by Aer-ki Jyr
As soon as she finished her sentence a large glob of air belted out of her nose and rose up to the surface, drawing a frown from Paul. “Do you have lungs?”
“I am sorry. That was rude.”
“What was that?”
She avoided his gaze for a moment. “Excrement.”
“It was air.”
“Yes. We excrete gases, do you not?”
Paul laughed. “Yeah, but we have lungs.”
“Elarioni have a small compartment,” she said, tapping her flat chest just below her neck, “that gathers up harmful byproducts from our bodies then releases them as gases time to time. I did not mean to do that now. The moment overcame me.”
“Well, to an air breather, that wasn’t rude at all.”
“I suppose not. But to a water breather we find the air to be harsh and foul. It is toxic. It is death. We must remove it from our bodies, but we do not like seeing it.”
“I understand. On my homeworld there are swimmers that breathe the air, not the water. Would you find them to be offensive.”
“I do not wish to anger, but I do not want to be untruthful. Yes, we would find them offensive.”
“The V’kit’no’sat are air breathers as well. Did they dislike you because you are not? We know very little of the ways of the water dwellers.”
“There was resentment from us, the stories are told, but we did not know of their reasoning, other than they wanted our planets for their own.”
“Tell me one of those stories, about the V’kit’no’sat.”
“I can tell you of the arrival?”
“Please do,” Paul said, listening intently as she recalled the history of her people when they first encountered their mutual enemy, peaceably. He wondered if the initial wellbeing between them was due to the fact that they were water dwellers, like most of the dominant races within the V’kit’no’sat. He’d read the data sent out to him via jumpship from the pyramid records which indicated that the Elarioni had ‘betrayed’ the V’kit’no’sat in some way, upon which basis they were exterminated. The records didn’t go into detail and Paul wondered how much of that was an excuse or if there was a legitimate incident that had occurred between them.
Ariel told him that story and many others in the days to follow, sharing openly about her people, their physiology and technology…she even taught him to swim with his legs locked as if they were a tail, then expanding on his already limited swimming abilities by helping him craft his own prosthetic leg extensions that translated his ankle movements into other, more useful swimming dynamics.
As much as Paul didn’t like killing every lizard they came across, necessary as it was, he felt better knowing that some lives had been saved from their assault on the Bounty, with his regard for the lizards falling even further knowing that they’d taken Ariel as a living decoration. They’d also discovered compartments full of small, fury rabbit-like animals that they bred on ship for food. Those thousands that had survived the lack of feeding when the lizards abandoned that section of the ship were rescued and relocated to a small portion of the planet’s surface where Star Force created them a preserve of sorts, where they could eat as much of Corneria’s vegetation as they liked.
They were kept pinned into a 26 square mile area, surrounded by high concrete walls that kept them from jumping over or digging out of the region as Star Force techs studied them and their capabilities. Over the following years they learned to establish a very basic language with them, limited in intelligence as they were, and began to instruct them to do various tasks in exchange for rewards. While they did well enough on leaves and roots, they especially had a taste for cookies, which Paul and most of the Archons could empathize with.
Thus began cookie-incentive training exercises designed to strengthen both their bodies and minds in an experiment to see if Star Force could help their ‘primitive’ race advance. It would be the first of many such endeavors in the centuries to come, for as skilled as Star Force and the Archons were at war, it was the preservation and advancement of life that was their highest priority.
Paul and Jason had discussed another such project concerning the lizards if they could ever be successfully captured and contained, working not so much in advancement in a physical sense, but in saving them from themselves. They hadn’t had that luxury with the crew of the Bounty, but Paul was glad to have saved another race off that ship, marking it also as a victory for freedom rather than just the slaughter of an intractable enemy.
Melee
1
March 22, 2266
Epsilon Eridani System
Corneria
Paul wacked one of the three lizards directly in front of him with his stun sword as he ran forward, rendering it unconscious within a second, then hop-kicked the next closest into a bundle on the floor, bending the lizard over with his boot in its gut. He flicked his sword down and nicked it in the side of the head, knocking it out as he took half a plasma hit to his right shoulder armor.
The next moment he was on the lizard shooter and dropped it to the floor with a jab in the tail as it spun around and tried to run away. The Archon stepped past all three in the walkway connection between buildings, his eyes focused ahead and out the windows of the enclosure, knowing that they were sitting ducks for a strafing run. Meanwhile the three Star Force security guards he’d collected as he made his way toward the command building in the main Star Force colony, designated as Corneria Prime, shot the stunned lizards with plasma rifles, picking up the targets that Paul was dropping, as had become their standard operating procedure over the past half hour.
The trailblazer paused long enough to let them finish, then sprinted across the elevated walkway tunnel between one of the adjacent structures and the much larger command building, finding yet more lizards on guard at the other terminus, but these hadn’t set up their portable turret yet. In fact they were just unloading the device from a floating shipping crate when Paul caught their attention, punching two back through the air from the entrance to the walkway as they came up to check on the sound of weaponsfire.
Those two hit the ground a split second before Paul jabbed one of the workers in the gut with the tip of his stun sword, releasing the pressure so he could flip it to his left and catch another that was scrambling to grab its weapon leaning against the wall in the small receiving atrium.
Paul jumped over to stun the two he’d knocked out of the walkway just as reinforcements began to pour in from the nearby hallways, apparently unaware that any Star Force personnel were in the area prior to the ruckus, otherwise they’d have had better defensive lines set up. As the first came into view the Archon charged forward, clearing himself out of the atrium and into one of the two opposing hallways, giving the security guards behind him clear lines of fire as they emerged from the walkway.
He heard the telltale sound of their own plasma weapons as he pummeled through a group of six closely packed lizards, one of which panickly fired at Paul and ended up hitting one of its own in the back, then another green plasma blast flew by him and accidentally took down another as the lizards in the opposite hall also began shooting at him.
He dodged side to side on purpose, increasing the odds that the lizards’ own troops would get caught in the crossfire as he cleared out the right side hallway, then turned around, making sure not to get tripped up in the bodies, to help the security guards finish off the others, though he needn’t have bothered. When that group of lizards had advanced to hit Paul from behind they’d walked right into the security guards’ firing lines, leaving only a pair of survivors to contend with.
One of them went down before Paul caught back up, but the second hit one of the guards square in the chest with a plasma blast before it was gunned down by the others.
“Cover,” Paul ordered as he dropped down to examine the wounded soldier. The two guards took up positions on either side, covering both hallways with their weapons, leaving the Archon and downed guard partially blocked between their legs
.
“It hurts,” the woman said, partially frozen with either pain or panic as Paul pulled her helmet off and unfastened her charred armored vest, tossing it aside on top of one of the dead lizards. Underneath he found a good amount of burnt skin, but the wound didn’t go deeper than a quarter inch and most of it had been cauterized…still, there was enough blood seeping out to be a major problem.
Paul brought the hilt of his stun sword up, popping open the nub at the base and dialed back the sword’s charge strength before tapping the woman in her wound. She immediately grimaced, then her face fell slack as the majority of the pain disappeared.
“Neat trick,” she said as her head began to clear, though her eyes were still wide with concern as she looked down at her wound.
“Finish the wounded,” Paul ordered the other two guards before looking the injured one in the face, though she couldn’t see his through his armor’s faceplate. “You have to stop the bleeding, and we can’t stay behind with you.”
“I know,” she said stoically, reaching for her plasma rifle that she’d dropped. “Can you pull me over there,” she asked, inclining her head back towards the atrium.
Paul walked around behind her and looped his arms underneath her armpits and across the top of her chest a few inches above her wound. “Brace yourself.”
The woman yipped with pain despite the numbing effect, and Paul made sure to make the move as quick as possible, eventually propping her up against the right side wall where she could watch the left hallway and atrium. He grabbed one of the lizard’s rifles and set it down next to her in case she ran out of ammo.
“I’ve logged your position and tagged you as injured on the battlemap, but there are no medics nearby. You’re going to have to hold out.”
“Might be a medic with Duke,” she said, her lips trembling. “Go get him.”
Paul gently laid a hand on her shoulder then disappeared down the right hallway with the others, leaving her sitting alone on the floor with the dead lizards and a seeping belly wound. She pulled up the hole in her shirt until the lower end covered the burn spot on her skin, then pressed and held it in place with her right hand while grasping her rifle in her left so she could aim at both hallways and the walkway entrance if need be…then waited.
Paul took his two remaining security guards and pressed down the side hallway until they got to a staircase then headed up. According to the battlemap Duke Hightower was holed up in the administrative levels in the top half of the building along with a lot of other ‘civilian’ Star Force personnel and a few security forces trying to hold off a group of lizards attacking from ground level. Paul and his team had come in 15 floors above the lizards’ entry point, hopefully bypassing at least some of them, but the battlemap said there was enemy activity all the way up to at least level 136.
By the time they got to level 84 Paul started to run into lizards using the same stairwell. He ordered the security guards to hold position and shoot anyone coming up from below, knowing that the building’s elevators were already locked down. There was more than one stairwell, however, but this would be the best kill zone available to put the guards in, as well as partially securing an exit corridor when he got to the survivors…hopefully before the lizards overran them.
They didn’t have the insane numbers typical of their hoard tactics, but more kirbies were landing troops in the Star Force city constantly, being ferried in and out by their cruisers as the surviving defense towers hammered away at their shields. They’d detach from the larger ship once they were over the city, fly down to the surface between the buildings and unload within 30 seconds, then fly back up and dock to the larger ships as they blasted away at targets of opportunity or the defense towers, then they’d zip back off across the forest to one of their 3 intact bases, load up more troops and repeat the process.
The assault had been going on for the past 3 days, but the incursion to the command building had occurred less than 2 hours ago. Up until then the lizards had been dropping troops in the northeast and southern sections of the massive city along the periphery, but once they knocked out one of the central defense towers they moved in closer, weathering the plasma storm with their shields and choosing to take the damage to the hull that the heavy lachars were doing to them in exchange for the 2 min runs in and out.
Another defense tower had been taken down from within the city an hour ago, blown up by troops infiltrating the structure on foot. Paul had intercepted a second group headed for another tower when the call came through that the command building had come under attack. While it wasn’t the command center for the city’s war effort, it did hold the economic and administrative offices that Star Force’s senior leaders on the planet frequented, along with a lot of their personal quarters.
The Archons had been evacuating people into the underground bunkers since the attack began, for fear of the cruisers just blasting away at buildings, but once it was clear that wasn’t their aim the evacuation efforts had started to focus on the invasion sectors of the city and getting people out of harm’s way, which Hightower and others had been helping to organize from the command building.
Paul didn’t know if the lizards’ knew it was a primary site of operations for the city or not, but he’d left his troops to protect the defense tower and began fighting his way across the city solo to get to Hightower, picking up stray troops he encountered along the way through what now felt like a ghost town with everyone either evacuated or taking sheltered, hidden somewhere inside the city’s massive buildings.
Paul hooked his stun sword to the back of his armor, swapping it for his plasma rifle as he charged up the stairs moving far faster than the security guards had been capable of running. He killed a pair of lizards he caught up with from behind, then raced ahead to find more of them as sounds of a firefight could be heard a few levels above.
He still didn’t know what the lizards were after, aside from trying to take the biggest building in the city. They had succeeded in bypassing most of Star Force’s troops, which were geared up and engaging the primary invasion points on the perimeter. Maybe that had been their aim and they’d just gone straight for the city’s center…but the fact was they were moving directly on the Duke’s position and he couldn’t rule out the possibility that they knew more about Star Force than he’d previously given them credit for.
He was unsure of how that could have happened, unless they’d intercepted their communications and managed to piece together data from computer and verbal languages that they’d never encountered before. Paul found that unlikely, but the unfortunate truth was they were heading directly for Hightower whether they realized his importance or not.
This whole attack had been a last gasp of defiance from the lizards after several Star Force jumpship runs had ferried additional warships into the system and Paul had taken out another of the lizard bases through orbital bombardment. He’d had enough ships on site that the lizards hadn’t made more than a few hit and run strikes with their cruisers, seeking to preserve them in the face of an unwinnable battle in low orbit.
Paul’s fleet had then been distracted by the cruisers making a flurry of raids against their orbital facilities, most of which hadn’t been manned. After evacuating those remaining personnel in danger he effectively conceded 80% of Star Force’s orbital stations to the enemy if they chose to attack them, preferring to mass his forces for a subsequent bombardment campaign that wiped another lizard base from the surface of the planet.
Before he could set up a third the lizards had struck again but this time it wasn’t in orbit, it was against their strongest surface base, making Paul think this was them resigning themselves to doing as much damage as possible before their were wiped out, and in doing so they had exploited the greatest weakness in Star Force’s surface defenses.
The lizard cruisers could fight in atmosphere, hovering mere meters above the surface, while most of the Star Force fleet couldn’t. One defense turret couldn’t stop a cruiser, nor could it
take its shields down. They had to work in conjunction with one another to destabilize the lizards’ resilient defenses, and the first thing the enemy had done in the assault was send two cruisers out around the perimeter of the city engaging isolated turrets. After that they’d sacrificed one of their capital ships to cut a path through the rest of the turret field to get into the city, through which 3 other cruisers continually ran routes, sucking up most of the damage Star Force could throw at them while sheltering the kirbies inside their shields.
Each time they came through they knocked out another piece of infrastructure with their plasma cannons, and when it was a turret tower it decreased the amount of firepower being thrown back at them…but they still didn’t want to take on the turrets directly, almost as if they didn’t want Star Force to consider everything to be a loss and call down orbital bombardment on their own city. As long as the cruisers kept on the move the orbital guns couldn’t effectively track and hit them like they could with their motionless bases.
All together they’d identified 5 active cruisers, one of which was drifting hundreds of kilometers away over the forests of the planet smoking something fierce as the crew attempted to contain the turret-induced damage all the while keeping the ship moving. Returning to the nearest base was impossible, given that Paul had ordered the third assault to begin piecemeal, even though he didn’t have enough ships in place yet. So far the base’s shields had held up to the incoming rail gun slugs, but the cruisers hadn’t flown up to orbit to engage the smaller fleet…instead they kept to their ferry runs, intent on doing as much damage to the Star Force planetary capitol as they could.
And they were doing plenty. Already over 200 people had been confirmed killed, though that was extremely low considering how bad things could have been if the cruisers had hit them directly instead of aiding the ground incursion. The airfield had been trashed, with damage done to most of the bunkers. Fortunately they were well armored, giving the crews inside time to evacuate before they were breached. Most of the aircraft not already in the air at the time of the assault were subsequently damaged, leaving those that had made it up without the ability to refuel or rearm…which meant they had to divert to other bases, leaving the lizards with a longer span of air superiority.