Star Force: Proving Ground (SF66)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  If we get closer maybe we can disable it and not worry about a trigger.

  Good call, Karen said, immediately beginning to hop to the next branch then, setting herself, she lifted Travis telekinetically over to the nearby tree, adding a repulsor conduit to supplement her Lachka. Travis landed across a fair sized gap then returned the favor, helping his sister across and the two of them began moving slower and slower, keeping as quiet as they could until they were directly over the heads of three lizards hunkered down behind knee-high wall segments hidden within bushes that they could snipe from and hide in when the Calavari eventually got to the trench below.

  Travis kept a mental eye on their minds, ready to freeze or distract them if necessary while Karen reached down into the ground with her Pefbar getting a better view of the explosive and looking for something to mess with. She took a moment to be careful and consider her options, but the sounds of the firefight just a few hundred meters away and the lizard troops running back through the gap in retreat underscored just how little time they had.

  Warn them off. This is going to take some time, plus we don’t know how many of them there are, she said, using her telekinesis to pull apart a wire from its connection on the buried device.

  She felt Travis smile, then abandoned her sabotage effort as her brother jumped down from the tree and she followed, landing next to the mind-frozen lizards as both of them abandoned their subtlety and sprinted along the edge, drawing attention and numerous lizards out of their hiding spots on the flats above the gap. One concealed tunnel entrance opened up and a line of lizards began pouring out but the twins ignored them, heading for a specific bunker on the other side of the gap and nearly a quarter mile down it, almost dead center in the entire giant booby trap.

  Going for pure speed, they didn’t fire any shots nor bother to disrupt the lizards other than with a few hasty psionics. They were standing on top of a giant minefield and had to get to the middle bunker now, else risk the whole thing blowing up underneath them. They figured that wouldn’t happen until the Calavari got at least partially inside, which was prompting their recklessness.

  When they got down almost all the way to the target they turned hard right and Karen launched her brother across the gap long jump style, steering him to the wall niche a few meters below the edge that he entered feet first, sliding into a short tunnel about Hobbit height. As soon as he was inside he emitted a Fornax field and kept it up, sliding/crawling his way into a connecting tunnel and dragging one twitching lizard out of his way, kneeing him in the ribs as he pushed by him.

  Maintaining the Fornax field at half his maximum radius wasn’t hard, but the longer he kept at it the more stress his head would feel, and like pulling on a rubber band, the further you stretched it the more power it took to maintain the effort, meaning he was on the clock.

  Scurrying his way through the small tunnels he pulled a fishhook turn that led him back to a concealed bunker that had one-way view panes into the gap, hidden behind a clever holographic camouflage screen of leaves and sticks that were also transparent with barely an outline showing on the wall of the little, traitorous den. There were three lizards inside, all lying on the floor save for one, who was twitching uncontrollably in his seat as Travis’s head began to complain from the sustained effort.

  He pulled out a pistol from his back rack and shot them all twice in the head, then pushed their bodies over the entrance and stacked them up like lego bricks, blocking the entrance.

  “Got it,” he told Karen via comm, now that she was running like crazy back through the forest to the Calavari with an angry army of lizards following her and hopefully not noticing him. “Tell them the trigger is secure and I’ll remain here to make sure it stays that way.”

  “You want me to double back and help?”

  “No, just get clear. These tiny tunnels mean they don’t have a chance of getting to me, and there’s a camouflaged window here I can break out of if I have to, so I’m not pinned in.”

  “They can break in too, you know.”

  “I’m fine. Get the team up here and take out those sniper positions before the Calavari start pouring through like big fat targets.”

  “Alright, see you after,” Karen said, with her soon passing outside of his ability to mentally track. Their battlemeld and twin link were broken, leaving Travis with only his own thoughts for a while, which was odd considering how they did almost everything together.

  But then again this wasn’t the first time they’d split up, and they had trained themselves accordingly so that it didn’t become a weakness. Still, the sooner his sister was back inside his head again the better. For now though, there were lizards scurrying about in the tunnels on the other side of his meat blockade and he intended to gum up the tiny roads with as many sleeping beauties as he could arrange.

  9

  June 1, 2756

  Pagaliss System (lizard territory)

  Varasiss

  Liam returned to his command ship’s nexus, having spent a very long couple of months groundside since his last visit doing commando work and helping to take down key targets during or in front of the massed assaults on the remaining lizard colonies. Now there were only 7 remaining, spread out widely across the planet having been bypassed by the Star Force troops because they were trap cities. Five of them still had their orbital defense towers intact, but the trailblazers had decided not to risk any more clandestine assault teams, for the last one that Morgan and Kara had been on had turned into a wounded evacuation run.

  It’d had five mages, three padawans, plus the two trailblazers and hadn’t managed to kill the tower. After the three previous successes and numerous other similar missions behind enemy lines in the less defended colonies the lizards had enacted numerous new safeguards, some of which had involved detonating entire buildings around the tower when security breaches were noted. The team had been in one of them when it came down, but fortunately the armor they were all wearing kept them alive, not to mention a few hasty bioshields being thrown up in the process.

  Six of them had been wounded to the point of limping, with three having to be carried out and an air evac being impossible. Kara had got them through it, going rogue and hunting the lizards in the depths of their substructures to act as a diversion and to clear passages, with a one-armed Morgan doing plenty of damage despite her left limb having been broken and hanging limp inside her cracked armor. Others had been more badly injured, but the few that had only a few dings in the chaotic building collapse supported the trailblazer enough to get everyone out.

  That was three months ago, and all the Archons in questioned had long since returned to battle after regenerator treatments. The V’kit’no’sat tech was still far ahead of Star Force medical devices and rebuilt their bodies within hours, though all were weaker for it after the fact…something that infuriated Morgan to no end because it could possibly see her losing her top Archon status.

  After that mess the trap cities had been ignored, with assaults on the others continuing with less surprises but still an incredible amount of heavy fighting. The lizards were no longer the soft targets they once were, and it seemed like the entire point of their planetary defense being a test of their new tech and tricks. The trap cities that remained would give the lizards even more data to work with when Star Force hit them, and the interstellar transmitters that each had were continually broadcasting signals out to other lizard worlds when they came within line of sight during the planet’s rotation, meaning that even if no lizard left the system alive their empire would still gain from the knowledge of what had happened here.

  And of what it took to stop or kill the Star Force troops.

  But with the rest of the colonies now destroyed the amount of firepower a single, or two orbital guns could throw back at the fleet was low. But then again their defense fleet was near to anemic, for the lizards had been continually sending in relief fleets to whittle their drones down. Star Force had been bringing in occasional jumpship fl
eets with replacement warships but their hold on the planet was tenuous, though there was little chance of the lizards actually retaking it with the two Sentinels in orbit…short of yet another escalation that had Liam a bit concerned.

  They needed to finish off Varasiss soon and start fortifying it themselves, and to do that these last few colonies had to go.

  Rather than waste more drones on an orbital assault, or even use the command ships and see them potentially take more hull damage on top of what they’d already racked up to date, Liam accessed the Sentinels and had their limited engines begin altering their orbits to bring them down to a very low altitude rendezvous point. He wanted both of them together to insure that neither one lost shields, for to date they hadn’t been scratched and letting the lizards get a few hits in now would have been beyond sloppy.

  It took a great deal of time to get them together, then as they lowered themselves with their anti-grav running high to counteract the planet’s gravity they started taking fire from a single phaser beam coming up from the surface. The pink energy tore through the clouds and hit the starboard Sentinel’s shields, with them warding off the attack with ease. Liam studied the data from the shield loss and ran through the quick math, seeing that it would take more than 500 hits at present levels to penetrate.

  That wouldn’t take too long, for the recycle on the lizard gun was only 1.7 seconds. Liam held off firing the Sentinels’ weapons until both were in position, using the extra energy to supplement the gravity drives and shields, then pulled power from the latter and engaged the heaviest cleansing beams.

  Six beams from each shot down their pale white lines and hit the defense shield covering the lizard colony, with their recharge rates linked together so they all hit simultaneously in an attempt to create a momentary breach with the overload and sneak some damage through. The slugging match that followed was mostly one sided, with the lizard colony’s shields coming down within a minute and the defense tower another 20 seconds later. That ended the orbital threat, for no missiles had been fired from the surface, oddly enough, but then again the Sentinels had enough anti-air weapons to knock them down with ease, so Liam wasn’t sure if this colony didn’t have them or wasn’t choosing to waste them.

  There were numerous defense turrets across the city, but it was impossible to determine exactly what they all were when some were buried beneath armor plating until they were revealed. At this point Liam didn’t care, and quickly reset the power flow away from the shields and into the weapons in order to give the Sentinels full firing capability. Targeting the beams himself, he began to cut the colony’s buildings apart, starting first with the defense turrets and hangars, then moving on to the other buildings while the wisp cloud that had been hiding underneath the city shield began to grow and disperse, running off to other locations around the planet.

  There was no knowing how many other lizard bases were concealed on Varasiss, and with some luck they might lead them to one. He didn’t expect the enemy to be that sloppy, but you never knew.

  The Star Force fighters patrolling the planet were ordered to keep their distance and let the lizards run while the Sentinels bombarded the colony, then moved on to the others. Once they had all of them torn to shreds they’d begin hunting down the remaining units across the planet, and there was no point in risking further engagements until that was completed.

  After several hours of bombardment Liam redirected the Sentinels to the pair of colonies remaining that had overlapping fields of fire, knowing this would be the bigger test. Based on the data from the single beam he knew there wouldn’t be a mathematical issue with taking them down, but still there was always an opportunity for surprises, and with the pair of phaser beams reaching up to strike back at the Sentinels came the missiles from both colonies.

  Liam turtled up and deactivated the cleansing beam, routing full power to the shields and point defense weapons, weathering the missile storm until it eventually ran out and knocking down most of them before they could hit. When they ceased and only the ongoing phaser strikes continued he reengaged the cleansing beams and began hammering against one of the two cities’ shield discs.

  It took a while to knock it down, then the tower, then he did the same to the second colony, but he managed it all without so much as a shot hitting the hull of either defense station. Afterwards he turned the firing control over to other gunners and let them methodically rip apart the two cities while he left the nexus and headed to the command ship’s sanctum for a good long run before catching a few hours of needed sleep and returning to the bridge to oversee the next colony attack.

  Meanwhile the ground troops were out and about in numerous locations, hunting down and safing the underground tunnels in the colonies that had already seen combat and were now nominally in Star Force hands…though all that meant was a handful of scouts looking for lingering enemies. The planet was huge and now full of ruins, without enough troops to properly occupy each site. From the reports continuing to come in there were still lots of pockets of small resistance everywhere, with about half of them operating with cohesion rather than random, last ditch attacks from survivors.

  The other four trailblazers and Kara were down there leading the efforts to eradicate them and locate what they thought were hidden control centers. There were so many tunnels underground that a good portion of their drone fleet was now floating over the surface doing intense scans to try and locate them in an effort to identify potential traps before the Archons and others started their expeditions into new areas. Morgan especially wanted to be there running point to look for more detonation devices, and while they hadn’t seen hardly any employed in such a manner during the length of the invasion, the gradually increasing popularity of blowing up your own building to get the enemies inside was alarming.

  If that trend continued Star Force was going to have to readjust their tactics when assaulting other lizard worlds, else risk losing chunks of personnel with every structure they forced their way into. When you didn’t care about dying and were just trying to achieve maximum damage to your enemy you opened up a lot of darkside tactical options that looked like they were uncounterable, but Liam and the other trailblazers were notorious for finding ways to get around the problem, though this one was going to be one of the worst to tackle to date.

  Kara flew across the sky a couple miles above the surface of their recently reclaimed planet, traveling from one ruined colony to another as she took a momentary break from tunnel diving and just did some patrolling up top. There were no Star Force fighters in the area at the moment, and the lizard survivors had a habit of moving from place to place so that when you finally did fully clear out a city, if that was even confirmable, they could move back in again coming over ground. The areas with wide plains were easy to spot them on, but the forested areas not so much.

  She didn’t expect to spot any lizards in the trees from this altitude, but felt like snooping around a bit while another subsurface assault team was getting prepped for her to lead. The Scionate she’d been with had been recalled and a group of Calavari were coming in to replace them, though they weren’t exactly the best at crawling around in small spaces. Most of the lizard infrastructure underground was large enough to accommodate them, but it was the small auxiliary tunnels that they couldn’t fit inside, nor did Kara like the idea of crawling in there herself.

  More than once she’d gotten a bit claustrophobic, recognizing the fact that if she got pinned there it would be almost impossible to dig her way out. It was worse for the others because they didn’t have her Vorch’nas, and talk amongst the trailblazers was that some of these locations would best be dug out from the top and simply removed from the surface in a massive earth moving endeavor rather than trying to explore and safe them manually.

  Some prototype AI drones were getting their evaluation work in, with masses of the things being ordered up for production in the ADZ and shipped out here, with the first load scheduled to arrive within the month. They were all
the size of a bowling ball or smaller, with interconnective capability like the drone warships used but designed to operate almost exclusively in blackout situations like, say, having tons of rock between you and a transmitter.

  They weren’t combat models, with Star Force not trusting computer programming with weapons in an urban setting. There were too many factors to preprogram for, and they didn’t want so much as one accidental death because of a miscalibration. Artificial intelligence was a myth, and a machine could only do what it was programmed to do. Without someone at the controls that programming would always be limited and unable to adapt to new situations, hence the little bug bots didn’t get weapons.

  What they were was surveillance and scouting equipment, able to transmit to each other over short distances and extend a net of comm and control lines down through tunnel networks if placed appropriately and in large enough numbers. Right now the bots they had were scouring the innards of one dead lizard colony, mapping it out as they went and roaming where they chose underground. They’d discovered three lizard hideouts so far, as well as constructing a battlemap of the lower regions without any Archon or Regular having to hike down every corridor.

  The prototypes were serving their purpose more here than ever expected, for this was the largest subsurface infrastructure they’d seen from the lizards to date and Kara expected jumpships full of the little buggers to be roaming the planet for years to come as they slowly deconstructed the mess. Everything Calavari had been eradicated by the lizards in their time here, and Star Force was intending to return the favor, tearing out all the lizard infrastructure rather than coopting any of it for their own use.