Star Force: Origin Series Box Set (25-28)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  No anti-air batteries opened up on the missiles, for the battleship had none, but a few seconds prior to impact the Kvash capital ship opened up several ports beneath its shields, with gaps forming in the protective barrier as hundreds of thousands of tiny little, pebble-like ‘blips’ shot out and curved toward the missiles, homing in on their location and interposing themselves between the incoming weapons and the warship.

  The Nestafar missiles got swallowed up in the clouds spewing out, detonating prematurely and scattering the blips from the concussion…but the little white dots resisted the scattering, slowing to a stop then gradually returning to their swarm and filling in the gaps where the missiles had detonated. They lingered there shortly, then like a dinner call a signal was sent out and the little white dots retreated through newly opened the gaps in the shield and back into their storage compartments just beneath the surface, clearing the firing line for the ship’s main weapons…all of which were streamers.

  All of the corvettes that approached got tagged with an individual streamer, one of which was a heavy. It cut through the shields within 2 seconds, while the other smaller models took more time, but none of the Nestafar ships lasted long. The small amount of plasma orbs they threw at the Kvash battleship smashed against their crystalline shields as if hitting a solid wall of wrinkled glass, barely draining away their energy, which was quickly replaced by the hundreds of redundant shield emitters positioned around the surface of the irregularly shaped hull.

  The Nestafar knew immediately what had to happen. The Kvash operated with a rock mentality to warfare…meaning they planned all battle strategy around fixed strong points like chess pieces that they could then move around the map. They weren’t accustomed to losing ships, due to the size they produced them as well as their impressive shields, which were by far the strongest in the Alliance and heads above what the lizards brought to bear. The only way to counter such strong assets was to bring overwhelming force to bear on them, thus when the ship appeared on the Nestafar sensors nearly every capital ship within range diverted towards it and started throwing whatever firepower they had against its shields, even if that meant they’d be taken out within 30 seconds of arrival.

  They had to weaken and disrupt the shields by hitting it continuously, then pick off the emitters below when they could, otherwise the shields would reform again. That was a tactic best employed by their fighters…which were currently engaged with the Calavari lower in orbit.

  The Kvash battleship, nearly 10 kilometers wide and functioning as its own jumpship, didn’t retreat in the face of the wave of Nestafar capitol ships heading its way, numbering over 600…and that was just the ones in range. They had more than 2,000 in orbit around the planet and over 10,000 spread out across the system. If allowed to isolate the enemy down to a few dozen at a time the battleship could work its way through those 10,000 on its own, which was why the Nestafar knew they had to take it out as quickly as possible.

  The main Nestafar fleet group the Calavari fighters had flown up towards now splintered, with the jumpships and a few escorts holding position while the others moved off to confront the Kvash. One large ship also stayed behind, nearly half the size of a carrier jumpship, and armed to the teeth. Its weaponry was the most powerful the Nestafar had in the system but it was electing not to confront the Kvash, rather staying behind and repositioning in between the enemy and the jumpships just in case the Alliance somehow broke through the overwhelming numbers they were throwing at them.

  Ironically, it was also the only Nestafar warship that didn’t have wings. It was pointed like an arrow and had three talons sprouting out of the hull and curving over, each of which held a super weapon, which in this case was an enormous plasma orb generator. The command ship looked like a long, gnarly stick with three thorns sticking out, save for the center, which was pushed out to form a ring with the center open and housing a small shipyard/repair center for their smaller warships. It was protected by a secondary bubble shield underneath the primary, with one of the thorns sticking up over it from the prow, literally daring anyone to approach from the topside.

  A large gap formed in between the command ship and the rest of the fleet as it coalesced around the Kvash with more ships coming into firing range faster than they were being destroyed, though the rocky aliens were racking up an impressive kill count in the process and their shields had yet to go down even briefly. The command ship organized and recalled more and more ships from planetary orbit and diverted them to the battlefield, knowing it would take them minutes, if not hours to get there, but if not dispatched now the delay would be even longer.

  All across the planetary orbit Nestafar ships moved, some taking advantage of the planetary alignment and getting microjumps in off the star or nearby planets, others using the three moons to propel them inward where they then easily braked against Sri’ka to drop them in nearby the Kvash, where they then had to approach at a much slower pace else risking running into one of their own vessels and annihilating both ships due to a navigational accident.

  Back out in high orbit where the Nestafar couldn’t detect them Morgan waited patiently, not knowing about the battle going on in low orbit for lack of sensor data. The four Warship-class jumpships had their active sensors turned off so as not to betray their position, not that they would have given them much information other than approximate locations if they knew where to place a direct sensor scan. A typical spherical scan would have been too weak to reflect back anything of worth other than maybe one of their jumpships, which was why they’d had to position themselves so far out into high orbit to keep themselves off the enemy’s sensors.

  So all Morgan had to work with was the countdown clock and trust the Calavari and Kvash were holding up their part of the plan…otherwise her ships would be microjumping into a world of hurt.

  “Go,” she said simply when the mark came well over half an hour into the battle.

  The four warships, lined up laterally with several kilometers in between one another, shot off towards the planet one by one, accelerating rapidly but not so fast that they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. They were pushing off a combination of the system’s central star and one of the moons around Sri’ka, using a precisely balanced combination to head them directly towards the planet with an ETA just over 6 minutes.

  Once they were up to speed, which occurred within 30 seconds, each jumpship began detaching the warships they were carrying with the outermost two pushing theirs wide while the central 2 sent theirs above/below the plane that contained all four massive carriers heading in towards the planet. They detached as fast as possible, then aligned into deceleration lanes so that no one ship would be eclipsing another in case something went wrong with an engine or if a decel sequence was a microsecond delayed.

  Almost as soon as the first jumpship had all its remote-controlled drone warships released and aligned it hit the brakes and disappeared off the back, then a few seconds later all the small warships did the same, blinking out of formation within three seconds and using their own gravity drives to brake hard against Sri’ka’s gravity well.

  In what appeared to be a shotgun of approach signatures, more than 60 ships appeared on the Nestafar’s sensors along with a jumpship further back…then a few seconds later another group appeared, followed by a third and then a fourth as Morgan brought her battlegroup in a few hundred kilometers away from the Nestafar jumpships while the rest of the enemy fleet was occupied with the Kvash.

  From the Red Ranger’s bridge Morgan watched the sensor data update, with a big smile crossing her face when she saw their command ship exposed. “Well hello there.”

  2

  Dozens of cleansing beams shot out from the Star Force ships, punching straight through the Nestafar command ship’s physical shields almost as if they weren’t there, making surgical cuts on the hull that increased in accuracy as the ranges closed. The white beams slashed across the thorn-like pylons protruding off the massive ship first, taking out
the command ship’s most powerful weapons while leaving the jumpships completely alone, save for a few smaller warships flying out to physically corral them in, forcing them to either stay in place or ram through them in order to make a microjump out of planetary orbit.

  Like a pack of patient wolves, Morgan’s fleet crept up on the command ship as the heavy cruisers picked apart its defenses from range and the rest of the Nestafar fleet, which was still approaching the Kvash battleship in pieces from around planetary orbit, suddenly had a moment of indecision. The ships assaulting the battleship were finally starting to poke through its shields, but they were far from killing it, meaning they either had to remain where they were and let their command ship and jumpships die…or pull back, letting the Kvash recharge their shields, at which point they’d be able to resume the attack with a lot less Nestafar ships in play, having been previously destroyed in what would have been a futile defensive effort.

  They chose neither option, which surprised Morgan as she saw their jumpships and command ship began to slowly maneuver away, some of which were actually headed for the corvettes and frigates blocking their paths.

  “Damn it,” she all but yelled on the bridge. They were going to make sure they killed the Kvash battleship while diverting their incoming reinforcements towards her fleet in twos and threes as the larger ships spread out, meaning her ships would have to do likewise, diminishing her available firepower or else some of them would get away. “Focus on the command ship. Let’s see how bad they really want the Kvash.”

  “Archon, we have incoming,” the Red Ranger’s Captain Wilkinson said.

  Morgan turned her attention to the holographic map the man was adjusting and half a dozen Nestafar ships not yet engaged in the battle were highlighted. Their previous tracks to the Kvash were being diverted and heading towards the four Star Force warships sitting back and out of the way of the fighting.

  “Continue the attack,” Morgan ordered. “We’ll deal with them here. Keep the pressure on the command ship,” she said, jogging off the main section of the huge bridge and into an adjunct. There she passed through an open doorway into a short tunnel, then through another open doorway and walked into the ship’s command nexus and powered it up with the touch of a button.

  The four warships appeared around her in holo, spaced well apart from one another with her point of view centered on the Red Ranger. Tiny icons on the ship’s hull began powering up as the Captain readied the warship’s weapons. Morgan sent out a similar order to the other three via the control podium in front of her and soon their little icons started popping up as well.

  With the flick of a switch the hologram shrunk until her drone ships and the enemy jumpships came into view. The Archon zoomed in on the command ship, seeing its damage statistics popping up as holographic tags noting the systems that had gone offline with various glowing colors. A plethora of red splotches covered the near side of the giant ship, but the reverse side was mostly intact, including one of the primary weapons that was partially shielded from the incoming cleansing beams.

  Morgan tagged it with vector approaches, then sent a signal out to her pilots onboard all 4 warships to begin moving the smaller drone ships in, meaning cruisers on down, into plasma range and hitting the intact claw along with a host of other targets that she was tagging with rapid fire keystrokes. A brief interruption in the cascade brought up a secondary hologram on her right that showed the ongoing battle with the Kvash battleship, which was now smoking in several locations, but most of the ship was still showing its impressive shields holding, meaning the enemy only had a few vulnerable spots to probe.

  They were doing just that, however, and she honestly didn’t know who was going to come out on tops there, but her fleet had an objective that the Kvash were bleeding for, not to mention the Calavari down near the atmosphere that were still engaging the Nestafar fighters and keeping them away from the other two engagement zones.

  And Morgan was going to make damn sure that Star Force came through on their part. The command ship was already retreating back down towards the planet…the only direction available given the bowl-like formation of her ships around both it and the jumpships. In order to keep it from getting away she needed to extend that bowl into a sphere and completely surround it, though the outbound vectors were the most dangerous, given that it had the planet to push off from with its gravity drives.

  Heading towards it was requiring partial pushes against other gravity wells in the system, which took a lot of fuel given the little traction it had, but the ship couldn’t attain any significant speed anyway without hitting the planet…but it could get low enough to flank the assaulting ships and open up a jumpline, which Morgan knew was their plan.

  Her ships were far faster, but there was that nasty primary weapon still in play and if they got out in front of that they’d be smoked with little effort, so she needed her ships to engage the Nestafar at close range and pick off that weapon before they could run out in front and block their escape route.

  On the holographic map she saw one of the jumpships wink out as it found a hole in their lines and escaped, but the others still appeared to have herders with them. Those were being repositioned constantly as the jumpships moved trying to flank their limited pursuit using partial pushes from the moons to get them moving laterally.

  Morgan knew she didn’t have enough ships to hold them, but then again she hadn’t expected them to run either. Both her and the Kvash had expected them to pull back their fleet and fight it out around the command ship, using its heavy weapons to tackle the Kvash battleship. The tactics they were employing now didn’t make any sense…but this war, and Morgan didn’t have to only make plans for what made sense but for what the enemy could do, and her fleet wasn’t well set up for this. She’d made the surprise attack play rather than going for containment.

  The command ship was going to die though, that much she was sure, and it was a far more valuable target than a jumpship. Those they could hunt down later, or at least scare off if they wanted to play cat and mouse around the system. The Nestafar military leaders for the Brokal invasion were reported to have still been aboard the command ship, and taking both them and the weaponry onboard the behemoth out of the equation would be a major victory for the Alliance.

  Morgan wanted more, however, and dispatched a handful of destroyers off from the main group with orders to pin down a single jumpship. The others might eventually get away, but she was going to snag at least one if possible.

  All around the hologram of the command ship the smaller Star Force blocks began clustering, first on the rear side where most of the ship’s weaponry was tagged in red, with the remaining intact batteries soon blinking out as the ships picked them off the exposed hull. From there they moved up the length of the ship, bypassing the still shielded shipyard bubble at the center of the warship and moved up and under the bow where the intact ‘thorn’ lay.

  The first few came in so low they almost scraped the hull, making sure they stayed below the firing range which, oddly, was limited to mostly the forward arc. A scattering of other defensive weapons targeted them, which the more distant heavy cruisers targeted with their cleansing beams, making it look like the destroyers were backlit by a lightning storm.

  The destroyers began firing on the backside of the ‘thorn,’ chewing into the thick armor and structure covering it, intent on taking it out without entering its firing range. That was going to take time, however, for it was well embedded within the pylon.

  A fireworks show ensued behind them as the rest of the Star Force ships caught up and began picking off the command ship’s weaponry with a hail of blue plasma orbs countered by a lesser amount of red coming back up at them. Morgan saw several of her ships suffer significant damage but the overall trend was positive…and more importantly they were making good time, for so long as the command ship was mobile there was a chance it could still escape.

  The pylon was slowing, however, and she was tempted to order
some of the ships around into its firing arc so they could get some clean shots at it, but long term that wasn’t a good idea, knowing that she was going to need as many warships as possible for future campaigns.

  Morgan forced herself to be patient, keeping her warships in the less dangerous areas around the command ship, adding more and more to whittle away on the backside of the thorn as the command ship began to move more laterally, with two of her cruisers actually kissing the hull on the port side when they failed to reposition fast enough. That told Morgan that the command ship was desperate, as it should be, and she wasn’t going to assume they wouldn’t run over one of her ships and accept the damage that would ensue if escape were possible.

  To that end she repositioned several more ships over to the port side, intent on seriously damaging the command ship if it decided to go bulldozer.

  The cleansing beams kept coming down on the back side of the command ship, carefully targeting around the other Star Force ships as they bathed the hull in plasma, nicking away at the giant but unable to get at its gravity drives that were located well inside the hull. According to intelligence from the Alliance the Star Force remote pilots knew the approximate location of the drives and the cleansing beams were now probing those areas, hoping to burn deep enough to prick one of them into malfunction. The command ship had 6 set along the length of the hull even though one was enough to move the ship about within the system, but all six were necessary to achieve maximum jump speed for interstellar travel.