Star Force Perseverance (SF81) (Star Force Origin Series)

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 ther />
  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.