Star Force: Retribution (SF60) (4 page)

Those individuals were then dumped back into the
primary group with no word as to why, other than that they weren’t serious
about their commitment to working their way out of the prison. They were told
that they’d have another opportunity to begin again 6 months later, and in that
way Star Force enabled their prisoners to work their way to freedom without
running the risk of unwittingly creating an internal resistance group in the
process.

Not that there was a significant threat from that. The
ADZ was full of malcontents that Star Force had been dealing with for decades,
not to mention people in Axius and even Humans in the Core Region that were
anti-Star Force. They weren’t a real threat and were looked on as little more
than children playing make believe, but even if they were a threat Star Force
wouldn’t have condemned the Skarrons or others to permanent imprisonment. The
sovereignty of the individual wasn’t just a high flung concept that you
abandoned out of necessity, it was an acknowledgement that people didn’t get to
choose where they were born or into what civilization, and Star Force wasn’t
going to give up on anyone.

That, and Star Force had learned long ago that the
fakers couldn’t take a long string of training and would eventually crack and
eliminate themselves, leaving only those willing to work hard to earn their
place left behind to exit the prisons and take a place in Star Force.
Challenges were the best way to ferret out who was worthy and who wasn’t, but
when you needed answers more quickly an Archon mental probe was definitely the
way to go.

Morgan didn’t stick around to watch all this go down.
Once she delivered the prisoners and resupplied her ships she returned to
Achkor and picked up another Voku escort, then went back out hunting more
Hobbits on the Skarron worlds that had been cut off by the lizards razing the
regional
capitol
.

Not all of them surrendered, in fact most didn’t. Some
hadn’t been visited by the lizards yet and Morgan had to conquer the planets in
order to get to the Hobbits, killing many in the process before they could be
convinced to surrender. Most of the Skarrons fought to the death, but like in
Quixva
there were some who didn’t see the point in further
resistance and accepted the surrender offer. Some were individual cities,
others military bases or even individual walkers. No full planets surrendered
until they were reduced to scraps, with Morgan not needing to make a one and
done campaign to head back with a full load of prisoners.

One by one she went around to the weakened or under
attack systems, catching one in the very end of a lizard attack and only able
to rescue a few thousand individuals after her fleet kicked the crap out of the
invaders. The trailblazer made use of the transitional nightmare in the region,
picking up survivors where she could as the lizards methodically chewed apart
withering pieces of the Skarron supply lines and claiming the worlds for themselves
with infantile colonies, some of which she destroyed when she came across them for
good measure.

But even with several large Skarron fleets roaming the
region and hitting targets there were too many lizard startups to eliminate,
meaning that no matter how many big fights the Skarrons won the lizards were
taking territory…and with every year that passed those little seeds grew,
making them even harder to eliminate down the road up until the point where
they were no longer vulnerable and full-fledged strongholds.

The collapse of the region didn’t happen quickly,
taking decades to accomplish, but by the end of it all the former Skarron
border with Achkor would completely disappear, leaving nothing but lizard
colonies and the systems they chose not to take interest in, with the ADZ being
further swallowed up by the lizard advance.

4

February 7, 2675

Gravis System
(beyond Protovic border)

Hampric

Paul watched from the command nexus onboard the Ma’kri
as the ship’s Ka’sevron cannons fired off their own projectiles along with the
nearby drone fleet’s rail gun rounds. All fell to the planet’s surface and the
small lizard colony there, with only one shield dome left to penetrate. The
rail guns were going there, but the Ka’sevron rounds were falling on one of the
exposed cities.

The hollow rounds hit buildings and sunk through the
infrastructure, using their kinetic mass to punch through before the internal
energy cocktail reached overload. It never happened at exactly the same moment,
but within a few seconds of impact each of the imbedded rounds exploded from
within, creating far more damage than the rail gun slugs or even the cleansing
beams could manage. Right now those were pinpoint targeting lizard structures
in a number of exposed cities, while Paul was reserving the Ka’sevron rounds
for where he needed to level a given area.

They were also useful in naval warfare in select
circumstances, but because they wouldn’t detonate on contact they were
virtually useless against shields save for their kinetic value. If fired
against a warship with sufficient shields to hold up to the physical assault
the rounds would hit and either deform or deflect, sending them off into space
where they would then detonate with little or no secondary damage done to the
ship.

Then again if a ship’s shields were down and you
landed one inside their hull…pretty much instant confetti. Down side was their
casings weren’t quite strong enough to survive the pass through an invoker’s
energy arcs, but give the techs another 50 years or so and that little problem
would be remedied. Right now the Ka’sevron cannons were more useful in
assaulting larger enemy ships and stations, but like the rail guns they had
limited ammunition that had to be stored before charging. Once the charge was
set the round was ‘live’ and had to be fired, else it’d explode inside your own
ship.

That made for a volatile weapon, but in the right
hands and the right circumstances it was highly effective, such as at the
moment where each Ka’sevron round was saving some 100+ rail gun slugs with each
detonation within a shipyard facility that Paul was slagging on the surface.
There were two partially constructed cruisers there, and while the cleansing
beams could have cut them up at range, the Ka’sevron rounds made the job oh so
much easier.

At present only the Ma’kri had the weapons, and that
would remain the case, for the other weapon systems coming their way from
techland
would be implemented on the drone fleet and would
take them to a whole new level of badass. Those weren’t out of prototype stage
yet, so it’d been decided to give the Ma’kri some extra bang in the interim
with the Ka’sevron cannons…which otherwise would have been reserved for
specialized assault craft rather than the fleet standard.

The Canderians also really liked the weapon system and
were implementing it large scale. To each their own, Paul knew, but useful as
it was now the weapon wasn’t going to fit in with their long term plans for the
mainline fleet, nor for Clan Saber. A few of the other Clans might dabble with
the
Ka’sevrons
, as they’d done with other weapons
that Star Force had built and subsequently decided not to use large scale, but
Saber and the mainline fleet were pretty much one and the same as far as tech
went, due in no small part to the fact that Paul was the primary architect in
both.

The planet that he was current chewing up was yet
another lizard expansion into the neutral zone around the ADZ, this one just
above the Protovic region on the border between Beta and Zeta Regions. No
matter how many Star Force killed, the lizards kept trying to sneak others in,
meaning that Paul and others had to keep mowing the grass or face an
overgrowth, with the lizards hoping they’d eventually grow tired or lax and
allow them to creep up on the fortified region.

But that wasn’t going to happen so long as the
trailblazers were in command. The lizards were used to rolling over rookies,
and they were anything but. These missions were tedious, and Paul had several
other systems he had to raze/check on, but it was necessary work, bloody as it
was. This one though had to be eradicated completely, for it was too close to
the ADZ to leave anything standing. That was why Paul was willing to waste the
Ka’sevron rounds, because he needed as many dead lizards as buildings before he
sent his ground troops down to clean up, literally.

Not only would they be hunting down the surviving
lizards they would also be removing their infrastructure…and that was always
easier if it was rubble rather than just sliced up segments. Paul needed to
erase this colony from the neutral zone entirely and not leave anything
remaining for the lizards to return to. Had this planet been deeper into lizard
territory he’d have been content just to wreck it and force them to rebuild,
but unfortunately this one had to become a blood bath…which he never liked.

The demolition from orbit continued until the last
city was
shieldless
and devoid of anything looking
like a standing structure, after which Paul took a skeet down from the Ma’kri
and joined his ground troops as they scoured the rubble fields looking for
lizards…and finding many still alive, most of whom were moving around looking
for and setting up ambush locations. Paul flew over them, close enough to scan
with his Ikrid and spot potential traps, but eventually when the surface
survivors were taken care of he had to come down to ground and help the
infantry make their way underground.

Some of the subsurface infrastructure had been
pulverized by the Ka’sevron cannons, but a lot was too deep for them to hit,
meaning some nasty fighting was still underway for Paul wasn’t going to turn
the machines loose on the rubble with living people still in it…even if they
were enemies trying to kill them at every turn. He also wasn’t going to try to
take any prisoners this go around, knowing the futility of it, but he could at
least give the lizards a fighting death and saw to killing many of them himself
as he took point to ferret them out with his Ikrid.

Every last one fought viciously to the death, like
always, but in the end it didn’t matter. Star Force lost no personnel and only
a few aircraft/mechs in the ground combat, most of which was due to hidden
explosives. Weeks later, when Paul was sure the cities were clear, he had the ‘
chewies
’ brought down from orbit and turned them loose on
the rubble. The anti-
grav
platforms grasped pieces
with tentacle-like arms, scoops, nets, and several other contraptions, all of
which were designed to move it up and into compartments on the exterior that
would funnel the junk to interior factories that would mash it up into the
equivalent of dust.

That dust was then dumped back onto the ground, either
directly under the
chewie
or off to another location
via a boom, eventually leaving a dune field where the cities had been, or in
the case of the subterranean structures a massive pit filled with the sharp
sand. In other situations Star Force would have recycled that debris, but out
here on a planet they didn’t intend to retain possession of, this was as far as
they were willing to go.

With the dunes marking the planet like scars Paul
eventually closed up shop and jumped to the next system on his list, but not
before swinging back into the ADZ to hook up with the grid and get caught up
with events, for these purging missions took a considerable amount of time.
With Protovic territory being the closest his Ma’kri swung by while the rest of
his fleet traveled to a standby point near the next target, which he would be
at with only a few days delay thanks to the superior gravity drives that the
newer Ma’kri possessed.

But when Paul arrived and connected his ship to the
relay grid he didn’t jump back out immediately, for there was a flag on a
message that came from Roger. Knowing that he might need to respond to it he
kept the Ma’kri sitting in place rather than swinging back out to an
exiting
jumpline as he read the message regarding the Nexus
raid on a lizard core world.

Roger’s sentiments were dark and mirrored his own,
with Paul physically pounding the arm of his command chair as he read
them…drawing the attention of the ship captain and the rest of the bridge crew.

Paul ignored them and read on. According to the
reports the ring shipyard had successfully been destroyed, which was a huge
victory and would reduce lizard ship building production by a significant
fraction, but the H’kar had lost 73% of their fleet and the Gfatt had lost 88%
in the assault…and those weren’t drone warships. They had crews on all of them,
and their lives had just been sacrificed in order to achieve a strategic
victory. It wasn’t a last ditch effort to hurt the enemy or to save a planet.
This was a planned assault, undertaken by choice, and they’d just traded away
those people’s lives in order to knock out the lizard shipyard.

From the way the H’kar report read, which they’d
translated and sent to Star Force as a FYI, they saw this as a huge victory and
payback for all the defeats they’d suffered in the past, and the Nexus saw it
as a key strategic victory. Neither faction saw it as anything but positive,
though there was a
subnote
that indicated that
hitting another ring in the near future wasn’t an option for lack of available
ships.

Roger obviously had a problem with that, as did Paul
and Star Force in general, but the Nexus was completely oblivious to the horror
they’d just committed, trading away people’s lives as they had. Each one of
those deaths was a defeat, a loss, but like the lizards they just saw those
crews as replaceable assets rather than prizes to be safeguarded. They’d just
handed them to the enemy in what arguably was the biggest tower dive Paul had
ever read about. Even the V’kit’no’sat were never this sloppy, despite the
drastic lengths they sometimes went to achieve objectives.

The Nexus had sent those troops in without any
intention of them surviving. They simply wanted the shipyard dead and knew
their superior technology would allow the ships to survive long enough to
accomplish their objective if they went full bore against it and didn’t get
distracted with anything
so
trivial as defending
themselves.

Paul pounded the armrest of his chair again, this time
standing up and walking around to the back of it and gripping the top of the
cushion with both hands in a stranglehold.

“What’s wrong?” the Captain asked, spinning around in
his own chair to face him.

“The Nexus has taken out a lizard ring in one of their
core worlds.”

The Captain’s eyes widened in surprise, then just as
quickly narrowed again in suspicion. “What’s the bad news?”

“They sacrificed almost all of a combined H’kar and
Gfatt fleet in order to do it…including several of the commanders we’ve been
training to avoid that kind of stupidity!” Paul finished with a half yell.

The Captain was silent for a moment, as was the bridge
crew, and he let the Archon have a moment before he spoke again, seeing that he
was clearly fuming. “How many?”

“18 million H’kar, and around 12 million Gfatt,” Paul
said, squeezing his eyes shut at the horrific numbers. Those were all soldiers
who had trained long and hard to develop their skills, serving their races for
years upon years…and now they were gone, not because the enemy had surprised
them or overwhelmed them, but because their leaders had decided to trade their
lives away in exchange for a damn shipyard.

“No matter how powerful the Nexus is, they can’t
afford to lose that many ships.”

“No they can’t,” Paul agreed, “but it’s their typical
bluff. Hit the enemy hard and in place that really hurts them and hope they
back down or submit. We know that won’t happen with the lizards. The H’kar
should know that won’t happen with the lizards, they’ve been fighting them
longer than we have.”

“How vulnerable do you think this makes the H’kar?”

Paul shook his head. “I don’t know. If they expected
to lose the fleet then they should have more than enough to hold their
territory without them, but it’s going to seriously inhibit their ability to
push back on the creep advance. This was stupid no matter how you slice it, but
all they can see is the big prize they bagged.”

Another moment of silence followed before the Captain
spoke.

“Do you need to go somewhere else?”

Paul sighed. “I want to beat the brains out of the
H’kar, but that’s already being handled by others. No, go ahead and get us
moving. We’ve got a mission list to complete.”

“Do you have all the data you need?”

“Yeah. I’m going to go through it more closely before
I send any messages, so there’s no need to wait. I’ll be in the sanctum hitting
something,” Paul said, spinning around and walking off the bridge.

“Get us to the
Jaxvot
jumppoint,” the Captain told the helmsman after he’d left. “And be glad you
were born Human and not H’kar.”

“Very glad,” the helmsman muttered, plotting the
course and goosing the gravity drives enough to get them moving around stellar
orbit.

Taryn stood in the V’kit’no’sat pyramid watching as
the medtech took several of her Clan Croft adepts through the ‘genetic carwash’
and unlocked their 7 basic psionics from the ‘rust’ that had rendered them
dormant from so many generations of illicit Zen’zat breeding. Normally Taryn
wouldn’t have brought them here herself, but today was a special case.