Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  “Welcome to the new age,” she said dryly. “Was there something in particular you wanted, or were you just roaming the area and felt like stopping in for a chat?”

  “Need some space?”

  “No…I didn’t mean it like that. I’m alright. I just hate losing people.”

  “Ditto, but we have to keep pressing on. The lizards are growing new troops and building more wisps by the minute. We can’t be reckless, but the invasion has to keep moving forward.”

  “No, we need to catch our breath and figure this out before we hit another target.”

  “What are we missing?”

  Larissa sighed. “I don’t know. This is too drastic a change. I admit, the lizards have always been inventive, but we’re seeing a slew of new technologies and techniques. These aren’t the same lizards we’re used to dealing with.”

  “Actually, if they’d continued to let us dominate them that would have been out of character.”

  “Something has changed, and until we get a feel for it I don’t think we should press forward with any amount of pace. That damn sensor dampener is going to cause more problems than we’ve encountered already.”

  “This may have been a test of it as well,” Liam noted. “To see if we could detect the boundary walls and chambers like this.”

  “And with their interstellar transmitters currently out of reach they’ve no doubt been feeding that data back to the rest of their empire. Damn it.”

  Liam looked at her, but didn’t say anything more.

  “Alright, point taken. But we have to find a way to detect the boundary walls if there are any more of them out there.”

  Liam pulled a small device out of the pack on his back and set it on the floor. A moment later a series of holograms sprung up around them with the trailblazer using a telepathic interlink to make adjustments on the buttonless little white disc. The three images moved out to form a circle around the device, with Larissa and Liam making up two of the five points around the circumference.

  “She back with us?” Morgan’s full body image asked Liam.

  “Yeeessss,” Larissa answered for him, annoyed more with herself than anything. Hesitancy wasn’t an Archon trait.

  “I’ve been on site for the past 6 hours,” Kian said from Larissa’s left on the impromptu little Jedi council ring. “I’ve been taking point blank sensor readings and I cannot detect a subsurface wall ring, nor any dead zones. Even if they have the full setup within this colony, without the wall they can’t pin us there and we’ll have the option of retreat.”

  “And the fighter swarms?”

  “I’ve got most of the mods on the Axius mechs reconfigured to anti-air, so if they try the same trick again they’re not going to have so easy a go at it. That said, I think we should proceed a bit more cautiously in the coming days. I want to double up with the Bsidd on this one.”

  “Calavari are doubling up with Mainline,” Morgan pointed out. “It’ll take a lot longer to knock colonies off the list, but it’ll take a lot more of an ambush to overwhelm us if they do have any more blindsides coming our way.”

  “Agreed,” Larissa said, pushing aside her past worries. There’d be plenty of time for thinking going forward, and if the lizards were using a new playbook it was best to read a few more pages of it. “But let’s start with a few probing attacks before we mass into the city.”

  “Allow me,” Conner insisted. “If Liam or one of you can take my assault list, I can have Canderous split up and play vanguard for all future hits. Their drone mechs and fighters are a good stick to poke the lizards with, and they certainly don’t mind going in first.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Morgan mentioned, “but the lizards waited a long time before springing the trap. They might just wait out the probes.”

  Liam raised a finger, prompting everyone else to stop talking, for they knew his mannerisms well enough to recognize he had just come up with a new idea. “Morgan, how deep are those sensor dampening plates located?”

  “Mostly just below ground level. The techs have found a few deeper below the largest buildings. They’re speculating that those were added after construction rather than during.”

  “What if we have the Canderous mechs escort a remote drilling unit, either attached to a mech or something independent, that can break through that shell and stick a conventional sensor probe underneath? If the plating is all more or less at the same depth, we should be able to get a peek at what’s underground.”

  “That’ll take an awfully big transmitter to penetrate the surrounding structures,” Larissa pointed out.

  “Yeah, but that could work,” Connor said, thinking hard. “We’d have to cannibalize a naval drone, but we’ve already got reclamation equipment here that can be converted to digging purposes. Patch in the sensor array and we’ve got a short range trap detector.”

  “Might have to sink it down in a few locations to cover the entire city,” Kian added, “but I like the idea.”

  “And we can use it to bait the lizards out if we bring it in to search for the wall rings...wait, never mind. We can just use a low flying drone for that if we don’t care about being stealthy.”

  “Are the walls sensor stealthed laterally or just on the caps?” Larissa asked Morgan.

  “Just the caps, but even then they can’t hide against that close of a scan at that magnitude of power. I think the lizards designed them to fool orbit scans, not anything down on the surface.”

  “Fighters?”

  “I don’t know,” Morgan wavered. “We only have one wall to work with, and we can’t rebury it to find out. Until we detect another one this is all just guesswork, aside from the subsurface bunkers.”

  “We’ll need a calibration run to determine how many drill points we need before we send Canderous in,” Liam added.

  “How do Kara’s sensors stack up?” Connor wondered.

  Morgan shook her head. “The advanced design can’t compensate for her lack of power. Already had her try and it didn’t work.”

  “Are we holding back the Clan strike teams, or still sending them in first to hit priority targets?” Kian asked, looking at Larissa.

  “I’d say simultaneously, otherwise the Canderous units might draw too much attention.”

  “If we do the sensor sweeps and the colonies come up clean, do we still want to double up on targets?” Liam asked.

  “Yes,” Larissa said firmly, then raised a hand to dismiss any thoughts of her still being gun shy. “There still might be new surprises in store for us, so let’s just pull back a little and lay the hammer down hard until we see their full basket of tricks. After that, which will probably be the end of this planetary invasion, we can get more economical with our troop deployments…what?”

  “I agree,” Liam said, “but I’m still waiting on the day when the lizards start building their cities with bombs and just destroy them when whenever we put troops inside. The larger force we use to take them the greater incentive that will be.”

  Connor sighed. “That would fit right in their playbook.”

  “I don’t think so,” Morgan differed. “While I admit they certainly could do that, it…oh, damn.”

  “Yeah,” Connor agreed, seeing the same thought process that had just gone through his mind go through Morgan’s. “Exactly.”

  “I don’t think they have the yields for that,” Kian differed. “And even if they go piecemeal their own buildings are going to block a lot of the damage. They can’t kill all of our troops with a trap like that, and I think they’d start with a kamikaze bomb tank or wisp before they tried anything on that scale.”

  “Well those two caveats are lovely in and of themselves,” Connor commented.

  “Could we do it?” Morgan wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Liam said, thinking hard. “Certainly not the most economical way of destroying a colony. It also depends on how strong the buildings are. Ours can stand up to a lot more than the lizards’ can. Most effective way would be a
kinetic impact, but you can’t do that from inside…unless you had an asteroid in orbit and just called it down, but you’d lose the surprise effect and give time for the ground troops to evacuate.”

  “Scale it down then. What if we booby-trapped individual buildings with our biggest bombs?”

  “We could,” Liam agreed. “And to a lesser extent I think the lizards could too. If they ever go that route…”

  “We start leading with all drone mech and even infantry units,” Larissa said, pointing out the obvious countermeasure.

  “Or just blast them from orbit like normal,” Connor added.

  “That’s probably why we haven’t seen that tactic yet,” Liam pointed out. “But I wouldn’t put it past them at some point going forward if we have to keep using ground assaults to disable orbital defenses.”

  “Damn it,” Morgan’s hologram swore. “Other than taking our chances, do we have any way of detecting bombs of that size prior to launching an assault?”

  “In theory, we should be able to scan inside buildings so long as they aren’t sensor stealthed,” Liam said, thinking a few steps ahead as he spoke. “A bomb of that size would be very large, given lizard technology…”

  “Which is improving,” Kian added.

  “Granted, but you know as well as I do why starships don’t have self-destructs. Too much mass to move around. Blowing up buildings is no different, especially when you want to wreck several blocks at once. If the lizards want to build that big of a bomb we should be able to see it from orbit if we look closely. If they put it underground that will dampen the blast. If they sensor shield an area we’re going to be careful of it regardless.”

  “So a sensor shield above the ground line?” Morgan asked.

  “Yeah, I’d say that’d be bomb bait. If they put one below ground they could kill a fair number of our troops, but they couldn’t get enough of them to be worth the effort. It’d have to be above ground.”

  “Or in a cruiser they fly in kamikaze,” Larissa wondered.

  “We can stop or dampen those with mobile shield generators,” Liam dismissed. “Have you guys seen many det packs recently?”

  “Not really,” Morgan answered. “They’ve pretty much given up on those attacks against infantry. I’ve seen a few try to grab a mech leg and do damage, but our infantry just shoots them down from range.”

  “Same,” Larissa agreed. “They’ve become very selective in where they deploy them, probably because they can’t be sure to kill us with a single blast given our armor strength nowadays.”

  “Good,” Liam declared. “Let’s hope they stick with that mindset. All the same, we need to start working on some defenses against a larger implementation of that tactic if they choose to push it in that direction.”

  6

  October 24, 2755

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  Iden dashed through the forest and up to the clearing surrounding the lizard colony that was their target along with 9 other Archons from Clans Jinx, Sneaky Fox, Stark, and Vulcan. There was barely a strip of 50 meters separating the trees from the outermost buildings, but Iden suspected that had been deliberate, for on scouting this colony they’d detected another hidden underground wall buried beneath the trees ready to be sprung up at a moment’s notice, trapping whatever Star Force troops were inside.

  They assumed there were hidden bunkers underneath the city that held more infantry, tanks, and wisps but that remained to be seen. It had been decided to skip this colony and attack the others without the traps, as they’d been doing for the past 3 months. All of those that they’d hit up until now had been normal colonies, with this being the second ‘trap city’ as they’d come to be called. Problem was, it had an orbital defense tower like all the others, and if they wanted to be able to operate high altitude aircraft and bring down transports anywhere in this area it had to go down along with its neighbors.

  Those were being taken down as the colonies fell one by one to the seemingly inevitable march of Star Force troops across the planet, but that slow march was going to be hindered even more so if they left this orbital gun intact until the final days of the planetary assault. It’d been decided to send a team in to take out the tower and the tower alone, then leave the rest of the city to rot while they moved on to other targets. Trouble was, with so many troops conceivably hidden inside waiting to be released, a standard Clan assault to target the key structures was problematic.

  Their solution was to send an Archon team in on foot and exploit the vulnerability of having the forest that close to the perimeter, which Iden now was as he sprinted across the gap and jumped up onto the wall, sticking there for a moment then climbing up with no one else aware of his presence other than his fellow wall-crawling Archons.

  Sonya-837 and Chrissie-10398 had the lead on this mission, being a master/apprentice pairing and bringing their experience and unique psionic skills to bear while Iden and the others were strikers and rangers. They were all carrying heavy packs with jump packs layered underneath, making their transit a bit clunky, but destroying the tower with psionics alone was almost impossible, hence the myriad of explosives that he and the others were carrying.

  Send a missile in and it’d get shot down by the numerous anti-air turrets within the city. Carry their own version of det packs in on the backs of Archons that the lizard infantry would have to counter and the odds increased greatly. That said, this strike was incredibly bold.

  Which Iden rather liked.

  When he got to the rooftop he followed the pair from Clan Vulcan at a running pace, crossing the wide building and jumping across the street below to the next…and having to fall a couple of stories in the process. He cushioned his fall with his jump pack easily enough and ran on, with the other seven Archons doing likewise as they avoided the streets entirely and pressed to get as far into the city as they could before being spotted.

  The little armored fleas had come in at night for just that reason, and were able to hop across the cityscape with remarkable speed until a patrolling wisp finally shot a pink blip down into the rooftop 12 meters away from Iden, blasting a small crater out of it and blowing up a pyre of vaporized plating and water, for the recent rain was still puddled everywhere.

  A telepathic prompt from Sonya told everyone they were headed indoors, with them altering their running direction as soon as the Vulcans pulled the fighter down and into a nearby building with their psionics. Once it was out of line of sight they broke away from their run to the next building jump and swerved into a rooftop entrance, taking the stairwell that led down into the building.

  “Stay tight and focus on point defense,” Sonya told them over the comm. “We’ll handle ranged targets.”

  Doing as told, Iden pushed out his Ikrid and Pefbar to cover the rooms closest to them, traveling behind a Clan Sneaky Fox ranger. Most of the minds he came across were already unconscious by the time he sensed them, with the lead pair knocking them out at range like she’d said. If they missed one or couldn’t handle a large number of them then it’d be his and the others’ job to take them down, either through Ikrid blackout or by shooting them, but their mission wasn’t to kill lizards this time, it was to kill the defense tower, so they couldn’t get distracted with firefights and had to keep moving at all times.

  For Archons that meant constant running, but that wasn’t a challenge considering the kind of workouts Iden and the others did. The mage and padawan weren’t moving too fast so he wasn’t having a problem keeping up, but he knew that trouble was all around them and could be shoved down their throats at any moment. The only way they were going to get where they wanted to go was to not let the lizards zero in on their position and stack bodies against them. That was the trick to this entire mission and why it was so dicey.

  It was certainly doable, but they couldn’t take a frontal assault mentality. They had to be ghosts as often as they could, disengaging more often than not and confusing the enemy as to whic
h direction they were headed. They couldn’t take a direct line to the tower or the lizards could prepare for them and put so many infantry between them and the target that there would be no way even a trailblazer could get through them all.

  If that did happen, Iden had already been told that they’d revert to secondary targets, taking out some anti-air towers or ground defense turrets and try to pull the lizards attention back away from the primary target. If that didn’t work they’d have to improvise, and pull out if necessary. They weren’t going to risk another normal Clan assault to get the towers, though the first one hadn’t triggered the traps until the mop up crew had come in to fight the army within rather than hit the defenses. That was probably to maximize the number of Star Force kills they could get, but now that their secret had been revealed there was no guarantee they’d wait as long at this location.

  So this was going to be it, one way or another. If they could sneak in and blow it, great. If not they’d work around the tower and neutralize this city until the end…then pound it to rubble from orbit. A single defense tower could do a lot of damage coupled with the city defense shield, but it was the combination of overlapping defenses that gave this new lizard tactic its true teeth. A command ship could probably take a tower 1v1, so if they had to they’d wait and deal with it that way.

  But they really needed the airspace clear to keep hammering the surrounding colonies, so Iden and the others were determined to make this work. They kept close, running a staggered two-wide formation with each a step ahead of their buddy as they ran through corridors and down stairwells, using some ladders where they had to, but avoiding all lifts that could be computer overridden. The Archon team traveled all the way down into the substructure and into the shallow tunnels that ran underneath the city streets, allowing them to pass into another area without making themselves visible.

  The trail of sleeping lizards, however, was quite obvious, so as soon as they found a empty area the team disappeared, avoiding lizards rather than subduing them so they could sneak off and keep the enemy confused. That took time, and Sonya made sure to keep them heading away from the tower more often than not. That made the trek across kilometers of city seem like Frodo’s hike to Mordor. They stopped twice to rest, eat, and catch a bit of sleep, then after two days of skulking around in the undercity they finally got near the tower.