Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  The remaining infantry from the initial firefight, as well as those that had come over from the other side of the tank formation, toppled to the ground unconscious with those closest to the Archons going down a split second sooner than the ones further out as if a giant tidal wave had hit them. The more minds taken down, the less charge there was to continue spreading out, but unlike an Ikrid link this effect had no range limit, so long as there were links in the chain to jump from.

  The infantry soaked up most of the Jini, but some managed to travel through them to the nearest of the tanks, taking out four of their crews and leaving them intact, but inoperable. That left Jenna and Levi huddled together with a moment of peace, as no more incoming weaponfire was hitting their combined bioshield that was just a thin shell remaining around them.

  Both of them knew they couldn’t waste time, so they dropped the protective barrier and stood up, sprinting towards the dead tanks and using them as cover as they closed with the rest of them. Soon they were running around the blocks and into view, dodging some more large plasma blasts until they got within Fornax range. Those they sent out individually, splitting up and heading towards different tanks, momentarily disrupting the crews of the closest ones until they could get within sound Ikrid range, then each Archon accessed the minds inside and put them to sleep, Levi one at a time while Jenna managed two or three with each connection.

  That left a handful of tanks remaining that had been closest to the city defense turret. Sprinting towards those Jenna juked to the left right before she expected the next plasma blast to be fired, but the stupid gunner fired a bad shot and missed to his right…meaning Jenna dashed directly into its blast point.

  She reflexively threw up her bioshield just before it hit, but it punched through with ease then ate through her armor’s shields, knocking her down and melting the outer layer of her armor. Stunned by the hit, she reached out with her mind while her arms grasped for the ground to roll herself over and stand up, finding the tank that’d shot her and throwing a Fornax blast that way to try and buy herself time. The range wasn’t good, but her shot hit, causing the crew to twitch uncontrollably for a moment, but by the time they got their hands back on the controls and shook off the ‘what just happened?’ confusion, Jenna was back on her feet and moving again.

  Levi got to the tank before she did, already having knocked out another. They finished the last ones off without taking another plasma blast to the face, then ran together over to the city’s outer wall and took cover alongside it, melting against the five meter tall barrier as a scattering of aerofighters passed by overhead…but at the moment they weren’t interested in them.

  Levi had felt Jenna take the hit, still linked in battlemeld as they were, so there was no need for questions. He knew her status, just as she knew his, and they both knew they had to lay low a bit to let their armor and bioshields recharge before they entered the city and went after far more troops than they’d just taken down now…though they’d have the advantage of cover to work with.

  While they waited, Jenna got on her suit’s comm and got a line to the Marauders.

  “Send in the Valeries and get those fighters down near us if you can. We’ll hold here and try to help you pick them off if you can get them close enough. Send the transports immediately. We’ll cover them on the ground if we have to, but you have to get to these tanks and infantry before they wake up. I don’t want to have to take them down twice.”

  “We’re on our way,” Brayden answered. “For the record, I have no idea how you just did that.”

  “Archon secrets.”

  “Are you injured? Looked like you took a direct tank blast.”

  “Yeah, not one of my better moments. Got a little cooked, but I’m fine.”

  “Valeries will be there in…seven minutes. You good till then?”

  “Yes, but get them to chase them as low as they can near us.”

  “Still want to take the pilots alive?”

  “That and our range isn’t very far.”

  “We can take them down the hard way if needed.”

  “Stick to the plan,” she said, with warning in her voice.

  “Copy that. Just offering to make your job a little easier.”

  “Don’t worry about easy, just pick up what we drop…including the brand new tanks we just bought you.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “I’d safely assume half an hour. After that a few individuals might start waking up. If one of them happens to be a tank pilot…”

  “We’ll be there in 20,” Brayden promised.

  10

  Levi ran down the narrow city street, throwing what felt like his billionth Fornax blast into a pair of soldiers ahead, then ran sideways and leapt up onto the wall, bounced off it with his right foot, and came down on the twitching Varshoo from above. The padawan knocked both down to the ground, pinning one against the paving stones with his armored knee while he dove into the other’s mind and took a pair of seconds to render it unconscious. He lingered for a third, making sure it went deep enough to stay out long enough to be retrieved, then he repeated the process with the other.

  His head ached with both contacts, but he did his duty and made sure they were both out of commission for a while, then the pain relented a bit. He took off down the street again, headed towards one of the shopping centers that the Varshoo had taken and were now holed up in. Jenna was already there picking them apart, but she’d sent Levi out to clear the surrounding streets and cut off anyone fleeing the area. He’d taken down six others before this pair, and from his Ikrid ‘radar’ he could sense that there were no others coming out…at least not on this side of the large complex.

  There were many ways in and out, and there was no way that only two of them could blockade the place, but the goal was to locate and disable the Varshoo soldiers…and if he could pick up a few more on the exterior with easy takedowns, then so be it.

  He placed a beacon on the battlemap for the location of the downed pair then paid them no more attention. Periodically his and Jenna’s comm systems would transmit the beacon markers to the Marauders, letting them know where the unconscious troops were so they could get to them before they woke up…or the locals got to them. Between the citizens in the under siege city, the few remaining defense forces, and the handful of mercenary units present, there were a fair amount of people who would consider shooting the unconscious Varshoo if/when they realized that they were still alive and not dead.

  The Marauders were running interference with them and collecting the prisoners while the two Archons did all the fighting, not wanting to risk anyone else or have to kill the attackers. The objective here wasn’t to take sides, but to stop the invasion, for neither the Varshoo nor Tieor were worthy of their trust. Jenna had decided to act in order to stop the carnage and to send a message, and neither she nor Levi had any illusions that they were saving the good guys from the bad. This was a fight against chaos and barbarism, and while they couldn’t stop everyone from dying they were sure as hell going to stick the middle finger up to the notion that they had to take a noninterference approach.

  The few troops they had on the Ma’kri weren’t fighting, rather handling the prisoners in orbit, and it was going to stay that way. The two Archons had dived in over their heads here and they weren’t going to risk anyone else. The Marauders were already here and fighting so they didn’t care about them, plus they were taking the hardest work off the quitters’ hands anyway.

  But it was taking a toll on Levi and Jenna, though more on the padawan. His armor had melted spots all over it, and he couldn’t count the number of times his shields had gone down over the past 8 hours. There had been over 20,000 Varshoo troops within the city, given initial estimates, and he and Jenna had gone through better than three quarters of them personally. He had no stun ammunition left, and his psionics were so overstressed his head was complaining even when he had brief moments like this to rest and recharge.

  P
ower wasn’t the issue, he was just getting fried with every mental contact he made. Levi tried to alternate psionics to keep himself functioning, but even his Fornax tissue felt like it was fraying with each subsequent usage. He really could have used a stun sword right now, or even stun gauntlets, but their weapons had run dry early on, and even two subsequent ammo/weapon drops into the city had been expended given the number of troops the two of them were having to take down.

  Ironically Jenna’s armor looked even worse than Levi’s, for she was trying to take the brunt of the fighting on herself. The two of them weren’t linking up with battlemeld anymore, for even that psionic was now painful. If they had to they’d briefly connect to take down a few troops, then it was back to old fashioned hand signals for most of their coordination, for they were so tired they didn’t even feel like speaking over the comm channels.

  He’d been pushed this far a few times before in training, but never in combat. He knew the more activities he could eliminate the better, for his focus could then flow into the others and speaking was one such thing. Opening a comm channel and talking to Jenna was easy, but with his mind being so punch drunk it was almost a rule now not to talk, and since they were already using their arms for movement and fighting, throwing hand signals just seemed to be the most efficient way of communicating…even if in fact it was not.

  Levi searched ahead with his Ikrid in a brief radar ping, getting the position of the people and sensing where Jenna was inside the complex, then he shut it off trying to minimize the continual frying. That wasn’t the wisest thing to do when in combat, but he had no choice. The city still had enemy troops in it and if he didn’t try some kind of prolonging tactics he was literally going to burn out and be unable to render people unconscious short of beating them there.

  When he got back to the entrance he sent out another ping, then ran in and eventually caught up to Jenna. He immediately got a battlemeld request and accepted it, knowing exactly what to do as soon as they made the connection and her thoughts melded with his. Without even seeing her he ran across to the next hallway, turned the corner and activated their Lew, stretching the invisible barrier out painfully, then he and Jenna both ran down their respective hallways and swept the psionic ribbon through the entire store that a group of Varshoo were holed up inside.

  When he got to the far end of that block he saw Jenna to his left as she relinquished the battlemeld. She ran towards him and signaled to the nearest door. Levi got there first and went inside, pushing past the barricades that had been set up and began looking around to confirm that they’d got everyone down. He used his eyes rather than his Ikrid and ran around the three-chambered store, seeing more than 40 Varshoo lying about where they’d fallen.

  He pulsed once to make sure they were all down and not hiding behind some clothing rack, then he grabbed a few of the weapons nearby and tossed them aside for good measure before heading back out and following Jenna into another section of the shopping center where they tackled a trio of well-placed snipers, with her using her psionics to take them down from afar and sparing him the effort of doing so.

  She pointed him to the right and the pair made their way back out into the hallways and to an alcove nearby where she gave him the ‘watch my back’ signal while she entered a doorway and disappeared inside. Levi stood guard in the hallway, watching both ways with his eyes rather than his overtaxed Pefbar for several minutes before she came up behind him and tagged him on the shoulder, then signaled for him to go inside.

  Too tired to ask questions, he turned around and went in…suddenly finding himself in the local’s equivalent of a restroom.

  He laughed, then walked over to a stall and hit the release on his armor. They’d both been fighting for hours and though his body had gone into a sort of stasis mode with the constant adrenaline pumping through him, his bladder had been mildly complaining for some time now. Apparently hers had been as well, and odd as it seemed, they weren’t going to go back to the ship to relieve themselves.

  Yet another excellent reason for the master/apprentice pairings.

  Levi stepped out of his armor and almost choked at some of the smells present, from races he’d never encountered before coming here, but his quickly shrinking bladder made up for it and when he got back inside his armor and headed out with Jenna at a run towards wherever she wanted them next, he felt considerably better.

  “No,” Brayden said flatly to the Tieor Defense Force commander. “These are our prisoners…all of them. Don’t make me take them from you by force.”

  Le’han’trel translated for him, and when the Protovic finished the thickset Shysosvan angrily shot back a reply…then stopped short as his eyes widened, looking at something behind the mercenary.

  “Is there a problem?” Jenna asked icily, walking up behind the half dozen mercenaries from around the corner of one of the broken buildings in the center of the city. They’d managed to get to the Varshoo just before they overran their last defense station, then had redeployed themselves elsewhere in the city to finish cleaning up the stragglers.

  Both Archons were in shambles, with holes spread over their impressive armor like they’d been hit with a shotgun blast, though none of them had penetrated all the way through to their flesh. That said, Brayden did see a few leakage points where the inner gel layer was pushing through, meaning those spots were now exposed and the next hit there would make it through to their bodies.

  “They have a number of the Varshoo and don’t want to turn them over to us,” Brayden explained.

  “He doesn’t have a choice,” Jenna repeated from behind a large melty scar mark on her visor approximately where her left eye would be.

  “He seems to disagree.”

  “Tell him again,” she said simply, but Brayden wasn’t fooled by the calmness in her words. He’d worked with a few Archons before, and he could tell that this one was angry. When their voice went whisper quiet you knew they were about to do something violent.

  Le’han’trel repeated their demands, then got a less argumentative response from the Tieor commander.

  “He says the captives are theirs and will be punished according to local laws, blah, blah, blah.”

  Jenna walked past Brayden and the mercenary cringed even before the bulky alien was knocked backwards three meters by a single palm thrust, bowling over several other subordinates that had been visually backing him up in their little spat.

  “Try now,” Jenna repeated, with Le’han’trel adding an explanation of how messing with the Archons was not a very good idea in his experience. Then he went on to remind him that they’d just beaten the entire army assaulting their city by themselves, floating the question of what the Defense Force could do to stop them and insisting that such a refusal was both stupid and rude, considering they’d just saved their lives.

  Jenna walked up near the downed alien as the Protovic spoke, but she waited for what he told her rather than trying to glean any information from their minds. She was barely holding her head together as it was.

  “Take them,” Le’han’trel translated.

  “Brayden,” Jenna urged.

  “Mason,” he delegated, with the other Marauder leading a group of others forward and into the area where the locals were holding the few prisoners that the mercs hadn’t gotten to before the Defense Force did.

  “Are there any other areas of activity?” Jenna asked when the Shysosvan and his party had scurried off, wanting to get away from the gods of war before they could become their next victim.

  “A few transports took off across the plains, but per your orders we let them go. I have sweeper teams looking, but so far the city appears clear.”

  “Broadcasts?”

  “We’ve had local crews plus our own recording and transmitting the whole thing. Anyone on the planet watching saw what you did, and we’ll keep spreading the images…and making sure they do too. When do you want to release your ultimatum?”

  “Not now. If they refuse to leave we�
��ll have to hit another city, and we’re not in any shape to do that.”

  “No replacement armor?”

  “We’ve both got another custom pair, plus generic ones on our ship, but we need rest first. We’ll let you know when to release it, until then just feed us the locals’ response and we’ll get back to you when the time is ready…and make sure these idiots aren’t holding out on us. Not one of the Varshoo stays here, clear?”

  “Very. I’ll have my people snoop around to make sure.”

  “Good,” Jenna said, rotating her left arm around in a lengthy stretch. As she did Brayden saw a small breach point on the back side.

  “You hit?”

  “Just a scratch. We’ll stick around another hour or so, to make sure the locals hand over the prisoners and that there aren’t still pockets of resistance. You’ll need to do the looking though, and we’ll supplement with orbital scans.”

  “Understood, but if I may ask…where are your weapons?”

  Jenna exchanged a glance with Levi. “We stashed them in a room when we ran out of ammo so we didn’t have to carry the extra weight.”

  “I’ll get them,” Levi offered, turning and walking off.

  “Let us,” Brayden said. “Just tell us where they are. We know what to look for.”

  “Thank you,” Jenna said, sending a beacon point to their tracking systems on top of the waypoint she’d dropped earlier to mark the building.

  “How were you disabling the others without ammo? I haven’t seen any bruising on the prisoners from physical night taps.”

  “Psionics,” Jenna said, looking over her battlemap as she talked.

  “Does using those make you tired?”

  “Extremely. We’ll be here for the next hour,” she said, sending him another beacon marker. “Bring our weapons and any additional intel or problems to our attention, then we’ll be back in orbit for a while. I trust you can maintain the city without us?”