Star Force: Axius (SF47)

  1

  April 30, 2521

  Achkor System (Skarron territory)

  Zenniza

  Morgan reached out with her Ikrid to sense the positions of the Engineers around her, timing her run accordingly before dropping down from her perch in the empty cockpit of the Skarron version of a forklift and sprinting across to the open side door of one of their parked transports. She kept a mental link with those closest to her, insuring that they didn’t see her and ready to make a few memory alterations if they did, but by the time she slipped her black armor inside the Skarron ship no one was the wiser.

  She took a moment to make sure of that, then moved through the cramped tunnels built specifically for the Engineers who maintained these craft. This one was the Skarron version of a dropship, but far larger than Star Force’s Dragon-class…then again it had to be, given the size of the Skarrons themselves. It was parked along with some 30+ others in a semi-enclosed landing platform that sat on the edge of one of the city’s interior clusters.

  Unlike with Human cities, or those of most other races, Skarron infrastructure didn’t occupy all the land space in a given area. Instead it had clusters connected to one another via strips of infrastructure. Large gaps of unused land existed like lakes in between them, save for they were nothing more than scorched earth or bare rock. From above the patterns reminded one of a bush with berries, for the clusters held a more or less circular/square geometry, while the interconnecting infrastructure resembled stalks or shoots, but again, they were also irregular.

  Irregular regularity is how Morgan would have described it, but given that she was on the ground behind enemy lines she didn’t much care for how it looked from overhead. This spaceport held a tiny portion of the planet’s transports that were constantly ferrying troops and supplies up and down from orbit. The Achkor System was located well coreward of Beta Region, and was the first truly Skarron world Star Force had discovered, though there was little doubt they had taken it from someone else some time ago.

  Whoever that was was long gone, with all native infrastructure erased and replaced by the Skarrons’ own construction. The planet appeared to have been geared towards resupply rather than habitation, for there wasn’t much in the way of a local population other than what was necessary to service the troops coming out from deeper within Skarron territory to the warfronts against the Alliance and others. Zenniza was one of three worlds in the system that the enemy had put down roots on, but the only one with a breathable atmosphere, which was probably why it had become the center of their operations within the system.

  The other two were mining operations with additional production facilities being built up around them and even the beginnings of a full scale shipyard in orbit, currently operational and producing Skarron transports and other ‘small’ craft for them, but with major upgrades under way that would allow them to produce their Destroyer-class warships.

  Or rather it had been, until they’d seen some recent setbacks. Morgan wasn’t the only striker in the system, and she knew Paul had already damaged the shipyard to some extent from the inside, much as she was about to do now with the transports. The key was to stay invisible and do damage that wouldn’t immediately give her away, for while she could control a few minds around her, if the Skarrons or their Hobbits came after her en mass she’d be forced to run, for she didn’t have enough ammunition to make a long fight of it.

  Morgan worked her way through the transport using a schematic Star Force had obtained from downloading portions of computer memory from post-battle Skarron debris…after the techs had learned to interface with their systems, which had included familiarity files that the Skarrons used to train their people with. The files weren’t blueprints, but rather user indoctrination assets, allowing green crews to learn their way around the various craft they would be serving on so that they wouldn’t get lost the first day and become a problem to the existing crews.

  And Morgan could understand why getting lost would be a problem. The Engineers were small bodied and apparently nimble enough to work in the tight confines she was now passing through that were designed with a similar erratic motif that the Skarron cities used. No straight hallways here, for everything was twists and turns and cutbacks, not just laterally but up and down as well, making for what seemed to be a very inefficient network of support tunnels.

  Spotting a few minds enroute, she navigated around them or, in the case of one Engineer, she froze him in place and walked over him, releasing the freeze when she was on the other side with him not even realizing he’d lost 20 seconds. Morgan remained a ghost as she worked through the underside of the transport, eventually coming up into the larger areas where the Skarrons operated.

  The transition was like night and day, with the Engineer labyrinth feeling like tunnels and the Skarron areas seeming as if open fields. Morgan avoided the cargo bay, staying instead in the pilot areas as she crossed them without incident. At present this transport was grounded for either storage or maintenance, with barely any crew onboard. She sensed only 9 Engineers and 4 Hobbits, all of which she was able to avoid as she worked her way through the ship to the sweet spot she’d discovered earlier in another sabotage run.

  It was on the Skarron level, in a maintenance panel that she had to remove without notice. Once Morgan had it open she made several small adjustments with a plasma cutter she’d brought with her, then replaced the panel and moved on, eventually sneaking out of the transport and over to the next one…and the next…and the next, working her way through the spaceport and disabling as many of the craft as she could get to, but even as she got to more than half of them some of the others were lifting off and making room for more to come down.

  Those coming down held troops, the first of which had an army of Hobbits pour out, while the second contained all Skarrons. They moved out of the spaceport straight to a processing center that got them situated on the planet where they needed to be while they waited for their next posting.

  Troops transfers like this were coming in every hour of every day, with the traffic activity around the system’s star being continuous. Even now there were well over 1000 warships in orbit, with more than five times that number of cargo ships. The transports that Morgan was hopping to and from weren’t interstellar capable, but the means for the Skarrons to move cargo and personnel to and from the surface. The ones in space were downright huge, larger than even Star Force jumpships, and the fact that there were so many of them and the rate at which they were changing out was a testament to the importance of this system.

  It was too bad Star Force couldn’t take it from them, for that would put a crimp in their assaults on the ADZ, but with so few ships available they didn’t have the resources for the scale of attack that taking and holding this planet would require…thus Morgan and a few of the others had decided to slow the enemy down a bit by going in on the ground and doing what damage they could in person, which turned out to be considerable.

  This wasn’t Morgan’s first sabotage run, more like the 100th. She’d been on the planet for more than a month, with this being her fourth trip down. Her team had been ghosts to the Skarrons, having employed a few new Infiltrator-class puddle jumpers that significantly reduced sensor detection range. Using one of them, Morgan had come down to an uninhabited portion of the planet undetected, leaving her ship behind and crossing the varied terrain via mongoose up to the small ridge that ran north of this city complex. From there she had came in on foot, crossing some 11 miles before getting into the city.

  First item of business had been to find a safe haven to stash her equipment pack, then after that she’d made sixteen sabotage runs into various parts of the city, with this being her 17th and last. Her supplies were al
most exhausted, meaning she had to return to her ship for more, but she was going to cause a disruption at the spaceport first, one that was noticed before she got to the last few transports.

  Thanks to her previous sabotage runs within the city, the local Skarrons were already on the lookout, so when one of the transports failed to engage its anti-grav and essentially became a big rock blocking part of the platform, the area went on alert and additional security patrols popped out of the surrounding areas, heading towards the exits and each of the individual ships.

  That said, Morgan took her time and disabled another of the transports, hopefully in a way that they wouldn’t find for some time. The damage she was doing wasn’t hard to repair, but it did require new components to replace the ones she was severing. If they already had some standing by it would be maybe a 10 minute fix, but then again if the anti-grav simply wouldn’t engage and they didn’t know why it could be a very long wait.

  She wasn’t counting on that, which was why she was quietly sabotaging other systems within the transports as well, learning with each attempt and adding more quick cuts here and there to her choreography, making her stay within each of the transports short and sweet…though the next dash between the two became much more difficult.

  Rather than risking going to ground where the security troops were, she worked her way up to the top of the transport and ran over to the edge, using her powered armor to enhance her leg muscles and jump from one to another, given how tightly packed they were on the pad. Morgan barely made it across, falling onto her stomach as her legs missed, hanging over the multi-story drop, then she climbed up over the edge and out of view. She checked for nearby minds, hoping not to have triggered an alarm, then moved on to the maintenance hatch that led to the interior…where she began her well-oiled sabotage run again.

  Morgan came back up to the top of the transport when she finished, seeing the next transport beside her lift off empty, for she could sense the hoard of minds below that had just came off it. All soldiers by the feel of them, prompting her to sit down on the roof of the transport and wait until they filed out before she moved on.

  It was a weird feeling, for her black armor stood out against the dull white coloration of the hull, meaning that she was easy to spot from above, but fortunately all the troops around her were below eye level. It was the transports coming up and going down that could spot her…or the occasional fighter flying past. Morgan just sat there, looking up with idle curiosity to see if any of them did notice her as she waited for the floor below to clear.

  Taking mental inventory of the ships she had left to hit, she picked out two more and waited for an opportunity, losing one as it took off, but able to slink back down into the ship she was on and out another of the small Engineer exits before the next one left. She hit the anti-grav’s first thing, making sure she didn’t go with the ship, then proceeded to move around ransacking whatever systems she could get access to and hitting about half of what was on her normal list, for there were more Engineers about, including a ship full of Hobbits and Skarron troops ready to be transported up to a cargo ship, and from there off to the war zone to reinforce one of the numerous enemy positions.

  When she went to leave her exit was blocked, so she circled back through the Engineer section in the transport to another hatch, finding it also with people outside. Figuring it was time to call it a day she mentally froze the few Hobbits outside and made a dash for the nearby cover of a stack of cargo pallets. She didn’t make it cleanly, for someone from further away raised an alarm, after which she abandoned her subtlety and sprinted for one of the spaceport exits, drawing a bit of white plasma fire that fell well wide.

  After that she was inside the city interior and disappearing into the infrastructure again, eventually working her way into the less obvious pedestrian routes that she’d become familiar with, avoiding the Skarron areas entirely and working her way through the Hobbit and Engineer-sized passages, psionically picking up on the none too subtle search effort taking place around her.

  With her cover already blown, she took a small detour to a power plant and easily fought her way past the guards using a combination of Fornax and Ikrid…the former to knock them down and the later to render them unconscious one by one. Once by them she moved into the power plant and carefully knocked it out of commission, blacking out the local region of the city, aside from emergency backups that gave a little light in the now dark interior areas.

  Using her armor’s night vision she evaded/fought her way through the search patrols and into the clear, moving through section after section until she came back into the lit areas and on to the spot where she’d set up her temporary camp. Taking a seldom used maintenance ladder up to the top of the city, she came out into the planetary atmosphere and walked on the irregular rooftops, with jutting pieces that went every which way. There were several tower-like segments, but for some reason the Skarron structures had no windows at all, giving her a little field of infrastructure debris to lose herself in.

  Finding her way back to the waypoint marked on her HUD, she crept into the narrow trench that was blocked from overhead view and retrieved her pack, finding it sitting in two inches of water from what must have been a recent rain. Morgan pulled it out and checked on the contents, taking a moment to remove her helmet and drink the last of her water bottles, as well as eating a condensed ‘fuel rod’ and an ambrosia wafer, with the former being a heavy, chewy cylinder that held a massive amount of calories in its small volume.

  Getting her stomach filled with badly needed fuel, she took one last moment to relieve her bladder in the small hovel, then she reattached her armor and pack and began a light jog across the rooftop terrain, alert for low flying ships as she started a 3 mile trek across the Skarron infrastructure that eventually led her to the northern edge where she dropped down to the surface and began to run at the best speed she could manage across the band of rocky ground surrounding the city and off into the grasslands that mostly obscured her passage up to the far ridgeline yet more miles away.

  Morgan had to rely on her battlemap to guide her, for most of the time the 4 meter tall grasses didn’t afford her much of a view…which was the only reason she’d been able to approach on foot in the first place. Eventually she came up to the ridgeline, unable to see exactly where it from her position, but not far down the opposite side and out of direct sensor range she found the waypoint where she’d hid her mongoose and was relieved to see it intact underneath the small grass hut she’d made to cover it.

  Pushing and kicking the thick mat clear, she slid up on top and powered the awesome little steed up, then knelt low over the front as she took off, pushing her way through the grasses with them rubbing on the mongoose and her helmet in razorblade fashion as she accelerated up to speed, following the approximate path she’d taken to get here, though the grasses had long since eaten up the tracks she’d made on the inward run.

  It took several hours for her to make her way out of the grasses and onto clear dirt ground, with Morgan then being able to accelerate up to decent speed and tear her way across the rolling landscape, meandering her way around hills rather than going over top of them and opening her up to distant observation, all the time loosely making her way back to the Infiltrator’s hiding spot, tucked up nicely inside one of the small valleys and covered over with a deployable camouflage canopy that mimicked the surrounding topography in both color and sensor profile.

  Morgan drove up underneath the canopy along a small creek bed that had a steady 3 inch deep flow to the water that splashed up on the mongoose’s tires as the boarding ramp lowered and she drove up inside, happy to be back in Star Force territory, even if it was just the inside of a small ship. She docked her mongoose next to three others in the bay, seeing one empty slot amongst them, meaning one of the other strikers was still out in the field, though whether it was Kip or Olivia she didn’t know.

  Morgan slid off the mongoose and headed for the puddle jumper’s interior,
finding her way to the lounge area that had been built into what otherwise would have been the cargo bay on other models.

  “Welcome back,” Kip said, sitting in one of the chairs with his feet up and looking at a datapad that held a now paused movie. “Any trouble?”

  “Not much,” Morgan said, pulling her helmet off and seeing Kip wrinkle his nose. “Bad?”

  “Tolerable,” he said, referencing the fact that she had been inside her armor and not showered for several days.

  “Olivia still out?”

  “Pilot says she came back early then went out again after picking up some special supplies. Not sure when to expect her back.”

  “We’re due at the warship in 3 days,” Morgan commented, unlatching her pack and setting it aside. “She knows the timetable. What’d you get?”

  Kip smiled and tossed her a different datapad. Morgan caught it telekinetically and flew it over to her hand, then began reading through the list of targets Kip and Olivia had hit since she’d last checked in.

  2

  “Miss me?” Olivia-051 asked, returning to the puddle jumper some 18 hours later with a nasty cut on her face.

  Morgan pointed up at it, now showered and in a fresh Archon uniform. “How did that happen?”

  Olivia tossed the helmet in her hand to Morgan as Kip walked into the lounge from another chamber in the ship.

  “That’s how,” the trailblazer said, referencing the puncture in the tinted faceplate just above the nose piece on the left side. Morgan touched a finger to it, seeing that there wasn’t a melty edge to the fracture that would have indicated the high heat of plasma damage.

  “Shrapnel?”

  “No, a damn structural beam fell on me.”

  “What’d you blow up?” Kip asked.

  Olivia shook her head slightly, not wanting to add much movement to the already scabbed-over cut that ran a good 3 inches across her left cheek. “Wasn’t me. A whole section of the build came down and I got buried underneath it. Don’t know if they knew where I was and were trying to get at me or if something else happened. I dug my way out after a Sesspik nap, then headed back here. I expected them to be all over me, but I hardly ran into any troops on the way. Mostly Engineers and Hobbits coming to work on the debris.”