Star Force: Backstab (SF23)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Sam, come low over the deck and buzz the dead dragon,” he heard Boen order him over the comm.

  “I’ll try…” he promised, his voice cutting out a bit prematurely as he yanked the ship hard through a skid turn and snapped off a shot with his own scattergun as the Valerie flashed by on his left. He wasn’t sure if he winged it or not, but he knew it would be circling around onto his tail in short order so he used the brief moment of opportunity to put a few extra meters on it and accelerated off towards the Star Force column, snapping off a quick shot at another passing Valerie and nailing it in the left flank.

  Another skeet flashed past behind him after it, then Sam dropped down to the deck and ‘drove’ his way towards the destroyed dropship remains, registering some shield hits from behind as the Valerie’s scattergun racked up more indirect hits.

  “Take cover,” Sam warned, “this guy is spraying everything.”

  “We’re ready,” Boen insisted. “Keep it tight.”

  The hits continued to increase as Sam kept the skeet in a more or less straight line, allowing the Nestafar pilot to aim better…then he brushed over the top of the broken dragon and held his line unnervingly as his shields were shot down under 20%...then suddenly the incoming fire ended and the icon on his sensors representing the Valerie winked out.

  “Thanks for the assist,” Sam replied to Boen as he upped his anti-grav and brought the skeet off the deck, circling around to find the next closest target.

  “Come on, come on,” Iren said, ducking down behind the far side of the dead dropship.

  “Incoming in four,” Boen counted down beside him but around the corner enough to get a clear view of the other side, “three, two, one,” he said with the last number coinciding with Sam’s skeet flashing overhead and into Iren’s view, “now!”

  Iren tipped up his rocket launcher and fired blind, trusting the auto-targeting systems to do their job. Six tiny missiles blurped out of the vertical box he held on his shoulder and streaked out towards the Valerie, catching it in the aft and hitting the shield that Sam had already weakened. The first two took it down then the other four broke off the aft end of the craft and sent it careening into the deck where the nose bent at an angle and it skidded to a smoky stop in one of the large plains in between columns.

  “Nice,” Boen commented as Iren tossed the spent launcher aside and pulled out his plasma rifle.

  “Wish we had a few more of those…heads up, east side high.”

  Boen spun around and took a knee, sighting with his sniper rifle then quickly downing another of the Nestafar’s flying infantry. “Anymore?”

  Iren glanced around. “Nothing close.”

  “Kara, how are you coming?”

  “Need another minute to get strapped in…it would help if it wasn’t on its side.”

  “Make it quick, we just lost another skeet,” Boen said, seeing one get hit then ricochet off a column before skidding across the deck missing both tail and right wing stub. His HUD tagged the pilot as Jenna, and given that it was still active he hoped that she was alright inside the pilot’s cocoon.

  “Ground,” Iren interrupted. “Bsidd complex.”

  Boen spun around again, aiming his lachar sniper rifle at the very distance column, seeing lots of tiny specs on the deck fighting it out. “Damn. I can just barely make them out, but I can’t get a shot without hitting the Bsidd,” he said, looking around for a group of Nestafar all to themselves. He waited 30 seconds before he thought he should try taking a shot, and when he did it missed clean.

  “Too far,” he insisted. “Anything closer?”

  Just then a loud thud shook him to his bones. Another followed it, along with the groan of stressed metal.

  “Looks like she’s up and running,” Iren commented as he glanced at one of the destroyed falcons as a mech forced its way out of the interior.

  “Will you quit playing around and get out here?” Boen complained as more thuds shook the ground.

  “Easier said than done,” Kara said as the dropship tipped sideways as the mech crawled out the hole she’d punched in the side of the bay, unbalancing it. As soon as the neo slipped out the dropship fell back down so hard the vibration rattled the Archon’s teeth. “Where to?”

  “Anywhere you can get their attention,” Boen said, switching frequencies. “Good news, fellas,” he said, talking to the skeet pilots. “We’ve got the boss’s mech in play, so bring the Nestafar our way for an introduction.”

  “That’s more like it,” Alex said, swinging his skeet around and heading back to base along with most of the other Star Force pilots. The rest were just flying to stay alive at this point.

  Kara raised her mech’s arms up, ready to deal with the incoming fighters. It’d been a long time since she’d been in a neo, but given this scenario she wasn’t going to have to do much moving around, but rather play turret. Her mech’s left arm held the standard plasma cannon which would probably down a Valerie with one shot, but it was going to be hard to aim. Her other arm, however, had been modified by Mark with a scattergun…a big, beefy scattergun.

  “I’m ready, bring ‘em here,” she announced.

  “Coming from the south,” Alex said, pulling a pair of Valeries along in his wake that were having a hard time keeping up with his twitchy flying.

  “Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” Kara mumbled, waiting for them to get close. Wisely Alex wasn’t flying directly over her position, leaving her a line of sight on the Valeries at all times, even if the angle was shallow. When they got close and he was about to zip over her mech’s left shoulder she fired.

  The blue plasma came out of the neo’s arm like a shotgun blast, crossing the distance between mech and fighter in the blink of an eye and consuming the rightmost Valerie, ripping off its shields and damaging the hull on the first shot. She managed to fire again twice more before the fighters flashed past, with her target shredding in the air and falling hard to the ground.

  “Yeah! Want some more of that?” Kara yelled into the comm. “Bring ‘em to me,” she said, firing off at another Valerie as Kevin came in with one on his tail. Meanwhile Alex corkscrewed around and went head to head with the Nestafar, now that he was down to a one on one.

  “Who’s in my mech?” Mark’s voice asked over the comm as his ID signature appeared at the foot of the column and ran out into the battlefield of the hangar deck.

  “That’d be me, boss,” Kara said, ripping apart another Valerie stupid enough to come in close and target her directly. Its plasma blasts hit the neo in the chest, but only managed to peel off the top layer of thick, heavy armor the likes of which starfighters could never carry.

  “Pick up your feet, you walk like you’re drunk,” he chastised as he ran over to Boen and Iren’s bit of cover. “What’d I miss?”

  “Half the party, boss,” Boen said, still searching the perimeter with his sniper rifle. “Nice job with the doors…I assume that was you?”

  “With some Calavari help, yes,” he said as a pair of Valeries swooped in and fired their largest plasma orbs possible at Kara, blasting a cascade of armor bits off the mech, but only one of the fighters lived to make another pass. The unlucky one twirled to a flame-filled crash 600 meters on the other side of the walking machine that continued to pace a small circle as the Archon fired off continuous scattergun blasts at the Nestafar Valeries.

  “Stop shooting up my mech!” Mark yelled at the enemy fighters.

  “Contacts,” Iren said, pointing off to the south. “They’re going after Kara.”

  “Where?” Mark asked as Boen sighted in on Iren’s line.

  The acolyte pulled the trigger twice, dropping two of the Nestafar and causing the others to scatter. “Right there…and they’ve got rockets.”

  Mark was silent for a moment, and after Boen fired off another lachar blast he looked up from his scope and turned on Mark. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Can’t let you guys have all the fun,” the ranger said, clapping Boen on the
shoulder before he took off sprinting towards the mech.

  “Damn it,” Boen said, setting his helmet back to his scope and firing at the broken lines of infantry running/flying forward low to the ground.

  “He does have the heavier armor,” Iren pointed out.

  “Not as heavy as that mech,” he countered as more bits of destroyed armor flaked off the massive machine.

  Mark ran towards the battling neo, but cut to the right to keep out of Kara’s immediate foot path, eventually passing her by and heading for the approaching infantry as she kept firing on and downing the Valeries. Why they kept pounding her he didn’t know, and it looked like their skeets were beginning to take control of the local airspace, though there were still large numbers of both fighters crisscrossing the airspace within the hangar.

  It took a long time to get out where he wanted to go, but eventually he positioned himself in the empty plains of the hangar with the mech and Star Force column behind him and the approaching infantry, several hundred worth, ahead and still keeping low to the ground. He stopped his run and held his ground, pulling out his plasma rifle and aiming at the nearest enemies as a few red plasma blasts came back his way.

  He killed half a dozen before their line came close enough for them to open fire en mass, though most still seemed to be focused on the mech. When that happened he went mobile again, zigzagging forward and diving straight into their lines taking a few hits along the way to his already damaged armor. He shot the two nearest him then reached up and pulled another one down by the foot as it passed over him, ticked when it shot him in the helmet.

  He kicked it in the gut then shot it as he moved off, gunning down a couple more as some of the others began to circle around him, all flying a couple meters off the floor and keeping their distance so he couldn’t yank them down. They went through a short yoyo session with him running out towards the perimeter to try and get some of them in between him and the others, with the circle pulling back and reforming each time, even as it lost more and more Nestafar to Mark’s rifle.

  A hot spot on his back told Mark that his armor was almost breached, prompting him to jump to the side in a dive roll that got him mobile and more difficult to shoot, then a bright flash crossed behind him, prompting another dive roll as he didn’t know what the hell that was. He turned face up just in time to see a second bright plasma orb come through and vaporize three of the flyers on contact before it angled down and into the deck, melting a small glassy crater in the floor material.

  Mark smiled but didn’t hesitate to waste the opportunity. He went after the confused survivors, gunning them down as Kara fired a third plasma blast into the thickest group she could find all the while taking hits from the remaining rocket launcher-carrying infantry in play, then the mech turned to the left on the torso and fired an almost pointblank scattergun blast into a passing Valerie with a satisfying detonation of its fuel supply, popping the fighter into a debris-laden fireball that rained down on the nearby infantry.

  Two skeets flashed by, which she didn’t target, and Mark saw them veer off on a wide angle towards another Valerie up near the ceiling that was poised to make a strafing run on the mech when its back was turned. Beyond that Mark didn’t notice, for he was still dealing with the infantry, shooting any in range but running towards the knots where there appeared to still be rocket launchers. The mech was filled with holes in its armor and a good shot by one of the ugly buggers could cause major trouble, so it was essential to get them out of the fight as soon as possible.

  A blur of motion from his left was his only warning to a skeet coming in at ground level and laying waste to most of the remaining infantry with several scattergun shots that barely missed Mark. He could literally see divots in the floor on the left of him 3 meters away and 8 meters distant on the opposite side. From his HUD he knew the fighter was being flown by Prat, so he opened up a comm line as he ran off to chase down the few Nestafar left.

  “I hope that was skill and not luck.”

  “Either way it worked,” the pilot answered back.

  “How many more do they have in the air?” he asked, shooting a Nestafar before it could sight in on him. He caught it in the chest and it dropped out of the air.

  “Six left and we own them.”

  “Don’t get sloppy,” he said as another bright flash vaporized the Nestafar he was aiming at, along with a good section of the deck underneath.

  “I’ve got the scraps, Mark. Get back to cover,” Kara said.

  “You giving orders now?” he said, shooting one more before taking off running.

  “I’m in the leader’s mech, aren’t I?”

  “What’s left of it,” he said as a large boom sounded. He turned his head as he ran, trying to see what it was. “Did anyone else hear that?”

  Another boom sounded, then Boen broke in. “Remember those doors you closed?”

  Mark skidded to a halt and turned around, looking out across the bay at the distant doors as a sick feeling crept into his gut, then a third boom sounded and a tiny bit of glow manifested on the left side, disappearing as soon as it began.

  “Oh crap,” he said, taking off again before the 4th boom sounded.

  5

  Gouts of blue plasma streaked out from the dozens of hovering skeets surrounding the small hole in the bay doors, firing back out against the Nestafar forces trying to break inside. Their much larger plasma weapon was expanding on the 10 meter wide hole, melting off bits of the door while shooting inside occasionally, which the pilots had to be leery of. The inside of the hangar had been pacified, though there were still battles being fought inside the base, not only in the ceiling infrastructure but within several of the column complexes.

  Mark had dispatched Archon ground teams out to assist the Calavari and others fighting inside while he organized the defensive effort being erected near the doors. They didn’t have a lot to work with, but based on the forces landing outside if they didn’t do something here, now, they were going to be overrun when the doors were breached.

  The trailblazer had wanted to hop in a skeet and fly out the opposite doors, but base surveillance indicated that there were fighters and ground troops waiting there as well in ambush, though the bulk of the assembling ground forces were at the southern entrance. The smaller base entryways scattered around the mountainside had been locked down with Archon guards as backup, though Mark was tempted to head out that way and start causing trouble for the Nestafar on foot.

  None of the options available to them were good ones, and to top it off all base communications were being jammed, with their orbital telemetry offline as well. The main comm array on the mountaintop had been slagged and the transmitters in the skeets were being interfered with by some form of signal washing. He’d thought about sending a team outside and up to the surface to try for a laser link to the seda as it passed overhead each day, but there was little the Canderians could do to help them without the airpower to break through the forces outside.

  Before the orbital telemetry had gone down they’d registered not only a swarm of Nestafar warships coming into planetary orbit, but at least five jumpships that had come along with them, which accounted for the insane number of ground troops outside. They certainly weren’t playing small ball in this and had brought an assault force sufficient to take the planet.

  Why, he didn’t know. The Nestafar had been founding members of the Alliance and even though they’d always been at odds with the Calavari they were also breaking bonds with the races they’d brought into the Alliance. Everyone in the base was under attack, as if the Nestafar had genuinely gone insane and were attacking everything that moved.

  “We have recovered four,” a Scionate said, walking up behind Mark almost silently as the armored quadruped looked up at the slightly taller man, “two of which are serviceable. The others we can use for parts.”

  The Archon nodded. The Nestafar had caught most of the other races off guard and pancaked their fighters and support craft in
the initial ambush, but some of those resources hadn’t been completely slagged. “How long?”

  “48 minutes for one, an hour and 13 minutes for the second.”

  Mark glanced over at the doors as another boom sounded, seeing a third cherry red spot appear on the intact portion of the door while sunlight shot in through the existing hole the skeets were shooting out. “Detonators?”

  “Remote or timer.”

  “Will the remote work with the signal jamming?”

  “Unknown…best we use a timer then?”

  “Yes.”

  The cheetah-like Scionate nodded its head and turned away, walking slowly at first before accelerating up into a slow run across the hangar deck and over to the Star Force column that had become the unofficial Alliance command post. Mark was out on the deck, organizing the creation of all kinds of nasty surprises for the Nestafar and riding around in one of the surviving jumpships as he visited the various complexes, offering assistance and supplies, along with engaging in a few fights. He’d brought back emissaries from all the races he could find along with all their intact fighters, landing them on the Star Force ‘parking lot’ along with any other equipment they could scavenge from the debris…including a few nukes the Scionate had brought with them.

  Messy as they were, Mark wasn’t going to pass on them. In fact, he was grabbing up all the ordinance he could find on the hangar deck and assembling it into an open air armory where techs from several races worked with Star Force’s people to repair, remount, and in some case jerry rig new weapon systems onto parts of fighters converted into hoversleds.

  “Negative on the cannon, boss,” Boen reported, coming up on his left flank as Mark was pulling apart a circuit board from the debris of one of their dropships. “We can’t get simultaneous fire control. We’re going to have to go with pea shooters.”