Star Force: Probe (SF42) Read online

  “Hold all outgoing dropships and get the ones on the way up here inside as fast as possible. Navigator, get me three quick options out of planetary orbit, but avoid the star. If the Skarrons are incoming that’s where they’ll be coming from. Comms, inform the spaceport to stop sending additional ships, but that we’ll wait for those already enroute if able. And get me a close up on the incoming ships.”

  A secondary hologram appeared on the right, detailing the Skarron fleet as it jumped into middle planetary orbit in the form of single ships, one popping up every couple of seconds as they came in on a stellar jumpline. Already there were 18, and they appeared to be holding up just off the jumpline…gathering their strength, probably, to begin the assault on the planetary defenses.

  Sorvela used her command chair controls to search around the map until she found the defense fleet, which was likewise assembling from its varied patrols, but unlike the Skarrons it was coalescing into several pieces, the closest of which was a group of 12 drone warships moving out towards the Skarrons, probably to hit them before the rest of their fleet arrived…which begged the question just how many were coming.

  Then all of a sudden a huge new contact jumped in, with the computer tagging it as a ‘Juggernaut.’

  “Eta on the dropships?” Sorvela asked with a forced calm.

  “14 minutes.”

  She nodded, biting the inside of her cheek to stay focused as more and more Skarron ships poured in. The cargo ships and other vessels in orbits closer to the attackers, including some from other races who happened to be insystem, scattered like insects moving away from an incoming boot. 14 minutes should be a safe margin, she hoped, given that their updates on the Skarrons had only made their way to her ship months ago. Before then she’d only heard of them in rumors.

  Who knew what they had in terms of technology, and that fact rattled her as she was forced to sit and wait…for she wasn’t abandoning the dropships. She could have, forcing them to return to the planet, but if she’d been onboard one with an enemy invasion incoming, she’d have wanted the ship to wait for her if at all possible.

  So they were going to wait, then they were getting the hell out of here and let the military deal with the Skarrons…though the more ships that popped up into orbit gave her the feeling that this wasn’t some raid they were going to fend off. She knew never to underestimate Star Force’s military might, but by the time the third of the massive juggernauts appeared she was swearing up a storm in her mind, with one thought pounding through her consciousness as the last dropships were on approach to the hangar bays.

  RUN.

  Two days later…

  “Here it comes,” Etito said to his fellow Kiritak as they waited in the shadow of a half-destroyed barrier wall that surrounded their barracks at the mining colony. It still stood half again over their one meter height, but had originally been twice as tall, with the top section of the concrete wall laying in chunks all over the inner courtyard from where an aircraft missile had hit the small defense turret on top.

  “Just one?” Movo asked in a whisper as the six Kiritak guards were hunkered up against the wall in their dark green body armor.

  An explosion elsewhere on the perimeter silenced Etito’s reply, with the small Kiritak putting its three fingered hand out where the others could see and counted down with each digit, pulling all three into a fist.

  When he did the last Kiritak in line sprinted out, followed by the fifth, then the fourth and so on until Etito was the last to jump out of cover. When he did he saw a huge alien down the trail ahead of them. It stood three times as tall and many times wider, with four massive legs and four long arms coming out the top. It was beyond ugly, even without a head, but it did have a mouth that looked big enough to swallow one of them whole.

  The next thing Etito saw was two small objects moving through the air towards the Skarron, who fired at the little Kiritak with two white plasma orbs from squarish guns on the end of its forward arms. Before it could fire again the two objects hit the thing’s tough yellow skin and bounced off, exploding a few inches out as the Kiritak who threw them triggered the remote mines.

  Etito heard a huge roar from the alien, but it walked forward through the smoke and continued firing, now with a wound oozing dirty white blood. Two of his fellow guards got hit and knocked down by the blasts, but their shields held up to the shots and they got back to their feet as the others fired their plasma pistols and chucked two more Kiritas grenades.

  They exchanged fire, white orbs for blue lances, for a few seconds, then with another explosion the big thing finally went down with a thud onto the dirt trail.

  “Make sure it’s dead,” Etito said, shooting it three more times with his pistol, and the others joined in…save for Movo.

  “You hit?” Etito asked, walk/hopping over to his fellow Kiritak.

  “What’s it look like?” Movo said angrily, holding a tiny hand over a hole in his leg’s thin armor.

  “How bad is it?” Reloni asked, seeing some blue blood seeping through his fingers…but not much.

  “Surface burn,” Movo said as he stood up wincing. “It hurts like mojorni’s girdle, but I think I can walk.”

  “Head back inside,” Etito said as another white orb flashed over their heads, followed by a splattering of smaller ones coming from the trail up ahead.

  “Shit!” he said, firing back at one of the equally small aliens with a flat head that were coming through the brush ahead of another one of the big ones coming up the trail. “Fall back!” he said, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger, with most of his shots going wide in his haste.

  “They’re everywhere!” Movo yelled, hopping as fast as he could with one leg to get back to the entrance in the wall. A warm spot on his tail told him he’d taken another hit, but fortunately this one didn’t burn all the way through his armor.

  “Hurry up!” Etito yelled, seeing that Movo was falling behind. “Ahhh!”

  Etito ducked down just before getting to the corner as a mass of red nearly ran into him. He ducked and the Archon jumped over his head, avoiding a collision, though the Kiritak felt a bit of liquid in his pants none the less.

  “Kick their ass!” he yelled as he turned around at the wall and took cover, shooting at one of the little aliens as the Archon shot several others on approach, then jumped up into the air and came down on top of the Skarron between its four shoulder joints and stood up, firing directly down into the thing’s back with plasma blast after plasma blast as it tried to shake him off, to no avail.

  The Skarron went down with another tremor felt as much as heard, then the Archon leapt off to Etito’s left and started shooting and kicking the little aliens into submission. The Kiritak stepped out of cover and threw one of his grenades at a trio of aliens well ahead to the right. It fell short, bouncing across the ground and ducking between the feet of the front one.

  Etito pushed his hand trigger, blowing it up underneath and knocking all three down, the first of which landed in pieces. Blue lances from the other Kiritak clustered near the wall finished off the other two as they tried to limp off bloodied, then Movo took another hit by an errant plasma orb.

  “Ah shit, not again!” he cried, rolling over on his tail as he jerked around, trying to rub away the heat in his chest that was burning through his clothes and scorching his skin.

  “Behind you!” Reloni yelled, pivoting around and firing at a couple of the small aliens that were coming out of the barracks’ door across the courtyard.

  “Ah, they’re inside!” Etito yelled as he turned around and fired. With the fire others they blanked the two Hobbits with blue streaks, two thirds of which missed, but the rest were enough to take them down, though Etito took a hit to his shields, with his helmet monitor informing him that its effective strength had been reduced to 13%. It would recharge slowly, but if he got hit again soon it would go straight to his armor and he’d end up like Movo, who was still on the ground, crying, but no longer thrashing about.


  Etito pointed a middle finger towards the barrack’s door and one of the other Kiritak ran over to it and looked inside…taking a plasma orb to the face and getting knocked back onto his tail. He scrambled off to the side as the other Kiritak shot the next Hobbit to come out.

  “Too many, too many…” the Kiritak said as he ran back to the others. “Where do we go? What do we do?”

  “We shoot them,” Etito said, not knowing what else to do as another small alien came out, but before he could shoot it a single blue streak hit it in the chest, coming down from overhead. Etito turned and looked over his left shoulder, seeing the tall, red armored Archon standing behind him.

  “You five, come with me,” he said in the typically low-toned voice of the Humans as he reached down and picked up Movo by the tail and slung him over his left shoulder. “Move!”

  “Coming,” Etito said as he and the other four ran/hopped as fast as they could, following the Archon outside the barrier wall and to the left. He led them down the wall for 50 meters or so, then ducked into the forest, keeping off the trail and heading away from the barracks…and everything else.

  “Where are…we going?” Etito asked after a few minutes.

  “Away,” the Archon said, zigzagging between trees and purposely avoiding a straight line, it seemed to the Kiritak.

  “But what about the other Kiritak? Why are you leaving them behind?”

  “I’m not leaving anyone behind,” the Archon said over his shoulder as he continued to jog as fast as he thought the Kiritak could move. “The mining colony is lost. Everyone else is dead.”

  “Already?” Etito asked in disbelief.

  “There are a lot more troops on the ground than you can see…hold up.”

  The Kiritak stopped behind him, grateful for the breather.

  “Thank…the Randy,” Reloni said, huffing.

  “Can you put me down now?” Movo asked meekly, clearly still in pain.

  “Not just yet. Hang on,” the Archon said, looking to the sky through the trees. He couldn’t see much, but there were enough brakes here and there to get a partial image of a large ship passing overhead.

  When he was sure it hadn’t spotted them he pulled Movo off his shoulder and gently set him down on the ground.

  “Stay here,” he said, running a few steps and jumping up to grab a low tree branch as he started to climb.

  The trees on Ettiana weren’t large, nor were they stiff, so every branch he climbed up gave a bit, but overall the plant was firm enough to support his weight up to the near top, where he stopped as he felt a bit too much give forming in the primary stem. He reached out and pushed aside several branches full of red and orange leaves the length of a banana, opening up his view back to the mining colony. In the near distance he could see the barracks where the workers lived, then further off was the much larger industrial facility…and smack between the two, over the forest that surrounded everything, was a huge, rectangular starship hovering in place.

  But it wasn’t a perfect rectangle, and it was far longer than most, with hooks and arms all along the length, two thirds of which were empty. The ones that weren’t held small items in their grasp, of varying sizes, one of which was released on the far side. It dropped into view, landing on its six legs as it crashed down into the trees, then it slowly stood up to its full height as the starship moved off to the east, gaining altitude.

  A rustle nearby caught the Archon’s attention as Etito climbed up the tree next to him, hopping from one branch to another and latching on with his small arms and tail, when necessary.

  “What do you see?” the Kiritak asked.

  “Trouble,” he said, pointing in the direction of the Skarron walker as it began to stomp off across the trees.

  “It’s huge!”

  “It’s a Type-4 Skarron walker, and nothing short of a mech will take it down.”

  “You said everyone was dead…”

  “So why drop it now? Good question. Maybe they’re expecting a counterattack, maybe they’re just fortifying their position. The battlemap relays are still active, for the moment, and I can’t see any troops nearby for that thing to fight, so I’m not sure what they’re up to. But we have to stay away from that thing or we’re as good as dead.”

  “Where do we go? There’s no other colonies near here. Too far to walk. And we have no food.”

  “No, it is too far. We wait here. Star Force isn’t going to let this invasion go unanswered, so our mission is to survive until help arrives.”

  “How long?”

  “Weeks at best, maybe months.”

  “We starve before that.”

  “No,” the Archon said, shaking his head. “The food’s down there. Unless they burn it. After things settle down I’ll sneak around and see what I can find. Until then, let’s see if we can’t find a hiding spot further away. They’re going to have their little buddies on patrol, no doubt, and their fighters might be able to spot us if we’re in a clearing.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “The Skarrons came with a large fleet, too much for our warships to fight off.”

  “No,” Etito said, “I mean how did they get here.”

  “Flying transports dropped their troops at various points around the perimeter after their fighters took out the defense turrets. They didn’t walk, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Nothing we can steal?”

  The Archon shook his head. “I wish, but no. They flew off after they made the drop off, just like the big ship that brought the walker.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  The Archon pointed across the forest to the southern side of the barracks.

  “Way over there is what’s left of my skeet.”

  “You’re a pilot?”

  “Pilot without a ship.”

  “How many did you kill?”

  “Six…their fighters are slow, but they coordinate well in groups.”

  “You alone?”

  “The rest of squadron went down earlier. I flew off trying to find some smaller enemies to kill, and still bit off more than I could chew. Let’s head back down.”

  “Ok,” Etito said, dropping from one branch to another and landing on each with a bird-like agility until he got to the ground…whereas the Archon simply dropped, grabbing a couple on the way to slow his fall until he landed on the hard ground in a crouch.

  “Let’s move,” he said, walking over and picking up Movo again, but holding him in front of him for a moment to examine his wounds. “How you doing little guy?”

  “Hurts…less,” he said between clenched teeth.

  The Archon saw little bits of green gel soaking into his burn marks from the edges of the holes in his armor, which was a good sign, for it was an anti-infectious, medical gel built into the armor that also included a pain numbing component.

  “Just stay alive until I can get you a proper med kit. Same goes for the rest of you,” he said, swinging Movo over his shoulder again as if he weighed almost nothing. “I’ll find us food, water, and whatever else we need in the colony later, after the Skarrons settle in. Until then we hide out here…or rather out there somewhere more to our liking. So let’s get going, and keep an eye out for the enemy or any good hiding spots you see on the way.”

  4

  June 4, 2467

  Ghanis System (Beta Region)

  Ettiana

  In the dead of night Ben-161339 came up to the edge of the forest surrounding the Kiritak barracks, already having evaded a Hobbit patrol. There were several more at the barrier wall openings, which was why he was going over the wall itself, despite not knowing what was on the far side…other than the supplies he and the 6 Kiritak badly needed.

  Watching the positions of the roaming sentries, Ben sprinted across the small clearing surrounding the wall and jumped up, grabbing the topside edge and pulling his helmeted head up enough to look over.

  He dropped back down immediately and retreated to the woods, havin
g seen a pair of Hobbits walking his way on the inside. The Archon kept a mental calculation going as he watched the sentries outside, then over a minute later he sprinted back across and jumped again, peeping over the edge.

  When he did he saw that he had a short break, so he hauled his armored body up on top of the wall and slid over the far side, dropping to the ground as quietly as he could before running into the compound through a nearby door that had been blasted open by the attack. He hesitated at the entrance, glancing inside to make sure it was clear, then he ducked into the short hallways that were perfectly suited for the Hobbits…but were too small for the Skarrons to enter, luckily.

  They were designed for the Kiritak, for they were the only ones who used this facility. Using his night vision, Ben went inside the low ceilinged dark hallways, seeing lights, doors, and just about anything not attached to the walls broken and burned, but with no sign of the Hobbits. Using that to his advantage, the Archon made his way through the somewhat familiar infrastructure to the cafeteria, quickly seeing the backside storage rooms had already been raided.

  There were blue blood stains everywhere, with open packets of foodstuffs scattered over top of them…but no bodies, suggesting the Hobbits had already cleaned up a bit, which was a sign that they intended to stay and make use of the facility, otherwise they would have left them where they lay.

  The cafeteria was deserted, so Ben tiptoed his way through the trash over to the storage rooms, breathing a sigh of relief when he saw a cluttered, but not empty mess of foodstuff containers.

  That took care of item number 1, but he wasn’t going to collect any now. Not only did his armor not have any pockets, there were other things he needed to find, and the less he disturbed the less chance there was of him being discovered…plus, he’d be a lot less agile carrying around a box or two.

  Before he could get out of the cafeteria he heard footsteps approach, so he hunkered up against the wall beside the doorway to an outside hall and waited, ready to jump whoever came through if they noticed him. After a few seconds in walked a Hobbit…who didn’t see him, let alone turn his head in his direction. All the lights were out, and the Hobbits weren’t wearing any head gear, so Ben didn’t know if they naturally could see in the dark or how they were navigating, but he took his good fortune and slipped out the door behind the little alien, then headed off through the dead facility enroute to the med bay.