Star Force: Initiation (SF61)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  That enemy fighter dropped to the forest as Krissy accelerated forward and nulled out her backwards momentum, redirecting in a way that caused the other wisps to loop around to pursue her…and that gave her a moment’s reprieve from their hounding fire.

  A slight turn to the right brought her into line with the waypoint marker indicating where the Archon wanted the incoming air support. She asked for a confirmation with a simple button press rather than the tedious nature of comming that particular Archon. In the seconds that had elapsed something on the ground might have changed, but she got the confirmation almost immediately and set herself, for it was a single point in the forest and a flyby wasn’t going to be good enough. If the Archon wanted it pounded, then she was going to level it.

  Krissy flew across the treetops, now seeing flashes of light from down inside the forest but unable to make out who was who for more than a fleeting moment here and there. Trusting in the waypoint she hit the brakes hard and flipped up on her nose as she gained a little bit of altitude, pointing the long tail of the T-shaped craft towards the sky as she came into a hover over the location and fired every weapon that she had down into the forest.

  Both mauler cannons obliterated the trees below when they hit, throwing out wooden shrapnel like bombs as her scattergun shredded the leaves and branches. Her long range sammie she fired off as well, hoping for a little more damage. Each weapon had its own cycle time, so she just held in the triggers for all of them and cringed against the plasma damage she was taking from the wisps, for as long as she held still those dumbass pilots didn’t have any trouble hitting her.

  Her shield indicator flashed red, then several spots on her hull armor lit up with damage warnings. Biting her lip again she waved her firing line back and forth a bit, then stopped firing and punched the acceleration of her gravity drive as fast as she dared, shooting her fighter straight up tail-first. As she gained altitude she spun it around her center axis so she faced forward, just in time to see a flash of hull as she clipped one of the wisps.

  A huge gash formed in the schematic representing her fighter that ran nearly half the length of her port side, having punched through the armor and hit numerous internal systems…but all three engines were still there and had partial power, though her sammy and scattergun were completely dead.

  That didn’t matter now, for she was just clawing for distance skyward as several wisps followed her up and more at altitude angled down towards her. Getting her skeet reset from the deviation that the collision had caused, Krissy continued to accelerate, but without her shields super pursuit mode wasn’t possible anyway, let alone with the power drain for at least one of her six redundant generators had to have been disabled in the collision.

  All showed operational on her display, which meant that a connecting line must have been severed. Either way that generator or two was out of order and she didn’t have time to do a diagnostic to see what was out. All she had time to do was climb and glance at the displays before angling 30 degrees to the east and continuing to accelerate slowly, trying to put some distance between her and the thickest regions of wisps.

  Some continued to follow her, at a distance, but they weren’t behind, rather ahead and lateral giving them opportunities for intercept unless she could get clear and up to speed…which didn’t look likely. The more momentum she built the faster she would go, but without her shields cutting the wind her aerodynamics were limited. That combined with the power drain was going to make this dicey.

  She wasn’t going to call for help though, because that meant a skeet or two would have to leave the ground troops hanging and she wasn’t going to have that. If necessary she could crash land and get picked up later, knowing that her pilot’s cocoon would make it very hard for the lizards to kill her even if they finished off her skeet.

  Still mentally cursing herself for running into one of them, she test fired the maulers to make sure they were actually still functional. Both fired off normally and their recharge rate was diminished but present, so she could fight a bit if she had to…and it looked like that was going to be necessary.

  Krissy counted 13 wisps in total that had broken off from various formations and were chasing her. They weren’t all together, nor would they reach her at the same time, with her seeing that she was in fact going to have to deal with at least 6 of them if she stayed on her present course, and the moment she went evasive the others would then have a chance to catch up from the lead she’d built on them.

  She had about 10 more seconds to make a decision before the first wisp got within firing range and Krissy realized she didn’t have a choice. She waited a few more heartbeats then spun the skeet around, facing back and to port she hit the brakes and brought herself even closer to the nearest wisp. She wished she had her scattergun, for even a few small hits would be enough to hurt the shieldless enemy, but she’d have to make do with her maulers. They required more skill to hit with, but Krissy wasn’t lacking in that department.

  The wisp did go evasive, however, making her first five shots miss, but as she turned her skeet to follow its line of flight she caught a hit with the sixth, then punched what acceleration she had to move away from it as two more came in. A heartbeat later her shields began to reform at low strength but she didn’t wait to try and let them rebuild, knowing that she had to make these kills quick while there were only one or two wisps nearby. Wait and let them bunch up and she’d be down before she had time to properly cuss them out.

  Moving into an aggressive evasion pattern that had her cutting back on her flight path as often as she could, she set herself to the task of using her superior skill to overcome the disadvantage…or at least take a few more of the bastards down before she was out of the fight.

  An hour and a half later one of the Star Force surface bases saw a smoking skeet approach from the west and set down in the middle of one of the open landing pads as if there was nothing at all wrong or unusual about it. There were no calls for emergency assistance or any alarm in the pilots voice as she signaled for pad allotment, but once seeing the state of her ship the deck chief got an emergency crew of techs rushing out to the skeet to deal with any potential mechanical explosions that might result from the damage and endanger the surrounding ships/personnel…as well as to see to the pilot.

  But when Krissy landed she popped the armored hatch and slid down the angled side of the skeet, for its port landing leg had never deployed. Her light combat suit protected her leg and elbow from the heat on the hull as she dropped to the ground and casually walked off, satisfied and relieved that she hadn’t been stuck in the forest.

  The pilot waved off the medtech in the emergency team and let them deal with her wreck of a skeet as she headed indoors to find out the status of the ongoing battles and how long it would take to get her a replacement fighter.

  7

  Niken-401229 fired his plasma pistol twice, hitting a couple of lizards that were heading towards a Bsidd that was carrying another wounded one back out of the battle, dropping both as he ran in a wide arc around several trees then headed back into the fray once they were clear. So far he’d had 19 casualties, all non-fatal and successfully evacuated from the heaviest fighting. Beyond that he didn’t know what had happened to them, but the troops still in the field under his and Jayce’s command were all still alive and fighting, though near to the breaking point.

  The lizards were throwing so many infantry and them and the other Star Force units nearby that they’d had to relocate 8 times to keep from tripping over the bodies. Each time the lizards kept pursuing them with an unending wave of standard variants moving through the trees like they were ants and constantly trying to flank their grouping and cut off the evacuation routes that Niken was using to get his seriously injured out.

  The rest of his troops had injuries, and he would have been surprised if any more than a handful were fighting with their shields up. His were currently recharging at 18% and had gone down more times than he could count, but he was
quicker than the Bsidd and could run away from a lot of fire coming in on him. They didn’t have that luxury and were resorting to picking up and piling the lizard corpses to provide some barricades to fight behind when there weren’t enough trees or time to fell them.

  In fact Jayce had recently ordered them to stop doing that in order to conserve ammo. Already a lot of the Bsidd had empty rifles and were resorting to hand to hand with their plasma rods. If they used those to cut more branches they’d run out of power quicker, and already as Niken ran back in towards his troops he saw Bsidd with only 3 or 4 glowing appendages when there should have been six, telling him that they were close to having to fight this out weaponless.

  He only had 19 rounds left himself, and as he got back to the nearest group of Bsidd he cut right and flanked the lizards shooting at them, blowing through half those rounds in a matter of seconds but taking that point of danger off their mental map. The lizards had been trying for hours to get around to the back of them and force the Bsidd into a situation where they would have to fight it out. Niken had been able to keep pulling his injured out before they could get hammered to death, but only because they kept a route of retreat intact and still the lizards were determined to flank and cut them off.

  The only reason the Archons hadn’t ordered a full retreat was because the end of the lizard wave had been reported some kilometers away, meaning that this endless battle was coming to a conclusion in their favor if they could just hold out a bit longer…and even if he did order a full retreat they’d have to fight their way back, for the lizards were hell bent on killing them and were just as fast as the Bsidd through forest, if not faster.

  That meant they were kind of stuck, but if they needed to retreat he could have made it happen in an orderly fashion. The skies overhead were still cluttered with wisps, though many of them were now junk piles in the forest. Given that present air cover he wondered if there wasn’t a second wave of infantry coming behind this one, but right now there was none reported so he was going to fight this out here and now without losing any more ground. They’d already retreated several additional kilometers away from their targets, and if this was the end of the major resistance they needed to get to them with what troops were able sooner rather than later, and it looked like flying dropships in wasn’t going to be an option.

  Weaving his way between trees Niken ran toward the next bit of trouble he saw, sniping down three lizards as he passed, then he was back into the heavy flow of incoming amongst knotted up groups of Bsidd acting as lethal islands amongst the flood and dropping lizard bodies everywhere, now almost exclusively through hand to hand combat.

  A few more shots and Niken was out of ammo as well, but knowing that they only had to kill a few thousand more he pulled up a rare command in his HUD and triggered his armor rack to release from his back. He caught it in his right hand as it slid off and whipped it around in front of him, reattaching the dead pistol next to his other depleted weapons and grabbing the two short cylinders off it that he carried for good measure.

  Dropping the weapon rack into a bush he carried a cylinder in each hand and ran on, now lighter and more agile than before but with a silver-armored body that was showing numerous melted spots from plasma damage. His shields took another hit as the lizards saw and focused their fire on him, and Niken knew that as long as they did so his troops would have a little more breathing room to work with.

  The Archon ran towards the thickest group of the lizards as they continued to run forward in tightly packed lines through the trees, bottling up near the Bsidd as their forwardmost infantry were cut down by plasma rods or knocked through the air by physical blows. Some of the Bsidd were picking up the enemies as they shot into their armor and hurling them like rocks back towards the others and bowling them over, for without their rifles they were having trouble keeping the lizards from grouping up in too large of numbers and pumping plasma into their already beaten and often broken armor, with many of the Bsidd visually bleeding out through burn marks.

  Niken jumped as high as he could after pushing his way through the scattering of lizards in the front, then did a half flip in the air that brought his feet around over his head and into a lateral battering ram that smashed one of the lizards back into the others as the Archon fell to the ground amongst them, opening a small space for him to stand up in. As he did the cylinders extended out with a button press and formed two stun swords, one in each hand, that he whipped around before they were even charged and knocked several lizards in their small heads.

  The next few started dropping to the ground with even small hits as the Archon ran through the horde. He knew they weren’t dead, and while he could pick up the lizard plasma rifles and use them against their makers the Bsidd couldn’t for their lack of fingers. They were the kill power and he needed to be the distraction…and right now he could take more lizards out of the fight with a stun sword than he could with one of their rifles, for even the slightest brush of the blade at full power would knock one out, even if he only caught them in the wrist.

  Niken began downing them at 5 or 6 times the firing rate of one of their rifles on one side, but with two swords he was mowing them down on both wings as he ran, cutting a huge swath out of the horde and drawing a lot of attention his way, causing some of the lizards up front who weren’t totally engaged to turn back and throw their plasma fire at him when they could, though they were having trouble doing so without shooting each other.

  Enough lizards were close enough to get off at least one shot before he poked or whacked them unconscious, with his shields going down not long after he jumped into the fray. Though he didn’t have time to notice, a group of Bsidd followed him in through the path of unconscious bodies, jumping into those around them and letting others trailing them poke and jab most of the unconscious ones with their plasma rods as they passed over them.

  Before he knew it Jayce was in front of him, having beaten his way through from the other side and signaled to him with a simple telepathic touch. Niken retracted his left stun sword into its hilt and tossed it to the other acolyte, whom he saw had been reduced to using a lizard rifle. Jayce fired one more pointblank shot into a lizard’s chest, then he caught the sword out of the air and opened it up in a roundhouse twirl that ended with the tip cracking a lizard’s neck from the physical impact.

  Switching to a two-handed grip Niken added more power and precision to his blows and the pair of acolytes drifted their way through the lizards, making sure not to get tripped up by those they were downing and to keep moving fast enough that they were hard to target. Green plasma was flying everywhere and more than once Niken felt a heat bloom on an arm or leg but nothing bad enough to slow him down. He was a blur of motion, caught up in sighting, moving towards, and making contact with the closest lizard…then he’d turn and repeat while mentally keeping track of where Jayce was beside him.

  The lizards having two Archons to shoot at helped spread out the damage they were taking, prolonging their ability to fight, but by the time Niken got to jabbing one of the rare maulers that lunged at him swinging its forearm blades his stun sword had ran out of power. The poke merely knocked the lizard off course and dropped it beside the Archon, who then twirled the sword around and smacked it in the head as hard as he could, rendering it unconscious through blunt impact.

  He would have grabbed a lizard rifle if he had time, but there were so many enemies around him he had to keep dodging and hitting them with the sword to keep them from lining up easy shots on him. The weapon, while unpowered, was still a heavy metal rod and that could do plenty of damage on its own, so Niken kept swinging and keeping close to Jayce until a blur of purple armor jumped into his view and grabbed three lizards up simultaneously…then sent them flying back through the air like they were mere toys.

  Two glowing plasma rods jabbed into the nearest others, then Niken had more Bsidd swarm around him and run over the lizards in what amounted to a stampede of purple armor and too many limbs to count.
Taking a moment the Archon spotted a lizard rifle and telekinetically pulled on it, moving it a half meter across the ground as he ran forward and reached down to pick it up in hand, discarding the dead stun sword.

  He fell in with the Bsidd and ran amongst them, weaving his way between them as they ran and fought their way through the lizards, many of whom were now turning to run before they literally got stomped on. Niken shot targets of opportunity but kept trying to make his way to the front, hopping over one Bsidd that was down on the ground but still standing on one knee. He was hit, bad, but wasn’t dead…so Niken flashed a ‘recover’ marker onto his position via his helmet controls as he ran by. There was no time to stop and deal with him in person, for there were more enemies around to kill.

  Then suddenly they were at the wall of them, lizards stacked together shoulder to shoulder and firing through the gaps in the trees directly into the Bsidd. Several of Niken’s troops went down, and he fired a pair of shots into the line, dropping a piece of it as suddenly he got a ‘no-go’ warning flashed on his HUD. The other Bsidd stopped immediately, taking partial cover behind trees and baiting the lizards to come to them, but the Archon kept shooting and running forward until he noticed a new group of dots on the battlemap.

  He fired three more times then ducked behind a tree as a plasma blast hit his helmet, failing to penetrate the silver armor but melting a small rivulet of it off. It ran down an inch over his visor and resolidified, sticking in place as his view filled with tree bark. Looking to his right he saw and telekinetically pulled another lizard rifle to him, dragging it across the ground as it was too heavy for him to fully lift, then grabbed it in his other hand, dual wielding as he turned around the far side of the thick tree trunk and opened fire again.