by Aer-ki Jyr
Now they were low hills of jagged debris, most of it being bedrock covered with dirt, grass, and ash. If he stayed low it would hide him from the V’kit’no’sat evac point to the south where drop pods were assembling and the troops were returning to, but one Ardent beam hit the wall behind him and traced along it, using a lower power mode that allowed it to be almost continuous. It blew out the wall in both directions as if taking an orbital eraser to it, creating a blast wave that traveled from north to south and hit Nathan after scrawling past his position.
Luckily his armor took the brunt of it, but he was accelerated so fast by the impact that he lost his reference points, even with Pefbar active, and went tumbling along with the debris until he landed somewhere unable to move and with damage indicators flashing in his helmet telling him his shields were gone and there were multiple breach points on the back of his legs, the pain from which he could already feel.
He didn’t struggle, holding still and playing dead as he used his Kgat to shield his mind. Hopefully any V’kit’no’sat that might have seen him would think he was gone and they’d have no reason to bombard outside the city. So he just needed to lay low and hope no one would notice him, wherever he was.
He used his Pefbar to look around and discovered that he was in a bank of mud along with several chunks of wall upside down…and completely buried. There was at least 2 meters of debris over top of his feet and he was going to have to do something about that before his oxygen ran out.
But at least he was still alive. And he doubted any of his Bsidd had made it to safety within the city unless they happened to be in a lucky position underneath some debris while the bombardment continued to fall. Even as his legs hurt he tried to check the battlemap, but it either wasn’t functioning or his armor’s receptors had been damaged. A quick check confirmed the latter, meaning he was cut off from the rest of Star Force.
But maybe that was a good thing right now. He made sure to shut down his locator, just in case it was somewhat functional, then turned his attention to his body. Using his Pefbar and Haemra, he discovered shards of debris in his legs. Some of it was broken armor, other pieces were probably from the wall but it was hard to determine. Unable to numb himself as he would have someone else he was working on, he used his Lachka to slowly pull the pieces of debris back through their entry points and nearly bit his tongue in the process.
He clamped down on his teeth to make sure that didn’t happen as he flinched several more times as he dragged the fragments out, flash healing key bits of flesh as he tried to minimize his blood loss. Thankfully the thicker armor on his back and head had held up and the debris didn’t penetrate, but it was stuck into his armor on some places making him look like a porcupine, though no one could see him buried under all the dirt…unless a V’kit’no’sat came by looking with Pefbar or sensors. He needed to hide himself from Pefbar as well, but he had to use it now to see inside his own legs as he was fully encased in the dirt.
If he didn’t have psionics he’d have been in a world of trouble, but might have been able to dig himself out by sheer muscle strength. Fortunately Nathan had other options, but right now his injuries took precedence and he was focusing on getting his legs clear of debris before he even bothered with the ringing in his head from the concussion he’d suffered.
The healing didn’t go as fast as he’d liked. His Haemra and his passive Uzti took what would have been weeks of healing and compressed it down into a few minutes, but he was already partially exhausted from the hours of fighting beforehand and every drop of blood he lost was going to make him weaker still.
He didn’t have any supplies with him, for they were fighting on home turf and his pack was empty save for a few ammo packets. Healing required material for new tissue to be formed that he was pulling out of his bloodstream and other parts of his body. Nathan could do that a lot, but not forever without killing himself in the process. Fortunately these injuries, while bad, didn’t take a lot of material to heal and neither did his head, but the weakness in his body would only increase until he got food and water in him to replace what he’d lost.
Right now he’d just have to make do, and as the skin on his legs healed over he abandoned the last bit of healing and focused on his telekinesis as he compressed the dirt above him in select places to create two small tubes all the way up to the surface. Thankfully the dirt wasn’t too hard and he got his breathing ties up and operating, with him using telekinetic plates to pull air down one tube and shoot it up the other as he pushed out a small chamber around his buried helmet’s filter plate as his armor’s oxygen backup began to replenish.
Or at least that was the plan, but after a few minutes Nathan saw it wasn’t happening. Damage, he assumed, that wasn’t showing up on diagnostics…for the diagnostic equipment was probably damaged as well. He must have taken a harder hit than he thought to get his armor messed up that badly, but as long as he had his air tubes he didn’t need to worry about suffocating.
Getting shot was the foremost worry on his mind, but he had no knowledge of what was happening outside other than the range of his Pefbar bubble that showed only the edge of a blast crater that he was buried in. He couldn’t see the wall or city, or rather what was left of it, but the constant rumbles he could feel through the ground every time weaponsfire hit and exploded something.
The sound was nearly constant, and he knew they were chewing up the city in a way that would destroy everything. Erasing it from existence like they had across the Devastation Zone. There were only two more cities left on the planet that were still standing, and they were several hundreds of miles away and not an option for him to get to very fast. He had to wait until the nearby V’kit’no’sat troops left and the bombardment stopped…the latter of which he could at least feel.
Until then he had to play dead. After that…if he made it through the following hours…he was just going to have to make it up as he went, for he had no idea how he was going to get out of this one.
23
August 30, 4814
Antelin System
Havi
Paul’s fleet had grown substantially after chasing the V’kit’no’sat out of the Jennizeren System, picking up another smaller Defender fleet that was coming in off the rim as they followed the enemy fleet through several jumps trying to pick off ships. Paul had hoped the V’kit’no’sat would try and stage an ambush, having his ships come in shallow to the jumppoint so they could hopefully catch them out, but for some reason they were not in a sparring mood and straight running away since they became heavily outgunned with the arrival of The Nexus fleet.
That was atypical, but not unexpected as Paul guessed there was a lot more going on with this invasion than had occurred previously. With the thousands of planets that had been destroyed to make up the Devastation Zone the V’kit’no’sat had used upfront tactics almost the entire time, counting on their tech and size advantage to methodically chip away at Star Force territory while still having inferior numbers.
Now that they were fielding so many more ships than in the past one would expect them to do the same thing only more forcefully so…but that wasn’t what was happening. Whoever this new commander was didn’t have an ego to prove and was fighting in a way that suggested guile and superior intelligence. He wasn’t underestimating Star Force, but he was expecting to win and have them dance to his tune. Paul could feel it, but didn’t quite have enough of a sense of what was going on to be able to anticipate the next move.
The fleet he was following kept running, with Paul having to veer off and head towards the nearest invaded system. He couldn’t waste time in transit while other planets were falling, so when he arrived in the Antelin System he came in hard, attacking with the first few ships out of the jumppoint along with what was left of the system defense fleet. That made the V’kit’no’sat feel they had an advantage and they accepted the combat, meeting just beyond the second of two inhabited planets while splitting their fleet and leaving some to cover the gro
und assault on Tabo.
The V’kit’no’sat fleet had moved over the second planet before even a third of Tabo had fallen, but they’d done it to keep the Star Force fleet there and not helping the other world…for if they did, the V’kit’no’sat would easily have enough firepower to poke a hole in Havi’s shields and start the second invasion early.
This was a system that had been hit fresh by the second wave, meaning there was no roaming fleet here to help and Antelin was at a serious disadvantage. Both planets had considerable planetary shields, but nowhere near as strong as Requiem had. Star Force defense policy had all systems gradually upgrading and adding additional shield generators, but a planet was so huge that getting a very thick defense covering all of it was not as easy as it sounded around every inhabited world.
That was why Paul was a bit surprised they went after the Karthus System, for it required a lot more ships than they’d sent to Antelin to pound through the shield to get a ground assault started. They’d sent far less ships here, but they were still more than needed. The V’kit’no’sat had done their recon work well, and Paul wondered exactly where they had gotten their information from. Was it from stealth ships navigating into Star Force territory using the Ghostbane sensor to avoid contact or had they actually hacked the relay network?
There were other options as well, possibly getting information out of others who had passed through Star Force territory, but figuring out shield strength was not as easy as counting shield generators, and a lot of them were not visible from the surface for that very purpose.
Whatever their methods, they’d brought the right sized fleets to every system that Paul had seen battle data on, but right now, after some heavy but necessary losses by Star Force to keep the V’kit’no’sat here, Paul kept bringing in more drone fleets and gradually surrounded the V’kit’no’sat who thought they were still going to win.
Then the higher massed Nexus ships started to come out of the jumppoint and head straight over to the planet, with the flow of combat shifting as Paul didn’t fight as ravenous an attack as first impressions might have looked. He had his drones cycling very fast, moving in and hitting the enemy but not sticking around very long to get hammered themselves before pulling back so they could recharge shields again and repeat.
Damage was being done to both sides, but it was a stalling game cleverly disguised as Paul got his support drones into position and began grabbing vessels with IDF traps and dampening shield walls to limit the V’kit’no’sat’s movements on the outer edge of the sphere-like formation they were fighting in that forced the Star Force fleet to stretch around it. That meant Paul’s firepower wasn’t concentrated at any significant point, and given the numbers it made the V’kit’no’sat very hard to kill…until The Nexus’s reinforcements began to scale out of control over the following hours. Then it became a death trap that Paul was not going to let them get out of.
It took a long time until the V’kit’no’sat finally realized they’d been duped, for the convoy coming in through the jumppoint still had not ended and the pace of battle was still chewing up ships but not as much as Star Force could have been doing if they’d pressed harder. The V’kit’no’sat commander realized what was coming and his fleet formation changed drastically as it tried to push through a specific spot, taking what losses they needed in order to bully their way through and get into positions where they could make emergency microjumps without ramming into Star Force ships.
Paul was in the command nexus on the Excalibur with his mind pressed to the limit trying to arrange his fleet to deny them jumplines out of the fight, but since they could move in any direction that was difficult, but the support variety of drones had been built to help with this by being able to cover areas far larger than their hulls. The dampener ships deployed shield walls that didn’t stop energy, but would slow physical objects passing through, including enemy ships. With additional firepower standing by, V’kit’no’sat ships got stuck there long enough to get hammered by coordinated fire, plugging up what looked like an escape route with broken ship debris that was only mounting…both from the enemy and Star Force vessels.
Other support ships created zones where gravity drives would not function, but they didn’t actually slow ships. They’d coast right through if they had started moving prior to hitting the field, but if a support ship could drop an IDF over an entire ship when it was sitting still, then it wasn’t going anywhere. If the field only covered part of the ship, the gravity drives within that piece wouldn’t work while the others would, allowing a ship to pull out at lesser speed until they cleared the field.
That was why Paul was having to overlap the IDF fields to fully ensnare some of the ships…and then protect those support ships as the V’kit’no’sat began targeting them first.
All the while more Nexus ships were coming in and adding to the fight, some of which were just as large as the V’kit’no’sat warships. Paul needed to keep them alive regardless of what the Gfatt, Albos, and Meintre had said, so he was using his drones in some kamikaze missions to relieve pressure on them when they began to soak up too much damage, for the V’kit’no’sat seemed to respond to their size and focus their attention on them when they couldn’t find escape routes from the battle.
Eventually some of the V’kit’no’sat vessels managed to escape, but after 22 hours of fighting 96% of their ships were destroyed. Had Paul not engaged them early and waited for his full fleet to gather they would have seen a fight they couldn’t have won and ran like the fleet in Jennizeren, off to fight another day or reinforce another invasion.
But not this fleet. Paul had lost a lot of ships, a good number of them from The Nexus, but over a third of his drones had been destroyed in order to bait and pin the V’kit’no’sat here, but it was worth it to keep that fleet from fleeing…and now the invasion on Tabo had no naval support, for those vessels had joined in the main battle, attacking from the exterior to try and free those pinned inside, and most of them were destroyed in the effort.
Paul had the escapees pursued until they fled the system, leaving the V’kit’no’sat ground troops abandoned yet still gaining ground on the surface. With Star Force in control of the intact shield generators and able to drop them at will, the enemy was going to be open to orbital bombardment and the mobile shields the V’kit’no’sat had couldn’t stand up to the firepower a fleet even a hundredth the size of this one could rain down upon them.
“Attention all V’kit’no’sat forces on Tabo,” Paul said, speaking V’kit’no’sat and transmitting on all their usual frequencies. “Your fleet is destroyed and the surviving ships are being run out of the system. You are getting no reinforcements and my naval guns are going to soon erase you from existence. I am giving you the option of surrender, but not additional time to consider it that you can use to continue to kill more of my people on the ground. If you want to live, disengage and signal your intentions. Silence will mean your imminent deaths.”
Even as he sent the message Paul had his drone fleet moving into position to bombard the sectors where there were enemy troops…but some of them he couldn’t hit because of the Star Force infrastructure they were currently inhabiting. He was going to have to take a lot of his drones down to surface level and shoot from within a few kilometers, and with such a delicate operation he wasn’t going to trust The Nexus ships with that, despite how well they’d fought. The efficiency level wasn’t there, but they were new to using the Star Force battlemap system and he had no complaints for their performance.
But shooting at his own planet was something he was not going to take risks with, so while The Nexus fleet was sent to chase down enemy ships, police debris, and hunt for survivors, he personally handled all the orbital targeting of key areas while letting other naval officers handle the more straightforward bombardment of V’kit’no’sat landing zones and other major groupings where there were no Star Force personnel or key infrastructure.
And as expected, there were no comms discuss
ing terms for surrender. Not a one, in fact, as the ground combat increased. That told Paul they knew they were going to die and wanted to do as much damage as they could…as well as the fact that there were no known relief fleets coming, otherwise they would have tried to stall for time.
So be it then. If they didn’t want to surrender or disengage, then he was going to kill them. Had they been anyone other than the V’kit’no’sat he might have tried to take some prisoner, but with battles across the front and the dangers that they posed with their psionics even when captured, Paul wasn’t going to waste time on them if they weren’t going to willingly comply. He made that known to all his people as well, both in orbit and on the ground, then brought the Excalibur down into the atmosphere along with the drones and added its massive firepower to the extermination efforts along with its shields, which Paul reconfigured to drop down to the surface like giant walls to help protect and herd the V’kit’no’sat where needed.
It was gruesome work, but after the slaughter required during the lizard war Paul knew better than to delay even a minute, for it could mean some more Star Force personnel on the ground would die when they didn’t have to…and as for the mass slaughter he was beginning to unleash, the trailblazer knew he didn’t have any other good options. He’d given the V’kit’no’sat a chance to live and they’d revoked it, just as the lizards had, and he’d been through the mental analysis of such situations so many times before it didn’t take him more than a couple seconds to figure out what had to be done here.
To others that might look like he was bloodthirsty, but anyone who knew Paul’s history would have argued to the contrary. He would have fought all wars with stun weapons if possible, but when your enemy didn’t let you fight that way you either had to take extra burden on yourself to make it happen or fight in ways you’d prefer not to. The V’kit’no’sat were too dangerous to take the burden on his people, which would mean more would die trying to capture them, and if Paul had to choose between the lives of the enemy who would not surrender and the lives of his own people, that was an easy choice.
