Star Force: Counterstrike (SF18)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  Some took the bait while others headed off over the forest towards the distant dropships that were delivering even more mechs to the ground at five different drop points that would filter in to the 3 approach paths to the base. Altogether there were 18 of the flying tanks deploying to counter the attackers, now split up into small groups, two of which passed over the trees and onto the path containing the Clan Davion and Clan Thrawn assault group.

  The madcats up front had to pivot around to hit the gunships, because they crossed well to the aft of the formation, but they were still within missile range and turned to target the mechs anyway, with the now trailing mad dogs poking at them with the lachars in their arms. Swarms of missiles rose up and smothered the two targets, knocking down their shields within seconds and pummeling the armored hulls underneath as the rest of the 58 mechs targeted the predators with plasma, lachars, rail guns, and missiles of their own.

  Both targets went down into the forest, falling well clear of the mechs, then became lost in the trees and blowing snow with only a few plumes of smoke rising up to mark their location but even those were quickly dispersed at altitude thanks to the storm winds. Reforming their lines the mechs moved on up the twists and turns in the path, gradually approaching the base as their reinforcements gathered kilometers back.

  Jasmine was piloting one of the madcats walking out of a Dragon-class dropship along with the other Clan Kerensky and Clan Saber mechs that would join up with the reinforcements from Clan Scorpion and Clan Sangheili further down the line, then make their way to the rest of their Clansmen in the western assault on the base. Each step her mech took made her head twinge, but it was well worth the tradeoff to be allowed to join in the attack rather than sitting back at base while the others went into combat.

  Clan Kerensky had lost so many mechs that Cora and Paul had decided to reinforce their numbers with a partial Clan Saber force brought in from Sol, while Clan Scorpion did the same with an element of Clan Sangheili that Jason had personally brought out to Corneria. Not being the best mechwarrior amongst his Clan, he too was going into battle with the reserves…though perhaps that designation was a misnomer, because they had a larger role to play if things took a turn for the worst.

  Jasmine formed up with another madcat, a rifleman, and a pair of thors and led her star out on picket duty while a pair of specially modified Falcon-class dropships each landed a Hoth-class assault mech onto the ironically appropriate snow pack. All around them more mechs filed out of dropships along with hovertrucks carrying heavy missile launchers that stayed in the far back of the formation as the quadrupeds unfurled their legs and stood up.

  “Alright, let’s do this,” she said over the comm to her star. “Heavies will take the gunships, we hit them if they slip by so stay within a kilometer and heads up for lizards on the ground. There’s no way of knowing what else they’ve got in that base to throw at us.”

  “Copy that,” the rifleman’s pilot said. “Permission to take point?”

  “Granted,” Jasmine said, beginning to walk her mech forward as the heavies behind her also started to move, though the one in the back was only partially visible on her aft cameras due to the increasing amount of blowing snow. If it picked up much more they’d have a blizzard on their hands.

  Fortunately her mech’s long legs wouldn’t be affected. With each step they tore through the snow on the ground, gouging out long tracks that the other mechs followed. The snow here was virgin and probably more than a meter deep, but the mech’s computer adjusted for the additional drag automatically, making Jasmine glad she wasn’t in a neo this time around. None of their Clan’s second group were, in fact. All of the Kerensky neos had gone with the first group, which should anytime now be hitting the perimeter of the lizard base.

  Glancing at her battlemap Jasmine noted several new icons had sprouted up, indicating defense turrets that apparently had been hidden within the forest. There were also some mobile enemy icons, suggesting that the lizards had some sort of base defenders that they hadn’t encountered before, but that she was happy to see were also showing up on sensors…unlike the approaching predators.

  “All forces, alert,” Paul’s voice broke over the comm of every unit in the assault force. “Incoming cruiser from the south. Looks like we got their attention.”

  “Figures they wouldn’t make this easy on us,” one of Jasmine’s mechwarriors commented.

  “All part of the plan,” she reminded him. “Focus on our part.”

  As she finished the words the lead heavy walker twisted its head to the left and fired off an electrolaser blast, followed by a pair of heavy lachars from chin-mounted barrels. Immediately a target illuminated on Jasmine’s battlemap as one of the 3 approaching gunships was damaged. The second hoth mirrored the first with a few seconds delay and fired off its head-mounted weapons at the same target, which quickly disappeared from the battlemap eliciting a smile from the Archon. The hoths had so much more firepower than the smaller, two-legged mechs it was crazy. They were practically walking turrets and extremely effective at range, though vulnerable to close range assaults.

  Which was what her star was here to prevent, along with a range of other options Cora had planned into their assault formation.

  Right now though Jasmine wanted to be with the first wave, mixing it up with the base defenders that she was monitoring on the battlemap while slowly walking her star forward, kilometers away from the base in the growing snowstorm with nothing to do but wait and watch.

  Jason felt much the same way, escorting another pair of heavy walkers from his landing zone, trudging through the snow in his neo along with two stars of Sangheili mechs augmenting four more Scorpion stars. Situated a bit farther out than Jasmine’s group, no enemy predators had come out to greet them…or rather they’d retreated after reports of what happened to the others got back to them, but Jason and the others didn’t know that, given that the enemy gunships didn’t show up on their sensors.

  That was the enemy’s greatest advantage, he knew. Had that not had been the case he was confident that Paul and the others would have turned the enemy back before he’d arrived on Corneria. His friend was thoroughly vexed at having his naval skills restricted as they were by being sensor blind to the enemy, but like always Paul was game for a challenge and was finding new ways to get at their opponent as the duration of this war stretched out.

  The other major advantage the lizards had was the fact that the trailblazers had known nothing about them at the outset, but with each battle they fought the Archons learned more about the threat they faced, which allowed them to adapt to counter the lizards’ tactics…such as this assault. He’d been involved in the planning meetings, mostly as a spectator, as Paul and Cora had most of it worked out before he even got here. Unlike with the V’kit’no’sat, the lizards’ tech was only marginally superior in the grand scheme of things, making Star Force technology at least effective in combating them, which was all they needed.

  Give the trailblazers an opening, however slight, and they’d find a way to exploit it. So too it seemed for the lizards, who were also adapting to Star Force’s tactics, but in the adaptation war the Archons were winning out, assuming this assault went as planned.

  The lizards had made a mistake in putting a base this far north. Allowing surface access through the snowy paths gave Star Force a ground assault option, whereas the rest of the planet was full of forest with almost no grassland to speak of. The lizards’ other base had no approach clearings at all, making it immune to mech assault, which was one reason why it hadn’t been taken down yet. Perhaps the lizards had felt they needed a closer base to attack the northern Clan colonies, but right now that decision was coming back to bite them.

  After a long walk in silence staring out at the near whiteout conditions Jason’s comm lit up with Cora’s heavy breathing.

  “Jason, we need the neos up here asap to deal with base defenses. We’ve put down their vehicles, but the rest of the mechs are tied up wi
th the cruiser and there are more turrets here than we expected. They’re delaying us from getting under the shield.”

  “Coming,” he answered her before switching to his task force comm, which included both his and Jasmine’s groups. “Every Sangheili and Saber with a neo advance to the fork and follow me into the base, they need help with the perimeter defenses.”

  He suited actions to words and began running through the snow, feeling his feet get tripped up a bit on the thick snowpack until his legs learned to adjust to the movement. A little over a kilometer ahead he and the six neos in his group caught up with four more waiting for him at the intersection of the paths.

  “Let’s go,” he commed the others, highlighting their icons on the battlemap and creating a new comm shortcut for those nine mechs as two of the neos came up on his right and left shoulders in flanking positions, making it apparent that the mechwarriors were faster runners in the gigantic suit-like machines than he was.

  As they ran through the snow, both on the ground and in the air, he began to see the outline of the cruiser ahead and slightly to the right. Its flat edge made it difficult to see, but the smoking holes in the hull sent up billowing black banners which drew his attention to the muted flashes hitting the hull below. He couldn’t see much through the snow, but it was clear that their advance mechs were putting up one hell of a fight.

  Trying to look at it and keep his running rhythm was problematic, but in one of the quick looks he took that direction when the bends in the sea of trees allowed it, he saw a dull line flash across the sky, then a not so dull explosion on the ship. As part of the plan, the heavy walkers were within firing range of the base and tall enough to shoot over the treetops from all 3 directions. He imagined they were responsible for most of the damage to the cruiser, though if they’d managed to take the shields down rather than just penetrating them with their energy-based weaponry, then the mechs would become a far more formidable threat to the hovering capital ship.

  His gut tightened when he caught a glimpse of a second cruiser silhouette nearby the first one, only set a kilometer or so back. At first he thought he was seeing things, with the falling snow messing with his vision, but then the contact popped up on sensors as it began to take damage, making him wonder why Paul hadn’t alerted them to a second incoming cruiser…or at least announce its arrival if they hadn’t been able to spot it on approach.

  Before he could contact Paul to ask him what was going on they hit the edge of the engagement zone, seeing the charred remains of two turrets flanking the exit of the path through the forest to the clearing the lizards had either cut out of the trees or set down within, for there was a kilometer-wide gap between forest edge and buildings that this prong of the attack had apparently come through and dispersed to the right, for that’s where all the icons were displayed on his battlemap.

  Jason passed a downed rifleman, already covered in a thin film of fresh snow, when target highlights flashed on his display via Cora, telling him which targets she wanted his neos to hit. None were near the cruisers and the other battling mechs, but in towards the scattered buildings were only a few allied icons were showing. The base was obviously still in a construction phase, apparently with defenses layered in to the misshaped mess.

  “Ignore the ships,” he told his double star, “we’ve got priority targets in the base. Stay sharp, stay agile. Make like commandos and follow me in.”

  7

  “All forces, alert,” Paul said, watching the orbital surveillance of one of the known cruiser hideaways on the planet’s surface. “Incoming cruiser from the south. Looks like we got their attention.”

  As soon as he spoke the words the lizard warship had accelerated out of satellite view, heading into the upper atmosphere and accelerating hard to get to the northern base that the mechs were assaulting. Orbital surveillance on that was nil, given that it was currently smothered in a monster of a snowstorm that blocked out all visuals and most infrared. That said, it wasn’t blocking most of their onsite sensors, so Paul still had access to their battlemap and the camera views from the units on the ground…which were partially obscured by the blowing snow.

  The Archon let the cruiser get a head start, then contacted his ships in orbit to drop down into preferred orbital bombardment range, splitting into two groups. One was a higher altitude orbit due to their limited gravity drive power/mass ratings. The lower group came all the way down to the top of the atmosphere and hovered in place at an angle to the target, allowing a wide bombardment corridor for the higher altitude ships to shoot through.

  By the time they were in position the mech battle was deeply committed, with not one cruiser in play but two, as the battlemap reported. Paul nodded grimly, knowing that the lizards still had assets on the planet that they hadn’t been able to locate, but two cruisers they should be able to handle as long as the base shields remained up. The mechs had advanced quickly to get underneath its protective halo, counting on the threat of orbital bombardment to keep it up, not that Paul would have fired down so close to his own troops, but hopefully the enemy wouldn’t be savvy enough to call his bluff on that.

  Based off the visuals coming in from the mechs on the ground and the growing sensor profile from the cruiser as they began to take damage, he saw that they were positioned low to the ground outside the shield perimeter, aiming at a very flat angle to shoot underneath the kilometer high flat shield without getting too close to its invisible edge. Given the shield strength, bumping into it would be the equivalent of running into an armored wall, so both the cruisers kept a buffer zone between them and the invisible barrier. While it would have been technically possible for their flat profiles to slide in underneath it, they would have been so pinned to the ground that their weapons batteries wouldn’t have been able to double up on targets set directly beneath it, so the lizards had done the next best thing and parked as close as they could outside.

  A lot of mechs were hugging the tree line for cover, then running out into the clear to fire on the cruiser before ducking back in behind the trees, many of which were now afire from the cruisers’ plasma attacks. One hit from the main batteries could take down a mech, and there were several of the walking machines with arms and legs missing, strewn out on the ground to testifying to that fact, but with the mobility of the mechs and the disadvantageous position of the cruisers the mechwarriors were able to survive long enough to be able to bring up the hovertrucks from the second groups while the heavy walkers continued to pound the cruisers from afar.

  Add to that the fact that a lot of the mechs were armed with lachars that were able to penetrate the cruisers’ shields. The mechwarriors had been instructed prior to the battle to aim for the ships’ weapons batteries rather than the easy to hit hull, and not long into the engagement the limited number of lizard plasma cannons within range began to thin, so much so that by the time the hovertrucks got to the engagement they weren’t fired upon by the two ships that had finally started to spin about to bring their far side weapons into play.

  The missile launchers on the back of each of the dozens of hovertrucks carried only 2 missiles, which they took very little time in aiming and firing off before turning around and driving back down the snowy paths through the forest and away from the engagement zone. Each of their missiles contained a plasma warhead, functioning like the shells in Star Force’s handheld plasma weapons. The man-sized container held the necessary compressed gas and power source along with a detonation cap that upon impact would trigger the energy release and create the plasma at the target, rather than firing it from range and having it dissipate during travel.

  Paul’s visual monitors, displayed like little windows floating in his holographic command nexus, started flashing with the ‘ship buster’ missile impacts. Huge plasma balls momentarily formed, reflecting off the snow clouds and bathing the battlefield in blue light as they assaulted the ventral shields on the hovering warships.

  “Time to give them something else to think about,�
� Paul said to himself as he sent the command to his waiting battle groups to begin orbital bombardment…of the tropical zone lizard base.

  Jason ducked his neo in behind one of the teepee-like lizard buildings, ducking away from the plasma shards a small turret was throwing his way. Two others behind him did likewise as they came around the corner of an especially high building that stood more than 3 times the height of the mechs and ran face on into one of the base’s untagged defenses on their battlemap.

  It was untagged because Core and her troops hadn’t gotten this far inside the perimeter. They were circling around the base, tagging and taking out the most easily accessible turrets to give the mechs fighting the cruisers cover to retreat back into. For whatever reason the lizards weren’t firing close to their own buildings, so the more mechs they could squeeze into firing positions there the better.

  This particular turret was low to the ground, its top only rising to about waist height on the neos but its anti-air like plasma weapon succeeded in filling the entire walkway between buildings, meaning the mechs were going to have to take damage on approach if they wanted to go in that way. Before Jason was willing to accept that he walked his mech down the ‘bread loaf’ like building that he was hiding behind and poked out around the far side. The building was also taller than his mech by about double, narrowing at the top until it flattened out at about half the width of the base. This gave his mechs arms a bit of clearance that its feet didn’t have, allowing him to slink around close to the side as he peeked out.

  No other turrets were in sight, just several more closely packed dirt streets.

  Jason walked around the end of the building and poked his mech out into the opposite walkway that led back down to the turret, firing off a blast of plasma from the flank only to see it rotate around quite fast and fire his way.