Star Force: Initiation (SF61) (8 page)

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 do 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.

Jason moved between three different hidden emplacements
before he ran out of tunnel. To get to the others he had to move across trails
that no longer existed around the blast radius, and some of the automated
turrets were up high and fixed to sheer rock…probably with power cables running
through drilled holes. There was no physical access to them for enemy troops to
take over and utilize, so Jason had to take those down from the outside or
disable the controllers wherever they were hiding nearby.

If Jason were setting these up he’d have relays in place
to allow remote control from far distances, so he didn’t bother looking for a
nearby bunker and headed out across and under the remains of the trees that had
been burnt and bent over, yet not totally destroyed, until he got underneath
one of the turrets…with it firing rifle-sized plasma blasts down towards him
the moment he came out from under one of the tree mashes.

This was where the tank would have been a particularly
bad neighbor to have, but since it was now gone Jason took a few plasma blasts
by not dodging, rather he dropped down onto his ankles and did his best
impression of a Jedi jump as he activated his jump pack. His trajectory moved
him at an angle, bringing him up to a narrow ledge that he managed to get a
foot onto. The jump pack held him up long enough to get steadied as he
continued to get hit with plasma blasts and the misses blowing out tiny bits of
rock shrapnel all around him.

Repeating the process he jumped again, this time
getting up to the height of the turret and taking one shot directly in the
faceplate. His diminishing shields held up and Jason grabbed hold of one of the
multiple barrels sticking out from the boxy turret. He held on and dangled from
it underneath, squeezing his mechanical hand as tightly as the mental controls in
his armor would allow and locking it in place so his muscles wouldn’t have to.
He nearly slid off anyway, but the mechanical grip put a little bit of a dent
in the barrel, allowing for some additional grip as he pulled out his plasma
pistol from his lower back and pumped multiple rounds into the turret, breaking
through the armored casing and exposing the inside.