Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (13-16)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Good to go,” Ally reported.

  “Same here,” Ras added, just as Brad’s skeet confirmed full shield deployment.

  “Ground troops report plasma cannons,” Mara’s voice broke back in. “Some big ones.”

  Brad reactivated the outgoing portion of that line. “Copy that. We’re getting underway now.”

  He shifted it back over to mute, then checked his heading to make sure they were pointed in the right direction. He corrected a few degrees to port, then feathered his propulsive engines.

  “Stay with me,” he told his pair of pilots as he accelerated forward with the air-breathing engines kicking him back in his seat enough that his butt hit the rear guard, checking his momentum. His skeet took off in the normal acceleration arc, with the long needle-like shield breaking the wind for him as his speed increased to debilitating levels.

  As the friction increased he began to increase altitude again using the gravity drive. Doing so decreased the thickness of the air, reducing drag, but it also reduced the amount of air getting to the engines, decreasing propulsion. When he got high enough that his airspeed began to actually diminish he flipped another switch and two more physical energy fields manifested around the pair of engines, acting like sails to collect and funnel the thin air into the intakes.

  The skeet’s speed increased again, rising to a comfortable mach 10. The pressure on the nose cone was within limits and the air feed was nominal, but he didn’t feel like pressing the speed any higher. They’d gone up to mach 11 in testing, but only for a few minutes. He knew the craft could probably take the prolonged duration that this trip would incur, but he didn’t feel that now was the best time to be setting any records. He needed his skeet, and those of his pilots, in working order when they got to target…not to mention for the return trip.

  “You guys still with me?”

  “A few klicks back,” Ras said. “You’re hard to stay with.”

  “I’m done accelerating, so snug up…and remember to stay out of my wake.”

  “Yeah, it’s spraying me a bit at 2 kilometers,” Ally reported.

  Brad checked his tracking display, seeing that her skeet was off to his left, but more aft than she should have been.

  “Go wide and come up, you’re too linear.”

  “Easy for you to say, you don’t have to steer,” she said, making small corrections around the insanely large ‘nose’ of the craft that the energy shield had created.

  Brad watched as she got her fighter repositioned and Ras caught up from behind, coming in well wide then nudging over to about 1.5 klicks to his right and held position there about 500 meters back, parallel to Ally.

  “Looks good, but keep an eye on your trajectory. No time to fall asleep at this speed. Stay with me while I try to get a little more information about our target. Apologies now if I wobble.”

  “Not accepted,” Ally rebuked him. “You can multitask.”

  Brad smiled, but didn’t let his amusement transfer over the comm. She was quoting him from an earlier conversation. “So noted,” he said, readjusting the comm line to talk to Mara.

  9

  “Target sighted,” Brad said from his vantage point high above the mining site. After a stiff deceleration run the trio of fighters were descending down to the designated coordinates and had just passed through a thin layer of high clouds, giving them an unobstructed view of the thick forest below. A bit of infrastructure was visible on the horizon, but only after muffled flashes drew Brad’s eyes toward it.

  As he watched one of the three bulky ships began to rise up above the tree line, as if in preparation for their attack run.

  “They know we’re coming. Stay sharp and dance, let’s see what they’ve got. Ally?”

  “Happy to,” she answered, dipping the ‘T’ of her skeet forward and cutting out the anti-grav engines while kicking in the primaries. Her fighter dropped down and zipped ahead of the other two, with Brad swinging right to get some angular separation before he did likewise and followed her down. Ras picked another angle and set up for third in their initial strafing run.

  A stuttered stream of green plasma shot out from the ship like a search light, bending this way and that trying to track the fighter’s approach but Ally easily evaded it and fired a pair of light blue plasma squirts back its way before turning sharply and cutting across the treetops to the right and away from the target. Her hits ran square into the side of the yellow/tan ship and were buffeted by a cascading shimmer of energy shields.

  Brad saw this and tried to target the same spot on his run, firing off a series of three paired streaks, all of which hit the stable target as it fired back, unable to hit the highly mobile skeets. His first two salvos were absorbed, but the third broke through the shields and kissed the hull, leaving a burn mark but little other damage.

  Ras targeted the same spot as well, making more than a dent. Bits of armor burnt off when his four streaks impacted, tearing an obvious scar into the side of the ship before he too went evasive and flew off.

  By the time Ally came back around for a second pass the lizard ship began to move up and off to the west, firing ineffectively at the fighters from range as the other two ships came up out of the forest and added their own weapons to the defensive effort. She targeted the first one again, but didn’t have a line on its damaged side. Her shots dissipated off of portions of the shield matrix that were still intact, but draining them of yet more energy as the ship’s generator tried desperately to reform and recharge the portions that had been penetrated.

  “They’re running,” Ras said as he finished up his second pass.

  “Stay on them, but keep your distance. Those gunners may suck, but up close you’re a bigger target.”

  “We know the drill,” Ally answered, swinging her skeet around in a big loop to come back in at the retreating ships who were gradually increasing speed. That acceleration made her loop fall long, so she had to readjust and come up on their aft to approach. All three targeted their defenses that direction and the air filled with green shards of plasma.

  Brad swung wide to starboard and came in on their flank, forcing them to give him either an uncontested run or swing one or more of their turrets around to track him. They did the latter, lessening the fire being thrown at Ally. He got a single paired shot off before zooming across their formation a few hundred meters over the tops of their ships and flying off to port while Ally came right up and over them from behind, adding four more plasma streaks into the rearmost ship’s shields.

  The three Star Fox pilots kept up this harassing attack for a long time as the enemy ships fled across the surface, to where no one knew, but gradually their shields were wearing down and more and more hull hits were occurring. Meanwhile other skeets were inbound, adjusting toward their heading for a distant intercept, making it appear that unless the lizards got some lucky hits in against the fighters they were doomed.

  About five minutes before that intercept occurred with a group of 9 Ninja Monkey skeets coming up from the south, Ras got in a killing strike on the rearmost of the three ships, sending it careening down to crash into the forest when its anti-grav engine took damage.

  “Nice work,” Brad congratulated, “but stay sharp. I’ve already took a couple nicks and they dropped my shields by 20%. We can’t withstand a direct hit and their gunners are getting better the longer this fight drags on,” he said, pulling up sharply as another line of green plasma shot out like a scythe across the treetops and passed underneath him. “Concentrate fire on the second ship, but stay evasive.”

  “Copy that,” Ally said, delivering another effective run and flashing past the pair of ships, but staying low and shooting the gap between them as the gunners guessed she’d go high like they had been earlier.

  Brad noticed the maneuver, and the fact that it worked, so he didn’t criticize, but that was far closer than he wanted them getting and he knew that in prolonged fights like this people usually got sloppy, predictable, or reckless…a
nd she had just showed a bit of recklessness.

  He followed his own advice and flew way off to port and ahead of the fleeing ships, then angled in for a run that would force the gunners to split their aim between him coming in from an angle to the front or the other two who were still sniping from the rear arc. One of the turrets on the lead ship tracked his way but a corkscrew approach made him hard to zero in on and he was able to deliver a solid triple hit against the front of the second ship as he passed. The leading plasma globs hit the shields in front, the second set slipped back to the flank and soaked up more shield energy there, then the third set hit pay dirt and melted away some more hull armor as that side of the ship lost its protective energy shell.

  “What the…heads up!” Ally shouted as a new contact blurrily appeared on her tracking screen…a big new contact with a weak signal.

  By the time Brad had swung around to see it with his own eyes the cruiser-sized ship had already pulled up halfway above the ridgeline it was hiding behind. Its knife-like design lay flat against the ground with small nodules poking up off the top at odd places. It quickly rose up and sky appeared beneath it, making it look like an alien version of a super star destroyer…very flat and long, and equally intimidating.

  Bits and pieces of plasma began flying their way from turrets somewhere on the distance ship, leaving a safe cone of approach for the two raiders in the center.

  “Break high!” Brad said, pulling up sharply as he took a hit to his port engine. The physical shield covering it ate up most of the plasma, but the little that got through burned off the paint and melted away the outside layer of thin armor, just missing the forward intake vent. A little smoke billowed up from the spot, trapped inside the shield perimeter, and formed a misty haze over that side of the craft as Brad kicked in his anti-grav engines and shot into the sky as fast as he could.

  “Report?!”

  “Tail damage,” Ally said, following him up. “Nothing critical. Speed intact.”

  “No damage,” Ras reported, matching their ascent.

  Brad toggled his comm to open Star Force band, which the approaching skeets, Clans, and Canderians could all monitor. “New contact, repeat, new contact. Big ass ship coming up off the deck. The raiders are heading towards it and they’ve got decent anti-air coverage. Assault is problematic. We could really use some orbital bombardment about now if someone could manage it.”

  “Our sensors show nothing, Foxes,” one of the Ninja Monkey pilots replied on the same channel, “but we can just make it out visually. What’s it look like from orbit?”

  “We’ve got no tracking data up here,” Harrison’s voice responded. “But we do have a limited visual. Confirm coordinates then get clear as spotters. We’ll bring the rain, but there’s no guarantee we’ll hit anything.”

  “Thank you,” Brad said, adjusting his flight line to bring him directly over the ship, but at a high enough altitude that he wouldn’t be an easy target. “Ally, Ras…break off and get to the edge of visual range. One take north, the other south. We need to keep this guy boxed in so we can direct the gunners.”

  “I’ll take north,” Ras offered, pulling away from their tiny formation.

  “Careful, Lead,” Ally warned, heading the south position.

  “Mara, I’m gonna get you as close as I can. Be ready to target my position at 45 seconds post ping.”

  “We’re set here,” the Archon replied.

  “Ninja Monkeys, stay clear on the west edge. We’ve got to keep a line of sight on the ship at all times because our sensors aren’t worth crap against these guys.”

  “We’ve got the backdoor covered.”

  “I’ll take the east side after this run,” he said, rolling his skeet upside down so he could look at the pan-like ship coming up beneath him. It was an elongated hexagon with the shortest two sides being front and aft, giving it a stretched out look. He could see the two raiders just now reaching the ship and settling into grooves on the upper surface. A shimmer of shields flashed across the east side, indicating to Brad that they’d left those down for the ships to come in under and now they were raising them back up. He didn’t know if they were physical-resistant shields or energy-resistant shields, but a ship hitting either would damage the matrix, even though a true energy shield would allow objects to move through and still remain intact.

  Either way, his fighter’s plasma weapons would affect both types of shielding. Because the plasma was made of atoms it would be stopped by physical shields and pass through energy shields…but because the atoms were ionized it would also be repelled by the energy shields, making it both a good multipurpose weapon as well as an easy one to defend against. The really potent physical weapons would pass through energy-resistant shields like they weren’t even there, and vice versa. Lasers would pass right through the physical shields that the skeets were using, given that the photons were so small they’d make it through the matrix ‘net’ that was designed to stop large, heavy atoms, such as the oxygen ones that the skeet’s plasma was made of.

  Energy-resistant shields were more difficult to construct, which was why Star Force didn’t currently have any. According to the V’kit’no’sat database most races didn’t have energy-resistant shields because the matrix required was too complex for them to create. Some limited energy shields, like a simple magnetic field, were possible, but a comprehensive energy-resistant shield was quite a ways up the technological ladder and many rungs ahead of Star Force at the moment.

  A magnetic shield would repel plasma and other charged particles, but allow all other matter to pass through as if there was no shield at all, which was yet one more reason why plasma was easy to defend against. It could also ward off electrical attacks, but light and other forms of energy were unaffected, making its defensive usefulness one dimensional.

  Brad didn’t know how advanced the lizards were, but if they did have energy-resistant shields it wouldn’t do them much good. The plasma would pound them heavily, but since Star Force didn’t use much in the way of energy-based weapons nowadays only the physical shields were going to come into play…and in about 60 seconds they were going to find out if that ship was as tough as it looked.

  Brad looked ‘up’ at the ship below his skeet, judging that he was approximately over top of it, and leveled his hand above the all important button on his control board. He flipped his skeet back right side up and began making a tight 180 degree U-turn, at the end of which he jammed down the button and kicked in his engines at maximum speed.

  “Sensor ping,” one of the Canderians reported. “We have the coordinates.”

  “Send them over,” Harrison said, watching the holographic map of the planet tag the location where the mystery ship was. Their orbital sensors still couldn’t detect a thing, but the visuals he was getting of it from high above were able to make out the yellowish knife-like shape set against the dark green forest. He wasn’t sure how accurate their bombardment would be, and he hoped their pilots would keep their distance.

  In the Saber colony control center the Archons on station received the coordinates relayed from the Canderians and remotely targeted their warships in low orbit that happened to be above that portion of the planet. The Sabers had two in position, as well as a third borrowed from 1st fleet. Two other Clan warships were also nearby and would come within range shortly, but the Sabers had wisely been using their engines to align for optimum orbital positioning while the other Clans hadn’t been so savvy.

  The 1st fleet corvette took aim as it orbited by, making for a difficult, but not impossible shot. The two Saber ships, however, had been upgraded with anti-grav drives sufficient to ‘float’ their ships above the surface of the planet. One was a destroyer, the other a light frigate, and Paul had specifically had the newer designs incorporate the technology for just this purpose.

  Having negated most of their orbital speed by now, the two Saber warships drifted low, just above the top of the atmosphere as the first rail gun slug fell at an angle p
ast them from the 1st fleet corvette. It was followed by a steady stream of slugs, with about 5-second intervals, that pummeled the area tagged as the lizard ship’s location as the two Saber ships joined in with their heavier rail guns.

  More accurate due to the closer range and lack of lateral orbital speed, 62% of the slugs they delivered to target impacted the wide profile of the lizard ship, while the narrow edge stared at the surrounding and waiting fighters, giving the warships the best possible attack profile. Their rail gun slugs, each a massive chunk of iron mixed with other elements and blunted to apply maximum concussive force, hit the top of the ship and sparkled against the shields, though no one was in a good position to observe the spectacle.

  The metal smashed against the physical shields and deformed, breaking through layer after layer of shield matrix as the cylindrical slug of metal mushed into a glob and bled off its kinetic energy, spraying glowing shards as the impact friction heated the pieces past the melting point. They resolidified in mid air and rained down on the forest or other parts of the shield while the main glob rebounded up into the air like sleet hitting and bouncing off of frozen ground.

  As impressive as the lizards’ shields were, they couldn’t stand up against much of that punishment, and after the first few dozen impacts the ship began to move forward on a gentle rise up towards orbit, making it damn hard to track.

  “Target drifting south,” Brad reported. “And gaining altitude. Looks like it’s coming up to play,” he said as one of the slugs got through the shields and poked a tiny hole in the upper hull.

  “Shield penetration,” one of the Ninja Monkeys reported as they began to fly alongside the ship at extreme range. “Mark our position at approximately 40 km. Foxes, give them a range and they can use us as targeting brackets.”

  “Best guess,” Brad said, trying to size up the distance mixed with the intermittent sensor bounces from the large ship, “25 kilometers.” He set his sensor ping to automatic, with it sounding off every 1.5 seconds.