Star Force: Rammus (SF83) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  With pink lances falling around her and exploding trees into shrapnel filled fireballs, the Archon mentally grabbed hold of the nearest wisp as it closed in and did as much hacking as she could in that short amount of time. Her skills weren’t as good as the more advanced Archons, but this wasn’t the first time she’d been in a lizard’s mind. Knowing she had to work fast, she sent it an overwhelming impulse to dive from a threat overhead.

  As it passed her the yellow/tan craft dipped down, running through the top of the trees before starting to pull up again, but it caught a taller one and a thick enough central branch that when it bent over it caught on the wisp and pulled it over with it, smashing it down into the trees below that then bowled over as it broke free and tumbled into trunk after trunk as it tried to regain emergency altitude.

  The small, unshielded craft rose up again and well out of Jaina’s range to influence as the other wisps were circling back around for another firing pass, but it came up dented and torn. It sailed upward in a smooth arc, getting some 200 meters above the treetops before a small puff of an explosion inside the craft preceded it from arcing back down and slamming into the forest for keeps.

  That left five wisps in play, but they suddenly gained altitude and distance, increasing their range from the threat and keeping Jaina from getting close enough to snag another one. She didn’t know if they suspected an Archon was here or if they were just being wary of whatever the threat was, but they quickly began firing again randomly into the forest too high up for her catch unless they came directly over top of her.

  Scatter and take cover. There are no troop transports in play, so they’re just trying to do whatever damage they can. What are the Menbati doing?

  Packing up, one of the Protovic said along with a mental flash of his view from below.

  Jaina realized what he meant instantly. The Menbati were taking down their tents and collecting the rest of their equipment to begin moving out with, but at the moment that meant they were all clustered around the campsites where the smoke had been rising from. Fortunately it was dispersed now, but they were still making themselves targets should the lizards get a lucky shot through. If a tree was hit it would send shrapnel out like a bomb…then again the Menbati had armored skin. Maybe they thought they’d be ok or didn’t realize the danger.

  Regardless, if a piece of wood hit them in the eye their body armor wouldn’t mean a damn, but there wasn’t a safe place for her to tell them to go and it was obvious that they didn’t want to leave their supplies behind. They’d had to run from their original base with all this stuff, so obviously they though it was essential to their continued survival.

  But right now it was making for a very bad strategy to avoid the phaser blasts coming down randomly everywhere around her.

  There was nothing to do about that so she just waited, poking her helmet out and wondering if the lizard sensors would pick it up. Climbing a bit higher and feeling the tree sway beneath her, she tried to get a bit more visible and was rewarded with the five fighters almost simultaneously turning towards her. Two pink beams leapt out at her, one of which clipped a branch a meter to her left.

  Having got their attention she slid off her footholds and fell, creating a bioshield around her to pinball her way down through the branches until she slammed into the ground. Her shield breached and she was tossed onto her side by the drop, but otherwise was fine and got to her feet as the top of the tree exploded into pieces that began to rain down on her.

  She sprinted off to the side while extending her Ikrid as far straight up as she could. Unfortunately it didn’t stretch out like her Pefbar did, but if she concentrated only on a small area it gave her more focus.

  A few second later a huge crash shook the ground as a wisp nosedived down into the forest thanks to a firm mental grip on it, but the other four wisps didn’t run. Instead they continued to blanket the area and shred a wide path of trees inside of which Jaina stood. Before she could grab another fighter a tree fell beside her and its branches pulled her to the ground and pinned her there as more and more came down on top of her.

  She couldn’t see anything, but soon a few plasma shots from the Protovic around the perimeter hit one of the wisps. They didn’t do much damage, barely little stings against the thin armor on the fighter, but hit it with enough and you’d punch through.

  With the leaves obscuring Jaina from view and sensors, the four wisps turned and went after the Protovic who smartly scattered and ran as fast as they could as more trees were being felled by the pink beams.

  She knew what they were doing because they told her with a variety of quick mental shorthand and images, with the mage wasting no time as she scrambled around underneath the pile, having to break some branches to get free, but as soon as she got into clean air she gathered herself into a Jedi jump and leapt up onto an exposed trunk nearby. She ran up to the top of it, which was actually the bottom that had been uprooted, and stood there defiantly waiting for the wisps to notice her as she got mental status reports from the Protovic.

  “Over here you bastards,” she said on an open comm channel, then in a few moments one of them streaked by putting a shot within a couple meters of her but it missed.

  She missed too, for it flew by so fast she couldn’t get a firm hold on its pilot. The wisp bobbled a bit but flew on avoiding the treetops. Jaina really wished these guys didn’t adapt so fast, not to mention having genetic knowledge of what Archons were and what they were capable of woven into them from birth. That was a revelation that wasn’t all that old, and it seemed that the lizards relied less on databanks and conventional learning than they did genetic updates that would spread across the entire empire and make all lizards within subsequent generations aware of what Jaina could do and a few tactics on how to avoid it.

  But that was ok, for the high speed pass reduced his firing run to only the one shot that nearly hit her, but it also kept him from shooting anywhere else. When the other three came in making equally fast runs, Jaina held her ground and upper her shields to full power forward, keeping her front towards them whenever they strafed her to increase her odds while also generating a bit of a bioshield as her tissues recovered from the last one getting knocked away.

  Reaching for one of the wisps she tried to affect it earlier in its run but couldn’t do much more with it than the last one. Two more came in on its heels and pelted the area around her with phaser hits, destroying the trunk underneath her feet and throwing her to the south in the explosion. She fell into the leaves on the downed and smoking trees, dipping out of sensor range of the wisps.

  How close are they?

  Another few minutes here.

  “Damn it,” she said to herself as she crawled back into view and jumped to another stump that would give her a decent foothold. She had to buy more time.

  The wisps came back in again and this time she got hit, blasting away half her shield strength as the branches that she fell into burst into flame with other hits. Another shot fell near to her, blasting into the ground and covering her with a spray of dirt as they streaked by overhead, still maintaining a speed that wasn’t giving her enough time to mess with them.

  As she picked herself up and waited for the next run she got an image of smoke trailing one of the wisps, though the surrounding intact trees were blocking her actual view. The image was coming from the Protovic, who’d managed to wound one of them enough with multiple rifle shots to get through the hull and do some internal damage.

  Another report came in detailing the progress of the Menbati and Jaina, seeing the low state of her armor’s shields and feeling the bad frayed feeling of her bioshields being completely spent, decided that was enough. Leaping across the burning, felled trees she got to the intact forest within four jumps just as another wisp came around. Rather than trying to snag it she just ran, sprinting ahead of the phaser strikes and getting knocked off her feet to the left as one fell close to her on the right.

  She flipped over midair and landed o
n her feet awkwardly. A split second of balance control and she was running again, taking a sharp turn to the right and away from the last known position the wisp had her at as she was now underneath the sensor dampening leaves again.

  With no visible target in sight the wisps went back to randomized bombardment, but still kept their speed up so high that she wasn’t going to be able to catch any of them with her psionics. Fortunately the Menbati were just finishing up packing when she got to the camp near the clearing the Protovic had been working on. It was the only one that had clear footing, but was too small for a dropship to land in. The ones the lizards had felled were large enough, but they were full of debris and there was no point in staying near any of them at this point.

  Jaina had the Protovic follow her in a widely spaced formation while they followed the Menbati as they retreated carrying heavy packs of gear with a few left unencumbered to act as skirmishers. She ran up beside one of them and gave it a boost over a line of rocks, picking it and its pack up telekinetically and hopping it over the terrain that the one in front of it had trouble with.

  It shrieked, not knowing what had grabbed it, then got back to slowly running after she set it down and ran up beside it. The Menbati probably didn’t understand what had happened, but with no enemies in sight it didn’t have time to think, only run, and it couldn’t enter wheel mode with the cargo it was carrying, meaning it was moving very, very slowly compared to the Protovic and Archon.

  Phaser blasts continued to come down randomly, but the further they traveled the less danger they were in because the lizards couldn’t see them, and fortunately there weren’t many natural gaps in the tightly packed forest to let them sneak a peek inside.

  After some ten minutes of running/jogging along with the Menbati, one of them rolled up to Kara in her distinctive dark blue armor that differed from the Protovic blue enough to be significant for these guys to spot.

  “The ***** is this way,” it said before rolling off a different direction.

  Jaina didn’t know what they were talking about, but she followed it anyway as it led away from the group of campers they had been following. Up and over a ridge and down through a couple of ravines and the Menbati stopped just short of a dirt mound that had a cave entrance in it.

  “One come. Others stay here.”

  Jaina nodded, not knowing if it would understand the gesture. “Yes.”

  The little wheel of armor rolled slowly into the leading edge of the rim and disappeared down the three meter wide tunnel at an angle as Jaina told the Protovic to stay behind and secure the immediate area. She walked in after it and accelerated into a slow jog to keep up, using her Pefbar to see as the light from above dimmed and there was no interior illumination to replace it.

  They traveled down gradually with the tunnel mostly taking them laterally off to what eventually transitioned from dirt into stone. Shortly after that the stone was replaced by fabricated materials and she had to duck down a few inches to walk inside as their ceiling hung low, but that was typical of Menbati structures. She’d been in several of their bases before, but those had all been on the surface.

  This one had obviously been here a while, for once they got past a guard station the interior revealed itself to be a small city, though the inhabitants that were moving around had multiple injuries. This was no doubt the location of the rest of the survivors that she couldn’t sense in the forest, and what those on the surface had been guarding…with something else inside.

  “What is the purpose of this place?”

  “Emergency,” her guide said, with Jaina realizing this must have been a premade bunker stashed far out in the forest. No wonder these guys had hidden from and survived the lizards for so long.

  There wasn’t much in the way of equipment or luxuries, but eventually the Archon was lead to a compartment that did have technology in it, along with a flatscreen map of this region of the planet detailing their location and the surrounding facilities, including several other bunkers that she had not known about nor had the Menbati told her existed previously.

  If she’d been told she could have saved days’ worth of wandering around in the forest looking for these guys.

  “You have come to move us?” another Menbati asked, this one dressed differently enough that she guessed it was a leadership caste ‘organizer,’ though the uniform was so ragged and dirty she couldn’t be for sure given the small differences in their clothing that covered only their softer bellies. Their armor had no need of coverings.

  “I have ships on the way to do just that. I had not been told this place was here. Do you want to go or stay?”

  “Most go. The ***** cannot be moved. You lead away.”

  Jaina sighed. “Prepare your people to leave soon. I will guard the surface entrance and tell you when the time is near.”

  “Thank you, Star Force.”

  “Thank you for staying alive,” she said, exchanging a few more words before heading back up to the surface and filling in the Protovic, one of which was up in a tree linking in with the battlemap and passing the signal back down to those on the ground. The dropships were on their way, but she knew it was going to be a tight fit to get some 900 Menbati in them.

  She linked into their comm systems and passed a message up to the lookout who transmitted it in a direct line towards the oncoming transports so the wisps wouldn’t pick it up, asking for more ships and a fighter escort.

  Within a few seconds a reply came, along with a highlight of the Protovic squadron already enroute with the skeets pressing hard to catch up before a series of lizard kirbies beat them there. The nearby 4 wisps hadn’t left the area and were still shooting down into the forest occasionally in the distance. Once they got boots on the ground they’d have a much better time of taking out the Menbati, but they had to know they’d be easy pickings for an Archon.

  Then she realized how many kirbies there were…not just in the group approaching, but those coming further back from not one, but four nearby bases, including the one that the lizards had just overrun and kicked the Menbati out of.

  These guys really want the Menbati dead, she told the Protovic. We are not going to let that happen. We’ve got air cover incoming, but there are too many transports to avoid getting their troops on the ground. We’re going to have to go on a killing spree once they find our evac point. We can’t load fast unless we have a large clearing, and we can’t get a large clearing without letting the lizards know where we are.

  4

  April 6, 3159

  Shemtala System (lizard territory)

  Yametren (contested world)

  Jaina helped a limping Protovic over a fallen tree with a brief telekinetic lift then followed her up into the last dropship, standing on the edge as the ramp closed up to make sure that nothing slipped in a final shot. All the lizards were dead, as far as her senses could tell, but you never wanted to assume.

  Once the ramp/door clicked into place she found herself a seat along with the rest of her troops and rode with the flock of dropships across the expansive forest until they arrived at a Star Force staging base set just outside a Menbati city, one of the few they still had left that was visible from the air. It had survived as long as it did due to the cheap and plentiful little missiles the natives had used. Individually they packed a small punch, but the Menbati had so many of them and used them so liberally against anything in the skies that the lizards were always taking heavy loses when they went about the obvious approaches.

  Even cruisers weren’t immune to the little missiles, and there were two on the horizon testifying to that effectiveness, half buried in the ground where they had crashed long ago, but not so long that they were overgrown with vegetation. More than anything the Menbati were making the lizards bleed in order to slowly take over their world, and gratefully the enemy hadn’t considered the little race too much of a problem to warrant sending in heavy reinforcements.

  The city itself was barely even with the treetops, with no st
ructure rising more than 3 or 4 stories above ground. Numerous tunnels and sublevels stretched out throughout the Menbati architecture, giving the bit of native civilization a larger footprint than appeared from the air. They’d allowed Star Force to set up a base only a few kilometers away and Jaina’s dropship headed there even as she saw others further ahead diverting over to the city to drop off the survivors.

  There were none in her ship so they went straight back to base to land and offload her troops. The casualties had gone first, with one of them losing an arm and others with severe yet lesser injuries. The lizards had not been subtle in their pursuit of the Menbati and both Jaina and her unit had to overextend themselves in order to protect the little twerps who refused to coordinate with them.

  The Archon was still fuming when she got off the dropship and was met by Stan-47554. He was the senior Archon assigned to this invasion while this base and its 23,000 Protovic were under her direct command, though more than a third of them were techs. Seeing him was a surprise, so as she diverted away from the line coming off the dropship she wondered what was up.

  “Your guys look beat up,” he commented as she stopped in front of his nearly identical dark blue armor and retracted her helmet.

  “They are,” she confirmed, showing a scowl. “Those damn Menbati wouldn’t stay put and my people had to cover for them. And don’t blame it on the translation programming. These guys don’t want to listen to us.”

  “They’ll learn eventually,” Stan said, glancing over her with his Pefbar. “You took a few nicks.”

  “Not worth mentioning when one of my people lost an arm.”

  “Already on the way up to orbit.”

  “Good. Now why are you here?”

  Stan offered only a mild sarcastic look, given how upset she obviously was. “Do I need a reason to drop in and say hi?”