Star Force: Starchaser (SF69) Read online

  The detail of the ice pack, the ridges dotting the immediate area, the atmosphere, the steps of the morpheus, and everything else involved in the area flooded into his mind and he began filtering it for the information he wanted, finding the four escort drone mechs standing behind them and prompting them to catch up and form a box around the morpheus while he likewise got the six huge Leonardo-class heavy mechs underway. They were the replacement for the Hoth line and were the medium sized variety of the hexped walkers, with the smallest version being the Donatello and the larger two being the Michelangelo and the Rafael.

  A lot of the trailblazers hated to retire the Hoths, both due to the nostalgic aspect and the amount of heavy modification that had been made to them over the years. They were no longer the lumbering behemoths that the first prototypes had been, but like the Star Wars machines that had inspired the design they had a big weakness…and that was if they were flipped over they were virtually impossible to right on their own. Adjustments had been made to allow for a slow means of wiggling their way back over on top of their collapsed legs, but the process was long and tedious and completely unacceptable with the revised mandate going forward.

  Another reason they’d been hesitant to replace them was because they worked so well against the lizards, who had nothing in their arsenal to tip them over with. That said, running the simulations against the V’kit’no’sat was essentially a cow-tipping affair, and in light of that the trailblazers knew they had to make a change and had decided sooner was better than later. The new hexpeds had their legs set on a ring around their turtle-shell like bodies with there being no top or bottom. Both compressed halves were identical, so if the leonardos trailing the morpheus were knocked off their feet or even flipped over their legs would just pivot around on their ball-like housings and stand the heavy mech up again with the former underside now being the top.

  That wasn’t going to be an issue today, because there was nothing out on this ice shelf that could flip them, though it was possible that the ice could collapse beneath their feet in some places that didn’t have dirt a few meters down. That was a minor concern, for these six heavy walkers were here simply as carriers, with Tom linking to them from his nexus and causing their exterior doors to open.

  His mind lit up with contacts and his Sav went to use consuming all the control signals from the tiny craft inside as they began to spill out onto the ground in metallic waterfalls on either side of the bottom halves of the headless walkers. When they hit the ground they floated on tiny anti-grav cushions with Tom sending them out to wherever he wanted them, not through group waypoint allotments but by controlling each individual Spark-class drone the same way he piloted a mech.

  His head filled up with processing clutter, which his well-trained mind sorted out with the help of the Sav. He’d been pushing his limits over the past year trying to up his number of simultaneous remote controlled units, but of the 20,000 units he’d brought with him down to the surface he couldn’t handle more than 12,400 of them. The remainder he ordered through group tactics into a holding pattern around the leonardos, knowing that their programming wouldn’t allow them to fire unless they had a ‘manual’ command to do so.

  That was standard Star Force protocol, for while they used automated commands on naval vessels there was too much clutter on planets for a computer to handle in the way of potential bystanders and the trailblazers weren’t going to tolerate so much as one person being wounded in an accident. Machines could only do what they were programmed to do, and there was always a limit to that programming no matter how advanced. There had to be a person at the controls to make sure weapons fired at the proper place at the proper time, and that was why ground-based drones had never been used in infantry applications.

  It was true that a commando could have been linked to an individual drone like the fleet controllers in naval engagements, but that would have left far too few units in the field. A commando could kill hundreds of lizards in person far more effectively than one of these little sparks, so the only way this technology was going to be effective in large-scale battles was if multiple units could be controlled by a single individual…and done so without cutting corners and getting sloppy.

  Tom still preferred using actual troops on the ground, as did the other trailblazers, but with the number of booby traps the lizards were setting up to try and kill even one Star Force soldier it was getting more and more difficult to assault their worlds with zero deaths. Often they had to pull back and sniff around with Archon scouts rather than diving in and kicking ass as they’d prefer to do. When you didn’t have expendable troops you had to fight in different ways, so the idea was to give Star Force some disposable ground troops to send in and trigger traps or to reinforce units in distress and have the machines take the brunt of the damage.

  Despite all the advances they’d made in communications there was still a detectable lag in transmissions coming down from orbit, even if it was just over 50 miles. That would have been unnoticeable to most people, but with the mental interface and Tom’s Sav he could feel it, and when it’d been programmed into simulations he’d realized he needed to be on site to circumvent that problem. If he didn’t have the lag to deal with he could control more units, for everything that required him to think even the slightest bit extra diminished his controlling ability.

  Even now he was using cheats by assigning sparks into small groups to fire on individual targets and a lot of other things that helped spare his mind additional stress, but to have the sparks operate on internal programming would mean mission failure so every movement they made had to come from him and him alone, which sent his mental processing levels sky high from the outset as he moved the swarms of little metallic spheres off across the ice field and out ahead of the mech that he was riding in but barely aware of in his overmind view.

  He didn’t even realize Victoria was right in front of him, for while his eyes saw her his mind was too occupied that he might as well have been in the Bahamas and lying on a beach for all he knew. He was completely disconnected from what was right in front of him, and even his own body felt absent for the most part with his mind extending out through the nexus and into the fighting machines, making them an extension of himself and far more effective than mere programming could ever hope to be.

  He saw hundreds of thousands of enemy contacts pop up on the battlemap starting 4 kilometers ahead and gave Victoria a new waypoint via the nexus controls, now unable to speak without dumping several hundred of the sparks in the process. The morpheus adjusted their track slightly to the right towards a rise rather than heading through the shallow valley as planned. The other mechs and walkers followed them as instructed in a short convoy while Tom sent the sparks out ahead and spread out the leading elements into skirmisher teams that almost immediately came under attack from concealed turrets.

  Those turrets popped up through the ice, breaking the natural camouflage and shooting at the sparks with the ‘phaser’ tech the lizards now used along with a few rocket turrets. Tom felt the sparks get hit as if they were a part of his own body and moved the skirmisher teams around, firing the limited weapons each one of them had. One spark was the size of a jacuzzi, making it small enough to push its way through all but the thickest of forest, but the anti-grav took up more than 40% of the interior space in order to give it full time flight capability. Using mechs with legs saved so much space and power that Star Force preferred using walking machines, but in order to keep the mental processing power down they needed simple hovering tech on the sparks, not to mention the advantages that gave them with rough terrain.

  Had Tom tried to mentally walk 200 units he’d have been overloaded, and driving the same number of walkers on their own programming meant they could potentially step on someone without him knowing…which was totally unacceptable. They had to float, but the tradeoff meant they had less internal space to utilize on other systems like weapons. A good chunk of their weight also came from armor and shields, leaving
only a small cluster of plasma emitters linked to a single power source for each spark to fight with.

  That meant they were ill suited for taking down turrets, but the vast majority of the targets ahead of him were infantry-class drones meant to simulate lizards with a phase rifle or rocket launcher. They were all little tanks with the appropriate weaponry and no defenses save for a bit of armor, but small enough that they took up no more room than a standard variant lizard did, meaning they could swarm you in a very small area just as the real enemy could.

  Mixed in with them were tanks, also similar in size and make to the lizard varieties. Those along with the infantry bots were being controlled by Humans in orbit, meaning that if their internal programming failed in some way they wouldn’t let Tom exploit it, making adjustments as necessary but otherwise letting the little bots fight and swarm according to known lizard tactics.

  And like lizards they had booby traps arrayed before them, with one of the skirmisher bots being taken out with an explosive detonation below the ice pack. It sent a huge plume of steam up into the air marking the position visually for Victoria to see, but from Tom’s perspective one of his many appendages was lost, though he could see the steam as well through all the little sensor eyes he now had.

  Those sensors were minimal, as was the comm systems in order to keep the sparks small enough to be effective and not the equivalent of warships in atmosphere. He knew that increased their ability to be hacked or jammed by an opponent, but the lizards weren’t going to be doing that and these were just the prototypes. Besides, one couldn’t have a drone that did everything, so Tom had had to make a choice as to what specific role he wanted these for…and that had been anti-infantry and scouting missions.

  The tanks and turrets ahead of them were going to make him pay for that design limitation, but he had five mechs and 6 heavy walkers to compensate, meaning he wasn’t going to just sit in the rear and direct the battle. Victoria was going to have to fight in it while he rode piggyback inside the cockpit.

  That was where the danger came in, and if necessary he could cancel the entire exercise on a whim, but he needed to know how these sparks worked in actual combat short of using an invasion of a lizard world as a test bed. That would have been stupid for a number of reasons, but Tom also wasn’t going to use the lizards as research targets. They may have been enemies seeking to slaughter everyone else in the galaxy, but they were people too and he was going to treat them and everyone else with a measure of respect regardless of whether or not they reciprocated. If he had to kill them it’d be quick and efficient…and because they chose not to take the out he’d give them, either through retreat or surrender.

  And likewise the little bots on the horizon weren’t going to hesitate to try and kill the mech he was in. Star Force rarely used live fire exercises, but with his mental finger on the kill switch Tom knew it was worth the risk. They had to really fight to see how this would play out, then they could build better simulations going forward.

  To that end he linked with the leading leonardo and had it target the nearest turret and fire the small, clear Keema beam weapon that it carried over range, blowing apart the armored casing and killing the stubby raised bunker with a single, precise hit.

  5

  When Tom sent the order to fire the weapon he subsequently lost control of 12 sparks, reacquiring them a split second later and realizing he was already maxing out. There was no way he was going to be able to fight with this many so he dialed back and released 600 to automated functions, giving them a waypoint back to the walkers where they’d join in the nonfighting formation with the others. He’d pull units up from that pool as he lost others, but as soon as the heavy fighting started his mental processing power was going to be even more taxed and he didn’t want to go into it already stressed to the snapping point.

  The ‘snapping point’ typically occurred in one of two ways. The first was what had just happened, his mind would release sparks to keep the others functioning properly and units would just drop off his mental map. The second was that all his controlling functions would lag and he’d get sloppy, not fully seeing them or what they were doing and losing the crisp, reflex-like synergy he had with the machines now. That was the worse option and he’d been training himself into a habit of letting units go rather than degrading his entire army, but the numbers were off today.

  He should have been able to control this many units without too much difficulty. The sustained neural interface would give him the headaches due to prolonged activity, but the simulations he’d run had him handling this number of sparks before with reliable accuracy, else he wouldn’t have grabbed so many of them right off. For some reason reality was diminishing his control capability and he couldn’t put his finger on why. As a piece of his mind started to reflexively run through possibilities ranging from mechanical issues to sensory overload a full 1300 sparks went offline and just hovered in position waiting for instructions.

  Mentally kicking himself for that…and losing another 50 in the process…Tom cleared his mind of all other thoughts and put himself into the battle trance with the sparks coming back online and consuming every part of his waking mind. He was them and they were him, with his mind pressing its limits to be able to see so many viewpoints and feather the mental trigger on so many weapons and navigation options. Normally an Archon in a nexus had to keep perspective over everything that was happening, but for this controlled experiment it was just about the combat…targets and kills and nothing else. He needed to know what he and the system was capable of before scaling back for more reliable operations.

  As he maneuvered the skirmishers around he triggered more explosives, losing a handful of them but clearing the path for the mass of others to move through in clusters. There was a band of hidden turrets and traps stretched across the landscape that had been arranged by another Archon so Tom didn’t know of their locations, but once a corridor was punched through it there was a stretch of what appeared to be clear space leading up to the swarms of infantry bots.

  Suddenly that clear space grew a spread of targets as more turrets popped up, having ignored the skirmishers and made themselves visible only when the masses of sparks were above them. They fired into the hordes with phasers and rockets, hitting many simply by firing without having to aim and getting multiple units with some of the explosions. The armor on the sparks was decent, but they were so small that they couldn’t pack much onto them for lack of available space…and the rockets’ yields were considerably high, enough to level a building and were only slightly smaller than a lizard debt pack.

  Tom reacted immediately, pulling the sparks away from each of the turrets to create a clear zone that would allow the sparks to fire on them without hitting each other. He raised up the sparks into rows on top of one another, forming a wall around each turret as they pummeled them with plasma streaks save for the few he left open for the walkers to target. The clear Keema beams shot across the distance and tagged them slowly, for the recharge on the weapon was considerable and only the first walker was in position to fire.

  He changed that up, having all of the leonardos fan out to get into firing position. Meanwhile a lot of his sparks were dropping offline from the damage and Tom began pulling a dozen or so out of the ‘waiting pool’ as needed…then the infantry bots accelerated across the landscape, coming up over several ridges like a flow of ants. They charged directly into the skirmishers, firing on them and taking several down as Tom surged the sparks forward, knowing this was going to stretch his mental limits. He stopped pulling up reinforcements as units went offline to the turret damage and waited for the snapping point to come as he started firing the weapons of more and more sparks.

  He was targeting each one of them manually with a bit of aim assist from their computer programming as well as guiding their movements, all individually. That allowed him precise attacks as well as unparalleled unit cohesion for all of the sparks were fighting as if they were of a single mind…which in this
case was literally true, for they were all an extension of one trailblazer.

  Tom’s mind began to fog up immediately, forcing him to cut loose another few hundred. That brought the crystal clarity back and allowed him to cut through the infantry bots with a variety of tactics similar in nature to naval combat, save these happened at a much faster pace. Damaged units were cycled off the front lines and into support positions while clusters were used to separate and flank the enemy formations. They too tried to use tactics again the sparks rather than just coming at them in a blind horde that fired on the nearest targets, but they couldn’t coordinate as effectively as the sparks could, leaving Tom’s forces with a decided strategic advantage.

  But they didn’t have a weapons advantage…or at least not much of one. They did have their armor and shields, but since the enemy was patterned off the lizards there were far more infantry bots than there were sparks, not to mention the tanks that were holding back behind a ridgeline. When the leading edge of the sparks crossed it they moved in, using the terrain to block the firing lines from the mechs.

  When that happened Tom sent Victoria a signal to take them in, with him bringing the escort drone mechs along with her. They would need to take the tanks head on, or otherwise their greater armor would allow them to eat up the sparks. In the future they’d try to develop anti-tank variants but right now all these could handle was anti-infantry, with massed attack as the only hope against heavier targets.