Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) Read online

  “Your movements will be allowed, but only if preapproved. Do not wander about.”

  “Our ship will file all movements on planet prior to flight,” Donn promised, but not saying anything about personnel on the surface.

  “An escort will be waiting at these coordinates,” the Lacvamat said before cutting the comm, obviously annoyed at having to let the Star Force ship through.

  “Coordinates received,” the Kiritak helmsman noted.

  “Take us in,” Donn said, seeing that the coordinates were relatively high up in orbit when they popped up on the holographic map.

  The rover made a lazy jump down to a midway point, braking to a stop before adding some lateral momentum to bring them around to a second mini-jump down lower to match up with the given coordinates where some 16 Lacvamat warships were waiting with starfighter escorts numbering over 300. Once there the ship was wrapped up in escorts and given additional navigational prompts that led them through a non-linear course down through orbit that took them more than 2 hours to hit the atmosphere.

  There the warships backed off and the starfighters remained, bringing down the rover to the point on the planet where the cargo ship had exploded and began the whole mess. Donn picked a spot nearby the debris field where the bits and pieces had rained down and had the ship land there…after getting permission from the Lacvamat.

  Huge landing legs extended from the underside of the rover that sank down more than a meter into the semi-soft dirt nearby a settlement that was now evacuated. Unlike Star Force cities the Lacvamat lived in spires on the flat and cliff dwellings where they had available terrain. The nearby structures were situated on the cut-out side of a small mountain with the rover being nearly half their size. A temporary camp of structures that looked to house many more individuals was spread out in little chunks across the nearby area, and Donn guessed those were the recovery teams for the ship debris.

  “Armor up,” he told Galia after they landed.

  “Babysitting?” she guessed.

  “You’ve got the medtechs. I’m going to roam.”

  Without complaint the tall redhead walked off the bridge leaving Donn with the four man crew of the tiny jumpship.

  “Not sure how long this will take, so just sit, keep your eyes open, and the door locked.”

  The Captain hesitated, then he simply nodded. “Will do.”

  Donn followed Galia out and headed to the small training facility on the ship. It wasn’t a full sanctum, not even close given the ship wasn’t large enough to hold one, but it had been enough to keep them occupied during jumps as well as serving as an impromptu armory. When he got there Galia was already part way into her armor with the others looking on waiting for orders.

  “Archons suit up, Brad with eagle, Kiritas stay put, medics grab your puffs,” he said as he started to step into his own armor, sliding his casual shoes into the hardened plates.

  There was a sigh of regret from the Kiritas, but the Humans moved immediately without any questions. The ‘puffs’ Donn referred to were extremely low grade, light armor that also doubled as hazard suits. The Archon armor did likewise with a filter upgrade, which they all had in place, but until the medics confirmed that the recently identified contaminant was truly only hazardous to Lacvamat they weren’t going to take any chances.

  They exited via airlock mode, with an energy shield covering the exit point so as not to exchange atmosphere with the outside, with Donn leading the group and getting a few meters past the foot of the ramp before a pair of Lacvamat swooped in and landed nearby. Both were covered in a thin, translucent material that was their version of a hazard suit.

  “We will take you where you need to go,” one of them said without preamble.

  “We need all the information you have gathered, access to the ship fragments, and the ability to roam around the area without interference.”

  “You will find nothing that we have not already discovered,” the other said.

  “Maybe, maybe not, but we came here to look and confirm your data. We can’t do that if we can’t make an independent analysis of our own,” Donn emphasized, picking up on a few of their thoughts…which were that this was just a for show exercise to give the Lacvamat analysis the credibility it needed with the rest of the ADZ…ostensibly for a counterattack at whoever they fingered.

  “He will search from the air,” Donn continued before they could object. “The rest of us will search on the ground. Please make sure that none of your security forces shoot him down.”

  “Yes please,” Brad-7919 said, wearing a heavy backpack that stretched from above his shoulders almost all the way down to his feet.

  The two Lacvamat looked at the awkward Human, not sure what to make of him, but they relented and had a short conversation with a comm device attached to their heads, coordinating with the rest of their security forces that were several thousand strong and covering the area, most of which were currently on the ground but many of the long winged avians were currently in flight, soaring around with little whip-like tails trailing them through every twist and turn they made as they glided about, rarely flapping their ample wings as they surfed the air currents.

  A group of three redirected from their patrols, which had reformed above them after the rover had landed, and dove down to the surface meeting up with the pair as several more flew in and circled overhead.

  “We must stay with you at all times. Do not attempt to go off alone.”

  “We’re here to help,” Donn reminded him. “And we won’t try to lose you, but it’s your responsibility to stay with us.”

  The Lacvamat that had spoken huffed once through its dragon-like nostrils and stared at the Archon’s brown helmet from its widely set eyes, one each on the double lobes of its tiny skull. It had but a short snout, but behind it was a cranium thick enough to double as a wrecking ball…and the Lacvamat were notorious for head butts on their almost snake-like necks.

  It didn’t say anything, merely waiting on the Human to move.

  Donn turned and pointed Brad up into the air, then looked back at the Lacvamat as the ranger shot up into the sky on his flight pack. “We need samples of the bioweapon to study. Have you recovered any from the debris?”

  “No need,” one of the medtechs said from behind him in his aqua-colored armor as he was messing with a field kit attached to a platform on his left arm. “It’s still in the air.”

  Donn frowned and turned towards the medic.

  “There is none remaining, except within the bodies of the sick and dead,” the Lacvamat said.

  The Archon’s head ping-ponged back, with him searching the alien’s mind to see if he was being genuine or lying, but having little prior contact with the race made mind sifting a bit uncertain.

  “It’s trace amounts,” the medic answered in English. “Their equipment might not be able to detect it.”

  “It should have dissipated by now,” Donn argued, “unless there was a renewable source nearby.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Do you have your dead nearby?”

  “They have been taken away to deal with properly. You will not be examining them, for none remain here.”

  “What have your people studied the bioweapon with? Where did your samples come from?”

  “The infected.”

  “Are there any infected nearby we can examine?”

  “Not here. They have been quarantined elsewhere.”

  “Arrange for us to get access to them after we finish here.”

  “That is not my task,” the Lacvamat said firmly.

  “Then pass on the request to whomever’s it is,” Donn said, matching its tone and adding a bit of Ikrid influence with it.

  As soon as Brad shot up into the air he had two Lacvamat pacing him, with several more diverting from nearby and flying in to assert their dominance. They hadn’t expected the Humans to be able to fly, even with technological augmentation, and they swirled around him as he got some 150 meters up and held p
osition, visually scanning the area. The area was rolling flat, with tuffs of scraggly vegetation dotting the otherwise barren terrain. It was mostly dirt, very few rocks, but those that were there were jutting up from underneath, almost as if something was punching segments of bedrock up and into view to form small mesas.

  Brad could see the various temporary structures the Lacvamat had set up to collect/analyze debris and began tagging the closest ones on the battlemap for the others to see. As soon as he got those marked he moved forward using the hand controls on the short armature on his left side, loosely attached at his elbow and giving him a gripbar/joystick to navigate with. The anti-grav unit was fairly simple, equipped with two differential drives that could push off of various portions of the planet’s mass to provide lateral movement, as well as to keep the rectangular pack from spinning about on a singular levitative point.

  One of the units was near his head, the other near his feet and situated so they would swing ‘up’ with gravity’s pull on his body and the rest of the unit. At the moment he was ‘standing’ vertical with his body spinning a bit to the left that he wasn’t able to control until he finally tipped the upper edge slightly forward and allowed gravity to settle the orientation on the anti-grav ‘pins.’ That left him facing down ever so slightly as he moved forward, gaining speed slowly as he crossed the landscape with the Lacvamat lazily keeping pace beside him.

  The flight pack or ‘eagle’ as they referred to it wasn’t a combat piece, given its size and awkwardness. He couldn’t fight with it on his back when on the ground and it made him a sitting duck in the air, but if one needed a good view and the ability to cross terrain quickly without a dropship or fighter the flight pack was the way to go.

  It was a civilian tool, but one that came in handy in a variety of situations.

  Brad continued tagging Lacvamat sites so Donn could see through the battlemap where to go without having to wander randomly, but as he did so he tried to get a feel for the debris impacts. He imagined most of the crash craters were underneath the little peach domes they’d constructed, but he was able to spot scratch marks and some other small trash on the barren landscape, with him actually descending to one spot for a look.

  When he landed he deactivated the anti-grav and walked across to a scrub bush, carrying the 280 lb pack like it was a Knight riding piggyback. One Lacvamat landed with him while the others kept to the sky, circling overhead and watching.

  Brad knelt and picked up a marble-sized piece of charred metal, holding it in his armored hand.

  “Ship debris?” he asked.

  “Everything of consequence has been recovered.”

  “How large of a radius have you recovered pieces from?”

  “Wherever you see our collectors. We set them on top of the locations rather than moving the items for study.”

  “Are the objects still here?” he asked, dropping the tiny fragment.

  “Some have been removed for further study after a forensic analysis was completed.”

  “Do you happen to know the spot where the ship exploded…in the air, I mean?”

  “It is marked.”

  “How?”

  The Lacvamat tilted its head to the air and looked in a specific direction. Brad followed its gaze and saw nothing.

  “What am I supposed to see?”

  “Hear,” it corrected him. “The beacon is auditory.”

  Brad adjusted the controls for his helmet and searched through the range of sounds that his ears weren’t capable of processing…finding a light, repetitive ‘beep’ that he was able to isolate the location of. Using his helmet’s zoom he examined that position, finding a tiny object hovering in midair there.

  “What is the purpose?”

  “To assist the search teams, as well as to mark remembrance.”

  “I want to get a look from that vantage point.”

  “Can you fly that high?”

  “I can go to orbit if needed…I’ll just run out of air.”

  “Then follow,” the Lacvamat said, a bit more eager to help than the others.

  Brad reactivated his flight pack and took off again, angling up to a spot high in the air where he began to mentally calculate the possible debris patterns, as well as working in all the little dome sites below, trying to figure out some insight that the natives may have missed.

  5

  “This it?” Donn asked.

  “Yes,” Brad answered from high in the sky overhead. “The distortion ripples are centered about two meters to your left.”

  “Give me a moment,” the Archon said, sitting down on the ground crosslegged by himself while the rest of his team was out inspecting various sites, mostly those that the Lacvamat had set up. The striker had an escort with him, but they stood back and remained silent, not understanding what the Human was doing but not caring to question him either.

  Donn took a deep breath through his filter mask and extended his senses, clicking on his Pefbar and looking down into the ground around him. He was sitting on what he would have described as a ‘sand wash’ in that it wasn’t hard packed ground. It was firm enough, but the top layer was loose and had moved around a bit in a pattern Brad had spotted from above. There was no visible debris in the area, but they’d seen similar crash site damage before and suspected there were pieces that had been buried and covered over in the turbulence.

  The Archon was sitting down to get his head an extra meter of range, with the Jedi pose being a mere afterthought. Focusing his Pefbar into a ‘spotlight’ cone he searched beneath him as far as it would reach before rotating it around and scanning the area. The grainy black/white images in his mind were hard to decipher the further away they got, but he did find several rocks beneath him that had been caught up in what was a small ravine that had been filled in with sediment, probably years before, but the top layer and several jabbing scars beneath were made of looser material that he knew was a recent deposit.

  And at the bottom of those scars were six pieces of untouched debris.

  Donn activated his all-team comm. “Got something guys, but it’s going to require some digging.”

  Galia was down on her hands and knees, her head buried in the hole she was scooping out with her big armored hands that was already two meters deep. Her white armor was only half visible, from the chest on out to her legs and feet which were almost vertical as she kicked dirt and tiny rocks up past her body as she dug further with the assistance of an Archon’s Pefbar as a guide.

  Donn was digging his own hole a few steps away, as were four other Archons while an army of Lacvamat surrounded them and the site, keeping others away and monitoring the Humans closely. They’d called for digging equipment of their own, but Donn wanted to get to it first…plus he didn’t want to wait. The softness of the wash being what it was they’d decided to go at it by hand, though in his case he was actually scooping as much telekinetically as he was pawing it out, though with his head down in his own gopher hole the Lacvamat couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Got something,” Galia said over the comm, but Donn kept digging after his own and didn’t pop his head out, seeing that he was only half a meter away from his.

  “Brad?” Donn asked.

  “Got it,” the free Archon said, stepping over to Galia while the others continued to dig and tapped the big Knight on the butt twice, hard enough to get her attention. She pulled out and let him down into the hole where he started pushing away small amount of debris telekinetically and cleaning off the edges of the shrapnel as one of the medics came up behind him and stuck a probe into the hole beside him.

  “Concentration is spiking. Nothing too dramatic, but far higher than the latent amounts in the air.”

  “This is a big one,” Brad commented as he ate away at the sharp and frayed edges of the junk, creating a little cave around it as he progressed and having to make a little telekinetic dome above his head to catch falling material to keep it from refilling the hole. What he caught he chucked back out pas
t his legs, making for a dirt sprinkler that was spitting out a nearly constant fine spray of material as opposed to Donn’s hole that was chucking large glumps out periodically.

  “Galia, we need to widen the hole. Play plow please,” Brad said, pointing her to his right.

  “Muscle coming,” she said, kneeling beside him and reaching her thick arms down in next to his hip and pulling large handfuls of material out from the sidewall. A lot of material fell back in, but Brad pushed it back up to her and between the two of them enlarged the entrance to more than two meters wide, enough for him to finally pry the piece loose. It was too heavy to lift telekinetically, so he leveraged it out by hand to get it loose then pulled out, letting Galia do the heavy lifting while he added some telekinetic pull from a distance.

  It took a while to get it out, given the bad angle the Knight had to reach down at, but eventually the trashcan-sized, razor sharp fragment came out and she put it down on the flat ground nearby with both medics scurrying over to it and taking samples…with a trio of Lacvamat techs coming over as well.

  One of the medtechs looked at his sensor analysis and immediately pulled out a device from his satchel of equipment and placed it on the ground nearby. With the flip of a button a semi-visible bubble shield activated over top forming a 3 meter high and wide radius around the piece of junk that would contain the atmosphere inside but otherwise wouldn’t interfere with their movement.

  “Containment shield,” he explained to the Lacvamat. “The debris has a fresher concentration of toxin given that it’s been buried since impact.”

  One of the flyers extended a wingtip and touched the shield perimeter, finding that it could move through without interference, then it stepped inside and touched a device to the debris next to the medtech.

  “I am detecting only trace amounts.”

  “Our equipment is more sensitive, and I think there’s enough of a concentration lingering on the debris to get a sufficient sample for a full analysis.”