Star Force: Revulsion (SF70)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  When they exploded they didn’t damage the lizard ships, rather mushrooming out in gigantic energy fields that interacted with the lizard shields and drained them, some to the point of breaching the matrixes for those closest to the detonation points, in preparation for the incoming drones that entered Keema range within the next handful of seconds.

  With the battlecruisers already firing their heavy, long range versions the medium Keema batteries opened up across the fleet as they coasted to a stop, intent on just poaching the lizard ships while staying outside their phaser range. That didn’t stop the lizards from returning fire, but when their phaser beams reached the drones they were diffuse and disintegrating, for like the Keema they were unstable upon release and didn’t continue indefinitely like a laser.

  Though like a laser they did fan out, spreading their damage over a wider area rather than a pinpoint strike that would have the best chance of momentarily breaching a shield. As the lizard ships surged ahead to cut the distance the beams from both sides got stronger, though the Star Force Keema quickly peeked out and had them tagging the enemy hulls with shots powerful enough to breach through their yellow/tan armor plating with a single hit.

  Once the lizards got within their prime phaser range the Star Force drones accelerated again, jumping across the gap to bring their short range weapons into play. Those were comprised of a few maulers and sammies but most were now Ta’lin’yi, with years of technical advancements making those weapons smaller and more potent, enough that most drones carried at least two. Those drones targeted the shieldless lizard cruisers, with their shield columns touching hull and blasting it away with fireworks-like results when the white/gold sparkling energy surge hit. All it took were a handful of Ta’lin’yi hits to take down a cruiser, allowing even a single drone to chew through one in under 12 seconds if the shields were already down.

  But there were a lot of targets to choose from, for there were thousands upon thousands of lizard ships just in this one tendril that they were sending against the leftmost prong. That was typical and nothing the remote pilots hadn’t seen before so they didn’t panic, knowing what they needed to do and listening to the prompts their controllers were giving them, whether they were a crewer on the bridge, a ship’s Captain, or even the Admiral or an Archon. When they told them to do something they did it immediately, then filled in the blanks themselves when left alone amongst the fray.

  That included everything from deciding which target to fire at to maneuvering the ship around the enemy vessels to get better firing lines, for the ships didn’t just sit still and shoot at each other. That would have been a death sentence for the lizard cruisers who didn’t have the armor, shields, or firepower for that kind of a slugging match, so they acted more like a slow flock of birds swirling about to deliver a few good salvos before running off to live to recharge their own shields.

  Trouble was starships weren’t all that fast and the Star Force drones were faster, so it wasn’t uncommon to see the drones breaking formation to briefly chase down a ship and make a kill then circle back around to the group they were in. If you could stay with the flow you’d dominate, but let the lizards create a current of ships passing by you and they’d pummel you with weaponsfire you could not stop, for even if you destroyed a ship its debris would fly on by and there would be intact cruisers coming at you the next second, every second, as the mass of lizard ships acted in unison to try and take down individual drones.

  The naval power scale had tipped so much in the past few centuries that the lizards were considerably outclassed at this point and even a cutter could take on two lizard cruisers and reliably win. That kind of dominance was countered with massive numbers, but the Bsidd fleet wasn’t going to let them use that advantage to its fullest. One reason for the three pronged attack was to spread their fleet out, but when the left prong engaged it fanned out even more taking small clusters of drones out at different angles and trying to get to the edge of the lizard formation. If they could do that then they’d essentially have their rear angles clear of enemies and be able to shift shields towards the incoming firepower and make themselves that much harder to kill.

  The lizards knew this and always tried to keep ships surrounding the drones…but that also drew them further and further apart. It was a numbers game and if Star Force could spread them out enough they’d win handily. If the lizards were able to stay clumped up enough and still surround the drones then they’d have the advantage of attrition with the Star Force ships having to retreat and recharge or stay and risk destruction in order to rack up a kill count.

  As it was they didn’t always have that choice. The remote pilots were good at anticipating when to pull back, and their controllers would ping them if they thought they’d overstayed, but there were never any guarantees and the flow of battle could change instantly. That was another tactic the lizards used, with multiple ships attacking different targets in a seemingly predictable way then all changing to a single target in the hopes of getting through its shields before it had a chance to pull back and retreat.

  So not only did the remote pilots have to worry about who to shoot and when, they also had to look at positioning and try to avoid giving the enemy too many proximity possibilities to counter them with. That responsibility lay with the pilot of each craft and the controllers orchestrating the overall battle, and the ones the Bsidd had sent with this invasion fleet were all experienced in lizard combat so most of the predictable tricks didn’t work on them.

  But they were always trying new ones, and it was Mike’s job to smoke those out and see ahead to any possible traps or opportunities from his position in the command nexus. He knew his troops would take care of the minutia of battle, as well as being consumed by it and unable to notice what was happening elsewhere. As the Admiral handled a lot of the duties coordinating the central prong of their attack that was heading directly for the larger lizard capital ships, Mike kept making alterations here and there but wanted to keep a clear head for the overall battle. Dive in too deep to micromanaging one piece of it and he’d lose perspective…which was the primary task he had and that others were counting on him for.

  It was that big picture approach that allowed him to see the multiple jump signatures of ships entering planetary orbit as soon as they manifested themselves into strings of lizard reinforcements coming in from other fleets. They couldn’t jump en mass, fortunately, and these were not coming by jumpship either so they had some time, but on the larger battlemap there were strings of the ships arriving and maneuvering around planetary orbit while the main battle was underway. The lizards knew they had to keep their numbers up or they might as well retreat and it looked like they planned to do just that rather than concede Star Force this planet’s orbital swath that they’d taken from the natives.

  Mike also noticed deployments from the native fleets, not heading for the huge battle that he was currently sitting in the middle of but the wide V-shaped ships were making slow course corrections from their current positions and heading towards the jumppoints the lizards were using, ostensibly to attack those reinforcements. The natives were still a wildcard in this, but he was glad that they noticed the opportunity for what it was and were throwing in at exactly the points needed while keeping their ships away from his own given their lack of knowledge of each other.

  Mike had a limited knowledge of their capability, based off the scouting reports and snippets of battle that he’d observed, but he had no way of knowing how many lizard ships were incoming and how the natives would fare against them. He thought they could handle a good number of them but hoped they weren’t desperate enough to engage in reckless engagements. Mike’s Bsidd fleet could kill all the lizards in the system given enough time, they just had to be smart and cagey about it and not rush in head on to their numbers, splitting them up and whittling them down by using Star Force’s strengths against them and denying them the swarm tactics that the lizards relied upon.

  But there was no way for him
to communicate that to the natives, so all he could do was hope they knew what they were doing and didn’t let their desperation to aid in this seemingly victorious unknown raid cause them to lose a chunk of their fleet that they’d kept intact this long. He wasn’t sure how it looked on the outside, maybe the natives thought his ships were losing, for after all these centuries of fighting the lizards Mike could look at an engagement and size up the tactics of it instantly, both because he was familiar with his own fleet and had so much combat experience against the lizards.

  Regardless, the natives were coming to the aid of Star Force and going to try and ambush the reinforcement fleet as they came into planetary orbit piecemeal. It was definitely an opportunity to exploit, but it was going to take some time for them to get there and they weren’t moving as fast as Star Force’s ships were capable of. That said, this battle wasn’t going to be over anytime soon given how much tonnage was in play and how long weaponsfire took to tear through hulls, armored or otherwise.

  But unlike in the movies, when a starship was destroyed it didn’t vanish in a cloud of vapor. Every molecule was still there, broken apart or maybe in altered forms, but the mass didn’t disappear. That meant that with every lizard ship killed there was junk now floating in the battlefield and the lizards weren’t retreating from that mess. Mike knew that was on purpose because they wanted the wreckage to offer them cover to pin down Star Force’s movement options more than to block incoming weaponsfire. They needed the drones to be in one spot in order to mass a swarm of ships against them, so the more pinned down Mike’s ships got the better it was for them.

  The mage sent a mental order to the Admiral and suddenly the Archer 7 accelerated up into the lead of the central prong, widening its forward shields and altering them into a physical plow while a secondary shield blocked the phaser beams that passed harmlessly through it. That umbrella caught and forced aside the growing debris, whether it be chunks of ship or pulverized hull plating that was now the consistency of sand floating ahead of them. Behind them the drones pulled in, traveling down the clear road as the jumpship began taking more and more hits from the surrounding cruisers.

  Those were added to by the larger capital ships that Mike was pulling the central prong towards. Against Star Force those ships were not very effective, for their increased weaponry and armor aside, they didn’t stand up well in a slugging match, ironically making the cruisers better suited for handling the drones. The larger ships weren’t produced in numbers to successfully swarm opponents, and their larger size only made them easier targets per equal amounts of mass than a fleet of cruisers.

  But they weren’t here to fight Star Force, they were here to conquer the natives who had a radically different fleet structure…which was why the lizards weren’t putting those warships into their front lines and trying to preserve them for cleanup if the cruisers were able to inflict enough damage.

  Mike wasn’t waiting though, so with the jumpship plowing the road of debris and a few cruisers that refused to budge out of the way, he brought the central prong directly to the larger lizard ships only to have them scatter and run…at which point Mike tagged drone clusters and had them race ahead, ignoring all the cruisers and putting damage into the larger capital ships.

  Meanwhile the cruiser swarm fell in on them, encircling the entire central prong and leaving the six jumpships in it surrounded enough that sensors couldn’t see much outside the cloud. If it hadn’t been for comm redundancy they would have been almost blind as to what was happening elsewhere in orbit, but Mike’s nexus links kept him in contact with all their ships and their non-clouded sensors, sharing data and keeping him in the know as he reformed the warships into a cluster of their own and created a pocket of ‘safe’ space between them where the damage drones were now rotating into since the edge of the enemy fleet was no longer accessible to retreat to.

  5

  Mike guided the battle in all three prongs from the nexus as well as watching the intervention of the natives on the reinforcement threads pouring more ships into the main battle. Until they got to those jumppoints the lizards had been gaining an advantage in that the cycling rate of the drones was getting higher and higher. When that happened there was a point of no return where ships would have to be brought to the front lines with full shields to replace those that were retreating, except that they hadn’t fully recharged themselves. At that point it was a grinding game with the drones’ extensive armor taking the hits, and it wouldn’t replace itself going forward like shield energy would.

  So far they’d only lost two drones, both cutters that had been ambushed in directed attacks without enough time to peel off. The lizard ships that had stuck around long enough to kill them were likewise taken out in an exchange of 40 or so for 2, but it was mostly a desperate attempt on their part to take out any of the Star Force drones. With them gone Mike had slightly less firepower to work with, but it wasn’t significant as the rotations continued and it being a shield war at the moment. The lizards would have to burn through a lot of ships to get the drones down into the kill zone, for Mike wasn’t going to let a few more get killed in order to set up takedowns on groups of others given the need for all his drones going forward throughout this mission.

  The lizard reinforcements had made things a bit iffy, but once that flow of ships was cut off Mike had fixed numbers to work with and saw that he had a narrow advantage. Keeping the ships moving and alive and only burning shield energy worked in sustaining them, then saw a reduced amount of incoming firepower as more lizard ships were killed continuously. He could have destroyed them quicker by just turning all the drones loose on offense, but he would have probably lost a few in the effort and damaged many others. The mage knew he had to be patient and the natives were giving him the time necessary to safely whittle down the lizards.

  Mike kept a keen lookout for more ambush moves, preempting some and reacting quickly to others by sending in relief ships to literally surround the targeted vessel with their hulls to soak up damage and escort it into a ‘safe’ zone. He was holding off on using his few support ships and just working through rotations in order to preserve his fleet’s longevity. With every minute that passed the numbers tipped Star Force’s way and eventually a critical point came when the battle was clearly not going the lizards way and it looked like they weren’t going to be able to kill another ship, for the jumpships were soaking up so much firepower in the battle that they were essentially giving the drones pseudo shields by keeping the enemy sights square on them as they actively hunted down cruiser packs and disrupted their movement patterns.

  Then the moment came when the lizard fleet altered its swarm disposition and sent out streams of ships away from the drones, running elsewhere in the system to regroup with other fleets rather than stay put and waste their remaining vessels only to burn away Star Force shield energy that would be fully replaced within half an hour.

  But Mike didn’t just let them run, instead sending out a flurry of orders and tagging enemy ships to pursue in the hopes of making a few more kills before they could get to a jumppoint. He also sent drones out to the ongoing confrontations between the natives and the ships they’d drew off at the reinforcement jumppoints, for they were still engaged in battles that were not entirely in their favor and there were still lizard ships coming in. Mike expected that to end as soon as the lizards’ comm delays caught up and they knew that the battle was lost, but until then they were still a threat.

  To their credit, all of the fleeing ships did not head towards those jumppoints. He expected that was because they wanted to kill some more native ships and didn’t want to draw Star Force’s fleet over to them before they could do that. Already Mike had seen some of the native ships get destroyed in the fighting and he wanted to minimize that as much as he could, especially since he’d been the one to start this fight and the natives were throwing in to help them out.

  It took him a few seconds to get all the ships in his fleet tasked even with the neura
l interface, then the clumps that were the three prongs began to splinter with small groups headed after the fleeing ships and chunks of the fleet centered around the jumpships moving out towards the ongoing orbital fights. If that wasn’t enough to tell the lizards that Star Force was claiming domain over this planet’s orbital tracks then the battle song that he had all the jumpships and drones in the fleet begin broadcasting over numerous frequencies, including those the lizards used so he knew they could hear it, made it clear that this fleet wasn’t sitting put and relishing the beatdown they’d just issued, but going on full offensive and hitting everything lizard around this planet that didn’t pull out and run immediately.

  The standard offers for surrender ended and the classic song ‘We will rock you’ replaced it playing on infinite repeat, with the Star Force fleet groups leaping across orbit pulling navigational feats that neither of the other two races could hope to accomplish and arriving on site within minutes rather than the 20+ it would have taken for the lizards to make the same trek.

  As the Archer 7 came out of its microjump Mike’s foot began tapping with the rhythm of the song as he assigned targeting priorities with a few quick thoughts and grabbed control of the jumpship’s own main Keema battery for himself, targeting a very tricky shot between two native ships to hit a lizard cruiser and cut a trench down half its length that gutted the ship and turned it into a mostly dead hulk that acted as a shield for the native ships in the short delay before a Star Force destroyer slid into that spot and extended its shields out in a disc to block weaponsfire hitting around it and sparing the native vessels that were already showing hull breaches while it also fired back and pounded the nearest lizard cruisers.