Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) (10 page)

Waiting for word was always troublesome, but
eventually another two reports of supply routes from other scout ships had him
breaking up his fleet further to send assault groups out into ambush position. None
of the enemy came to Achkor, but they were out there, he knew, and would come
eventually. Having assault groups missing when that occurred worried him, but
he had to keep the pressure off the Humans and that meant he couldn’t turtle up
here and hold out. He had to extend his reach and become a major blocker to the
Skarrons and hope the Humans could take care of things behind that naval
umbrella.

The first report of combat came back positive. A ship
returned with a kill count indicating an ambush had
went
down with disastrous results for the enemy. It had been a warship convoy, but
his fleet had intercepted them beautifully and chewed them apart before they
could fully arrive in the system, ending up with a 97% kill count.

It was those other 3% that Cal-com didn’t like. He
didn’t fault his troops for that after watching the battle telemetry, but it
meant that those surviving ships that had fled would cause the convoy route to
change again. Had they got them all there would be no way of knowing that the
Voku were there poaching and he’d hoped they’d get at least a short span of
easy takedowns, but that wasn’t going to be the case this time.

The next report he got was more favorable…a supply
convoy coming through one of the other routes that was completely annihilated
as it tried to run. A surrender option had been given and decline, which
Cal-com had demanded. The Voku were not going to become predators shooting up
ships that had nowhere to go, but if the enemy didn’t take that offer they’d
been instructed to blow them away. There was only so much mercy he was going to
give to the enemy, and it was more about his troops being in the right than his
concern for the enemy that had him issuing those orders.

Finally a scout ship entered the Achkor system, a
Skarron ship, and was intercepted before it could flee. It was damaged and
captured on his orders, with the crew all dying save for six due to
decompression issues. Those he added to his prisoner count, but it was the ship
itself that he wanted. A thorough look at its computer systems gave him some
information about where it had come from and some fleet movements with him
being able to identify a link in their chain further in towards the core and
potentially the location where the hammer blow would come from when the
Skarrons got around to coming back to reclaim Achkor.

Cal-com dispatched a small scout fleet to that system
to poke around and see what they could find, again having to wait weeks or
months to get a report back. During that time the link to the Human relay grid
was finished with two separate transmitters being brought in by the Humans and
deposited in high and odd orbits that would make it difficult for the Skarrons
to get to without binary drives.

Those relays were adjusted to interface with the Voku
comm systems then the Humans left again, leaving Cal-com with a faster
communication option with his allies than courier ship would have allowed,
though messages still took weeks to travel across the grid.

What it did gain him was continuous reports of what
the Skarrons were doing on the ADZ border and a private line to Warlord Paul,
with both of them beginning to exchange a large amount of information on a
regular basis. Each respected the other for their skills, but over time that
respect mutually grew as they plotted out the next phases of the war, pulling
on both of their experience and skills and running ideas past each other.

During that time Warlord Paul also broke the Skarron
blockade of the Dvapp world he’d been defending, just as Cal-com had expected
him to if he’d provided him with an opportunity. Hopefully the rest of the
Humans and their allies could do the same in the coming years. In the meantime
he had a planet and system to fortify, with him sending a ship back with
requisition requests…for as his infantile shipyards came online he was going to
need more personnel to fill them, along with the myriad of other positions in
his fleet and on the planet as it started to grow into a full Voku battle
colony.

10

November 30, 2550

Reesi
System (Beta
Region)

Metropolis

Megan stood in the command nexus on the planet, safely
inside one of the cities on their secure continent. The Skarrons still retained
theirs and the fighting was now on the third, with Star Force holding its own
and keeping the Skarrons contained to the southern chunk with combat operations
going round the clock. The trailblazer was still mounting sabotage missions to
the Skarron continent but most of her efforts were focused on the center of
fighting and in keeping the enemy off of theirs.

Right now the Skarrons were making another push in
orbit, with Megan dancing her defense fleet around between Sentinels and
killing what ships she could. With Skarron transports coming down towards their
continent they were hoping to bait her fleet out into the open to engage
it…otherwise she’d have to let the transports land uncontested. She wasn’t
about to do either, so she was personally handling the navigation for a number
of ships in order to get them to make an in-atmosphere strike run underneath
the Skarron fleet.

Meanwhile she had another group make a strike up into
a higher orbit, essentially
backdooring
the enemy as
they focused on low orbit. They had so many ships that it wasn’t easy pickings,
but even if she could manage a few kills it would be worth it. Until now they’d
had too
many in position
there to risk it, but now
with the trap they were setting having repositioned some of them it was time to
try.

She let one of her naval commanders handle that
strike, for right now the Skarron ambush fleet was coming down towards
atmosphere hard as the ships she’d sent after the transports tore fiery meteor
plumes through the air as the friction mounted on their shields. They hard
braked against every gravity well they could find and stopped short of ramming
the transports, ending up a couple of kilometers beneath them and in prime
position to strike.

The Skarron escort warships moved off immediately, but
Megan had sent enough ships…18 in all…that they were met and challenged,
leaving some 6 drones free to pursue the transports and hammer them hard at close
range with Talon cannons after the maulers stripped their shields off. Within
20 seconds the first of them tilted off course and out of control, falling into
a death spiral that would land it in the ocean and hopefully away from any
aquatics units or infrastructure down there.

Megan wasn’t overly concerned about that, for the
water itself acted as a shield against impacts if it was deep enough. A brief
look at the battlemap told her that particular area of ocean was clear of
friendlies so she concentrated on the other transports while the higher drones
quickly cut apart the Skarron escorts. Higher up the ambush fleet was coming
down into the upper atmosphere after them, forcing Megan to make a choice…bring
the rest of her fleet down as well and fight it out there or let the Skarrons
move about with impunity, hoping they’d go back up after the transports were
either destroyed or landed safely.

Frowning, she was about to issue the orders for her
ships to come down in-atmosphere as well, because she couldn’t give the enemy
the chance to strafe ground troops if they were so inclined, but before she
could issue the thought a notice beeped in her mind, letting her know that
there was activity at the star. A quick glance indicated that there were ships
incoming, signal lagged, but otherwise occurring in realtime. She expected more
Skarron reinforcements after such a long drought without them, but then she was
relieved to see Star Force ID tags begin popping up.

She began composing new orders to be sent to them,
indicating where she wanted them to hit…for with a chunk of the Skarron fleet
in atmosphere and additional Star Force ships in play they had an opportunity
in orbit so long as the Skarrons didn’t get too belligerent down on the planet.
Megan almost sent the order,
then
stopped when she saw
that one of the incoming ships was a command ship…and it was the
Excalibur
.

Grinning like an idiot, Megan recomposed her message
into a short two sentence request and sent it off…then turned her attention
back to the Skarron fleet in-atmosphere.

They were descending fast, trying to get to the few
remaining transports that had yet to be shot down, or more likely trying to get
to the ships that had done the damage in order to exact revenge. The closest
Star Force city was some 2,000+ miles away from their location, but that
distance wasn’t all that comforting. It was true that it would take them some
time to get there moving in the friction of the atmosphere, but Megan had to do
something to stall them from whatever they intended.

The trailblazer dispatched some two dozen additional
drones from orbit and sent them shooting down into the atmosphere towards the
Skarron fleet, knowing they’d see them coming but also know that those few
ships wouldn’t be enough to stop them. They’d be wondering what she was doing
and hopefully that confusion would stall them. If not, she could harass them
with the ships and maybe get in a few kills…or if necessary fly them straight
into the maw and slug it out. Whatever she did she had to keep the enemy fleets
split so Paul could work his magic up top.

Eventually two Skarron transports made it to their LZ
on the Skarron continent, with the atmosphere lighting up with missile launches
as the walkers on the ground fired on the drones. Their anti-air and shields
held up well, enough for the warships to redeploy towards the descending enemy
fleet, which cut out the missile fire from the walkers didn’t want to risk
hitting their own in the brawl that was about to ensue.

Megan didn’t want to count on their good sense so she
reconfigured the drones’ shields into needle points and aimed them sky high.
With a boost from their gravity drives the drones shot up through the Skarron
formation, creating some significant atmospheric disturbance on the way by that
buffeted the enemy ships a bit, then the drones peaked in the upper atmosphere
above the enemy fleet and began firing back down on them with their own
missiles and rail guns, for at the moment they were outside of both plasma and
mauler range.

A portion of the Skarron fleet moved up to engage them
while the rest continued descending down to the surface, intent it seemed to
lay claim to their continent there and perhaps drift over to the neighboring
ones for some naval support of their ground troops. Megan ignored that for the
moment, hoping the timing for everything worked well, but she sent a warning
ahead to the closest troops telling them to be prepared to scatter if it came
to that.

Just then a ship jumped into orbit…right into the
midst of the
mid level
enemy fleet. Megan saw it was
the
Excalibur
as the battlemap
updated and the command ship began targeting the enemy blockade directly before
any of its escorting warships jumped in and began deploying drones in a flurry
of activity. The big donut-shaped ship literally advanced up to pointblank
range and opened up with every weapon system it had, tearing apart the Skarrons
as they quickly moved to arrange themselves into a conical formation so they
could pound the Human ship for its arrogance.

But behind it came many
Warship
-class jumpships, all spewing drones like a hive and sending
little bees out to surround the command ship as it continued to push forward
into the enemy lines. The smackdown the Skarrons had expected to give to the
command ship soon turned into an even fight…then a not so even one as Megan’s
warships in low orbit came up to assist and caught the Skarrons in a pincer
movement. For a while they decided to fight it out, then with more and more
ships coming in from the star the enemy broke ranks and fled en mass.

Both Megan and Paul sent ships after them, killing many
on site before they could get to adequate jumplines, then tracking down others
as they ran across the system…with Paul having left a few ships behind at the
Star in ambush for just such a retreat. Those ships got many kills as the
Skarrons fled right towards them, but some of the enemy ships made it past and
out…with the majority scattering around the system and being hunted down in the
coming days.

The enemy fleet in atmosphere chose to hold position,
fighting off the few drones that Megan had originally sent after them and then
taking up permanent residence in the sky over their controlled continent. They
didn’t advance to the contended one or Star Force territory, merely sitting and
daring the Star Force ships to come down and get them…which would bring them
within the firing range of their walkers.

It was the best tactical play the enemy had and a
sticky one. Megan couldn’t let them stay down there, for it would be too easy
to drift over and start shooting surface targets. She could bring her own ships
down over their continent and play a chess game in-atmosphere, but hovering
warships ate up a lot of fuel so it wasn’t something they could maintain
indefinitely…nor could the Skarrons.

That said the smaller ships could stay there for weeks
with their current fuel loads, so for the moment it was a good play for the
Skarrons. What they would do after that point was up in the air, but for the
moment it looked like they had good position to survive and become a nuisance
until the figured out what to do next.

Megan was about to have a chat with Paul about their
next move when the
Excalibur
suddenly
dropped out of mid orbit and headed down to the atmosphere in a slow jump,
braking just prior to the planet’s boundary and sinking into the gasses like a
boulder being thrown into a pool of water.

“You son of a bitch,” she said in a whisper as she
watched him take the monstrous ship down with a host of drones following it at
a safe distance to avoid the violent disruption in the air…not to mention the
mountain of missiles coming up at it from the walkers on the surface.

The command ship’s huge mass and heavy shields ate up
the missile fire with ease while the fiery wall of air in front of it destroyed
or shook off many of them. Then when it finally slowed and came into weapons
range of the Skarron fleet the missile damage began to add up and the big
ship’s shields began to weaken, but as they did the drones caught up and kept
to the blind spot it was creating for them before zipping around its hull and
engaging the Skarron warships and walkers head on.

Sitting there literally daring the enemy to shoot him
down, Paul took the naval fight into the atmosphere and littered the landscape
with the hulks of the enemy ships who couldn’t maneuver half as well as the
drones could in atmosphere. Paul used that maneuverability to his advantage
with Megan wisely letting him assume control of all naval forces insystem while
she began organizing ground troops for an insertion onto the Skarron continent.

Gravity grapples shot out from many of the walkers
below, tugging down some of the drone warships but they couldn’t do anything to
the command ship. In a costly battle to both sides Paul used his drones like a
disposable hammer to stun and delay the enemy fleet while the
Excalibur
killed them, accounting for
nearly a third of all the enemy warship kills and then began hammering the
nearby walkers that simply didn’t have the necessary firepower to take it down.

With its shields hanging on at 7% and beginning to
recharge, Paul dismissed most of the surviving drones back up to orbit to keep
them safe before drifting his command ship across the Skarron continent, taking
down additional walkers and strafing enemy LZs and the infrastructure they’d
begun assembling, some of which was quite far along given the newness of this
invasion campaign. He got ID tags from Megan’s sabotage teams on the continent
and made sure to avoid shooting anything near them, but otherwise just strolled
his big ship across the countryside like a scene out of Independence Day shooting
anything that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Megan let him go and concentrated on other ground
aspects, seeing that he was simultaneously overseeing the hunting teams
elsewhere in the system. Within a few hours she had flocks of dropships taking
off from safe zones and carrying mechs towards a new LZ on the Skarron
continent that an aquatics team had just carved out, mounting a quick assault
on an enemy shoreline outpost and securing it and the nearby area by taking out
the three enemy walkers that had been present.

That was the foothold she was going to use to start
taking back their territory. She wasn’t sure how long Paul was going to keep
the command ship in atmosphere, but as long as he was out doing his thing she
was going to take advantage of it and grab up some quick gains that, for the past
two and a half years, had seemed virtually impossible to attain.

As Paul had reminded her many times, in the
rock/paper/scissors contest of interstellar warfare…
naval
beats everything.

“Hey,” Paul finally said some hours later as his holo
popped up in Megan’s nexus. “Sorry for the kill steal.”

Megan grinned. “No you’re not.”

“You’re probably right,” he said straight faced.

“How long you sticking around?”

“As long as it takes to secure the planet, then we’ve
got other Dvapp worlds to cleanse before this lull ends.”

“Any idea how long that will be?”

“Permanently if the Voku get their way, but there’s no
way the Skarrons are going to accept this defeat. If they’ve got the ships
available they’re going to hit back. Question is how far away are those ships going
to come from and how much time
do
we have.”