Once the seed’s final transformation took place that crew boarded and began monitoring the automated process, sending Cal-com a message indicating the initial resource collection rates with a level 3 efficiency rating out of a possible 5. That indicated that this wasn’t the most rich site in natural resources but it was more than adequate for their needs. It also gave Cal-com a generic time estimate to the next phase of the operation.
Satisfied that all was getting underway properly Cal-com signaled his escorts to merge with his Stranom and the three other mechs walked over to his and melted into it. Internally the four pilots’ pods came together and the walls separating them disappeared. Each was still latched into place but the air was open between them allowing them to speak to each other without the use of comms, though there was no chatter here.
Cal-com took priority command of the now larger mech while the other three went into support/observation mode. During combat they would be useful, but right now they were simply extraneous passengers.
Cal-com waited for the much larger version to finish transformation then he looked out through the Stranom’s sensor ‘eyes’ from a much higher vantage point on the seed than he had had before, nearly seeing over the top of it as he raised the mechs arms up over his head in a clenched fist pose and opened the comm and external speakers on the mech and finished the ceremony with the last bit of the story, told in short segments of words with a rhythm intoning the importance of the moment.
When he finished a log amendment was made, indicating that this planet was now part of the Voku Empire, despite the fact that the enemy still controlled most of it, with nearly all the Skarron cities needing to be dealt with. Clipping their orbital weaponry was one thing, but there were troops and workers in them that could still fight and they would have to be dealt with when the time came.
Those cities closest to the seed and the primary LZ had been hit already, with the Skarrons being driven out and allowed to evacuate…or run, to be exact. Some had stayed and fought to the death, while others, especially the Aronsic, and eventually abandoned their posts and fled, many running outside the city with nowhere to go.
Cal-com hadn’t ordered hunting teams to go after them, preferring simply to take the city and eliminate the threat of it while they established their perimeter and their assault teams pushed on to more distant ones, clipping their defenses and leaving the house cleaning for other units to accomplish. That house cleaning was a matter that Cal-com had to deal with next, for they weren’t simply going to slaughter the enemy. Such things were a matter of necessity when your back was to the wall, but here, with the Voku predictably gaining dominance, offering a surrender was protocol and some of the fleeing troops had already submitted when a comm call over their own equipment had made the offer.
For them it was either try and make the long hike over land to the nearest Skarron city, for the Voku air cover wasn’t letting any transports through to pick them up…or face starvation. Many thousands of Aronsic had already been taken captive, with a much larger number to come, Cal-com knew. Accommodations for them had to be made, which the seed would eventually supply. In the meantime temporary prisons had to be fashioned using prefab constructs brought with them, but Cal-com wanted to use one of the captured and not completely destroyed cities for that purpose…which was his next destination.
His oversized Stranom split back up into four standard ones and they ran across the landscape back to the LZ where he boarded a transport while still in the mech and was flown out to the city that he had chosen for the prisoners. He roamed it in what felt like a giant suit of armor, inspecting the construction and adding a few orders here and there based on what he found intact and destroyed, planning out how his prison was to be built and seeing that the first captives were properly secured and fed, using first their own foodstuffs being recovered from the city. Once fully grown into a Hatomek the seed would provide all the Voku-made foodstuffs the prisoners and the assault force would require.
Cal-com stayed there for many hours, then eventually transferred back up to orbit and his command ship, resuming the traditional position of a Renimar…at least until a proper command center was built on planet, but that would be in the distant future, for it was far down the priority list when raw infrastructure was required.
9
February 11, 2550
Achkor System
Zenniza
Cal-com stood in the oracle onboard his command ship, giving the final orders to bring his fleet down into the low end of orbit and to set up for orbital bombardment. His ground troops had succeeded in destroying most of the Skarrons’ anti-orbital missile platforms, though some still remained on the walkers they had stationed in or near their cities. Strike teams had gone into those cities and hit the immobile launchers, knocking them out while leaving the rest of the infrastructure and troops alone. It had taken a long time to pluck the planet of its defense against orbital bombardment, but now was the time to put an end to this assault…one way or another.
Cal-com had already sent a message to the Skarrons, telling them which city they were going to obliterate and the timetable on which they were going to do it, giving them a chance to either surrender or flee…and to date none of the surrender options he’d given to intact cities had been taken. It seemed the Skarrons needed to be bloodied before they would consider that alternative and Cal-com sympathized, for surrender wasn’t in his own vocabulary. That said, what the Skarrons were doing was wrong and they should expect to have to pay a penance for their misdeeds, so when he was giving them the option of living it was something they should take, especially with the recent history between the two races.
But no, the Skarrons in the target city weren’t surrendering nor were they fleeing. Cal-com resigned himself to having to set a bloody example, having already given them forewarning. If they chose to stay and die then that was on them. The bounds of honor had been satisfied, though he didn’t like their stupidity. They had nothing to defend themselves with now, even though a handful of missiles did come up toward his ships as they got into bombardment position just on the border of the upper atmosphere, braking against the orbital drift and hovering in place.
Those missiles were shot down easily, with only an occasional one getting through to knock on their shields. The swarms that made for such an effective defense were no longer here, and as the timer eclipsed the window of evacuation he’d given the Skarrons he issued the order to begin bombardment.
Javven opened up with larger energy packets meant to sustain through the atmospheric friction, landing tiny hits by the hundreds of thousands in a blue/white sparkling rain that ate away at the buildings as if it were acid. Every hit destroyed a bit of the structures and those individuals standing outside. After a few moments a Skarron shield went up covering the city, drawing a bit of a surprise from Cal-com. His reports had indicated that the strike teams had taken it down along with the missile launchers, but apparently the Skarrons had managed to do some repair work…yet it was only showing 36% strength.
Even if it had been at 100% it wouldn’t matter more than a delay. The Javven rain continued to fall and stress the shield, diminishing its strength until the matrix finally broke and the deadly fireworks finally returned to hitting the city structures. They didn’t destroy them quickly, but then again they didn’t need to. This wasn’t a lightning strike with them needing to get in and out before reinforcements arrive. The Skarrons had no one in the system to come to their aid, so Cal-com waited patiently through the multi-hour bombardment without so much as a peep of reply from the Skarrons.
When it was finally finished the Renimar deployed nearby ground troops to the location to clean up what remained in the rubble fields. He needed to make sure the site was secure and couldn’t be used by the enemy for any future operations. That meant every piece of every structure had to be visibly inspected, including subsurface chambers. From orbit he could see that there were no intact buildings remaining, but there may very well ha
ve been extensive bunkers below that the enemy could hide out in.
Those would have to be probed and eliminated, then the recovery crews would begin moving in and taking bits and pieces of the rubble away to a nearby machine that was already beginning to travel their way. It was a recycling mining station that would both clear away what was left of the Skarron city as well as use those resources within the rubble for the Voku, sifting, sorting, and condensing them down into bricks of pure materials that would then be shipped off to the Hatomek.
Any surviving Skarrons recovered would be taken away to the prison facilities and kept there rather than simply being annihilated. Already Cal-com was collecting quite a few from battling units that got caught out in the open without anywhere to flee and he guessed that number would increase drastically once the destruction of this city was seen by the others across the planet. With the bombardment complete he issued an ultimatum to the next three, each with individual timetables, and began repositioning his fleet towards the location of the next one on his hit list.
It was two weeks later when the first large Skarron fleet finally arrived in the system, though Cal-com didn’t think they were here to fight him…but rather to transfer out to fight the Humans and their allies. When their long convoy first began to arrive the warships were jumped immediately, but their numbers pooled to the point where Cal-com’s ambushing fleet needed assistance with him bringing portions of the main fleet out from the planet to reinforce them, his ship included because he didn’t want to have to direct the fighting through signal lag.
Upon making a microjump back to the star his partially reformed conglomerate split up and moved off to engage the Skarron warships that were still continuing to arrive. Many of them were already destroyed with a massive debris field forming, but the others were arriving outside of it and getting enough forewarning that they began deploying into attack groups to counter the Voku.
Cal-com had sufficient forces to deal with them, but what he couldn’t do was contain them all. They were certainly up for a fight, but he regrettably noticed several make jumps back out, no doubt carrying word of the Voku presence in the system that so far he’d managed to keep a lid on.
With no way of stopping them he focused on destroying those that were here now and worked through most of them before the last of their convoy even arrived. The remainders went down easily enough given the mass of Voku ships waiting for them, then it was back to recovery operations…first for his own ships that had been damaged/destroyed, then bringing out ships to tear apart the Skarron wreckage and begin recycling it. Every bit of refined material that they could collect without having to mine was invaluable, plus they needed to clear the space around the star for navigational purposes.
Anything left behind deemed not of value would pushed into a descending trajectory into the star to be rid of it, but there was very little material that the Voku did not use, with the pushing being relegated to gas and dust fields that could interfere with navigation at high speeds. Those clouds were contained within an enlarged IDF field and dragged onto a collision course with the star before being released to drift on their new trajectory. The process was tedious, but necessary to maintain movement options.
In the past Cal-com had been involved in a number of campaigns where he deliberately created debris fields around a star in specific locations to give his fleet some ‘terrain’ to operate within, as well as to block certain jumplines. While it was true that a ship could jump from any point on the line, meaning they didn’t have to be in close to the star, the further away you were the weaker the gravity got and the less push you would get per jump. That forced his enemies to travel at slower speeds coming in and out of the system, and that was one of many different advantages that he’d used to win campaigns in the past…but for now he wanted this star clear, so his ships diligently went about removing the debris field and chasing down the bits of it that had drifted out to considerable distance.
With them beginning their work and an adequate ambush fleet in place to catch any more ships arriving in the system, Cal-com took the rest of the ships back to the planet and continued with the orbital bombardments of the now evacuated cities. The Skarrons didn’t want to surrender but had gotten the clear message that they were going to die if they stayed so prior to each attack there were long overland convoys of evacuees pouring out and traveling at high speed to the nearest city or outpost, or in some cases just into the countryside to avoid the deadly rain that was about to fall.
Those that headed towards other cities Cal-com ordered to be left alone. Those that headed out to nowhere he had engaged and a surrender forced upon them whether they agreed or not. Some died but many were taken prisoner and added to his haul of captives, for which he had to continually expand the prison facilities, but with the Hatomek up and running that was never an issue…only what else he could or couldn’t build due to the delay of resources.
It took another 5 months to completely secure the planet, with the last city choosing to fully surrender prior to the orbital bombardment. Cal-com went down to the surface in a Stranom to personally oversee the surrender and make sure the enemy didn’t have any tricks up their sleeve…but the truth was they were whipped and didn’t care to die. A sensible mindset to have given their circumstances, though they did find many bodies within the city of those who chose death over surrender.
Those were all Skarron bodies, not Aronsic, and Cal-com looked at them with disgust. Death was failure, not honor. If the enemy killed you then at least you had the dignity of going out fighting, but this…this was a betrayal of all that the Voku stood for and it disgusted him.
He took those with more sense and had them moved to the prison facilities, leaving the city intact for his own people to begin working on. They would clear out all the trash first then begin disassembling the components and recycling them, eventually tearing down everything and leaving nothing but a large hole in the ground where the subsurface structures were.
The same was being done across the planet, with the Voku removing everything Skarron that they weren’t currently using. The prison facilities would be the last to go, but eventually even those would be replaced with Voku construction and every trace of Zenniza having been a Skarron world would be eradicated. The planet and system were now part of the Voku Empire and they would look as such, with every building and structure that Cal-com created strengthening their foothold here, including some very large defensive weapon platforms beginning to be constructed on the surface that would be capable of reaching up into orbit.
Time…time was the key factor here. Given enough and Cal-com could lock down the system permanently, but he knew he wasn’t going to have decades to work with. The Skarrons were being alerted to their presence even now and the Renimar had no way of knowing how far back into their territory that message would have to travel until it got to a fleet nexus that could divert the necessary response ships their way.
He had his ships on a keen lookout for any scouts to enter the system, but to date none had arrived. Many more Skarron ships had, coming in on previous orders without realizing the change of hands, but in the past month they had had none arrive…telling Cal-com that word had at least gotten to the nearest links in the chain and those convoys stopped before disappearing into the maw that Achkor had become.
Knowing that the convoys could be redeployed around the system to still get to the front, Cal-com sent out scout ships of his own to the neighboring systems to wait and watch, not to jump them but to detect them when/if they came through. Once he had that information he could start to play blocker and even give the Humans a heads up to what was coming. He’d had some contact with them recently, with them informing him that they were extending a link of their interstellar communications system out to the system so they could stay in more reliable communication, both ways. When that happened they could coordinate somewhat effectively, but he already knew that the pressure on their worlds under blockade was weakening. If Cal-com could m
aintain the break in reinforcements another year or so he guessed the weakening would snowball and the Humans would break through.
But he couldn’t make that assumption, given that now the Skarrons knew of their problem and would seek to work around it. Cal-com had to find their new supply lines and shut them down, and in order to do that he had to put ships out into dozens of systems and physically look, augmented by some detection stations he was having constructed. Little more than permanent sensor probes, they would be able to monitor stellar traffic within line of sight, but his available resources were still low and most were going towards projects on planet, leaving him having to send out a small chunk of his fleet to manually monitor the possible routes.
It was another 3 months before he got his first hit. A ship returned to Achkor with a report of a Skarron supply convoy with warship escort passing through a system some 24 lightyears away from Achkor. Cal-com immediately dispatched an assault force to lay in ambush for the next one to come through, but he wasn’t going with it. Achkor was going to be his base of operations with him needing to remain here, meaning he was going to have to direct regional actions through intermediaries. He trusted his senior commanders with naval intercepts, but always liked to do everything himself when possible.
Waiting for word was always troublesome, but eventually another two reports of supply routes from other scout ships had him breaking up his fleet further to send assault groups out into ambush position. None of the enemy came to Achkor, but they were out there, he knew, and would come eventually. Having assault groups missing when that occurred worried him, but he had to keep the pressure off the Humans and that meant he couldn’t turtle up here and hold out. He had to extend his reach and become a major blocker to the Skarrons and hope the Humans could take care of things behind that naval umbrella.
Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) Page 8