Star Force: Shame (SF59)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  That list of targets was constructed by Greg personally for each assault, not wanting to leave anything up to chance or his subordinates, and the H’kar had grown to trust in his judgement and now followed his orders to the letter. That hadn’t always been the case, but after many years of fighting side by side with Star Force and learning from them the number one lesson they’d picked up was that the trailblazers had no equal when it came to strategy…and the fact that their ships survived more engagements when one of the Humans was in command.

  Greg had already sent down the list of targets, which spared the lizards main habitation areas and food storage/production facilities but targeted all other industry and the growth pods. Greg was willing to let most of the current lizards live, but he couldn’t afford to let them easily make more, hence the growth pods were always a high valued target. They could and would rebuild them again after Star Force left, but it would delay them considerably by not being able to replace their personnel losses in such short order.

  The H’kar had originally argued that if they were razing lizard colonies that they should kill everyone on the planet, but after fighting alongside Star Force they’d begun to accept the different strategy and, whether they agreed with it or not they did adhere to it, which was why Greg was willing to let them carry out the secondary surface bombardment. He didn’t have to worry about them going off mission and targeting structures he hadn’t tagged. That sort of foolishness was not something the H’kar went in for, and Greg was glad they had a professional ally to work with.

  While most of the H’kar battleships, their smallest ships, were in atmosphere their two behemoths sat nearby Greg’s command ship in wait. Both H’kar ships were the equivalent of mobile starbases, capable of a wide range of support tasks but just as well equipped to throw down the damage at heavy targets…in fact that was the design behind the entire H’kar fleet, to walk up to a big enemy and punch it in the face. That made them a heavy hitting race, and so ill-suited to fighting the lizards.

  They didn’t previously see the value of having smaller warships, though their time with Star Force was certainly giving them an education. Their destars were a Nexus upgrade that they’d created for just that purpose, and essentially being a superlaser that would fire continuously with no recharge cycle. It was made of a dense photon slurry, but altered in such a way to artificially bond them together into packets, giving it much more kill power than any traditional laser could conceivably throw out regardless as to how much power you put into it.

  Typically one of the H’kar battleships would move up close to an enemy and tag it with the destar, keeping the blue-white beam on it until the ship was destroyed then moving on to the next. When facing off against a few large ships this worked very well, but with a lizard cruiser swarm each individual ship didn’t last very long under that level of firepower, but it took time to target another and the speed at which the cruisers moved often gave the H’kar gunners trouble.

  They could certainly kill a lot of cruisers, but the same tonnage of ships, when combined into three or four big vessels was much easier for the H’kar to take down. Spreading it out into fleets of hundreds of them mean the H’kar had to take weaponsfire for a very long time because no single crippling shot could be fired.

  Add in the fact that each battleship only had 1 destar and not a lot of support weapons and you had a prime target on their ships for the lizards to target, often with the H’kar running off with ‘blinded’ ships that had their destar destroyed. While having a big gun was an advantage in many circumstances, the mismatch against the lizards proved to be one glaring problem for the H’kar. Already they were working with Star Force to develop new warships designed specifically to fight the lizards, but the first prototypes were several years from completion.

  That said, the H’kar fleet was anything but useless. Originally no H’kar battleship had ever entered the atmosphere of a planet, for they were built in space and operated in space…up until Liam had convinced them that they could go planetside and be effective. Now it was a standard tactic in their joint raids, with their destars being able to widen the beam and created a paintbrush that could level infrastructure quite quickly as opposed to the thin cleansing beams that Star Force could hit the surface with.

  Rail guns were also less effective because of their needle-prick hits. Both weapons had been used to take down the colony shields, and now Greg had the H’kar moving in to clean up even as he repositioned his own drone fleet to assault more of the lizard colonies on the planet that had seen nearly a third of its surface consumed by the invaders. They were in what had once been Calavari space, though this planet had belonged to the Vesdan, who sadly had not survived the encounter nor were able to flee from it, given their primitive technology.

  The battle in orbit had been quick, with only a few dozen cruisers in defense which the much larger joint fleet easily hunted down. It was good to eliminate them, but the real long term effect was in ridding the surface of the colonies’ ability to build and sending what they had already created into the junkyard category. This was the third system that Greg had assaulted on this campaign, and in each case he left the lizards with less than they had originally, setting back their development in these systems and effectively nullifying their ability to reinforce or spread to others.

  As of now they didn’t have a single starship left in the system, nor had they advanced to the point of creating an interstellar comm station, meaning that the rest of the lizard empire was going to be kept in the dark as to what had happened here, and the more confusion Greg and the others could sow behind enemy lines the better.

  Just then the battlemap began to flicker with activity as a group of incoming jumps registered in planetary orbit a few dozen kilometers higher in altitude than his command ship currently sat on its lazy orbit around the planet and several hundred behind its current track.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, mentally sending out an alert and repositioning those ships closest to him. “Now there’s bad timing for you.”

  An image of the exoskeletal H’kar commander popped up alongside the battlemap, with the computer handling the translation given that only a handful of their allies spoke English.

  “An ambush?”

  “They’re coming from the stellar jumpline, so I’d guess they were scheduled to arrive here and we just picked a bad time,” Greg said as the much larger image of an invoker appeared on the battlemap behind a large mass of cruisers that, almost belatedly began to reform into a screen, suggesting that they were as surprised by the raiding fleets’ presence as Greg was to see them here.

  The H’kar made an annoying clicking sound that the computer didn’t bother to translate, but that Greg knew was angry frustration. “Shall we withdrawal?”

  “No, we’re taking this bastard down…so long as there’s only the one of them.”

  “We only have a light fleet and not the tonnage required to defeat that ship…at least not without great sacrifice.”

  “Keep half your fleet on the surface running through the target list and bring the other half up to me and task them to protect these ships,” Greg said, mentally tagging every rail gun-equipped drone he had. “Do not assault the invoker.”

  “You cannot take it alone.”

  “Your destars are medium range and will require you to get within the energy arcs, that means you stay back or get slaughtered.”

  “Our behemoths can weather the storm briefly.”

  Greg shook his head. “Watch and learn. This isn’t the first invoker we’ve tangled with. They’re designed to destroy tonnage, so what you have to do is sting them to death.”

  The H’kar commander was silent, then a moment later his hologram disappeared, but as ordered portions of the fleet assaulting the surface abandoned their targets and began to gain altitude.

  Greg watched carefully as the rest of the lizard fleet arrived. There were a few bigger ships in the mix, four battleships and one dreadnaught, but it appear
ed to merely be an escort fleet for the invoker with no other ‘chess pieces’ involved. He guessed they were either passing through the system en route to elsewhere or were using this location as a rendezvous, for there was nothing here warranting that much firepower.

  Greg’s own command ship he was keeping away from the fight as well. He knew he could dive into the energy arcs if he had to, but the shields wouldn’t last long enough for him to deliver a killing blow to the invoker before it started to eat away at his giant donut. No, Liam had taught him this trick a while back, and it was a drone-only affair. He just hoped the lizards hadn’t developed a counter for it.

  The enemy didn’t hold off, but rather came straight at the command ship and the two H’kar behemoths, which with their escort fleet would have made for an even fight. It was odd, given how in the past the lizards had always wanted to protect their invokers, but now every time they had a chance to hit one of Star Force’s command ships they took the opportunity regardless of what it would cost them. They wanted a kill badly, but Greg wasn’t going to give them a chance today.

  Instead he had his rail gun-equipped warships move into a partial spherical arc around one quarter of the invoker as the cruiser swarm came out to meet them when it was determined that they were going to hold range and not let the big ship move within striking distance. By then the H’kar began to catch up and helped the drones fend off the cruisers, using their overpowered destars to knock out one gnat at a time, leaving the rest of the swarm free to poke at the black, rectangular drones.

  As they did the rail runs began targeting the invoker and firing on specific points that Greg gave them. The metallic bullets moved so fast that they passed through the energy arcs without getting fully disintegrated, merely a little melty on the outside, allowing the hard central mass of the slugs to hit the thin shields guarding the hull of the ship. It took several minutes of pounding, but eventually they broke through and with enough subsequent hits knocked out a few of the invoker’s emitters.

  That reduced the amount of energy arcs in that area, with the invoker immediately beginning to pivot around to bring a more intact area of the field into the firing line. Greg wasn’t going to have that, so he had his drones chase the weakened area around the invoker like they were the horses on a carousel, all the time with the H’kar and other drones protecting them from the cruisers and the five larger lizard ships that the H’kar eagerly pursued.

  Those kept trying to retreat to the invoker and draw the H’kar into range, but every time they poked a few holes in them they’d disengage, not falling for the bait as they would have once done. Traditional H’kar strategy held that once you engaged a target you stayed on it until either it or you were destroyed, but thankfully Star Force had rid them of that lunacy…at least as far as their raiding fleets were concerned.

  The rail gun slugs kept firing, targeting the area near the emitters despite the fact that sensor locks were nearly impossible given the disrupting nature of the energy arcs, but the more that were damaged the more gaps there were in the crisscrossing rainbow lightning field, allowing more precise plotting and even a few well targeted cleansing beams to shoot through.

  Greg could have had all his cleansing beams open up on the invoker, including those on the command ship, but he needed those to assist with destroying the cruisers right now and his own ship had to keep moving to stay away from the invoker that was still chasing it, with the battlefield being dragged along wherever it went.

  The Star Force and H’kar ships had to keep dancing to remain in position, but eventually the weak area on the invoker dropped its energy arcs low enough that Greg gave the go ahead to four of his drones that were standing by in the back of the battle. As a group they moved through the lizard swarm and dove towards the energy arcs, with the three cruisers tucking up against the rear of a shield ship as it deployed its full power to create an egg-like barrier around the foursome.

  Greg had never done this before, but Liam’s notes had indicated how much the shield ship should be able to take and he’d gone just a little under that amount to be on the safe side…though the random nature of the lizards’ weapon defied confident numbers, so he found himself holding his breath a bit as the remote-controlled ships dove into the field.

  He lost track of them on the battlemap briefly, with the control signals also being disrupted by the energy arcs but with enough gaps that there was still intermittent contact and control. The shield ship lit up with damage statistics suddenly, then it and the three cruisers were inside the energy arcs and into the ‘calm’ center of the hurricane where the hulk of the ship sat.

  Defense weapons began popping plasma at the quartet, but the three cruisers had come through virtually unharmed and targeted them, first having to break through the massive ship’s shields with their maulers before they began picking off the defense batteries and owning a little piece of the ship as they maneuvered carefully so not to hit the hull or be flung back out into the energy arcs as the invoker made several abrupt course changes.

  The drones were the faster and able to stay in their pocket of calm, and from which they began moving out across the hull, targeting other defensive weapons before they migrated over to the nearest emitter and slagged it. From there they hit more and more, diminishing the energy field to the point where the lizards saw the writing on the wall and decided to run.

  The invoker reversed course and moved back to the stellar jumpline, with the four drones sticking with it and some of the remaining cruisers following, with the rest staying behind to fight and die as a diversion. When the invoker got back to the jumpline it deactivated its energy field and disappeared with a massive surge of acceleration…and with it went the drones, now out of communications range and acting on preset orders.

  Greg didn’t know if they’d do much more damage or not, but he wanted them pestering the invoker when it arrived at the star.

  A few seconds later his command ship made its own offline jump, tugging on other gravity wells to get the proper angle as he intended to beat the invoker to the star, leaving the two behemoths behind with orders to move in and assist with cleaning up the remains of the enemy fleet which included the battleships and dreadnaught.

  Greg’s navigators had to guess at what altitude the invoker would come out of its jump, but they got him close. The command ship arrived some 17 seconds head of the invoker, which lit up its energy arcs again and one of the cruiser icons pacing it went out, unable to stay or get back within the hollow in time.

  The other two and the damaged shield ship were still there and now back in remote control range, with several more emitters shown to have been knocked out during the microjump. Greg’s pilots used them to target a few more as the command ship chased down the invoker and dove straight into the now weakened energy arcs, taking the massive hits against its shields and getting within close firing range.

  When that happened the hull of the invoker literally exploded with weapons impacts. Several emitter pylons were severed by cleansing beams and the bloon launcher blasted into the hull with multiple hits in the same location, chewing a crater into it as the command ship enlarged its IDF field to dangerous levels in order to ensnare the bigger ship and keep it from jumping out or maneuvering at all.

  It was a modification that had been made in the newer models and had the IDF emitters ramped up to their maximum output, with so much power flowing through them they were on the verge of burning out, but it had been approved by the techs and was holding up at the moment, though Greg knew it wouldn’t last because the field was drawing off of a specific capacitor that only held so much juice.

  But in that short span of time the command ship was going to rip apart the invoker. The only question was whether they could damage the internal gravity drives before their nullification bubble popped.

  Eventually the command ships’ shields went down and the hull started taking hits, with several weapons batteries going offline like the lights of a Christmas tree slowly winki
ng out, but the number of emitters left on the invoker was diminishing even faster, and before long there were only a few rainbow tendrils left to damage the Star Force super ship, and those were having trouble getting through the hull armor, for like the invoker had done previously Greg was now spinning the giant donut around and taking the damaged portion out of the line of fire.

  With their sensors now back to almost normal, the cleansing beams began poking deep into specific portions of the hull, reaching for and hitting some of the gravity drives or their support components, but they were having to burn through kilometers of ship to get to them, and every twitch in their firing lines meant more material to get in the way of the beams.

  Then the IDF bubble expired and the field reverted back to ship’s size, with Greg waiting to see what would happen.

  A sudden surge of motion tore the invoker away from the command ship, then it was off on a course around the perimeter of the star, ostensibly towards a jumpline.

  “Damn,” he swore, getting navigational analysis a moment later that indicated the invoker was off course and headed towards no known jumpline…as well as drifting out from the star, which would diminish the gravitational intensity it would need to make an interstellar jump, especially now without all of its gravity drives to pull on.

  Greg smiled and input a chase course to the navigator, with the command ship making its own jump and catching up to the invoker without it altering course in response. A quick look at the sensors indicated that there had been an internal explosion, possibly due to the last microjump, that had gutted the remaining gravity drives or at least their power sources.