Star Force: Divide (SF76) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  That meant to the south, barely visible when Iden’s head popped up over a ridgeline, were dispersed carpets of lizards spread across miles of terrain following finger-like tendrils of tanks heading out at speed to catch up with the wisps, and included in them were anti-air platforms. They looked like thick, flatbed trucks and Iden knew they were fire and forget packages that would turn the air above them into a very dangerous place to be. If the skeets weren’t careful to avoid them they’d go down with a single hit from the cluster fire, but fortunately that massive army was staying south and making a direct line for the Bsidd landing zone…or zones, for there were several placed in close proximity within the center of the bit of Star Force territory on the planet.

  The forces to the north were just building, with infantry to follow soon. The area in between where his mechs had been stationed was now barren, for they’d all peeled off and the lizards weren’t trying to push anything in their direction. They were trying to flank them and avoid a confrontation with as many troops as possible, knowing that any delay would mean more Bsidd getting down and organized on the ground.

  The lizards were in a frenzy and Iden could see some of their tanks bobbing over the uneven terrain as they pressed their speed hard. Floating on anti-grav could give you some impressive speeds, but the tanks weren’t built for aerodynamics and that limited them. Still, they could move faster than the mechs at full speed, especially the heavy walkers. It was the aerial craft they couldn’t outrun, but at the moment those were busy with the wisps, leaving the tanks with a clear sprint forward so long as they could avoid the mechs.

  That single Keema shot was easily missed in the maelstrom, probably put down to the heavy walker just shooting at a target in range as it turned, but it had been deliberate. That infantry turret was located where Iden and Ciatra were going in and would have had an easy shot at them on approach. As it was there were two anti-mech turrets that were going to be within range of them but they didn’t have the tracking speed needed to hit really mobile targets…which the two Archons currently were.

  They were still several kilometers out, but were running at 27 miles an hour over the rough ground. Iden could go faster, so could Ciatra, but he didn’t want to risk pushing too hard and leaving her behind. Likewise he didn’t want them winded when they got to the city’s edge and have their reflexes dulled as a side effect. They weren’t moving at a jog, to be sure, but most races couldn’t achieve this speed on foot and the two of them were crossing ground at the speed of slow vehicles as they both watched the city edge ahead while the fighting continued to escalate behind them.

  Iden felt a battlemeld prompt from his padawan and accepted it, suddenly getting her senses added to his situational awareness…in addition to his Ikrid range. Their combined strength and skills now let them feel ahead to the remaining turrets and sense the pinprick of minds inside. Iden had wondered if they were manned constantly or not, but at the moment at least they were. Rather than risk getting shot by the anti-mech versions getting lucky, he kept the pair zigzagging on approach to reduce their silhouette and stretched out their combined ability as far as they could and began to blanket the lizard minds with a simple sense of sleepiness.

  They couldn’t knock them out from this far, but they could incentivize them to stop paying attention. There was no guarantee here, and even if they didn’t shoot the Archons on approach there was a good chance that they were still going to be noticed entering the city with a subsequent alert being sent out. What Iden was counting on was the confusion of the mounting battle and getting lost in the frenzy, for once they got inside they were not going to lay low and wait to be found. They were running and gunning as much as necessary to get to their target and back before the lizards realized there was a serious threat in their midst.

  He still didn’t know how well that would work, but one never knew for sure before you tried and now was the time. With their combined Ikrid getting stronger with each step closer they abandoned their weave and headed on a more or less straight line towards the city edge, bobbing up and down over the little undulations in the ground that would have made them easy targets for the now smoking remains of the anti-infantry battery the michelangelo had so easily taken out from range.

  Live dangerously, Iden said mentally.

  And kick ass, Ciatra finished a moment before they both accelerated up into a low sprint and covered the remaining distance as quick as they reasonably could while still maintaining their psionic blanket on the turrets. The pair wasn’t headed towards a gap in the buildings, but rather to the blunt side of one that doubled as a thick wall outlining a tiny piece of the city’s edge. When Iden got to it he activated his jump pack and leapt up some 7 stories to where he stuck on the side spiderman style with Ciatra arriving on his right a second later. Both held there, crouching down into launch positions, then jumping up after their packs had a moment to recharge.

  The second leap got them to the top and the pair of Jinxes took off running across the rooftop not bothering to look back at the war breaking out behind them. Their focus was ahead and keeping away from the army formations within the city that had yet to leave their corrals. Knowing that going rooftop to rooftop was a good way to get spotted in daylight from above, they were counting on the fact that the lizard wisps were all out engaging the landing zone defense forces. If that held true then this was better than going down to street level or subterranean and dealing with run-ins that would undoubtedly raise an alarm.

  Iden didn’t expect to go unnoticed, but he wanted to stretch their window as far as they could. If a lizard looked out a window and saw them, well, there was nothing they could do about that, but by the time they reported them the Archons will have moved off another kilometer or two, which would make tracking them difficult if you didn’t have craft in the air following the pair.

  To her credit Ciatra stayed with him smoothly, to which he did not attribute his own training. Padawans were not students, but rather fellow Archons that needed to add advanced psionics to their personal arsenal. Each of them came with a plethora of skills already, as Iden had when he’d been taken on by a mage. Now the roles were reversed and while he was the stronger of the two she was not holding him up. So long as he didn’t go full out she stuck with him, and with their battlemeld still active there was no chance of her accidentally falling behind, for he knew where she was constantly, as well as how hard she was pushing herself.

  Ciatra had maintained a bit of a cushion in the effort department, but not much. He’d done the same when he was an apprentice or just paired with a higher ranking Archon on missions. Sometimes the slower one would go first and the faster would follow, but the quickest way to cover ground was for the faster to lead and navigate, with the slower just keeping up and not worrying about anything other than their footsteps and effort. That was how Iden preferred to move with his padawan and Ciatra understood the inherent advantage, with the responsibility on her to keep moving at such a high rate indefinitely, taking what small breaks they had when possible.

  Not many of those occurred on their leaping course across the city, but when they got near to the construction site they did slow and drop down to street level a few times to take advantage of the cover as they approached the partially built battery that looked like a thick cylinder reaching up into the sky. The weapon itself was encased inside of thick armor that wasn’t fully applied yet, nor was it full height. Construction crews were everywhere, meaning that the pair had to pick their mode of attack before heading in, for there was no way this was going to go unnoticed.

  With the two staying in battlemeld they knew what each other was thinking so no discussion was necessary, but they did keep looking at new angles of attack and weighting their effectiveness. They didn’t have any explosives of their own to use, so they were going to have to improvise…and it was going to mean they had to split up.

  Without hesitation the pair broke, with Ciatra heading up to a nearby rooftop and Iden going down to street leve
l. They released their battlemeld before the connection broke and Iden dropped down on top of several lizards that didn’t expect him to be there. He knocked them back with a telekinetic burst then took them down to the ground with his Fornax but didn’t waste the time to kill them as he sprinted off into the construction zone that was still a crater around the anti-orbital gun where the surrounding buildings hadn’t yet been rebuilt, though the debris had been cleared away.

  In its place was a myriad of equipment and supply stacks, giving him ample cover to disappear within once he got off the street. He couldn’t hide from the lizards, for they were all over the site, but he could get out of view of all but a few of them as he darted from one crate stack to another heading to an onsite fabrication machine that was spitting out fresh structural beams that were then being carried up to the top of the tower by anti-grav chutes.

  Iden ran up and into one of them, passing through the clear containment shield and jumping upward, with his momentum carrying him up into the sky thanks to the 0 G inside. He lightly bounced off one side of the shield as he careened into it, then began an agile bouncing fest as he passed several haulers coming back down and even overtook a few going up. They were little more than a lizard with a thick backpack tugging the now weightless pieces up the shaft, but there were so many of them that it felt like a vertical highway at rush hour.

  They saw him go by, but there was nothing they could do other than report in if they had comms. He didn’t stick around to check, getting to the top and bouncing his way out the side of the shield where egress was intended. There he did let loose with his pair of pistols, killing some two dozen lizards on the wide top platform and continuing to shoot all those he could find as he made his way across the football field-sized parking lot where the components were being stacked for use just below by the assembly crews.

  Iden found one of the ramps down and jumped over the edge, coming down on top of a tram and shooting the lizard driving it in the head. Without its pilot the stubby flatbed continued to move up to the top of the ramp then motored on in a straight line to the edge, bouncing up and over the small retailing wall there and careening over the edge. It fell the full height down to the ground where it landed like a bomb into a stack of metal rods, spilling them off their clusters and sweeping away a few lizards who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Iden ran across the catwalks that were underneath and stretching down to the actual construction points on top of the growing structure. They were rising up in one place a few meters as that assembly was complete and ready for the next structural beam up, but the Archon just bypassed them all and jumped over the edge, falling down through the beams and into the empty heart of the tower where the actual weapon was being built several stories down.

  When he landed there he didn’t shoot the work crews, instead grabbing hold of one of their minds and ordering it to turn the big machine it was piloting against the delicate machinery it had been carefully assembling by cutting into the panel that had just been freshly placed over a completed segment of the firing matrix.

  Iden just stood there and watched until one of the other lizards tried to stop his puppet. He shot that one with a single, high intensity plasma lance and the lizard collapsed onto the walkway and rolled off it, falling deeper inside what was the base of the firing barrel. The Archon guarded his post and his helpless assistant until the casing had been cut free, then he jumped across the barrel gap with some help from his jump pack and landed next to it, rendering the lizard inside the machine cockpit unconscious with a strong Ikrid push before firing multiple pistol blasts into the innards and beginning to telepathically pull the pieces out as if he was shoveling snow.

  Save for this snow was charred and metallic, and he was sinking deeper and deeper into it as he dug his way through the freshly built mechanism until he disappeared from view entirely, with only the spray of debris coming out and falling off the edge to the barrel’s bottom marking his position.

  5

  Ciatra watched as Iden made his way up the anti-grav lift as she launched herself off the nearest rooftop at a sprint. Using her jump pack she got halfway across the barrens around the tower, coming down atop a crate stack that was itself as large as a building. She ran across it for a few seconds then dropped down to the ground and began shooting every lizard that she came across as she zigzagged the ground traffic enroute to the base of the tower where there normally would have been anti-infantry defenses.

  Given that it wasn’t finished there were none whatsoever, just a lot of construction crews that obligingly tried to throw themselves at her in the hopes of a mass tackle. If they did get her pinned down it could be trouble if there were armed troops on the way, but right now she was in dominance over the construction site and chose to make use of it by blasting herself a path in to the tower base through the throngs of workers now dropping what they were doing and coming at her.

  She hoped that meant Iden was being mostly ignored, but that wasn’t the point. Ciatra needed to get inside and aside from jumping over some clumps of lizards there was nothing in her way to prevent it. Cutting around the side of a massive hover truck, she darted through a pack of 6 lizards that were in the way, shooting the first and knocking the others down as she moved through the doorless entryway and into the incomplete structure.

  Some walls were in place, others were just ribs allowing her to move through areas that normally one couldn’t. Her objective was either the main power feed or the backup reactor, not knowing which was complete at this point. To get to one she had to cross laterally to a vertical line, to get to the other she had to climb six levels…which with her jump pack was a piece of cake.

  The inside of the structure was full of lizards as well, but situated in specific sections that were under work. They weren’t so numerous as to give her trouble while on the move, but once she jumped/climbed up through the open structural lattice that made up the base of the tower she got to a middle bit of floor around the reactor that had several work crews on it. Ciatra dispatched those with her plasma rifle, taking a minute to go on a killing spree and give herself some room to work on the reactor.

  Glancing up she saw that connective lines were already in place all the way to the actual weapon base. Iden was up there somewhere trashing it from the inside out, and she knew as well as he did that whatever damage done the lizards could just rebuild. The trick was to do it in such a way that would keep them busy the longest, which in this case meant forcing them to disassemble what they already had constructed before rebuilding.

  Her familiarity with lizard tech wasn’t great, but with everything stripped down as it was and bits of sunlight coming in through pieces of the far wall that were missing to facilitate parts inflow she was able to find the reactor access hatch. It and the rest of the reactor core were already complete, but the question was did they have the fuel rods inside yet?

  And by fuel rods she meant the lizard form of a battery that would physically store potential energy tapped from the main line, then be able to cannibalize the molecular structures in a form of fission that would run for a very long time if main power was cut. When it was reapplied the rods would begin the reverse, turning from their base slurry back into a thick, solid rods. It was one of the lizards’ newer engineering feats and gave the anti-orbital guns the ability to keep firing even if the city’s main power supply went offline.

  When Ciatra pulled open the panel there was a short crawlspace that she dove into, eventually coming to another panel that she removed and found that the fuel rods, all six of them, had not been put in place yet. That was just fine, as far as she was concerned, because this whole reactor assembly was something that you couldn’t just replace with spare parts…and if she did her job right they wouldn’t even know about the damage until much later.

  Using her Pefbar and Lachka, she reached into the walls of the small fuel rod chamber and started to bend and twist things where no one could see, snapping connections and
crossing others. Ciatra allowed herself a few Ikrid scans of the exterior to monitor the construction crews and pushed her timetable a bit, wanting more small scale damage so that they wouldn’t be able to fix this thing and be forced to replace it entirely.

  “How you doing?” Iden’s voice said in her helmet.

  “Redecorating. You?”

  “About to scatter.”

  “I need a couple more minutes. Make a ruckus on the way out will ya?”

  “Hurry,” he emphasized, leaving her to work in quiet.

  Not knowing the situation outside she took heed to that warning and forced herself to three more bits of sabotage before pulling out and shutting the chamber. When she climbed back through the crawlway there were lizards on the outside very angry and unable to do anything with her inside. They all dropped to the ground wriggling with muscle spasms as she crawled out, then she went around and shot each and every one of them, hoping that her sabotage might go unnoticed. She shut the outer hatch and tossed the bodies over the edge of the platform, dropping them like bombs down to the lower levels where others were scurrying around.

  She followed them down, but only a few levels. There, in plain view, she moved to the central power line that was rising up from ground level to the base of the reactor and began firing into it with her rifle and then a pistol when she ran out of ammo. She burned enough of a hole into it that the internal mechanisms were junked, effectively cutting the power transfer possibilities and forcing the lizards to replace the line.