Star Force: Resurrection (SF84) (Star Force Origin Series)

1

June 14, 3202

Krachnika
System
(lizard capitol/homeworld)

Middle Zone

Paul was standing in the
Excalibur
’s command nexus as the ship was finishing its hard
deceleration into the enemy system when he heard a series of distant rumbles
and had a vibration through the deck rock him on his feet. Immediately he saw
alerts pop up on the ship’s status display, detailing the fallen shields and
the huge hole in the ship’s forward starboard side that ran like a knife blade
halfway to the interior.

Already linked into the system he calculated what had
happened and sent an immediate ping backwards to the other ships in the convoy
alerting them to the fact that the jumpline was mined. He’d brought his ships
in off the line a ways and was right now having to correct for that
misalignment with some serious navigational tugs on the system’s planets…though
that was made even more difficult due to the fact that the ship had just lost
two gravity drives in the damaged area.

But the
Excalibur
slid to a halt in the middle zone of the star system, farther in than he’d
wanted but still clear of the lizard fleets choking the inner zone to death.
The ship’s sensors could pick up the enemy’s own sensor bounce and the light
having come off them minutes ago, though they hadn’t seen his ship arrive yet.
Paul did see, in addition to multiple smaller holes on his command ship that
hadn’t penetrated more than a few hundred meters, that a warship came out of
its deceleration further behind the
Excalibur
and was reporting no damage.

Another came, then another before his ship’s sensors
bounced back from the numerous contacts further out along their incoming
trajectory. There were millions of chunks of rock placed in a cylinder along
the jumpline far away from the star. The
Excalibur
,
having come in offline, had clipped the nearest edge of that field…

Paul immediately sent information back to the
approaching ships of the field size and placement so they could navigate around
it no matter how that would screw up their approaches. They might end up on the
other side of the system before they
bled
off
momentum, but that was preferable to ramming another of the rocks.

A contact zipped by the
Excalibur
and Paul’s gut wrenched as the sensors recognized the
debris of a
Warship
-class jumpship
broken into four segments and falling out of control in towards the star. There
were people on that ship, not just drones, and anyone who might have still been
alive was either going to ram into the star or run into the lizard ship swarm
first and get blown away.

Paul sent out dozens of orders simultaneously, one of
which was to the command ship’s remaining gravity drives, having them enhance
the star’s pull as much as possible and jump the
Excalibur
in towards it at reckless speed. It had to accelerate
from a dead stop, but it gradually ate up the speed difference with what had
been the
Manticore
then reeled it
back in as the lizard fleet ahead was getting closer in a hurry.

As fast as it was going, the now dead jumpship had
already bled off most of its interstellar speed, which had been further reduced
by the slow jump necessary to allow the fleet to come out in the middle zone
rather than the inner and avoid the lizard defense fleet waiting there to
ambush anyone coming in on the expected jumplines.

But Paul still didn’t have enough time. Even as the
lizard fleet saw the speeding ships coming and graciously moved out of the way
so they could hit the star without interference, the
Excalibur
caught up to one of the four segments and his waiting
crew locked onto it with every tractor beam the command ship had, having to
abandon the other three, and extended a weakened IDF field out around it.
Normally that was something a command ship was built to do with ease in order
to disable nearby enemy ships, but a decent portion of the necessary equipment
inside the
Excalibur
had been junked
when that mine had dug in so deep.

The field was steady, but there was only so much
stress it could take without collapsing. The tractor beams held the ship
segment firm to the command ship, but they couldn’t do squat to move the thing
at any decent speed without the IDF. It was what was taking the inertial
stresses in the
Manticore
fragment’s
place, and if it collapsed the tractor beams would rip out the pieces of the
hull they were gripping and it would break free.

Paul and the ship’s computer were calculating the
stresses as best they could and knew it was going to be close. The blue/white
star ahead of them was shifting to the right even as it was growing to fill the
forward
viewscreens
. Stellar radiation began baking
the exposed hull, but a few seconds later the shields snapped back over most of
the
Excalibur
, thought the
Manticore
fragment had no such
protection.

Pulling to the side as much as it could, the command
ship brought the chunk of jumpship down to kiss the star’s atmosphere, burning
through several sections of hull before they began gaining stellar altitude,
but were continuing to get baked from the radiation that close in. With their
momentum persevered they passed by the star quickly and the radiation threat
diminished as the
Excalibur
shot
between lizard formations on the other side that were fortunately not in the
way.

“Admiral, get rescue crews over there immediately. You
have the ship.”

“Understood,” Admiral Franken said grimly as Paul’s
mind directed itself to the rest of the star system. Lag times in signals were
increased the further they got away from the convoy, but he was already picking
up battlemap signals indicating that two other jumpships had been hit by mines
upon entry. Cursing silently he watched the updates belatedly flow into him,
noting that no more in his convoy were taking hits thanks to a much wider
approach vector. They were coming in somewhere other than planned and much
closer to the star than he’d wanted, but there were no lizards waiting for them
there.

But there were other damage alerts starting to make
their way to him coming in from other Star Force convoys that were coming into
the star system simultaneously on other jumplines. They’d timed their
departures so that all 12 convoys would be arriving along different jumplines
at the same time, making it hard for the lizards to spot them incoming and rush
to meet them before they could get enough ships into play. Simultaneous
arrivals also meant they could get the ships here 12 times faster, even if they
weren’t all in the same location.

Paul was reading damaged or destroyed jumpships in
Aaron’s convoy, more in Brian’s, and he expected to get more in as the
battlemap signals from the more distant ones traveled across the system far
faster than the speed of light, but well too slow for anything resembling
instantaneous communication.

Paul was furious at the loss of people occurring, for
every one of those ships were manned. The last scout they’d sent into the
system had reported no mine fields of any kind, and it’d only been 37 days
since it had last been here.

How the hell did
the lizards get mine fields of this size and density set up on multiple
jumplines and this far out from the star since then?

The answer didn’t hit him for some time, namely
because it was so big and his focus was on the arriving convoys. All of them
eventually stopped reporting dead ships soon after the first ones arrived, for
they were all adjusting their incoming trajectories around the fields once
alerted. If they hadn’t, or had been coming in straight on the jumplines, just
about every ship in their convoys would have been destroyed up until the time
when the impacts cleared a hole through the field for more ships to pass
through.

The lizards had walled themselves in good, expecting
attack. That meant the scout ship had not been here undetected. Paul hadn’t
counted on it going unnoticed, but how had they gotten that many mines in place
in such a short span of time?

His mindboggling answer came when he looked at the
status of the six inhabited planets in the system…and saw that one of them was
missing a shipyard ring.

Paul double checked himself, making sure he was
thinking straight, but there was no mistaking the fact that the scout had
reported 6 rings, one around each planet, 37 days ago…

And now there were only 5.

Paul pulled up a closer look at those mines from the
previous sensor readings, as well as what was being transmitted from the other
ships, and saw that they weren’t identically shaped. Rather they were chunks of
rubble ranging from the size of a tank up to the size of a cruiser.

The lizards had somehow disassembled an entire
shipyard ring and moved the pieces out to all 12…no, make that 23 different
jumplines, and mined them all the way out in the middle zone where a wider
pattern was needed to catch ships. Normally you’d put a field in close where
maneuvering options were less, but they’d probably expected Star Force to come
in using slower jumps so to avoid the defending fleet near the star. They
couldn’t know where exactly they’d emerge to be waiting for them, so they’d
mined all the approaches and sacrificed a shipyard ring to get enough material
for it.

But how had they torn apart one and moved it all in
such little time?

Paul looked at the lizard fleet guarding the star and
the updated ship icons around the planets as they came in, knowing he had his
answer.

They’d brought in their cruiser fleet and had it shoot
the ring, breaking off pieces that were then latched onto and pulled out to the
wanted locations. The scout had reported there were over 12 million cruisers in
this system, and apparently they’d put them to good use since the scout ship
had left.

As the Admiral saw to getting dropships over to the
piece of the
Manticore
to see if
anyone was still alive, Paul stepped out of the nexus for a moment,
disconnecting from the system and balling his fists. He knew it could have been
far worse, but he’d gone through entire planetary invasions without losing a
single person before, and already they’d lost several thousand minimum to these
mines. People who had spent centuries training and improving themselves. All of
it wasted by running into some dumb chunks of rubble.

The lizards didn’t care about dying, or killing others,
no matter what the numbers…and that was one reason why they had to be taken
out. Whether by dying or being captured, these bastards could not be allowed to
leave this system.

And Paul knew they didn’t care about that either.
Every lizard here knew they were going to fight to the death and there would be
no escape. It was their homeworld and they didn’t care. They hadn’t bothered
trying to evacuate, merely writing off everyone here to their deaths, so why
would they care about trying to kill Paul’s fleet? The more Star Force
personnel who died here the better, and if they had managed to kill most or all
of the fleet with the mines then they probably would have considered the loss
of their homeworld suitable compensation.

Ripples of invisible energy formed around Paul as he
let his fury flow out of his mind and into his body. The Jumat energy pooled
around him, then in a split second of rage he threw it all at the wall to his
left, denting a two meter wide crater into it with a crunch.

Paul forced a slow breath, transitioning his internal
fire into ice. He had a moment to spare while the Admiral worked, but he needed
to get his mind into as efficient a mode as possible before he went back at it,
which was why he’d allowed himself to bleed off that Jumat blast. There was no
way to bring back those who were lost, and they were going to have to kill
every lizard in this system anyway, so there wasn’t even a chance for
vengeance. The lizards had won the opening round, and there was no undoing
that.

A crewmember ran into view in the short hallway behind
Paul, with the trailblazer waving him off. “It’s ok. I just punched the wall in
frustration.”

The
crewer
looked at the
dent and nodded. “We all feel the same way. Make these bastards pay for it.”

“Unless they surrender, none of them are leaving this
system alive,” Paul said firmly.

“You’re still going to offer…after this?”

“Yes,” Paul said simply, getting himself back into
‘Admiral’ mode. “They won’t accept it, but if we don’t offer then they will
have scored another victory in being able to manipulate us. And if even one of
them surrenders, that’ll be a victory for us.”

“I guess more dead lizards mean nothing to their
leaders.”

“I highly doubt it.”

“Sorry for the suggestion.”

Paul shook his head. “Wanting to get back at the lizards
is the correct emotional response. How you apply it is the tricky part. The
most obvious method is not always the right one.”

“Point taken,” the crewman said, excusing herself with
a nod and disappearing back around the intact wall that separated the command
nexus from the rest of the bridge.

Paul stood there for a moment, thinking. Sometimes you
did just need to hit something, immediately. Unfortunately this war was about
the lizards expanding, which meant they were actually winning. Lose 1 world,
gain 10 more, even if that one was their homeworld. Taking this system was
going to hurt the lizards for sure, but they weren’t defeating them in coming
here. The lizards would survive as a race, even if these would die, and they
would spread and build elsewhere. Already the Voku had identified three systems
in the coreward half of lizard territory that had partially operational
shipyard rings. They’d destroyed one of them, but it was clear the lizards were
just building new, albeit small at this point, core worlds in their new
territories even as Star Force was taking their originals down.