Star Force: Newbslayer (SF64)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  It was the headquarters for the faction that had been involved with the first Skarron walker. Oddly, the other one belonged to yet another subsection of the Varshoo, but none of the soldiers had known where it originally came from, though they knew of others having been used in previous missions. They were the key pieces in their assault plan, but not for the raw military power they possessed. They were brought in after the initial attack to demoralize the locals and hold onto a region of the planet where the Varshoo were devoting less troops than they should. It was a bit of tactical mastery and would have worked had the Marauders not inexplicably been able to destroy one of them.

  Jenna had tried to get some information on the ex-Star Force unit from the Varshoo, but they knew nothing about them. They’d traveled a long way to get to their target system, having originated entirely outside the local geography…which was why the mercenaries had no knowledge of them either.

  Levi took to the lower side of the ridge, dodging between trees as he followed a dry creek bed yet stayed out of view underneath the spotted canopy, pacing the wash some ten meters or so from the edge. Jenna could tell from his movements that he was getting tired, but his speed hadn’t flagged yet, which meant he wasn’t too fatigued. If it started to drop off she’d slow him even further to make sure he wasn’t going to tank on her later, but he was holding up better than she’d thought he would. Halfway through their run she thought he’d been overcooking it, but apparently he was a bit more robust than she’d realized.

  Then again, running at night always made things seem faster, even when using Pefbar, for you couldn’t get any distant visual markers to calibrate off of, just the quickly moving terrain nearby. Jenna had already worked up a good sweat, which she could feel soaking into her minimal clothing underneath, but she wasn’t feeling taxed and could have sped up a bit without wearing herself out if need be. Levi might be one of the most advanced Archons in Star Force, but she and the other mages were far beyond him, not just in psionics, but in physical skills. Had there been a trailblazer here her role would have been reversed, for they were likewise ahead of her, but few others were.

  She’d gotten used to being one of the dominant ones and took to that role well, regardless of whether or not the Archon was with her kin on a training stint or fighting who knew what race out on the frontier. Other than the Voku, no one else even had a chance going hand to hand with her level of skill, meaning that wherever she went she had the advantage, and the outcome of the battles wouldn’t depend on her outfighting her opponent, but in maneuvering the conflict into situations where she could apply her advantage.

  She could kill 10 tanks single handedly if she got to them one at a time, coming in from anonymity and getting the jump on their pilots, but go straight in at 10 of them on a wide open battlefield and her armor would quickly be tasked with keeping her alive long enough to run away. She could own any hand to hand confrontation, no matter how many individuals were involved, but Jenna still had to pick her fights…which was why they were going into the Varshoo-held city on foot, hopefully keeping any interactions a personal affair and not inviting any of their tanks or aircraft to the occasion.

  They made their way along the ridgeline without incident, other than a few annoying soft spots in the ground that would sink in on contact and threaten to trip you up. Jenna had started to press her Pefbar down into the ground to see the little rodent tunnels to give her some warning, but eventually just said ‘screw it’ because at the speed they were running she didn’t have enough time to focus on such small details. Her balance was good enough to recover when it did happen, as was Levi’s, so she just stuck behind him a couple of steps and ate up ground until they got to the city’s edge.

  The padawan slowed, finally, and began to recover his strength as they crept up towards one of the dirt roads, keeping trees between them and the city lights as Jenna mentally pointed him to a spot with a little bit more elevation. On top of it was a guard post, but the two minds inside were bored and half asleep, so not a threat. Not wanting to risk an alarm, Jenna had them move a quarter mile around the perimeter to the north and enter the city there, sprinting across the dirt road and sliding into one of the building alleys that were for pedestrian traffic only.

  Given that it was on the outskirts this one didn’t have anyone using it, so the two armored Archons jogged down it with impunity, seeing only a few doors and no windows. They took a moment to have a look up, then both of them took to an opposite wall and began to crawl up using their armor’s grip points, for the building sides were nearly sheer.

  Jenna made it to the roof first, pulling herself up over the edge as Levi crawled up the taller building and kicked off the wall, jumping across the alleyway to her side and rolling out of a reverse somersault before catching up to her as she walked across to the building side with a larger street below. She inched her head over and looked down, finding a light amount of traffic, mostly pedestrians who were moving with haste. They weren’t the Varshoo, rather denizens who had been captured along with the infrastructure. A quick mental scan on a few of them indicated that they were in no immediate harm, but they were spooked none the less, not knowing what was coming in the future with their new rulers.

  She also realized that most of the people were staying indoors, with only those that needed to travel about were doing so. That should help their transit, but the agitated state the populace was in would also make them more aware of what was going on around them. Hopefully though, that attention wouldn’t be focused skyward.

  Jenna backed up a few steps then sprinted off the building, planting her foot on the edge and jumping with the assistance of her armor. Levi followed a split second later and the two armored bodies flew across the gap to land on the slightly shorter building on the far side of the double-laned road.

  They ran across to the next building, but given that it was taller they had to transfer over to a side building and the alleyway there to do their spiderman thing and climb up high enough to make the next jump. One after another they made their way across the city to the location of the Varshoo headquarters that had been set up in one of the local buildings, but with ample security established around the block that it was located on to deter guests.

  The first sniper position they came across saw the Varshoo soldier slumped over his weapon as Jenna walked up to him, already having knocked him out from afar with her Ikrid. She searched his memories, trying to determine if any of the people on their ‘to find’ list were inside. As far as this one knew at least some of them were, so the Archons eased up to the edge of the building and looked across the wide street to the buildings on the far side. The one they wanted was behind those, but the gap was too far to jump…and neither of them had brought a jump pack.

  “Pole vault or slingshot?” Jenna asked, giving Levi his preference.

  “You think I can make the roof, or have to shoot for the wall?”

  “I’m thinking wall.”

  “Pole vault then. Softer landing.”

  “Alright, get ready while I blanket the area,” she said, her eyes disfocusing as she reached out with her Ikrid searching for all nearby minds. Any that had a line of sight on the street she hacked into, planting a little bit of programming that would disincline them from looking up. The effect would last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the race. Given that she was unfamiliar with these they probably only had a short window of opportunity, but it should be enough so long as something didn’t attract their attention, otherwise it would break the little spell she was weaving on them.

  It took too long for her to get through them all, with the first ones being questionable as to whether they were still affected or not, but Jenna gave Levi the go ahead anyway and he started running from the far side of their building roof where he had been waiting. She offered out a battlemeld prompt and he immediately took it, syncing their minds and giving them access to other psionics. Using Bataf, which the Archons typically referred to as ‘r
epulsor,’ Jenna pushed her hands out towards Levi and emitted an invisible column of energy linking to him. It was loose at first, then with their linked precision it instantaneously hardened as he jumped, becoming the ‘pole’ that he rode up into the air as Jenna gave him a telekinetic kick in the butt on the way up to add to his momentum.

  She pivoted her hands up, bracing with her entire body for his weight was transmitting down to her limbs, but she held her position and allowed him to ride the pole all the way up over her head, then as he began to tip over to the street side the Archons transitioned the ‘solid’ state of the pole into a repulsive conduit that actually pushed him further. That thrust was less controlled, but their previous practice with one another had been sufficient for them to get the distance they needed, with Levi eventually letting go of the psionic and falling the last few meters as he reached out with his hands and feet and stuck against the side of the far building Garfield style.

  Jenna saw and felt him slip, for she was still battlemeld linked, but he held on with a few fingers as the bounce bled off, then he was able to steady himself and begin crawling up to the roof. When he got there he spun around and planted a foot against the slightly elevated rim and made himself the grip point as Jenna backtracked to get some distance, then took off sprinting for the edge.

  When she got there she jumped, getting more altitude than Levi had managed out of his own legs, but without the help of the ‘pole’ she didn’t get nearly as high. But as she got into the air the pair established another repulsor conduit between them, but caused it to attract rather than push. Like a long rope retracting, it pulled Jenna across the gap and up a bit as her own momentum did most of the work. A few seconds later she hit feet first against the wall below Levi, then she scaled the side on his invisible rope until their hands met and he pulled her up over the edge.

  Their battlemeld link broke then and Jenna searched the street, surrounding roofs, and windows to check on her psionic blanket she’d laid down.

  “We’re good.”

  Levi turned and looked across the huge roof to the slightly taller building beyond that was their eventual target, picking up a few minds in between behind several protrusions and access hubs into the building below.

  “We’ve got company up here.”

  “I’ll take left,” Jenna said, with the pair breaking up and quietly sneaking off to different sides of the roof to send the sentries into naptime once they got within close enough proximity to establish a firm Ikrid link to them all, for they couldn’t have one nod off in the view of the others, meaning they had to do them simultaneously when their sight lines overlapped.

  But it wasn’t something new to the Archon pair, and within a couple of minutes the rooftop was theirs, setting up their last jump over to the Varshoo command center.

  6

  Jenna clung to the building wall with two feet and one hand, holding Levi’s armored glove in her other as she blanketed the surrounding area in Ikrid, keeping any onlookers from noticing the two tiny ticks attached to the side of the building as her padawan slowly traced his finger across the window.

  Or rather through it, for his fingernail was fully imbedded inside the material and poking through to the interior air as he used his Rensiek to increase and channel his internal heat production onto the surface of an invisible shield covering his finger. The heat went to it, pouring through his flesh and pooling there to reach the temperature necessary to melt the glass. Jenna hadn’t been sure that he was strong enough to get to the required point, for not every planet’s ‘glass’ was made of the same material.

  This stuff appeared fairly flimsy, but she didn’t want to just break or shoot their way in. She would have done the cutting, except that her Ikrid skills were also well beyond Levi’s and keeping them hidden while in plain sight was the priority at the moment. They still had several hours of night left, which certainly helped their efforts, but the city lights made it difficult to hide down low on the streets. Likewise the top of the command center was ablaze with all manner of illumination, prompting her to decide to go in one of the dark windows on the other side of the street from their jump point and nearly at the same altitude.

  Levi pulled his finger slowly, needing to keep the heat flowing to it in order to melt the material. Little globules ran down over his finger, hardening as they dropped off or moved onto the rest of the window. He had to maintain the heat shield all the way up to the knuckle, for if even a little droplet hit his exposed skin it would burn it instantaneously. It was odd how he could hurt himself with his own heat, but the numerous applications that came into play as one got stronger in Fornax more than made up for the danger.

  The Archon patiently made a huge arc over his head, having to reposition his body several times to keep the motion continuing into a large circle taller than his height. He made it approximately two meters wide and had to scoot to the side on the window to keep from falling off when he finished the cut. With some telekinetic pressure he held and pushed the clear circle inside, with Jenna crawling over and following it in with a hand placed over top the hole and the mage swinging herself down and inside.

  She took the glass plug from him and pulled it aside while he crawled in, disconnecting one of her gloves in the process. The pair then slid the circle back into place and used their hands to squeegee the excess material back into a few spots in liquid form, letting it harden enough to hold the window segment in place, though there was no way to hide the finger-wide cut.

  Jenna released her last Ikrid links and waited, assuming no one would notice the odd window given its height and the darkness, but she didn’t want to be sloppy. When no mental alarms were triggered she tossed Levi his glove and reattached her own, then the pair got moving across the dark room and linked up in the battlemeld.

  With Levi’s abilities adding to her own, Jenna began searching the building and accessing the nearest minds as she began looking for one of the priority targets. Language issues and unfamiliar mental structures bogged her down, but by constricting the search to hierarchy placement she was able to get an idea of which floors held the commanders. With those being in range of the pair’s combined Ikrid, she searched them one mind at a time until they got their first hit.

  Jenna logged that position on her blank battlemap using a program that had been introduced along with the telepathic armor that allowed for tracking data to be gathered by her psionics. As a result a waypoint popped up inside the building even before the floors did, aside from the one they were on that was within range of her and Levi’s armor sensors.

  The mage didn’t stop with the one target, but kept on searching for others and tagging their locations. Eventually she found three before she ran out of contacts. The building had over 200 people in it, and one target was enough to give them a shot at figuring out what was going on with this invasion.

  Thinking together as one, Levi went to the door and opened it, knowing that the hallway outside was clear. He broke the battlemeld link just outside and headed for the few minds on this floor, intending to black them out given how sparsely populated the large building was.

  Jenna stayed put, picking off a few nearby minds from where she was and forcing the individuals to fall asleep. Once she was sure they were out of the picture for a good few hours she found a nearby ladder/stairwell and moved down while Levi continued the hunt on the upper levels. She got to one of their three priority targets first and stayed with the two and a half meter tall hairy creature where it laid slumped over a tabletop.

  Pulling her glove off again, she made physical contact to increase her Ikrid effectiveness and dove into its mind, sifting through weird and varied thoughts until she found something familiar. Focusing on the memory of the Skarron walkers’ deployment she backtracked to linked thoughts and eventually got to the planetary invasion overview after a few minutes.

  Levi reported back that the upper building was clear and she responded telepathically telling him to finish up below while she worked. Kn
owing that he’d take care of the rest with ease, Jenna kept digging into recent events. This one had a different point of view than the lower ranking soldiers, and eventually she was able to determine that they were here because they’d been contracted to take this planet for someone called the Trzzl. It was a person, not a race, but someone with a lot of influence in whatever region the Varshoo came from.

  They had been instructed to keep as much of the infrastructure and population intact as they could, but some losses were allowable. The Trzzl wanted the civilization as much as the planet it was on, but this one didn’t know why. They were here to take it, hold it, then turn it over to the Trzzl’s people when they eventually arrived. To him this was just a mission and he didn’t care what took place in the aftermath. Once they were done they’d be leaving, but Jenna sensed that how they proceeded with this takeover was important and would have consequences, whether positive or negative, going forward for the Varshoo.

  She pressed that further, with the difficulty increasing the further Jenna went off of current events. Speculation was something that required an active mind, with the memory of speculation being something very difficult to track down even in a familiar one. For this mind it was buried too deep, but she was able to pull a sense that reputation had a significant effect on the Varshoo and that what they were doing here would affect their people…all of their peoples, given that they weren’t a united civilization.