The opposing fleets were close enough now that Leri could imagine the stench of charred metal and immolated corpses. The Xiu crossed through the floating, dilapidated hull of the Xank battleship, using it as a temporary shield from the Xank formation ahead of them.
‘Their formation is solid, Rii,’ a crewman said.
Leri rubbed his beak, thoughtfully. They could attempt to break the formation. Enough firepower could make an opening and allow quick deployment, where the Xank would be forced to engage in pure ground warfare. But then they wouldn’t be able to bring in reinforcements from Zeruit. Running a blockade was not something Leri was fond of attempting every single time they needed to refresh the front.
Leri gazed towards the blitz-metal formation. Sunlight reflected off their shimmering hulls. It seemed quieter now. Leri’s fleet was hiding in the debris fields and the Xank fleet was only firing the occasional shot. Leri’s eyes darted from ship to ship. They were close enough to examine even without the super-scope. A small blast of pulse-energy dissipated on the Xiu’s windscreen shields.
‘Any ideas, Tek’roa?’
‘A spearhead charge will be suicide. And we can’t let that fleet stay there. It won’t be as effective in tactical support, but I still don’t like the idea of ships looming over our beachhead on La’rz.’
‘So, we must eliminate it.’
‘Ten-to-one. Not impossible odds, but we must play against their weaknesses.’
‘And their weaknesses are…’
‘Xank fleets are built for long-range engagements. They suffer up-close.’
Leri sighed. ‘So, it comes down to a charge either way.’
Leri surveyed his crew. Wide-eyed. Young. Not nearly as grizzled as he was. They had hope. And they should…
‘Pincer. We’ll flank them and open up with our salvos at close range. We’ll break their formation from the sides.’
‘As you command, Rii.’
The order was sent through the fleet comms. The fleet split into two, dividing the command between Tek’roa and Leri. The debris field was still holding up, but the shifting of the enemy formation showed that the Xank anticipated the renewal of the attack.
‘Prepare for sub-warp. All hands to battle-stations. We break them here!’
Leri counted down. Everyone held their breath.
Three…
Two…
One…
The fleet warped on either side of the enemy fleet. One ship warped off course and was split in two. Leri watched as choking zangorians spilled from the hull like ants from a collapsing nest. They stayed afloat between the debris, doomed to become staples of the scrap fields that would inevitably surround La’rz for years to come. The Xank formation tried to pivot to react to the redeployment, but it was too late.
‘Give them a broadside!’ Leri bellowed.
The side-guns of Leri’s forces opened fire, disintegrating the shields and then the ships of the Xank formation.
‘Don’t relent! Keep up the salvos.’
The veritable fireworks show did not end until the once brassy blanket of Xank ships was shredded to pieces. Only the heavier battleships and frigates in the centre of the formation remained.
‘Fighters, engage!’ Tek’roa and Leri ordered in unison.
Hundreds of ships sallied forth from Leri’s vessels. One and two-pilot fighters, designed to provide tactical support to larger vessels, and wreak havoc on broken formations. Most of them were captured Xank vessels but a few were heavily modified zangorian designs. The arc-wing fighters, armed with torpedoes and shield-destroying lasers were followed by spire-craft bombers. These slower moving vessels carried payloads designed for sinking massive battleships. Their short-range torpedoes would drill through the shield and hull of a ship, and then detonate within.
Leri clenched his talons in barely repressed excitement.
The battle reaches its crescendo…
The swarm of arc-wings and spire-crafts was met by Xank tac-fighters. Dogfights ensued. Circling, biting, dive-bombing, feinting, retreating and then charging once again. Two swarms, gnawing at each other. Blue and orange puffs contrasted with the blurry grey and brass. From either side of the ship melee, the two armadas continued to fire, annihilating friendly and foe alike. Spire-crafts divebombed the enemy battleships, letting loose their payloads to destroy crucial sections of the enemy crafts. Many of these bombers were cutdown. Sacrifices for the liberation.
Battles seldom end with a bang. They turn into a whine. A methodical clanking of blade on armour. The repetition of load, aim, fire. The soul-crushing orders of: ‘Charge, stand down, fall back, charge again.’
But sometimes, battles could end with a bang, after the whine rose to a fever pitch and the stage was appropriately set.
‘Enemy shields are critical!’
‘Fire all guns!’
From both sides of the now whittled Xank formation, Leri’s armada let loose with all their weapons of war. The remaining Xank battleships, so proud, so powerful, were cut to ribbons.
Leri slumped into his chair, breathless. He had been standing throughout the entire engagement. His metal arm felt heavy by his side. He took a deep breath and then spoke through the fleet comms.
‘All fighters, return to your ships. Armada, regroup on flagship Xiu. Patch the holes and prepare for combat. The real battle is about to begin.’
One of Leri’s destroyers was smashed to pieces under the hail of anti-air gunfire. In the dense atmosphere of La’rz, the usually more manoeuvrable ships couldn’t evade the enemy volleys. They had to rely on the fast fading shields of their ships’ bellies.
The Xiu rocked. It was worse than any earthquake Leri had experienced in his life in the body-budget. A crewman who hadn’t strapped himself to his seat in time was catapulted into the air. He broke his neck on the roof. Fire alarms blared. Red and blue lights blinked throughout the ship. Maintenance staff had to pull themselves along the inner hull with mag-treads and carabiners.
‘There’s nowhere to land!’ the pilot said, panic rising in his voice.
Leri surveyed the command-screens. The surface of La’rz was covered in densely packed grey buildings. No open fields. No shipyards. Just a sea of hatcheries and barracks.
‘Flatten it,’ Leri ordered.
Silence.
‘Excuse me?’ the crewman manning the main battery asked.
‘Cut down a city-block. If there is nowhere to land, then we make a place to land.’
‘Rii, there are people down there.’
‘And there are people in this ship,’ Leri shouted. ‘Open fire!’
In seconds, the plasma cannon opened fire. A wide dispersal. It shot out like glowing water from a fountain, fell to the ground in a column, and then incinerated everything under it.
The anti-air guns abated on the Xiu.
The crewman who had fired the gun looked like he was about to get sick. Leri noted that he would need to be replaced. There was no space for soft-stomachs and white-feathers in this struggle.
The echoes of warfare continued in the distance. Anti-orbital guns continued to fire, but they were not close enough to get a clear shot. Sirens erupted around the city.
Even now, the battle had not truly begun. This was the prelude. The bloody-work before the real action. For there was no real glory in anything other than the infantry. The melee. The street-to-street carnage. Beak breaking. Talon slashing. Blood matting feathers.
Leri quivered with anticipation.
The Xiu hovered above the wasteland that it had created on La’rz’s surface. Fire dotted the grey, obscured by an ash-fog. No corpses. But still burning feathers floated in the wind. The rush of air-flow from the Xiu’s exhausts extinguished the fires around them.
Leri looked to his metal arm. It lay impotently, exhausted, by his side.
‘Not now, my friend,’ Leri whispered. He bit through the fatigue wrought pain and clenched his talon. He stood up, his cape bellowing behind hi
m.
‘Deploy and setup a perimeter. We take La’rz today!’
“The death bell tolls for thee.” – Grav’tesh, Lord-Undertaker of the Final Empire of Resh, to Krag-Zurktag, the first Avenger of the Immortal Council.
Chapter 9.
Battle of La’rz
The feathery mass hit against the rubble like waves on a cliff. Its defenders fell to blaster and talon. The beachhead was secure, like so many before it. Blood stained the tarmac. Feathers flew in the wind. Chipped keratin mixed with shattered and warped blitz-metal.
Piece by bloody piece, La’rz fell to Leri’s liberation. This was not like Zeruit. There was no diplomacy. No winning hearts and minds. La’rz’s residents were to be purged. They were too indoctrinated. Too loyal to Xank authority. Tek’roa wept for his people and planet, but he knew it was necessary.
La’rz needed to be taken. Not for its current warrior-slaves, but for its vast hatcheries and weapon-forges. For that to become possible, sacrifices would need to be made.
So, commenced what every zangorian in the body-budget had been trained to do their entire lives – kill their kin. There was no long-range engagements in the packed urban centres of La’rz. Leri’s armada touched down in emaciated wastelands, using the rubble-strewn fields as a kill-zone as hordes of zangorians poured into the city.
The goal was uncertain. Leri wanted to take a planet, but how do you do that? You take its seat of power. On Zeruit, that had been Kazh-aira. But La’rz was a planet-spanning city. How did one take a planet-spanning city?
One couldn’t. Instead, you crushed its will. You made its people unwilling to fight any longer. You broke every limb, until their crippled and bleeding body cried, ‘I surrender!’
And then you executed them for cowardice.
Leri’s liberation drew on. From his seat at the command table in the Xiu, and occasionally when he moved to investigate new beach-heads as his forces took new ground, he saw very little action. He should’ve been bored, if he wasn’t so anxious.
It was taking too long.
He tapped his non-metal talon on the dashboard of the planning table. Peron didn’t comment as his multiple eyes darted around the holo-screen map of the planet. Red on the map indicated their captured territories. Flame orange indicated disputed territories. Grey was everything else. Like a cancer, the red was steadily taking the place of the orange, pushing the orange into the grey. While all of La’rz was urban, much of it was undefended and run by automated non-combat systems. These areas were bypassed after quick scouting operations. As such, a quarter of the planet had been liberated.
‘War is a slog, Rii. Patience,’ Tek’roa urged, noticing Leri’s talon tapping.
‘I know, Tek’roa. I know.’
But he didn’t really. Leri was impatient. He wanted La’rz today.
Tek’roa zoomed into one of the disputed territories. Comms info was being live-fed into the map, indicating suspected enemy locations.
‘War is a slog,’ Tek’roa repeated, dragging the view around the city-streets of his homeworld. He seemed sombre. ‘And there is no glory to be had in it. Only engagement, rest, and engagement again. I wouldn’t be so anxious to take the planet today. It isn’t going anywhere.’
‘We must secure it, lest Xank reprisals destroy us before we’re dug in.’
‘The Xank are in shambles. And even if they weren’t, then let us establish our goals. Not full occupation in a day, but simply making sure we control the orbital and anti-air guns.’
Leri took control of the map and filtered the displays to focus on the known gunneries. Quite a few fell in their territories. Most of them had been disabled to allow deployment of reinforcements.
‘Fine,’ Leri conceded. ‘Focus attacks on the guns. Aim to capture, not destroy. Keep a skeleton force along the front. Retreat to more defensible locations if necessary. Blitz the guns.’
Leri squinted at one long front of disputed territory. ‘Get a frigate over there to use as a base of operations. If this is to become a war of attrition, I want to start training up the fledglings into warriors as soon as possible.’
‘Train troops on the front?’ Peron asked.
‘Problem?’ Leri almost snapped.
‘Not at all. It is ingenious. If the hatcheries aren’t sending troops to the Xank training facilities, they’ll be losing their supply of troops, while we gain. We’re cutting them off and growing our manpower.’
Leri stopped tapping the dashboard. His trust in the gleran had been dissipating since the discovery of his people’s genetic plague, but he couldn’t help but feel some appreciation towards Peron for this compliment.
‘Very well. Peron, can you lead the training program?’
Peron nodded. ‘I will get right on it.’
He departed and Leri turned to Tek’roa. ‘War Lector, do you think our fronts will hold if we make a break for the gunneries?’
‘Only if we leave enough forces on the front. It’ll have to be more than a skeleton crew. Street to street fighting is brutal, as you well know. We can’t just setup a fort to hold a region. We have to station troops in every intersection. If we can raise a few thousand more troops and pull back from non-essential fronts, then we can do it.’
Leri gazed at the map, zooming out until it was a globe. The image shimmered as a distant explosion echoed in the distance.
Leri pondered. They needed to maintain their territory. They needed to secure the gunneries. They needed to hatch a new army. And Leri wanted to take the planet in a day.
He couldn’t accomplish all of it.
War was a slog. A drawn-out affair. A battle of wills. And when one tried to sprint a marathon, they collapsed. But did the war have to be a marathon?
Leri gazed at the globe and said.
‘What if we make a new front?’
Xank drones were not as efficient at killing as zangorians. They didn’t have the killer instinct of organic warriors. They didn’t have the brutal cunning of a creature with the unprogrammable instinct to wage war. But there were many of them…
Peron had hidden his irritableness at being called from his work on the hatcheries so soon, but he was the only being for the job. He understood computers better than any zangorian. How to use them, build them and manipulate them.
A fast-moving squad transport carried Peron and a crack vanguard squad far behind enemy lines, dodging orbital guns. This was alongside a brutal blitz towards one of the Xank command centres. The bulk of Leri’s forces redeployed, setting up a perimeter to guard their essential strategic points, but dedicating most troops to a huge push on the regional Xank HQ.
The Xank rushed to defend their regional HQ, rather than pushing in on the liberated territory.
The feint had worked.
Peron’s forces landed on the other side of the planet, on top of a flat-roofed building. The vanguard fanned out and secured the perimeter. If Peron’s intel was correct, this was the correct building. The sound of battle was distant.
Good, Peron thought. It had been a long while since he had fought a battle himself. He could still handle a blaster, but he’d prefer not to. One of his guards signed that it was all clear. Peron exited the ship. The sky was grey. Dark and cloudy. A crack of thunder punctuated the roar of machinery. The streets were empty. Quiet and melancholic.
Peron hated Xank cities. They felt dead. They reminded him of the ravaged cities on his homeworld. Abandoned settlements. Strewn with lifeless buildings. Cities should be lively. Well-lit. Bristling with commerce and chatter. Not automated and people-less. Cities weren’t meant to just be glorified facilities. They were meant to be for life. For living!
Sometimes, Peron hated the Xank more for their lifeless cities than their other atrocities and oppression.
Peron carried his reinforced computer cases in his left-arms, and a blaster in one of his right. He had fired the crude zangorian blasters before. Edmund had needed fire support against zangorian raiders – deserters
from the early Xank invasions. Peron had shrugged off a pulse blast (but needed medical treatment afterwards) and subsequently incinerated the offending raider. He would have cried if he could. Peron didn’t like killing. But it had saved Edmund. Not forever, but it had saved him then. And that mattered.
The vanguard proceeded, blasters raised. Two of them had two handed blasters. They would have been the size of a human LMG but was even more massive in zangorian talons. One of these heavy gunners took the front, with the other holding the rear. Peron remained in the centre. He recognised some of the faces. Rebels from Bexong.
Oh, how innocent we all once were, Peron lamented.
A loud hum sounded, and the group dropped to the ground. A drone whizzed far above their heads. It didn’t notice them or didn’t care. It rushed to the front. Peron hoped Leri and Tek’roa could handle it. And above that: that Leri would not be sacrificing too many young zangorians for his ideals.
The group proceeded. They scaled down from the roof using a rope and climbing apparatus and rounded the building until they found a doorway.
Click. Click. And hiss. The plasma cutter burst to life and its user cut a zangorian sized hole in the doorway. Peron was fine hunching down to enter. The interior of the building was a dark-maroon. Emergency lighting. Just enough to navigate. Most power would be redirected to the planet’s defences. Peron examined the halls. It didn’t look like a Xank structure. Not Spartan enough. There were even emblazoned decorations around the doorways. And the fact that the building was accessible at all meant that it wasn’t a usual Xank structure. Xank facilities only allowed entry for slave-races and for Immortal overseers – but this building could have reasonably been fully automated. It didn’t need an interior. It could have been a solid chunk of metal. But, it was always cheaper to convert pre-existing buildings than to construct new ones completely. This building, Peron realised, as well as many others, must have belonged to some other race. He didn’t recognise the architecture or recall any race that previously inhabited this part of space.
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