Star Force 82 Hradeiti (SF82) (Star Force Origin Series) (10 page)

      
The missiles the lizards had fired were now blocked by the leading lizard cruisers, which allowed them to get more than half of them to their targets before the warships blew past the battleships, firing as they went, then disengaged and began running back down to the planet.

      
The missiles slammed into one and only one of the battleships, not Bra’shom’s flagship, but the one situated to his left. He watched in horror as the lizards’ phaser shots weakened its shields enough for the missiles to punch on through and blast into the armor plates. Some of the cruisers, even now under heavy fire, circled back around and closed to pointblank range to finish off what the missiles had left. Those six cruisers were destroyed, along with two others that didn’t escape the mass of cleansing beam and lachar fire coming from the Hradeiti fleet.

      
More cruisers were damaged, but still mobile and retreated down into the safety of the atmosphere despite a few ranged cleansing beam shots hitting home before the distances grew too great to target accurately as they flew in an evasive path.

      
The Scionate snarled with contempt, cursing the lizards as well as his own overconfidence. One of his four battleships now sat, mostly intact, but with craters blown into it from all angles. More than a third of its mass was missing and now debris floating into nearby ships, but the overall shape of the ship was still there, now looking like a zombified version of its former self, with no active weaponry nor a connective comm signal.

      
“Organize search teams,” Bra’shom growled. “If someone is still alive on that ship I want them off there now! Meanwhile commence orbital bombardment again and redeploy the fleet into formation Gamma 7. They’re not pulling that move on us again.”

      
The Scionate paced around the bridge, waiting as his orders were carried out and the pale white lances began connecting with the distant spot on the planet’s surface again. More missiles came, but no cruisers with them, leading them into an overwhelming anti-air response that didn’t allow any to get through. The lizards were probably firing them off rather than losing them when the shield collapsed, which it did less than 12 minutes later under the sustained assault.

      
Lizard shields had gotten considerably stronger over the years, but even with his vastly inferior fleet compared to Star Force standards, they were more than the defenses could hold out against. When the circular plate went down they immediately targeted the shield tower, ensuring that it was destroyed and would not be regenerating another charge. After that they hit the largest buildings and as many smaller targets that they could given their accuracy limits.

      
After that they just pounded the location repetitively, hoping massed shots would compensate for lack of pinpoint accuracy and eventually hit everything in the city that needed destroying. Without explosives the damage was more needle strikes shooting through buildings and carving out holes, meaning the structures would still be there afterwards, more or less, unless Bra’shom wanted to stay up here and waste so much energy that even the buildings would be ground down into the orbital equivalent of sand.

      
As much as his ire would have approved of that he knew they couldn’t waste ammunition…even in the form of reactor power that fed the cleansing beams. There were two other cities that needed destroying and they both were under the protective umbrella of those anti-orbital batteries that could wreck half of his fleet before they got through the shield and took it out.

      
He almost regretted leaving the asteroid chuckers behind, but knew what he had to do. Landing ground troops was the best way to take out those guns, after which the fleet could pound the two cities into dust at their leisure, but he still had the enemy cruisers in atmosphere. He had to get rid of them before this system would be secure, and right now they didn’t seem inclined to rush up and fight it out.

      
Damn them
. They didn’t control orbit until those ships were neutralized, and he didn’t dare risk landing ground troops with them in play. One cruiser could wreck their ground forces in short order if left unchecked. So what was he going to do?

      
He really didn’t have a choice. Time was on the side of the lizards. Eventually one of their ships would arrive, bringing with it additional resources, reinforcements, or just the ability to jump out and rouse a call for help. The initiative was with the invaders, but so was the responsibility of finishing this fight before it could escalate. A stalemate was a loss, so Bra’shom had to act.

      
He wasn’t going to waste his ships against that gun. Better to retreat and admit defeat than spend the lives of his crew like that, not to mention the waste of ships.

      
No, they had to take the gun via the ground, and to go to ground his troops were going to need naval cover…

      
“Bring in the troop ships,” he ordered. “It looks like we’re taking this fight in atmosphere whether we like it or not.”

 
      
8

 
      
Chamsen sat in the tiny cockpit of the hovertank he’d been training in for the past 3 years, rolling in formation with six others as they raced across the desert landscape, keeping the dunes between them and the lizard cruiser sitting almost on the ground outside the target city. It was staying low enough that that anti-orbital gun could cover it, so that if the naval fleet eased up over the curve of the planet to shoot it they’d have to face the big gun too.

      
That was a stalemate as far as the naval battle went, but with that cruiser parked there they were going to have a damn near impossible time fighting their way past it on the ground. Knowing this the fleet commander had ordered an unusual attack, which Chamsen and his tanks were getting in position for while about half the fleet crawled over land to stay below the anti-orbital gun’s firing depression.

      
They were going to have a low ceiling to work with…a very low ceiling, but it was the only way to remove the cruiser ahead of Chamsen’s tanks, not to mention the others that had parked themselves around the perimeter. Plenty of dunes were providing them cover, meaning that the fleet was going to have to get very close in order to get open firing lines on them.

      
As was prudent, the naval drones were going in first with the manned ships following up, but there was also a large contingent of wisps and lizard tanks to deal with as well. It would take a while, but they could take down a warship if left to chip away at it long enough. Not to mention the limited perimeter defense turrets…all of which were sitting underneath a high, flat shield that was blocking the city against orbital bombardment.

      
A few minutes ago a missile attack was conducted, probing the lizard city and seeing that they did have anti-air capability, for the missiles were knocked down before they hit any buildings. That meant the Hradeiti fighters couldn’t go in there just yet. This was a mess of an assault, but the Calavari didn’t know any better way to go about doing this without Star Force backup…which they weren’t going to get. The Hradeiti had to do this on their own, and he just hoped they hadn’t bitten off more than they could swallow on this one.

      
When one of the drones came around the side of a dune that shallowed out, it immediately drew pink phaser fire from two nearby cruisers as it responded with a single cleansing beam and a series of lachars, the latter of which glowed bright red. Following it was another drone, then a larger destroyer, and that was all that Chamsen could see before his tank formation ducked behind another mountainous dune and turned to the right following a bit of a valley as the big ships began slugging it out at nearly pointblank range all along a 10 kilometer line.

      
The 6 tanks were outside the northern end of that line, heading towards a washout that would lead them directly to the city’s nearest point. Fortunately there was no wall around it, meaning all they had to do to get into the buildings was to drive right up to them. But there were plenty of defenders in the way, so while the big ships occupied each other’s attention the tanks snuck around and got a firing line on one of the perimeter turrets that was pumping phaser shots into a warship somewhere off to the far right.

      
Chamsen flew his tank out wide of the sandy hill, making room for the others to get firing lines on it as well. He held his weapon secured until they all got into the open, then together they shot dual heavy lachars at the turret, hitting it with 12 red beams within the first second and blowing armor plates off like it’d been hit with a shotgun. The second salvo silenced the weapon, but the tanks didn’t stop there. They blasted it until the turret was visibly junk, then they pulled back into the cover of the dunes before a cruiser could take a shot at them and moved on further through the sandy canyons looking for their next opportunity for a sniping attack further away from the brawl that was attracting all of the lizard cruisers, the rest of which were abandoning their positions on the other side of the city and flying directly over it to come down on the Hradeiti warships.

 
      
By the time Bra’shom’s battleship pushed its way through the tip of a sand dune in order to stay below the firing ceiling of the anti-orbital gun the fight was already old and with multiple ships from both sides laying broken on the sand. The bigger cleansing beams his flagship carried leapt out immediately, drilling two pale white daggers into the side of an already damaged lizard cruiser and cutting a swath through it as one popped out the far side and tattooed one of the city buildings beyond.

      
A giant pink beam passed within 20 meters of the top of the battleship, missing it and streaking off into the distance behind the fleet as the big gun tried to get a glancing shot in. Fortunately it wasn’t as big of a gun as the ones he’d seen in action in the past, and wasn’t situated on top of a huge tower. This one was lower to the ground with several buildings actually interfering with its lowest firing lines. Depress as it could, the battleship was still under its firing line and Bra’shom was glad his crew were holding to that navigational mark meticulously.

      
Seeing all the devastation and ongoing carnage playing out before him, the Scionate figured they had the lizard cruisers beat. They were getting hit hard in the process, but they had numbers and the city defense turrets weren’t adding a lot to the fight. It looked like this is where the lizards were planning to make their last stand, and…

      
Suddenly Bra’shom saw one of the lizard cruisers dart forward, digging into the sand to the left of his battleship but he knew it wasn’t a crash course. The ship got hit by several lachars while the cleansing beam gunners were focusing on a pair of cruisers ahead that were pounding away at the forward shields. That let it get through all the way underneath the bigger ship, wedging itself between hull and sand and breaching the battleship’s shields with the contact.

      
The phaser beams now started hitting armor from the pair in front even as one of the cruisers lost half its weaponry as a cleansing beam cut a critical power conduit. Bra’shom wasn’t worried about those ships, but he was scared as hell to have that cruiser underneath them. If it had a self-destruct it could…

      
Suddenly the battleship began to gain altitude, and before Bra’shom could order full thrust down the cruiser pushed it up enough that another thick pink beam leapt out from the city and punched straight into the forward hull, burning through the armor there in a flash and cutting a tunnel half the length of the ship that blew out with the vaporized material into the surrounding decks.

      
The bridge was about 30 meters away from the beam trace, which was too close. The whole leftside wall exploded and Bra’shom got slammed in the rear as it blew him and the rest of the bridge crew to the far was in a load of shrapnel and heat that killed them all within a matter of seconds.

 
      
Commander Tyree was standing on the bridge of another battleship a couple kilometers to the south of the flagship when he saw it rise up above the combat ceiling and get slammed by the anti-orbital battery at maximum depression. It took him a moment to realize that there was a lizard ship underneath, crumpled and half buried in the battleship’s hull, but it had obviously pushed the warship up into the firing line.

      
“Damn them,” the red/green Protovic swore, immediately punching buttons on his chair’s control console and assuming command of the fleet. With that he opened a comm channel to all ships while sending out his own placement orders and reconfiguring the alignment as he saw fit. Bra’shom hadn’t been an idiot, but Tyree had learned to fight differently and if they were going to get the fleet through this they had to take a different approach.

      
“All ships, beware the cruisers diving beneath you. They just killed our flagship by moving it up into range of the city’s big gun. Drag bottom on the sand and push all gravity drives down if they do manage to undercut you. Crush them into the ground. If you drift up you’re good as dead anyway, so don’t worry about the damage to your ships. Smash them no matter what it takes.”

      
“Helm, we’re going in. Follow the course I give you and please be accurate,” he said as he ordered six of the remaining drones into flanking positions, being flown by pilots in orbit, while the rest of the fleet continued slugging it out. “Scrape bottom on approach, I don’t care how much armor you grind off.”