Star Force: Augmentation (SF22) Page 4

  Rolling his wrists to the left in various amounts he scooted his skeet level to the left, passing by one of the holographic barriers then nudged it back right a hair before pulling hard left again, trying to keep his speed up as much as possible. The binary control joysticks allowed him more fine motor control than usual, which was very helpful at the moment, but also was the fact that he was flying a craft extremely familiar to him and low level maneuvers weren’t new to him or the skeet, which right now was more driving across the surface than flying.

  Mark thumbed his right joystick and fired off a plasma orb into another target, juked left around a barrier and hit another, all the while modulating his speed with the foot pedals as best he could. One thing about the Valerie that he liked was its anti-grav propulsion unit that used differential technology to pull on various pieces of the planet to provide minimal to moderate thrust. It was something Star Force had been working on, but they hadn’t come up with a viable prototype that could fit on a skeet frame yet. When completed it would allow a ship to propel itself without any convention engines…assuming you weren’t in a hurry, given the reduced acceleration curves.

  Right now Mark would have liked to have that as a forward brake, but all he had to work with was atmospheric drag because there was no way he could reverse thrust on his engines fast enough to make the maneuvers he was doing. He was having to smooth out the angles as much as he could, which also meant bleeding off speed. He’d seen a Valerie run through this course using hard decelerations and even faster accelerations when the anti-grav was used to boost its conventional engines, registering a time that he was nowhere near to competing with.

  Then again that had been one of the better Calavari pilots. Mark and his skeet were actually ranked in the 89th percentile on this course, meaning that he’d progressed enough to beat a handful of pilots that were actually using the Valeries. Kara had gotten up to the 73rd percentile using one of the alien ships with several other Human pilots in between. Most of the pilots in the 96-100th percentile, the bottom of the barrel, were using their own native craft and not the Valeries, so overall Mark and the other Humans were still getting their asses kicked.

  Two more targets and six more barricades flashed by, then Mark was out of the restricted altitude zone. Barely 100 meters past it and he pulled up hard, using both his skeet’s conventional and anti-grav engines to push him up into the sky at maximum acceleration as he closed with a distant target floating up in the thin part of the atmosphere. The fighter was environmentally sealed so air pressure didn’t matter, but go high enough and his conventional engines would lose effect, though his anti-grav was fully capable of propelling him up into space…where he’d become completely ballistic.

  As Mark’s fighter climbed he kept an eye on the distant target, seeing his targeting reticule just below it and drifting up as his anti-grav pushed his skeet straight up while his conventional engines were accelerating the ship at an angle of climb. He lined up the lateral vectors then waited for the center of the crosshairs to cut over it. When they finally did he triggered a series of lachar bursts as he adjusted his flight line to hold onto that target.

  The plasma was out of range, he knew, but ever since adding a lachar to the skeets they’d had the possibility of engaging targets at extreme range, though unless they were stationary it was virtually impossible to line up a shot. Even with computer-assisted micro-targeting it was problematic, but the weapon gave the skeet the ability to penetrate lizard shields where the plasma wouldn’t, yet the plasma was a far stronger weapon, even when confined to an orb rather than a streamer, and the skeets had been modified so they could produce both.

  Mark kept firing off lachar blasts hoping for a hit as he approached, then finally flipped over to plasma when he came into the outermost range, firing off an orb with each trigger pull and racking up a few early hits that visually dropped the health meter on his HUD by a sliver. He kept firing until the target began firing back, at which point he veered off and decelerated in the thin upper atmosphere, using his anti-grav to stay aloft and his conventional engines with double thrust to maneuver around and avoid the lizard-sized kirby cannons.

  Had this target been equipped with lizard anti-air it was unlikely he would have been able to attack it with a skeet. The Valeries had shields strong enough to survive their anti-air for brief moments, enough for a strafing run if they were quick about it. That was one upgrade he was going to steal from the Calavari, for their shield tech was better than what Star Force or the lizards were using, and they were offering it to all Alliance races freely.

  That couldn’t be said of some of the others, such as the Kvash who had the strongest shields of them all, but there was enough tech sharing going on that the Alliance, as an overall front against the lizards, was growing in technological strength by leaps and bounds, the only question was how quickly could they get their new equipment into the field to replace the old. In fact, that was one reason why the Calavari claimed they’d developed the Valerie, so that they could sell directly to all Alliance members and handle the production themselves so the others wouldn’t have to build up production infrastructure prior to putting them into use.

  Mark appreciated that, but Star Force was going to produce its own equipment. To do anything less would make them dependent on others and that was a quick way to a slow death. Sharing tech and equipment was fine, but tie your regular supply network to someone else and you were just asking for trouble. That was a lesson Davis had taught the trailblazers long ago and Mark had never forgotten it.

  As he came around for another pass on the large shielded target, the Archon switched plasma cannon fire over to the old school streamer that fired a lance of plasma out like a squirt gun, except that it’d been modified to fire a very wide beam, allowing the skeet to dump a lot of damage on a stable target when needed in lieu of carrying bombs. The plasma wasn’t condensed like the orbs were, which gave them their extra explosive kick on impact, a trick they’d learned from the lizards, but it made up for the lack of concentration with pure volume, allowing Mark to scathe the target as he flashed past.

  The health meter dropped by a third with that single run, eliciting a smile from the trailblazer. He guessed that was a little better than the Valerie could dish out, which also had a bombardment setting to its plasma cannons, but the dynamics of the skeet’s weapon had come from a watered down version of an insanely powerful weapon in the V’kit’no’sat database…that was listed as a minor model. It still galled Mark at how far behind them Star Force was, even with the treasure trove of data they’d recovered, making him ever more grateful that the dinos were nowhere to be seen at present. One of their fighters could take out every skeet in existence, if they were all thrown together in one battle, and Paul had confirmed that the same held true for their navies.

  Mark had to wait for his plasma reserves to fill back up before making another deep pass, but he managed a few more orb hits in the meantime, trying to shave down that health bar far enough that two more runs would knock it out. It had a regeneration function to it, meaning that if he left it alone long enough the bar would start to refill and he could be at this forever.

  He glanced at the clock on his HUD, seeing that he was still slightly ahead of schedule compared to his previous runs, then started his second pass even before the capacitors were fully filled. That occurred halfway in, then he dumped another full load on the target, getting winged by return fire that cut 18% off his own shields. He corkscrewed away, making several more shots miss, then circled wide to recharge for the last hit.

  When he eventually came back in he nailed the target with a long stream of plasma that broke through the outer shield and impacted the inner one, signaling that he’d killed the target. The anti-air return fire ceased and Mark dove back down towards the planet, heading for the last section of the course. He switched his plasma back over into orb mode and linked his pair of cannons for simultaneous fire, knowing that the last targets would require more tha
n one hit each to take down.

  As he lost altitude the view of the mountain range that held the Alliance base grew in size, but the last section of the course was located in a plain to the southeast hidden between several peaks. Mark had the location tagged on his battlemap to insure he made the quickest trip there possible and eventually came down over several long lines of objects on the surface representing lizard vehicles. On his HUD a quarter of them lit up, indicating that they were activate targets, along with a 112 second timer once he dropped to a predetermined altitude.

  Mark dropped low to the ground and took a narrow attack angle to the first target, bottoming out on his gravity drives but tipping the tail up slightly higher than the forward engines so that his weapons would point down a bit. He held that hull angle, thanks to the skeet’s design, and fired off his first linked pair of blue orbs at the target…with only one hitting at range.

  He knew firing from far away was difficult, but with the dual fire setting he had a pair of dots to shoot with, so if one missed wide it was likely that the other wouldn’t unless he was way off target, which Mark hardly ever was. As his skeet approached he got a few hits in, then the target flashed red, indicating that it was dead. The Archon switched to the next closest target as his forward momentum brought him up on the group in a hurry, but he had succeeded in taking out at least one before he had to slow his approach.

  He got a few hits in on the second, then came to a drifting hover and blasted away at the targets from close range, two plasma shots at a time spaced apart a few meters with lachar blasts throw in whenever he could manage. The main plasma weapon operated off the same draw as the orb cannons, so he couldn’t fire both simultaneously, but since the lachar was altogether separate he could add its limited firepower to the plasma now that he was close enough in to fire without spending too much time aiming. The targeting computer for the plasma factored in gravitational pull, which the lachar was unaffected by, so he had two reticles on screen and was snapping off lachar blasts with his left trigger whenever it drifted over the target while flying to keep the plasma zeroed in at all times.

  Luckily there was no return fire coming from the targets, otherwise he would have been a sitting duck this close to the surface and moving forward almost as slow as a mech. One by one he patiently made his way up the line of targets, then came to a full hover while he poured shot after shot into the final target of the course, simulating a lizard structure. After about 20 shots it went down, ending the run and stopping the clock at 23:14…a full minute better than his last run.

  Satisfied with his progress, Mark gained some altitude and flew up over the nearest mountain and back to base, setting his skeet down on the deck next to the others and pulling his breath mask out of a pocket in the cockpit before cracking the canopy and letting the foul air inside. Sweating a bit from the exercise, a cool breeze immediately caught his attention, prompting him to jog rather than walk back over to the Star Force annex.

  “79th percentile,” Boen reported when Mark walked into the control center.

  “I know. I was reading the statistics on the way back,” he said, sitting down in a random chair and stretching out. He preferred the pommel seats in the skeets to others, but after a while they got the body sore, even for those pilots used to them if they flew enough straight hours, and Mark had just finished off a five hour training session.

  “Get her refueled. I want to go back out in a few hours.”

  “Workout first?”

  “A hard 10k around the roof,” Mark said, pointing above them. “Wanna come with?”

  “I already got an easy 20 in this morning, so no. I can’t keep up with you anyway.”

  “Not even a couple of kilometers?”

  “If we had a track I’d give it a go, but I don’t feel like walking all the way back here when you leave me in the dust.”

  “Just jog back.”

  “Sorry, boss. I’m done running for the day. I’m going over to the simulators with Alex and Jenna for some head to heads with the Protovic in two hours anyway.”

  “Valeries or skeets?”

  “I assume they’re all using Valeries, but I’m going to try a Bsidd raider. Been working out the controls the past two days and it’s got a good aft cannon setup that I want to test out. I don’t think the Pros will be able to stick so close to it, and that might give us an advantage.”

  “Let me know how it works out. I’ve been eyeing that ship for a while.”

  Boen glanced to his left when a tone sounded. “Incoming message from Vornac.”

  Mark smiled. “Right on time,” he said, sitting up in his chair and scooting it over to the nearest comm terminal. He pointed down at it with a finger and Boen routed it over to him. He listened through the recording, which was critiquing his course run, then he read through the attached datasheet, slowly nodding.

  “What?” Boen asked.

  “The lizards hit a Kvash border world, big ground assault with a lot of fighter combat. They had Valeries in the mix and Vornac sent over the performance sheets.”

  “And?”

  “16 to 1 kill ratio. The rest were at 2.3.”

  Boen whistled. “They’re definitely living up to the hype. What was the battle outcome?”

  “The war is still ongoing, but this engagement was a loss. The lizards hit them with a 47 to 1 fighter ratio.”

  “Damn,” Boen swore. “They’re not playing around anymore.”

  “Jason was right when he said the ones that hit Corneria weren’t line troops. If we’d faced these kind of numbers we would have lost the system.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  Mark looked him straight in the eye, but kept his voice even. “We get better.”

  5

  January 3, 2396

  Jartul System

  Daka

  Boen went flying back through the air and landed on one of the lounge chairs, flipping over backwards and rolling into a heap in the middle of the viewing promenade and 200+ other pilots.

  “Ow,” he said calmly, kicking a chair out of the way as the other pilots stepped back, giving him and the newly arrived Nestafar pilot some space. He stood up and rubbed his neck, ignoring the miniature winged dragon that reminded him a bit of Godzilla as it fumed, huffing and growling as it flexed its muscular wings wide and flapped its short tail on the floor.

  Boen finally turned to look at his attacker and smiled, uttering a half laugh. “You hit like a Cajdital.”

  That elicited a roar from the pilot, as well as the two standing behind it. All three walked forward, intent on pounding Boen for the insult, as well as the result of the ongoing simulator battle that the assembled pilots were watching. Mark and five other Humans were teaming with an equal number of Calavari as they battled against the Nestafar and Protovic, with the trailblazer just having downed the best Nestafar pilot.

  Given that the Nestafar and the Calavari were both primary members of the Alliance and traditionally at odds with one another…and add in the fact that the Nestafar were the only pilots on the planet that could actually fly themselves…the one standing next to Boen had become quite agitated when the Human vocally cheered on his peers as they took down the Nestafar pilots in the simulator.

  When the leader got halfway to Boen the Archon released his ramrod-straight posture and ran forward two steps, lowering his shoulder and colliding with the abdomen of the slightly taller alien. His momentum knocked its spindly frame down, which Boen pushed off of to keep himself standing. The other two Nestafar came in swinging, but the Archon ducked under one then kicked the other back a step to get some spacing before he tore the two aliens apart with a flurry of strategically placed punches. Using some leverage he tossed their shocked bodies on top of the first one in a pile, then he stepped back and placed his hands on his hips stoically, looking around at the other assembled pilots.

  “Anyone else?” he asked as a group of Calavari pushed their way through the crowd to get to the ruckus.

&nb
sp; “What’s going on?” one of the four-armed aliens demanded, looking between Boen and the three Nestafar that were climbing to their feet.

  “A sore loser,” a Bsidd pilot said, gesturing to the Nestafar.

  The Calavari turned toward the three winged aliens. “Causing trouble already?”

  “Bah,” the Nestafar bellowed, turning and walking away with the other two.

  “Are you alright?” the Calavari asked Boen.

  “More than alright,” the Bsidd interjected. “He took them down with ease.”

  “Oh? That’s hard to believe,” he said, sizing the Human up.

  “I’m not just a pilot,” Boen said, picking up and righting one of the chairs that had gotten knocked down. “I’m an Archon.”

  “And what’s an ‘archon?’” a nearby Protovic asked.

  “We’re trained in all forms of combat.”

  “Such as?”

  “Hand to hand, piloting, naval, mechs, aquatics, and a lot of specialized areas,” Boen said as his eyes flipped back up to the main display holo and the ongoing battle that the Calavari/Humans were clearly winning.

  “You’re special operations?” the Protovic asked.

  “That too,” Boen said, watching Mark go evasive as one of the Valeries dropped in on the skeet’s tail.

  “What about the other Humans?”

  “11 are Archons, 10 are pilots, 2 are Canderian pilots…which is a military civilization that lives primarily in space. They’re our lowest scoring pair, if you’d noticed. They’re not used to piloting fighters, so they’ve got a bigger learning curve.”

  “Because you don’t believe in starfighters?” a different Calavari asked.

  “That’s right,” Boen said, pulling the last chair up and sitting down.

  “Arrogant twit,” a Gnar said, its mechanical voice high pitched coming through the metallic mask it wore connected to a small tank on the back of its head that provided the ammonia it needed in addition to the oxygen being breathed in from the air. “How you survived even a small Cajdital invasion is beyond me.”