Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  1

  July 1, 2755

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  Sam Nestor held his skeet in a steady line as he glanced at the battlemap, seeing the rest of his 10-man squadron flying around him at nearly maximum velocity. While their engines could go faster their shields could only handle so much sustained friction, and traveling up to a high altitude for the diminished drag would actually take longer to reach their target so they’d decided to punch through the densest region overland as quickly as possible, with each of the fighters being a fiery meteor on its way to the distress beacon.

  That beacon had gone out with orders, drawing all mobile units nearby to a particular colony that had inexorably sprouted containment walls and opened up a flood of lizard reinforcements from below, including a cloud of wisps that was now measuring over 300,000 and still growing. The Star Force aerial craft that had been on site previously were now gone, either shot down or retreated, and heading directly into that mess was a virtual death sentence. Naval assistance would have been very nice right about now, but a few limited attempts had already been thwarted.

  The main defense tower for the colony was already down, but enough nearby ones were still online to prevent any warship from coming within firing range. Despite that fact, one of the command ships had flown down and got its shields hammered long enough to unleashed three Ka’sevron rounds towards the colony, set to detonate in the atmosphere rather than hit the surface where their troops were, with the intent being to knock down a lot of the fighters while they were grouped so close together.

  None of the three rounds made it to the target, one getting sniped down by a lucky phaser shot coming from the nearby colonies while the other two were hit with anti-air missile swarms from the same sources. The Clan team that had gone in to knock out the anti-air defenses in this city had paved the way for the skeets to come in on a very low ground level, but rise high enough up and you’d expose yourself to the long range anti-air from the neighboring locations, which unfortunately the descending missiles had to pass through.

  Sam was currently flying under that ceiling, having been pulled off another assault and redirected to the ambush site along with numerous other units. He could see a large group of Calavari Valeries approaching from further away to the south, plus a scattering of Canderous remote fighters being controlled from orbit. Everyone else was further away, leaving Sam’s skeet squadron and a few others nearby as the closest reinforcements.

  His squadron had been configured for anti-air operations, but a few of the others had anti-tank and standard variety skeets, plus a few gunships that were going to be badly needed here. He knew they couldn’t dive into the swarm, but if they could entice a portion of it out from the city to chase them they could double back and pick them apart slowly…not fast enough to get to the troops inside the colony, or what was left of them, but they had to start somewhere.

  This was by far the largest concentration of wisps the lizards had deployed, and they were all coming up out of subsurface hangars. That was insane, and made it look all the more obvious that this was some sort of preplanned trap…but to what end? Even if they killed all the Star Force troops within the city that was only a small portion of the invasion army. It was true that they were having trouble beating the lizard defenses down as quickly as they’d originally hoped, but this one debacle wasn’t going to stop the inevitable progress they were making across the planet, so what the hell were they thinking?

  And more importantly, if they had anticipated an invasion and prepared for it, what was special about this one colony, or were there more of these wall rings hidden around other sites?

  Another contact on the battlemap nearing his squadron at high speed caught Sam’s eye. At first he assumed it was some type of missile, wondering if a Ka’sevron had been smuggled down to the surface and fired off at low range to beat the anti-air defenses, but they weren’t built for gravity resistant flight. The icon on it was definitely Star Force, but then he realized that it wasn’t a weapon per se, but rather a unit traveling at speeds the skeets could never hope to match and catching up with them quickly.

  Sam activated the comm channel reserved for his squadron. “Heads up, the Queen of Diamonds is in play.”

  “Music to my ears,” one of the other aerial Regulars replied as Kara’s icon shot by the squadron to their left and didn’t slow to keep pace with them.

  “Looks like she’s going on ahead. I know she’s nimble, but watch your firing lines when we get there. She may juke into them as easily as away, so keep a good margin when the fray starts.”

  “How are we playing this?”

  “Lightly,” Sam insisted. “Even the gunships can’t plow right in, so we’re going to have to nibble.”

  “The ground troops don’t have that kind of time,” another pilot said. “Have you seen the estimated number of ground troops they’ve deployed inside the walls?”

  “I know, but we’re no good to them dead. We can’t go anywhere near that swarm and expect to survive for more than thirty seconds.”

  “How about a 20 second hop in and out then?”

  “I feel the same way you do, but we can’t beat these guys, only trim them down a little. So let’s focus on that.”

  “What do you think she’s up to then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe heading to ground like Larissa did, or maybe she’s going to fight the swarm too. If she wants us to coordinate she’ll tell us, but aside from direct orders we’re not going to dive right into the lizards’ preferred kill zones.”

  “Agreed,” another pilot said. “Are we waiting for the gunships or start nibbling on our own?”

  “We can’t wait. Let’s see how many we can bait out and knock down. If they flood towards us we lead them off and hope someone else can exploit the opportunity.”

  “Copy that.”

  Sam looked ahead, through the battlemap since the camera view was little more than a fireball at this point. The shields were keeping his hull safe, but there was so much turbulence covering the needle-shaped energy barrier that it was disrupting a lot of his sensors. The battlemap connection was holding, so he could fly by that along with a few other means, but he was definitely isolated from the outside world in the friction cocoon, with the other members of his squadron flying nearby but far enough away that his turbulence wouldn’t interfere with them.

  The trip over was a lot of waiting, but when they were still more than two minutes out Kara’s signal intercepted the lizard swarm and he immediately saw two enemy signals wink out, followed by a stream of others. He didn’t know how she was taking them down, but the question as to whether she was going to ground or not appeared to have been answered.

  Sam gripped the flight controls eagerly, then began to decelerate well beyond the colony perimeter along with the rest of his squadron. The fireball faded and his camera views that covered the interior of the opaque canopy returned. He reset his shields to conform to the T-shape of his craft and felt a considerable amount of drag hit the skeet, slowing it even more until the normal feel returned and the magically appearing boundary wall came into view ahead on the horizon, with the bee hive of tiny green dots hovering over top of it so thick that they looked like a sick cloud.

  “Irelia, Candice…go knock on the door.”

  On his order two of the skeets stopped decelerating and shot on ahead while Sam and the others began taking on a holding pattern. In response a plume of wisps shot out from the cloud to intercept the pair, exchanging a bit of weapons fire, blue for Star Force and all pink for the lizards. That was a bad sign, meaning that these wisps were the upgraded variety with greater range and kill power. He jus
t hoped they hadn’t added shields yet.

  As the two Regulars swung around after killing five of the wisps, they dragged their pursuit with them and out away from the rest of the cloud, bring them back towards Sam and the others.

  The pilot cringed, for there were hundreds following them out and only the 10 of them, with Kara nowhere near them to help out.

  “Here we go. Don’t get greedy and pull back at the first sign of trouble. We can repeat as often as we want,” he said, readying his plasma scatterguns and taking aim at a clump of fighters nearing his position. He swerved slightly to the left and accelerated hard, getting up close to them and unloading into their general area, seeing bits of plasma hit their hulls and confirming that they had no shields, but aside from some smoke trails on the others only one went down.

  From that point on Sam was lost in the twists and turns of combat, seeing nothing else of the multifaceted battle as he was consumed with his little corner of it.

  “This is insane,” Namkrel said over the comm to his fellow mech pilots as they flew their Jamtror-class war machines towards the distant colony capped by a swarm of lizard wisps.

  “There’s an army of Bsidd in there, not to mention a lot of Humans, the Queen of Diamonds, and a trailblazer,” Hemror said firmly. “We’re going in.”

  “How?” another Calavari mechwarrior asked as their group of 34 jamtrors flew in aerial mode side by side, having gathered from three different battles at a series of rendezvous points while other units raced on ahead to relieve the besieged Star Force troops.

  “We go as far as we can by air, then fight the rest of the way in on the ground.”

  “I don’t think we can make it to the wall in the air.”

  “Neither do I, so we’re going to land outside and beat the crap out of their wisps until the skies clear enough for us to get over.”

  “Now that sounds like a plan,” Namkrel said, reversing himself. “For a second I thought we were going to fly straight into that mess.”

  “We’re not that reckless,” the Calavari said with a bit of sarcasm. “But we’re not going to let our allies die retaking our capitol.”

  “Have you looked at the battlemap?” another in the group asked via comm. “There are a lot of downed signatures in there.”

  “If all we can save is one, then we save one,” Hemror said, making it clear with his tone that there was no room for argument. “Then we avenge those that were ambushed.”

  “Alright, let’s do this,” Namkrel said, a mix of eagerness and worry. “Give us a waypoint.”

  “In a moment. Let’s see if we can’t sneak a little closer. Follow me down,” Hemror said, dropping his flying mech from altitude until he was skimming the grassy plain they were approaching by. It was the least contended approach, but with plenty of wisps circling around lazily above the city waiting for anyone to get close. The mechwarrior kept his bulky fighter moving quickly, waiting to see when the enemy would react to their presence.

  Like clockwork, when they came within 9 kilometers a group of wisps broke off and headed towards them, prompting Hemror to mark a position 3 kilometers away from the wall as their landing point. They would meet the enemy fighters before that, but their shields and weapons would be sufficient for them to engage and pass through them before they were overwhelmed.

  “Fire on targets of opportunity, but do not deviate from course. We have to stay grouped up or they’ll pick us apart individually,” he said, firing his single lachar at a distant wisp and missing…but managing to hit the one behind it. The beam punched a hole in the front of the fighter, penetrating the cockpit and hitting the pilot in the head, dropping the mostly intact craft to the ground where it plowed into the dirt in a debris-ridden streak.

  “That was a hell of a shot, Hem.”

  “Thanks,” he said, not bothering to mention his true target. He fired off a scattering of lachar blasts with less luck, hitting a few more of the tightly packed wisps but not taking any out of the sky with the weak weapon. When they came within range he fired off his scattergun along with the other pilots and filled the space ahead of them with cones of tiny plasma packets, catching dozens of wisps as they angled in and peppered the heavily armored and shielded hulls of the jamtrors with phaser strikes.

  Hemror was pleased to have killed at least two himself, though many of the wisps were flying from cone to cone so it was impossible to determine how much damage he alone had done. Still, there were many fighters falling out of the sky, though the mass that had come out to meet them seemed not to have been thinned, for they were all over them now and hitting their shields hard with the massed firepower.

  The Calavari pushed through it stubbornly, getting to the waypoint with some of their shields going down and their thick hull plates beginning to take hits, but Hemror came to a hover over the ground with some 12% remaining and immediately transformed his fighter, with it sprouting legs and four arms while it floated just above the ground. When the head piece finally formed he set it down, feet sinking into the grassy soil, and the power from the anti-grav transferred over to his shields, recharging them at more than double their previous rate.

  His light mech sprouted an anti-air cannon and the Calavari began pepping the sky above him with sammy blasts, targeting the approximate area he wanted the computer to chew up, then its quicker calculating capability tracked and hit the wisps within that area as they flew about, save for a few that were fast enough to avoid the shots. Most were too boxed together to maneuver much, so a lot of wisps started to fall out of the sky, especially when the other mechs landed and contributed their own fireworks.

  Hemror signaled for them to form up into a moving cluster and the biped machines began gathering around his mech, making for a virtually impenetrable airspace above and in front of them that the wisps simply couldn’t survive within. The 34 mechs kept together and walked forward, heading for the distant wall and downing aircraft while their shields began a slow recharge. They were still taking hits from range, but with every craft they shot down there was one less phaser hitting them…until more reinforcements began to come out and replaced those that were lost.

  By the time they reached the wall the air was so thick above them that they could barely make out the sun. Most of the mechs no longer had any shields and were taking hull hits, so they clustered up at the base of the wall and used it for some cover, allowing them to focus their sammies into half the airspace they had been covering before, increasing damage against the wisps while decreasing their own vulnerability. The worse hit mechs were pushed against the wall and mostly blocked by the others, allowing their shields to begin regenerating and hopefully allowing the group to eventually recycle themselves back into fighting shape.

  All the while aircraft were dropping from the sky like bugs, some of which actually fell into the mechs. Some of them were quick enough to reach up with their four mechanical arms and grab the pieces as they came down, but others were knocked off their feet and had their armor damaged by the larger hits.

  As they were turtled up there Hemror and the others got a course and a destination waypoint over the wall and into the city from an Archon. Crazy as that sounded, the Calavari were relieved because they trusted in the Archons’ judgement implicitly. So when the countdown ended and it was time to go, the lot of them began hovering up along the wall and holding to it as closely as they could while still taking hits to their weak shields.

  Those hits suddenly stopped as the wisps were pulled away by a large group of Valeries and skeets that roared in over their heads, effectively plowing a path for them to move into the city, but one that would only exist for a few short moments.

  Hemror recognized the opportunity for what it was, so when he reached the top of the wall he set down on it and immediately began running across to the far side that was some 350 meters away. When he got there he jumped off, using his anti-grav to slow him to a barely controlled fall, during which he transformed his jamtror back into fighter mode and shot off
across the plain towards the city’s outer buildings only meters above the ground.

  He took some fire as he went, despite the disruption occurring above him, but he made it to the outer edge with 8% shields left and set down there, wedging his fighter between two buildings on a narrow street and transforming back into mech mode. Others did the same nearby, scattering to find cover, then they began marching their way towards waypoints that he and a few others began laying down so they could gather in some larger openings and keep peppering the sky in groups as they forced their way towards the lizard tank and infantry armies.

  In the blink of an eye their fighter cover was gone and the swarms reformed over their heads, with a lot of them firing down into the streets from directly above, but with most of the skyline now obscured by the surrounding buildings.

  2

  July 1, 2755

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  Flying low to the ground two Star Force drone cutters skimmed under what was guessed to be the minimum depression angle of the lizard anti-orbital batteries, flying in close proximity to each other and the Canderous transport that was trying to keep up behind them. It was manned, while the cutters were not, and already the swarm of wisps over the besieged colony were starting to break their holding patterns and come out to meet them.

  There were multiple units already on site, ranging from the Calavari to the Clans to even a small Scionate team that had managed to sneak in close to the wall and deposit a mobile anti-air battery, but it wasn’t enough. As the hours passed more and more Bsidd signals within the city were going down, and until the massive amount of air cover was removed there was no easy way to get troops and mechs into the city with the walls blocking ground access…not that it would have been safe inside either, for the wisps were shooting anything alien that moved within their sight, meaning those Bsidd still alive were holed up within the buildings and not on the streets.