Star Force: Endless Crusade

by Aer-ki Jyr

  The damage indicators only noted limited shield impacts from the sides and nothing from behind. Something was happening out there that the sensor blinds were meant to hide, and whatever it was, was saving his fleet from certain death and getting them to the mouth of the jumppoint where the newest arriving Skarron ships were coming in blind and decelerating along a pre-determined route.

  When the conglomerates eventually got there they began targeting the incoming ships one at a time, with enough firepower to snuff them out within seconds as they also fought those nearby, but the sensor blind extended and they could no longer fire at what they could not see. Part of Ley-yen almost ordered his people to start firing manually into the sensor blind, for not being able to see the enemy when they were around your neck was infuriating, but the damage indicators were dropping sharply, so he clenched his fists silently and let it ride as his fleet sat in oblivion save for the tiny slice of space visible ahead of them that had the incoming Skarron ships that didn’t stand a chance arriving at a rate of one every few seconds.

  This is what it had been like initially, but then the Skarrons had been bringing in ships on other jumplines where the Voku were not camped out. The Gahmorn had no idea how Cal-com was taking the heat off of his fleet, but if this was to stand then the inflow of Skarron ships were going to be completely neutralized so long as he didn’t lose too many conglomerates. The Skarrons were getting some shots off before they exploded, but it was the rest of their massive fleet that should have been pounding the Voku into crumbs right now that concerned him.

  Where were they? And why was this damn sensor blind in place so he couldn’t see them?

  Ley-yen didn’t have any answers, but whatever the case was they were ambushing the incoming Skarrons and killing every single ship that came through. That ended up lasting for hours upon hours before the sensor blind suddenly dropped without warning and the Gahmorn almost fell to the floor in shock.

  They were gone. All of them. Across the entire system. The entire Skarron fleet that had the Voku in a death grip was gone…or rather reduced to long tracks of rubble that were visible on sensors, but the Voku ships that had done this were not. There was the fleet in orbit of Hakibi, with the smaller worlds of Tadin and Vok without any fleet presence at all. Their planetary shields were almost gone, reduced to a few scattered regions while the main planet was faring much better…except there were no longer enemy bombardment fleets above any of them.

  “Gahmorn?”

  “I do not know,” he said humbly. “Thanks be to the Elders, but I do not know how this happened. Are there any further orders?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Ley-yen looked at the fully functional battle display, seeing the Skarron ships incoming and his own conglomerates handling them. The workload wasn’t too much and the Skarron ships weren’t stacking up. So long as he could continue killing them this fast then…

  “We can hold them off indefinitely,” he said whisper quiet, but the entire Oracle was noiseless, so they all heard him. “The Skarrons have no interstellar communications. They rely on couriers…are there any Skarron ships moving out there?”

  “Negative. There’s nothing left.”

  “If they don’t know, then they’ll keep sending in ships expecting the jumppoint to be secure…”

  “How long before a courier is overdue to report and they send someone to investigate?” the primary navigator asked.

  “I have no idea how they’re set up, but if these routes are predetermined they may just be sending ships down them blindly with the leading elements organized. Those already reported back that the system was secure, otherwise the other jumplines would still be sending in ships.”

  “If they don’t know…” one of the crew said, realizing the full impact.

  “Let me make this painfully clear,” Ley-yen said, raising his voice significantly. “I do not know how Cal-com managed this, but our task is clear. We have this jumpline secure and we must maintain a pace of carnage sufficient to keep those ships from grouping up. If we can do that we can hold this system indefinitely. If we fall behind they swell and we slowly return to the situation we were in. We must hold this position with all our might. I want status reports on every damaged system and anticipated failures and weapons depletion. Anything that could reduce our kill power, I want to know ahead of it happening. We cannot waste this.”

  “We have a surplus so long as their ship stacking doesn’t intensify.”

  “We need enough additional vessels to cover that contingency. Send a message to Cal-com asking for more if he can spare them. There may be debris to police, but if there truly are no more Skarrons left here then…”

  The Gahmorn dropped silent as he exchanged glances with his crew. None of them knew how to take this. They were as good as dead one moment, then the entire system just upended itself and returned to Voku hands. Nothing his race had could have done that much damage, and the Gahmorn was at a loss for words, but he and his crew knew well they couldn’t waste this opportunity, for the Crusade was still on in full force with more ships continually coming.

  But so long as they were coming through this one jumppoint and only this jumppoint…

  “We will get our answers later. For now we have an ambush point to hold. They cannot pass this point again, and if we have to die to secure it, it will be worth our lives,” he said, looking at the near perfect positioning and wall of death they were laying down on the individual ships as they came in and the drifting debris that was passing through the Voku fleet and being moved aside slightly by tractor beams to lessen the impacts on their shields, for the enemy ships were being destroyed before they could come to a full stop and saving the Voku the task of having to pull them out of their firing lines.

  “But I will not tolerate any more of us dying if unnecessary. There can be no mistakes. Query every section and every crew member. I need readiness data now,” he said, reaching a hand into the main hologram and using his palm to form a wall between his fleet and the specs of incoming ships decelerating from interstellar jump speed. “We have to hold this line. Hakibi may yet be saved if we can.”

  8

  November 5, 3655

  Bavrenti System (Voku Regional Capitol)

  Hakibi

  The ambush point had held for 11 months straight, with a never ending stream of Skarron ships coming through and being destroyed immediately, but Cal-com knew it was going to come to an end once the first scout ships started entering on other jumplines and fleeing immediately. The Elders hadn’t stopped them, and the Dafchor assumed they’d left the system or had done all they were going to here. He truly had no way of knowing where they were unless they let him know, but the sensor blind on the Voku ships and planet had long since gone, so he assumed the Elders were too.

  They’d given this system an extra year, and that in turn had delayed assaults on other Voku worlds, but this one was once again in peril as additional reinforcement lines started to divert, meaning the Voku had to defend multiple jumppoints simultaneously.

  Cal-com had expected that, and his fleet had held off 6 incoming streams before sporadic clumps of fleets began appearing at random locations and fleeing elsewhere in the system before the Voku could get to them. Those fleets eventually grouped up and hit one of the blockades, doing enough damage to allow some of the incoming ships to survive, and from there things snowballed in the Skarrons’ favor.

  Rather than defend the planet, Cal-com had chosen to keep 98% of his ships at the jumppoints killing as many Skarrons as they could while they were vulnerable, for some of the jumppoints were still holding and the other Skarrons were ignoring the deaths of their brothers so long as they were tying up Voku ships there. Mathematically Cal-com knew he had to maintain that, even as the planet was subjected to another massive ground invasion after the free Skarron ships had punched right through the weak shield that had been built to cover the hole from the first invasion.

  The rest of the planetary defense shiel
d was up and running normally, with the Skarrons not having enough ships to even try taking down another section…not that they would. The ground assault was by far their best option, and Cal-com was trying to knock down as many of their transports as he could with the Voku aerial fighters that were almost impossible for their warships to target from above as they flew into the descending transports and fought directly over the landing zone while small teams of Voku moved across ground on virtual suicide missions to knock down the defense batteries and shield generators that the Skarrons were trying to set up again.

  Send too much out and the Skarrons would fire on their own troops to destroy them, so Cal-com had to send too few troops to avoid that bombardment. They knew what they were being asked to do and didn’t hesitate, but he hated not being able to use his fleet to cover them…though if he did, there’d be so many more warships coming through the jumppoints that it would be counterproductive. He either had to fight them over the planet or as they came out of their jumps, the latter of which gave him a huge killcount advantage.

  And this wasn’t the only system under attack. 13 more had fallen while the regional capitol held and another 28 had come under new attack, with Cal-com organizing them from afar so long as communications held up. The relays the Voku used were not on any planet, and so far the Skarrons hadn’t bothered to go after them. They seemed focused on overrunning the planets and cleaning up the smaller stuff later, so at least Cal-com wasn’t isolated here, but the situation everywhere was grim despite the invaluable assistance from the Elders.

  The Skarrons couldn’t keep up this loss of ships and troops forever, but Cal-com didn’t know how many more were still coming. Maybe the Elders did and they’d tipped the scales enough for the Voku to survive. He hoped that was the case, but they hadn’t said anything to him of Skarron fleet numbers and he couldn’t assume anything. All he could do was hold on as long as possible, making the Skarrons bleed for every system they overran, and play this out the hard way…for as many decades or even centuries that this might last.

  3 months later…

  Bi-tor was in a sleep cycle between the never-ending fights that had become his life when the pause happened. He woke to find that the incoming stream of warships had stopped, giving the Voku in the heavily populated Viskhe System a temporary relief…or at least it would once they burnt through the ground troops and ships already here, which were many. Pauses in this Crusade were few and far between, and Bi-tor was very grateful to see that this system was getting one.

  Of the four planets, two had more than half their surface conquered by the Skarrons with the other two holding out better, but with sizeable chunks of enemy territory within them. Bi-tor was on Niivan, one of the former, and knew that they had a long fight ahead of them, but without more reinforcements to bring in they now had a fighting chance to delay the destruction and evac more people out of the system.

  They were already crunched here, with many Voku having to sleep outside of tubes and foodstuff supplies thinning. What they had went to the warriors, for they couldn’t afford to be fighting at anything less than prime condition. If they were even more would die, so the civilians that hadn’t been evacuated in previous years were trying to stay out of the way and wait for a chance to either leave or do something to help, with many of them assigned to construction duties that amounted to little more than moving rubble around to form makeshift barricades and funnels to direct the Aronsic swarms into traps when they progressed into new areas.

  So Bi-tor went back to the fight, trying to make the most of this naval reprieve on the ground, knowing the payoff would come in the following weeks or months as the Voku warships were whittling down the huge enemy fleet without having to position at the jumppoints. If they didn’t use everything they had now to engage the Skarrons that were here the enemy might win anyway…and if more started showing up soon then this system was sure to fall, like all the others. Right now getting as many people out and delaying future system invasions was the mission, and all the Voku warriors knew that. It was ingrained into their very existence now, with more and more of them falling to accomplish that ultimate goal.

  Bi-tor and the others here were very acquainted with how to fight this Crusade, but every now and then they’d find themselves facing too many and not able to pull back fast enough. Other times someone would make a self-sacrificing move to buy more time for the rest of them, but if they fought smartly and their naval cover didn’t completely evaporate they’d lose territory and equipment but few lives…though the high population levels in this system were forcing them to hold positions longer than they’d like, meaning Bi-tor was pushing close to his own death far too often to try to shield the civilians that were bunching up with few places to run.

  Several of the Voku he’d been fighting alongside for years had fallen in the past 2 months and he knew his time might be coming soon, so as the days passed he kept an eye on the sky and the empty jumppoints, wondering how long it would be before the next enemy convoy began to arrive, for when it did he was almost certain he’d go down fighting here, for there was no way he was going to turn and run and leave the civilians to fight this army on their own.

  So day by day he fought and waited for the head of that convoy to arrive, seeing the additional ground troops being landed eventually dry up, but the Skarron advance didn’t stall or wither. They kept pushing hard, as if they expected more to come, but they didn’t arrive soon enough and the planet of Ichio was the first to rid itself of the Skarron army even before the naval battles were over.

  When that happened the troops there were immediately transferred over to the other three worlds, with Bi-tor’s group getting badly needed reinforcements, but few Stranoms. Most of the fighting now was hand to hand, with the aerial fighters and remaining Stranoms not even paying attention to the infantry horde and focusing entirely on the enemy walkers that still outnumbered them.

  Bi-tor was actually engaging the smaller walkers in infantry units, taking down their shields with massed fire then jumping up onto them and clawing their way inside while Aronsic and infantry Skarrons tried to peel them off…but still no reinforcement convoy arrived and slowly the enemy advance stalled to a grinding halt that lasted about a week.

  When the collapse came it came fast, and the Skarrons overwhelming numbers broke and the Voku began picking them apart with flanking attacks without going crazy. They knew they had an advantage now, but they weren’t going to get people killed with unnecessary haste. Bi-tor and the others were barely able to contain their rage, now having a chance to actually win a fight, but they held back just enough for prudence sake as they hunted down and killed every enemy unit on the planet…but still no new convoy came.

  It wasn’t until the naval battles were also over did they finally get word from Renimar Noru-sar’s fleet out ambushing the numerous convoys on their way to their territory. When the news arrived Bi-tor was out on a debris patrol looking for enemy stragglers. He stopped running and looked to the sky, feeling true relief for the first time in memory. Eventually he took a knee, not losing focus on his surroundings, as he breathed slowly, soaking in the moment.

  The Orica fleet was reporting that the Skarron reinforcements were not destroyed or exhausted…but rather they were diverting elsewhere. Some were actually turning around and heading back the way they came by parallel tracks, jumping through systems neighboring the lines they were using to get to Voku territory. Where they were going was still unknown, but they were no longer reinforcing their units fighting the Voku…and were leaving those already engaged in combat to die fighting.

  “We live,” he said to no one in particular, then looked up at the sunny sky that saw only a few specs of Voku warships in orbit. “Was the fight too bitter for you? Did you tire of losing so many? Or is there another method to your madness? Someone worth killing more than us?”

  Bi-tor stood back up, knowing he still had work to do here and it would unacceptable to die to a lone Aronsic hiding in the r
ubble because he wasn’t paying attention…or to lose someone else for the same reason.

  “How badly did we hurt you? How badly did you hurt us?” he wondered, not knowing the state of the empire save for some basic update maps. How many Voku had actually died he didn’t know, but the number would be painful when he eventually found out.

  A prompt on his forearm gauntlet caught his attention and he activated his comm.

  “Speak.”

  “We have deployment orders,” Sor-vak said. “We’re leaving the planet.”

  “To go where?”

  “I do not know the system, but word is we’re assembling an invasion force to take back the worlds the Skarrons took from us. I don’t know about the Firewall, but our original ones are not going to be left in their hands.”

  “How well defended are they?”

  “Not very. I am told their strength was centered on their fleets passing through them. Now without those ship flows they have little to defend themselves with…but they do have extensive industry under construction to supply the Crusade. The longer we wait to strike them the stronger those worlds will grow.”

  “Are we expecting to find any of our people there?”

  “No,” Sor-vak said regretfully. “This is a hunting campaign. We are going to eradicate them all. No surrenders accepted if they stay and fight.”

  “Nor should there be. How soon do we depart?”

  “The fleet is leaving in 3 hours. If you don’t get here in time you won’t be coming on the first wave. For some that is best…”

  “I will be there.”

  “How is your arm?”

  “Adequate. I am more than ready to take the fight to them.”

  “And we won’t have people to protect this time. I’m looking forward to it as well. Get to the landing zone now if you want to come. Not sure what our equipment situation is, but the orders are coming swift and the Gahmorn says this first wave is a strike force. No understrength units allowed.”