Star Force: Initiation (SF61)

by Jyr, Aer-ki

  There were no less than 8 full Voku conglomerates up there, ahead of schedule. They weren’t here to fight, but to use this system as a springboard for launching attacks into the surrounding area. He’d expected them to wait until Star Force had actually taken possession of the system, but apparently they were eager to get to work expanding their own empire.

  The Jafat System was the furthest out into what had formerly been Calavari territory that Star Force had ventured short of a raid. This one they were keeping and would undoubtedly draw a strong reaction…which they were expecting. Irad itself hadn’t been Calavari, but rather belonged to a weak race known as the Bvdan, which were now extinct. The lizards had wiped them out long ago then only recently began heavily colonizing and fortifying this world, probably expecting an attack at some point from orbit, which this subsurface base and others would mostly have been immune to.

  That was one thing about the lizards, no matter how cookie cutter their civilization was they always got around to adapting to what was beating them. They’d lost here and were going to lose in the other battles across the planet, but they’d set up their defenses in a way that had made it very difficult for Jason’s troops to root them out. If it hadn’t been for some very wise plays by his people they would have had massive casualties rather than the mere handful he saw tallied on his HUD.

  The trailblazer had brought them up first thing along with similar reports from the other engagements. Most were injury reports, but amongst there were a scattering of fatalities. Jason cringed with each one he saw. The vast majority of the galaxy would have seen these reports as an impossibly dominate victory, but to him each individual lost was a defeat. Star Force didn’t assault any world where they expected to lose troops and did their best in defensive engagements to minimize losses, so losing even one meant they’d screwed up somehow…or the lizards had pulled some more trickery out of their butts.

  13 deaths…to date. He’d lost 4 of those in this fight, a Calavari, two Scionate, and a commando. The Scionate had gotten overzealous and done something stupid, with Jason kicking himself for sending them in so green…but the others had fought well despite their youth, and if those two hadn’t gone off mission they’d probably still be alive. Jason didn’t like losing them, but he had to remind himself that he couldn’t babysit everyone and if they acted stupidly then there wasn’t much he could do to stop it from coming back to bite them.

  What most people in the ADZ knew of the lizards came from these battle reports, for most of them had never seen them in person and those who had were dying off, replaced by younger generations. When landslide victory numbers like this were eventually relayed back to them they thought the lizards were numerically dominant pushovers…but that was not the case. The only reason Star Force had been able to take this base in the way it had was because they were damn good at what they did, but it had the side effect of making the enemy look weak when they were not.

  The Calavari he’d lost had been caught up in an ambush and took so much armor damage that he’d been barely able to walk, but he and his unit had come out of it alive and were heading to the rear when a wisp was shot down overhead and fell to the ground. A proximity warning had been quickly issued from orbit, predicting the fall trajectory and the Calavari had managed to get out of the way just in time…save for the one who could barely move.

  That was just pure bad luck, and he’d deserved better than that. To win out against an ambush then to die while in the clear was just plain wrong, but then again the galaxy was full of wrongs and try as they would Star Force couldn’t stop all of them. Two other Calavari had been hit with shrapnel from that fighter crash, but their armor had protected them enough to survive the spear-like impacts.

  The commando had died in circumstances he hadn’t yet discovered, but it had been in a huge firefight. He’d review that later with those who had been on the ground at the time plus the vid logs once they compiled them all. He knew they had to learn from their mistakes, or their enemies’ ingenuity, in order to prevent deaths like this from occurring again, and Jason would be spending a lot of his future downtime reviewing everything that had taken place on this planet in detail.

  That was the beauty of the battlemap and its recorders, which lifted the fog of war in the post analysis and helped to keep the realtime fighting coordinated and sane. If an enemy ever figured a way to compromise their low level communications it would hurt Star Force badly, which was why all their troops had trained to fight with jamming shutting it down and even to fight with a compromised system utilizing various checks and non-electronic hand signals.

  But when the battlemap was working it gave them a huge advantage that the lizards didn’t have. The battlemap, their armor and shields, the advanced weaponry…each was a piece in the ever growing puzzle that allowed Star Force to fight and live to see tomorrow, with Jason never willing to tolerate the concept of ‘acceptable losses.’

  A lizard might go into combat mere months after it was born, working off of genetic knowledge and its default strength, but in order for a Star Force soldier to get to the frontlines they had to put decades of training and trials in, making each one of them a veteran before they fired a single live plasma blast in battle. And not a veteran as in being on a warfront, but in knowing how to dominate it, when to attack and when to retreat. There were no newbs in Star Force’s assault groups, and because of everything they did in prep and tech, along with battlefield leadership from the Archons, almost everyone Jason had brought into this fight was walking out of it.

  But it was the handful that weren’t that weighed on him.

  He didn’t want to accept dumb luck, because that meant he couldn’t find a way to protect against it later. When the enemy came to your doorstep to fight, you didn’t have a choice of circumstances and had to work with what was present, but when you were the attacker you did have a choice, and every time someone died Jason wondered if he should have ordered the assault or not, for he was pressing his troops against some very dangerous enemies who had the advantage of terrain and prep time. On the whole he’d been correct about this base assault, but no mission was a complete success unless everyone on his team walked away from it afterwards.

  Now that he was back in the open and could receive transmissions from afar an incoming comm icon lit up on his HUD which he activated with a telepathic thought.

  “Jason, the Voku have arrived and will be staying insystem for several weeks prior to deployment. They’re asking if you want any assistance on the ground,” Admiral Petry said from the command ship in orbit.

  “We’ve got things under control.”

  “I think they’re eager to fight rather than questioning the eventual outcome.”

  “Explain it to them, and if they are bored assemble them into hot drop response units so I can call them down when needed.”

  “Will do. How much longer are you staying down there?”

  “We’re finished underground so send a dropship. I need to recharge before the next assault.”

  “On its way.”

  “Thanks,” Jason said, walking along the burnt grass atop the base around the point where a cleansing beam had punched through the ground to give them a backdoor entrance. A little further off there were broken trees followed by whole forest, through which the mechs had cut several roads to get to makeshift spaceports situated wherever they could find some bits of flat terrain.

  The trailblazer walked through the forest until he came to one of those roads then slowly made his way along the side of it. There wasn’t much traffic, but a passing speeder slowed and offered to give him a lift but he waved it off. The driver nodded and zipped on ahead, taking the pair of wounded commandos with him back to the modular medical station they’d brought in from orbit so they could treat nearly all injuries on the surface rather than have them wait to get back onboard a ship in orbit.

  But that wasn’t why he’d waved the speeder off. He wasn’t exhausted but needed the break just to clear his th
oughts and settle his mood, which was accomplished best when he had some low level activity to do, which made walking preferable to sitting at the moment. He pulled one of the last senzu beans out of its slot within the interior of his helmet and telekinetically steered it around his cheekbone to his mouth where he bit off a tiny slice.

  That he swallowed while returning the rest of the bean to its holding spot, not wanting an overdose right now that taking the whole thing would have resulted in. Jason was feeling a bit deplenished and just wanted to top off. He also felt like pulling his helmet off and getting some fresh air on his head, but knew better than to do so in what was still enemy territory. One little lucky plasma shot by a roaming lizard to the head and he’d be dead…and after over 600 years of training he wasn’t going to risk squandering it all for a bit of fresh air.

  So he just walked and let the responsibilities for the troops below his feet rest with someone else for the time being. There was no more fighting going on in the base, for they’d cleared it all out, but there were housekeeping duties that required an army of techs that he’d ordered to start coming down a little over half an hour ago. After a few minutes of walking a larger speed passed him carrying the first of them, with his troops staying in and around the base to guard them just in case they’d missed a lizard or two.

  With them mostly off his mind Jason tried to relax and let the combat emotions flow out of him…which had become easy after so many years of training and fighting. Rarely did anything spook him enough that he couldn’t transit back and forth between emotional modes within a handful of seconds, but the deaths of his men were always something that stuck with him. Even though they were gone he still couldn’t accept it, for accepting it would be condoning it and that could never be allowed to happen.

  So what he did instead was accept the anger but let his body relax. There would be more fighting to come and they’d need him there, in one fashion or another, so it was necessary that he was awake and alert, and right now he was pushing 48 hours of activity. Inas aside, that was pushing it for Jason considering how much ambrosia he’d been pumping through his body. The physical combat was less intense than his normal training, but his psionic usage combined with the ever present need to be alert, both for his sake and others, had taken its toll on him.

  He wasn’t near the dropping point, nor anywhere close to it, but he was close to getting his mind hazy and his reflexes sluggish and that was something he couldn’t tolerate. He’d head back up to the command ship, take care of some duties there and begin organizing the next big assault while his troops likewise began transferring back up to orbit or some of the secure bases they’d established on the planet for a brief rest and recovery.

  Meanwhile other battles were ongoing and Jason would pick through those from the command ship briefly, but what he needed right now the most was rest, meaning it was time for a crash nap then some light training to get his mojo back in order before a good long sleep.

  But right now he was just walking along the crudely cut out road and hopping over an occasional limb that had fallen out into the clearing or over the small puddles that mech footprints had created with a recent rain. With each step he took he seemed to process out more of the stress flowing through him and by the time he reached the end of the road and the edge of the makeshift clearing that had dropships coming down like an orderly flock of birds he feeling good enough that he was tempted to redeploy out to one of the ongoing battles.

  He knew he had to stay ahead of the fatigue rather than fight it head on, so he stuck with the plan and found the dropship that the Admiral had sent for him as the techs unloaded from the others nearby. With them came loads of equipment and some fresh troops that would start relieving the ones below. All of the techs wore light armor, despite their dislike for it, and would continue to do so until this area was completely safed. Couldn’t afford to lose one of them either with sloppiness.

  More speeders zipped off down the road, taking them over to one of several base entrances where they would begin itemizing the contents for decommission and removal. They weren’t going to take the time to destroy and remove the entire base given that it was built underground, but they were going to gut it, do some patchwork repairs, then seal it up for either future use or reclamation…which would see the lizard structures broken down piece by piece and replaced with Star Force ones without caving in the ground over your head.

  That would be long into the future, for most of the techs would be busy building Star Force structures on the surface and tearing apart the lizard bases that orbital bombardment had wrecked while safing others like this that were below ground. Star Force was keeping this system and building up this planet into a fortress world…or so was the plan, and that wasn’t something that happened overnight.

  This was the beginning of the big push into lizard territory, not merely for raids to ‘mow the grass’ but to start taking back systems by the dozens and call the enemy’s bluff. Jason knew it wasn’t a true bluff and they’d be in for a big counterattack at some point but now was the time to do it before they grew any stronger. They were committing so many resources to Skarron space he wasn’t sure what kind of a hit the lizard would or could throw at them, but he doubted they’d just be left alone. The design of this planet’s infrastructure told him that the lizards were gearing up to defend against Star Force and he doubted that they wouldn’t have another surprise or two waiting for them.

  Jason still had numerous sites on this planet to take, plus the waterworld that was reporting continuous small-scale fighting. It would be a while before both were securely in Star Force hands, then even longer for them to get truly secure, though a few Sentinels were already on their way here from the ADZ. Those combined with the fleets heading this way, of which the Voku were only one, would be able to hold this system while Star Force built it up along with a few other guests.

  Once they had it secured they’d begin funneling all resupply through the system and branch out as they began the long crusade towards the Pagalis System, sweeping up the systems in between and along the Zeta Region border as they began returning the Calavari to their former worlds.

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