Star Force: Paradigm (SF35)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Shaking the beehive, aye,” Voru acknowledged as one of the vid screens switched over from ‘window’ mode to the perspective of the torpedo, still hanging underneath a skeet with the craft just visible in camera on top.

  When the skeet moved into its diving run the ocean appeared, then the torpedo detached and fell straight through the waves, quivering a bit as its engines fought the turbulence of the last explosion, but it maintained its course down to the crater and sank to a lower depth than the others had, now that there were no tendrils blocking the way.

  It passed through the broken concealment doors and into the shaft, with the camera view having to switch to computer enhanced imagery due to the lack of light at that depth, despite the glows being cast from the intact tendrils that looked like a field of ugly Christmas trees. Inside the rectangular tube there was nothing to see for some time, then the architecture made a turn and shallowed out, running lateral a bit before coming up to another set of closed doors that it detonated against.

  The feed cut out, and there was a delayed reaction before a tiny bit of turbulence made its way up to the ocean surface, with the lizard passageway acting like a squirt gun to direct the blast straight up rather than out spherically, allowing it to reach all the way back to the surface, carrying a lot of tendril debris with it that arced over and drifted back down into the field.

  Kyler kept staring at the ‘signal end’ message on the vid screen, chewing on his fingernail as it switched back to an external view.

  “So that’s how it’s going to be then,” he whispered, seeing his easy assault just get a lot more complicated. The lizards were burrowed in good and deep, meaning that Star Force was going to have to go down through predictable entrances and engage them at places of their choosing…and who knew what was waiting for them down there.

  “What’s the width on that passageway?”

  “Widest point is 580 meters,” Voru answered a moment later.

  Kyler nodded. “So they can come in and out, but our battleships can’t.”

  “It appears that way, though our squids will have no problem.”

  Kyler shook his head. “We’re not playing their game. I’d bet our mastermind is down there, and he can stay all comfy and incommunicado until he’s ready to come out. Begin a search for comm lines, buoys, transmitters, and signals. I want this place under blackout…or whiteout if necessary. We can build jammers if we have to, let’s just make sure they haven’t got any buried lines that can circumvent it.”

  “We’ll need to be in the water for a tight scan…and I suggest we use the squids to maximize our coverage area.”

  “Put a hold on that. Direct the rest of the torpedoes to the likely entrances and peel off as many tendrils as we can. I don’t want the lizards sneaking out once we submerge.”

  “No guarantee we’ll get them all, given the size of the field,” Voru cautioned.

  “We’ll disassemble the rest with the battleships.”

  Voru raised an eyebrow. “That will take some time,” he understated.

  “No rush,” Kyler said offhand.

  The Captain smiled. “And no resupply for the lizards in the mean time?”

  “Not here anyway.”

  “Where do you want the Pearl?”

  “As soon as the water calms down I want us over the big entrance…and a probe sent down inside to see what damage we did. Have the rest of the battleships go hunting. If their fleet hasn’t already gotten out of sensor range, see that they don’t live to learn from their mistake.”

  The tiny probe jetted its way out from the underside of the Black Pearl, arcing over into a dive that brought it down through the water towards the broken entry doors as multiple blue lances flashed around it as the battleship targeted the closest defense tendrils with its shield columns and delivered plasma blasts down the waterless conduits to their targets.

  The man-sized probe eventually got low enough that the debris shrouded its view of the tendrils under attack, then the camera angles were consumed by the interior of the rectangular tube. The probe continued straight down for quite a ways before it encountered any floating debris, then the remote pilot in the Black Pearl slowed it down and zigzagged its way through until it came to the turn. It paused there briefly, receiving new programming, then pushed on, with the control signal from the battleship weakening the further in it got, given that it couldn’t pass through the solid rock.

  The camera signal returning to the battleship eventually disappeared as well, with Kyler waiting nearly half an hour before contact was remade and a data dump of data flooded back up to the Pearl. As the bridge crew deciphered the sensor data a holographic map began to form, drawing Kyler’s attention away from the ‘window’ that showed the ongoing tendril destruction.

  The doors to the passageway had been destroyed, along with chunks of the rim that led into a massive underwater chamber that was clogged with ships…some intact and others damaged or destroyed. Kyler knew instantly that this was one of the lizard shipyards, even before the construction slips were displayed, attached to the rocky walls.

  Connecting tunnels exited out four other points around the large chamber, but the probe hadn’t ventured down any of them. Instead it had explored the intricate lattice work of cargo modules that had been cracked open and warped by the explosion, meaning the computer had wasted most of its scanning time nudging its way through a maze of junk.

  That was the downside of computers…they could only do what they were programmed to, unable to improvise where a person easily would, but at least the wasted time had kept it away from the active lizard ships in the chamber, allowing the probe to survive long enough to return to them with the data it had.

  “Your thoughts, Captain?”

  Voru rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “All that debris would make for a chaotic battlefield, giving more value to the nimbler ships. I’d recommend shipping in another load of tactical torpedoes and shoving them in there rather than going in with ships. I’d still give us the advantage if we brought enough forces to bear, but it’d get really messy and we’d lose a lot taking it. I also don’t like those connecting passageways. We have no idea of how many more ships they have to reinforce this chamber with.”

  Kyler pointed to several points on the ever growing map near the entrance.

  “No to the torpedoes. They’re erecting minnow launchers. They’ll take them out before they could breach the interior.”

  Voru frowned. “They do learn fast. We could still use one, detonated prematurely, to push those defenses out of position with the blast wave, then send a second before they could get them realigned.”

  “Some potential there,” Kyler granted him, “but I don’t want to fight their fleet without the battleships. We bring them out to us.”

  “And if they don’t feel like it?”

  “This base is neutralized one way or another while we take the fight to the others. For now we need to focus on getting this entire tendril field cleared.”

  “Permission to use our onboard ordinance?”

  “Denied. I still don’t trust the lizards not to have an ace up their sleeve. Be patient and use plasma only. The next move is theirs. If they feel like sitting on their hands then we’ll systematically take down the field with our only losses being plasma and power. Time is our ally in this…let’s make the most of it.”

  9

  October 19, 2432

  Retari System

  Atlantica

  Kyler ran through Manaan’s interior corridors, bouncing in and out of people walking by as he shot his way towards the command level, then when he finally got there he bypassed all of the staff and ran across to the command nexus and logged in with a quick touch to the Ikrid sphere, bringing up the systems in a hurry.

  The holographic map of the planet shrunk down and highlighted the location where his battleships were still working their way through the lizard defense tendril field, having cleared more than 60% of it and revealing 5 different entra
nces to the subsurface base…but that wasn’t why he was in a rush. It was the plume of lizard aquatics ships coming up out of one of the entrances that his fleet hadn’t gotten to yet that had prompted a quick comm call from his staff that had pulled him out of Balboa Lane.

  There had only been so many hours he could keep himself from going crazy using the Black Pearl’s treadmill and other limited training equipment, so after it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a massive battle for control of the lizard base, he’d called for a dropship to come pick him up and return him to the city while Voru and the other Captains went about their work clearing the field. Apparently the lizards didn’t like the idea of all their entrances being exposed, so they were now coming out to engage the Star Force fleet while they still had some tendril defenses left to aid them.

  But it only took a quick look from Kyler to see that the lizards weren’t engaging the battleships…they were running, while using part of their fleet as a sacrificial distraction, hoping to draw the battleships in to the tendrils.

  Using the nexus controls the trailblazer set up a no-go line on the hologram, indicating that the battleships shouldn’t press any closer in towards the tendrils, even if the lizards withdrew into them…which they were doing, making it almost impossible for the battleships to get a straight shot at them, because the tendrils would sway and snap the shield columns before they could fire on the ships.

  That left hundreds of lizard light cruisers and frigates with cover to fire their torpedoes and minnows out of the tendril field against the closest battleships, covering their shields in a flurry of impacts that their point defenses were allowing through. The battleships wisely let some hit the shields, knowing that they could absorb the gnat-like blows while saving PDMs for later, but that was only going to lengthen the engagement, for there were so many lizard weapons coming their way that there was no way they were going to be able to keep shooting them down, at which point they’d be forced to retreat or advance into the field where they could not go.

  The Highwind and Nautilus maneuvered up to the surface, then over top the field so they could fire down directly on top of the tendrils, hoping to aim through the gaps between them…but the large moving strands of what looked like living machinery bent over to provide cover, not allowing the vertical shield columns any more luck at reaching the ships nestled below the tendrils, which glowed with thousands of plasma nubs that would wreak havoc on anything that they came into physical contact with.

  The lizard ships were immune, however, and the tendrils knew not to brush up against them, even turning off the plasma nubs nearest to their hulls so there would be no accidental grazes…all the while more torpedoes and the slightly smaller minnows kept swimming out and hammering the battleships in a lengthy torrent, which the larger ships more or less shrugged off, though they couldn’t keep that up forever and Kyler knew it.

  Now would have been a perfect opportunity to use a tactical torpedo…had they any left. He guessed the lizards had waited until they were fairly sure that Star Force had expended all they had before launching this counterattack, for the turbulence alone from a detonation would have knocked their ships into the tendrils, effectively using their own defenses against them in one masterstroke of a blow. And even if the tendrils deactivated in time the ships would still receive hull damage from the collisions and the concussion of the blast.

  But no, Kyler had used all of them to take out the tendrils as fast as possible, and even if he had pulled more out of storage in Seaquest there was no way to get them here in time, for the lizard ships were continuing to come out and saturate the tendril field, all the while part of them shot off in a straight line away from the battleships, making a run for the edge of their sensor range while the others kept up the torpedo barrages.

  Kyler immediately tagged two of the nine battleships with orders to go after the fleeing ships, and a few seconds later they almost synchronously started to rise up towards the surface, knowing that they could travel farther and faster in air than the lizards could underwater. The trick was in keeping them in sensor range, and scanning from the air down into the water was more problematic than scanning through water only.

  Even as he gave the order Kyler suspected it was what the lizards expected him to do, so he waited and watched…then he saw another strand of ships come up from a second hidden entrance and shoot off a different direction while more and more came up the first one and added additional torpedoes to the attack on the closest battleships.

  Kyler knew the lizards…no, the mastermind lizard…was trying to divide the battleships up and he was succeeding, but was it doing it to whittle them down and hope to win a battle, or as a diversion while something made a run for it? With the sacrificial nature of lizard war tactics he didn’t expect the boss lizard to be trying to save his own skin, but they were definitely not making a random push, meaning they had an objective in play. Now what was it?

  As Kyler watched the escaping convoys of ships stretching out like fingers his gut collapsed into a cramp as he had a thought, then he zoomed the map out a bit and saw the ends of the lizards’ communication relay network that Star Force had cut the base off from, and the fact that the ships were heading directly for them…meaning the mastermind would be able to relay signals through the line of ships and out to the intact infrastructure, giving it the ability to both send and receive messages for at least a brief period of time.

  Kyler knew that wasn’t the main reason they were fleeing, just a side benefit. It was clear that the lizards didn’t feel like they could hold the base so long as Star Force didn’t feel like trying to fight it out inside, and rather be neutralized by a siege they would prefer running and…doing what?

  Even as he formed the mental question he knew the answer. Their mastermind would pull a Thrawn and devise a better defensive system than the tendrils alone, after scattering their fleet across the planet where Star Force could only get at a few of them…essentially resetting the game with a disadvantage of resources, but with an ocean of anonymity to hide within, letting the lizards hold out and play for the long term, perhaps hoping for a reversal in orbit.

  Kyler didn’t want to let that many of them get away, and he had no idea where the mastermind was, let alone how to confirm they’d found it if they ever did, so he opened a comm line out to the Black Pearl in lieu of typing out orders and got Voru’s hologram in response.

  “Sorry you’re missing all the fun,” the Captain commented.

  “Deploy squids down the cleared tunnel entrances,” Kyler said quickly, knowing they had little time to waste. “Use a handful at the junctions for relays and scouts down to probe for booby-traps and defenses…then push through en mass and flank these bastards from inside.”

  Voru’s eyes narrowed quickly, then eased back open as he comprehended what the Archon was saying. “With pleasure.”

  Kyler cut the hologram off and returned his main view to the battlemap, which was being relayed from the battleships on site through an aerial buoy floating on anti-grav above the ocean, allowing it to transmit through the air back to their cities rather than trying to do so through underwater relays. Before the lizards had knocked down any such vulnerable objects with their air power, but now that it had diminished to almost nothing Kyler had gotten more bold and started to reset the aerial relay grid, with a special buoy having been brought with the battleships to this location to allow them all to submerge and still stay in contact with the rest of the planet.

  It was his only link to his ships on the battlefield so long as they were all underwater, just as the line of fleeing ships was about to give the mastermind its link to its underwater grid, allowing it to organize in the same way…though there couldn’t have been enough ships nearby to call for aid, so whatever it intended it probably didn’t have to do with this battle, and launching a simultaneous assault elsewhere was nearly futile, given that it would only take a handful of hours for the battleships to relocate via air to wherever needed withi
n Star Force territory.

  Kyler knew it had something up its sleeve, but right now he couldn’t do anything about it.

  The first of the squids were popping out of the battleships on his battlemap now, reminding him that even if the lizards had some side objectives going, they were at the disadvantage here and he needed to push for as many gains as he could get before they had a chance to regroup.

  He switched over to binary view, with the battlemap shifted to his left and the right side of the nexus’s holographic display becoming the first person view of one of the squids heading for a descending tunnel around which all the defensive tendrils were gone. It zipped down the passageway at decent speed, then came up against a wall of torpedoes and the signal dropped out.

  Kyler pulled up another squid, this one further back in line, and saw a hoard of the remote-controlled aquatics craft rushing forward to overcome the torpedo launchers with sheer numbers. The first few soaked up a lot of hits, churning the water about chaotically within the tube, but as much as that affected the squids it also buffeted around the torpedo launchers at the far end.

  Like a football running back pushing through blockers and the defensive line, the squid Kyler was watching through got past the debris and came up on one of the blocky launchers that looked like it was part of a frigate that hadn’t been fully assembled, probably pulled from their construction facilities and repurposed for use here.

  Whatever its origins, Kyler’s squid latched onto it with its four gigantic arms, gripping it so tight it left grooves in the hull as the drone extended a short shield column out from its ‘mouth’ and poured plasma into the torpedo launcher multiple times…then the explosives must have been hit, for the entire assembly exploded, taking the squid with it.

  Kyler shifted view over to another, and followed it in past where the impromptu defenses had been laid out and inside a much cleaner chamber than Kyler had seen at the previous entry passage that they’d sent the probe down. There was no floating debris here, but rather an almost completely empty sphere of water with construction slips around the periphery. A few lizard ships remained, and Kyler could see other squids go after them while his and the main body pushed on through the chamber towards one of the side tunnels.