Star Force: Excursion (SF46)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Keep them well wide,” Kip emphasized as he worked the nexus controls and ordered some of his and Canderous’s drones into more favorable positions to potentially catch the enemy transports on their way back up from the atmosphere after they dropped off their walkers and ground troops. The Skarron warships that had entered the system a few hours ago had retreated back to high planetary orbit and broken up into small groups after a light, exploratory attack on one of the sedas.

  They’d been repelled easily, with the 284 warships deciding not to press the issue above screening to get their transports to ground. Entering the atmosphere at points well outside the sedas’ firing ranges, the transports had gotten through while the Canderous remotely-controlled drones had made their first kills, taking down 3 enemy destroyers and damaging several other capital ships.

  Now that the transports were in atmosphere they were heading to a variety of landing zones, of which Kip was following closely. Canderous had established several mining outposts, as well as recycling measures for the mass of technological rubble on the planet, mostly due to the previous Issvok civilization, but there were a few bits of Skarron infrastructure that had been trashed/captured and were now being ‘mined’ for raw materials as well.

  As he watched, Kip saw that none of the transports were headed to those locations, instead preferring to land in neutral territory, meaning both sides would have ample opportunity to plan out the coming ground game before they made contact.

  “Archon, will you be taking part in the surface combat?” Dayna inquired.

  “If necessary. We need to see how they plan to play this first.”

  “With your permission, I’ll continue coordinating out forces from the ground.”

  Kip smiled. “Trust me when I say that there will be plenty of combat opportunities in the coming months. These Skarrons are intractable bastards, and if they’re devoting troops to retake this world then they’re going to make a serious effort. We may get in over our heads, in fact, so don’t get in a rush for direct action. That said, permission granted and good luck. Where are you going down?”

  “Firebase 8.”

  “Copy that. I’m staying onboard for the moment. Their fleet is experienced and devious, and I want to feel them out a bit before I’m convinced that they’re staying back and watching.”

  “That’s why I asked. Having both of us in transit to the ground would have been a momentary disadvantage that I did not want to afford the enemy.”

  “Get moving, Consul. Time to impress me with your toys.”

  “Challenge accepted,” the Canderian mission commander said, signing off.

  Part of Kip wished he had mainline or Clan troops here, above and beyond the four warships he commanded, because the Canderians hadn’t taken standard Star Force equipment as their own. Like their unique warships and drones, they’d designed different aircraft, mechs, armor, and just about everything else, taking Star Force tech and putting their own spin on it.

  That meant these troops and their equipment were green…in so far as combat with the Skarrons were concerned. A good portion of the troops down there and in the sedas had seen at least light combat against the lizards, but overall this mission was an experiment to see what the Canderians were made of, and Kip hoped the Skarrons didn’t throw down the hammer on them. So far the ground troops they were deploying were well within the ‘safe’ number that Dayna had calculated when he’d been tagged to head up this mission.

  But given that they’d never gone up against one another, that number had been based off of Star Force ground battles with mechs…with the Canderians taking a slightly different approach.

  Their entire civilization was based off of living in space onboard their sedas, each of which was a battle station in its own right. Because of this there were no ‘civilian’ Canderous facilities. All of them had the means to defend themselves, and so too did the people that inhabited them. Each of them was trained as a soldier from birth in their maturia, which vaguely resembled a school, after which they chose their place in Canderous society…meaning that even those who chose not to become active soldiers or security still had the basic combat skills to fall back upon in a time of crisis.

  But their combat skills and overall philosophy were still space based, with them building temporary ground facilities rather than permanent bases. This aversion to the ground was omnipresent in their society, and as such their ground forces, above and beyond pure infantry, had been designed with a transitory motif.

  Originally Canderous had used Star Force mechs, preferring the thor over all others, but they’d since scrapped all the older mechs and built original ones of their own, save for the starscreams, whose flight capability made them a good fit for the Canderians. The mechs were tier 1 and lightly armed, but they were able to convert to full ‘jet’ mode and fly about from location to location on a planet without having a dropship come and pick them up.

  That left them with good anti-infantry and strategic reinforcement capabilities, but no hard hitters, which against the Skarrons was outright suicide. But ever since the lizard threat reared its ugly head the Canderians had been working on developing a counter to their low flying cruisers. Likewise, when the Skarron walkers emerged as a threat, they also began retooling in order to combat them, with some impressive results…in theory.

  That theory was about to be tested in earnest, with Kip transferring down to the planet the next day with a handful of mechs and his handpicked mechwarriors, all of which came from Clan Protoss. He landed at firebase 3 and unpacked his voltron, assembling the 5 sections together and giving him a tier 2 mech with 5 tier 1s equipped with a hoard of anti-air weapons to knock down Skarron missiles.

  His voltron also had additional anti-air weaponry located in the shoulders, a necessary redesign in previous years as the Skarrons learned that only through a huge missile barrage could they take out the biped mechs at range, often launching on a single one from multiple walkers simultaneously. Kip’s forces fighting on Protovic worlds had had several voltrons trashed in such attacks, forcing them to bring yet more smaller escort mechs with them to counter the tactic. That decreased mobility and required a redesign, with several compartments worth of intercepts shoved in, making the Mk. 2 voltron look like it was wearing football pads.

  The Mk. 3 would be considerably slimmer once they were completed with the new technology that the arc elements opened up, but there were so many advancements possible that it was taking a long time for the engineers to hammer out prototypes, let alone get to the point of building production models. And in addition to that, creating the arc elements required a whole slew of new factories to be built for just that purpose, with the specialized atoms being in short supply. Already Star Force was producing 12 different elements, with hundreds more possible.

  That meant that Kip had to either make do with what he had available or wait for the advancements to come down the pipe…which the Skarrons weren’t letting them do. The Protovic were putting up a good fight, and as more cleansing beam-equipped ships were coming off their lines the more they were able to hold against the Skarrons’ never-ending stream of reinforcements, with Kip believing that they’d soon have the strength to start pushing back and reclaiming territory that was lost to them…but not without Star Force assistance.

  Even now, if Star Force pulled out its help, the Skarrons would eat away at the Protovic until they had nothing left to defend themselves with and were forced to run like the other Alliance races had. The balance of power was very even at the moment, with the tech upgrades they’d given the Protovic seeming to start to tip the scales in their favor, but Star Force had to continue to fight aggressively, else all that they’d gained, or saved, would fall apart.

  This foothold in Gamma Region needed to happen now rather than later, so Kip didn’t feel they had the luxury of waiting. Plus, if the enemy ships and ground troops in the system had been peeled off form the reinforcements going to Protovic territory, so much the better. But if
they were from an entirely different wing of the Skarron war machine, then Star Force need to push them back now before they inched their way too close to the Core Region.

  That meant bringing Canderous to the forefront, for nearly all other combat resources were tapped out or held in reserve to counterattack another incursion…save for the Australians and Kiritas, both of whom he didn’t feel were ready for this level of combat. Canderous had been patient for years, waiting for this chance, and now that Star Force had a need for them, the wardogs were about to be let off the leash as they followed the trailblazer against the enemy.

  The surface conditions around firebase 3 were swampy, slowing down the mechs and all but stopping the Skarron infantry from making a push. Their hobbits were out and about, but the Skarrons themselves were too heavy to do anything but plod through the grass-covered mud and make good targets for themselves, so they stayed at their landing zones, sending up huge plumes of steam as they had specialized equipment attached to their arms that blasted the moisture out of the soil.

  They looked like an army of maids vacuuming the ground on the intelligence scans coming in from the circling Canderian fighters and reconnaissance drones that had slipped their way across the surface. The little probe droids were remotely/computer controlled, giving the Canderians eyes on every landing site the enemy had, though most of what was going on was being obscured by the steam plumes.

  The huge, pointy legs of the Skarron Type-4 walkers and up didn’t appear to be as effected as Kip’s own mech legs were, with a convoy of the battlewagons heading out from one of the Skarron LZs towards a Canderian mining operation, which was where Kip and his star of support mechs were heading to intercept, slugging their way through the muck and hoping to catch the enemy at least a few kilometers short of their target.

  Following behind Kip’s voltron were the Canderian mechs…or rather what had replaced their mechs. Floating solely on anti-gravs were a line of Turtle-class mechs, though Kip didn’t quite agree with calling them mechs. To him a mech had legs, with these having none. What they had were landing struts. They couldn’t propel the ‘mech’ forward, just keep its belly-mounted weaponry off the ground and give the anti-gravs a rest.

  They had a flat underside, but the top was a modified half sphere that held a very thick layer of armor plating, dotted with shield emitters and nothing else. They hadn’t wanted a lot of weak points in the armor shell, so they’d put all the weaponry underneath the turtle, allowing it to drop out of the belly and fire ahead, then retract out of the enemy’s firing line on command.

  That meant the belly was the vulnerable point, especially to infantry. Because of this the turtles always flew low to the ground and had a slew of anti-infantry weaponry underneath, so anyone who thought that they could hide underneath the turtles was in for a rude surprise. If the Skarrons chose to hit them with a missile attack they could drop all the way to the ground, without putting out struts, and let them hit the shell, over which a strong energy shield was deployed.

  Short pylons could then extend out around the perimeter of the shell from underneath that held anti-air batteries that could shoot down some of the incoming ordinance, but if they were destroyed it was a minor loss, given that they were expendable and designed only to reduce damage to the shell…which carried more armor than Kip’s voltron.

  The turtles were the backbone of the heavy end of the Canderian ground game, with Hive-class and Grappler-class mechs carrying lesser firepower for more specialized roles. The grapplers were essentially neos build with collapsible limbs and a heavy anti-grav that allowed them to fly across the battlefield in ‘ball’ mode, then drop to the ground on legs and fight hand to hand with enemy units, inspired in no small part by the Nestafar protomechs.

  Unlike the neos, the grapplers had no ranged weaponry of any kind, with most of their damage potential coming from physical, ripping/punching strength coupled with touch-release weaponry inspired by the lizards’ plasma rod technology.

  There were no grapplers following Kip, nor were there any hives, which operated like a heavily armored carrier that dispersed attack drones that could swarm a single target or spread out to hit multiple ones simultaneously. Both versions were too light to hit the Skarron Type-3 walkers with in this upcoming engagement.

  “Legat, you’re free to break ranks and engage at will. Good luck and don’t shoot me in the back.”

  “With pleasure…and we won’t,” the Canderian in charge of the 18 turtles replied, with the single file line breaking apart and the anti-grav floaters moving off with ease over the swampy muck that was holding Kip up. Ahead of them the line of 8 Skarron walkers was just becoming visible on the horizon, with a scattering of trees here or there masking the lower edge of their silhouettes.

  Kip switched to his local Clan comm. “Alright fellas. Looks like their missile boats aren’t coming out to play, so follow me in and add damage where you can,” he said, accelerating his voltron up into a run…something that the Canderians, who were passing him on either side, hadn’t expected him to be able to do. He had a hard time compensating for the mud that he was sinking into with each step, but he’d run through mud before with his own feet, so he had some experience there, and with the mech moving as his body moved, the trailblazer was able to make a workable crossover.

  That left him running forward at a decent pace, but the turtles still outpaced him. They knew better than to get too far ahead, for they wanted his firepower augmenting theirs, but he was still the slower, with the tier 1 mechs using their jump jets and hopping from footprint to footprint behind him rather than trying to make their own.

  Kip worked up quite a sweat, glad that he’d removed his shirt before strapping into the control harness, as he fought the controls to keep the big mech from stumbling and falling flat on its face. He wouldn’t have advised anyone else to try such a breakneck pace with such bad footing, but he thought he could handle it and was proved correct when the first of the white plasma showers hit the leading turtle, instigating the first ground combat with the Skarron reinforcements.

  Kip kept running, not bothering to shoot as he knew he had a better chance of taking down the Type-3 closest to him if he ran right up to it, but he held off arming himself until he started to draw plasma fire on his energy shields. He slowed to a stop, not wanting to attempt the necessary acrobatics while slogging his way forward, and detached the plate covering his back.

  It fell to the ground, almost sticking in the mud before leaning forward and laying against the back of the voltron as Kip spun it around and grasped the inside handle on the huge, knight-like shield, lifting it up and around in front of him where it picked up most of the incoming plasma on its own dedicated energy shield. Reaching back with his mech’s right arm he pulled out the ‘fan’ that was imbedded in the back of the mech’s nonexistent neck and held it at his side as the sword elongated and locked into place, then Kip started walking forward slowly, unable to run as he had been with all the extra weight in his arms.

  “Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” he said as a warning flashed across his HUD. “Guys, heads up. We’ve got a redeployment. Continue the attack but be ready to swat missiles.”

  “Copy that,” his Protoss wingmen confirmed, still following the big mech forward in its footsteps.

  “Hurry,” Kip said to himself, walking a bit faster towards the Type-3 that was starting to backtrack as it bathed his shield with every plasma cannon it had in a useable firing line. The energy shield covering the knight shield in a surface blanket shimmered its last time then breached, allowing the physical material of the shield to start eating up the plasma blasts. Kip knew it would last for quite a while, but he didn’t want to delay…and the damn walker was almost as fast as him with this bad footing.

  It took him far longer than it should have to get up to the enemy machine that stood nearly twice his voltron’s height, then he swung his sword out beside him to the right and activated his anti-grav jump jets. Adding the strength of his mech�
��s legs he launched himself up into the air at an angle, dropping his massive shield as he released the grip, and sailed up overtop the enemy walker…dropping down on its back as he took a slew of heavy lachar blasts to the chest that punctured his own shields.

  The next moment his sword came down point first and sliced into the weak section of the armor that held the anti-air cannon, cutting through it and driving to the interior as the Type-3 struggled to remain standing with the voltron’s extra weight on top.

  Almost as soon as he got the sword inside the armor a hoard of missile launches were detected some 100 miles away as a Skarron transport dropped off a Type-2 within firing range.

  “Kip, heads up!”

  “I see it,” he said, sliding his mech off the right side but hanging onto his sword and dragging the entire Skarron walker over onto its side, using it as a barricade as he popped up his shoulder-mounted anti-air pods and began pumping intercepts into the sky even as the walker he was hiding behind shot him at pointblank range with some of its plasma cannons.

  8

  The missiles coming towards the voltron diverted when their target became obscured, heading instead for one of the turtles as 5 of them took the brunt of the attack. Already having dropped down to the ground, their extendable pylons were peppering the missiles with plasma shards while Kip’s voltron was throwing up intercepts and sniping a few missiles on the way down beside him with his shoulder-mounted lachars. Unlike in previous engagements, the Skarron Type-2 walker didn’t hold back, choosing to empty its hold as quickly as possible, hoping to overwhelm the defenders.

  Behind Kip his escort mechs lit up with the sky with their anti-air weapons as the swampy ground around the turtles lit up in huge plumes of steam as the missiles that got through exploded and vaporized the water in the muck…which worked to the Skarrons’ advantage, for the Canderian plasma shards and Star Force lachars couldn’t fire through the vapor while the missiles had no trouble reaching their targets.