Star Force: Backdoor (SF53)

by Anal Backdoor

  Keeping them alive long enough to become a worthy ally was his duty, though he didn’t have as large of a fleet as required to fight the battles for them. The Humans and their less capable allies were fighting two major enemies at the same time and playing for a defensive engagement while creating a safe zone in which to continue building and advancing. In Cal-com’s opinion it was a wise play, but they were outmatched heavily, with the only reason they’d survived this long without being overrun is that their enemies didn’t consider them to be as dangerous as the Elders indicated that they would become in time.

  Ignorance had turned the tide of many wars before and it had served the Humans well thus far, but as both the Skarron and Cajdital lightly probed the Humans’ territory and discovered the level of resistance they could offer their ignorance was diminishing and their military assets being deployed were increasing. Soon, Cal-com feared, there would be too many enemies for the Humans to handle, despite their skills.

  Without being able to directly protect them the Voku commander had to assist them. He couldn’t win it with the few troops he had, but he could do things to help them win…which is what this current mission was designed to do in that it would buy them additional time to increase their defenses and further develop their technology.

  He only had 72 conglomerates at present to work with, and he was bringing 43 of them with him now, given the importance of hitting the Skarrons hard in order to diminish losses. The increase in fleet strength on the scouting reports worried him, but not in the overall outcome. He didn’t like the attrition that would ensure amongst his forces, so he spent many hours reworking their battle plans and running sims…most of which did not turn out favorable.

  Frustrated, he kept up the effort until it was time that he needed to get in his daily workouts. He wanted to stay and work, but training was the lifeblood of his race…something the Elders had taught them long ago, and he wasn’t going to forsake their lessons out of eagerness or worry. Mentally setting aside the task at hand he left the oracle and cleansed his mind of naval concerns as he delved into a myriad of physical training exercises, letting his muscle take priority and drive his purpose for a long period of time.

  He returned to the oracle afterwards and found, as he did most times, that his point of view had shifted as a result. Sometimes he lost his previous insights, but this time was one in which a fresh perspective was a welcome change. Reassessing nearly everything he had been trying to do in simulations previously, he went an entirely different way then started pulling back towards what he had originally planned.

  He hit the sweet spot somewhere in between…as far as sims were concerned. The real enemy was unpredictable, but the Voku had had enough experience fighting them on the border of their own territory to program a computer enemy that mimicked their fighting styles adequately. Still, there was no way to know for sure what would happen when battle actually commenced aside from wading into it and working the problems as they arose.

  Cal-com finished his simulations for the cycle and retreated to another section of the massive ship where he dealt with his subordinates and the maintenance of the vessels and the troops they contained. Such detail work was necessary and he never felt comfortable letting others handle such things, for they could make or break a campaign…and with the Elders specifically requesting they assist the Humans the importance of this campaign could not be overstated.

  After that work was done it was time for nourishment and additional training, with him spending time in both physical activities and in simulator work…not the speculative assaults he’d been planning, but in combat games with other members of the crew designed to keep their skills sharp during the long down times in between planetside activity. Cal-com often piloted one of their Stranom mechs in the games and had an average ranking, given that it wasn’t his specialty. That fact that he could hold par impressed those with more experience than him in that type of combat and he liked to mix it up with them in the games, both to gage their capabilities in order to know how to best assess what they could and couldn’t do in missions he’d be assigning them, as well as to push his own skills and learn from those superior to him in their fields of specialty.

  When it came to fleet operations he had few equals, so it was usually him instructing and training others, including those on his advisory staff. This cycle there was none of that, with them focusing on the mission prep, so Cal-com satisfied himself by indulging in the games for many hours up until his 79 hour day was complete and it was time he returned to the rest ward.

  When he returned to a random tube he sealed it over him and deactivated the gravity with the sound suppression canceling out all exterior interference. In a well-practiced mode, Cal-com retreated within his own mind, cutting out most sensory stimuli and slipping into a vulnerable yet deep rest. The armor plating on the tubes and the internal locking mechanisms insured that no one could mess with him other than offering a soft tone to get his attention. Not having to worry about physical threat the Voku could lower their mental barriers and engage in a healing trance that allowed them to recover far quicker than had they attempted to do so on the battlefield. In only 15 hours Cal-com woke again to a soft, preprogrammed chime which brought him slowly back to reality and barely 30 minutes away from system entry.

  Refreshed and fully prepped, Cal-com returned to the oracle just prior to the deceleration of the massive conglomerate against the star, dropping them out of their drifting interstellar jump inside the Skarron-held Achkor System. He triggered his own command center to rise up out of the floor, containing a number of different control stations around which his advisors situated with him taking center position and inspecting the battle feeds while allowing his staff to handle the more basic organizational tasks…leaving him free to watch and react as necessary.

  There were no ships in orbit around the star…at least not on the visible side, which meant their entry would go down without incident. Cal-com’s conglomerate was the second in line to decel, with the first having arrived some 20 seconds earlier. Both vessels moved in closer to the star to clear the spacelane for the others to arrive and began a slow transition around the perimeter of the star towards the primary jumpline in to the planet of Zenniza, as the Human charts referred to it.

  If there were any hidden Skarron reconnaissance assets they’d see the ships prepping to go in on that line, but as the others came in some of them deployed elsewhere, jumping off to other planets as Cal-com got additional updates from the scout ships that were already in system and now transmitting their updated intelligence to him rather than the burst transmissions they’d sent back along the incoming jumpline to his approaching fleet.

  These reports gave him nearly up to date positions of the Skarron fleet and the Voku commander began tweaking his mission assignments. At the moment the conglomerates were still together, but with new orders going out a few tiny pieces began to break off and make microjumps of their own elsewhere in the system. Cal-com wasn’t going for a blunt, break the door down type assault. No, he was much more cagey than that, and was going to work this attack from multiple angles.

  So when his conglomerate finally did make its microjump into the planet he had them come out in extreme high orbit, getting their first live sensor feeds and seeing what they were up against.

  As expected, there was a huge Skarron fleet spaced in clumps around orbit that was no doubt intended to transition on into the ADZ and supplement the blockading fleets there. Cal-com also detected numerous transport ships in orbit, with him knowing that Achkor was also a ground troop staging system, with those transports potentially full of reinforcements being run into the worlds that the Humans were currently defending. The more of those he could kill in orbit the better, regardless of whether or not they were full.

  Using a pedestal before him he added a few more ship assignments to the star to hunt down any transports attempting to flee the system. Even a few taken out could turn the tide in a single ground battle, and he
wanted to give the Humans every advantage that he could.

  “Renimar?” Hem-ra asked, using his Voku title that was the equivalent of ‘Grand Admiral’ in the Star Wars universe, with the skillset to match.

  “Not just yet,” he cautioned. “Let’s see how they react first.”

  7

  Cal-com watched as the Skarron fleets in orbit began repositioning to assault those conglomerates and pieces of conglomerates that he’d shown to them in orbit, about 7 in total thus far with the others still elsewhere in the system and hopefully out of view. Those he was showing had been intentional, as he was trying to maneuver the Skarrons around to where he liked and after some 20 minutes of repositioning and shuffling on the enemy’s part he finally got the opportunity he was looking for.

  “There,” he said to his advisors, pointing to a particular slice of low orbit. “Bring in Dorpa. Full engagement protocols and get us ready to move.”

  His staff carried out his orders without so much as a verbal acknowledgement or gesture. The Voku military was notoriously efficient, knowing that delays in combat often resulted in losses of material, personnel, or opportunity. Cal-com watched the orbital displays, seeing the Skarrons continuing to reposition and forming up into larger fleet configurations in order to assault the Voku conglomerates, for they were familiar with this enemy. That Cal-com knew by the way they began arranging their fleet.

  It was true that the Skarron Empire was huge and that Voku territory was a considerable distance from here and that in all likelihood none of these enemy troops had ever fought them before, but knowledge had to have traveled across their empire for they were responding to the threat that they knew the Voku to be given their pathetically ineffective attempts to take systems away from Cal-com’s home territory on the lower side of the galactic plane.

  These Skarrons knew the Voku and knew they had to mass their fleet together or otherwise be chewed to bits once the conglomerates separated and chased down their ships. Cal-com knew he had a winning hand here, that wasn’t the issue, it was how many ships and soldiers he would lose in the process.

  Suddenly there was a microjump into orbit as a streak appeared on the sensors, decelerating rapidly and coming down into a small gap in the Skarron formations. They weren’t aligned yet, still in transition, and the conglomerate came in right at a very bad spot where they were still spread out. Weaponsfire immediately sprouted from the conglomerate in the form of long range Javvens that were condensed packets of energy that were launched in clusters. They appeared to be a beam, but were actually a shotgun of individual orbs.

  Those orbs spread out over extreme range, allowing the Voku to at least nip away at distant targets where they didn’t have the necessary accuracy and dozens of Skarron ships were showing hits on their shields within seconds as the conglomerate began to flake off pieces that reformed into hunter squadrons that rapidly accelerated away from the mass to hunt down the ships that the Javven were weakening.

  Cal-com highlighted the largest combined Skarron fleet on the near side of the planet and signaled for them to make a tiny jump. Using their binary drives they enhanced Zenniza’s gravity pull and closed distance rapidly, then switched back over to gravity repulsion and braked hard, bringing the full conglomerate in to what otherwise would have been the Skarron’s prime kill zone. Cal-com kept his conglomerate intact and fighting as a single mass as he signaled others to start coming in, being the bait for his much larger trap.

  The conglomerate’s shields were considerable, but the Skarrons had an idea of what it would take to get through them and they had more than enough ships in the local area so they moved towards the big mass rather than away and hammered it hard. It was a calculated risk for Cal-com, but one that he had made before many times. As that large battle escalated and he watched his shield strength consistently diminish, Skarrons ships were literally being shredded by short range Dwio cascades that essentially threw hundreds of them out like a fountain into the nearby ships.

  The Skarrons ignored the losses, going for the big score and even circling ships around to the back side of the conglomerate to keep it from jumping back out. Soon there was a sphere of enemy ships encircling Cal-com and effectively pinning his ship in place unless he wanted to risk a collision…but that’s exactly what he wanted. The Skarron fleet was so close in that he was destroying a lot of it in the exchanges, but he needed it close for the next part of his plan.

  With the press of a button the Voku commander activated the conglomerate’s auxiliary IDF and extended it out as far as he could, covering a spherical zone some 17 kilometers in radius and catching about 2/3rds of the Skarron fleet within it. It took an incredible energy expenditure to do it and most of the weaponsfire on the conglomerate shut down to compensate, with what energy they had left over going to recharging the shields, though a few Dwio cascades were still firing.

  The IDF created a pocket of space around the conglomerate where external inertia was attributed to the entire field as if it was a single mass. This meant that any acceleration by the conglomerate would drag all the ships within the field with it…but at the moment that wasn’t possible, because the conglomerate’s gravity drives were also located within that field. And because all external forces were applied to the field rather than the contents, they had no gravity effect to push off of.

  Nor did the Skarron fleet, leaving them drifting on their last known trajectories.

  A few moments after the IDF extended conglomerate chunks began jumping in around it and disintegrating into smaller, faster attack ships that began encircling the Skarron fleet in a much larger sphere. Those ships outside the IDF began engaging the newly arrived ships immediately while the others were stuck in limbo save for conventional thrust which the Skarrons had little of. Those maneuvering engines were reserved for small scale docking adjustments and not capable of true flight, throwing off gasses for minimum thrust. Almost all maneuvering was accomplished by gravity drives, even with the Skarrons not having binaries.

  With Cal-com’s conglomerate getting hit hard, the Voku commander held position and the field until his trap was fully deployed then shrank the IDF back down to the dimensions of his ship and the weaponsfire returned…as did the Skarrons’ maneuvering capabilities, but by then there were so many Voku ships inside and outside of them that they had no choice but to fight and die, for there was little opportunity for escape.

  In order to preserve as much of his conglomerate as possible Cal-com didn’t have it disengage until the shields finally went down. With the exterior armor beginning to take hits he issued the warning to the crew then began the split along predetermined patterns, for the many pieces of the conglomerate could reconfigure into many ship analogs.

  Standing at his command pedestal, Cal-com watched as force fields came up and bisected the oracle, separating the various command crews and containing the atmosphere in each of some 24 segments before the walls started moving and the ceiling and floor disintegrated. Cal-com’s section moved through the conglomerate until it arrived in a new location, with a much smaller oracle forming around it with the walls closing in and reforming into an octagonal shape.

  As that happened, similar transitions were happening all throughout the interior of the conglomerate as the massive superstructure reset its internal design to what was needed, breaking apart the giant mothership and essentially ‘building’ the smaller ones. Cal-com hadn’t ordered the smallest possible units, and had kept a sizeable one for himself and two other subcommanders, known as Neppas, but the rest all went into fast, moderately small ships with decent firepower that could stand up to the Skarrons.

  In addition to those there were tiny pieces coming off and turning into what were essentially supersized fighters given their speed and agility. Those moved off throughout the Skarron fleet, zipping in and out of ship formations and nipping at their shields for the larger ships to add to later, all the while creating a very chaotic battle environment that left the Skarrons unsure who to target fo
r they weren’t standing still and slugging it out. A ship would move in, exchange fire for a handful of seconds up to a minute, then move on to engage elsewhere at speeds the Skarrons couldn’t follow.

  The battle wasn’t short, and took nearly 3 hours to complete. There were so many Skarron ships just in this one location that the area became littered with debris that added ‘terrain’ to the battle, with the last stages involving a hide and seek situation that the Skarrons excelled at. Cal-com had to rein his ships in so they didn’t get too aggressive and fall into traps, for knowing they were as good as dead the Skarrons liked to go kamikaze and take as many of their opponents with them as they could.

  Meanwhile there were other battles ongoing in orbit, with some of the Skarron fleets leaving to try and escape planetary orbit. Many made it out, for not all the Voku Neppas had gotten the Skarrons to fall into an IDF trap, but those fights then transitioned to elsewhere in the system because the fleeing Skarron navy ran into a blockade at the star, with so many ships lying in wait that getting to an exiting jumpline was going to be difficult. Given the size of a star it was hard to lock it down, but apparently the Skarrons didn’t like their odds so they redeployed back out into the system and bounced around from planet to planet, attempting to either get away from the Voku or lure them into smaller engagement traps.

  That chasing game would continue for weeks, but planetary orbit was secured within a day…save for low orbit. The few Voku ships that poked down there received a hail of surface missiles and had to quickly gain more altitude before they were destroyed.

  Cal-com had expected as much. Normally with an enemy once you took orbit you owned the planet. The more advanced races had surfaced defenses, but the Skarrons had for some reason decided to build such capability into their walkers. It was overkill as far as Cal-com was concerned, for it diminished their ground operations and kept them from being as effective as he would have liked had he been their commander, but in this situation it meant that in order to successfully move down into orbital bombardment range they’d have to either suffer the missile fire or take the walkers and surface launchers out first…and there were many of the latter as well, given the well-established Skarron cities on the planet and those had defense shields that would take considerable pounding to get through.