Star Force: Shiva (SF98) (Star Force Origin Series)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  He didn’t turn to fight, knowing that if they delayed him the Brat’mar would finish him off, so he continued running as their Chi’parat ate into his rear armor. He got nearly a kilometer before they got one of his leg joints and his mech fell to the ground, digging a furrow in the hard pavement and forcing him to fight from a kneeling position...but what they didn’t expect was the massive Fornax blast thrown their way along with the weaponry in his intact arm and shoulder mounts. Another followed it, and another, disrupting their balance but not taking them down to the ground as many of their return shots missed his mech entirely…but then a cannon shot from a Brat’mar hit him square in the chest and knocked his mech flat on its mechanical back.

  Free of the Fornax disruption, the Kar’ka swarmed over him, shooting into the armor damage and wrecking his mech until a combination of air strikes and a star of mechs got to him, fighting off the Kar’ka and killing most of them before losing two of their own to the Brat’mar as Rio sat in his armored cocoon trying to get his mech back on its feet…but it was no use. It was toast and all he had was the secondary battlemap feed coming from the cocoon to see what was going on outside, for his command and control systems were down.

  He could issue commands, and did send a few quick ones before he started digging his way out of the dead mech. It took him several minutes of pushing and cutting using the tools inside to get through the damaged cocoon even with the help of internal releases, then he crawled out through the gash the Brat’mar had torn in the torso and stood atop his dead mech in his purple/white Archon armor and looked around.

  The two Brat’mar were being pushed back by another star coming to assist the broken one, but neither of them were damaged. Shields were low, but no armor damaged yet. As for the Kar’ka…

  Rio leapt up off the mech and kicked in his Yen’mer, flying up a few meters then doing a superman low to the ground as he headed for three of the Kar’ka. Each was a good three meters tall and had weaponry that could eat through his shields and armor really fast, but he never gave them the chance. Readjusting his shields into a forward cone and throwing up his own bioshields over them, he dove straight into one of them and knocked it over with his body, dropping both shields right before impact so not to drain them, then flicking them back on after the fact as he bounced to the second one and punched it in the head.

  Running/flying between the three he moved too fast for them to easily shoot with their Chi’parat, but they also had smaller Dre’mo’dons on their short arms that they did land a few shots with, but not enough to get through both sets of shields before Rio started messing with their mental aim and causing the others to go wide or to shoot phantom images of himself. He kept them so busy and frustrated that they didn’t even see the skeets coming in, and when he dropped into a ball on the ground between the three and generated the biggest Fornax field he could, the area around him lit up with weaponsfire as the skeets didn’t fly past. They came to a hover nearby and unloaded on the three Kar’ka with repetitive shots…shots that the V’kit’no’sat could not return so long as the Fornax was messing with their aim.

  When the weaponsfire ceased all three Kar’ka were full of smoking holes and Rio waved off the skeets as he went around and made sure each of the three remained dead while also watched from afar as the 10 mechs took down one of the Brat’mar and chased the other off…though there were only 4 of them left standing at the end.

  Another neo ran over to him and Rio flew up to land on the shoulder, then the Regular pilot ran him across the battlefield to a secure area before heading back out to help clean up what was left of the V’kit’no’sat and establish a perimeter in case more were on their way…and with the local jamming devices they were setting up to minimize Star Force sensors and their battlemeld coordination, the odds of ambushes were considerably greater. Rio was going to need to bring sensor beacons in and set them up everywhere to fill in the gaps, for armor and mech systems working in conjunction were not going to pick up anything beyond line of sight with this much jamming in play.

  Another neo guarding the recently established evacuation site…given that it still had some intact ships sitting on the tarmac…commed him and offered his ride, but Rio declined. Instead he headed over to the Morpheus-class mech that was standing guard along with a quartet of drones. Rio had it open up and he flew into the hatch, sliding inside with the two occupants and taking a seat on the floor.

  “The neo can cover this location. Get your star moving and out to the damaged mechs. We have to recover pilots before they can get picked off by Zen’zat. I’ve seen one killed already, and I know they’re waiting for another opportunity. I’ll provide coordination and psionic assistance if we encounter anymore Brat’mar, but right now we need to go Zen’zat hunting.”

  “Gladly,” the Archon in the controller’s seat said while the Regular that was piloting the Morpheus itself didn’t respond other than getting them into motion. The Archon mentally ordered the four pilotless mechs to fall into formation behind the Morpheus, and Rio rode with them out towards the battlefield as he looked on sensors for dead spots where the V’kit’no’sat may have been hiding jammers…for the Zen’zat were using them cagily to move in and around the various structures and downed mechs, often running across the gaps so fast that no one could shoot them because they weren’t in range, then disappearing from sensors again and unable to be tracked down once a mech or skeet got to their location.

  Rio kept checking the battle in the air as well, seeing that what fighting was left amounted to a few I’rar’et poking the perimeter in order to keep the skeets from massing against the ground troops as they fought an aggressive retreat away from the spaceport trying to bleed Star Force of as many mechs as they could without going down themselves.

  But they weren’t Rio’s concern…the Zen’zat were, for right now they were acting as assassins and looking to take down the mechwarriors when they exited their dead machines or going after them inside them. Rio picked up on one such attempted to the west and the Morpheus star responded in time, seeing a large explosion rip open the heart of the mech as a Zen’zat ran off under ranged weaponsfire that wasn’t accurate enough to hit him, though Rio had hoped they’d get a lucky hit in.

  They didn’t, but when Rio exited the mech and flew down to the site of the explosion he saw that a bit of the cocoon had remained, then he coordinated with the Archon inside to cut him out while standing guard against any more assassination attempts.

  The spaceport was theirs, but this was not safe territory yet. They’d have to clear and reinforce it heavily before they could open up the space doors and start accepting in the convoys of transports to evacuate the survivors…and he had no doubt that there would be Zen’zat lurking in the shadows to ambush the unarmored civilians as they transitioned here.

  Which meant that he was going to have to be spending a lot of time out of mech counter hunting them…along with Archon teams linked in battlemeld with the same objective.

  As long as the mechs and aerial division could keep sufficient numerical advantage to hold the V’kit’no’sat heavy hitters back from this location, and the navy outside could do the same, this was going to be a war of Zen’zat versus Archons with the prizes being the lives of the civilians yet to be evacuated…and Rio knew that they weren’t going to get them all out, so he set himself to the task of hunting the hunters rather than being a defender, and took most of the best Archons he had available with him for the same purpose as other Archons, Knights, and Commandos were deployed in defensive arrangements and escorts along the evacuation routes that were just now being set up to channel the panicked civilians that were running out of buildings everywhere and heading straight for the nearest Star Force troops they could find…

  Which the Zen’zat took advantage of, killing many in the chaos before Rio returned the favor and started a killcount of his own that would cross into triple figures within two days…but that was only the beginning of the fight on the Ribbon, for the V’kit
’no’sat had come here for answers and they weren’t going to give up their captive population until they had learned from them who among the V’kit’no’sat was sponsoring the rogue Zen’zat.

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