Star Force: Marauders (SF63) (4 page)

When they did the chimra effect occurred and the shield
immediately breached, with the three beams spread out again beneath it and
causing damage to separate locations.

The warship adjusted the targeting on the constant
beams and brought the intersection point down to the transmitter. When it
touched the beams no longer melted the infrastructure on contact, but they
exploded it in such a magnitude of force that the entire assembly was junked
instantly. The warship ceased fired when it was inoperable and flew back up to
orbit, ignoring the ground defense batteries that were only tickling its
shields.

Cal-com observed the attack from afar, intently
monitoring the output from the enemy transmitter. As far as he could tell no
signals had been sent, meaning their surprise attack was going to remain a
secret for some time and he intended to keep it that way. With the blockade
formation patrolling the area around the star, both to intercept ships trying
to flee and to poach any that might come into the system in the coming days,
the Dafchor expected to have a decent amount of time available to him before
the lizards had a chance to respond…which he was going to need.

Once the system was cleared of enemy ships Cal-com
ordered the first conglomerate and pieces of the second to head down to the
surface and begin cleansing the planet. As they did so he took a chunk of his
command conglomerate, which of the three was the only one comprised of the new
technology the Elders had gifted the Voku, and flew to the outermost planet of
the three in the system.

There he found an ice-covered world, but per the
instructions given to him via his implant he searched a specific set of
coordinates with the ship’s sensors until he found structures buried beneath
the ice. He didn’t know what they were…until the implant suddenly released new data
it had been withholding until this moment.

Cal-com suddenly understood why this system was
important. Not only was it centrally located, offering him reach options to the
other servants of the Elders, but it held the remains of another race that had
died out long ago. One that also served the Elders up until they were overcome
by an enemy too powerful for them to hold at bay.

That knowledge settled a question that had long been
lingering in the core of his mind. Would the Elders intervene if the Voku faced
annihilation?

Apparently they would not. Their servants had to learn
to stand on their own, in victory or defeat. Help them the Elders might, but
they would not carry them.

Then again, the Elders had only recently returned to
the Voku. What they had been doing in the absence Cal-com did not know, but if
this race, who had been called the
Yampley
, had been
in a similar situation and not been able to survive in their absence as the
Voku had…

The thought sickened Cal-com, for if the
Yampley
were as loyal as the Voku they did not deserve this
fate. Powerful the Elders might be, but the remains on the planet below only
underscored how vast and dangerous this galaxy truly was.

That thought made it all the more imperative for him
to get to the other servants before it was too late for them. If he failed,
this would be their fate at the hands of the lizards.

Giving the order without delay, even as the ground
battles on the other planet were just getting underway, Cal-com had his
conglomerate section disintegrate and break up into a number of protective
warships and the
Hatomek
seed that subsequently
plunged into the ice near to the ruins, burrowing its way down to the surface
and beginning to locate and extract the necessary materials to grow itself into
the world-building machine that would eventually create the defenses to hold
this system against any lizard counterattack.

Cal-com noted with pride how much faster this seed
worked than previous models, for it was constructed from the new technology as
well, and took very little time digging its way into the bedrock and carving
out a dome in the ice above for the Voku workers to begin grounding additional
supplies within.

4

February 28, 2735

Numar
System (lizard
territory)

Sashneo

Tom-008 stood in the nexus onboard the
Zeus
, personally controlling the
ultra-heavy cleansing beam that the command ship was using in low orbit to
pulverize the lizard infrastructure on the planet below. The defense shields
protecting the numerous colonies covering the planet couldn’t stand up against
the beam for more than a handful of seconds, for it was a major upgrade over
the previous versions, capable of delivering pinpoint destructive energy on a
level that Star Force had never achieved before.

Tom and the other trailblazers knew the days of the
cleansing beam were coming to an end, in light of higher end weapons projects
coming down the research pipe, but that didn’t mean they’d given up on their
current batch of tech. There were always improvements to be made, and the
‘ultras’ were one of them. Beam width was the same as a ‘heavy’ but the
intensity was ratcheted up so much that only a very dense shield could hold up
to it…or a different matrix that the lizards couldn’t yet produce.

Regardless, with the
ultra onboard
his command ship Tom was able to bust through lizard defenses that typically
would have delayed a planetary assault such as this for days as orbital
bombardment hammered each of the shields until they fell, then cleansing beams
or rail guns would take out the exposed generators and primary defensive
emplacements, opening up the bases or colonies to a ground attack or further
obliteration from orbit.

Odd as it was, throwing a chunk of mass at an opponent
never got old. The physics were simply undeniable, with the rail gun, a weapon
that dated back to the very beginning of Star Force, slated to always be in the
offensive bag of toys, right up to the day when they finally caught up with the
most advanced tech the V’kit’no’sat had. They’d be
highly
modified rail guns by then, but the principle was sound and
there was no easy way to kill the momentum they produced.

Ammo resupply was their weakness, and in a situation
like this it made more sense to use the cleansing beams to knock down buildings
along with a few Ka’sevron rounds thrown in by the Ma’kri. In the past Star
Force would have tried to assault the lizard colonies with their buildings
mostly intact, preferring a cleaner battlefield to work on, but the more time
that went on the trailblazers had just gotten in the habit of obliterating them
from orbit, then sending down skilled teams to deal with the rubble fighting
and subsurface hunting.

They didn’t like fighting that way, but the lizards
would never surrender. Even now Tom was issuing periodic calls down to the
various colonies to see if they’d relent, but never once in his life had he
gotten a reply. They were intent on fighting it out to the last scaly minion,
and with this planet covered in numerous colonies and billions of lizards, it
made more sense just to blast them from orbit than to go at it hand to hand, or
even with the mechs and aerial craft.

Tom punched through another shield plate then fired a
second short cleansing beam lance down and into the shield tower, blasting it
apart with one hit as the internal components were vaporized along the beam’s
path and the rapid expansion burst out laterally and popped the tower in the
blink of an eye. The debris rain around the site was an added bonus, but the
trailblazer turned his mental attention to another colony nearby as the regular
cleansing beams began chewing up the now exposed one.

There were only so many he could hit with the ship in
its current position, but he wanted to remove their defenses as quickly as
possible to get this small region of the planet knocked down enough that the
Zeus
could move on to the next while
leaving the drones and Ma’kri in place to really hammer it. He hated fighting
like this, for it was almost exactly how the V’kit’no’sat would have gone about
it, but with the lizards being totally intractable it was the quickest option
to take the planet from them, especially considering that they didn’t intend to
use any of the enemy’s infrastructure.

It would all get tore down and recycled, whether it be
standing or rubble, so there was no disadvantage in taking it apart from orbit.
Tom just hated such destruction, both in the lives and the equipment. When one
conquered a planet the idea was to take over what was there. Wiping out a
civilization was not conquering, that was annihilation. Star Force were
definitely conquerors, but rarely were they annihilators.

The V’kit’no’sat were almost exclusively annihilators.

But the lizards couldn’t be conquered. They couldn’t
be negotiated with. All you could do is fight and kill them…or be killed by
them. That was their choice, and unless Star Force wanted to force them into
imprisonment utilizing stun weapons and such, slaughtering them back was the
only way to fight them.

Star Force had never gone that far, for they always
gave the lizards an out. A chance to surrender, or sometimes retreat. The
outcome was always the same, but it was by the lizards’ choosing, not Tom
decrying they had to die.

But die they would, for the lizard civilization saw
their personnel as expendable tools. They’d just grow more in a different
location, hoping that these here would do at least some damage to the invaders
before they died.

And that was the primary reason Tom and the others
chose to use orbital bombardment to raze the surface…to give the devious
bastards less opportunity to find ways to kill a few of his troops when they
did go down to the planet.

Sashneo
was not lightly
populated either. A lot of the higher tier lizard infrastructure wasn’t
present, but in the 221 years since Star Force abandoned this transitional
world they’d filled it with low tech colonies, going for a massed approach
rather than a fortified stronghold. With the fleet Tom had at his disposal,
some 22
Warship
-class jumpships and 4
Ma’kri in total, plus the
Zeus
, he
was going to take the planet regardless of how much they’d built it up, but he
found it odd that this planet had gone down a slightly different track than the
others that Star Force was currently taking back.

Over the past few decades the map had been changing
drastically. A huge swath of what had been lizard-occupied Calavari territory
now gleamed Star Force blue, and ever since the massive pushback at
Jafat
had failed, barely, the local region had pretty much
been free pickups for anyone that could overwhelm the local defense forces. No
more were there reinforcement fleets perusing about ready to drop the hammer.
Everything was now up for grabs, with Tom and a handful of other trailblazers
pushing to grab up as much territory as they could before the lizards caught
their industrial breath and started reinforcing their systems again.

Simultaneously the Voku were hitting the lizards hard
in what had been Nestafar territory while Kerrie-057, Larissa-048, and the
H’kar were pushing out from Alpha Region and securing another huge swath of
territory that was slated to become property of the Bsidd as their explosive
growth continued…aside from a few planets that would be returned to the
refugees in the ADZ that had previously fled them.

Wes-049 was making a smaller push up the galactic
plane beyond Delta Region with Axius, with the intent of adding more colonies
in that region to house that growing population, both from internal
reproduction and immigration. Axius was now tops within Star Force in terms of
citizenry, but it was estimated that the Bsidd would pass them by at some
point. Odd as it was, given how this had all begun, Humans were now a tiny
minority within their own empire, despite a population that had recently passed
10 trillion.

Democracy would have put Humans in the backseat, had
it still existed, but a beast such as Star Force was such a high level entity
that it simply could not exist with such a simplistic design. Humans were the
glue that held everything together, because they were better than everyone
else. Not in birthright, though the Ikrid blocks and psionics were immensely
useful, but because the most advanced individuals in every division within Star
Force were Humans, from techs up to Archons. They had individually earned those
positions, and acquitted the enormous responsibility for maintaining and
advancing the empire.

That wasn’t something a popularity contest would
result in. Star Force had to exist based on merit, else it would have collapsed
long ago.

This next phase of advancement was a huge undertaking,
and as such required an increasing level of skill to pull off, not just in
taking worlds back from the lizards, but in expanding out to the new
acquisitions without allowing Star Force to become too heavy to manage. Some
people believed that a civilization could only expand so far before it lost
coherency in a variety of fashions. Tom knew that wasn’t true, for there were
ways to make it work if you were clever enough, but every empire that grew to
significant size had to know what it was doing, else they’d self-destruct in a
variety of ways.

That was true of the lizards, Voku, and even more so
the Skarrons. The size of their empire was ghastly huge, and even with the
lizards tearing huge chunks out of it the overall mass was unaffected. It was
simply too huge to kill. Tom didn’t know how that fight would ultimately turn
out, and whatever went down was going to occur on the other side of the ‘no-go’
line so it was probable that Star Force wouldn’t know, unless the Skarrons
pushed the lizards back this far.

Respect was due to anyone who could assemble and
maintain an empire of that size, and with the path that Davis had set Star
Force on, it wasn’t going to back down from those challenges ahead. It was
already proven that they could do things better than everyone else on a ‘small’
level, and now was the time to prove they could do it on a larger scope. V’kit’no’sat
or no, they couldn’t hide and let the galaxy burn around them, and while there
had been some hesitancy on that issue in the past, that was no longer the case.

Star Force was pushing hard into the lizards, using
the window of opportunity that Paul had told Tom and the others about from the
Dragon Forecast Bureau. And in truth, technological advancements aside, the
only way to truly beat the lizards was for Star Force to grow insanely larger.
They couldn’t do that purely with Humans, nor was Star Force really about just
Humans. It was a set of principles, based on the sovereignty of the individual
and not the
race, that
just happened to have rogue
Zen’zat that came with a slew of genetic abilities that the others didn’t
possess.

But as Tom and the others had learned over time, those
abilities weren’t all encompassing, with other races holding single, or
sometimes multiple abilities that could be used to enhance Star Force above and
beyond what Humans alone could do. The Bsidd were the biggest case in point,
but the Kiritak were the first major addition in that department and were still
quietly forming the backbone of Star Force’s industry.

Add in the hundreds of other races that were part of
Star Force, whether by group or individual, and on the whole they were stronger
than ever. Now they needed to add more systems and more population to the mix.
That, coupled with the continuing tech upgrades coming out of the pyramid and
the way Star Force was now gobbling up lizard territory, had gently shifted the
trailblazers’ focus from holding back the lizards to outright beating the
bastards at their own game.

The no-go line kept a complete victory out of the
question, for in order to defeat the lizards it seemed you had to annihilate
them, and now they’d passed into a region where Star Force wouldn’t go. There
were other races and factions out in the rim, like the Nexus, that were far
more powerful and territorially large than Star Force and the V’kit’no’sat
hadn’t bothered to notice them, so it was hoped that the same would be true of
the Humans’ expansion. But going closer to the core would be akin to waving and
shouting at them through the Skarron
empire
, so despite
their newfound boldness Star Force was going to keep a safe distance, even
though there would never be any guarantees of anonymity no matter how far they
went
rimward
.

As Tom finished popping the shield plates over the
last of the lizard colonies within range, he took a moment to run his fingers
through his shock-white hair, rubbing a spot on his head that was still aching
from his last ascension. Paul had brought it out to him a month ago, before Tom
had left on this campaign, and still there was a lingering bit of
friedness
there.

He wasn’t complaining though, for the
Sav
ability was a tier 3, and had he wanted to he could
have controlled all of the cleansing beams on the
Zeus
and half his drones simultaneously. The processing upgrade had
been one that had long eluded them, save for Bo, but now that they’d finally
cracked the trigger all the trailblazers were getting it and Tom didn’t mind
the discomfort that came along for the ride. It was almost gone anyway, and
more than worth the tradeoff.

He rubbed it a few more times through his genetically
altered hair as he mentally checked on the locations and statuses of his entire
fleet, which were currently assaulting three different positions on the planet.
The flurry of indicators flooded through is mind within .4 seconds, and thanks
to the
Sav
he comprehended it all with clarity. In
truth he’d gotten good enough with the nexus interface that he’d already
acquired some impressive skills in that regard, but the
Sav
had taken everything he’d built up and just multiplied it exponentially.