Star Force: Origin Series (17-20) Page 16

  “Thanks,” one of them said as the pair dropped into formation behind the trailblazer as he pushed his mech into an intersection, intent on turning right, then juking back left and diving his mech across the gap and landing it on its face, digging up the dirt underneath the thin layer of snow as a large orb of plasma flashed by where his mech had just been.

  “Heavy turret,” he warned them after a long pause as he crawled his way back to his feet. “No more than 30 meters in. I need one of you to poke your arm around the building and distract it to your side of the intersection on my signal.”

  “On it,” the rearmost of the two said, walking his mech up close to the wall and standing ready a few meters shy of the opening. “How tall is it?”

  “I’ll give you 20 credits if you miss,” Jason said sarcastically. “Just fire blind once and pull back, I’ll do the rest.”

  “Ready.”

  Jason walked his mech back away from the intersection and set himself. “Five…four,” he counted, starting to walk forward.

  “Three…two,” he continued as his mech transitioned to a run and veered towards the more distant wall, but still short of the intersection by 50 meters or so.

  “One…mark!” he yelled, ducking his mech’s shoulder and turning hard left in anticipation of moving out into the turret’s firing arc.

  The other neo took two stuttering steps forward and exposed its left arm, firing off a single shot before ducking back behind cover. His attack didn’t draw a return shot, probably due to the turret’s firing arc including another lizard building in the background, but the upper portion of the stubby turret rotated that direction just before Jason’s mech came running around the corner, clipping the inside wall with its arm and staggering forward off balance.

  The Archon didn’t slow and plowed fist first into the turret, punching through the armor plating on the turret just below the plasma aperture. It fired over his shoulder harmlessly as the mech withdrew its arm and punched with the other, not making full penetration, but denting the panels considerably. Jason stood there, underneath its firing arc, and pounded the turret into submission. With the outer armor broken into shards he unfurled his mech’s fingers and grabbed at the inner mechanisms, ripping them apart and getting a power surge into his mech as he severed one of its conduits.

  The surge scattered across the surface of the neo’s arm up to the elbow before disappearing, causing no damage to the shielded inner mechanisms. Other than the plasma cannon on the forearm, which had its own extensive protection, the mech’s limbs were heavily reinforced and shielded against all kinds of dangers that physical contact might spell…power surges, acids, shrapnel, excessive heat or pressure. The neos had been designed for hand to hand combat, originally intended to give the Archons the ability to fight it out with the dinosaurs one on one, but Jason and several others had been finding new applications for the Humanoid mechs, some of which had never been anticipated…including rockem sockem turrets.

  Jason pulled the mech’s hands out of the turret that filled 90% of the gap between buildings and rose a good head above his neo, but like the rest of the lizard infrastructure it tapered towards the top, giving the Archon a slice of view to a courtyard of some sort on the far side, which he figured was the main reason for such a heavy turret in the middle of the base.

  “I didn’t know these mechs could do that,” one of the other mechwarriors said, inspecting Jason’s handiwork as the pair came into view from behind.

  “Your shot softened it up,” the Archon said deadpan. “Split up and find a way around these buildings. We need to get to the other side, and I don’t feel like taking the time to crawl over.”

  “Move away, now!” the rightmost pilot said, drawing his mech’s forearm cannons up as if to shoot Jason.

  To his credit the trailblazer didn’t hesitate, which is probably why his mech retained its legs. Before the other neo could fire at the ground troops running out from the small gaps between turret and building one of them detonated its backpack and blew half the turret apart, sending debris out into all three mechs while knocking Jason’s neo over onto its face.

  The concussive force of the explosion, amplified by the close confines of the two flanking buildings, drove the neo forward and into the legs of the others, knocking all three to the ground in a pile of metallic limbs.

  “Get off me…before more come,” Jason said, catching his breath as his mech squirmed around beneath the other two, realizing before they did how vulnerable the three of them now were.

  “My right arm won’t move.”

  “Roll off,” the other suggested, doing likewise to extricate his mech from the pile. When the other had done so Jason pulled his mech to its feet, seeing his faceplate filled with distorted images as the computer tried to compile the information from the various cameras into a single composite image. A few moments later the cameras cleared as the auto-cleaning mechanisms took the mud off, giving the Archon a good view of the shrapnel damage to the other two mechs.

  The one on his right had a jagged piece of turret armor stuck in its elbow joint, while smaller pieces had either imbedded or scraped across the white camo armor. The other mech was similarly damaged, but without any large chunks imbedded.

  The damage statistics on his own mech indicated moderate damage to the rear of his mech, but he couldn’t detect any hindrance in his movements as he spun his mech around, looking for more lizards coming through the now expanded breach.

  “You ok, sir?”

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me,” Jason said, moving his arms around. “How do I look?”

  “Needle butt, Commander.”

  Jason almost laughed, but his attention was focused enough on the enemy that it didn’t make it past his mental barriers to the surface.

  “Pull off any of the large chunks,” he said, walking up and doing likewise to the other neo’s arm joint, then turning around so they could clean his mech off.

  “Can you move that arm?” he asked, facing away from the pair towards the remains of the turret and mentally sizing up the width of the gap.

  “The elbow is locked, but the shoulder and hand still work.”

  “Test the cannon on the turret,” Jason said, walking aside.

  “Hold on a second,” the other mechwarrior urged, pulling out one last chunk from Jason’s armor. “There,” he said, tossing the piece in front of the Archon for his inspection, “that’s all the big pieces, but you’ve lost a lot of armor depth to the smaller shrapnel.”

  Jason stepped back and a blue plasma lance passed just in front of his mech, followed by a small explosion compared to the one that had knocked the mechs down.

  “It works.”

  “Good, now follow me,” he said, turning back into the dead end. “We’re squeezing through. Watch our rear,” he warned, digging his mech’s left hand into the turret’s innards and stepping up into the blast crater before pushing through the slightly wider gap at that height and wedging his mech in sideways. He fired off three plasma blasts at ground troops on the far side but his mech didn’t budge any further.

  “Ah, somebody give me a push, please. I’m almost through.”

  “Permission to tackle?” the closer mechwarrior asked, spreading his mech’s feet and arms wide, ready to sprint forward.

  “Lean your shoulder into it and aim for my elbow, don’t hit my cannon.”

  “Got it.”

  A moment later Jason’s mech jerked from the impact and slid out of the vice grip the building and turret had on his mech’s chest, giving him a meter or so gap to work with. He fired at more lizards trying to approach from a large open area, either a landing zone or a reserved construction site, because it was too large and too far into the base’s interior to have been an inconsequential gap between the buildings. The far end of the rectangular plain butted up against a few tall but otherwise ordinary structures on the immediate other side of which stood the main defense tower that was sprouting the overhead shield.

&nbs
p; Jason pushed and wiggled his mech through baby steps until he got past the intact half of the turret, finding a second rotational track slightly higher than the one on the opposite side sporting three times the weaponry, all of which had also been knocked offline, covering the giant plaza.

  “Follow me through,” Jason said, firing two-armed now that he was clear, putting his ‘needle butt’ back towards the turret as he scanned the perimeter looking for more imbedded defenses for them to poach.

  8

  Jasmine watched as the hovertrucks sped by their leading mechs, then as the Saber neos were called up. Back behind her the two heavies were constantly firing their weapons off into the snowstorm, hitting one of the two cruisers that were picking at the mechs underneath the base shield. Everyone but her, it seemed, was getting into the fight, and she desperately wanted to do some damage to the enemy, especially as she saw some of the mech icons on the battlemap winking out…but for some reason she and the others had to guard the heavies when they could have been making a much bigger difference up front.

  Her frustration increased when the hoths actually stopped moving forward, making Jasmine and the other mechs stop their slow advance altogether. The four-legged giants continued firing repeatedly, but apparently didn’t feel like getting any closer. Jasmine could appreciate that, given the firepower the cruisers had, but it also meant that her star and the others were just sitting by and watching. She would have pounded her fist against the console but stopped short, knowing it would only make her head hurt more.

  A few minutes later that all changed as one of the two big icons on the battlemap began to move away from the base…and towards them.

  “Oh crap,” she said, realizing they were extremely outmatched. Apparently the lizards had gotten tired of the big mechs taking potshots at them and were coming out to eliminate them, and probably all the others, before heading back in to the base.

  “Everyone listen up,” Evin-693 said to the all the mechs in their battle group. The Sangheili was the highest ranking mechwarrior left among them, which meant it was his responsibility to organize the defensive effort. “Spread out and advance. Don’t let them take two of us down with one shot and don’t get caught up around the heavies’ feet. Make them choose between us and them. Target their weapons or we won’t have a chance of surviving this. The cruiser’s shields are down, but we don’t have the firepower to knock it out of the sky and we don’t want it landing on top of us either. Pull out its teeth and it can float around up there as much as it likes.”

  “Move,” Jasmine told her star, pushing her mech forward with long strides that ate up the increasingly thick snow. Despite the relatively close range to the base she couldn’t see it or the cruisers in the snowstorm. She could barely see the trees on either side of the path, but fortunately her mech’s sensors weren’t so limited.

  Before the giant silhouette appeared several lightning-like flashes in the sky marked the position of the heavies’ weapon strikes, then a huge mass of ship blocked out part of the blowing snow, suddenly increasing visibility between the mechs and the cruiser as orbs of plasma began raining down on the mechwarriors along with tiny shards from the anti-air weaponry.

  Jasmine resisted the urge to fire immediately, but instead took the time to pinpoint the location of the weapons batteries while the rest of the mechs opened up on the underside of the ship. The Archon sent the coordinates for one of the heavy plasma cannons out to her star then launched a quarter of her missiles at it, having to use a visual lock in which the computer mapped out the target ahead and she picked the part of the screen she wanted them sent towards in lieu of a targeting laser which her madcat didn’t have.

  The other weaponsfire from her star coalesced around that point on the hull, along with impacts from the other mechs, which knocked out the battery before Jasmine’s missiles could even get to it. Responding quickly while taking a bit of damage from the plasma shards coming down like rain as the snow continued to blow almost sideways, she tagged two more targets then fired off her plasma cannons at one of them, suddenly realizing that the ship wasn’t firing from very many positions. In fact, after one of the two she tagged went down, no more heavy plasma bombardments were forthcoming…only the rain of the anti-air batteries.

  Those were deadly enough, but couldn’t take out a mech in a single shot.

  Jasmine launched another quarter of her missiles against a new target as the rest of the mechs ate up the anti-air battery that she’d previously marked. This time her missiles made it to the battery before it was taken out, peeling off hull plates around the nub while cracking the aperture of the weapon itself. A backfire occurred and a green plume of plasma shot out from the underside of the ship, bathing the surrounding snow in green light before setting a chunk of the forest on fire, but the blowing snow quickly got to smothering the flames as more and more of the cruiser’s ventral weaponry was knocked out.

  Looking for another target to hit rather than wasting her ammunition on the hull as others were doing, she noticed with some chagrin, her visual tracking program suddenly became inaccurate as the cruiser began to move again, first going forward towards the hoths, then it pulled up and retreated into the cover of the storm and disappeared from view. The torrent of snow immediately returned, blocking out most of Jasmine’s vision as she turned her mech around and looked back, wondering what was going on. She could only see a handful of the mechs through the snow, but her battlemap was reading a mass of friendly dots, meaning they couldn’t have lost too many.

  “All mechs advance to base,” Evin said, his voice tight. “Best speed.”

  “Yes,” Jasmine whispered, wheeling her madcat around and running off through the snow with her star pulling into a pentagon formation with her in the forward left slot. She kept the trees to her left in her view at all times, having no other means to navigate by as the mechs ran into a massive white wall that all but made them snow blind. She monitored their position on the battlemap, looking ahead to what mechs were left standing in the base and finding a lot of them still active.

  What she neglected to notice was the absence of one of the heavies behind her, its disfigured hulk having fallen to the ground and been left behind, swallowed up by the snowstorm with only the flashes from its twin’s weaponry marking their position behind the advancing bipeds, but that light too disappeared as the distance increased and the snow thickened.

  Neither she nor the others saw, minutes later, when a group of kamikaze kirbies, invisible on sensors and visually covered by the snow, flew by and rammed the other heavy walker, knocking it off its feet as one impaled it in the port side. The others flew by as if looking over the damage then zipped off through the storm towards the other hoths around the base where they would take several more down unsuspectingly.

  Paul watched as one of the two cruisers assisting in the defense of the northern base pulled up out of the snowstorm and headed for space, both because it was leaving and because their sensors could clearly track it, meaning that the damage done to the hull must have been extensive. He watched its trajectory closely, wondering if it was retreating or redeploying to counter the fleets he had further south bombarding the other lizard base.

  So far no cruisers had appeared to challenge them, but Paul didn’t think that would last long. The cruisers up north wouldn’t be the same ones that they’d had positioned in the south, because as fast as they were it would take them too long to intercept, meaning those that they did have laying in wait had to be closer by. One of those positions had been the original location of one of the cruisers that had redeployed to the north, but in the past the lizards had responded with no less than 2 ships, so when his lower fleet came under assault he wasn’t at all surprised.

  The trailblazer issued a quick, preset order that he’d compiled earlier, ordering that fleet to dispense with the bombardment and hit the cruisers as hard as they could. Meanwhile the other, higher fleet continued its bombardment. Paul was not going to bring the two fleets
together, so if the lizards were going to stop them from penetrating the base’s shields they were going to have to fight two separate engagements.

  Minutes went by and no challenge to the upper fleet manifested. The 13 warships he had in the lower group essentially negated the pair of cruisers, driving them off heavily damaged while retaining only 3 equally damaged ships of their own. One still had its rail gun online, but its engines had taken damage and it was no longer able to maintain the hover orbit required. It kicked in its plasma engines and limped up into a conventional orbit, while the other two gained altitude intent on rendezvousing with the second fleet and offering what little weaponry they had to its defense.

  As time went on and the orbital bombardment continued Paul began to crack a smile. It was a small one, unsure of itself, but growing in confidence as each additional rail gun slug hit the lizards’ shields, draining them of energy and further destabilizing the matrix.

  No assault on the upper fleet was forthcoming, and Paul knew he’d pushed the lizards past their limit. Even if they did have another cruiser or two incoming from other locations, they couldn’t take the fleet he had assembled alone, which meant they’d either have had to hold back their first two cruisers and wait for the reinforcements, which would have let the Star Force ships pound on the base with two fists, or send out what they had against the weaker of the two fleets, hoping to be able to destroy it and then move on to the second with the help of the reinforcements.

  The damage done to the two cruisers made that impossible…or maybe the lizards didn’t have any reinforcements available. Maybe the two cruisers up north were all the others they had on planet. Paul didn’t know which, and at the moment it didn’t matter, because the southern base’s shield was showing up on sensors, meaning the energy matrix was being disrupted close to the breaking point.