements and start to close their grip on this system again.

  It was possible they were tapped out, but given how well the lizards adapted in the past he wasn’t going to assume that their industrial muscle couldn’t flex a bit more and knew he could take down the massive fleet they had here…all 2.3 million cruisers arrayed in a massive nebula that stretched around the star like a partial halo.

  The longer this battle for the system dragged on, the more cargo flowed through what was now the choke point between the two halves of the lizard empire. If they could cut that link it would alter the way the lizards fought, and though Paul didn’t know entirely what that would mean for them the more they could disrupt and isolate the two halves the better, for the strength of one couldn’t back up the weaknesses of another…and maybe, just maybe, the Skarrons could find their footing without the lizard core systems spamming them with reinforcement fleets.

  Then again, if they couldn’t send fleets to them they’d just use them more locally…which might make the upcoming battles more difficult than before, though Paul doubted any would reach this level until they actually tried to hit a core world. The H’kar had done that once and shared their data with Star Force, so he knew what to expect from them…which was pretty much what they were getting here. But cut off their link to their new conquests and their ability to send ships or resources back from them and it’d weaken the rimward half. If they could do that they could eventually starve them to death by whittling down their systems as they had been doing, but leave the link intact and you’d be giving the lizards an opportunity to do something innovative and change the game once again.

  So this system had to fall, and Paul thought they could make it happen here and now, so he, Liam, Sara, Kiran, Dakota, Logan, Alden, and Riley had gathered all the command ships in the system together, leaving only a few small fleets of drones and a handful of warships to protect the planets, and brought them in towards the star and began engaging the lizards on a wide front before sending this dagger into their center.

  It was a bold move, and hopefully one the lizards didn’t expect them to make, for it gave the lizards exactly what they wanted…ships surrounding the enemy in every direction, kilometers thick. The trick of it was, that’s exactly where Paul wanted the ravagers, they just had to keep them alive long enough for them to do their work and chew apart the enemy fleet from the inside out.

  With his command ship crew safely in the center portion of the ship behind additional layers of armor, Paul accepted the massive damage to his flagship as necessary and kept moving the formation forward and deeper into the lizard fleet, both to hurt them more and to leave behind the debris field that was accumulating from the damage being done to the lizards. If they stayed put that debris would block for both sides and Paul wanted clean firing lines on the enemy.

  Meanwhile the 229,000 drones were hitting the lizards from the outside along a wide front, forcing them to fight head on or retreat, and there was only so much maneuvering room inside the massive array of ships, so the cruisers didn’t have much running space unless it was away from the others. Fight or flee were their only options, for they couldn’t fall back to the safety of the other ships without running into them.

  What Paul hoped the lizards also didn’t see was the removal of several Sentinels from orbit around Planet 13. Using their own small gravity drives and a lot of cradles stuck to them like ugly bugs, 8 of the defense platforms were moving in towards the star and would be here within minutes to add their firepower to this insane brawl. So much damage was being done to both sides already that this battle was pretty much going to take both sides out, and once that happened Star Force’s superior tech would win out, whether it be in the few number of surviving ships, the Sentinels that could be redeployed later to stellar orbit, or reinforcements coming in from the ADZ.

  If they could remove this pool of lizard ships that had been building for decades it would be virtually impossible for the enemy to replenish it…or so the trailblazers hoped. Paul was banking on that being the case, meaning it was time to go all-in, and the approaching Sentinels were his ace in the hole.

  The ravagers were the bait and the distraction, for they were also the primary threat. The Dre’mo’dons they carried were more powerful than the weaponry on the Sentinels, but they were meant for short to medium range combat while the S
entinels could reach out and clobber you from afar. Diving into the center of the lizard fleet was bringing them and their secondary weaponry right into their preferred ranges, so it would make all the sense in the world for the lizards to assume that they were the hammer in this fight rather than the anvil.

  And if you looked at the numbers, the lizards had a chance to squash them here and now. It all came down to the details of combat and who adjusted better, for there were so many variables involved with two fleets of this size that chaos ensued…for the lizards. Star Force had never fought a battle of this size, not even close, but their control systems operated perfectly no matter how many ships were involved. Remote pilots had their assignments and higher level overseers, such as Captains and Admirals, would direct them where they needed to go in the immediate area while the trailblazers oversaw the entire battle and made adjustments as necessary to counter the lizards and the unpredictable fortunes of war.

  The lizards couldn’t compete with that, fighting more like rabid dogs than the strategic masterminds they’d shown to be before. In this their numbers hurt them, for the more they had the less precise they could be. As soon as Paul had dove the command ships and ravagers into the center of the enemy fleet this had become a free-for-all for them, meaning they were being reckless and sloppy, attacking whatever targets came in range.

  The Mk.7 ravagers were smaller than the command ships, but not by a lot. They were elongated like most jumpships while the Excalibur and others were circular and wide, with that width being able to block out portions of the cruiser filled sky around them, allowing the battlewagons to focus their firepower into more specific areas and literally chew apart whatever ships were there like the aforementioned ‘machine gun’ that Davis had humorously cited.