Star Force: The Admiral

by Aer-ki Jyr

  The Bsidd were insectoid, standing taller than Humans and massing very little in comparison. Their bodies looked like a twisted mess of tree branches with more open space between them than body parts. They had numerous mandible/arms and could move about walking on them in any orientation, even upside if they wanted, with their equally holey heads usually riding up top.

  Their armor covered most of the holes in their bodies, with those empty spaces filled with equipment that gave them the strongest shield generators of any infantry within Star Force. If the Zen’zat came they wouldn’t be able to take down the Bsidd quickly, and they had multiple weapons held pinched between mandibles or attached onto the ends of them, including some plasma swords they could ignite if it came to hand to hand combat.

  The Zen’zat were not here yet, but the enemy was getting close and the cupola had fired off a few long range shots, none that hit, at the very edge of visibility within the broken cityscape ahead. The Bsidd were watching the sensors and waiting for reports from scouts they had out there when all their comm systems opened up on a channel from the Star Force warships in the system.

  A very rare sound came through it, but it was one every Bsidd warrior knew as a battle song. Archons often used them to let troops know help was coming, and as the Bsidd’s attention went to the battlemap and saw the scores of ships jumping into planetary orbit over Tardon as the ‘Imperial March’ blared through their helmets.

  The Bsidd exchanged looks with one another, and would have smiled widely had their faces been capable of that. There were Nexus ships along with the Star Force ones, and Archon Paul was bringing them into assault positions overtop the V’kit’no’sat fleet…and he never played that battle song unless there was a beatdown coming for the bad guys.

  There were no orders for these Bsidd to do anything yet, but as they waited with weapons gripped and a surge of hope flowing through them they began humming along with the battle song, ready to start giving some payback to these V’kit’no’sat bastards as soon as they were given the word to do so.

  21

  May 4, 4814

  Solar System (V’kit’no’sat territory)

  Stellar Orbit

  Kara stood in the command nexus onboard the Yi, her mind casually linked into the battlemap system as she undid the ponytail on the back of her head. She didn’t use her hands, rather her telekinesis, as she pulled off the small tie and laid it on the edge of the bank of controls in front of her while her hands were resting gently on the control sphere to maximize the telepathic interlink efficiency. She could do it remotely, but when going into battle you wanted every advantage possible and a direct physical link to the system avoided a microscopic bit of lag that only someone with a Sav-enhanced mind would even notice.

  Her purple/white hair draped down around her ears, not quite touching her shoulders as Kara felt it brush against the back of her neck. Most Archons had short hair, but a few like her had kept it moderately long. Inside armor it didn’t really matter, but without that protection the long hair made for a good handhold that you didn’t want to give your opponent. It also made sleeping on a pillow a bit odd, but she tolerated the minor inefficiencies there because it fit her style and now it helped to calm her mind a bit further as the multi-colored hair smoothed out and settled around her mind as her command ship got a return signal from the scout ship a few minutes ahead of the fleet.

  It signaled the jumppoint was clear, so there was no need to alter their arrival mathematics and Kara came out at the head of nearly every warship Clan Ghostblade possessed. They were packed tight, meaning the staggering between them during the jump was dangerously close, but with no anomalies at the exit point the advanced gravity drives and control systems braked them precisely enough to accommodate for their different masses and put them within a few kilometers of where they were supposed to be, with the ships maintaining a little momentum after they ‘stopped’ so they could clear the jump point and not have a traffic pileup that could be disastrous.

  But Kara’s Clan had the most experience jumping from system to system, for that was how they lived, and she was pleased to see no hiccups as the first hundred or so jumpships came through and stretched out into a ribbon behind her as she returned to Star Force’s home system for the first time since it had fallen. A few other missions had been sent here, mostly for scouting purposes, and the data she had on the V’kit’no’sat infrastructure here was getting updated from the passive signal bounces from insystem sensors and the star itself, showing her that the shipyard had grown greatly, along with several new constructs beyond Earth.

  The V’kit’no’sat called it Terrax and the system Terraxis, but unless she was having a chat with one of the bastards she wasn’t going to use their terminology. To her and Star Force it was the Solar System, or ‘Sol’ for short, and Earth. The V’kit’no’sat hadn’t even bothered to name the other planets, for they’d never inhabited them, and now was no different with the only habitation showing being on the blue/green planet itself.

  When the V’kit’no’sat had finally conquered the planet they had bombarded it relentlessly until it was a cratered, charred mess, and even the seafloor had suffered similar treatment…but no longer. The vast tracks of wilderness had returned and the remnants of the continent-wide Star Force cities were gone, wiped clean by the reconstruction efforts. Now there was nothing but alien forests and alien cities, less than what Star Force had built, but far more than the last scouting run a few hundred years ago.

  Getting in and out of the system wasn’t easy for a scout ship, but this time it didn’t matter because Kara was bringing a warfleet with her and the stellar patrols that were moving to intercept the odd jumpline soon saw they were outnumbered and held off, not retreating but not closing to weapons range as the system defense fleet was rallied.

  There were no defensive platforms in stellar orbit, and there were few elsewhere in the system, but Earth did have full planetary shields and a rebuilt planetary defense station that Kara knew as ‘the pyramid’ from since her inception into the Archon ranks of Star Force so long ago. She wasn’t taking her fleet anywhere near that monster, but it only covered a portion of the planet and many of the V’kit’no’sat facilities built here were in various orbits and not on the surface.

  As her fleet began to send out its own active sensor pings, for they weren’t trying to hide and could make use of the more powerful sensors, she began to get a ship count for the defense fleet…and saw it was pathetically low. Only 739 vessels unless there were more on the other side of the star, and she sent several groups of ships out to find out, with them pushing both orbital directions until sensor scans could see all the way around.

  “Well well,” she commented to herself as a stellar mining platform popped up on the battlemap in low orbit on the far side of the star. “You have been busy.”

  It was still in operation, sucking several strands of glowing material out from the giant orb and into processing factories that sifted out the valuable material and sent the rest back down the gravity well, with the main purpose being to harvest solari. They were rare particles that primarily existed in stars and were denied to most of the races in the galaxy because they didn’t have the ability to harvest them.

  Those solari were a big reason why the V’kit’no’sat and Star Force had such advanced technology, for they allowed them to make things others could not, and it was a mark of an advanced civilization to mine in such a way. The Nexus did as well, but the V’kit’no’sat had never had stellar mining facilities in this system even way back when they owned it the first time.

  That told Kara they were trying to localize the supply chain a bit. There was no way Sol could produce the attacking fleets going after the Star Force front…not even the fleets that had been patrolling the DZ…but what they could do was service them, and the shipyards here needed solari to produce replacement equipment to handle battle damage. They’d been shipping it in from the rest of their empire before, but now it looked lik
e they needed a lot more going forward.

  That was a bad sign, because it meant they were planning for a long, grueling campaign. A quick win and withdrawal would see those ships returning to the empire, but if they were going to come here for repair work then that suggested they wanted to keep constant pressure on Star Force until they cracked.

  And in addition to the stellar mining platform there were huge warehouse facilities in null orbit between Venus and Earth. There were two defense stations with them along with a handful of ships, transport models that were probably offloading rather than picking up.

  It was a supply depot, and the previous shipyard in Earth orbit now had two twins in orbit around Mars and Ganymede. The second one was a moon in orbit of Jupiter that used to hold extensive Star Force colonies on the airless surface, but now it was showing a lot of V’kit’no’sat infrastructure there…but not habitats. It was thin, like a spider web of sites that Kara recognized as mining and fabrication infrastructure that were probably feeding key components to the shipyard in orbit.

  The same went for Mars, with more limited stuff visible on the surface, but from this range Kara couldn’t get good information on what exactly it was. The huge habitats that the V’kit’no’sat used were definitely not there, at least not in normal format, but they were covering Earth in shotgun fashion. The workers must have been commuting, and with their insystem ship technology that meant an hour or two at most for the furthest planets, though right now it was unclear whether or not they had any assets all the way out there.

  Kara had several more fleet groups zip out to do flybys of the various planets as her ship pool continued to grow near the jumppoint…enough that the V’kit’no’sat defense fleet didn’t engage them…and as the 101st trailblazer watched her battlemap update with new targets for her to hit she was getting a very good vibe. They had enough defenses to fend off any native races to the area and then some. They even had enough ships here to discourage an attack from Star Force, but without their fleets in the DZ being available to track and intercept hers, they’d essentially left their backdoor open while hitting the front.

  Even the massive fleet guarding the Tarric 3 System couldn’t be recalled fast enough to get here within the week…and that was if they even knew. There was no known Urrtren relay grid set up by the V’kit’no’sat that connected the two, and it was out of range for a direct signal, so they’d have to operate off of couriers unless they had another trick up their sleeve.

  But even assume they knew this moment that Star Force was here, or had gotten warning about their approach earlier despite Kara’s best efforts to move through irregular systems. She was going to have a head start and there was nothing here she couldn’t hit aside from Antarctica. Everything else was in play, and the V’kit’no’sat had built up a lot in relatively little time in addition to the shipyards.

  There were literally thousands of stations sprinkled over the system and hundreds of large ships, not counting the tens of thousands of smaller transports, most of which were visible heading for Earth where they would be ducking down under the protection of the planetary shield.

  “Run you bastards,” she said as her jumpship count continued to climb. “You’ve made an art out of razing our systems. Now let’s see how you fight when you’re outnumbered and can’t retreat.”

  Kara moved the Yi further out from the jumppoint and summoned a large group of ships to her, then began a lazy move towards the stellar mining platform with the V’kit’no’sat fleet racing ahead of her to get there and into defensive positions.

  “Alright. You want to evacuate it, go ahead, but in a little over two hours it’s going to be junk along with any of you that stick around to defend it,” she said with a humorless grin. Kara knew some of what was happening back on the Star Force front, minus the huge second wave, and knew that a lot of Star Force people were dying under their attack. She wasn’t going to go darkside here, but she wasn’t going to show any compassion either.

  This was Star Force’s system, taken from them in a bloody mini-war of its own 15 centuries ago, and that meant that every V’kit’no’sat here was part of the invasion campaign. This wasn’t Star Force going into their territory and hitting their people who were minding their own business. Everyone here was a fair target, and anyone who didn’t run from Kara’s guns was going to be destroyed by them.

  The V’kit’no’sat had messed up royally unless they had a huge fleet hidden out behind Saturn or elsewhere, but Kara soon confirmed that they did not as her scouts reported back. As far as they knew all of Star Force’s roaming fleets in the Devastation Zone were back at the front fighting to defend it, but they apparently had never realized there was another one out here.

  They’d had plenty of hints, for Kara had been ambushing small groups of V’kit’no’sat ships for centuries, but the Ghostblade fleet had never before in its history been fully assembled. Even now the partial or non-warships were not here, safely still roaming the vast tracks of stars in the galaxy and harvesting resources to build more ships like these.

  Ships that no Star Force shipyard had born, and thus no record of their existence had ever been recorded. They were literally a ghost fleet, and they were more than a match for the defenses the V’kit’no’sat had arrogantly left here while sending the majority of their ships on the attack.

  “Alright people,” Kara said, activating the fleetwide comm, “let’s not get sloppy. We’re winning this and winning it big, but don’t underestimate them or we’ll come out of this with less ships than we should. I don’t know how close their nearest reinforcements are, so let’s take this methodically quick and wreck as much of this system as we can while staying the hell away from the pyramid’s firing range. Assume the Tar’vem’jic has been rebuilt and it’s off limits. If we wanted it we’d go overland, but we’re not sticking around that long. We kick them in the balls then get the hell out of here and back to the front. People are dying out there and we have to make this worth it.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, they’ve been busy building a lot of new toys for us to smash, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. Stay sharp, stay focused, and we’ll own them. Get sloppy and I’ll send you on a one way ticket to Shangri-la. You unnecessarily break my ships and you’re sitting out the rest of the war…and you know how much I love to accessorize,” she said sarcastically, looking down at the huge diamond-like jewel imbedded into her left wrist. The Zak’de’ron had put it there against her will, but they’d actually done her a favor. It was still the most advanced piece of technology that Star Force possessed, but not so much as it used to be.

  She wondered if they were watching now, or what they’d think when they saw the results of this raid. Hopefully they’d consider her a worthy investment.

  “Let’s get this done,” she said, pulling up a an old battle song and sending it out across all the ships with every pilot and crewmember hearing the bit of lyrics that said ‘YOU’LL NEVER KILL THE LIGHT INSIDE ME’ knowing exactly what it meant for Star Force.

  After all the V’kit’no’sat had done to them they were still here and had not lost their way…and now it was time for some badly needed payback.

  22

  August 29, 4814

  Karthus System (Star Force territory)

  Requiem

  Nathan sprinted hard on the outskirts of the fallen city as the orbital bombardment started to come down. Most of the Star Force troops had already been evacuated out by a variety of means, most of which were underground, but he’d been covering their withdrawal along with others when the V’kit’no’sat started to pull out. He’d fallen back immediately, but the precision weaponry on the V’kit’no’sat ships…which weren’t even in atmosphere…began striking specific buildings now that the redundant shield generators had been taken down.

  There was no reason for the ground troops to keep fighting, so the enemy was pulling back and firing in clear areas even before the city was empty of V’kit’no’sat troops. The entrance N
athan had been heading to got hit, leaving him nowhere safe to go except on the heels of the enemy where their ships would not shoot, so the Archon had ran as fast as he could leaving other Star Force troops to scatter wherever they thought they could go, but he knew there was no getting away from the firepower coming down.

  He hated leaving them behind, for there were over 200 Bsidd with him, but there was nothing he could do other than tell them to scatter and hope someone survived. There were only a few entrances to the subsurface tunnels and no more on this side of the city, so he ran and ran, moving through intact buildings that were going to be annihilated within minutes, if not seconds.

  But as long as they stood the sensors on them still worked, giving him access to the battlemap that marked the evac zones the V’kit’no’sat were heading to. He deliberately avoided them, heading for a section of the city edge that held a huge, thick barrier that the enemy had to fight through. Unfortunately there was no breach in this area, so as soon as he got up to it he jumped then flew along it, hoping to go unnoticed as he skimmed a few inches away all the way up to the top where there were still smoking defense turrets that had been taken out earlier.

  The wall itself was over 50 meters thick and it took too long for Nathan to get across it…then he dropped along the wall on the other side instead of flying straight out. That wasted time as the rolling thunder behind him got closer, but if he was going to have a chance of surviving he had to stay down and hope no one saw him. If he just flew a straight line out through the sky the I’rar’et would get him for sure, so as soon as he hit the ground he took a few steps then ran/flew across the narrow intact section of grassy plains and into the tortured landscape left in the aftermath of the planet-wide ambush explosions that had killed so many V’kit’no’sat.