Star Force: Counterstrike (SF18) Read online

  It was defending another mech, this one looking like an oversized madcat. Jasmine had never seen it before, outside of the Battletech fiction. It bore the marker of Clan Scorpion, so she assumed it was one of Cora’s newest additions. The madcat mark II stood taller than the neo by a third, and was carrying lachar turrets on its shoulders instead of missile launchers, giving it an odd look. More important than that, though, were the pair of rail guns attached to the arms.

  Immediately Jasmine knew that she needed to protect that mech above all others, just as Cora was doing now. The lachars would penetrate the enemy shields, while the rail guns would knock them down in short order, opening up opportunities for the rest of the mechs to exploit. The massive mech must have gotten to the party later than the others, just as Jasmine had, and Cora was now directing it to snipe the predators pummeling the base buildings with who knew how many people still inside.

  “Qui, eye line, comm open, aff.”

  Suddenly an icon for the mark II illuminated below the data box, indicating that a mech to mech comm line had been opened.

  “Coming in on your left, madcat,” Jasmine said, sweating profusely from the prolonged exertion required to operate this type of mech, which was usually reserved for the highly skilled Archons. “Anything I can help with?”

  “Thank you, yes,” Stanley-672 said gratefully. “The ground pounders with det packs have been redirected my way. Keep them off me if you can.”

  “Copy that,” Jasmine said, taking a pot shot at several in her path.

  “No plasma,” Cora’s voice cut in, “or you’ll set the packs off.”

  “What do you want me to use then, my feet?”

  “You’re in a neo, Jasmine. It’s designed for hand to hand.”

  Suddenly a building a block away took a hit from a predator and came crashing down in a loud rumble, making Jasmine hesitate, unsure what to do in the midst of so much chaos.

  “Stomp, throw debris, whatever,” Cora suggested. “Just keep them clear.”

  “I’ll do what I can, but I don’t usually pilot a neo,” she said, running a few steps forward and kicking one of the lizards with the mech’s foot and bouncing his broken body off a nearby wall.

  Keeping an eye on the big mech’s moving position, as well as Cora’s which seemed to be staying out in front, Jasmine took up rear guard position. She walked backwards from time to time, keeping most of her attention on the streets ahead and beside her as she played soccer with any approaching lizards, missing most of them. None the less she was delaying their approach as Stanley moved through what was left of the base and knocked down predator shields for others to finish off.

  Jasmine saw many more mechs entering the base’s streets, figuring that Cora must have been rallying them to the defense from within, not only to protect the people inside but to give the mechs more cover to fight from. A quick glance at her battlemap told her they had approximately 30 mechs left in play. If they could regroup around the mark II, and they continued to get air support, then they might still have a chance.

  Jasmine bent her mech over and jammed her left hand down into the pavement, then scrapped it across half the street trying to catch a group of lizards running at her legs. She caught only one of four, with the others sprinting on past her, firing up with their tiny plasma rifles. The Archon saw those and others moving past, with her unable to stop all of them. She was tempted to use her plasma cannons anyway, and blow up the det packs before they could get to the mark II…then she saw a useful metallic girder sticking out of the building debris.

  She kicked two more lizards as she ran further back, away from the mech she was supposed to be protecting, and used her right hand to grab the broken beam. It bent slightly in her grasp but was still firmly connected to what was left of the building at the other end. Forming a partial fist she tapped her left thumb to her palm and deactivated the hand, then pumped round after round of plasma into the stuck end of the bent beam at pointblank range while still holding on with her right.

  The metal began to corrode under the plasma attacks, first weakening to the point where she could almost bend it free, then finally sheering off, offering the mech a crude-looking hockey stick with the far right side having been bent at an angle.

  It was awkward to maneuver, but Jasmine got her stick down on the ground and experimented with moving it side to side, finding it very heavy but offering better leverage than she’d had before. Pushing the stick ahead of her she walked back towards the mark II, knocking aside every lizard she came across and splattering many of them against the side walls of buildings that she half destroyed in the process.

  As one went flying to the right Jasmine noticed it had a det pack on, and she unconsciously held her breath as it hit the wall…but thankfully it didn’t explode. The Archon moved on, clearing the road and keeping her mental fingers crossed that one of the little twerps didn’t detonate right underneath her. The hockey stick’s range gave her some comfort, but not being able to fire down on the lizards was just plain frustrating.

  As Jasmine got back in position barely 50 meters away from the mark II it fired its rail guns again and took out the shields on an already smoking predator that it’d been gouging at range with its lachars, along with the help of a few surviving riflemans. As expected it had diverted across the base, brining it over the cluster of mechs Cora had waiting for it.

  With its forward shields down a salvo of plasma leapt up from between the buildings and slammed into it, resulting in a forward tilt almost immediately as one of the anti-grav engines was hit. The mark II then lit up its topside with its lachars, but wisely reserved its limited rail gun ammunition for later targets. Bit by bit, over the course of 30 seconds, the mechs hidden within the base chewed it to pieces, with the unfortunate result being that in its death spiral it landed on and destroyed a pair of intact buildings.

  On the other side of the mark II Jasmine caught a glimpse of Cora’s neo down on all fours swatting at the lizards to good effect, crawling from point to point in an almost humorous fashion as more and more of them appeared seemingly out of nowhere. She knew they had to have already been within the base and redeploying to come after the mechs, but it also made her wonder why they had so many boots on the ground when the predators were doing so much damage from the air. Their motives didn’t make full sense to Jasmine, but it was clear they wanted the base eliminated one way or another.

  As if coalescing for one last push, the 9 remaining predators all repositioned themselves over top of the base, floating in slowly and shooting at both mechs and buildings with an insane amount of firepower. Stanley did his best to stay behind cover, but with so many weapons platforms flying about he couldn’t hide from all angles of attack and instead chose to pick a lane of fire to defend, firing everything he had at the first target to come up.

  Abandoning her lizard squashing mission, Jasmine ran out in front of the big mech and down the street towards his target, hugging the right side as much as she could so he could still keep firing. His lachars were over her mechs head, so they weren’t effected, but he did have to hold back fire on one of his railguns as she passed, pushing her stick along on the ground in front of her.

  With mixed emotions she drew some of the plasma fire away from the mark II, but lost chunks of her own armor given that she didn’t have much maneuvering room in the narrow street. She did manage to duck off a side lane for a moment, then reemerged with the beam held high like a club she could barely balance and walked towards the low flying predator with deadly intent.

  But it was no good. Taking another couple hits to her armor she walked up underneath the predator as it fired on the mark II and realized it was too high to hit. Frustrated, she tried to throw the beam up and hit the underside, but it tipped out of her hand and flew off sideways, landing in one of the buildings that was now rubble. Letting it go she reactivated the plasma cannons in her hands and fired up at the belly shields of the predator, doing as much damage as she could. They went d
own on the first hit, thanks to the rail gun damage from earlier, so Jasmine hit the plasma cannon chewing into her mech’s head and eliminated it first off, then the one to the side that was targeting one of the intact buildings when her comm activated.

  “Get clear, it’s coming down!”

  Not needing to be warned twice, Jasmine walked backwards as she kept up fire on the underside, then saw the predator drop straight down without any prior tipping. The power source feeding the anti-grav engines must have been taken out, she figured, because the whole structure suddenly smashed down in front of her, shaking the ground so hard her mech tipped over, unable to maintain her balance…though that was partly due to the fact that she was walking backwards at the time, a trick she’d had little practice doing.

  Even cushioned from the jarring blow within the cockpit, Jasmine’s body felt the brunt of the fall as the control straps stiffened to represent the ground at her back. Wasting no time she began to roll the mech over, only to find that the building to her left was blocking her way. She then tried to roll up to the right when another building came crashing down and buried that side of the street, pinning her arm to the ground under a pile of concrete.

  “Wonderful,” she said, using her free left hand to pull chunks off and wiggle free. She had to scoot like a worm up the street on her back, digging her feet down into the road and tearing gashes in it to get traction, but she eventually got to a point where she could flip over onto her right side and get her legs under her. When she got back to her feet the mark II was gone…as were all the other mechs.

  Her battlemap was also gone, meaning her comm array was damaged, either from the enemy plasma, the fall, or the building collapse, she didn’t know which. She tilted her head upwards in the cockpit, looking at the sky but couldn’t see any more of the predators. One piece of good luck, at least.

  She began walking her mech off, checking the status of her right plasma cannon and seeing that it was still functional, though her arm had the white paint chewed off it by the rubble along with several gashes in the armor where the plasma had hit. Jasmine flexed the hand experimentally, finding the middle finger wouldn’t retract, but the other four digits still worked, which she almost found amusing.

  A bit further down the road she came to a section of the base that had been wrecked, dropping the buildings down low enough that she could see over the top of the rubble. Two more predators were a few blocks away, exchanging fire with what looked like three groups of mechs, how many in each she couldn’t be sure, but the enemy shields were still intact, meaning the mark II hadn’t gotten to them, or worse yet it might have been taken out during her mech’s recent nap on the street.

  She brought the neo’s arms up and opened fire with her plasma cannons, adding what damage she could from range and was happy to see her shots bring down the shield along with what looked like lachar blasts coming up from a mech behind cover. Trying to target the gun ports, but missing due to the distance and the inherent inaccuracy of shooting by arm position rather than computer controls, she kept up the constant fire. Had she been in her madcat it would have been a different matter, but she had to make do with what she had at the moment.

  Her right arm suddenly exploded with a plasma hit, knocking out her cannon and almost severing the arm at the elbow joint as another predator surprised her from the side, dropping down in amongst the buildings and hitting her with multiple shots. Reflexively she stutter-stepped to the left and tried to twist around, but by then her right arm did come off, first at the elbow dropping the forearm and hand to the ground, then at the shoulder as multiple plasma blasts all hit in the same area. Jasmine cursed herself for being stupid enough to get caught standing still, but didn’t have the luxury of time necessary to form any of those thoughts into coherent words.

  Another strafing run saved her, knocking out the weaponry on that side of the predator in explosive fashion and giving Jasmine a brief moment of respite to consider her next course of action. Her mech was wounded, but she still had one plasma cannon operational…and as long as she could contribute to the fight she wasn’t going to run away to try and live to see another day. She’d fight some more, then run.

  True to her thoughts she stepped her mech over the debris of its severed arm and fired on the wounded predator. The flying tank spun around, trying to bring operational plasma cannons to bear on the mech but before it made a quarter turn it got hit again, this time from a rail gun, coming in from the left of Jasmine’s street. A moment later Cora’s mech appeared beneath the predator, firing up at the underside as Jasmine fired into its flank. The combined damage from the three mechs knocked out part of its anti-grav engines, but instead of dropping to the ground it careened to the side, scraping the top off several buildings as it skidded on its intact engines in a slow fall that was taking it directly toward Jasmine.

  The Archon tried to run forward and duck underneath before the predator dropped too low, hoping it might even get stuck on one of the buildings but her luck didn’t hold up. As her one-armed mech loped forward in a hasty and awkward run, the bottom edge of the smoking predator dropped down and caught the mech in the chest, crushing its armor plates and knocking it backwards. The doomed gunship dragged the neo back with it as it crashed into three buildings, bringing them down and half burying it and Jasmine’s mech in the rubble.

  5

  Paul watched from Cora’s telemetry as the best mechwarrior the Archons had worked her way across the urban battlefield, stepping and jumping over debris from the destroyed prefab buildings that were falling like children’s toys under the aerial assault from the remaining predators. His battlemap showed skeet squadrons dancing around the perimeter of the assault, making tentative strafing runs when they thought optimal, but the anti-air batteries on the flying tanks were making them keep their distance. Already more than a dozen had gone down in an attempt to help the Star Claw base, unable to just sit by and watch as it was ground into rubble.

  Paul didn’t like sitting and watching either, but there was nothing he or the others could do. The three Clans were in the northern polar region, too far away to reinforce in time. Orbital bombardment was out of the question, even though they had several ships positioned in geosynch orbit over the pole for just that eventuality. Had a cruiser advanced on the base then maybe he could have done something, but there was no way he was firing on their own base, so those ships had to sit by helpless.

  Sending a ship down into the atmosphere would take time, and they weren’t truly built for that type of action. Only his smallest warships had enough engine capability to pull that off, and the enemy gunships were powerful enough that he wasn’t convinced that even a corvette would have won out against 4 of them with their shield tech. He would have sent one anyway, but there weren’t any in range…nor were there any Star Force gunships in the polar region. He and Cora had figured that the presence of the mechs would be far more effective, and they’d been right, but never before had the lizard’s hit them with so much firepower.

  Nor had that firepower come from the lizard base. Paul and the others hadn’t found a way to crack it yet, but they had it under close observation and none of the polar raids had ever originated there…meaning they were either coming from orbit or the lizards had more than one base on Corneria.

  Star Force had been expanding too, having geared up a significant portion of their local industry to the production of defense towers. Paul and Greg had been spreading them out like flowers in the forest around their bases, giving them a buffer zone against future attacks. They now had hundreds of the hastily constructed towers in the equatorial zones, mostly concentrated around the main Star Force bases while the Clans were largely responsible for their own defenses.

  They’d been building smaller versions and packing them with missiles, on Paul’s orders to Clan Saber that the others had wisely duplicated. So long as they could laser tag incoming targets, massed missile assaults had proven to be the best means of defense in orbit and on the g
round, given the short ranges the enemy’s sensor dampening armor forced their battles into.

  Deploying mech armies had been a new technique, as had establishing a second combat theatre. But like every other advantage Star Force had gained in this war, the lizards came back at them with increased strength, nullifying it through sheer numbers or tactical brilliance.

  These predators they were deploying on the northern front had never been seen down south, and Paul got the feeling the lizards had brought them in specifically to counter the mechs…making Paul wonder just how much more there was to their military that they were holding back. By now the lizards could have wiped them out if they wanted to do so…why they hadn’t still remained a mystery, and Paul suspected it had to do with their psychology, and perhaps their supply routes.

  On the battlemap he saw a formation of 27 skeets comprised of fighters from all three Clans circle around from the east and fly so low to the ground they were kicking up snow plumes. As Cora and a few other surviving mechs were fighting an intact predator they fighters snuck up on it from the rear and launched a cascade of plasma into its shields as they passed by two and three at a time.

  The predator’s anti-air turrets responded after the first few impacts, spraying out plasma shards in the general direction of the incoming fighters, most of which missed high. For some reason the predator’s couldn’t depress their anti-air fire below zero degrees, which the skeets had apparently figured out. Flying over building tops and down streets at high speed was dangerous, but with the predator up high over the city and firing down on it they had a narrow approach window which they utilized.

  Paul’s fist clenched, pleased to see the predator’s shields go down, followed by significant hull damage on the one side. He was not pleased to see two of the fighters get hit, one of which pulled up after getting clipped and ran straight into the heaviest zone of anti-air fire, disintegrating within seconds. The other careened down outside the base and skidding to a halt in the snow near the western tree line.