“I know, I’ve never heard of it before either, but it fits with their MO.”
“That Type-1 is going to light us up over ground.”
“I’ll help with the voltron’s anti-air. At minimum we can get it to waste some of its ammo on us.”
“And when the transports nearby reload it?”
“I’m open to any better ideas,” Kip floated.
Another mechwarrior broke in. “I’m onboard with trading plasma for missiles. Costlier for them.”
“And our armor,” another added.
“These guys are up to something,” Kip reminded them. “We need to interfere however we can.”
“Alright, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“You and me both, buddy,” Kip agreed as his five mech segments finished linking together as they floated above the ground. He flipped it upright when the legs fully formed and set it down, then transferred the energy going to the anti-grav into the other systems. The mech was so heavy and the anti-grav units so small that it took nearly all the power generation it had to move the individual pieces around, then when it transformed into the bipedal mech the internal components reconfigured into jump jets that operated off a capacitor that was even now beginning to fill.
All the other systems came online, drawing power from the five generators and taking away its full flight capability. Sensors, weapons, shields, and muscle fibers all began drawing from the active energy supply as Kip stood the mech on the ground and began walking it forward, choosing the anti-missile shield variety and getting its matrix forming, knowing that it would be many kilometers before they’d come within range of the plasma hurricane the Type-1 was capable of producing.
The starscreams did the same, shifting from standard shields to the variant and giving them a chance of pulling this off. With the one big mech and its ten flankers they began running across the ground, diverting to the right slightly to work their way around a small Protovic city enroute to the walker that was clearly visible on the horizon behind it.
Another round of missiles popped up from the Type-1 and Kip readied the anti-air units on the Voltron’s shoulders as he chose a deployment configuration and sent it out to the starscreams…with them heading forward and spreading out to give the Skarrons wider spaced targets so they couldn’t get double hits on missile strikes. He assumed they’d be shooting at the voltron, and this way the starscreams could knock down a few more missiles as they flew overhead.
“Looks like you could use a hand,” a very familiar voice broke through the comm as the missiles were halfway to him.
“Cora?” he asked, confused and a bit distracted.
“Who else?”
“I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“Noticed. Got a couple Easter eggs here if you want them.”
“Seriously?” he asked, surprised, as the missiles continued to accelerate and his anti-air systems began tracking them.
“Got two Mk. 3s ready for hot drop if you’ll let me come down and play.”
“You see the bastard shooting at me?”
“Yep.”
“Go say hi.”
“With pleasure,” Cora said as she saw the missiles beginning to hit Kip’s group of mechs. She cut the comm and sent a message to the transport in orbit to go ahead and detach, with Kip’s coordinates already preprogramed into the navigational program.
The big transport released two spherical pods of considerable size from berths on the underside, with them coming out of racks in a specialized bay. The specialized dropships accelerated towards the planet, coming down into the upper atmosphere within minutes and heading on an angled trajectory to get to Kip’s location. Cora watched her fellow trailblazer fend off round after round of missiles as she fell towards the planet, hoping they didn’t get too much through their shields but also hoping that he kept the Type-1 distracted.
The two pods passed into missile range of the Type-1 but didn’t get any response fire for another thirty seconds…then missile streaks began to come out towards them en mass, with some still heading towards Kip.
“Looks like they noticed us,” Jarvan-1381 commented from the other enormous pod.
“The shells can take it…but we may need another lift afterwards.”
“Understatement of the year,” the fellow Clan Scorpion mechwarrior specialist said dryly.
A few moments later the pods began to take hits, with their thick armor absorbing the impacts after the limited shields went down. That hurt their insertion angle a bit, now that they didn’t have the invisible wings to navigate with, but such a situation had been anticipated and built into the design with the anti-gravs still capable of keeping them on course, though without the shield the front of the giant sphere began to sprout an ablative fireball of reentry friction in addition to the missile impacts assaulting it.
Watching the status telemetry, Cora rode in the shell down all the way to the surface, then braked hard allowing the damaged pod to set down on the surface with only a tiny thump as its landing legs sunk in and stabilized the giant egg as it continued to take missile hits, some nearly getting all the way through.
“We’re down,” she told Kip as she powered up the mech inside.
“We’ll get there as soon as we can,” her fellow trailblazer reported, with her seeing his group now running at top speed since the Type-1 was no longer shooting at them.
“We’ve got this,” she promised, triggering the pod release.
“Damn straight,” Jarvan agreed as his pod also began to crack apart along a single seam. The two halves rotated out exposing one side of the protective cocoon and the Archon walked his giant mech out, but Cora’s shell had been damaged enough that that pivot function wasn’t working so she triggered a secondary release and the two pieces flower-petalled out, with her hitting the jump jets and shooting her Mk. 3 madcat into the sky in a giant hop that got her outside the pod.
It took a couple of moments but the missile streaks hitting the pod eventually switched targets to the big mechs that had landed about a kilometer apart from one another. As soon as they did the ‘missile boxes’ on the mechs returned fire, save for the Mk. 3s didn’t have missiles. They were prototypes that Kip had been working on in conjunction with Cora and designed specifically to fight the Skarron walkers. They were slightly taller and massed more than a Mk. 2 Hoth, with both shoulder boxes containing all anti-air weaponry.
When those boxes came online the missile plumes disappeared in a torrent of topaz light as the rapid-fire Sammies ate up the missiles and began to push the explosive collision point back further up the stream given the anti-air’s exceptional range and firing speed. Cora and Jarvan both began walking their enormous mechs forward, with nothing but an occasional missile or two getting through to hit their shields.
“How’s that?” Cora asked as the Skarron walker continued to fire relentlessly.
“I want one,” Kip said seriously.
“We’ve got four more upstairs for you.”
“Sweet. How’s it handle?”
“Like a fat turret, but straight line speed is good. And it can run rings around their walkers. Everything looks good, but this is the first battle test so feel free to criticize,” she said as the Type-1 finally stopped firing and wasting its missiles now that it saw that they weren’t getting through.
“Show me some fireworks.”
“Not quite in range yet,” she said as she and Jarvan lightly ran the big, backwards-canted leg mechs across the ground with a touch of a hop in their strides. That was as much as they could manage given their weight, but in future years Cora knew they’d work on that and get them more speed. Right now though what they needed was a slugger to take on the big enemy walkers…and that’s exactly what Cora had given Kip using his basic designs and adding her own special touch.
“Do you want the starscreams to move up with you?”
Cora frowned. “Not yet. Let’s just see how we handle solo.”
Jarvan ta
gged one of the Type-4s that was closest to them and Cora saw the icon flash on her battlemap. “He’s all yours,” she told him, adjusting her line a bit more to starboard and tagging another for herself.
The two fat madcats trotted off towards their targets with Cora stitching hers with Sammie fire before her weapons came into range and was pleased to see she was able to whittle its shields down some 7% with those alone. That wasn’t something that she could have done with lachars, which was why all Star Force anti-air was eventually going Sammie once they worked out the conversion issues.
Cora kept her madcat moving forward, holding off on her primary weapons and getting within mauler range. Before she was quite there she opened up with the four cannons on the central body of the mech and bathed the Type-4 in mauler blasts that were spreading out and becoming impotent but still containing some damaging effects. With each step closer she got they became more condensed and dangerous, eating through the walker’s shields and then the armor, with the Skarron walker going down before she even got all the way up to it.
The tick-like design slumped to the ground with the front half of it melted off and its legs collapsing like toothpicks beneath it when they lost power.
“Well that was easy,” she said, ignoring the others and heading straight for the more distant Type-1.
“I’ll get the rest of the little ones,” Jarvan said, killing his a few seconds after hers.
“Give me some support fire when you can,” she said in agreement, focusing the primary weapons in her madcat’s two bulky arms and aiming them at the middle segment of the lateral Type-1. She was coming in at it from the flank…which normally would have been suicide given that all 7 segments would be able to target her with plasma.
Before she got within plasma range she opened fire with one of her small cleansing beams, hitting the wall-like shield that the Skarron walker put up in between it and the mech. The beam and shield collided and held out against each other for more than a second before the pale white beam disappeared. When its twin in the other arm fired a moment later the shield again reappeared with the distortion effect but breached almost immediately on impact.
The rest of it cut into the hull, then Cora began carving out a section of it like she was working on a giant pumpkin…all outside the walker’s plasma range.
Looking like it was totally outmatched the Type-1 fired off a gravity grapple, with the device hitting her mech in the left leg and nearly knocking her over. She struggled for balance and nearly had it until the device powered up and sucked her mech down face first into ground and held her there.
“Cora?” Jarvan asked.
She tried to leverage the mech back up, but the odd angle it had her pinned was giving her trouble.
“A little help,” she asked.
A cleansing beam shot out from Jarvan’s mech and sliced a swatch across the ground in between her and the walker, easily cutting the power cord to the grapple and releasing the gravity trap. Cora, now with her mech’s muscles seeming to work again, worked her boxy arms and legs around and got the mech back on its feet.
“Thanks,” she said, having antipicated that tactic but she’d been unable to get any of her weaponry pointed at the device or cable due to the way she fell. “Let’s cut this guy up.”
“Mid section?”
“Yes,” she said, targeting both cleansing beams where she’d previously been firing as Jarvan did the same. With the beams alternating as they recharged, the four bright but pale white beams sliced through the insanely thick armor on the walker with little effort, cutting up the middle segment to the point where it became dead weight and ceased to function.
Another gravity grapple came out and hit Cora again, this time landing between her mech’s legs and sucking her down into the dirt but she remained standing. Her arms dropped and nearly touched the ground while her mech’s feet sunk in deep into the soil but she remained standing. With some effort she got her body rotated slightly and fired a mauler blast out from her mech’s protruding chest and cut the power cord herself, with her mech’s handling once again returning to normal.
As soon as she did that the Type-1 began launching all the missiles it had from all six intact segments, pinning both the Mk. 3s down as they had to defend against it. While they were preoccupied the six intact segments on the walker detached from the damaged one, creating two three-segment sections that began walking towards the mechs as fast as they could trying to get within plasma range as they kept the mechs pinned with missiles.
“Looks like they want to slug it out,” Jarvan commented as his mech was throwing so many tiny Sammie blasts into the missile cloud it looked like he was a wizard hurling magic to keep the weapons at bay.
“Shall we oblige?”
“Since this is a test run, why not?”
“Let’s go,” she said, beginning to walk the mech closer and giving the Skarrons what they wanted, eventually coming into plasma range while the missile storm continued, but they didn’t stop there, with both madcats moving into their own mauler range and unloading on the two segments of the Type-1 and giving their heavy shields a good test…but in the end it was no contest and the pair of madcats destroyed the largest walker the Skarrons had without even taking a lick of hull damage, then they got around to cleaning up the remaining Type-4s before Kip’s group could even arrive.
6
July 3, 2549
Interstellar Space
Mid jump
Cal-com woke from his sleep early as a soft, repetitive tone brought him back to full consciousness as it grew ever louder in his tube. The Voku’s sight returned as he gave focus to his single eye, previously ignored as he floated inside the vertical null g chamber that encased his body. He reached forward and pressed a few buttons, canceling the weightlessness and audio suppression a moment before he triggered the release and the tube split in front of him.
The Voku naval commander stepped out, seeing one of his advisors waiting for him in the rest ward where hundreds of other tubes resided, many with occupants and more without. Neither Cal-com nor the other Voku had personal quarters, for when they weren’t sleeping they were working or training in some fashion, with time spent on anything else being viewed as a waste for military personnel.
As Cal-com looked at the slightly shorter Voku Hem-ra bowed slightly in apology. “We have received an update from our scout ships. The enemy fleet is larger than expected by 32%. I assumed you would want to prepare before our arrival.”
“You assumed correctly. Were the ships discovered?”
“Not according to the transmission.”
Cal-com nodded. “I will be in the oracle shortly.”
Hem-ra bowed again, dipping his elongated head in a curt gesture before leaving Cal-com to his personal prep. The commander, fully nude but with no exterior genitalia to be concerned about, walked over to a curvy corridor that wound its way through many pod sections and branches before he finally arrived at the prep area. There he took care of biological needs and cleansing before pulling on a body-hugging suit of clothing and thin shoes that covered his wider than Human feet. He added a few accoutrements to his arms and popped out his eyepiece, revealing his natural line of three eyes beneath.
Each was tiny and blacker than his skin with two ports set between them that the artificial eye plugged into. It was a technological implant that all Voku received once completing their basic training, but one that required a power source that Cal-com now had to replace. He took out the small charging bead and swapped it out with a new one despite the fact that the one he had was only a few weeks old. Prior to going into combat it was expected of all soldiers to replace the bead to give them maximum longevity with the enhanced eyesight.
The lateral rectangle that stretched across 80% of the width of his face actively scanned in a number of different modes as well as allowed Cal-com to see in wavelengths that his natural eyes could not. Those eyes still saw through the crystal-like implant, for otherwise they would atrophy, with
the sensory enhancements being added to the visual input from the device and being smoothed together by the processing circuitry just beneath the ports that functioned off of the charging bead as well.
With the new bead in place he reinserted the small pylons into the ports and sealed the visor back in place with a double click. Good to go he walked out of the prep area and headed towards the nearest transit terminal, finding one some 40 seconds of walking away.
It was a personal model, barely larger than his rest chamber, and when Cal-com stepped in he had the cover seal over him and an options menu arise on the panel before him. He chose the oracle and the tiny pod whisked him away through the monstrous conglomerate that was thousands of individual base ships and a scattering of specialized ones that could be configured into various combinations to suit battle needs. All of them had been designed to be interconnected, with them now forming a giant jumpship/warship that was traveling between stars.
The command center on the conglomerate was the oracle, which Cal-com got to with only a bit more walking after exiting the pod. When he arrived he stepped through a circular door and into a wide open plain that only had a few workstations popping up here and there, with most of the 5 acre wide area simply being empty, which was due to their being in transit. During battle conditions this chamber would be packed with personnel, though it wouldn’t be this large.
Cal-com walked over to what looked like a random section of floor and knelt down, pressing his hand into a soft panel and triggering a transformation. A pedestal and two display monitors rose up out of the floor and gave him his command station which he quickly pulled up the scouting reports on…seeing as Hem-ra had said, a much larger Skarron fleet than had been anticipated. It was still within their power to handle, but the amount of warships they were throwing at the Humans was beginning to mount towards the level they were attacking the Voku with…to no avail.
The Humans were temporarily weaker than the Voku but the Elders had said they would grow stronger if they were preserved, and given what little time he had spent with them, especially warlord Paul, he didn’t doubt it. Never before had the Elders led the Voku astray, and while still somewhat primitive in technology the Humans had shown considerable ingenuity in their combat strategies and weapons development.
Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) Page 5