by Aer-ki Jyr
battery enough that they couldn’t get it repaired within 2 months meant a lot
of fireworks, but Paul’s team had gotten good at it now, despite the fact that
two buildings had been brought down on their heads as the lizards tried to kill
or pin them inside the structures.
They knew what they were doing and were fortifying the
anti-orbital batteries heavily but they were so big it was almost impossible to
cover all the cracks, especially when psionics allowed minds to be distracted
and wiped. The Archons, now that they were within the globe-spanning city, were
damn near impossible to find and even harder to lock down, with them running or
hitching rides across the landscape and easily disappearing again so long as
they chose to run and not engage. Their targets were the orbital batteries, not
the inhabitants, for which they didn’t have the ammo for anyway.
Paul and Riona had been living on the streets and in the
undercity ever since they’d gotten to ground, relying on their supplies to
sustain them and knowing they were on the clock. There were lots of defense
batteries on the ground, not to mention shield generators that could throw up
very heavy barriers overhead in an instant, but there were only so many weapons
batteries that could reach orbit…and even those couldn’t reach all the way up
to the ring shipyard. The Star Force fleet was safely out of range there, but
when they came lower to assault the planet they’d come within range and have to
slug it out, punching through the shields first to get to the guns…and taking a
lot of ship casualties in the process.
And some of these anti-orbital batteries were the new
cleansing beam models that packed more firepower and a decent range upgrade.
The Archons had to clear a column of ‘safe’ passage around the column that
spread out approximately 800 miles in radius, for that was the guessed range
that the lizard cleansing beams had and the closest a ship could jump into the
planet was directly outside the atmosphere. Unfortunately that was far enough
away from the surface that you were high enough for multiple batteries
otherwise denied line of sight by the planetary curve to still target you. A
cone of safety directly over your landing site was enough to cover aerial
traffic, but that wasn’t going to be enough to get dropships down to the
planet.
As of now there was enough of a cone of safety that
Paul could call down a command ship and sit it over the landing site if he
wanted to. It could weather the few hits on the way down, but then it’d have to
contend with the short range weaponry coming from the surface. If they needed
evac he could have the Excalibur come
down and batter one of the city shields to the point it broke, but his ship
would get chewed up in the process and he didn’t want to bring a fleet of
drones in at this close range at all.
The plan was to park them in low orbit, outside the
short range lizard weapons and out of the anti-orbital batteries maximum
range…but that required eliminating those close enough to cause them a world of
hurt. Once that was accomplished, Paul would order an orbital bombardment to
take out shield generators, short range weaponry, hangars, barracks,
hatcheries, and anything else needing blown up before sending the ground troops
down to clean up and start pressing the war across land to the other
anti-orbital guns.
At least that was the plan in traditional invasions,
but with so many high level Archons here they were going to keep hitting them
in small teams ahead of the main force so long as the lizards didn’t find a way
to counter them…and Paul knew that was always a threat, so they had to hurry
and get all these close guns down and an LZ established before they adapted.
The rest of the guns spread across the planet would be extras, but these had to
go down now or extraction was going to get messy.
With Paul driving through the eyes of their pilot, he
brought the blocky transport down onto a street a few kilometers away from
their next target. The four titans dropped off and down to the street, then
started running into obscurity as the crowds of lizards around them went into a
panic. Paul knew that as long as they kept moving they’d have an advantage, but
let the lizards know exactly where they were and they’d start running kamikaze
wisps down on top of them…again.
Keeping that in mind, the foursome headed over ground
for a couple of minutes before taking to the undercity and approaching the gun
from there, out of the view of aerial reconnaissance and losing themselves in
the lizard infrastructure.
After ‘interviewing’ a number of lizards they found
out that several buildings and sublevels around the massive turret had been
booby-trapped with explosives so the lizards could take them down the moment
they spotted the Archons in them. Paul got the locations of those buildings and
brought his four man team to one of them…for they needed to sneak off with some
of those explosives themselves. The trick was not being seen, for the lizards
would just detonate them in your face.
It was an old trick that they’d been using for what
felt like years, though it’d been less than 2 months since they’d arrived on
the planet. Being an intense situation nonstop, it had ground out into an
endless flow of adrenaline, fatigue, and quick bits of sleep when you could
manage it. How the other teams were doing now he didn’t know, for they were out
of contact range, but his trio of Archons were holding up well and Paul was far
from tapping out. It was rough, but they were getting the job done and not
having to slaughter lizards to do it.
They were killing some, but the objective was to evade
and the massed bloodbaths that Paul and Riona had been having to endure were a
welcome absence. Most of the lizards dying here were from friendly fire, for
they didn’t evacuate the buildings they’d booby-trapped, else they tip their
hand.
When they finally went into the turret they’d have to
do some fighting, but smuggling in the explosives was going to take a few hours
and a lot of skill. If luck was against them that timetable would stretch out
even further, but they’d get them inside eventually. Diversionary attacks would
have to be made, but right now assembling the needed ordinance was the task,
and as long as the lizards were providing factory-grade explosives they might
as well take advantage of that rather than trying to MacGyver their own out of
fuel cells and whatever else they could get their hands on from the local
synthetic jungle that they were ensconced within.
When they got near the building in question Paul had
the other three screen for him using mind tricks and diversions, allowing him
to enter unnoticed and track down one of the bombs in the structure. He didn’t
approach it directly, for there were guards in the area and he needed to knock
them out first, but thankfully he could do that at range and even through the
walls with his telepathy…so long as there wasn’t a security camera trained on
them. Spotting those was the more challenging evasion, though so long as he had
time to look around at his leisure with his Pefbar he could find and avoid
them.
Luckily the lizards hadn’t put cameras on the bombs themselves. Those they were trying to hide from view and stuck them within the infrastructure as much as possible. When Paul finally got to one inside the building foundations he didn’t approach it, rather hiding behind a bulkhead and ‘touching’ it with his psionics just in case it did go off. Between the bulkhead and his armor he might be able to survive that, and he wanted the cushion just in case something went wrong.
Halfway through his inspection of the device he heard a faint screeching sound causing him to twitch. He recognized it instantly, and barely a second later Riona’s mental voice contacted him in lieu of a comm. signal that might be tracked.
The big gun just opened fire.
On what?
Not sure, but it’s depressed pretty far.
Which direction?
Towards the column. You think…
Get eyes on it now.
Riona didn’t hesitate, breaking from her cover within
a nearby building that was not rigged with explosives and making her way to the
roof, knocking unconscious a few lizards along the way that happened to see
her. Climbing 128 levels took some time, but when she got to the top she
stepped out near a cupola and kept her back pressed against it so her
silhouette wouldn’t stand out. It was transitioning over into night, with the
suns no longer visible on the horizon but with a pink/orange sky trailing them
still visible in the dimming light.
A much larger flash of brilliant pink cast shadows
across the roof, with Riona circling around the cupola until she could see the turret.
Another deep pink phaser beam shot out parallel to the ground and streaked over
the building tops into the distance. The column was so far away it didn’t even
register in the dark light near the surface, but there was a reflective stump
reaching up and thinning into the sky where the sunlight was still reaching it.
That disappearing line intersected with a thick yellow/tan ring that stretched
across the entire sky in an arc, looking about a fifth the thickness of Earth’s
moon.
Riona stared at the darkness beneath the visible
column and zoomed in with her helmet’s optics as far as she could. The view
changed into a myriad of lights around the column, bathing it in pinks coming
from different directions, some of which seemed to be coming up from directly
underneath it, along with a few other colors that she recognized as rocket
plumes. The nearby turret screeched again and its pink lance was visible as it
intersected the column, but Riona was too far away to see the effect.
She jacked up her comm signal, knowing that it might
be tracked to her so she set to transmit to Derrick-633 so that he could then
relay it to Paul using the dampened signal strength that wouldn’t reach all the
way up to her through the layers of lizard infrastructure.
“Paul, have a look,” she said, sending him her
visuals.
“Damn it,” he said with a snarl. “I need you to boost
for an orbital link.”
“I’ll keep my head down,” she said, visually scanning
the nearby sky for ships as she reset to act as his transmitter with a signal
strong enough that they could not keep the lizards from being able to detect
it. “Link established.”
“Admiral?” Paul asked, waiting a few heartbeats.
“I assume you’re seeing what we’re seeing?”
“Confirm they’re attacking the column.”
“Confirmed. Looks like they intend to sever it at the
base before we can send any more troops down it.”
“Any change in combat on the ring?”
“Negative. I don’t think they expect it to all come
down.”
“Make sure of that and get someone working the gravity
drives to compensate for when the column gets chopped off.”
“You think it’ll hold?”
“I hope so, or 26,000 miles of pain are going to come
falling down who knows where. The lizards can’t hit it further up so this is
their only point of attack. Compensate for the weight and keep your fingers
crossed.”
“Do want an evac team standing by?”
“Negative. My team is scattered going after different
targets and we’re all under the fire canopy. If it does fall I’ll get back to
you, but for now just wait it out and make sure someone is riding those gravity
drive controls nonstop from here on out.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Admiral Hestin promised.
“And evacuate the connecting point in case it rips a
chunk of the ring off with it.”
“Sending the order now.”
“Ground team going dark,” Paul said as he cut transmission
with orbit but stayed on with Riona. “Get back down here.”
“Coming,” she said, taking a few more seconds to look
at the column. It hadn’t moved so much as a twitch yet, but if/when the lizards
did blow through the base she didn’t know what would happen.
With another phaser screech sounding and the
corresponding pink bath of light flooding over the rooftop, Riona circled
around the stairwell cupola and headed back into the building. She expected
some sort of lizard response to be on her position soon and she needed to get away
from this building now.