Star Force: Initiation (SF61) (7 page)

Krissy counted 13 wisps in total that had broken off
from various formations and were chasing her. They weren’t all together, nor
would they reach her at the same time, with her seeing that she was in fact
going to have to deal with at least 6 of them if she stayed on her present
course, and the moment she went evasive the others would then have a chance to
catch up from the lead she’d built on them.

She had about 10 more seconds to make a decision
before the first wisp got within firing range and Krissy realized she didn’t
have a choice. She waited a few more heartbeats then spun the skeet around,
facing back and to port she hit the brakes and brought herself even closer to
the nearest wisp. She wished she had her scattergun, for even a few small hits
would be enough to hurt the
shieldless
enemy, but
she’d have to make do with her maulers. They required more skill to hit with,
but Krissy wasn’t lacking in that department.

The wisp did go evasive, however, making her first
five shots miss, but as she turned her skeet to follow its line of flight she
caught a hit with the sixth, then punched what acceleration she had to move
away from it as two more came in. A heartbeat later her shields began to reform
at low strength but she didn’t wait to try and let them rebuild, knowing that
she had to make these kills quick while there were only one or two wisps
nearby. Wait and let them bunch up and she’d be down before she had time to
properly cuss them out.

Moving into an aggressive evasion pattern that had her
cutting back on her flight path as often as she could, she set herself to the
task of using her superior skill to overcome the disadvantage…or at least take
a few more of the bastards down before she was out of the fight.

An hour and a half later one of the Star Force surface
bases saw a smoking skeet approach from the west and set down in the middle of
one of the open landing pads as if there was nothing at all wrong or unusual
about it. There were no calls for emergency assistance or any alarm in the
pilots voice as she signaled for pad allotment, but once seeing the state of
her ship the deck chief got an emergency crew of techs rushing out to the skeet
to deal with any potential mechanical explosions that might result from the
damage and endanger the surrounding ships/personnel…as well as to see to the
pilot.

But when Krissy landed she popped the armored hatch
and slid down the angled side of the skeet, for its port landing leg had never
deployed. Her light combat suit protected her leg and elbow from the heat on
the hull as she dropped to the ground and casually walked off, satisfied and
relieved that she hadn’t been stuck in the forest.

The pilot waved off the medtech in the emergency team
and let them deal with her wreck of a skeet as she headed indoors to find out
the status of the ongoing battles and how long it would take to get her a
replacement fighter.

7

Niken-401229 fired his plasma pistol twice, hitting a
couple of lizards that were heading towards a Bsidd that was carrying another
wounded one back out of the battle, dropping both as he ran in a wide arc
around several trees then headed back into the fray once they were clear. So
far he’d had 19 casualties, all non-fatal and successfully evacuated from the
heaviest fighting. Beyond that he didn’t know what had happened to them, but
the troops still in the field under his and Jayce’s command were all still
alive and fighting, though near to the breaking point.

The lizards were throwing so many infantry and them
and the other Star Force units nearby that they’d had to relocate 8 times to
keep from tripping over the bodies. Each time the lizards kept pursuing them
with an unending wave of standard variants moving through the trees like they
were ants and constantly trying to flank their grouping and cut off the
evacuation routes that Niken was using to get his seriously injured out.

The rest of his troops had injuries, and he would have
been surprised if any more than a handful were fighting with their shields up.
His were currently recharging at 18% and had gone down more times than he could
count, but he was quicker than the Bsidd and could run away from a lot of fire
coming in on him. They didn’t have that luxury and were resorting to picking up
and piling the lizard corpses to provide some barricades to fight behind when
there weren’t enough trees or time to
fell
them.

In fact Jayce had recently ordered them to stop doing
that in order to conserve ammo. Already a lot of the Bsidd had empty rifles and
were resorting to hand to hand with their plasma rods. If they used those to
cut more branches they’d run out of power quicker, and already as Niken ran
back in towards his troops he saw Bsidd with only 3 or 4 glowing appendages
when there should have been six, telling him that they were close to having to
fight this out weaponless.

He only had 19 rounds left himself, and as he got back
to the nearest group of Bsidd he cut right and flanked the lizards shooting at them,
blowing through half those rounds in a matter of seconds but taking that point
of danger off their mental map. The lizards had been trying for hours to get
around to the back of them and force the Bsidd into a situation where they
would have to fight it out. Niken had been able to keep pulling his injured out
before they could get hammered to death, but only because they kept a route of
retreat intact and still the lizards were determined to flank and cut them off.

The only reason the Archons hadn’t ordered a full retreat
was because the end of the lizard wave had been reported some kilometers away,
meaning that this endless battle was coming to a conclusion in their favor if
they could just hold out a bit longer…and even if he did order a full retreat
they’d have to fight their way back, for the lizards were hell bent on killing
them and were just as fast as the Bsidd through forest, if not faster.

That meant they were kind of stuck, but if they needed
to retreat he could have made it happen in an orderly fashion. The skies
overhead were still cluttered with wisps, though many of them were now junk
piles in the forest. Given that present air cover he wondered if there wasn’t a
second wave of infantry coming behind this one, but right now there was none
reported so he was going to fight this out here and now without losing any more
ground. They’d already retreated several additional kilometers away from their
targets, and if this was the end of the major resistance they needed to get to
them with what troops were able sooner rather than later, and it looked like
flying dropships in wasn’t going to be an option.

Weaving his way between trees Niken ran toward the
next bit of trouble he saw, sniping down three lizards as he passed, then he
was back into the heavy flow of incoming amongst knotted up groups of Bsidd
acting as lethal islands amongst the flood and dropping lizard bodies
everywhere, now almost exclusively through hand to hand combat.

A few more shots and Niken was out of ammo as well,
but knowing that they only had to kill a few thousand more he pulled up a rare
command in his HUD and triggered his armor rack to release from his back. He
caught it in his right hand as it slid off and whipped it around in front of
him, reattaching the dead pistol next to his other depleted weapons and
grabbing the two short cylinders off it that he carried for good measure.

Dropping the weapon rack into a bush he carried a
cylinder in each hand and ran on, now lighter and more agile than before but
with a silver-armored body that was showing numerous melted spots from plasma
damage. His shields took another hit as the lizards saw and focused their fire
on him, and Niken knew that as long as they did so his troops would have a
little more breathing room to work with.

The Archon ran towards the thickest group of the
lizards as they continued to run forward in tightly packed lines through the
trees, bottling up near the Bsidd as their
forwardmost
infantry were cut down by plasma rods or knocked through the air by physical
blows. Some of the Bsidd were picking up the enemies as they shot into their
armor and hurling them like rocks back towards the others and bowling them
over, for without their rifles they were having trouble keeping the lizards
from grouping up in too large of numbers and pumping plasma into their already
beaten and often broken armor, with many of the Bsidd visually bleeding out
through burn marks.

Niken jumped as high as he could after pushing his way
through the scattering of lizards in the front, then did a half flip in the air
that brought his feet around over his head and into a lateral battering ram
that smashed one of the lizards back into the others as the Archon fell to the
ground amongst them, opening a small space for him to stand up in. As he did
the cylinders extended out with a button press and formed two stun swords, one
in each
hand, that
he whipped around before they were
even charged and knocked several lizards in their small heads.

The next few started dropping to the ground with even
small hits as the Archon ran through the horde. He knew they weren’t dead, and
while he could pick up the lizard plasma rifles and use them against their
makers the Bsidd couldn’t for their lack of fingers. They were the kill power
and he needed to be the distraction…and right now he could take more lizards
out of the fight with a stun sword than he could with one of their rifles, for
even the slightest brush of the blade at full power would knock one out, even
if he only caught them in the wrist.

Niken began downing them at 5 or 6 times the firing
rate of one of their rifles on one side, but with two swords he was mowing them
down on both wings as he ran, cutting a huge swath out of the
horde
and drawing a lot of attention his way, causing some
of the lizards up front who weren’t totally engaged to turn back and throw
their plasma fire at him when they could, though they were having trouble doing
so without shooting each other.

Enough lizards were close enough to get off at least
one shot before he poked or whacked them unconscious, with his shields going
down not long after he jumped into the fray. Though he didn’t have time to
notice, a group of Bsidd followed him in through the path of unconscious
bodies, jumping into those around them and letting others trailing them poke
and jab most of the unconscious ones with their plasma rods as they passed over
them.

Before he knew it Jayce was in front of him, having
beaten his way through from the other side and signaled to him with a simple
telepathic touch. Niken retracted his left stun sword into its hilt and tossed
it to the other acolyte, whom he saw had been reduced to using a lizard rifle.
Jayce fired one more pointblank shot into a lizard’s chest, then he caught the
sword out of the air and opened it up in a roundhouse twirl that ended with the
tip cracking a lizard’s neck from the physical impact.

Switching to a two-handed grip Niken added more power
and precision to his blows and the pair of acolytes drifted their way through
the lizards, making sure not to get tripped up by those they were downing and
to keep moving fast enough that they were hard to target. Green plasma was
flying everywhere and more than once Niken felt a heat bloom on an arm or leg
but nothing bad enough to slow him down. He was a blur of motion, caught up in
sighting, moving towards, and making contact with the closest lizard…then he’d
turn and repeat while mentally keeping track of where Jayce was beside him.

The lizards having two Archons to shoot at helped
spread out the damage they were taking, prolonging their ability to fight, but
by the time Niken got to jabbing one of the rare maulers that lunged at him
swinging its forearm blades his stun sword had ran out of power. The poke
merely knocked the lizard off course and dropped it beside the Archon, who then
twirled the sword around and smacked it in the head as hard as he could,
rendering it unconscious through blunt impact.

He would have grabbed a lizard rifle if he had time,
but there were so many enemies around him he had to keep dodging and hitting
them with the sword to keep them from lining up easy shots on him. The weapon,
while unpowered, was still a heavy metal rod and that could do plenty of damage
on its own, so Niken kept swinging and keeping close to Jayce until a blur of
purple armor jumped into his view and grabbed three lizards up
simultaneously…then sent them flying back through the air like they were mere
toys.

Two glowing plasma rods jabbed into the nearest
others, then Niken had more Bsidd swarm around him and run over the lizards in
what amounted to a stampede of purple armor and too many limbs to count. Taking
a moment the Archon spotted a lizard rifle and telekinetically pulled on it,
moving it a half meter across the ground as he ran forward and reached down to
pick it up in hand, discarding the dead stun sword.

He fell in with the Bsidd and ran amongst them,
weaving his way between them as they ran and fought their way through the
lizards, many of whom were now turning to run before they literally got stomped
on. Niken shot targets of opportunity but kept trying to make his way to the
front, hopping over one Bsidd that was down on the ground but still standing on
one knee. He was hit, bad, but wasn’t dead…so Niken flashed a ‘recover’ marker
onto his position via his helmet controls as he ran by. There was no time to
stop and deal with him in person, for there were more enemies around to kill.

Then suddenly they were at the wall of them, lizards
stacked together shoulder to shoulder and firing through the gaps in the trees
directly into the Bsidd. Several of
Niken’s
troops
went down, and he fired a pair of shots into the line, dropping a piece of it
as suddenly he got a ‘no-go’ warning flashed on his HUD. The other Bsidd
stopped immediately, taking partial cover behind trees and baiting the lizards
to come to them, but the Archon kept shooting and running forward until he
noticed a new group of dots on the battlemap.

He fired three more times
then
ducked behind a tree as a plasma blast hit his helmet, failing to penetrate the
silver armor but melting a small rivulet of it off. It ran down an inch over
his visor and
resolidified
, sticking in place as his
view filled with tree bark. Looking to his right he saw and telekinetically
pulled another lizard rifle to him, dragging it across the ground as it was too
heavy for him to fully lift, then grabbed it in his other hand, dual wielding
as he turned around the far side of the thick tree trunk and opened fire again.

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.