Star Force: Divide (SF76) (Star Force Origin Series)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  So long as they didn’t do that and this assault continued Star Force would defaultly own the planet, but they couldn’t keep it. They didn’t have nearly enough ships and Sentinels to blockade the entire surface, so most of Nephasil would be perpetually up for grabs and she had no doubt the lizards would keep running ships and troops down to ground. The thing was, now they couldn’t congregate in the open and pour in reinforcements. It would have to be a piecemeal insertion, making the lizard occupation more of a resistance than an army. They’d try to build colonies underground and regrow their infrastructure in hidden places, but Star Force knew how to deal with that and to not let them get a head start, so odds were this wouldn’t be their last aerial assault on the planet, but it would be the last big one.

  The skeet squadrons continued to drift their way towards the city as the bombardment continued, then they accelerated heavily into single squadron formations when they got the all clear. Sharon’s squadron was second in line, but when they got near the city edge they all spread out laterally heading to different locations and watching for turrets that the orbital bombardment had missed. Most of the big buildings showed damage, but they weren’t wrecked. Rather than flatten the entire thing and give the lizards more places to hide, the bombardment had been selective.

  Now was the second phase of the attack, with the skeets flying in low and diving between the buildings where they released their payloads on different streets, dropping thousands of ping pong-sized balls out of the canisters they detached from the temporary racks underneath. The sheathing disintegrated after a few seconds of falling, allowing the tiny probe droids to scatter and bounce off the ground, walls, and bits of rubble. Once their speeds slowed the tiny anti-grav units in them took over and they began floating around the city searching for lizards on their own or following remote signals from the fleet above as they mapped out and cataloged every street, hallway, and room they came across.

  The skeets weren’t going to wait for targets though, with them darting off through the city and shooting whatever became visible. The worthless surrender offer had been given prior to the bombardment and the lizards, as always, hadn’t replied back, so the pilots were here to soften up whatever troops were on the ground before the mech and infantry columns arrived to clean out the city properly.

  Sharon took another glance at the orbital battle, seeing it not having abated yet. The fleet was in the thick of it providing them cover, else a swarm of cruisers could be descending to give the ground troops a mess of trouble. The skeets could always run away, but the others couldn’t and they were currently about 20 minutes out and approaching from the east. Once they secured a portion of the city dropships would bring in more reinforcements, which meant naval had to hold this orbital position until they were finished…and that was going to take days, if not weeks.

  Maybe the lizards knew that and wanted this fight. Maybe they were just shooting at anything within sight, but she knew they had a much larger fleet guarding the star and ensuring that their convoys could still pass through the system at will. That seemed to be their primary objective, with maintaining possession of the planet a secondary concern, though one they had fought tooth and nail to achieve. This was by far the hardest won world Star Force had ever taken…assuming they finished here…and she didn’t expect the other inhabited world in this system, Thannep, to be much different. It was less populated, but she doubted the lizards would let it go any easier than this one.

  As if on cue, a group of wisps were highlighted with a warning beacon approaching from the north and the remains of what had been their LZ. The orbital bombardment wasn’t going to be a threat to the tiny aerial craft, and though they weren’t in the insane numbers that had been seen on this planet previously, they were going to be tough to take down given the 90 skeets that were on station only had a couple of nearby squadrons pacing the ground troops to call in for help.

  “Guys, looks like we’ve got some business to take care of first,” she said to the rest of the Regulars in her squadron as she sent a request ping to the Calavari Valeries. In fact all of the skeets were piloted by Regulars save for two, with Archons being scarce nowadays given how many army units there were to spread them out between. “Let’s meet them over open ground so we don’t get blindsided by a missed turret.”

  The ten skeets pulled up from the city streets and accelerated to the north with the other squadrons doing likewise in the face of the approaching cloud of wisps. Rough estimates tagged them at about 8,000 and that was manageable if they could split them up and whittle them down over time. The lizard craft were lightly shielded now, but against Star Force weapons it made little difference. What it did change was their top speed, for the shield geometries allowed them to smooth out their air resistance. The skeets were still faster, and the Valeries more so, but the speed gap between them and the lizards was not as great as it had once been.

  That said, they were still able to meet the wisps far outside the city perimeter and give the approaching ground troops time enough to get into the city, for the wisps weren’t bypassing the fighters and heading for them…rather they seemed only to be interested in killing the skeets.

  Sharon kicked the top of her cockpit, barely moving it a quarter of an inch but that didn’t deter her. She kicked it again and again, more out of frustration than in an effort to dislodge the pinned canopy. Her instrumentation was out, including the powered release function, but she was pretty sure that she was upside down on the ground in what was left of her ruined skeet. The IDF and artificial gravity within the cockpit was still working so she couldn’t feel her orientation, but when she’d hit the release the opaque armored barrier hadn’t budged.

  “Fuck this,” she said, kicking it again and getting the same result. Sharon hadn’t gotten sloppy up there, but the wisps had shot her down just the same…and all because of a lucky collision that tore through what was left of her shields while she was flying an evasive turn after killing two wisps. She’d known better than to go for the third, with others falling in on her tail, and had done the right thing in breaking off and taking her time with her shields already diminishing from multiple phaser hits.

  Then a stupid wisp diving away from another skeet had turned right into her turn and they clipped each other. For the wisp it was a fatal hit as it crunched in the entire right side, but for Sharon it had merely wounded her skeet…while in the middle of the furball. She’d tried to make it to the edge and fly off to let her shields recharge but hadn’t made it. The phaser fire added up and the last thing she knew her tail disconnected just aft of her armored cocoon. Power to her forward engines went out and she’d fallen like a rock, with the impact knocking out the rest of her systems.

  Inside everything had gone black, for she didn’t feel the impact, but now she was pinned with no way of knowing what was going on outside, for her comm system was also dead. There were supposed to be backup generators in the nose to prevent a total collapse if the main power cell was hit, but maybe those had gone out first, for her skeet had been chewed up thoroughly even before the tail came off. Star Force had built then to take a lot of punishment but there were still limits, and the lizards had pushed her craft past them.

  Sharon slid off her back and sat down on the pommel, wanting to punch something else but nothing useful was available. There were still a lot of wisps up there and at least one less skeet to knock them down with, and she hated being on the sidelines watching a fight…even if she couldn’t even watch it right now.

  “Things could be worse,” she reminded herself. The lizards didn’t own this planet anymore, nor did they have ground troops anywhere near her position. The wisps were too busy to shoot her downed skeet, though if she had gotten outside they might have made an exception. No, she just needed to sit tight and wait. Help would come or she’d be able to find a way to wiggle out of this predicament eventually.

  With a battle going on over her head, playing dead was probably a good idea right now.

&n
bsp; Sharon blew out a slow breath, sucked in another and repeated. Calming her battle frenzy nerves and anger, she took the ample free time and tried to meditate to clear her mind. The cockpit was silent and still, but she was not internally. She focused on that to waste time, embracing it as a small challenge rather than just sitting here and going stir crazy. It took a few minutes to hack down her combat state, but eventually she entered the calm, motionless trance that she’d practiced many times before. Clamping down on her thoughts to silence them, then releasing the pressure and allowing the stillness in her mind to exist without force, she became as still as her worthless wreck of a skeet and waited, breathing slow, steady, shallow breaths.

  She lost track of the time and embraced the disconnection. Her squadron could take care of itself, and even if some of them got shot down there was nothing she could do about it so she put it out of mind and got a bit of rest, blinking her eyes open for no apparent reason some time later and looking around, finding her anger gone but her resolve burning bright as ever.

  Moving around in the cramped cockpit she slid off the pommel then opened up it, finding a stash of emergency supplies underneath the seat. She dug around until she found the emergency comm unit, flicking it on with a small holographic display showing channel options. Sharon hit the ‘retrieve’ icon and let it begin automatically transmitting with an added ‘safe’ addendum. There wasn’t anything else to say so she didn’t try to find someone to talk to, knowing that if her squadron was still fighting then talking to her would be a distraction and she didn’t want that.

  Someone would come for her eventually, and if they didn’t she try her luck again with the canopy.

  She didn’t have to wait long, for only minutes later her canopy cracked open and daylight shown in. Sharon looked up and saw the ground above her. She climbed ‘up’ with her hands pulling her out of the canopy and her head dipping to the left as gravity pulled on it. Suddenly her entire body betrayed her and she lost all grip points, floating out of the IDF field and having her mind reorient itself to the planet’s center as she was telekinetically spun around and set down a few meters away next to a golden-armored Archon.

  “You alright?”

  “Uninjured,” she said, looking up and seeing wisps, Valeries, and skeets still battling overhead to the west.

  “Good. Let’s get out of here before they decide to take a few more shots at us.”

  “More?” she asked as the Archon turned and began to run away. She followed after him, running hard to stay close by and feeling her legs a bit wobbly after so much time spent in that cockpit.

  An armored finger pointed to the right and Sharon saw the wreckage of a wisp that had apparently taken a nosedive into the ground.

  “I’ll cover you, but we have to move.”

  “Where to?”

  “A bit further away from here.”

  “How many others are down?”

  “Six. We haven’t gotten to them yet, but I was close by so I thought you’d appreciate a lift.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Keep running that direction,” the Archon said, pointing ahead before he veered off and turned around. “Your ride is coming.”

  Sharon didn’t argue, but didn’t fully understand. A few minutes later a speeder came across ground from the south and stopped beside her just long enough for her to get on, then it turned and raced away before the remaining wisps could take notice.

  “You alright?” the Commando asked as she held on behind him.

  “Yes. Who was that?”

  “The Archon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Kiran.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. When we pulled out his team he insisted on going after you. Probably going to play with the fighters now.”

  “He’s that powerful?”

  “He’s a trailblazer,” the Commando said rhetorically.

  “That he is,” she agreed, realizing he must have rolled her dead skeet over by himself.

  8

  December 19, 2963

  Gvaris System (contested territory)

  Nephasil

  Paul returned to his quarters after a short run in the sanctum, showered quickly then sat down at his computer terminal to pull up recent news and events to look through before bed. Without a grid relay in this system there was no news with the outside world besides that brought by courier, but there were still local updates that didn’t always warrant an immediate notification to him when he was in the nexus…which was where he had been spending far too many hours over the recent years.

  He was still training but his progression had slowed considerably, as had the other trailblazers here. Paul imagined the same was true of the rest of the troops and had instituted a cycling program amongst them a while back. This invasion had begun three decades ago, and while a lot of people had spent most of that time here they’d always had rotations back to the ADZ, save for the trailblazers. Once they arrived here they did not leave until the job was done, and Paul was seeing the payment for that in his training scores.

  But he didn’t have a choice. If he and the others weren’t here leading this invasion, especially Liam, then the lizards would have won by now. The trailblazers had Star Force hanging on by a thread most of the time and were actually eeking out a win over the long haul…but they couldn’t have a single lapse else it’d all vanish. That meant Paul needed to be in the nexus or near to it at all times, with him taking less sleep than normal. Inas had already reduced that amount, so with the restricted workouts that amounted to little breaks from seat time in the nexus his sleep cycle of 4 hours was occurring every 36 hours.

  He needed to hurry now, but he couldn’t let himself get so stuck in a routine that he lost track of current events. And while he could, and often did access whatever information he had while in the nexus during slow times, checking in before bed was more of a reminder to focus on the big picture rather than the realtime feeds that he sucked off constantly while mentally connected to the system.

  Being disconnected for a few hours of workouts, he found a few updates from the outer colonies that were of interest, along with reports from Nephasil’s surface detailing hunting raids for lizard upstart colonies that they were constantly trying to plant. Orbital insertions could be tracked, but with so many subsurface tunnels still existing on the planet the scaly bastards had a habit of disappearing soon after landing. They couldn’t take much in the way of technology with them but it was clear that they hadn’t given up on the planet yet, even as their other foothold in the system was under assault.

  Star Force was slowly eating away at Thannep much as they had here and fighting against a never ending flow of reinforcements coming down from orbit. A few Sentinels held position above the planet, but blocking all orbital movement was impossible. The lizards could get down to the surface if they wanted to, and they were flooding more ground troops into the system at alarming numbers. Though Star Force was winning this long battle for the system, it wasn’t over. Not even close, and a misstep could see it all come undone very, very fast.

  The lizards were making them earn this the hard way, or perhaps they were convinced that they’d eventually succeed. The number of ships in the system was the true problem, and even after all these years Paul still hadn’t been able to secure stellar orbit. The fleet there never fully left to engage either planet, though if it had Star Force would have been forced to evacuate. Trick of it was, they would have killed enough lizard ships in the process to leave stellar orbit vulnerable. The lizards didn’t know how many reinforcements Star Force had coming any more than Paul knew what they had in transit, so they’d played it safe and held onto what he figured was their primary prize, that being a secure route between the two now stretched hemispheres of their empire.

  Cal-com had been widening the divide between the two while this battle dragged on, taking out weaker systems by the dozens all around them and constricting the lizard
s down to this one bottleneck…meaning that if they could cut it then the lizards would have to try and establish a new one far from here rather than just going next door, but for the moment the link was intact so long as those millions of cruisers held stellar orbit.

  Star Force had its Sentinels insystem as a strongpoint and the lizards had their stellar fleet as a counterpart, with the planets being lesser prizes that the majority of the fighting was playing out on. As far as naval battles went, both sides were limited. Paul couldn’t assault the roaming fleets much other than to cover the ground campaign, and whenever he got another sizeable shipment of drones in they didn’t last long. He needed to fight offensively to whittle down the lizards but was being forced to cover targets and conserve his ships, allowing the enemy to determine engagements.

  Every convoy that came in was challenged and he lost drones covering them, leaving him in a perpetual shortage of warships to make use of, otherwise he would have conquered this system long ago. More often than not he was having to come up with victories with far too few ships, as was Liam, and there was only so many times they could strategically pull that kind of magic before the lizards adapted to their tactics. Paul had to keep adapting as well and stalling while the ground troops slowly made progress, with him constantly cursing the lizards’ industrial might, for they were continually amping up their imports of cruisers to the point where if he didn’t make some assaults they’d pool to too large of numbers and the end would come quite quickly for his defense fleets, Sentinels or not.

  But more Sentinels were coming in as well, which was helping to offset the numbers game. The cruisers that Nephasil had been actively producing were gone now, and he was glad of that, but the imports had more than made up for them. Both sides were escalating this battle in order to win, making it almost a microwar of its own with the end still in doubt.

  Right now the Excalibur was sinking into the upper atmosphere of Nephasil to bombard a few surface locations where lizards were suspected, but that was something the Admiral he’d left in command could handle. Right now he needed sleep, then he could begin the next cycle of this never ending battle and find a way to scrimp up another bit of progress before the entire lizard fleet decided to show up on their doorstep and end this by choking them to death with cruiser spam.