Star Force: Symbiosis (Star Force Universe Book 72) Page 4

Ren brought her rifle up as he poked out from behind Harold and fired…except her gun malfunctioned, which was when she saw the melt line drawn across it just before Mark exchanged positions with Harold before his armor was breached.

  The Caretaker had many holes in it by now, but it was still firing its constant beam as it floated two feet off the ground…then Ren flung a small disc half the size of her palm onto the floor and it slid just behind the drone, passing underneath a moment before the grenade exploded, punching the Caretaker up into the ceiling where it crunched, then fell to the ground with the constant beam now deactivated.

  “Move,” Harold said, with her four-member squad sprinting towards it and putting more shots into the machine as it moved about for a moment, but its anti-grav was clearly fragged and within the next 20 seconds it was reduced to junk.

  “What the hell was that?” Ren asked, dipping a finger into the crisscross pattern on her chest, confirming what her internal sensors already told her. Atmospheric integrity remained, meaning no holes all the way through, so she could still handle vacuum without having to engage emergency protocols.

  “It’s not in the Temple catalog,” Brennan confirmed as the four Humans moved past the Caretaker and continued to make their way towards the hangar bay where this one had apparently entered. “Must be something special they were saving.”

  “My rifle is slagged,” Ren said, clipping it onto her back and pulling out a pair of pistols from her rack. “We can’t trade like that again.”

  “We need cover,” Harold said, running alongside Ren behind the other two as they finally got to the hangar entrance…only to have another beam shoot out it and wing Mark before he rolled behind the wall on the far side while the other three tucked up against the nearer flank.

  “When it comes through, we…” he said as the wall beside him began to glow a moment before it blew out and the beam cut through where his head had just been before he ducked and was now kneeling on the ground.

  “Chipmunks,” he ordered, with Mark pulling two hockey pucks off the small storage compartment underneath his weapon rack. Both transformed in his hands into mechanical quadrupeds, onto both of which he attached grenades…then he dropped them to the ground, only to have them scurry off around the corner and into the hangar as he remotely guided them via his helmet, though most of their programming was automatic.

  The beam didn’t alter, still cutting through the wall, but a secondary weapon shot near one of the skittering things with the shock wave knocking it to the side…but it was so fast it made it within 3 meters before getting shot and detonating the grenade in the process.

  That moved the Caretaker drone backwards a bit as the second ‘squirrel’ got underneath and jumped up onto the drone, sticking to its shields for a split second before it detonated…then the four Commandos came through the opening with Mark taking the beam on his shields and intact armor as the other three fanned out and poured all their weaponsfire into the Caretaker.

  Ren dove in front of Mark, putting her back to it so the beam wouldn’t punch through his armor, and that meant she couldn’t shoot either, but it gave him a chance to overcharge his rifle as he took cover and then stepped around her armored hip, firing the larger glob of energy into the damaged undercarriage where the chipmunk had detonated.

  The Caretaker dropped to the ground, its anti-grav slagged, and the beam twisted off the Ren and burnt into the floor as it refused to stop firing.

  “All clear,” Harold called out a few moments later as they got to pointblank range and finished off the phone-booth sized machine. “Door controls.”

  “On it,” Mark said, sprinting off to a small cupola at the top of some stairs along one hangar wall while the other three pushed the dead Caretaker around to make a barricade out of it facing the doors that were open to space aside from a containment shield that did nothing to mask the partial view of the warship battle outside from getting to them.

  “Holy crap,” Brennan said. “They’re going at it at melee range.”

  “No choice,” Harold growled. “They have to hit them on entry, and they can’t maneuver much on mooring beams. It’s close quarters or get so far away from the dish that they can hide behind the debris. The warships are pushing it where they want it right now.”

  “Into the oncoming path of the enemy ships,” Ren said, seeing what he meant. “How?”

  “Creative weapons fire. Mooring beams. I don’t know. I just hope there’s enough ship left for us to board. I don’t want to get stuck here,” he said as another dot shimmed in the light from the weaponsfire not too far away from them. “Incoming!”

  All three began firing on the opening, with their weaponsfire hitting the shield and disappearing into it until the Caretaker passed through, then most of their shots went straight into it as the topaz beam appeared and went for Jen’s head, hitting her facemask for a second before she ducked down. Her shields took the hit, thankfully, then she rolled to the side and came around the end of their barricade on her side, poking her two pistols around vertically and showering the drone with mostly misses, but more and more hits connected as it got closer.

  The beam went for one of the others, then it cut/blew apart the dead Caretaker at the middle, shoving Ren’s body a meter across the floor, with her rolling up onto her feet and continuing to fire, as did the others, with rifle shots coming from the cupola now as well, with Ren seeing the doors behind the Caretaker slowly begin to close.

  One more…she thought, knowing that one of them probably wasn’t going to make it.

  The Commando unclipped the last grenade she had from her belt, which she’d slipped out of her pack before using it as a shield earlier, but when she threw it towards the Caretaker it was sniped out of the air with a torch-like burst weapon, detonating it halfway between them, but doing nothing to stop that constant beam that was hitting Harold in his back while Brennan hid behind him and continued to fire.

  Then a hail of rifle fire came from behind them, passing around Ren on all sides with her knowing to stand still, even as the beam switched to shoot her.

  Instead she dropped face first to the ground and rolled sideways, with the beam hitting her helmet, shoulders, and arms before she twisted on the floor and put her legs in front of her…then there was a large explosion and the beam stopped.

  “Damage report,” another Commando demanded, kneeling down beside her as one of his squadmates retracted the rocket launcher and put it back into its large niche on his back rack.

  “I’m breached,” she said. “Chest. Regenerator is taking care of it.”

  The Commando slapped her on the helmet in a friendly gesture then left her to deal with the damage. She could feel her body healing from the burn that had grazed her, but it was pretty clear part of her left breast was gone. Better that than a lung though.

  As her bleeding stopped and new skin formed over the crater to seal it up, she triggered emergency protocols and a small packet of nanites stored in the white stripes on her armor melted leaving nothing but blue below. Those white rivers ran to the breach point and covered it in an armored patch…not nearly as good as what had been there, but the pressure in her chest disappeared when it did, at which point she checked her environmental sensors and saw the atmosphere that had recently popped up in the facility was only at 12% of Star Force normal, meaning her body had literally been pressing out through the gap from her own internal pressure.

  Ren laid still, propped up on an elbow until the Regenerator finished locking down the damage and repairing what it could, but there was no way to replace the bulk of the missing tissue without a lot of food, so it pulled what it could from elsewhere in her body to fix the essential stuff, primarily the blood she’d lost to the decompression…which she could see showered on the floor in tiny drops so fine it looked like mist a meter to her left. The rest was on her knee and boot from her spinning through it earlier.

  “Ren?” Mark asked.

  “I’m mobile,” she answered, slowly g
etting to her feet.

  “There’s 8 more Caretakers on their way here. I don’t know if they can burn through the door or not, but I jammed the door shut the best I could. Don’t ask me to open it again, because I can’t.”

  “We’ll cover here,” Andrea said. “Get your squad moving.”

  “To where?” Harold asked.

  “Anywhere but here. You guys look like crap.”

  “No argument,” Ren said, limping towards the door, though not from a leg injury. The adrenaline and shock of her injury weren’t clear yet, and it took her a moment to remember how to move her body in a coordinated fashion.

  Mark took the lead and they kept Ren in the middle as they made their way back into the inner areas of the facility, seeing that the battlemap had other fights going on. Some with the ‘Xerath’ drones, as somebody had tagged them. Others with the conventional ones, and it was to that lesser combat that they moved.

  When they got there they passed two other Commandos on the floor, both missing limbs that were nowhere to be seen. The position was marked as a waypoint, and Harold knelt down beside one of them to do a direct interface with their armor in a Commando ‘handshake’ that would allow them to monitor their internal stats without hacking the armor’s computer systems in an intrusive way.

  “Dead,” he said, flipping the body over to find a huge crater in the back that had cored out several inches of flesh inside. He checked the other one, finding him unconscious and barely alive. “Harold. Health pack, now.”

  “On it,” he said, pulling out a small block of biomatter. Each squad carried one, just in case someone got hurt so bad their body didn’t have enough tissue to repair the critical components. Ren didn’t carry any, and she was glad she didn’t, otherwise she might have been tempted to use it on her inconsequential wound.

  Harold took the block and rolled the Commando over, shoving it into the left abdomen where the white material had moved to cover the breach. Thankfully Commando armor was programmed to accept it, and the nanites passed it through, giving it to the Regenerator tendrils that greedily sucked it up and used it to replace internal organs that were damaged.

  “Why’d they leave him?” Ren asked, searching the battlemap for answers.

  “I don’t know, but it’s got to be something bad,” Brennan said as he saw a Commando dot disappear from the map a few hundred meters away…then it reappeared again briefly before going back in.

  “Null field,” he warned. “Hostiles in play unmarked.”

  “Great,” she said, kneeling next to the unconscious Commando as orders suddenly got rewritten. The ‘engage all targets’ standing orders were refined to evacuation cover combat only, with routes to one hangar bay only popping up for all units in the field.

  “Carry them both,” Mark said, running off a different direction. “I’m going to the null field.”

  Ren knew what that meant as Brennan and Harold picked up the pair of surviving and dead Commandos, then followed her as they tracked the virtual trail of breadcrumbs to their evac point. Whatever Commandos were inside the null field wouldn’t have gotten the orders, so Mark had to take them to them directly.

  The station was a big one, so it took a lot of running to get to the hangar bay in question, and thankfully they avoided the ongoing fights…thanks to whoever had laid out the evac routes. When they arrived they fell in with dozens of other Commandos, a few Archons, and 22 support staff…out of 31 that were supposed to be here. There should also have been 124 Commandos, if everyone had made it.

  More trickled in, some coming with fresh combat wounds, then the last of them arrived carrying dead or injured, but no Mark. Jason-025 came in last, his own armor mangled in a lock-up protocol that the nanite armor engaged in when there were too few remaining to cover the body in the normal fashion, so they spread out and became rigid, just enough to keep air in and hazards out, but very low in armor value…and the trailblazer had several visible ridges swollen up on his chest indicating such damage.

  He issued the ‘board immediately’ order as soon as he came in…which coincided with a dropship sliding through the open hangar doors as flashes of weaponsfire reflected off its glossy surface from somewhere nearby…and from the colors Ren could tell it was small point defense weaponry, probably from other dropships or a small naval drone keeping the Caretakers away from this hangar door.

  Ren ran with the others onboard as she searched the battlemap for Mark’s ID, but it had never come out of the null zone. She replayed the data after she sat down against a wall inside the dropship as everyone poured in, but too few to make it crowded. His position marker went inside, then several minutes later others came out, including Jason’s, but not Mark’s.

  “Who got left behind?” she asked as the dropship lifted off and slowly moved out of the hangar, so not to gain too much momentum after it left the anti-grav and had to deal with nearly gravitational-less space.

  “The dead,” Jason said, peeling back his helmet and spitting out a sickly black goo onto the floor.

  “What was in the null field?” she demanded.

  “More of those Xerath drones in storage. One of the other ones got there and began activating them,” he said, pointing to someone else. “Make sure she stays unconscious, or she’ll kill you in an instant.”

  Ren followed his finger to one of the support staff…who was kneeling next to and scanning someone that was not from Star Force.

  “She’s an Essence-capable prisoner. She has to remain unconscious, and I don’t have the right equipment here. Monitor her continuously.”

  “Where did that come from?” one of the other Commandos asked.

  “Portalled in from one of their ships before I could destroy the terminal. If they get bold they can come through the walls into our ships. They just can’t see where they’re going and might end up in a bulkhead, but be alert regardless.”

  Ren stiffened, not realizing that little tidbit about Essence capabilities, and brought one of her pistols up into her lap as she sat and ground her toes inside her boots to distract herself from the pain of her wound…which was healed over, but there was a nagging ache that would not go away and wanted to make her puke, and the Regenerator wasn’t doing anything about it.

  She pulled up the battlemap outside the dropship to see where they were going…and suddenly the ache didn’t feel so bad. One of their warships was dead and listing with huge chunks of it missing. The other two were still fighting, but one was badly damaged and only showing partial weapons discharge. Most of their drones were still in play, and it seemed the enemy ships were focusing on the Star Force manned vessels…which usually did not get this close to combat, though at the moment they didn’t really have a choice. It was do or die, and right now both sides were tearing into each other rapidly as more ships continued to arrive, often running into the debris of others and damaging themselves in the light collisions.

  Their dropship wasn’t heading for the warships, but rather to one of the converted Caretaker vessels that was drifting their way…along with three other dropships that were tagged with having passengers. Those would be from the other excursion teams located in the smaller stations at this mag jump terminal. They were reporting no casualties, so it seemed the Caretakers only cared about the big ringed station for the moment.

  More dropships and other small craft were following them to provide cover fire, but the battlemap made it clear that everyone living in the Star Force occupation force was now off the big station.

  Meaning Mark was dead, and they weren’t even going to get a chance to bring his body back.

  Ren puked in her mouth, then smashed her hand against the wall and she fought to control her body and swallowed it back down.

  And she wasn’t the only one. All around the dropship bay there were gestures of frustration and anger, with the trailblazer amongst them, punching a supply crate so hard his armored hand went right through, then came out holding some mashed food cubes.

  Jason looked
at the mush a bit, then calmly opened the crate the way it was meant to be and started to pull out packages that he threw to the injured.

  “Eat now and get those wounds healed up as best you can. We’re not out of this yet. Not by a long shot. And if we get pinned here, we’re taking the fight onboard their ships rather than stand by as target practice. So use the moment of rest as best you can to refit,” he said, walking over to another container and pulling out a canister of nanites that he proceeded to graft into his armor to replace what he had lost, with the swollen ridges disappearing as the grey nanites changed color to match his white/chrome Clan armor.

  Ren pulled off her helmet and took a package that Jason threw to her, then made herself eat, swearing that if she got one of these Founder bastards in her sights she was going to take them down with her before a drone could finish her off.

  She glared at the prisoner, wanting to put a shot into it now, but refrained. If Jason wanted it alive then there was a reason for it.

  “Here,” Harold said, handing her a new rifle and a clip of grenades. “If you’ve got a place for them.”

  “I’ll make a place,” she said, standing up to do just that as she inspected the damage to her back rack…or tried to, since it wouldn’t detach.

  “Can you fight?”

  “Well enough,” she growled, then he put a hand on her shoulder…not saying anything.

  She looked at his face plate, her eyes filled with fury, then two tears formed that did little to diminish her intensity.

  “No mistakes,” he finally said, and when she nodded her agreement he let go and walked away to sit on a bench that had been extracted from one of the walls.

  Ren knew what that meant. Mark was dead, as were others she had known, and she couldn’t let it get her or others killed by making stupid mistakes out of grief or vengeance. Vengeance had to be calculated and efficient. Not sloppy.

  And if she got the chance, it was definitely not going to be sloppy…though her slightly shaking hands seemed to argue that point.

  Whatever. She’d just have to get closer.