Star Force: Divide (SF76) (Star Force Origin Series)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Ciatra tucked her pistol back onto her weapon rack and flipped her middle finger at the lizard construction crews below before jumping/crawling her way through the rib cage of the tower to one of the slits of light on the armored exterior. There she went out a hole meant for supplies to come in and got onto a small temporary catwalk on the outside with a good view over the construction site to the east.

  “I’m done,” she reported.

  A waypoint popped up off into the city, different from Iden’s current location, and Ciatra knew that was to be their rendezvous. A quick scan of the sky showed no fighters coming in to harass them, but there was a number of civilian craft up there just hovering in place, probably to give eyes to the site and allow them to figure out what was going on. They couldn’t shoot at them, but it was clear that their surprise attack advantage was coming to a close and they needed to get out of here ASAP.

  Ciatra backed up into the gap, then pushed off with her right hand to help accelerate herself into as much of a sprint as possible over the few meters she had to work with and jumped off the catwalk in a huge arch that dropped her to the ground with a gentle landing and into a zigzagging run through the cargo stacks. She knocked aside a few lizards with her Lachka or Fornax but refrained from shooting them as she kept her pistol on her back and her arms pumping for maximum speed.

  Just before she got to the edge of the construction site one of the vehicles above nearly rammed the Archon, with her Pefbar just catching it coming in time for her to jump to the left. The car-sized craft hit and scraped into the ground digging a long furrow in the hard packed dirt, missing her by a couple of meters. Angry, Ciatra ran up to it, hopped on top and kicked the lizard driver in the head as she passed, then hopped off back to the ground and disappeared into a narrow gap between buildings.

  She telekinetically knocked down the first of several lizards there, with more behind them arriving to either see what was going on or do something about it. None of these had weapons, yet, so she decided not to play with them and grabbed a bit of wall and started climbing. The adhesive sections on her fingers and toe-tips worked well enough, but you had to take your time and Ciatra was getting impatient. She had her jump pack as a backup so she pushed the limits of traction and raced her way up and away from the lizards below her, stopping when she did finally slip and taking the moment to gather her legs in a crouch before launching herself straight up with a boost from her pack.

  The padawan grabbed for traction again much further up and continued to climb until she got to the rooftop. There were several aerial vehicles waiting for her, with a single lizard phaser rifle greeting her. Her shields took a hit, then both the lizard and the weapon were pulled off the floating vehicle and fell to the rooftop below courtesy of Iden who was approaching from another direction and just now hopping the gap between buildings.

  “I got the reactor in a way that shouldn’t be easy to find,” she reported.

  “I was less subtle with the firing array,” he said as she hesitated a few seconds for him to catch up, then the two of them raced off side by side across the rooftops. “We’re going to have to ditch these watchers.”

  “I know,” she said as they came to the edge and ran straight off it, hopping the gap to the next building and falling several stories in the process to the much lower rooftop. Iden caught the landing in stride, but Ciatra had to do a dive roll to keep moving…which wasn’t all that easy with a pack on your back. She fell behind a couple of steps then sprinted to catch up just in time to follow Iden over the next gap as he slid on his hip and dipped over the edge, dropping down to street level.

  When she came over Ciatra saw him partway down and clinging to the wall as a window blew out just in time for her to duck inside. Iden followed her into the building and the two of them started a hasty descent through the structure not even bothering to waste ammo on the lizards they encountered, but Ciatra thought she killed at least one with a punch to the neck on the way by.

  Iden led the pair down below ground level then traveled a bit of distance in the undercity before coming back up in a different building. Reversing their course, they busted out another window and climbed up to the rooftop, careful to not get spotted. The watchers were several buildings over, still above the building they had disappeared into, and the pair of Archons snuck off across this one and began their journey across the city again, for the moment undetected, as they headed back to the far perimeter with a lot of buildings and lizards between them and clear ground…

  Ciatra hit the rocky surface at the base of the perimeter building first, landing hard to avoid the single wisp that had been chasing them the past 3 minutes. She knew better than to stand still, so even before Iden came down the padawan sprinted out into the open away from the city, making a plain target for the lizard aerial craft, but one that was not going to be super easy to hit moving at the speeds she was capable of and able to turn at a moment’s notice.

  Iden came down with the wisp whipping over the building a split second behind him and blowing out a chunk of roof with a near miss of pink phaser fire. He let gravity pull him as fast as he dared, then decelerated sharply with his jump pack at the last moment, landing so hard he lost his balance and fell to the side, cracking his head on a rock. Fortunately his helmet protected him, but it still rung his bell as the wisp circled around sharply and dove down at Ciatra as she heeded Iden’s advice to not wait up on him.

  He got on his feet and ran after her, shaking off his disorientation and getting up to a sprint faster than his padawan was capable of as he began closing the distance with several phaser blasts stitching the ground near Ciatra. He saw her go into a weave even before the wisp opened fire, ducking to the left, then the right before reversing course entirely and backtracking. That allowed Iden to catch up a lot, enough for the two of them to link up in battlemeld and reach out to the wisp on its next pass.

  It got off one shot that hit near Ciatra and blew apart a rock into a spray of shrapnel that penetrated her already weakened shields. It pinged off her corovon-laced armor as the two Archons hacked into the lizard’s mind and took control, forcing it to pick up speed and ram into the ground.

  It didn’t explode, for it wasn’t that high up in the air to begin with, but it did drag across the ground through a couple of boulders, flipping over twice and getting thoroughly dented. Iden wasn’t sure if that was enough, but it was on the ground so they let it go and just ran straight out from the city towards a small dot on the horizon, behind which there was a storm of activity in the form of wisps and dropships. They were so far away Iden and Ciatra couldn’t make out what was going on, save for the larger transports involved that looked like mere specks against the smokey haze that he knew were ships and not clouds.

  The wisp stayed on the ground for more than a minute, then the battered craft got airborne again and circled around a tight spiral as it gained altitude. Seemingly disoriented, it just hovered there for a moment before accelerating towards them as another three wisps were just becoming visible to the north, apparently coming back from duty elsewhere to chase after the Archons, for they were not coming from within the city, nor from the maelstrom straight ahead.

  “Do we try all three?”

  “No,” Iden said as they both slowed ever so slightly to ready themselves. “Just disorient them and make them miss.”

  Ciatra jumped over a boulder, getting a bit of hangtime in the process, then came down and stepped on a much smaller rock causing her to stumble and lose a step as the ground in front of her lit up with badly aimed phaser strikes that were intended to cause the Archons to turn back rather than hit them. Both knew they couldn’t do that so they got a little more spacing between each other and ran on, forcing the wisps to come in at them.

  They came together, three wide, and the Archons reached out telepathically to cloud their minds. It didn’t work well enough to keep them from firing, but the shots missed so badly it was apparent that the pilots couldn’t concentrate. As they p
assed overhead the Archons released two of them and grabbed hold of the third, forcing it to fly its fighter down into the ground.

  Off to their right it took a steep nosedive and planted itself into the terrain with a brief pop of smoke as it hit, with the other two wisps circling around to come in for another pass just as a phaser blast hit between the two Archons from behind.

  A second one hit Ciatra in the back, knocking her face first into the ground before the damaged wisp came down itself ahead of them as Iden grabbed hold of the pilot’s mind and forced it into a shallow hillside where it didn’t have the luxury of skidding. It compacted in a mild spray of yellow/tan fragments as long range pink spit began to vaporize dust clouds around the two Archons.

  The remaining wisps were too far away for Iden to affect, but they were getting closer and looked to want to keep firing the entire way in. With an effort, he telekinetically helped Ciatra get to her feet and start running again, albeit much slower. Their battlemeld had snapped when she fell, but he extended the prompt to her again and felt the light burns on her back when they connected. Both her shields and her armor had taken the hit, but he didn’t have the luxury of inspecting the damage. They had to keep running towards the dot that was getting much bigger ahead of them, and the wisps knew it too.

  Which was why they made one last kamikaze run, coming within range of the Archons’ psionics and firing as quickly as they could. Both their minds got a wash of disorientation again, as if their vision suddenly got cloudy, and one of the wisps stopped firing. The other did not, with the phaser blasts hitting near both of them with such regularity that Iden knew a hit was coming. Running ahead of Ciatra he suddenly turned back and wrapped her up in a bear hug, with both of them dropping to the ground behind the closest rock they could find…which unfortunately was only half a meter tall.

  They linked up their bioshields and wrapped themselves up in as much of a cocoon as they could, then the pale pink rocks around them got a lot more vivid as phaser blasts rained down. Most of them missed, but two hit and sucked their bioshields into nothingness. Iden’s shields took part of what remained, then it was their armor that had to do the rest up until they got hold of that pilot’s mind and forced him to fly away.

  When they did they realized the truth…he’d set his firing controls to auto, expecting to lose physical control. The wisp had honed in on their position and fired on its own.

  Clever bastard, Iden commented. He has to die next.

  “Run,” Ciatra insisted. “Don’t let them hit both of us again.”

  Iden realized through the battlemeld that Ciatra was losing blood, not from a new hit but the old one, and her head was starting to get foggy.

  “Move it or lose it, Jinx,” he said, pulling her to her feet and pushing her ahead of him.

  “Good idea,” she said, slowing a bit and reaching back to release what was left of her jump pack and supplies. The tattered frame dropped off onto the ground, making her a bit lighter as well as letting Iden see the crater in her upper back where the phaser shot had burnt through in a few tiny spots, leaving a thin shell elsewhere through which tiny streaks of blood were pouring. The cauterization was cracking apart with every movement of her body.

  Iden released his pack as well, suddenly getting a boost of agility from the lack of mass he’d gotten used to being there. He ran off to the left and got some distance in between them as she’d suggested just as the pair of wisps was coming back at them. He spotted a larger boulder ahead and mentally told Ciatra to get to it while he kept running, so from the lizards point of view the two targets suddenly turned into one as she dove down and disappeared behind it with a head-first slide.

  That left them Iden to target, so he ran back towards Ciatra ensuring good battlemeld range, and the both reached out to the ‘smart’ pilot as he came closer. Iden knew the phaser blasts were coming so he went as evasive as he could, causing several to miss before they got hold of the pilot’s mind and forced him to turn to the right. The two wisps nearly collided, but the second pilot adjusted in the nick of time.

  Both flew out of psionic range within a few seconds, though for the moment the phaser fire had stopped.

  “Go!” Iden shouted, verbally and telepathically, with Ciatra coming up from her cover and sprinting along with him towards the now very large silhouette on the horizon. They knew they weren’t going to get another chance at this pair of wisps, for they were circling around to come back at them in a wide spacing, meaning there was no chance of getting them to collide again. If they took control of one the other would have a free shot, and if they tried to dampen both the auto-controlled one would get at least a couple lucky shots in that would end them.

  Fortunately they had another option, if the timing was going to be right. Squeezing as much speed out of their legs as they could, now lightened without their packs, both Archons sprinted across the ground in as straight of a line as they could manage towards the approaching mech that was also running towards them. It was their ride out of here, as well as their aerial umbrella, with its anti-air batteries already sprouted from its shoulder mounts and ready to fire when they came in range.

  The wisps were determined though and didn’t break off, making it a race for distance and Iden not sure who would win out. When one of the wisps ducked down to the ground he knew it intended to ram them, mental interference or not. A moment later he got a warning prompt on his battlemap and the two Archons split, veering left and right with that wisp having to choose who to follow as yellow sammy spurts started to fill the air above them.

  The topside wisp took a few hits and veered off smoking, but the lower one was committed and went after Iden. The Archon sensed it was trying to use him to keep the mech from firing at the wisp, so the Archon slammed on the brakes and reversed course…with a slew of sammy shots passing within 3 meters of his head and streaking right into the wisp.

  It fell a meter to the ground, caught on some rocks and began a tumble with debris spraying out with each bump. The wisp tore past Iden and came to a halt some 200 meters ahead as he and Ciatra ran back towards each other and the mech likewise sprinted up near them like a giant intent on scaring off any further pursuit. At the moment there was none, so when it came to a standstill the two Archons climbed up its thick metallic legs using their adhesive armor points in lieu of the jump packs they no longer had and worked their way up the mech’s back onto the shoulders next to the slight bump it had instead of a head.

  Both of them latched onto it with as much leverage as they could and caused their adhesive points to lock to maximum. Once stuck in place they informed the mechwarrior and he slowly turned the neo around, accelerating smoothly into a jog and carried the Archons back into the ‘safety’ of the warzone beyond the city.

  6

  July 17, 2946

  Shaleth System (Voku territory)

  Inova

  Cal-com stood in his private oracle studying the recent data update the Preema had sent him. With it his galactic map, or rather only a tiny portion of the mind bogglingly large swirl, updated with another swath of yellow lizard dots being eliminated and tagged neutral grey that the Voku and their pact were tasked with monitoring and keeping clear of reinhabitation. The lizards were constantly trying to expand, even to the worlds they had lost less than 5 years ago. Cal-com had to keep everything under surveillance and his sweeper teams moving around constantly, else the hard fought gains that the Preema were racking up would ultimately be a loss.

  Right now the damage they were doing, regardless of how many worlds the lizards colonized, was adding up. The Preema had the lizards beat badly and they knew it, but their empire wasn’t something that could be toppled swiftly. It had to be corralled and shrunken with care, which was a task beyond their current capabilities. While many fronts were being challenged and pushed back there were still regions where the lizards could expand freely. Right now the race to destroy worlds looked like it was winning out, but neither the Voku nor the Preema had eyes on
every lizard system and there was no way to be certain where they all were.

  If even one jumpship ran away from their territory, heading off into the galaxy in an unknown direction and traveling for 100 years before finding a quiet world to settle down on, they could regrow their entire empire from scratch. That was a threat that Cal-com was beginning to realize would never end. Like weeds growing in a field, all you could do was eradicate the ones you found and stay on the lookout for others. He had no hopes of eliminating the lizards entirely, though the Preema seemed to think it was possible.

  The Dafchor felt that was naivety on their part, but the trick in the lizards gaining dominance wasn’t in hiding, it was in putting their territory in plain view and growing it. They might be nearly impossible to destroy completely but they couldn’t wield power without consolidating themselves, and when they did they made themselves a target for the Voku and others. If they could knock them down now, undo the centuries of mistakes that others had made that allowed them to grow this large and widespread, then he could count this mission a success.

  To that end they were nearing an important milestone. Star Force’s push into lizard territory was functioning like a blunt knife blade that had reached to the centerline, not far off from the system Cal-com was currently situated in. There were several systems along that border under attack, but most of Star Force’s efforts were focused on breaking the link in the lizards’ primary supply chain while Cal-com’s fleet was hunting down their efforts to establish other ones and smuggle ships through unprotected systems.

  In addition to that his forces were razing worlds and protecting others, spread out so far that he didn’t have any one single fleet capable of delivering the hammer blow to the lizards around Paul’s neck, and the Human had told him not to try with the few conglomerates he could spare. His friend had assured him that Star Force could handle this, long as it may be, and that he should use the distraction to his advantage and pluck as many other worlds from the lizards’ grasp as he could.