by Aer-ki Jyr
With a wordless understanding reached, Mike and his new best friend floated through the dark hallways with the Protovic functioning as a mobile flood lamp and spraying red and green light wherever he went. When they got to the single room with the others inside the Archon let the Protovic go in first as he gently woke the others, then let him explain what was going on.
That took less than 30 seconds before what was left of the crew came floating out eager for rescue and knowing that these people were the ones who had come to their aid in the space battle. Apparently that was enough to establish trust…along with the fact that the air was getting stale and without at least moderate repairs to the ship they’d all suffocate or freeze to death, though Mike did see what looked like portable equipment, possibly heaters, set up in the room they were exiting.
One of them was missing an arm and a good portion of the skin over the right side of his face. The tissue underneath did not glow, nor did the blood that looked dark where it had dripped over his illuminated skin. The others had burns and gashes from what looked like fragmented debris strikes, with only about a third of them that appeared undamaged, though their mental states were considerably distressed.
With the help of his emissary they got them all into Human-sized envirosuits and onto the hand lines with the Bsidd escorting them out to the exposed hull and across the short gap to the waiting dropship. Mike had already called for another, for there were 34 Protovic survivors and they weren’t going to all fit in the sparrow. Once it was loaded up and the tether line disconnected it flew off, with another dropship, an Eagle-class this time, coming in and taking up position to rescue the rest of the survivors.
A third dropship came to pick up Mike and his team and take them over to the next location where survivors had been spotted, for one of the other Archons had assigned himself to spotter duty and had been flying around mentally scanning all the debris to save the search teams time. He’d kept the one Protovic with him and used him as an intermediary with the few other survivors they found and got them off their ships, or what was left of them, without complaint. That said, there were a few groups that had been identified that lost people before the Archons and Bsidd could get to them.
One Protovic shuttle was seen moving about looking for survivors, but other than that there was no help coming from them. That bugged Mike a lot, but he knew that a lot of races didn’t care about rescuing survivors from debris. It was a difficult process if you didn’t have the right equipment and some people didn’t bother to try…while others did but at a leisurely pace that often saw people lost due to a lack of alacrity.
Regardless, by the end of it he and his teams spread across all the orbital battlefields recovered 389 Protovic, 32 of which were near death. Four of those didn’t survive the trip over to the jumpships, and even the crude regenerators that Star Force now fielded weren’t enough to revive them. Had they a V’kit’no’sat model onboard that probably would have been another story, but there were so few of them in existence that even a mage of Mike’s standing didn’t rate one being sent with this invasion force.
The Star Force version didn’t melt, but was shaped like a mechanical mushroom that unfolded into bands and plates that cradled the injured part of a person’s body and set to stoking the natural regenerative processes. It was appropriately colored green and referred to by many Archons as the ‘extra life,’ and thanks to the Protovic sharing a physiology that was already logged in the Star Force database the units this fleet carried were already capable of fully treating the wounded, including the regeneration of severed limbs. That would take days, if not weeks to fully accomplish, but those Protovic that they got back to the jumpships still alive would all make full recoveries going forward. Those that had missed their window of opportunity had been mere minutes shy of making an eventual full recovery.
That was why rescue operations couldn’t be delayed and why Mike had ordered them immediately. Fortunately the lizards didn’t try any shenanigans in planetary orbit while the operations were going on, but he learned they were doing quite a bit of relocating throughout the rest of the system now that they knew there was a Star Force fleet in play. They needed far more ship concentration than they’d had here to deal with his drones, and by pulling ships in from multiple other locations they were assembling a big enough armada that Mike’s troops might not be sufficient to deal with them.
That meant there was a lot of strategy needed going forward and the lizards weren’t going to make it easy on them and keep themselves spread out enough to get picked off in smaller engagements such as the one they’d just fought and won. Mike didn’t have the ships he needed to quickly cleanse this system of the invaders, but he could still do it if he took the patient approach. In lieu of reinforcements that he didn’t have coming that was how he was going to have to play it, but for the moment establishing communication with these Protovic was his top priority after ensuring they got all the survivors recovered.
By the time Mike got back to the Archer 7 there was still no reply from the Protovic in response to any of the languages they attempted, which was understandable given that these Protovic were obviously not the same as those they were allied with…unless the red coloration was some secret that Star Force had never been told about. If these Protovic had split off from the others a very long time ago then they might not share a similar language now, but it had been their best bet other than lizard, to which they had not responded either.
So Mike took his Protovic emissary with him to a room on the jumpship that had database access and pulled up the visual information about the other Protovic and tried to translate as much nonverbal information as he could to him. He could clearly sense his shock at seeing the photos, as well as the satisfied conclusion that if Star Force was allied with the other Protovic then that made them allies of theirs as well, which was why they’d come to their aid.
That wasn’t true, for he’d had no idea this system contained Protovic, but given the lack of translation he wasn’t going to bother trying to explain that bit of detail, especially when it seemed that this one was slipping into the role of ally almost automatically. That was a big step, especially if his kin would reciprocate, but without a reliable means to communicate with the natives any combat coordination was going to be limited going forward and Mike knew he couldn’t just let the lizards have oodles of time to reposition and prepare for the beatdown that was coming their way. If he made a misstep they’d make him pay for it, and their victory here was not a sure thing…though he knew if he handled it correctly the lizards wouldn’t be able to stop them.
How many Protovic they killed before then was another matter, for there were still ground campaigns ongoing. Mike didn’t like the idea of setting down troops without the ability to talk to the Protovic, for the chances of misunderstandings or paranoia were high and he wouldn’t stand for a single soldier of his to be killed because of it.
He also wasn’t going to let the lizards have time to kill Protovic while he twiddled his thumbs in space either, so he had to come up with something.
After several hours of tedious telepathic chats with his new friend whom he’d dubbed ‘Candy Cane’ he let the man return to the rest of his crew that were going to remain on the jumpships until they healed. He ordered the Admiral to give the man comm access so he could try and talk to his own people, that was, if they could receive and decipher the Star Force transmissions. If their computers talked in a totally alien language as well then that was going to be a no go, but they had to try regardless.
Meanwhile Mike caught a quick nap for a couple of hours then took a short run and headed back to the command nexus to begin working on his next move…and seeing what the lizards and Protovic were going to make theirs.
7
March 3, 2826
Aphat System
Jmry
Mike sat hunched over inside the cockpit of his skeet, his Archon armor sliding into grooves in the seat designed to match it perfectly and give
him a relaxed pose even while leaning forward and essentially resting his chest on the angled padding. His hands and feet were leveraging manual controls while his mind was partially linked into the neural interface and giving him the sensor feeds directly rather than relying on the holograms surrounding him. His eyes were closed to slits with him barely seeing the images around him through his own visual senses, though he was very aware of his body as he feathered the controls and eased his aerial fighter down beneath the ridges outlining a valley where a Protovic outpost was under siege.
In the days that followed the first orbital battle there had been no progress on finding a common language, or even roots of one, but an agreement had been reached on landing troops to fight the lizards on one of the 4 held planets with advancing lizard incursions on them. It was more of a point and nod ‘yes’ exercise than an actual agreement, but the Protovic knew Star Force was coming down to aid them in the fighting and that was pretty much all they had to go on.
Leaving the Admiral in command of the fleet after considerably thinning the lizards’ system ship count, Mike had come down with the ground troops and helped rout an invasion of a city. Trouble was, Protovic cities weren’t self-contained. This one had buildings sprawling across a wide area in splotches without a defined perimeter. Some lizard troops had gotten into sections and dug in, but Mike and the Bsidd had kept most of their troops blocked from ever getting that far, then he had gone in and helped locate and eliminate the interlopers less than an hour ago.
Once finished there he’d ordered his troops out to other locations and hopped in a skeet enroute to another front. This section of Jmry was falling apart under the lizard assault and he didn’t have time to waste transitioning from one to another. He was tired, but sitting in a cockpit wasn’t going to stress him much, prompting him to put off a sleep cycle until he’d helped his troops keep this military outpost from falling to the lizards.
Columns of infantry and mechs were making their way up the valley, already having cut off the lizards’ reinforcement lane here and attacking them from behind, but as was typical the enemy had multiple fronts and had encircled the Protovic in this very treacherous circuit of canyons with an uncertain amount of troops in play. Mike expected them to have been dug in by now, with him flying on ahead to scout the area.
His Pefbar did him no good at this altitude so he had to rely on the skeet’s sensors entirely to search with, but his gut told him there was trouble here and that he was flying into hazardous terrain. That proved true about a third of the way up to the Protovic bunker as a burst of anti-air fire came from a nook in the canyon. A few splinters of plasma hit his shields before he was able to roll out of it, then he went evasive and drew fire from at least half a dozen more hidden weapons batteries.
Which is what he had hoped would happen. Better for the enemy to shoot at him than his troops, with him drawing them out of cover so that crew in orbit watching could tag the locations of the weapons hidden amongst the rocks. The lizards still hadn’t created a good replacement for their anti-air plasma weapons that utilized ‘fire and forget’ packages, and Mike knew well how to handle the glowing green splinters flinging up at him from seemingly everywhere.
Rather than flying up he went down, cutting under the firing cones of some of the batteries and letting his superior shields take some hits while he kept moving and dodging based off of the targeting tendencies he’d learned over the years rather than seeing and reacting to the weaponsfire that was far faster than his craft. He kept his speed up and hugged the terrain, eventually sliding up the slope and peeking over the far side and down into another valley, this one wider and more heavily forested. The entire area was choppy with washed out ‘roads’ that the infantry and mechs were making use of. They were visible from the air but the source of the anti-air fire was coming from the clumps of trees.
Mike saw them but couldn’t study their placements, running the gauntlet as long as he dared before pulling up hard and shooting straight up into the sky, taking some lucky shots to his right wing stub that didn’t penetrate as he got outside of their weapons range. The mage rolled his fighter over once high enough above the terrain that he didn’t need to worry, which was when he noticed a blot on the horizon to the west.
A quick check of the battlemap showed him that the blot was a lizard cruiser coming overland.
“Where the hell did that come from?” he wondered, setting a direct course for it while seeing a drone corvette heading down from orbit on an intercept course. It was going to be late, though, with the cruiser going to get to his ground troops before it could get shot down…and with various Protovic settlements spotting the countryside he couldn’t risk calling on orbital batteries to try and take it out. Even then there wasn’t much time to get the ships into position. The lizards had slipped a warship past them and it was going to be here within a couple of minutes.
Mike mentally tagged all the fighters in the air nearby to rally to him as he set course to intercept the cruiser at least a short distance away from his troops on the ground. There were 3 squadrons within range, each of which contained 10 fighters. The pilots were a mix of Bsidd Thetas, Eppies, and Zetas, all medium to small sized variants, and flying Y-shaped skeets known as ‘Behatis’ that were about 30% larger than Mike’s craft. They also had three engines, each on the ends of the spurs, but had a larger midsection bulge than the skeets did, which allowed even the largest Bsidd variants to pilot them if necessary.
When a smaller Bsidd was known to be the pilot, the cockpit was sectioned off and the excess space given to modular upgrades, including cargo compartments, additional fuel cells, a secondary shield generator, comm equipment, or a variety of other tech to take advantage of the size of the craft. It was a design concept built specifically for the Bsidd and only a couple of decades old, but the behatis had already replaced all other aerial fighters in popularity and was now the only design being actively produced.
Where the Calavari had their Valerie the Bsidd now had their Behati, but Mike was sticking with his skeet like the rest of the Humans, though his was the only one in the sky at the moment. There were also a few gunships of Bsidd manufacture to deal with lizard wisp swarms if they were to come their way, but so far that hadn’t happened. The lizards had air assets on the planet, but since they were the invading army rather than the defending one those numbers didn’t tilt into the insane and most of what was here had been chewed apart previously by the Protovic and their flying ‘Javelins.’
Mike was in his skeet to help identify and take out surface targets, as were the other fighters nearby, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t do what they were primarily designed for…which was taking down aerial targets, even if they were really big ones. His skeet had two mauler cannons and the behatis had one each, meaning that with enough hits they could disrupt the cruiser’s shields and get some hits into the hull. Problem was they needed to take this thing down quick before it had a chance to pound the infantry.
Mike had mechs in play on the ground that would add considerable anti-air fire, not just from typical anti-air batteries but from all their weapons, for you didn’t need any specialization to shoot up into the air at a slow moving target. To that end he accessed the battlemap and fed commands out to the mechs to fire every missile they had at a point he then specified, splashing a virtual marker on the quickly approaching cruiser.
A moment later little plumes of fire leapt up from the ground at multiple locations down in the one canyon and arced over to travel horizontal to the cruiser. There was a slight delay, then a billowing cloud of fire and smoke built up on the leading edge of the enemy ship that it kept trying to push its way through, eventually succeeding but coming out of it with weakened shields…albeit temporarily.
Mike shot his fighter ahead at the best speed he could manage, getting into mauler range before the behati squadrons and pulling the trigger after selecting a double linked blast from his customizable control board, sending two blue blips of shield-disr
upting energy at the front edge of the cruiser.
Klakten was with a group of Betas down on the canyon floor when the overhead sun was eclipsed by the front of the lizard ship as it appeared in the sky above them, crawling out over the rocky ridgeline and firing a pink phaser beam down at a madcat. It hit the left missile box and nearly penetrated the mech’s shields, but the Bsidd walking machine did what it did best and leapt ahead into a running gait as it turned its weapons skyward and added to the other streaks and orbs of weaponsfire reaching back up towards the cruiser, making the next phaser burst miss by a couple of meters as the madcat pilot juked the mech around in a randomized pattern.
Apparently the lizard gunners weren’t that good, but all it would take was one shot to kill Klakten or any of the other infantry. Their armor and shields couldn’t stand up to that kind of firepower, and there were already waypoints leading to places in the canyon that would provide some cover in the terrain, though he knew the trees wouldn’t do much to protect them. He sprinted with the others nearby over to the edge of the canyon, putting as much angle as they could between them and the rest of the enemy warship as it continued to creep out overhead and expose more weapons batteries to the troops below.
More and more pink rain followed, but at least it seemed to be targeting the mechs rather than the scattering infantry. Klakten kept his rifles silent, knowing that shooting up at the big ship wouldn’t do a damn bit of good and could alert them to his position. When he got under the tree cover he weaved through the thin trunks and found a bit of rock to hide behind, but he could still see the yellow/tan hull above him through the breaks in the leaves.