by Aer-ki Jyr
“A lockdown takes more skill than an unlock, and if you caught them off guard I’m guessing they didn’t have time.”
“If not we’ve got a lot more work to do,” Cora added. “Either way, get us there before the Vargemma can retake it.”
“We’ve been heavily reinforcing it,” another Paladin said as the group began to run inside the facility rather than summon a dropship to their location. “It’s now our 05 stronghold, but they haven’t tried to retake it with full force as they have here. Hopefully they don’t think it’s that much of a priority, or maybe they don’t realize it has weaker shields. They’ve been assaulting lesser positions via ground assaults. I don’t know why, because some of them are vulnerable to bombardment.”
“They probably don’t want their stun weapons to damage or disrupt the Caretaker structures.”
“There should be little effect.”
“Maybe they don’t realize that,” Steve said, “but right now I don’t care. We just have to get there ASAP.”
“Subsurface tunnels are the most secure route. They won’t know where you’re going, but if we go by air they will.”
“Good call,” Cora said, running a step to the left of Steve with a couple Paladin ahead of them leading the way with the bulk following in a silent entourage. “But I still want that mech.”
“We will have one reconfigured to your specifications as soon as you provide them.”
Cora blinked, sending a mental order through her armor. “Done.”
“Keep your mech,” Steve said as they ran into a shaft that had no cars in it, but was a direct drop down to the lowest reaches of the base. He grabbed the old school fireman’s pole as a shield appeared beneath his feet and he began to fall rapidly with others doing likewise on the four other poles in the rectangular shaft. “I want Thrawn…”
3
July 12, 128549
Krichkraw Nebula (Novatis Kingdom)
Alpha Temple
Traveling underground was not fast, but the Paladin had determined that the Vargemma sensors couldn’t penetrate as deep into the bedrock as they’d built their tunnels, meaning the pair of trailblazers could move around without being followed everywhere there currently was a tunnel network…and the Paladin had been industrious little moles from the moment they had first arrived in the Sphere.
But the vastness of the Temple meant it took days to reach the control room that operated the barrier shield surrounding the sphere’s exterior and preventing anyone from coming in without getting their mind wiped. The Paladin had captured it along with most of the other notable Caretaker facilities beyond the barrier cities, and so far it seemed that the Vargemma did not anticipate their coming here…otherwise they would have assaulted it with everything they had.
As it was the Paladin were having to fight hard to keep it and the other installations they’d claimed, for the Vargemma were mounting ground campaigns against them in lieu of orbital bombardment…and that was where Cora headed the moment they popped up in a nearby Paladin-built outpost nestled up against the fat tower that held the control room. The battle lines were farther out, with a defense shield of Star Force making covering both the tower and the surrounding miles, giving the Paladin some territory to defend before the Vargemma could get to the tower entrance.
Titans of metal stood all around it, with one of them turning around and walking towards the outpost as Cora took flight directly towards it. The Paladin mechwarrior inside stopped short and exited the cockpit, floating down to the ground as Cora took his place inside, for the Paladin didn’t have any extra mechs here for her to use, and bringing more in would alert the Vargemma to the importance of this facility prematurely. A whole army was staging to come here and reinforce the location, but until her custom one could arrive Cora was going to have to borrow one.
Yet that was still highly preferable to fighting hand to hand, and when she slid inside the spherical cockpit and the force fields lifted her body off the ground, Cora’s mind linked with the machine as her body set into its familiar vibration to stave off the stagnation. Her viewpoint suddenly shifted to the giant mechanical body that had no tail, nor did any of the Paladin mechs, for they were patterned off of Human designs, though it wouldn’t have mattered. Cora could pilot mechs with four legs and no arms, or even the giant Turtle-class mechs that had six and were so heavy they were almost walking mountains.
One of those was here to her left, firing long range stun blasts towards approaching ground troops in mortar-like fire with the arc going up and over the engaged Paladin troops. Cora took off the opposite way, for the Vargemma were assaulting all sides of the tower, and she intended to go where the defenses were the weakest as Steve went inside to open the door for the real reinforcements…but once the Vargemma saw what was happening they’d have to hold this location long enough to get the fleet in, and that wasn’t going to occur quickly.
They’d learned that exterior ships entering the Temple had to go through the portals, but ships leaving could go directly through the barrier shield. It was a one way lock, and even when access was granted the incoming ships would stick on the barrier shield momentarily before being rerouted to the closest available portal.
That meant a Vargemma fleet could jump out of the Temple simultaneously, but they’d have to come back in one at a time. That wasn’t an issue for them when they had an impregnable fortress to retreat to that no one knew existed, but the first ships in were going to be outnumbered…meaning this fight was going to get damn messy, especially when the Vargemma could use their full weaponry against Star Force drones, but not vice versa.
But down here on the ground the Vargemma couldn’t kill her mech with her in it and not piss off the Caretakers. If they knew who she was they might do so and accept the consequences, but they had no way of picking her out of the field of mechs, because the Vargemma couldn’t read the Star Force battlemap IDs and she wasn’t transmitting in the clear. As far as they were concerned, she was just another Paladin out of thousands surrounding the tower in mechs supporting millions of infantry and aircraft.
But that wasn’t going to last for long, because as soon as she ran up to the line of mechs sniping the approaching Vargemma crawlers…which were basically mechs so low to the ground they looked like snakes with legs…she ran forward, deciding to engage at close range, and the dexterity the basic Star Force mech designs offered allowed her insane skill level to show immediately.
Her Neo-frame Renekton-class mech didn’t have death saber mounts, but it did have finger claws that were much thicker and glowed with the same destructive energy. Cora activated those then dove her mech down and rolled through a crude somersault, tearing up the ground but missing the nearby Vargemma infantry in little floating pods that scattered away from the crazy mech as it slid past the first crawler and de-legged it on the right side.
It fell only a small amount, but the opposite side legs couldn’t get it to its feet, so it was stuck in place and only able to drag itself around in a haphazard way until the pilots figured out how to move using only the four legs on the opposite side. If they were using software to control movement, they might not have a program for this…which was why Star Force used pilot-controlled movement as their primary method of engagement, saving the computer-controlled autopilot for special circumstances only.
Cora’s mech took hit after hit from the crawler and the nearby units, but her shields held firm compared to the inferior technology the Vargemma possessed. She couldn’t go it alone like this forever, but she could withstand it enough to move across the enemy crawler and disarm it by attacking the weapons only and leaving the crew inside alive. When she was finished she had other Paladin mechs coming forward to support her, with one Braum-class moving up and planting a massive object down into the ground in front of her 26 meter high mech.
It was boxy shaped, but it immediately started to glow and extend a shield out in both directions, blocking the forward attack and basically claiming the ground ar
ound the downed crawler for their own. Cora and the other mechs partially hid behind the shield while firing at the surrounding crawlers that were converging on them…then on cue they all moved into a line behind the shield before the mech that had planted it hit the activation code and the shield shot out a massive wave of disruptive energy in a 270 degree arc, going everywhere except where the grouped mechs were.
Crawlers all over dropped to the ground, as did the infantry pods, as they temporarily lost power…then the mechs shot out from behind the cover and raced to claw away the enemy weapons while avoiding stepping on the little eggs covering the ground that the Paladin infantry were racing forward to disable in hand to hand combat with the aquatic Gevdak that could not be removed from their pods without killing them.
It was as if the Vargemma were baiting the Paladin into killing some of them, even by accident, so the Caretakers would turn on them…which was a sickening tactic, sacrificing your own troops to certain death to do so…but the more they learned about the Vargemma this is what they came to expect. Their plans were not working, however, as the little Paladin swept forward on speeders and other small craft to collect and then stack the ‘easter eggs’ onto transports that would permanently disable them and drag them off to temporary prisons in the area…and the active Vargemma troops couldn’t assault them without killing their own people and turning the Caretakers against them, meaning that Star Force wasn’t going to get overloaded with prisoners around the tower as they continually shipped them out through enemy lines that had to allow passage.
Cora jumped from one crawler down to the ground, then popped up her main stun cannons from each forearm as her red glowing claws disappeared, then she bathed a swath of approaching infantry that were firing so many tiny green blasts that her shields were being picked away at by what felt like a swath of ants. The weapons were not damaging, except to shields, for they were designed to drain them on impact.
Cora actually dropped her shields briefly, letting the infantry shots bounce off her armor plating, but the nearby crawlers weren’t going to let her get away with that and immediately turned their lethal weapons on her, forcing her shields back up again. They had a good mix of weaponry, and enough fire discipline to know when to switch from damaging to disabling to avoid killing the Paladin units, but they didn’t always succeed. In other locations the Caretakers could be seen periodically sweeping in and eliminating the units that did kill, with their Vargemma brethren abandoning them and giving the Caretakers a wide margin to accomplish their executions, but so far that wasn’t happening here.
When Cora went after another crawler a wave of infantry rushed around her feet, trying to make her step on them. She barely avoided doing so, jumping up and on top of the crawler and sliding both legs over the sides to ride it as she clawed away at its surface weaponry. When she was finished the entire area around her was filled with little white orbs so close together she couldn’t leave without stepping on them.
Nearby crawlers all turned their weaponry against her while she was pinned there, bombarding her with weaponsfire as Paladin aerial fighters swooped in and picked at the crawlers. They couldn’t use any heavy bombardment without hitting the infantry, and that seemed to be the Vargemma’s main play now. Use the weakly protected infantry as living shields while the crawlers slowly approached the tower.
But Cora wasn’t a Paladin, and these aquatic Gevdak had no defense against telepathy, so the trailblazer reached out with her Ikrid and grabbed hold of as many minds as she could around her…several hundred or so…and jammed into their minds the same command.
Run!
The little orb infantry scattered away from her mech, allowing her to come down off the disabled crawler and take out its legs, then she took her slightly damaged mech across the sea of infantry with them moving out of her way as she headed towards the largest crawler that was acting as a mobile landing pad for troop ships to come in and deposit more infantry off of.
The Paladin aerial fighters moved in to assist, for she was drawing so much attention her shields couldn’t fully protect her and the trailblazer was having to burn armor as she fought, but eventually she got to the crawler that was more than three times her height and she leapt up on top of it, pulsing the mechs limited anti-grav to make the jump.
A cutting torch emerged from her mech’s left wrist, then a powerful white cleansing beam shot down into the crawler where she sensed there were no minds and proceeded to slice off one of the huge leg joints…or rather the power conduit to that joint. She wasn’t going to amputate the 18 legs on the thing, but instead she was going for the reactor…though in a way that would cut power without detonating the thing.
Slicing through power conduit after power conduit she got the thing disabled, then slid down one side and turned the cutting torch sideways to sever the connections for the landing pad to the back of the crawler even as another transport tried to set down on top. She found the pilots’ minds quickly enough and made them leave, then took another few minutes to disconnect the flat top and let it slide off the back of the powerless crawler.
It crashed to the ground where there was no infantry, for Cora had cleared them out before it could crush them…then she walked around to the far side, firing off distant shots as she went, before taking cover between the opposite side of the crawler and the disconnected shield that made for an impromptu tent barely large enough to fit her mech inside when she hunched down.
“Rally point here,” she told the other mechs. “Let’s keep them on the defensive and their attention away from the tower. Bring in the reinforcements. They’ll think we’re trying to launch a counterattack to break them, not that we’re desperate to defend the tower. We’re over reached a bit, so we seem vulnerable. Let’s use that and draw them further away from the tower, but don’t overdo it. I don’t want to be bogged down with rescue missions later. You hear me?”
A chorus of responses came in over the battlemap as the Paladin mechs moved forward to her position, fighting as they went and often having to lightly kick the little infantry pods out of the way, for they didn’t have any Archons with them, nor did they have any Mind Raiders suitable for this task. Newborns were not powerful enough to deal with multiple minds at the same time, nor at range. That required skill, experience, and thousands of years training minimum, making Cora uniquely suited to the task here.
“Alright, Steve,” she said to herself. “Get that damn door open before I run out of mechs. These guys might be running inferior tech, but it still stings.”
Cora used her cutting torch to remove a piece of the landing pad small enough to carry, and took it with her in place of a mech shield that the Renektons didn’t carry. She carried it in her mech’s left hand while using its right to continue to fire down at the infantry and disable them, for they were scurrying all over the place like rats, totally confused between their orders and her periodic telepathic overrides.
The more of them they could disable and fix to one place the better, because sooner or later someone was going to accidentally step on one, and right now she didn’t need to be fighting Vargemma and the Caretakers at the same time…
4
Steve flew across the gap between the outpost and the tower, zipping past the Paladin guards and their barricades outside and stopping just inside the only entrance long enough to shut the door behind him and use the bioplasma in his right arm to weld it shut along a meter or so of its length. Then he flew through the corridors and up the circular stairwell to the control room near, but not quite at the top, where the Paladin research team was waiting for him.
They’d already transmitted everything they knew to the Viceroy, and then he in turn had made sure Steve and Cora got all the updates during their subsurface travel out to the site. Now it was up to Steve, because these researchers couldn’t use the Essence necessary to operate most of the equipment in here…but as they’d informed him, the Vargemma had not been able to shut off what they had long ago unlocked, meaning S
teve didn’t have to pass any skills tests to access this facility or its functionality…which was why holding it after capture had been so damn important.
Steve took a moment to look around, with 18 Paladin watching him closely but not interfering. There terminals everywhere, but they weren’t made of desks. Instead they looked like crystal growths, not quite obelisks, but of a similar material with various buttons and dials fashioned out of bumps and lines that could be physically manipulated, much like the control rooms in the barrier cities, but here there were many blank spots that only those with Essence vision could see the additional input nodes within.
There were more of them than physical controls, and Steve was going to have to figure out what they were and how they worked, because other than some mind raids by the Paladin, they had no way to experiment and learn without an Essence wielder helping them.
“Alright, anyone pick up anything new while I was enroute?”
“Unfortunately no,” a small researcher said, looking up at the taller Archon. “But we are convinced that there is no code required. Only a reset.”
“There’s a lot of functionality here,” Steve said, looking around at all the different Essence toggles. “What else is this tower used for aside from the barrier shield?”
“As far as we know, nothing.”
“Then we’re probably looking at some sort of anti-Hadarak defense system that’s currently dormant.”
“Don’t shoot Supreme Viceroy Thrawn,” one of the others mentioned.
Steve retracted his helmet and cracked a smile at the Paladin. “I was thinking the same thing,” he said as the rest of his armor condensed down into heavy forearm gauntlets that he moved around with as if they weren’t even there.
“It appears this station is monitoring and this one is where they allow them entry,” another researcher said, pointing at two different crystalline growths coming up out of the floor around the edge of the circular dome.