Star Force: Empire (SF58)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  It was the anti-grav that they needed to maneuver, not the air, and this far above the planet the angles were all wrong. He could fly his Valerie through space, but not at combat speeds given the lack of necessary lateral tug that being on the surface provided. That, and if he got shot down he’d suffocate to death if the canopy was breached or someone didn’t get to him in time.

  Thoughts of getting into the action in some way were pounding through his head as the panel that would show deployment orders was annoyingly blank, but then his attention was taken fully back to the battlemap as a huge target manifested itself on sensors, with him recognizing it as a lizard assault pillar. That meant they were going after the Sentinels before Star Force could get any more here, which was a wise play because a few more with overlapping firing arcs would make it almost impossible for the lizards to reclaim orbit.

  A moment later a second jumppoint, one not originating from the star, began spewing more ships. They too were lizard cruisers, so many that Uxtral couldn’t visually count, but with them came another large ship, this one an invoker that was headed not towards the Sentinels but towards the cluster of Calavari ships parked in orbit…including the one that he was sitting inside.

  “Damn it, let us go!” he yelled to no one inside his cockpit, smacking the armored canopy over his head in frustration. The navy was going to have its hands full dealing with that beast, and there was nothing he could do about it sitting in here so they might as well let them head on down to the planet where they could do some good, otherwise they’d just be target practice in here or their quarters.

  The Calavari’s frustration turned to dread as another target at the first jumppoint materialized on sensors, with this being a second assault pillar amongst even more waves of cruisers.

  “What the hell is going on?” he said angrily, knowing that they should have had some ships covering the star. It took some doing, but he adjusted the battlemap to give him the lag-delayed data from stellar orbit and his jaw dropped when he saw how many enemy jumpships there were. No more incoming arrivals were being logged, but there were far more than he’d expected the enemy to have available to counter attack with, especially after only 3 weeks.

  The Calavari ships that had been there were gone, but a quick check of stats indicated that they had redeployed elsewhere rather than stay and get destroyed…which was smart. With the two Sentinels up and running this was going to be a good fight that could go either way, but regardless of who came out on top Uxtral’s fleet was going to get trashed in the process.

  But so be it. The fight was here and the more lizards they killed…

  Then the Calavari pilot saw the other large contacts sitting around the star as they waited their turn in the long lines heading to multiple jumppoints. There were three more assault pillars on the way, plus a second invoker.

  So much for the lizards poking around and experimenting. The Calavari had wanted to hit them hard, and it looked like they were counterpunching in the same fashion. Uxtral figured the ground assault was now permanently off, with his transport and others probably going to evacuate the system while the navy played with the enemy for a while. They weren’t going to waste two Sentinels, but he didn’t think there was much of a chance of them winning out, despite their range advantage with the cleansing beams.

  The lizard cruisers could compensate for that by running ahead and screening for the bigger ships, and if more than one assault pillar targeted a Sentinel at the same time it was unlikely that both could be taken down before it was taken out. Add in the invokers that would rip apart any drone warships that got within short weapons range, meaning their maulers and talon cannons were going to be useless against them.

  Just as Uxtral was mentally calculating the strategic advantages that the lizards had his display lit up with a countdown just before his transport made a microjump down into low orbit. He was so confused that he didn’t register the deployment orders for several seconds, then blinked away invisible haze over his eyes as he confirmed that it was telling him that they were going to drop into the atmosphere and clear the way for the troop transports to land.

  Battlemap data was shunted his way showing swarms of wisps near the target area and part of his mind immediately flipped into combat mode while the rest was screaming out in panic, knowing that their naval fleet was about to get their ass kicked.

  He didn’t know what his commanders were thinking, but he wanted to trust them…he just had no idea what angle they could possibly be playing with all of this.

  Uxtral was ready to fight though, and with the countdown ticking off the seconds until they were in position for release he committed himself to his part while hoping this whole thing didn’t turn into a bloody mess. A few seconds later that bad feeling reversed itself as a rare but familiar sound played out into his cockpit and every other cockpit and control station throughout the Calavari fleet as more incoming jumps were registered on the battlemap.

  These weren’t lizard though, they were mainline Star Force coming out of odd and difficult jumplines directly into ganking positions, and they were broadcasting the Imperial March as both reassurance that they had the Calavari’s back and a massive middle finger towards the enemy that was receiving the same battle song on open broadcast.

  Uxtral should have had more faith, and he kicked himself for not counting on the Archons to have everything covered as the bay doors opened and his countdown expired. Without hesitation he launched his Valerie into space and put it into an easy dive down into the upper atmosphere along with the others in his squadron and the squadrons pacing them. He had new worries to deal with now, but before he got within the fog of war and focused entirely on the enemy wisps he glanced back at the battlemap, which still included the stellar orbit data…and he saw a flurry of Star Force icons there, hitting the lizard jumpships where they were lightly defended.

  The Calavari gritted his teeth in both excitement and a swell of pride seeing that this was going to be a hard win, but they were going to own the enemy so long as no one screwed up and he was going to make sure he didn’t.

  Dismissing the extraneous battlemap displays he brought the local up to full size and got a feel for where his squadron was and how the enemy was moving below them as they kept to their nose dive, intent on hitting them from above as the lizard fighter swarm spread out like bees below. This was not going to be easy, but they had Valeries and Star Force training, and it was time to give the enemy another lesson on why both were superior.

  9

  September 3, 2652

  Iona System (Beta Region)

  Kirit

  Fatti had a decision to make, and a big one. The Kiritas stood in front of a display screen in his maturia quarters, two days from leaving and still he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had graduated a day ago and was now ready to transition into his ‘real’ life, but until he chose what his path would be they couldn’t assign him new quarters or travel plans.

  He had two more days before he’d automatically be punted into the general population, which was a fair option. No responsibilities and an unlimited amount of time to decide what he wanted to do…or to just kick back, relax, and do nothing. That sounded horrible to him, for the Kiritas had so much energy that downtime was literally the worst thing possible. He wasn’t going civie, and like most other Kiritas he was going to find at least something he could do to keep himself busy and help out either his race or Star Force.

  He wasn’t entering the general ADZ population independently, he knew. That didn’t appeal to him. He wanted to remain somewhere within Star Force and had a lot of options to choose from, though all of them required a lot more training to qualify for. He could stay local and find some support task to help out with, ranging from personnel relations to maintenance, but that seemed a bit too low energy. He wanted something bigger.

  On the screen in front of him was a list of all the options available to him, and he’d been running through it for the past 4 hours, pacing bac
k and forth as he thought and weighed his options. In general there were 3 basic paths available to him, and that was stay with the Kiritas, go into Axius, or become Kiritak. Axius wasn’t some place that Kiritas went unless they wanted to get away from everyone else, and while there were a handful making use of themselves there most of the stories he’d heard were that they’d gone civie and essentially given up on Star Force.

  That wasn’t for him, which left the two main options every Kiritas had. Work as part of the semi-independent Kiritas empire, into which he had been hatched, or transfer over to the Kiritak that had no independence and directly served Star Force as a massive workforce. The Kiritak reproduced on their own too, with their population being far larger than the Kiritas, but some of them didn’t want to stay and came over to Kirit or one of their colonies to take a different path. Nobody was locked in to where they began and there was a lot of swapping back and forth, sometimes with the same person changing more than once during their life.

  For the Kiritas, they were fervently loyal to Star Force, for in their distant history it had been the Humans that had saved their planet and race from starvation and utter collapse, but more than that they had taught them a better way to live and had guided them through stages of advancement that had led them to colonize multiple star systems within the ADZ…something that was totally beyond his ancestors, who only had Kirit when the Humans first came to them.

  The Kiritas were building and expanding along a plan that Star Force had set out for them, which everyone knew of from their maturia training. They were meant to be a home guard and resource production carry while other portions of Star Force focused on tech development, exploration, and combat. Kiritas troops and ships were rarely ever called upon for frontline duty, with their purpose being to defend their own worlds and be in a position to reinforce others if things went bad and the front was lost. To date that hadn’t happened, and a lot of Kiritas didn’t like sitting back and waiting while others did the fighting, but faithful as they were they followed the plan and so far it seemed the Humans knew what they were doing, as always.

  While the Kiritas kept to their own systems and were continuously developing them into outright marvels of engineering capable of holding an insane number of people in a workable and comfortable environment, the Kiritak were the exact opposite and scattered across the ADZ. They had no civilian population and were all business, doing various tasks for Star Force that heavily fell into the resource collection and processing categories. Entire Kiritak colonies were established for no other reason than to mine and ship the materials collected off to other parts of the empire for use, while other colonies were industrial-based and used those materials to make parts and products that were likewise feeding the rest of Star Force, not to mention foodstuff production.

  But more than that, the Kiritak were also heavily merged with mainline Star Force activities, not in terms of military, but the cargo naval fleet. The Kiritak had their own fleets built for the express purpose of shuttling resources to and from their colonies, but even the massive cargo freighter jumpships that had no contact with those colonies were seeing a good portion of their crews being made up of Kiritak. It was a mix, with Humans always involved, but no other race had such a presence in the mainline operations of Star Force as the Kiritak did, and that was a note of pride that interested Fatti greatly.

  But making it onto one of those crews would be a long process full of training and competing against others for who had the highest marks. Only the best got to crew with the Humans, and he knew that 4 jumpships even had Kiritak Captains, who were literally a legend to all Kiritas. If Fatti wanted to go that route there was no guarantee he would make it, and to be honest he wanted to start making contributions now rather than later.

  The Kiritak also had a military division, which was used as security for their various colonies. Those had seen more action than the Kiritas military had, but only through combat with the Skarrons during the initial invasion…during which most of them died fighting. That wasn’t the case anymore, and like the Kiritas they were merely homeguard protecting the valuable resource collection infrastructure upon which Star Force depended, but they too were elite and required years of training and competition to rise to a level to earn those positions.

  Fatti wanted the notoriety of a military unit, but feared he’d be bored just sitting and waiting for a fight that might never come. Crewing on a cargo ship meant he’d be contributing on a daily basis, which was more to his liking, but it would take so long to earn a slot that he reluctantly pushed that option aside as well. That left a slew of possibilities that were less visible, but none the less important, and he stopped his pacing once again to run down the list that he’d practically memorized by now.

  He’d had enough waiting and thinking and otherwise boredom and told himself he was going to pick and pick now so he could get going, so he ran through field after field, ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10, then going back and eliminating everything below a 6 on a datapad he had nearby. Then he went through the remaining list, weighing the advantages and difficulties of those before him and ranking them again, eliminating the bottom tier and repeating the process.

  Fatti kept it up, feeling reckless but knowing he had to make a choice for there was no one area that stood out beyond the rest. Eventually he narrowed the long list down to five options, then found himself stuck as to how to eliminate another. All were quick routes, which employed huge numbers of people in a massive workforce and required less than 2 years of additional training beyond what he already had in the maturia…and as he looked at the list he realized all 5 were in the Kiritak rather than his native Kiritas.

  Well that bit was decided, at least, but he still wasn’t sure how to choose between the 5. The first two were mining related, with one being a vehicle pilot and the other being a cargo loader. They were simple tasks but very important to keep the flow of materials moving, and they needed lots of them, meaning the competition for those slots wasn’t as fierce as it was for others, though he’d still have to prove himself once his training was complete. If not he’d stay in training until his skills rose to a level where he could earn a slot.

  That was why he didn’t want to go naval, for he could be stuck in training for the next 50 years. The other 3 options he had on his short list were also movement related, with a bioharvest loader, warehouse loader, and an aquatic terminal loader having caught his attention. The last one was the rarest, with some aquatic mining colonies sending trains of resources up the sea floor to the coast where they were held in a depot for ground or air transport to other locations on the planet.

  Being that it was rarer than the others Fatti reluctantly crossed it off, knowing he needed something that was widespread and easily accessible if he was to maximize his chances of earning a slot. With that in mind he also nixed the pilot, figuring there would be less craft available than crates to move, leaving him with three choices…all of which were nearly identical.

  He went back to pacing again, glad to be near to a decision but still stuck. Eventually he just said to hell with it and chose one at random, imputing the numbers 1, 2, and 3 into his datapad and having the randomized function choose one…with it spitting out #2.

  That was the bioharvest loader, which would have him moving crates of foodstuffs, either grain or finished products, between segments of the transportation grid, be it from rail to dropship or from hovertruck to warehouse. The position didn’t specify, which was why it had such a large number of open slots which were literally being updated with every transmission that came through the relay grid and he could see the numbers changing on his screen. With every slot filled they’d decrease, then new batches of openings would become available and the number would rise again.

  At present, there were 1.6 million slots available, though only yesterday there had been 1.4 and two weeks ago when he’d been lightly perusing the numbers while going through his final graduation challenges there had been 1.7 million. That me
ant there was an insane amount of transition going on, but with a population in the trillions that was to be expected.

  Fatti couldn’t petition for one of those slots now, for first he had to go through the proper training. To accomplish that he needed a slot in a higher level maturia, and a Kiritak one at that. Using his terminal he put in the request and got an acceptance message within 3 seconds, followed by deployment orders within the hour.

  Feeling the excitement and relief at finally being on the move again he packed up the few belongings he had and headed out of the maturia to the spaceport indicated, hop/walking through the Kiritas crowds with his little duffle over his shoulder and mentally saying goodbye to the planet that had always been his home. He’d never been offworld before, but now he was headed for a Kiritak colony in Alpha Region, clear on the other side of the Human Core systems.

  Most of his peers that he’d gone through maturia training with were already gone elsewhere, with about 15% remaining that would graduate soon, so it was time to move on and he was glad to be doing so in such a wild fashion. Transitioning to the Kiritak was going to take him farther away than any of the home colonies and he liked that. More to do and see and less chance for boredom.

  When he got to a transit terminal he hopped inside and road a subsurface tram over to the spaceport and came out directly underneath it along with a lot of other soon to be passengers, most of which carried duffles like him. They didn’t talk, for the most part, but exchanged glances and understood that they were all in a similar position and heading out for new assignments.

  He had a nav beacon on his wristbound comm/datapad that led him to the check-in point where he was given his dropship ID and departure time, with him having to wait only half an hour before it came in through the open ceiling doors and landed next to some 50 others. He and a large group boarded it and took their seats, then were flown up to orbit and deposited on a jumpship. Fatti was led to temporary quarters and left there on what would be more than a month’s journey across the ADZ.