by Aer-ki Jyr
Taryn stood in the command Nexus just off the bridge of the Winston, studying the progress of her ground troops on the planet below. This was the first time her fleet had seen major ground action in the 30+ years she’d been engaged in this theatre of war. During most of that time they’d made naval raids, but now with Operation Conduit in full throttle they had a mission objective beyond simply neutralizing as many Nestafar ships as they could…they were here to rescue Calavari and take them out of the war zone.
That war zone had seen little shift in the balance of territory. What the Calavari had lost they’d made up for by taking Nestafar systems, and in turn, 63% of the captured worlds were then recaptured by their former owners. Some star systems had flipped multiple times, leaving the only clear result of the war effort so far being widespread death and destruction.
She didn’t have numbers on the Nestafar, but the Calavari had reportedly lost a full third of their population, meaning they’d lost several times over the entire number of Humans…and that wasn’t something you just rebuilt over the space of a few years. Both the Calavari and Nestafar were losing the war, with the only question in play being who would be left standing in the end to rule over the rubble.
That said, even the weakened Calavari still far outnumbered the Humans, both in terms of systems, ships, and population. Their empire was massive, and as such it took a great deal of time to tear it apart…with the four-armed brawlers doing a better job of defending themselves than the Alliance had given them credit for at the outset.
Juness was one of three planets in this system that the Calavari had inhabited, but it held 98% of their population. The other two worlds were merely starter colonies and had been bypassed by the Nestafar entirely. Taryn had already dispatched jumpships to begin evacuating those worlds, but the ongoing conflict on the surface of this planet was still in full swing. Usually Star Force was coming to planets that had already been conquered or were on the verge of destruction, but with Morgan sweeping through the smaller systems and Leif pulling out Calavari units that had pushed too far into Nestafar territory and got cut off, she was left with picking a larger world under siege and coming to its rescue.
The Calavari had lost orbit, but they had not conceded the planet. Both races’ ground forces were in far greater number than Taryn’s, so she had to be tricky in knowing where to insert them and her smaller warships to tip the scale of the ground battle to their favor.
Trouble was, she was going to have to hold this system for several years before Star Force could supply enough jumpships to evacuate all 3.3 billion of them…or at least that’s what their population had been before this invasion had started. How many of them were left alive now was an ongoing conversation amongst her analysis staff. While Taryn wanted as many of them to be alive and rescuable as possible, the more that were meant she was going to have to hold this position longer…and the longer she held it, the more time the Nestafar had to size up her fleet and plan a counter assault.
So far Star Force hadn’t faced any of those, given they were raiding systems rather than taking them, so this was going to be a whole new ball game and she wanted to micromanage as much of it as possible this early on to give herself more options down the road.
She’d held off deploying herself into combat for just that reason, instead deciding to play ‘Admiral’ and organize everything from afar. Her troops had dropped down into 18 combat zones, committing all the forces she had in order to overwhelm the opposition and reduce casualties to both Star Force and the Calavari troops they were aiding. So far two cities had been wiped clean of the Nestafar…two that had not had walkers in play.
Taryn had already dispatched fleets of dropships to head down to those locations and begin picking up the Calavari civilians. She didn’t know how reluctant they would be to leave, but had told her personnel that if they balked to just pass them over and pick up those that were willing, then they’d come back and deal with the others later.
The dropships that had just taken down the ground troops were now being recycled into pulling supplies off the jumpships that the civilians would soon be boarding. Those supplies currently filled every room and hallway, and would have to be pulled out before the people could go in. Most were foodstuffs, with the rest being survival supplies including portable tents, medicine, tools, and a host of personal items the Calavari used. Their purpose was to supply those that they were forced to leave on the planet to wait for future jumpships, but by the look of the planet Taryn guessed that a lot of their industry and support systems were still intact.
With that in mind Taryn began tagging those facilities as priority targets to grab and hold, directing her troops, mechs, and aerial forces like she was playing a game of StarCraft and kept at it for the next 6 hours before forcing herself to abandon the nexus and get in some training time, food, and a nap, after which she was back at it and would continue to be for the next two weeks.
That was the point when she finally decided to deploy herself into one of the hotly contested cities via aerial drop. With her comm system set up so she could manage the entire planetary war from her helmet if needed, Taryn stepped off the boarding ramp of a dropship midflight and fell down through the atmosphere feathering her jump pack controls to land her near the front but still inside the Star Force lines.
Carrying a pair of plasma pistols and a backpack full of replacement ammo, Taryn got to work quickly helping to clear the skies and streets of the Nestafar’s flying infantry, engaging them at short to medium range while her mechs hammered the protomechs zipping about the streets trying to pick off the Calavari and now Star Force infantry. They did their part, she did hers, and the skeets zipping over the city did theirs as they worked through the captured sections of the Calavari metropolis, reclaiming building after building and saving a lot of the Calavari hiding inside.
But for every one they saved, 10 more lay dead on the streets or in the hallways, making it ever more evident that the Calavari were losing this war, one way or another, and that Operation Conduit might very well end up being the only way to save their race if the Alliance wasn’t able to find a way to cut the legs out from under the Nestafar invasion.
Though Taryn didn’t know it, nor would know it for some years to come, the Bsidd, Kvash, and Hycre were planning just such an assault on one of the Nestafar homeworlds in conjunction with the Elarioni, who were giving them all the intel they needed on their former ally.
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"The Imperial March"
