Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66) (3 page)

The dive slowed near the end, decelerating enough that
a low flying wisp nearly rammed him as he tried to snipe the Star Force solider
out of midair. Fortunately it missed, then the fighter took a nose dive down to
the street and crash/skidded past Larissa, with her mind locking down the
pilot’s long enough to make sure the wisp was crumpled beyond a return to
flight before she reached her Ikrid out to the other fighters above as the rest
of the Scionate spilled over the rooftop like a waterfall of suicide jumpers.

With her providing psionic cover the wisps never got a
good shot and three of them careened into the sides of the nearby buildings,
pinballing
around with two of them crashing. The third
managed to bounce outside her Ikrid range and skillfully recovered quick enough
to avoid a fatal smash, but limped off slowly into the sky with a dented and
damaged craft.

“Archon,” the first Scionate said as he approached her
position and swung around her backside, coming up on her right flank in a guard
position as he surveyed the dead lizards around her.

“Inside,” she ordered. “Kill all you can find, but
stay within the confines of the building.”

“Gladly,” it said, running on all fours and diving
into the gap in the debris still partially blocking the door while Larissa
stayed put and continued to cover the others as more wisps poked their way down
between the buildings. The yellow-armored cats eventually all fell safely to
ground, then sprinted over to her position and followed their brethren inside,
with her ducking through last and beginning to reassemble the barricade with the
bits of junk she’d moved aside earlier.

“Did you lose anyone on the way in?” she asked the
three that had stayed with her.

“Not us, but many mechs have fallen to the fighters,
both Calavari and Canderous. Archon Connor sent you this,” he said, producing a
small container from the pack on his armored back that rotated around his body
to his belly where his paws could reach it.

Larissa took it telekinetically then opened it with
her armored hands, finding a canister of ambrosia senzu beans inside.

“If he was here I’d kiss him,” she said, popping the
seal on her helmet and telekinetically flying three of them up and into the storage
slots before stowing the rest in her own pack. “The Bsidd in this building are
very battle fatigued. Protect them and help me hunt the lizards. They keep
sending waves into the building and I’m having a hard time covering all the
angles.”

“Hunting lizard infantry is our specialty,” the
armored mask covering the
Scionate’s
muzzle said
before turning to the right and sprinting off with the other two following on
its armored tail.

“Thank you, Connor,” she whispered, taking another few
seconds for a
microrest
before finishing up the
barricade. It wouldn’t hold up to a tank blast, but fortunately they hadn’t
sent any of those to her position yet. Other Star Force units hadn’t been so
lucky, but she’d cobbled together what survivors she could find and rallied
them here, with none of the Bsidd mechs that she’d come across having made it this
long.

With the battlemap signal disruption being what it
was, she hoped there were still others out there, but at the moment the only
ones she could pick up were a trio of Calavari jamtror about two kilometers
away that were poaching lizard tanks while sticking to a region of the city
that had a multitude of overhangs. Larissa wanted to be out assisting them, but
there was no way she was going to leave these Bsidd infantry alone. They were
barely hanging on as it was, and there was no way she was going to risk them
dying after all they’d done to stay alive thus far.

She considered leaving them in the
Scionate’s
protection, but nixed the idea immediately. There were too many lizards still
coming at them for the Scionate to handle alone, and right now her psionics
were the big reason they were able to mow down so many that the Bsidd were
having to assign cleaning crews to remove them from the hallways in the interim
between fights to keep their bodies from clogging up their pathways and firing
lines.

No, she was going to stay put unless there were other
troops nearby that she could bring back to them, and those mechs wouldn’t fit
in the building. Until someone else strayed nearby she had to stay here and
hold out until the rest of Star Force fought their way in to rescue them.

3

July 2, 2755

Pagaliss
System
(lizard territory)

Varasiss

Kara saw the break in the fighter swarm above and
leapt up from her position between two very close buildings, shooting into the
sky like a missile and arcing towards one of the nearest wisps. It didn’t
respond to her approach, frozen on its current course thanks to her Ikrid as
she moved up close to it and produced a small green/white orb in her hands and
sent it into the hull at a range of less than 20 meters.

The Archon curved away sharply as the fighter
detonated in a confetti-like spray and headed for the next closest one as the
others took notice of her position. There were only a few hundred within
reliable firing range and she intended to tear up at least a third of them
before having to retreat back down into the city.

As she hunted down, froze, and destroyed her next
target, a larger battle was brewing out over the gash in the wall. Star Force
troops had been hammering it relentlessly and subsequently destroying a lot of
the lizard tanks in the process, which had taken pressure off the city streets and
the few surviving Star Force mechs roaming there. She’d been down helping them
for most of the past two hours, but couldn’t miss this opportunity to strip
away a bit more of the enemy air cover.

That air cover had been continually reinforced by
units coming in from other colonies now that the hidden hangars below the city
had emptied themselves. Between her, the mechs, the dead drones, and the Star
Force fighters operating on the periphery of the swarm, they’d killed over
120,000 wisps, but there were still more than a quarter million in operation.
More than half of those were now centered over the gash and engaging a lot of
mechs that were increasing the kill count drastically.

The only infantry that had gotten into the city were
through hot drops, with several Archon teams making their way across the wall
at other locations while the swarm was preoccupied with the gash. Those had met
heavy resistance but managed to slide through, with the lizards keeping enough
fighters over all parts of the city to prevent any mass of troops from getting
through and inside the barrier wall.

Morgan had come in with one of those teams, meaning
that there were now three trailblazers on site, if she included herself. Had
either of them asked she would have linked up and used their battlemeld
abilities against the still numerous sea of infantry inside the city, but Kara
knew as well as they did that her armor gave her too many combat options to
keep her reserved to commando work, and that the biggest problem right now was the
air cover, hence her taking out groups of fighters whenever she could.

With more and more heading to reinforce the gash
against a third drone warship making its way there she now had a lessened
concentration above the buildings, yet still far too many for the mechs to come
out into broad daylight. As she zipped about taking down wisps while the others
nearby tried to regroup to mass fire on her, Kara noticed another lizard convoy
coming in over land on the opposite side from the gash. There was probably at
least 20,000 more fighters providing air cover for it, with so many tanks and
transports that it was clear that the lizards badly wanted this colony held for
some reason.

When Kara eventually had her shields ripped off by the
mounting phaser fire she dipped back down below the rooftops and lost her
pursuit, ending up clinging to a wall in shadow mode and watching the
approaching convoy as one of the wall segments in their path began to lower
back into the ground. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but for
some reason this convoy hadn’t been hit on its way in…and it was probably due
to that excessive amount of air cover. The lizards were notorious for learning
and adapting, and it looked like they’d taken a cue from the burning hulks of
ground transports stretching out in lines around the colony resulting from their
previous failed attempts to reinforce the city.

Suppressing a long string of cussing, Kara slid down
the side of the building and kept to the shadows as she moved through the city,
stopping only once to kill a group of lizards that were moving about in small
number and out in the open as she headed to where the reinforcement convoy was
now coming through the mechanically created gap.

She waited amongst the buildings as the tanks rolled
in and crossed the plain that separated wall from city, letting them get just
onto the streets before she jumped out from the side and stuck herself to the
first tank where it couldn’t shoot her, nor could the ones behind it. She
summoned up a large energy orb and used it to melt through the armor with a
single hit, then sent a second one inside that detonated and shredded both the
crew and interior components while leaving the outer shell visibly intact.

The hovering tank dropped to the ground, blocking a
third of the street, and Kara jumped to the next few repeating the process and
creating a blockade of junk as a mix of phaser bursts and large plasma orbs
rained down on her and the dead tanks simultaneously. She weathered a few
glancing hits to kill one more, then flew off down the street and turned a
corner, getting out of their firing lines.

A huge pink beam passed over the city with a telltale
buzz, but from the angle she knew it had come from another colony. When it
abated she heard other faint buzzes, immediately flying up to building top
level and taking a look despite the trio of wisps that noticed her and fired
bad shots in her direction.

Another huge beam passed over the city and she could
see many others crossing the landscape from other neighboring colonies and
converging on a point back inside what was now Star Force territory…where she
saw a distant, but huge mass coming across the ground. Kara did a double take
as her battlemap tagged it as the
Ironstrike
, one of the command ships in the orbiting fleet.
It had come down to ground level but was so massive that it couldn’t get below
the closest of the neighboring colonies’ firing lines and was taking heavy fire
head on.

Kara finally paid attention to the wisps and flew up
to meet them, killing two before heading back down into the city and avoiding
the pursuit that inevitably followed from 50 more nearby. She cycled around
through a few blocks then came up on a more concealed perch so she could see
with her own eyes what was happening.

The giant grey donut got larger and larger on the
horizon, but was still so far away that she could easily see around either
side. With her armor enhancing her sight she was able to zoom in and confirm
that its shields were still up, but those planetary defense beams had to have
been hitting it hard. Like a giant tsunami coming towards them the
Ironstrike
grew
larger and larger, eventually becoming its own mountain range before it even
got close to the boundary wall.

But it didn’t have to get too close before its cleansing
beam leapt out and backtracked one of the pink beams to a neighboring colony,
returning the attack on the distant defense tower even as the mass of weaponry
coating its hull began firing at the wisp swarm whether they were designed for
it or not. Kara saw several bloons launched into the mass, followed by
Ta’lin’yi and maulers in addition to an insane number of anti-air batteries
mainly designed to shoot down missiles, but that proved to work equally well
against fighters.

As awe inspiring as that was, it didn’t dawn on Kara
what they were doing until the ship reached the edge of the swarm near the wall
gash and a warning was sent out over the battlemap to get indoors and under any
available cover immediately.

She held her position, eagerly awaiting what was
coming. As the swarm looked to hold its ground and continue firing on the Star
Force troops at the gash until the last moment, an IDF field expanded out from
the command ship and caught them all in its grasp. Suddenly the gravity of the
planet disappeared from their point of view and with it the ability for them to
maneuver with their anti-
grav
…leaving them floating
in midair on whatever trajectory they previously had.

With them incapacitated most of the fire coming down
to the surface ended as they were no longer to aim properly, but as the first
of the planetary defense beams got through the
Ironstrike
’s
shields and blasted
a huge crater in its armor the ship continued to move forward at considerable
speed. The mass of air preceding it knocked the fighters askew, then the hull
hit and splattered the wisps like bugs against a windshield.

The command ship mowed down so many of them that they
fell like bits of yellow/tan hail down to the surface. That storm continued up
to the wall, covering the mechs that were fighting their way to the gash and
then on in to the outer buildings. Before long the edge of the donut passed
over Kara’s head and knocked the wisps out of the sky right down on top of her.

She held her ground, mentally calculating their fall
angles and having to jump aside once to avoid a collision. Once the forward
edge of the massive ship was past her she saw hundreds, if not thousands of
wisps flying around beneath it that hadn’t been caught up in the IDF, or held
there long enough. Using the battlemap she confirmed that the field was only
extended off the front of the ship, so Kara jumped back into the sky and
started hunting the remaining wisps aggressively now that their concentration
had diminished to almost nothing and they were scattered about with plenty of
room for her to maneuver beneath that beautiful donut.

As she flew to her first target she noticed on her sensors
as chunks of the command ship also began to fall to ground as the planetary
defense phasers carved up the outer layers now that the shields were down.

Larissa was running down one of the city streets with
two Scionate pacing her when the ‘duck and cover’ order came in, but they were
being pursued by a pair of tanks at the time and didn’t have the luxury of
doing so. They’d been probing a large infantry gathering point and bit off more
than they could chew when several nearby buildings began producing far more
infantry than they had previously contained, indicating a high probability of
additional tunnels beneath this section of cityscape.

The tanks she could have taken on her own with her
psionics, even fried as she was, but with infantry pacing them there was no way
she could knock all of them down and kill the tanks at the same time, so the
only legitimate option she had was to run, regroup, and find some other place
to probe to keep the lizards’ attention off her Bsidd and more to their own
defense.

With each corner they turned they got a brief respite
from the weaponsfire, but there were multiple groups of lizards now pursuing
them, including a handful of fighters that ventured down into the narrower city
streets. One of those that got too close Larissa snagged and had it swivel
about and fire on one of the tanks, delivering a pink phaser burst into the
yellow/tan hull armor.

After that she lost contact with both, running out of
controlling range for the fighter and turning yet another corner as they
zigzagged their way back into ‘friendly’ territory where the rest of the
Scionate and a small group of Archons were patrolling and hunting down any
small lizard teams that ventured inside.

By the time she and the two Scionate reached that zone
the sky disappeared a la Independence Day as the command ship moved over the
city, plowing into the wisps and gratuitously knocking
them
out of the sky…save for the fact that she was running where some of them were
falling.

With a telepathic urge she sent the Scionate over to
the nearest wall and joined them in running there, hoping that the wisp pieces
would bounce off the walls and not hit the ground within a few meters of the
buildings. She was right for the most part, but they did get sprayed with small
debris twice as impacts on both the ground and the buildings above threw
components and glass everywhere.

Larissa’s shields held up to that sandblast, but the
street was literally dotted with dead fighters and she assumed a great deal
more were covering the rooftops, which fortunately were more or less flat in
most cases, else they’d been funneling all the wisp remains down to the
streets. The Scionate likewise were alright tucked up alongside the wall and
the three of them continued running back into friendly territory, with the
giant ship above them entirely eclipsing the sky but not firing down on the
remaining fighters.

For a moment Larissa wondered why, since after the
‘duck and cover’ order had been given there shouldn’t have been anyone in the
streets to get hit by misses, then she saw several squadrons of Star Force
skeets and Valeries making their way overhead and engaging the remaining wisps
directly, along with Kara’s signal that was prominently displayed on the
battlemap so everyone involved would be aware that she was there when often
they couldn’t see her, given her body’s tiny size compared to the fighters.

That and she was a badass, so she might as well have a
badass marker on the battlemap.

Larissa likewise had one of her own on the ground,
letting all other nearby units know where she was at a glance rather than
potentially lose her small dot in the mix of others. Right now Morgan’s icon
was half a city away, with the full battlemap returning now that there was a
Star Force command ship and fighters overhead to relay the weaker signals
around the buildings.

To her relief she saw many active Bsidd units
scattered across the battlefield, but at a glance she knew there was less than
10% of what had originally been here, with the ‘down’ markers covering the city
in large clumps.