Star Force: Mak'to'ran (5)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Take us out of the system,” he ordered as he mentally connected to the ship’s systems and composed the message that would rally the might of his reforged V’kit’no’sat against this invasion. “Maximum speed. The Hadarak are upon us and we must respond with without delay. They are testing our weakness, and if we cannot sufficiently match them the empire will fall and the galaxy with it. Inform the Brat’mar, and tell them I expect every loyal V’kit’no’sat world to send ships to assist us. If we fail, I do not expect to live long enough to punish them for their disloyalty. The Hadarak will do that in due time,” he said ominously as his crew listened and obeyed, but with a deathly silence hanging over the ship.

  They knew the implications of what he had said and ordered. They’d barely survived the invasions following the Zak’de’ron War, and the empire then had been much larger than it was now.

  The Hadarak moved through two additional systems, one uninhabited and another populated by 3.4 billion non-V’kit’no’sat. The Hadarak did not target them nor any of the planets in the system, merely passing through to get to the Iesclak System where there were two planets heavily populated by the Zep’sha. The long necked cousins to the Oso’lon had been given this system because of their ability to heavily fortify it, but they did not have a large fleet present…at least not as large as necessary…and the over 26,000 starships present only contained 4,038 warships.

  Plus planetary and system defenses, which were tailored specifically to fighting the Hadarak, among which were Teo’naq weapon platforms located in low stellar orbit that drew a significant portion of their energy from the star itself. That energy was harmless to the Hadarak, but once transformed within the Teo’naq stations became Arsuen…a rare type of energy that wasn’t as effective against traditional targets as an Ardent or Tar’vem’jic, but one that reduced the energy absorbent nature of the Hadarak’s outer shell.

  It wasn’t very effective, but nothing was against the beasts. It was better, and knowing that the Teo’naq would be destroyed they had constructed them for remote control with little defenses, maximizing their attack power while knowing that they could not survive weaponsfire from the Hadarak minions for long enough to be useful. Hence they were the biggest sticks in the Zep’sha arsenal, and the system has some 9,392 of them in total, each measuring 7 miles wide and 52 miles long.

  When the Hadarak arrived they moved, capable of travel significantly faster than the Hadarak themselves but slow compared to warships, and aligned their needle-like profiles tip first towards the first of them as it braked against the star’s gravity.

  Brilliant blue beams encased within green auras leapt out and hit the tier 3 Hadarak repetitively, digging shallow furrows into its pale black ‘skin’ that was harder than Yeg’gor armor and yet somehow still flexible, evidenced by the warping of its elongated shape as it decelerated shy of the star and angled slightly off centerline in order to move towards the Teo’naq and the defense fleet firing from behind the system defenses.

  Before the second Hadarak arrived the first began to unfurl. It’s shape warped enough that huge enclosures split open, exposing weaker internal areas that the V’kit’no’sat targeted, but even those were rock hard and absorbed a great deal of weaponsfire as huge chunks of the Hadarak shot out and began to free-fly. They were targeted by the V’kit’no’sat immediately and began to break up…but not all of it was weapons damage. The tightly packed globs of Hadarak material were pulling apart on their own merits and spreading out into Cov’ri, a type of Hadarak minion equivalent to a small starship and capable of speeds their parent could not approach.

  They were faster than most of the V’kit’no’sat ships and raced towards them and the Teo’naq, not firing any weapons but intending to ram. Many were shot down, but about a third made it to their targets and smashed into shields, bypassing the countermeasures against collision due to the energy fields they were emitting. They negated the dampening shields the V’kit’no’sat typically used to prevent collisions and allowed the Cov’ri to hit the hard shields, weakening them as the globs of tissue broke but didn’t fracture. They smooshed against the V’kit’no’sat ships, now unable to move on their own, but transitioning to their primary function.

  They became IDF emitters, blanketing the area around them with engine crippling energy fields and slowing the V’kit’no’sat ships as the Hadarak got closer. Meanwhile more Cov’ri were being grown inside the Hadarak at a remarkable rate as other types of minions were set loose and got to the V’kit’no’sat before the Hadarak did.

  The weaponsfire from the fleet shifted to the swarms while the Teo’naq continued targeting the Hadarak in select locations, starting to burn through a section of its incredibly resilient skin as they overlapped firepower and poured a nearly continuous stream of damage into the same location, overloading its absorption abilities and causing decent damage.

  But as several Teo’naq lagged behind as their engines were disabled by the Cov’ri, De’mo’tap began hitting shields and literally sucking energy away from them as the V’kit’no’sat weapons shot them off, ironically giving them more energy than they could handle with their weapons, but even a few seconds of contact severely weakened the defensive shields in that area. When large numbers of De’mo’tap hit a single ship, the shields essentially evaporated under their collective draining attack, then when individual De’mo’tap were at saturation they would release it in the form of a single small energy weapon attack…then begin draining more to recharge.

  Between the drain and the little stings they were a nightmare in numbers, and the tier 3 Hadarak was spilling them out by the millions. Eventually the predictable happened and many V’kit’no’sat ships were disabled enough that they could not pace the others in their fighting retreat and the Hadarak slowly loomed up upon them, coming into ‘close’ range and latching on with massive energy fields that drew them in closer as massive tentacles leapt out from pockets beneath the Hadarak’s skin and made physical contact with the vessels.

  They latched on and dragged them down, then used enhanced gravity fields to crush the V’kit’no’sat ships against the Hadarak’s skin, that was far harder, until they broke into scattered bits that the Hadarak then pulsed away from itself with a reverse gravity field.

  That was why the V’kit’no’sat could not get within a certain range of the Hadarak, for they literally had no chance of fighting them in that close until the Hadarak was so damaged as to be weakened to the kill point…but even them some of them had proven lethal in their death throws.

  Overcoming the Hadarak meant first you had to destroy their minions swarms, then attack them directly and hope they didn’t run away before you could finish them off…but with the arrival of the second Hadarak and the release of its minions, the V’kit’no’sat commander of the defense fleet knew they had no chance of winning this fight.

  So he had them focus their attack on the minions and tried to draw them further away from the Hadarak so he could have more time to rescue inhibited ships before they drifted into kill range…but eventually he stretched the distance too much and the minion swarms broke off as the tier 3 changed course after the fifth Hadarak arrived. Two of them did not even engage, merely moving around the star to an outgoing jumpline and departing, leaving three behind that moved towards the two inhabited planets. The pair of tier 1s to one planet and the tier 3 to the other as the V’kit’no’sat continued to snipe at them from range.

  They shrugged it off in addition to the firepower now hitting them from the surface batteries. Tar’vem’jic and heavy Arsuen hit and did damage, but not before the tier 3 descended slowly and made physical contact with the planetary defense shields, throwing its mass against them as shots from around the perimeter of the impact point passed through gaps and savaged the exterior with shallow damage craters that were beginning to add up.

  But the planetary shield couldn’t hold up against that much mass for long, and when the Hadarak enhanced the gravity fields to add additional pre
ssure they snapped, allowing the Hadarak to descend to the surface within 30 seconds where it smashed all the V’kit’no’sat cities beneath in a single moment and continued to dig deep into the planet as a massive concussion blast spread out in a ring around it, with the closest city shields unable to hold up against the impact wave.

  Beyond them there were surviving cities where the snap evacuation of the impact point was ferrying evacuees, but as the earthquakes wracked the surface and the Hadarak settled in, it sent several digging tentacles down beneath it reaching for the molten levels of the planet through the solid crust as apertures on the Hadarak opened up and spilled out hundreds of thousands of infantry minions.

  They spread out through the devastated cities looking for resources to exploit and V’kit’no’sat to kill, with ground troops moving to meet them now that the Hadarak had landed. It couldn’t use its close-in fleet killing powers with its minions in play, or rather wouldn’t, and the V’kit’no’sat knew that it was here to harvest resources from the planet. The longer they could delay it here the more additional systems they would spare, so given no other choice the V’kit’no’sat ground troops went the opposite direction of the evacuees and sought out the minions to kill all the way up to the Hadarak itself if possible, for there was also a small opportunity here to smuggle explosives inside.

  The Hadarak usually lifted off before that took place, but on a few cases in the past small teams had been able to pull it off and wreck the minion growth areas inside, saving the others from fighting millions of them into the future. That was small compensation, but significant if the flying minion swarms filled the sky and low orbit as they now were, preventing orbital bombardment of the target that was so large that it was sticking up above the atmosphere even as it dug its tentacles deep into the crust to make passageways for direct seepage, like a tree extending roots down into moist soil, but more than that to allow the minions access to multiple layers of the crush for them to begin mining operations of their own that would extend an army of ‘ants’ out to collect far more material that would be funneled back via tunnels and transports as the biological army fed the Hadarak as they slowly picked apart the planet.

  Shortly after the tier 3 landed one of the tier 1s made it through to the surface of the other planet with its counterpart withdrawing to the star and submerging beneath the surface. It was the more damaged of the two, but the V’kit’no’sat couldn’t attack it there with much effect, so it was safe to wait and make repairs as the other two spawned more and more minions and began the slow digestion of the planets they were now attached to like ticks.

  The V’kit’no’sat defense fleet, now missing many Teo’naq, kept on the periphery of the minion swarm and picked at it, fighting many skirmishes as the two sides played a constant navigation game that would soon be augmented by even larger minions once the Hadarak got enough resources from the planet to produce them. Fortunately the first of the reinforcements fleets began to arrive within 2 days and the V’kit’no’sat started to chew away at the minion fleet while landing additional ground troops far from the Hadarak and its protective swarm.

  The planets were gone and the V’kit’no’sat knew it, but it would take time for the Hadarak to wreck them and until that fully happened attacks on the ground could slow their progress and attacks in orbit could negate the minion production by killing them as fast as they could be grown anew…or that was the basic strategy, but a tier 3 was so much larger than a tier 1 that they didn’t have a chance of countering it without massive reinforcements.

  Those were promised to be coming, but now was the most important time as the minion swarms got set up, so all incoming ground troops from orbit went to fight the tier 1 while those ground troops already on the planet now infested by the tier 3 were left to delay its consumptions by whatever measures they could as the number of minions there were growing at a rate far faster than they were being destroyed once the resources began to flow in from the magma taps…then even more as the crust resource flows snowballed.

  Right off the bat the V’kit’no’sat were losing and losing badly, but as had occurred in past millennia it was the level of resistance they put up that would determine how far the Hadarak would dare push, so even as troops on the ground and in orbit died, they died with one mission firmly implanted in their minds…do damage.

  That was all that mattered now, and the more reinforcements they got the more damage they could do…but not to the minions. It was damage to the Hadarak themselves that provoked them to withdraw. Their minions were expendable, though living people in and of themselves. They were spawned and subservient to the Hadarak, linked into a very powerful telepathic web of control that required the V’kit’no’sat to use their armor’s Ikrid inhibitors else they become overwhelmed or killed by the massive telepathic aura of the Hadarak. Even the Zen’zat had to use inhibitors, else the headaches that would result from their own blocks would become so great that they would be unable to function.

  But as they had done for millions of years, the V’kit’no’sat did not back down. They faced the nightmare head on and fought it, inch by inch, scratch by scratch, with the number of their own dead stacking up on top of those instantaneously lost when the Hadarak hit the planet. But no number of deaths would dissuade them. This impossible fight is what the V’kit’no’sat existed for, and everyone in the system knew it and responded accordingly.

  Living wasn’t the objective. Stalling and driving off the Hadarak was.

  And that was going to take a lot of bloodshed to accomplish…which was why the V’kit’no’sat required such an expansive empire in the first place. They had to have the population to spend in these battles if necessary and the weaponry for that population to use…and they did. And they would come in droves from the reforged V’kit’no’sat, fighting and dying for as long as necessary.

  The question was how committed were the Hadarak to this invasion and how much damage were they willing to take?

  And how much it would cost the V’kit’no’sat to push them to that point?

  5

  April 27, 3695

  Amcigor System (Hjar’at territory)

  Terrolmas

  Mak’to’ran’s ship had arrived a few days previously to meet up with the gathering fleet that was already 12,000 warships strong and gaining numbers quickly as more trickled in from across the nearby region. The Hjar’at fleet was amongst them, with many new vessels that had initially been tasked with defending this key system now prepping to go to war against the Hadarak while the yards continued to produce more at an astounding rate…now amped up considerably as other races in the reforged V’kit’no’sat began shipping in additional resources for them to use.

  There were four major planets in the system, but the bulk of the shipyards existed in their own orbit in the middle zone around the pair of stars at system center, one of which had extensive mining apparatus pulling solari and other important resources out of the radioactive maelstrom. Small ships were constantly moving between those platforms and the shipyards as more than 9,000 slips were active with partial hulls constructed and another 2,000 waiting for the necessary resources to begin fabrication.

  The reason this fleet was assembling here was simply a matter of location, and it wasn’t the only one. Waypoints all along the border with the Hadarak were being used to rally and meld the numerous ships the V’kit’no’sat possessed into hundreds of fleets that would be moving to different objectives, for more Hadarak had been detected on approach and a few had already blown past existing defenses. So far they were making pushes into three regions…Bovok, Gavsor, and Evvcha…which represented over 8,000 inhabited V’kit’no’sat systems in addition to hundreds of thousands more belonging to native races and others that were uninhabited.

  That meant this fight was already taking place across a vast track of territory and the real slug fest hadn’t yet started. The Hadarak were so slow the V’kit’no’sat would know they were coming days, if not weeks, before reachin
g their targets, but once they arrived they were almost impossible to stop and required huge amounts of ships to damage, let alone kill a Hadarak. If Mak’to’ran skimped and sent too small of fleets to reinforce then he’d be sending virtually all of them to their deaths and defeat. He had to assemble an overwhelming number and send them in to pound the Hadarak so fast that they didn’t have time to whittle them down. Only then would the Hadarak consider retreat, but not before they had tested the assembled strength through at least a few rounds of combat.

  Such battles were going to have to take place in dozens of systems, for so far there had been 48 Hadarak detected and probably more on the way. The V’kit’no’sat had a speed advantage, but pulling in vessels from across their empire took time while the Hadarak only had a few system jumps to make to get to the nearest targets.

  Mak’to’ran needed more time, which was why he’d already ordered massive recon efforts into Hadarak territory. That was risky, but if his ships kept moving they should be able to avoid the Cov’ri. If they lingered they’d be tracked down and disabled, then ultimately destroyed. That was why there weren’t many scouting missions sent into Hadarak territory, and most remote sensors dropped there were found, even if stealthed. However the Hadarak worked they could sense things that the V’kit’no’sat could not, and to date no effective cloaking fields had been able to protect even the smallest V’kit’no’sat ship against detection.

  That meant beyond the front he had no knowledge of where the Hadarak were or how many of them were moving towards detection points. Mak’to’ran needed more of an advance warning, so he was sending thousands of their fastest ships to dart in and out and gather data, giving them a fair chance of survival, but even the slightest misstep or bit of bad luck would lead to deaths. Regardless, it was necessary so he could get his growing fleets in the proper position to counter the Hadarak, and hopefully intercept them in a few neutral systems before they reached V’kit’no’sat planets.