Star Force: Benefactor (SF19) Read online

  1

  October 2, 2264

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  “Clear to point 12,” Morgan reported over her comm before continuing on down the tree-covered hillside. She ran forward easily, dodging one tree trunk after another in her ranger armor, now repainted in forest camo, while maintaining an average speed of 12 mph over the rough terrain as she broke trail for the other Archons. Periodically she had to stop so they could keep up, so every few kilometers she would drop a virtual nav point and search the surrounding area, making sure it was lizard free before moving on.

  The other 8 Archons were all acolytes, given that they needed enhanced leg speed and endurance for this mission. A mantis had dropped them off behind a ridgeline while in flight some 104 kilometers out from one of the 5 lizard bases on planet so their sensors wouldn’t know they’d deposited a ground team. The ‘fellowship of the nine’ as Jason joked had crashed down through the canopy, braking against the branches before finally dropping down to the forest floor as the mantis flew on to another location, making its flight line appear to be skirting the base while moving to one of the defense towers they were constructing nearby.

  After collecting themselves and insuring that their equipment packs were undamaged from the fall, Morgan had taken point and led them cross country for the past 6 hours, running up and down the varied terrain in the straightest line possible. As of now they were only a few kilometers from the base, but over the next rise would put them in line of sight to the complex over three smaller hills.

  The trailblazer charged up the opposite hillside, despite the heavy pack she wore, and made it halfway to the top before the others made it to her waypoint on top of the hill behind her. Had she turned around she could have seen their ID tags on her helmet’s HUD, but otherwise they remained as invisible as she was through the cover of the forest…or so they were counting on as they approached the lizard base.

  The main worry was scouts or monitoring devices in the forest surrounding the target, which Morgan had the task to search out while the others just focused on maintaining their speed and not falling too far behind. Among them were Rafa, Paul, Jason, Cora, Greg, Kevin, Ace, and Ariel, the last of which was the only non-trailblazer among the group. She was currently a level 2 Acolyte, while the second lowest ranking member was Kevin at level 24. He’d always been one of their better runners, which left Ariel as the weak link in the group, and as such she was only carrying a pack half as heavy as the others.

  That accounted for every trailblazer on Corneria at present, with this mission seeming to defy conventional wisdom in having all your war leaders put into such a vulnerable position. That would have been the thinking back in Sol amongst the various nations’ militaries, but true to Archon philosophy those who were the most skilled took on the toughest missions…and this mission would have taken twice as long and twice as many people had they sent a second gen team in on their own.

  It was also an experiment, and Paul and the others felt it best if they were on site to feel out the lizards’ weaknesses. With total forest enclosure and a defense shield covering the base there was no way to drop their mechs into the clearing that orbital scans showed surrounded all of the lizard bases…no doubt to keep ground teams from being able to infiltrate the perimeter. Star Force couldn’t even get their fighters in over the base, which had significant anti-air capability in addition to the fighter swarms that would appear if any ship got within a set distance. Orbital bombardment was their only way to break through the surface defenses, and after the spanking Paul had given them earlier they’d scrounged additional cruisers from somewhere, because when he tried to repeat the process on one of the five newly discovered bases they intercepted and drove his ships off immediately.

  He’d ordered his bombardment fleet to retreat as another experiment, seeing how aggressive the lizards were going to be. The fact that they let his ships go even though they were the faster suggested that for the moment they were merely concerned with protecting their bases rather than racking up ship kills. Paul had organized enough ships into the bombardment group to be able to kill at least one cruiser, and apparently the lizards didn’t want to get into a war of attrition if they didn’t have to.

  That told Paul that they were operating with limited resources, but that they had enough available to make a mess of his bombardment fleet if he pushed that tactic. Part of him was tempted to do so and see if he could get free reign of low orbit, even if it meant losing half the ships he possessed. He didn’t feel comfortable doing that without knowing what the lizards’ resupply capabilities were, for ever since they’d captured the two enemy bases the lizards hadn’t mounted any more assaults against Star Force’s orbital facilities.

  Now that could have been because of the reinforcement efforts Paul had been employing, or perhaps the fact that they were running short on cruisers. Either way it was buying Paul time to reinforce their orbital infrastructure and he wasn’t willing to lose the gains they’d made there by taking half his defense fleet out of the equation. He guessed his capital ship resupply rate coming in from Sol was greater than what the lizards had going for them, so as long as he could keep them on the defensive they might be able to win the war of attrition.

  With orbital bombardment out of the question and aerial attacks being extremely problematic, it seemed the lizard bases were well secured and essentially untouchable. Paul and the others knew, however, that the longer they stood the more troops they would grow and the more equipment they would build, so they needed to at least do some damage periodically if they wanted to win the resource race, otherwise the enemy expansion could snowball.

  When Morgan got to the top of the next hill she paused and put down another waypoint using her interactive helmet controls and forearm keypad, then she did a brief perimeter search. Several minutes later when the Archon group arrived she reported in that there wasn’t so much as a scaly tail tip within sight.

  “Where are you at?” Paul asked as he got to the waypoint third in line behind Jason and Greg.

  “Look up,” Morgan said over the comm.

  Paul did as he was told and saw her ID tag up in the treetops, but couldn’t make out her position visually. The camo paint was doing its job well. “See anything from up there?”

  “Plenty. Set a guard detail and come on up.”

  “Greg, Rafa…play venator. Everyone else set up here, packs off, and rest,” he said, disconnecting his own gigantic pack of equipment and stretching out his body in a few loosening flexes before jumping up and grabbing one of the overhead branches, then hauling himself up onto it as he climbed his way up into the canopy.

  “That tree’s not tall enough,” Morgan told him. “Move two to your southeast and you should be able to get high enough.”

  Paul walked out on one of the thicker branches, holding onto those above him until he felt it begin to sag beneath his feet. He stopped there and bent down into a crouch…then leapt off the branch, which half collapsed beneath him, over to the next tree, grabbing for whatever handholds he could find.

  He fell two meters before latching on and hand walking his way back up the very supple branches until he got a good foothold, then he shimmied his way around to the far side of the tree, having to move up another 3 meters to find an appropriate branch and repeated the jump, landing in much the same way with several branches sagging under his weight before he climbed back up towards the trunk and finished his ascent.

  From the floating icon to his left he saw that Morgan was in a tree just south of his and still well above his head. Sticking close to the trunk he climbed up to the top where it started to wobble but his helmet finally caught a glint of moonlight now that he
was higher than most of the other tree branches. There were still a lot of three pronged leaves in view, but after a few minutes of repositioning he finally got a good perch where he could look out and see the lizard defense tower and the top half of the base’s buildings, but not much of the clearing around it, for the hills in front of them blocked most of the lower view.

  “I’m up,” he said, on a private line to Morgan. “What’s your take?”

  “Do you have your scope on?”

  Paul flipped the switch on the helmet add-on and saw a large section of his HUD replaced with a zoom window. He enlarged it to fill most of his vision, leaving a bit of normal view on the left side so he could see the branch that he was holding on to. “Yes.”

  Interlinking with Morgan’s, Paul’s view of the base suddenly had a small tag added. He zoomed in on that point and saw a low and long building.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “You tell me, you’re the naval expert.”

  Paul frowned, then gave the building a more thorough inspection. “You’ve got me. What’s so special?”

  “Look again,” she said, adding a few more icons.

  Paul looked at the points she’d tagged, then it suddenly clicked. “That’s a piece of a cruiser…dorsal ridge I think.”

  “Then they’re building more rather than getting reinforcements,” Morgan pointed out.

  “We can’t be completely sure of that,” Paul warned her. “Why didn’t we see that from orbit?”

  “Look higher.”

  Paul pulled back the zoom a bit and looked around, having some difficulty in the low light, then a bit of metal caught his attention about halfway up to where he figured the invisible shield would have been. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Looks new to me,” Morgan offered. “Might be they’re shorthanded and don’t want us knowing they’re building another cruiser. If we had a few more ships on hand I’d say take it to them in orbit and bomb the hell out of this place.”

  “Dicey,” Paul warned, looking at the false cityscape suspended in air above the construction yard. “I can see two other ship pieces from here. I wonder if they build in segments rather than on a skeleton.”

  “Do you want to hit the ship?”

  “No, we need to hit their fabrication units, which I’m guessing are here,” Paul said, tagging four icons onto his and Morgan’s scopes. “I also think this is a firearms plant,” he said, adding a fifth.

  “I haven’t been able to location the hangar, which makes me wonder if it isn’t underground.”

  “No, I see it. It’s a decoy too. See the narrow building to the left of the defense tower…there’s a false cover floating on top. I bet the fighters can fly underneath for a good ways.”

  “Why disguise the hangar?” Morgan asked. “We can’t hit it without taking the whole shield down, so what’s the point?”

  “Either this is in response to our tactics, or this is a more mature base. I’d bet they’re operating on a predetermined playbook as far as the layout is concerned. Nothing here looks randomly placed. I’d imagine they’ve done this sort of planetary insertion dozens of times before.”

  “What do you want to start with?”

  “Let’s try the crawler.”

  An hour later after the Archons had finally crept up on the tree line and got a good, ground level view of the base, a small six legged miniature walker scurried out of the forest and into the tall grasses that dominated the perimeter clearing. Barely half a meter long, the crawler disappeared into the moonlit greenery that swayed with the breeze, hiding the bits of motion the machine created as it passed along low to the ground.

  Using a small datapad, Rafa guided the crawler across the sea of grass while the others waited for a reprisal from the lizards. None of their ground troops had been discovered in the forest outside the base. They’d done an extensive check of the immediate area before setting up a few hundred meters inside, dispatching Ariel and Kevin as venators while Cora guarded Rafa. Morgan was up in the treetops again as lookout while the rest were situated another hundred meters back guarding their equipment packs and ready to reinforce the others if the lizards did show their scaly faces.

  It took a long time for the crawler to get halfway across the kilometer-wide clearing, then Morgan stopped Rafa with a quick word as a sentry was spotted emerging from the gaps between buildings. It scurried along the perimeter of one, looking out over the grass, then darted back inside on patrol. A few seconds later the ranger cleared him to move on, even though it was unlikely that it could have been spotted from the ground.

  From the air was another matter. Morgan could see its location on her scope, but she could also make out a faint bump in the grasses when it was moving forward…like a hamster moving underneath a blanket. She didn’t see any elevated guard towers on the nearby buildings but there was no reason they couldn’t have hidden camera mounts the way Star Force did.

  “Slower,” Morgan urged, with Rafa responding by decreasing the crawler’s forward progress rate by 50%.

  That took it even longer to approach the buildings, but make it it did. Rafa stopped it just shy of the edge of the hard dirt roads that lined the interior of the base, keeping the mini walker inside the edge of the grasses.

  “Directions?”

  “Go up the building on your left,” Morgan prompted. “Patrol shouldn’t be back for at least another 6 minutes.”

  “Alright,” Rafa said, scurrying the little machine out and onto the rock-hard dirt. The camera mount showed that in fact it wasn’t dirt, but some ultra-compressed compound that formed a sort of asphalt. The Archon snapped a photo tag and archived it in his datapad for review later, then walked the machine over to the wall.

  When it was a few inches away he trigged the gripping mechanisms to extend on all six legs, then began to slowly attach its front two legs to the building in front of it. From there it hoisted its weight upwards, attaching all of its legs to the building via air pressure, given that the material wasn’t magnetic, then disconnecting one and attaching it further up.

  One leg at a time Rafa climbed it up the three story tall building and onto the roof, beating the sentry by 2 minutes. On top there was no one in sight, though there was a roof access door.

  “I’m up,” he said, deactivating the suction cups and walking out across the building top with quick, regular steps.

  “Head southeast,” Morgan said, guiding the little robot as it penetrated further and further into the base, dropping tiny marker beacons on various buildings as it passed.

  Jason stood on the edge of the forest with only a few trees between him and the clearing as he unpacked the 7 projectiles that he would be using for ammunition in the shoulder mount launcher that he’d already assembled and had leaning against the tree two meters to his left. He knew he would have to fire as fast as possible, so he wanted to arrange each firing piece within easy reach to minimize reloading time.

  Paul, Greg, Ace, and Cora were doing likewise, each at various points along a kilometer-wide section of the perimeter. Morgan was still playing lookout while Kevin and Ariel stood guard on either flank. So far their infiltration mission had been a success, but now was the time when their recent engineering would be put to the test, and if they’d guessed wrong about the lizards’ anti-air defenses they weren’t going to get much out of this attack.

  Regardless, as soon as Jason fired off his 7 projectiles he would be on the run. The Archons didn’t know what kind of response to expect, but they weren’t going to stick around and watch in person…they had cameras set up for that, deployed and spaced several kilometers apart around the perimeter during the crawler’s long trek inward. They’d transmit visuals in burst mode several hours after the attack began, hopefully without the lizards finding them. The transmitters had been deliberately pointed away from the base and designed to transmit a cone of signal to an overhead satellite network that the lizards hadn’t yet deemed worthy of knocking out of orbit.

  “Re
ady,” Jason heard Paul say over the comm, then a moment later Cora reported in as well. “Check.”

  “Ready,” Jason added.

  “I’m green,” Greg confirmed.

  “Say when,” Ace said, waiting for the go ahead.

  “Pop ‘em,” Morgan ordered, watching intently from her treetop position. Using the enhanced nightvision and tracking system on her scope she saw five very fast projectiles shoot out from the forest in a shallow arc, tagged by their tracking icons on her HUD, then slow as they hit the halfway point, dropping down almost all the way to the grass before leveling out.

  More followed them in the same manner, all taking slightly different tracks as what Paul had nicknamed the ‘buzz droids’ flew into the base on tiny fan blade engines, tracking the locators that the crawler had placed. When the first group got to the buildings they either flew up and over or down the streets, going every which way in a very erratic manner using their proximity sensors and onboard navigation programs to track a path to their targets that wouldn’t take them very high.

  “Anti-air is silent,” Morgan reported as the first of the 7th wave appeared on her scope.

  “I’m out,” Paul said, breaking from his position and running deeper into the forest.

  “Ditto,” Jason said, pulling the launcher off his shoulder and activating the self-destruct timer set for 3 minutes. He tossed the weapon aside and took off running, not bothering to look back.

  Morgan waited a bit longer than the others, wanting to see their little buzz droids through to target and expecting the lizards’ defenses to be putting up some response. On her scope all the first wave of the flying bombs landed at their targets, settling down over the tiny tracking pellets like insects feeding off of flowers and waited for the others, or more accurately waited for Morgan’s delay signal to end. She kept it active in order to get all the buzz droids to target before alerting the lizards to trouble, but the moment it cut out their individual programing would take over.