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  As the pressure built she began to kick in the basilisk’s anti-grav, pushing back against Daka and gently slowing the dropship’s descent as the atmosphere thickened. Already they have left the Nestafar fighters in their dust, but more remained below, circling above the Alliance base and waiting for them…so she had to keep her descent speed up.

  Using a modification to the shields she steered the falling, wingless dropship towards a specific spot on the surface to keep from potentially colliding with the others. All of them were spaced out widely, then would break towards their true destination at the last possible moment, distracting the enemy from their intended landing zone enough that they couldn’t reposition ahead of them and be waiting in ambush.

  “Prepare for landing,” she said over the intercom to the two modified thors when her altimeter told her it was time to pull up out of the meteor-like dive they were in. She ramped the anti-grav up to maximum power and banked the ship hard to the left as it decelerated, shooting it out towards the valley north of the base.

  The pressure on the shields dropped like a rock and the fiery nose cone the ship was creating dissipated enough for Rena to see the grass-covered mountains below. She’d been staring down at them from the seda for years, but this would be her first touchdown on the surface of the planet, let alone at the Alliance base, short as it would be.

  She started killing lateral momentum as the LZ approached, where several other basilisks were already setting down, then dialed back the anti-grav so it wouldn’t shoot the dropship back up into space. With the smooth touch of a professional pilot, the Canderian dropped the basilisk down into the valley like a slowly falling rock to kiss the surface on its six thick legs with the backwards facing cargo bay doors facing up the grassy incline. The protective hatch covering her cargo opened up within 4 seconds, exposing the tightly packed mechs.

  A mechanical arm pushed the leftmost one out first, dropping its box-like form onto the ground with the second one falling out just as the first one began to unfurl. The dropship’s hatch reclosed and the basilisk took off, rocketing back up into the sky now much lighter than it had been on descent, heading off away from the base and back towards orbit on a course that would take it well away from the enemy’s ineffectual blockade.

  Both mechs popped out their arms and legs from their ‘cargo mode’ and stood up, flexing their joints for a moment to insure that all was working as the missile launcher riding over the left shoulder of each cycled its projectiles around internally, loading the 3-prong firing rack as more of the basilisks dropped around them. Within a matter of minutes 56 thors were scaling the side of the mountain and picking at the Valeries with their anti-fighter lachars as the enemy fighters swooped by overhead.

  The Nestafar troops staged outside the northern bay doors saw them coming and began to redeploy their medium and heavy walkers down the slope towards them. The taller giraffes fired red plasma orbs down at the thors from atop their long necks while the spiders seemed content to march forward and wait until they got closer in range. Meanwhile a flood of protomechs came down around the flanks, not wanting to get caught up between the larger machines.

  To the Nestafar’s surprise the thors split along the center and ran up the hillside heading directly for the protomechs with a surprisingly fast gait. The little ones were faster and had the advantage of moving downhill, but the Canderians were able to regroup into attack clusters of five each and absolutely hammer the smaller mechs with heavy plasma cannons, one in each arm.

  A low knob over the right shoulder of each thor held a standard lachar, as well as the anti-air version, that stitched the protomechs at range as they balled up and rolled down the hillside to try and escape the plasma torrent of those thors closest to them. The lachars chewed them up, able to accurately target them on the move with less than a dozen making it down to the bottom of the valley and attempting to climb back up to hit the Canderians from the rear.

  One group of five, or a ‘star’ of mechs, turned back to deal with them while the rest continued up the hillside at a slow run, now split into two assault forces that were beginning to exchange fire with the Nestafar’s heavier walkers. The spiders began spitting out plasma streamers at those closest, hitting the thors with potent red streaks and melting the armor straight off their machines. The Canderians lost two before they knocked out the belly gun on the first one with a coordinated plasma attack, but there were six more coming up from behind with equally potent weapons.

  The spiders also had missiles in play, similar to the fireflies their navy used. The glowing green missiles launched out a roof compartment on their backs and arched down onto the thors below, blasting away at several of them in a focused strike that wiped out an entire star within 20 seconds.

  But the losses only seemed to enrage the Canderians rather than break their spirit. They charged upward, maintaining unit cohesion and methodically targeted the spiders’ belly-mounted streamers and taking them out of play while they suffered through the devastation of the missiles, accepting their losses in order to take away the walkers’ firepower.

  18 of the thors went down before the spiders were neutered, with them continuing to fire off their remaining missiles and smaller point defense plasma weapons while the giraffes and thors went head to head in a plasma orb slugfest. A scattering of fighters circled about, strafing the mechs when they had an opening, but the automated lachars kept most of them at bay as the thors quickly discovered that the giraffes couldn’t fully rotate their heads around to cover their aft arc.

  Soon the stars, or what was left of them, began splitting up and encircling the medium-sized walkers, each of which massed a bit more than they did, and took turns being the point man. The bipeds were more maneuverable that their counterparts, especially on the slope, so when one got badly damaged it would circle around behind and let a fresher thor take the brunt of the shots until they’d succeeded in decapitating the weapon mount off the walker, after which they’d ignore it and go after the others.

  Not a single enemy had been taken out, save for the small protomechs which were now all dead. The walkers staggered about firing off secondary weapons as the Canderian swarm moved through their ranks as if picking flowers, one by one taking out the enemy’s heaviest weapons and ignoring their formidable armor.

  The thors eventually moved up the hillside far enough to be able to come around and flank the Nestafar mechs from behind, finishing off the weapon cleavage of the giraffes then focusing on hitting their secondary plasma weapons as the spiders threw their last missiles at the thors. With more than half of their number down, the Canderians continued to pick apart the enemy with their plasma cannons while holding back on their own missiles, knowing that they wouldn’t do much good against the Nestafar’s chrome armor.

  There were two exceptions, however, that kept charging up the hillside towards the hangar doors, leaving the rest of the mechs to fight it out behind them. Both thors unleashed their shoulder-mounted missiles at the base of the doors and the infantry stationed there, then began picking them off with their automated anti-air lachars when they took flight. Some of them fired back with rocket launchers, but the mechs were too heavily armored for that to matter. They were also bathed in dozens of tiny red plasma blasts coming from the infantry’s rifles, but the mechs simply shrugged it off and continued the slaughter.

  Eventually the rest of them ran…on foot to avoid the anti-air, vacating the doors and abandoning the now besieged walkers who had little weaponry left to fight with. Those batteries that they did have were now being targeted by plasma at close range or with lachars and missiles from further out, gradually wearing down the Nestafar’s offensive capability until they were near to becoming irrelevant.

  Before that happened the bay doors shook violently and began to grind open. The two thors turned around into guard positions and slowly advanced forward, sweeping up what little there was left of the infantry while making sure none snuck inside the base as Star Force skeets began to
shoot out, first one at a time, then by the twos and threes as the doors opened wider. Behind them came a scattering of Valeries that had survived the initial ambush in the hangar along with 8 other fighter variants from the Alliance races. Behind them all came two Star Force gunships, loaded up with missiles, lachars, and scatterguns, that took to climbing straight up the mountain towards the peak while the fighters immediately mixed it up with the enemy.

  Mark was among them, firing off a plasma streamer at one of the Spider-class walkers the moment he exited the doors. The blue jet of superheated xenon splashed across the walker’s back side and melted away a few inches of armor plating before the Archon pulled up and flashed into the sky, extremely happy to be back in the cockpit again and sticking it to the Nestafar directly. As he climbed he searched the sky for fighter contacts, finding several still hanging around and more off to the south.

  “Boen, Kara, Iren…you’re with me. We’ve got some Valeries to kill.”

  Origin

  1

  December 21, 2399

  Jartul System

  Daka

  Mark flew in low, just skimming the brown grasses with the underside of his skeet’s shields as Kara and company came in high on the spider walker and hit the breach in its armor with multiple plasma orbs, most of which missed and impacted the intact armor around the hole, though two did slip through and cause more internal damage to the intimidating mech. A short plume of explosive debris shot back out but the spider stayed on its feet and continued walking towards the base doors where the onslaught was continuing. It fired back at the quick fighters with its secondary plasma weapons and missed badly, though it did manage to catch the tail tip of one of the skeets, punching through the shields and burning off a bit of the hull.

  The fighter didn’t go down, instead it streaked across the walker with the others providing the diversion that allowed Mark to get in close at a perpendicular angle where he released a plasma streamer dead on target, filling the hole in the spider with a thick squirt gun shot of fiery blue plasma that burned away at the interior. Internal components melted and rehardened, turning part of the walking mechanisms to slag and freezing one of its six legs in place.

  The giant machine staggered, nearly falling over before the pilot corrected for the malfunctioning leg. Using the other five it began limping forward, dragging the dead one across the ground and digging up the native grass as it moved slowly towards the Alliance base’s southern doors where numerous other walkers were in the process of blasting their way inside.

  Mark shot his skeet to the left, keeping low to the ground and skimming the aft end of the spider before weaving an evasive pattern across the plain then rocketing back up into the sky when he was clear of the walkers’ return fire. He pulled over to the left and came around, giving him a good view of the enemy LZ further south and the line of ground troops crossing up towards the hangar doors like an army of ants…with several of them dead along the route.

  The skeets had made quick work of the remaining Nestafar Valeries, losing only two of their own in the engagement. Those two might yet be recoverable, Mark didn’t know for sure, but air superiority had been returned to the Alliance. All the training they’d done against the Calavari had proven to make them very prepared for dealing with Valeries…especially those flown by less able pilots than the craft’s creators.

  Knowing that their ground troops were now exposed, the Nestafar knew they had to push their ground advantage and break the base now, else they’d be picked apart from the sky. To that end the LZ had been receiving additional dropships, spewing walkers, protomechs, and infantry to support the others being slowly picked apart by the skeets and the few other Alliance craft in the air. Mark had sent his gunships up to try and harass the dropships in flight, but the truth was they had too few fighters to counter this large of a ground assault when the bay doors had already been breached.

  He was keeping in contact with the defense team inside, which was reporting several holes forming in the trash heap covering the breaches in the doors. They weren’t big enough for the walkers to get through yet, but infantry was slipping through and trying to make a mess of things inside. To top it off several of the units assaulting the smaller entrances were also getting reinforced and at least one had gone down, with the Archons and Alliance troops on site reforming their lines further inside the base and keeping the enemy breach team contained for the moment.

  The northern doors were still theirs, and the surviving Canderian mechs had left a pair on station outside while the rest had entered the base and walked the long distance over to the southern doors to assist if/when the Nestafar walkers broke through, adding considerable firepower to the makeshift defenses Mark and the others had erected the previous day.

  As the trailblazer turned around and headed back towards the Nestafar lines he took a glance at his plasma levels…which read 23%. That wasn’t good, because the only way to seriously affect the heavily armored Nestafar walkers was by using the plasma streamer, which ate up plasma at a very fast rate. Before long he was going to have to try and reenter the base to get reloaded, as would the others, unless he felt like fighting out the rest of the battle with only his lachar.

  The line of troops in the distance before him stretched across the entire length of the plain between the LZ and base with a larger group set directly outside the doors, but those were scattered around the debris from the gargantuan and half of them were dead walkers, which was making it difficult for the assaulting troops to throw a concentrated force against the doors…but they didn’t need much to break in now, and apparently their infantry had brought along enough explosives that they were busy making holes for the big machines to move in through.

  With that in mind Mark sighted in on a trio of quickly moving dots moving up the line and tore after them, mindful of the larger walkers and their slow rotating, slow firing secondary weapons. While he would be difficult for them to hit, they were bound to get lucky once in a while and their weapons were powerful enough that even a partial hit would cause him serious problems.

  He came in at a 45 degree angle and fired his lachar at one of the rolling balls, hitting it twice before nailing it with a plasma orb…then he shot across the lines and weaved away for a bit before circling around and coming back across to hit a second one in a similar manner, damaging another of the protomechs before it could get to the base. Both weren’t destroyed, but they were unable to maintain ball form and had to start limping their way forward on their legs once they transformed, one of which was missing a foot.

  Many more of the rolling dots were making their way up to the base before Mark could shoot them all. The other skeets were picking off a few, with the rest of them teaming up to take down the spiders and giraffes one by one. The other races’ fighters were concentrated around the entrance, using the debris for cover as they made their strafing runs against the partially pinned walkers, letting Star Force hit the ones in the open.

  Mark jerked his skeet up into the sky, aborting an attack on another of the protomechs as a tiny missile shot out towards him, seemingly coming out of nowhere. He rolled his left engine pod up while jamming the anti-grav at full power, dancing around the infantry-launched missile and missing it by 20 meters.

  That was the 3rd time today that their damn infantry had nearly shot him. They were so small they didn’t appear on his sensors until the last second, and then only their weapons did, for their bodies were poor reflectors, making them almost invisible. If he looked close he could spot them visually, but with the speeds the skeets were strafing at that was next to impossible.

  The missile turned to follow in his wake, but by the time it did Mark was too far away and traveling too fast for it to catch up, and once it expended its fuel supply it dropped from the sky and fell to the ground, exploding on impact and ironically killing two of their infantry that were unlucky enough to be flying by that spot at the time.

  Mark took his random direction and turned it into a d
ive towards another spider, firing down from nearly straight above and seeing his plasma orbs virtually sink into the chrome armor and disappear before he broke off, firing another at a group of infantry and spraying them with mud from the hit that otherwise missed. In reality the plasma burnt a few inches off of the walker’s topside, but it would take multiple strafing runs to bust through…and if they managed to survive this whole ordeal Star Force was definitely going to snag some of that armor to copy.

  “Boss, got another big one walking out of the LZ,” Boen reported over the comm.

  “Wonderful…and us out of nukes.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Where are you at on plasma?”

  “34%”

  “Ignore it for now. We have to take pressure off the doors.”

  “Can’t ignore it forever,” his fellow Gunstar pointed out. “And it looks like it’s got a lot more escorts this time around.”

  “I’ll figure out something,” Mark promised. “Keep working on the walkers, and especially those damn protomechs. They can slip through sooner and I don’t want them chewing up the Canderian mechs before the big boys break through.”

  “You think they will?”

  “Break through or chew them up?” Mark asked, delivering a partial plasma streamer into a blast crack on a giraffe’s neck. It was well low of the head, making him wonder who had been targeting it there until another blue streak shot out and hit a split second after his did. It melted through, sheering off the top portion of the neck and taking away the walker’s primary weapon.