Star Force: Endless Crusade

by Aer-ki Jyr

  They actually auto disconnected when it was yanked off the ground, splitting the walker in half with both sections skittering around to new locations as Cal-com lifted the damaged segment up over the Stranom’s head, then threw it across the battlefield to where it knocked down four smaller walkers like bowling pins…all of which appeared to be in slow motion due to the massive size of the mechanical combatants in play.

  Further to the west there was another massive Stranom fighting hundreds of Skarron walkers with more walking up behind them from landing zones out in the open where the enemy warships could provide covering fire. Right now the fighting was occurring under the farthest edge of the primary defense shield, but beyond that the Stranoms couldn’t go or they’d be blown apart in short order.

  That allowed the Skarrons to organize their massive walker formations with a sea of Aronsic and Skarron infantry supporting them. From his point of view, Cal-com felt like the largest person on the battlefield, slow but very, very powerful, yet even this Stranom’s shields were already down over most parts of its mechanical body and the weak plasma weapons of the Skarrons were adding up as the overall size had to shrink each time a chunk of it was damaged. That meant Cal-com’s Stranom would keep fighting for a very long time, but get weaker with each height demotion.

  But with the reductions would come additional speed, though right now he didn’t need it. He was able to physically do more damage to the enemy walkers by slow punches and kicks than the weaponry was doing, which was why he and others were fighting in this melded fashion while other smaller Stranom were fighting around his feet.

  Unfortunately they were all trampling the Voku buildings that were now evacuated…or at least he hoped. If someone was left down there they couldn’t be saved now, for many of his Stranom’s steps were crunching rooftops in order to get into position to hit the walkers that were doing less damage with their spindly legs making pinhole damage points beneath them.

  The destruction couldn’t be helped, but he had to make sure to avoid the infantry locations or he’d accidentally kill his own troops. The enemy didn’t seem to care, for they were rushing Aronsic right under the Stranom’s feet and making the Voku infantry circle around behind the massive machines and away from their flanking positions. It was a chaotic battlefield, but the Voku were masters of warfare compared to this sloppy and dishonorable Skarron army that didn’t care for the fate of its own troops.

  Cal-com ran his Stranom three steps forward and turned his right side into a slightly smaller walker, ramming it and essentially tackling it to the ground as many of its tiny legs snapped from the stress overload. He rotated his shoulders and whacked his other arm into the top of one section elbow first and crunched it right through the shields that could not stand up to that much sheer mass.

  Before Cal-com could get his Stranom standing again the light went out…literally. It was as if the star in the sky had simply shut off. By the time his machine was standing and firing off shots like a turret, he realized it was the planetary shields. For some reason they’d switched to opaque and were not letting light nor sensor beams pass through. In the distance it was still bright over the enemy landing zones where there were no shields, but for some reason the Voku sensors nearby that could look up through that gap were not functioning.

  Cal-com took a quick break from the fighting, letting a subordinate handle the movements as he tried to figure out what was going on. He hadn’t ordered any such action, nor did it make any strategic sense, blinding themselves like this, unless they needed to hide something from the Skarrons in orbit. The Dafchor made some quick inquires but found that no one knew what had triggered the change in the shields, nor could they undo it.

  Their links to the navy were also down, so they had no knowledge of what was going on above them until Cal-com started to see parts of Skarron warships falling through the gap and down onto their landing zones by the dozens. A strange sensation began to creep over him, then his suspicion was confirmed as his mind exploded with the voice of an Elder.

  Silence must be maintained, but we are here. We cannot remain to be seen, and the blindness will be lifted shortly, but their numbers will be thinned. Make use of it. This is still your fight to be won or lost.

  When the voice ended new information was evident in his mind, and suddenly he could see several other attacks the Elders were making against the Skarrons across the interstellar warzone. They were helping the Voku, but no one could know it else word could get back to the V’kit’no’sat, so they couldn’t fight directly. If this system was to be saved it had to be the Voku that held off the enemy. The Elders could wipe them all out, but there would be too many eyes to see, so they were doing the next best thing and aiding where they could.

  Cal-com realized the knife-edge they were walking. There were billions of eyes here, and even if you could blind the technological ones it was possible word would slip through from person to person, and all it would take was one report making its way across the stars to imperil the Elders.

  They were risking much to aid the Voku, and the enormity of that sacrifice brought tears to his eyes that had to be vented out the bottom side of his crystal eyepiece. The Elders were not just overlords assisting with guidance and technology from afar. They were willing to fight alongside the Voku in battle, risking possible exposure, in order to give them a chance to survive.

  Cal-com immediately took back motion control on the Stranom and kicked over a small walker before stepping on it and running towards another bigger one even as a piece of his left arm fell off and a shimmer traveled over the entire Stranom as it shrunk to reappropriate necessary components.

  What withering his spirit had taken over the years of constant losses was now gone. The Elders were with them, though he couldn’t tell anyone of it, but it reinforced to him that this war was survivable and that the Voku were important enough to the Elders for them to take a personal hand in the fighting.

  Even though the Stranom couldn’t move any faster given its mechanical limitations, Cal-com’s energy level was buoyed and his pace of combat increased as he pushed into the encroaching Skarron ranks and did massive amounts of damage until his Stranom was so diminished in size that there were too many pilots for it to carry without an additional bulge on the chest.

  Eventually he had to retreat, with other Stranom covering the withdraw of his now tiny and fat one as the Skarrons continued to pepper the almost weaponless frame as it ran back through the more or less intact buildings to a rally point where additional Stranoms were waiting in cube mode. Most of what Cal-com had left was the interior workings of the original Stranom, and those parts weren’t meant to be in such a dense and small cluster.

  Because of that he and the other pilots had to evacuate the ugly mass that was left, then they ran over to the cubes and boarded them, reforming into a larger Stranom but not the full size of what they’d had before. Some of the pilots moved off in level 1 or 2 versions to reinforce weak areas that were of greater priority, but even before Cal-com had moved his new super Stranom off a kilometer a sea of Aronsic surged beneath his feet heading for the depot.

  Every weapon on the Stranom fired down on the street, but Cal-com went the extra distance of taking a knee and using the lower right leg as a barrier that crushed some beneath it and forced those on the other side to stop moving and work their way around. He knew there were too many to stop, but he needed to delay their getting to the deactivated Stranom who had no pilots.

  After a few minutes he knew it was futile, so he went back to the deactivated cubes and turned them all on, summoning them into his super Stranom and increasing its size beyond all design limits. It was larger than any ever used in battle, and for good reason. It moved so slowly it was little more than a mobile turret, but that was enough to get the Stranom cubes out of harm’s way as what looked to be plasma fire from all the walkers arrayed before them angled up to hit the monster Stranom.

  Cal-com was so high up now that he couldn’t use
the buildings for cover, meaning he was taking more damage than the Stranom would have if it had been in multiple pieces lower to the ground. That meant this was actually to the Skarron’s advantage, but he had to get the extra cubes away from the Aronsic or they’d lose them entirely.

  At the moment there were no more Skarron reinforcements coming into the landing zone, so he decided to make a dangerous gambit. Rather than taking the reserve Stranoms backward out of the fight and depositing them in relative safety, he took his skeleton crew of pilots inside with him and split up the monster Stranom into 6 versions approximately the same size of what he’d been fighting in previously before battle damage had shrunk it.

  That meant there were less pilots to man all the weapons, but they’d trained to multi-task and he knew they could be stretched this way if needed. Besides, it was the physical blows that were doing the most damage to the walkers, and with six of them he could most definitely punch through the Skarron lines and get to their landing zones…assuming the warships overhead that were raining down through the shield gap were indeed all disabled or driven off.

  He couldn’t know that for certain, but if he could get even partway into that LZ he could wreck so much of the Skarrons’ organization that they wouldn’t be able to mount an assault for days while they tried to clean up the mess. The Skarrons were counting on their rear flank being protected by the warships, and the Elders may have just exposed that weakness now. Cal-com couldn’t know for sure, but the raining chunks of warship were as good a sign as any.

  “Follow me, brothers. We push through to the interior now and let tomorrow fend for itself. Let nothing slow you down,” he said to those in his Stranom and the other 5 super ones nearest him while everyone else was fighting just to try and hold position against the waves of walkers. Hopefully he’d be able to take pressure off them, and without knowing how long this reprieve from the warships would last, or even what was occurring in orbit, he knew he had to act swiftly.

  To that end he launched his Stranom off at the fastest run it could manage, brushing by two Skarron walkers as he punched them aside and his pilots fired the weaponry at pointblank range as they passed. He could feel their moment of opportunity and wanted to waste no time, even as he ran head on into fresh walkers that had not a lick of battle damage on them and which were reforming their lines to block his path…including one of their largest turning sideways so that it made for a long wall before him that Cal-com shoulder rammed, then punched his way through, breaking the walker in half and opening up a gap that the others followed him through enroute to the back lines where they intended to swing around and attack the walker waves after taking out the massive transport ships that were constantly ferrying them down from orbit.

  Except that some of those ships were already damaged from the falling orbital debris, and the further he got out into the enemy the more he could see up through the hole in the planetary shields. He knew, somehow, that his vision of it was not being blocked as everyone else’s was, and the sensors sending information directly into his brain allowed him a glimpse of the Elders’ ships far up in orbit slaughtering the Skarron fleet that had poked the hole in the planetary shields in the first place.

  That sight, along with the fact that they were letting him see it, humbled him greatly…along with reinforcing the wisdom and righteousness of their cause. The Elders were the true masters of the galaxy and the Voku were important to them, for what reason Cal-com didn’t know, but his part in the here and now was clear.

  The Voku had to survive, and if the Elders had come in person to make sure that happened, Cal-com was going to make certain he did everything he possibly could to make ensure his race survived, both for their sake and for the future purpose the Elders had for them, whatever it may be.

  7

  Gahmorn Ley-yen was onboard a conglomerate near the entry jumppoint the Skarrons were using to arrive in the Bavrenti System, fighting yet another losing battle as there were too many ships coming through to deal with. Originally they’d been able to stop all those coming through here, but the first wave into Voku systems saw multiple jumplines used so they couldn’t blockade them. Over the course of 2 days no less than 7 different jumplines had Skarron ships arriving, and those that arrived elsewhere eventually transitioned over to this primary jumppoint in order to defend it.

  Now all the Skarron reinforcements were coming through here and only here, an unending spigot of ships that kept replacing whatever the Voku destroyed. The key was to stop that spigot, but there were too many ships in the system and the best that the fleet admiral could do was to disrupt the jumppoint and force the Skarrons to bunch up on each other. That gave him some additional kill opportunities, but it wasn’t enough. That said, given this insane war, the Voku needed every advantage they could get, so while there were a lot of Skarron warships over the capitol planet he was out here trying to reduce the inflow and take some pressure off them…but it felt like he was failing miserably.

  The actual ship counts would attest otherwise, but at this point it did not matter. So long as the stream of reinforcements continued the system would eventually fall. It was how the Skarron Crusade operated and why it was so dangerous. It was hurting that empire greatly, but if you eliminated all your enemies then it didn’t matter how little of a fleet you had left because there would be no one around to exploit your weakness. The Skarrons were going all in here and many other locations beyond Voku territory, and they were not going to be deterred by losses, no matter how costly, when their great war machine continued to push forward conquering every world they attacked without exception.

  The Voku hadn’t been able to hold a single one, despite a few temporary reprieves. When the tendrils of the Skarron fleet reached out to you they came in waves, but if you held out against the waves they eventually turned into an unending stream of ships traveling from far, far away and stacking up in a line that stretched across the stars. It was an awe-inspiring and terrifying way of fighting a war, and so far the Voku didn’t have an answer for it. Ley-yen was going to stay put here and do his duty, reducing the ship count as much as he could, but he doubted…

  Everything onboard his ship suddenly cut out, with his sensor displays going blank beyond the immediate ships they were targeting. The Gahmorn didn’t know what was happening, nor did anyone else, then a series of priority orders from the Dafchor came through in a very odd way, but Ley-yen wasn’t going to question it. What he did question was why his sensors were not fully operational.

  “Why do we have systems failure?”

  “I don’t know,” one of his Oracle staff reported. “But it does seem to be acting in conjunction with our new orders. Our targets are coming through clearly,” the Voku said as a slew of new ships coming through the jumppoint were highlighted…ships that the Voku fleet could not get to without taking massive casualties.

  “If this is what the Dafchor thinks is best, then so be it, but there is no reason to blind us. How can he even do that?”

  “Unknown, but all other systems appear to be functioning normally.”

  “If we are going to our deaths, why be distracted by other matters?” another Voku floated.

  Ley-yen’s eyes blinked suspiciously beneath his crystal where no one else could see. “Perhaps. If we survive this I’ll ask him about it, but for the moment we have our orders. Take us to the mouth of the jumppoint in Zarkdex configuration…,” he said, cutting off suddenly. “What is he thinking?”

  More clarification of the orders had come through, indicating an approach route that would not get them to the mouth as quickly as possible. It had them going straight through the bulk of the enemy fleet rather than skirting around the edges and flanking the deceleration lane. Ley-yen would have rather tried to brave the incoming side of that lane than go straight into that maw of ships, but he admitted that he could eventually get his fleet through…or at least part of it.

  Maybe that was what was required, but he couldn’t even see the status of th
e planet now. It was all blocked out, and that made this situation even more odd. Dangerously odd, but there was no time to contact the Dafchor. The comm lag was too great, so he either had to follow the orders, amend them, or disobey. He badly wanted to amend them, but without knowing what was going on he could not.

  Maybe that was why he was being blinded, but that wasn’t how the Dafchor typically operated. Never, in fact, so whatever was going on had to be something…well, the Gahmorn didn’t know, nor had he any plausible theories, and that left only one choice before him.

  Trust Cal-com or refuse the order.

  “If we go to our deaths, let’s make them count,” he told his Oracle crew as he confirmed the orders. “Proceed.”

  Ley-yen breathed slowly as his fleet reformed, literally, with multiple conglomerates coming together to form larger ones with the purpose of being able to withstand greater firepower while concentrating their own. The crews were moved to more interior locations expecting massive hull damage, with each Zarkdex conglomerate moving in close formation with the others and firing at the targets ahead of them even as the flanking Skarron ships were hidden by the sensor blind.

  Revised targeting data came through from Cal-com. Was he out here with them? Did the Skarrons somehow have a link into the Voku data net and the Dafchor didn’t want them to know of his presence? None of this made sense, but as the first Skarron ships in the thickest of the enemy fleet began to blow apart and the conglomerates pushed their way through the debris the Gahmorn noticed something odd. The flanks of his formation were not tanking damage…or rather not much. The Skarrons should have been swarming all around them, closing in from behind and firing from all directions.