by Aer-ki Jyr
Ahead the Trinx started to waver like heat waves on a sunny day. Veronica pulled her pistol out and put another shot into him, cancelling the effect and returning him to full visibility. Apparently their stealth suits had a recharge delay and every shot she’d put into it had kept him visible.
The Knight put the pistol back into its slot on her lower back, knowing she wasn’t going to need it but wanted her hands free. The movement cost her a little bit of speed, but some twenty seconds later, running down the incredibly long hall, she caught up to and grabbed one of the headtails with her left hand and yanked…
The Trinx tripped, falling backwards and skidding across the ground as Veronica came down on top of him with her knee and pinned him to the floor, pounding on his armored face with her fists even before the pair had ground to halt. A few more heavy punches and his helmet cracked, with her reaching down to the neck and yanking it off his head. As she did so he got a shot off into her abdomen, but she knocked his gun out of his hand with a simple swat as she pulled out her pistol and put it up against the Trinx’s head.
Two quick shots and he was gone, with the Knight getting to her feet and kicking the corpse once out of frustration before running off to rejoin the others as more and more clankers poured into the ship from access points that the defenders couldn’t fight their way to in order to close off.
Nefron followed a tech as he lead him to the waypoint that the troops were using just outside the armored core where there were other techs and ships’ crew that weren’t needed in the naval battle that were forming a backup line of defense in case the Trinx got all the way to the interior. The Chixzon passed them by, following the faint telepathic signals ahead as he ran towards them. There was a lot of ship to move through that he was unfamiliar with, but it didn’t take long until he came up behind one position that had a handful of commandos and a Knight taking on what looked like a much larger group of the Trinx machines that were trying to push their way to the ship’s interior.
The Chixzon’s eyes glowed green as he growled and ran straight towards them, curiously noting that they didn’t fire on him as he pushed past one commando’s sniping position and went head first into the machines, digging both glowing spike mandibles into the chest of one, then throwing it backwards and knocking down another as he spun around and started punching and stabbing everything in view as a burst of energy hit him.
Most of it absorbed, but he could tell it wasn’t damaging, but rather a stun. Immediately he knew what that meant.
The Trinx didn’t just want this ship, they want him…and they wanted him alive.
With a snarl he pushed further into the machines, digging his glowing spikes through them and melting cuts across their limbs and torsos as more and more of the stuns hit him. He was starting to get wobbly, but they obviously didn’t know of his ability to absorb energy. When he felt like he’d gotten enough he tucked his spikes in against his back and pushed through the thick lines of machines, essentially delivering himself to them as he got some distance away from the Humans fighting behind them.
His right leg gave out as it suddenly got wobbly, then when he hit the deck with his knee he released his built up energy in a cascade of lightning strikes that arced from one machine to another for a few jumps. Half a dozen of them fell to the ground toasty, with a few more smoking with damage but still active. One tried to shoot at him but found its weapon wasn’t working, then Nefron put it out of its simulated misery with a pair of spikes to the chest that he dragged to the right, partially cutting through the dense plates but also pulling the machine to the side enough that it knocked another one down as he used a handhold to give himself the extra leverage needed to topple it.
He pried his spikes out with ease then leapt backwards, jumping over a fallen machine as he retreated before he could take too many stun hits. The machines all followed him and he led them back into a hastily constructed ambush that ended with him staggering and falling to the ground where he blacked out for the last few seconds.
A Knight’s helmet was the next thing he saw when he woke back up, then when his eyes locked on it a massive hand pushed beneath his back and sat him up.
“They have orders to go after you,” Veronica said.
“It appears so,” he said, looking into her helmet. “We can use that.”
“How many more hits can you take?”
“I’m purging the stun already.”
“Good, because we’ve got about 20 seconds. Run or fight?”
“Run. I need a couple minutes at best,” he said, getting to his feet. “Then we can go at them.”
“Watch where you point those things,” she said, gesturing to his spike mandibles as she pulled him up into a run with the commandos forming a protective screen around the Chixzon as the sound of the incoming machines was getting louder coming from around a corner 20 meters further down the hall.
Leaving the Admiral in charge of what weaponry still worked, Riley stepped into his armor that he’d had a crewmember fetch for him during the battle and ran off the bridge, sprinting through the hallways on his way out to the battle within the ship. More and more Trinx reinforcements were getting in, but they were paying a heavy price to do it. For every ship that offloaded ten more were destroyed before they could get into position. Paul had the situation about 8 minutes from turning as he drove several tendrils of ships into a wide grasp around the Zeus and the ships battling within it, and once he did he could cut off most of their reinforcements. Until then the battle raged on at a furious pace with the 7 allied races holding up to the promise and fighting just as savagely as the Trinx were to defend his command ship.
There wasn’t a lot he could do from the bridge now, but there was a lot he could do to keep the Trinx troops from getting to the transmitter and his crew. It wasn’t until he was almost to the fighting did he realize that Nefron was out there as well and he almost cussed the idiot out, but just as quickly canceled that thought. There wasn’t a full ground troops compliment on the ship, only a handful of security and naval Archons that were suiting up and leaving what ship to ship combat remained to the naval regulars.
Nefron could fight, so it was probably a good idea he was throwing in too…unless he got killed, in which case the Uriti was suddenly going to become a huge problem all over again.
Knowing that, he headed for where he was sensing his telepathic presence but ran into an unopposed column of Trinx vassals heading down a hallway towards him. The ViLord didn’t even hesitate as they opened fire, simply letting his shields take a few hits as he sprinted at full speed towards them. When he got within a few meters he summoned up a Jumat blast in his right arm, pooling it around the his armor and building up the charge before releasing it…and tossing half the column back and into the air as if they were toys.
Then he was in their midst, fighting hand to hand with the bigger machines and finding it easier to damage them with brute force than weaponsfire. After a few shots from his rifle he tossed it aside and exclusively went at them with his arms, legs, and psionics. After a few minutes of one sided combat he finished the last pair of vassals by telekinetically ripping their heads off and throwing a point blank Jumat blast down inside one of them and tossing the other into the side wall. When it slumped to the ground an armored elbow drove into a crack in the chest plate and punctured through, with his fist soon to follow and a piñata bloom of shrapnel soon after that.
Riley was expending his energy too fast, he knew, but there was no time to waste. Sucking some ambrosia from his helmet he ran on towards Nefron’s mental signature, hoping that there weren’t many more of these unopposed Trinx assault teams heading for the core of the ship.
Onboard the Excalibur, Paul’s face was covered in sweat as he stood in the nexus overextending himself in order to control as many ship functions as he could throughout the drone fleet while orchestrating the entire battle simultaneously. Riley was in trouble, and couldn’t run so long as the Trinx kept blanketing his ship’s hull
with that IDF coating. It was obvious that they wanted to capture it, but Paul had no doubt that destroying it was the backup plan and he needed to end their stranglehold on the perimeter as soon as possible.
That wasn’t easy, given that this was actually a fair fight. The Trinx had brought a ship count in the tens of thousands that Paul hadn’t had the time to tally up or to ask the combat computer to do so for him. More were still coming in from behind the star where they’d been hiding, but it was those immediately around the Zeus that were the concern and those nearly upon them. Paul had to intercept those reinforcements and block them off, but the Trinx were fighting him hard on that and attacking his drones as much as they were trying to blow by them.
He was gaining ground though, but it wasn’t fast enough. Already there ships boarding the Zeus through 16 different breach points in the hull, and no matter how fast Paul’s ships destroyed them more would come in while others would block the firing lines and make him destroy them first before he could get to the boarding ships.
The allies were helping, but they were incredibly disorganized and it was frustrating to Paul, for had he been able to give them orders this situation would have been resolved by now. They fought as individual ships or sometimes units, but they were not coordinated even within their own race. This battle was so large and chaotic that the only thing that was holding together the allies was Paul’s efforts and the precise coordination of the drone fleet. Paul’s people knew how to integrate with his orders and take a lot of the effort off him, but there was so many adjustments to make to compensate for their allies and the actions of the Trinx that Paul was stretching himself beyond his previous limits. He’d never gone this deep in training, nor did he have time to consider why or how or anything else.
Every second was consumed with fighting and had a new enemy showed up behind them he would have been blindsided, for his focus was on the Zeus and everything radiating out beyond it. He couldn’t spare a glance at the star or anywhere else…not when his brother’s life was on the line, not to mention Nefron and the only hope to control the Uriti.
Paul didn’t even have time to mentally curse the Trinx. Everything he had was poured into maneuvering and fighting his ships to aid the Zeus and cover for the chaotic actions of their allies in order to make use of them, and it wasn’t an effort he could keep up forever.
10
Nia-11917 stood in the nexus onboard a Warship-class jumpship overseeing the drones that it had launched in conjunction with Paul’s overall command. He was micromanaging so much that she was filling in on lower level duties wherever she could to assist him but could see that time was running out. Making the decision to override the trailblazer, she relinquished all drones to him and the remote pilots but took direct control over the jumpship and powered down all weapons, channeling as much power as she could into the shields and rammed the Trinx ship ahead.
It was a low level impact, with the much larger jumpship pushing it aside before the forward shields collapsed. Nia then drove the ship into another, and another, and another…battering her way through the blocking ships and doing monstrous damage to the front of the warship. The bloon launcher was destroyed, along with most of the forward weaponry, and crew were being evacuated from the forward regions as she drove the ship on towards the Zeus, sometimes having to avoid allied ships that were getting in the way.
Eventually she got to the command ship, her own taking heavy fire and the crew evacuating to bunkers within the ship as the outer levels got vaporized with numerous weapon strikes. The drones the ship were controlling were diverted to other remote pilots as the massive ship continued to break apart as it flew into position over top the command ship and sunk down against it, crushing two docked Trinx vessels even as chunks of the jumpship flew off as it was now being heavily targeted.
But Nia kept it there, physically blocking a large section of the command ship’s hull with its own and giving Paul a naval pick to work off of without bothering to communicate that to him and distract him further. She knew he’d see what she’d done and make use of it, and if one ship was going to be destroyed better it be the jumpship than the command ship, for it and it alone had the ability to control the Uriti…and it had a trailblazer onboard.
A minute later an explosion broke through to the bridge, a small one, but the crew stayed at their posts knowing that there was no better armed section of the ship to retreat into. They did pull back from the breach point as Nia analyzed the damage within the ship and quickly came up with an escape route to buy them time. She mentally connected to them all and told them to leave via a specific door and travel deeper into the part of the ship that had the least damage while she stayed behind in the nexus.
Some of them resisted, but there was nothing left for them to do here and ultimately they decided to trust her, fleeing the armored cocoon of the bridge as it began to fail and running through less safe corridors that had not yet come under weapon hits.
Nia stayed put and linked to the ship’s systems, guiding them remotely along with the rest of the crew to try and keep them as safe as possible, noticing that within another minute there were four more jumpships doing the same thing and barreling through the enemy fleet. Breaking apart under weapons fire, they clustered around the Zeus, using their dying mass as a shield and crunching the attached docked vessels while blocking the boarding points against further incursions.
It wasn’t typical Star Force strategy, but the Zeus had been caught off guard and the Archons were improvising, which instilled a swell of pride in Nia as she saw the enemy thwarted even as the bridge wall next to her blew out and knocked her aside.
Paul didn’t like what those jumpships were doing, but he was grateful for it. The drones simply didn’t have the mass to force their way through the Trinx ships and the growing debris field, but they did. It was costing them badly, but they’d made it all the way in to the Zeus and they were not going to be easily removed. Even as dead ships they were now blocking attacks or boarding attempts onto Riley’s ship and the only way to get them out of the way was to blast them into oblivion or push them aside.
The Trinx couldn’t get enough ships into position to do either, meaning those jumpships had just succeeded in blocking off most of the incoming troop transports and their escorts from the command ship. With Paul’s vice grip tightening around the area even the Trinx saw that their attempts to capture the ship were going to fail, so they stopped trying to preserve the command ship and fired on every piece of it that was visible through the gaps between the jumpships.
Paul moved as many drones into position as he could, but it wasn’t enough. He just didn’t have them in close enough yet, but the allied fleets did and they physically moved in and took the hits, forming a spherical wall around the Zeus even as the Trinx were shooting them up and ramming some of them to open up holes.
Paul had been in many battles against the lizards that had a greater level of carnage than this, but none of them had ever been focused as intently on a single point as now, making the area around the Zeus so chaotic and destructive that it surpassed any battle he had ever been part of…but after several long minutes the internecine suddenly disappeared.
The weaponsfire between both sides was so intense that when Paul finally cut off most of the Trinx reinforcements, those inside the perimeter died off quite fast and had few left to replace them. That allowed the allied fleet to hammer those that were getting past Paul’s blocking tendrils, at which point the perimeter around the Zeus was temporarily secured and the trailblazer kept maneuvering drones every which way to harden that defense.
The Trinx hammered the outside of his lines trying to get in and did not relent. For hours to come they attacked, regardless of whether it looked like they were going to get to the Zeus, and both they and the allied fleet decimated one another. They tore each other apart with such frenzy and zeal that by the time the last few Trinx ships late getting to the party turned and ran to report back to their leaders what had
happened here, there were few allied ships still alive. The Chamra, the Sety, the Dati, the Domu, the Jonstar, the Bpret, and the Breti…their immense fleets that had been tracking the Hamoriti from system to system and keeping its minions contained…were all but destroyed.
Paul relinquished as much responsibility for the fleet as he could, feeling his head hurt with the release as he took in the strategic picture without having to micromanage. The Zeus was buried at the heart of a massive debris field with half destroyed ships floating within it and stranding surviving crews. The few surviving allied ships were disorganized, moving around aimlessly or holding position not knowing what to do. Their command and control, what little of it had survived the chaos of the engagement, had been utterly destroyed.
Most of the Star Force drones were gone. Paul saw that only 8% remained operational and another 2% were responding to control signals but had most of their functionality missing. The jumpships, however, were mostly intact. Some badly damaged, and excluding those that had gone to interpose themselves around the Zeus, their crews were still alive and they still had engine power. The Excalibur was beat up as well, with some 60% of its weaponry offline and big chunks of the hull missing, but it was still combat capable though currently stuck inside a debris field that was going to take some time and some regenerated shields to work its way out through.
Rescue efforts were going to be a nightmare, so Paul laid down the operating rules and communicated that information to all the jumpship captains, then left his Admiral in charge of the overall effort before his head collapsed. Right before he released his link to the nexus he saw the Uriti still sitting where it had been told to, either oblivious to the combat or not caring. It was the reason for this carnage, yet it had been unaffected entirely. Neither side would go near it with their ships, leaving it perfectly pristine, and something about that just felt wrong.
