Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) Read online

Rvitx

  “Where are they?” Donn-1001 asked in the trade language, leaning over the holo table in his striker armor as the wind whipped across the open air outpost.

  One of the four Dvapp with him extended a tendril from its column-like mass and pointed to a nearby area on the battlefield map.

  “Here. There are several subsurface caverns that the Aronsic appear to be moving through.”

  “Do you have them charted?”

  “No.”

  “Then we do this the hard way. Heavy scout team, formed on me. We’ll go in and flush them out, but you have to keep them away from here,” Donn emphasized, pointing to a relatively flat section of the barren, rocky landscape on the map that held the entrance to one of the Dvapp’s mining stations. It was mostly below ground with only a small surface facility, but it held subsurface tunnel links to 5 nearby facilities…and similar tunnel links were allowing the Skarrons to assault many other Dvapp facilities in the area. If they broke through here, they were practically inviting them to spread further.

  “I do not know if we can,” the Dvapp said honestly. The Skarrons had no walkers in play, but they were flooding the area with infantry while the big toys from both sides were off playing elsewhere on the planet.

  “Slow them down when they’re crossing terrain, but do not let them mass out in the open. Buy me time to plug a few holes.”

  “We will try.”

  Donn nodded and left the holotable, walking across the small prefab Star Force outpost and electronically tagging two other Archons nearby to follow him. He picked up a half dozen Dvapp on the way and the 9 of them ran out through the entrance and onto the orange/brown cracked ground that made up the majority of the planet. A few meters out and they ran up a hillside before sliding in between boulders and making their way over the varied terrain towards the caverns the Dvapp had indicated.

  It was more than 8 kilometers away straight shot, but with so many ravines and other topography a straight anything wasn’t going to happen. Donn didn’t have a jump pack, which would have helped him greatly, because his Dvapp troops didn’t have any. He only had a few Archons and commandos assigned to what was a low priority region on the planet that had been basically left up for grabs while the heavy fighting was occurring elsewhere.

  Only some local ‘troops’ were available, but Paul had sent him to the region to do what he could while he and the others fought the heavy opposition in orbit and some 6 different ground sites, two of which the Skarrons had already secured and built into fortified anti-air havens. With the Voku disrupting Skarron reinforcements the enemy had abandoned all but six invaded systems, choosing to throw everything they had at them while leaving the ground troops on the other worlds to do what damage they could before being wiped out.

  Donn had come from one such Protovic world that they’d just finished cleaning up, and it hadn’t been an easy affair. With so much anti-air fire capable of coming from the ground troops most of them had to be taken out down low else risk losing a sizeable chunk of your navy to do it from orbit or the air…and right now Star Force couldn’t waste drones taking the easy route, leaving the dirty work up to the ground troops.

  That hadn’t entirely been true here, with several naval strikes supplementing the Star Force troops before a warfleet had arrived to reinforce the Skarrons’ hold over orbit. Their blockade of the planet had only grown in number as fleets from neighboring systems had redeployed here to help secure the ground gains they’d made. Two small Star Force fleets had come as well, with Paul commanding one, that had kept the Skarrons from attempting a forced overrun of the 6 Sentinels around the planet.

  That no longer looked to be in the cards, but an enormous number of ground troops were being escorted down to the surface en mass and a huge surface campaign was underway. While that was happening the Skarrons were pushing out to secondary and tertiary regions with infantry alone and taking most of them almost by default. Donn had been sent to try and secure one of the regions now coming under assault by taking command of the Dvapp there and adding a little Archon magic to the mix...though it was questionable as to whether that would make enough of a difference.

  He’d already reorganized their shoddy defense, for most of these Dvapp were not soldiers. They were essentially militia rounded up from workers and denizens that were otherwise simply going to be killed as the Skarrons came through. Under his direction the past 3 days they had begun to offer more resistance, but the Skarrons kept progressing forward despite the many ambushes Donn was organizing against them.

  Recently enemy infantry had been popping up into locations they had no business being in, with the newly revealed subsurface caverns giving the Skarrons an underground route to bypass some of the surprises the Archon had been laying out for them.

  It was to the nearest of those confirmed locations that he was now running, with two acolytes in tow trying to keep pace with the much faster Archon. He slowed enough not to lose them while the Dvapp scurried across the ground like bouncy snakes, moving in a mix of a crawl and leaping stride as the giant, crystal worms moved as fast as they could. A lot of the time they’d simply fall on the rocks rather than try and step around them, melting into the crevices and moving past in a partially liquid fashion, but over flat ground they couldn’t keep up with Donn and were just barely managing over the varied terrain.

  Inside their bodies they carried their weapons, suspended in the midst of the crystalline goo as if they’d ate them. Each was a hard shard about the size of the Archon’s forearm that made up their version of a rifle that fired a yellow energy beam about 3 times as intense as a lachar. The beams were long in duration, requiring them to be held on target as opposed to a quick flash that Donn’s plasma rifle wielded, but given that the Dvapp didn’t move that fast to begin with they fit their physiology well and could burn through the Skarrons’ thick skin quickly when given the opportunity.

  About halfway to the waypoint he’d put on the battlemap for him and the other two Archons to track towards they met up with a few Hobbit scouts. Donn broke left and began to flank them as the line moved forward, then another Archon moved out to the right giving them flankers on both sides. The striker accelerated on his zigzaggy path now that he had no one following him and got up to within 10 meters of the first Hobbit, gunning him down with a quick pair of plasma streaks before he noticed the four more nearby via Ikrid.

  Heading straight for them he rounded a car-sized boulder and mowed down the two nearest him with plasma, then kicked another aside before telekinetically yanking the rifle out of the hand of the fourth. He killed those two within a pair of seconds and moved on, eventually coming back up to the line of Dvapp that had continued moving forward at pace, knowing they had to get to those caverns sooner rather than later.

  Donn eventually got back into the lead position, with the acolyte coming back as well after dealing with a pair of scouts on his side of the line. After a lot more running the Archon brought the full scouting group to a halt, with the Dvapp literally melting into the rocks around them to get out of sight while Donn cautiously walked ahead as far as he dared, using his Ikrid and Pefbar to scout ahead.

  On the other side of the hill he was kneeling against was a large group…too many to hit, but at the moment they weren’t moving. Donn plucked a few recent memories from the closest of them and confirmed another cavern exit nearby with more infantry coming up through it and assembling for a new push on the Dvapp infrastructure further to the south.

  Getting an approximate size on the deployment, Donn got his scouts moving laterally and worked his way around it, eventually getting back to their original path on the far side while logging the position of the enemy troops on the battlemap so those back in the outpost would know where they were. What little aerial surveillance they had was complicated by the rocky terrain, and it was possible that the intermittent cloud cover could block it entirely.

  He didn’t know if this group had been spotted or not, but it was better that he log
it just in case and sent the data back with a pulse transmission, knowing that if the Skarrons tracked it back to their location they wouldn’t find them, given that they were staying on the move.

  It took a while and some more dodging/killing of scouting groups until they eventually got to the entrance that he’d been made aware of back in the outpost. It too had troops pooling around it, but less than a minute after the scout team arrived the enemy infantry began to move out, sneaking their way through the house-sized rocks and cracks within the ravines and traveling in several strands across to where Donn didn’t know, but they were heading in a generally west direction.

  He logged that too, then brought his team down into the hollow that the troops had just left, finding several overhangs cut out by wind or water a long time ago that had the ground chewed up with footprints. Nearby was a narrow crack in the rock that led to the subsurface caverns, with Donn heading in without hesitation given that his Pefbar gave him a limited heads up to what was ahead, though too much rock would block his ‘x-ray’ vision as well.

  The two acolytes followed him in, then the Dvapp after that, taking them out of transmission range and into the planet’s crust in search of more enemies and where they were moving about.

  As soon as he got inside Donn began recording a new map, placing waypoints for himself and the other two and having them move off down every branch they came across with their armor emitting a low level signal that essentially measured the shape of the hollows and added a crude schematic to the map on his HUD, though several times it would update in chunks when one of the acolytes came back into normal battlemap transmission range, which in this case was line of sight of only a few meters given the rock that was everywhere was blocking all standard signals.

  The Archons tried to run to save time, but the chambers were so narrow and jagged that the best they could manage was a slow jog most of the time until one of the acolytes finally found a route out of the maze that led to a much larger chasm some 215 meters below the surface.

  Donn followed the others down there, with the acolyte signaling for silence as they approached. When the striker came through he got down on his belly and crawled across the small slope down to a large boulder where his fellow Archon was crouching…and on the other side of which was a dry creek bed with hundreds of Hobbits milling about.

  His armor sensors were mapping out only part of the chamber, which was more than a football field wide and stretched off both to the left and right in a ragged U-shape that had them currently on the peak. The Hobbits were scattered, apparently waiting while more came in, for Donn could hear movement to the left in the extreme distance as well as sense some of the closer minds. There were more coming this way, not in great numbers but enough that he knew this scattered group was going to grow…and there were a few Skarrons with them.

  The Hobbits could see well in the dark, he knew, but the Skarrons less so. The chamber was pitch black, without a single light to see by and the Dvapp moving around mostly by feel, though knowing they were going underground they’d ‘ingested’ a small nightvision device that gave them some sight capability when used, though at the moment none of them were for they didn’t want to give away their location with the little pings of lights that they emitted.

  “More on the way?” the acolyte next to Donn asked via the comm, with the other holding back in the narrow tunnels with the Dvapp.

  “Yeah, with most outside my range I’d guess,” he said, crouching down behind the rock and ‘looking’ with his psionics.

  “Map or fight?”

  “I don’t think we have the option of just mapping, but we can’t engage them head on either. Fight and run, but without knowing where we’re going that’s going to be tricky.”

  “Send me out to map the right side,” the acolyte suggested. “If I get into trouble you can ambush, and at least you’ll have some idea of what the layout is.”

  “Nice to have a volunteer,” he commented. “Go quietly as far as you can.”

  The acolyte crawled off to another rock without a word and disappeared around the far side, with Donn tracking him via Ikrid when the battlemap signals eventually cut out from so much rock in between and no lateral transmitters to relay. A quick telepathic signal brought the other acolyte down out of cover, crawling up beside him to the spot the other had just left.

  “What’s up?”

  “Hold the fort and keep the Dvapp here. I’m going left and getting a better read on the layout.”

  “Kind of crowded that way.”

  “I know,” Donn said, leaving the group behind and moving off. There were Hobbits some 20 meters ahead of him that he had to avoid, but with a few Jedi mind tricks it wasn’t difficult. Finding the proper rocks and crevices to move through was, and Donn forced himself to go slow and be as invisible as he could while his armor automatically updated the battlemap for every meter that he crossed.

  The Archon got some 150 meters down before he could go no further, not because of geography but because of too many eyes being nearby. He stopped and tried to knock a few of them asleep, but those standing wouldn’t go down so easily, and the third one that he tried shook off the effect just enough to stumble and fall over a small cliff, landing two meters down and drawing the attention of the others.

  When that happened the two that were asleep looked to be dead at a glance and an alarm went up, prompting Donn to get moving before they could figure out where he and the others were. Jumping out of cover he ran, slide/hopping across two large boulders up to the nearest Hobbit and punched him down into the ground, knocking him out with a single hit then jumping another one before the first white orb lit up the dark cavern as he was spotted.

  Blue plasma streaks tracked the source of the orb and killed that Hobbit, with many more popping up like fireflies as Donn ran about gunning down the few easy targets he had before probing a little deeper and eating up some of his shield energy, knowing that his battlemap would continue to update until he eventually got too much attention and had to fall back…fighting his way through more of the Hobbits that were seeming to come out of the rocks from every angle.

  A second blue plasma lance shot by him, followed by three yellow beams that reminded him of the sentinels from Halo. They burned into their targets for what seemed like an overly long period of time, but took them down in single hits save for the Skarron that came charging down through the widest gap in the rocks…and extremely angry from the brief emotional surge Donn picked up from it when he pulled a location trace on the nearby minds.

  As soon as the striker got back behind cover his attention went directly to his battlemap, with the section from the other acolyte not yet having been added…then suddenly it was, all at once as the Archon popped up on the map some distance away but at higher elevation, giving the signals line of sight, as well as his comm.

  “Found another entrance with a group assembling. Small enough for us to take if you’re not too busy.”

  In the distance the other direction Donn felt a swell of minds pop up on his Ikrid radar, making for a waterfall of enemies churning down the chasm towards them.

  “Might as well, we can’t go the other way,” the striker said, switching to his exterior comm after telepathically telling the other acolyte to get moving. “Get moving,” he told the Dvapp. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

  3

  Donn fired two plasma lances back into a pack of Hobbits that were chasing him aboveground, with many more spilling out behind them as he ran looking backwards but with his Pefbar on so he could see where he was going without tripping over or running into rocks. The scout group had managed to slaughter all the Hobbits in the assembly area, but that only seemed to tick the rest off even more and they were pursuing them heavily as the group came up out of the surface entrance and began fleeing across the complicated terrain.

  The other two Archons were on point, clearing any Hobbit scouts in the way while leading the Dvapp out. All six were still with them, but their phys
ical size had shrunken after taking lots of body hits. The tiny portions of their crystalline structure that had been vaporized by the enemy plasma had been left behind as the rest of them reformed into whatever shape they needed, but Donn knew they couldn’t keep getting whittled down forever so he’d volunteered himself to play rear guard and harass their pursuers long enough for the Dvapp to get away.

  That was easier said than done given that he was almost out of ammo, but he did have psionics to use. Right now he was just trying to get some distance on the Hobbits, but a few dozen meters ahead he came to a blind spot and disappeared from their view.

  When the Hobbits got to that spot and turned the corner he was gone…then suddenly they fell to the ground twitching as they got hit by some invisible weapon. Two of their own plasma rifles flew up into the air and into the Archon’s hands as he reappeared, with the Hobbits unable to do anything as he shot them dead with their own weapons.

  More enemies kept coming so Donn had to stay on the move as his team made progress further to the east to where the Dvapp had a forward firebase. It was little more than a camp, but it had some defensive weapons and barricades that served the troops there. It was 4 kilometers off, and with the damage the Dvapp had taken they weren’t traveling over ground as fast as they had been on arrival so Donn needed to buy them as much time as possible.

  He thought about leading the Hobbits off another direction, but nixed that idea with the thought of them splitting up and catching up to the Dvapp from behind. Speed-wise that shouldn’t happen, for the Dvapp were still faster, but with such an irregular terrain he wasn’t going to risk them getting ambushed from behind and decided to keep fighting a rear guard action while he monitored their progress via Ikrid.

  Back and forth he ran, engaging a few then getting some distance from the others only to come at them from another angle. Twice he nearly got in over his head and took armor damage, but he succeeded in buying enough time for the others to get a decent head start, then ran to catch up with them before they finally made it to the outpost.