Star Force: Upgrades (SF41)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  1

  February 22, 2465

  Krichjan System (Protovic territory)

  Star Force Warship Tassadar (Mid-jump)

  Kip stood in front of his command chair watching the system holo as the Tassadar moved from its null orbit towards the 8th planet’s innermost moon. The jump itself was a tricky one, with the warship having to yank hard on the system’s gravity wells to get suitable momentum, given that it wasn’t camped out around any of them. Still, an insystem jump was far slower than an interstellar one, but it was something that the drone warships would have trouble making without the Tassadar giving them a lift.

  Kip had ordered a slower than normal jump anyway, coordinating with the other 6 warships enroute across the system via timestamp orders that would take away the time lag. With their shipboard clocks synchronized, they could lay out a battle plan to the second even if their active communications didn’t cycle that fast across the billions of kilometers of distance that made up the Krichjan System.

  Kip had wanted the slower transit so that the Tassadar would have time to unload a significant portion of its drone warships enroute, whose own gravity drives would then brake against the target gravity wells. Such braking was easy…it was the acceleration from beforehand that was not, thus the need to disperse them in transit. The other warships were not doing the same, leaving the potential catch to the Tassadar alone. Should one or all of the five Skarron ships get away, the others could chase them without having to gather up their drone fleets, as the Tassadar would need to do, putting the emphasis of this intercept squarely on the trailblazer’s flagship.

  The larger drone warships Kip kept inside the jumpship’s hull, it was the smaller ones, the cutters, corvettes, and frigates that he dispersed, for they were the fastest and best suited to tracking the Skarrons if they did jump out, giving the rest of the fleet a beacon to follow. The trouble was, those ‘trackers’ would be on automatic pilot once they made the jump…at least until one of the control ships arrived within comm range.

  But that wasn’t the only reason Kip was deploying them. One trick Star Force had learned about keeping an enemy ship in place was to block its jumpline with another. That was hard to do if the enemy had differential gravity drives and nearby moons to push off of, which they did in this case, but the closer he could position a blocking ship the greater the angle off the primary jumpline would be required for a clean escape.

  And if the enemy wanted to ram his blockers…well, they were the smallest of his ships anyway, and he’d be willing to make the tradeoff.

  Based off the intel from the warship that had detected the 5 Skarron vessels, which was still staying away so as not to spook them until the others arrived, Kip’s people had been able to match up the approximate classes with the information they’d brought with them, coupled with the data the Protovic had provided. There appeared to be two cruisers and three destroyers…with neither of the juggernauts being present. Why the Skarrons had split their fleet Kip didn’t know, but by isolating them it was going to be easier to destroy them…if they could contain them in their present positions.

  The Tassadar was working off their last known location, having plotted a jumpline to intercept where they were expected to be given their orbital revolution…with a decent safety margin. Once the jump was ended they’d have to assess the situation and make adjustments, all the while hoping the Skarrons were a bit slow and off their guard, otherwise it would be almost impossible to keep them from jumping out, for all a prepped starship had to do was press a button and a moment later they were gone.

  If the Skarrons didn’t know they were here, and weren’t overly concerned about the Protovic fleet coming after them, then they might be in ‘sleep mode’ and just holding orbit while waiting for further orders. Kip didn’t think they’d get that lucky, which meant they were going to have to disable them quickly once they arrived if they were given a window to do so.

  Kip had the Tassadar slow down slightly after the 18 drone warships were away, allowing them to get to their braking points first. He needed them to get to blocking positions as soon as possible and the Tassadar’s mass was going to show up on the enemy’s sensors sooner than a corvette, so letting them get a head start should shave a smidge of time off the intercept.

  As for the moment when the Star Force ships came out of their braking maneuver and stood face to face with the Skarrons…well, there weren’t many options available. Typically they would open fire and start slugging it out, or races with starfighters would deploy them into blocking positions. Star Force had attack drones for that, but they rarely used them anymore. They were so small opposing ships could just run over them, and their weaponry was equally insignificant against capital ships, leaving their usefulness in much more small scale engagements.

  No, the only way to engage another fleet was if that fleet wanted to engage…or so conventional wisdom held within the Alliance. The trailblazers wouldn’t hold for that, especially since they and some of their Captains had successful captures/kills in the past, lucky as they were, but moreover because they had access to the V’kit’no’sat database…and they definitely knew a thing or two about naval engagements.

  Most of their techniques involved technology that Star Force couldn’t yet build, but centered around creating a localized inertial dampening field over the target ship’s gravity drives, thus rendering them inert. An IDF nulled out acceleration factors by encasing all matter within it in a sort of latticework of an energy field that spread out external forces across each molecule evenly, such as gravity did during a free fall…it felt like there was no effect, but in truth gravity was still pulling, just without any resistance in one part of your body or another, or in this case, a ship’s hull.

  Objects could still move around inside the field, or even pass through it unaffected, like a dropship entering or leaving a jumpship. The gravity drives had to be outside the IDF and push against the emitters…which then spread the effect out over the interior, which acted as a single mass. A gravity drive couldn’t function inside an IDF, given that gravitational effects didn’t penetrate the boundaries of the field. Because the entire IDF acted as a single mass, gravity pulled on it as one. The field was the mass, not the contents, meaning the external gravity didn’t reach the interior. With a gravity drive set inside an IDF, it would have nothing to push or pull against.

  It was in this way that high gravity colonies nulled out the local gees with IDF, then created normal gravity through gravity plating inside the field. So if the V’kit’no’sat wanted to pin a starship in place, they just blanketed the target ship with an IDF and poof…their gravity drives were suddenly useless.

  Trouble was, Star Force couldn’t produce an IDF without an emitter. Paul, Liam, and Roger had worked up a variety of ways to put one on an enemy’s hull, but if their shields were up there was little they could do except park it nearby outside…which the enemy could then shoot down with ease.

  So they’d done the next best thing and modified some of the smaller drone warships with a super large IDF emitter, meaning that if a cutter could get close enough to the enemy ship it could ‘grapple’ the target with the field, allowing it to only maneuver on convention thrust…assuming the cutter didn’t get blown away in the process. Four cutters and two corvettes were so modified within the Tassadar’s onboard fleet and had been dispatched with the other blockers, but they wouldn’t be any use against the Skarron cruisers.

  The term ‘cruiser’ or ‘cutter’ or ‘corvette’ weren’t terms with specific meanings, they were a way of categorizing ships, naval or aquatic, and really just a rule of thumb measurement. Star Force cruisers, matched up against the Skarron version, were only half as massive, making
them similar in tonnage to Star Force battleships. The difference was in how they were used, and in general all Skarron starships were larger than their Star Force counterparts.

  But larger didn’t necessarily mean stronger, thus Star Force had dubbed the Skarron fleet ships as ‘cruisers’ or ‘destroyers’ based on how they measured up. The smallest warship they had was dubbed a ‘destroyer,’ for they didn’t use the smaller classes, much like the Hycre, whose ships were considerably smaller, much more in line with Star Force classes.

  Due to the Skarron cruisers’ size, the IDF fields on the Interdictor-class drone warships couldn’t lock down all the gravity drives, for like the lizards, they had multiple drives stretched along the length of their hulls, as opposed to Star Force designs that had them all in the rear. If the Star Force ships got close enough, one of them might be able to snag a destroyer, but it would more likely require two working together, for the Skarrons’ hulls were shaped like artistic, curved blades, with spirals coming out on many sides, each of which held a gravity drive, making it difficult to cover all of them with a single field.

  But while Kip had deployed the interdictors, they weren’t his primary means of disabling the enemy warships. For that, he was going to rely on one of Roger’s contributions.

  The system hologram suddenly zoomed in to the planet and the moons, with a countdown clock above indicating that the number of seconds remaining until arrival was at 21. A dot on the emblazoned jumpline indicated the Tassadar’s calculated position, with a cluster of dots appearing at the end where the ship’s telaris sensors were just beginning to pick up the Skarron ships.

  “Captain. Target the nearest and clearest ship you get with the bloon launcher and don’t wait for my order to fire. Hit them quick. I want at least one kill out of this engagement.”

  “Copy that,” the Captain said, with Kip leaving the details to him and the crew, who knew well what they were doing. The trailblazer remained standing in front of the hologram as the tiny dots just ahead of the Tassadar began their braking maneuvers, followed by the big ship a split second later.

  As the relative speeds between them and their targets resolved back to manageable numbers, additional sensor data began pouring in and updating the hologram, showing the five enemy ships in greater detail as another Star Force warship jumped in from one of the moons, coming in at a different angle. Soon the others followed, but the Tassadar got off its first shot before the last of them arrived.

  Mounted along the bow of the Warship-class jumpship, the ‘bloon launcher’ was a unique weapon created specifically for the warships, and needed their size to house the massive thing. Inside were IDF emitters that were saturating an energy matrix equivalent to goo that would be used to carry the field to the target. The V’kit’no’sat had many types of energy matrixes that held other energies contained, for the more damaging ones, like the mauler, repelled from themselves, meaning they had very short firing range before the energy mass disintegrated.

  Star Force had recently been able to reverse engineer the most basic of the coagulant matrixes, and thanks to Roger’s genius had used it like they’d used paint to hold stun energy together until it could reach its target. The bloon launcher, which was a shortened version of ‘balloon,’ essentially threw water balloons at the target, carrying with them various forms of energy, similar to the perimeter defense weapon on the V’kit’no’sat pyramid, though much less potent.

  The bloon launcher had various types of ammunition, but for interdiction duties the Star Force techs had worked out a way to saturate the pseudo-goo with IDF. It wouldn’t persist forever, lasting maybe 30 seconds after impact, but it gave the Tassadar and the other newly built warships the ability to temporarily disable the enemy’s gravity drives if they ‘painted’ the hull with enough bloon hits.

  And the warship certainly wasn’t holding back. Already having formed and charged several coagulant bloons, it was chucking them out the forward launcher at a rate of 1 every 3 seconds and aiming at the cruiser on top of the Skarron formation as the Star Force ship continued to drift closer off its residual momentum coming out of the jump.

  Soon the other seven warships were firing off bloons as well, making sure not to hit the Tassadar’s drone warships as they quickly got into blocking positions around the Skarrons, who didn’t so much as move until after they were surrounded, at which point they began repositioning and firing off showers of white plasma streaks from multiple cannons, similar to the weapon loadouts of their walkers.

  Each cannon was low yield, but combined they amounted to a considerable offense. The small Star Force ships held their ground, covering the Skarrons with their IDF as much as possible as their own shields got hammered by the plasma…then one of the other cutters that was punching a small hole through one of the Skarron destroyers’ shields with its mauler got pelted with what looked like a rapid-fire splinter gun.

  The first three deflected off the cutter’s shields, but the fourth cored it, with the back tip just showing at the entry point, for the rest of it had buried itself inside the well-armored hull.

  “Rail gun,” Kip whispered to himself as he saw all but one plasma cannon on the cutter go dark. Two hits later and it went out as well, with the destroyer turning its attention to another of the ships as the Skarrons were quickly chewing apart his blockers, all the while getting plastered with bloons that were, ironically, sticking to the enemy’s shields where they couldn’t get to the hull.

  That was another little piece of matrix technology Star Force had stolen from the V’kit’no’sat. Kip knew how they could defend against it…expand their shield matrix out then deactivate it altogether. The momentum would push the IDF goo away from the ship and they could reestablish shields again at a closer proximity…the question was, could the Skarrons do that with their shield matrix, and if they could, would they think of it in time?

  The Tassadar continued to pound the cruiser with bloons, careful to continually adjust its heading to keep the cannon in line with the enemy, for the massive jumpship didn’t turn very fast and it had only the one cannon mount, which, like a rail gun, didn’t have much aiming ability off the ship’s axis. With the other jumpships doing the same, four of the Skarron warships were pinned in place, but one of the destroyers was able to destroy the interdictor corvette holding it and moved out to bully aside the frigate blocking the obvious jumpline away from the moon.

  The much larger destroyer pounded the frigate with plasma and rail gun splinters, but the frigate held position and its shield strength up until the two ships collided when the Skarrons made a minuscule jump…just enough to punch the frigate aside, crushing the forward/port corner in and ripping apart one of the ‘blades’ on the Skarrons’ hull where the two met. After the impact pushed the Star Force ship aside the destroyer took a bloon hit, but its IDF didn’t cover all the gravity drives and the ship was able to limp away in a surge of momentum, taking it out of the engagement zone.

  Kip tagged one of the other warships and ordered it to pursue, with the big ship hesitating as it worked out the jump calculations and reoriented itself, then it also disappeared in a slow surge, matching and slightly exceeding the Skarrons’ velocity as it tailed it within sensor range to wherever it was headed. The other six jumpships continued to pound the Skarrons with IDF as they and the Tassadar began launching their drone warships.

  “Open a comm channel and tie in the translator,” Kip ordered. A moment later he got a hand signal from one of the crew, and Kip telekinetically tagged the ‘on’ button on his control chair behind him.

  “Skarrons, this is the Star Force commander. You’re a few minutes away from being destroyed. I’m offering you a simple choice. Surrender and live, or ignore this communication and die. Respond if you want to live, and do so quickly.”

  Kip hit the mute button with a thought, then raised an eyebrow at Captain Shannist. “Odds?”

  The blue-haired man shook his head. “Not enough data to speculate, but my gut says no
.”

  “Concentrate fleet fire on one of the destroyers, continue to suppress all four with bloons. Maybe if one goes down the others will get wise.”

  “And if they do surrender, what do we do with them?”

  Kip sighed. “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.”

  A few moments later the first of the heavy cruisers shot out a cleansing beam at range and punched straight through the Skarrons’ shields…or so it looked, but on the computer analysis it showed that the weapon had indeed been blunted for 1.2 seconds before penetration. Still, it cut straight through a thin portion of the hull, gouging out a trench some 20 meters long that, if you looked close, you could see stars through. Secondary explosions cut that view out, as internal atmosphere and a host of liquid and solid debris filled the gap and spewed out along the breach point on both sides.

  The significance of the Skarron shields not being instantaneously penetrated by the cleansing beam meant that they were hybrid shields…part physical, part energy. Lizard shields were totally physical shields, blocking plasma due to its mass. The cleansing beam was a pure energy weapon, something that physical shields couldn’t block, meaning that the Skarrons had a more complicated matrix…or two matrixes in play.

  Kip glanced at the updating computer analysis, which indicated one shield barrier only, after plasma and mauler blasts began to rain down as the drone warships closed to medium and closer ranges. The Skarron destroyer fought back, with fire support from the others that weren’t too far away, but within a minute it was KIA from the multiple cleansing beams, leaving the other weapons to chew up the carcass.

  Kip waited for a return communication, but none came, so he let the carnage continue, one ship at a time, until the last cruiser was overwhelmed and destroyed…which told him that the Protovic commander had been right. The Skarrons were hungry for conquest, and it didn’t look like losing was in their playbook.