Star Force: Return to Earth Read online

  1

  September 18, 4833

  Solar System (V’kit’no’sat territory)

  Earth

  “Contact…northeast,” Arc Commando Viles said over the teamcomm.

  Ben Dagran hefted his Dre’mo’don rifle a little higher as he waited behind a very thick tree trunk with his Commando team scattered nearby. None of them had the psionics needed to pick up the stealthed Zen’zat, but the addition of Viles had changed that. They were going to have to rely on him to engage the Zen’zat enough to make them visible…then it would be ass kicking time.

  A ping on his battlemap from the Arc Commando highlighted the approximate location, but Ben couldn’t see anything out there. The trees were so big you could have parked a speeder inside one, yet they were spread out enough that you could move around freely, but seeing very far was a nightmare. He had maybe 80 meters of sightlines before the trunks blocked everything out, though the sensors from the warships overhead were adding their own vision down into the forest that now covered Greenland.

  The few V’kit’no’sat cities on the island chain were gone now, having been blasted into oblivion after giving the denizens a chance to flee. Ben’s Commando team wasn’t near any of them, and this was the first Zen’zat contact that any of the teams out here in the wilderness had made. No one knew if the V’kit’no’sat were going to challenge their little construction project, but it had been assumed that they would use stealth infiltrators if they did…and now that theory was being proven true.

  “Zen’zat team…three contacts. They know they’ve been hit and are fleeing,” the Arc Commando said as his dot on the battlemap took off running so he could stay in contact range. “Converge!”

  Ben left his tree trunk behind and took off running on a route that would hopefully catch the Zen’zat at an angle a few minutes later. They were just as fast as the Commandos, and perhaps even faster, but the layout of the trees meant that nobody had a straight route to run and a lot of weaving back and forth was required…which gave the smaller Commandos a slight advantage.

  Ben wasn’t 10 seconds into his run before he heard and saw a squadron of skeets zip past him…on his battlemap anyway. The canopy over his head was thick and blocking out most of the sun, allowing only a little glint of polished hulls to be seen as the aerial craft homed in on the location the Arc Commando had identified.

  Thankfully the ground was basically clear of vegetation, so the Commandos weren’t getting tripped up on much more than the occasional fallen branch and wildlife here was virtually non-existent. Back before the V’kit’no’sat had taken Earth from Star Force this entire area had been underneath a glacier. Now it and both polar caps were long gone, having melted thanks to the terraforming the invaders had done to make the planet it more to their liking.

  Even Antarctica was now green with forests and jungles and a massive amount of plants that were growing like wildfire now that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere had gone up from 0.03% to 1.28%. Not high enough to bother anyone breathing, but a total game changer for plant growth…both for the bits left here after the destruction of Earth and for the varieties brought in by the V’kit’no’sat afterwards…including these giant Farbo trees.

  But it wasn’t the carbon dioxide that was fueling the higher heat levels. It was the extra water in the air over the formerly ‘dry’ regions of the planet. Water vapor held in twice as much heat per molecule as CO2, and when the V’kit’no’sat had melted the ice caps they’d deliberately relocated a lot of that water to the land to fill giant lakes and conduits that the aquatics required beyond the oceans that they now primarily inhabited.

  But those lakes and conduits also fed the forests and jungles, eliminating all the deserts and other ‘dead’ regions of the planet. Also gone was every last trace of Star Force infrastructure. It’d been wiped clean in the planetary remake, now replaced with the abundant greenery that many of the V’kit’no’sat races preferred.

  It had been joked that where Humans had used to prefer grass lawns, the V’kit’no’sat version was full blown forests…and that’s what Earth was now. Green spread across every bit of land with numerous bits of civilization seemingly carved out of it. The difference was one walked on top of grass, but here you walked underneath the greenery that was well over 100 meters high.

  The Greenland forest was so dense that Ben knew they’d lose the Zen’zat if they couldn’t stay on them, and the skeets opened fire down into the forest thanks to the lack of native wildlife…allowing them to free fire without hesitation hoping to hit…

  Suddenly all hell broke loose as one of the skeets went down hard, with the battlemap updating as several large contacts were made out just beyond the Zen’zat, popping into view as their stealth fields dropped and they began firing on the aerial fighters.

  “Kar’ka!” one of the other Commandos shouted, with Ben immediately turning left in response to battlemap waypoints hastily thrown up as golden Chi’parat shots started to blast apart the tree trunks ahead of them. Following the machine-gun like blasts came the Kar’ka, now fully visible, running awkwardly through the trees on their two legs that were each taller than Ben. Their bodies were covered in brown armor head to tail tip and the Chi’parat weapons they carried on their flanks were far more powerful than the rifles the Commandos had.

  The firing rate combined with the firepower meant the Commandos were outmatched, but they had aerial support and naval support much higher up, but no warships in atmosphere at the moment…and when the Kar’ka were rushing them like this there was no way a warship could target them without the possibility of friendly fire.

  His Commando unit regrouped as they retreated, firing little and mostly running while trying to stay out of line of sight and scattering when needed only to come back together again when the Kar’ka got too close and they had to fight.

  Ben went far right, circling around and firing on one of the Kar’ka from the side as it tracked after their lone Arc Commando. Whether he was drawing its attention psionically or they were going after him because he had psionics Ben didn’t know, but for the moment he had a free shot so he took it.

  He fired three blue Dre’mo’don orbs into the Kar’ka’s shields, then had to duck out of the way as another Kar’ka came up and shot in his direction. The blasts hit the tree two meters above his head as he circled around it, blasting out a large enough chunk that the whole upper part began to tip over. Ben was long gone from there by the time it came crashing down as Viles had them retreating again.

  This time they got closer to the defense lines and he saw the first bits of metal ahead of them as some of the smaller mechs came out to them. The Commandos stayed away from their footsteps and disappeared behind the trees as the big boys began to lob weaponsfire at each other...after which Ben finally had time to look at the battlemap in a larger sense and saw that there were hundreds of Kar’ka showing up in the forest along with a handful of Era’tran.

  How the Era’tran were moving through the trees without getting pinned down he didn’t know, but they were heading this way and Star Force was scrambling to get enough mechs and aerial craft here to stop them. Luckily the Commando team had detected the approach when they did, for that bought them some time to…

  Ben’s ability to think strategically ended as his unit was almost overrun by Zen’zat coming directly at them. They were stealthed up until the last few meters, then the oversized Humans were firing at them and diving into hand to hand combat with Viles throwing them a warning barely two seconds before Ben took his first shield hit.

  He fired back as he spun behind the closest tree trunk, then he met up with another Commando and double teamed the next Zen’zat to come at them, pouring shots i
nto his chest as he barreled into the pair and knocked both down.

  Ben grabbed at his legs, but a large foot knocked him away while an invisible hand tried to yank his rifle out of his hand by the barrel tip. Fortunately Ben held tight as he fell, but he couldn’t line up a shot as the Zen’zat kicked into his fellow Commando and landed several pointblank shots to his chest shields. The enemy broke through them as Ben got back to his feet, but his rifle didn’t want to point in the right direction. Fortunately the Commando on the ground wasn’t being held in place other than by a foot on his chest, and he twisted it out of the way and nearly took the Zen’zat down before it jumped away and fired on Ben.

  He caught the diversion just before another Zen’zat punched him in the head from behind, realizing that the Zen’zat knew they didn’t have Pefbar so rear attacks would be the most effective. His battlemap tracking gave him a heads up though, just in time for him to peel himself in the direction of the hit and thus diminish its impact. Rather than knocking him to the ground it spun him around and he got a lazy punch into the Zen’zat’s side, but it barely nudged him.

  Shots from another pair of Commandos intervened, and the 4v2 ended up with one Zen’zat down and two Commandos with armor damage…until the downed Zen’zat suddenly got back up and ran off, with Ben putting a few shots in his butt that failed to get through the armor.

  “How many of these bastards are there?” he asked as they pulled back to another waypoint and he began readjusting his anti-psionics shield that for some reason hadn’t fully covered his weapon barrel.

  “Too many,” the Commando said, referencing small dots all over the battlemap that were not Commandos or Knights. “And they can go invisible. Hardly fair.”

  “We have a Uriti, so don’t complain about fair.”

  “Not very helpful right now, is it?” another Commando commented, then they were back in the firefight again.

  Ben didn’t last long, going down some 7 minutes later but the Zen’zat were too busy to stick around and kill him. He lay on the forest floor looking up at the stupidly tall tree branches overhead as the gel layer in his armor seeped into the hole in his chest, applying chemicals that would stop blood loss and assist in healing, but it wasn’t even close to the regenerators that the V’kit’no’sat armor carried. Even the Zen’zat had them now, but their armor wasn’t as strong as his Commando armor, and it had saved him for a few more seconds before the takedown hit got through.

  His armor recognized the damage to him, citing that he had a damaged lung but the impact point had missed his heart. That didn’t really matter to Ben as the pain was so intense he wanted to jump up and run and do something…but he forced himself to play dead and wait, letting the gel do what it could to stabilize him, but he already was having trouble getting a breath in. His entire torso was clenched up and, had he looked, he would have seen his chest missing half a baseball-sized chunk of tissue. He had several other internal organs damaged and was of no use to anyone right now, so he just stayed put and tried to hang on as long as he could.

  A very long time later another Commando appeared over him and he nearly vomited when the pain spiked to blinding levels when he was suddenly picked up and carried, his viewpoint shifting from the high up branches to the twig-covered dirt as he was bounced with each and every step. Tears seeped out as he tried to ride it out, then when he was close to passing out the movement stopped and he felt a blissful numbing effect hit his wound.

  His vision cleared enough to see the superimposed icon of a medtech over him and the wall of the defense ring behind the armored Human, realizing he’d been carried all the way back to the construction site the V’kit’no’sat had been trying to get at from the ground.

  “Easy fella, you’re safe now,” the medtech said, with her voice being calm and soothing. “You’ve dropped about 7 pounds of flesh, and I can’t replace that here, but you’re healing over. You’re going to make it. Whoa, lie still, the regenerator isn’t finished yet,” she said, placing a firm hand on an intact portion of his chest armor as Ben tried to sit up.

  “Did we win?”

  “They got through the outer wall, but they didn’t scratch the portal before we took them down. Seems like a huge waste on their part. They must be really ticked that we’re here.”

  “Good. They’ve got it coming. How long before I can walk?”

  “You’re walking to a medbay and nowhere else, but you should be up and moving in a couple minutes. What hit you?”

  “Zen’zat.”

  “Really? I thought you’d got hit by one of the big ones.”

  “That huge of a hole?”

  “You can pull up my helmet telemetry later and see. I’ve got a hover cart coming, so you won’t have to walk more than a couple steps.”

  “Whatever,” Ben said, wanting to get back on duty but still leery from the pain. Most of it was numbed out, but there was no ignoring the damage that had been done and the rest of him was still feeling the effects of nearly dying. When the medtech finally gave him the all clear she helped him stand up and he almost tipped over the other way, catching his feet and taking a few laborious steps to the hover cart where he gladly laid back down. He was too weak to walk, and the new skin-covered cavity in his chest felt like it was about ready to rip apart at any moment.

  He rode on the hover cart to the small outpost built near the portal on the edge of the defense wall the V’kit’no’sat had managed to break through. Further in were the construction crews putting the finishing touches on a gate into the planet, bored down into the crust with a shield cap over it. Underneath was nothing but a huge hole several miles deep, but after Ben got to a medical station that had enough biomaterial to allow the built-in regenerator to repair and replace all his missing tissue, he was waiting outside on the roof for a dropship to arrive and take him back up to a troopship in orbit. He needed a few days of training and testing to see how much strength he’d lost before he’d be put back into combat duty, but for now he was going to have to wait because all dropship traffic was temporarily canceled in and out of the outpost.

  At first he thought that meant they were going to come under attack again, but that wasn't the case as he studied the battlemap inside a new set of armor. The airspace was being cleared because the portal was now operational and Morgan-063 wasn’t going to waste any time in bringing the Uriti down to the planet.

  Ben had a very good view of the ‘small’ Uriti 1.7 miles long and shaped into a tip on the front end, making it look like a plump arrowhead. Its virtually imperious skin was a deep blue with a single red streak along the ‘upper’ side, and it was heading down to the planet tip-first.

  The Commando watched as that small Uriti became huge before his eyes, only a few miles away with his helmet triggering a psionic alarm, indicating that it was blocking out a telepathic attack. Had he been inside the outpost the walls would have done that for him, but he was now very glad he had a suit of armor on that could protect him from it above and beyond his Ikrid block, for he’d heard that the sheer weight of a Uriti’s telepathic aura would give him, at the least, a headache as it pressed against the block.

  Critters had no such defense, which was why everything inside the border wall had been removed. There wasn’t so much as an ant left, not that there had been many to begin with, and just in case a rare bird happened to fly into the area they were being kept away by light shields around the perimeter stretching up miles into the sky. They weren’t always in effect, but had swept the area a few minutes ago without Ben even seeing them. Now the Uriti was coming down and affecting everything around it without even trying, which was why Star Force had made sure to ‘clean’ the area beforehand.

  Ben’s teeth ground together lightly, tensing against some disaster that was not going to happen. Papa Smurf was under the direction of the Archons in orbit, and the Uriti slid down into the cap shield without incident, passing into the 1.4 mile wide hole in the ground and disappearing from view as it dug its way down into th
e planet on its own after that.

  The airspace didn’t clear before he saw the magma impact on the cap shield, which kept it from turning into a volcano in the wake of the Uriti’s entry all the way down into the liquid rock layers of the planet. Had it been a crack in the crust it would have sealed over on its own as the magma hardened, but a hole the width of even this small Uriti was another matter. Without Star Force’s construction of the cap shield it would have turned into a huge plume of material that would have reached half the way up through the atmosphere, for the pressures below the surface were extreme.

  That pressure was now capped underneath the shield as the top of the red/orange magma began to solidify and turn black, but it would take weeks before enough of it hardened to repair the damage to the planetary crust, with the sidewalls of the tunnel accelerating that effect with cooling equipment.

  This entire facility was a one-off, and now that the Uriti had entered the planet it would not be coming out through here again. It was going to snack a bit on the planetary material as it made its way down near to the core, then travel around it to the southern pole…where it was going to come up underneath the pyramid and do its damage there, where the massive Tar’vem’jic defense battery couldn’t fire on it.

  2

  Sess’met stood on the command deck of the planetary defense station, seeing both a small hologram on his cushioned pedestal and a huge one that filled the airspace above them of the Star Force commander who had contacted them. She was smug, as usual, but offering a warning to the V’kit’no’sat for them to evacuate.

  “You have an estimated 3 days at the minimum,” Morgan said sternly. “After that the Uriti will emerge beneath the pyramid and destroy it from below. The magma discharge associated with it will probably destroy nearby buildings, so get your people out of the entire area. We’re taking the planet back via your deaths or your evacuation. Your choice. When the Uriti gets to your location we’re not calling it off if you change your mind at the last moment. Leave now or die,” she said in the V’kit’no’sat language, then cut transmission and her obnoxious form disappeared from the mile wide command deck.