Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  “What was that?” she asked, pushing the others off her with Chrissie’s telekinetic help. “Damn it,” she added, sensing the pain in her padawan.

  “I’ll live,” the Archon said with a grimace, referencing the charred hole in her hand where some of the molten metal had dripped on her in the tumble.

  “Det pack,” Iden informed her, given that she hadn’t been linked into the battlemeld to see it coming. “And we’ve got a hole,” he said, telepathically pointing to the outside wall that was missing a huge chunk of structure, with a lot of the debris having fallen through it down to the next level.

  “Go,” Sonya said, still being on the bottom with Chrissie.

  One of the rangers beat Iden to it, running up to and jumping through the hole to fall several meters down to the next level. When the striker came down there was a flurry of phaser blips crisscrossing the area, and Iden’s weak shields went down after a few hits, having been drained of power in the explosion. Adding his plasma fire and psionics to the ranger’s they cleared out a perimeter around the hole and pushed the lizards back, allowing the others to come down and form up, with a regauntleted mage and padawan pushing into the lead and plowing through the sea of lizards pooling around them.

  They fought their way to the next stairwell, finding no barricades on it and quickly making their way down to ground level. They didn’t stop there, but went down further into the subsurface levels until they got to the security checkpoints that they hadn’t wanted to fight their way through to get in. Hitting them from the opposite side took some of the turrets out of alignment, but there was an even larger sea of lizards waiting for them, with plenty of room in the road-like hallways to stack their numbers and return fire en mass.

  “We’ve got the turrets,” Sonya told them as she and Chrissie leapt ahead, falling into small craters of lizards as they made room by emitting short range Fornax fields to allow them to leapfrog ahead into the tightly packed masses. “Plow the road guys.”

  Iden and the others knew what that meant and fired into the lizards closest to them, using the distraction the other two were making to their advantage but only killing or dislodging enough of the enemy infantry to create a momentary corridor for them to move through. It felt like him playing football all those years ago, with barely any gap gained, but even a little bit was enough for the Archons to wedge themselves in and through, then killing more just ahead as they turtled up into a group, allowing their bodies and shields to cover each other’s flanks as they powered their way through, with almost everyone having their shields at low to no power.

  Their armor held though, and with so many bodies in such a small space the lizards couldn’t get many shots off. They needed a bit of air between them and their targets to really dish out the phaser blasts and the Archons weren’t giving it to them. Like a pack of security guards escorting a celebrity through an animated crowd, the 8 Archons pushed their way up to the gap between the nearest two turrets that were now smoking with plasma damage.

  Both of the elite Archons were already ahead of them, attacking the other turrets and killing their gunners as they tried to pivot them around to shoot the opposite direction. They reminded Iden of grunt plasma turrets from Halo and fired the same, for they oddly weren’t equipped with the new phaser tech.

  Chrissie took one hit square on in midair, with the plasma blooming to cover almost her entire body as she punched through the green destructive cloud and landed on top of the turret, swinging her body around and whipping her armored foot into the lizard’s head who was sitting behind the protective blast plate. A few shots from her rifle into the control mechanisms junked that turret, with her armor holding up against both that intense burst of plasma as well as dozens of phaser hits.

  Iden knew she and Sonya were wearing the heavy armor varieties that their ranks afforded them, but they were still pushing the limits in order to take out those big guns, which he knew the lizards wouldn’t hesitate to fire into their own people in order to kill even one of the Archons.

  As that pair leapfrogged across the 7 turrets in total Iden and the others pushed their way through, with a lot of the standard variety lizards just jumping on them and grabbing for their weapons, arms, legs, or whatever other handholds they could get to drag them to a stop so the others could shoot them, but with the group battlemeld linked they could see it all coming and used a lot of impressive hand to hand combos and their psionic kin to intercept or knock away the grapples. Part way through they pushed out their formation and formed a small opening inside that Sonya and Chrissie jumped into, their armor ugly with melt marks and the padawan with a slight catch in her left arm movement where the elbow joint was no longer swinging smoothly.

  With the turrets gone all that was left was a football field-sized area full of lizard infantry. Getting beat up by the occasion phaser hits and the physical contact draining shields whenever they started to regenerate, the 10 man Archon team slugged their way across, killing a lot but with even more lizards piling into the underground road behind them as they came down from street level. This was the biggest spamming effort Iden had ever personally seen, and he was glad they’d decided to bring a full 10 Archons, for any less and he doubted they could have made their way across without enough armored bodies to soak up all the incoming damage.

  A telepathic signal from Sonya told them not to use their Fornax, for the lizard bodies around them were also a shield against the others, so Iden stopped throwing out any such attacks laterally and used his Lachka and limbs to fight off those nearest him. All he had to worry about was the two meters to his left, for he had an Archon in front of him, beside him on the right, and one behind him, giving the striker the ability to focus on his little part of the armored turtle and avoid taking hits from all around, though is left arm and hip were getting pretty chewed up.

  To counter that he switched with the striker to his right in an awkward transition, but that left both of their highest damaged areas facing each other and buying them more longevity throughout what felt like an eternity of shuffled steps moving forward. Eventually Sonya gave them the heads up and launched Chrissie forward like a bomb, with her landing in the midst of those ahead and toppling them to the ground twitching from a Fornax field.

  As a group the other Archons ran over them, with Chrissie and now Sonya throwing Fornax blasts out ahead to keep those lizards down while avoiding disabling their own people. Iden and the others fanned out, jumping over the tightly packed fallen bodies and throwing their own Fornax blasts into them and helping each other with telekinetic lifts, including one from Sonya that pulled Iden up midair into a hail of phaser fire and over the last knot of them, but landed him on a small patch of clear tunnel ahead.

  He twirled about, punching the nearest lizard to him and shooting the next as the other Archons reached the semi-clear area and were able to start fighting their way forward at a jog, doubling up on targets and getting some momentum into their formation. Half a minute later they were all but in the clear, with them all accelerating into a high run with the master/apprentice pair taking the lead and scouting out any hazards while planning their underground route back to the city perimeter.

  All Iden had to do was keep up and follow the group, while keeping an eye on their rear and the swarm of slower lizards trying to chase after them.

  8

  February 11, 2756

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  Karen shot through the air like a guided missile, landing foot first into a lizard with a rocket launcher and knocking him back, throwing off what would have been a shot into the cluster of Calavari going hand to hand with a horde of lizards blocking the narrow gap in the rocky ridge. As soon as the Archon’s body hit the ground the Bataf link to Travis ended and she bounced on her hip, rolling to a knee and keeping some of her momentum as she sprang to her feet in one fluid motion, detonating a Fornax field that took down the other half dozen lizards around her with only one of them managi
ng to get a shot off into her black armor.

  Her shields caught the pink blib as she brought her rifle to bear and shot the downed lizards, then she reached a hand back over the edge of the ridge and leaned the opposite direction, reestablishing the Bataf and connecting herself to her brother with another repulsor conduit, yanking him up to her and getting both of them high above the battling armies throwing down in the forest north of the current target colony.

  Unlike previous assaults, the lizards hadn’t waited to fight within the city boundaries, instead choosing to come out and into the forest to fight Star Force as they began to hack away at the perimeter turrets. A combination of tanks, wisps, and rocket carrying infantry had hurt the mechs badly on the narrow, treeless approaches, forcing them back with only the six hoths still in play at range, but even those were getting hit hard by wisp clouds that were funneling in from two other nearby colonies. More than half the planet was now in Star Force hands, or rather had been removed from lizard ownership as the invading forces hit and moved on, not putting down any roots aside from a handful of firebases.

  Deconstruction of those sites would occur later, with the current priority being the removal of the enemy troops. Once again the lizards were being devious, with the Calavari assaulting the colony having to fight through the forest in order to get to the city’s edge, for it protected them against tanks and aircraft alike, though on several occasions a rain of phaser fire had punched through the canopy on precise locations, strafing the Star Force troops before being beaten back, either by mobile anti-air units the Calavari were carrying or a handful of mechs that were tromping their way through the trees and making some very long roads to get in closer.

  The wisp cloud defending the colony was keeping Star Force air cover away, but it wasn’t so thick that they could be reckless with their numbers. Aside from a few brave strafing runs on the infantry beneath the green/black leafed trees they were staying back over their own buildings and reaching out in several tendrils to hit the hoths that were continuing to snipe the perimeter turrets from range, though they were having to find inventive spots to establish line of sight given the hilly terrain.

  With some of the turrets taken down already the infantry had an open door to get into the buildings and return to the normal street fighting that this invasion had grown accustomed to, but the lizards weren’t going to have it and were saturating the hills with troops. Virtually all of them were standard variants, for maulers were next to useless against armored Calavari, but the one that Karen had just kicked out of firing its rocket had been a mauler, with the muscular variant having been repurposed into a heavy weapons carrier.

  There were more of them popping up almost at random, and while they were typically going after tanks or a lucky aircraft hit, they’d begun using them to shoot clusters of infantry the past two days, with this current pass through one jaggedly cut hillside seeing the most resistance of any location. Karen knew there were tunnels carved into the hills, for she had already spotted two entrances, suggesting that this hadn’t been a last gasp effort on the part of the lizards to keep Star Force out. It was another planned tactic, though this city did not have any boundary walls traps. That said, the landscape worked almost as well to keep people in or out.

  Until the wisp dome over the city was removed they had to be careful not to get surrounded, for there was no way of knowing how many of these small tunnels there were, or how far out they reached short of flying a drone warship up and scanning the hills further. The one they’d sent to check for a buried wall had had a hell of a time getting close enough without rising up too high passing over the hills to come within range of the defense tower that was still operational, not to mention those in the nearby colonies that could double up firepower if a ship rose high enough.

  With the initial Clan insertion having failed, the main Calavari force had been brought up to join them in a more conventional assault…that had turned unconventional quickly, forcing them to fight in these hills with the lizards able to move around far more easily given their smaller size and, mostly, because of their tunnels. The Calavari couldn’t fit inside them, and from the reports going around in the other locations across the 12 mile wide front, the Clan infantry couldn’t either unless they got down and crawled on their hands and knees.

  Karen suspected that was deliberate, for the lizards moved around on all fours as easily as they did biped, meaning they could reposition across the battlefield far easier than even she and her brother could, allowing them to flank and ambush to their hearts’ content, which was making this battle such a pain in the ass that an Arc Knight team had been sent in to assist, with Karen and Travis coming with.

  Those six Knights were down below, split up into threes and both working their way towards the choke point, cleaning out the flanks on the Star Force side from where they knew there were concealed tunnel entrances. They’d help the Calavari secure the area and press on through, but it was up to the twins to sniff out any surprises in the gap itself.

  To that end they both ran through the trees along the top edge of the ridge, making sure not to fall off the corroded hillside that was already giving way. The portion exposed to sunlight was full of bushes and other plants eating up every available ray, and inside of that there were multiple lizards sniping down on the Calavari or waiting to do so when they had an opportunity. The trees below offered some cover, but there were plenty of deadfalls that Karen would have bet the lizards had cut down previously to give them firing lines on anyone approaching the gap.

  With their greeting party now dead, the two strikers ran together along the edge using their psionics to detect the lizard minds hidden in the brush even before their Pefbar could make them out amongst all the jumble of branches and vines. Battlemeld linked, the pair had no trouble picking them up one by one and chucking them over the side. Whether they died on impact or were merely wounded upon landing they didn’t care. They were getting them out of sniping position and giving the Calavari some easy kills while keeping their own noise to a minimum as they made their way towards their mission objective.

  They’d come up the hillside/cliff pretty far away, giving them some cover while the lizard units were split between the gap and the creek bed further to the southeast. That was much heavier guarded, with numerous concealed turrets to bust up mechs trying to use the waterway to walk through. A fight was going on there, but a cautious one, with several Clan teams trying to pick off the turrets to allow their mechs and the Calavari’s to get through once they got up to them. Any on approach within 5 kilometers were getting a wisp greeting, so the fighting was designed to take down the ground defenses before they sent the mechs into harm’s way.

  There were over a dozen other locations that the Calavari and Clans were trying to make their way through, with this gash being the smallest. Some loner units had scaled the hillside already and were making light probes into the area beyond the lizard defensive line, but those were quickly being forced back through sheer numbers of infantry. Each of those forays did get a little bit more battlemap information for the entire army to use, with one tunnel location ahead having been spotted previously and marked for the twins to avoid.

  They could feel minds moving around deep underground, but how many was unknown due to the depth involved. Putting a few to sleep just to mess with them, Karen and Travis swung wide of the tunnel entrance, sensing a few waiting there in the bushes to secure the location and ambush anyone who came close…which would then be followed up by a flood of the scaly infantry spilling out.

  They didn’t want that now, so they bypassed them by jumping up into the trees and going the slow route, branch to branch. Fortunately the forest was large enough to get them up more than 10 meters, and it was the thick upper branches that were protecting them from aerial fire that also allowed them to hop between trees, made all the easier with their psionics. A combination of climbing, jumping, and lifting each other got the pair past the tunnel entrance, then they dropped back dow
n to the forest floor and kept moving cautiously but at speed, knowing the Arc Knights would add that extra something special to break through the bottleneck below in short order.

  It didn’t take long to get within Ikrid range of the lizards lining the gap, and there were hundreds of them spread out along either side up top and even more within what were probably carved out hideaways within the narrow V-shaped crack that ran probably better than 300 meters at its steepest, but with nearly a half mile of full stretch from flat forest floor to the same on the other side.

  It was a kill zone for sure, but it wasn’t the lizards that the twins were looking for.

  They crept as close as they could get before there were too many minds around them, so they jumped back up into the trees and gradually got their Pefbar range close enough to see their half of the gap, or at least their piece of their half.

  Damn it, Travis told his sister telepathically as they both crouched on separate branches emanating from the same two meter wide trunk, they do have explosives.

  And plenty of live bait to conceal them, she added, seeing the boxes buried just inside the dirt/stone on the inner edge of the ‘V’ in a way that they could bury anyone passing through. I don’t see any landlines. Must be remote activated.

  That’s bad.

  When in doubt, ask for help, Karen said, using both her and her brother’s psionic strength in unison through their battlemeld to access the lizard minds nearest them and start rifling them for information. The first 20 or so didn’t have any knowledge about the explosives buried beneath their feet, but finally they found one that did, but he didn’t have the trigger.

  Or… Travis suggested, with her knowing exactly what he was thinking before he could say it.

  I don’t think they have a detonate button on them, she said, bringing her Pefbar back to the location of the meter-wide block buried about 80 meters ahead of them and to the lower left, just shy of one of the concealed bunkers on the inside of the gap, but with enough rock and soil around it to blow out like shrapnel when it did go up.