Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) (7 page)

Using a pedestal before him he added a few more ship
assignments to the star to hunt down any transports attempting to flee the
system. Even a few taken out could turn the tide in a single ground battle, and
he wanted to give the Humans every advantage that he could.

“
Renimar?
”
Hem-
ra
asked, using his Voku title that was the
equivalent of ‘Grand Admiral’ in the Star Wars universe, with the skillset to
match.

“
Not just yet
,”
he cautioned. “
Let’s see how they react
first
.”

7

Cal-com watched as the Skarron fleets in orbit began
repositioning to assault those conglomerates and pieces of conglomerates that
he’d shown to them in orbit, about 7 in total thus far with the others still
elsewhere in the system and hopefully out of view. Those he was showing had
been intentional, as he was trying to maneuver the Skarrons around to where he
liked and after some 20 minutes of repositioning and shuffling on the enemy’s
part he finally got the opportunity he was looking for.

“
There
,” he
said to his advisors, pointing to a particular slice of low orbit. “
Bring in
Dorpa
.
Full
engagement protocols and get
us ready to move.
”

His staff carried out his orders without
so
much as a verbal acknowledgement or gesture. The Voku
military was notoriously efficient, knowing that delays in combat often
resulted in losses of material, personnel, or opportunity. Cal-com watched the
orbital displays, seeing the Skarrons continuing to reposition and forming up
into larger fleet configurations in order to assault the Voku conglomerates,
for they were familiar with this enemy. That Cal-com knew by the way they began
arranging their fleet.

It was true that the Skarron Empire was huge and that
Voku territory was a considerable distance from here and that in all likelihood
none of these enemy troops had ever fought them before, but knowledge had to have
traveled across their empire for they were responding to the threat that they
knew the Voku to be given their pathetically ineffective attempts to take
systems away from Cal-com’s home territory on the lower side of the galactic
plane.

These Skarrons knew the Voku and knew they had to mass
their fleet together or otherwise be chewed to bits once the conglomerates
separated and chased down their ships. Cal-com knew he had a winning hand here,
that wasn’t the
issue,
it was how many ships and
soldiers he would lose in the process.

Suddenly there was a microjump into orbit as a streak
appeared on the sensors, decelerating rapidly and coming down into a small gap
in the Skarron formations. They weren’t aligned yet, still in transition, and
the conglomerate came in right at a very bad spot where they were still spread
out. Weaponsfire immediately sprouted from the conglomerate in the form of long
range
Javvens
that were condensed packets of energy
that were launched in clusters. They appeared to be a beam, but were actually a
shotgun of individual orbs.

Those orbs spread out over extreme range, allowing the
Voku to at least nip away at distant targets where they didn’t have the
necessary accuracy and dozens of Skarron ships were showing hits on their
shields within seconds as the conglomerate began to flake off pieces that
reformed into hunter squadrons that rapidly accelerated away from the mass to
hunt down the ships that the Javven were weakening.

Cal-com highlighted the largest combined Skarron fleet
on the near side of the planet and signaled for them to make a tiny jump. Using
their binary drives they enhanced
Zenniza’s
gravity
pull and closed distance rapidly, then switched back over to gravity repulsion
and braked hard, bringing the full conglomerate in to what otherwise would have
been the Skarron’s prime kill zone.
Cal-com kept his
conglomerate intact and fighting as a single mass as he signaled others to
start coming in, being the bait for his much larger trap.

The conglomerate’s shields were considerable, but the
Skarrons had an idea of what it would take to get through them and they had
more than enough ships in the local area so they moved towards the big mass
rather than away and hammered it hard. It was a calculated risk for Cal-com,
but one that he had made before many times. As that large battle escalated and
he watched his shield strength consistently diminish, Skarrons ships were
literally being shredded by short range Dwio cascades that essentially threw hundreds
of them out like a fountain into the nearby ships.

The Skarrons ignored the losses, going for the big
score and even circling ships around to the back side of the conglomerate to
keep it from jumping back out. Soon there was a sphere of enemy ships
encircling Cal-com and effectively pinning his ship in place unless he wanted
to risk a collision…but that’s exactly what he wanted. The Skarron fleet was so
close in that he was destroying a lot of it in the exchanges, but he needed it
close for the next part of his plan.

With the press of a button the Voku commander
activated the conglomerate’s auxiliary IDF and extended it out as far as he could,
covering a spherical zone some 17 kilometers in radius and catching about
2/3rds of the Skarron fleet within it. It took an incredible energy expenditure
to do it and most of the weaponsfire on the conglomerate shut down to
compensate, with what energy they had left over going to recharging the
shields, though a few Dwio cascades were still firing.

The IDF created a pocket of space around the
conglomerate where external inertia was attributed to the entire field as if it
was a single mass. This meant that any acceleration by the conglomerate would
drag all the ships within the field with it…but at the moment that wasn’t
possible, because the conglomerate’s gravity drives were also located within
that field. And because all external forces were applied to the field rather
than the contents, they had no gravity effect to push off of.

Nor did the Skarron fleet, leaving them drifting on
their last known trajectories.

A few moments after the IDF extended conglomerate
chunks began jumping in around it and disintegrating into smaller, faster
attack ships that began encircling the Skarron fleet in a much larger sphere.
Those ships outside the IDF began engaging the newly arrived ships immediately
while the others were stuck in limbo save for conventional thrust which the
Skarrons had little of. Those maneuvering engines were reserved for small scale
docking adjustments and not capable of true flight, throwing off gasses for
minimum thrust. Almost all maneuvering was accomplished by gravity drives, even
with the Skarrons not having binaries.

With Cal-com’s conglomerate getting hit hard, the Voku
commander held position and the field until his trap was fully deployed then
shrank the IDF back down to the dimensions of his ship and the weaponsfire
returned…as did the Skarrons’ maneuvering capabilities, but by then there were
so many Voku ships inside and outside of them that they had no choice but to
fight and die, for there was little opportunity for escape.

In order to preserve as much of his conglomerate as
possible Cal-com didn’t have it disengage until the shields finally went down.
With the exterior armor beginning to take hits he issued the warning to the
crew then began the split along predetermined patterns, for the many pieces of
the conglomerate could reconfigure into many ship analogs.

Standing at his command pedestal, Cal-com watched as
force fields came up and bisected the oracle, separating the various command
crews and containing the atmosphere in each of some 24 segments before the
walls started moving and the ceiling and floor disintegrated. Cal-com’s section
moved through the conglomerate until it arrived in a new location, with a much
smaller oracle forming around it with the walls closing in and reforming into
an octagonal shape.

As that happened, similar transitions were happening
all throughout the interior of the conglomerate as the massive superstructure
reset its internal design to what was needed, breaking apart the giant
mothership
and essentially ‘building’ the smaller ones.
Cal-com hadn’t ordered the smallest possible units, and had kept a sizeable one
for himself and two other
subcommanders
, known as
Neppas
, but the rest all went into fast, moderately small
ships with decent firepower that could stand up to the Skarrons.

In addition to those there were tiny pieces coming off
and turning into what were essentially supersized fighters given their speed
and agility. Those moved off throughout the Skarron fleet, zipping in and out
of ship formations and nipping at their shields for the larger ships to add to
later, all the while creating a very chaotic battle environment that left the
Skarrons unsure who to target for they weren’t standing still and slugging it
out. A ship would move in, exchange fire for a handful of seconds up to a
minute,
then
move on to engage elsewhere at speeds the
Skarrons couldn’t follow.

The battle wasn’t short, and took nearly 3 hours to
complete. There were so many Skarron ships just in this one location that the
area became littered with debris that added ‘terrain’ to the battle, with the
last stages involving a hide and seek situation that the Skarrons excelled at.
Cal-com had to rein his ships in so they didn’t get too aggressive and fall
into traps, for knowing they were as good as dead the Skarrons liked to go
kamikaze and take as many of their opponents with them as they could.

Meanwhile there were other battles ongoing in orbit,
with some of the Skarron fleets leaving to try and escape planetary orbit. Many
made it out, for not all the Voku
Neppas
had gotten
the Skarrons to fall into an IDF trap, but those fights then transitioned to
elsewhere in the system because the fleeing Skarron navy ran into a blockade at
the star, with so many ships lying in wait that getting to an exiting jumpline
was going to be difficult. Given the size of a star it was hard to lock it
down, but apparently the Skarrons didn’t like their odds so they redeployed
back out into the system and bounced around from planet to planet, attempting
to either get away from the Voku or lure them into smaller engagement traps.

That chasing game would continue for weeks, but
planetary orbit was secured within a day…save for low orbit. The few Voku ships
that poked down there received a hail of surface missiles and had to quickly
gain more altitude before they were destroyed.

Cal-com had expected as much. Normally with an enemy
once you took orbit you owned the planet. The more advanced races had surfaced
defenses, but the Skarrons had for some reason decided to build such capability
into their walkers. It was overkill as far as Cal-com was concerned, for it
diminished their ground operations and kept them from being as effective as he
would have liked had he been their commander, but in this situation it meant
that in order to successfully move down into orbital bombardment range they’d
have to either suffer the missile fire or take the walkers and surface
launchers out first…and there were many of the latter as well, given the
well-established Skarron cities on the planet and those had defense shields
that would take considerable pounding to get through.

The Skarrons hadn’t amassed such a large empire by
being pushovers, Cal-com knew, and given his two obvious choices he decided to
go with the ground assault op. Scanning the planet he found several weak regions
of coverage and massed ships there, commencing in orbital bombardment of one of
the cities and several walker positions and traded
Javvens
for missiles, rotating his ships out as they became damaged and accepted the
hits in order to neutralize the missile launching capabilities in that single surface
region.

The walkers went down fairly easily, but the city
lasted long enough that Cal-com’s fleet took considerable damage. They had so
many missile launchers throwing up ordinance simultaneously that, on his
screens, it looked like the enemy was sending a snake up to orbit to bite into
his ships. This wasn’t the first time the Voku had done this sort of thing, for
they’d counterattacked a few Skarron forward bases near their own territory,
but the strength of the surface resistance was always a question mark without
detailed intelligence…which he didn’t have here save for what the Humans had
provided him.

He’d calculated for more than what they’d reported to
be safe, and in fact saw that his estimates had been nearly
spot
on accurate…which both surprised and worried him. The Skarrons had fortified
this city, at least, far more than the Humans knew, or perhaps since they’d
last taken a look. That didn’t bode well for the rest of the planet, but this
city at least was still going down, yet at a cost of equipment. Cal-com wasn’t
going to lose any lives here, given his option for cycling out ships, but many
ended up damaged before the city shields fell and the Javven finished taking
out the hundreds of missile launchers within the city, often with them popping
in ‘small’ explosions visible from orbit.

Those explosions ripped apart sections of the urban
landscape with the Javven doing even more damage elsewhere. Cal-com ordered the
offensive threats targeted, not the city infrastructure itself. He wasn’t
trying to obliterate it, just clear the airspace to establish an LZ. Barbarians
the Voku were not, but in this case the city inhabitants happened to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time…which was right next to their missile launchers.

When the return fire finally ended Cal-com had his
damaged ships join the recovery conglomerate that had already started to form
from the damaged/destroyed warships in the orbital battle. An intact segment
went around and picked up the ‘wounded’ components and incorporated them into
the whole, sweeping up even their own debris for crews to salvage or destroy as
necessary. Those segments that could be repaired would be,
then
sent back out into other groupings to enhance them or form new ones. Recovery
of damaged ships was essential for campaign longevity, and Cal-com had his
fleet get on it immediately following the cessation of weaponsfire.