Star Force: Survivor (SF52)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  He did notice that the pace was faster than it had been previously. Not hearing anyone nearby he ventured a hushed question between breaths.

  “Where are…the others?”

  “They didn’t make it,” the commando said.

  “And the…Archon?”

  “Covering our exit. Keep moving as fast as you can.”

  “I’m the slow one now?” Davi asked.

  “Yes,” the commando said with no animosity, only regret.

  “I can manage…a little more. But I don’t know…for how long.”

  “Give us what you can.”

  Davi took in and let out a deep breath, then accelerated up another gear with the commando matching pace. Those ahead did so as well when he started to catch them. He didn’t know if this was everyone, but by his count they were down to 13, not counting the Archon which was nowhere in sight. The slow and wounded were no longer with them.

  Davi ran and ran until finally the group stopped and he was told to grab some quick sleep while he could, as well as some rations. Water had to wait a few minutes until one of the commandos came back with a container full, which Davi sucked down gratefully. It was literally the best water he had ever tasted…then he laid down on the ground and passed out, trusting the commandos and giving in to the urge his body had been hammering him with forever.

  He was woken in what felt like 5 minutes and dragged to his feet. His body didn’t want to comply and his mind was foggy, but the commando pulling him up and on eventually got him woken up and they were back on the run again…though this time it was more of a jog. The food he’d gotten in him had done some good, but it wasn’t enough and his legs felt like shredded lead. Still, he knew the importance of keeping moving and while he wasn’t wearing any armor nor as strong or fast as the commandos, he was military and he understood their predicament. He desperately wanted to get back into the air, but right now their failure or success was largely dependent on how fast he was able to move, so for the sake of himself and the others he focused on that to the exclusion of all else.

  Iden wasn’t with the group, nor did he intend to be. He was trailing behind them at the very edge of battlemap range so he could know where they were but keep enough of a buffer between them and him so he could keep the Hobbits off their tail. He’d grabbed a handful of foodstuffs from one of the commandos on the run and had ate them in the past few minutes, the first food he’d had since the crash, then he was back into Venator mode, hunting the enemy in order to play aggressive defense.

  His own ammunition had run dry by now, and he was left with using the Hobbits’ own weapons against them. He had three armor punctures, not large but the burns on his chest, back, and left leg were hurting quite bad, not to mention seeping blood occasionally. He’d stopped some 14 hours prior for some quick Sesspik work to stop the bleeding, but more than that he couldn’t manage. He was on the clock as far as supplies went, with very little body fat to operate off of and his ambrosia already depleted.

  He hadn’t been able to get any of it from the commandos, for there had been no time during the firefight. Iden knew he could still fight with the low energy, but sooner or later attrition would wear him down. Before that happened or he got a lethal puncture to his armor he had to get back into friendly territory. Linger and he was as good as dead, even if it came from simple starvation.

  Even in his weakened state he was faster than the others, who were now moving at a decent clip since the slowest members were no longer around. That was a small, bittersweet blessing and Iden was committed to making the most of it by causing the Hobbits so much trouble that they wouldn’t have a chance of catching up.

  He’d already killed over 200 of them, not that he was counting, or cared, for they had so many in play that it almost seemed not to have mattered. How they were keeping up with them was a mystery to him until he caught sight of a transport flying further to the south, barely a small object on the tree choked horizon, but it was then that he realized that the Skarrons were dropping Hobbit groups off nearby and ahead of them…fresh Hobbits, in order to run them down and potentially cut them off.

  If the enemy had known exactly where they were they would have landed right over them or sent in fighters to blast into the trees, but it seemed they didn’t and just had an approximate location and heading. That was one more reason why Iden was pressing his attack on the trailing Hobbits, in order to draw the attention to him and away from the others, but if/when they set down a group of infantry ahead of the others there was nothing he was going to be able to do to distract them there.

  He kept in range of the battle map link as he ran in and out of the enemy lines, which were constantly trudging through the forest and giving him plenty of ambush opportunities when the alert came through from one of the commandos, giving him a heads up that there were enemies ahead…

  When he saw that Iden turned and ran back to the group, moving far faster than the Hobbits behind could match and worked hard to catch up, knowing they’d need his help to break through or divert…which the latter was what occurred. They’d been headed in a mostly eastern direction, but the group suddenly turned and headed north, with Iden catching up to them just as the Hobbits were chewing away at their back positions.

  One of the commandos went down just before he got there. He didn’t know if he was alive or not but telepathically told one of the others to check while he went into berserker mode and didn’t concern himself with anything other than engaging the enemy and killing as many of them as he could. He moved from one to the other, with his partial shields protecting him from a scattering of plasma hits until they eventually went down. He risked a few more kills, grabbing a fresh Hobbit rifle, then turned and followed in the direction the others had went, darting from tree to tree and trying to give his shields time to reform, though he took another hit to the left leg, fortunately in a spot that didn’t have exposed flesh.

  The armor there melted slightly, but remained mostly intact. A few steps later and he was momentarily in the clear and gaining ground on the others when he noticed another group of Hobbits ahead and coming at the others from the flank. Apparently they’d set down further to the north and were coming down on them from multiple angles.

  Resigning himself to another scrappy, fatigue-laced fight he veered off to the right, heading for the nearest of them and jumped the enemy as they keyed in on the others, shooting many of them at pointblank range as he ran up on them. He didn’t bother to wait around and make sure they were dead, for even wounding them at this point was a victory with the ever moving battlefield.

  Slipping back into berserker mode he went to work, buying the others time and thinning their opponents while drawing as much attention to himself as possible without getting overwhelmed by enemies.

  8

  January 23, 2549

  Reesi System

  Metropolis

  Davi was beyond tired, operating completely on biological emergency backups. If he stopped he knew he’d collapse so he kept moving…always moving, always with the enemy on their heels or trying to ambush them from ahead. The commandos kept guiding him on, with the Archon having gone missing again. Yesterday he had went back to divert their trackers then hadn’t been seen since. At least Davi hadn’t seen him, but without a helmet or headset he couldn’t tap into the battlemap, so it was possible he was still around and just out of sight.

  That said, he could barely see two meters in front of his face. It was night and all he could do was stay with the commando ahead of him and pace in his footsteps. They had nightvision, he didn’t. And even if he had he wouldn’t have trusted his eyes. His head was so groggy he was surprised he could even keep his eyelids open, but somehow he managed and they moved on, getting closer and closer to the Star Force city.

  Rio was in a much better position, though his own ambrosia levels were teetering off. He did have nightvision and battlemap access through his armor, and they’d just crossed into transmission range from the city, picking
up their telemetry through relays that were constantly transmitting out. They weren’t within their own transmission range yet, so the city didn’t know where they were, but Rio could see their status…and it wasn’t good.

  The Skarrons were already assaulting the city, with half of it having been fully evacuated and the rest in the process of fleeing while a pitched battle was taking place outside and on portions of the interior. The defense shield was still up, but there were breach points on the barrier wall with troops coming through. At the moment they were being held off and the evacuees were being covered, but if they didn’t get there soon there wouldn’t be anyone left to evac them.

  After a long night of continuous running/walking the commando ahead of Davi stopped short and put a hand on the pilot’s chest to get him to halt. His body didn’t want to, so locked into movement that the man had to forcibly stop his progress as he looked back at him through his helmet.

  “Wait here…and get down.”

  Davi didn’t have the energy left to swear or he would have. Dropping to a knee and nearly collapsing down onto his face he ducked behind the nearest tree and waited as told. The commando stayed with him, looking up every now and then until a section of forest blew up not far away as a hail of plasma came down, blasting away the trees.

  Davi jerked, his nerves fried on adrenaline, but the commando didn’t move so neither did he. After about 20 seconds of heated destruction the plasma stopped falling and the commando yanked Davi up onto his feet and literally dragged him forward by the arm as he fought to get his legs working again.

  They headed directly to the blast sight, and as they got close a fighter sank down into the gap…but with no sound of anti-grav. Skarron fighters had a tell-tale hum/whine due to their inefficiency, but the skeet that was coming down was whisper silent.

  “Your ride,” the commando said as he pulled him forward. “Hurry. We only have a small window.”

  Seeing a way out Davi somehow found more energy within him and pushed on, but the commando was still providing most of his momentum all the way up to the cockpit that cracked open. When they got to the side the commando grabbed Davi around the waist and literally threw him up to the opening where another pilot grabbed him and pulled him inside.

  “Slide in,” she said, scooting over as much as she could in her armor. She was a pilot, not an Archon, but she still wore light armor in case she had to ditch her craft. That made the fit even tighter, but she moved over to the far side of the cockpit on the pommel seat and pulled him in almost onto her back.

  The cockpit canopy came down and almost fit, but not quite. A little more wiggling and the two got their bodies aligned enough for it to seal, clicking shut with a reassuring sound as Davi almost lost consciousness.

  “Thank you,” he mouthed, his face in her armored shoulder.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, raising the skeet back up through the hole in the trees and flying as best she could at the odd angle her body was at. “Had to take down 21 fighters just to get here, and there are more on the way. We got about 15 more seconds before they’re all over us.”

  Davi didn’t say anything further, realizing what she was up against and just glad to be inside a ship again, even if he wasn’t piloting it.

  Rio watched the anti-air skeet lift off and move away from the city and the enemy fighters he could see on battlemap, glad that they’d gotten the pilot away. That left 11 armored commandos and 1 Archon, who was current outside their range somewhere delaying the enemy infantry. The commandos knew what they had to do now and even as Rio watched the skeet move up and off the 11 of them came together on the run and formed a single file line as they accelerated up to true commando speed and took off through the forest at a rate that the Hobbits shouldn’t be able to catch up to from behind.

  But there were plenty ahead, hunting them and those simply assaulting the city. It took several more hours and three more skirmishes until they got to the forest edge, with two of them injured but still moving. Now with no one to protect they could fight as a unit and had kept themselves alive despite several hundred Hobbits worth of kills. It was mind blowing how many the enemy had in play, but that seemed to be their MO in this invasion. They weren’t better on the ground than Star Force, certainly not in terms of infantry, but they were making up for it and then some with sheer numbers…and orbit was no exception. If not for the Sentinels holding them at bay this planet would long ago have been theirs.

  That said, this piece of it looked to already be theirs, or at least in the transition stage. Waiting just inside the tree line the commandos spread out and scouted out the view ahead. The forest ran right up to the city, but the engineers had cut it back for a radius of nearly a kilometer to accommodate new growth and to give the perimeter defenses decent firing lines.

  That was good for the city, but not for them. As they looked out with their own eyes in addition to the battlemap they saw several Skarron walkers in that gap, none too close but nearly within firing range…but at the moment one of them was getting picked to death by a trio of mechs making an ambush run, coming out from inside the city…with a fourth heading out into an infantry pool entering through a breach in the city wall and laying waste to them by the dozens per second.

  Another walker to their left began to crawl its way towards that mech, trying to get within firing range.

  Suddenly a waypoint materialized on Rio’s HUD with a ping, ping, ping sound indicating that they had to go now. Trusting in it he and the other commandos ran out from cover and sprinted towards a point some 100 meters out from the mech and in the gap between it and the walker heading their way…and now he could see a second behind it coming around the curve of the city wall as well.

  “Wedge up!” one of the commandos said, prompting them to adjust their formation into an arrow that would give each of them a clear firing line straight ahead. The wounded two fell in behind that arrow and kept up as best they could but they were lagging behind. One of the others went back with them, keeping some cohesion in their formation as it stretched out into a much longer line.

  Rio and the first few kept pressing hard, heading for a group of Hobbits that finally noticed them coming that were running away from the mech. It took a couple of minutes for them to get to each other, but when they did the commandos were faced with a shower of white plasma orbs, which they returned fire on with their own more accurate blue streaks…and a few white orbs of their own from captured enemy weapons.

  The commando arrow cut through them, with the flanking edges downing more Hobbits as they passed through and wounded several Skarrons, clearing a narrow tunnel through them that the wounded pair and their escort slipped through, adding weaponsfire of their own. In front of Rio the mech suddenly abandoned its slaughter on the right and cut hard left, coming across the commandos and helping to clear a path as it took the first hits from the Type-4 now coming into range.

  The neo didn’t bother shooting back at it, saving its weaponry for the infantry and playing big brother to the commandos as they sprinted towards a specific point on the wall. When they got close a small anti-infantry battery opened up and shot down a few hobbits with plasma fire as a car-sized portal opened up on the city exterior and allowed them access.

  Rio ran up to that point but didn’t go in, turning around and circling back to make sure the others got in…just in time to see one of them get cut in half by a plasma blast from the Skarron walker. The white glare was so bright and intense that it seared through the commando’s midsection, with his legs and head toppling to the ground as separate pieces in the steam-laced explosion from where the rest of the plasma hit the wet surface.

  Recklessly ignoring it he stepped out a few strides and fired at the nearest Hobbits as the wounded pair finally caught up. When they were within a few meters he finally retreated, seeing the mech doing the same and running across the now smoldering grass, kicking and stepping on several Hobbits and even a Skarron that didn’t move out of the way fast enough
. It roasted a few with its maulers then Rio lost sight of it as he dashed inside and out of the firing line.

  When the last of them came through the blast doors shut on their own accord, but there was no one on the other side.

  His helmet came alive with a transmission that was going out to all of the now 10 commandos. The Archon wasn’t with them, but another’s ID tag popped up with the comm, and this was one a ranger.

  “Welcome back, but unfortunately your day is just starting. I’m in the city’s command nexus and remotely controlling as many functions as I can. The section of the city you’re standing in has been evacuated and is currently under Skarron control. You’re going to have to fight your way through and I’ll guide you as much as I can, but several areas have already gone dark. I think the enemy is learning how to cut our feeds. Head here,” he said, with a waypoint popping up on the city map, “and I’ll get back to you. Not many dropships left, so hurry.”

  “You hear that?” one of the other commandos asked.

  “Yeah,” Rio responded. “Let’s go.”

  By the time they got to the waypoint Rio had a hole in his armor, right chest under his armpit that was spitting fire through his body with every move. Between the cauterizing nature of the plasma and the medical gel laced into the armor’s inner layer his blood loss was kept to a minimum, but every time he twisted while running the crunchy layer of burnt skin and scabby clotted blood would crack and seep even more, enough that the right side of his white armor down to about his knee now had dark red streaks.

  The Skarrons knew they were in their backfield now and were cycling troops back from pushing further through the city to get at them. They’d had two big firefights, the second of which they’d been pinned down for more than 15 minutes before they broke free…but they hadn’t lost anyone else, though several more were chewed up like Rio was, one with a shin wound that caused him to run with a limp that couldn’t keep him with the others.