Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) (9 page)

For them it was
either try and
make the long hike over land to the nearest Skarron city, for the Voku air
cover wasn’t letting any transports through to pick them up…or face starvation.
Many thousands of Aronsic had already been taken captive, with a much larger number
to come, Cal-com knew. Accommodations for them had to be made, which the seed
would eventually supply. In the meantime temporary prisons had to be fashioned
using prefab constructs brought with them, but Cal-com wanted to use one of the
captured and not completely destroyed cities for that purpose…which was his
next destination.

His oversized Stranom split back up into four standard
ones and they ran across the landscape back to the LZ where he boarded a
transport while still in the mech and was flown out to the city that he had
chosen for the prisoners. He roamed it in what felt like a giant suit of armor,
inspecting the construction and adding a few orders here and there based on
what he found intact and destroyed, planning out how his prison was to be built
and seeing that the first captives were properly secured and fed, using first
their own foodstuffs being recovered from the city. Once fully grown into a
Hatomek the seed would provide all the Voku-made foodstuffs the prisoners and
the assault force would require.

Cal-com stayed there for many hours, then eventually
transferred back up to orbit and his command ship, resuming the traditional
position of a Renimar…at least until a proper command center was built on
planet, but that would be in the distant future, for it was far down the
priority list when raw infrastructure was required.

9

February 11, 2550

Achkor System

Zenniza

Cal-com stood in the oracle onboard his command ship,
giving the final orders to bring his fleet down into the low end of orbit and
to set up for orbital bombardment. His ground troops had succeeded in
destroying most of the Skarrons’ anti-orbital missile platforms, though some
still remained on the walkers they had stationed in or near their cities.
Strike teams had gone into those cities and hit the immobile launchers,
knocking them out while leaving the rest of the infrastructure and troops
alone. It had taken a long time to pluck the planet of its defense against
orbital bombardment, but now was the time to put an end to this assault…one way
or another.

Cal-com had already sent a message to the Skarrons,
telling them which city they were going to obliterate and the timetable on
which they were going to do it, giving them a chance to either surrender or
flee…and to date none of the surrender options he’d given to intact cities had
been taken. It seemed the Skarrons needed to be bloodied before they would
consider that alternative and Cal-com sympathized, for surrender wasn’t in his
own vocabulary. That said, what the Skarrons were doing was wrong and they
should expect to have to pay a penance for their misdeeds, so when he was
giving them the option of living it was something they should take, especially
with the recent history between the two races.

But no, the Skarrons in the target city weren’t
surrendering nor were they fleeing. Cal-com resigned himself to having to set a
bloody example, having already given them forewarning. If they chose to stay
and die then that was on them. The bounds of honor had been satisfied, though
he didn’t like their stupidity. They had nothing to defend themselves with now,
even though a handful of missiles did come up toward his ships as they got into
bombardment position just on the border of the upper atmosphere, braking
against the orbital drift and hovering in place.

Those missiles were shot down easily, with only an
occasional one getting through to knock on their shields. The swarms that made
for such an effective defense were no longer here, and as the timer eclipsed
the window of evacuation he’d given the Skarrons he issued the order to begin
bombardment.

Javven opened up with larger energy packets meant to
sustain through the atmospheric friction, landing tiny hits by the hundreds of
thousands in a blue/white sparkling rain that ate away at the buildings as if
it were acid. Every hit destroyed a bit of the structures and those individuals
standing outside. After a few moments a Skarron shield went up covering the
city, drawing a bit of a surprise from Cal-com. His reports had indicated that
the strike teams had taken it down along with the missile launchers, but
apparently the Skarrons had managed to do some repair work…yet it was only
showing 36% strength.

Even if it had been at 100% it wouldn’t matter more
than a delay. The Javven rain continued to fall and stress the shield,
diminishing its strength until the matrix finally broke and the deadly
fireworks finally returned to hitting the city structures. They didn’t destroy
them quickly, but then again they didn’t need to. This wasn’t a lightning
strike with them needing to get in and out before reinforcements arrive. The
Skarrons had no one in the system to come to their aid, so Cal-com waited
patiently through the multi-hour bombardment without so much as a peep of reply
from the Skarrons.

When it was finally finished the Renimar deployed
nearby ground troops to the location to clean up what remained in the rubble
fields. He needed to make sure the site was secure and couldn’t be used by the
enemy for any future operations. That meant every piece of every structure had
to be visibly inspected, including subsurface chambers. From orbit he could see
that there were no intact buildings remaining, but there may very well have
been extensive bunkers below that the enemy could hide out in.

Those would have to be probed and eliminated, then the
recovery crews would begin moving in and taking bits and pieces of the rubble
away to a nearby machine that was already beginning to travel their way. It was
a recycling mining station that would both clear away what was left of the
Skarron city as well as use those resources within the rubble for the Voku,
sifting, sorting, and condensing them down into bricks of pure materials that
would then be shipped off to the Hatomek.

Any surviving Skarrons recovered would be taken away
to the prison facilities and kept there rather than simply being annihilated.
Already Cal-com was collecting quite a few from battling units that got caught
out in the open without anywhere to flee and he guessed that number would
increase drastically once the destruction of this city was seen by the others
across the planet. With the bombardment complete he issued an ultimatum to the
next three, each with individual timetables, and began repositioning his fleet
towards the location of the next one on his hit list.

It was two weeks later when the first large Skarron
fleet finally arrived in the system, though Cal-com didn’t think they were here
to fight him…but rather to transfer out to fight the Humans and their allies.
When their long convoy first began to arrive the warships were jumped
immediately, but their numbers pooled to the point where Cal-com’s ambushing
fleet needed assistance with him bringing portions of the main fleet out from
the planet to reinforce them, his ship included because he didn’t want to have
to direct the fighting through signal lag.

Upon making a microjump back to the star his partially
reformed conglomerate split up and moved off to engage the Skarron warships
that were still continuing to arrive. Many of them were already destroyed with
a massive debris field forming, but the others were arriving outside of it and
getting enough forewarning that they began deploying into attack groups to
counter the Voku.

Cal-com had sufficient forces to deal with them, but
what he couldn’t do was contain them all. They were certainly up for a fight,
but he regrettably noticed several make jumps back out, no doubt carrying word
of the Voku presence in the system that so far he’d managed to keep a lid on.

With no way of stopping them he focused on destroying
those that were here now and worked through most of them before the last of
their convoy even arrived. The remainders went down easily enough given the
mass of Voku ships waiting for them, then it was back to recovery operations…first
for his own ships that had been damaged/destroyed, then bringing out ships to
tear apart the Skarron wreckage and begin recycling it. Every bit of refined
material that they could collect without having to mine was invaluable, plus
they needed to clear the space around the star for navigational purposes.

Anything left behind deemed not of value would pushed
into a descending trajectory into the star to be rid of it, but there was very
little material that the Voku did not use, with the pushing being relegated to
gas and dust fields that could interfere with navigation at high speeds. Those
clouds were contained within an enlarged IDF field and dragged onto a collision
course with the star before being released to drift on their new trajectory.
The process was tedious, but necessary to maintain movement options.

In the past Cal-com had been involved in a number of
campaigns where he deliberately created debris fields around a star in specific
locations to give his fleet some ‘terrain’ to operate within, as well as to
block certain jumplines. While it was true that a ship could jump from any
point on the line, meaning they didn’t have to be in close to the star, the
further away you were the weaker the gravity got and the less push you would
get per jump. That forced his enemies to travel at slower speeds coming in and
out of the system, and that was one of many different advantages that he’d used
to win campaigns in the past…but for now he wanted this star clear, so his
ships diligently went about removing the debris field and chasing down the bits
of it that had drifted out to considerable distance.

With them beginning their work and an adequate ambush
fleet in place to catch any more ships arriving in the system, Cal-com took the
rest of the ships back to the planet and continued with the orbital
bombardments of the now evacuated cities. The Skarrons didn’t want to surrender
but had gotten the clear message that they were going to die if they stayed so
prior to each attack there were long overland convoys of evacuees pouring out
and traveling at high speed to the nearest city or outpost, or in some cases
just into the countryside to avoid the deadly rain that was about to fall.

Those that headed towards other cities Cal-com ordered
to be left alone. Those that headed out to nowhere he had engaged and
a surrender
forced upon them whether they agreed or not.
Some died but many were taken prisoner and added to his haul of captives, for
which he had to continually expand the prison facilities, but with the Hatomek
up and running that was never an issue…only what else he could or couldn’t
build due to the delay of resources.

It took another 5 months to completely secure the
planet, with the last city choosing to fully surrender prior to the orbital
bombardment. Cal-com went down to the surface in a Stranom to personally
oversee the surrender and make sure the enemy didn’t have any tricks up their
sleeve…but the truth was they were whipped and didn’t care to die. A sensible
mindset to have given their circumstances, though they did find many bodies
within the city of those who chose death over surrender.

Those were all Skarron bodies, not Aronsic, and
Cal-com looked at them with disgust. Death was failure, not honor. If the enemy
killed you then at least you had the dignity of going out fighting, but
this…this was a betrayal of all that the Voku stood for and it disgusted him.

He took those with more sense and had them moved to
the prison facilities, leaving the city intact for his own people to begin
working on. They would clear out all the trash first then begin disassembling
the components and recycling them, eventually tearing down everything and
leaving nothing but a large hole in the ground where the subsurface structures
were.

The same was being done across the planet, with the
Voku removing everything Skarron that they weren’t currently using. The prison
facilities would be the last to go, but eventually even those would be replaced
with Voku construction and every trace of
Zenniza
having been a Skarron world would be eradicated. The planet and system were now
part of the Voku Empire and they would look as such, with every building and
structure that Cal-com created strengthening their foothold here, including
some very large defensive weapon platforms beginning to be constructed on the
surface that would be capable of reaching up into orbit.

Time…time was the key factor here. Given enough and
Cal-com could lock down the system permanently, but he knew he wasn’t going to
have decades to work with. The Skarrons were being alerted to their presence
even now and the Renimar had no way of knowing how far back into their
territory that message would have to travel until it got to a fleet nexus that
could divert the necessary response ships their way.

He had his ships on a keen lookout for any scouts to
enter the system, but to date none had arrived. Many more Skarron ships had,
coming in on previous orders without realizing the change of hands, but in the
past month they had had none arrive…telling Cal-com that word had at least
gotten to the nearest links in the chain and those convoys stopped before
disappearing into the maw that Achkor had become.

Knowing that the convoys could be redeployed around
the system to still get to the front, Cal-com sent out scout ships of his own
to the neighboring systems to wait and watch, not to jump them but to detect
them when/if they came through. Once he had that information he could start to
play blocker and even give the Humans a heads up to what was coming. He’d had
some contact with them recently, with them informing him that they were
extending a link of their interstellar communications system out to the system
so they could stay in more reliable communication, both ways. When that
happened they could coordinate somewhat effectively, but he already knew that
the pressure on their worlds under blockade was weakening. If Cal-com could
maintain the break in reinforcements another year or so he guessed the
weakening would snowball and the Humans would break through.

But he couldn’t make that assumption, given that now
the Skarrons knew of their problem and would seek to work around it. Cal-com
had to find their new supply lines and shut them down, and in order to do that
he had to put ships out into dozens of systems and physically look, augmented
by some detection stations he was having constructed. Little more than
permanent sensor probes, they would be able to monitor stellar traffic within
line of sight, but his available resources were still low and most were going
towards projects on planet, leaving him having to send out a small chunk of his
fleet to manually monitor the possible routes.

It was another 3 months before he got his first hit. A
ship returned to Achkor with a report of a Skarron supply convoy with warship
escort passing through a system some 24 lightyears away from Achkor. Cal-com
immediately dispatched an assault force to lay in ambush for the next one to
come through, but he wasn’t going with it. Achkor was going to be his base of
operations with him needing to remain here, meaning he was going to have to
direct regional actions through intermediaries. He trusted his senior
commanders with naval intercepts, but always liked to do everything himself
when possible.