Star Force: Mantle (SF92) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  It had cost them a lot, but they’d taken orbit and the land regions of the planet and were defiantly fortifying it against all opposition while openly mocking Star Force’s ability to protect the race that the Hashvi had claimed was their birthright to conquer. Now that their claim was being challenged directly and Star Force/Bandaii troops were nearing to breaching the opaque shield domes that prevented any knowledge of what was happening inside from getting, out and vice versa, scouts who had snuck near to the coastline and linked up with a few rebels within on short range comms had informed the Bandaii armies that civilians were being rounded up and ceremonially executed.

  It was claimed to be for any number of propaganda reasons, but it was understood to be an act of desperation on the part of the Hashvi, for they feared they might lose control of this region soon and they didn’t want their captives to potentially be freed. Better to kill them while they still had control, but as of yet they hadn’t resorted to just mowing down everyone in sight. They were still playing with them and doing so in a slow and organized fashion.

  How long even that would last was up in the air, but the Bandaii rebels were hell bent on getting in there and saving as many as they could and they weren’t listening to anything other than a full blown attack order from the Archons…who were going with them to try and help avoid any mindless attacks that would result from panicked rage. It wasn’t the best of situations to lead from, but leading they were.

  Ryen was coming in with some of the few Star Force assets available, but fortunately there hadn’t been a lot of need for aquatics troops in other campaigns and the bulk of those forces had been devoted to the Bandaii, with a good chunk of them already sprinkle engaged across some 50 miles of coastline in order to get under the shield perimeter that extended out from the shore. Reports indicated that inside it they were getting bombarded with some type of artillery, but that was the last update he’d gotten before dropping off the transport…which had been on a quick in and out due to the Hashvi aerial fighters that were patrolling around the shield perimeter.

  They were comm blinded by the haze, which was electromagnetic and visual, looking like a thin mist, but without naval dominance Star Force couldn’t secure the site so Ryen’s troops were being run in and offloaded quickly west of the main engagement and quite a ways back. Any closer in and the transports might have gotten shot down, and through the comm buoy he saw the exiting transports come under attack as they accelerated hard for orbit and returned fire with their decent complement of defensive weapons.

  That part was done, at least. His troops were all here though scattered over three separate areas. They were barely in comm range, and even as he watched one of his scouts disappeared from an area beyond them…then came back in a few seconds later and placed a waypoint distance marker to indicate how far their battlemap would be useable in this sludge that passed for water. The thicker material also slowed their movements a bit, but otherwise it was normal combat conditions. This deep in the water you didn’t normally get much light anyway, and the few Elarioni he had wore armor that covered their entire bodies, so they no longer visibly glowed to give away their presence.

  Several of the objects dropped off by the transports waited next to the mechs that were piloted by Bsidd, and when Ryen activated the miniature nexus programing in his armor he mentally connected to the 13 aquatic drones and brought them to life. It took a bit of focus away from his surroundings, but he didn’t intend to be doing a lot of hand to hand combat anyway. He was directing the others and now in personal command over the squid-like attack drones that massed as much as a small whale.

  He would have preferred having actual aquatics warships, but the transports required to get those here could not get past the naval blockade until they thinned down the ships further, so they were waiting in high orbit but the situation with the Bandaii couldn’t wait, hence Star Force was running down what smaller equipment it could along with troops while the naval fleet bought time and poked holes in the blockade at the cost of losing multiple drones.

  It also meant that Ryen wouldn’t be seeing orbit again anytime soon.

  And for that reason some of the crates contained prefab structures that he ordered a group of the Bsidd to set up in a ravine half a mile further to the west. It would serve as a fallback point and a place to get food, water, and additional oxygen, armor repairs, etc. He thought this far out would be safe from attack, but he was leaving a decent amount of troops here to protect it and to set up permanent defense batteries that were also in the crates.

  But Ryen didn’t need to stick around and oversee that, so once everyone was down and accounted for and they had their maximum spacing range set so they wouldn’t lose contact with one another in the mucky water, they all activated their armor jets and began trolling towards the distant shoreline. In the case of the Bsidd that was slightly faster than him, for their normal body cavities that were left as empty spaced in commando armor were not underwater. Rather, those spaces were filled with equipment and weapons, including more powerful navigation jets that caused them to become hybrid soldiers/ships with appendages sticking out and trailing in the water behind them.

  And the Elarioni scouts were even faster, with their jets adding to their already impressive natural speed, leaving Ryen the slowest of the group save for the mechs. Everyone adjusted their pace to them while the Archon tried to navigate using what little the sensors of his entire unit could tell him of the seafloor. It wasn’t flat in most places, with lots of jagged outcroppings and spires that rose up but did not fully connect to the surface. Those would have made it tricky for warships to navigate around anyway, but if necessary the smaller ones could have been cut away.

  As it was, there was a lot of terrain to move through and most of it was invisible to Ryen until it got within 300 meters. Their comms might punch farther than that, but their sensors didn’t. For that reason they all had to stay in formation and share data, with the unit quickly passing out of range of the surface buoy, cutting his link to orbit and the other units that likewise had buoys up and functioning.

  A group of his Bsidd were carrying additional cargo packages with more buoys, but he wasn’t going to leave a string of them for the fighters to pick off. He’d save them for later when needed, but it was obvious that this fight was going to be close quarters with the fog of war dominating. If the automated defenses ahead, wherever they were, could communicate and share information across landlines they’d have a huge comm range advantage, but their sensors would probably be even less effective than Ryen’s. He was going to have to use that to his advantage, for this entire peninsula was reported to be surrounded with heavy underwater defenses and the single land approach wasn’t much better.

  Most of that coastline had been evacuated by the Hashvi, moving the populace into controllable areas, but they’d thrown up shields covering the empty land areas anyway to prevent troops from dropping on them. They wanted to force a water fight, or at least a water landing, with their aerial craft just waiting to pick off whatever transports attempted to get to land, for they could get through the shield at various points and no doubt had plenty of reinforcements inside to poach the few miles of ocean under the protective veil even if landing craft got underneath it.

  The Hashvi had set up an unbeatable defense line against the Bandaii, and it was up to Star Force to find a way to get through…and to do it without getting the Bandaii army killed in the process.

  Ryen wasn’t going to have to worry about working with them, for they were all involved in the heavy assault to the north. He was going to approach on the south side of the peninsula that had its land bridge to the east. If reports of mobile units were accurate, most should have been heading to the west and circling around the perimeter, but he doubted they had all left. Making sure to avoid whatever was there, he drifted his forces far to the south to avoid the western defense line, taking him further and further away from the main engagement.

  It wasn’t until they w
ere within 4 miles of the shore that they picked up their first contact. A stationary turret attached to the side of an underwater natural pillar. Ryen had the Elarioni move ahead while the rest of his unit held position. They disappeared from his battlemap for quite a while, then eventually returned and updated his map with hundreds of turrets spaced ahead of them.

  He pulled up a diagram of one, limited as it was, and he saw ports on the exterior that suggested it was a projectile launcher of some sort, and he doubted it was line of sight. Torpedoes were something Ryen could deal with easily, but his Bsidd were another matter. They had intercepts loaded into their armor, but it was a limited supply and if this was a taste of the defenses ahead they’d run out of defensive ammo long before they got near the shield perimeter, let alone the shore.

  “Alright guys, time to get to work,” he said, talking to the mech pilots. “Need you to punch a hole through a turret field with extreme caution. We don’t know how many turrets there are and I assume an insane amount, so conserve armor at all costs. Primary targets,” Ryen said, transmitting them tags on the first five turrets he wanted taken down.

  6

  “Yes, Archon,” the Bsidd Delta piloting one of the aquatic mechs confirmed. “It will be done.”

  Seeing the targets marked ahead he got the mech up off the seafloor and hovered it forward along with its twin off to the left. He crept in gradually until he got an active sensor ping off the closest of the turrets, then stopped and held position. No return fire came, suggesting that they had a range advantage on them.

  Prepping a small test missile, he fired off a single shot that wove its way around a swirling current only to impact a defense shield several meters out from the turret itself. A stab of ruby red light shot back in the general direction the missile had come, but only made it three quarters of the way through the water until the energy was dissipated and traveling up to the surface in a line of bubbles.

  The delta, which stood some 7 feet tall and was referred to as a ‘tribush’ had three rows of appendages running in strips from its head down to its wider base. It had no central leg shunts like some of the other variants had, but rather the bottom appendages on the three sides were extra thick. They angled laterally more than vertically, giving the Bsidd the appearance of an ugly Christmas tree on a stand, save for this one had very quick reflexes and a steady nerve. Not all mech pilots were deltas, but a fair amount of them were due to their even temperament coupled with the ability to handle a lot of information hitting them in a short amount of time.

  ‘Don’t poke the tiger’ was a common explanation of the way they thought, often appearing stagnant while they waited for a task, but give them one and they’d pursue it relentlessly…but not recklessly.

  Which is exactly what was needed now, for with it being established that missiles couldn’t breach the shield on a single hit, the aquatic mech extended a shield column through the water until it touched the enemy shield, then it delivered through the vacuum in the invisible tube a miniaturized cleansing beam that popped the shield in an instant and continued on to core a deep hold in the exterior of the turret, though dampened slightly by the few meters of water it vaporized on the way through.

  With the shield down the Bsidd extended the column all the way up to the surface of the boxy device that was the size of a house and switched weapons, sending a Ta’lin’yi burst through that gutted the inside of the turret as a single missile made its way out. The shockwave for the explosion rocked the mech back and jostled the infantry further behind, but the target was successfully destroyed and was eliminated from the active battlemap, though the location of the dead turret was still marked for other purposes.

  The missile, apparently not having gotten a sensor lock on the mech, trolled around aimlessly until it quickly ran out of power, then the mech extended a shield column to it and destroyed it.

  “Well done,” Ryen said approvingly. “Keep picking them off patiently and watch for a counterattack. They’re not going to let us keep doing this indefinitely.”

  The Bsidd did as instructed and worked through the targets one at a time while the other mech did the same, cutting a corridor through the turret field for the infantry to pass through. After taking down dozens each they finally got their response in the form of a swarm of tiny attack craft. They were the size of missiles, but they didn’t explode on impact. Rather they swam up to the mech and bumped into it, releasing an energy discharge that it took on its skintight shield perimeter.

  At the rate they were discharging it would take hundreds of thousands of hits to take the mech’s shields down so the Bsidd didn’t bother attacking them, rather it continued forward with the little minnows nibbling away at it and proceeded to take down another turret.

  Ryen waited behind the mechs with the rest of the infantry as the little attack craft found both mechs and began to attack them, unable to get through the shields but filling the space around the machines with fizzing bubbles from the spillages of their point blank discharges into the surrounding water. According to the information from the other engagement zone that he’d gotten before submerging, these little attack craft were dangerous to infantry but only in groups of 5 or more. They’d eat through shield recharge rates with enough attacks, but to the lightly armored Bandaii they were deadly.

  “Pull back,” he ordered his Elarioni scouts, unsure of whether or not they could outswim these things just as one of them spotted more mobile contacts coming in of a larger variety.

  “The mechs are vulnerable,” one of them warned as Ryen saw her reverse course on the battlemap.

  “I know,” he said, shooting forward on his jets and ordering the Bsidd to come with him. “We have to stand our ground against this wave and thin them out. Pull back inside the shield generators.”

  “On the way.”

  Ryen swam up near to the leftmost mech as he put a waypoint down in between the two machines to set up the equipment on. Some of the Bsidd moved to secure that location while several dozen came with Ryen and went after the little attack craft trying to suck down the shields on one of the mechs. The infantry didn’t have shield columns to extend, but they did have torpedoes and the Archon authorized them to use some of them now, with tiny streaks coming off the Bsidd and heading towards the mech. A moment later there was a storm of discharges and vaporized water that rose up in a maelstrom towards the surface, eventually leaving the mech standing exactly where it had been before with far fewer attack craft around it, though some had only got buffeted upwards and were now swimming back down to it.

  Ryen ordered the mech to move closer to the central waypoint and dig in as he jetted ahead and fired up the mauler gauntlet on his left arm. It telescoped out past his hand into a small lance attached to his forearm that held a glowrod-like shield column 9 inches long that lit up the dark water around him. When he got to the mech several of the attack craft switched to target him but he held them in place telekinetically as he ordered the Bsidd to hold back and cover him from afar with missiles if needed.

  The one little machine that did get through to him he stabbed with the lance, breaking the tip of the containment shield and shooting the mauler energy inside and exploding the thing within half a second. The shockwave knocked him back and he lost his grip on the others for a moment until the churning water settled down, then he grabbed one with his right hand and squeezed, keeping its dangerous tip away from his body as he tested the strength of the material. It gave under the pressure but would not break until he added his telekinesis to it, which allowed him to snap the thing in half, disconnecting the weapon from the drive and crushing the power cell in the process.

  With that knowledge he knew he could kill a lot of these things single handedly and keep them from making contact with him thanks to his psionics, but they could overwhelm the Bsidd if too many of them came into play…plus there were the larger ones coming in.

  He updated the battlemap with waypoints for all of his units and they immediately began to red
eploy into their engagement zones as the mech Ryen was peeling the elongated footballs off of continued walking to its position. When it finally got there Ryen pulled back and gave it the go ahead to stop targeting turrets and begin point defense.

  The giant pointy legs dug into the soft seafloor as it claimed its position, then the shields went down in several places as panels opened up and the ‘sea vines’ shot out, curling around at sharp angles to impact the attack craft with the glowing buds along their length that contained similar mauler energy to that in Ryen’s gauntlet, only far more was contained in each bud. The attack craft popped instantaneously whenever one was struck and the vines actively sought out contact, whipping around and jabbing when needed and always avoiding one another. They gave the Zyra-class mech its name and made it a very tough fixed position to tackle with more and more panels opening up as swarms of addition attack craft flowed in, though a lot of them diverted to go for the infantry that soon came into view.

  Ryen and the Bsidd engaged them with their own small clusters fighting back to back until the shield generators came online. Rather than creating a protective dome around everyone in play they created strategic walls wherever Ryen dictated. These forced the attack craft to either target them and waste energy that otherwise could have been used against the troops inside, or cause them to divert around and into the openings where the Archon was stacking overwhelming firepower, including some mobile turrets that were mounted on the seafloor with Bsidd operating them from inside another tiny shield bunker.