Star Force: Revulsion (SF70) (5 page)

The mage sent a mental
order to the Admiral and suddenly the
Archer
7
accelerated up into the lead of the central prong, widening its forward
shields and altering them into a physical plow while a secondary shield blocked
the phaser beams that passed harmlessly through it. That umbrella caught and
forced aside the growing debris, whether it be chunks of ship or pulverized
hull plating that was now the consistency of sand floating ahead of them.
Behind them the drones pulled in, traveling down the clear road as the jumpship
began taking more and more hits from the surrounding cruisers.

Those were added to by
the larger capital ships that Mike was pulling the central prong towards.
Against Star Force those ships were not very effective, for their increased
weaponry and armor aside, they didn’t stand up well in a slugging match,
ironically making the cruisers better suited for handling the drones. The
larger ships weren’t produced in numbers to successfully swarm opponents, and
their larger size only made them easier targets per equal amounts of mass than
a fleet of cruisers.

But they weren’t here
to fight Star Force, they were here to conquer the natives who had a radically
different fleet structure…which was why the lizards weren’t putting those
warships into their front lines and trying to preserve them for cleanup if the
cruisers were able to inflict enough damage.

Mike wasn’t waiting though,
so with the jumpship plowing the road of debris and a few cruisers that refused
to budge out of the way, he brought the central prong directly to the larger
lizard ships only to have them scatter and run…at which point Mike tagged drone
clusters and had them race ahead, ignoring all the cruisers and putting damage
into the larger capital ships.

Meanwhile the cruiser
swarm fell in on them, encircling the entire central prong and leaving the six
jumpships in it surrounded enough that sensors couldn’t see much outside the
cloud. If it hadn’t been for
comm
redundancy they
would have been almost blind as to what was happening elsewhere in orbit, but
Mike’s nexus links kept him in contact with all their ships and their
non-clouded sensors, sharing data and keeping him in the know as he reformed
the warships into a cluster of their own and created a pocket of ‘safe’ space
between them where the damage drones were now rotating into since the edge of
the enemy fleet was no longer accessible to retreat to.

5

Mike guided the battle
in all three prongs from the nexus as well as watching the intervention of the
natives on the reinforcement threads pouring more ships into the main battle.
Until they got to those jumppoints the lizards had been gaining an advantage in
that the cycling rate of the drones was getting higher and higher. When that
happened there was a point of no return where ships would have to be brought to
the front lines with full shields to replace those that were retreating, except
that they hadn’t fully recharged themselves. At that point it was a grinding
game with the drones’ extensive armor taking the hits, and it wouldn’t replace
itself going forward like shield energy would.

So far they’d only lost
two drones, both cutters that had been ambushed in directed attacks without
enough time to peel off. The lizard ships that had stuck around long enough to
kill them were likewise taken out in an exchange of 40 or so for 2, but it was
mostly a desperate attempt on their part to take out any of the Star Force
drones. With them gone Mike had slightly less firepower to work with, but it
wasn’t significant as the rotations continued and it being a shield war at the
moment. The lizards would have to burn through a lot of ships to get the drones
down into the kill zone, for Mike wasn’t going to let a few more get killed in
order to set up takedowns on groups of others given the need for all his drones
going forward throughout this mission.

The lizard
reinforcements had made things a bit iffy, but once that flow of ships was cut
off Mike had fixed numbers to work with and saw that he had a narrow advantage.
Keeping the ships moving and alive and only burning shield energy worked in
sustaining them, then saw a reduced amount of incoming firepower as more lizard
ships were killed continuously. He could have destroyed them quicker by just
turning all the drones loose on offense, but he would have probably lost a few
in the effort and damaged many others. The mage knew he had to be patient and
the natives were giving him the time necessary to safely whittle down the
lizards.

Mike kept a keen
lookout for more ambush moves, preempting some and reacting quickly to others
by sending in relief ships to literally surround the targeted vessel with their
hulls to soak up damage and escort it into a ‘safe’ zone. He was holding off on
using his few support ships and just working through rotations in order to
preserve his fleet’s longevity. With every minute that passed the numbers
tipped Star Force’s way and eventually a critical point came when the battle
was clearly not going the lizards way and it looked like they weren’t going to
be able to kill another ship, for the jumpships were soaking up so much firepower
in the battle that they were essentially giving the drones pseudo shields by
keeping the enemy sights square on them as they actively hunted down cruiser
packs and disrupted their movement patterns.

Then the moment came when
the lizard fleet altered its swarm disposition and sent out streams of ships
away from the drones, running elsewhere in the system to regroup with other
fleets rather than stay put and waste their remaining vessels only to burn away
Star Force shield energy that would be fully replaced within half an hour.

But Mike didn’t just
let them run, instead sending out a flurry of orders and tagging enemy ships to
pursue in the hopes of making a few more kills before they could get to a
jumppoint. He also sent drones out to the ongoing confrontations between the
natives and the ships they’d drew off at the reinforcement jumppoints, for they
were still engaged in battles that were not entirely in their favor and there
were still lizard ships coming in. Mike expected that to end as soon as the
lizards’
comm
delays caught up and they knew that the
battle was lost, but until then they were still a threat.

To their credit, all of
the fleeing ships did not head towards those jumppoints. He expected that was
because they wanted to kill some more native ships and didn’t want to draw Star
Force’s fleet over to them before they could do that. Already Mike had seen
some of the native ships get destroyed in the fighting and he wanted to
minimize that as much as he could, especially since he’d been the one to start
this fight and the natives were throwing in to help them out.

It took him a few
seconds to get all the ships in his fleet tasked even with the neural
interface, then the clumps that were the three prongs began to splinter with
small groups headed after the fleeing ships and chunks of the fleet centered
around the jumpships moving out towards the ongoing orbital fights. If that
wasn’t enough to tell the lizards that Star Force was claiming domain over this
planet’s orbital tracks then the battle song that he had all the jumpships and
drones in the fleet begin broadcasting over numerous frequencies, including
those the lizards used so he knew they could hear it, made it clear that this
fleet wasn’t sitting put and relishing the beatdown they’d just issued, but
going on full offensive and hitting everything lizard around this planet that
didn’t pull out and run immediately.

The standard offers for
surrender ended and the classic song ‘We will rock you’ replaced it playing on
infinite repeat, with the Star Force fleet groups leaping across orbit pulling
navigational feats that neither of the other two races could hope to accomplish
and arriving on site within minutes rather than the 20+ it would have taken for
the lizards to make the same trek.

As the
Archer 7
came out of its microjump
Mike’s foot began tapping with the rhythm of the song as he assigned targeting
priorities with a few quick thoughts and grabbed control of the jumpship’s own
main Keema battery for himself, targeting a very tricky shot between two native
ships to hit a lizard cruiser and cut a trench down half its length that gutted
the ship and turned it into a mostly dead hulk that acted as a shield for the
native ships in the short delay before a Star Force destroyer slid into that spot
and extended its shields out in a disc to block weaponsfire hitting around it
and sparing the native vessels that were already showing hull breaches while it
also fired back and pounded the nearest lizard cruisers.

Mike released control
of the battery back to the remote pilots and tweaked a few alignments going
forward, but by then it was pretty much automatic. His people knew what to do
so he just mainly watched and waited for an opportunity to make changes if
needed, but the short trip over to this location and the others for the various
splinter groups had allowed them to partially recharge their depleted shield
matrixes, virtually insuring that none of the drones would be destroyed short
of their deployments getting sloppy or the lizards pulling some brilliant play.

Preventing both of
those was Mike’s primary role here but none was to come to pass. The lizards’
ships were destroyed as they ignored the Star Force drones and focused
exclusively on the natives, for those were the weak targets that they wanted to
take out. For every one that they destroyed they could bring in more
reinforcements later to compensate for any losses, so the emphasis was on doing
damage and not the cost to the lizards, which was catastrophic for this small
fleet of enemy ships.

Mike’s forces managed
to keep all but one of the native ships intact once they arrived. That one had
already been damaged prior to the arrival of the drones and a kamikaze cruiser
got through the blockade and rammed it, bumping two drones aside in the process
just to get the kill. As soon as the last active ship was destroyed or disabled
Mike sent orders for rescue crews to get to the native ships and recovery crews
to the remains of their two dead drones. It was unlikely that someone could
reverse engineer them given the tech level Star Force now had, but they didn’t
want to get sloppy with their trash and end up making someone a lot more
powerful through negligence.

As soon as he sent the
order he knew there was going to be issues with the recovery. The natives were
an unknown, as was their biological needs. He didn’t even know if they could
breathe the same atmosphere but he wasn’t going to risk someone dying from
delay while they tried to establish some form of communication with the
natives.

“Admiral, you have
command,” he said through the
comm
as he deactivated
the nexus after sending one last order for the other Archons in the fleet to
assemble for possible recovery operations. “If we’re going to have a first
contact situation we need my telepathy, so I’m heading to the hangar bay.”

“Understood. Still no
response from hails.”

“Keep trying and cycle
through all languages we have in the database. Maybe we’ll get lucky and hit on
one they’re familiar with.”

“That’ll take a lot of
time.”

“We just bought them
time.”

“True. What are your
standing orders?”

“We own orbit. Keep the
lizards out but ignore the rest of the system save for recon until I say
otherwise. I’ll be on armor
comm
in a few minutes if
you need to reach me.”

“If you find survivors,
will you be bringing them back here?”

“I don’t know yet.
We’ll play it by ear. Prep various atmospheric containment pods in one of the
hangars and get the medtechs ready to adapt. If we can buy a few minutes with
some prep I want them.”

“At all locations I
presume?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make it happen
and have a dropship standing by when you reach the hangar.”

“Keep an eye on the
lizards and feed me updates. The dropships are going to be soft targets.”

“We’ll keep them out of
reach.”

“I’m off,” Mike said,
fully deactivating the nexus and turning about and into a run as he reentered
the bridge and crossed it heading for the interior of the ship where his
quarters were. When he got there he found his dark blue armor, or rather one
out of three sets that he had onboard ship, and stepped into it within a few
seconds. His feet went into already intact boots and his arms went into already
intact gauntlets held in a statue-like pose with the rest of the armor being
peeled apart in segments that included the helmet.

A mental command saw it
all close up around him and lock into place. He sent another mental command to
retract the helmet, sensing a 3 second holding ‘aura’ with in his mind.

“Retract helmet,” he
said, enabling the safety protocol to release. His helmet split apart and the
segments slid back down around his neck and behind his head, leaving him
breathing free air and able to twist his neck side to side and backwards
without being hindered, but with the segments piled behind his neck and acting
as a bit of protective collar triggered with the binary command so that a rogue
thought wouldn’t see the helmet splitting apart when one was in, say, a toxic
atmosphere or no atmosphere at all.

The same protocol was
in effect for the rest of the armor, but the quick in-and-outs were worth that
little speedbump, though he had to telekinetically smooth his pant legs down
inside to get some wrinkles in his casual uniform out. Another mental command
crunched the armor down around feet, shins, thighs, waist, and every other part
of the armor that had been designed to give him some room for internal
movement. When it contracted down to his predetermined body form he felt
himself mentally slip into battle readiness with his feet gripping the ground
and able to twitch in any direction necessary in a split second. He didn’t have
Kex
like Jason did, but he could launch himself into
a full aerial flip with barely a split second of preparation in order to jump
over something flinging at his ankles…which was hard to do with loose boots.

As soon as he got his
armor locked into place he headed out through the ship and to the hangar bay,
finding a dropship waiting for him with a small crew of Bsidd all in either
combat armor or envirosuits, some which appeared to just be getting to the ship
a few seconds ahead of him.

“Ready for departure,
Archon,” one of the Gammas said, standing next to a pair of Alphas in combat
armor and a few other of the slightly larger ‘workers.’ Mike knew the Admiral
had sent them here because they were the strongest of the Bsidd…not taking
training into consideration…and could lift or pry apart debris and carry
modular equipment better than any of the rest of the ship’s crew. The Alphas
were armed, lightly, and were both Bsidd commandos there for security to watch
Mike’s back and those of the other Bsidd just in case something went awry…like
a group of lizards showing up or the crew turning on the rescuers.

Mike took a quick
glance, confirming that they both had one lethal and one stun weapon, keeping
their options open to deal with the unknown.

“Let’s go,” he said,
walking through the small
Sparrow
-class
dropship and into the cockpit.

“Where to?” the Epsilon
variant pilot asked.

“Any of the tagged
ships that their own vessels aren’t at.”

“Do they have rescue
parties deployed?” he asked as they lifted off the deck and drifted towards the
energy field separating the bay from space as the heavy blast door over it
slowly retracted with a bright splash of sunlight shooting inside the crack.

“Not as a few minutes
ago, but I hope we’re not the only ones picking up people. Get me within 400
meters of the hulls and I should be able to sense if there are living crew
inside.”

“Really?”

“Archon magic,” Mike
said, referencing a term that a lot of others had come to use when they didn’t
feel like explaining something. “No point wasting time searching empty debris.”

“Proceeding to the
nearest target,” the Bsidd said, setting a course around the various debris
chunks and getting a few pea-sized hits as soon as they left the jumpship.