Warlord's Invasion (Starfight Book 1) (21 page)

“Go! Go! Night Shadows!” Lucinda shouted.

The next target was a destroyer, about 12 light-hours away from her. It looked like a giant beetle, two hundred meters wide, with so many moving legs.

Well, either you’re going down or I am, Lucinda thought as she spearheaded the attack.

As if the beetle had read her thoughts and accepted her challenge, it turned its entire body to greet her. It directed its main cannon at her—and fired.

A massive h-wave slashed towards her and her comrades.

“Evade!” She slammed her fighter to the side and watched as the h-wave passed through a giant hole that her squadron had suddenly made just for it. As a result of this quickly improvised maneuver, she only lost four of her wingmates.

Four dead. Quite minimal.

Not bad, Lucinda surmised, except that she had hoped it’d been her. Disappearing and fading out of the universe seemed like the best way to go.

She fired back with her own unique version of death, revenge, and spite.

Betelgeuse Combined Fleet

Flagship,
Beginner’s Luck

Flag Bridge…

Vier couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d succeeded when all attempts at capturing an enemy vessel had failed. They were supposed to blow up before she could incapacitate them, weren’t they?

Now, there was another dimension to her game.

Sitting in her admiral’s chair, surrounded by holograms and interfaces, she still couldn’t believe it. Now, a new goal existed. To give these twelve—no, eleven Valkyries enough time to board the alien vessels and take over their ships. It was the find of the century—if it could be done.

Vier bit her lower lip. She absolutely would love it if her marines succeeded, but the reality didn’t favor her. There were two obstacles for this to happen. One, although the alien ships may no longer be able to use their antimatter or fusion cores to self-destruct their ships, that didn’t mean they didn’t have chemical explosives to damage the most important parts. Two, she had no idea what was inside these ships. Were they made to withstand an assault by marines?

As she watched the battle continue, she hoped everything worked out in her favor. If it didn’t, she could always pull the marines out.

Meanwhile, she ordered her warships to form a protective sphere around the MABs, to make sure they could do what they needed to do without being destroyed by h-waves or wormholes blasts from outside. She also ordered other MABs to
move
towards a location that was easier to protect. She felt lucky. As long as the warp fields of these MABs extended around the incapacitated targets, the entire bubble could be moved, just like a normal warp bubble.

Got to protect these MABs. They could be the key to winning the war!

She surveyed the rest of the battle as a whole. Her fighters were doing extremely well, although their losses were extreme as well, since they had no h-deflectors. The damage they were doing to the enemy ships made up for the tonnage she lost in terms of fighter weight. She made a note to herself that if she survived, she would also recommend more effort be put into producing hyperspace fighters and pilots as well as missiles. Her warships, on the other hand, were being mauled by the wormhole weapons and the h-waves. So much dead…she glanced at the kill count. So much…At least 3000 humans each minute.

Then she glanced at the incoming main fleet of alien warships. They were there, moving at a steady speed of 14,000 SL as always. She estimated they’d enter the battlefield, which was stationary now that the battle was being fought in every direction, in about two hours.

Two hours was more than enough time for the battle to be decided, but two hours was not enough time to eliminate the crews of captured starships and to find a way to control the starship after its main computer had been encrypted or worse yet destroyed. But it didn’t matter, she could
move
the captured vessel using the same warp bubble as the marine assault boat at speeds faster than 14,000.

What else to do? What else to do?

She gave out more orders to her lower ranking flag officers and manually controlled squadrons of ships herself.

It was all a mess, but she loved every moment of it.

Marine Cutter 001, Delta Battalion

Deployment Compartment

Marine Captain Huang Rui shouted, “Alright, boys! You’ve done this drill before. Keep your heads cool and perform your function. Let’s kill those suckers and take over that vessel!”

The inside of the marine assault flyer cramped like hell. It had a right to be. Twelve meters long and holding twenty men, it was heavily armored with the latest durotitanium and a power core that fueled two laser cutters, a gravitic drive, and a miniature grav shield. Its cylinder shape made it look like a long slender can, but in the darkness of hyperspace, its black body slithered like a shadow.

Huang Rui had never met a Cat before, but he had heard reports of their assaults on human worlds. He knew what to expect, but what he didn’t know was whether the ships themselves were equipped to handle a human marine assault. The faces of his men glanced back him inside his HUD—cold, gruesome, like monsters ready to be unleashed. Besides being trained combat troops, these men were also trained technicians. They had been prepared to quickly learn how a hostile space vessel worked and to quickly learn how to manipulate its controls.

Huang had read the reports – how each attempt to board a feline vessel with marines ended with the targeted ship self-destructing. He wondered why the ship before him didn’t self-destruct. He reasoned that it was probably because if every feline ship self-destructed before being hit with a MEC Jammer field, then the felines would have done the work for humanity in this battle. Now, it was too late. The ship before him couldn’t self-destruct even if it wanted to.

He heard a clunk. His in-helmet display read that their assault cutter had attached firmly with the enemy light-cruiser. The lasers should be cutting anytime soon…

Inside Huang’s helmet, information about the target suddenly displayed in front of him. The flyer-cutter automatically began running resonance scans through the targets hull. Now, Huang knew the 215 meters long target had outer armor made of some type of material unknown to man, but it still wasn’t strong enough to resist laser cutters. Although the ship may have been deadly prior the marine assault, its grav shielding and outer defenses were powered down. As his cutter began scanning the target’s internal schematics, Huang didn’t like the fact that it would take a long time to fight to the control center or its power core. Huang only hoped he had enough time to do what was needed…

Ga First Fleet, Light Cruiser Hukna Sevank

Bridge…

Mila Commander Ky-Dorat growled inside the battle bridge of the Imperial Cruiser
Hukna Sevank
. He saw through his holodisplays everything that was happening in and around his ship. He saw the Decha-Pra drilling holes into his vessel’s outer armor, and what was more unsatisfying was that he was powerless to stop it. How dare they do that to his ship!

Ky-Dorat, son of Hal-Dorat, was no inexperienced commander when it came to infantry battles on board a starship. The enemy’s variation of the matter-conversion jammer field was no new technology to the Ga. Before the battle, he had been briefed by his father about the enemy using that possible tactic.

High Command had assured Ky-Dorat that in the event he or any of his warrior brothers were targeted by a jammer field, he ought to prevent the enemy from taking control of the ship. He’d also been told to destroy key systems the moment he felt they were threatened, as well as encrypt the main computer or destroy it outright if regaining control of the ship was impossible.

He’d been informed that help would arrive soon, that there was no way the Pra could control the ship for long… All he needed was to repel the Pra for several hours until they were forced to abandon their attempt.

“Combat armor!” Ky-Dorat shouted into the shipwide comm system. “All warriors, prepare for battle inside the
Hukna
! Directions will be displayed inside your armor interface!”

Ga warriors were unique in that every personnel on board a warship, no matter whether he was a lowly technician or a ship commander, were all capable of defending the ship if it was attacked by enemy infantry. Every Ga warrior was trained in infantry combat, and was given a set of powered armor and fusion-less weapons to fight enemy boarders.

Come, Pra…You will see how warriors of the Ga Empire fight!

Although Ky-Dorat no longer had enough power to control his starship’s weapons or his grav shield, he had enough energy in his ship’s auxiliary batteries to power a lot of anti-personnel defenses. The Ga were not unused to be being surrounded by a jamming field. For centuries, they have had experience inside fighting one. It was an honor, actually. A testament to hunting instincts of a natural predator.

“Warriors on deck 5 to 6, form a group on deck 5 section 2,” Ky-Dorat shouted over the intercom. “Warriors on Deck 9, prepare to rebuke the attack from the hole being drilled in Deck 9 section 4…”

Marine Cutter 001, Delta Battalion

Currently attached to Ga Light Cruiser

Deployment Compartment…

Captain Huang Rui did not know what this particular feline ship was called. The only thing he knew was the ship’s schematics made available to his in-helmet display through the resonance scans from all 50 flyer-cutters that have now clamped themselves around the hull of this enemy ship.

And—there was a problem.

There were automatic sentries throughout the vessel. Not enough that it would make every attempt to gain access to a new part of the ship impossible, but enough to really stagnate his marines’ progress. What made it even worse was that from the looks of things, there was enough armor inside the ship to make it difficult to cut through hull parts to gain access to a new corridor. As skilled as Huang Rui had been trained in shipboard combat, he knew just from looking at the schematics that this would be tough nut to crack.

He looked at the drilling progress. 90 percent done.

…100 percent.

“Alright marines! Let’s go!” he yelled. “Prepare for the other side!”

He popped open the hatch that led the team into the hole, the cutter had drilled. He aimed his rifle and ran through it.

The first thing he noticed was the darkness of the corridor inside the ship. All the lights had been turned off. He knew the Cats saw the world using the same visible spectrum as humans. As his men ran through the hole behind him, each of them had to switch to night vision.

Then, just when he thought it was safe, a kinetic round slammed into the man beside him. The man’s armor took much of the impact, but it didn’t matter—he was dead when another bullet penetrated his head, which exploded in a red mess.

“Fire at will!” Huang yelled, who purposely fell to the ground.

Space inside the corridor erupted with magnetic rounds shooting in every direction. Bullets slammed into the armor of his men, sometimes penetrating it, other times bouncing off. His men yelled and screamed as the wounded increased. Huang targeted his adversaries across the corridor and continued firing.

He saw them. The Cats wore armor just like humans did. There were seven of these large black armored bodies holding their end of the corridor steadfast while they continued shooting rounds into Huang’s men.

“Ahhhh!” someone yelled over the net.

Everything around him exploded as armor-penetrating bullets bounced off walls and armor then crashed into metal and carbon. Sparks flew everywhere. Across the other side, the same thing was happening to the opposite wall. Armor-penetrating rounds from human forces that missed smashed into the wall behind the Cats.

For the longest time, there seemed to be no change in the level of ferocity between the two combatants, but as more human exoskeletons poured through the hole that the flyer-cutter had made, the tide changed little by little. More and more Cats were hit, and less and less of them continued firing. Huang was not an expert marksmen – he was a good strategist – but he was certain he had hit at least three of the Cats with his scopes. Finally, when the last Cat stopped firing, Huang yelled out, “Cease fire!”

The passageway became quiet, except for the sound of panting from his men.

Huang walked towards the dead armored Cats, looking for any sign for movement. When he was certain they were dead, he passed them by and signaled the big ‘OK’ to his men, who all hurriedly got up and followed him through the next tunnel.

Meanwhile, in his helmet’s HUD, he checked on the status of his platoon leaders from the other cutters and felt an unusual feeling—optimism.

Yes, it might actually work out…

…until he encountered the first robotic sentry.

Betelgeuse Combined Fleet

Flagship,
Beginner’s Luck

Flag Bridge…

Another MAB exploded as its ventral power plant took a direct hit from a feline h-wave. A thousand marines, gone, just like that, along with the incapacitated ship it was currently boarding.