Star Force: Aquatics (SF31)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  8

  “There…and there,” Ariel said, pointing to two different positions as a pair of streaks beneath her in the water finished off the other two lizards, with the wash of their distant concussion waves rippling her hair as they passed. “They’re coming from the north.”

  Levi floated beside her, with the streak floating above them thanks to a touch from its anti-grav, and placed an approximate waypoint in both areas she indicated, though it was impossible for him to spot the lizards at this range.

  “Can you see any others?”

  “Not from here.”

  “Get back inside,” he said, twisting around with his forearm jets and climbing with his leg-mounted ones to get back up to the cockpit, with Ariel beating him there easily. He grabbed the edge of the open cockpit and pulled himself over the pommel and sat down, then triggered it to auto-close before he moved the water fighter off to the north.

  “Another there,” Ariel pointed out a good distance from the others but still holding to the branchlike-pattern emerging from some northern entrance point.

  “How the hell are they all getting in?” Levi mumbled inside his helmet, placing another waypoint.

  “Levi, report?” Kyler’s voice asked.

  “We’ve got lizard infantry with det packs inside the perimeter. They don’t show up on sensors unless you’re within a couple hundred meters. Ariel is visually picking them out from range, and we’ve already identified 4 separate groups, all coming from what looks like a northern vector.”

  “I see the markers,” the trailblazer said, referring to the waypoints on the battlemap, “how many per group?”

  “Three for the first. The others are unknown. We’re heading north trying to spot more.”

  “Keep her clear of the blast radius.”

  “Understood.”

  Kyler cut the comm line and walked away from the hologram of the city as other command staff readied their defenses. He worked his way through the workstations and consoles until he got to a wall and ducked into one of three alcoves that contained command nexuses.

  He powered it up and was immersed in his own private holographic underwater world with the city, the surrounding buildings, perimeter fence, and exterior turrets all there in a 3D display. He adjusted the zoom and triggered the playback of the battlemap data to when Levi had encountered the first lizards, watching the sensor records carefully.

  First there were no lizards, then three blips showed up. Those blips got better resolution when additional streaks came into the picture, chasing them down as they split up. Kyler zoomed in again, sorting through the little data they had, and got a half decent picture of one of the contacts with just a touch of visual light added in.

  It was lizard infantry alright, carrying heavy loads that were obviously det packs, but the lizards were wearing clothes, oddly, for the water variants never did. These covered them in a black body stocking, leaving only small patches of skin showing on their hands/feet/face. The same black material stretched over the det packs, making them very hard to see visually in the dim light.

  Kyler opened a Star Force-wide comm channel. “Be advised, the lizard infantry are wearing some form of stealth suits. They’re probably based off their hull armor, so expect nil from your sensors. Everyone with external lights, pump them up as high as you can. That goes for buildings too. Let’s not leave any shadows for them to swim through.”

  As he said that the command level staff heard his order and began flicking on the external lights on the main city structure, bathing the area in omni-directional flood lights and turning the giant seashell into a Christmas tree. The other buildings soon followed suit, as did the 5 functioning towers. Even the perimeter fence lit up its running lights as bright as possible, making the dark ocean come alive with light thanks to the more or less clear water that encircled the planet.

  Not long after that another waypoint popped up on the map, followed by three others in the following minutes. As more streaks got into the water and out to the targets Kyler was able to get sensor hits on the enemy, seeing that while they were coming in groups they were splitting up and heading for separate targets, most of which appeared to be the expansion buildings around the city.

  As Kyler studied the seascape, trying to divine their battle plan one of the mark 3 towers inside the fence line stuck out one of its shield columns, visible on the battlemap, and peppered the seafloor with plasma strikes, aiming at something that wasn’t on sensors or near the existing waypoints.

  With a few button presses Kyler opened a comm channel to the Archons/Regulars manning the consoles that were remote controlling that particular defense tower. “What are you shooting at?”

  “Movement on the seafloor. If it’s not us, and there’s no wildlife, then it’s got to be lizard. We can’t get anything on sensors though…wait, check that,” the gunner said as a contact manifested near to where they’d been aiming.

  Kyler zoomed in and saw that the steam bubbles had carried one of the infantry up off the ground, allowing the sensors to finally get a lock.

  “Keep at it,” the trailblazer urged, “and knock them off the ground. I’ll send units to take them out, but we need at least a momentary sensor ping to tag their location.”

  “Will do.”

  Kyler highlighted a squadron of arrowheads just coming out of the bay and ordered them to the most recent contacts with spotter-only orders, given that ramming explosive-carrying infantry wasn’t wise, nor was trying to connect a short range shield column to blast them with plasma, meaning they were going to have to rely on PDMs or larger torpedoes.

  Several larger ships than the streaks were already in the water, namely those too large to enter the standard bays, and Kyler started moving the destroyers, frigates, and corvettes around like chess pieces, putting them into gaps between buildings and other sensor towers to try and spot infantry moving about. In addition to that he worked out patrol routes for the arrowheads, of which there were now more than 50 zipping about in the water, but with around 110 square miles to cover inside the fence perimeter, there was a lot of ground to cover, giving the sneaky lizards the advantage in this situation.

  More of their demolition teams began popping up as their visual detection grid expanded with more ships and higher visibility, not to mention the ones Ariel was spotting. Kyler knew they were lucky that she happened to have been outside to spot the first ones, otherwise…

  A damage indicator lit up on the battlemap, and not at one of the tagged infantry locations. This one was on the edge of a power distribution node for the surface guns, one of five each that fed power from the main generators and by necessity had to come aboveground. All other power transfer lines were protected in tunnels carved out of the seafloor rock and thus inaccessible to the lizards.

  “Damn it,” Kyler muttered, glancing over the map and realizing he’d missed the obvious, due to the fact he hadn’t assumed the lizards would be that ambitious. With a flurry of keystrokes he began redeploying ships…then he said to hell with it and pulled out the interface sphere and placed both hands squarely on it, linking to the system directly through his Ikrid ability and mentally reorganizing the defensive effort at a speed his hands could never match.

  He wasn’t as well practiced as Paul, but he’d mastered the basics of the technology years ago.

  On that note he opened up a comm prompt to orbit with a side thought, and a few moments later a hologram of his fellow trailblazer popped up beside him in quarter scale.

  “Trouble?” Paul asked.

  “They’re targeting the power feeds for the surface batteries,” Kyler said, still mentally ordering units around and recalling the Black Pearl and Highwind from their current missions. “That suggests we’re going to have aerial problems…”

  “We’re seeing activity up here too,” Paul said grimly. “They’ve been prepping for something big lately, maneuvering pieces around in a very atypical fashion. What are you dealing with now? I can only see a handful of
targets.”

  “Damn demolition infantry…wearing a knockoff of their sensor-absorbing hull armor would be my guess. We’re having to spot them visually. The sensors don’t do much good until you’re about to trip over them so long as they stay tucked to the seafloor.”

  Paul was silent for a moment as he analyzed his own holographic battlemap onboard his flagship, Excalibur. “Bubble lift?”

  “They’ve knocked a few loose, high enough for the sensors to tag. One of their teams already got to a target, and I don’t know how many more there are.”

  “Any idea how they’re getting in…or do you think they’re just crawling past the front door?”

  “No clue right now. Don’t suppose you could send a few ships down to babysit us?”

  “I’ve got a corvette close that I’m sending down, along with a frigate and destroyer that you’ll have to wait a bit longer for. They should be able to cover you until this attack runs to completion. No approaching ships yet?”

  “Not a twitch on sensors, but these lizards obvious got here somehow, and I don’t think they swam the whole way.”

  Paul’s hologram frowned. “I’m picking up incoming jumps, low orbit. Something’s afoot. I’ll get back to you. Got some warships to blow up.”

  With that his hologram winked out and Kyler turned his full attention back to his own part of what looked to be the opening salvo in a much larger battle…check that, them taking down the tower earlier was probably the opening gambit, in which case that meant they’d be attacking from that vector if they did have ships in the water.

  Kyler pulled a pair of destroyers off their current search positions and marked an elaborate course over to the fence overlap, having them search that route and then head out to open water to patrol the area where the destroyed tower was currently being rebuilt, getting some extended sensor range from them as he signaled for the construction crews to pack up what they were doing and return to the city.

  Another detonation pinged on his screen, this one on the opposite side of the city and again against once of the power transfer nodes. A handful of seconds later a second explosion on that same node from a slightly different position knocked it offline, though there were no pyrotechnics involved. It simply registered as disabled on the map, though the turret island it fed remained undamaged nearby.

  As if in response a group of tagged infantry blinked out as those units were destroyed shy of their targets by a streak launching a torpedo on the still clustered group. Elsewhere individual units were winking out sporadically, all the while more were being tagged on the battlemap as the streaks moved out to the waypoints being provided by Ariel and some of the smaller defense towers. Kyler didn’t know how many units they were dealing with, leaving his assessment of the enemy as a giant question mark.

  He hated not being able to know what was going on, but this was the situation he had to deal with so he made some guesses as to where the lizards were coming from and had a group of arrowheads looking for the infantry’s entry point when a third power node took a hit.

  One of the frigates simultaneously spotted a pair of infantry approaching another node and got to them first, blasting the surface ahead of them with their tiny plasma cannons, then knocking them out with PDM when they floated up high enough for sensors to lock on. Ships of all sizes across the city began swirling around the other nodes, looking for more enemies and finding many on approach, but they weren’t only targeting the nodes, for a few minutes later a large group of lizards appeared directly in front of one of the access tunnels leading into an interior docking bay, having been creeping along the connection of the main structure and the seafloor, using the almost 90 degree nook to hide from both sensors and vision.

  As soon as they swam out into the short waterway they immediately were pinging on sensors as a swarm of PDM came at them from wall turrets, exploding on contact and taking out half of them without detonating the packs on their backs, for they were hit in the head or chest. The rest of them did detonate, cracking the surrounding walls and sending an overpressure wave into the internal bay, save for the egress shields stopped it at the end of the tunnel.

  The reflection of the concussion wave pushed the debris back out into the ocean, leaving bits and pieces of lizard and wall floating about before the heavier bits slowly sank through the dust cloud generated from the silt on the ground and the pulverized debris. Ambitious as they were, the lizards should have known better than to assume the entrances to the city wouldn’t be defended.

  Similar incidents continued to occur across the city landscape, with about half of the lizards getting through to their targets being obliterated by standing defenses, but the others that chose just to detonate against exterior walls were proving effective, both against the power nodes and other structures, two of which saw minor interior flooding as the detonations cracked the exterior armor and allowed the ocean to begin seeping through.

  Just when Kyler thought things were winding down and the number of enemy contacts began to dwindle the pair of destroyers he’d sent outside the city on patrol picked up a contact a few kilometers outside the city…a hammerhead judging by the size and shape, small as the sensor silhouette was. A few seconds after it appeared Kyler saw another pop up beside it, followed by a slew of others as another lizard armada was making its way towards the side of the city where the mark 5 defense tower had been taken down.

  He checked the aerial sensors, seeing that the Black Pearl was 4 minutes out, meaning it would arrive before the enemy did, and he tagged the exact spot he wanted it to land, putting it between the city and the lizard fleet just in front of the partially reconstructed turret…then he indicated the depth he wanted it, so that both the dorsal and ventral weaponry would come into play. Then he sent a message to Captain Voru indicating that he wanted the battleship to be aggressive and dive right down their throats once they were in position, to which he received the following text reply.

  WITH PLEASURE

  As those two words hovered in the air beside Kyler inside the command nexus, more lizard ships began appearing behind the others, making this group far larger than the one that had hit them before.

  The destroyers launched a salvo of torpedoes at the leading hammerheads, then they turned and retreated laterally, both of them taking different directions and keeping extended sensor range out from the city for Kyler to observe the enemy fleet with, given that they were still outside the range of the city’s sensor grid.

  When the Black Pearl slowed to a stop, floating overtop the submerged city and began its descent into the water, Kyler’s gut clenched up as another group of lizard ships appeared on one of the destroyer’s sensors, coming in from a different angle and heading for the adjacent intact defense tower. If they could take that one down, then they’d have a clear run to the fence where the other towers couldn’t reach.

  Then, to make matters even worse, a slew of aerial targets emerged well away from the city but coming in at considerable speed. Kyler flipped over to a surface map as one, then two naval cruisers appeared.

  That two became three…then four…and five…and six…with a slew of transports mixed in between them.

  “Making this hard on us, aren’t you,” Kyler said with plenty of venom in his voice, mentally requesting an update on the incoming naval corvette. Gratefully its ETA put it ahead of the lizards, but it was severely outmatched, and the other two ships Paul was sending down were considerably farther behind in their atmospheric entry.

  Kyler keyed for an open comm again, addressing all Star Force units across Manaan.

  “Alright people, looks like they mean business this time. Let’s light ‘em up.”

  Kyler sent another mental command into the nexus, with the battlemap flipping back to underwater view. Six of the buildings on the seafloor suddenly detached and began rising up on extendable columns, pushing a huge amount of water askew as they rose. Attached to each of them were connecting lines looking like 5 ropes stretching down to the grou
nd to tether it in place. Those ‘ropes’ were the armored power lines feeding the turret islands that were rising up to the surface, whereas the central column was solely for lifting purposes.

  Some of those power lines were now dead, their connecting nodes on the surface having been taken out by the lizard infantry, but each of the six artificial islands breached the ocean surface with at least 3 lines intact, allowing the smooth mushroom-shaped surfaces to sprout numerous plasma cannons, lachar turrets, missile racks, and anti-air batteries, ready to defend the submerged city from an aerial attack trying to drop units inside the fence perimeter.

  9

  Blue plasma lances leapt out from three of the six turret islands towards the first of the incoming naval cruisers as Paul’s corvette moved out to engage the enemy before it could get to the fence perimeter, lashing out with its own plasma and its single mauler cannon, painting the forward edge of the flat yellow/tan ship with a wash of energetic fireworks that punched through the shields in short order.

  The cruiser took the hits with impunity, letting the Star Force defenses chew into it as the rest of the aerial assault force slipped by…right into the face of a coordinated missile assault rising up from all six turret islands. They got chewed up by the lizards’ anti-air batteries, but there were so many coming in that more than half got through and nailed the leading transport, completely ignoring the cruisers that the plasma cannons were targeting.

  The transport, half the size of the cruisers, went down hard in a cacophony of explosions…then dropped into the ocean with a massive splash the sent water up onto the nearest cruiser and two more smaller transports behind it. If any lizard units inside the transport survived, they now found themselves sinking outside the fence, meaning the missile barrage had done its job and stopped at least one transport from reaching the target.

  The lizards apparently came to the same conclusion, realizing that the city’s aerial defenses were tougher than anticipated, so the 5 cruisers not entangled in the slugging match with the corvette moved ahead of the transports, leaving them momentarily exposed as they swatted down more incoming missile barrages at closer range. The turret islands in the back opened up with their plasma cannons when the enemy ships came in, but the cruisers kept moving forward, then suddenly split up, each going to an individual island and hovering over top of it.