Star Force: Origin (SF24) Read online

  1

  December 21, 2399

  Jartul System

  Daka

  Mark flew in low, just skimming the brown grasses with the underside of his skeet’s shields as Kara and company came in high on the spider walker and hit the breach in its armor with multiple plasma orbs, most of which missed and impacted the intact armor around the hole, though two did slip through and cause more internal damage to the intimidating mech. A short plume of explosive debris shot back out but the spider stayed on its feet and continued walking towards the base doors where the onslaught was continuing. It fired back at the quick fighters with its secondary plasma weapons and missed badly, though it did manage to catch the tail tip of one of the skeets, punching through the shields and burning off a bit of the hull.

  The fighter didn’t go down, instead it streaked across the walker with the others providing the diversion that allowed Mark to get in close at a perpendicular angle where he released a plasma streamer dead on target, filling the hole in the spider with a thick squirt gun shot of fiery blue plasma that burned away at the interior. Internal components melted and rehardened, turning part of the walking mechanisms to slag and freezing one of its six legs in place.

  The giant machine staggered, nearly falling over before the pilot corrected for the malfunctioning leg. Using the other five it began limping forward, dragging the dead one across the ground and digging up the native grass as it moved slowly towards the Alliance base’s southern doors where numerous other walkers were in the process of blasting their way inside.

  Mark shot his skeet to the left, keeping low to the ground and skimming the aft end of the spider before weaving an evasive pattern across the plain then rocketing back up into the sky when he was clear of the walkers’ return fire. He pulled over to the left and came around, giving him a good view of the enemy LZ further south and the line of ground troops crossing up towards the hangar doors like an army of ants…with several of them dead along the route.

  The skeets had made quick work of the remaining Nestafar Valeries, losing only two of their own in the engagement. Those two might yet be recoverable, Mark didn’t know for sure, but air superiority had been returned to the Alliance. All the training they’d done against the Calavari had proven to make them very prepared for dealing with Valeries…especially those flown by less able pilots than the craft’s creators.

  Knowing that their ground troops were now exposed, the Nestafar knew they had to push their ground advantage and break the base now, else they’d be picked apart from the sky. To that end the LZ had been receiving additional dropships, spewing walkers, protomechs, and infantry to support the others being slowly picked apart by the skeets and the few other Alliance craft in the air. Mark had sent his gunships up to try and harass the dropships in flight, but the truth was they had too few fighters to counter this large of a ground assault when the bay doors had already been breached.

  He was keeping in contact with the defense team inside, which was reporting several holes forming in the trash heap covering the breaches in the doors. They weren’t big enough for the walkers to get through yet, but infantry was slipping through and trying to make a mess of things inside. To top it off several of the units assaulting the smaller entrances were also getting reinforced and at least one had gone down, with the Archons and Alliance troops on site reforming their lines further inside the base and keeping the enemy breach team contained for the moment.

  The northern doors were still theirs, and the surviving Canderian mechs had left a pair on station outside while the rest had entered the base and walked the long distance over to the southern doors to assist if/when the Nestafar walkers broke through, adding considerable firepower to the makeshift defenses Mark and the others had erected the previous day.

  As the trailblazer turned around and headed back towards the Nestafar lines he took a glance at his plasma levels…which read 23%. That wasn’t good, because the only way to seriously affect the heavily armored Nestafar walkers was by using the plasma streamer, which ate up plasma at a very fast rate. Before long he was going to have to try and reenter the base to get reloaded, as would the others, unless he felt like fighting out the rest of the battle with only his lachar.

  The line of troops in the distance before him stretched across the entire length of the plain between the LZ and base with a larger group set directly outside the doors, but those were scattered around the debris from the gargantuan and half of them were dead walkers, which was making it difficult for the assaulting troops to throw a concentrated force against the doors…but they didn’t need much to break in now, and apparently their infantry had brought along enough explosives that they were busy making holes for the big machines to move in through.

  With that in mind Mark sighted in on a trio of quickly moving dots moving up the line and tore after them, mindful of the larger walkers and their slow rotating, slow firing secondary weapons. While he would be difficult for them to hit, they were bound to get lucky once in a while and their weapons were powerful enough that even a partial hit would cause him serious problems.

  He came in at a 45 degree angle and fired his lachar at one of the rolling balls, hitting it twice before nailing it with a plasma orb…then he shot across the lines and weaved away for a bit before circling around and coming back across to hit a second one in a similar manner, damaging another of the protomechs before it could get to the base. Both weren’t destroyed, but they were unable to maintain ball form and had to start limping their way forward on their legs once they transformed, one of which was missing a foot.

  Many more of the rolling dots were making their way up to the base before Mark could shoot them all. The other skeets were picking off a few, with the rest of them teaming up to take down the spiders and giraffes one by one. The other races’ fighters were concentrated around the entrance, using the debris for cover as they made their strafing runs against the partially pinned walkers, letting Star Force hit the ones in the open.

  Mark jerked his skeet up into the sky, aborting an attack on another of the protomechs as a tiny missile shot out towards him, seemingly coming out of nowhere. He rolled his left engine pod up while jamming the anti-grav at full power, dancing around the infantry-launched missile and missing it by 20 meters.

  That was the 3rd time today that their damn infantry had nearly shot him. They were so small they didn’t appear on his sensors until the last second, and then only their weapons did, for their bodies were poor reflectors, making them almost invisible. If he looked close he could spot them visually, but with the speeds the skeets were strafing at that was next to impossible.

  The missile turned to follow in his wake, but by the time it did Mark was too far away and traveling too fast for it to catch up, and once it expended its fuel supply it dropped from the sky and fell to the ground, exploding on impact and ironically killing two of their infantry that were unlucky enough to be flying by that spot at the time.

  Mark took his random direction and turned it into a dive towards another spider, firing down from nearly straight above and seeing his plasma orbs virtually sink into the chrome armor and disappear before he broke off, firing another at a group of infantry and spraying them with mud from the hit that otherwise missed. In reality the plasma burnt a few inches off of the walker’s topside, but it would take multiple strafing runs to bust through…and if they managed to survive this whole ordeal Star Force was definitely going to snag some of that armor to copy.

  “Boss, got another big one walking out of the LZ,” Boen reported over the comm.

  “Wonderful…and us out of nukes.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Where are you at on plasma?”

  “34%”


  “Ignore it for now. We have to take pressure off the doors.”

  “Can’t ignore it forever,” his fellow Gunstar pointed out. “And it looks like it’s got a lot more escorts this time around.”

  “I’ll figure out something,” Mark promised. “Keep working on the walkers, and especially those damn protomechs. They can slip through sooner and I don’t want them chewing up the Canderian mechs before the big boys break through.”

  “You think they will?”

  “Break through or chew them up?” Mark asked, delivering a partial plasma streamer into a blast crack on a giraffe’s neck. It was well low of the head, making him wonder who had been targeting it there until another blue streak shot out and hit a split second after his did. It melted through, sheering off the top portion of the neck and taking away the walker’s primary weapon.

  “Break through,” Boen clarified. “That trash heap is massive.”

  “I’m getting reports that their infantry are carrying explosives in addition to the rocket launchers. They’re planting them in the heap and blasting it apart bit by bit when the walkers don’t have a shot.”

  “That I didn’t know. You want us going after the infantry?”

  “Not really, but if you have a clear shot take it.”

  “Will do…you just worry about that super dragon.”

  Mark spun his skeet around on a long loop, giving himself a moment to think before he flashed back into combat. The Nestafar had already landed a second mega walker and they’d managed to take it and a lot of other walkers out with their second nuke, the blast marks of which were still visible on the trail from the LZ up to the base, as was the remains of the giant machine. The line of ‘ants’ had moved to the side around it as if it wasn’t important, and now Mark understood why. He’d hoped they didn’t have a third sitting up in their jumpships to bring down, but apparently he’d been wrong.

  He made a diagonal strafing run across the path heading back south, hitting another protomech then flying off towards the east as he came around closer to the LZ. There he saw the super dragon stretching out one of its enormous legs to take a step forward while the ‘small’ spiders and giraffes skittered out around it in a wide formation, forming a bulge in the ant line that was creeping its way out from the LZ and up towards the base.

  Boen was right, they had to do something, and soon.

  Mark flew in through the slit in the northern bay doors directly over a pair of thors and slipped inside the base along with three other skeets behind him. As soon as they got inside the doors ground closed, locking them in and the Nestafar out. So far the enemy hadn’t attempted another assault there, though they were making plenty of progress in other places.

  The skeets flew across the cavernous bay and landed snug up against Star Force’s pillar and the refueling equipment that had been built inside it. Mark popped the hatch as the techs and a handful of grounded Archons ran out and began attaching refueling equipment to his skeet, both for the engines and the plasma, along with a third smaller one for the lachar that virtually never ran out of the scattering of physical particles included in the mostly energy cocktail.

  “How we doing?” he asked Luke-593 as soon as he hit the deck, wearing his armor minus the helmet and gloves, both of which were sitting at the bottom of his cockpit in restraint bins.

  “No mask?” Luke asked as they walked over and into the airlock while the techs were busily servicing the skeets.

  “I’m trying not to breathe much,” he said, toggling the door closure routine and feeling the whirlwind of exchanged air to follow.

  “We’re losing ground,” Luke said loudly so he could be heard over the noise, “but all fronts still have the enemy contained at the moment.”

  “Found anything useful downstairs?” Mark asked as the sequence died out and the interior doors opened, with both Archons jogging off to the control room.

  “Nada. We’ve pulled everyone back up save for two and a group of Protovic. All but one of the Scionate we had to divert to the auxiliary exits to hold them.”

  “Tunnel?”

  “Can’t get it sealed. Not enough dry time and their digger is operational again…or they brought in a new one. They keep cutting through or digging new tunnels around and we have to keep falling back. We’re trying to erect a larger blockade at the base intersection, but if we don’t take out the digger they’ll tunnel back in within a week.”

  “A week I’ll take,” Mark said, walking in on a very sparse command staff, none of which were Archons. The shipless pilots and techs had a holographic battlemap glowing in the center of the room, detailing the conflict outside as well as the numerous ones on the perimeter of the base. Mark looked over the icons representing the auxiliary exits and saw the mass of infantry on the exterior.

  “Have they snuck a dropship by us or are these units flying in on their own?”

  “No dropships have deviated from their orbit to landing zone flight path, aside from the one the gunships shot down,” one of the techs reported. “No units have emerged from the crash site and no recovery units have been sent out.”

  “Any progress on that third nuke?”

  “No go,” Luke told him. “Not even close.”

  “Damn,” Mark said, leaning on the holoprojector table. “We’ve got to have something to hit the big one with. If it was alone we might be able to pick it to death, but it’s got an army of escorts.”

  “We need to get the gun,” Luke pointed out, “unless you’re worried about it ramming through the doors.”

  “We can’t get a look at it without taking down the spiders ringing it.”

  “We could introduce one of the dropships to it?”

  Mark looked over at the other Archon. “I don’t think it’d get through, and nobody is making a one-way run, I don’t care how bad the situation is.”

  “Their anti-air sucks, and if we build up enough speed prior to impact…”

  “I’ve already considered that. And I didn’t mean get through their weaponsfire, I meant get through its hull. It took a nuke to crack the other two, and they barely got the job done.”

  “Oh…don’t suppose we can tip it over?”

  Mark’s eyes suddenly went wide as a crazy idea hit him. “What do we have that might trip it?”

  “Sorry, no tow cables.”

  “We don’t have to kill the thing, just keep it away from the base.”

  “If you can’t stop their other walkers it’s not going to matter. They’re about through as it is and the Alliance fighters don’t have enough firepower to take all of them down. They only thing…”

  “The approaches,” Mark said, getting the same idea as Luke a split second later.

  “The starship pieces are too big to move, not that we could get them in there anyway, but…”

  “…we do have a lot of dead mechs on the north side.”

  “And a big Protovic transport to help move them, along with some others…if you can thin the herd out there first.”

  Mark dug a finger in the Archon’s chest as he turned to leave. “Make it happen,” he said, taking one last glance at the battlemap and the incursions happening on the surface, then he took off to head back to his skeet, knowing it wouldn’t take long to get it refueled. When he got back outside he noticed, to his satisfaction, that a group of techs were in the process of loading two missiles underneath…but they weren’t of Star Force design. Another standing nearby came over to explain as the first of the four skeets took off and headed back out towards the northern bay doors.

  “A present from the Gnar, simple release. We’re arming them now so don’t bump into anything on your way out.”

  “What yield?”

  “About 200 kilotons.”

  “How many?”

  “They had six stashed away, with the other four going on their craft. They were buried under debris, or so they said. I think they were just holding them back until now.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,”
he said, clapping the man on the shoulder as he climbed up into the open cockpit and resealed it as he waited for them to finish, coughing out a bit of the harsh atmosphere as the air inside recycled to get the noxious compounds out. While he waited he triggered his comm as he checked to make sure his fuel and weapons were at full power, which they were.

  “Boen, you busy?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “Got a couple party favors from the Gnar. Not enough to do our big boy in but I should be able to wound a couple of spiders. I’m about to come out, get your ass in here and refueled, then I need your help with plan B.”

  “Please tell me plan ‘B’ stands for bomb?”

  “‘B’ for barricade,” he explained as the techs rushed away from his skeet and one of them gave him a thumbs up. “I’ll fill you in later.”

  “Heading in,” Boen said as Mark lifted off and headed for the doors. The other 3 skeets were already gone, but the doors were still cracked open, either waiting on him or they’d just decided to keep them open until they saw an enemy closing in. On his battlemap he saw a few other skeets circling around to the north but he beat them there and ducked through the visibly narrow gap that drastically widened at the last moment, then he was out of the base and back into the sky, turning off to the right and heading along the curve of the mountain rather than flying straight over.

  “Heard you picked up some bombs?” Kara asked.

  “Be there shortly,” Mark answered. “Got some infantry to hit first.”

  “You’re wasting them on infantry?”

  “No, but our defense teams are getting clobbered,” he said, approaching the first site and getting a little bit more altitude sufficient to make a strafing run…except he didn’t increase speed. “Are you refueled?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep hitting the protomechs, we’ll deal with the big ones when everyone gets cycled through.”

  “Better hurry. That big one is slow, but it’s making progress.”

  “I know,” he said, coming to an almost standstill over one of the exterior exits but retaining just enough of a drift to keep the skeet moving laterally to make it a bit harder to target. He switched over to scatter gun and fired into the assembled infantry outside and hit his anti-grav, rocketing him up into the sky as he pointed the nose down, keeping the gun in line as he hammered the Nestafar outside, knocking out several rocket launchers before they had a chance to fire and thinning the numbers of reinforcements they had to throw at the defense teams inside.