Star Force: Penance (SF49) (5 page)

There they made a dive into the planetary gasses and
headed towards the surface, with only a few Scionate warships moving to
intercept them. Some of the drones pulled back up and intercepted the enemy
warships in a high altitude brawl with the others moving down to surface level.
Paul watched all three fleet engagements closely, but knew that he had to get
to the Scionate ground troops before they got safely inside the cities…with a
tone sounding that informed him that the Sentinel was now repositioning. It
wasn’t a warship, and couldn’t move all that fast, but putting full power into
its gravity drives would allow for some slow jumps between planets.

So with its drives cranked up as high as it could
manage, it sucked itself down towards the planet and put itself on a descending
track that would bring it towards the enemy fleet in approximately 27 minutes. That
was slow compared to what the drones and warships could do, but it was going to
be enough. Now the Scionate had a choice to make…wait and fight until it
arrived, or leave now and try to hit somewhere else in orbit.

They decided to fight on for several more minutes…then
they took an approach that Paul had thought was of low likelihood, but none the
less effective in the short term.

With the Scionate fleet beginning to even out its
disadvantage with the influx of a lot more ships, they suddenly broke off…not
leaving to a higher orbit or going after Star Force’s shipyards or other
facilities, but moving down into the atmosphere, passing the warship Paul had
positioned there and moving towards the surface to engage the drones that had
slipped by them.

Morgan’s neo was all but trash, having lost her
shields more times than she could count and now down 3 emitters, leaving her
left leg permanently exposed. Her left mauler was gone, with the sword blade in
that arm locked into deployed mode. She could still use it, but couldn’t
retract it, meaning her hand in that arm was now useless for the blade stuck
out from underneath the wrist.

Her armor had damage everywhere, but none had gotten
below 25% in any spots, though there was a deep cut in her back that was
registering at 34% thickness. She’d gotten that damage running away from a
group of tanks that otherwise would have killed her, given that there had been
some 22 of them that she’d felt like trimming down to 20. Now that kind of
seemed like a bad move, but it had provided a distraction for two trios of
other neos to take down some smaller groups, all the while wading through the
suffocating, self-sacrificing infantry that was constantly trying to slow them
down.

Morgan had stepped on more of them than she cared to
remember, not liking to kill enemies that way but they were giving her no
choice. Even one of the hoths had taken a leg hit that made it unable to walk,
but it was still standing and fighting…forcing her and the others to change
their tactics to fight around it or leave it behind. She’d chosen the later,
pushing forward with the still working one while leaving a pair of madcats
behind to assist the hoth with the infantry that kept trying to overwhelm it.

Morgan hadn’t had time to think about much else, let
alone look at her battlemap, which meant it was a huge surprise and relief when
the sun was suddenly blotted out by a rectangular cloud that started firing
down into the tank formations with mauler blasts that literally melted them on
explosive contact.

It wasn’t until a bright torch beam swept across the
infantry hoards that she realized it was coming from a warship overhead…with
her amending that sentiment as she checked the battlemap and saw multiple
drones coming down from orbit and beginning to annihilate the enemy troops. She
wondered how in the hell Paul had managed that with the enemy fleet sitting up
there…which was when she also saw on the battlemap that they were coming down
into the atmosphere by the hundreds.

“Oh shit, Paul,” she whisper swore. “You better know
what you’re doing.”

5

One of the remote pilots stationed on the planet,
situated in a city that was currently under attack, was flying one of the
drones sent to that location. It was odd for her to see where she was from
above, not to mention he hoard of enemies outside and now in, given that the
city wall had just been breached. Her corvette was descending rapidly through
the atmosphere, now only a handful of kilometers in altitude as she and the
rest of the fleet had been given orders to engage the enemy ground forces
directly.

That was an unusual order, but one that they’d trained
for extensively…and given the current situation one that she agreed with
wholeheartedly. There were Knights guarding their building in order to keep the
enemy from cutting off their control of the drones, and given dire enough
circumstances they would tell them when to evacuate, so Kaleigh didn’t have to
worry about looking over her shoulder, but she was apprehensive and being able
to contribute to her own defense was immensely helpful. That way she could
actually do something rather than sit and wait to be shot or blown up.

“Assuming direct control,” a deep, dark voice said
into her earpiece and suddenly she no longer had helm control of the corvette.
In fact she wasn’t linked to it at all, now pushed into a waiting cue to be
placed somewhere else within the fleet remote systems.

“What the hell?” she asked, feeling like the universe
was just plain being unfair until she saw the ID tag on the top of her primary
screen that had bumped her from priority control. It wasn’t a higher ranking
pilot,
nor
even an Archon…but the Admiral himself,
bringing a confused frown to her face as her display shifted to a targeting
program for a weapons battery on a cruiser that was just now engaging a trio of
Scionate warships of equal tonnage in the upper atmosphere.

She didn’t have time to think, dropping into her new
role on cue and controlling the single battery, as opposed to the 3 or 4 that a
gunner would usually control. Being given one meant that there were a large
number of pilots to a small number of ships with the duties being split up for
greater efficiency.

Kaleigh sighted her mauler cannon on the position of a
targeting tag and fired, opening up the enemy shield for another mauler blast
that hit a moment later. Together she and the other unknown gunner chewed a
hole in the side of the cruiser along with a lot of others before the ship
finally lost power and began to fall towards the planet…with Kaleigh mentally
crossing her fingers and hoping that it wasn’t about to come down on her head.

From the command nexus Paul took control of the
closest warship to the second city breach, dipping it into an even steeper nose
dive as he passed out targeting orders to the pilots handling the weapons. He
assumed control over the torch along with the helm, but left the secondary
weapons to the others, knowing they could do a better job with them than him
trying to mentally control them all…which he was capable of doing with ships
far larger than a corvette.

The Scionate were taking a big gamble bringing their
warships into the atmosphere, and Paul knew that regardless of how that turned
out he had a small window to target the ground troops without immediate
reprisal. He was going to make use of that then turn his attention to the
Scionate warships that, for the most part, were not configured for atmospheric
flight.

But that didn’t matter at this particular moment,
because the second city breach had just occurred and there was only one Queen
of Diamonds around to plug holes with, so as he brought the rectangular cube of
a warship down over the city its knife blade-shaped shields reformed into their
normal blocky configuration and he drifted the corvette down past the curve of
the bubble shield and directly over the heads of the enemy infantry and tanks
outside…with the latter turning their weapons skyward and blasting into the
underside of the warship.

It blasted back, with Paul using the torch as its
namesake implied, targeting the tanks like a painter making long brushstrokes,
punching right through the shields and armor on impact as if they were little
more than plastic toys. With the remote pilots hitting the others with maulers
and the anti-air chewing up the surrounding Valeries, the corvette made its
dominating presence known as more and more tanks turned their weapons on it and
covered its shields with plasma.

Paul watched the shield strength
closely,
knowing that with enough hits the tanks would get through, given that the
corvette wasn’t all that much bigger than them. Still, it had superior tech and
could take a beating even after it lost shields, and Paul knew he had to take
pressure off the troops inside the city fighting the enemy infantry…which was
being ravaged by one of the mauler cannons that he had assigned to that task.

It was coating the area outside the breach with its
destructive blue energy, vaporizing the ground and creating huge plumes of
moisture and dirt littered with bits of Scionate. The pilot kept pouring more
mauler blasts on the area, effectively creating a wall of destruction that kept
additional infantry from getting past…though he couldn’t target inside the city
without lowering the bubble shield, and doing either one was fraught with
problems.

With the corvette’s shields near to breaching on the
underside Paul shifted energy from the top to reinforce them,
then
informed his gunners to target the infantry exclusively
while he continued to pick off tanks with the torch. All the other weapons
onboard, including the anti-air lachars, began picking off the armored cats by
the hundreds, then Paul moved the warship out into the midst of the formation
before drifting left, cutting a path towards the edge were a group of mechs
were fighting.

With the corvette’s shields finally going down the
ship began taking light armor damage, but the weapons batteries themselves were
now exposed, save for small redundant shields covering them when they weren’t
firing. Those shields would delay the weapon strikes but a smart enemy would
shoot the weak points and clip his offensive capability rather than trying to
burn through the thick armor first. Knowing this Paul drifted the ship over the
mechs, helping them out while simultaneously gaining escorts to protect his
underside, though the warship was still the primary target of the tanks.

That took pressure off the damaged mechs, allowing
them to start fighting more effectively as they gradually thinned the enemy
troops…but it wasn’t nearly enough, for more were still coming in from the
grounded transports until more of Paul’s drone warships arrived and started
blasting them to bits as well.

The free shoot didn’t last long, with Paul eventually
relinquishing personal command of the corvette and returning his nexus to fleet
view, seeing that the Scionate had now brought down several
thousand
warships into the atmosphere to
combat the drones and protect their troops…but Paul knew they could also be
used to hunt his mechs and pound the city shields if uncountered, no matter how
ungainly they were in the atmosphere.

And that ungainliness is what Paul had to exploit. The
air itself was aiding Star Force, because it wasn’t allowing the Scionate to
maneuver as quickly as normal. They did have their Valeries to aid them, adding
weaponsfire where able, but the anti-air batteries on the drones made such
efforts risky for the pilots who, like all the rest of the Scionate, seemed to
be in a fury that pushed aside reason. That saw swarms of the fighters running
against the smaller drones and laying down considerable plasma, despite the
cost to them in losses.

Those fighters could maneuver quickly in the
atmosphere, but the warships couldn’t. Star Force’s were a bit different,
however, because Paul had designed them for atmospheric combat, though they
didn’t look it. The plain bricks didn’t have a lick of aerodynamic design like
the Hycre had, but they made up for that with shield geometries that did. Invisible
as they were most of the time, the drones became pointy aerodynamic needles or
knife blades when needed, allowing them to outmaneuver or outrun the Scionate
warships, making it almost impossible for the enemy to make a kill if the
drones didn’t stand toe to toe and slug it out.

Which they didn’t.
They
employed similar tactics to those used in orbit, cycling in and out of the hot
zones to recharge shields. Problem was that the area was clogged with ships
fighting in a much smaller region than before, meaning Paul had to have his
ships eating away at the perimeter of the Scionate fleet…but he couldn’t, for
they were coming down on top of the ships fighting the ground troops, meaning
that for several minutes all hell broke loose as ships vied for position and
Paul manically reworked their fighting position at a speed no manual interface
could handle.

Using the Ikrid interlink he became the fleet, issuing
orders like pressing buttons on a video game controller and doing so many so
fast that there was a blur of commands coming out of the nexus to the fleet
that 10 controllers out in the main room behind him couldn’t have matched in
volume or skill.

All the while the debris from the fighting was falling
like rain over the ground battles, with many pieces hitting the city shields
and sliding off down to the edges to land in a ring of trash that the mechs,
tanks, and infantry had to dodge.

Morgan’s view caught the sight of half a Valerie
smashing into the topside of the hoth she was pacing besides, hitting it on the
head and smashing through its shields. The impact came so fast that it off
balanced the big walker, forcing her to scurry out of the way before it fell on
her…but the driver was good enough to maneuvering the legs around quickly to
catch itself, though the big machine did drop to a knee like a dog taking a
drink of water, only to come up firing its cleansing beam again at a none too
distant tank.

There was debris everywhere, mostly in little bits no
bigger than a trash can, but if those bits were chunks of warship armor they
could do a
 
lot of damage to the
mechs…not to mention the enemy troops. Morgan didn’t like it one bit and kept
waiting for a ship to fall down on their heads, but there was nothing she could
do about it now so she embraced the moment and tried to use the chaos to her
advantage, as well as assigning a person in each of the hoths to keep an eye on
the sky and mark approximate landing positions for the big pieces coming down
to alert the mechs to stay out of the way just in case the main battlemap controllers
in the cities missed something.

That wouldn’t work for the hoths, for they were too
slow to move much, but it did give the Tier-1 mechs a chance, with Morgan
already having missed three large strikes thanks to the heads up. They
basically had to whistle through the graveyard and hope not to get hit, or at
least hope the hits were survivable, like the broken fighter that had left a
nasty scar on the top of the
hoth’s
head, digging
into the armor and scraping it up something fierce, but the heavy walker was
still in the game, now pushing far ahead of the other that was pinned in place,
with its two escorts using it as an umbrella and hiding underneath as they shot
incoming infantry.

Those three were far behind the rest, with the
walkable hoth now having pushed far inside the enemy swarm and Morgan’s mechs eventually
meeting up with another group that had originated from within the city outside
the breached gate. They combined what numbers they had left, with Morgan
assuming command of the others, and did
not
hold position. They cleared the entrance that Kara was still clogging up with
bodies then turned and headed in the direction of the enemy transports, walking
over the carpet of infantry and fighting their way through with what little
weaponry they had left intact, with the hoth being responsible for most of the carnage.

They got about a third of the way out into the enemy
formation before the tide suddenly turned and the infantry reversed course,
sprinting away from the city with their tanks doing the same on a delay,
forming a rear guard that kept firing at the mechs and covering for the
infantry as they began to retreat towards their distant transports.

“Morgan?” one of the mechwarriors asked.

“Let them go,” she said, relieved. “Get into the city
through a working gate and see if you can help out with the cleanup. We’re too
chewed up to pursue anyway. Take two stars,” she said, tagging which ones had
the most armor and weaponry still working, not including hers. “The rest are on
recovery op. Let’s get our people inside before the Scionate decide to come
back for a second round.”

A moment after she said that a pair of tiny white
beams struck the surface on the horizon, with barely any longevity. They were
little flashes, like straight line lightning. She adjusted her gaze and
followed them up into the sky, gulping when she saw the thousands of dark
shapes with tiny flashes occurring between them that were the battling fleets.
The cleansing beam strikes weren’t coming from them though, they were coming
from higher up and another small shape, this one looking like a cigar.

Morgan checked her battlemap and blanched, seeing that
the Sentinel had somehow repositioned directly over them, just holding outside
the atmosphere in a
geosync
pseudo orbit…meaning it
was sitting there mostly on anti-
grav
, something that
was hard for a mass of that size to do, let alone have enough power left for
weapons.

But firing it was, sending down what appeared to be 6
or 7 different beams in rotating cycles and skewering the enemy warships with
small bits of the energy punching clean through their hulls and falling to the
surface. She hoped like hell the gunners were back checking their targets, not
wanting one of the beams to hit a city…or her, but still the Scionate fleet
didn’t run.