Star Force: Mastermind (SF32) Read online

  Fred-6992 was one of the closest Archons to the shipyard when the orders came through, offering him an overtop view of the huge building as he zipped his arrowhead along its flank heading for the far corner door as the shields dropped. Visibly it didn’t register. An invisible shield going down didn’t show up, but the vortex that formed above the armored door as it slowly began to retract was.

  With the interior clear door already having been removed, once the armor shell that covered 1/8th of the building cracked open the incoming water and out flowing air twisted around each other and made for all kinds of turbulence that Fred was happy to be far from. He continued his approach, slowing his speed so as not to arrive too early, and waited for the air/water exchange to finish out, noticing that the door wasn’t fully retracting.

  That was probably intentional to keep the equipment inside from being completely blasted apart by the water. He didn’t doubt he’d have a minefield of parts to navigate through once he got inside, but he’d definitely prefer it if the battleship’s hulk wasn’t broken up as well, that way at least he’d have a predictable structure to zip around hunting lizards rather than a chaotic mess.

  Truth was, he wasn’t sure how much damage the water was doing, but given the weight of it falling from the height it was, plus the pressure the water was under with a mile and a half of ocean pushing down above it, he definitely didn’t want to be inside while the transition was taking place.

  The fact that they’d gotten to this point was a bad sign, but if the subsurface tunnels were already flooded and filling up with lizard infantry then bringing the arrowheads inside made sense…even if they had to junk the shipyard in the process to do it. Also, he knew they could have taken the long route and carried the arrowheads through the city and down to the tunnels via the cargo lifts, so the fact that they were intentionally flooding the shipyard to allow them access told him that the situation inside must have been worse than he thought.

  Fred was pleased to see a number of lizards get sucked up into the vortex. That hadn’t been part of the plan, but there were hundreds swimming over or near the shipyard that got caught up in the turbulence and knocked around, if not sucked inside. He didn’t know if they’d survive or not, but at least it was disrupting their movements, of which the arrowheads and other craft had done little to stop. Fred alone had stunned/killed hundreds of them in the previous hours, but the enemy was pouring an unbelievable number of the ‘ground’ troops into the assault, far more than he’d thought they’d have in play on the entire planet.

  The vortex, or more accurately, vortexes, lasted several minutes before the entire mile+ long building was filled with water. Even then there were still erratic currents flowing around the entrance but Fred wasn’t going to wait any longer. By then several other arrowheads had assembled around the area, and as soon as one of them started heading in the others followed suit and jetted up to the crack in the doors, then dropped down inside, visibly quivering as they got buffeted around by the remaining turbulence.

  Fred passed through the ‘small’ gap easily, given that it was wider than a football field, and dropped down on top of a skeleton of a battleship directly beneath. He followed the others as they pulled up and skitted along the underside of the doors until they got past the skeleton to the open water surrounding it…which was littered with debris and lizards.

  Before he could zip over and tag his first with the V-shaped stun blade on the front of his craft, he got a ping on his battlemap from one of the Archon teams near the entrances. He followed it, or rather navigated to it around the floating junk, and came in slowly on the doorway to an offshoot chamber where he saw numerous Archon ID tags floating.

  Making sure not to hit any of them he ducked his arrowhead in first, with another four following behind him with the others moving around the shipyard to other locations, and immediately finding a cluster of lizard infantry to target as they closed with a knot of Archons who were fighting hand to hand with some others. They looked to be holding their own, but the numbers definitely were not on their side.

  Fred plowed right into the enemy troops, ignoring their plasma rods given that he was coming at them from a backside angle and he didn’t think they’d seen his approach…nor were expecting it.

  He put the point of the arrowhead dead center in their formation and busted his way through, hitting some with the stun weapon and others with the sides of his tiny ship, knocking the whole group apart and making easy pickings for the arrowheads following him. They spun around the large chamber, taking down others and allowing the Archons in the water to finish off the stragglers before the arrowheads left them behind and ducked into the tunnel entrance, seeing a hoard of infantry ahead, most of whom appeared to still be scattered from the currents created by the flooding of the shipyard.

  “Hold up, Fred,” Sera-10483 said over the comm as she fought to catch up to him in her own arrowhead. “Let’s go in side by side.”

  “Gladly,” the other Archon said, coasting forward until hers came up alongside, then the pair accelerated hard ahead and began catching the lizards off guard as they plowed through them, keeping their mental fingers crossed and hoping they didn’t take too many plasma rod hits in the process.

  Far outside the fence line Vander was approaching the lizard fleets surrounding Manaan, jetting forward in his streak as he sized up the enemy alignment. His ship, low on power as it was, was faster than anything the lizards had, but if he got too close he’d be in trouble…and his mission now was to get inside the fence, not engage the ships outside.

  “Ok,” he said, flexing his back for the umpteenth time in the cramped cockpit that had been his home for far too long. “Here we go.”

  He angled the streak to the left, ran it out about 500 meters then banked back right and started a shallow ascent as he ran the water jets up to maximum power…then he kicked in the anti-grav and his ascent steepened. His speed also ramped up until he became a long, thin missile cutting through the water towards a gap between the lizard ships drifting around the 38 mile perimeter.

  The point he’d chosen had no large ships nearby, but there were hundreds of sharks moving about in between and they’d seen him coming, given that they were now moving to intercept him where they thought he was going to cross their lines.

  Vander held his nerve and his line, knowing that they weren’t going to be able to predict his exact spot given his anti-grav ascent…plus he kept wavering his line a bit to keep them guessing, which was difficult given the speed he was moving, for every little twitch of the nose moved him several degrees due to the friction of the water, making his entire ship a directional pane despite its needle-like hull.

  He kept a close eye on the altimeter, knowing he had to nail that one exactly, or nearly. He had a little leeway there, but not much.

  As he got near the sharks, most of which were still lateral of him, he saw minnows start popping up on his sensors by the dozens and forced himself to breathe. There was no shooting them down, he simply had to outrun them, and given the speed he was bringing in, so long as he passed them cleanly, he doubted those already fired would be able to reverse course fast enough to catch him on the other side.

  However, as he closed to parallel with the sharks they continued popping out more minnows…and those were coming at him from the side at nearly his speed and accelerating quickly.

  He saw most of the first minnows pass behind him and arc around, trying to fall in on his tail. He mostly ignored them, watching his line and just hoping none of the little torpedoes got lucky. The fence was just ahead and he was nearing the end of his ascent as the minnow count pursuing him passed 100. Vander wasn’t counting, and when he saw he was going to stay ahead of them by at least a small margin he ignored all but his trajectory, making a few small last moment adjustments as he neared the fence.

  Given the speed he was traveling, which was insane for an underwater craft, he wasn’t going to risk shooting the gap in the fence…so instead he chose to
go with something a bit more flashy.

  A few hundred meters before he reached the top of the fence, which was a single layer reaching up to just above the waves, he adjusted his angle of climb heavily, pointing the nose higher up and shifting his anti-grav from lateral to vertical, ramping the streak out of the water and into the air…

  Like a javelin it shot up, arched over, and came back down in the water on the far side, clearing the fence top by more than 20 meters. The minnows that hadn’t already ran out of fuel lost track of the ship when it was in the air and went after the closest proximity target they could find…which was the fence.

  They swarmed to it, detonating against the thick metal pylons and barely nicking them with their small explosions, leaving Vander’s skeet unpursued as he shifted the anti-grav back over to lateral and sped in towards the Highwind that sat in the water a couple of kilometers ahead of him and more than halfway down from the surface.

  He could see sporadic blue flashes from the plasma columns as they targeted the seafloor, trying to hit or scatter the thousands of lizard infantry that the battlemap had tagged crawling over the fence line interior like an infestation of ants. Vander wanted to help out with them, knowing that the battleship wasn’t equipped for such small scale combat, but he knew the major fight was occurring indoors so he set course for the now flooded shipyard, passing by several smaller Star Force capital ships floating in place and targeting what infantry they could, though by now most of them had expended their ammunition and were awaiting resupply.

  Vander knew that wasn’t likely to come with the support structures around the city under assault, and even as he shot his streak across the interior landscape he saw a large shield column rise up above the city and connect to the atmosphere, indicating that a transport was either coming down or going up.

  That meant they were beginning to evacuate the city, and if he was going to get into this fight now was the time.

  Once he reached the shipyard he dove his streak down through the large crack in the topside doors, knocking aside lizard infantry that were now pouring down into the facility through the crack as a swarm of arrowheads were waiting below to ambush them.

  They made way for his streak, after which he literally had to blow through the unconscious/dead bodies floating inside to get down to the bottom of the shipyard to where he snaked his way around the debris and battleship skeleton over to the tunnel entrances, picking the one he thought held the quickest route to the heaviest lizard concentrations below.

  “Heads up, people,” he announced over open comm to the Archons’ helmet receivers, but excluded any ship ones. “Streak coming in. Point me where I’m needed.”

  6

  “Vander, that’s not going to fit around the corners,” Kyler’s voice said over the comm as the Archon shot his craft down the flooded tunnel, knocking aside lizards that got in his way like they were bowling pins, though most survived the impacts.

  “I can at least disrupt their movements,” he argued, coming up to the first crossroads intent on trying to turn anyway. The tunnels had never been designed to be flooded, so he doubted anyone had considered the possibilities of ships moving through them, though he did see several arrowheads moving about on the battlemap ahead of him.

  “How many PDM do you have left?”

  “Full load, plus four torpedoes if I can find a use for them. They get anything other than infantry in here?”

  “No, just the little guys. Play train as long as you’ve got lizards to kill, then ditch the streak and take it to them hand to hand. The only way we win this one is by racking up an insane kill count. They can’t get their fleet in past the battleships yet, so this is their only play and they’re going for broke. They’ve been mass assaulting choke points and using their det packs to take down the containment shields and flood sections ahead of them, so watch it when you get close and use needlers on any carrying packs at range.”

  “Evac?”

  “We’re not giving up the city,” Kyler said emphatically, “but if they break through into the main building things are going to get messy and I don’t want noncombatants getting in the way.”

  “Copy that, but I wouldn’t assume they’ve given up on the fence line. They’ve got a freaking huge fleet camped outside that I had to run my ass through to get back here.”

  “I know,” Kyler said calmly. “That’s the battleships’ fight right now, this is ours. Get into Halo mode and work on our kill count.”

  “Happy to,” Vander said, stopping at the intersection and bending his skeet at the midsection. Using only the anti-grav for maneuvering he tried to tip the needle-nose to the left into the next section, but the ship was too long and even with the bend in the hull the curve wasn’t sharp enough. He pounded the tip against the wall, then wiggled the hull around a bit seeing if he could goose his way through, but it was no use. He was stuck with forward and back only.

  “Ok,” he said to himself, switching over to weapons control as he backed up and straightened out, “let’s make this death row then.”

  He picked up a cluster of lizards ahead in his tracking display and fired a PDM out at them. It was larger than the versions fired by the needler pistol but it operated off of the same technology. The little missile spat ahead and swam to its target and detonated, killing the lizard it hit and wounding those around.

  Vander’s streak spat out several more, then he reversed direction and backed his way up the tunnel with the more blunt end of his ship pushing a significant wall of water ahead of it. Those lizards that he’d knocked aside before were hit again, then when they became visible in his forward arc he popped them with PDM at close range, making it feel like he was playing a videogame in reverse.

  He moved his streak all the way back out into the shipyard, then swam it around to another tunnel entrance and proceeded down it, shooting all the lizard groups he could come across while simply ramming the individuals. This process he repeated for all the tunnels, including an angled spur off of one that he was able to make the bend for.

  Vander patrolled the stretches he was capable of maneuvering down while the arrowheads in the shipyard and above kept disrupting the incoming lizard flow as much as they could. The other streaks in play were elsewhere, shooting up the lizards as they crossed the seafloor, as was the rest of the interior defense fleet, but the carpet of invaders kept coming in numbers that seemed unfathomable.

  Four hours later…

  “Close them, now,” Kyler said in between plasma rod parries with three more of the never ending lizard infantry.

  “What about the Archons outside the doors? There are several dozen of you,” Linda said from the command level.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said, jabbing one of the lizards with its own plasma rod after a Fornax burst that disrupted the nervous systems of all three. “Shut them now.”

  “Closing,” Linda said, nodding to another staffer in the city’s control center who pressed the final commands into the console before him. On the central holographic display detailing the subsurface battles they were gradually losing, the five tunnel entrances into the city flashed with highlights as meter-thick doors began to inch their way into position, physically closing off the entrances where before there had only been containment force fields.

  It took the better part of a minute for them to all close, with Archon and Regular troops ducking back through at the last minute as the lizards approached two of the positions on foot, with the wall of water held back a few sections in each location by still intact energy fields.

  “Doors closed,” she told Kyler. “Good luck.”

  “So long as they have det packs they’re still coming through,” the trailblazer reminded her. “We just bought ourselves some more time. Beef up our defense lines inside.”

  “On it,” she said as Kyler cut the comm from his end, no doubt busy killing more lizards.

  “We’ve got a flight of dropships and mantises inbound from Seaquest,” another staffer reported.
“They’re requesting permission to land in the city.”

  “Are we clear?” Linda asked, glancing at the hologram but not relying on her cursory look.

  “No aerial lizard contacts showing. No known launch capable submersibles.”

  “Open shafts 3 and 4. Launch two skeets on patrol.”

  Up on the ocean surface two tiny shield columns reached up from the seafloor and broke the surface, then began widening as they pushed a mile’s worth of water aside, gradually creating a pair of open air corridors capable of carrying the wider aerial craft straight down into the city. As those formed two smaller ones manifested beside them and launched the skeets into the air where they split up and began circling around the perimeter.

  All of Manaan’s transports had already left the city with passengers onboard and had yet to return. The incoming flight was from their twin city, carrying Archons and Regulars along with a number of small aquatics craft. Those carrying personnel went straight for the open shafts, with a pair of Falcon-class dropships being the first to settle into a hover and carefully descend down into the shafts with the ocean water poised around them in heavy walls ready to come crashing down on top of them if the shields failed.

  Four Dragon-class dropships ignored the shafts and landed in the water itself above the city, opening up their holds and releasing schools of arrowheads into the war zone below. With their cargo released the dropships slowly rose back up, draining their holds of the water, then made their way over to the entry columns and got in line behind the others, ready to take on additional Manaan evacuees.

  Paul’s mind was working frantically, his eyes darting across three different holograms in the command nexus as he was Ikrid linked into the system. He saw an escaping opportunity to take out several lizard ships in the chaos and knew he had to act quickly before the enemy took its good fortune and fled.