by Aer-ki Jyr
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1
February 24, 2933
Gvaris System (lizard territory)
Nephasil
Sara-012 sat in the nexus onboard her warship, not heavily engaged in anything but keeping an eye on the fleets while they were in orbit of the lizard world sitting too far up the gravity well for the enemy’s anti-orbital batteries to reach them and already having beaten the massive lizard fleet that was on station here. It had taken more than a week to get through the naval battle, for this system was one of the extremely valuable dots connecting the lizard core worlds and their holdings in the chunk they’d bitten out of Skarron territory.
The Voku and Preema had likewise carved a huge chunk of territory out of the far side of lizard territory all the way over to the midline that Cal-com had agreed upon. They stopped there, expanding their wedge of conquest laterally and, in the case of the Preema, all the way to the coreward edge of the galactic arm in order to try and get ahead of the lizard spread there. The ships they were devoting to actually aiding the Skarrons were limited on the far side, but they were taking names and kicking ass all along the closest border to Preema territory and leaving a swath of empty systems for the Voku and others to keep unoccupied.
Star Force had likewise been pressing towards the midline while the H’kar were headed rimward. In truth Star Force was attacking on multiple fronts, but their emphasis was on getting at least a strand of systems out to the midline so they could connect with the Voku and establish a firm linkage while severing what the lizards had. While there were hundreds of systems along the ‘middle’ of enemy territory, the lizards had been fortifying a single line through, expecting to lose the others.
This one had been so well fortified navally that even the huge Star Force fleet Sara had brought with her and Kiran-011 had had its hands full. They’d chewed threw more than a million enemy ships by the time it was done, losing a third of their drones in the process, including six of the new Ravager-class warships that Paul had designed. Each year that passed saw them getting smaller and smaller as the techs refined the Dre’mo’don specs, but the ones that she had in her fleet were among the oldest versions…though still damn more powerful than any of the other drones.
She had 11 left and Kiran had 8, plus 182 Warship-class jumpships between them and 4 command ships, not to mention the supply and transport fleet that was fueling the ground invasion. There were two inhabited planets in this system plus a scattering of outposts and Star Force had chosen to go for the biggest of them first. Right now Sara was keeping an eye on events below, as well as the relatively quiet orbit. There were still some lizard ships out there, she knew, sneaking around the system. If they slipped up she’d get them, but they were no threat to her fleet.
However, if they got to ground they could cause a lot of trouble for their armies, which was why she was standing guard in the nexus for a few hours, taking turns with Kiran and other veteran Archons just in case the lizards pulled something fancy…or kamikaze. Her ship had shields to deal with ramming debris but you had to set it up first, so staying vigilant was essential. Her crew could handle that, but there was something in her gut that told her this wasn’t going to be a regular ‘cleansing’ mission.
The only activity going on right now was the ambush groups around the star. Giving that this was on the lizard lifeline between the two hemispheres of their territory there was a massive amount of cargo transit occurring through this location. Her ships were stationed to poach them as they came into, then tried to round the star and get to the exiting jumppoint for the next leg of their journey. Most of them were easy kills and normally she’d feel bad about that, blasting away at cargo ships that couldn’t defend themselves, but in truth none of the lizard ships could defend themselves against an equally sized Star Force vessel. The tech levels were too far apart, despite the impressive gains the enemy had been making in recent decades.
But the bottom line was that there were too many lizards to play nice with, and even if you did bother capturing them they’d try and kill you the moment they had an opportunity or, barring that, try and kill themselves. Knowing what they were and what they’d done, for instance this planet used to belong to a race known as the Bmat that was now extinct because of them, Sara was comfortable simply blasting away at them as they came within range, for if she let them go they’d only aid the rest of their empire, perhaps against Star Force, or maybe against someone else less able to defend themselves.
If it was the Skarrons she’d think twice about letting them go, just so they could fight it out, but this juggernaut of an empire was just too deadly. Not to Star Force anymore, but Sara could remember back when it had been. When they’d been the lesser and hanging on by a thread. The Hycre had saved them back then, and they’d since repaid that favor with returning the bulk of their conquered worlds back to them, but she wasn’t going to make the mistake of thinking that the lizards were less dangerous than before. She and the others had simply gotten a lot more dangerous themselves, though to unknown races out there far, far away it wouldn’t matter. The lizards would simply run them over and slaughter them.
With that in mind, Sara kept her warships at the main jumppoints with orders to blow away anything lizard on sight.
One factoid that she’d been noticing, and confirming what the Voku had already told them, was that the lizard cargo ships were only full heading coreward, with the bulk of them returning empty. That suggested the lizards were heavily favoring the combat in the Skarron zone…not a bad move considering that Star Force and its allies were winning out here and pressing ever closer to the lizards’ core worlds. If they’d devoted those resources here it would have delayed things further, but not stopped it. Though now that they were effectively blocking off their internal highway those ships and supplies would be staying put and fortifying the rimward half even more.
There were plenty of other systems still in lizard hands to send convoys through, which they no doubt would begin to divert through until Star Force and the Preema/Voku eventually spread out to take those systems as well, but any ships traveling off this line were vulnerable to ambush because there wasn’t heavy lizard defenses waiting to screen for them. If they could break this link in the chain the lizards would either have to risk being ambushed constantly, which they would be as the Voku were already doing a very good job of it throughout this area, or have their empire effectively cut in two.
And it was for that reason that Sara felt uneasy about this. It’d been a hard fought win to claim naval dominance, but her gut said it wasn’t over yet.
When an unusually large number of incoming ships popped up on sensors arriving at a jumppoint on the rimward side of the star she took notice, with her warships and their drone fleets ambushing them as they arrived…but they kept coming in a long convoy that didn’t stop, eventually dumping off enough cruisers to fill the jumppoint with a beehive of contacts that kept getting larger by the minute, for they were jumping in so close to each other that she knew this wasn’t a standard shipment.
Already linked into the nexus she started giving a flurry of orders to both her fleet and Kiran’s. Sara didn’t know where he was at present, but he wasn’t logged into a nexus so she had priority command. Taking control of every ship in the system she began maneuvering her chess pieces around and pouring a chunk of them in towards the star including her command ship, for she couldn’t suffer the lag involved if she was going to micromanage the arrival point battle.
Her connection cut out when the ship made
its microjump, with the speed messing with the battlemap reception. Rather than send corrupted signals the technology switched to observation mode until the braking microjump was made and the speeds of location and ship returned to relative stability. As the battlemap updated so did the ship counts, with the lizards literally ramming their empty jumpships into her fleet.
She saw one of the massive jumpships flash into the side of four drones, vaporizing them on impact with a shiver running down Sara’s spine. The drones had been starside, meaning the lizards couldn’t accelerate off the gravitational mass at system’s center. Rather they’d have to push off of distant planets for slow movement navigating the star, but this one hadn’t. Where they normally would have been safe from such a tactic, her fleet was getting hammered by what was obviously an upgrade in gravity drives.
The lizards now had binary versions.
Another flash ended before it began, with a command ship on site bracing against the kamikaze jumpship. The dampening shields had gotten up in time, and given the short distance between the two vessels the lizard jumpship hadn’t been able to accumulate a massive amount of speed. As if punishing it for its impudence, the command ship lit up the jumpship’s surface with dozens of weapon strikes visible at range, including a bloon launch that carved a crater into the bow, spraying debris out in a quickly expanding halo.
Sara made adjustments to her ship formations immediately, recognizing this battle was quickly turning into chaos. The lizards weren’t just trying to damage the Star Force ships, they were buying time for the new ones coming in to dump their cruisers before they could get sheared off their docking ports by Star Force’s superior weaponry.
And there were more and more coming, with no way for her to scan to see how many were on the way. Star Force transmitted signals ahead of them when entering friendly systems, but the lizards were not, meaning there was an unknown number of ships coming in and she was losing drones rapidly from the kamikaze runs, not by the cruisers, but by the humongous jumpships. That was a waste of resources she’d rarely seen the lizards commit, but this system was their lifeline to the other half of their empire and it seemed they were more than willing to commit excessive reinforcements to try and hold it.
That meant they had a genuine war on their hands this time, not the one-sided affairs that Star Force had to work for, but whose ultimate outcome was never really in doubt.
“So be it, then,” Sara whispered, stretching her Sav-enhanced limits and taking a deeper control of the fleet movements, yanking priorities out of captains’ and remote pilots’ hands and making this her personal battle more so than normal.
She broke off a group of drones and sent them bypassing the lizards at the forefront, diving in between their fleets and heading for the incoming jumppoint itself, which was creeping outward into the system like a slowly deploying rug laying down ships. It was there that the loaded jumpships were coming in, and it was those that Sara wanted to hit before they could unload, figuring that they wouldn’t go kamikaze until they did so, as well as realizing that there were other lizards ships in the way up front that they would run into.
With that front line being the collision risk, the trailblazer forced part of the fighting behind their lines, getting far closer than normal. Typically it was Star Force that stood off and sniped from range, but now they were doing the reverse across the battlefield as Sara ordered all incoming ships into pointblank range to lessen the impact velocities of any ramming vessels. She knew she was going to lose a lot of ships, but better to fight this here and now than give them easy access to the system.
Sara kept calling in more ships from planetary orbit, but didn’t pull them all out, for she didn’t want them running reinforcements down to the surface where the ground battles were only 2 months old. The planet was still mostly in lizard hands, and it would be easy to reinforce them if they could get their ships down inside the safety zone that the planetary defenses provided.
She sent a message to the commander there to form a defense line at the jumppoint in from the star and at several of the subsidiaries coming off the planets. If the lizards did try that tactic they’d have to approach much slower or creep in on an indirect jumpline, but for now the battle was here and Sara tried to focus as much as she could without overloading herself.
Minutes passed with the carnage continuing to escalate, then a chunk of the ships under her direct command were siphoned off by another person in the network. The only one who had access to override her was Kiran, whose command ship had just jumped into stellar orbit and was on approach. Thankful for the help, both in firepower and mental workload, the two trailblazers split up the battle into two parts…the front line and the flankers. Sara was already working the flankers in between the enemy ships so Kiran let her keep those, pulling the main defense line to his control and reworking it slightly to fit his combat preferences.
That Sara didn’t mind, for each commander handled things a bit differently. She could see the changes happening as she watched the overall battle in mind’s eye, but most of her focus was on the weapon strikes she was coordinating to cripple jumpships within a few seconds of their shields going down. Boring strikes down deep into the hull to knock out gravity drives and power generators, she left the ships otherwise intact but unable to summon up the energy for kamikaze dives…or at least not very fast ones, for hitting every single gravity drive within a jumpship was difficult, for in the lizard designs they were spread throughout the ship in numerous locations.
But taking out some of their capability left them to limp around to be destroyed layer, for they weren’t leaving the system in such a state unless they wanted to spend years in transit to the closest star system. With her goal being just that, she had numerous drones firing in coordination that a crew of pilots couldn’t handle as well, for all the ships were the pieces of one player, that being Sara, in this computerized hive mind that she was working through.
But there were so many lizard ships now that she was overwhelmed, losing a few drones here and there to cruiser fire or collisions, but unable to stop the wellspring and having it force forward into Kiran’s lines. Rather than let it get to them, both trailblazers did what they had to do…collapse their widespread lines down into solidified groups that could chew through enemy ships. Let them get spread out and the lizards would do the same to them, tech advantage or no.
But that also meant sections of the massive lizard fleet that was continuing to roll in were left to do as they pleased. Many pressed the attack, but some sections of it started to form a wall in space that well over half an hour later shielded for a different group of jumpships to come in. These carried troops and supplies, pooling in a series of groups with escorts and then making microjumps elsewhere into the system while Sara and Kiran were still fighting the warships and just trying to knock them down as fast as they could while they were still somewhat unorganized.
The first reinforcement convoy jumped into planetary orbit behind its wedge of cruisers and empty jumpships that just rammed the Star Force lines, forcing blunt stops and running interference while the support ships flew past and raced towards low orbit and the range where the planetary anti-orbit guns could cover them. Sara and Kiran were out of the loop on this behind far too many seconds of lag, but the mage in command of the orbital defense dispatched small groups of ships to take down some of the reinforcements while the rest were left dealing with the attacking warships.
A swarm of blocky drones shot after the blockade runners far faster than the lizard ships could move, binary drives or not, and came up behind them to open fire where the lizards own planetary weapons couldn’t target them. Chewing into their ships from behind with a ravenous appetite, the drones followed the lizard ships down into the atmosphere, dropping more of them as they progressed down the line as a few huge pink phaser blasts leapt up at them. A few drones got hit and were lost, but the rest stayed tucked in with their prey and continued to kill them up until the point where the lizard sh
ips scattered, forcing the drones to choose who to chase.
But at that point the mage ordered them to hold fire and simply follow the ships at extremely close range to avoid the defense batteries. If they shot the lizard ships down they’d be exposed, and the mage wanted them to get to ground as well. The lizard cities couldn’t admit their own ships with the drones tucked in, so they had a problem to deal with.
When the split happened a lot of the transports got away, but the drones stayed with some and found blind spots in the terrain where the anti-orbital guns couldn’t hit them. Stashing them away there for future use, the mage continued to fight the short-lived battle in orbit only to have another group with escorts coming in.
There were so many lizard ships in the system, both at the star and coming in to the planet, that Star Force couldn’t stop them all. They were destroying them left and right, and taking a beating as they did it, but hundreds and then thousands of ships made it down to the planet in an anti-like flow as the never-ending convoy kept pouring more ships into the system with no end in sight.
2
February 26, 2933
Gvaris System (lizard territory)
Nephasil
Harris-739221 stood atop a lizard building on the outskirts of one of their cities that Star Force had invaded some 4 days ago. They’d met up with heavy resistance but had succeeded in claiming a slice of the southeast quadrant, essentially a crescent moon with the middle starting to widen out and push further in. The still smoking remains of the city’s single anti-orbital battery lay to the northwest, having fallen victim to the costly orbital bombardment that had seen many drones get junked cutting the invasion force a blind spot to land troops inside. Now it was up to them to take out the rest of the planet from the ground.
The ranger had been in 3 large campaigns prior to this one, but none of them had seen fighting like this. Even in this city alone there were lizards pouring in from reinforcement lines as other cities shifted their resources to fight here rather than wait for the invaders to get to them. Six cities lay wasted behind them, with this one and two others currently under Star Force attack with hundreds more across the planet for them to get through, but right now that wasn’t a concern.