Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) (22 page)

Vier winced as she watched the MAB’s warp bubble fade to nothing on her personal holo. She
wished
she could order one of her warships to extend their warp bubble around the ‘system’, but it was impossible. That type of equipment was only carried on the Valkyries. And she had no free Valkyries left.

Seven more to go, she thought to herself. Oh, she had tried to protect them, but it was too damn impossible. The light attack Cats could move fast, and they could flank, and they could destroy all opposition, including the warships she jammed in front of the Valkyries to protect them.

At this rate, she could potentially lose all her MABs, which, she surmised, was all the more reason it was necessary to win the battle. If she could force the enemy’s warships to retreat, then she would have all the time in the world to dissect and learn from her trophies.

At the moment, the battle was still undecided. Vier still found it hard to believe that she had a forty to one tonnage advantage, and she could not win.

If only she had more missiles left! If only she had more fighters!

She sighed, fully knowing that regrets were pointless waste of time and energy. She had to work with what she had.

There must be something she could do to tip the balance…something!

Suddenly, a thought occurred to her that she could try to evacuate the fast-moving MABs off the battlefield while surrounding them with her lightest ships. That way, even if she lost the battle, she would be able to save her trophies. But logic shut that thought down immediately. One, even if she took the remaining MABs and provided them with all her light escorts, they would not be able to protect themselves against all of the enemy’s light attack ships. She was having trouble protecting them just by using her entire fleet. It was true, the MABs were fast, but could they get out of the battle fast enough? Secondly, if she did that, she was essentially condemning the rest of her fleet to death. She couldn’t do it, yet a saying occurred in her head, “the person who wants everything gets nothing”.

She thought about it a little more, but ultimately decided not to gamble here.

Better to win the main fight. Just a little bit more. Just a little bit more effort!

Ga Light Cruiser

Unknown Corridor…

The robot sentry killed four of his men by blasting armor-piercing rounds insanely accurately at a rate of one hundred times a minute. Each round zoomed at about 2,000 meters per second, enough to break a bone with the percussion even if it didn’t penetrate human armor. Huang almost bought the farm too, if it were not for one of his men yelling, “It’s a trap!” Just before that same man was skewered by a tungsten round that chemically exploded after it tore into his torso. Huang was glad it wasn’t a larger nuclear detonation, because he stood right nearby. The sergeant’s body expanded in a ball of fire, blood, and flesh, independent of what type of explosion ignited it.

“How the hell do we get past that thing, sir?” yelled Private Ritter yelled over the comm net, standing beside Huang Rui as they watched bullets fly past the corner.

Huang took a second to recall that they did have a weapon against that. “Bring the XG-108, Private Greenhill!”

“Yes, sir!” a voice replied over the comm net.

An armored suit ran up to where Huang and his men stood. It held a giant rifle called the Cornershot, which could bend around a wall like a snake. The only problem, Huang thought, was that there was a possibility that the sentry might hit the XG-108 before it could hit the sentry. Nevertheless, he had to try. He took the massive rifle from the trooper and held it in his arms. It weighed about eighty pounds, but to a person in exoskeleton armor, it felt like feather.

Here goes nothing
.

He crept close to the corner and aimed his rifle around the bend, and—the world around him lit up with armor piercing rounds.
Bang! Bang!
The wall to the side and the wall he hid behind exploded. Luckily, it was everything except his rifle. Using a visual sensor tied into a monitor in his helmet’s HUD, he fired the Cornershot.

The Cornershot bullet skewered the sentry like a machine gun, creating sparks and explosions throughout the alien apparatus. After twenty of these rapid
and large
penetration rounds, the sentry blew up in a giant metal fiery mesh. Bang!

Score, again!

“It’s done. Let’s go!” Huang yelled into the net.

“Yes, sir!”

They ran around the corner and past the dead metal hulk of the sentry. They kept moving until they reached another corridor. Huang felt relieved that it wouldn’t take much effort to neutralize a sentry as long as he had a XG-108—until he met his next robotic sentry, which could actually move—and some more Cats behind it.

Betelgeuse Fleet

Alpha-nine Wing, Squadron 8 “Night Shadows”

Fighter 1

I’m a sadist
.

Pilot Lucinda Sanford, Lieutenant, Senior Grade, suddenly found a sick pleasure in seeing her squadron’s third kill die. In a way, she had always suspected she was—now it was absolutely true.

As she watched in her HUD the very object of her hate explode in a white-hot fireball into a hundred pieces due to a power core containment failure…and then fade away into nothing, she was washed over with relief. At least she had taken away from them what they had taken away from her. Although nothing could replace the loss of a loved one, there was such a thing as respite and comfort—a sense of justice in this cruel universe that didn’t give a shit for human concerns.

Out of the 25 members in her squadron, only nine remaining fighters could still align with her in a new distributed flat sheet. The rest were gone. She had trained and bled with them—now they were gone.

“Next target,” she said. “We take on that big cruiser, number 609.”

In her HUD, she saw it. It looked like a massive beetle – all of them did – but this one was twice as large. She wondered how fast it could go. Staring at her sensor readouts, she was surprised to see that it could move as fast as one of the feline destroyers half its size. Measuring five hundred meters from head to tail, with a hundred legs moved back and forth emitting the feline version of a gravitron shield, it was certainly the Cats’ largest asset within the immediate battlefield.

“Night Shadows, attack!” Lucinda shouted.

While hearing the affirmative responses come back at her, she carefully monitored her fighter’s readouts on her HUD. She was running a little low on energy. Her antimatter stores had been bled to death from her rampant use of power in her impressive calisthenics. She had, at most, enough power for one or two more battles before she could no longer power her warp suspenders.

A thought crept into her head, something that she found repugnant, which was that she should
retreat back to her carrier and reload on antimatter.

No.

Now was not the time to retreat. She had a battle to fight and a team to lead.

No, she would rather disappear from the universe than leave her comrades in their moment where every single bit of help mattered.

Ride! Destiny awaits!

Disappearing from existence in hyperspace seemed like a great way to die.

Light Cruiser Hukna Sevank

Unknown Corridor 2…

“Fire!” Huang ordered.

Anti-armor rounds smashed into metallic walls and explosions detonated everywhere inside the corridor within the feline ship. Huang fired his cornershot at every opportunity he could get, taking down more armored Cats than he could count.

The Cats across the hallway fired their own version of the cornershot, which killed many in his platoon. And of course, there was that robotic sentry, which could shoot armor piercing rounds faster than his remaining members combined.

But Huang had one advantage that none of the feline defenders of this ship could reciprocate.

More men.

Out of the 1000 men he began with, he was now left with 825. From the computer resonance analysis and nanoprobe data, he believed his troops had killed at least 210 of the 650 enemy ship’s personnel. He had also taken at least a dozen feline prisoners during the assault. That, combined with the reasonable pace in which his forces were starting to intrude into the core areas of the ship—Huang was certain he had this one in the bag.

Provided he had enough time, of course.

Another blast blew a giant hole in the head of one of his platoon mates. His soldiers responded furiously. They fired and fired, giving the enemy nowhere to go but hell, but even then—that was not enough.

That blasted robotic sentry—its frontal armor was tougher than anything Huang or his platoon had encountered so far. And it could move.

It continued going down the corridor, getting closer to where his squad was entrenched, roaring its cannons. Anything that
didn’t
hit his men sent shrapnel and debris that bounced off their nano-c armor. At this rate, he would either have to retreat his men or witness the annihilation of his platoon.

How many of these metallic monsters were inside this ship? Huang wondered, as the robot got closer and closer.
He grunted. The problem was…the moment he told his men to get up and run away…that was the moment his men would be most vulnerable to line of sight attacks. They would be exposed to all kinds of fire, especially from that sentry.

But he had no choice. Even his Cornershot could not kill it. Also, the heavy particle gun that his platoon carried had been destroyed earlier in another fight.

Huang took in a deep breath and was about to say, ‘Men, retreat!’ When suddenly, the Cats stopped fighting, and screaming could be heard from outside his helmet.

Puzzled, Huang shouted, “Ceasefire!”

“Ceasefire!” people shouted down the platoon net.

One by one, his platoon obeyed.

Huang gazed around the corner with his cornershot sensors and saw the heavy robotic sentry lying on the metal ground, spurting fire and sparks. The armored Cats around it were on the ground, too. Some of them screamed in their own unique feline tenor. One of them, however, knelt on the metal meshing, begging for mercy.

An armor piercing round from nowhere struck and penetrated its torso and blew its body into a hundred fiery metal and flesh fragments.

“I said ceasefire!” Huang yelled into the platoon net.

“That wasn’t us!” said Private Shelby.

Huang zoomed his 3D HUD map out a little bit, so he could see the surrounding corridors and saw where the bullet had come from.

Another platoon had made quick progress behind the enemy blockade and had gained line of sight on the feline combatants Huang had been fighting for the past five minutes.

“Lieutenant Dunbar, do you read?” Relieved Huang asked the CO of this new platoon.

“I read you, cap,” Dunbar’s voice came back.

“Thanks for coming to our aid, D. We would have lost a lot of men if you hadn’t reached that intersection just in time.”

“No prob, cap, do you need assistance?”

“No, let’s continue forward as separate groups. Maybe you can try that trick again when we hit another roadblock.”

“The pleasure is mine, cap,” Dunbar replied on the net. “Men, you heard the cap, let’s go!”

Still relieved, Huang retracted his cornershot and led his platoon through the metal tunnel past the mess of incapacitated and moaning felines along with their fragmented armor. Another team will come to take prisoners, thought Huang, but for now, he had a battle to fight and a ship to take over.

Betelgeuse Fleet

Alpha-nine Wing, Squadron 8 “Night Shadows”

Fighter 1
…

It was big. It was quick—and it fired back.

A massive H-wave slashed through the matterless space behind Lucinda.

“Ahhh!” voices yelled in her helmet. Pip and Irri were gone, eradicated from the universe—just like that.

Inside her cockpit, Lucinda sighed.

For the last thirteen minutes, she had dodged and fired, dodged and fired against that gigantic beetle that had already killed five members of her remaining squadron. Now, she only had four pilots, including herself. Yet, the blasted feline insect would not go down.

It wasn’t because she could not fire enough shots on its gigantic armored body, but instead because her tiny h-beams just weren’t strong enough. Sure, she had eradicated entire sections of its outer hull – the very act of which gave her a release of pleasure – but the sheer amount of hull made it very difficult to puncture into its innards.

She needed more firepower. It was so big, it could take all this damage from her squadron’s h-beams.
“Alpha nine, group eight, requesting assistance,” Lucinda said into the tact-net.

A second later, a controller’s voice responded, “Assistance is coming, alpha-nine-eight. Continue holding 609 at bay. Well done so far.”

Half a minute later, a new object entered the immediate battlefield. She knew it had come because she saw the beetle turn its entire body to face it.

Lucinda glanced at the new object in her nav display and saw its metallic, sword-like familiar shape – a human battlecruiser named
Veritas
. In her HUD, her computer tagged it as a Pulsar class miniature dreadnought with a crew of four thousand. Armed with four h-beam cannons and plenty of h-deflector ports, it was an arsenal ready to counter anything in hyperspace—anything human, that is. For a moment, she felt relieved, but reality took that emotion away from her quickly. By weight, the Pulsar class battlecruiser was about nine times as massive as the feline beetle it faced, but that mattered little.

Both ships fired at each other simultaneously.

Four h-beams from the
Veritas
slashed towards the beetle at incredible speeds. Three of them were deflected, bouncing harmlessly off the insect’s stabilization shields. The one that managed to get through — cut into the beetle’s topmost portion, eradicating about twelve thousand tons of hull space, causing inner atmosphere to leak out, as well as feline crewmen, hull parts, and minor explosions.

The beetle’s return fire slashed at the
Veritas
. The H-wave was almost half as large as the surface of
Veritas
exposed to the alien ship. The
Veritas’s
h-deflectors protected maybe twenty to thirty percent of the destructive destabilization field. The rest slammed into the
Veritas
, causing over a hundred thousand tons of hull matter to disappear. Atmosphere and human crews spurted out like innocent dolls from a temperamental child. Explosions detonated and energy discharged out across the human ship’s damaged surface.

All this time, Lucinda and her three remaining pilots kept firing.

The two major combatants fired on each other again, without mercy, without any apparent worry with what was happening to both of them. They – the ships themselves – were killers in a deadbeat battle for tactical dominance and supremacy.

Another wave, and then another, slammed into the human battlecruiser, destroying so much matter that by this time—its hull looked like a shattered and wrecked corpse half eaten by a bear. But the
Veritas
kept firing with whatever it had. Its remaining forward H-beam ports were long gone, so it turned to its side and prepared to fire its side-ports. An h-wave slashed at the human’s now vulnerable side, and killed even more exposed systems.

Eventually, the human battlecruiser limped, like a bird in the air suffering from a bullet wound, floundering this way and that, trying to come to senses to what was happening to it
and
avoid the enemy at the same time. Meanwhile, the feline beetle came closer for the kill – just when the bird released a last attempt to take down its killer, an h-beam aimed right into a partially exposed section of the insect’s ventral hull. The h-beam did not get blocked, but managed to eradicate twenty thousand tons of armor and hull plating, mesmerizingly on target.

The much smaller insect furiously followed through with its killing blow. Waves after waves of destabilization fields cut deeper and deeper into the bird’s most crucial areas, until the corpse had all its stomach contents eaten out. Then, the
Veritas
’s energy containment failed and it exploded.

About 4000 humans gone.

The insect turned its attention back at Lucinda and her mates...when Lucinda fired her weak h-beams into the exposed and damaged hull hole that had been created by the
Veritas
not more than thirty seconds earlier. Her h-beam, combined with two other h-beams from her mates, erased even more matter within the alien’s jugular. Because Lucinda and her squadron mates were so close to the alien, much closer than they would have been had the Veritas not appeared, all the alien had to do was fire a single h-wave and it would have killed Lucinda on the spot. She did not have the distance or reaction room this time to agilely evade it – but nothing happened. The alien did not fire.

Instead, a shockwave emanating from deep within the alien’s hull, right where Lucinda’s squadron had fired their h-beams, blowing and exploding the alien vessel into three gigantic, flaming parts. The beetle broke apart.

“Yahoo!” the survivors of the battle yelled over the squadron-net.

“Congrats guys, we did it,” Lucinda said, watching the enemy’s warp bubble destabilize. “Now, let’s find another—” Her eyes gazed at her antimatter fuel readouts. 0 percent...