Star Force: Survivor (SF52)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “And we have a lot more to kill,” she said, letting go and sitting down in the empty copilot’s seat.

  “Yes we do,” Davi agreed, glancing at the battlemap full of enemy contacts.

  3

  January 11, 2549

  Reesi System

  Metropolis

  “Go, go, go!” Victor Anassi yelled over his comm to the rest of his squad as he ran across a fairly firm section of ground. Skarron infantry was trailing them but not very fast on their quadruped feet, nor were their Hobbit skirmishers, meaning that if the commandos and other Knights kept moving they could stay ahead of them. Sticking around to fight, however, would end up being a bloodbath.

  They’d just executed a fighting retreat out of the partially constructed city of Topalia, which was now being overrun by enemy infantry with light walker support. There were no mechs or aerial units in the area, so they’d had to abandon their position. The firepower the walkers threw down was just too much, and even with the building cover there was no way to take them down. They could have stayed and tried to find a way, but the enemy infantry had driven them out and now the defense team was executing a running retreat to the northern sea a few kilometers away.

  Victor kept up a steady pace, his longer strides eating up the distance as the shorter commandos scurried alongside him. His Knight shield had been so damaged and full of holes that he’d left it behind, making his running considerably easier, though a few of the others still had theirs and were lugging them over their backs as they moved. Altogether there were about 500 Star Force troops fleeing across the ground and out onto a peninsula, effectively boxing themselves in as the Skarrons swarmed over the city and chased after them, cutting off all other land retreat options.

  Victor didn’t like that, but they had few choices. Had they gone laterally they would have had to run the gauntlet and most probably wouldn’t have survived to get to the nearest forest…and even then they would have had a very long hike to the next closest outpost. They’d been placed in Topalia to hold it, being backed up by a mech unit roaming the area. That unit had been redeployed in an emergency relief effort to the south two days ago that had not gone well. Stripped of their support the Skarrons had eventually moved on them and forced their hasty retreat.

  All across the continent Star Force cities were falling, with the civilians now being evacuated prior to assaults as the Skarron approach was becoming predictable. They were knocking off one city after another and being none too subtle about it. Star Force was kicking the crap out of their units but they were overwhelming them with numbers…the same old story, it seemed. Very rarely had Victor fought a battle where they had the numerical advantage. They were always trying to pull off the upset, and usually did, but today wasn’t one of those days, nor this year, for the Skarrons were getting close to owning the full continent.

  There were still a number of cities that were intact, but they were already undergoing evacuation with the writing on the wall being clear. Star Force orders had set down that they weren’t going to hand anything over to the Skarrons, hence Victor’s unit’s assignment here. Hold if you could, but hurt the enemy regardless. That they’d done, in terms of infantry anyway, but they simply didn’t have the ordinance to take down the walkers…nor the Archons. He’d heard rumors of strikers and even some rangers taking them down single handedly. He wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but he really wished they had one of the higher ranking ones with them now.

  All they had were two adepts, powerful enough in their own right, but not a match for a walker by any stretch of the imagination. They’d had a third, but she hadn’t made it out of the city, along with a few others that had got caught in an ambush by the Skarron elites. They’d engaged the Archon while sending in a flanking wave of Hobbits. The Archon had mowed down the smaller infantry, as expected, but the larger plasma weapons on the elites wore her down to the point that when she finally broke free and retreated another group of waiting Hobbits got the drop on her.

  Victor had gotten to her and pulled her out of the fire, but she didn’t last more than five minutes. They had to leave her body there, for they couldn’t carry anything with them on retreat, save for the three injured commandos. Victor had offered to take one of them, but the remaining Archons wanted him in the rear being unkind to anyone that might catch up to them, leaving him trailing behind the others slightly with a constant eye on his battlemap and peripherals.

  The three commandos ahead of him, one of which had a plasma gash on his left hip that had melted through the armor and left a visible burn mark on his skin, splashed through a small creek slowing their process momentarily. Victor jumped and made it across with only one foot hitting water, but it sank in some four inches, nearly tripping him up as he ran on but the light muck was nothing his superior musculature couldn’t handle.

  When he caught up to the backs of the commandos he turned sharp right, running perpendicular to their direction and allowing himself to look behind them, as he’d been doing for the past 2 kilometers. No one was close, but he could see glints of Skarron armor in the distance as the sunlight reflected off their shiny plates. There were tufts of trees and grasses, making the visual inspection dicey and leaving plenty of opportunity for ambush. He wished they’d had at least a probe in the air for a visual, let alone a fighter or warship that he could pull telemetry from, but at the moment all he had was his eyes and ears to work with.

  Victor turned back on course and slowly made up the distance, catching up to the others then pulling a juke to the left in a similar manner. They were staying ahead of their pursuit, but before long they’d run into the water’s edge and could go no further. They were supposed to receive evac there, but if it didn’t come they’d be in for a tough battle. So far none of the Skarron walkers had left the city, meaning they’d only have infantry to deal with for a while…which was a fight Victor was more than willing to make.

  He was still fuming over the lost Archon and commandos and really wanted something to smash.

  About 20 minutes later he got his chance as the soldiers bunched up on the water’s edge, their ride now there yet and the enemy slowly catching up. Victor moved out into a small depression, keeping his head high enough to see through the grasses while relying on a spotter further back to keep an eye on enemy positions. He waited there until he got a battlemap ping then took off, springing up and running straight towards an armored Skarron and jumping up onto its back.

  It tried to move aside, but Victor was too quick and got up on top…their weak spot. He pulled its two front arms in, which were jutting up from the sides of its flat back, throwing off their aim as it tried to shoot the commandos following Victor out. He held them, weapons up, as the back two tried to knock him off, delaying it long enough for the commandos to pour plasma into its ‘face’ and break through the armor there. A lot of wrestling later and it dropped to the ground, with Victor taking a plasma hit to the left arm as a nearby Hobbit took aim at him.

  The Knight jumped off and ran towards the stubby creature, pulling his sword off its armor latch and whipping it around so fast he nearly took the thing’s head off with it. It rolled to the ground, stunned and possibly with a broken neck, and Victor paid no more attention to it as he moved to the four more nearby and physically beat them down. His sword and one backup pistol were all he had left in the way of ammunition, but his body was also a weapon and he was going to save his last few plasma shots for later when he expected to need them the most.

  More and more plasma began to fly through the air as the Skarron troops closed in and both sides went at it. A few minutes of hard fighting and several commandos went down. Victor didn’t know if they were dead or not, but he couldn’t worry about that. There were enemies all around and that meant just one thing…if he couldn’t run, he was going to take as many down as he could.

  With his physical shield left behind and his armor’s shields flickering on and off he began to take damage, but that didn’t slow him down
one bit. Pulling on decades of experience and training he moved from point to point as fast as the two Archons and punched, kicked, and whacked Hobbits down like they were nothing more than children throwing rocks at him.

  When he was about to get to another Skarron, this one unarmored and leading a group of some 50 Hobbits, a loud screech belted out from behind him. To his credit Victor didn’t look back, taking the distraction as an advantage and getting several more Hobbits as they stared up the water behind the Humans as a giant walker rose up from the depths emitting the electronic battle cry.

  As the water fell off it two thick forward arms on the crab-like Weapon-class aquatic ‘mech’ opened up with mauler blasts, showering the infantry beyond the Star Force troops with not a single glob of energy but a shower of smaller globules spewing out like a showerhead. They mowed down the hobbits and penetrated the armor on the Skarron elites while kicking up a huge plume of vaporized water and ground, creating a visible wall separating the friendly troops from most of their attackers.

  Switching his HUD over to augmented view Victor dove into the edge of that cloud and took down the nearest Skarron as the rain continued to fall 100 meters out. He knew better than to go out there, but also knew that the gunners would be watching the battlemap closely and see his ID tag. He felt safe to venture out a bit and take advantage of the visual mess, which he hoped the enemy wouldn’t be able to see through.

  He spent four shots from his plasma pistol and took the unarmored Skarron down quickly, then used his sword to plow through a group of more than 20 Hobbits before finally getting a retreat ping on his battlemap. Victor took down two more then turned and ran, coming back out of the cloud and heading towards the spot where the beacon was located, visible on his HUD as an overlay marking a position near the shore.

  Victor sprinted up over a small rise and saw another craft coming up out of the water as the Weapon moved up fully onto shore, walking with its eight pointy legs and waving its four upper tentacles around like a goad to the enemy as it continued firing with its stubby arms. The aquatic mech was designed for underwater combat, but with shoreline applications in mind as well…and right now the ugly thing was a welcome sight…as was the hatch opening up on the transport that had just the upper section of its hull above water and a long bridge reaching out to get all the way to shore.

  With the Weapon providing cover fire, and hopefully killing a lot more enemy infantry in the process, the commandos sprinted across the five meter wide bridge and poured down inside the aquatics craft, with Victor and the two surviving Archons running around the battlefield to pick up the wounded, which appeared as special icons on the battlemap. Victor got one of them and slung him over his shoulder, then picked up another and brought both of them to the foot of the bridge, dropping them off for others to carry in while he went back for more.

  He did that three times, then moved around the battlefield looking for more despite there being no more ID tags. From experience he knew that armor could be damaged and not transmit their location, so he made a visual scan and ran around the area…and it was a good thing he did, for he saw a dull white suit crawling across the ground with its helmet off and a large blood splotch on the side of his blonde head.

  Victor ran over to him and, without a word or gesture, picked up the commando and ran him back over to the bridge as the Archons made similar sweeps to look for others. Three steps before he hit the bridge he got a ‘finished’ ping so he took the man all the way in, running across the firm, rail-less walkway all the way to the top of the transport that was barely two meters above the water line and fairly far out into the water. He felt very exposed running out there, but as soon as he ducked down inside he knew they were safe.

  There were several medics in the much larger compartment below, so he set the wounded commando down and let them attend to him as he stepped back up enough to look out as the Archons finally came back. He let them pass him by, then he ducked down as the hatch sealed over and the bridge retracted.

  The transport eventually sank back into the water, but the Weapon did not. Instead it walked further up onto land and laid into the infantry at range as far as its maulers would reach. It worked them over good, killing as many that were stupid enough to stick around, then when it had no more within reach walked backwards and disappeared into the water like some monster of legend, with the ripples of its passing eventually dissipating and making the calm water a question mark of what other terrible things lay beneath.

  Victor and the others rode the transport for several hours until it docked with an underwater city and they got off into familiar surroundings. With no immediate reassignment the troops were given temporary quarters and Victor was shown to his. He went inside and began stripping off his damaged armor, inspecting each piece and judging whether or not a simple patch job would suffice or whether he’d need a full replacement for the piece.

  His chest plate was going to have to go, for it had taken the most damage and was nearly penetrated in three separate spots. His back showed no damage whatsoever…which was typical Knight. They always fought facing forward and did very little running away, though in large skirmishes they often dove into the middle and had enemies all around them. Today hadn’t been one of those days, so his back piece was salvageable.

  He disconnected the emergency latches, for the torso usually stayed together as a single piece when he put it on, and pulled the damaged section off. The rest he categorized and organized into piles, then took a shower and got the grime off of him before heading over to the local armory and trading out the damaged pieces for new ones and getting some quick ‘putty’ work on the small holes in the rest.

  That sealed them off and hardened into a good armor of its own, slightly weaker but much better than throwing out nearly good pieces in exchange for new ones…and in an long campaign like this you never knew how many new suits were going to be available, so you needed to make do with what you had whenever possible.

  With his armor back up to snuff Victor headed to the cafeteria and grabbed a bite to eat before heading off to bed. When he woke up the next morning new orders still hadn’t come through so he hit the training facilities and got in a good few workouts until four days later when an underwater transport finally arrived to take him and the others off to another engagement zone.

  The same type of transport deposited them on another shore some 1000+ miles away from where they’d been evaced. There they boarded land vehicles and sped off to a nearby city where they supplemented the defense forces prepping for a Skarron attack that looked to be two days out, judging by the pace their walkers were making heading towards it.

  This city did have mech and aerial support, which gave Victor hope that they could hold out this time. There were a lot of walkers headed their way, with ample infantry support, but he didn’t think they were unmanageable numbers…so long as an enemy transport didn’t swoop in and add to them, which was always a possibility. That said, fresh troops were in short supply on both sides, so he hoped the enemy had better places to send them. He wanted a victory to counteract the bad taste in his mouth from so many retreats and maybe, just maybe, this upcoming battle had the look of being one.

  With ample motivation, Victor armored up and headed for his combat deployment post, supporting a group of commandos waiting inside the outer wall for when/if the enemy penetrated into the city…with the mechs outside already starting to snipe at Skarron units on approach.

  4

  January 18, 2549

  Reesi System

  Metropolis

  With the initial attack successfully repulsed, Victor was reassigned to a unit that was headed into what was now Skarron territory. Glad to be going on the offensive, he joined up with a group of 60 commandos and four other Knights and boarded a single Falcon-class dropship that took off from the city several hours into night and flew across the horizon, gaining more minutes of dark as they moved opposite to the spin of the planet.

  Their dropship had a
full squadron of skeets in escort as it flew an evasive path up and around the main Skarron strongholds, avoiding their walkers and their anti-air, and traveling a very long route up to a captured outpost. They set down in the trees barely a kilometer off as the fighters strafed the small defensive emplacements the Skarrons had set up.

  Victor offloaded with the others and ran in formation with four commandos attached to him, his physical shield held at ready in front of him on his left arm and his massive stun sword held in his right hand. The nightvision in his helmet showed them the way through the trees until they eventually came out into a light skirmish, with Victor sprinting ahead and bashing a hobbit with the front of his shield, sending it flying back a couple of meters while he turned and whacked another with his sword as the commandos followed up closely and gunned the others down.

  There wasn’t much more to do than that, for the rest of the troops were mowing over the light guard the Skarrons had on the place. It was a relatively minor outpost, barely 20 buildings in total. They had no illusions about retaining possession of it, but what it did possess was an entrance to an underground tunnel network…and that was where they were ultimately going.

  With the initial attack a success, Victor saw the dropship lift off and fly away with the skeets in escort, leaving the ground troops on their own.

  That was the plan, and the sooner they got underground the better…take the mechs and fighters out of the equation entirely. That left head on head infantry fighting, which Victor highly preferred.

  Not wasting any time the commandos found the entrance, still sealed up and apparently undiscovered by the Skarrons. They descended down a lengthy staircase into a small terminal that held a number of parked pod-cars. Victor and the others boarded them and quickly set off through the binary tunnels, all traveling down one side and leaving the other free for passing traffic…if there was any. This network was already shut down for the most part, and the Skarrons hadn’t seen fit to use it given the thousands of miles it spanned and the limited number of troops able to be moved around.