Star Force: Shame (SF59) (4 page)

“That gives us one permanent border to work with
then…once we creep out to it.”

“And it gives our enemies worlds that they’re safe on,
meaning we can never fully defeat the Skarrons.”

“I hate even hearing that,” Davis said with a sigh,
“but unfortunately that’s the galaxy we live in. We’ve done well to survive and
grow to the size we have, given everything concerned.”

“And now that the lizards are pushing further into the
core, we can’t go after them there either.”

“You think the Skarrons will let them stay?”

“Not willingly, but I have no idea what their
priorities are or what other opponents they’re tangling with. Most of the
intel
data we’ve gotten has been local only. We still
haven’t recovered a comprehensive map of their territory.”

“Compartmentalization?”

“That’s been another long, on-going discussion.
Current theory is they’ve got fiefdoms that operate independent from one
another to counteract the lag times given the distance, but who knows.”

“So even if we grew strong enough overnight to defeat
the lizards, they’ve crossed a line into a region where we will not follow?”

“Sounds like something out of the Lord of the Rings,
but yeah.”

“Which leaves our victory rooted in staying alive and
saving as many others as we can?”

“If you’re asking can we militarily expand…the answer
is yes. The question is how much, when, and where.”

“I know a border stretch is impossible, which will
leave us with colonization blips similar to what Canderous is doing, correct?”

“We’ll need to establish strongholds with Sentinel
emplacements, yes.”

“Which leaves reinforcement the issue?”

“I sense a suggestion coming,” Greg said keenly.

“One of the requests,” Davis said, zooming in on a
portion of the map, “comes from a cluster of systems with 10 different races.
They’re practically located on top of each other.”

“I like this,” Greg said immediately after glancing at
the map. “Their proximity would allow a mini version of the ADZ to be built,
though it’d have to be self-supporting and that would take a lot of time…but it
is far enough away from the lizards to potentially have that time.”

“It’d have to be off the grid,” Davis pointed out.

“It’s doable. Not sure if it’s the best use of our
resources, but if you want it we can make it happen.”

“And the others?”

Greg bit his lip. “Hate to say it, but without a link
into the ADZ transit network it’d be a bit of an overreach at this point.”

“Which brings up another item I wanted to discuss with
you. How difficult would it be to establish trade routes beyond the ADZ to link
us to the surrounding regions?” Davis said, bringing up a premade map of what
he was thinking, with numerous finger-like lines reaching out like the branches
on a plant…including one that ran all the way down to Voku territory.”

“You are a bold one,” Greg said, giving Davis credit
for an idea that even the trailblazers hadn’t thought of…at least not to this
extent. “These lines will be vulnerable initially and we’ll have to devote
considerable military presence until they get fortified locally. This isn’t
something we can setup all at once. You’d have to grow these routes out over
time.”

“I assumed as much. Once we get them set up?”

“As far as our scouts have gone we haven’t found
anyone that can challenge us at our current tech level. That’s not saying much,
considering a lot of these routes go beyond our current maps, but so long as
they stay away from the lizards I’d say it’s also doable.”

“Too much?”

“Depends on our long term plans.”

“Which are still in flux.”

“To be honest, we’re going to annex all this region
anyway. We’re just being cautious and not wanting to overextend ourselves,”
Greg said bluntly. “No one else is strong enough to step up to the plate and
we’re not just going to sit back and watch the lizards run rampant.”

“If I’m hearing you correctly, we’re going to settle
on a fixed coreward border to keep from inviting discovery by the V’kit’no’sat,
but we’re going to have to stop worrying about drawing attention to ourselves out
here in the mid rim?”

Greg closed his eyes. “That’s what I do not want to
say.”

“Because there’s no way of knowing what could tip them
off,” Davis said, his thoughts running down a similar path, yet he’d come to a
conclusion about 30 seconds ago that he’d been working towards for centuries.
“The fixed inner border is a necessary decision that I support, but we can’t
let people die that we can save on the possibility of our actions drawing the
V’kit’no’sat here. If we’re truly going to hide then we need to start
evacuating to the rim now and go far beyond the lizards.”

Greg smiled deviously. “You know we’re not going to
walk away from a fight.”

“Agreed, so let’s just admit to the fact that we’re
going to be ourselves and not be handcuffed by what might happen. We’re a long
way from the current V’kit’no’sat border with the Skarrons sitting in between,
and while we can always take one more precaution I say we stop now and get to
work. The inner border will have to be it.”

Greg blew out a slow breath. “I can’t disagree with
that. I wonder if the V’kit’no’sat know the Nexus is out here and don’t care or
just don’t have a clue. The lack of maps suggest the latter, but it still feels
like a gamble.”

“We have an unknowable variable that will remain
unknown until they drop in on our heads. The question is, how
are we
going to deal with it.”

“I hate to say it but my gut is still uneasy on this
one. We’ve made so much noise already I’m half surprised they haven’t found us.
The size of the galaxy is our greatest advantage, and the bigger we grow the
harder it will be to remain unnoticed.”

“Now this is odd. I find myself more gung ho than an
Archon,” Davis said with some amusement.

“Very odd,” Greg agreed.

The merriment left the Director’s face as he looked
the trailblazer in the eye. “We can’t leave these people to die,” he said
slowly.

Greg returned his stare. “No…we can’t.”

4

March 7, 2658

Gangon
System (lizard
territory)

Sevvba

Greg sat on an elevated pillar in the command nexus,
having been on station for several hours as he watched the surface assault of
the lizard world with care. None of his ships were down in the atmosphere, but
the H’kar under his command were. Their Destar Conduits were far more efficient
at wrecking unarmored infrastructure than anything Star Force had, and now that
the defense shields were breached on several lizard colonies he’d sent his
allies down to target key facilities to cripple the lizards’ regrowth rather
than trying for wholesale slaughter.

That list of targets was constructed by Greg
personally for each assault, not wanting to leave anything up to chance or his
subordinates, and the H’kar had grown to trust in his judgement and now followed
his orders to the letter. That hadn’t always been the case, but after many
years of fighting side by side with Star Force and learning from them the
number one lesson they’d picked up was that the trailblazers had no equal when
it came to strategy…and the fact that their ships survived more engagements
when one of the Humans was in command.

Greg had already sent down the list of targets, which
spared the lizards main habitation areas and food storage/production facilities
but targeted all other industry and the growth pods. Greg was willing to let
most of the current lizards live, but he couldn’t afford to let them easily
make more, hence the growth pods were always a high valued target. They could
and would rebuild them again after Star Force left, but it would delay them
considerably by not being able to replace their personnel losses in such short
order.

The H’kar had originally argued that if they were
razing lizard colonies that they should kill everyone on the planet, but after
fighting alongside Star Force they’d begun to accept the different strategy
and, whether they agreed with it or not they did adhere to it, which was why
Greg was willing to let them carry out the secondary surface bombardment. He
didn’t have to worry about them going off mission and targeting structures he
hadn’t tagged. That sort of foolishness was not something the H’kar went in
for, and Greg was glad they had a professional ally to work with.

While most of the H’kar battleships, their smallest
ships, were in atmosphere their two behemoths sat nearby Greg’s command ship in
wait. Both H’kar ships were the equivalent of mobile
starbases
,
capable of a wide range of support tasks but just as well equipped to throw
down the damage at heavy targets…in fact that was the design behind the entire
H’kar fleet, to walk up to a big enemy and punch it in the face. That made them
a heavy hitting race, and so ill-suited to fighting the lizards.

 
They didn’t
previously see the value of having smaller warships, though their time with
Star Force was certainly giving them an education.
Their
destars
were a Nexus upgrade that they’d created for just that purpose,
and essentially being a
superlaser
that would fire
continuously with no recharge cycle. It was made of a dense photon slurry, but
altered in such a way to artificially bond them together into packets, giving
it much more kill power than any traditional laser could conceivably throw out
regardless as to how much power you put into it.

Typically one of the H’kar battleships would move up
close to an enemy and tag it with the destar, keeping the blue-white beam on it
until the ship was destroyed then moving on to the next. When facing off
against a few large ships this worked very well, but with a lizard cruiser
swarm each individual ship didn’t last very long under that level of firepower,
but it took time to target another and the speed at which the cruisers moved
often gave the H’kar gunners trouble.

They could certainly kill a lot of cruisers, but the
same tonnage of ships, when combined into three or four big vessels was much
easier for the H’kar to take down. Spreading it out into fleets of hundreds of
them mean the H’kar had to take weaponsfire for a very long time because no
single crippling shot could be fired.

Add in the fact that each battleship only had 1 destar
and not a lot of support weapons and you had a prime target on their ships for
the lizards to target, often with the H’kar running off with ‘blinded’ ships
that had their destar destroyed. While having a big gun was an advantage in
many circumstances, the mismatch against the lizards proved to be one glaring
problem for the H’kar. Already they were working with Star Force to develop new
warships designed specifically to fight the lizards, but the first prototypes
were several years from completion.

That said, the H’kar fleet was anything but useless.
Originally no H’kar battleship had ever entered the atmosphere of a planet, for
they were built in space and operated in space…up until Liam had convinced them
that they could go
planetside
and be effective. Now
it was a standard tactic in their joint raids, with their destars being able to
widen the beam and created a paintbrush that could level infrastructure quite
quickly as opposed to the thin cleansing beams that Star Force could hit the
surface with.

Rail guns were also less effective because of their
needle-prick hits. Both weapons had been used to take down the colony shields,
and now Greg had the H’kar moving in to clean up even as he repositioned his
own drone fleet to assault more of the lizard colonies on the planet that had
seen nearly a third of its surface consumed by the invaders. They were in what
had once been Calavari space, though this planet had belonged to the
Vesdan
, who sadly had not survived the encounter nor were
able to flee from it, given their primitive technology.

The battle in orbit had been quick, with only a few
dozen cruisers in defense which the much larger joint fleet easily hunted down.
It was good to eliminate them, but the real long term effect was in ridding the
surface of the colonies’ ability to build and sending what they had already
created into the junkyard category.
 
This
was the third system that Greg had assaulted on this campaign, and in each case
he left the lizards with less than they had originally, setting back their
development in these systems and effectively nullifying their ability to
reinforce or spread to others.

As of now they didn’t have a single starship left in
the system, nor had they advanced to the point of creating an interstellar
comm
station, meaning that the rest of the lizard empire
was going to be kept in the dark as to what had happened here, and the more
confusion Greg and the others could sow behind enemy lines the better.

Just then the battlemap began to flicker with activity
as a group of incoming jumps registered in planetary orbit a few dozen kilometers
higher in altitude than his command ship currently sat on its lazy orbit around
the planet and several hundred behind its current track.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, mentally sending out an
alert and repositioning those ships closest to him. “Now there’s bad timing for
you.”

An image of the
exoskeletal
H’kar commander popped up alongside the battlemap, with the computer handling
the translation given that only a handful of their allies spoke English.

“An ambush?”

“They’re coming from the stellar jumpline, so I’d
guess they were scheduled to arrive here and we just picked a bad time,” Greg
said as the much larger image of an invoker appeared on the battlemap behind a
large mass of cruisers that, almost belatedly began to reform into a screen,
suggesting that they were as surprised by the raiding fleets’ presence as Greg
was to see them here.

The H’kar made an annoying clicking sound that the
computer didn’t bother to translate, but that Greg knew was angry frustration.
“Shall we withdrawal?”

“No, we’re taking this bastard down…so long as there’s
only the one of them.”

“We only have a light fleet and not the tonnage
required to defeat that ship…at least not without great sacrifice.”

“Keep half your fleet on the surface running through
the target list and bring the other half up to me and task them to protect
these ships,” Greg said, mentally tagging every rail gun-equipped drone he had.
“Do not assault the invoker.”

“You cannot take it alone.”

“
Your destars
are medium
range and will require you to get within the energy arcs, that means you stay
back or get slaughtered.”

“Our behemoths can weather the storm briefly.”

Greg shook his head. “Watch and learn. This isn’t the
first invoker we’ve tangled with. They’re designed to destroy tonnage, so what
you have to do is sting them to death.”

The H’kar commander was silent, then a moment later
his hologram disappeared, but as ordered portions of the fleet assaulting the
surface abandoned their targets and began to gain altitude.

Greg watched carefully as the rest of the lizard fleet
arrived. There were a few bigger ships in the mix, four battleships and one
dreadnaught, but it appeared to merely be an escort fleet for the invoker with
no other ‘chess pieces’ involved. He guessed they were either passing through
the system en route to elsewhere or were using this location as a rendezvous,
for there was nothing here warranting that much firepower.

Greg’s own command ship he was keeping away from the
fight as well. He knew he could dive into the energy arcs if he had to, but the
shields wouldn’t last long enough for him to deliver a killing blow to the
invoker before it started to eat away at his giant donut. No, Liam had taught
him this trick a while back, and it was a drone-only affair. He just hoped the
lizards hadn’t developed a counter for it.

The enemy didn’t hold off, but rather came straight at
the command ship and the two H’kar behemoths, which with their escort fleet
would have made for an even fight. It was odd, given how in the past the
lizards had always wanted to protect their invokers, but now every time they
had a chance to hit one of Star Force’s command ships they took the opportunity
regardless of what it would cost them. They wanted a kill badly, but Greg
wasn’t going to give them a chance today.

Instead he had his rail gun-equipped warships move
into a partial spherical arc around one quarter of the invoker as the cruiser
swarm came out to meet them when it was determined that they were going to hold
range and not let the big ship move within striking distance. By then the H’kar
began to catch up and helped the drones fend off the cruisers, using their
overpowered destars to knock out one gnat at a time, leaving the rest of the
swarm free to poke at the black, rectangular drones.

As they did the rail runs began targeting the invoker
and firing on specific points that Greg gave them. The metallic bullets moved
so fast that they passed through the energy arcs without getting fully
disintegrated, merely a little
melty
on the outside,
allowing the hard central mass of the slugs to hit the thin shields guarding
the hull of the ship. It took several minutes of pounding, but eventually they
broke through and with enough subsequent hits knocked out a few of the
invoker’s emitters.

That reduced the amount of energy arcs in that area,
with the invoker immediately beginning to pivot around to bring a more intact
area of the field into the firing line. Greg wasn’t going to have that, so he
had his drones chase the weakened area around the invoker like they were the
horses on a carousel, all the time with the H’kar and other drones protecting
them from the cruisers and the five larger lizard ships that the H’kar eagerly
pursued.

Those kept trying to retreat to the invoker and draw
the H’kar into range, but every time they poked a few holes in them they’d
disengage, not falling for the bait as they would have once done. Traditional
H’kar strategy held that once you engaged a target you stayed on it until
either it or you were destroyed, but thankfully Star Force had rid them of that
lunacy…at least as far as their raiding fleets were concerned.

The rail gun slugs kept firing, targeting the area
near the emitters despite the fact that sensor locks were nearly impossible
given the disrupting nature of the energy arcs, but the more that were damaged
the more gaps there were in the crisscrossing rainbow lightning field, allowing
more precise plotting and even a few well targeted cleansing beams to shoot
through.

Greg could have had all his cleansing beams open up on
the invoker, including those on the command ship, but he needed those to assist
with destroying the cruisers right now and his own ship had to keep moving to
stay away from the invoker that was still chasing it, with the battlefield
being dragged along wherever it went.

The Star Force and H’kar ships had to keep dancing to
remain in position, but eventually the weak area on the invoker dropped its
energy arcs low enough that Greg gave the go ahead to four of his drones that
were standing by in the back of the battle. As a group they moved through the
lizard swarm and dove towards the energy arcs, with the three cruisers tucking
up against the rear of a shield ship as it deployed its full power to create an
egg-like barrier around the foursome.

Greg had never done this before, but Liam’s notes had
indicated how much the shield ship should be able to take and he’d gone just a
little under that amount to be on the safe side…though the random nature of the
lizards’ weapon defied confident numbers, so he found himself holding his
breath a bit as the remote-controlled ships dove into the field.