Star Force: Internecine (SF55) (7 page)

Travis looked over at the group of Engineers just
staring at them blankly, throwing them a sarcastic salute then leaving them and
their residential buildings and food supply intact as he and his sister ran off
down one of their roads heading towards the next link in their mountainous
supply chain. They couldn’t do anything about destroying the roads themselves,
but they could wreck the equipment being used to create them and kill their workforce,
for most of the Hobbits were doubling up their infantry duties with
construction ones.

Leaving the Engineers alive could have been seen as a
strategic mistake, for they could go to work again, but in truth the only
reason the Archons were targeting these camps and killing the Hobbits on sight
was because they were actively assaulting the Protovic world. Had this been a
Skarron world the Archons wouldn’t have killed them so…lithely, but they were
here doing harm or helping others do harm to the Protovic and that they
couldn’t tolerate. Those Hobbits, while building roads, would just as quickly
pick up a plasma rifle and go into battle. The Engineers wouldn’t, which was
why there was no point in killing them.

Not to mention the fact that a good number of them
were defecting to the Alliance, for they were seeing more compassion from their
enemies than they were their masters. Karen and Travis didn’t care about that
now, for they weren’t on a recruitment or rescue mission. They were hear to
cause havoc and havoc is what they were going to cause…but there was a very
fine and firm line between being a slayer and a butcher, and butchers they were
not
going to become.

That was a lesson that
Bri
had drilled into their heads, and they hadn’t truly understood until she showed
them some of the results. While the twins had always been told how Archons were
supposed to think and behave, all the way back into basic training, it had
always been focused on them doing the right thing rather than seeing how it
affected others. Once they’d gotten to see and hear firsthand from some of the
Hobbits that had switched sides and get their point of view did they stop
looking at the enemy as targets.

They were people, and not always involved due to their
own choices. The Hobbits in particular were a slave race that would be killed
on the spot if they didn’t fight, which meant that Star Force wasn’t just going
to kill them off. They were going to help them if they could.

But if they were trying to kill their allies and doing
a good job of it, well, the kid gloves would come off fast enough. Bottom line
was, Archons would let you stop being an enemy, and would always give someone
that option…but if you chose to be an enemy then they would treat you as such,
with their dislike for killing quickly disappearing when you put someone else’s
life in danger.

They were warriors and took on the role of slayer in a
heartbeat if necessary, and right now, with the Skarrons pressing hard against
the inhabited band of the Protovic planet, slayers were what Travis and Karen
had to become…and they were very good at it.

7

October 23, 2553

Evelynn System
(Scionate/Star Force Territory)

Shadow Isle

“Report please,” Admiral Victor asked when walking
into the moon base’s command center.

“A large Lacvamat/Gnar fleet has arrived insystem and
is moving to assault Night’s Veil. Information is still updating, but I would
guess they’ve already begun combat.”

“Damn, they are getting bold,” Victor said, sitting
down in his chair and accessing his personal
holos
with information coming in directly from the insystem relay network. Though
Star Force had no presence on the Scionate world they did maintain a number of
surveillance posts throughout the system, including planetary orbit, though at
present Night’s Veil was on the other side of the star from Shadow Isle, which
was orbiting a large, uninhabited planet full of valuable resources cloaked in
a noxious atmosphere named Widowmaker.

It and the three moons surrounding it belonged to Star
Force, while the rest of the system was Scionate property. Shadow Isle wasn’t a
transit grid nexus, but rather a more private Star Force colony used as a
military staging base that doubled as a storage depot, collecting both
shipments of supplies from other systems as well as a scattering of mining
outposts on Widowmaker, though those operations were mostly remote operated
from the moon, with only a few hundred personnel on the planet to facilitate the
machinery and handle the quiet excavation of subsurface tunnels that Star Force
was creating without anyone else’s knowledge.

To the Scionate the moon was just a little backdoor
Star Force outpost recently created since the transfer of ruling bloodlines and
an added bit of penance on the part of their race…while also serving to bolster
the system’s defense as Star Force kept a decently sized naval force there to
service both Beta and Gamma Regions with reinforcements as needed. Most of that
fleet had since been dispersed, but 3 warships and several hundred drones were
still present around the moon as a defense fleet.

So far the Lacvamat had stayed away from Star Force
worlds, even going so far as to avoid transitioning through one of their
systems given the bad blood resulting from the Sentinel incident, but now they
were hitting a Scionate planet right next door and Victor wondered just how far
they were prepared to push this…and if the Scionate were going to flee to the
moon to seek sanctuary.

Admiral Victor was the senior commander on the moon,
given that it was primarily a naval way station, with a handful of lower
ranking Archons on site for security reasons but no high level ones.
Technically they outranked him, but given his experience they let him handle
the security of the moon and planet below while they worked on their training
and dealt with any odd problems popping up. They were stationed here primarily
as backup, and Victor hoped they wouldn’t be needed in the coming days.

A new fleet of six warships was due to arrive within 2
weeks, fresh off the shipyards in Epsilon Eridani, and he truly didn’t want to
have to waste any of their drones with this mess that was about to unfold, but
so far the Lacvamat hadn’t shown any signs of strategic sensibility…though
their tactical acumen was proving to be significant. They were handing the Scionate
their asses where the reserve should have been true, both out thinking and out
maneuvering the dominate military power and putting them on the defensive, but
with no planning for the long term or how it would affect the ADZ as a whole.

If the front fell the Skarrons would come in and wipe
out the Lacvamat, which would make this war all but pointless.

Then again blood feuds rarely made sense outside their
fanatical context, which was why the Admiral wasn’t entirely sure the Lacvamat
would avoid the Star Force world. It was small and isolated, and if they truly
wanted to control the system they’d have to take it out…which would put them at
war with an opponent far more powerful than the Scionate but so overwhelmed
with the Skarrons that they couldn’t do much at the moment.

At the Sentinel incident they hadn’t fired on any Star
Force craft or facility, they merely braved the weaponsfire to get at the
Scionate, showing that they weren’t going to listen to Star Force’s edicts, but
then again they weren’t, Victor hoped, stupid enough to cross the line into
actually fighting them.

As the updated reports made their way across the
system and to the command center the Admiral watched with keen interest how the
combined Lacvamat/Gnar fleet systematically drove the Scionate out of orbit,
with many of the ships fleeing to elsewhere in the system but the attackers
didn’t follow them. Instead they held onto low orbit and began landing a large
number of troop ships, some of which were
Nammet
but
none
Gnar
. They opened up three different ground
invasion sites and went about the process of what looked like a legitimate grab
for the world.

Victor couldn’t do anything about it, given that his
orders were not to waste ships on their blood feud, but he hated watching a
fight going on nearby and sitting it out. The Scionate also sent out a plea for
help the second day, which he had to grudgingly refuse. This war never should
have been happening, but given that it was the Scionate were the defenders. He
didn’t know about the legitimacy of the bioweapon attack, but the Lacvamat were
the ones to start the actual fighting and he really didn’t like having to leave
their insystem neighbors vulnerable when they were being assaulted.

He had to keep reminding himself of the Skarron threat
and that his ships would eventually end up fighting there, as would he once the
reinforcements arrived. He’d be transitioning out with a new commander coming
in, for his stay here was just a temporary one.

But none of that mattered to his gut. Combat was going
down and he wasn’t involved…and that just felt wrong.

8 days later the situation changed when a relief fleet
arrived from the Hammids and Victor took keen interest in seeing how they were
going to fight. To date
they
hadn’t taken part in
combat on either front, but for some reason they’d sided with the Scionate and,
so far as he’d been updated, this was the first time their troops were being
thrown into battle.

Their fleet wasn’t large, but it was strong enough to
defend itself and the massive number of transports it was escorting down to the
surface. Victor wished he had some surface surveillance posts or even some
stealth drones in play, but he didn’t. All he could see was from high orbit and
where the ships went, with only a very tiny glimpse at what was happening down
on the planet.

Nammti
was riding in one of
the first transports to go down, her wings tucked in closely as she and her
broodmates
were packed together in a rack so cramped it was
hard to breathe as they waited to be released into open air. Her feathery wings
were stiff and cramping from the long wait that had her cooped up with the rest
of them prior to arrival in the system so they could be deployed tactically
once they arrived no matter what the circumstances were.

She didn’t know any more now than she did before
loading, but when the signal came the floor beneath her feet opened up and she
dropped out of the transport like a rock, letting gravity pull her down and
away from the others before spreading her wings and nulling her fall. There
were so many other Hammids around her that it was hard to fly, but they’d
practiced such maneuvers ad
nauseum
in the past and
they all managed to avoid hitting one another as they formed up into groups and
flapped their way down to a surface position now being marked for a diving
attack on her visor.

She wore a headset and light harness around her body
that mimicked the old
Calavari
design and had
actually been created with assistance from one of their techs. It provided an
energy shield that would shield her from plasma while not interfering with her
flight in the least. Physical objects would still get through, but their
enemies didn’t use many weapons of that sort aside from missiles, which would
be mostly useless against the flocks of Hammids given they were deploying in
the tens of thousands.

Each was about half the size of a Lacvamat and could
outmaneuver them with ease, and as she flew with the others
Nammti
saw that the distant ground below her was covered with a swarm of Lacvamat that
were their targets. She’d never liked the fleshy avians who didn’t have a
single feather on them, nor their overly militant attitude. Hammids knew how to
fight but were very reserved in doing so given their fragile bodies. They
couldn’t put armor on else lose their flight capability so they had to brave
the fields of combat without protection, at least until the shield generators
had been built.

That gave them some measure of survivability, but
their strength had always been in their numbers and being able to chip away at
a superior enemy until they were wore down enough that they either retreated or
were destroyed. The Lacvamat had a similar strategy, except they liked to
bombard ground troops from above where they were out of return fire range. It
was a cowardly method of attacking that the Hammids didn’t employ, though they
would bombard the surface, but through diving runs rather than just lopping
ordinance down…though in part that was because of their smaller size their
weapons had a much shorter range of attack.

But the Hammids also believed that if you were serious
about fighting then you’d do it face to face, with the way the Lacvamat fought
being disconnected to the point of cruelty. They killed opponents without even
seeing them, leaving them little more than statistics, and in war the Hammids
fought people, not statistics.

What the Lacvamat were doing to the Scionate had
nothing to do with a bioweapon. They’d been the major contender of the
quadrupeds for dominance over internal ADZ matters while the big three were
focusing on the fronts to keep everyone safe, including the Hammids, who had
been devoting a steady supply of resources to the Protovic in lieu of sending
their own people into battle. The anti-air capability of the Skarrons would be
a literal death sentence to them, and the lizards were not much better.

During the defensive battles they’d fought, the
lizards had slaughtered the Hammids save for when they had overwhelmingly
superior numbers. If it wasn’t for Star Force and the
Hycre
helping them relocate to the ADZ they would have been wiped out long ago. They
knew they couldn’t fight either enemy directly, so they’d decided to wage war
on the resource front and had been doing so ever since the ADZ had been
created.

But now was different. The Lacvamat were jeopardizing
everyone with their bloodlust and the big three couldn’t pull troops away from
the front to stop it. Despite Star Force’s warnings of consequences for getting
involved, the Hammids had decided to take matters into their own hands and come
to the defense of the Scionate…as well as to make the Lacvamat pay in a way
that no other race could, avian to avian.

As
Nammti
flew with the
others they corkscrewed their way down, forming numerous tornado-like spires
that hit the topside of the Lacvamat formation, attracting the attention of their
fighters. Some of the Hammids’ own Valeries moved to intercept the flying
boomerangs, but some small carnage couldn’t be helped as the Lacvamat
fighters
unloaded scatterguns on the descending flyers. Their
shields saved many of them from small hits that would have winged or killed
them on contact, but those that took the brunt of the fighters’ attack were
turned into puffs of feathers and burning flesh.

Knowing that there was nothing she could do about it
Nammti
took her chances and continued descending with the
others down into the Lacvamat swarms, charging her two tiny plasma pistols
located on either leg as she stretched her short arms down and pressed the
activation levers. The Hammids were flying quadrupeds, but when in air they
were mostly wings and beak, keeping their appendages tucked up underneath their
elongated bodies for maximum aerodynamics.
Nammti’s
pistols were ankle bracelets with loops around her four claws that allowed for
firing and weapons control, now that she’d hit the ‘on’ switches.

Knowing that she wanted to take the Lacvamat down as
quickly as possible she triggered the holding charge, which contained and grew
a tiny plasma burst so that when she finally did drop down on the back of one
of the disgusting fleshy flyers she literally touched the back of it with her
two short legs and unloaded one of the pistols’ charge into it.

The Lacvamat dropped into a death spiral as soon as
the blue plasma discharged, burning a hole through its thin torso armor and
either killing or wounding it,
Nammti
didn’t know,
but it was out of the fight and she flew towards the next one headed in a
similar direction, with many more zipping by on alternate trajectories in a
jumbled, chaotic mess that the Hammid found to be neither. She was used to
flying in thick, complex swarms…at least more so than the Lacvamat were, which
gave her an easy second kill as she came up on one of them that was distracted trying
to shoot from its chest launcher horizontally at another Hammid.

Nammti
tagged it on its
exposed head, burning a hole into the left side of its double skull and
dropping it down through the air while she dodged another dead Lacvamat coming
down from above as her two pistols began to charge up again. She flew evasively
until they were, then went about poaching more targets as her kin did the same.