Star Force: Resistance (SF75) (10 page)

The work had to be done and done right the first time,
as quickly as possible. She could get caught up on current events later. Right
now all that mattered was this Keema battery, and if others were able to find
or ship in the necessary raw materials to allow the sedas to fashion all the
necessary components…which she considered the truly hard part in all of
this…then she was going to be damn sure the assembly went off without a hitch.
They didn’t have a schedule to follow, working with what pieces were brought to
them when available and adapting as they went, but the skill and speed of both
the Mainline and Canderian crews was admirable and she doubted the lizards
could have done the same.

It took them another 11 months after she arrived to
get the battery constructed, which was breakneck pace considering the
situation. When it was completed that wasn’t the end of her stay, for there was
even more work to do on the surrounding structures. Star Force needed to expand
their base and construct a legitimate war colony underground, which meant
getting rid of temporary structures and building proper ones.

The Canderian construction crews were given priority
over most of that while the Mainliners were shipped off to secondary sites retrieving
raw materials or expanding upon those temporary bases elsewhere in the system.
That suited Jasmine just fine, and though the architecture wasn’t Canderian
specs she found it reasonably familiar as all Star Force tech was, and more
than one of the other workers had noted that this construction effort was less
building a base on the planet rather than turning the planet into a makeshift
seda of its own.

That wasn’t even near to accurate given the size of
the planet, but something about it rang true regardless and from that day on
she started to think the same, with the Canderians building another home in the
rock rather than in the void of space.

And once the Keema battery was built she allowed
herself the luxury of watching the battle updates, for scuttlebutt said that
the finished construction was going to usher in the next phase of the invasion.
She didn’t know what that would be, but was interested in finding out.
Protecting this planet with the big gun made sense, but not when the sedas in
orbit were already accomplishing the same task. She also felt something was in
the works, and was working in one of the residential facilities installing a
door when word was passed from worker to worker.

A relief fleet had just arrived, which wasn’t uncommon
given the size of this campaign, but with this one had come something
unexpected…in the form of Sentinel segments.

Lots of Sentinel segments.

10

February 12, 2937

Gvaris
System (lizard
territory)

Inner Zone

Paul stood in the
Excalibur
’s
nexus as he watched the clock ticking down. The lizards still controlled low
stellar orbit despite his many attempts to root them out of it, due in no small
part to their ever flowing river of reinforcements. No matter how many ships he
destroyed more would come to replace them, and without controlling the inner
zone he couldn’t ambush them on the way in. Furthermore, there were cruisers
being built on the two inhabited planets round the clock, adding to the number
of orbital fleets that kept growing and growing despite the rising number of
Star Force vessels in the system.

Every time a convoy arrived it had to do so on a
predetermined schedule so Paul could get to its jumppoint and screen for them.
A few ships could arrive easily enough and avoid the lizard swarm near the
star, but a long convoy was an invitation for them to come further out and jump
it before they could all safely arrive…and this one coming in was going to be
the largest and most important to date.

With a thought he sent the warning signal out from the
Excalibur
detailing the exact
jumppoint he wanted the convoy to arrive at. The lizards had been pushing their
fleets further and further out, forcing incoming convoys to brake hard and exit
early in the weaker outer system gravity and come to a stop before they reached
deep into the inner zone. It was a fuel heavy maneuver, but doable so long as
the convoy wasn’t traveling at too great a speed.

With less than a minute remaining Paul sent his drones
on ahead in a small microjump to get into position, heading almost directly
down the jumpline the convoy would be arriving on and attacking the lizard
ships already drifting out in their direction. He kept the signal transmitting
a bit longer, then jumped the
Excalibur
itself up into position and plowed into the growing lizard fleet, destroying
many of the cruisers and pushing the others back for fear of being destroyed
prior to gaining sufficient numbers to do the damage they knew was necessary to
take down the drones, let alone a command ship.

It had been a long time since one of the donuts had
gone down, but the lizards had never forgotten. Paul hadn’t been there, but
he’d reviewed the mission reports in detail. Most of the crew had survived,
thanks to the rest of the fleet surrounding the dying ship to cover for an
evacuation, but the
Evanescence
had
been so badly damaged it could no longer move. System purges had been enacted
to erase data from the ship’s computers, but that had been a moot point. As
soon as the weakened fleet pulled back with the evacuees the lizards chipped
away at the ship until it became a debris field.

Paul thought that was more out of vengeance than
prudence, but ever since then the lizards had been
more coy
about attacking the command ships. They knew how much it would take to damage one,
and even with the tech enhancements that both sides were escalating through
they could still guess at the changes. The sedas were another story, for they
weren’t used to fighting constructs of that size. The assault pillars and
invokers were still sitting quietly in the stands watching this campaign
unfold, but Paul had a feeling that today that would change as soon as they saw
this convoy arrive.

The first ship to enter was a
Warship
-class jumpship, followed soon by two more only seconds
behind that immediately linked into the battlemap system and Paul incorporated
them into his fleet. He had them launch drones immediately after moving forward
off the jumppoint and began to spread his umbrella of protection out further to
the sides as more and more ships came in.

In response the lizard fleet came out in even greater
numbers than before, knowing they’d have to up their game to get to the convoy
this time, but Paul thought they had another agenda in play. For these holds
meant he had to fight them straight up, and he thought the lizards were just
trying to take out Star Force ships whenever and wherever they could, then rely
on their industrial might to replace whatever they lost. So far it was working,
save for the fact that Star Force was also sending in replacement ships, but
the lizards seemed to be gaining the advantage as time passed…which is what he
hoped they would think.

When the first cradle came through carrying a
12-kilometer long piece of Sentinel everything changed. The other lizard fleets
throughout the system began to move, knowing that they had to destroy it before
it became operational. The sedas were already giving them considerable trouble,
able to take such a beating and keep on fighting, and they knew the Sentinels
were worse. They had no crew, no living structures, not even a single hallway.
They were simply a mass of weapons, armor, shields, and power generation…and
Star Force was bringing six of their biggest ones in today, each in four piece
segments.

Those segments were a pain in the ass for the jumpship
cradles to carry, for unlike the new sedas the Sentinels couldn’t travel on
their own. Their gravity drives were small, enough for maneuvers around orbit
or a slow hike from planet to planet insystem. They could not travel from one
system to another, nor were they meant to. They were defensive strongholds,
typically meant to be built on site, though Star Force had gotten in the habit
of designing them to break down into ‘travel carry’ size. It would only take a
matter of minutes for them to be assembled, not days, and once they were they
would put out more firepower than even the largest of the sedas…and they were
expendable, so Star Force wasn’t shy about having them eat up as many lizard
ships as they could before being destroyed.

The lizards knew that about Star Force tactics, which
is why after a delay even the assault pillars and invokers started moving. It
was going to be too late though, for as soon as the first piece arrived Paul
had it move off the line and make a microjump out deep into the system. It’d
have to run its engines hard to slow down again in that limited gravity, but it
would take it well away from the lizard fleets that would have a harder time of
chasing it…yet chase they did.

Numerous cruisers disappeared from the battlemap as
they made their own microjumps to go after it and the escorts Paul had already
traveling there from elsewhere in the system. There would be a massive fight
out there, with the second Sentinel piece arriving a minute and a half later
and moving out to join them. The two pieces were meant to fit together, but the
third one that came in was not. It was a duplicate of the bottom segment that
had already gone out to the edge of the system, with Paul sending it on
microjump in another direction towards a rendezvous with a second escort fleet
even as his neighborhood was filling up with ships rapidly, including the first
assault pillar to arrive from its parking position deep in near the star.

The cruisers in front of it split, opening up a
corridor through which objects were hurled at controlled speeds. When they hit
the
Excalibur
, if they ever got that
close, they’d do some damage to the shields but not nearly as much as a
kamikaze cruiser. No, these were meant to relay the firepower from stone to
stone and hit his command ship outside of the
Excalibur
’s range to return fire.

But as soon as the assault pillar launched the first
object he knew something was wrong, for it wasn’t shaped the same way they
typically were. Six of them were released and traveling towards his ship, about
to get picked off by his defensive guns and picket ships, whichever got to them
first, when they exploded on their own. Not in any damaging way, but
fragmenting into a halo of pieces that did not scatter. Rather they held their
ring-like shape up the line all the way back to the assault pillar, which then
emitted a blinding aqua-colored light that passed through each of the still
moving rings and hit his command ship’s shields.

The blast didn’t abate, but kept grinding off shield
energy like a firehose. Paul knew from his connection to the computer exactly
how much shield damage it was doing and the fact that if the
Excalibur
just sat here it was going to
penetrate within 42 seconds. After less than 2 seconds he already had his
drones moving to a position to target the first of the rings, but when they
destroyed it with ease the beam only scattered a bit, enlarging its footprint
on the shields and lessening the overall damage a chunk, but it was still
draining them.

Paul had the command ship move to the left, but
somehow the rings also moved laterally. They must have had gravity drives of
their own for they brought the focusing power of the beam back onto the
Excalibur
, catching a corvette in the
process. It blocked the beam for a few seconds, then was burnt through in a
popping explosion that let the rest of the beam get back to draining the
Excalibur
’s shields.

Paul raised an eyebrow, noting the design upgrade and
the fact that this energy was not their invoker style arcs nor their phaser
tech. This was something new, but it wasn’t going to be enough. The trailblazer
moved his escort ships out of the way then executed a short microjump out of
the firing line and drifted back in towards the lizard cruiser swarms while the
assault pillar moved forward towards the now exposed jumppoint as drones were
headed towards it and cruisers were forming up in defensive screens.

Paul sent another signal up the line, telling the
incoming convoy to break harder and move the jumppoint out while he slugged his
way through lizard ships and used the fleet of drones to go towards the assault
pillar…not to shoot it, but to shoot the focusing rings it was launching
towards the next incoming Sentinel segment. Simultaneously he had another
command ship move in to block the firing line for when the huge chunk of
relatively unprotected tech appeared insystem, long enough anyway for it to
make a microjump out to head to site number 2.

But despite the lizards’ cunning, and the fact that
two more assault pillars and an invoker were heading to the jumppoint, this was
all a diversion. The Sentinel segments that were being pursued were not going
to stop and try to assemble. They were merely drawing large chunks of the
lizard fleet out of position. The next Sentinel segment to arrive jumped to a third
site, but the following one, which based on the pattern would follow it to mate
up, did not. It jumped to Planet 13, then three more segments came in with very
little spacing in the deceleration jumps, all of which followed it as Paul took
the
Excalibur
directly for the
invoker, intending to fight it head on while the rest of his fleet was going to
delay the assault pillars as best they could.

The four Sentinel segments that headed for the planet
were met up in orbit with a defense fleet there that was screening against the
entire orbital fleet the lizards had. A massive battle was already underway,
but the Sentinel segments were maneuvered down into low orbit and into a
holding position that required a lot of tugging by the cradles to keep them
from falling down onto the planet. Until their own gravity drives segments got
powered up they were going to have to hold them in a mutual IDF field, which
was difficult but not impossible to manage while their own gravity drives held
the whole assembly aloft.

Trick of it was they had no power left for shields, so
it was up to the fleet to defend them while they hastily assembled the four
pieces into the thick Sentinel ‘rod’ that the lizards had come to fear.

The ships that had left to pursue the other pieces
were now too far away to get back to Planet 13 to stop this Sentinel from being
assembled, but many of the others weren’t. All across the system ships with
decent jumplines took off towards the outer planet and began spamming orbit,
first with cruisers, then four invokers arrived ahead of six assault pillars
just as the first two pieces were assembled.

The numbers, however thinned by the subterfuge and the
Sentinel pieces continuing to arrive that were moving off to yet other
rendezvous points within the system, were not in Star Force’s favor. Thanks to
Paul’s update, Liam was able to get drones into position to snipe at the first
of the ring targeting relays and take them out as the assault pillars launched
them, but soon those ships were overwhelmed by cruisers and destroyed with Liam
keeping them there as long as possible to delay the big enemy ships from firing
on the helpless Sentinel segments or the cradles keeping them from crashing
down onto the planetary base directly below them.

Except it wasn’t exactly underneath, with a small
chunk of the planet’s surface cracking apart and being shoved aside like a mole
moving dirt to expose thick armored doors set just below ground. Those doors
then parted, revealing the aperture of the planetary defense battery. It
rotated in its spherical socket and took aim under Liam’s personal control. He
altered the beam width into a very narrow cone then targeted a group of
cruisers where there were no Star Force ships engaging them.

The almost totally clear beam leapt up from the
surface and disintegrated 27 cruisers in a matter of 4 seconds, with the excess
energy that missed them moving off into space past the engaging fleets. The big
gun suffered a recharge period while its capacitors filled to the brim, then
Liam fired again taking out another swath of cruisers before lining up a shot
at one of the invokers that was coming in to engage a fleet of drones. He had
the drones part ever so slightly as they danced around the energy arcs that
were covering the big ship in a bush-like shroud of rainbow light, then he
dialed back the conical spread to as fine a beam as he could manage and put a
shot straight through his fleet formation with it passing unseen into the
maelstrom.