Star Force: Internecine (SF55)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  By that time the second segment had been disabled so badly by the pointblank plasma fire that it had become dead weight, the other 5 segments disconnected from it and pulled back, leaving Paul with his intact segment on the other side of the still standing damaged one and able to use it as a blocker as his armor began taking hits from the nearby walkers he’d just fired upon with the long missile barrage.

  Paul created a plate shield over the exposed connective tissue on his segment’s backside and closed his eyes for a moment, reaching out to the surviving crew in the damaged section and trying to access one of them…but it was no good, for those in the control pit had died in an explosion and those in other sections didn’t have access to the missile control.

  Oh well, he’d have to go after the others then.

  Taking the pilot station and having to use a lot of skill and telekinesis to operate the controls meant for a quadruped with four arms, he walked his enormous segment around the other into a wave of plasma coming from the 5 segments that were in the process of turning their flank towards him so they could all fire simultaneously. Knowing his armor would hold up for a while he didn’t bother to try and shoot back, for that would have required a different control console. Instead he focused on accelerating the sluggish mass towards them, with it stutter stepping across the bad footing and him almost tripping it up three different times.

  Piloting the walker wasn’t a point and click endeavor, but he had practiced before on captured machines and simulators for just this type of situation and managed a half decent walk over to the middle segment of the remainder of the Type-1 and rammed it.

  Though by ‘ram’ it was more of a slow moving kiss as armor hit armor and the shield covering his backside began to weaken. With the range now being as close as it was going to get Paul reached out with his Ikrid and tried to access the minds in the segment ahead of him…with success.

  About a minute later a huge plume of missiles shot out from that segment and nailed the Type-2 that was getting near to plasma range. Paul sent all of them into it, consuming it in a black-smoked billowing fireball that eventually dissipated into the remains of a crippled walker with its leg segments having collapsed and its previous flank wound having been expanded upon into massive internal damage.

  Paul tried to reach out to the crews in the other segments but they were too far away, so he kept control over a mind or two in the middle one and made them lock down their legs so the whole walker couldn’t move without disconnecting from them. Then, like a student driver backing out of a minor crash, he pulled his plasma-eaten segment away and walked it to the side, losing more plasma cannons by the minute as the hull was ravaged by fire coming in from multiple angles.

  Now in front of the segment to the left he walked it forward and kissed it with an impact, bringing it within his Ikrid range so he could hijack the minds within. Knowing that his time was nearly up, he didn’t bother sending missiles at the other mechs, but instead programmed them to fire straight up…and come back down on the other segments from above.

  10

  “That’s it, let’s go,” Yavi Soloson said, lifting her neo up out of the crouch it was in and climbing the side of a steep hill when Paul signaled. It took several seconds to get to the top, but then she had a clear view of the distant Type-1 now broken up into pieces and clouded with missile impacts. That walker wasn’t her target, but the other smaller ones nearby were, with a Type-4 less than half a mile down the far side of the hill.

  She popped up both mauler cannons and ran forward, dodging the outcroppings and other rocky tripwires the terrain had for her as other mechs came up and over the hill along with her, two being neos and a pair of starbrights that opened fire immediately with their plasma streamers. Yavi held off on her maulers until she got down the hill and on relatively flat ground, then she began trading fire with the tick-like walker as the rest of her star collapsed on it, not giving it a real chance to do anything more than weaker her shields.

  Her maulers ate through the plasma-resistant armor after the starbrights took down its shields from behind, then the other neos ran on by leaving her to finish it off as they headed for a more distant Type-3 as other stars were popping up at various places and jumping on the walkers that were redirecting themselves towards the messed up Type-1 at the behest of the crews in the loyal segments.

  With Yavi’s attention on the walker before her she didn’t see the carnage taking place on the disloyal segment until after she’d finished off the Type-4 and began to move to back up the others as they tackled the Type-3. Plasma from a dozen walkers was pouring into the thick armored hull of Paul’s segment, with it blasting apart the interior when the shield plate finally went down and exposed the unarmored linkage.

  Even as it did another section of the Type-1 sprouted missiles that traveled up and came back down on the adjacent segment, covering it with so many explosions that the dust and debris even swallowed up Paul’s piece, with his ID signature coming through clearly as he declared his location via battlemap. Yavi didn’t know how he was going to get out of that mess but he was thoroughly trashing the Type-1, leaving the smaller ones for her and the other mechwarriors to handle. There were a lot of them, but with the jump they’d got from coming out of concealment the enemy was situated all wrong to bunch up and fight them, leaving a few easy first kills before the real slugging match began.

  Yavi pulsed her neo’s weak jump jets and added momentum to a jump up a steep but short cliff, getting her mechanical foot on the rim and traveling over before sprinting some 150 meters up to another Type-4 that had two buddies not far off that began throwing plasma spit her way. Ignoring their weak attacks she charged directly for the closer walker without support and began blasting away with her maulers at pointblank range.

  Her shields went down fairly quick, given the amount of plasma coming back at her from the taller walker, but her maulers ate through the forward section with an appetite for armor, melting it off after punching through the shields and letting her deliver a kill shot to the interior before the enemy plasma did more than kiss her hull. Rather than collapse the Type-4 locked up, becoming a dead statue on the rocky battlefield that she took a moment to reposition and hide behind while her shields started to recharge.

  As she did that a distant madcat threw some missiles into the side of one of the walker’s near her as another neo came in from the same angle. She waited to coordinate with it then jumped out of cover as both assaulted the closer of the walkers, doubling up their mauler damage and taking it down quickly given that its shields were weakened from the missile strike.

  That left one more, which the pair of the mechs took down with only minor armor damage to hers and none to the other. After that it was on to the interior and closer to the broken up Type-1 where the hard fighting was going on and the rest of the walkers were grouping up, meaning heavier plasma fire coming their way when they headed after them, needing to make the most of Paul’s disruption while it lasted.

  Paul tucked himself into a corner of the control pit, wedged in between a bulkhead and a bit of computer panel that wouldn’t stop much in the way of shrapnel but it was the best location he had available as the explosions around him blew plasma gouts into the chamber as his walker segment got hammered by the others. He’d managed to take out their missile launchers up top and do some damage beyond that, but the lower sections of the Type-1 segments were still intact and bathing his captured piece with plasma, blasting through the armor while the other walkers hammered the exposed backside that was now shieldless.

  He’d long since given up on using his segment as an offensive weapon, now focused on surviving the destruction while reaching out with his Ikrid to any Skarrons within range, of which there were only a few in the segment directly touching his as it leaned into the other, now that its legs were not fully powered. Paul took control of a few of their gunners and turned plasma cannons on the far side against their own walkers in that direction, causing more chaos as the St
ar Force mechs came out of concealment at distant positions and began fighting their way in.

  He couldn’t get a whole lot from the battlemap given the amount of walker around him interfering with the signals, but every now and then he’d get a surge of update and could see his people doing well and chewing through the isolated walkers on the edge of the engagement with no losses of their own.

  The wall ahead and to the right of him blew out in a wave of shrapnel that danced over his padawan armor’s shields, failing to penetrate but scattering debris all over the chamber as he kept tucked in next to the rib-like bulkhead. He could feel the nearby crews trying to get the Type-1 moving, but he kept his foot on the brake with the control of the crew directly ahead refusing to move their legs in conjunction with the others.

  Eventually the other segments saw they had no choice but to detach, and when they did Paul knew they had them if he could goose the damage rate up a bit. Using the gunners within reach he targeted the exposed sections where the connections were broken and threw plasma into them before shield plates formed, knocking out some of their functionality and actually preventing the shields from forming over one of them that had already been partially damaged into the connective tissue from the missile strikes.

  Paul continued throwing plasma into it as his remotely controlled segment began taking fire itself, meaning he was now getting the Skarrons to shoot at two of their own segments. He kept up the chaos until a much larger explosion breached the control pit and knocked him against the wall so hard that he lost his mental link…then a wash of machinery rushed over him and he was buried in debris as his segment finally lost all power to its legs and came crashing down to the ground.

  It took Paul a long time to crawl his way out of that mess, and by the time he finally got a clear view of the outside sky most of the other walkers were down, along with most of his mechs according to the battlemap. The few that remained were harassing one intact segment of the Type-1 that was showing heavy damage but still throwing off some 30% of the plasma fire it was normally capable of.

  Paul spotted a pair of mechs finishing off a Type-4 nearby and signaled to them, with the madcat making a quick jump his way before walking around the debris from another Type-1 segment and into view as Paul ran/climbed towards it. Like a tick he crawled up the back of the armor-damaged walker and clung there as the mechwarrior turned to face the nearest enemies and walked forward.

  The one-armed neo that was pairing with it fell into step and the damaged duo approached one of the three remaining ‘small’ walkers and began trading fire until it came within Paul’s psionic range, with the crew taking repetitive Fornax blasts that kept them unable to operate the controls. The return fire ceased and the damaged mechs pounded the Skarron walker until it crashed to the ground, then the neo ran ahead of the madcat and the two headed for the Type-1 piece as four other mechs were engaging it and getting pounded in the process.

  The neo didn’t last long, going down before it could get anywhere near the spindly legs, but it bought enough time for the madcat to get Paul close enough to start Fornaxing at extreme range, with a chunk of the plasma fire dying out immediately. Eventually the madcat made its way up to the legs and walked underneath the teetering segment, allowing Paul to Ikrid link with the crew, turning their remaining plasma cannons against the other remaining half-dead walkers and assisting the mechs in finishing them off…as well as sparing them the defeat that was heading their way, for even a partially intact piece of a Type-1 had enough plasma to eat away the shields and armor on tier 1 mechs quite easily, and there were no larger Star Force models on planet at the moment.

  Eventually only the Type-1 segment was left, which then opened up and extended its boarding ramp down to the madcat where Paul hopped off and ran up inside, shooting the crew dead in a short-lived killing spree as he ran about to hunt them all down. Once he returned to the boarding ramp and got back within battlemap signal range and saw that all of the enemy were truly down and out of the fight did he sit down on the top of the alien stairs and take a breather, feeling his head about to cave in from the excessive psionic usage.

  But that didn’t matter. He’d recover and the Skarrons wouldn’t, for this was their last major offensive. They had only a handful of walkers left on the planet guarding their remaining bases, five Paul knew as of last count, and each was isolated from the others. He could take them himself if needed, meaning the planet was all but back in ADZ hands.

  As he rested his aching head he got on the comm and organized infantry search parties to come out and search the debris. Whether they shot them on sight or took them prisoner they had to account for all the Skarrons, including those probably still alive in the hulks of the Type-1.

  But that was cleanup work, important and occasionally dangerous, but nothing that would jeopardize the fate of the planet. So long as the Skarrons didn’t get more reinforcements the Dvapp were about to get their world back, broken and busted up as it was, but it would be theirs again.

  Paul stuck around on the ground to help with the searches, using his Ikrid to spot the location of minds, before grabbing a dropship and heading up to orbit. There were still Skarron warships up here, but Admiral Caster was doing a good job of keeping them at bay. As they approached the Excalibur Paul cringed, seeing that the chunks missing from the hull had expanded a bit in his absence, but then he realized the outlines were nice and straight, not the ragged cuts from weaponsfire, meaning it was the work of the crew disassembling surrounding components in order to repair them properly…or at least as much as they could outside of a shipyard.

  The damage had been a necessary tradeoff earlier, taking hits that he knew the big ship could take and survive instead of wasting valuable drones that he needed for multiple, simultaneous hits. As powerful as the command ship was, it could only be in one place at one time, and as much as he didn’t like doing it he’d used it to beat down the Skarron fleet multiple times while holding his drones back.

  The results were still visible, making it look like a wounded ship that was a sitting duck, but it had so much bulk and redundant weapons systems that it was still quite lethal, especially when its shields were up. Some of the generators had been lost, along with two gravity drives. One was supposed to be repairable but the other had been slagged. That would slow the ship a bit, but not stop it from making decent jumps, for the command ships had multiple gravity drives in order to achieve the insane speeds they were able to travel.

  Fortunately the sanctum wasn’t anywhere near the damaged areas, with the crew sections being located towards the interior. That was where Paul was heading next, and even as the dropship came in close to the massive ship he saw the central plug disconnect and head down to the surface to pick up the damaged mechs and other equipment as they continued the cleanup rather than send repetitive dropship flights.

  It was empty of troops, unfortunately, but with luck they wouldn’t need any more here. Paul wasn’t counting on that, but he did have his fingers crossed.

  When the dropship landed he walked off and found Caster waiting for him on the deck.

  “Bad news?” he guessed.

  “Yes and no,” the Admiral said, falling into step with him as the trailblazer headed out of the landing bay. “We got word that a Sentinel is on its way here and should be operational within 18 days.”

  “That’s good news,” Paul said happily. This world had had none to begin with, making the naval situation even more tricky. Putting one up wouldn’t stop the Skarrons from getting to the ground, but it would give what was left of the Dvapp fleet a safe haven to run to if/when the Skarrons came back.

  “I also got word that Veernad finally fell. They’re finishing up evacuations before they get completely overrun, but they’re conceding the planet and system.”

  “Damn it,” Paul swore angrily. The Dvapp planet was some 13 lightyears away and the next planned stop for the Excalibur after securing Plenx, but apparently they were too late. He stood still for a m
oment, then took a step to the left and punched the wall with his armored hand while the Admiral patiently waited nearby with other passing members of the crew giving them both a wide berth.

  “Where are they headed?”

  “The Dvapp to Keema, the Clans to Metropolis,” Caster said, referencing the still intact Dvapp capitol.

  “How much is left?”

  “About twice what we have here, ground wise. Shall I have their naval assets transferred to us?”

  Paul pulled his helmet off and blew out a sigh. “Feel like going hunting?”

  “Always.”

  “Give me as many full jumpships as you can, send the remainder on to Metropolis.”

  “Rendezvous here or at a neutral location?”

  “Here. We’ve still got a few locals to run down now that we don’t have a blockade to maintain.”

  “Shall I wait on that?”

  “No, my young apprentice. You may begin causing havoc immediately. Call me if you get stuck. I’ll be doing some badly needed training.”

  “Nice work down there,” Caster added. “You pulled out a victory single handedly.”

  “No, not single-handedly. I just carried.”

  “Impressive none the less.”

  “Gave me a headache,” Paul mildly complained.

  Caster smiled then nodded, touching two fingers to his temple in a brief salute before heading back to the bridge and leaving the trailblazer to start getting himself back into shape.

  Paul didn’t even bother showering before heading to the sanctum. He got out of his armor and into fresh clothes then hit the track immediately, intent on running the stagnation out of himself. Almost non-stop combat missions had been taxing on him, but not in any beneficial way. Having been away from his normal workout routine he’d gotten rusty and sloppy, but he knew his body and mind would readjust quickly enough, but it was going to be an ugly process and he wanted to get through it as quickly as possible.