Star Force: Paladin (SF94) (Star Force Origin Series) Page 2

  “Copy that,” Myra said, cutting the comm and examining her scarecrow again as it woke. She held it in place telekinetically and looked into its creepy red eyes, trying to glean some information about it using her range of psionics. Though if she didn’t know better, it might have been designed to prevent that very thing.

  2

  When the second dropship arrived Myra and the others got the additional oxygen tanks loaded onto their armor underneath their weapons racks and began clearing out the ship. Stun weapons were used since these guys were such pushovers, but they had to be tied up at the hands, ankles, and shoulders around the arms to keep them from working their way out. Their bodies were so pliable that they could squeeze out of traditional restraints, so multiple ones were used with a few babysitters to go around and reapply them whenever one got its hands or feet free.

  None of them spoke, which was beyond odd. They literally felt like zombies, especially when viewing them with psionics. It wasn’t until Myra got halfway through the jumpship that she finally sensed a whole mind…actually, a cluster of whole minds confined to one area of the ship. She detached herself from the methodical sweeping teams and fought her way there, having to do little more than run past the scarecrows and telekinetically yank the weapons out of their hands…at which point one of them smashed its hand together to form a knife-like blade that bounced off her armor’s shields when she let it hit.

  She put a hand in its face and shoved it back into a wall, then kept moving on following the mental signatures she was detecting. There were so many scarecrows onboard it felt like too much, especially considering that there was supposed to be pirates down on the surface having come from the ship, and the closer she got to the full minds the more the odd aliens got in her way to try and block her path.

  Myra disarmed them easily, though the sheer number of weapons they were bringing to bear could have whittled her shields away with time. They weren’t not dangerous, but Star Force tech had come so far it almost made it seem so when going up against lachars and similar tech. Had she not been so equipped though, these guys would have been incredibly terrifying.

  She bowled over the last cluster with a Jumat blast then forced open the doors they were protecting. Once inside there were no more scarecrows, only empty corridors, but she could sense people moving around and staying away from her. A quick check of their minds at this closer range confirmed that they were scared and hiding. Too bad for them that they couldn’t do that with an Archon onboard.

  Myra went to the closest ones and found a group of 3 holed up in a small room behind a locked door. Her Pefbar told here they were waiting there with their own weapons drawn, probably because of the sounds of the scarecrows still shooting at her. She knocked down a few more and stunned them to keep them quiet for a little bit, then punched through the flimsy door in front of her. Her armored hand took a few shots as it curled down then pulled, crumpling and yanking the entire door off its hinges.

  She tossed it into more scarecrows coming at her as she used a Fornax blast to disable the three rhino-like bipeds before her. Two of them dropped their weapons in the process and she yanked the third clear. Doing a quick mental search for a familiar language, she held them in place telekinetically until one of them finally spoke in words she couldn’t understand…then the other two started jabbering, with what she translated to be a variety of insults and swearing based on their mental states.

  With a thought she knocked all three unconscious, then turned around and shot a few more scarecrows.

  “I’ve found a second set of crew. These are not cyborgs and are napping nicely. I need a retrieval team over here and techs as soon as possible to pull language files. Hopefully these guys know something we’re familiar with.”

  “Are they just as ugly?” Tia asked over the comm.

  “Not that bad, but they’re mean sons of bitches. We need to get them wrapped up and get down to the planet.”

  “And the scarecrows?”

  “When the techs get here have them rebuild a room as a pen and just shove them in.”

  “They’ve got knife hands too.”

  “So I saw. Unless they can cut through walls I don’t think we need to do more than that.”

  “We’ll get it done. How many other guys are there?”

  “Still bagging. I’ll let you know,” Myra said, knocking a few more scarecrows down as she left the three sleepers where they lay and headed for the next closest group.

  Myra didn’t wait long for the techs to get to work. As soon as the ship was secure she left with most of the assault team and headed straight down to the planet along with another two dropships worth of combat personnel. Each was headed for a different location the pirates had landed in, knowing that the longer they delayed the more damage these guys were going to do. Orders were given to shoot to kill anyone caught misbehaving and to capture all others, but when her dropship came over a pirate landing site she saw that the situation wasn’t going to be one for stunners.

  There was a long trail of dead Vittis and signs of scarecrows roaming the streets in packs while Myra caught sight of one of the rhinos leading another. More were carrying bounty back to their grounded ships, though one had seen them incoming and was taking off in a hurry.

  “Fly close to that one,” she ordered the pilot from the cockpit as she watched the vid screens along with him. “We’re taking it down.”

  “With what?” he asked. “Or do you want me to ram it?”

  “I’ll disable the pilot, just get me close.”

  “If you say so,” he said, altering their descent to chase after it, which wasn’t hard considering the superior engine power the Star Force dropship had. When they got within half a mile the enemy ship suddenly stopped accelerating and took a nose dive towards the buildings below…then leveled off and began to circle around.

  “Got him,” Myra confirmed. “Flank them back to the drop zone and get me a little closer. This is hard enough with new minds, let alone the range.”

  “Impressive, Archon. Very impressive.”

  She didn’t respond, focusing on her tenuous link to the pilot and keeping his compatriots from interfering with him. When the ship eventually returned to its original landing zone she ordered the Commandos with her over to it while she walked behind them maintaining her suppressive link until they broke in and secured the ship. When they reached the cockpit she rendered the crew there unconscious then ordered them to be taken prisoner while she turned away from the ship and headed off into the city in search of bad guys to kill.

  There was gore everywhere, and this location on the planet hadn’t seen reaver activity yet, meaning the pirates had done all this. Bodies were strewn about along with trashed equipment and buildings. It looked like these guys weren’t just here to pillage the natives…they were having fun with it too, and the death screams of several more people registered to Myra’s senses when she extended them out as far as possible. That told her where to go and the Archon took off running at insane speed without bothering to get backup.

  The first scarecrow she crossed got blasted in its chest, burning a hole clear through, but it didn’t drop to the ground. Rather it turned around and tried to lift its weapon towards her, but its arm didn’t have enough strength and it could only get it halfway up. A second shot to its head killed it as Myra ran into the group it was with and tore them to bits with a series of pointblank shots and physical blows. Flexible as they were, they did not have much structural integrity and she found out quickly that their heads were the weak spots. A good punch there would crush their mechanical brains and knock them out quickly, whereas hits elsewhere would damage or stretch them, but otherwise keep them alive and fighting.

  Myra didn’t linger with this group, dispatching them as quickly as possible so they couldn’t kill anyone else, then she headed straight for where the death screams had been coming from. She fought through two more roaming groups of scarecrows before she got to them, then came head on into a plaz
a with over a hundred of the things and several rhinos that had taken a bunch of Vittis prisoner…and were ripping off limbs one by one in some sort of sick game.

  With her ire flaring, Myra sprinted towards them and shot the one that had a Vitti in its grasp directly in the head. The armless Vitti dropped to the ground bleeding heavily as the scarecrows all turned on her and fired, but they weren’t going to stop her. She went straight for the other rhinos and killed each of them quickly and efficiently…even the pair that dropped their weapons and raised their hands in surrender. After what they’d done, she wasn’t going to accept one.

  Once the leaders were killed she dealt with the scarecrows, having to work fairly hard to headshot them, otherwise it’d take 10 or more plasma blasts to kill one and she didn’t intend to leave any of them to suffer like the Vitti were.

  Tossing her weapon aside, she knelt next to the armless Vitti as it was still screaming and numbed out its pain with a quick mental link, then she detached her right glove so that her hand was shown bare to the air. Reaching down she touched the Vitti and used her Haemra to try and save the little guy, difficult as that was on unfamiliar races. The other Vittis that had been captured and were waiting to be torn apart had scattered when she took out the scarecrows, but some were tentatively creeping back in towards her. They didn’t want to leave the wounded one behind and some of them were trying to pick up the huge scarecrow weapons and aim them at her.

  “I am not your enemy,” she said, using the translation program developed from the scout’s reconnaissance intel. “I am trying to save this one.”

  The little fuzz balls twitched with their blue noses sniffing like a rabbit, but they didn’t drop their weapons. Myra ignored them, focusing her full efforts on stopping the bleeding and saving this one’s life, even though it had had one of its four legs pulled completely off and that had dislodged other bones inside its now mangled body. She was trying to push it back together using her Pefbar/Lachka then heal it enough to hold together on its own with her Haemra, all the while keeping the little guy numbed up so he wouldn’t feel what she was doing to him…and what had been done to him.

  On top of that he was in shock and she had a city with more pirates to kill, but she wasn’t going to abandon this guy. That might mean others died when she could have saved them by getting there faster, and she hated that, but leaving this one to die when she was already here was just wrong, so she was going to do what she could.

  “Captain, get a dropship with medical personnel down here now. We’ve got a mess of Vittis that need assistance.”

  “To your present location?”

  “Might as well start here.”

  “Dispatching now.”

  Myra continued to work on the little guy, ignoring the body parts lying around her from those that were already dead. She wasn’t going to let this guy join them, but she knew if she let go of him he’d slip away. The Archon was having to take control of so much of his bodily functions that he couldn’t sustain himself. Not yet, anyway. And the lack of blood in his body was hampering efforts considerably.

  “Ah hell,” she said, telekinetically removing her other glove and dipping her fingertips into a pool of blood on the ground. She used a gross application of Haemra she’d learned a while back and pulled the blood cells up onto her hand and held them there, forming a sphere that she then moved over and held against the Vitti. With the physical contact made she was able to force them into his body, hoping that it was his blood and not someone else’s, but right now she had to take the chance for he had too little left in him and not enough time for her to advance his natural production rate.

  “Archon,” a voice from behind her said sometime later and she blinked with surprise as a medtech suddenly blossomed into mental view. She’d been so consumed with saving the Vitti that she hadn’t even noticed him arrive.

  “This one is barely hanging on,” she said, not letting go. “Limb ripped off and additional structural damage. I’ve patched what I could. Massive blood loss.”

  “I still don’t know how you do that,” he said, kneeling beside the Vitti with a briefcase-like box of equipment, “but keep it up another minute.”

  “No problem,” she said as he scanned the new race, but thanks to the basic notes they already had he was able to adjust the equipment accordingly and attached four wire-like extensions in through the excessive fur to the skin. When he pressed a button Myra could see tiny tendrils enter the body and begin to take hold, pulling bones back together and starting to make other repairs.

  “You can release now. This one is messed up, but this should stabilize him until we can get a full regenerator down here.”

  Myra let go her contact, but didn’t move off. “Are you sure?”

  The medtech checked his reading thoroughly, then nodded. “Yes. He’s stabilizing.”

  The Archon stood up, looking around at the gore and the living Vittis that were watching, then altered her armor speaker to their language translation again.

  “We are Star Force and we have come to help you fight the reavers. We will also deal with these pirates. You have nothing to fear from us, and this one,” she said, pointing at the Vitti, “will live. Stay away from the pirates and tell us where they are if you can, but leave their deaths to me.”

  On that word she took off running again, pulling her plasma rifle into her grip telekinetically as she moved off and began a rampage across the city, hunting down every pirate she could find and killing them all. The ones already prisoner she’d spare, but these down here were getting no mercy. They weren’t going to be tortured like they’d done to the Vittis, but they were going to die. Quick and clean, but dead and gone. She likewise sent out orders to the other two teams and the rest of her Commandos here.

  They had to die, even if they tried to surrender, for there was no way she was going to let them get away with this one day then throw down their weapons and pretend to be helpless the next. They came here as raiders and barbarians and that was the role they were stuck with. There was no changing with the wind, and for all the Vittis that had been tortured and killed in previous days there would be quick vengeance enacted and no survivors from the raiding teams.

  The same would hold true in the following days as the other pirates were tracked down across the planet. Those trying to flee back into orbit were shot down by naval drones and the few pilots that had been taken captive before Myra’s rampage began were shuttled back up to the jumpship and dumped inside with the rest of the captives, who were subsequently free of their restraints, rhinos and scarecrows alike, and given a simple order when enough of their language had been translated to handle a few words, with Myra adding a telepathic emphasis to make sure there was no misunderstanding.

  Leave now. Never return. Or die.

  She added an image of the planet rotating beneath them, and that they had until one completion to get out of her gun sights. If they were still in planetary orbit after that they’d be hunted down and destroyed. If they were in the asteroids they’d be given a head start to get to the star, but Myra made it clear that they were now enemies and if they came across them again they’d be killed on the spot.

  The pirates were left onboard their ship for a few hours, then it finally got moving. Myra was already down on the planet again by then, leaving those bastards for her Captain to deal with as she met with the Vittis and had a long talk, explaining why they were here, what had just happened, and that it would never happen again because Star Force was making this planet a ward, meaning they were now responsible for its security and the Vittis had just become part of their empire.

  That took some explaining, for it sounded like they were being conquered, but Myra was able to convince them that it was in fact a rescue and not an occupation or exploitation. Besides which, without their help the Vittis were going to all die to the reavers anyway, so there wasn’t much opposition to her arrival…especially when she went directly to one of the reaver combat zones and displayed just what
it meant to have an Archon on your side.

  After that point the Vitties threw their full support behind their new help even as the reavers continued to gain more territory across the planet, for the Archon could only be in one place at one time, but as she and the other combat teams began to spread out and help slow the bleeding of territory a bit the other ship she’d brought with her into the system slowly descended down through the atmosphere and landed in one of the remaining safe zones on the planet…at least until the reavers eventually fought their way in that far.

  It landed in a small valley as the local Vitties pulled back from the few homes in that area to give the cruiser the space it needed in the crowded landscape that was becoming even more so as evacuees from other areas were being compressed into a smaller and smaller landmass. Meanwhile the reaver swarms were growing to such a large size that their own population was becoming totally unsustainable, but it wouldn’t matter to the Vittis because they’d be long dead by the time the planet’s food supply ran out.

  Long dead unless they got help, and as soon as the cruiser set down a long stream of blue lizards came out and immediately started setting up equipment and digging down into the soil and bedrock below, establishing the first bits of Paladin infrastructure that, if given a chance, would fight swarm with swarm for control of the planet.

  3

  November 8, 3493

  Tekin System (Rim Region)

  Plataro

  Paladin Skirmisher ARV-119 woke to the world violently, tasting the air for the first time and lashing back at it until his genetic memories awoke and he saw where he was…standing in a Paladin facility with other blue skinned lizards surrounding him. He calmed quickly, hacking out some biogel from his nostrils and fully coming awake. He knew he’d just been grown, but he wasn’t an invalid. He knew a great many things by default and when his fellow Paladin led him off into a nearby chamber he knew that it was for calibration purposes.