Star Force: Evasion (Wayward Trilogy Book 2)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Hard fought and paid for,” a Bsidd added. “You deserve better than this.”

  “We work the problems. We don’t choose them,” Rammak said stoically.

  “Agreed,” Bard said knowingly. “We’ve got a couple days, so let’s start organizing our supplies and squeezing every bit we can into whatever makeshift carriers we can come up with. After the techs finish here, they’re going to be cargo carriers too.”

  “We’ve still got the speeders don’t we?” a Critel asked.

  “Do we? Did those get brought onboard?”

  “Yes they did,” the Protovic said after a moment of telepathy.

  “Gooood,” Bard said slowly. “Very good. Now let’s get to tricking them out.”

  “On it,” a Bsidd said as they all broke up and left the cafeteria with Rammak signaling Esna to follow him to wherever they were going.

  26

  August 8, 4812

  Narven System (Devastation Zone)

  Stellar Orbit

  Esna and everyone else onboard ship was watching the battlemap as they came out of their jump. So far the Vik ship hadn’t caught up to them, meaning it wouldn’t be waiting when they arrived, but how far behind it was trailing them was still an unknown. When the Blockade Runner came out of its jump it didn’t fully stop, instead maintaining some speed towards the star while being askew of the proper jump point as its engines continued applying lateral motion and dragging them into a faster stellar orbit headed towards their next jumppoint.

  It had been explained to Esna that the Kaeper couldn’t see which way they were heading, so it would have to brake along a straight line, find the Blockade Runner on sensors, then chase after it. If they could get far enough around the star before it arrived then they wouldn’t be there to be seen, which was why the ship was dipping down very close to the star. Right now it was a huge wall of light on the hologram next to the ship’s position as the jumpline they had arrived on slowly rotated out of view.

  But then the Kaeper arrived a few minutes too soon. It was 1.7 hours behind them, meaning it was gaining ground as feared, though Esna saw the time to intercept estimates start to rise as their momentum got them further ahead, creeping up to 1.8 hours before they lost sight of the Kaeper around the curve of the star.

  “We’ll make it out of this system,” Tyrenk told them all after coming back from the bridge. “But the V’kit’no’sat have too much closing speed. They’re going to catch us after the next jump. Good news is we have more time to work. Unless we bump into help we’re going in atmosphere to fight them. Let’s just hope we can get to the planet before they catch up. We’ve gained a bit of a lead with the slingshot maneuver and should again in the next system, but I can’t promise we’ll even make it into the atmosphere. Do what you can to stack our odds now and we’ll see how this goes. Get to work.”

  And with that they broke up and Esna had nothing to do, so she and Rammak went to the track and got another workout in. Later they needed the Calavari muscle to help move some equipment, but there was nothing Esna could do but wait. Even Tyrenk was busy using his telekinesis to move objects along the hull outside the ship while he was still inside, so he wasn’t able to give her any more lessons.

  She hated being useless, but she liked the idea of that Vik ship getting to them before they got to the planet even less. The others had made it clear they had no chance in a space battle, and just waiting to die was…well, at least back on Tauntaun she had a tunnel to run through. Out here there was just…nothing.

  The next three days went slowly, but eventually they came to the end of the jump and decelerated against the star before the Kaeper caught up, but it wasn’t four minutes later that the ship came out of its own jump on a straight track, which put some more distance between them and the Viks as the Blockade Runner was already redirecting towards the planet.

  After that the chase was on, with everyone watching the battlemap as they were quickly discovered and the Kaeper turned to come after them with it gaining ground every minute that passed. Esna didn’t know if they’d make it or not, for her math skills weren’t that good, but the techs seemed to think that they weren’t and 19 minutes prior to getting to the planet the Archon ordered everyone into the reinforced survival cage near the back of the ship.

  Esna ran through the corridors with the rest of them as hatches were sealed and everyone piled into what had been a barracks. The bunks were now torn out with the padding having been added to the walls. Other than that it was just a large empty room that they all moved into save for one workstation where Tyrenk sat down and cradled a small orb in his bare hand.

  “Mental interface,” a Kiritas tech said when he noticed her watching. “He’s flying the ship with it.”

  Esna nodded, then watched the battlemap on her helmet’s HUD as the Kaeper kept getting closer and closer…then the first bit of weaponsfire hit the aft shields. Both ships exchanged shots as the Kaeper flew past them, slowing as it did but not enough to match speed. It overshot and flew out of weapons range until they got closer to the planet and its gravity gave the Vik more engine grip to work with, then it slid back into range as the Blockade Runner flipped over, showing the enemy their reinforced shields on the backside.

  Esna saw some 18% of their shield strength get chipped away in the minutes that followed with even less depletion on the Kaeper, then both ships had to hit the brakes hard to keep from slamming into the planet. The distance between the two wobbled as the Blockade Runner actually accelerated for a brief moment, shooting past the Vik momentarily and taking a few hits to the forward shields before slamming on the brakes.

  The maneuver wasn’t enough to put them ahead of the Kaeper, for it had slightly stronger engines and was able to hold with them all the way down to the edge of the atmosphere where the deceleration ended, but both ships left enough residual momentum that they dipped into the gasses only seconds later.

  Esna saw their ship hit hard and turn to the left but she didn’t feel anything. She’d been told that unless the IDF failed nothing would be felt in this room…and if it did fail she’d be dead so fast she wouldn’t feel it anyway, which was why there were no handholds or safety straps in here. She would have wondered about the padding on the walls if they weren’t in the middle of a firefight, but right now there was more important things to follow as the Archon had them moving so fast that they were literally a fireball cutting down into the thick atmosphere over the jungle-covered world.

  The Kaeper turned to follow, but it couldn’t catch them very fast. In fact not at all as the Blockade Runner began to creep further away. Not more than a couple kilometers but it was something as the chase around the planet’s curve continued all the while weaponsfire was shooting back and forth. The fireball they were trailing helped, Rammak said, but it wasn’t enough to stop the incoming fire completely and the hits on their shields were continuing to sap power…along with the massive drag of the atmosphere itself.

  That drag was also draining the Kaeper’s shields, with sensor estimates putting them down to 53% while the Blockade Runner was at 39%. Tyrenk kept the ship maneuvering side to side, up and down, anything to try and throw off the incoming shots but none of it worked. The Vik gunners were too good to miss something that large, so eventually they dove towards the surface only to pull back up again and skim the mountains, getting some of them in between the two ships and blocking the weaponsfire.

  That allowed the shields on both ships to start recharging slowly, but before the Viks could come up over the mountains the Archon had them flying low and fast through the valleys, not so much that they were setting fire to them, but they were causing a huge gust of air to hit and knock down trees in some places.

  It wasn’t 20 seconds before the Kaeper rose up high enough that it could see down between the mountains and spot the half mile long ship, then the energy blasts ripped up and down between the two as the Viks maneuvered to stay overtop of them and not let the mountains get in the way again. They were s
everal miles overhead and Tyrenk pulled the Blockade Runner up enough just to clear the mountains, then they rocketed off again laterally. The fireball returned and it was another chase that couldn’t quite shake the Viks.

  The Archon ducked them back down in between mountains for a brief respite, but the Kaeper rose back up to its preferred height and rained down more weaponsfire on them in an exchange the evacuation ship simply couldn’t match. Esna realized this is what the Viks must have known would happen the moment they spotted them. Their weapons, shields, and engines were simply too much of an advantage for the enemy, and even while the shields were dropping hard and fast they would still be up when the Blockade Runner’s went down, meaning the Viks might not even take a scratch on their ship before Esna’s was blown to bits.

  So long as the Viks didn’t do something stupid it was an automatic kill and that sickened Esna. They had no way to win this, no help to run to or call for. They were as good as dead, she could see that plainly, and when they finally abandoned ship the Viks would hunt them down on foot or just shoot them from the air if they even made it out. It was hopeless and they knew that, but they weren’t offering or even demanding a surrender. They were out for Star Force blood and it looked like they were going to get it no matter what Esna and the others did.

  Despite the fast and awesome starship she was in, they were totally helpless.

  But as the V’kit’no’sat had learned long ago, Archons had a tendency to find ways of hurting you when you thought you had them all but defeated.

  With the Blockade Runner down between mountains firing up at the Viks with her shields almost gone, he pointed the ship straight up but held position, throwing what little shield energy remained in the rear to the front and reinforcing that bow shield. That would give them a few more seconds of fight left, especially considering that the narrow profile offered less for the Viks to shoot at, but it was only a delaying measure. Once the shields were down completely the Kaeper would clip the weapons batteries at such close range and then the Star Force vessel wouldn’t be able to harm the Viks anymore.

  The Archon held them floating just over the jungle, aft gravity drives low and almost touching the treetops as the Blockade Runner faced the sky and continued to exchange fire, then a couple seconds before the shields failed completely…after draining as much power from the Kaeper’s shields as he could…the Archon pulsed the now partially recharged gravity drives and shot their ship straight up at a speed it couldn’t survive passing through the thick atmosphere at. The shields popped and the bow of the ship began to burn in the split second before it rammed the Kaeper.

  The Vik ship tried to turn away at the last moment, meaning either its pilots were good or they had an automated anti-collision program running, but with the atmosphere limiting their movements and the Archon being mind melded into the piloting controls, he was able to make a microadjustment that ensured the Blockade Runner hit the middle and thickest pylon on the enemy ship.

  The shields covering it crunched the front of the Blockade Runner where the techs had added additional armor they’d stripped off other areas of the hull as well as having added internal bracing to shore it up more, but it still pancaked a few meters in before the energy shield matrix collapsed and hull hit hull with the hammerhead bow punching into the Kat’vo vessel and tearing clear through to the other side, severing the central section as well as two of the outer pylons that got clipped.

  The Blockade Runner gained altitude quickly on the other side…or rather what was left of it. Fireballs flew everywhere above the Kaeper as parts of the evacuation ship shot out erratically as they vaporized into massive sized fireworks with the aft chunk of the ship now careening over towards the south as its momentum carried it onward, now less than half a ship and with that half horribly contorted.

  The Kaeper’s pieces were propelled upward from the collision, then fell back down into the mountains either due to lack of power or lack of input control, with the intact pieces hitting and rolling down the incline and tearing away long gouges of trees and rock until they settled at the bottom of the valleys, one of which hit a narrow lake and splashed almost all the water out of it, blanketing the hillside jungle in a tsunami that gradually worked its way back down to the bottom.

  Inside the safe room Esna didn’t feel a thing except a single vibration when one of the three doors suddenly dented inward with some exterior hit. Other than that she wouldn’t have known about the impact or the destruction, the latter of which she didn’t fully grasp as the battlemap winked out when the ship’s systems died.

  But not all of them, for the Archon was still using the few rear gravity drives that were intact to steer their descent into a giant smoking rainbow across multiple mountain ridges until they crash landed a fair distance away from the V’kit’no’sat ship. That impact Esna heard more than felt as the walls contorted with loud screeches and one of the doors popped off with a wave of fire coming inside that the Archon stopped with an upraised hand.

  “We’re down!” he yelled over the comm and externally. “Let’s go!”

  The next thing Esna knew the golden armor dove into the flames, pushing most of them with him, then Rammak grabbed her by the arm and pulled her alongside him as everyone followed the Archon out…

  To be concluded in

  Persistent Ravage (Wayward 3)