Star Force: Melee (SF20) Read online

Hightower was crouched behind an overturned table set just inside the double doors to the conference room nervously waiting with stinger pistol in hand as he listened to the distant sounds of battle further out in the building as their few security guards did what they could to hold off the lizards working their way up from below. Beside him were two other civilians armed with stingers, but the rest of the 83 people holed up in the room had no weaponry at all.

  The Duke’s pistol had come from his desk, and he only kept one on hand because Paul had demanded that he get into the habit of stashing a personal weapon away years ago, and despite the fact that he was no longer Marquis of Clan Saber he’d kept to the Archon’s advice.

  He was certainly glad to have it now, but against the lizard hoard he doubted it would be enough. Hightower had helped the rest of the civilians pile whatever furniture they could into the stairwells to block the lizards from getting up to the higher levels of the building, but from the weaponsfire outside it was apparent that they’d broken through at least one of the barricades. There was a small chance that they might continue on up the stairs and bypass this room entirely, but as the sounds of plasma died out he lifted his pistol towards the doors expecting the worst.

  The rightmost door flicked open and Hightower pulled the trigger on reflex, sending the stun-laden glob of paint into Paul’s silver armor, splattering his chest plate with a blue glob.

  Paul’s helmet glanced down at his chest as he felt the armor suck the faint tingle of stun energy out of his body. “Nice shot.”

  “Sorry,” Hightower apologized, standing up behind the table. “Are we clear?”

  “Hardly,” Paul said, waving at everyone to get up and moving towards the doors. “We’ve partially secured an evacuation route. Is this everyone?”

  “Not counting security, yes.”

  Paul walked over to the table and pulled it right side up…then punched down into the middle of it, breaking it in half with a loud crack. He slid half of it aside and punched the small lean-to three more times, breaking off a roughly rectangular piece before snapping the legs off and handing the impromptu shield to Hightower. “Cover up and stay close to me.”

  The Duke took the heavy piece of table, gripping it from the metal frame still attached to the backside and holding it in front of him with both hands.

  “Like this,” Paul said, giving another piece of the table to the other two armed men, one of which he pressed it up against his shoulder. “Hold it one handed, weapon in the other.”

  “It’s heavy,” the third man said, sagging a bit under the weight.

  “It’ll soak up plasma. If you can’t carry it find someone else who can and follow me out. Everyone else stay behind them and whatever you do, please don’t shoot me in the back. It tickles.”

  Hightower suppressed a smirk and followed Paul out of the conference room and over to the debris-strewn remains of one of the barricades on the stairs. Two security guards were covering it, but there were bits and pieces of furniture everywhere having been blasted apart by some sort of explosive.

  “You two are a last out. Get me on the comms if you so much as see a scaly tail.”

  The two armed, but armorless men nodded and stepped aside, making room for Paul and the table holders to pass by…but after taking a step forward Paul suddenly backtracked and ran a few dozen meters down the hallway and pried a squarish box off the wall. He returned and thrust the emergency medical kit into the hands of one of the evacuees.

  “Carry that for me,” he instructed, heading down the stairs at the head of the line.

  The Archon still had his plasma rifle in hand, though his remaining ammo count was running low. If he could manage to get this group out of the building then he could start backtracking through areas they’d already cleared and hopefully wouldn’t encounter many more lizards along the way. If they did he still had his stun sword, but the charge on it had to be below half by now as well.

  One level down and Paul passed another security guard stationed at the exit of the stairwell onto that floor, clapping him on the shoulder as he went by. The man stepped aside and waited till about half of the throng of civilians passed then mixed in with the flow as they descended as planned, just in case the lizards hit them from the flank on the way down. They didn’t want the civilians to get hit with all the armed personnel at the front and back of the line, so at least this way there would be someone with a weapon nearby if they did get flanked.

  Paul ran down the stairs well ahead of the table shield bearers, making sure each platform was clear and then waiting up for the line to come down before repeating the process. Only twice did he run into any lizards, which he dispatched before they got within sight of the civilians, but the lower he went the more occasional plasma blasts he heard from down below.

  Suddenly the stairs below him filled with lizards and the two men he’d left to guard the ascent were firing down into the pile, out of which an orb of green plasma came up and shot past his head. A moment later he realized that most of the lizards he was seeing were dead and heaped together in a pile at the right turn in the descending stairs.

  “Coming through,” Paul yelled before jumping over his men and onto the stack of bodies. He only got partially tangled up in the mess of limbs that broke his fall, landing face to face with a live one.

  Paul punched it back with a quick jab, then shot it in the chest twice to burn through its body armor before kicking it back down the heap and diving forward after it.

  He landed at the bottom of the stack and took a plasma shot right into the chest with his armor absorbing it in a wicked looking crater…but that was the last bit of damage the lizards would do to him. Two minutes later they were all dead and he was pulling bodies aside to make room for the civilians to come down.

  “You two, get down here,” he told the security guards that had been responsible for creating the pile of dead lizards.

  “Are you alright, sir?” one of them asked after they’d made their way down, referring to the obvious damage in his armor.

  “Just a little crispy,” he said, jerking a thumb to the side door onto the current level. “Stay here and keep watch. I’m heading on down. Follow the end of the line out of the building.”

  “Will do,” the guard said, stepping out into the hallway to avoid the lizard corpses and the civilians picking their way through them as they tried to descend the stairs through the bottleneck.

  Paul tucked his plasma rifle onto his back, knowing it was almost out, and pulled out his stun sword, pointing it tip down in front of him and flipping on the charge switch in the hilt. He heard the distinctive crack/pop as the blade invisibly lit up with energy and preceded to move down the stairs slowly, knowing that it was going to take a while for the line to get past the dead lizards and he didn’t want to get too far out ahead of them.

  He didn’t get down two levels before he ran into another group coming up and littered the stairs with their stunned bodies. Picking up one of their plasma rifles he finished them off just before another group came up, making Paul wonder just how many of the damn things they could stuff inside one kirby.

  He fought through that group and five more before he brought Hightower and the head of the evacuee line to level 16 where he held his position.

  “I need guards on the descending staircase to cover our flank,” he said into his team comm that now included all the members of his security forces that were wearing a helmet, then he turned to Hightower and the other table shield bearers. “Stand here and shoot anyone coming up from below until security relieves you. We’re almost out of the building.”

  “Be quick,” the Duke urged, wedging up against one of the other men and slightly overlapping their shields as they took a knee to cover their legs, then dropped the shields down one stair to get the proper height to both cover themselves and shoot over if and when the lizards came up.

  Paul led the head of the line of civilians through the area he had recently cleared on his way into the buil
ding then sprinted ahead to the walkway atrium, intent on clearing out any lizard presence before they got a line of fire on the evacuees. With so many cross hallways it was impossible to defend them all, so he figured the best chance they had was for him to play rabbit and see what incoming fire he could draw.

  He made it all the way back to the atrium without incident, finding the wounded security guard still sitting where he’d left her…save the right side of her head now had a plasma burn on it. Paul also noticed three more dead lizards on the floor directly in front of her position, as well as the fact that the rifle she’d used to kill them had slid out of her grasp and was laying a few inches away from her bloody right hand.

  The Archon looked around for more threats, but finding none he waved back at the leaders in the line, signaling them down the long hallway when they emerged and didn’t seem to know where to go, then he knelt down next to the dead soldier and looked at her closed eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I should never have left you here,” he whispered, putting a hand on her shoulder in further apology before standing up and resigning himself to deal with the living.

  He stepped back out into the hallway and saw the people were walking…didn’t they know what an urgent waving hand meant?

  “Move it people!” he yelled, amplified by the external speakers in his helmet.

  A bit of movement to his right caught his attention…and to his disbelief the woman opened her eyes and looked up at him, tears welling up. “I…knew you’d be back,” she stammered, the burnt flesh on her face making it difficult for her to speak.

  “Damn it girl,” Paul said, dropping back to a knee beside her. “I thought you were dead.”

  “They tried…but I got them. Guess I blacked out afterwards.”

  Paul pried open the hilt of his sword again, dialing the stun charge back, but not as far as last time.

  “I’m going to get you out of here,” he said, ever so lightly touching her midsection with the blade, then her head.

  The woman’s eyes rolled back into her head for a moment but she remained conscious, barely.

  “I love you,” she said in sarcastic relief as the pain almost completely vanished.

  The first of the evacuees appeared beside Paul, coming into the atrium. He turned to face them but didn’t stand up. “Give me the kit.”

  The man with the emergency medical kit walked over and handed him the box as more and more civilians began to spill into the atrium, including the first of the security guards.

  “Check the walkway,” he ordered, prying open the box and finding a can of spray foam.

  “I hope this is already numb,” he told the woman as he pulled her blood-soaked shirt off her wound, mentally cataloging a future upgrade to add a numbing agent to the foam itself. He covered her abdomen with the stuff, double thick, then administered a painkiller injection that would supplement the stun charge he’d given her.

  He hesitated a moment, inspecting her head, then decided to spray a thin amount of foam over the burn mark, shielding her bloody right eye from the aerosol spray with his other hand.

  “You two, carry her,” he said, pointing separately to the two largest men in the group of civilians as he closed the lid on the med kit and handed it to a random person before he made his way over to the walkway where the civilians were waiting. At the far end he could see the security guard waving back.

  “All clear,” he reported over Paul’s comm.

  “Let’s go,” the Archon said, leading them out at a jog through the suspended walkway, glancing out the windows and seeing a cruiser to the north unloading a fresh set of kirbies as small explosions were popping up across its hull from brief flashes of light that he recognized as lachar blasts. Meanwhile large lances of blue plasma were hitting the side and upper hull of the cruiser and being deflected by its intact shields as the yellow/tan troop-laden transports disengaged from the underside of the hull.

  Paul knew that their lower shields had to have been dropped to release them and wished they had a few mechs walking the streets to target the underside.

  Just then a blur of motion shot by underneath the walkway and hit one of the plasma cannon batteries on the underside of the cruiser, taking it out with one well-placed rail gun slug. Paul couldn’t see it passing by in any detail, but the from tell-tale damage he knew what had hit the ship.

  A gout of green plasma from another cannon flashed back the opposite way, also passing under the high walkway, making Paul’s skin twinge with goosebumps at being so exposed in the tiny tube suspended between buildings.

  “Hurry!” he yelled, running faster as he looked to his right to see where the plasma had hit.

  Far down the street but running forward with a smooth gait was a madcat mark II equipped with a pair of rail guns in the arms, one of which fired off another slug straight under the walkway. A few moments later it ran directly underneath them and Paul could hear the impact tremors from its footsteps. He stopped at the end of the walkway as the people ran out and watched both those coming across and the mech as it continued to attack the cruiser, dodging to the right and scraping its arm against one of the walls to avoid another plasma blast that hit the ground a few dozen meters in front of the walkway on street level.

  Fortunately they were 15 stories above and unaffected but the bright green light swallowed up everything for a moment, then the madcat launched all its missiles simultaneously…or as simultaneously as it could. It took 4 seconds for it to unload both missile boxes in a flash of smoke that partially obscured Paul’s view…then the next thing he knew the glass in the walkway shattered in numerous places as the cruiser’s anti-air batteries opened fire to take down the missiles.

  One man in the civilian line took a hit to the chest, vaporizing his midsection and dropping his disconnected arms and head to the side while his pelvis and legs fell out the hole on the far side that the potent plasma shard had cut straight through the walkway. A woman behind him froze in fear, then registering the gruesome death barely three feet in front of her as she bent over and puked on the floor before getting knocked down by others running for their lives behind her.

  “Move, move, move!” Paul yelled, ducking back behind the cover of the building but staying within a meter of the walkway. The anti-air misses cut out a few seconds later and Paul snuck a peak back out into the now windy walkway with the warm outside air flowing in through multiple sections of broken glass.

  He saw the mech fire again…but it was missing its left missile box, having been sheered clear off presumably by the cruiser’s return fire. Its rail gun slug smashed into the underside of the now smoking ship as a few kirbies started to redock, already having unloaded fresh troops onto the battlefield.

  Suddenly another blast from what was left of the cruiser’s underside weaponry hit the mech square on, blasting apart its stocky body and knocking the machine backwards onto the ground, the impact from which Paul could clearly hear through the broken windows. He could see that the round nose of the central body had been blown open and the mechanics inside severed, which had made the mech’s legs go limp…but there was a bit of a glint from the dense Herculium armored cockpit showing through the blast damage, meaning that the pilot was probably still alive.

  The mech didn’t move, however, and the cruiser left it alone, picking up the kirbies and then fleeing the city as the defense lachars continued to blast away at it through its intact shields as wave after wave of plasma tried to beat them down. One of the docked kirbies exploded from one of the hits, then the cruiser passed out of Paul’s view behind several other buildings as it fled the city, heading back to base to pick up more troops to deliver.

  As if on cue a swarm of lizards came around one of the street corners below and swarmed into the command building they were just now leaving, hundreds strong with a few maulers among them.

  “Keep moving,” Paul yelled at the last few civilian stragglers as four security guards brought up the rear just behind the civilians that were ca
rrying the foamed-up guard. He ran back out onto the shattered glass of the walkway and pulled one woman up who was bodily shaking but unwounded, and pushed her towards the exit before running on.

  He helped the security guards pick up two more wounded personnel, one of which had lost his left leg just above the knee from an anti-air blast, cutting and cauterizing the leg in the same instant. Paul picked the staggering man up like a rag doll and ran him back across the walkway and called for the med kit from the group milling about on the other side as the security guards in the lead held them back until Paul gave the word to move on, and in which direction.

  The Archon used the last of the spray foam on the man’s half leg then gave him an injection to numb the pain, then one to knock him unconscious.

  “Carry him,” Paul told a man and woman beside him who seemed to be keeping their wits about them.

  “Control,” he said, using his helmet’s comm system to radio for assistance. “I need mantises to evac 100 or so survivors with medics on hand. We have some seriously wounded.”

  3

  Two medium-sized mantises landed on the street a block away from the command building and the lizard incursion, retracting their blade-like wings into the hull and lowering down to the ground on anti-grav engines as the civilian survivors rushed to board from their cover inside the nearby buildings that extended well up into the skyline, constricting the transports maneuvering capabilities while shielding them from the nearby ground troops. As the boarding ramps lowered one of the mantises offloaded three Archons carrying an assortment of equipment packs.

  As they stepped off a pair of medics followed them, quickly spotting the wounded and getting them onboard as a third mantis flew in and settled down on the street, accepting another two dozen or so passengers.

  “Thought you could use some backup,” Harrison said, tossing a heavy bundle to Paul as the other two Sabers went inside the building and deposited their satchels before coming back out with weapons drawn and their gaze alert. So far there hadn’t been any lizard activity on this street, but that could change at any moment and they knew better than to get caught off guard.