by Aer-ki Jyr
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 entrances 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 than 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 within 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.
When it ducked in, Kyler could see that it was the same width and shape as the external shaft, but not nearly as long, for it opened up into a much smaller chamber that reminded him of a parking lot with a large building attached, having been dug into the rock face. With nothing there to attack the squids pushed on through to the far side and back into another tunnel, with the battlemap updating and expanding as they and other squid groups worked their way through the other entrances…all of which were headed towards the intact region of the tendril field where the enemy fleet was coming out of.
Eventually Kyler’s squid, being piloted by a crewer onboard the Loch Ness, came out into a chamber that was not deserted…at all. It was packed full of warships, apparently having been pulled from other areas of the base and awaiting their turn to go up the shaft in the ceiling and exit through the tendril field.
The trailblazer almost blanched when he saw how many they had built, then his squid accelerated in behind another trio of the drones and headed for a lizard destroyer, bypassing a host of smaller ships and sharks. As he watched the arms, which had been clenched together into a rough arrowhead shape for maneuvering efficiency, split apart just before it rammed into the whale-like hull and grabbed hold.
Kyler’s holographic screen was filled with hull as it extended its shield column out and started hammering through the lizard hull with blue plasma strikes. He watched it break through and begin slagging internal components, then just as he was about to switch to another squid he saw his get hit by minnow strikes that took down its shields.
He pulled back from the camera view and went straight to battlemap, seeing swarms of the sharks hammering the squids that had attached to the large ships, all the while more of the Star Force craft were pouring out of the connecting tunnel into the already crowded chamber. It was the equivalent of two boxers being shoved into a phone booth with each other and trying to go at it with only inches of separation, with chaos ensuing.
Kyler started tagging targets, trying to get his team organized while the lizards panicked and shot at anything that moved. First thing he did was mark the destroyers and cruisers as non-primary targets while putting the most emphasis on the frigates, which carried a disproportionate amount of the lizard’s torpedoes. The larger ships had more and stronger versions, but using them was doing as much damage to their own fleet as it was the squids, so Kyler wanted to trim down the enemy’s precision weapons, given that with the forming debris field the bigger ones would have a hard time getting to their targets.
As the melee ensued, the nearest sharks quickly ran out of ammunition, allowing the incoming squids more freedom of movement. The lizard light destroyers, amazingly, had put up their defense trees, looking like swollen puff balls trying to block what little room there was in the water and getting a mess of debris in their defensive netting as a result. That said, they were spitting out hoards of minnows, with the squids hard pressed to get at them through their strands.
Kyler ordered them to just ignore them and focus on other targets, namely the frigates and the now pesky corvettes that were clamping down and crushing the squids as they held onto other targets. Meanwhile the portion of the lizard fleet that was situated away from the entrance the squids were coming through either held position or moved around a bit trying to get into a position where they could engage the enemy…if they could only get past all the others in the way, plus the debris.
Most of the lizard fleet kept siphoning out the shaft to the surface, but it was so narrow and the fleet so big that it was like trying to sip up a gallon of water through a single straw…all the while the carnage of the squids was eating into the lizard numbers at a considerable rate, with every drone destroyed being replaced by more coming through from behind.
Kyler switched battlefields and saw a similar engagement occurring in another chamber, though that area was only half as congested, with more conventional warfare ensuing. Two other engagements had also broken out, with a third just starting as the other groups of squids rushed through the lizard base in search of targets, and found plenty.