by Aer-ki Jyr
with gold trim, save for one in the front pair leading the others. He wore all
black armor.
“Damn,” one of the Commandoes on the deck whispered.
“Those are all Arc Knights.”
“I’ve never seen them together before. Always alone
working with other troops.”
“They’re not all Arc Knights,” an Archon striker said,
stepping up behind them as they watched the group go where they pleased,
bypassing all the handlers and heading straight to an individual waiting for
them at a side door. It was another Archon, this one wearing golden armor, and
her presence alone caused another stir, for while there were many titans on the
ring they were hardly ever seen.
“Trailblazer Megan,” one of the Commandoes said,
seeing her ID pop up on his helmet’s HUD.
“That’s not who I meant. Do you see the one Knight
that doesn’t have gold trim?” he asked quickly before the group left the hangar
entirely.
“In the front?”
“Yes. He isn’t an Arc Knight. He’s the Black Knight.”
“What’s that?”
“A legend to all Archons. He was the first Knight,
from all the way back when Star Force began, and he tormented the trailblazers
and second generation Archons in their basic training. He beat the crap out of
them, just like his replacement did to me. We all hated and feared the Black
Knight, and that one, the original one, is the only Knight permitted to wear
the all black armor. His name is Vermaire, and he trains the Arc Knights
personally.”
“Shit. I’d never heard any of that.”
“Are they here to train then?” another Commando asked
aghast.
“No,” the striker said with a rueful smile concealed
beneath his helmet. “I have a feeling the trailblazers want this ring captured
more quickly, hence all the reinforcements…and those you just saw are the big
guns they’re bringing in.”
“Damn,” the Commando said again as the last one of the
Arc Knights disappeared from view as they left the hangar.
“You have no idea,” the striker promised as the normal
flow of offloading resumed.
On the opposite end of the Star Force zone Paul and
Riona were beyond the front lines, pressed deep into lizard territory and
finding their hands full. They’d stumbled into one of the massive staging areas
and decided to dive in head first, using a combination of battlemeld abilities,
Jumat, and their death sabers to chew enough of a hole to stand in as more and
more lizards pushed themselves into the chamber in an attempt to overwhelm them
with bodies, even if they couldn’t shoot them, with the lizards grabbing for
their arms and legs in an attempt to slow them down with no regard for the
lethality of the glowing white blades.
Linked in battlemeld as the two titans were they
didn’t need to worry about hitting each other with the death sabers, which
would kill their shield strength with a single hit. The weapons held their
‘blades’ by continually recharging that area with additional energy. As much
bled off as necessary to cut through a tiny sliver of a target, so it appeared
that the blades were solid so long as the substance wasn’t too tough. Hit a
shield and all that energy would release into it if needed, and either it or
the blade would go down.
If that happened it would take a few seconds for the
blade to regenerate, pulling extra power from the pack they wore on their
backs, but that much energy delivered into their shields would bite a chunk out
of them for sure, and they were getting nicked down enough as it was with
numerous phaser blasts they couldn’t avoid. The entire crowd of lizards had
weapons, and they didn’t seem to care if they shot each other with them so long
as they ended up doing damage to the Archons.
There were tens of thousands in this chamber,
originally built to construct ribs for jumpships and necessarily huge in
design. That’s why it was being used as a primary staging ground from which
teams were being dispatched at a nearly constant rate to probe the front lines
until they thought they found a weak point, after which many more would be sent
in like a firehose spewing infantry in an attempt to put out the fire that was
the invading Star Force troops.
Paul and Riona were in over their head, but they knew
they could work their way out of it. In the mean time they would be killing far
more here than they would hunting down loose groupings elsewhere and killing
the most possible was the goal, with both of them using their battlemeld link
to remind themselves of their purpose here and not get overloaded with the gore.
And it was working, for Riona stood out to Paul like a
beacon of civilization amongst the lizard hoards, and vice versa. Not only were
they more powerful working together, but they kept each other sane as they
became the slayers that they needed to be in order to take some of the burden
off the Regulars and keep them from dying from these never ending infantry
waves.
Just then Riona spotted a det pack approaching, with
Paul switching off his death sabers as he stepped over to her and wrapped her
up in a hug, layering his bioshields around her as she telekinetically picked
up the lizard and threw it back through the air over the others. Realizing what
was happening in an instant, the lizard detonated itself after only getting a
few meters away.
The blast killed hundreds of lizards around the
detonation point and knocked both Paul and Riona away, with the two tumbling
along with the dead bodies…but they rolled out of it and split again, alive and
still with some mechanical shields remaining thanks to their linked bioshields
taking most of the hit.
With a whole area of lizards now dead and lying on the
ground, those behind them suddenly had open lines of fire and dozens of phaser
blasts lit up the area. The two Archons took hits, but jumped up high into the
air and let the blasts track underneath them, some taking out friendly targets
before they landed again and began dashing towards one side of the blast area,
getting tripped up a bit by all the bodies.
Riona’s shields went down before they made the edge,
with Paul telekinetically picking her up and throwing her like a ball into the
lizards ahead. Her armored body hit them and knocked more than 20 over as the
others focused their phaser shots on him until he slipped in amongst the hoard
and got back to cutting them up at point blank range, once again with the nearest
lizards blocking the firing lines of the others in the staging area.
And the process repeated. Riona got to her feet and
reengaged her blades with a bit of bioshield covering her armor to give her
primary shields a chance to recharge. She took a few melting hits anyway, but
it was going to take an awful lot to get through the Archon battle plates,
which over the years had gotten strong and stronger. Had the lizards been using
&nbs
p; plasma she could have attacked them with no shields at all and gotten about the
same result, but even with their upgraded rifles they weren’t going to get
through to her flesh without them standing and pounding on her for several
minutes.
Neither Archon was going to give them that opportunity
for they were constantly on the move, even if it only be a few steps here and
there. The fought so closely together at some points that it looked like they
were going to hit each other, but battlemeld meant they were of one mind and
essentially one body, knowing where the other’s limbs were and where they were
going at all times, allowing them to fight at an insanely efficient level in
close quarters.
The lizards that were diving at their legs were a real
nuisance though, with Paul having to kick or peel off several multiple times.
One dove down and wrapped up his left leg now and he sliced it in half with his
left blade. It squealed in pain, but the arms didn’t release for a second or
two, allowing another to jump in in its place with similar results.
They did slow him down enough that three others jumped
towards his head, but a telekinetic block stopped them dead in the air, acting
like little blast shields floating around him, then he summoned a Jumat blast in
his right arm and held it up, blasting them all back and into the others as he
kicked the upper torso of a lizard off his right leg.
Piece by piece the master and apprentice killed the
lizards, leaving such a body count behind that the incoming reinforcements were
having a hard time reaching them over the mounds that were building. Every now
and then a det pack would go off changing the landscape, but the sea of blood
always flowed back in. Paul and Riona were walking in it with every step, now
half an inch deep and being added to by the corpse piles that the living
lizards were scrambling over to get to the Archons.
It was mindless killing, but Paul would rather take it
on himself to do rather than leave it to the Regulars who might get injured or
killed in the process. The more he fought these battles the more he hated the
lizards. Their civilization was impressive in some ways, but he had long lost
any appreciation for them in that regard. They were barbarians, pure and
simple, and didn’t give a damn about the lives being lost. Their people were
expendable, and apparently even these infantry thought so. There wasn’t a
discord amongst the grunts and the leaders, they were all on the same suicidal
page.
After hours of fighting in that chamber something
changed…the wall of lizards coming at them ended, with only a few stragglers
left. Those stupidly still came at them, having no chance at all of succeeding
but apparently wanting to go down fighting. The Archons obliged and cut them
down quickly, then stood still breathing heavily as they searched with their
eyes and minds for more targets.
There were none. The entire chamber was empty of the
living save for a few nearby on the ground that would exit that category soon.
Most of the blows the death sabers landed were spot on, but occasionally they
only maimed a target until they bled out. Paul would have finished them off
sooner than that, but both he and Riona, having been battlemeld linked for
hours, just stood there looking at the literal hills of chopped up bodies
surrounding them and stretching across the entire length of the chamber.
They were now standing in several inches of blood,
splashing around like water with severed arms and legs and heads of lizards
scattered around. Now that their minds were coming out of threat aversion mode
both of them were stunned at the sight of it all. It made them both sick to
look at, but they were so numbed up by now that they avoided puking in their
helmets. Focusing so that didn’t happen as their adrenaline began to taper off,
they both just stood still and looked around, feeling each other and helping
one another to snap out of the funk they were in.
After more than a minute Paul finally shook himself
loose of the spectacle and walked over to a few of the lizards that were
immobile on the floor but still alive. He mentally linked to them and numbed
out their pain, then put a few final slashes through their necks and saved them
the final agonizing minutes. Riona did likewise with a few others, then their
Ikrid radar was clear as far out as they could stretch it. They were totally alone
behind enemy lines because…there was no one left to kill.
Theyboth walked towards one another, flicking aside a
few corpse pieces so they had somewhere flat to stand, then they both retracted
their helmets. The stench was bad and would only get worse in the days to come
but they didn’t hide from it. They leaned on each other in a loose hug and
touched their foreheads together. No tears came, but both were emotionally
spent. With the area clear of threats they took the moment to collect
themselves rather than numbing it out. Better to do it here and now than wait
until they were back, because they could not let themselves become jaded.
Other elite Archons were now pairing up in a similar
manner to help them handle the load, staying linked to one another during the
fighting for both combat and emotional support. Paul and Riona had gone on many
of these missions now, usually at least one every two or three days, but none
had been as gruesome as this one. Everything around them, every cut in those
bodies had been their doing. They’d created all this, and damn the lizards for
forcing them to do it.
The two Archons took several minutes, taking solace
within each other’s minds and focusing on the skin to skin touch to override
the oppression of everything around them and put it into context. Once they had
themselves grounded again and their heartbeats and breathing had returned to
normal they broke contact and their helmets reformed around their heads…then
they began hiking across the mounds of dead and through the shallow lake of
blood until they got to and had to clear away more bodies from an exit.
After that they left the gore behind in lizard
territory, knowing that they’d have to get a cleaning crew on it as soon as
their lines pressed this far forward, because the lizards didn’t bother
cleaning up their dead. Paul and Riona made sure to not pass back by this way
again until it was cleaned up. They’d had to create it in the first place, and
now that they were turning their backs on that travesty they weren’t going to
lay eyes on it again, for sanity sake.
October 12, 3106
Solar System
Earth
Wilson walked up the circular stairway into Davis’s
office, finding him in the middle of a holocom with a Hycre so he turned the
corner on the railing and headed for the empty opposite side of the office.
Never in his memory had Davis put anything here, leaving it open space with
only the staircase and his desk breaking up the observation platform that he
ran Star Force out of. Wilson h
eaded over to the curved window opposite the
Director and looked out at the not so busy cityscape below.
There was a fair amount of air traffic, but not nearly
as much as there had been back in the day when Atlantis was the primary
spaceport on the planet. Now it was hallowed ground with the busy commerce
centers located elsewhere, though a stream of dropships and assorted craft were
coming and going nonstop to service the capitol within the capitol. This had
always been the nerve center of the empire, but now it lacked the added energy
of a tourist resort.
Wilson waited patiently until the conversation ended
and the hologram disappeared before he left his vantage point and headed back
over to Davis’s desk.
“I didn’t realize there were any Hycre in the system.”
“There’s a single jumpship here on special permission.
There are some future plans of theirs that they needed to discuss with me in
person.”
“Anything I need to know about?”
“Mostly economic. Now that their war with the lizards
is all but at an end they’re retooling and want a bigger role in the Star Force
economy.”
“Last I checked the war was far from over.”
“For them it is. Their systems are secure and while
they’re still patrolling and intercepting an occasional ship, they’re not
actively hunting or attacking lizard worlds as their border gets pushed further
away. They don’t have the weaponry for it anyway, and we’re not upgrading them
again.”
“Did they ask?”
“No. They helped us long ago, we’ve repaid the favor.
They’re moving forward with their own agenda now that they see we’ve got the
lizards beat and that they can’t really contribute much to that going forward.
The H’kar are in a different position, with their original territory still in
lizard hands, but the climate within the ADZ has been developing into one of
apathy regarding the lizard threat now that it’s away from our borders. We’re
the ones that are doing the fighting, so everyone else is doing other stuff.”
“Begging for some of that prime lizard territory?”
“The Hycre…no. They can’t really use it anyway, and
we’re not keeping too strict a hold on the gas giants. They are negotiating