Star Force: Foothold (SF25)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Trouble?” Captain Andre asked as he finally got over to the central command ring as the officer Greg had been speaking to took a respectful step back.

  “Kirby tracks, and what appears to be a lizard farming planet. No sight of the bastards yet, but the system scan is far from complete.”

  “So, more going on than the Hycre knew after all?” he asked, glancing at the hologram. “How large of a population are we talking about?”

  One of the seated officers half spun around to answer. “Minimum…500,000. But our survey is only a third complete.”

  The Captain’s expression change as he looked back at Greg. “Orders?”

  “None at the moment…other than to stay sharp.”

  “Staying sharp, aye,” he said, walking past Greg and over to his Captain’s chair where he set down and started reviewing the surface intel that they’d gathered while he had been off duty.

  Greg caught the eye of the comms officer and pointed at the man, then back at himself. “Ear piece.”

  The officer pulled a random one out of a nearby drawer and typed in the serial number before tossing it to the Archon, who deftly plucked it out of the air.

  “Get me a line to the Hawkeye.”

  Sara was conscience of her precarious balance, standing on a small, raised circle only 5 inches in diameter as target holograms spun around her. She fired at one with the laser pistol in her left hand, making a small, quick jerk of her waist to counteract the movement of her arm. The invisible beam impacted the photoreceptors on the wall and the holoprojector painted a briefly lingering red splash on the spot, indicating where she had aimed and missed.

  Another target zipped by her right shoulder and almost out of sight behind her, but the trailblazer managed to twist around on her left foot with her other coming up and hanging in the air as she rotated. It was an awkward position but Sara got both her pistols on target and fired at it multiple times.

  Several red splashes pot marked the wall, then a green one destroyed and replaced the target for a moment before all the colors disappeared in sequence and she moved on to track other random shapes floating around the sphere that she stood within. Only a tiny area below here feet was unused and the targets often flew up over her head or down low, making Sara constantly reposition on the tiny pillar…else wait for the glowing shapes to work their way up and around into her preferred firing zones. That tactic had been anticipated in the design, and as such would only yield a moderate score for the best of marksmen.

  If Sara wanted a high score she was going to have to dance around on her tiny tabletop in order to get at enough targets fast enough to beat the timer.

  The Archon twisted her foot aside and made room to set the toes of her other one down alongside, getting both feet on the circle and standing ramrod straight as she fired at two separate targets with either gun, plastering the walls with shots instead of trying to go for precision fire. Her accuracy was being taken into effect in her scoring, but a hit was worth more points than she was losing with the misses so she’d just decided to try and rack up as many targets as she could.

  A minus sign materialized directly in front of her face on the wall, held position for a heartbeat, then shot up straight towards the ceiling. Sara brought both pistols up and fired at it, missing behind as it and her back arched up. She hit it just before tipping over and let her knees collapse partially in order to catch her balance and pull her torso forward. The butt of her right pistol caught the edge of the tiny circle she was standing on and helped pull her back to neutral, then she stood up and started firing at an inverted triangle to her left that crisscrossed with a curvy snake-like line.

  She bombarded the area where they came together with shots and managed to hit the snake, but the triangle shot on by and her right arm followed it while her left stayed up and in position, waiting for another target to manifest itself in that area. Sara had learned a while ago that reacting wasn’t always the best route to go, and sometimes she needed to be proactive and position herself for shots that may or may not come about, though with the way the targets were zipping around it was unlikely that any field of fire would remain empty for long.

  A block ‘U’ appeared from her peripheral vision and Sara shot it with a clean first hit, surprisingly, then the entire holographic simulation went down, which elicited a disappointed response from the Archon.

  “Ugh,” she moaned, knowing that she hadn’t hit anywhere near the number of targets she’d wanted. Sara spun around on the pillar and found her score floating behind her.

  1734

  Her goal for the immediate future was a 2200, and this run had just plain sucked. She was a decent shot, but this particular training challenge had been created by Taryn, who was just a whiz with firearms. The trailblazer’s best score, at least as far as the ship’s data had been updated, was an 11,751.

  A mixture of cockiness and instruction, Taryn had posted the video of one of her more modest runs and Sara couldn’t believe the acrobatic and contortionist maneuvers the woman would go through to get shots…and then nail the target with one or two trigger pulls. After seeing that Sara had felt pathetically outmatched and rededicated herself to raising her marksman skill a chunk higher, knowing that while she didn’t think she’d ever catch Taryn, she needed to keep within a reasonable range of her skills.

  1734 was better than most marksman specialist adepts could tally, but for a ranger it just wasn’t going to cut it.

  “Computer, reset chal…” she said as her earpiece activated. “Computer cancel,” she said, reaching up and tagging the backmost button. “Sara.”

  “Have you seen?” Greg asked.

  “Seen what? I’m training,” she said, getting both feet on the tiny pillar and bending at the knees so she came down in a crouch, almost sitting on her ankles.

  “The system’s not uninhabited, as it turns out. There’s a significant number of Ninkari on the surface that we think the lizards put on this planet to use as livestock. We haven’t found any lizard ships or bases yet, but I did see Kirby tracks in the mud inside one of the villages.”

  “Villages?”

  “Apparently the Ninkari are a bit more advanced than the Chipparat back on Corneria. Mud and wood huts by the looks of it.”

  “Wonderful,” Sara said, slipping her pistols back into her hip holsters and rubbing her eyes. “What do you want to do?”

  “Not sure yet. Wanted to run it by you.”

  “Well,” Sara said, getting the obvious possibilities out of the way, “we can set up shop here, go for an orbital defense to keep the lizards out, or we could relocate them to another system. How many are we talking about?”

  “Upwards of 500,000.”

  “And there are no…harvesting facilities on the surface?”

  “None that we’ve found yet. I think the lizards see this region of space as their backwater and they just dumped the Ninkari off here to grow their numbers, then they come back occasionally and pluck out the ones they want.”

  “Gruesome, but it suggests this system is part of a supply chain. I wouldn’t think 500,000 would be enough to justify an excessive number of lightyears of travel, so they’ve probably got some more worlds nearby out here that we don’t know about.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “So…ambush?”

  “Not with everyone. There’s no telling how long it will be before they get back…assuming they aren’t already somewhere in the system.”

  “Their bases and ships are hard enough to find as it is,” Sara pointed out. “And if they’re building camouflaged ones now, they’re going to be almost impossible to find if they don’t want us to.”

  “I know.”

  Both Archons paused their conversation for a moment, trying to think of what to do.

  “We can’t let them take any more,” Sara said finally.

  “If we’re going to camp out here permanently we’re going to need Paul’s resources.”

  “I think a wars
hip will be enough to hold it for now,” Sara differed. “We can split up and explore the adjacent systems and rendezvous back here on our return to Namek.”

  “And then?”

  “Long term I’m thinking this is a perfect location for Canderous.”

  Greg smiled. “You’re right, it is.”

  “We’ll have to sit on it for a few years before we can get them out here…and we’ll probably get another ‘I told you so’ out of it, but they’ll make for better guardians of the planet than we will. I for one have lizards to kill and I don’t want to get tied down to the point that they have the movement advantage. We need to retain first strike capability or they’ll overwhelm us with numbers.”

  “Those numbers appear busy at the moment.”

  “When we start causing them a lot of trouble I have no doubt they’ll find their way over to us.”

  “We’re in agreement there. How do you want to split up?”

  “I think we can do six groups. Single mission, out and back to the closest star systems. If we find anything we retreat and report, then engage as we see fit with everyone back onboard.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Which ship is staying behind?”

  “If there are no volunteers draw lots,” she suggested.

  “I was thinking about the Avenger. Captain Klivan has the most experience fighting the lizards.”

  “Done deal,” Sara said, staring down at the hexagonal ridges that covered the dome’s interior. “Are we finishing the survey here first or leaving it up to him?”

  “Finish here. I don’t want to leave him alone if there turns out to be a base here.”

  “One warship is more than enough to handle a single base,” Sara pointed out, referring to the Warship-class jumpships rather than an individual fighting starship, of which they carried dozens.

  “But if another jumpship comes in to harvest more Ninkari it’ll bring cruisers, kirbies, and fighters with it. I’d say he’d still have the advantage in that situation, but throw in more assets already present with a surface base and the odds aren’t so good.”

  “Point taken. How many days are we looking at then?”

  “Preliminaries should be done in 2 days, but it’ll be another 2-3 weeks before we get decent topographical maps constructed, and I don’t want to leave before then.”

  “Do you want to send a courier back to Paul?”

  “Not yet. Let’s have a look around the area first.”

  Sara smiled, knowing that by ‘around the area’ he meant the neighboring star systems. “Guess we do need to know who’s next door before we think about setting up permanently here,” she said, standing up. “Keep me updated if something happens in the next few hours. I’m in the middle of a lengthy session.”

  “Progress?”

  “I said ‘lengthy’ for a reason.”

  “Will do,” he said, cutting out.

  Sara touched her earpiece and put it into sleep mode so she’d only get a single chime if she was being contacted rather than an immediate link to any ongoing chatter, then pulled out her pair of pistols and lifted up her right leg, flexing it a few times, then alternated with the other before twitching her fingers and getting her mind ready to jump back into the flow.

  “Computer…restart challenge.”

  A split second later the glowing icons returned and Sara’s body turned into a blur of precise muscle movements as the curved wall began to sparkle with red and green dots.

  9

  March 29, 2404

  Eritath System

  3rd planet

  Jason stood in the Legolas’s bridge command nexus, watching the ongoing naval battle in mid hologram. At the moment his point of view was from the warship, with icons representing the remote-controlled cruisers and destroyers spanning a large defensive line in front of the massive ship. Further off to the right were two more warships under Jason’s command, each of which also had their fighting ships deployed in an ongoing engagement with a batch of lizard cruisers and battleships. The Legolas’s fleet had yet to be engaged, as it had come in behind the others, and was now flanking the melee in order to get at the enemy defense station in orbit.

  Or rather one of them. Three had been constructed to date, with the partial skeleton of a 4th floating lazily around the reddish planet below with construction crews buzzing around it nonstop. Kyler’s forces had blasted it apart from the get go and were currently engaging one of the other defense stations while Emily’s had the third, neither of which would prove difficult in taking down. The trick would be doing it without losing a ship, which he knew both Archons were keen on doing.

  Jason’s task was the hardest of the three, for the lizard warships had decided to cluster together to defend this one station, maximizing what little odds they had. Star Force’s numbers were far too great, but had they not been the lizard defenses would have rated very high for such a distant colony world…and one that the Hycre had not known existed.

  That bothered Jason, because it meant that the maps they’d been given were woefully out of date. Not only did the lizards have a significant presence in this system, but it meant that they were a lot closer to Namek than they’d assumed…which was the real problem. They were having to make assumptions about their enemy using intelligence from their allies. The least the Hycre could have done was mention the fact that their maps were old…and now he wondered just how old they really were.

  Jason input a few additional commands into the nexus, but otherwise let the Captains handle their fleets’ movements. The lizards were picking individual ships to target, hoping to take out at least a few before they were overwhelmed and Jason wanted to deny them that, issuing orders to rotate the lines so that those ships getting hit could be given some cover from the attackers once their shields went down.

  Even as he watched though, one of the heavy cruiser icons winked out, meaning that there would be little more than debris left to reclaim afterwards and recycle, rather than a damaged ship to repair. He clenched his fist in frustration, knowing that meant one less cleansing beam he had to work with. Jason was about to issue new orders to get the other heavy cruisers moving back and bring the smaller ships into gap when the ships began to redeploy in just that fashion. Apparently the warship Captains had come to the same conclusions and already made the correction.

  Satisfied that they were on top of things Jason turned his attention back to the defense station as the first cleansing beams were being fired from the Legolas’s fleet, which stretched out far longer than the enemy’s plasma range and penetrated the station’s shields, burning into hull plates like tiny scalpels before dissipating. They fired over and over again, slowly picking off weapons batteries, shield generators, and cutting into the hangar bays that were in the process of disgorging thousands of fighters.

  Jason sent out a prompt to all of the pilots flying the drone warships to prepare their anti-air batteries as the lengthy swarm began to race out towards the distant ships in several tendrils on the holographic map. As they came the cleansing beams continued to fire, all the while the rest of the Star Force ships began to position themselves around the heavy cruisers to bolster their anti-fighter support, as well as to draw some of the enemy’s fire onto themselves.

  It took a while for the fighters to reach the Legolas’s fleet, but when they did they swarmed around the nearest destroyers, frigates, and corvettes that had eeked out in front of the larger ships. Lots of enemy dots began to disappear from the battlemap but the swarm was unphased…then one of the corvette icons went out, followed by a destroyer not soon after.

  Jason frowned hard and zoomed in to that particular section of the battle, with the tiny pinpricks that were the fighters enlarged to the point where he could almost make out their shape. Most were swerving in and out of the capital ships, but he caught sight of one ramming a nearby destroyer…after which the battlemap took off the ship’s shields and carved a small section out of its wireframe hull.

  “Damn it, they’ve got
Kamikazes with nukes…or worse,” he whispered to himself as he began typing out new orders. Soon a flurry of new dots, lesser in number, began appearing around some of the destroyers and cruisers as they ships emptied their stores of attack drones. The small, cubbish little devices flew up and out of the concealed holds and spread out around the warships in a defensive halo…with about half their number traveling over towards the heavy cruisers.

  When the lizard fighters encountered them there was a clash of tiny plasma weapons, with missiles added into the mix by the drones. The blue Star Force dots began cancelling out the red lizard ones, while some shot on past the defensive halos and in towards the warships…which the warships’ anti-air weaponry then focused on.

  Jason assumed those were the bomb-carrying fighters which, as far as he could make out with the sensor data being analyzed and piped into the nexus by the Legolas’s bridge crew, were exactly the same hull design as the regular fighters, making it impossible to tell one apart from the other. Another nice surprise from the lizards, and Jason was just glad they’d had the previously worthless attack drones onboard some of the ships as standard weaponry, otherwise the kamikazes would have been able to make it through to a lot more ships.

  The lizards weren’t stupid, however, and when they saw the writing on the wall they began bypassing the attack drones and escorting the ‘bombers’ down onto the capital ships, confusing the anti-air batteries as to which were the priority targets and actually pummeling into the ships’ hulls along with them to insure there was no break in the ruse.

  The attack drones ate up a lot of the fighters as they passed by, but multiple nuke-level detonations began popping up across the larger ships’ hulls, but most of which were focused on the heavy cruisers. Half of them were significantly damaged, with three being a total loss. One of the lizard ‘poppers’ wasn’t enough to kill a cruiser, but it would take a chunk out of the hull even with the shields up, with upscaled damage if the shields had already been taken down or weakened.