Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) (3 page)

“What I said may not make sense now, but just remember
it and in time you’ll understand. Don’t let it become personal. I’ll give you
tasks and you’ll complete them. You are not becoming part of the Hepcha
community like an Axius colony. You’re separate. You may cross paths with them
but don’t let yourselves become standard bearers. Don’t let them get to know
you or else they’ll pattern off of you. Let them focus on me and Ginsi while
you analyze them. Keep your distance or your perception might slip. We have to
make changes to them in order to get them up to speed and I don’t want you
empathizing with them because they’re, as some people have already stated,
cute
.”

“Cute or not they want this and we’re going to give it
to them. That means a lot of work and training on their part. If they see you
making excuses for them they’ll think that’s acceptable. It is not unless I say
it is, so let them get their cues from me. You just remain pleasantly neutral.”

“Are they really that impressionable?” Ginsi asked.

“Very. And insulated. As a ward they haven’t had the
commerce traffic coming to and from them. It’s restricted to keep them safely
anonymous for the most part. That’s going to be a shock, and I want me to be
the intermediary that brings them through the transition. Not 50 different ones
that might be telling them opposing things, even if it’s just with your body
language during off hours. You can let your hair down in private, but do not
take any Hepcha as close friends. You need to keep a professional distance
while you are working here. After the fact is your prerogative. The first step
for them has to be at my sole direction.”

“We’ll keep our distance,” one of the techs assured
her.

Taryn nodded. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way,
ambrosia is going to be tricky to develop for these guys given that they’ve
already got a hyperactive metabolism that requires near ambrosia levels of
sustenance in their food anyway. For their ambrosia we’re doing the opposite
and making it an endurance boost, and how we’re going to do that I’m not quite
sure. Just one of many things we’re going to have to figure out going forward.”

3

March 1, 2848

Aphat
System
(Veliquesh territory)

Dmak

Kip zipped his skeet past a Veliquesh building and
delivered a pointblank mauler burst into the last of the anti-air defenses the
city had, melting through the light armor casing and junking the interior.
There was a small spurt of debris that flew out the other side, but the
turret’s death wasn’t dramatic. He circled back around to confirm that he’d hit
it, and the lack of fire when he raised up above the rooftops told him
everything he needed to know even before he got eyes on the damaged turret.

A quick check of the battlemap confirmed that the city
had now been fully plucked of defenses.

“All fighters pull back. Admiral, send in the presents
once we’re clear,” he
commed
as he accelerated
towards the perimeter of the Veliquesh city. It’d been 17 years since this
invasion began and to date they hadn’t lost a single man. Some of the Veliquesh
had managed to get themselves killed, but none of Kip’s troops or any of the
other Star Force armies had suffered more than bodily injuries, and those were
far and few between…largely due to a change in tactics they’d made after the
first few years.

The Veliquesh cities were huge and widespread, not making
use of their volume and relying mostly on low level buildings, as far as Star
Force standards went anyways. It took Kip and the other pilots some time to get
into the clear, and when they did he set and traveled out to a waypoint where
the others would eventually gather with him. Once they were all out a virtual
marker appeared covering the entire city and out past the edges like a golden
blanket indicating the no-fly zone that was now in effect. The Admiral had set
that in place, not Kip, and soon the first of the bombs became visible on the
upper edge of the battlemap as they fell from orbit.

Or rather flew, for they were actually missiles rather
than rail gun slugs or just chunks of matter. They came down in a spread, one
wave after another and each bomb targeting different locations within the city
where it would pop just prior to reaching the buildings or the surface. When
they detonated they created a huge plume of green that washed across and
through the buildings, then turned pink when it expanded out far enough. The
clinging stun energy saturated the area and would hold its charge for several
minutes while more bombs fell nearby and onto the same locations, blanketing
the cityscape and rendering anyone caught out in the open unconscious on contact.

Originally Kip and the others hadn’t been able to use
area of effect weapons for fear of overloading their targets and killing them,
but subsequent research into Veliquesh physiology and some sneaky techs had
found a way to lace the energy with a regulator that would actually repel
additional stun energy past a certain concentration. As a bonus it wouldn’t
only resist that energy, but push it away until it hit something that wasn’t
already saturated. For that reason one bomb could cover a lot of city if the
buildings were small, while others required multiple hits to soak through and
saturate the large ones. Everything from person to bulkheads got a bath with
the residue rippling across already hit areas and traveling, in some cases,
kilometers before it found a fresh area to soak into.

The energy was configured to be matter hungry and
lightly susceptible to gravity, meaning that the bombs were effectively water
balloons that would spread out across the city rather than blowing back into
the air. It’d taken years of tweaks to get them to where they were now, but
they were more than worth the effort for they could neutralize a city far
faster with the bombs than going in on foot and shooting them one person at a
time. It also meant there was little risk to the ground teams, though on
occasion there would be a handful that the bombs would miss.

To Kip it felt fitting, for while they were almost forced
to use such weapons against the lizards they were using them now to take down
an equally bad enemy but without having to resort to the bloodshed that the
Veliquesh lived and breathed. That was a snub to them in and of itself, for
they weren’t just defeating them militarily, but culturally as well.

And there was nothing the Veliquesh could do about it.
Star Force’s weapons and tactics were far superior to the lizards, whom had
finally been winning out against the Veliquesh when Kip and the others had
arrived. They’d driven them off then set about the methodical destruction of
the sick culture without killing the people in it. It was a crusade that he and
the others here were fully behind with no mixed feelings. Had they been sending
down lethal bombs that would have been another story, for you never knew who
was down there and if they deserved killing or not.

By taking away that question mark Star Force could be
as aggressive as it liked, and the number of bombs coming down certainly
testified to an appetite for destruction. None of the buildings were so much as
scratched, but with every detonation swaths of the sick race were taken out of
the equation and would wake up later as prisoners in an isolation that would
only end if they effectively switched sides. So Kip knew that every bomb detonation
was taking down the number of Veliquesh permanently, for if any of these did see
their freedom again it would be as Protovic, with the Veliquesh in them dying
here with every beautiful green explosion.

But as always, this was just one piece of a very large
puzzle. The other four systems the Veliquesh had owned were now barren and under
watch by Star Force, but not inhabited. Their cities were slowly being
dismantled by an advance team, but most of the techs assigned to this mission
were busy building new prison habitats to keep up with the demand. When they
eventually worked through those they’d be redeployed to reclamation duty that
would wipe the Veliquesh stench off those four systems and add them to the
unoccupied territory list that Star Force was accumulating from its conquests
throughout lizard territory.

The
Aphat
System was different.
It was too valuable to pass up with 18 habitable planetoids, whereas other
systems were lucky to even have 1. That meant it also had the bulk of the
Veliquesh population in it, with this world being the second major one they’d
hit. They’d started with the ones that the lizards had invaded and worked their
way through the Veliquesh survivors there while a group of them also tracked
down and destroyed the lizards on the ground. As usual they refused to
surrender, but after all this time Kip only felt a tiny pang of regret. He knew
they had genetic ‘brain boxes’ on them that would resist the isolation
technique they were using on the Veliquesh prisoners, but he still hated having
to kill them all…a little bit.

By now that it was clear that it was either their race
in dominance or their deaths trying to accomplish it. If there was another way
to deal with them he and the others would find it in time, but for now it was
offer
them
surrender and when they didn’t accept it,
blow the hell out of them.

Kip was glad they weren’t doing that to the Veliquesh,
even if some of them deserved it. Star Force wasn’t interested in punishment,
only neutralizing threats, and once these bastards were taken prisoner they
wouldn’t be sacrificing anyone else again…not to mention what other horrors
they might have wrought had the lizards not boxed them in. According to their
interrogations of the ‘diplomatic envoy’ that Mike had brought back with him,
they seemed to have galactic domination as one of their long term goals, and if
they had no qualms about killing their own younglings for not maintaining 100%
compliance he doubted they’d be any more merciful to other races.

Kip waited with the other skeets on the perimeter
until the bombardment ceased and the no-fly zone restriction disappeared. When
it did he and the others headed back in as a flock of dropships came down from
orbit carrying cleanup teams that would begin collecting the captives and
transporting them back up to the holding ships. Several combat teams were
coming down as well, for the bombs didn’t always penetrate deep enough to catch
all the subsurface structures. Kip was going to be flying patrols in case there
were any hotspots that needed hit and organizing the teams from the air while
staying on guard for any more of the suicidal Veliquesh fighter squadrons that
seemed to be interested in doing damage to the transports carrying their own
people rather than to Kip’s troops.

For whatever their reasons they were targeting them
with ambushes wherever they could, so Kip was staying in pilot mode for these
operations just in case he needed to intercept some more of their fighters
springing up from concealed hideaways. The Veliquesh might be crazy, but they
weren’t totally stupid, and Kip could see now how they’d held the lizards off
for so long. They were innovative within their strict strategies, which were
focused around causing damage regardless of the strength of their opponent. The
lizards happened to be weaker than them, technologically speaking, so it had
paid off, but Star Force was not and the Veliquesh were essentially throwing
themselves at them trying to do what damage they could.

They’d changed targets now, but the methodology was
the same. The switch to hidden hangars spread across the planet had been an effective
move for the fact that Star Force hadn’t been able to locate and eliminate them
all initially, but the Veliquesh pilots still fought in the same manner. Again,
as he’d noted on numerous occasions, these bastards showed some potential along
with the crazy in them. How the two could coexist Kip wasn’t sure, but they
did. And that meant he always had to stay on his toes just in case they showed
another spark of adaptability and tried something new.

Today wasn’t going to be one of those days, and the now
predictable fighter squadrons appearing from outside the city and rushing the
filled transports as they headed back to orbit with prisoners were intercepted
and destroyed. Those pilots that survived the crashes would be recovered, but
there was no way the skeets could go easy on them when there were troops on the
ground and ships in the air that were vulnerable. The Veliquesh weapons were
better than what the lizards used, and had they got to one of the transports
they could have brought it down with sustained weaponsfire from 6 or 8 of them.

They sent over 300 towards the city this time, meaning
Kip and the others had to take them down quickly. Some of the pilots would die,
but so be it. These were actively attacking their ships, which was considerably
different than some Veliquesh sitting in a building minding his own business.

So after the fighters were destroyed and he sent
recovery teams out to the crash sites Kip continued his aerial patrol for
several hours until his bladder called it quits and he cycled back up to orbit
while replacement patrols took over for him. They came from firebases on the
surface but he headed back up to his command ship that was sitting next to
Greg’s in a low parking orbit. The other three were spread out around the same
planet with their fleets in blockade formation to keep any remaining surface
ships from escaping and to prevent any ships from the other Veliquesh planets
in the system from interrupting this planetary assault.

For the most part they didn’t try anymore, given the
number of ships present, but when the transports finished filling a jumpship
with prisoners and that ship would leave the system they would try and
intercept it if they had an opportunity. Usually they didn’t, given the speed
of the Star Force vessels, so the naval front was pretty much mundane up until
they got around to finishing with this planet and would assault another.

Right now Kip was in the bad guy farming business,
harvesting the citizenry from planet after plant and shipping them off to a nearby
Star Force system where others would deal with the aftermath. As long as this
crusade was taking, he wouldn’t be involved in the non-combat assignments, nor
would the other four trailblazers. When the last prisoner had been collected
their work would be finished and they’d return to other duties, leaving what
happened to the Veliquesh in others’ hands.

And that was for the best, because after so many years
of dealing with these guys Kip thoroughly hated them. Even now they were
conducting sacrifice rituals on the other planets in order to try and stay Star
Force’s inevitable march against them. He couldn’t stop them all and had to
just turn a blind eye to it and focus on one planet at a time…but he never
could, not completely. And even on a planet like this that was crawling with
Star Force units there were still Veliquesh killing each other, whether it be a
public ceremony or younglings that didn’t measure up.

Sometimes they’d find bodies of individuals in the
buildings after a stun bombardment that had been eviscerated through a number
of sick means with no clue as to why or how it’d happened. The depth of this
civilization’s corruption was something Kip didn’t care to figure out, given
that he was here to destroy it. To that end he did his job and ‘harvested’ as
many living Veliquesh as he could get his hands on, but the trail of bodies
left behind from their internal affairs made it clear why Veliquesh didn’t
typically live past half a century.

That was another reason why Kip preferred organizing
assaults from the air, so he didn’t have to see what they’d been up to in
person. Every time he did it made him angry, and after a while that anger
drained you of energy. The same was true of his troops, so he made sure to
rotate them in and out of duties that had them on the front lines to give them
a chance to recharge physically and emotionally.