Star Force: Aquatics (SF31)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  1

  July 2, 2429

  Retari System

  Atlantica

  “Captain, we’re receiving a distress call from Manaan.”

  Voru turned from the aft observation display screen ‘window’ and walked across the small bridge, abandoning his ocean view. “That cruiser we picked up coming down from orbit?”

  “No, sir,” the comm officer answered. “There’s a major assault underway, with additional aerial forces coming in from the east.”

  “Show me,” Voru said, glancing at another bridge officer.

  A hologram of the planet popped up just in front of his empty Captain’s chair, then it zoomed in to cover a third of the planet’s surface with icons marking all Star Force ships and installations on the waterworld. The city of Manaan was a few thousand kilometers to their northeast, and Voru could see the additional lizard contacts moving in that direction.

  “Sir, the Dutchman says they’re moving to relieve the city and are asking our intentions.”

  “Tell Captain Isso we’ll be there as soon as we can,” Voru said, gripping the back of his chair as he studied the hologram. “Mr. Cadren, get us airborne…plot course for Manaan.”

  “Aye, sir,” the helmsman said, beginning to work his console.

  “Give me ship-wide.”

  The comms officer pressed a few buttons, then nodded to the Captain.

  “Attention all hands. Manaan is currently under lizard attack. We’re moving to assist, but it’ll take us some time to get there. Make ready all war assets and wait for deployment orders,” he finished with a nod to cut the intercom. His eyes moved back to the hologram, seeing the icon for the Dutchman not far from Manaan and moving out to interpose itself between the approaching contacts and the city…leaving the onsite defenders to handle the ensuing assault.

  All around the perimeter of the bridge were ‘windows’ relaying video images from the exterior of the aquatics battleship, and as Voru studied the tactical hologram he caught the image of the ocean line sinking in his peripheral vision, though the view was much better from the outside, had anyone been around to see it.

  The 1,840m long warship looked like a giant sea creature, without a single sharp edge or line to the flowing, deep blue hull shaped like a flattened whale. The center line was raised, but from there the sides went well wide of any traditional design, stretching out to a maximum width of 720m. The perimeter of the ship was a curved edge that looked like a blade, but was in fact flat rather than sharp when viewed in close. The angled hull rolled wave after wave of water off it as the blade edge of the ship came up from below the water line, showing the battleship to be much larger than she appeared from the surface.

  As the low-powered gravity drive lifted the aquatics warship out of the water the underside of the hull came into view, dripping gallons upon gallons of water back down into the ocean beneath as it cast a shadow on the resettling water, blocking the harsh yellow sun that quickly began to dry out the upper hull. The underside was the top’s mirrored twin, with a single long, shallow ridge running down the midsection with the rest of the hull angling up and out to the blade-like edge that narrowed to a rounded peak near the ship’s bow and a much more gentle, overarching curve on the aft end.

  No engine ports were visible, nor was there any other obstruction of the hull. It was one solid piece of machinery tailored to be as smooth as possible to reduce friction…both in the water and above it.

  As the battleship rose to a kilometer in height it began to slowly spin around, pointing itself on the heading for the distant city of Manaan like a compass needle turning round the center pin. When it finally settled into place the differential gravity drive within the ship excluded the mass of the planet ahead of them and pushed against the mass behind, providing limited lateral propulsion…limited at least as far as naval warships were concerned, but this ship wasn’t moving through space, it was heading through the atmosphere to another point on the globe and couldn’t attain the super-speeds only capable in vacuum, so the ‘limited’ lateral propulsion was all it needed to create a smooth acceleration curve off across the sky in ‘airship’ mode enroute to the Star Force city to counter the lizard assault just getting underway.

  “Ready?” a voice asked over the comm of Dan-1191’s skeet as it sat nose up in a series of mechanical restraints inside Manaan.

  The Archon pressed a few remaining buttons, bringing the aerial fighter’s anti-grav into standby mode.

  “Lock me in,” he ordered, bringing his opaque cockpit into full holographic mode and seeing the inside of the launch bay through the walls, ceiling, and floor around him, as well as the stubby T-shaped frontal wings on the fighter sitting directly ahead of his dual control handles. Silently the hologram began to shift as the Clan Cloud yellow skeet was hauled upwards into the base of the hangar’s ceiling and into a narrow tunnel barely wider than the fighter.

  The tunnel wasn’t empty. Ahead of him were two other skeets, viewed from the tail, while others were packing in beneath him as the vertical column was loaded up as the pilots stood by, knowing enemy air assets were approaching the city. The Dutchman had intercepted two lizard cruisers escorting transports towards the city and had engaged and destroyed one of the naval warships, but the rest of the hoard had slipped by during the fighting.

  Those were going to be the skeets’ targets…well, not the cruiser. That was out of their league, but the transports coming in to bring reinforcements to the lizard aquatics forces already engaging city defenses beneath the ocean’s surface had to be hit prior to emptying out, otherwise the already heated battle beneath the waves was going to get even more dicey.

  “Standby,” the controller said, transmitting to all of the waiting skeets as the top of the tunnel/tubes were opened to the water, which was held back by a powerful force field. Though Dan couldn’t see it, he knew what they were standing by for. Overtop that force field another one was forming…a tiny sliver running from the top of the submerged city straight up to the ocean surface and a little above it. Once connected all the way the sliver would widen, pushing the water back until the physical shield had created an open air conduit through the water for the fighters to exit the city from.

  “Launching in 3…2…1…”

  Dan gripped his skeet’s controls, knowing that he wouldn’t be the first to go, but when the tail of the skeet ahead of him in the tunnel/tube flashed up and out he knew his acceleration would be less than 2 seconds delayed.

  He didn’t have to touch anything, for the process was automated. An inertial dampening field was created around his skeet, emanating from a mechanical ring in the tunnel. That ring essentially held the fighter locked to it via energy, so when the ring was accelerated upwards the fighter came with it, but without feeling any sort of acceleration. Just before hitting the top of the tube the inertial dampening field cut out and the ring decelerated, allowing the fighter’s momentum to carry it up and out of the city, essentially coasting up the open air conduit through the ocean water surrounding it for a heartbeat before it broke into open air and Dan kicked in the craft’s anti-grav, rocketing up even higher into the atmosphere.

  He wasn’t alone. Fighters were pouring up from multiple launch tubes within the underwater city, about a third of which had Clan Cloud pilots. The rest were a mix of Star Force regulars and an assortment of other Clans, though none were officially given a chunk of Atlantica to colonize. It was a massive co-op designed for one purpose…to draw the lizards in and use the planet as a battlefield, keeping them away from Star Force’s actual colonies.

  Almost as soon as Dan leveled out his skeet he got a command signal, requesting him and the others in his squadron to form up around their leader, Eric-
2056, a slightly younger member of Clan Cloud whose aerial skills surpassed his own. Without need of comm chatter Dan and the others found Eric’s location on the very active battlemap and flew to his position while the other 6 squadrons did likewise before heading off towards their various targets.

  They didn’t have to wait long, for the lizards were on their doorstep within a minute, decelerating hard with the kilometer-long, flat lizard cruiser coming in above them and peppering the air with plasma shards to try and keep the skeets away from the transports coming in behind it low to the surface.

  More commands came through Dan’s display and he followed the symbol-driven orders, splitting their squadron apart and giving the lizards multiple groups to deal with as the cruiser launched its own Wisp-class fighters. Dan ignored them and dropped to the deck along with four others. Once there they leveled out they accelerated towards the incoming transports as plumes of steam lit up the ocean around them as the cruiser’s plasma tried to intercept them in a deadly, hot rain.

  Dan’s skeet took a hit, but the enhanced shields held up and he zipped across the ocean towards the first of some 36 transports beginning to slow to a stop and descend into the water. They had the same yellow-tan hulls as the cruiser, but the smaller objects that two of them began dropping into the water from side doors opening up were altogether different.

  Dan lit up one of the dark brown attack craft with his lachars, hitting it as it dropped down to the water, but most of the dozens of objects got through, though he did see a plasma streamer hit one of the side bays and get inside the transport, given that its lateral shields were down for the unloading.

  Dan’s skeet closed to effective plasma range within a few seconds and he targeted the transport behind the front pair, knowing that most of their goodies were probably already in the water. He hit it with a long, blue plasma streamer, eating into the shields along with three others before they finally popped and let additional weaponsfire through.

  Pulling his skeet up for a bit more altitude Dan clipped off a lachar blast at a transport behind the one he’d been targeting, then delivered two more plasma streamers to other transports before flying out the backside of the enemy formation and swinging around to come in on another pass…which was when the wisps from the cruiser finally caught up with them.

  Knowing that the transports were the main priority Dan went evasive and tried to get clear of the swarm of fighters long enough to line up another plasma streamer…but only at the cost of several plasma hits to his shields. In the past that would have been enough to take them down, but with every year that passed the Star Force techs back home were learning more and more about shield matrixes from the V’kit’no’sat database, and from that they were designing progressively more advanced shields that operated off the same power output, enhancing the protection the aerofighters had without adding weight.

  Dan couldn’t ignore the wisps forever, so after getting a plasma lance into the topside of one of the smaller transports that he saw another squadron picking on, he spun his skeet around on its anti-grav and reversed direction, confusing the wisps momentarily and giving him a clear shot at two of them.

  He fired off a series of ‘chips’ at the shieldless fighters, killing both with the tiny blue energy arcs. The chips didn’t have much range before they dissipated, but with fighter to fighter engagements being what they were, they literally shredded the fighters on impact, given that his skeet was firing 7 with each pull of the trigger in a rapid-fire burst.

  After easily killing those two weak fighters, Dan crisscrossed the impromptu battlefield downing several more as he hoped the rest of the pilots would focus on the transports…then he noticed another contact on his battlemap incoming, followed by a painfully bright blue sun that emerged to the west.

  That ‘sun’ was the chips’ big brother, designated a ‘mauler,’ and it had just impacted the side of the cruiser floating high above them that was returning heavy green plasma fire on the aquatics battleship just coming into the fight.

  Dan saw the ship, designated as the Black Pearl, fire another mauler blast into the side of the cruiser as the Star Force vessel dropped in altitude, heading for water where it held a bigger advantage. Fortunately it could handle most of the troops the lizard transports were dropping off, but Dan knew they needed to hit as many of them as possible while they were on the surface to thin their numbers, so he dropped back down to the deck, burning another wisp on the way, then turned most of his attention on the biggest of the transports as it lowered ever so slowly into the water.

  Several other skeets were pounding its topside, so when David lit it up with a plasma streamer of his own it got through the shields and burned a long furrow into the hull, which the others quickly expanded upon as he flew off and swung around for another pass.

  As he did he caught sight of the underside, still not all the way down to the water, as the ventral bay doors opened up and began releasing a very long, narrow aquatics craft. Grinding his teeth in frustration at their inability to stop the mass of deployments, Dan went as low to the small waves as he dared and flew towards the transport, zigzagging around two others to get a good approach vector, and then repeatedly firing his lachar until he got within plasma range.

  He burned a fiery blue lance into the side of the corvette being deployed as it dropped into the water, but its own shields held up to the assault…then it sunk into the ocean and was suddenly beyond the skeets’ ability to touch.

  “Get us into the water,” Voru said from the bridge of the Black Pearl as the aquatics battleship traded weaponsfire with the space navy warship in an odd confrontation that had become almost commonplace on Atlantica ever since lizard assault fleets had arrived to reinforce their frontier colonies that Star Force had been handily tearing up. Given that all the Human colonies on the planet were beneath the ocean and had eschewed the tiny bit of available landmass, the lizards were forced to fight them underwater if they wanted to remove them from the planet, but there were no shortage of air assets in play, with most of the heavy lifting being done by the enemy’s nimble fleet of naval cruisers.

  As the Black Pearl dropped towards the ocean it continued firing its mauler cannon, blasting away at the cruiser’s shields with the medium-sized weapon that seemed to defy reason. It was another little ‘primitive’ gem discovered in the V’kit’no’sat database that operated off of an exotic type of energy that was extremely unstable, giving it an ultra-short range of only a handful of kilometers in space and less than that in atmosphere, but the destructive potential was undeniable…not to mention it wreaked havoc with shield matrixes.

  With the third salvo fired from the Black Pearl the lizards’ shields went down over a small section of their hull, but Voru didn’t have much conventional weaponry onboard his ship to exploit the breach with, though several medium-sized plasma cannons opened fire and targeted the critical systems on the lizard hull that were now vulnerable, knocking out at least one weapons battery before most of the Star Force vessel’s batteries submerged beneath the waves. Once settled in, the battleship’s spinal bulge was all that remained above the waterline, making the vessel appear as a very large and long whale…but the mauler cannon was located in that section of the hull, so it continued to fire unmolested as now most of the ship was protected by a ‘water shield’ that would continue to replenish itself to no end.

  The cruiser responded by narrowing its plasma fire onto the above water portions of the ship, with its misses vaporizing huge plumes of water and sending them into the air like geysers, especially over the shallow portions where the hull of the Black Pearl helped to reflect the concussive pressure of the flash vaporization.

  All of the aquatic battleship’s weapons were medium grade, when compared to naval implements. That was due to both the size and design of the ship, which was not a drone vessel and not designed for space combat. The lizard cruiser was, which would have given it the advantage if not for the continuing tech progression Star Force was spewin
g out, with the mauler cannon more than evening the odds now that the Black Pearl was in the water and having to defend very little hull area with its shields…which were now being redeployed to strengthen the upper matrixes by drawing power from the lower ones.

  In the past that sort of shield alteration hadn’t been possible…but there again, the pyramid database was playing into their hands, offering them much more dynamic shield matrixes that the V’kit’no’sat still considered to be child’s play.

  Entrenched in the water as it was, the lizards knew they weren’t going to win out against the Human battleship, but they maintained the exchange until their transports…or what was left of them…finished unloading and flew off, with the cruiser following. They retreated off into the sky, heading either into space or to one of the many hidden lizard bases on the besieged planet.

  “Keep an eye on the sky,” Voru cautioned his sensor officer. “Subsurface hologram, please.”

  The surface of the planet, a smooth curve with the Black Pearl, Dutchman, and several Star Force cities and marked craft, including the overhead skeets, literally inverted at the waterline. The units above the waves disappeared and the flat ocean morphed into the crumpled terrain of the seafloor…with Manaan and the assaulting forces arrayed around it outlined in hundreds of moving icons.

  “Full submersion,” Voru ordered. “Let’s take it to them up close.”

  2

  “Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Voru commented to the bridge crew as he saw the underwater army the lizards were throwing at Manaan…not to mention the incoming reinforcements that the transports had just deployed. They were still off a ways from the confrontation points, centered around 2 city defense towers that were stationed outside the boundary fence.

  There were six in total, spread in hexagonal formation around the more or less circular fence and set well off its perimeter to give them better firing lines. The lizards had tangled with enough of this type of turret to know better than to close within firing range, otherwise their ships would be obliterated…thus they were doing the next best thing.