Star Force: Initiation (SF61) (10 page)

Darius waited for the other Arc Knights to catch up to
him, then he tossed the lizard weapons aside and grabbed new ones, not knowing
what their charge level was, and followed the pair as they passed him on the
run. Moving faster than the Calavari could, the threesome fought their way up
the trail dropping bodies as they went and rushing towards the rendezvous
point, with Darius seeing that the other Calavari unit was closer than them and
already engaging infantry near to the waypoint on his battlemap.

That was good, for there were no Arc Knights with them
and they’d need both Calavari groups to keep the enemy infantry busy when they
hit the tanks, for the region around the turret was heavily defended.

10

March 29, 2692

Jafat
System (lizard
territory)

Irad

Jason jumped up to the edge of the hole that they’d
blown into the roof of the lizard subsurface facility, grabbing the edge and
hanging with his feet dangling. He pulled himself up and got an elbow on the
edge then slowly wiggled his mass up over the tipping point and crawled along
the dirty roof plate. It was melted in some places, jagged in others, but less
than a meter away there was a wall of hardened dirt that he began scaling on
all fours until he reached the top and could finally stand up.

He breathed a sigh of relief, now that the key
facility had been taken and secured. This assault was over, but there were
several others ongoing across the planet and many more to come. Taking a planet
was not an easy task, especially one with this many enemies…but beyond that
they had been dug in more than normal and it had been a very long past six
days.

He’d cycled out twice for sleep, with his troops doing
so more often than that, but they hadn’t let the lizards rest, keeping someone
banging on the door nonstop as they fought their way through the ravines and
down into the base. Now that he was topside again his battlemap began to update
with information from other battlefronts and space, with him immediately
noticing the arrivals in orbit.

There were no less than 8 full Voku conglomerates up
there, ahead of schedule. They weren’t here to fight, but to use this system as
a springboard for launching attacks into the surrounding area. He’d expected
them to wait until Star Force had actually taken possession of the system, but
apparently they were eager to get to work expanding their own empire.

The
Jafat
System was the
furthest out into what had formerly been Calavari territory that Star Force had
ventured short of a raid. This one they were keeping and would undoubtedly draw
a strong reaction…which they were expecting.
Irad
itself hadn’t been Calavari, but rather belonged to a weak race known as the
Bvdan
, which were now extinct. The lizards had wiped them
out long ago then only recently began heavily colonizing and fortifying this
world, probably expecting an attack at some point from orbit, which this
subsurface base and others would mostly have been immune to.

That was one thing about the lizards, no matter how
cookie cutter their civilization was they always got around to adapting to what
was beating them. They’d lost here and were going to lose in the other battles
across the planet, but they’d set up their defenses in a way that had made it
very difficult for Jason’s troops to root them out. If it hadn’t been for some
very wise plays by his people they would have had massive casualties rather
than the mere handful he saw tallied on his HUD.

The trailblazer had brought them up first thing along
with similar reports from the other engagements. Most were injury reports, but
amongst there were a scattering of fatalities. Jason cringed with each one he
saw. The vast majority of the galaxy would have seen these reports as an
impossibly dominate victory, but to him each individual lost was a defeat. Star
Force didn’t assault any world where they expected to lose troops and did their
best in defensive engagements to minimize losses, so losing even one meant
they’d screwed up somehow…or the lizards had pulled some more trickery out of
their butts.

13 deaths…to date. He’d lost 4 of those in this fight,
a Calavari, two Scionate, and a commando. The Scionate had gotten overzealous
and done something stupid, with Jason kicking himself for sending them in so
green…but the others had fought well despite their youth, and if those two
hadn’t gone off mission they’d probably still be alive. Jason didn’t like
losing them, but he had to remind himself that he couldn’t babysit everyone and
if they acted stupidly then there wasn’t much he could do to stop it from
coming back to bite them.

What most people in the ADZ knew of the lizards came
from these battle reports, for most of them had never seen them in person and
those who had were dying off, replaced by younger generations. When landslide
victory numbers like this were eventually relayed back to them they thought the
lizards were numerically dominant pushovers…but that was not the case. The only
reason Star Force had been able to take this base in the way it had was because
they were damn good at what they did, but it had the side effect of making the
enemy look weak when they were not.

The Calavari he’d lost had been caught up in an ambush
and took so much armor damage that he’d been barely able to walk, but he and
his unit had come out of it alive and were heading to the rear when a wisp was
shot down overhead and fell to the ground. A proximity warning had been quickly
issued from orbit, predicting the fall trajectory and the Calavari had managed
to get out of the way just in time…save for the one who could barely move.

That was just pure bad luck, and he’d deserved better
than that. To win out against an ambush then to die while in the clear was just
plain wrong, but then again the galaxy was full of wrongs and try as they would
Star Force couldn’t stop all of them. Two other Calavari had been hit with
shrapnel from that fighter crash, but their armor had protected them enough to
survive the spear-like impacts.

The commando had died in circumstances he hadn’t yet
discovered, but it had been in a huge firefight. He’d review that later with
those who had been on the ground at the time plus the vid logs once they
compiled them all. He knew they had to learn from their mistakes, or their
enemies’ ingenuity, in order to prevent deaths like this from occurring again,
and Jason would be spending a lot of his future downtime reviewing everything
that had taken place on this planet in detail.

That was the beauty of the battlemap and its
recorders, which lifted the fog of war in the post analysis and helped to keep
the realtime fighting coordinated and sane. If an enemy ever figured a way to
compromise their low level communications it would hurt Star Force badly, which
was why all their troops had trained to fight with jamming shutting it down and
even to fight with a compromised system utilizing various checks and
non-electronic hand signals.

But when the battlemap was working it gave them a huge
advantage that the lizards didn’t have. The battlemap, their armor and shields,
the advanced weaponry…each was a piece in the ever growing puzzle that allowed
Star Force to fight and live to see tomorrow, with Jason never willing to
tolerate the concept of ‘acceptable losses.’

A lizard might go into combat mere months after it was
born, working off of genetic knowledge and its default strength, but in order
for a Star Force soldier to get to the frontlines they had to put decades of
training and trials in, making each one of them a veteran before they fired a
single live plasma blast in battle. And not a veteran as in being on a
warfront, but in knowing how to dominate it, when to attack and when to
retreat. There were no
newbs
in Star Force’s assault
groups, and because of everything they did in prep and tech, along with
battlefield leadership from the Archons, almost everyone Jason had brought into
this fight was walking out of it.

But it was the handful that weren’t that weighed on
him.

He didn’t want to accept dumb luck, because that meant
he couldn’t find a way to protect against it later. When the enemy came to your
doorstep to fight, you didn’t have a choice of circumstances and had to work
with what was present, but when you were the attacker you did have a choice,
and every time someone died Jason wondered if he should have ordered the
assault or not, for he was pressing his troops against some very dangerous
enemies who had the advantage of terrain and prep time. On the whole he’d been
correct about this base assault, but no mission was a complete success unless
everyone
on his team walked away from it
afterwards.

Now that he was back in the open and could receive
transmissions from afar an incoming
comm
icon lit up
on his HUD which he activated with a telepathic thought.

“Jason, the Voku have arrived and will be staying
insystem for several weeks prior to deployment. They’re asking if you want any
assistance on the ground,” Admiral
Petry
said from
the command ship in orbit.

“We’ve got things under control.”

“I think they’re eager to fight rather than
questioning the eventual outcome.”

“Explain it to them, and if they are bored assemble
them into hot drop response units so I can call them down when needed.”

“Will do. How much longer are you staying down there?”

“We’re finished underground so send a dropship. I need
to recharge before the next assault.”

“On its way.”

 
“Thanks,” Jason
said, walking along the burnt grass atop the base around the point where a
cleansing beam had punched through the ground to give them a backdoor entrance.
A little further off there were broken trees followed by whole forest, through
which the mechs had cut several roads to get to makeshift spaceports situated
wherever they could find some bits of flat terrain.

The trailblazer walked through the forest until he
came to one of those roads then slowly made his way along the side of it. There
wasn’t much traffic, but a passing speeder slowed and offered to give him a
lift but he waved it off. The driver nodded and zipped on ahead, taking the
pair of wounded commandos with him back to the modular medical station they’d
brought in from orbit so they could treat nearly all injuries on the surface
rather than have them wait to get back onboard a ship in orbit.

But that wasn’t why he’d waved the speeder off. He wasn’t
exhausted but needed the break just to clear his thoughts and settle his mood,
which was accomplished best when he had some low level activity to do, which
made walking preferable to sitting at the moment. He pulled one of the last
senzu beans out of its slot within the interior of his helmet and
telekinetically steered it around his cheekbone to his mouth where he bit off a
tiny slice.

That he swallowed while returning the rest of the bean
to its holding spot, not wanting an overdose right now that taking the whole
thing would have resulted in. Jason was feeling a bit
deplenished
and just wanted to top off. He also felt like pulling his helmet off and
getting some fresh air on his head, but knew better than to do so in what was
still enemy territory. One little lucky plasma shot by a roaming lizard to the
head and he’d be dead…and after over 600 years of training he wasn’t going to
risk squandering it all for a bit of fresh air.

So he just walked and let the responsibilities for the
troops below his feet rest with someone else for the time being. There was no
more fighting going on in the base, for they’d cleared it all out, but there
were housekeeping duties that required an army of techs that he’d ordered to
start coming down a little over half an hour ago. After a few minutes of
walking a larger speed passed him carrying the first of them, with his troops
staying in and around the base to guard them just in case they’d missed a
lizard or two.

With them mostly off his mind Jason tried to relax and
let the combat emotions flow out of him…which had become easy after so many
years of training and fighting. Rarely did anything spook him enough that he
couldn’t transit back and forth between emotional modes within a handful of
seconds, but the deaths of his men were always something that stuck with him.
Even though they were gone he still couldn’t accept it, for accepting it would
be condoning it and that could never be allowed to happen.

So what he did instead was accept the anger but let
his body relax. There would be more fighting to come and they’d need him there,
in one fashion or another, so it was necessary that he was awake and alert, and
right now he was pushing 48 hours of activity.
Inas
aside, that was pushing it for Jason considering
how much ambrosia he’d been pumping through his body. The physical combat was
less intense than his normal training, but his psionic usage combined with the
ever present need to be alert, both for his sake and others, had taken its toll
on him.

He wasn’t near the dropping point, nor anywhere close
to it, but he was close to getting his mind hazy and his reflexes sluggish and
that was something he couldn’t tolerate. He’d head back up to the command ship,
take care of some duties there and begin organizing the next big assault while
his troops likewise began transferring back up to orbit or some of the secure
bases they’d established on the planet for a brief rest and recovery.

Meanwhile other battles were ongoing and Jason would
pick through those from the command ship briefly, but what he needed right now
the most was rest, meaning it was time for a crash nap then some light training
to get his mojo back in order before a good long sleep.

But right now he was just walking along the crudely
cut out road and hopping over an occasional limb that had fallen out into the
clearing or over the small puddles that mech footprints had created with a
recent rain. With each step he took he seemed to process out more of the stress
flowing through him and by the time he reached the end of the road and the edge
of the makeshift clearing that had dropships coming down like an orderly flock
of birds he feeling good enough that he was tempted to redeploy out to one of
the ongoing battles.

He knew he had to stay ahead of the fatigue rather than
fight it head on, so he stuck with the plan and found the dropship that the
Admiral had sent for him as the techs unloaded from the others nearby. With
them came loads of equipment and some fresh troops that would start relieving
the ones below. All of the techs wore light armor, despite their dislike for
it, and would continue to do so until this area was completely
safed
. Couldn’t afford to lose one of them either with
sloppiness.