Star Force: Penance (SF49) (2 page)

That little ‘respite’ resulted in dented armor and
several dozen Scionate unconscious on the ground before a pair of tanks
dispersed them and hit her with a wash of their own anti-air…with one of them
managing to land a plasma cannon shot on her.

That shot melted through the armor of the two Scionate
next to her, killing them on contact while her shields, weakened as they were,
canceled out the entire blast, but the anti-air following it got through,
starting to absorb on her armor and actually give her a bit of a recharge…but
doing tiny bits of damage in the process.

Now enraged, Kara shot off towards the nearest tank
and flew underneath it, then put as much thrust up under it as she could,
flipping it over and shoving it onto the other tank, catching it partway across
and pinning it to the ground. Before either could even attempt at righting
themselves she popped out her orb launchers and skewered both of them, hitting
some of the crew in the process and no longer caring.

She ducked underneath the top one as another Valerie
shot by and peppered the area with plasma orbs and scattergun fire, then
blasted into the tank again to make a hole it the armor that she climbed in
through. She punched the toppled Scionate back, knocking them unconscious with
a single blow each, then she tore into the section of the machine that held the
power conduit to the main cannon.

She reached in and grabbed it, siphoning off energy to
recharge her capacitors while giving her shields time to reform their intricate
matrix. She didn’t linger there for long, pulling only a ‘small’ amount of
power from the now wrecked tank before moving back to the hole and dropping
onto the grass underneath her impromptu lean-to and looked out the opening…seeing
a sea of Scionate infantry and tanks moving across the landscape.

She checked her battlemap, seeing that the Star Force
fighters had already pulled back to the city…save for one, which was showing as
having crashed. Kara’s jaw clenched and she shot out from under her cover and
fired indiscriminately into the ground troops underneath her as she flew over
their armored heads towards the fighter, knowing/hoping that the pilot was
still alive inside the protective cocoon.

When she got there enemy infantry were all around the
crash, but not paying it too much attention save for a few that were climbing
on top and trying to figure out
 
how to
get inside the grey T-shaped craft. Kara killed them on the spot and threw
their bodies off while the plasma fire from the infantry around her increased
rapidly now that she had given them a more or less stable target to fire at.

She ignored them and pried open the canopy, having
felt the pilot inside and given her a telepathic heads up to release the latch.
The top part gave them a bit of cover to hide behind, with Kara wrapping her
shields around the Regular’s flex armor as she grabbed her and flew them both
up and into the sky, accelerating as hard as she could in a curve that brought
them onto a trajectory towards the nearest city. It took less than a minute to
get clear of the Scionate army, with a few Valeries tracking and giving her
trouble, but when she got near to the city defense shield anti-air lachars took
down one of the Valeries, causing the others to fall back and leaving her in
the clear to drop down to the forming rows of mechs and stop just outside the
shield.

Kara dropped the pilot off without a word on the
pavement surrounding the outer ring of buildings, then leapt back into the sky while
searching the battlemap for any weak spots in the Scionate’s developing
formations that she could exploit without getting herself mauled by their now
swarming air cover.

2

Outnumbered more than 10 to 1, Paul kept his drones
hitting the edges of the Scionate fleet in coordinated attack groups, picking
on one ship at a time and killing/disabling it before moving onto another, with
damaged drones pulling back to recycle and potentially lure more of the blocky
Scionate ships out away from the orbital zone they were aggressively defending.
Technology wise Star Force’s ships were better, but with their capitol in this
system and six worlds to draw off of the Scionate had more military might to
call on than they thought they needed…though Paul was about to make them
recalculate those numbers.

The Scionate’s strategy was clear…screen for their
transports to get to ground, which was taking a long time considering how many
of them they were bringing into low orbit. Their defensive fleet was holding
position just above the atmosphere, which Paul was currently chewing on, while
escort groups were meeting the transports at their jumppoint and shepherding
them down with a third set of attack groups roaming the perimeter and meeting
up with anything that dared to get close to their vulnerable ground troops. The
Scionate had devoted so many warships to this attack that they appeared
unbeatable…but looks could be deceiving, and speaking candidly the Scionate
naval commanders were rookies.

They were set up for a slugging match, which Paul
denied them. Using the binary drives that his fleet had he chose when and where
to strike, pulling back when he wanted with the enemy unable to match the
curved trajectories down towards the planet, with Paul sending the drones into
the upper atmosphere and underneath the Scionate on more than one occasion to
target some of the bigger ships with pointblank mauler strikes. Already the
Scionate had lost a battleship to those tactics and they weren’t adapting well,
allowing Paul to strike and kill the bigger ships that were out of position.

Meanwhile he had the smaller drones harassing the
Scionate attack groups, outmaneuvering them and nipping away at their shields
until one or more would get wounded, then swarming and eliminating it before
retreating and repeating the process again and again. The remote pilots in the
system were proving quite adept, despite their lack of combat…which Paul could
see via icons describing each one’s current level and combat history at a
glance, with most of them having decent training scores but little real experience.

Training was everything, and Star Force was putting
that point to the Scionate in a very destructive way as their dominate fleet
was getting chewed up and reduced in size while successfully screening for the
ground transports. Paul didn’t like killing so many of their supposed allies,
but this was a fight of their choosing, and should they turn around and run
he’d let them go…but so long as they were attacking one of his worlds and
potentially going to kill his people on the ground he couldn’t afford to cut
them any slack on the naval front.

Which was why, when their formation split a crack in
response to yet more probing action around the perimeter of their main fleet,
he sent in the most advanced drones he had. Most of the ones in action were
equipped with the standard plasma/mauler/rail gun trio of weapons, with the
heavy cruisers carrying small cleansing beams. A few of the drones were missile
boats, while a handful were special varieties, custom configured by the local
commander into what he’d wanted on deployment.

But one warship in orbit, the one Paul had arrived on,
came equipped with their most recent tech upgrades. Those ships he’d kept back,
hovering behind the others and waiting for the proper moment to send them
in…with his eye on the flagship of the Scionate fleet, a huge
Dreadnaught
-class warship that was
nearly the size of a jumpship. It was sitting dead center in their formation,
with the incoming transports flying within a few kilometers of it as they moved
down into the atmosphere, insuring that no one was going to follow them from
above.

The dreadnaught was covered with plasma cannons,
nothing special in their design but in sufficient numbers that they would eat
apart any drones that got close to them, meaning Paul couldn’t send in the
mauler-equipped ones without suffering huge losses. That would be a mistake,
for the dreadnaught was so massive that it was going to take a lot of pounding.
The next best option would be to hit it with cleansing beams from the heavy
cruisers at range, but the Scionate fleet was spread out enough to keep those
attacks down to a handful, with very little hull damage being inflicted on the
massive ship.

That said
,
Paul had already
weakened its shields prior to the formation split occurring. When the moment of
opportunity arrived he sent a single mental command to the remote pilots while
assuming direct control over one of the cruisers. His perspective in the nexus
shifted to the view from that individual drone as he flew it, maintaining control
over the main weapon while leaving two remote pilots to handle the other
weapons and another two for shields and anti-air, for the Scionate were
spitting missiles out like crazy trying to hit and kill the resilient Star
Force drones.

Paul executed a short jump
towards
the planet, something the Scionate couldn’t do off the
local gravity well, and pulled an atmospheric slide/bounce to redirect
underneath the enemy fleet, coming up the ‘safe’ conduit the transports were
going down with several dozen Scionate ships dropping into the atmosphere to stay
below them and block any run against their boxed-up ground troops.

Paul ran his cruiser in between those ships and the
main fleet at high speed, avoiding most of their plasma fire before hard
breaking directly underneath the hourglass-shaped dreadnaught as a wave of
yellow plasma came pouring down on his ship while the other advanced drones
followed him in. Mauler blasts shot out immediately, pounding what was left of
the dreadnaught’s shields and penetrating the local areas, doing massive hull
damage on the surface but failing to penetrate very deep.

That said, a swath of plasma cannons got hit and
slagged, reducing the amount of return fire and prompting the dreadnaught to
spin about to get a better firing angle on those ships beneath as the rest of their
fleet repositioned as well, coming down on the sneak attacking drones.

Paul had planned for that was well, signaling a
predetermined attack run up top while he aimed the primary weapon on the
cruiser and fired a translucent shield column up at the dreadnaught. It hit the
hull and crunched a few battle plates, almost like the ship had physically
punched the other, but the damage was superficial and a moment later the
emitter on the cruiser released the Ta’lin’yi energy that crackled like a
fireworks display down the length of the containment shield, sucking energy out
of it enroute to the dreadnaught and unleashing against the hull.

The white/gold prickles that looked like a billion
tiny fairies gorging themselves on pixie dust blew through the hull armor like
it wasn’t even there and blasted like a torch into the dreadnaught’s interior,
exploding everything they touched on contact. The Ta’lin’yi was so destructive,
in fact, that Star Force had lost several prototype weapons from backfire,
requiring the most advanced shields built to date to hold and channel the
weaponsfire to target…which they now had thanks to the arc elements, with those
shields also temporarily protecting these drones from the dreadnaught’s plasma
fire.

Paul kept the continuous Ta’lin’yi, which they simply
referred to as a ‘Talon Torch,’ or just ‘Torch,’ firing nonstop so that he
could eat well into the interior of the dreadnaught while the other cruisers
and destroyers fired theirs off in short bursts, targeting key points on the
hull that the maulers opened up. Trick of it was, the Ta’lin’yi lost most of
its effectiveness against shields, making it about 3 times effective as plasma
and useful in assaulting shielded ships, but it didn’t get its big bang until
it hit physical matter…which was why the shield disrupting nature of the
maulers was so critical, allowing them to punch at least small holes it the
protective barrier to deliver the torch lances through.

Paul kept his attack up until the drone’s shields
eventually went down and the main weapon was hit and destroyed, but he didn’t
retreat, instead pulling in closer to the dreadnaught and letting the maulers
eat away at surface targets, thinning the plasma cannons that were hitting his
other ships until a coordinated salvo from the other Scionate ships eventually
killed the cruiser and his display reverted back to ‘Admiral’ view…where he saw
the rest of the new drones finishing the work he’d started and tearing the big
ship apart via deep core damage.

The dreadnaught itself was too big to blow apart, at
least not all at once, but huge conduits of damage were being poked into it
along with the exterior looking like a person that had been burnt so bad they’d
lost all their skin. As the big ship began to list the surviving drones turned
their weaponry on the surrounding ships, with Paul instructing the pilots to
fight it out to the last functioning weapon. He didn’t want to lose them, but
he would gladly spend them in exchange for the damage they were doing…plus the
disruption they were creating in the rest of the Scionate fleet that he began
exploiting with the conventional drones.

The debris from the destroyed ships on both sides fell
into the atmosphere, given that they were hovering on anti-
grav
rather that actually sitting in orbit…or rather a lazy orbit so the Scionate
could remain overtop their ground troops at all times. That was a mistake as
huge chunks of ships fell down into the atmosphere, partially burning up from
the friction but also reigning down meteors on the Scionate’s own troops…most
of which were deflected by the transports’ shields, but some were coming down
as far off as the neighboring cities, making the Star Force personnel there
having to shoot them out of the sky in the case of small ones and run away when
larger ones hit, with the advanced comm system and battlemap they shared
proving invaluable as the meteor strikes were calculated and warning areas were
flashed as no-go zones, allowing the mechs and fighters in the area time to
maneuver out of the way.

The same wasn’t true of the Scionate, who lost several
hundred troops to the meteor strikes…but then came the dreadnaught hulk, unable
to maintain its orbit, and now guided down to the surface with a few Star Force
drones equipped with IDF tugging it on a more preferable course directly down
onto a cluster of transports.

One managed to lift off and fly away, but even it got
caught in the impact concussion wave and knocked into the ground, skidding in
the dirt before righting itself and gaining altitude again, but once it came up
out of the dust cloud and looked back down on the area with its sensors there
was nothing but sheer destruction in its wake. 19 transports were now gone,
along with thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks, with the airborne tsunami
pushing all the way up to the nearest city’s shields and bouncing off them like
a gentle wave, tugging at the mechs waiting outside for the ground troops to
arrive…but they never did.

Those Scionate around the impact point that survived
redirected and abandoned the attack, now in too few numbers, not to mention
utter shock, to mount an assault. They redeployed towards another of the
multiple landing zones, abandoning their target city to support the assault on
another…with the herding drones staying down in the atmosphere and targeting a
few of the transports before the Scionate warships caught up to them and had a
brief fight over the surface. Three enemy warships fell, then the drones pulled
back damaged towards the nearest city, firing as they fled.

The Scionate warships, now 8 in number, followed them,
killing one before they got near the city and dropping it to the ground where
it dug out a long furrow, but avoided hitting any ground troops.

Another kilometer closer and a tiny white beam struck
out from the nearest city, slicing into the Scionate shields and penetrating them
a moment later as the defense turret cleansing beam began providing cover for
the drones. The Scionate pressed the attack a few moments longer, enough to
lose one of their ships to a well-aimed slice from the third cutting beam shot
as it hit the ship’s gravity drive…then the others pulled off as fast as
possible, getting outside the preferred firing range of the small caliber CB
and allowing the surviving drones to get some distance and redeploy back up to
orbit.

Paul didn’t try to drop ships down into the ground
campaign again, needing all he had for the naval fight. As it was he was having
to pull back to more hit and run attacks, for he was losing too many drones
compared to how many ships the Scionate had…and not just the ones involved in
the attack, but the numbers he knew they had on their six worlds insystem, and
if he let his planetary defense fleet get thinned too much he’d be at a
disadvantage, no matter what their technological edge was.

Without any more deep thrusts into the enemy fleet the
transports continued to flow down the ‘safe’ zone to the planet, landing well
away from the dreadnaught wreck and deploying more and more troops to the
assault lines heading out to the nearby cities. Paul brought up side displays
in the nexus of the first ones to engage, seeing that the city defense CBs were
angling down to hit a few tanks at range, but once the troops got within a
certain radius the angle wouldn’t work, leaving it to the mechs and perimeter
defense turrets to fight them off, with the Archons, Knights, and other
commandos waiting to dual it out in the city streets and knowing not to venture
out into what was going to become a massive kill zone.