Star Force: Upgrades (SF41)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  The Skarron machine came to a skidding halt with Kip releasing the sword handle and dropping to the ground, whereupon he popped up his mauler and arm-mounted plasma cannons and started blasting into the armor where the white plasma had stopped firing from. He took advantage of the sword damage and the small blind spot and tore a hole in the armor as the walker tried to stand back up, then Kip dug his hands inside the breach point and pried the armor apart, large enough to fit an arm inside.

  He grabbed anything and everything he could and started tearing the components out and dumping them on the street. Apparently he hadn’t tore out enough, for as the walker stood back up suddenly Kip had difficulty reaching into the breach point, for with the legs fully extended the Skarron walker stood nearly twice his mech’s height.

  He backed up the voltron and jumped again, landing on top where the sword was still imbedded and forcing the walker back to the ground through sheer weight. Kip grabbed the sword hilt as he slid off the edge and held on tight, yanking the Type-3 over onto its side and into the buildings. Before he could get trapped underneath he let go of the sword and slid down to the legs, where he grabbed one and pushed, completing the sideways flip of the machine and exposing its underbelly…where upon Kip faced a plasma shower as he punched and blasted away at the hull until most of the closest cannon mounts fell silent…though he was still taking fire on the flanks.

  A quick look at his shield gage told him he was down to 32% on his torso shields, but he didn’t care. This son of a bitch was going down now, before it had a chance to hit any of the smaller mechs.

  With the shields over his arms taken down so the punches would drain them, Kip crumpled and tore off the bottom of the hull, then pried a leg mount off and tossed it back into the street behind him. He dove back into the machine and put several mauler blasts into the delicate machinery, silencing more of the plasma cannons as he cleared the melted wreckage with his hands and tossed it out onto the street like confetti…some of which were Skarron bodies as he tore through the control center.

  Eventually his hand hit something more solid, finding the end of his sword. He half climbed into the walker’s carcass and tore out the pieces around it, eventually freeing the handle and pulling it through by the blade. Kip stepped the voltron back out, twirled the blade around, and stabbed it into the guts of the opposite end once, twice, then a third time before pulling back and examining the walker to see if it was fully dead or not.

  No weaponsfire came from it as he walked around to the far end, squeezing through the gap between walker and building. He wanted to tear it apart a bit more, just to be sure it wouldn’t ambush a smaller mech as it walked by with a salvo or two, but there wasn’t time. There were four more Type-3s in the area, assuming Dina had gotten hers.

  He checked the battlemap, seeing that she was still engaging her opponent with a halo of support mechs. Her shields were still holding, and it looked like she was just taking more time at it than he was…which meant she was good, and he had to get after the next one before they got too close to the hoths.

  As he turned the voltron around another of the white beams shot by not too far over his head, but higher than a Mk. 2 hoth should have sat. He glanced back the way it had come, but there were buildings in the way so he did a quick check of the battlemap and saw the four Mk. 2s standing up on their hind legs and bracing against buildings in front of them in order to raise the position of their heads up and over most of the Protovic cityscape in the way.

  It looked awkward, but was strategically viable, especially since the buildings they were leaning on were providing them cover from the immediate front.

  Kip started his mech walking further away from Dina towards another Type-3 that had slipped past their line of advancement as he scrolled the battlemap over to check on their target…seeing the big Type-1 continuing to walk their direction, stepping over buildings rather than following streets that it was too big to fit in anyway. Its steps crushed structure after structure, and the big behemoth looked to be in quite the hurry as it ponderously ground its way closer to the hoths, which were still kilometers away.

  The cleansing beams were eating into its armor in multiple spots, puncturing through to the interior but apparently not having hit anything vital as of yet. The Type-2s flanking it hadn’t been hit yet, with the preceding one having gone down already and been left behind, with the hoths now focusing all of their firepower on the Type-1 as Kip had instructed, now that its blocker was out of the picture. If that thing got within range its plasma shower would be too much for the hoths or his voltron to handle, meaning the only way they could engage it was from range…which fortunately they had the weapons for.

  Overhead a trio of Skarron fighters ducked down and fired their small plasma weapons into Kip’s mech, eating up a bit of shield strength before they zipped off elsewhere in the city. So far the Skarrons were maintaining air superiority, for their walkers made it all but impossible for Star Force to operate in the air. Kip had given strict no-go radiuses around the various walkers, but had given orders to pounce on anything that crept outside of them. So far they’d made a few kills, but the Skarron fighters were more interested in picking on the mechs than coming out to engage their aerial cousins.

  The hoths had plenty of anti-air mechs protecting them, but this far out into the city was open season on the smaller mechs, though some of them were also anti-air equipped, making it more of an even fight rather than a turkey shoot.

  Kip ignored his own anti-air lachars and kept running towards the next Type-3. If they wanted to strafe him go ahead, he had enough shields to hold them off and the more they shot him the less they would be shooting the other mechs. In about 30 seconds he was going to have another big one to deal with, and maybe a few Type-4s as well if his backup didn’t come with him.

  Just then a ruby-red streak shot across the street ahead of him. Unlike normal weaponsfire it wasn’t a flash, but a continuous beam that continued for a good 8.2 seconds before the capacitor ran dry and it had to begin recharging. A few seconds later another beam shot out, coming from the second continuous heavy lachar and lasted an equal amount of time before disappearing.

  When Kip got up to the next corner he turned it, seeing the bulk of a Type-4 with a hole burnt into the front of it. He raised his arms and fired a pair of plasma blasts, one of which hit the hole and passed inside, before he realized that the beams had already gutted the interior, leaving the walker as another dead statue blocking the road.

  Instead of pushing his way through it he turned around and backtracked to the next side street, seeing in the far distance one of the Mk.1 hoths half hidden behind a low building. Normally their lachar tech wasn’t nearly as destructive as plasma, let alone a mauler or cleansing beam, but they’d upgraded their tech enough that they could now produce continuous lachars, allowing the technology a whole other level of badass that had replaced the electrolasers on the original model heavy walkers, which had two of the weapons on the front head.

  Kip raised his left hand, throwing the distant walker a salute before turning left and tucking his sword back into a reverse grip as he headed around the local group of buildings in zigzaggy fashion heading for the next Type-3, with his shields recharging a bit more with every second that passed.

  “Got him, Kip,” Dina’s voice broke through suddenly. “What next?”

  “How bad you chewed up?”

  “Just shield damage.”

  Kip set a waypoint on the battlemap, attaching it to one of the Type-3s. It wasn’t the furthest ahead, but it was the closest to her, and he redirected his own course slightly to head towards it, temporarily ignoring the others.

  “This one…we’ll take it together. We double up on the rest of these to save shield strength.”

  “Copy that, on my way.”

  Kip checked the battlemap again, seeing that he was going to get to it before she did, but there was a pair of Type-4s in the way, so he diverted onto a side street and moved over one
section, intending to smoke one or both of them before meeting up with Dina and taking down the next Type-3.

  9

  Another cleansing beam shot out across more than 10 kilometers and dug into the front of the pot marked Type-1 as it continued to claw its way forward across the cityscape, occasionally having to make course corrections to avoid the buildings that were bigger than it. The thing’s body was 6 times the height of a voltron and it stood better than 10 times as high on its legs, allowing it to step over most of the Protovic structures. It wasn’t fast, but it was making good time and getting closer to the Star Force lines, which had been contracting as the ‘smaller’ walkers closed in on them in greater numbers than they could chew apart.

  The Mk. 1 hoths were assisting there, leaving the big Skarron to the Mk.2s…which had already hit the thing with some 70+ cleansing beams. They didn’t know what they were shooting at, given they didn’t have a schematic of the interior, so they were poking holes in through the armor at different places, probing and hoping to hit something vital. Though they couldn’t see it in the walker’s movements, they’d already succeeded in taking out several power conduits, cutting juice to a chunk of its plasma cannons and the ‘plate’ shields on the port side.

  Then the big walker took another cleansing beam to its ‘face,’ which was the front most bulbous section on the caterpillar-like design of 7 unique segments mashed together, and suddenly the four legs sprouting from that section locked up, plowing into the buildings ahead of the others that continued pushing forward, with the ‘head’ of the Type-1 dipping down and ramming a mid-level building that otherwise it would have cleared by 20 meters.

  The building disintegrated under the pressure of the hit, but the walker didn’t move much beyond it as it struggled to get its footing back as another cleansing beam from the northernmost Mk. 2 hit it on the top of the front section that was now angled down. That beam cut into an anti-air cannon situated in a depression that had been shielding it from view. Next to it were the missile ports, which the cleansing beam nicked, detonating two that were still inside.

  A plume of debris shot up into the air out of the ‘head’ of the Type-1 as the forward section went completely dead…pinning the walker in place unless it wanted to drag the unpowered legs behind it.

  Which is exactly what it did. It took another poke from a cleansing beam as it turned around, swapping front for back, and began crawling its way forward again at considerable speed.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kip whispered as he saw the ‘front’ section of the Type-1 half standing on its locked legs between half-crushed buildings as the other 6 segments moved off without it. Somehow the big thing was designed to release its individual segments.

  On a hunch Kip got a closer look at the discarded piece via a rooftop raven acting as a spotter and feeding the rest of the Star Force troops battlemap info on the Type-1 and the remaining pair of Type-2s that were now well ahead of it. The trailblazer zoomed in on the section of the walker that had been bonded to the others, quickly seeing it was of a different color than the exterior, as well has having multiple interlocking components now exposed, and he assumed the opposite end of the Type-1 contained the same…both without armor plating covering them.

  Kip placed a waypoint on the back side of the moving pieces of the walker and opened his all-troop comm frequency.

  “The hoths just disabled the front piece of the Type-1, which then jettisoned that piece and is continuing forward on the other 6 segments. The backside of those segments is not, repeat, not armored. If anyone is in position to do some long range flanking attacks have at it.”

  With that Kip ignored the oncoming Type-1, knowing the hoths were going to continue picking it apart as long as they could, but even now they were coming under attack from the ground. Thousands of the Skarron ground troops had flooded around their feet, hitting them with small arms fire, missiles, and whatever else they had available. There were so many of them they’d managed to bring down the defense shields on their legs and were starting to chew away at their armor…which would be a problem if they were allowed a few more hours to do so.

  Dozens of ravens were darting in and out of the area, killing the Skarrons on the ground as much as they could, but if they ran up against too many all at once they could go down themselves, which two of them already had. The pilots had been rescued from their downed mechs before the ground troops could get at them, but Star Force had had to use the Starscream-class mechs to get to them in time…which was dangerous, because the flying mechs could have come under anti-air fire, but fortunately their mechwarriors kept them low to the city streets and out of the aerial firing radius of the Skarron walkers.

  Trouble was, the starscreams were weak mechs, both in terms of armor and firepower, though with regular strength shields. They’d been at as much risk as the ravens when they’d gone in, coming up from the distant LZ, and had only got to the downed mechwarriors due to the support of a squadron of thors that had happened to be nearby.

  Those mechs were doing better against the infantry hordes, even if they weren’t as fast and nimble as the ravens, because they were bigger, heavier biped mechs that resembled a giant Human in armor without the backwards-canted legs that the ravens and madcats had. The compact form also helped them navigate the city streets in formation, stomping on infantry for a third of their kills while lighting up the others with missiles from a shoulder launcher and multiple small plasma cannons located on the arms and chest, with a baby mauler slung under the left arm.

  They’d learned quickly that they had to stay together to keep from getting overwhelmed by the infantry, who’s armored troops liked to get in close and latch onto the mech’s legs and try to trip them up with some kind of cord they were carrying so the others could pound them on the ground when their shields popped on impact.

  The streets around the pair of Mk. 2s were clogged with gore, so much so that some of the mechs were having to make small jumps over the piles of Skarron bodies to avoid getting tripped up, all the while more of the enemy ground troops skittered across their fallen comrades, peppering the air with tiny plasma orbs and weak missiles, so much so that it occasionally looked like blowing snow.

  Kip had been forced back to take out a pair of Type-4s that had gotten within firing range on one of the Mk. 1 hoths, which was in turn intercepting them before they could get to the Mk. 2s. The Mk. 1 had taken down the first of the Type-4s before its shields went down, then took some light armor damage from the second until Kip’s sword skewered it and dragged it behind a nearby building where he took the time to properly finish it off.

  His own shields had failed multiple times, leaving him with a deep gash on his right upper arm and lesser damage across his mech’s torso and legs. His aft side was unscathed, but that was only because he’d been running towards the enemy most of the time, which he was even now as he headed towards the intersection point of two continuous heavy lachars. One faded out before the other, but not before Kip saw rivulets of armor running down the surface of the Type-2 they were attacking. It wasn’t within plasma range yet, but a few more minutes and that would change, which meant he had to do something to help, otherwise he was sure they were going to lose at least one of the Mk. 1s.

  With most of the smaller mechs now pulled back to deal with the infantry that kept rising up from underground in too many points for Star Force to block, only the pair of voltrons was left for excursions out into the oncoming walkers, and they’d been focusing on the remaining Type-3s, given that most of the 4s and 5s had already been eliminated by the smaller mechs. The battlemap showed six smaller walkers around the southernmost Type-2, and they were holding their formation, making it virtually impossible to approach without getting annihilated with plasma, even for the voltrons.

  That left him only one slightly insane approach…which was to flank the southern group and come in at the Type-2 from behind, either getting a clear shot at it or forcing the other walkers to turn around and move backward
s to provide covering fire.

  Kip was already on his way, with Dina following a few seconds behind him. They’d been doing well to double team the enemy walkers, but she was carrying armor damage too, meaning the longer this dragged on the less combat capable they were going to be. So far they each had 100% of their weaponry intact, but a few deep hits on the arms and they’d lose a plasma cannon, which was why they were taking as much time as they could afford to recharge their shields in between bouts.

  Kip knew the two of them alone weren’t going to be enough, so he finally made the comm call he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to make.

  “Vyr, you there?”

  “Been wondering how long it’d take you to come to your senses,” the Protoss Archon said with a touch of frustration.

  “Tell me you can do something without flying into a massacre.”

  “You’re heading for the southern Type-2?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much weaponry do they have underneath that thing?”

  “A lot of plasma cannons. It’s not a safe spot to be.”

  “Well nuts…there goes that plan. Don’t worry, we’ve got a few others worked up. We’ll pull some of the heat off you.”

  “Don’t go crazy,” Kip warned. “Those pulse rings…”

  “I know better than you do,” Vyr reminded him. “We’ll stay low. By the way, avoid these spots.”

  Kip received 8 no-go zones on his battlemap, not making out what their significance was for a few seconds, then nodding appreciatively as he belatedly understood.

  “Ok, get going.”