Star Force: Revulsion (SF70)

1

February 17, 2826

Trium
System (lizard territory)

Nefti

Krimja
Hakti
reclined on a small bench with his numerous
appendages draped over the sides as he studied the tactical displays that
detailed the progress of the orbital bombardment of the lizard world. The Bsidd
monitored all 17 ships involved in the attack, seeing them firing their clear
Keema beams down at the distant planet’s surface while numerous phaser beams
were fired back towards the drones, though their range limits were passed and
the enemy beams were losing coherency, meaning they did considerably less damage
than normal.

But the shields on
Krimja’s
drones were still dropping, not that fast, but
with the amount of time it was taking to punch through a lizard shield plate
there was no way one drone could sustain that much cumulative damage. That
meant standard rotational patterns had to be employed with the Bsidd remote
pilots cycling the drones in and out to maintain a constant rate of fire while
not losing any of their ships.

The Bsidd Admiral
preferred to be on the bridge as much as possible during the assault, but
they’d already been at it 2 days now and had only destroyed a handful of
colonies. The planet had hundreds of large scale cities and thousands of
smaller settlements covering its surface, but the more they could take out from
orbit the better to not expose their ground troops to any unnecessary
fighting…the downside was these orbital assaults took forever because there
were only so many drones equipped with Keema strong enough to outdistance the
lizard planetary defense phasers, with the rest of the drones and even the
jumpships sitting back and waiting patiently while a handful of Star Force
ships ate away at the lizards with impunity so long as they kept the shield
rotation strategy employed.

But this is what had to
be done. No longer were they assaulting expansion colonies, but worlds that the
lizards had been on for a very long time and developed in depth. That meant
heavier defenses, and aside from the newer planetary defense guns there was a
whole lot of nasty stuff on the ground should they need to invade and take out
the rest of the cities the hard way.
Krimja’s
troops
could do it, he knew, but only if they had to. The lizards had to be purged
from this world, but it wasn’t worth a single limb off of one of their ground
troops to get in a rush. They had time and would use it, while the lizards had
to sit and wait while their civilization on
Nefti
was
taken apart piece by painstaking piece and made all the longer due to their
continual shield upgrades. They weren’t enough to stop Star Force’s weapons
from eventually breaching and destroying the emitters beneath, but with every
new model employed it took them longer to do so.

Krimja expected this
orbital assault to last months at the minimum, but he still wanted to be
overseeing as much of it as he could just in case something went wrong, and
with the deviousness of the lizards that was always in play no matter how
controlled a situation looked.

On the status boards
before him the Alpha watched the firing status of the
Battlecruiser
-class drones. The Keema built into them could be
fired indefinitely so long as power was available, unlike plasma weapons that
required a matter component in each charge, and these drones had been doing so
non-stop save for swap outs. Right now there were two additional ones sitting
back out of range recharging their shields while the 17 currently engaged were
hammering away at one colony in particular with individual batteries, for each
battlecruiser could only hold 1 Keema.

That was because the
range needed had required a massive battery to be built, and even it was too
large to fit on the heavy cruisers. A new, larger class of drone had to be
created, with adjustments made to the carrier jumpships in order to fit them
inside the hold for they were longer than it was deep. These had been carried
horizontally rather than vertically, then stacked over the top of with
additional drones. Each battlecruiser was 3 times the size of a heavy cruiser,
making them almost too big to be classified as drones, but fortunately the size
of jumpships they were using nowadays allowed for them to be fit inside
regardless.

Krimja saw each of the
batteries charging and discharging as expected, knowing that these few weapons
were the only way to take this world without excessive loss of machinery
through a typical orbital assault, blasting away with a large drone fleet and
in return losing many ships to create a hole in the planetary defense grid.
They’d then take out the cities via a ground campaign and remove this
infestation the hard way, as they’d done many times before, but these handful
of battlecruisers were allowing them another route to victory and that made
Krimja want to keep an eye on them constantly, even if there was no obvious
concern.

With his main two legs
straddling the bench, Krimja used his other appendages to manipulate the
control boards as needed, though most of what he was doing now was just
oversight and that required watching rather than acting. He was an
Alpha-variant Bsidd, which meant he was their ‘standard’ variety and stood just
a little shorter than a Calavari. His musculature was average and his
appendages numbered only 14. Most of the naval division was comprised of
Epsilon and Theta variants, with him being one of a small minority of Alphas to
rise through the ranks of the smaller Bsidd to become one of the 378 Admirals
in the current fleet.

Bsidd population was
managed by the Humans, with them determining how many of each variant to hatch
per year, and Alphas were low in number. Most of them found their way into niches
dominated by other variants with none to call their own. That didn’t matter to
Krimja because Star Force was designed around the individual rather than groups
and allowed him to go wherever he could earn his way. A lot of Alphas went
straight civilian, but he’d wanted naval because the war against the lizards
was largely being fought on that front…and if they ever lost their advantage
there it would doom Star Force into turtling up and holding onto the systems
they already had.

That would be a win for
the lizards, with their only hope at defeating them coming through conquest of
those systems they already possessed. The Bsidd and their Star Force allies
were busy cutting out a whole new region of territory for their empire and they
were doing it strictly out of lizard systems that the old Alliance wouldn’t
have dared to touch. That’s why the density of the targets was increasing,
along with their difficulty to take, but with each victory came another world,
another system for Star Force…and with the Bsidd able to reproduce so quickly,
so long as they had sufficient material resources they were populating a lot of
those worlds themselves while acting as caretakers and watching over the empty
ones.

The Bsidd Region was
quickly going to outgrow the ADZ itself, but they were still a long way from
the lizard core systems that had an equally impressive number of conquered
systems on the far side. Lizard territory was huge, and that wasn’t even
counting all their conquests from the Skarron
empire
and everything coreward of Star Force. Krimja knew the key to victory lay in
taking it one invasion at a time and denying the enemy their prizes while Star
Force grew ever stronger, with the Bsidd taking a greater and greater share of
the workload with their surging population.

Krimja took pride in
that, but knew that the Humans were the key to it all. They were the ones who
had rescued the Bsidd and gave them a place in Star Force, along with many
other races, and they were fighting to protect everyone they could. Had it not
been for them the ADZ would not have existed and all those who had taken refuge
there would have been wiped out or forced further on, trying to stay ahead of
the lizard advance for as long as they could.

Unfortunately not
everyone in the ADZ felt that way. Krimja wasn’t well connected to the
non-Bsidd portions of Star Force territory but all were interconnected through
the relay grid with communal information databases and news services, so he had
some idea of what was happening elsewhere and had studied the other races with
interest, especially those that had taken refuge within Star Force’s boundaries
without joining them.

A great many of them
were ingrates, complaining of this and that but offering no solutions
themselves. Almost all of it centered
around
a lack of
control, citing that Star Force and the Humans had too much and the races under
their ‘care’ had no say in their own future. Krimja knew that was absurd, for
those races hadn’t earned a say. If simply having population numbers gave you
authority then the Bsidd would rule everyone else. It didn’t work that way, and
the reason the Humans were in control was because they had responsibility for
everyone and had seen to it that they not only had sanctuary from the lizards
and other threats, but an opportunity within the Star Force economic system to
grow and advanced as they were able.

Did the Humans rule?
No, they didn’t. They led, with the difference being that they allowed freedom
that many of these other races wouldn’t if they held dominance. Star Force set
some ground rules, and many people didn’t like those, but beyond that you were
free to do what you wanted. No one was entitled to success, only life, for
which Star Force provided a comfortable existence. Anything beyond that you had
to earn, whether you were an individual or a race.

Some didn’t like that,
wanting to be given status and resources that they hadn’t earned simply out of
birthright or because they thought that protesting would entail them with
appeasement. Both were laughable, and at the end of the day anyone who didn’t
like being a guest of Star Force could leave their territory and take their
chances elsewhere.

Almost all of them
chose to stay, however, so their mindless protests had no real merit. Star
Force didn’t censor them, and there was almost constant news coverage of
discontent here and there in the non-Star Force races, but those people who had
earned their way didn’t care. The whiners would whine and the protesters would
protest. If they went beyond speaking their mind and into disrupting traffic or
vandalizing they were shut down instantly by security…with more complaints
about the militant attitude of Star Force.

Stupid people. The
reason why they were alive was because Star Force was militant. People used
that word as if it was a negative but here, in orbit of a lizard world that
they were in the slow process of retaking, ‘militant’ was a prerequisite.
Pacifists held no power, and anyone thinking to negotiate or appease their way
out of the lizard threat were fools. You either stood up to them and fought, or
you were run over and obliterated.

 
Unfortunately that attitude wasn’t only
present in the lizards, and had Star Force not been so dominant some of the
races under their protection might have been doing similar things to others.
Some people wanted their way no matter what, whether it was logical, reasonable,
or true. They would fight, cheat, con, and kill their way into dominance…then
when they lost they cried foul and tried to demean the responsible ones who
stopped them.

Krimja was glad that
the Bsidd were a Star Force race, for he could see the vast difference between
what he grew up in and what else was out there…and he knew it was probably
worse outside of Star Force territory. That only went to prove that it wasn’t
your race that dictated your behavior and potential, it was mainly your
culture. Nobody chose when or where they were born, but those lucky enough to
be born into Star Force had a huge advantage over everyone else, for their
training programs were so advanced that Krimja couldn’t understand those that
had been born outside them. They were everything to him and the others, and as
a result the culture within the Star Force races was so much more unified than
the others.

And Krimja knew that
was because they had each been told the score and earned their way, like he had
all the way up to a position of Admiral. That journey of advancement through
merit, not appointment or promotion, gave him and the other Bsidd, as well as
the other Star Force races, a sense of
kindredship
above and beyond them being in the same empire.

It was a major advantage
that Star Force had, but the lizards likewise had their own unity…and since
theirs was accomplished through restrictive means it was far stronger. Not
better, but stronger and seemingly without deviation. The lizards fought as one
team, sacrificing themselves for their race’s goals no matter how small. They’d
die just so their civilization could test a theory, and that bond was not
something to underestimate. It was wrong, but it was impressive none the less.

As the bombardment
continued
Krimja’s
comm
officer
was periodically repeating an offer of surrender to the lizards every hour
during times like this and more often than that during heavier action. So far
in this assault they hadn’t received a reply back, and in all the other
campaigns he’d been a part of had been the same. Surrender wasn’t an option.
They would win or die, and they were all of the same mind.

Star Force had people
that didn’t agree, wanting to do things differently and often stupidly. Rather
than suppress them through various means of control they were left alone, with
those like Krimja having to earn their way into the ranks of those that held
the power and responsibility. In that way those within his fleet here were just
as united as the lizards, leaving the dissenters back in the civilian wings of
the empire.