by Aer-ki Jyr
His command ship was at the front along with two others while the rest of the trailblazers were further back with their flagships in what amounted to a long arrow shaft rather than a wedge that was pushing forward like a freight train and leaving a protective shroud of debris around the ships at the back of the penetrating formation that eventually left the drones behind and was eclipsed with cruisers flowing in behind them and chasing them into the center of the lizard fleet.
Paul knew to keep them moving, but once they got to the approximate center and he saw that the lizards were not retreating, rather standing their ground and hoping to be able to take out the entire Star Force fleet in this one engagement, he pivoted their advance and brought the Excalibur to a stop allowing the other ships to pull a hard left as he covered for them, tipping his ship up on its side as it took weaponsfire directly to the hull in most places where the shields had gone down.
His gunners were continuing to destroy nearby cruisers, essentially creating a new debris field that would eventually become a wall blocking more phaser strikes from behind it, but rather than hold position there he fell into the back of the arrow shaft but ahead of a few other ships, taking a spot on the train that wasn’t seeing the most counter fire. So long as they kept moving the enemy couldn’t pick on the damaged Excalibur, with the ships ahead of them plowing the road and leaving the ‘shaft’ to fire laterally at targets of opportunity through the surrounding debris as they passed.
That didn’t mean his ship didn’t take more damage, including another ram that had half the cruiser sticking out the ventral side after it imbedded. A nearby ravager obligingly shot it off, allowing the Excalibur’s shields to reform over the wound as two more command ships came in and made a sandwich out of Paul’s ship and gave him time to recharge.
The same was happening for the other leading ships, including the ravagers, to buy them more battle time before becoming disabled or destroyed. When Paul finally signaled the two command ships to break off and give him room to maneuver he saw the first of the Sentinels arrive on the battlemap behind where the drones were engaging the cruisers in more carnage than the arrow shaft was inflicting, which was a testament to just how many drones Star Force had in play.
Knowing that he had to kill as many lizard ships as quickly as possible, Paul didn’t have the Sentinels join the drones in typical hold/stall/recharge tactics. Rather he had the Sentinels plow right into the lizard fleet and kill as many cruisers as they could before they were taken down, forcing the lizards to focus on destroying them or seal their own fate by letting them roam free and eat up so many ships at pointblank range, which allowed their Sentinels’ secondary weaponry to also get into the fight.
One might have expected the arrow shaft formation to punch out the far side of the lizard fleet and run to safety once the Sentinels arrived, but it did not. The trailblazers and their biggest ships stayed right in the middle, metaphorically punching the lizards in the gut and daring them to either kill them or run away, leaving Star Force with control of stellar orbit.
Typical of the lizards, they chose to stay and fight it out to the death, win or lose, leaving Paul and the others with an uncertain outcome before them, but one that was going to end this stalemate one way or another…
Paul ducked under a collapsed bulkhead and onto the makeshift hangar deck where three dropships were waiting for him and the last of the evacuees from his flagship. There were no proper hangar decks left, so this one had been cut out of a chunk of the ship that had been exposed to space and fitted with temporary atmospheric containment bubbles to allow the crew in the protected interior to walk their way out to the dropships without having to armor up.
Paul was wearing his armor though, having retrieved it from his quarters on the way out. He was the last person to walk onto the smashed rubble pile that the ‘hangar’ had been made of. Some strips of metal had been laid down for walkways out to where the gravity ended, with the crew floating their way to the open doors on the dropships the last few dozen meters.
Looking around at the junked interior of his ship, he said a silent goodbye. This wasn’t the original Excalibur from long ago, but he’d taken the name with him to all of his flagships and this one had been in his possession for several centuries, getting upgrades and repairs as time went along. It wasn’t going to be fixed this time, for there wasn’t much of the ship left. It was floating debris right now, no engine power whatsoever, only a couple of weapons batteries operational, and the TF at the center too damaged to disconnect.
And it wasn’t the only one. More than half of their command ships were now junk, but the crews had all been pulled off post battle. Only three ravagers were still combat capable, and all the Sentinels they’d sent into the battle were down, though one was still salvageable. They had 32,000 drones left in decent shape and another 78,000 in partial working order, which sounded like a lot, but given the numbers they’d stared with Paul’s fleet had lost almost everything…save for personnel.
73 people were lost, 71 of which had been on the command ships, and two others on the Warship-class jumpships that had been destroyed. The protected interiors had failed in a few spots from excessive weaponsfire and it ground on Paul to have even lost one person, but 99.9% of the crews had survived to be evaced out after the fleet had finished off the last of the cruisers…which had stuck around to the last in order to do as much damage as possible to the Star Force ships.
Paul lagged behind as the last of the crew pushed off the last platform and floated forward to the commandos waiting to grab them if they missed so they wouldn’t go floating off into space through the canyon-like trench they were sitting in. The trailblazer looked around at the massive wounds that had carved his giant donut up. This had been an interior section, with more than a half mile of ship overhead that was now missing. It’d been sheared clear off after more phaser hits than he could ever count, but the rest of the fleet had killed the cruiser swarm before it could get all the way to the protected interior.
Paul sighed, then shrugged at all the catastrophic damage. What was left of the ship would remain in stellar orbit along with the new asteroid belt of ship debris for some time. Until either a fleet of salvage ships got here to recycle it or they simply pushed it into a descending orbit and let the star clean up the mess. As it was a jumpline or two were blocked, but they weren’t ones that Star Force used and Paul wasn’t about to waste the valuable materials scattered across the battlefield if they could be recovered later, even if it was decades later. They’d set up a warning beacon for now, telling ships where a safe jumppoint on this line was while marking it off limits to their own vessels.
He doubted anyone would be coming in on those lines, long as they were, but you never knew. Everyone within Star Force, the ADZ, and their associates would have their maps updated eventually, but if someone else came passing through them…well, Paul couldn’t protect everyone, and even a warning beacon couldn’t necessarily be interpreted by incoming ships unless they knew how to read the signal. But still, it was a potential lifesaving measure in some wild circumstances, so he felt better about having it in place than not.
As for the Excalibur, he’d take the name with him to his next command ship, whenever he got a new one, for he wasn’t going to steal an existing one and plaster the name on it. Besides, he wanted a few new tweaks built in anyway.
Taking one glance at the wreckage he shook his head at how much it had taken to finally evict the lizards from stellar orbit. The fighting in the system wasn’t over yet, with another convoy of lizards already having jumped in and then out again before they could be destroyed, and there were no doubt more cruisers on their way, but for now the naval engagement had been won, with insane damage to both sides.
“Worth,” Paul whispered as he stepped out of the gravity and launched himself towards the last dropship as the others sealed up and headed out to space.
10
October 23, 2965
Gvaris System (Star Force t
erritory)
Thannep
Paul stood atop one of the broken lizard buildings searching the area with his Ikrid just in case there were a few lizards hiding in the rubble as the Scionate unit he’d just finished fighting with gathered below for a badly needed rest and some food. Their assigned sector had several Bsidd units engaging and hunting down what was left of the lizard army and Paul’s roving team had come in to help them root out a determined knot of infantry that had dug in to several subsurface levels. He’d been the dislodger in that offensive, with the Bsidd being the hammer and the Scionate the skirmishers that ran down the lizards that attempted to flee so they could set up a few more ambushes before they were all destroyed.
There were other sectors in this city with fighting ongoing but this one was clear, more or less, though one could never be too sure where the lizards were, for they had a habit of spreading back into conquered sections and running a bomb or two up into your face. Paul wasn’t as tired, so he felt his time would be best spent doing a little psionic recon and making sure his team didn’t get hit by a suicide bomber or other nastiness. Fortunately the lizards hadn’t gotten around to creating drones to deliver the det packs, for so long as there was a living person carrying it their mind would stand out like a beacon to him as soon as they got into range.
It would take a few more days to conquer this city, at least, but without the influx of supplies and reinforcements the lizards on this planet had no hope of victory or stalling its conquest. As usual they were ignoring all offers of surrender, but within a year or two this planet would be in Star Force hands, same as the rest of the system. With stellar orbit finally buttoned up, albeit loosely with a small fleet and several Sentinels to provide support, Paul had reassigned himself to help with the remaining ground battles on Thannep and putting the finishing stamp on this long and costly victory.
So many ships had been lost that Star Force’s expansion efforts elsewhere were going to be scaled back for the next couple of decades, which unfortunately meant the lizards would have more time to rebuild and consolidate their forces in near their core worlds, but that couldn’t be helped. This win was far more important, Paul just hated having to go this deep into their reserves to accomplish it. Clan Saber alone had lost 43% of its overall fleet here and wouldn’t recover those numbers for a very long time, how long he didn’t know, for the production of ravagers was taking priority for his Clan…but they weren’t small enough yet to replace the standard drones, so he has going to have to skimp somewhere and he hated doing that.
The sedas that now orbited several planets in the system were likewise damaged and wouldn’t be repaired anytime soon. They were all still functioning, but wounded shy of being the second Death Star at Endor. The chunks bitten out of them were smaller, but still an awful eyesore attesting to the damage they’d soaked up that the rest of the fleet had badly needed to be spared from.
A few more Sentinels were on their way here, to help shore up the system, but now that the lizards had gotten wind that the link in their chain had been severed they hadn’t been back in numbers. Some fleets tried to break through but eventually Paul was able to lock that down and start killing most of them, save for a lucky few that managed to run his limited blockades. Without a lizard defense fleet here to safeguard them, this system was no more strategically viable than any of the others nearby for them to transit through, and the Voku were doing a very good job of being a nuisance and not letting them even start to set up another waypoint.
As of now the two halves of the lizard empire were severed, and once Star Force caught its logistical breath they were going to widen the currently narrow gap considerably.
A ping on his HUD brought Paul’s attention to a falling object overhead, but a quick look at the identification marker on it told him it wasn’t a threat…to him anyway. It was a Stranom mech coming down from orbit and he watched the Voku machine land nearby outside the city, though it came no closer.
“Frel’sa, I’m going to be gone a bit. Assign a couple of lookouts while you eat, just in case.”
“Yes, Archon,” the Scionate responded over the comm from below as Paul ran to the edge of the building and leapt off it, using his jump pack to move from one broken structure to another as he leapfrogged his way to the edge of the city then came down on the grassy fields beyond. He landed heavily, for the gravity on this world was 1.3g, but it was nothing that he couldn’t handle and his troops were better acclimated to it than the lizards were, movement wise.
Paul ran easily out to where the jackal-like biped stood in tier 3 form. That meant it was actually three Stranoms combined into a single unit, making it considerably bigger than one of their standard mech/suits, and dwarfing the two individuals standing near the right foot of it. One was a Voku, standing tall and proud in their armorless combat attire and dwarfing the fully armored individual beside him, with Paul running up to and stopping a couple steps short of Cal-com.
“You sneak in here or was I not informed of your arrival due to the combat?”
The big black shoulders on the Voku shrugged slightly. “We made no attempt to hide our arrival, but I did come straight here without delay. Why your people didn’t inform you I cannot say.”
“I’ve been busy,” Paul admitted. “There’s not much fighting left systemwide, but the lizards are tenacious bastards no matter what numbers they’re in. We’ve got some more work left for us here, but the outcome isn’t in doubt. We just can’t afford anyone getting sloppy.”
“If you will allow it, I can take one of the cities off the map for you,” Cal-com offered.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No, but we always travel prepared. I have four conglomerates in orbit and see no reason why they should sit there while your troops fight.”
“They still have a good number of planetary defense guns in play.”
“We’ll work around them.”
“Help yourself then,” Paul said, glancing at the other person beside him.
“This is my liaison from the Shanplenix that I spoke to you earlier about.”
“Demmcha?” Paul asked.
“Correct,” the slightly synthesized voice answered.
“And why are you two here?” Paul asked.
“A decision is needed,” the Shanplenix said evenly as he glanced at Cal-com. “And I am told that it requires agreement between the both of you, so I am here to conduct negotiations personally to speed up the process. Time is of the essence.”
“Oh?” Paul said, curious as to why Cal-com would agree to this.
“The Preema have decided not to commit any troops to the future conquest of the lizard core worlds,” Cal-com said with a hint of disgust. “They are going to continue attacking and conquering the weaker systems along their border, but their primary focus is going to be on the other side of the divide. The Skarrons are still responding poorly and the Preema feel you and I have this theatre under control, so they are leaving the key worlds for us to conquer.”
“Since when?”
“16 days ago.”
Paul dug the toe of his armored boot into a tuft of grass, then began kicking it with more and more effort as his anger spiked, peeling back the clump at the roots until it finally dislodged and went airborne.
“Son of a bitch…” he said in frustration, knowing how much of an effort it was to take this system and expecting each of the 40 or so core worlds to be just as bad.
“Which is why I came in person,” Cal-com explained. “We need another course charted going forward.”
“And that involves the Shanplenix how?” Paul said, finding another nearby tuft of grass to beat up and removing it from its roots in three swift kicks. He couldn’t believe the Preema were dodging the hard fights after that long spiel they gave him about wanting to hit them where it would really hurt. Damn hypocrites.
“We cannot replace the Preema militarily, for we do not have their numbers. However, we have been in contact with a number of othe
r races within Li’vorkrachnika territory that have been waiting for an opportunity to strike back. The more systems that fall the more of them will be willing to join the fight, as I have discussed with the Voku previously,” he said with an inclination towards the hulking Dafchor beside him. “If we can rally a fair number of them to our banner now, the Shanplenix can offer a weaker substitute to the Preema to help counter the loss when you eventually strike at the heart of the enemy.”
“And what part of that needs to be discussed?”
“Compensation after the war,” Demmcha said bluntly. “To be fair, if you are able to remove the Li’vorkrachnika from this region of the galaxy you will be in defacto control of a vast domain, of which I am told you plan to do nothing with.”
“Next to nothing,” Paul amended. “We’re keeping this one, by the way,” he said to Cal-com.
“I thought you might.”
“If we assist you in a much larger endeavor than at present,” the Shanplenix continued, “may we have some additional equivalent territorial gains to accompany it, and through which to entice others to do the same?”
“Considering how much we’ve already accomplished,” Paul said evenly, his anger at the Preema creeping over into his response to the greedy request, “what do you feel is fair compensation?”
“If we are able to assemble an alliance of those within the Li’vorkrachnika’s borders to fight against them, we ask that we be able to control an area of influence regardless of whether or not we choose to inhabit every system.”
Paul looked at Cal-com and shook his head. “Uh uh. I’m not giving domain to people that I don’t even know about, for we may have to end up fighting them if they turn out to be unscrupulous anyway.”