Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) (10 page)

“Convoy. Not
Grom
transports, but definitely built for overland travel. Nothing the locals could
build.”

“How many?”

“I count 3. I don’t think more than one will fit on
the landing pad at a time.”

“Damn…our timing super sucks on this one. Looks like
we start taking it all down and sort through the pieces afterwards.”

“I don’t think the transports are shielded.”

“Show me.”

Ikra
sent the visual link as
they came within a half mile of her position.

“Take the last, wait for the first to land.”

“Gladly,” she said, waiting impatiently until the
three box-like hovering transports passed her by. When the first one dipped
into the gap underneath the trees where Jack was waiting she pushed hard out of
her perch and flew across the distance like a slow missile, coming up on the
back transport and landing on top of it. It only took a moment to find the
hatch, which she grasped with her talons and pulled up. It flipped open on a
hinge, then she released and let it bang down on the top of the metallic box as
she dove inside and went to work on the crew.

These might not be lizards, but this was still combat
and she was working one on one with an Archon taking down targets far larger
than her small frame. That was due to the armor, weapons, and training that
Star Force had given her race in addition to sanctuary when their homeworld had
been destroyed. She’d gone from being a helpless victim to a hunter, a moral
hunter, and
Ikra
appreciated the irony in that as she
got battered around inside the transport by the
Groms
as they flailed
panickly
to no avail.

After a long 40 seconds all 13 of them were
unconscious and she was still unharmed, though her shields had gone down from
the physical blows. With a satisfied beak pucker she drifted back over to the
hatch when the transport hit something and came to a sudden stop.
Ikra
bounced off the wall then righted herself, flying up
through the topside entrance and having to pull her way through tree branches
that the pilotless transport had rammed into.

With them sliding harmlessly over her armor she pushed
through and into clean air again, just in time to see the second transport
turning away to run.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said with grim determination
and took off after it.

10

November 19, 2888

Palma System
(Preema Invasion Corridor)

Hefisti

Riona-111 looked out through the command nexus
interface at the graveyard of lizard ships in orbit around the oversized planet
that they’d recently been defending. It was a monster of a world with three
times the surface area of Earth but only a 1.2 gravity rating. That made it a
very valuable piece of property, but one that neither the Preema, Voku, nor
Star Force would be laying claim to. This was going to be yet another
world/system added to the list of purges and monitored to keep the lizards or
others from coming back.

The purging process was already underway on the
planet, with a fleet of 6 Preema
Beta
-class
warships and 10
Alpha
-class sitting
in tranquil position just inside the orbit of the debris field that they’d been
responsible for before
Riona’s
fleet had arrived. She
had 12
Warship
-class jumpships, one
of which she was onboard, escorting a fleet of some 42 cargo/transport
jumpships carrying Star Force aquatics troops.
Hefisti
housed a single body of water, but one that was bigger than all the oceans on
Earth combined. The lizards had colonized it as well as the land, and digging
them out of it was going to be a pain in the ass.

Which was why the Preema had asked for Star Force’s
help on this one.
Riona
could see that they were
already doing heavy damage on the land as they were given access to the
Preema’s
own version of a battlemap that displayed the
location of all their units, but nothing was in the water as of yet. She didn’t
know if that meant they were going to let her handle all of the aquatic warfare
or they’d be joining in later, but either way the cleansing of the ocean was
her responsibility.

According to intelligence reports from the Voku, this
world had been a major lizard stronghold and it looked like they’d fought hard
to hold onto it based on the space debris, which could easily have accounted
for over 100,000 cruisers.
Riona
didn’t know how many
there had been, nor how many ships the Preema had used to destroy them, but she
got the feeling that those left in orbit were just here to guard the planet
while their ground troops went into action. If these 16 alone had done this
much damage then she was considerably underestimating their firepower.

The Alphas were their smallest ship, battleship size,
and they scaled up from there. Star Force had tagged them all Alphas, Betas,
Gammas, Deltas, Epsilons, and jumpships. The Epsilons were so large that two of
them squeezed together around a jumpship and took up all the available space on
it, for they each easily outmassed the spindly frame.
Riona
knew of only five that the Preema had brought with them out of their home
territory to the staging outpost and had never seen one in person, but knew
they were the most powerful warships Star Force had ever come across given
their sheer size and technology.

The Preema warships also doubled as troop carriers,
for there were no ‘civilian’ ships within the system.
Riona
also assumed that there had been a much larger fleet here previously because
the amount of troops showing on the planet was far greater than what the
handful of ships in orbit could carry. They’d landed and set up a huge ground
offensive, with their obvious intent being to destroy the lizard colonies as
quickly as possible so they could check off this system and move on to the
next.

But they couldn’t do that until the ocean was clear as
well, and
Riona
knew there was a bit of a time
competition in play. How much infrastructure the lizards had down there was
unknown, but she intended to destroy it before the Preema got finished with the
land-based colonies if at all possible.

One of her bridge officers got a line to the Preema
commander and patched it through to the nexus with the winged quadruped
appearing in holo, resplendent in its armor that they seemed to wear just about
everywhere, though this one’s helmet had been retracted, which she knew was a
measure of respect they were granting the Humans during communication.

“I am Riona-111 and have an army of aquatics troops
ready to deploy into combat, with your permission,” she said, with the computer
translating her words into the
Preema’s
native
language. She and the other Archons had gotten out of the habit of learning new
ones, relying instead on translators unless there was a significant reason to
do otherwise. She’d learned lizard, obviously, as well as the old Alliance
trade language, then more recently added Voku given their ever growing
relationship, but unless something similar was going to happen with the Preema
she wasn’t going to bother to add theirs to her personal list.

“Thank you for responding to our request,” the Preema
said, his tone artificial due to the program being responsible for his words
and therefore stripping them of all subtext. “There is a large lizard presence
within the ocean. We have not probed it beyond light reconnaissance. We will
transfer the appropriate files to you, but we suspect that there is much more
down there that we do not know about. It will be a long, hard fight.”

“We came prepared for a hard fight.”

“Permission granted, and a request.”

“Yes?”

“Will you give us access to your communications
protocols so we may monitor your efforts in
realtime.
We’d like to learn how the enemy fights for a time when we are required to
fight them under the water as well, whether it be on this planet or another.”

“I can set up a relayed feed without linking you into
our grid. It will provide you with a viewable
datastream
,
but one that you won’t be able to interact with. We keep our
comm
systems’ intricacies a closely guarded secret.”

“I did not mean to pry. We only wish to watch and
learn. Please do so in whatever manner you can that is not intrusive.”

“I’ll have it set up before we make
planetfall
.”

“Thank you, and good hunting.”

“Likewise,”
Riona
said as
the brief conversation came to an end. She’d heard they weren’t overly
theatrical, and this one seemed to be entirely down to business…which is
something she could respect.

Using the mental control interface she sent the order
to the bridge crew to set up the data transfer as well as picking their first
landing spot and ordering the ships to begin heading down to low orbit and
start unloading. The jumpships were not going to try to go in-atmosphere, even
though it was technically possible, but rather get right on the border and drop
the anti-
grav
equipped aquatics craft off there.

While she had some time to spare she zoomed in their
surveillance equipment on the ground battles and took a look at what the Preema
were up against. The land was full of lizard colonies, all of which had been
stripped of their anti-orbital batteries from above. They had large craters
where they had been, but the rest of the cityscape had been untouched and
Riona
knew why. The Preema ships had a variety of weapons
at their disposal, but the largest one was a plasma orb the size of a football
field that was generated within their U-shaped hulls.

That plasma was highly energized matter, the same way
Star Force rifles were, and required physical material to generate the plasma
in addition to the energy from a reactor or capacitor. That meant ammo
limitations whenever you had something that big in play, though the plasma
weapons were a lot more economical than rail guns. Preema plasma was extremely
advanced and dense, but it was still just ionized gas. They were putting it to
good use though, and looked to have probably dropped their warships down into
the atmosphere and pummeled the batteries up close from a few miles above.

Staying put and vaporizing the city bit by bit would undoubtedly
bleed them dry, and she didn’t think they wanted to do that and probably didn’t
have enough supplies enroute to feed that kind of a campaign. If the lizards
saw you systemically tearing a city apart they’d probably run and hide and
you’d have to come down on foot and kill them up close anyway, so why waste the
ammo?

Though by ‘foot’ she meant wing, for the Preema were
avian and she could see swarms of them over a few sites. The resolution wasn’t
great from their altitude and angle, plus some cloud cover obscuring straight
visuals, but they were operating not in tight formation, but a widespread
grouping that suggested non-lizard swarm tactics…more of a strong-man
formation. They had armor that could take a pounding, she’d heard, so she was
as interested in seeing them fight as they were to see the Star Force aquatics
in action…though this wasn’t the first joint mission to date, but it was the
largest.

It was also
Riona’s
first in
conjunction with the Preema and on this side of the boundary line between the
Voku and Star Force claimed ‘harvest’ zones, for the mage often thought of all
the lizard systems like a forest on the map that they had to clearcut. Every
other mission she’d gone on had been on the Star Force side, with this campaign
having brought her clear across lizard territory to the far edge where the
pushback was occurring. The Preema had jumped ahead a bit to get to this
planet, given its significance, but there was definitely a huge sea of lizard
systems between her and friendly territory, meaning her resupply options were
nil.

Riona
had to make do with
what she had, and she’d brought along a lot of equipment and troops for that
reason. When the jumpships hit the lowest comfortable orbit they could, they
began releasing the aquatics battleships, destroyers, and frigates to coast
down on their own to the water, or in the battleships’ case fly around the
planet at will, for they were actually designed for the air as opposed to the
water craft that could limp around on their anti-
gravs
that gave them propulsion underwater.

The smaller Star Force vessels were carried down in
bunches inside larger transports that disengaged from the jumpships and ferried
them, aquatics mechs and troops, and prefab modules that would be used to
construct Star Force firebases, supply depots, and even a repair yard once they
got them situated. This was going to be a multi-year campaign unless the
lizards had really scrimped on their aquatics footprint, and
Riona
knew she was going to have to take her time and put
down some temporary roots in order to hunt these bastards down properly.

In the meantime she was going to stay in orbit and
observe both the underwater and ground battles, learning how the Preema fought
and seeing how many surprises the lizards had in store for both of them. They
were definitely going to lose this planet and system, but that didn’t mean they
couldn’t take a few of the invaders with them and knowing the lizards as Star
Force did,
Riona
knew to be constantly on guard for
an innovative attempt at doing so.

She hoped the Preema wouldn’t get overconfident and be
caught off guard just as her ship orbited around far enough to get sensors on
the back side of the planet…where the crashed remains of one of their
Alpha
-class warships was visible at the
base of a still present smoke plume.

“Damn,” she whispered, guessing it was from the
efforts to take out the anti-orbital guns. “So much for our invincible ally.”

Riona
took another look at
her drone placements, which had disconnected from the warships to cover the
cargo ships during offloading and once back up into holding orbit. They were
where they were supposed to be, and she made a mental note not to trust the
Preema for their security at any time, merely to count them as a luxury backup.
She didn’t know the circumstances of the loss of that Alpha, but the lizards
had managed to take one down in the face of what should have been an
overwhelming assault fleet.

Paul has said the Preema might be
newbs
as far as their isolation saw them doing more watching beyond their borders
than fighting, and she had a gut feeling he was right. But
newbs
or not, they were getting the job done and now with her here she might be able
to spot a few ambushes before they went down. If not she’d keep her own people
protected and see what happened to the Preema, for it was still unclear just
how ‘close’ this alliance was to be.

Paul plopped down in the chair at his quarters’
comm
terminal in Atlantis after another 29 hour training
stint. He was due for a badly needed shower, then some food and downtime before
heading to bed for 13 hours before getting up and repeating his 45 hour day. It
was by far the heaviest workload he’d ever tried, but that’s what the advanced
training group looked like now for all of the veterans. Paul spent more time
here than most of the trailblazers, cycling to and from it between missions to
the front or master builder duties within the ADZ.

He could feel the stress on him from the past 8 months
that he’d been holding this insane cycle, for the workouts he was doing were
not skill-oriented, for the most part, but effort-based in order to push his
body’s power generation capabilities to new heights across the board. He was
hanging in there well, having already gotten past the worst of it, he thought,
and was now settled into the grind.

Right now he was delaying the shower in favor of
checking for map updates…and finding one had come in through the relay grid. He
downloaded it to his personal map and brought up the hologram of the war zones,
seeing tiny colored dots representing star systems and a few with pulsing
‘update’ highlights. Wanting to know how things were going out there at all
times, especially with regards to Cal-com and what the Voku and Preema were
doing, he searched through and made himself aware of all the changes, most of
which were small when compared to the overall battlefront.