Star Force: Fiddlesticks (SF65) (5 page)

Then one day many years later a huge Star Force
fleet of warships and Ma’kri entered the system and began offloading damaged
drones that the shipyard hurriedly began to repair, filling all its slips and
yet having more waiting in line. Two of the Ma’kri had even suffered
significant damage and were moved into the larger berth, one at a time, with a
small army of Axius workers supplementing the onboard techs as they began to
rebuild the ships with the crews still onboard.

The Ma’kri-sized slip was exposed to space, for
this wasn’t a super-sized shipyard, but it was surrounded with an always
running energy shield to protect it against attack or rogue debris. Inside that
shield there was no atmosphere, which made the repair efforts tricky, but it
wasn’t something new to the crews, nor above their expertise.

What was new was the type of damage they were
seeing, for it wasn’t plasma in nature. It was the result of more of a cutting
beam-type weapon, and since all the traffic they got here was from conflicts
with the lizards, who almost exclusively used plasma weapons, the damage to
this fleet was a bit of a shock, not to mention the scale to which these ships
had been damaged, for some of the drones were barely able to fly from jumpship
to repair slip under their own power.

Scuttlebutt gradually worked its way around from
the Ma’kri crew to the shipyard workers, with word being that the lizards had
developed a new weapon and a fleet full of the augmented ships had come to the
relief of one of their planets that was under invasion. The Star Force fleet
now sitting in orbit had fought and defeated them, protecting the ground troops
and allowing them to continue battling on the surface without naval
interference, but they’d gotten beat up in the process.

None of the jumpships had been damaged, for the
weapon upgrades weren’t anything that was going to get through those shields
without considerable, repetitive banging, but the smaller vessels were not so
fortunate, especially given that they didn’t have the option of retreat when
they had to protect the troops on the ground.

Fortunately no one had died from the damage to the
two Ma’kri, but their hulls were still a mess and a lot of the junked weapons
couldn’t be replaced with the stores the moon had. They were going to repair the
hull and armor damage, but to replace the more sensitive components fully
they’d have to travel to some place with larger stores.

The commander of the fleet, a trailblazer no less,
wasn’t going to wait that long. She wanted this fleet back in as much working
order as possible, then they were heading back into the fight, intent on
hunting down these newly equipped lizards that were roaming around and knocking
them out before they could jump planetary defenses. The new weapon was more
powerful than plasma, but worse yet it had range, meaning the lizards could
easily engage the Star Force drones outside their mauler and talon cannon kill
zones.

That changed the game considerably, taking the
short range lizard fleet and upgrading it to a significant
mid
range
threat with what the crew had already dubbed as ‘phasers,’ which
turned out to be either a long burning beam or shorter flare of more intensity.
The lizard fleet had operated with both weapon varieties, though it was said
they were comprised of the same destructive energy.

The lizards had been making small upgrades to
their tech ever since Star Force had first encountered them in Epsilon Eridani,
but now it seemed they had hit upon a major breakthrough…and everyone knew it
was only a matter of time before all of the lizard worlds began producing ships
of the same make and model.

5

December 31, 2754

Rotunna System (Beta Region)

Ida

Kara-317 flew through the skies of Ida, passing out
over the city’s edge and buzzing the jungle’s treetops following one of many
surface trails. She’d arrived insystem less than two hours ago enroute to a bit
of a summit gathering on Sashneo. It would take weeks to get there, coming from
the clandestine missions she’d been pulling outside of the Achkor Region, and
she wanted to pick up a couple of Archons to take with her. Currently they were
out running a workout together on the trails, and she didn’t feel like waiting
around until they finished up and returned to the city.

Her armor’s sensors penetrated the treetops and gave
her body heat indicators from all the
lifeforms
in
the jungle, but only for a set distance. No Human signatures were within her
current radius, but she was familiar with the set of trails, having spent a
month here previously on another layover. They didn’t appear to have changed
much in the past century, and if she knew Prick and Pram they’d be taking the
longest of the trails, so Kara followed it expecting to pick up on them
eventually.

She moved quickly, knowing that the invasion date
wasn’t going to change if she arrived late and she was cutting it close as it
was. Kara hadn’t realized it was even going down yet until she’d gotten back on
the grid and caught up with current events and postings. Her mission had seen
her behind enemy lines for the past 2 years, with her going all the way out
through lizard coreward territory to try and find their current border of
conflict with the Skarrons.

She’d had to go really far to find it, for the lizards
were taking it to the super huge empire far harder than they’d ever come after
Star Force…and it was paying dividends for them, for they were acquiring an
enormous mass of territory. How well they’d colonized it yet was still
uncertain, for there was only so much scouting Kara could do with her single
jumpship, but knowing the lizards they’d suck up every system that was to their
liking within the regions they dominated and begin using them to spew out more
conquering fleets and armies.

By now Kara was assuming that the lizards controlled a
region coreward of Star Force that was at least equal to everything they had
around their own core systems…which was freaking huge. Too huge, for it meant
the lizards were growing by leaps and bounds with literally no one around to
stop them. Add in the new phasers they were slowly implementing to their
fleets, and even their handheld weapons, and their threat level was literally
shooting through the roof.

Star Force did not have a full map of their territory,
and very little was known past the no-go line aside from what the Hycre were
snooping around to find, and Kara’s travels were adding to that, but only in a
small way. She had found the new Skarron border, but it looked like it was
still in flux. Several systems were falling to the lizards when she got there,
literally being overrun, while a handful of others were holding firm and seeing
insanely huge fleets battling it out.

Those she watched from afar, and conceded that the
Skarrons were still every bit as deadly as they’d once been. How the lizards
were beating them was a question mark, but they were doing it, evidenced by the
long trail of conquered systems on the ‘green’ side of the border.

At least that’s how Kara thought of it, and had her
ship’s maps labeled. Most lizard tech was yellow/tan, but their bodies were
green and she’d always mentally associated that color with them. On the reverse
she saw the Skarrons as white, because that’s what their walkers were colored.

The green on the map was eating into the white at an
alarming pace, based on the distance from the ADZ that it had now stretched,
but Kara knew the white stretched across an entire galactic arm and into the
next, which was why she was surprised the lizards were still doing so well. No
matter how many systems they took, the Skarrons should still have been able to
bring in a fleet, or 100 fleets from elsewhere and hammer them back. That
wasn’t happening, yet, but it definitely wasn’t because the Skarrons weren’t
trying.

She’d given the Skarrons a little push of her own,
racking up 6 lizard warship kills while she was out scouting solo. Her armor
had so many uses it was crazy, and she’d gotten in the habit of sneaking
onboard enemy ships and destroying them from the inside. Every ship the lizards
didn’t have to throw against Star Force was an improvement, but she was kind of
pulling for the Skarrons in this fight, despite the fact that they were the
larger threat. Kara didn’t know why for certain, but it just seemed like the
lizards were the cocky upstarts that needs to get the wind knocked out of them
and that hadn’t happened yet.

Star Force was working up to that, and were already
doing so in small scale around the ADZ, but the first big counterattack was
about to happen and she wanted to be a part of it, for the lizards really had
this one coming their way.

As for the pair of Archons she wanted to bring with
her, it wasn’t for her sake, for she usually fought better solo, but they’d
been kind of ostracized, mostly by their own doing, from the rest of the
Archons and Star Force, and had been holed up here training on their own for
the past 6 years after completing some fairly successful counter-ops into
lizard territory. They also liked to work alone more than with others, and Kara
was probably their only true friend…which she found to be sad, hence the slight
detour coming here to pick them up for a mission that they really needed to be
a part of, not only for the skills they brought to bear, but for their own
sakes.

She spotted several individuals ahead on the trail,
but there were 5 of them and Kara knew that the pair she was after would be
alone so she didn’t bother dropping down through the trees to identify them or
use her Ikrid to get a mental fingerprint. Flying on, she passed by several
other groups and singular individuals, finding only one pair amongst them, but
when she dropped down underneath the jungle canopy she discovered it was the
wrong duo…and not even Archons at that, just a very fit couple of commandos.

Kara flew back up above the trees and searched on,
reminding herself to mentally look before heading down again on an assumption.
Eventually she found another pair 18 kilometers out and relatively isolated,
already headed back on the trail. She didn’t bother to try and get a feel for
them telepathically, breaking her own rule given that she was sure it was them
this time, and dropped down to the trail a good 600 meters ahead of them. There
she waited, arms crossed over her chest as her armor retracted back down into
the clear jewel on her left wrist.

Kara sent out a short telepathic ‘hi’ when they got
close so they wouldn’t run over her, for they were moving at decent speed and
the trail was anything but straight. She felt them slow a bit before they
rounded the thick tree trunk ahead and came into view, with Karen almost
skidding to a stop a meter and a half ahead of Travis who mimicked her sudden
deceleration.

“Where the hell did you come from?” he asked the mage.

“Nice to see you too,” she responded with a genuine
smile, looking at both of them in all their sweaty glory. In one sense they
were peers, even beyond her when you took into account their battlemeld
psionics, but in other ways they were still her two little younglings and she
was proud they’d advanced their way up to the striker ranks by now, and well
eclipsing their former classmates, most of whom were still rangers and
acolytes.

“Trouble?” Karen wondered, walking up beside Travis
and gently brushing elbows with him as they filled up the narrow trail. They
often did that, making physical contact where others would leave at least a few
inches gap, and Kara assumed it was a side effect of the battlemeld, for they
kept themselves linked together virtually round the clock in addition to their
own lesser, but unique twin link that they’d had since birth, or whenever it
had actually formed.

The honorary trailblazer shook her head. “Just passing
through enroute to
Pagaliss
, but I don’t have much
time, otherwise I wouldn’t have interrupted you two out here. I only got word
of the invasion a little while ago and if I don’t hurry I might miss the beginning,
and I figure that’s where I might be able to make the biggest difference.”

“More than on the ground? I doubt that,” Travis
commented.

Kara inclined her head slightly to the right, as if
she was studying him, or perhaps his stupidity. “My personal warship kill count
is now up to 87, and that includes two lizard assault pillars.”

“I thought those were sneak missions, not during
battle.”

“Which is why I want to get there before the shooting
starts,” Kara pointed out.

“At least you got an invite to the party,” Karen said,
disgruntled. Of all the Archons being rounded up for this mission from across
the ADZ, she and her brother and their unique skills had not been included in
the battle planning…nor much else over the last century aside from small missions
that usually saw them doing some sort of short term or solo work. Nothing truly
befitting their skillset.

“And now you’ve got yours,” Kara commented, seeing
both their eyebrows raise a tick, also in unison. “What, you thought I’d waste
time just to drop in and say hi?”

“Did they want us, or you?”

“I am one of ‘they,’ and you’re wasting time. Get your
asses back to the showers and get cleaned up. I want us out of this system and
on our way ASAP.”

“You could just fly us back,” Travis said as Kara
stepped aside to clear the path and motioned them forward. Karen took off
running, with him following a step behind.

“I don’t like you that much,” Kara said as they
passed, with their conversation coming to an end. They could have continued it
telepathically and she could have ran with them, but there was really nothing
else to say at this point…plus she could feel them accelerate and start to
hammer the last section of their workout, and there was no reason to go with
them and show just how slow that actually was compared to her skill level.

Once they were gone Kara jumped up into the trees,
with her Vorch’nas spreading out to cover her body as she zipped up through the
leaves and into the sky again, keeping pace and following the pair from above
given that she didn’t have anything else to do. They were the only reason she’d
come down to the planet in the first place, and it wasn’t going to take all
that long for them to work their way across a few kilometers of jungle, no
matter how twisty these trails were.

Her Vorch’nas had more than enough power to let her
just linger in the air, lazily following from above but out of their sight. She
even went so far as to engage her Kgat ability, which was essentially a
cloaking mechanism for her mind. She couldn’t use any of her other psionics
with it active, but it essentially took her off everyone’s mental radar, with
their Ikrid unable to penetrate or even detect her shield. Likewise she
couldn’t sense them, but it made for a very useful trick for sneaking up on
people who didn’t already have their Pefbar active.

She didn’t want the twins knowing she was pacing them,
but she kept watch on them and the few others on the trails below with her
armor’s sensors, which she attuned for a narrow scan on their pair of heat
signatures, giving her more data and allowed her to ‘see’ them through the
trees. Kara could tell from their movements that they were excited, which was
another reason why she didn’t want them to know she was watching.

They pushed hard all the way back to the city, which
was when Kara left them for a bit after making mental contact and arranging a
rendezvous point. They were there with some half-full duffels slung over their
shoulders exactly 27 minutes and 13 seconds after they entered the city, which
was about 18 minutes faster than she’d expected. Though she was sure they
weren’t going to say anything, Kara knew they were aware of the gravity of the
invite she’d just extended to them.

“Took you long enough,” Kara quipped sarcastically as
she turned and walked ahead of them down the connecting tunnel to a tram
station that led to the spaceport where her dropship was waiting…or rather the
dropship that she’d arranged to have waiting, for she’d just hopped out an
airlock in orbit and came down to the planet in her armor. That was one bit of
freedom she relished, and was more than grateful that the dragon had been
arrogant enough to slap the Vorch’nas on her wrist without asking permission
first, which at the time she would have flatly denied.

“What are we going to be doing?” Karen asked after
they got situated in the dropship, with Kara sitting back in one of the seats
with her feet up on the headrest of the one ahead of her, with no one else
onboard save for the pilot.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing, and I’ll defer
to Morgan’s preference when I get there, but I expect that you two can assume a
lot of ground work after the orbital battle is completed…unless you think you
can find a gunner with lesser skills to boot.”

“The general information we got didn’t say much beyond
we’re taking back the old Calavari capitol,” Travis added. “I’m guessing your
closed files said a bit more.”

“Did you see the reconnaissance reports?”

“No,” Karen answered for them.

“Whether out of pride, spite, or some logistical
concern, the lizards have built up Varasiss more than the other former Calavari
conquests. A lot more. The planet isn’t as developed as some other lizard
worlds that have been around longer, but it’s going to be the strongest one
we’ve hit to date and will open up a huge chunk of territory around it once the
supply lines go down. For that reason alone, we’re expecting multiple
reinforcement fleets to arrive while we’re hammering on them. With their new
phaser-type weaponry it’s going to be one hell of a naval battle before any of
you set boots to ground.”