The Skarrons hadn’t amassed such a large empire by being pushovers, Cal-com knew, and given his two obvious choices he decided to go with the ground assault op. Scanning the planet he found several weak regions of coverage and massed ships there, commencing in orbital bombardment of one of the cities and several walker positions and traded Javvens for missiles, rotating his ships out as they became damaged and accepted the hits in order to neutralize the missile launching capabilities in that single surface region.
The walkers went down fairly easily, but the city lasted long enough that Cal-com’s fleet took considerable damage. They had so many missile launchers throwing up ordinance simultaneously that, on his screens, it looked like the enemy was sending a snake up to orbit to bite into his ships. This wasn’t the first time the Voku had done this sort of thing, for they’d counterattacked a few Skarron forward bases near their own territory, but the strength of the surface resistance was always a question mark without detailed intelligence…which he didn’t have here save for what the Humans had provided him.
He’d calculated for more than what they’d reported to be safe, and in fact saw that his estimates had been nearly spot on accurate…which both surprised and worried him. The Skarrons had fortified this city, at least, far more than the Humans knew, or perhaps since they’d last taken a look. That didn’t bode well for the rest of the planet, but this city at least was still going down, yet at a cost of equipment. Cal-com wasn’t going to lose any lives here, given his option for cycling out ships, but many ended up damaged before the city shields fell and the Javven finished taking out the hundreds of missile launchers within the city, often with them popping in ‘small’ explosions visible from orbit.
Those explosions ripped apart sections of the urban landscape with the Javven doing even more damage elsewhere. Cal-com ordered the offensive threats targeted, not the city infrastructure itself. He wasn’t trying to obliterate it, just clear the airspace to establish an LZ. Barbarians the Voku were not, but in this case the city inhabitants happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time…which was right next to their missile launchers.
When the return fire finally ended Cal-com had his damaged ships join the recovery conglomerate that had already started to form from the damaged/destroyed warships in the orbital battle. An intact segment went around and picked up the ‘wounded’ components and incorporated them into the whole, sweeping up even their own debris for crews to salvage or destroy as necessary. Those segments that could be repaired would be, then sent back out into other groupings to enhance them or form new ones. Recovery of damaged ships was essential for campaign longevity, and Cal-com had his fleet get on it immediately following the cessation of weaponsfire.
Once the Skarron city was shredded he sent down fighter squadrons to secure the local airspace against the enemy’s own fighter squadrons which were hovering around the edges of the bombardment zone, not wanting to accidentally get caught up in the downpour. With those fighter engagements paving the way he deployed ground troops, first through direct orbital drops for a number of his mechs, then through full transports that had been brought inside the conglomerates and now freed to fly free.
Those transports landed in the ‘safe’ zone and began offloading more troops and temporary infrastructure, allowing Cal-com to quickly set up a number of surface bases of his own, complete with shield generators and defense towers. Those guarded and created LZs for an even larger flow of troops and supplies to the surface, for the Voku commander was going to have to wage a ground war to secure the planet and he’d brought enough material and resources to make sure he got the job done. Last thing he wanted to do was come up short and have to try and stretch his resources.
He could do it, and had many times before, but he needed to quickly take the planet before the Skarrons in other systems could become the wiser…which was why he had ships stationed near the star to hopefully intercept any couriers they tried to send out, as well as ambush any incoming reinforcements or transports that would have no way of knowing the system had suddenly changed hands.
Information was critical in interstellar warfare, as well as knowing how to exploit the blind spots. The Skarrons didn’t have any known transmission capability between stars and operated explicitly off of couriers. That meant so long as Cal-com could keep any ships from leaving the system he would have a very large timespan to work with here, but let so much as even one ship through and it would just be a matter of time before an even larger Skarron fleet showed up to evict them.
He knew they would come eventually and was already planning for that battle, but the ultimate goal here was to take pressure off the Humans and buy them time…with the more days this system’s change of hands remained a secret meaning the more time he could give them.
And he was confident that if he gave Warlord Paul the time he needed that he would secure their territory. He was young, and didn’t have the wealth of experience that Cal-com had in his 3,832 years of military deployment, but he was smart and innovative and largely responsible for the creation and design of the Human’s navy which, while inferior to the Voku, had an interesting makeup, especially their use of pilot-less drone warships.
Cal-com knew that there was a serious risk of jamming that the Voku would never tolerate, but against the Skarrons and the Cajdital he didn’t think it would be a problem, given the type of comm system that Paul had hinted they were using. Obviously he wasn’t going to give the details of it to the Voku or anyone else, nor should he, given how much the Humans and their Star Force relied upon it. Also, the inclusion of other races into wings of their military was something Cal-com was studying with interest. Typically multi-racial organizations were doomed to self-destruct, but what Paul and his kin had set up seemed to be functional…all the while maintaining an all-Human core, which Cal-com found to be both wise and insightful.
Still, different races gave them different combat options. He could see it in the Skarrons and how they used a smaller race to supplement their own movement and size weaknesses. The Voku were strong in all areas and had never bothered to experiment with bringing in others for a variety of reasons, so Cal-com was very interested in seeing how it played out for the Humans over the long term.
And he intended to give them the time necessary to find out. Achkor was the Skarron’s main supply base to their invasion of the ADZ and as of now it was no longer operational…not to mention the Voku had just destroyed many of the ships slated to reinforce their assault fleets. Give Paul that bit of an assist and Cal-com was confident that he could finish up the rest of them.
That said, it meant that Cal-com had just put the target squarely on his newly captive system…which is exactly the way he preferred it. It was the place of the strong to be in the center of the storm in order to shield the weak, and in this war the Voku were the strong…though personally he didn’t consider the Humans to be weak, just young and needing some time to catch up. The Elders obviously saw merit in them, and even without that incredibly important edict Cal-com would have eventually come to the same conclusion on his own after seeing them fight in their curiously reserved, yet aggressive style of warfare.
8
September 1, 2549
Achkor System
Zenniza
Cal-com set foot on the surface of Zenniza for the first time, landing in their primary LZ that was now safe from enemy interference. Their overland push had consumed nearly half the planet with the Skarrons unable to hold them back. The lack of mobility of their walkers made for easy targets when the Voku could drop more from orbit on a whim, and whenever the enemy’s transports tried to pick up and relocate theirs the Voku fighters would harass them to the point that it was safer to leave the walkers on the ground where their anti-air weaponry could be effective in keeping the fighters back.
They still managed some movement, but mostly it was the Voku on the offensive, hunting down isolated walker groups and hitting cities when they later bunched them up to avoid such
poaching. Slowly and efficiently the Voku took out more and more of the surface missile launchers, often attacking a city to destroy those very batteries then pulling back and leaving its conquest for later. Right now the key to the invasion was to get their navy into bombardment position. Once that happened, it was practically game over.
So far as he knew, no enemy ships had managed to leave the system. Many had come in to the star and been subsequently destroyed, but the blockade and the resulting surveillance provided by it had shown no further attempts to get out, meaning that with any luck the rest of the Skarron Empire still didn’t know that the Voku were here. And if they didn’t know they couldn’t send the forces necessary to reclaim it.
Cal-com expected more warships to arrive enroute to battling the Humans, so he knew there would be naval fights to come and there had already been 5 separate battles when small warship groups had arrived. He’d lost a few ships in those ambushes but the Skarrons had been totally wiped out jumping into a system they thought was secure. With his fleet deployed properly in orbit and the land fronts far from the LZ, it was time for the Voku commander to come down and officially lay claim to the planet in a ceremony he’d conducted numerous times before.
Within the conglomerates were also cargo ships carrying all kinds of equipment, some of which had now landed on the planet to deliver specific pieces necessary for a long term occupation. It was those pieces that required activation though they weren’t at the LZ, but rather at a specific site some distance away but still close enough that there was no threat of enemy counterattacks or sabotage.
Cal-com could have flown to the site but he preferred taking a Stranom instead and there were many situated here in reserve so they could be called upon for support or replacement as necessary. The Renimar walked up to one of the egg-shaped material constructs and placed a hand on the activation panel…which quickly caused a dent to form in the material as it reconstructed itself into a small pod. Cal-com stepped inside and turned around, facing out, and pressed another panel that sealed him inside with a flow of moving parts covering him.
From the exterior the giant egg began to transform into a tall bipedal mech with a head that, unlike the Voku’s pointy craniums, was flared out more like a Jackal from ancient Egypt and with a stocky body to match. The exterior armor plating was the last to form, with the tiny segments migrating to the exterior and locking into place forming a smooth, lineless mechanical construct that moved as if it was made of muscle as opposed to the obvious joints in the Human mechs.
Cal-com stood in his pod, with several restriction bands coming out to encircle his body. One wrapped around his head, giving him direct neural access to the Stranom that allowed him to operate it completely by thought. His eye piece registered the mech’s external sensors and fed the information directly into his visual processing matrix while machinery monitored his neural output, linking him to the machine in such a way that he saw, felt, and fought as the giant device…including light pain stimuli when it was damaged so he could instantly be aware of what was happening to it without looking on a display screen.
That was necessary to fight at speed, and as Cal-com brought the mech online he began accelerating up into a run that he held across the landscape with three other Stranoms encircling him in escort. His people knew better than to ever let him go off alone, even in secured territory, and the constant bodyguards were something that he’d simply adjusted to. He no longer even had to give them orders, they simply went wherever he went when outside a warship. Renimars were rare in the Voku and had to be protected, for losing even one of them would seriously hurt their Empire’s military efficiency.
Cal-com was one of only 29 at present, though that number wasn’t set. The most there had ever been simultaneously in their history was 34, with 7 having since been killed in a variety of ways, two of which had been accidents. Another had chosen to retire from the military and pursue other endeavors, which made him effectively dead to them. To relinquish the responsibilities of a Renimar was equivalent to treason, but that Voku had made his choice and Cal-com chose not to comment on it. He’d been one of his mentors early on and an individual he’d patterned his early years after…but no longer.
With only 29 Renimars for the entire Empire his being sent away from it on this mission was highly irregular. There were always wars being fought, on some level, with the Skarrons being a newer threat arising, so there was always work to do, not to mention dealing with internal matters and advancing their military through training, recruitment, and experimentation.
But the Elders had deemed this a priority so Cal-com had been sent. Keeping him alive was of such importance to the Voku that the light escort was to be expected, though both he and his bodyguards knew he could handle himself in the Stranom…it was the unexpected ambushes they wanted to guard him against, and for those there was no preparation available.
Today that wasn’t an issue for he made his cross country trek at decent speed and without enemy contact, even eventually arriving at the secondary LZ where the precious cargo had already been unpacked and spread out into the necessary arrangement. Being linked in to the Stranom, Cal-com decided to remain inside and let his biotelemetry be transmitted through it rather than going down on foot and doing it the normal way. This was still a battlefield, after all, plus it looked much more imposing to perform the activation ceremony from a mech.
Cal-com walked the mech up to one of the pieces that stood more than twice the Stranom’s height and reached out his giant mechanical hand towards it, placing it palm flat against the device. He opened a comm channel and recited several lines from a story, which also doubled as activation code in addition to his genetic identification. The ‘seed’ piece he was activating could only be done so by a Renimar or, in some limited cases, a Gahmorn, which was the equivalent of a fleet Admiral.
Once Cal-com finished speaking and his genetic ID was transmitted through the physical contact between him and the mech, then the mech and the device, it began to transform. As it did so he walked the Stranom over to the next piece and did the same palm press, but with different activation lines as he continued to recite the story of creation, detailing in metaphor what they were about to do to the planet they were still in the process of invading.
Cal-com went around did the same on all six pieces, then backed away as the final transformation began and the pylons the seed pieces had extruded sought each other out and locked all the segments together, forming one giant mining machine that continued to transform even as it began digging down into the ground beneath it in search of the raw materials that would fuel its growth.
Not everything could be got from one location, however, but there was a tiered hierarchy of seed planting. This location held all of the necessary components for tier one equipment that the giant machine would construct. Those machines would then be taken to other sites to harvest additional resources that would then be brought back to the seed. Those materials would then begin to be incorporated with the others and the creation of tier two machines would begin.
Likewise those would be sent out to find and harvest even more varied compounds, eventually escalating to the point where the seed would have all the necessary requirements for fueling its own growth, becoming bigger and bigger until it was essentially its own city. From there more preplanned stages would occur, with the Hatomek eventually sprouting more secondary seeds of its own that would be taken to distant regions of the planet or nearby planets to begin their growth. The secondary seeds wouldn’t require a Renimar for activation, only the primary, with the lesser ones being activated by high ranked, yet lower personnel in the command structure.
Cal-com had only been given a fixed number of ships and supplies, but in order to buy the Humans the time they needed he was going to have to hold the Achkor System and draw the Skarrons attention away from his allies for an extended period of time. In order to do that he needed to not just bust up Zenniza’s Skarron fleets and infrastructure but actually take
possession of it and establish a full Voku presence.
Once he did that and could begin building more ships, mechs, aircraft, etc he could requisition personnel to man them from the Empire, drawing on reserve units and such. It would take time for them to get here, but likewise it would take time for the Skarrons to bring in their reinforcements as well, meaning he had a time game to be played on the supply front and this seed would allow him to build faster than the Skarrons could ever hope to do so.
Cal-com stayed and watched the seed continue to change shape until it finally settled on its necessary form and began pouring dirt and rock out of exterior ports into large piles around it that would eventually form a crater-like ring of material that would double as a defensive barrier. Already there were numerous mechs circling the site with defense turrets and shield generators in place on a wide perimeter to ensure that nothing interfered with the seed’s growth, but having a mass of material to block incoming weaponsfire was always a help.
That wasn’t the purpose of it though, for the seed was having to dig large shafts down into the planet’s crush to get at the resources it needed and that material had to go somewhere. Internal sifting machines sorted through what was being dug out, maintaining the valuable components and discarding the rest, all with a very small onboard control staff that wasn’t technically necessary. The seed could be operated by remote, but Cal-com always preferred to have people inside so they could troubleshoot as necessary.
Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) Page 7