Star Force: Mantle (SF92) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  2

  “Lizards are across The Line. We’re going down,” Ritti said, poking into Scri’s quarters.

  The Irondel nodded his thick head and put aside the tiny datapad he’d been reading on as he ran out the open door on all fours as he and the other infantry pilots headed for the minimech bay within the modular troop compartments onboard the star destroyer. It was an Axius-designed module and all of the troops were Irondel by choice so they could fit far more of them on the ship than they could other races.

  Scri stood all of 7 inches tall when he stretched to his max, but he ran down corridors that were only 5 inches tall as he and the other Irondel infantry moved from their tiny living quarters through the crate-like module on the orders of the Archon. This wasn’t their first surface drop, but to the Irondel it never got old. The smallest ground walking race within Star Force, the Irondel in Axius were often dismissed as inconsequential by the public but trailblazer Paul himself had requested their assignment to the Kvash’s new Star Destroyer-class ships. That gave them all a swelling of pride and a sense of responsibility with every mission placed before them.

  They didn’t want to let any Archon down, let alone that one.

  When Scri, Ritti, and the others got to the bay they passed by a few Irondel techs that maintained their battle machines and went straight to the boarding ladders, climbing up them and onto the catwalks that gave easy access to the open panels on the machines. Scri ran inside a neite, traveling down a short tunnel that would seal behind him upon activation, and into the only room inside the sweet, sweet ride that he was happy to call his own.

  The Irondel walked across a flat ring that surrounded a smooth crater in the bottom of the pod, flicking a few wall switches and bringing life to the machine as he found the crown-like control ring and slipped it onto his head before he stepped into the soft curved depression. Utilizing the mental interface he activated the energy fields that lifted him off his feet and held him suspended in midair inside an IDF field to nullify the gravity and all external impacts while his senses of his surroundings grew hazy, almost like an afterimage in a corner of his mind.

  Suddenly his senses became that of the machine and he was looking through its ‘eyes’ and hearing through its ‘ears’ as the mental interface fully kicked in. The machine was quadruped and built to mimic the Irondel’s natural body, so as he moved his own legs the neite responded in kind. Pressures felt by the machine were translated to his mind only, leaving Scri swimming and kicking like an idiot in midair during a fight, but no one else was inside the cockpit to see him so it didn’t matter. His body would be protected even if the neite got tossed head over heels…which had happened before…and whatever damage occurred to it he’d feel in his mind and not his own body.

  It was a very smooth, complicated system that took years to learn, but all the Irondel in this unit were veterans and loaded up into their neites quickly, with a stream of the meter-tall metallic chipmunks strolling out of the modular bay and into the ship’s ‘normal-sized’ interior. To Scri it was the land of the giants, but when he was in his machine he felt their size and interacted with them as such. It was a not so small transition that many Irondel had trouble making, often getting too cocky with their gigantic forms and peerdom with the Archons and others, but those Irondel that didn’t adapt and realize just how vulnerable they still were didn’t make it through training.

  Reckless Irondel were dead Irondel, whether it was from getting stepped on or blown up didn’t matter. You had to use your head and think…and thinking in combat was one thing the Archons had always emphasized.

  The neites headed through the utility corridors that led to the stairwells rather than the lifts, with the nimble machines climbing them easily as they ascended out of the wedge-shaped hull and into the boxy upper pylon on top of the battleship that the troop ships were docked with. When they entered their assigned one most of them moved into drop position, which were little cubicles in a bay where each of them parked, almost shoulder to shoulder, and waited. A few of the neites went to another chamber where the Irondel got out of them and skittered along walkways into the tiny bridge on the ship that they would pilot or into the true mech bay.

  Scri wasn’t one of them, but he was glad that they’d have mech support. His neite was a machine, but it was designed to move and fight like infantry, which he was classified as. Piloting a mech was another skillset entirely, and the few huge machines that they had were permanently parked on the troop ships so they didn’t take up unnecessary space inside the star destroyer. But as per protocol, the Irondel didn’t leave their specially designed modules without being inside a neite no matter what their duties were. Their bodies were so small and fragile that a Human tripping and falling on top of them could kill them, and that was a risk the Archons didn’t want them taking.

  All Irondel knew they could handle themselves in the field without machines if necessary, relying on their speed and agility to keep them alive, but it was always best to take a neite wherever you went just in case, and you could abandon it if you had to…not to mention it could survive vacuum, extreme heat or cold, and a number of other conditions that normal crew could not. And while the Kvash were about as hardy as they came, a neite would still survive in a range of conditions they could not.

  That, and the ship always ran hot. When the Archon or others were onboard the Kvash kept it as cool as they could stand, but to Scri and the others it was dreadfully oppressive heat. Their quarters were not, thankfully, and while he could stand the Kvash ‘coolness’ for a while it was best not to even mess with it, making having a neite to run around in essential on an assignment like this.

  Once parked in position there was a long wait as the transport eventually undocked from the ship, and he watched on his display as the star destroyer fully pulled in its docking racks now that all the ships had departed. Those sealed up inside the boxy top behind armor plating, which was how the Kvash preferred to fight. The shields on the star destroyer were beastly, but they were all that protected the racks when exposed. Tucked up like they were now, with the shields reset to cover a smaller silhouette, Scri knew was the most dangerous configuration the ship could get in naval combat, though it seemed right now it was content to just continue firing down at the surface in preparation for their landing with no opposition in orbit to shoot back at it.

  That meant the lizards hadn’t surrendered, as per frickin usual. The buggers never surrendered whenever Scri was on a mission, nor anyone else he’d talked to, but apparently some had and were even now working for Star Force. They were the smart ones. These must have just been dumb lizards, for there was no way they were going to survive this and unless they got lucky or the Irondel screwed up, they weren’t even going to be able to kill one of them, making their deaths pointless.

  But he knew the lizards would try anyway and he’d have to fight well to make sure they didn’t score a victory against them. When the transport finally landed his orders hadn’t changed. They were to hunt down and destroy all remaining lizards.

  The ranks of neites before him began to file out with Scri’s taking his place in the double line as the machines ran with excessive nimbleness through the corridors and out the boarding ramp that deposited them into the rubble of what had just been a lizard colony an hour before. The star destroyer had done a nasty piece of work to it, but the lizards were hard to kill and always found somewhere to hide out and ambush from. If they didn’t kill all of them they might be able to hide here and rebuild after the Executor moved on to the next system…and that was something they couldn’t let happen.

  The neites circled around and secured the perimeter of the transport with some of them hopping up on top of chunks of debris to get better vantage points. Everything was a mess, but the transport had come down inside a blast crater that was more or less flat, though it was still smoking in several places and Scri was glad he wasn’t out there on his bare feet.

  He felt the heat in his mind as the ne
ite’s sensors translated it to him, but it wasn’t going to damage the machine at these levels and it was dropping fast as it bled off into the frosty air that was a few degrees below freezing. In fact there were even some snowflakes coming down and melting instantly into little puffs of steam as they hit the hotspots in the rubble.

  As the neites gradually expanded their perimeter a pair of mechs came out of the transport’s main bay. Both were bipeds, being driven by different mental commands but using the same ring control system. They walked slow with huge steps and were pound for pound more heavily armed and armored than Human mechs…for the simple reason that their pilots didn’t take up as much internal space, with it being devoted to more machinery and less life support.

  Yet another reason why the Irondel were perfect for this kind of low numbered ground troop assignment…they had to make every mech and minimech count, for there were no available reinforcements to come and bail them out, aside from the Archon, and if that was necessary they’d have failed in their mission.

  When the call finally came Scri joined up with four others and headed northwest in a patrol looking for and coordinating with the sensors on the other minimechs and the battleship in orbit while the two Vulture-class mechs blasted their way into rubble to expose certain areas or break through to subsurface structures that were still intact. One of them opened up a shaft that led straight down 30 meters and into which Scri and his squad dived in head first a few hours later.

  The anti-grav within their machines cushioned their fall, but as soon as they touched down there was a hail of phaser fire from dozens of lizards coming in from multiple directions. The shields on the minimechs held up to the initial barrage, but Scri and the others knew better than to just stand still and take it. He immediately launched out at a frighteningly fast run, skittering across the stone-like ground with blurry strides and up to the nearest lizard he could find, then shot it with a lachar blast from the head of the neite.

  He followed it up with a rapid-fire assault, chewing into the lizards like a buzz saw as their return fire dropped his shields lower and lower. Before they could get through to his armor he pushed all the way into their bodies, using the lizards as shields against most of their own guns as he landed on top of one standard variant and knocked it to the ground, punching it in the head with his forward right metallic paw three times in quick succession before leaping ahead and headbutting another…followed by a lachar blast only inches away that blew out the lizard’s skull like a dull grenade popping.

  Soon another neite jumped past him, tearing into another three lizards with a sway of its head and a flurry of shots. Scri didn’t know how many lizards there were around him, he just fought those closest and worked the problem…though it was short lived. Barely 2 minutes later and they were all dead, leaving nothing but an empty chamber that looked like it had been a warehouse with very little stored in it.

  With orders coming in over the battlemap, Scri and Tikro ran off to one exit and began exploring the lizard infrastructure searching for signs of more survivors in what by now was a very practiced procedure. Room by room, city by city, they’d search and destroy until this planet was confirmed cleansed of lizards, then they’d move on to the next mission and repeat as many times as was necessary.

  “Jumpship neutralized,” the Kvash reported.

  “Good,” Ellie said, now sitting down in her command chair as she observed the continuing efforts of her crew. The ground troops were already deployed and making kills, with her following a bit of their viewpoint on a side screen as she also monitored the naval front. The shipyard hadn’t surrendered and she’d sent drones on around to deal with it while the Executor lived up to its name, pummeling more surface targets and killing as many lizards as they could that were out in the open or in the uppermost buildings.

  “Shall I organize boarding parties?”

  “You think they’re beat up enough to handle without Axius?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Prep two squads of commandos and one of techs. I’ll personally take them over and begin securing the first target after all hostiles are eliminated in orbit.”

  “The two docked cruisers?”

  Ellie nodded as she saw the drones on approach, though there was still no movement from the ships. She didn’t know if they were damaged or fully operational and just sitting, but she wasn’t going to leave the Executor until they were taken out. The Kvash could handle them, or she could even give orders via comm from her armor, but it was better to just wait a bit and play it safe with a mostly green crew, as far as Star Force standards went. In other civilizations these guys would count as veterans, unfortunately.

  When the drones eventually got to the shipyard both cruisers didn’t respond with more than a few weapons batteries, and the close in scans revealed heavy damage to both of them. They’d been fighting someone other than Star Force and had come here for repairs. Who that was she couldn’t guess, but there was definitely going to be an investigation started. Star Force didn’t own all the territory this side of The Line, but anyone that could do damage to the lizards was worth noting.

  To that end she altered the orders to the drone pilots, having them pluck the weapons batteries off the cruisers and hit a few key places on the shipyard as she had the weapons batteries on the star destroyer cease fire.

  “Detour,” she announced. “Get us to that shipyard. We’re going to secure and clean it out first, then I want a tech team to salvage as much of the computer systems onboard those cruisers as possible.”

  The captain and the crew carried out her orders, getting the Executor underway in a massive arc around the curve of the planet, but she could feel they were confused so she took a moment to explain for their benefit. Normally she didn’t have to, but part of this mission was learning and they needed to know more of her thinking than a standard crew would.

  “The cruisers,” she said loud enough that all the bridge crew could easily hear, “have been damaged in battle. They didn’t get here on their own power, so they had to dock with a jumpship that transported them here. If they engaged us they wouldn’t have time to dock, let alone get away. I do not think they were engaged in combat with Star Force, and I want to know who they are fighting in this region. If we can pull data from those ships, I want it.”

  3

  November 19, 3446

  Grid Point Mankla

  Riona’s Warship-class jumpship pulled away from the massive chasm that was the interior of the Nexus mag jump carrier that had brought it and four other Star Force jumpships across the gap from H’kar territory to the tiny island of Gfatt territory in the Rim Region. The massive construct that they’d braked against was the size of a planet, just like its twin back in H’kar territory, but here there were four of them, spaced within 2 million kilometers of one another and well away from the nearest star system.

  One of those links led across a much larger gap and into what was still Nexus territory, while the other two were connected to the Tolsoi and Vedran. This connecting hub had been expanded to include the H’kar when they joined and was the single largest and most important grid point within the Rim Region. Most members only had a single link that led to Grid Point Dagran or Grid Point Ullpor, each of which was a large spur within territory that still belonged to The Nexus, so travel from one point in the Rim Region to another required leaving it via the grid point system and coming back in again on a different spur. As far as distance traveled was concerned that was a huge detour, but speed wise it was vastly superior to using gravity drives.

  Grid Point Mankla was the only one now under Star Force control with multiple constructs in it, though the H’kar’s Grid Point Annsa was going to be upgraded to include a second construct when it eventually arrived from Nexus territory. Nearby to Mankla was the transit star system for local traffic, and only a single jump from it was the world the Gfatt had colonized. They continued to provide security for this grid point in order to hold the link between The Nexus
and Star Force territory, and as Riona looked at the updating battlemap from the command nexus onboard her ship she saw an enormous defense fleet comprised of Gfatt ships mixed in with those from the local member races, most of whom were from the Tolsoi.

  No Star Force warships were here, but there were over a hundred cargo/civilian ships present for the same reason as the Archon had come to the bridge rather than sleeping or working out in the sanctum while they transitioned this point on their way to Vedran territory where Clan Saber was setting up shop.

  There were so many ships present in the space between the four grid point constructs that she wouldn’t have argued with the ship’s computer if it gave an error message when asked to catalog them all. Though there were no planets here there were stations…huge stations with commerce traffic equal to what you might find in Epsilon Eridani. This hub of the grid point system was a star system in and of itself and completely fabricated in deep space so that there would be no orbital wobble throwing off the long shot trajectories that were required to hit the ‘small’ dish-shaped targets on the constructs.

  And Star Force now owned all of this, despite the Gfatt’s presence to help defend it. Their single world was still classified as belonging to The Nexus and would be used as a much more vital waypoint for traffic coming through the system, which the Gfatt had told Star Force they were very grateful for, but Grid Point Mankla was now Star Force’s property and their responsibility to maintain. Seeing how many ships and stations there were here, Riona realized just how much trust The Nexus was being forced to place in their hands, for the trillions of people living here relied on commerce to fuel their economy and the four regions linked together by this hub did likewise.

  The Gfatt would help defend it, but they would not be running it anymore. They and the other exterior Nexus races had been slowly withdrawing their personnel as locals were upping their numbers and Star Force was sprinkling a few of their own in as well to replace the losses. A Duke now ran this grid point and the people controlling the constructs now took orders from Star Force personnel, but the bulk of the crews here and the denizens were made up of the local races that were sort of now Star Force, but until they went through indoctrination Riona truly didn’t count them as such. They were Star Force’s responsibility, but other than dots on a map there was no true connection yet between them.