by Aer-ki Jyr
But it would still work. She inserted another rod and used a different tool to cut it off before liquefying it. She had to add a touch more before getting full saturation, then Jasmine inserted a prompt into the hole that made contact with the liquid there. She hit a button and sent a triggering burst of energy that traveled the length of all the liquid filaments that she had inserted, initiating a 6 second solidifying process that firmly bonded the two frame segments together.
Another scan confirmed it, then she waited in place a few minutes until another segment was brought down and she got the base of it as well while the other techs were working on the lateral connections. The barrel was in grid form at the moment, with more holes than casing, but it was interlocked with secondary structural supports and even smaller tertiaries. By the time Jasmine got through with the second one she and the other techs had established a rhythm that kept them motoring through some 36 more segments until they ran out of parts.
Beefy as the sedas’ industry base was, they could only produce so many so fast, so Jasmine and the others were shunted to another work project, then another, and another. Each was building a piece of the mile-wide weapon, some on site while others were being assembling in nearby caverns only to be moved into the main when they were finished. Had Jasmine not worked maintenance on the Keema batteries before she would have been thoroughly lost, but as it was she knew what everything was and how it had to come together even as it was lying in bits and pieces across a labyrinth of tunnels and rock-carved chambers that hadn’t even had walls and framework built into them yet.
This was definitely a makeshift site, but it was an orderly one that allowed her and the others to get to work immediately and stick out an 80 hour shift before heading back up to her seda for a 20 hour rest/training block, then she was shipped back down to work another shift and would continue to do so indefinitely. Time blurred away and she knew to simply delve into the work else she’d get distracted. When she returned to the seda she didn’t check the status of the battles, focusing instead on her needs and compartmentalizing herself to the task at hand.
The work had to be done and done right the first time, as quickly as possible. She could get caught up on current events later. Right now all that mattered was this Keema battery, and if others were able to find or ship in the necessary raw materials to allow the sedas to fashion all the necessary components…which she considered the truly hard part in all of this…then she was going to be damn sure the assembly went off without a hitch. They didn’t have a schedule to follow, working with what pieces were brought to them when available and adapting as they went, but the skill and speed of both the Mainline and Canderian crews was admirable and she doubted the lizards could have done the same.
It took them another 11 months after she arrived to get the battery constructed, which was breakneck pace considering the situation. When it was completed that wasn’t the end of her stay, for there was even more work to do on the surrounding structures. Star Force needed to expand their base and construct a legitimate war colony underground, which meant getting rid of temporary structures and building proper ones.
The Canderian construction crews were given priority over most of that while the Mainliners were shipped off to secondary sites retrieving raw materials or expanding upon those temporary bases elsewhere in the system. That suited Jasmine just fine, and though the architecture wasn’t Canderian specs she found it reasonably familiar as all Star Force tech was, and more than one of the other workers had noted that this construction effort was less building a base on the planet rather than turning the planet into a makeshift seda of its own.
That wasn’t even near to accurate given the size of the planet, but something about it rang true regardless and from that day on she started to think the same, with the Canderians building another home in the rock rather than in the void of space.
And once the Keema battery was built she allowed herself the luxury of watching the battle updates, for scuttlebutt said that the finished construction was going to usher in the next phase of the invasion. She didn’t know what that would be, but was interested in finding out. Protecting this planet with the big gun made sense, but not when the sedas in orbit were already accomplishing the same task. She also felt something was in the works, and was working in one of the residential facilities installing a door when word was passed from worker to worker.
A relief fleet had just arrived, which wasn’t uncommon given the size of this campaign, but with this one had come something unexpected…in the form of Sentinel segments.
Lots of Sentinel segments.
10
February 12, 2937
Gvaris System (lizard territory)
Inner Zone
Paul stood in the Excalibur’s nexus as he watched the clock ticking down. The lizards still controlled low stellar orbit despite his many attempts to root them out of it, due in no small part to their ever flowing river of reinforcements. No matter how many ships he destroyed more would come to replace them, and without controlling the inner zone he couldn’t ambush them on the way in. Furthermore, there were cruisers being built on the two inhabited planets round the clock, adding to the number of orbital fleets that kept growing and growing despite the rising number of Star Force vessels in the system.
Every time a convoy arrived it had to do so on a predetermined schedule so Paul could get to its jumppoint and screen for them. A few ships could arrive easily enough and avoid the lizard swarm near the star, but a long convoy was an invitation for them to come further out and jump it before they could all safely arrive…and this one coming in was going to be the largest and most important to date.
With a thought he sent the warning signal out from the Excalibur detailing the exact jumppoint he wanted the convoy to arrive at. The lizards had been pushing their fleets further and further out, forcing incoming convoys to brake hard and exit early in the weaker outer system gravity and come to a stop before they reached deep into the inner zone. It was a fuel heavy maneuver, but doable so long as the convoy wasn’t traveling at too great a speed.
With less than a minute remaining Paul sent his drones on ahead in a small microjump to get into position, heading almost directly down the jumpline the convoy would be arriving on and attacking the lizard ships already drifting out in their direction. He kept the signal transmitting a bit longer, then jumped the Excalibur itself up into position and plowed into the growing lizard fleet, destroying many of the cruisers and pushing the others back for fear of being destroyed prior to gaining sufficient numbers to do the damage they knew was necessary to take down the drones, let alone a command ship.
It had been a long time since one of the donuts had gone down, but the lizards had never forgotten. Paul hadn’t been there, but he’d reviewed the mission reports in detail. Most of the crew had survived, thanks to the rest of the fleet surrounding the dying ship to cover for an evacuation, but the Evanescence had been so badly damaged it could no longer move. System purges had been enacted to erase data from the ship’s computers, but that had been a moot point. As soon as the weakened fleet pulled back with the evacuees the lizards chipped away at the ship until it became a debris field.
Paul thought that was more out of vengeance than prudence, but ever since then the lizards had been more coy about attacking the command ships. They knew how much it would take to damage one, and even with the tech enhancements that both sides were escalating through they could still guess at the changes. The sedas were another story, for they weren’t used to fighting constructs of that size. The assault pillars and invokers were still sitting quietly in the stands watching this campaign unfold, but Paul had a feeling that today that would change as soon as they saw this convoy arrive.
The first ship to enter was a Warship-class jumpship, followed soon by two more only seconds behind that immediately linked into the battlemap system and Paul incorporated them into his fleet. He had them launch drones immediately after moving forward off the jumppoint and beg
an to spread his umbrella of protection out further to the sides as more and more ships came in.
In response the lizard fleet came out in even greater numbers than before, knowing they’d have to up their game to get to the convoy this time, but Paul thought they had another agenda in play. For these holds meant he had to fight them straight up, and he thought the lizards were just trying to take out Star Force ships whenever and wherever they could, then rely on their industrial might to replace whatever they lost. So far it was working, save for the fact that Star Force was also sending in replacement ships, but the lizards seemed to be gaining the advantage as time passed…which is what he hoped they would think.
When the first cradle came through carrying a 12-kilometer long piece of Sentinel everything changed. The other lizard fleets throughout the system began to move, knowing that they had to destroy it before it became operational. The sedas were already giving them considerable trouble, able to take such a beating and keep on fighting, and they knew the Sentinels were worse. They had no crew, no living structures, not even a single hallway. They were simply a mass of weapons, armor, shields, and power generation…and Star Force was bringing six of their biggest ones in today, each in four piece segments.
Those segments were a pain in the ass for the jumpship cradles to carry, for unlike the new sedas the Sentinels couldn’t travel on their own. Their gravity drives were small, enough for maneuvers around orbit or a slow hike from planet to planet insystem. They could not travel from one system to another, nor were they meant to. They were defensive strongholds, typically meant to be built on site, though Star Force had gotten in the habit of designing them to break down into ‘travel carry’ size. It would only take a matter of minutes for them to be assembled, not days, and once they were they would put out more firepower than even the largest of the sedas…and they were expendable, so Star Force wasn’t shy about having them eat up as many lizard ships as they could before being destroyed.
The lizards knew that about Star Force tactics, which is why after a delay even the assault pillars and invokers started moving. It was going to be too late though, for as soon as the first piece arrived Paul had it move off the line and make a microjump out deep into the system. It’d have to run its engines hard to slow down again in that limited gravity, but it would take it well away from the lizard fleets that would have a harder time of chasing it…yet chase they did.
Numerous cruisers disappeared from the battlemap as they made their own microjumps to go after it and the escorts Paul had already traveling there from elsewhere in the system. There would be a massive fight out there, with the second Sentinel piece arriving a minute and a half later and moving out to join them. The two pieces were meant to fit together, but the third one that came in was not. It was a duplicate of the bottom segment that had already gone out to the edge of the system, with Paul sending it on microjump in another direction towards a rendezvous with a second escort fleet even as his neighborhood was filling up with ships rapidly, including the first assault pillar to arrive from its parking position deep in near the star.
The cruisers in front of it split, opening up a corridor through which objects were hurled at controlled speeds. When they hit the Excalibur, if they ever got that close, they’d do some damage to the shields but not nearly as much as a kamikaze cruiser. No, these were meant to relay the firepower from stone to stone and hit his command ship outside of the Excalibur’s range to return fire.
But as soon as the assault pillar launched the first object he knew something was wrong, for it wasn’t shaped the same way they typically were. Six of them were released and traveling towards his ship, about to get picked off by his defensive guns and picket ships, whichever got to them first, when they exploded on their own. Not in any damaging way, but fragmenting into a halo of pieces that did not scatter. Rather they held their ring-like shape up the line all the way back to the assault pillar, which then emitted a blinding aqua-colored light that passed through each of the still moving rings and hit his command ship’s shields.
The blast didn’t abate, but kept grinding off shield energy like a firehose. Paul knew from his connection to the computer exactly how much shield damage it was doing and the fact that if the Excalibur just sat here it was going to penetrate within 42 seconds. After less than 2 seconds he already had his drones moving to a position to target the first of the rings, but when they destroyed it with ease the beam only scattered a bit, enlarging its footprint on the shields and lessening the overall damage a chunk, but it was still draining them.
Paul had the command ship move to the left, but somehow the rings also moved laterally. They must have had gravity drives of their own for they brought the focusing power of the beam back onto the Excalibur, catching a corvette in the process. It blocked the beam for a few seconds, then was burnt through in a popping explosion that let the rest of the beam get back to draining the Excalibur’s shields.
Paul raised an eyebrow, noting the design upgrade and the fact that this energy was not their invoker style arcs nor their phaser tech. This was something new, but it wasn’t going to be enough. The trailblazer moved his escort ships out of the way then executed a short microjump out of the firing line and drifted back in towards the lizard cruiser swarms while the assault pillar moved forward towards the now exposed jumppoint as drones were headed towards it and cruisers were forming up in defensive screens.
Paul sent another signal up the line, telling the incoming convoy to break harder and move the jumppoint out while he slugged his way through lizard ships and used the fleet of drones to go towards the assault pillar…not to shoot it, but to shoot the focusing rings it was launching towards the next incoming Sentinel segment. Simultaneously he had another command ship move in to block the firing line for when the huge chunk of relatively unprotected tech appeared insystem, long enough anyway for it to make a microjump out to head to site number 2.
But despite the lizards’ cunning, and the fact that two more assault pillars and an invoker were heading to the jumppoint, this was all a diversion. The Sentinel segments that were being pursued were not going to stop and try to assemble. They were merely drawing large chunks of the lizard fleet out of position. The next Sentinel segment to arrive jumped to a third site, but the following one, which based on the pattern would follow it to mate up, did not. It jumped to Planet 13, then three more segments came in with very little spacing in the deceleration jumps, all of which followed it as Paul took the Excalibur directly for the invoker, intending to fight it head on while the rest of his fleet was going to delay the assault pillars as best they could.
The four Sentinel segments that headed for the planet were met up in orbit with a defense fleet there that was screening against the entire orbital fleet the lizards had. A massive battle was already underway, but the Sentinel segments were maneuvered down into low orbit and into a holding position that required a lot of tugging by the cradles to keep them from falling down onto the planet. Until their own gravity drives segments got powered up they were going to have to hold them in a mutual IDF field, which was difficult but not impossible to manage while their own gravity drives held the whole assembly aloft.
Trick of it was they had no power left for shields, so it was up to the fleet to defend them while they hastily assembled the four pieces into the thick Sentinel ‘rod’ that the lizards had come to fear.
The ships that had left to pursue the other pieces were now too far away to get back to Planet 13 to stop this Sentinel from being assembled, but many of the others weren’t. All across the system ships with decent jumplines took off towards the outer planet and began spamming orbit, first with cruisers, then four invokers arrived ahead of six assault pillars just as the first two pieces were assembled.
The numbers, however thinned by the subterfuge and the Sentinel pieces continuing to arrive that were moving off to yet other rendezvous points within the system, were not in Star Force’s favor. Thanks to Paul’s update, Liam was able to get dron
es into position to snipe at the first of the ring targeting relays and take them out as the assault pillars launched them, but soon those ships were overwhelmed by cruisers and destroyed with Liam keeping them there as long as possible to delay the big enemy ships from firing on the helpless Sentinel segments or the cradles keeping them from crashing down onto the planetary base directly below them.
Except it wasn’t exactly underneath, with a small chunk of the planet’s surface cracking apart and being shoved aside like a mole moving dirt to expose thick armored doors set just below ground. Those doors then parted, revealing the aperture of the planetary defense battery. It rotated in its spherical socket and took aim under Liam’s personal control. He altered the beam width into a very narrow cone then targeted a group of cruisers where there were no Star Force ships engaging them.
The almost totally clear beam leapt up from the surface and disintegrated 27 cruisers in a matter of 4 seconds, with the excess energy that missed them moving off into space past the engaging fleets. The big gun suffered a recharge period while its capacitors filled to the brim, then Liam fired again taking out another swath of cruisers before lining up a shot at one of the invokers that was coming in to engage a fleet of drones. He had the drones part ever so slightly as they danced around the energy arcs that were covering the big ship in a bush-like shroud of rainbow light, then he dialed back the conical spread to as fine a beam as he could manage and put a shot straight through his fleet formation with it passing unseen into the maelstrom.
Instantly that tumble of energy reduced, with visible gaps forming in the cascading arcs. It didn’t stop its forward progress though, heading directly for the Sentinel pieces and intent on either ramming them or burning them if it had any weaponry left. Liam accounted for the first possibility by sending ships to push the invoker out of alignment, but first he had to get it disabled or any ships getting close enough to yank it away with an IDF field would be shredded by what looked to be standard invoker weaponry, though perhaps beefed up in intensity a bit based on how some cruiser debris literally puffed into dust upon impact with it.
