Star Force: Upgrades (SF41)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  He sensed a few more lizard minds heading his way, but they didn’t know exactly where he was, giving him a few seconds of anonymity that he used to cut around through another room and come up behind the foursome, gunning down two before they even realized he was behind them. A few more shots and they were down too, with the briefly returning green plasma impacting his chest shield dissipating like a snowball hitting a blast furnace.

  The shields on the striker armor were stronger than what the adepts, acolytes, and rangers had. Their protective shield was standard, while their armor got progressively denser, allowing more protection to the higher ranked Archons who could handle the extra weight, and likewise Paul’s black striker armor was heavier than the others, but not any thicker. The material was denser, with a few flecks of corovon thrown in throughout the structure that gave it a much higher physical defense rating, while still melting under intense energy attacks.

  The armor weighed almost as much as he did, but thanks to his enhanced strength he was able to manage decent combat agility…though unlike his previous armors, the striker version that he currently wore was a prototype incorporating a lot of new tech. He and Morgan were the only ones using it, as they were the only strikers at the moment. Paul was a level 1, Morgan a level 3, and each of them had a design technician assigned to shadow their assignments, learning from their training and battle experience and making upgrades to the armor as needed.

  The shields and armor rating were impressive, but the biggest change came in the form of a telepathic interface and what it controlled. Consciously it had only one switch, which was off/on, but subconsciously it was having a much bigger effect…or it would when Paul finally decided to use it, and hunting these scattered lizards certainly wasn’t requiring it.

  It wasn’t until he worked his way around to the main lift shaft when a car came up full of the little buggers that he mentally flipped the ‘on’ switch and felt the heaviness of his armor disappear.

  Paul ran out of an access shaft as fast as if he hadn’t been wearing anything more than a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, plowing into the hoard and firing his captured lizard rifles at the first dozen or so, then tossing them aside and resigning himself to go hand to hand with the lizards, who were so densely packed together most of them couldn’t get out of his way if they wanted to.

  He took a lot of plasma hits at first, but once he was in amongst them on the basketball court-sized lift most of them couldn’t shoot him without hitting their fellow soldiers, leaving him with an intimate cover that only continued so long as he stayed up close to them…while dropping the dead or injured ones behind as he moved through the mass.

  His muscle movements were no longer moving the armor about alone, but were now being aided by mechanical propulsion…the kind of which he and the other trailblazers had strictly forbidden the techs from creating, due to the problems it posed. After Kara had got her Dre’mo’don that had changed, as they saw what powered armor was capable of, as well as seeing a technology that avoided the problems most ‘dumb’ suits posed…such as moving in a direction the person didn’t want and wrenching your arm out of socket, or worse.

  Paul’s striker armor had pressure sensors covering the interior that sensed his movements and added strength to them, but the technology hadn’t been sufficient for it cut down on their reaction times. The delay was unavoidable, so the Archons had just kept with the traditional muscle power until the telepathic interface technology had advanced to the point where they could put it to use.

  The system was still crude, from Paul’s point of view, but it was acceptable, using neural mapping sensors to monitor the control signals passing from his brain to his muscles to anticipate what his next move was going to be, calculate how the armor needed to move, and then wait for confirmation from the sensor grid inside the suit. In this way nothing moved unless Paul moved, but with the delay being greatly reduced. It wasn’t quite the same as moving without armor, for the feel was slightly off, but it was close enough that his speed increased across the board compared to what he had been able to do in his ranger armor…or even a set of adept armor that he’d experimented with, now that he was far stronger than necessary to fight in it.

  This striker armor beat the adept armor in terms of agility and speed, no contest, when it was powered up…which was accomplished by several redundant power sources worked into the structure at thicker points, so that if one was damaged or destroyed the suit wouldn’t lose all power, but even if it did it would just revert back to ‘standard’ mode without locking up or otherwise hindering the wearer.

  Paul was still waiting for something to go wrong, but he’d gotten comfortable enough with it to take it into combat, and right now, punching, kicking, twisting, turning, and jumping all seemed effortless as he tore through the lizards on the lift in a shockingly short amount of time. Once they were all down he pulled up a rifle from the mess and began finishing off those who weren’t already dead, reminding himself that despite their inability to hurt him at the moment they’d kill him without a second thought if they had the advantage…and he wasn’t in a position to be able to take prisoners.

  “Ah, hell with it,” Paul said aloud after shooting five of them as they crawled across the ground. He dropped the plasma rifles and pulled a short cylinder off his rack, pressing a button on the handle that extended out a full length sword blade in interlocking segments.

  Paul flicked on the stun sword and jumped around from spot to spot, jabbing the wounded unconscious after deciding that if they had survived this long against him they deserved a chance to live to fight another day. That, and he just didn’t like killing the helpless…which was what they were right now, given that they couldn’t hurt him.

  Suddenly the lift started to descend, prompting Paul to run to the side and jump up, clinging to the rising edge of the wall and pulling himself up easily with the suit’s power on. Once he got back to his feet he mentally disengaged the power, returning its movements solely to his muscles. He knew that such a technology would greatly enhance the lower level Archons’ combat capabilities, but he also knew that he was able to carry the weight of the striker armor because he’d worked his way up through the lesser armors. If they gave the powered movement to the adepts, they’d never grow as strong as Paul had become, making this new technology a double-edged sword.

  Until they worked out how to implement it without hindering Archon development, it was going to remain a striker-only technology, and they were going to keep the on/off switch, reserving the extra power for when they needed it, whereas a rookie would keep it on all the time. Moving about in the armor, whether it be in the sanctum or on the battlefield, was a workout that the powered armor would deny them. The trailblazers were wise enough to know not to use it often, but that couldn’t be said of the younger Archons, who just didn’t seem to get the concept of weighted training clothing, no matter how many Piccolo references he threw out.

  “Paul, how you doing?” Kara’s voice asked over his comm.

  “Peachy. What’d you find?”

  “Pretty much like you said. They’ve got a huge industry base down here, but what you didn’t guess was they’re tunneling out to other locations. They’re planning on using this one base to build an unlimited network underground, shielding it from orbital bombardment and prying eyes, and they’re going down pretty deep, or plan to, based on the files I hacked.”

  “How many are down there now?”

  “A little under 10,000. They’re keeping the population low until they’ve got enough room to house and feed them. They don’t want too many cargo shipments coming and going to give away the ruse.”

  “Too late.”

  “Yeah. It’ll take some time, but we can handle these guys on our own. They’re all standard variant and not heavily armed.”

  Paul laughed…then thought about it.

  “Well?” Kara asked, knowing he was considering it.

  “Do they have growth chambers?”


  “Not yet. They’re all imports.”

  “Alright, here’s the game plan. We know about their little project here, and we let them know we know. Start working up a priority list on the machinery they’ve got, we want to hurt their construction efforts, not bring the walls down. We leave life support and foodstuffs alone for whatever lizards don’t get in our way, then they can tell their buddies when they get here how bad the two of us kicked their asses. They’ll either fortify the base or abandon the effort…and I’m hoping the later.”

  “Then I come back in a couple of years and check it out?”

  “You or someone else.”

  “Sounds good. You clear up top?”

  “More or less. You may have to send a lift back up for me.”

  “I’m on it,” Kara promised as Paul retracted his stun sword and put it away, picking up two of the lizards’ weapons. He didn’t know how long Kara’s Vorch’nas weaponry would last, but there was no way his Star Force ammo was going to hold out against the numbers below, meaning he was going to have to do a lot of battlefield scavenging for weapons…or just rack up a wicked hand to hand kill count.

  Either way, it looked like his prototype armor was going to get a thorough field test.

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