Star Force: Initiation (SF61)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  All four ships came down together until they were halfway down to the surface of the mostly water-covered world, then they split apart so that they reached the ocean waves at different locations around where the lizards had established their primary aquatics colony. According to intelligence reports this world was the second one colonized in the system and as such hadn’t seen as much development as Irad, but the lizards had already begun building within the water in addition to on the small tracts of land. Those water-based troops had to be eliminated before Star Force could lay claim to the system, hence the inclusion of the rarely used aquatics division in this assault.

  Four battleships for an assault against an entire world was light on the extreme but if the lizards had only one, or even a handful of fortified locations, it would be more than enough to break through their defenses…which were known to be formidable. Star Force and the lizards had tangled aquatically on a few worlds, but the largest conflict had been the initial one on Atlantica, during which both sides had learned much about their opponents. That said, Star Force’s aquatics division had been wholly revamped since then, and the two previous assaults that had taken place hadn’t left any lizard survivors to inform the others how they’d been defeated.

  When the battleships hit the surface they came down gently, sinking into the water with their defense shields covering the hulls in a thin, protective layer that the enemy’s weapons would be hard pressed to penetrate. Of the four ships one of the dark blue ones came down directly over the location of the lizard colony, and as it pushed its hull into the water a swarm of missiles came up at it, hammering the shield.

  That was part of the plan, for the ship was acting as a distraction and continued to descend down through the deep water until it reached weapons range, then a shield column extended down to the top of the base, which was made up of numerous domes built on the seafloor that covered all directions for miles. The tiny tendril of energy pushed through the water and contacted its lizard counterpart covering the largest central dome where Star Force knew they were building aquatics warships.

  Those were in the water nearby, but not directly over the base for they had been out on patrol and not in position to defend against an overhead assault. Their firepower was significant, but it didn’t match the number of missiles coming up from below. The two combined would be enough to get through the battleship’s shields, so it only had a short window of opportunity before it would have to withdraw and recharge…but it wouldn’t need long to do damage.

  The shield column made contact with the dome shield and immediately a blue streak flew down the vacuum and hit the opposing energy barrier, missing the sidewalls of the column by half a meter of clearance, else the mauler blast would have breached them instead of the lizards’ shield. The first blast destabilized a patch of the dome’s defensive layer, with the second punching through and allowing the shield column to dip down another few meters and touch the hull of the dome. The lizard shield reformed around and inside of it, for it was being emitted from within the base rather than a lateral generator.

  The problem with that was the Star Force shield column, acting like a giant straw, wouldn’t allow lizard shield energy to flow into the breach from the surrounding areas to help counter weaknesses and breaches, leaving only a small patch inside that was recharging from direct transmission from the emitter. That was sufficient to reseal the shield over the light crater in the hull, but when the aquatic’s warship switched weaponry and the Ta’lin’yi firecracker beam came down with the white/gold pinpricks slamming into the shield patch, it punched through with only a slight hesitation.

  Suddenly the base of the shield column broke contact, blowing apart along with that section of the dome as the talon cannon hit the matter of the hull and did what it did best. A shockwave rippled out through the water all the way back up to the battleship as another shield column tracked down into the now damaged and unshielded dome to deliver another huge punch, with a likewise impressive explosion when it contacted and sent an immediate talon blast down.

  The battleship sat there and reached out into the lizard infrastructure, attacking it with impunity as the missile swarms continued to mount and drain shield strength. It wasn’t until they’d racked up sufficient energy loss and the lizard warships were nearing weapons range did the Star Force vessel begin sniping down the incoming missiles with its own intercepts. The tiny glowing ‘fish’ spit out of several holes in the hull and swam towards the missiles, knocking out several with a single hit and ‘popping’ the water around them out into short-lived voids.

  That disruption not only allowed the secondary explosion to hit more of the clumped missiles but it knocked others askew and slowed their approach, with only a few making it through the counterattack to hit now that the ship was defending itself, which allowed the shield to begin to recharge a bit as more missiles from the nearby warships began shooting in laterally and a slew of hammerheads motored in as fast as they could, intent on ramming the sides of the Star Force battleship with their full array of plasma nubs.

  Holding off on any return fire the battleship continued shooting out intercepts to lengthen the duration of its stay while it broke through dome after dome below. Some were air domes, others were water ones. Either way they were taking heavy damage and attracting a lot of attention while the other three battleships settled into the water at their more distant positions and began releasing the onboard craft and infantry that this one was holding onto as it played bait, soon to retreat to the atmosphere to recharge its shields and reposition to another location to continue the assault.

  Davrel Stinson flexed a bit in the cockpit of his aquatic mech, still in the hold of the other Human battleship as he waited for the go order. Right now his body was strapped into the control harness similar to that in a neo, but his movements were not translated directly into this mech for his body didn’t match its configuration. The harness he was in was essentially a full body controller for the live videogame he was about to play.

  It wasn’t a drone, as he was situated inside it, but the various arm, finger, leg, and even toe movements controlled a variety of functions in the mech…with him very eager to get the new prototype mental interface. Word was it was still experiencing glitches, but once they got it hammered out he could forgo the tricky harness that took such a long time to master. The up side was that aquatic mechs didn’t move as quickly as their ground-pounding cousins, but now with a heavy dose of Elarioni influence they no longer had the option of just walking around on the seafloor or motoring along as clinging brawlers.

  Right now his mech was in transit mode, meaning its various arms and other protrusions were tucked into the hull in a little bit of a homage to Voku transforming tech. When Davrel finally got the go order he followed another mech out into the ocean water, passing through the shield that separated the bay from the exterior and feeling a bit more resistance as he passed through, for the ocean water was more compacted at this depth.

  The mech looked like a finless dolphin, stretching out long with a narrow silhouette that allowed it to move through the water far faster than previous designs. Davrel had been one of the first aquatics regulars and stuck with the military ever since, hence he was one of the few capable of piloting these mechs that weren’t Archons given the intricate design interface that most of his peers hadn’t been able to pass the qualies on.

  As soon as he was out into the ocean he directed towards one of the lizard destroyers nearby. It wasn’t on the seafloor, nor would his mech be. Now the mechs were full-fledged anti-ship weapons covered in armor more dense than what the battleships carried. It was rich in corovon, and therefore very expensive to produce, but it gave them extreme tankiness against the lizard weapons…so much so that he sped his mech towards the six distant warships with little worry. He was going after the largest one and knew the others wouldn’t be able to do much more than tickle him throughout the process.

  A slew of missiles came his way as he got close
, with the other mechs heading to different locations leaving Davrel on his own. His mech didn’t have any intercepts, for they wouldn’t fit in its tiny hull that was about twice the size of a thor, so he just let them hit the shields and explode, with the wall of water that he was pushing ahead of him helping to dampen the blows as he closed on the destroyer.

  Before they could be stripped off his mech entirely he triggered a transformation with a combination of thumb button press and right leg extension. The smooth hull of the elongated mech bunched up, pulling its tail up and into the hull that then plumped out into what was more recognizable as a mech body…but one without legs, for he was well above the seafloor and didn’t need them.

  Four arms did emerge, and as he got close to the destroyer he rammed into the side of it and latched on, extending ‘growths’ out from them that wrapped around the hull like the vines from a plant and allowed him to hold on despite the destroyer being covered by its own thin shield that soon snapped under the pressure. The Vel’koz-class mech then opened a port on its ‘head’ and pressed it up against the hull, firing through a short shield column a very thin mauler stream rather than a blast, with it cutting into the hull like a laser and blowing out a seam as Davrel moved the mech around a bit as it clung to the ship.

  He rotated it around enough to cut out a badly shaped circular plug, then cut the beam out and loosened his grip on the ship with the backside of his mech getting hit with a few more missiles as one of their corvettes approached. The aquatic mechwarrior knew he still had some time so he pulled back one of the arms, retracting it into a stubby protrusion that he then pointed into the breach, ramming the ‘shoulder’ of the mech into it.

  Once that connection was made he used a very tricky interface to control and ‘see’ the arm as it jutted out and, with a lot of sheer physical force, punched its way into the destroyer’s interior and began ripping it apart like the inside of a blender.

  Then came the difficult part, for one of the big design advantages of this mech was its multi-tasking capability…which was quite a strain on a pilot who wasn’t used to seeing behind his back. As the corvette came in it extended its two large claws, which it obviously intended to latch onto the Star Force mech with and pull it off, or maybe to snip away the arms holding it to the hull. Either way the sheer crushing power they were capable of would do damage to his mech, though his armor and skeleton strength would keep it from being a one pinch kill.

  Using an elbow bump he triggered the extension of another arm from the mech, this one much thicker and claw-like of its own. Davrel knew it was much more nimble, with the lizard corvette basically being a battering ram with two big scissors attached, so as it came within touching range he reached out with his own pincher and grabbed the port one on the enemy ship while gripping tighter with the three arms wrapped around the destroyer’s hull. Using the raw leverage power built into his mech he caught and halted the corvette’s momentum, then swung the ship around slowly until it banged against the side of the destroyer.

  Davrel pushed it back, letting go his grip, then easing his hold on the destroyer enough to twist the ‘head’ of his mech around and point the mauler orifice towards the lizards’ version of a crawdad. A short shield column sprang out and briefly linked the two ships with a waterless corridor that the mech used to fire a full sized mauler blast through rather than the tiny cutting beam…all the while Davrel continued to lash his whip-like arm around inside the destroyer, further wrecking its interior.

  That single mauler hit blew off the starboard arm of the corvette and left a huge chunk of its hull exposed to the ocean. Davrel reestablished the shield column again and hit it twice more before the enemy ship was out of the fight and quite literally in pieces, some of which floated up, others down in a drifting debris cloud.

  Meanwhile Davrel’s cockpit was pinging with a collision warning as a hammerhead swung around and was headed directly towards him, apparently not caring about damaging the destroyer in the process. Watching the approach rate carefully the mechwarrior continued to wreck the inside of the bigger ship’s hull, then suddenly retracted the arm and disconnected from the ship. Waiting till the last moment, he used the tiny gravity drive inside to shoot him down through the water and avoided the plasma nub-covered head of the lizard ship by a few meters, expertly ducking beneath it.

  A massive explosion of vaporized water and hull pushed him down even further as the hammerhead couldn’t slow in time and, failing to hit the Star Force mech, hit off center on the destroyer as it tried to veer off. Davrel immediately reversed course and reached out with his arms, which he was controlling with both of his and his legs to get the quartet to function in sync enough to grab the tree trunk of the hammerhead’s T-shaped design. A quick mauler kiss there followed by some ripping and tearing took out that ship, allowing him to move freely and get back to the destroyer that was limping off.

  As soon as he got clear for a moment a wave of missiles hit him from the light destroyer nearby that finally took down his shields. The rest of the explosions barely scratched the hull as he veered off and headed towards the ship, knowing he could come back to the destroyer later. As soon as he made the course correction the lizard ship began extending its defensive ‘bush’ of thin tendrils covered with berry-like plasma nubs.

  Davrel knew there was no way to get through them in order to grab onto the hull, and while he could have just pushed through he didn’t want to take the damage so he triggered the third of 4 transformations the Vel’koz was capable of. This one tucked the arms back in then pushed various segments of the body out like blocky pylons while the internal components rearranged, including his cockpit pod that was shuffled around near to the exterior but with at least a thin armor plate protecting it as the big gun within the mech assembled itself from various components.

  The defensive bush around the light destroyer wouldn’t allow for a shield column to attach normally, but there were enough small holes in it for it to fire missiles out of, making for an odd turtle-like tactic that not only protected it but allowed it to become an offensive position, though more or less fixed to one spot for the bush couldn’t be dragged along with it at any respectable speed.

  Fortunately the big gun didn’t require a shield column, and thanks to a little sharing on the part of the Elarioni only a handful of years ago Davrel had a Yor’vok that didn’t move the water out of the way as it fired, but rather simply vaporized it when the beam leapt out towards the light destroyer as the mech emptied its capacitor charge.

  The silver beam quickly disappeared inside the vaporized water and Davrel’s targeting sensors became partially obscured along with his vision as the ultra-condense laser-like weapon burnt through the water, the tendrils surrounding the lizard ship, and then the hull plates in the equivalent of one big Kamehameha.

  Once it finished its discharge Davrel transformed the mech back into phase 2, then headed off to get the wounded destroyer after seeing that the annoying bush was no longer sprouting missiles. Meanwhile the capacitor began recharging very slowly, with it taking upwards of half an hour to refill if he wasn’t using any of his other weapon systems. It was a big hit upgrade to the mech, which the Archons referred to as an ‘ult’ which, like a lot of their naming system, came from things he wasn’t familiar with and they didn’t always bother to explain. He guessed it was short for ‘ultimate’ weapon and he couldn’t disagree with the results…especially when he used it on land with no water in the way to diminish the beam.

  The other light corvette that had been pacing the destroyer veered off, putting as much distance between itself and Davrel after seeing what had happened to the other ships. Usually the lizards fought it out, but apparently not this one. He would have let it go and finished off the destroyer, but there were infantry in the water as well and that ship could do them a whole lot of harm so he ignored the big target and switched back into phase one, swimming his mech after it before it got away, then he’d circle back and finish off the destroyer
, which for good measure spat a few missiles Davrel’s way as he swam off after the corvette.

  3

  Jeimae swam through the interior of the battleship, racing towards the waiting room where the other Elarioni were just about to depart the ship. She’d had a defective shield and had to quickly swap it out for a new one in the equipment room, leaving her just enough time to swim through the corridors of the water-filled ship to meet up with the 22 others in this compartment. She bumped up against one of them, offering a distracted apology just before the outer door irised open and the Star Force aquatic infantry scurried out.

  With her being the furthest back she exited last, transitioning through the force field covering the entrance and into the chillier ocean outside, following in the wake of the others as they moved down towards the wreckage of lizard infrastructure below. Her tail flicked rapidly, propelling her along with the jets located along either hip in her flexible armor as a slew of tiny green dots below marked the positions of the lizard infantry and their plasma rods.

  Almost as soon as the dozens of lights began to grow into hundreds as the Elarioni were spotted the armored infantry fanned out in a spiral, making like a living tornado that fell down on the enemy troops. Jeimae swam quickly, her shield compacted and attached to her left arm. Her normally free flowing hair was pulled back into a tight helmet that transitioned into scale-like armor that wrapped around her entire body, making her unafraid of the plasma nubs below, knowing that she could take several hits before penetration…not that that was going to be an issue.

  She and the other Star Force Elarioni were swimming so fast the lizards were practically frozen in place when they finally met. Jeimae was a few seconds delayed, but swooped down then made a tight arc, pulling into a lateral motion and jabbing her right arm into the nearest one of the four-legged monstrosities. They might be able to breath underwater, but they certainly didn’t belong in it.