Star Force: Initiation (SF61)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  He checked up after five shots when two yellow-armored blurs appeared in the air behind the lizard line, falling in amongst them and throwing the enemy into havoc. Several more jump/lunged from their flanking position, then Niken ran out of cover towards the brawl and fired on the lizards that the Scionate had pushed out towards him.

  Firing off the green plasma blasts into the nearest ones, he saw the ambush group mow down the others with blue streaks seeming to come out of their mouths, though their helmets were fully sealed just as his was. In addition to shooting they were jumping on and knocking down the lizards, stunning some of them with the ‘gloves’ that their armor contained and just physically beating others down with their impacts.

  When the Bsidd saw the Scionate hit the lizards they came out of cover and rushed forward, picking apart the survivors along with Niken until they pushed through the group and saw clear forest on the other side…the end of the lizard wave, finally.

  But there were many more lizards nearby and across the battlefield, so the Archon kept on the move even as others took a breather. In the breaks he had he consulted the battlemap as he ran, heading towards where there was still fighting with several Scionate catching up to and pacing him as an escort. He hadn’t known there were any of the rare units even engaged in this fight, let alone close to his position, but he didn’t have time to ask where they’d come from. He was just glad they were here.

  Jumping over corpse after corpse Niken’s luck eventually ran out and his fatigue + speed saw his foot catch on one, dumping him to the ground where he rolled into a tree, banging his head. He shook it off quickly and got back to his feet, never minding the looks from the Scionate around him who’d stopped alongside. He was beyond exhausted and knew the Bsidd were the same, so he didn’t feel any shame, he just needed to get moving again so he could kill the remaining lizards before they took the slackening battle as an opportunity to hit some of his vulnerable troops.

  When he got to another group of lizards fighting hand to hand with a trio of Bsidd the Scionate didn’t wait for orders and sprinted ahead, jumping some 10 meters through the air to land on their targets and crush them into the ground. One shot the one he’d landed on, but the others bounced off them, knocking others down and keeping them from firing on the wounded Bsidd as they poked and picked up the lizards with no glowing appendages among them.

  Niken followed up and shot the lizards that some of the Scionate had knocked down and between the three races they finished off the enemies in that spot quickly. With a glance at the Bsidd he signaled for them to stay put and ran off with the Scionate following, headed towards more little lingering engagements.

  It would be another 13 minutes before his unit was fully disengaged, then he was busy organizing what armed Bsidd he had left into kill parties to go around and finish off any surviving lizards, whether they be stunned or wounded, when he got a comm call from an Archon in another unit a few kilometers off.

  “Still here,” he answered.

  “The road ahead is clear. Proceed to the base entrances with what able troops you have, I’ll meet you there with mine,” the ranger said.

  “Sorry, Roy. Aside from the Scionate I’ve got nothing to offer. Right now a stiff breeze would kill half my Bsidd.”

  “What Scionate?”

  “Hold a moment,” he said, looking at one of them nearby him. “Where did you come from?”

  “Aerial drop. Trailblazer Jason’s orders.”

  “Are you ready for some more action?”

  “Always,” the Scionate said with an energetic growl.

  “Take your men and proceed to these coordinates,” Niken said, giving him a waypoint that would link up with the other Star Force troops getting ready to assault the subsurface base. He’d expected to be among them, but the lizards had thrown far more infantry at his unit than they’d expected. “They’re going to need all the help they can get. And thanks.”

  “No debt,” he said before turning and running off with the rest of his armored kitties going with him. The phrase had become popular amongst the Scionate, for it meant that there was no error on Niken’s part that had made the rescue necessary, nor did Star Force troops typically owe each other. They were all family on the battlefield and didn’t keep score, something that had been hard for the Scionate to come to grips with after all Star Force had done training them and rebuilding their society.

  Now that they had the opportunity to return the gratitude, ‘no debt’ was a way of them saying they’d owed you anyway, and was a version of saying ‘you’re welcome’ or ‘don’t mention it.’

  Niken looked around visually, then on his battlemap trying to get a feel for where all his troops were. He spotted the injured, marked with a special icon until they were recovered, and headed to one nearby. He got to it to find one of the bigger Bsidd kneeling on the ground with both knees and missing one of its appendages…which was lying beside it next to several lizard corpses, having been melted off his body with pinpoint or just unlucky plasma hits.

  “You with me?” Niken asked, running up beside him and placing an armored hand on its head.

  “I am…here,” the Bsidd answered in obvious pain and shock.

  “When we get you back to a medical facility they’ll regrow it, so just hang tight until I can get you out of here. I don’t know about dropships yet, so we may have to go overland. Can you walk?”

  The Bsidd stood up, as if finally having an order to follow allowed it to focus past the pain.

  “Good. Come with me,” he said, stepping ahead of him and leading the Bsidd towards one of the medtechs that had been brought in within the past few minutes now that the lizard threat was over. He’d come by speeder, rather than aerial drop, and a few more were also on their way according to the battlemap, coming through the trees along with some other small vehicles while the fighters continued their game of cat and mouse overhead.

  So long as one of them didn’t crash down on top of them, Niken figured he and the others were going to be alright…and checking his battlemap totals he saw that as of yet there were no Bsidd fatalities listed. Numerous casualties, but no fatalities, and that let the Archon release a very slow, relieved breath knowing that his decision to stay and fight it out hadn’t cost him any of his men. Those like the Bsidd with him had been badly wounded, but they’d recover so long as the medtechs did their job.

  To that end he picked up the pace a little, comming one of them to head his direction, fearing that this Bsidd might bleed out, for his wound hadn’t cauterized completely and he was leaking a steady trail of purple/black blood from the severed limb.

  8

  Jason-025 input the deployment order for the Scionate detachment into the HUD on his helmet a moment before he hit the power on the jump pack to slow his descent. He’d just leapt out of a dropship at extreme high altitude in order to get in over the wisp cloud surrounding one of their mountain strongholds and had some time to kill as he fell so he’d dug into the battlemap to monitor the other assaults taking place on Irad.

  He hadn’t expected to need to issue any orders, but when he saw the extraordinary amount of resistance the Bsidd were going up against he knew they were near the tipping point and had located a reserve unit on standby and sent the order while adjusting his fall to miss the enemy fighters as he passed through their swirling formations. There were skeets on the edges, poking some of them down, but directly over the stronghold there were only wisps that were sniping the ground troops when they could, but the terrain was hiding both sides’ units well and leaving the fighter cover primary to keep Star Force air assets at bay.

  The ground teams had already took out the perimeter defense stations, but the twists and turns of the nearly vertical canyons made the approach a maze of ambush points. The Calavari and Humans assaulting the base were being patient and not overworking the problem, but the lizards pretty much had them tied up and unable to advance…hence the need for a bit of a push. Jason had been holding back, waiting
to see which combat zones were having the most trouble before deploying himself, though had he waited a bit longer he would have gone to the Bsidd.

  Falling through the air didn’t give him the option of redeploying so he’d sent the Scionate instead, but now he had to forget the bigger strategic picture and focus on not getting shot down. To that end he reached out his mind to the pair of lizard fighters angling towards him now that he was slowing down and veering to the south. When he could feel them he locked onto their minds and froze their bodies, with both wisps flying on their previous courses with no additional input to the controls.

  Both were flying towards the ground and remained so, with Jason adjusting his fall a bit to stay well wide of them. The wisps flashed by some 900 meters away and continued to descend until they got out of the trailblazer’s Ikrid range. One pulled up and avoided crashing into the ground, but the other wasn’t so lucky. It came down into a lizard-filled section of forest and took out a few of them on impact, with the Star Force front better than a mile away.

  Jason continued his fall, now too far ahead of the other wisps for them to get within firing range in time. With his landing options diminishing with altitude, he spied a few shards of plasma headed his way from a tower just poking up above the treetops. It was anti-air fire and he immediately got clipped with two hits, but like the fighters he was able to reach out, locate, and cripple the minds at the firing controls, shutting the turret down temporarily and allowing him to come down safely into the treetops nearby.

  Jason braked hard, but let his excess momentum tear him through the canopy. He deactivated his shields so not to drain them further with the physical impacts, letting his armor take the hits and scrapes as he slowed to a slight hop that barely had his footprints pressing into the ground when he finally got to the surface.

  Shutting the jump pack off he ran through the trees over to the defense tower, finding and crippling the minds around him to clear a path rather than fighting it out. He got to the entrance and opened the door with the guards falling unconscious by his mere presence. The same effect occurred to those inside, with none of the lizards able to even fire at shot at him as he connected to and rendered each one unresponsive by literally putting them to sleep.

  Jason worked his way up the tower until he got to the technological guts of the turret, then he found a sweet spot and pulled an explosive out of his pack and set it inside on a timer before heading down and out back into the forest, dropping more lizards unconscious around him. He got 300 meters away before he heard the boom that rendered the anti-air tower unuseable, then a few steps later he came up on the edge of one of the many ravines in the area.

  Below there were more lizards hidden in various places with bits of infrastructure here and there. He’d seen some of what they had waiting for them from orbital scans, but now that he was here on the ground Jason could see a lot more laterally that they’d been hiding in the walls and under the trees. It looked like a Halo multiplayer map, there were so many cover points and trails running through the ravine, not to mention stairways built inside the rocky walls for the lizards to use to get up and down, forcing the attackers to hack their way up the ravine or get air support to pick them up.

  The air support wasn’t an option, so it was either go by foot or jump pack, and get close enough to one of those anti-air towers with the jump packs and you were going to be toast. From his vantage point he could see several smaller versions dotting the ravine as they stuck out from high points on the walls or on the edges up top, making this and probably a lot of other locations around the base killing zones.

  Star Force liked a challenge, but the longer the lizards held this base the less troops he’d have to hit other targets so Jason was going to start clearing the roadblocks ahead his troops’ advance…or at least reducing them, for there was a lot to get to and only so many explosives in his pack, not to mention far too many lizards for him to take out with the limited ammo he had.

  But he had psionics, not to mention his physical strength and a forest canopy that more or less put the wisp air cover out of the game. He’d have to be careful not to hang out anywhere in the open or predictably hold to a single location beneath the trees that they could target, but this looked like it was going to be an all-ground affair and that was something he could handle solo so long as he didn’t get too many enemy firing lines on him simultaneously. If he could buy time between bouts for his shields to recharge he could stay out here kicking ass indefinitely.

  Leaning against a thick tree at the top of the ravine he was about to make for one of the anti-air protrusions a quarter mile down the eastern edge when a familiar sound stopped him from moving. He looked around suspiciously, then a few moments later one of the lizards’ tanks moved through the ravine, hovering over the trees and trails. Fixed emplacements Jason could handle, but with that kind of mobile firepower and no fighters to take it out he’d be a sitting duck above the tree line.

  Jason lost sight of it again as it moved to the left and behind a rocky outcropping two meters ahead of him, so he ran to the left and meandered along the choppy ravine edge until he had a good vantage point. Given that there were none of his troops nearby he had a second option and fixed a beacon onto the tank virtually using the tracking software in his helmet. A pointed polygon appeared over top of it along with concentric circles emanating out from the anti-vehicle ‘shade.’

  Those circles moved with it as it progressed up the ravine at a snail’s pace on patrol. Jason knew he was within the outermost of those circles but he had to keep a line of sight on the tank in order for this to work. Opening up his comm for unstealthed transmission he sent a continuous signal to orbit, knowing that the lizards might be able to backtrack it to his location. That wasn’t important right now given that they’d just seen him drop from the sky and blow up a turret…what was important was that his luck held up, and the clear sky was going to help.

  A firing button appeared on his HUD and Jason dropped as low to the ground as he could, tree hugging with his left should as he kept his eyes on the tank as it continued to creep left and would be out of view in less than 30 seconds. Taking a deep breath he looked at the button, closed his right eye, then blinked three times with his left. That ‘pressed’ the button with the necessary safety interlocks, resulting in a beam of insanely white light coming down from the sky within an instant and drowning out the tank and everything else in the ravine as his visor tried to adjust to the brightness.

  It didn’t fully work and Jason was left stunned as he was forcefully knocked back by the concussion wave. His hands dug into the dirt to try to slow and ground him as the trees cracked and burnt all around him. It took a moment for his eyes to start to clear, then a lesser blowback pulled him forward a few inches and brought debris with it, covering him in bits of leaf and limbs, half of which were charred and smoking.

  Jason held his eyes shut, knowing that was the best way to get them to process out the excess light. Had he not been wearing a helmet the glare from the cleansing beam would have blinded him for well over a minute, but thanks to his visor it only took a few seconds before he could see the glowing indicators on his HUD, then a handful more before the ravine started to come back into distinction. A couple of kill tags were updated where nearby turret emplacements in the walls had been knocked offline, and in one case Jason saw a tree trunk impaling it, but most of the emplacements below him were still intact…though the lizards manning them were not.

  He couldn’t take a headcount, but nearly all of the minds he had previously been sensing below were now gone around the blast radius. He searched for the tank and saw it flipped over and lying against the nearer ravine wall…half of it missing and apparently scattered elsewhere amongst the tree mash. A deep hole had been blow out in the center of it all, some 30 meters away from where the tank had been. Firing from orbit wasn’t the most precise thing, and sniping tanks was almost impossible even with the cleansing beams, but this one had gotten close enough to d
o the job with the plasma wave resulting from the beam colliding with the air and dirt. And fortunately it hadn’t hit near Jason.

  He knew the odds of it missing that badly were low, but it wasn’t something he was going to repeat often. Doing so was something he could have ordered prior to the attack to just lay waste to everything in the ravines, but the lizards knew Star Force had that capability and had constructed this base and its defenses mostly underground. There was no way to get at all of it with orbital bombardment and the downside was the mess he now saw below him. Fighting in that burning mash of trees would be difficult for him, but even more so for a unit of troops.

  No, he wasn’t going to spam the area with cleansing beams and then expect his troops to fight through the rubble. Better to use the forest to their advantage, but in this case he needed the tank gone, and gone now it was.

  Standing up and walking to the edge of the ravine he tapped his jump pack controls and slid off the side. The angle was steep, but the vegetation covering it had mostly been stripped off in the fiery concussion wave. His feet hit knobby rocks and patches of loose dirt, making his descent awkward but manageable. When he was halfway down he planted a foot on a stable-looking rock and jumped to the left, launching himself with an anti-grav push into one of the side niches that had a topside overhang and that he hadn’t seen from above.

  He missed low, but got a handhold on the rim and pulled himself up into the little porch, seeing the body of a lizard with a head wound…as well as the patch of blood on the nearby wall where it had bounced off. There was a small doorway that led inside the ravine wall and Jason could feel minds inside. Pulling out his plasma rifle he headed in and began cleaning out the narrow corridors and stairs, first mentally disabling the lizards then coming up on them and killing them with single shots to conserve ammunition.