Star Force: Endless Crusade

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Having someone else watching your back while you moved and fought was an advantage, but that wasn’t why they’d formed up. They needed the extra shields and armor, for when they finally got up underneath the massive Skarron walker they could see other smaller versions moving alongside it…all of which fired on them and the other Stranoms.

  Bi-tor moved his Voku-style mech forward, blocking for another smaller Stranom behind them as they ran towards one of the legs, firing on it and trying to melt through a single spot, but while the legs looked spindly and easily snapable from a distance they were in fact quite large. Thicker than a level 1 Stranom, with the Voku weaponsfire only chipping away at the sturdy leg material until Bi-tor got up to point blank range and began melting away a great deal more as he grabbed hold of it and held on as it moved, dragging the Stranom along with it.

  Some of the underside turrets shot down on him but the other Stranoms kept the surrounding walkers busy long enough for him to finally burn through enough that the next step snapped the leg off…but the massive walker didn’t go down, for it had many other legs to redistribute its weight to.

  Or rather it had, for there were other combined Stranoms going after more legs, and soon the massive walker stopped moving forward as it tried to fight off the anklebiters. When it couldn’t, the segments began to split apart, allowing those with enough legs to walk off on their own and leaving the damaged sections to fall to the ground where they were easy to destroy if the Voku wanted to stick around and pound them.

  They didn’t. Just taking them to the ground was enough, with Bi-tor leaving the giant target behind and moving on to other moving ones even as its weaponry continued to fire on them. If they could just hold the Skarrons in place it would be a win, but the enemy was constantly rolling forward, albeit slowly at times, meaning this downed walker was going to be out of firing range of the Voku as their side continued to press forward…their success taking it out of the fight until it could get repaired, and so far in this Crusade the Voku hadn’t witnessed any repair work being done during combat. They simply left their damaged and dying troops behind as they pressed the attack, making it clear they felt everything and everyone was expendable.

  Unfortunately, that tactic was a winning one for them…at least as long as their two slave races didn’t turn on them.

  There was zero evidence of that even being considered. However the Skarrons worked their hold over the Aronsic and Jenipars, their loyalty was holding and they were throwing themselves at the Voku and dying by the billions to take Bi-tor’s worlds, and he hated them for it. This wasn’t true combat, this was sloppy, inferior opponents that should not be winning. Their insane numbers were allowing them victories and, damn it all, the Voku couldn’t stop them. At least not yet, and there was no way of knowing how many more were coming.

  Could they hold this fighting retreat from world to world until they ran out of troops? Unlikely, but there was no way to know how many more were out there. The Voku scouts had reported so many approaching fleets that they couldn’t begin to count them all, and even with the Orica Fleet returning and trying to shoot down as many as they could before they could get to Voku worlds there were still far too many getting through. They had delayed the Firewall breach by an additional 2 years, but now the Skarrons were into the homeland and the combat was even messier in cityscapes that had not been fully designed for fighting.

  That was making moving the Stranom from point to point more difficult while the Skarrons were flooding any and all approaches. He was having to stomp through Aronsic as he tried to pull back to another group of Stranoms, even kicking some elite Skarrons in their gleaming armor as they tried to tackle his legs and take the Voku mech down. Fortunately the Stranoms were far more agile than the enemy walkers, but his fell to the ground twice before he fought his way back up to a standing position with Aronsic pouring off the back as they stupidly jumped on his shields trying to use their pathetic mass to hold the Stranom down, but they couldn’t hold on when Bi-tor altered the energy barrier into ‘slick’ form.

  His copilot fired a few shots into them, but there were too many to worry about and Bi-tor was just trying to get them back from the horde…which he was able to do a few minutes later, seeing several Voku infantry units firing from range from the buildings and trying to thin the infinite numbers before they too pulled back.

  Bi-tor wanted to help them, but he knew the walkers were his responsibility and when he arrived at the waypoint he got a signal from a higher ranking Voku to combine again, with three level 2s coming together with 7 level 1s to form a massive Stranom that stood taller than most of the Skarron walkers, but still was shorter than their largest worm-like machines.

  But the weaponry from all the Stranoms was now combined into the arms, with several specialized components that they carried forming 3 complete Stuvjo beam cannons. All three went into the chest, with Bi-tor being given firing control over one of them.

  Suddenly he was able to focus on one thing only as he no longer had to drive the Stranom, and he pointed the firing reticle at one of the Skarron’s mid level walkers and let loose a stream of green/orange energy that punched right through the enemy shields and blasted into the armor that was very useful against plasma, but not the more advanced Voku weaponry.

  Meanwhile the super Stranom was being targeted by so many walkers firing white plasma that it looked like they were in the middle of a snowstorm. They couldn’t take that much incoming firepower continuously, but for now the draining shields were holding and allowing Bi-tor and others to do a massive amount of damage to dozens of walkers in their forward firing arc as they tried to circle around and surround them as the infantry flow finally caught up and swelled like a thin layer of water around the Stranom’s feet. The stupid Aronisc were even firing on it with their pathetic weapons, but every shot would drain the shields a touch, meaning even the infantry getting stomped on were diminishing the amount of time the super Stranom could hold this position.

  Bi-tor didn’t pay much attention to the other weapons aiming down and killing that infantry en mass, for his focus was on the bigger prey his Stuvjo was meant for, but eventually he saw the Stranom turn and began retreating, with his beam cannon shifting from the front torso to the back, allowing him to cover their retreat as they passed through buildings that had once been Voku homes…now reduced to a battlefield with the enemy overrunning them and the walkers punching their thin legs right down through roofs as they walked over or on top of them to get to better firing shots against the giant mech.

  But it wasn’t the only one. As they retreated, Bi-tor saw two other giant Stranoms of similar but not identical size acting as stand-in turrets along with several proper ones built into the city structure. Beyond them was another holding line, and one that wasn’t going to fall so quickly.

  Bi-tor knew it would eventually, but for now it was going to provide cover for his Stranom as it deconstructed from the massive one, with all the smaller versions breaking apart and running behind the defense lines. His was carrying damaged components and shields that were at less than 7%, but all his weapons were intact and he could use them again if he had a chance to recharge his shields.

  That meant he had to pull back while others fought and needed at least a good 12 minutes to get his shields back up fully. Then he’d cycle back to the fighting covering for others as the Voku tried to drag out this battle as long as possible, for the more of their own units and troops they lost, the faster the conquest of the planet would progress…and that would mean the next assault against another system would also come sooner, so every hour they could delay them here was shielding another world.

  And the other worlds were constructing additional defenses as fast as they could, but it never seemed to be enough to hold one against this unending stream of Skarrons and their loyal slaves.

  Another massive Skarron fleet was passing through a system 4 jumps away from the now broken Firewall. Their ships followed a line from one jumppoint 142 d
egrees around the central star to the outgoing one, sharing limited information back and forth during the mundane travel until the ships at the outgoing jumppoint suddenly fell silent. No messages came from them and no shared sensors were being relayed until ships further back in the line began to see with their passive sensors the carnage occurring at the outgoing jumppoint.

  Battle was evident, but they could not identify the ships attacking them. They were not a match for any ships in their extensive database, but it was clear that they were an extremely advanced race for the Skarron warships were exploding on what looked like single hits, though without active sensors it was hard to be sure. Those were being jammed, and soon that jamming extended further back through the line with the Skarron computer systems suddenly freezing up.

  When that happened small ships appeared nearby and fired on them, swinging in and out of the giant Skarron vessels in comparison as they damaged but did not completely destroy them. Rather they were targeting specific points on their hulls that contained communications equipment before the Skarron computers reset and their shields came back up.

  Like pilot fish proceeding the sharks, the individual Zak’de’ron free flew through space in nothing but their personal armor ahead of their nest-like vessels that were killing the Skarron ships so fast they never knew what had hit them. Between the sensor jamming and computer hacking, most of them couldn’t even see their attackers unless they looked out an open hangar bay and saw with their own eyes.

  The few that did saw coils wrapped around each other, some that moved as the ships transformed slightly to bring different weapons to bear or to take the little fliers back onboard. They were firing cutting beams and pulse weapons, the latter of which would hit solid hull and burn through only to explode within, killing most of the smaller Skarron ships in a single blow once the shields were down.

  And those shields were being taken down rapidly by the beam weapons that preceded the knockout blows with such a terrible efficiency that it was almost a beautiful thing to behold. But those few that did, didn’t live to share their vision of that terrible beauty, nor could they transmit what they had seen as the Dragons kept the outgoing jumppoint clogged with dead ships and guardian vessels to insure not a single ship got through as they worked their way back down the line all the way to the entry jumppoint.

  The few ships that tried to flee to other jumppoints were intercepted, and with no means of interstellar communication other than by courier, as long as the Dragons kept them here no word would get out that they existed, and they had thousands of free flying Zak’de’ron working to ensure that as the warships progressed all the way up the line then sat at the incoming jumppoint and took out the Skarron ships still entering the system one at a time.

  Those vessels literally never knew what hit them, save for the few survivors in the pieces that the warships moved to the side and the free flying Dragons finished off after dragging the chunks of ships out of the jumppoint to give the fleet clear firing lines. The survivors on those ships were ended soon thereafter, with the Zak’de’ron fleet staying put until the last of this convoy came through 18 days later.

  When the outflow stopped, the Zak’de’ron ships recovered their free flying brethren then disappeared from view, hiding behind cloaking fields and making their way out of the system by other routes and leaving behind such a massive debris field that no one would even bother trying to clean it up for millennia to come. It would be labeled on various races’ navigational databases as a hindrance akin to an asteroid field and let drift in place, with no one knowing who had caused such massive damage nor caring so long as they didn’t show up again.

  And with so many Skarron fleets about and combat happening in hundreds of locations, the destruction of 458,283 ships would eventually be lost in the enormity of the Crusade, preserving the anonymity of the Zak’de’ron as they ‘quietly’ tried to relieve some of the pressure on Voku territory without their knowledge.

  5

  August 14, 3646

  Poxtrov System (Voku territory)

  Poxtreen

  Bi-tor and 28 other Voku were racing across an open paved plain between two cities, slashing and blasting apart the Aronsic there as they worked their way back towards an enemy landing zone even as a fierce aerial fight was taking place above them and dropping destroyed craft down onto the infantry below. The Voku were not affected, so few in number and agile enough to avoid the crashes, but the Aronsic were so numerous there was literally no place for them to run aside from jumping on top of one another, which didn’t get them far.

  The Voku were tired, very tired, but today was different. They were counterattacking rather than fighting a withering retreat. There wasn’t much of the planet left, and the other two in the system had already fallen, but the long string of Skarron reinforcements that had been coming into the system had suddenly ended. At first they thought it was just a pause, but 5 days had passed with no new entries.

  The fleet in orbit was beyond huge, but the Voku were constantly diminishing their numbers and losing few of their own save for the desperate battles to protect the surface when another shield generator fell. So long as more Skarron reinforcements were arriving to replace the losses it literally didn’t matter how hard the Voku fought…but if there was even a short pause the scales would begin to tip, and they already were in orbit.

  Patches of orbit track were now back on Voku hands, one of which was overtop where Bi-tor was now. Previously they couldn’t have gone this far out because they were no longer under the protective overhang of the planetary shields and from past experience they knew the enemy warships would have no qualms about firing on their own troops if they were able to quickly eliminate Voku units with the same weaponsfire. Mathematically they were correct, for the Voku were so superior they’d end up killing more Skarrons in the long run if they weren’t taken out with orbital bombardment, but that was a cold way to fight and it was clear the Skarrons didn’t care about anything other than winning.

  But now was different, for the Voku had naval cover above them that was fighting to keep the enemy fleet from coming in, and their cover wouldn’t be firing down on the Skarron troops while they were holding position. That meant the ground warfare was on its own now, for however brief a period it would be, and the Voku were more than eager to fight an ‘even’ fight, even though they were still horribly outnumbered. It felt even, if only for the fact that there was a slim chance of victory.

  Bi-tor’s group had pushed far ahead of where the walkers and Stranoms were fighting, and just ahead was a very active landing zone where fresh troops were being brought down from orbit, albeit having to fly overland a long distance to undercut the Voku fleet far overhead that was arrayed to defend against the outlying fleet with very few weapon batteries left to point down. Once the Skarrons had figured that out they’d continued to reinforce the ground troops en mass, but with so many in play they had to organize carefully and keep certain landing zones clear with the Aronsic the Voku were fighting their way through being forced to move away to allow more to debark the transports.

  If those transports could be destroyed on the ground, then this LZ would be obstructed and more troops couldn’t be landed here inside the portable shield generators that were essentially creating tall semi-clear walls around the transports so Voku aerial fighters couldn’t fire into their open holds when the Aronsic were coming out. There were also some anti-air batteries actively firing up through portal shields that would close over top when the transports were on the ground.

  All of it was makeshift, but what was ahead of Bi-tor had been designed and honed through battle to a very robust design, though the landing field itself was miles wide, meaning the defensive measures were for large scale attack and there were many overlapping shields that held open walkways for the Aronsic to pour out of…making for an easy route in if the Voku could get there.

  Fighting through a sea of Aronsic was commonplace now, and with the phalanx’s additional shiel
ding his unit and others were making progress while more aerial fighters from both sides were falling from the beehive of activity above them. One bounced onto the top shield of the landing zone and slid off it, crunching a group of Aronsic that happened to be shuffling past below, then that top shield opened up and one of the half mile long transports lifted up into the sky with a heavy escort of fighters, making room for another to come down only a few minutes later. The top shield was lowered physically, allowing it to pass through while energy weapon fire would not, then the topside shield reformed completely and the new transport began to unload even more Aronsic.

  There were no Skarrons visible in the fields of troops around the LZ, but there were some inside the perimeter guarding/organizing the troop debarkments, including the setup of some more anti-air turrets that were being placed on the outside by Jenipars so the shields wouldn’t have to momentarily lower to allow them to fire through. Whether those were additional units or replacements Bi-tor didn’t know, but it looked like this site was getting more and more fortified as the Skarron advance stalled. Normally they just rushed ahead, but now that the Voku were able to put up more resistance without having to worry about orbital bombardment the Skarrons were adjusting their strategy.

  That meant this LZ had to be neutralized now, before it got any beefier, and it looked like the Voku aerial craft were doing little more than keeping the Skarrons from strafing the phalanxes. Bi-tor didn’t know how much longer they’d last, and it was quite possible that they were going to get caught out here and die, which was why he and the others didn’t kill the Aronsic any more than they had to. Speed was required, so they fought a path through and over the dead ones they were shooting down ahead of them, all the way up to the base of the shields that reached all the way to the paved ground.