Star Force: Origin Series (17-20) Page 33

  One got through and blew out a shower of armor-dust sparks over Paul’s head just as one of the lizards he was shooting managed to spin around and hit him in the side of his helmet with a nearly pointblank shot. Paul felt the heat soak through and suddenly his battlemap went offline, but that was the worst of the damage. He shot the lizard and the one beside it, then had the area around the turret and between the three barricades all to himself, though there were still lizards on the opposite side of the stairwell barricade trying to get a shot off at him.

  With the turret blocking their firing line Paul dropped his plasma rifle on the ground near his feet and put his hands on the front of the turret as it fired another shot directly over his head, blasting into the wall two meters away from him. His hands hit the shields at first, then broke through as the already weakened matrix snapped under the pressure. The turret rocked a bit as Paul’s contact was momentarily broken, but then his hands found the armored front panels surrounding the plasma muzzle and pushed again.

  Suddenly the lizard in the gunner’s seat jumped out and to the left as Paul lifted and tipped the portable turret over, then the Archon ran and dove over the first line barricade he’d come in by, not having time to grab his rifle as a line of four lizards from the stairwell began shooting at him. He almost took another hit as he slammed down on the hallway floor behind cover and slid into the gunner as the plasma blasts flew over his head.

  Neither one of them had a weapon, but Paul had the advantage in strength. He wrestled the lizard to the ground as it scrambled for one of the dropped weapons, then he got hold of one himself and awkwardly shot it in the head before spinning back around and taking up a shooter’s position on the innermost barricade.

  Meanwhile the two Canderians were advancing up the opposite hallway, taking out the distracted lizards on the front two barricades as Paul overturned the turret. They came forward firing their Star Force issue plasma rifles with a much higher cycling rate, burning holes into the top of the nearest barricade along with the upper torsos and heads of the lizards, half of which were turned around and firing at Paul.

  The Archon flashed them some quick hand signals as they got to the third barricade opposite his position and hunkered down. The far right side of his faceplate was melted and distorted, but he still had about 90% of his view unobstructed, and the lizards were on his left anyway. That didn’t bode well for his battle longevity, but it was a tradeoff he was comfortable with, now that they’d eliminated the turret.

  Lila slid out along the barricade and into view along the box-like perimeter they were pinned on. All three sides of the box were inset from the walls, meaning it was difficult to shoot to the other side because the corners would get in the way, offering Paul, the Canderians, and the lizards plenty of cover where they needed it…though if both Star Force groups slid out their overlapping fields of fire would leave the lizards without a covered angle.

  Paul had another idea, though. Instead of shooting it out across the barricades he stood up close to the wall and walked back to the second barrier, which was actually two sections latched together. Paul reached down and disconnected the two with some wiggling, then picked up one of the heavy pieces and put it on his shoulder like a stubby, thick beam. He walked it forward, hugging as close as he could to the wall for cover, and brought it up to the first row.

  Dropping it down he attached it to the top of one of the others, sliding the prefab pieces together as they were designed to, giving him a barrier he could stand up behind.

  He stooped down and slid his fingers under the other half and disconnected it with considerable effort while trying to keep his head down. Once it was free he pulled back and began shoving the taller half of the barrier forward a few inches at a time.

  Plasma blasts began to pour into the barrier as the lizards figured out what he was doing. The Canderians moved out into firing range, spraying plasma their way to diminish their focus on Paul as he swung the wall-like barricade around until it blocked off half of the lizard’s firing arc. Once that was done the Canderians had enough cover to jump over and enter the square along with Paul. Lila took up position behind the downed turret and fired into the stairway gap that had numerous lizards pouring down into it, though only a few had room enough to fire at the Humans.

  Sensing their weakness the lizards chose to charge forward, hopping over the barricade half that wasn’t covered by Paul’s improvised wall two at a time and getting shot almost before their feet hit the ground.

  Before their swarm tactics could prove effective Paul took his captured lizard weapon and turned it on the downed turret, blasting into the control panel and taking it out of the battle even if the lizards could find the strength to right it. Lila slid him his Star Force plasma rifle across the floor with her foot and the threesome began to retreat back behind the half barricade on Paul’s side, killing more and more lizards as they poured out as they retook the ground they’d lost.

  Paul held position on the half barricade as the Canderians retreated back to the second row, then he ran back and jumped over it to join them, dropping on his damaged shoulder with a crunch as tiny bits of melted and rehardened armor broke off on impact.

  They held there, knowing that the lizards only had half a barricade to hide behind. The hallway didn’t offer them a lot of flanking room, so between the three of them they were able to down so many lizards that their bodies began to stack up and interfere with the movement of the others. Eventually they got the point and stopped rushing them, instead retaking what defensive positions they had and continuing to guard the entrance to the upper levels.

  Paul thrust a thumb backwards and the Canderians began retreating back down the hallway, first hopping over the last barricade and pausing there, then running down and turning the nearest corner to get out of view. Paul kept up firing on the lizard positions to keep them pinned then turned and ran after the Canderians, hurdling the barrier and pulling out of the hallway within a few long seconds.

  “That’ll keep ‘em busy,” Paul said, leaning back against the wall so he could keep his peripheral senses trained in both directions as he faced the Canderians. “My battlemap and comm are out. Are any of the others through?”

  “Archon Fred’s team is currently on the move above us.”

  “Good. Let’s get over to their breach point,” Paul said, running off to the left. “Inform Fred that I’m offline.”

  It took a few minutes to get across to the stairwell that they’d broken through and Paul just caught a glimpse of green armor shooting up the stairs ahead of them. He jumped over several broken and smoking pieces of furniture cluttering the hallway, chopped into bits by plasma fire and discarded to the sides, then stepped over a pair of lizards at the foot of an even larger pile that had been trampled down as the other teams had climbed over it.

  Paul followed them up and found a pile of lizard bodies just outside the next level where Fred’s team had pulled them off the stairs. Further into the level he heard sounds of weaponsfire but he didn’t head that way. Instead he headed further up the stairs, hoping to flank the lizards, then came up behind Kali’s team two levels higher, cursing his luck for not having his battlemap up and running.

  “Make way!” Paul yelled, getting the Canderians’ attention ahead of him on the narrow staircase. He pushed his way through until he was right behind Kali as she took peeking shots around the corner and further up the stairs simultaneously. “What have we got?”

  “Where’d you come…oh,” she said, seeing the damage to his helmet. “You alright?”

  “Comm’s out,” he said, ducking as a plasma shot hit a meter above his head coming down from upstairs.

  “I’ll take the stairs if you can go right?” Kali suggested. “Harrison is coming around that way in about 20 seconds. Time it right and you’ll catch them from both sides.”

  “Say when,” Paul said, switching places with her on the third stair below the doorway onto that level. He fired a shot up the opposite sid
e as a lizard poked out around the switchback, discouraging further curiosity for a few seconds.

  “Three, two, one…go,” Kali said calmly, running up the three stairs in sync with Paul. She crossed the short landing and hit the opposite bank of stairs just as he hung tight to the turn and smashed himself up against the right side wall of the hallway, facing a group of five lizards with more milling around behind. He exchanged shots with one, hitting it in the chest armor and dropping it to a knee but not taking it out of the fight. Its shot hit him in the left pectoral, but the next few bursts of plasma missed to his left as he slammed into the wall.

  The shots hit the inside of the stairwell just before the first Canderian came through. By then Paul had another two lizards down and had gotten up close enough to take the fight to them hand to hand. He was moving so fast it appeared as a blur to Lila as she came through in third position while half of the others followed Kali upstairs. Paul knocked a lizard back her way three meters through the air with a single punch, then Lila finished it off with a shot to the head as she advanced.

  Several furious seconds of fighting later and the lizard line was broken, with Paul running forward and bagging more lizards with his bare hands as Harrison’s group appeared from a side hallway, pushing another four lizards back in retreat. Paul got one of them in a headlock, which he then snapped with lethal efficiency as his fellow Archon gunned down the other three.

  Lila picked up Paul’s rifle from where he dropped it and brought it over to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, placing it on his back and pulling off his stun sword. He thumbed it on and started to head back to the stairs.

  “She’s already through,” Harrison said, stopping him. “This way.”

  Paul turned about and followed him, with the Canderians keeping their distance from his sword, which waved back and forth in front of the Archon as he ran a couple steps behind Harrison. He led the now growing group of Canderians to another stairwell, this one completely unguarded, and charged up another 8 levels until they met up with another set of barricades, not set on a stairwell, but in the middle of a hallway.

  “They’re guarding something,” Harrison explained as they ducked across to another hallway out of the lizards’ line of fire. “Fred’s on the other side. Give me a 10 count then take these,” he said, running off another direction and turning a corner out of sight.

  Paul started counting, and by the time he got to 8 he heard a firefight start down the hallway. Two more seconds and he did a blind turn around the corner and started sprinting towards the barricades.

  Only one of the lizards was looking in his direction. The other three had turned around and were firing at Fred’s team down the long hallway as they broke through from the right side. Paul ducked right, dodging a plasma shot, then Harrison broke through from the left, adding further confusion. The lizard aiming at him suffered through his weapon’s recycle time then got one more shot off at Paul, which he successfully faked his way out of, twitching to the left right before jumping right and bouncing off the wall as he ran.

  Paul leapt over the barrier and swiped his sword around from his left, catching the lizard in the head and smashing it up against the sidewall from the force of the impact. Harrison had already gotten two more of the nearby lizards, but Paul got the last one with a poke in the back, giving them a moment of calm in the hallway before Fred’s team broke into another chamber and the sounds of plasma fire renewed.

  Harrison walked over and shot the lizards Paul had stunned. “You out of ammo?”

  “Yes,” Paul said, following him up to Fred’s position. As they ran down the long hallway Kali appeared from the right, all of them converging on the same area. “What’s the room?”

  “Maintenance area,” Harrison said as the plasma fire stopped again. They jogged the last 10 meters up to the entrance then carefully stepped inside with Paul letting Harrison’s plasma rifle lead the way.

  “That looks important,” Harrison said sarcastically as they spotted two large pieces of lizard tech standing as tall as a phone booth, one wedged up and attached to a bank of the building’s computer systems…the other attached to a thin pipe heading up into the ceiling.

  “Transmitter,” Paul said, pointing to the top of the pipe that he surmised led up to the roof of the building.

  “Permission to get acquainted with the device?”

  “Granted,” Paul said with a wry smile.

  Harrison waved Fred and his triarill aside as they came back from the other end of the large room, then fired six shots into the lizard device, melting/exploding the outside in several spurts of sparking components, then all the glowing control nubs went dark.

  “Bingo,” Harrison said, seeing all the Canderians below him in the building suddenly appear on his battlemap.

  “Jamming gone?” Paul asked, doing a lazy sweep around the room looking for other devices or lingering lizards.

  “Locally…but I can’t access any signals more than 3 blocks away. They must have more than one jamming device in play.”

  “They do. Get rid of their other toy then get to the roof and take out that anti-air. There are more Canderian assault shuttles on the way and they’d prefer to land here if they could.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Harrison said, shooting the second lizard device.

  7

  March 25, 2266

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Paul stood on the roof of the command building, a wide, flat, square plain that stood higher than any other structure in the Star Force colony. From his perch on the north side he could see out over the tops of the rest of the buildings, but not a lot of what was going on in the streets below. He could see the 7 defense towers they had left, each of which co-tied for the city’s second tallest buildings, and were mostly spaced around the perimeter along with six closer ones in what he thought of as a second ring of defense. Four of those were down, one thanks to a cruiser and the other three to lizard ground teams.

  The two that were operational were keeping the cruisers off the command building. The lizard ships would fly over them, once directly over, to deposit more reinforcements elsewhere in the city but they wouldn’t linger. The plasma from those towers was potent at the closer range, doing more damage than the lachars if and when the shields came down but to date Paul hadn’t seen that happen. Granted, he’d been incommunicado for a great deal of that time and inside the urban structures most of the rest, but it seemed the lizard naval crews were being smart about their reinforcement raids and only braving the city defenses if they knew they could keep their shields up for the duration.

  The damage the lachars were doing to them, however, was significant. Many of the shield-penetrating blasts had been targeting the cruisers’ heavy plasma batteries, reducing their available kill power when they flew over the city. After the majority of those had been hit they began sniping the harder to hit anti-air batteries, as well as the docked kirbies the cruisers were carrying in.

  To compensate for this the cruisers began flying lower and lower, trying to eek out some cover from the various buildings and picking landing zones along the perimeter so at least the underside of the giant ships wouldn’t come under fire from the towers, that way their kirbies would be safe while docking and undocking. The cruisers had also got in the habit of rapid approaches and departures, minimizing the time the towers had to poke at them.

  As Paul zoomed in on the northeastern combat zone with his helmet scope he could see the top nubs on one just sticking up above two midrange buildings. One of the remaining perimeter towers was hitting it from the flank, but he didn’t think it had a shot on the underside. Several small flashes were visible as the long range plasma streaks hit the shields, doing less damage due to the dispersion factor associated with range, let alone the atmosphere it had to travel through. The lizards’ plasma cannons didn’t have such a limited range, nor did they fire in squirt gun-like streaks. Somehow they managed to hold their plas
ma together in a compact orb past its departure point from the cannons.

  Paul wished their techs had figured that one out, but they had to work with what they had available. Despite the city’s size, the ranges involved were considerably smaller than a naval engagement, but the air was proving to be the biggest detriment, especially when it was windy. Like a bullet-firing sniper rifle, they had to account for the wind when aiming, and snow or rain serious hampered their efficiency the further out the plasma got from the turret.

  Today was good weather, however, and Paul had a clear line of sight out to the grassy perimeter surrounding the city…which he truly wished was filled with mechs, but the lizards had been doing a surprisingly good job of keeping their larger transports away. The small assault shuttles the Canderians were using to ferry troops down from their seda were slipping past, but anything large enough to carry a mech was being pursued by their local guardian cruiser, which was right now hovering above the forest to the east.

  Paul could just barely make it out with his scope, and it was hard to find since it was constantly moving…no doubt to keep his orbiting fleet from blowing the smithereens out of it. He hadn’t had contact with them since the comm whiteout began and he seriously wondered if the lizards hadn’t tried to hit them after they took down one of the comm relays. The city had three transmitters, one primary, one backup, and a second smaller backup used to issue commands to their orbiting fleet all the way out into the star system via line of sight. As such, they had to be extremely powerful transmitters.