Star Force: Survivor (SF52) Read online

  1

  October 2, 2548

  Reesi System (Beta Region)

  Metropolis

  Rio Jakson walked in full battle gear along with a large group of his fellow commandos onto the Armadillo-class transport that was currently docked with their jumpship. The transport was so large it couldn’t fit inside one of the hangar bays at nearly a mile long, so it was nestled up inside the docking hollow that allowed the jumpship to carry other vessels within it. This transport hadn’t arrived in the system, but was meeting up with the cargo jumpship to transfer the troops onboard. There were some 58,000 commandos and Knights from the 18th army onboard with him, but only a third of that was going down in the armadillo…and they were being packed in tightly.

  Rio walked across the docking umbilical casually, along with many other battle-hardened vets. He was still young by commando standards, but his newb days were long behind him. Now at 107 years old he’d spent 9 decades training and fighting, with what eagerness he’d previously had now lost…replaced by a steely calm that knew when the time to act came he’d be ready. His body and mind no longer wasted energy in worry, for he knew the naval division would get them to ground safely. Then it would be time to fight, but not now.

  Wearing the dull grey/white armor that commandos were infamous for, Rio carried a small pack on his back, over top of which was his weapon rack, full of rifles and pistols, all but one of which were plasma. The sole exception was a stun pistol, just in case the need arose…and those situations happened, he knew, but they weren’t being shipped here to play nice. Metropolis sat in a system kissing up against Dvapp territory and was one of two Star Force systems that had been hit by the Skarron ‘second wave’ as it’d come to be called by the Regulars. The other had hit Rotunna, which was practically asking to get your ass kicked.

  Archon Randy was there, safeguarding that system and its multiple planets, while Reesi had only Metropolis. It was a much smaller colony system, but well developed none the less. There were some 1.2 billion Humans and Kiritas living on Metropolis, which at the moment was surrounded by a Skarron blockade in middle orbit. Low orbit still remained Star Force territory, with now 4 Sentinels patrolling in lazy circles and the navy taking shelter in their destructive auras, baiting the Skarrons in but the numerically superior enemy was having none of it.

  All across the ADZ Beta Region border the Skarrons were blockading their chosen targets and not touching a single Sentinel. Any ships trying to get in and out from the planets had to run the blockade, which was doable, but tricky…and the Skarrons were getting good at making intercept runs, despite their inferior gravity drives. They’d had 2 years to practice in some cases, with the assault on Metropolis being only 7 months old and the newest addition to the 14 other worlds that were currently under the enemy’s naval squeeze.

  When Rio got to the other side of the docking umbilical the commandos were led via guiding holograms to their waiting area in the transport, with him and several other members of his Phalanx being seated in what looked like banks of theatre seats facing opposite each other with a walkway separating the two. Above that walkway were holographic display screens, updating the troops on the ongoing battles and offering other intel that would be valuable…but it was mostly a way to keep them preoccupied during the long wait.

  Rio sat down on one of the bench-like seats…for his equipment rack wouldn’t have fit with a backed chair and the armadillo had been built specifically as a troop transport. Nearly identical commandos sat down on his left and right, with the row behind him already filled and the one in front to soon follow. They all had custom fit armor, with a few inches in height differential and body thickness to tell them apart, but for the casual eye they all looked the same. Rio’s helmet HUD gave him the ID tags of everyone around him when he looked at them, emblazoned in little icons above each person’s helmet.

  That mode he could toggle on and off, but with so many people around he wanted to know who was who. His Phalanx was his operational unit, and he knew every one of the 991 commandos in it…along with the 25 Knights assigned to pair with them. Normally there would have been 1000, but they’d taken some losses in their previous campaign and had yet to be sent replacements…if there were any to be had.

  Rio was immensely glad that Star Force had had the wisdom to keep him out of the war zone for as long as they did while he got the training he needed…which now looked a lot less thorough from his experienced point of view. And the only reason he’d been sent out when he did was because of the special circumstances and Clan Metal Gear’s individual approach to assignments. After 43 years in the Clan’s service he had been transferred to a Mainline army unit…not a colonial one or other relief/training units, but a frontline army.

  The 18th had 1.2 million commandos in total, augmented by Knights, Aerial, Mechs, and Aquatics that put their full roster at 2 million+. His Phalanx existed within a Brigade of 10,000 and a Regiment of 200,000…with his Phalanx identification being 18th Blue Epsilon 4. The 4s and 7s were being dispatched to Metropolis in a fleet of cargo jumpships that were also carrying badly needed supplies along with a new Sentinel, broken down into pieces that was even now beginning to run the blockade to get down to low orbit where it would be assembled and add to the planet’s orbital defenses.

  The Skarrons weren’t taking well to that and a major battle was forming along the entry corridor as the navy was screening for the first piece. They’d entered on a seldom used jumpline because the Skarrons had all the main ones guarded. Thanks to the binary drives Star Force could come in anywhere they wanted, but it was the speed of approach that varied. The main jumplines could deposit ships close in or far out from a planet in the blink of an eye, but use a rogue line and your approach had to be much slower…while expending the same engine output, for you didn’t have a direct line to the gravity wells to push/pull off of.

  That slower approach had given the Skarrons a little bit of a heads up they were coming, but not much. As it was they were scrambling to get more ships into position to engage the screening drone fleet, but as Rio watched he could already tell they weren’t going to make it. Warships on both sides were getting slagged in the fighting, but the jump cradle carrying the first piece of the Sentinel was getting through and soon would be within the firing range of one of the complete ones…and Rio doubted the Skarrons would dare to go there. For the past 2 years they hadn’t gone within firing range on a Sentinel anywhere, meaning that if this piece got through to that radius then it was probably going to be safe.

  There were still three more sections to get in, and Rio guessed they’d be coming in along different jumplines. A notice indicated that the armadillo would be going to ground concurrent with the third section and using the blocking naval fleet to cover for it simultaneously. Rio had expected to go down somewhere else while the Sentinel sections made for a distraction, but apparently not. He waited patiently as the armadillo finished loading, then watched on some of the holos as it detached from the jumpship and began maneuvering away, ready to make its own microjump.

  Currently they were sitting in high orbit around a nearby planet, with the data feeding into the holos being delayed by lag but otherwise ‘live.’ The armadillo moved down into a lower orbit and aligned on a jumpline to nowhere, launching off the planet’s gravity well with just a kiss of momentum. It traveled out into null space between the planet and the star, then yanked hard on both distant gravity wells in order to slow them to a stop at the rendezvous point where the Sentinel section and its escort fleet already waited, with the escorts being mostly the same ones that had just been fighting to screen for the first piece.

  The escorts taking the second piece in were already currently engaged while thi
s fleet finished assembly. When they were ready and aligned the armadillo pumped up its gravity drives nearly as high as they could go and pushed off using multiple gravity wells, all of which only gave them a small response. The jump cradle had no trouble, given it was capable of traveling between stars and had huge gravity drives. The armadillo was another story, designed as an insystem transport, and had to boost its output extremely high in order to keep up.

  When they came out of the microjump at Metropolis the deceleration was a piece of cake, but a group of Skarron ships was nearby and redirected to intercept them immediately. The jumplines down to the Sentinels were constantly obscured, despite the orbital rotations, by the enemy fleet to keep Star Force from jumping incoming ships directly to them else risk a collision. That meant the armadillo and others had to come down beside it, outside of weapons range, then scurry over to get within its protective umbrella or head down to the surface.

  The Sentinel piece went laterally along with most of the escort fleet while a few drones followed several armadillos down to the atmosphere until they were sure the Skarrons weren’t going to cause them trouble. Only a few ships actually tried, for most were desperately trying to break through the escort fleet around the Sentinel piece…making the choice of coming down with the massive payload obviously correct. Rio had expected a diversion, he just didn’t think it would occur in the same place.

  Still watching the holos and feeling only a little trickle of adrenaline starting to creep its way into his system, Rio and the other commandos talked little, merely waiting patiently as the armadillos split up heading to different locations on the planet and picking up aerial escorts waiting for them. While the Skarrons weren’t engaging the Sentinels, there was way too much orbital space for the defense platforms to block, with the enemy having run ships down to the surface whenever they could get past Star Force’s low orbit fleet…which wasn’t overly hard given the number of warships they had in orbit to screen with.

  Star Force almost always made them pay for it, but they’d succeeded in getting troops to several LZs and were pressing the war to conquer the planet from a ground perspective rather than naval. Rio appreciated that, for it was usually the reverse. The fate of Metropolis and the other 14 systems under assault would be determined by his field of specialty, and both he and the others were more than ready to fight that kind of war.

  Recently his Phalanx had been engaging the lizards on multiple worlds with most of those engagements being cleanup efforts when the enemy was outnumbered but still needed killing. They were hard fights…they always were when you went up against the lizards, but the outcome was never in question. The losses they’d suffered were more like freak accidents, with Dan having been killed by an errant tank blast that was never meant for him. A mech had hit the tank just as it was firing, twisting the shot and landing a swath of plasma on his shieldless armor as he took cover behind a Knight’s shield as his emitters reset.

  He’d been doing everything right and been caught by the lateral blast. The Knight survived, but Dan had his armor melt right off him in several spots, with what plasma was left getting through and carving several deep gashes into his body that he didn’t survive. Rio hated losing him and how it had happened, but life was messy and sometimes the statistically impossible scenario played itself out. Had his shields even been deployed at 10% he would have survived, but he’d been caught by a tank blast in the maybe 15 seconds needed to get a matrix back up at minimal power.

  That was just plain bad luck…and it had ended the life of a good commando that had been training and fighting for more than 150 years. That felt like such a waste to Rio, to die like that, but he couldn’t find fault in anyone that day. It had just happened, like getting sucker punched in the gut and losing your breath. The only thing you can do from that point on is recover and keep moving forward, which is what he and the others had done.

  They didn’t like losses, at all, but if there wasn’t a mistake made that they could correct then there literally wasn’t anything to be done, so Rio had put Dan out of mind and same for the other 8 losses in recent years. He didn’t know when they’d get replacements, for sufficiently experienced commandos were in high demand nowadays, but they didn’t really need them. 991 or 1000 made no difference to Rio. They’d get the job done regardless, and he almost preferred going 9 short rather than getting sent newbs that didn’t belong here.

  He credited Star Force for that too, given that none had shown up and they were simply floating the reduced Phalanx.

  Halfway through their atmospheric flight orders started popping up on the holos and then in Rio’s helmet, indicating that they were going to come down very near a combat zone instead of the preplanned LZ. That got a spike of adrenaline flowing, and Rio clenched and unclenched his leg, back, and arm muscles, loosening him up a bit from what he knew could be a sluggish body after such a long time sitting.

  Around him the others did the same, for they’d been through this before and knew how to prep.

  He got a comm prompt in his helmet and activated it with an eye blink.

  “You ready?” Peter asked.

  “Always,” he answered, seeing that he was seated on the opposite half almost all the way up to the back.

  “We’re going to have to find each other pretty quick. There’s plenty of elite Skarrons in play, and we can’t get caught isolated.”

  “Not that it’d matter,” Rio commented, knowing that by ‘elite’ Peter meant the armored versions of the quadrupeds that more resembled walking tanks than infantry.

  “It matters in how quickly we take them down.”

  “Point. I’ll make sure I find your beacon.”

  “Make it fast, I’ve got skirmish orders and we can’t wait around.”

  “Copy that, Pete.”

  His squad commander cut the link, cycling around to other members of the 13 commandos that would be working in conjunction with each other. The ‘squad’ was a flexible designator and could have any number of infantry, including Knights or others. Peter had been Rio’s squad commander for about 2/3rds of his time with the 18th and the 308 year old commando certainly knew his stuff…not to mention he was stronger and faster than Rio, so much so that he looked up to the guy like a big brother.

  When the armadillo eventually set down Rio and the others exited the seats in a fast, organized flow by rows with none of the craziness that would have resulted had there been civilians here. Commandos moved with each other, never as a random crowd. Rio gave others just enough space to get by while keeping tucked close to maximize available space for others to move through as they debarked via a series of ramps into a thick, moist atmosphere with tuffs of fog that covered the ground in places…but with the sun overhead coming down brightly, making for an eerie feel.

  Rio switched to one of his scanning modes, with the fog cover being pierced by an overlay onto his normal vision. He immediately felt better, knowing that no enemy was going to be able to use the ground clouds to get the jump on him…then he groaned as soon as his boots hit the soil and sunk in about two inches.

  They had landed in a swamp. That would slow them down, but so too the enemy…and probably more them given the commandos’ agility and overall lightness on their feet.

  Rio got the beacon from Peter on his battlemap in the form of a moving waypoint as the other commando moved off and out from the units assembling around the armadillo and safeguarding it from any attempt to board or sabotage by Skarron infantry. Soon Rio broke out and away from the others, running around a scattering of trees and passing through a thick cloud with one other commando on his flank until they both met up with Peter inside a thicker area of trees.

  He fell into position with them, focus turned outward as they slowly walked forward as the others gradually caught up. When all 13 were there they took off running, with no words being exchanged. No ‘good lucks’ or ‘be carefuls’ were needed. They were experienced warriors who knew the score and didn’t want to give the enemy so m
uch as one extra second of preparation that needless talk would consume.

  Like ghosts moving through the foggy swamp Rio’s squad moved off to an area in between the entrenched Skarron forces inside a captured mining outpost and the armadillo that the bulk of the troops would be coming through. Ahead there was already fighting as a couple of stars of mechs were engaging the trio of Skarron walkers, with a large infantry battle was occurring on the far side.

  The armadillo had landed in a position to backdoor them and Rio’s squad was pushing hard ahead to clear the way for their coming, with the commando already spotting a couple of Hobbit scouts nearby. His squad split up, intending to come at them from different angles and get their first kills without slowing their run.

  18 seconds later they were down and the commandos moved on, scouting ahead and prepping the way ahead for the heavy hitters with Knight escorts to come through and into the outpost perimeter without any surprises.

  2

  October 21, 2548

  Reesi System

  Metropolis

  Davi Jameson kept the dropship low to the ground with the Falcon skimming the tall marshy grassland as numerous Skarron walkers were visible on the horizon, some of which were spewing tiny white dots in the dim light of evening, but too few. The perimeter defenses of the city ahead were all but down, leaving a nasty fight on the interior that was slowly becoming a losing effort. Further ahead on the battlemap but out of visual range for the moment, more enemy walkers were approaching as the horde of ground troops they had on planet was slowly making its way across the largest of three flat continents.

  Already two cities had fallen, with this one looking like it was about to be the third. Davi’s mission was straightforward but dangerous…get to the city and evac personnel. Trouble was, Skarron walkers dominated the local airspace. The few fighters they had in the air flew about with impunity, for anything that Star Force sent into region would be shot down almost instantly by the heavy anti-air capability that the huge walking machines carried…but he knew there was a window of opportunity low to the ground. Their anti-air had a ceiling limit, and if he could stay under that he could theoretically get into the city and out again.