Star Force: Nexus (SF57) (4 page)

Liam kept that support ship and others moving,
sometimes controlling them himself, sometimes letting the remote pilots handle
it, but he made sure to reinforce his drones prior to them taking serious
damage rather than after, extending their battle life and keeping their
weaponry more or less active nonstop, though some lucky shots by the lizards
were taking out a few batteries here and there, which was why you never wanted
a ship with just a single weapon. Too easy to render useless with pinpoint
fire.

Liam kept his chess pieces moving, waiting for the
right moment in several locations, then when it looked like the lizards had
them outnumbered with far too much plasma pouring into his ships for them to
sustain much longer, a few specialized drones that hadn’t been contributing
much firepower to the fight opened up armor panels, revealing concealed storage
compartments while the rest of the nearby Star Force drones pulled back in
close to the support ships, which created large shield walls in front of them
that began soaking up plasma…but that wasn’t their purpose here.

The shield ships put everything they had into the
walls, dropping the rest of their shields and leaving themselves vulnerable to
flanking shots which the other drones tried to block as the specialized ships
spewed forth a swarm of tiny, self-guiding objects out through the gaps between
the shield walls as they too ducked behind any nearby.

The seekers were each the size of a small dropship,
but as they flew out towards the closely packed lizard fleet they split up into
smaller pieces, each moving out on their own trajectories but linked together
by a remote timer. Liam held the detonation trigger himself, assuming priority
control and detonating each cluster when it got into prime position. Over the
course of the next 30 seconds the space surrounding the turtled up little
cluster of drones became a fireworks display of explosives that put the old
style nukes to shame in an area of effect attack that resulted in a lot of
damaged ships.

Suddenly the overwhelming enemy numbers switched over
to being targets of opportunity, with the support ships pulling their remaining
shield energy back into defending themselves while the drones shot out on one
final attack run before retreating, hammering the wounded cruisers and making a
lot of easy kills in the face of the incoming reinforcements that were going to
be minutes too late to the party.

Just as Liam issued the recall order to one drone
fleet he got a ping on his battlemap, alerting him to something he had not
expected to happen. The Gfatt warship, sitting high up in orbit and observing
the battle, had just jumped into low orbit and was headed towards one of the
lizards’ massive
Atlas
-class battle
stations.

4

The hourglass-shaped warship moved in towards the
lizard station, being barely a tenth of its size and only half the mass of one
of the Star Force jumpships, with its flat top pointed towards the incoming
plasma storm. No other ships were in the area, with the battle station being
left unguarded as the fleets chased the Star Force ships, and it looked like
the single, oddly shaped warship wasn’t going to stand a chance on its own but
once it got within short weapons range it flipped over, exposing the narrow
band around the center that held most of its weaponry, and unleashed hell at
nearly pointblank range.

Multiple points of light appeared around the
midsection of the Gfatt ship, then they leapt out in series at the lizard
shields in squirt gun fashion, showing that whatever the weaponsfire was it was
partially matter but not plasma. The warship flashed six different attacks
every .68 seconds, creating a rapid fire torrent that built up on the stations’
shields, sapping them of strength and quickly breaching as the Gfatt hourglass
was likewise covered in plasma hits.

Liam watched off and on, still leading his own
battles, but it wasn’t long until the lizard battle station was showing heavy
damage with scores of ships heading to reinforce and, fortuitously, drawing
them away from his fleet. He did a quick mental check, not seeing any advantages
to exploit, and continued the fighting withdrawal as he watched to see how much
damage the Gfatt would do. He hadn’t expected them to fight at all, but
suddenly now they were and he wondered why.

The slugging match wasn’t over quickly, and Liam had
to keep turning his attention elsewhere as he had his hands full making as many
ship kills as he could but he kept watching, hoping the Gfatt hadn’t bitten off
more than they could chew…up until the ship finally pulled out from the
station, which was showing a huge crater in its center but otherwise still
intact and returning showers of green plasma fire, including a few streamers
that were really hammering the
Gfatt’s
still intact
shields.

The squirt guns ceased as the ship paused several
kilometers out, not firing back at all as the plasma continued to flow,
dampened by the range a bit but still doing damage to the shields when a huge
blast emitted from the warship and sailed into the crater on the station.

The next thing Liam knew the battle station was breaking
apart into chunks amidst a huge debris-riddled explosion that for a brief
moment appeared like a mini nova down in low orbit.

“That’s one hell of a finishing move,” he commented
dryly as he continued to issue mental commands to the ships he was linked in
with, keeping an eye on the Gfatt in case they needed support, for he really
didn’t want to have to relay the message that the ‘observer’ got itself killed
in combat.

He needn’t had worried, for the warship ignored the
incoming cruisers and made another microjump back up to high orbit and waited
there, returning to its altitude perch and watching as Liam finished up his
combat assignments one by one and eventually pulled his ships out of orbit,
jumping to a rendezvous spot elsewhere in the system where he began to consolidate
reports from the ships dispatched to the other two planets.

They didn’t arrive until later, but their
laggy
telemetry did and Liam watched as they quickly and
efficiently pounded several orbital and surface sites, using their drones’ rail
guns on the latter and knocking out several lizard mining colonies that had
been funneling resources over to the main planet. The enemy would rebuild, of
course, but the damage would slow them down a bit and right now that’s all Star
Force was trying to do.

Some might say what they were doing was recklessly
violent and wasteful, that without even trying to conquer the planet they were
just wasting their time and resources, but Liam had long ago learned that the
lizards thrived off of being left alone. They were builders, and in order to
knock them out of their mojo you had to come in and wreck what they’d built
randomly to keep them scared and cautious, otherwise they’d just creep right up
on your doorstep and then start hammering your door from very short resupply
lines.

That was essentially the problem the Nexus had, for
winning battles wasn’t the problem, it was holding territory. Not their own,
which was more than secure, but the other systems in between that they didn’t
care about or were inhabited by others. The lizards were devouring them and
spreading, steadily growing stronger even without conquering a single Nexus
system. They didn’t have a strong world to be targeted, and even ‘small’ ones
like this, given enough time, would escalate to the point of being formidable
strongholds.

The trick was that one was not more important than
another. Liam didn’t know about their homeworld, but every other planet they’d
come across was built up in the same way using the same tech and strategies, so
if you hit and annihilated one well established planet or system others would
grow to replace it, often multiples ones for every one you took out…and the
larger the lizard territory grew the more that math snowballed.

Every ship they killed here reduced that snowball by a
fraction, which was why Star Force and the Hycre were continually hitting them
near the ADZ and elsewhere where they were weak, denying them more strong
worlds by getting at them before they were built up. They couldn’t get to all
of them, obviously, but the region directly around the ADZ was of high priority
to keep ‘weeded’ while worlds like this a bit further out were prime targets
when and where they had an opportunity.

Even this attack was designed to go after the ships in
orbit so they wouldn’t be available to reinforce other systems when they were
hit. Taking out the reinforcements before you began the assault was another
tactic that Liam, or more accurately Roger, had come up with long ago and
worked well against the lizards so long as you had good intel data, most of
which the Hycre were providing.

Liam was glad the Gfatt had taken out that battle
station, for it was one more chess piece the lizards didn’t have to work with,
though this one was immobile and could only be used to defend this planet
unlike the fleets surrounding it that could go anywhere. Those, after all was
said and done, were reduced by 384 kills with an additional 392 damaged. A good
tally for this mission, with him having only lost 3 drones in the process.

54 more were damaged, but all of those were able to
return to their jumpships and could be repaired later. He didn’t like losing
the 3 and would review the battle records later to determine why they’d been
lost, but overall they’d put yet another nick in the lizards’ empire. Liam
wanted to do more than that and watched the surveillance
intel
from the monitoring probes they’d dropped off before leaving, but as predicted
the lizards had restructured their fleets into larger groupings without leaving
any targets of opportunity for him to hit with a second attack…at least not without
losing a chunk of his own fleet.

That wasn’t an option given how many more ships the
lizards had than the ADZ. Each drone they had was worth multiple lizard cruisers,
both in armor and armament, and as that fact continued to snowball with
subsequent upgrades it was imperative that they not get into a trading war, for
the enemy would always have more to throw at them given their production
capability that stretched across thousands of worlds by now.

No, Star Force had to engage and retreat, engage and
retreat…preserving its own ships while taking out some of the lizards. That was
the only way to fight them, which he hoped the Gfatt were now realizing.

After everyone had reached the rendezvous point and
Liam saw there were no more opportunities for easy strikes he took the time to
contact the Gfatt and ask them why they had hit the station. They responded by
stating that they saw an opportunity and decided to take it, which he thanked
them for, but then he inquired why they weren’t fighting with them the entire
time, to which they said they were merely here to observe.

The two things didn’t jive and he wouldn’t get any
more of an answer from them before they left the system and headed back to the
ADZ, but after they returned to their staging base he pushed the issue with
their commander and learned that similar battle stations in the H’kar region
were never so exposed and that the Gfatt had been targeting them specifically.
Biggest chess pieces in the game, hence they drew the first attention, so far
as the Nexus thought.

It seemed the lizards had been using that to their
advantage and using the battle stations and other large ships as bait, getting
them to drop the hammer on them and potentially losing them in the process, but
doing decent damage to the attacking fleet by having flanking units nearby.
With having to fight long and hard to take out similar stations the Gfatt were
not going to miss the opportunity for a clean kill, despite that fact that the
system in question was far from their borders and no threat to them.

That gave Liam an inkling as to how the lizards were
countering the Nexus, or rather surviving it and learning from the engagements.
They had plenty of ships and resources, with the ability to grow additional
personnel at will, to throw at an enemy that seemed unwilling to take the fight
directly to them in a wide campaign. They’d hit a target and obliterate it, but
the lizards could always rebuild elsewhere or even in the same location after
they’d left. The Nexus wasn’t yet serious about fighting the lizards because
they were fighting out of a defensive mindset.

Star Force was as well, but only out of necessity.
Liam and Paul had long talked about going after the lizards’ core worlds but
they never had the fleet strength necessary to do it. They were fighting
defensively to preserve the ADZ because they had to, but because they knew and
wanted to eliminate the lizards on the whole they went about their defensive
efforts much differently than the Nexus.

Liam was wondering why, with the long experience the
H’kar had of fighting the lizards, had the Nexus not wised up earlier. Kerrie’s
notes had guessed at troop strengths and that they didn’t have a lot to throw
around the H’kar front, superior as they were, which basically gifted the
lizards a permanent presence there. One had to go all in when fighting them,
gruesome as that might be, because so long as one of them lived they would
continue fighting with no surrender and no mercy.

Star Force had learned that the hard way after
centuries of trying to make inroads against the lizard hive mind. To this day
they still took some prisoners, but they always tried to kill themselves when
it looked like there was no way for them to escape or harm their captors. Those
taken were for specific reasons and often dumped off at another lizard world
when Star Force tired of them, but in general when Star Force attacked it was
to kill the enemy for there was no other way to deal with them when they were
coming at you with the numbers they possessed.

Mercy was a luxury of the dominant, and with the
lizard empire slowly creeping its way around the perimeter of the ADZ it had
become a ‘shoot and move on’ scenario, though the trailblazers still hadn’t given
up the idea of one day breaking the genetic lock that the lizards had on each
other. Until they found a way to free them as they had the Bsidd, the lizards
were a threat round the clock no matter how many of them there were or the
circumstances, and had to be hunted down and destroyed in order to secure
targets.

The raids weren’t meant to secure territory, but
diminish resources. Star Force wasn’t targeting their population but their
ships and infrastructure. Without those their personnel numbers hardly mattered,
so when Liam bombarded a planet he wasn’t interested in killing the people down
there but their equipment…though with the lizards he wasn’t going to hold off
because they were next to or inside the infrastructure. Other races he would,
but with no other options with the lizards he wasn’t going to let them act as
living shields to protect their assets.

That was a hard choice for him and the others to come
by, but at the end of the day it came down to a matter of offense and defense.
If Star Force was attacking someone else they’d use more controlled tactics and
not target population centers, troop ships, etc. They had a respect for life,
even that of the enemy, and would only go all-in if one of their own worlds was
under assault, with any enemy present there essentially declaring their ill
will when they came into the system.

Enemies sitting on their own worlds minding their
business were completely different, and Star Force had dealt with the Skarrons,
and the Hobbits especially, in a different manner. The Humans weren’t going to
become destructive monsters and were smart enough to find ways to defeat the
enemy without outright slaughtering them…but with the lizards there was catch.

The creep factor. All the lizard colonies near the ADZ
hadn’t originally been there. They were recent and growing fast with the pure
intent on expanding further by defeating enemies and consuming their worlds.
The lizards there weren’t minding their own business, they, as a collective
civilization, were bent on conquering others, making all of them active enemies
attacking the ADZ and others even if they hadn’t set foot inside their
territory.

Liam and the others couldn’t respect their worlds and
‘citizenry’ because they were essentially firebases setup on the galactic battlefield,
and in order to fight back they had to look at it as such. No other race that
Star Force knew of held themselves to the same standards of combat as they did,
but when it came to the lizards they knew that if they didn’t fight them all-in
in every engagement that the creep effect would eventually surround and strangle
them, at which point they would, in obvious defense, go all-in…but at that
point it would be too late and the enemy would have the overwhelming advantage.