Star Force: Evacuation (SF50) Page 3

  “No, no, no, not now!” she said, concentrating and scattering the effect. Given any other circumstance she would have welcomed the ascension prompt, but right now she was in hot water and there was no time. Fortunately it took her warning and disappeared, clearing her head and letting her focus on lifting what was left of the skeet up again.

  Riona repeated the jerk drop, this time forcing her arms up as she lowered her torso and held an Atlas pose for a moment with her butt nearly touching her heels. She took a twitchy step forward and came back up, pushing her helmet against the hull and making very tiny steps along it until she caught against a section of rock-like wall and could go no further, so she twisted around and pushed laterally as the fighter slipped down, creating a small crevice that she got herself stuck in just as a pair of scalely heads began to climb up over the debris.

  One of them got its rifle up and into firing position before Riona yanked it from him telekinetically. She thought about trying to shoot him with it as the other came up into firing position then abandoned the idea, emitting a Fornax field as she wiggled and clawed her way up a few inches with the fighter still pinning her against the wall.

  It was an effort to move, let alone maintain the field, and the instability in her head started to come back again. Now thoroughly frustrated she dismissed it a second time and continued to work her way up, glad that her striker armor’s design was smooth on the exterior and she wasn’t wearing a pack or rack on her back, for eventually she was able to slide free once she got her waist up past the choke point, letting her slender legs pull through without incident.

  Riona climbed on top and finally released the Fornax field, sagging a bit with relief as she reached down and picked up one of the lizards, throwing him off the heap of rubble that was inside one of their structures and knocking down three more climbing up towards her. She mentally flicked on her shields as plasma fire started to hit around her and pulled the lizard rifle into her grip as she side kicked the other one off the top of the skeet wreck.

  Her plasma rifle was in the cockpit, but she wasn’t going back down to try and pull it out at the moment, needing to deal with these infantry first. The striker took two short steps over the burnt hull and jumped, coming down into the group below and firing at them from pointblank range, taking hits to her shields as she did so.

  The exchange didn’t last long, with Riona mowing them down with ease and them unable to get through her shields, though one did try to grab her legs and knock her over. He got sent back the other way with a stern kick before receiving the last plasma blast to his chest, melting through most of his vest armor before she fired a second for good measure, punching through the hole and killing him.

  Riona tossed the weapon aside, noting how it wasn’t as strong as she was used to as she concentrated and searched inside her ship with her Pefbar, eventually finding her rifle and guiding it up through the crevice telekinetically and over into her waiting hand.

  “That’s better,” she said, turning the power on and jumping over some of the low rubble before climbing over a broken wall and up near to the roof. She didn’t have a jump pack on, or anything else for that matter, so she tossed her rifle up first then jumped, getting a handhold on a broke piece of ceiling and pulling herself up where she awkwardly pulled her body over the ledge and into the clean air.

  Riona retrieved her rifle and looked around, seeing that she was still well within the lizard base but not too far from a pair of mechs blasting their way into the interior…with the enemy counterattacking with overwhelming numbers of infantry and a good number of tanks in support.

  “When in Rome,” she muttered before running over to the edge and sliding her legs over the side before dropping down to street level some 13 meters below. She fell on impact, but partially rolled out of it and came up into a run headed for the nearest lizard as they saw her and responded accordingly.

  Riona dove into the melee and got to work, remaining with the ground offensive until she ran out of ammo a few minutes later, then began working her way back to the exterior of the base and fighting hand to hand where necessary until she got to a group of Star Force commandos and bummed a replacement clip from one of them, then took up command of their small group along with grabbing a Calavari Knight from nearby. With the four-armed mass of white armor leading the way she assisted them psionically in punching deeper into the infantry as one of the nearby cruisers fell out of the sky and shook the ground so hard two of her men tripped and fell.

  The battle from that point on was one-sided, with the Star Force warship eventually killing the other cruiser and using what operational weaponry it had for close-in fire support, but none the less the combat was brutal up close with the lizards making them pay for every inch of ground they took…and then once they had the surface secure they transitioned into a subsurface theatre where the naval and aerial power couldn’t come into play. The mechs did, to a certain extent, but some 36 hours later they were still fighting it out hand to hand deep inside planet’s crust as an Axius team came in to relieve the battle weary mainline troops.

  Riona stayed and helped them clean up most of the hot spots, then with fatigue dragging her into a near coma she eventually relented and turned over command to an Axius Protovic, letting him see to the rest of the sweeps and allowing her to return to the surface where she called for a dropship to pick her up and take her back to the TF.

  Riona dosed off enroute, having to be woken up by the pilot when they’d returned. She thanked him then dragged herself out, turning on the powered nature of her armor to help her walk back into the confines of the huge dropship and find her temporary quarters where she began stripping off her sweaty armor, feeling a huge sense of relief. She was about to grab a very quick shower, if she could keep herself awake long enough, when she got two steps away from the tube entrance and fell to the ground when the instability in her head returned.

  “Alright, might as well,” she said, urging it on and feeling the stress immediately increase. This had happened once before, or rather four tries ending up with one new ability, plus the battlemeld transfer that Jason had helped her trigger. Her Yetu ability had manifested just like this, and she was eager to see what new ability was making its way forward, despite how tired and loopy she was.

  Lying on the elevated shower platform sweaty and naked, she suffered through the transition pains and succeeded in pushing it all the way through to spurn the new tissue growth…which left her in so much pain spread across her entire body that she wondered what the hell she had just gotten, or whether or not her fatigue had contributed to the effect, perhaps leaving her too weak for a ‘regular’ transition.

  Sweaty and smelly as she was after spending a day and a half in her armor, Riona mentally told herself to forget the shower and began to climb to her feet to head to bed, not getting more than a knee step forward before saying to hell with it and easing herself back down to the ground and sinking into the fluffy bath mat and falling asleep within seconds.

  Riona woke up 6 hours later, feeling like it had been maybe 5 minutes, and was shocked to see how bad she’d been hit. Her entire body ached and her neck had a pinch in it from the angle her head had been bent, but she summoned up enough energy to finally take her shower, then she got dressed and dropped into bed for another 4 hours before getting up and eating something…and by something that was two plates full of food and a load of ambrosia cookies.

  Knowing she was unfit for combat and curious as to what new ability she’d gained she headed over to the TF’s training facilities for some light workouts. The dropship didn’t have a sanctum onboard, for that was located in the rest of the warship, but it did have an abnormally shaped running track/hall plus several sparring chambers and challenge specific rooms. Riona went for an easy 5 miles to start with, trying to work out the burning in her muscles from the transition before grabbing a punching bag and doing some light sparring with it…that she gradually escalated up into her normal caliber blows.

>   Despite her body disagreeing with her she activated her Yetu, which was a combination neural enhancement/muscle speed mode that she could maintain for 12 seconds max…or at least that had been her best to date. She didn’t try for anything so energetic, instead pulsing it for .5 to 1 seconds and getting some blurry punching combos in on the bag, which registered hits and strength intensity on a holographic diagram floating nearby, which the striker used to calibrate her workout and create a baseline for analyzing just how bad her body was at the moment.

  She’d been worse before, but only barely. Everything in her seemed to be hurting, and the Yetu made that pain flare up something bad but she stubbornly kept nibbling at it, trying to work herself into a semblance of normal so she could get back out into the field. Flying a skeet wasn’t that strenuous, but she needed quick hand movements to fly effectively and right now she couldn’t hold her hand still. She was shaky and needed to bleed it off, and triggering Yetu was a painful, yet effective way of resetting herself through the super speed that her twitchiness seemed to be imitating.

  Rather than trying to hold herself still she’d feed the movement, or so her theory went. It wasn’t working well but after a while she started to get a bit of inner calm that she knew would transition over into other things with time, so she pressed on. The workout continued well past an hour, but she didn’t relent nor did she escalate, preferring to just ‘grease the gears’ rather than exhaust herself again, with that sensation lingering on the edge of her senses as it was.

  Riona went through a series of kicking drills against the target, some hitting with her foot and others with her shin…which was usually a bad idea for there was no muscle covering it, just skin over bone for the most part and not a good place to get hit. The bag was soft enough to alleviate that but firm enough to give necessary resistance, so after several hundred kicks her shins were starting to complain a bit…which was when it finally happened.

  As if protecting her leg from the next impact, Riona felt an invisible bubble directly over her bare skin hit the bag without her flesh ever making contact. She kicked three times in sequence, with the same light effect, until she finally stopped and tried to figure out what was going on. The Archon touched her bare leg with her fingertips, wondering if her skin was starting to get abrasion fried, but there was no sign of it so she went back to the drills with the sensation returning some 30 seconds later.

  This time she caught it, mentally speaking, and pulled back from the bag while maintaining the feel over her right leg. She reached down and touched it again, with her finger being stopped a few millimeters away from her shin against a slick but firm force.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered, not believing what her senses were telling her. She touched the invisible barrier again, then forced herself to let it go and reengage it, fearing that she wouldn’t be able to. It took several tries but she did manage to find the mental trigger and recreate the bioshield over her shin again.

  Riona stood up and focused on her left hand, forcing what felt like a glove to form around it, then curling her fingers down into a fist and forcing as much energy as she could out into the aura around it…then she stepped forward and punched the target, hard.

  The hologram registered the impact, but she never felt it hit her skin. Instead she felt the pressure all along her arm, as if the shield were physically connected not to one piece of her anatomy like an emitter, but to her entire limb…which was when she realized why her entire body was aching. The bioshield upgrade Paul had got had created little bits of tissue everywhere that acted as emitters rather than one or two solid chunks.

  Suddenly Riona was glad for the excessive pain, for if she was right then she’d be able to create shields around any and all parts of her body.

  She took a few more ‘gloved’ blows on the bag, then her head started to spin as she suddenly felt the effects of low ambrosia sweep over her.

  “Dumbass,” she criticized herself. “Paul said it eats ambrosia. I’ll need snacks,” she said, leaving immediately for the cafeteria to collect a stash of ambrosia-laced foodstuffs along with several bottles of red, feeling the draggyness of her workouts already.

  When Riona came back she spent the next 3 hours probing her new ability and working through stretching and light sparring drills while her snacks digested to continue to loosen up her body then, after she was convinced she was fit to fight, went back to her quarters and set her alarm for 45 minutes, catching a rejuvenating nap before heading over to the hangar bay and grabbing another skeet. She headed out to the closest battle zone that needed fighter cover, this one being a Scionate offensive, and dove back into the fray, overly pleased with her new ability but knowing that she needed to put it aside for the time being. She’d have an opportunity to train later, right now there was a planetary assault requiring her skills and attention.

  4

  July 12, 2536

  Gwet System (Delta Region)

  Leonis

  Riona flew her trio of drone fighters in a triangle formation behind her skeet, two positioned above and one below so they’d all have forward firing arcs as she made yet another pass on the lizard cruiser pummeling the TF with a green plasma streamer. The weapon was holding out despite the fact that the back half of the ship was on fire and smoking heavily. The lizards had put most of their shield strength forward to protect that battery and Riona hadn’t been lucky enough to get a shot through the tiny opening that was allowing the plasma to come out.

  So the Archon did the next best thing and kept hammering the exposed section of the warship while six others were still pouring fire into the massive dropship as it recalled the last troops from the surface campaigns. Likewise Axius and Scionate dropships and transports were pulling up the last of their troops in the face of a huge lizard relief fleet that had come into the system a day ago prompting the recall. All of the lizard bases had been eliminated with some residual cleanup efforts ongoing, but those had been quickly scrapped in order to get the troops back onto the jumpships and out of the system.

  The bulk of the Axius and Scionate fleets had already left, with the Adamant and the handful of Star Force warships and their drones providing cover for the others on their way out. Riona’s TF was the last major chess piece on the planet, given that she’d had her mainline troops assume the final responsibilities to cover the others getting out, meaning there were still convoys coming in to the big dropship even now.

  They had avoided the warship barrages, which seemed more interested in killing the dropship than strafing the troops on the ground, though the mechs had downed one of the cruisers on their own when it got too close. Perhaps that was the reason they were staying back and hitting the TF at range, but while they did other warships were scouring the planet and harassing the fleeing Scionate and Axius groups who were putting up a good fight while covering the evacuation.

  Meanwhile orbit was where the heavy fighting was going down. The Hycre had long since departed, apparently having left the system but in actuality had gone into hiding within it, so when the lizard fleet arrived to face off against the Adamant and the ‘small’ number of warships it had with it the lizards thought they’d brought more than enough firepower to overwhelm the big ship.

  That hadn’t happened, with the Hycre jumping the enemy at a very vulnerable transitional period between star and planet, hitting both locations simultaneously and making several devastating attack runs that sent the battle into a free for all as the lizards split their attention between the Hycre and pushing down to the vulnerable transports waiting nearby their warship escorts.

  The few ships that had come down to the surface were nothing compared to the hundreds going at it above the atmosphere, and Riona desperately wanted to be up there in a command nexus but that wasn’t an option. She had troops to get back onboard and right now that meant taking down this warship, which she tore up a little bit more with a mauler storm augmented by the few missiles her drone fighters still had left onboard.

 
As soon as she zipped past overhead a pair of wisps fell in on her tail that she had to deal with, triggering a preprogrammed attack pattern in the drones and having them split up and loop back. The wisps were caught with four targets to chase and only two fighters to do it with, allowing two of the Star Force craft to get in behind them and execute the kills in short order. Riona had the fighters reform behind her and turned for another run on the warship when she saw a concussion ripple move through the atmosphere as something big inside the lizard cruiser detonated…with it falling to the ground in a soft crash, bending it slightly on impact but otherwise leaving the smoking hulk intact.

  Riona tagged the next closest cruiser as the primary target for the 18 other pilots flying with her, a few of which had their own drone escorts, and zipped off towards it together rather than splitting their fire between multiple targets. The rest of the aerial craft were dealing with targets in other planetary locations, covering for their allies while leaving her with the job of supplementing the TF’s defenses.

  That hadn’t been the plan, but rather the only option given the timing of the lizard attack. She’d been inside the TF when it had happened, leaving her too far away from the other locations to do any good so she’d decided to make sure the TF remained where it was to pick up the ground troops while the other pilots were off making the kills. Only recently had these warships come into attack range giving her something to do, but in truth she would have preferred they’d just stayed away for the shields on the TF weren’t going to hold out forever.

  That said, the last of the troops were nearly onboard and it wasn’t but a few more long minutes until the last of the mechs backed their way into the exposed hangar, firing up at the few wisps stupid enough to follow them into range of the TF’s anti-air, with the shield dropping down to cover the hatch before the bay doors fully closed. When that occurred Riona got a notification on the battlemap and broke off from her current attack run, taking the other pilots and drones with her as they shot upward ahead of the big dropship as it slowly began to rise up from the surface.