by Aer-ki Jyr
24
November 11, 4817
Sarbran System
Tahbrana
The ship Esna and Tior arrived on barely had any training facilities, for it was a smaller ship with decent weaponry and not meant for much more than courier work, but they managed to maintain their fitness until they arrived in planetary orbit of Tahbrana. It wasn’t a Star Force world, and Esna could see the various smoke plumes from orbit that marked the heavy war zones below as the native population fought outsiders who were plundering their planet for whatever they thought was of value…including slave labor.
The three Canderous ships in orbit had put an end to the naval presence of the invaders, who were from a mix or races and empires, and stopped them from taking anyone or anything off the surface in bulk, but a few ships were sneaking past due to sheer numbers. That had shut down most of the organized looting, but left the armies on the surface enacting extermination orders. For whatever reason they wanted the native Yados dead, and the millions of invading troops, when spread out, were not easy to stop.
“What’s that?” Esna asked, seeing another ship in orbit.
“Paladin. They only recently arrived, so the bulk of the fighting is up to us until they can get going.”
“Meaning what?”
“The Paladin? I mean reproducing. They’re the long term solution to securing this world, but there has to be something left to save. Keeping as many of the Yados alive is our job, and while the Canderian units on the ground are playing defense, we’re going behind enemy lines on the offensive.”
“Am I jumping right in?” Esna asked, a bit concerned.
“Yes,” Tior said flatly. “That wasn’t the plan, but I’ve got a good feel for your skill level and I think I can compensate for your weaknesses. We’ll operate as a pair, though I may need to carry you piggyback some of the time when we need to move faster than you can run. It’ll take some time for us to get good at it, but I don’t want to wait to put you into action more than a few days. They need both of us down there, and especially you so we can access some areas that we currently can’t get in to without taking casualties.”
“Alright. Just tell me what to do.”
“We’re transferring over to that warship, then I’ll get you up to speed and we’ll practice a few binary operations. When I’m satisfied, we’re going mission ready.”
“If you think so, I’m game.”
“Your job here is to use your Fornax and that’s it until you grow up, youngling. Focus on your task and we’ll make this work.”
“I’m comfortable with the role of weapon, and I’ve ridden on the back of a Scionate before.”
“Oh?”
“He was a Maverick.”
“Well he has a flat back, mine is vertical, so it’ll take some practice,” he said as their view of the holographic display in the main hall showed one of the Canderous warships shoot off from their formation and head down closer to the planet.
“Do you know what’s happening?”
“Looking like a bombardment run. Probably got a call from the troops on the surface for fire support. I don’t see any enemy ships in play.”
“Aerial craft?”
“They have plenty down there, but they keep away from ours. Our kill rate is sky high and their shields are crap. The entire tech level of the enemy is inferior, but they’ve got numbers and a head start on us.”
“How long have we been here?”
“8 months.”
“And how long do you think this mission will take?”
“It’s a fairly well populated planet, so Canderous will be here for a few years most likely.”
“Years?”
“Welcome to the big leagues, Red. But defeating the enemy isn’t our team’s objective. We’re here to stall and delay the enemy as much as possible in order to save as many natives as we can. Others can handle the straight up combat, but until the Paladin numbers start to swell this fight is a losing one. We’re here to tip the scales. If and when the fight becomes a conventional one we’ll leave and move on to another assignment while others finish the hard work. We’re here to do the impossible.”
“We can’t save them all, can we?” Esna said sadly.
“No we can’t,” Tior all but whispered, “but the more damage Pantheon can do, the more pressure we take off them. Which is why we’re not holding back, and with you we can hit some bigger targets, but there will still be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people dying every day. We can’t stop all of that.”
Esna sighed. “Then this is where we need to be.”
“Dropship,” Tior said, with Esna taking that to mean it was time to leave and she headed out of the chamber first with her new teammate following. They went straight to the hangar and boarded the dropship that already had her armor and their other supplies packed into it, then they transferred over to the Canderian warship that, unlike most Star Force varieties, did not carry drones. It was one big, fat, angular ship full of weaponry rather than docking ports, and the base of operations for Pantheon 7 in this system.
Like on the seda, they had a special section of the ship where only they could go and once onboard Tior brought her to it with a special code input onto a keypad after a genetic scan. The door whooshed into the wall, allowing the pair to walk through before it sealed again. What Esna saw inside wasn’t anything special, just more hallways and rooms like on the rest of the warship, all in Canderian design and colors, but it felt like hallowed ground all the way into an equipment room where there were two other Humans sitting and doing some maintenance work on weapons.
“Hey, buddy,” one of them said, setting aside a large rifle and standing up. “New girlfriend?”
“That number 22?” the other asked, also standing up and walking over to where she gave Esna a good looking over.
“Yep,” Tior confirmed, then looked at Esna. “Say hi.”
As Tior had instructed her to do before, Esna sent a focused Fornax blast into each of them with about a half second delay between the two. Both the man and the woman dropped to the ground twitching and stayed there long enough for Esna to walk over and look down at them, then she stopped hitting them with repetitive blasts and put a sarcastically friendly look on her face.
“Hi there, fellas.”
She heard Tior laughing behind her as her two new teammates got to their feet with scowls on their faces that quickly shifted to respect as they suspected who had put her up to that.
“That’s one hell of a takedown,” the man said, looking her over. “Name’s Harten. I’m guessing your physical skills don’t match up.”
“No, I’m a weak ass, one trick pony right now,” Esna admitted freely.
“Useful trick,” the woman said, glaring once at Tior. “Nice introduction.”
“I thought you’d like that,” he said, walking up and putting a hand on Esna’s shoulder. “She’s going to be useful, but until she can grow up I’m going to partner with her. We need a couple days to practice, then we’re going live.”
“That fast?” Harten asked.
“She’s weak, but her heart is that of a warrior. She’d learn the most from combat, and I’ll make sure she stays alive long enough to learn.”
“I’m Aeryn,” the slightly shorter woman said, but who easily outmassed Esna with her sculpted muscles. She wasn’t what Esna would call ‘thick,’ but she had a build that suggested she was a wrestler/grappler.
“She also goes by Phantom and Red,” Tior added. “Seems she didn’t take to the scum she was training with so she kept to herself a lot.”
“We’ll that’s not going to happen here,” Aeryn said firmly. “We work and train as a unit. So much so we get to the point where we almost breathe for one another. You’ve got to embrace that or we’ll send you back.”
“The more I’m with you guys the more I’ll learn, so not a problem,” Esna said confidently. “I don’t like hanging around people that will drag me down, and I apologize if I
do that for you. I’ll try to keep up as best I can.”
“You’ve got something we don’t, so it’ll even out,” Harten promised, “but you won’t be able to keep up.”
“Just tell me what I need to do.”
“Tior can do that, and when we’re needed to help you train we’ll be there, but I’m heading back down within the hour. District 19 is a shitstorm and I’m going to clean up what I can.”
“I’m taking a day,” Aeryn said. “Hurt my leg pretty bad and had to come back up. Need a rest day before I get back into it.”
“How?” Tior asked.
“Stupid trip mine. Torqued my armor so much my bone snapped. I read you got into it with the Viks?”
Esna nodded. “Yeah.”
“And that’s when your Fornax popped?”
“Third time, on a high gravity world. Only three of us made it out alive.”
“Those Zen’zat are nasty buggers with Archon powers. I don’t know why we’re not allowed to earn psionics. Leaves us sitting ducks whenever we go up against them.”
“They let us have her,” Harten countered. “So maybe she’s a test to see if we can handle them. The Protovic didn’t start off with them either.”
“They have their own set, but I agree,” Aeryn said, looking at Esna anew. “Maybe she is a test.”
“I don’t think so,” the new Pantheon said. “Tyrenk…the Archon that brought me to Canderous…said I didn’t have what it took to become an Archon. I don’t think they’ll be giving their powers to anyone they don’t think is worthy, and if they are worthy they’ll just make them an Archon.”
“She has a point,” Tior noted.
“Then lets show them a reason to give us at least some psionics,” Aeryn countered.
“That’s not why she’s here. Focus on the mission, please. The Archons will do what the Archons want to do, and they haven’t steered us wrong so far. They have their tasks, we have ours, and she’s here to help with ours. We finally have a psionic on the team and you’re whining about not getting more. Suck it up, cupcake. The Archons just gave us a gift, not a test.”
“You underestimate them, but point taken. We need both of you down there. The Paladin got hit and lost all but a tenth of their reproduction pods.”
“Shit,” Tior said with a shake of his head. “How’d that happen?”
“They got swarmed by the Bajka. Apparently the buggers knew what was coming and tried to stop it from happening. They didn’t fully succeed and bled themselves dry in the process, but that setback is going to cost a lot of people their lives.”
“I thought we had mechs covering them?”
“We did. They ran right by them taking the hits.”
Tior closed his eyes, imagining the gore that must have resulted in. Mechs vs infantry was always a win for mechs, and the Bajka had to have sacrificed an awful number of themselves to force some of them past…and even then the Paladin on the ground would have killed a lot of them with perimeter defenses and their own troops.
“How did they get that close?”
“Hot drop on all cardinal points, then reinforced by rushed formations overland when the mechs were spread.”
“No aerial support?”
“They had theirs keeping ours busy.”
“We still shouldn’t have lost.”
“Tior, they sent half their army on this one attack and lost all of them. It was a desperation move.”
“Apparently a successful one,” he said, putting his hands on his armored hips as his and Esna’s heads and hands were uncovered, but otherwise wearing their full armor rather than carrying it as cargo. “Damn it, how far behind does that put us?”
“We lost most of the Arbiters, but it wasn’t a death blow. There’s enough to rebuild from, but it’ll take 9 months to get back to startup levels.”
“What…the…hell…” Tior said in dismay.
“Our thoughts exactly,” Harten agreed.
Tior put a hand over his face, squeezing the bridge of his nose for several long seconds before letting go and looking at Esna.
“That time span I quote you just got thrown out the window. We’re in scramble mode now, and most of the people on this planet are going to die unless we get reinforcements.”
“You know there aren’t any available,” Aeryn reminded him. “We’re all they’re got.”
“Then they just got fucked,” he said, kicking an empty box halfway across the room in frustration. “Someone dropped the ball. Who was it?”
“Tior, have a look at the battlemap before you start going down that road,” Harten said, pointing him towards a console on the other side of the room.
The Pantheon walked over to it without another word and Esna followed him, seeing battle records brought up as he worked through what had happened since he’d left to go pick her up. He took his time, ignoring that Esna was even there, so she decided to wait patiently rather than make a nuisance of herself. The other two Pantheons didn’t say anything to her, rather going back to their maintenance work while they waited the few minutes it took for Tior to catch up…and realize that the enemy hadn’t been aided by a failure on the part of the Paladin or Canderous. They’d simply committed suicide in order to hit the Paladin before the Paladin could reproduce to levels that the Bajka and the others attacking this world could not stand against.
“So much for an ignorant enemy,” Tior said, walking over and sitting down next to Aeryn.
“We’re getting kind of famous out here, you know.”
“Comms suck out here, you know.”
“They chose to die fighting rather than surrender,” Harten added. “Sometimes stupidity is just unpredictable.”
“We’ve seen enough of it that we ought to be able to predict such bull shit before it goes down,” he said angrily, then seemed to remember that Esna was there. “Sit down, Red. I’ve got to figure this out.”
“What’s to figure out?” Aeryn asked as Esna found another bench and perched on it in her black/green armor.
“How we were sent here with so few. If we can’t protect the Paladin then, how can we protect them now?”
“They’ve been moved,” Harten informed him.
“Doesn’t matter if someone finds them and copies the Bajka. Someone miscalculated or we messed up. This shouldn’t have happened.”
“It did. We can’t predict everything.”
“Aeryn, we don’t land troops we can’t protect. Something went wrong somewhere.”
“We gambled, sending too few troops to help this planet. If there was an Archon here maybe they would have seen it coming, but we’re just Canderous and I didn’t see anything missteps from the Regulars.”
“We still got our asses kicked by a bunch of primitives.”
“A bunch is right,” Harten pressed. “A whole, big bunch. Numbers matter, and they spent a lot of them for that hit with no casualties for us. We lost the Paladin, but Canderous came through untouched aside from equipment. That made our job going forward easier.”
“But it delays the final solution. More natives will die because of this because we can’t be everywhere at the same time. The Paladin can, which is why they’re the key that we just lost.”
“They will regrow,” Aeryn assured him.
Tior looked at the floor. “This is why we need an Archon.”
“We have to make do without,” Harten said, finishing his project and pulling over a small pistol with weapons damage to it that he began disassembling.
“Yeah,” Tior agreed, standing up again and pointing to Esna. “Let’s go. The sooner we work this out the sooner we can get down there. We’ll start on the track. Leave your other gear here.”
Esna disconnected the pack on her back and stood up, following him out further into the ship and leaving the Pantheon section behind. They got to the halo track with a few other people already there and running, but it wasn’t crowded.
“First lesson,” Tior said, and Esna could tell he was angry, but not
with her, “is mounting quickly. We need to do this on the run, but let’s walk it through slowly. You need to hop and grab my shoulders, use them as leverage to get your torso onto where my pack would be. When it’s there it’ll be easier to grab, so we gotta learn to do this the slippery way,” he said, turning his back to her. “Try it.”
Esna ran a step towards him and hopped, getting up on his shoulders then wrapping her armored arms around his neck.
“Not…my throat. Cross your wrists over my chest. Make a triangle.”
Esna did as instructed, then offered a suggestion. “Grip points?”
“Yes. Bottom hand. Leave the top free and grip your other wrist. That way you can pull it away to get to a weapon quickly. Do you need line of sight?”
“I emit from tissue in my head. If it hits your body it’ll affect you.”
“Do you have to look though?”
“To aim. I can throw it any direction I want, even backwards.”
“Ok. If I have my countermeasures on you don’t have to worry about hitting me. We’ll need to do that when you emit a field…you can do that, can’t you? I’ve seen Archons do it.”
“Yes, but probably not as large as them. I actually learned to do that first.”
“Alright, legs. I need decent arm swing. Can you lock your knees on my lower back?”
“Let me see,” Esna said, leveraging herself higher on his back while he supported her full weight easily. She touched her knees there, arching her body very far away from his, and used the grip points in them to connect to his armor. “How’s that?”
Tior swung his arms experimentally. “Tolerable. We’ll have to reset our shields to allow for this.”
“We can do that?”
“There’s some deep customization possible when you dig into the program. Not something we can do on the fly, though. Hold on, let’s see how this works,” he said, taking off running with Esna’s head totally above his as if she was a giant backpack getting jostled slightly from his steps and torso twist.
“Can you loosen up?”