Star Force: Starchaser (SF69) Read online

  That was one of the primary challenges for Tom today, to see what he could do against them. The sparks were little more than floating micro turrets that could be taken out with a single tank blast, so it was going to be in the maneuvering that he gained an advantage rather than through any shield recharging strategies that the Archons used heavily in naval combat. Virtually everything Star Force built had that longevity in mind, but Tom was going to have to go a different way against the tanks his mechs couldn’t take down.

  He barely noticed as Victoria opened fire on the closest one, seeing it through the ‘eyes’ of the sparks and not the mech’s telemetry. He was viewing the other four but not the morpheus, allowing him to handle more of the drones in lieu of keeping in the loop as to what Victoria was doing. If his mental control were a hurricane, then the morpheus was the calm center of that storm that he was completely blind to…which made his copilot even more invaluable in keeping him alive.

  Tom knew he was being crude with his control, but right now he was using only three options for each spark. Target and fire, position change, and altitude change. When he needed a lot of plasma beams on a tank he’d raise up and stack the sparks into a wall, or form a brick of them that would push into the infantry bots, flaking off dead sparks and driving well into their formation in order to disrupt it. He’d send reinforcements up that corridor so they could fire on the others from the sides, getting more guns on target and managing the flow of bots that kept increasing with every minute.

  Had these been Regulars, Knights, and Archons on the ground they would have necessarily turtled up and worked to kill off those closest to them, weathering the storm through armor and shields and rotational strategies in order to keep anyone from getting killed, but since the sparks were just machines Tom could be more aggressive and abandoned most of the shield recharging formations and just hammered the opposing infantry. One on one the sparks would win easily, and it was important for Tom to keep the bots from massing too densely, else their combined firepower would eat through the sparks quite fast.

  To do that he sent clusters shooting out into the enemy formation like fingers, then spreading them out and sending units right into the midst of the enemy formations expecting to lose them, but not before they killed many bots and thinned the lines…at which point he’d surge the others and wipe them out using traditional cycling strategies to preserve the rest of his mechanical troops.

  It worked well enough that he saw the infantry bots start to pull back after about 12 minutes of fighting…then the tiny bit of his brain that was still left to wonder realized it was because the walkers had just gotten up over the ridge and into firing position. These leonardos were configured mostly as troop transports, but the defensive weaponry on them was more than sufficient to do damage to armored targets at range, not to mention some point defense weapons for if the bots ever got close enough to start chipping away at their legs.

  Suddenly there were more targets popping up, which Tom only noticed due to their proximity to the walkers. He and the mechs were up with the tanks now, leaving the walkers in the back with the extra sparks tagging along in preprogrammed navigational mode. He wasn’t seeing through them, only the walkers, when the hidden doors under the ice opened up and broke through the cold camouflage and spilled out swarms of the infantry bots right into the midst of the neutral sparks.

  Not one of them fired back, for they couldn’t without Tom’s control…forcing him to choose between fighting up front or disengaging his mind from those so he could defend the walkers…who couldn’t very well shoot down into the swarms of sparks without destroying them as well.

  “Damn,” he whispered, losing control of over a thousand for a second when he uttered the word and lost concentration. It took him another second to decide to send the neutral sparks off to distant waypoints, having them run away from the walkers rather than switching control over to them or abandoning the front lines. They were faster than the infantry bots and quickly cleared the area, letting the leonardos have clear firing lines down near and around their feet.

  A handful of Sammy turrets opened up on the bots, killing several with showers of yellow energy spurts that were actually a very high cyclical rate of the same beam firing tiny bits of bolts. Each turret bathed an area where the infantry bots were, for Tom couldn’t precisely target them without abandoning more sparks on the front lines, instead using area of effect commands and having the onboard computers handle the distribution patterns.

  Instead of running or chasing the sparks the infantry bots ran under the walkers and fired on them with their tiny phasers, doing no damage to the armor with the walkers’ shields covering them. Those were virtually impervious to the small weapons…up until some of the bots began ramming the legs and detonating against them.

  The shield strength dipped in chunks with each explosion and the phaser bursts only added to it in the hundreds of strikes per second. Tom forced himself not to calculate how much damage was being done and how much time he’d have, else he’d lose control of more sparks. He made the choice to let the walkers fend for themselves and ordered them to group up closer and share their point defenses as he continued to press the assault against the main infantry wave.

  There was no victory end to this engagement. They were meant to fight and that was it, with the results being measured afterwards to determine weaknesses and efficiencies. His opposition was going to do as much damage as they could and they’d just found a way to mess up his plans, so rather than aid them by scrambling to make changes he continued on, letting them chip away at one of the leonardo’s legs as he kept the most number of sparks engaged as he could.

  Meanwhile Victoria was hauling him around in the morpheus kicking the crap out of the tanks with her maulers and stitching the infantry bots with her anti-air pods whenever she could get an angle forward. A lot of anti-air defenses, whether they be man-sized or planetary, did not lower to ground level to avoid being disabled from such strikes. A big orbital battery tipping over to target things like Skarron walkers could be a huge boost to a city’s defense, but likewise that battery tip would bring the sensitive pieces of that weapon into the firing line of the ground troops.

  That was why they were normally covered in a shell of armor or building that would keep them safe from all but air assets while they exclusively targeted the same. Some units like the mechs had experimented with shoulder-mounted pods that could tip over and double as anti-infantry mods, and that’s exactly what this morpheus had been outfitted with. The small sammies roasted the infantry bots with single hits, allowing Victoria to keep the little det pack bots from getting up to her mech’s legs while their numerous phaser hits kept chipping away at her mech’s shields.

  She didn’t know what Tom was doing other than what the battlemap showed her, but there was a beehive of activity all around and she just did her job and focused on what was affecting her mech and what targets she could hit without jeopardizing their safety. There were a lot of tanks out there, in the hundreds, so she chose the ones that were separated from the others and took them on while the flanking drone mechs stayed alongside or drifted off slightly to go after other targets, always cycling back around into formation.

  Tom was controlling them as well and it made her wonder why she was even here when he could have controlled this mech just as easily. It would have meant a few less sparks under his control but she didn’t really see the need for her to be here up until a large group of tanks came straight for them and the infantry bots shifted, heading kamikaze towards the drone mechs and firing some unknown weapons mods at them…which amounted to tow cables wrapping around their legs.

  “What the hell?” she said, turning her maulers at the infantry in addition to the sammies to try and thin those around the morpheus and prevent any of them getting close enough to fire the cables, for they all looked the same externally so she couldn’t identify which they were and pick them off prior to firing their concealed weapons.

  But
as it was there were none coming at them anyway. They were meant to disable the morpheus’s escorts while the tank formation headed to pick off the quarterback.

  Victoria knew that as long as she kept them moving and in play that Tom would take care of it, so she didn’t try to head towards the tethered mechs as the enemy would expect, but rather went the other way and waded out into the infantry battles expecting the leonardos to pick off the tanks or the sparks to swarm to their defense…except that the help wasn’t coming. There was no change in the flow of battle other than the enemy tanks moving faster than they were and encircling them with the infantry actually being stepped on as they tried to slow the morpheus through sheer numbers grouping around its feet.

  She turned the mech’s torso and blasted two tanks with her maulers, one shot each, then got slammed with a series of blasts in the mech’s back and the shields nearly breached. Twenty seconds later they did go down as the tiny little phaser blasts added to the continuous tank hits and the rear of the mech was exposed, now taking armor damage.

  And still there was no help coming to their aid.

  “Tom, we’re getting cooked!” Victoria warned, hoping her voice would bring his attention to them. She waited, fighting it out but still seeing no response. She was about to ping him on the battlemap but decided to go the drastic route since this was a training fight and used the emergency override, pushing a button that momentarily severed Tom’s connection to the army around them.

  “Feel like covering our ass?” she asked as he snapped back into awareness of his body and what was around him.

  “What happened?” he asked, quickly seeing the status displays around him and noticing the mess they were in. “Why didn’t you ping me?” he said, reconnecting to the sparks nearest him as well as the leonardos, with two of them popping tanks immediately.

  “Why didn’t you see it happening?” she countered, then remained silent as they both had to focus on what they were doing. Tom got them the reinforcements they needed before their armor was breached, then they pulled back and recharged their shields before diving back in for the last round of fireworks before the enemy forces were spent and the battle wore down to a few handfuls of units.

  Eventually the end signal was given by the opposition and Tom put all his remaining units into standby as he pulled out of the intense control mode and returned it to a chess game, telling units where to move and letting them float there on their own.

  “I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened.”

  “How’s your head?”

  Tom didn’t respond for a moment, flicking away several layers of numbness before the pain materialized. “Worse than I thought. I think I zoned that out too.”

  “That was very untrailblazer-like of you,” Victoria noted. “You guys are usually on top of everything before it happens.”

  “No argument there,” he said with a sigh as he massaged his forehead with a pair of fingers. “I guess we’re a lot further away from a working prototype than I thought.”

  “You can’t fight like that,” she warned. “You have to know everything that’s going on or we’re going to get slaughtered.”

  Tom smacked the back of his head against his seat in frustration. “I know. I know.”

  6

  August 11, 2825

  Hyperion System (Zeta Region)

  Yert

  Mina Delari stood on the stage in front of the crowd of some 238,458 people singing the last song of her concert, hand reaching toward the sky boxes overhead as a waterfall spilt out over her, drenching her from head to toe as the chemical it was laced with dissolved her hair tie, her shirt, shorts, shoes, and every other thing on her body over the course of the following 15 seconds, leaving her fully nude and ‘exposed,’ as the song was titled, in her signature finish to her performances.

  The Human female stood there as the last of the water washed the scraps of clothing off her and the crowd roared so loud she could actually feel the stage vibrate. She stood there smiling as she dropped her arm and posed, letting them get a good look at her as the song music ended and a finishing theme took its place, signifying the end of the concert and her farewell to the crow. Mina lingered for more than a minute, then walked back to a circle on the ground that only she could see and turned to give them one final pose, this one an X with arms raised and legs spread wide, then columns of steam rose up from the stage floor obscuring her for several seconds before dissipating and revealing her to have vanished.

  Mina rode the lift down into the floor, stumbling slightly as it had to accelerate fast to get her clear and the hatch covered, then it slowed to a stop and she stepped off into the prep area below with assistants waiting for her. Per usual she didn’t accept any clothes from them, for once she ended a concert in the nude she remained that way until she got back home. One of her maturia handlers had told her during sexual training that if you had ‘it’ don’t be afraid to flaunt it, and she’d taken that advice to heart over the past two years.

  She did accept a mug of Xerta, which was one of the current soda pop flavors popular amongst the Axius colonies that she was a native of. It had only been 6 years ago that she’d graduated from the maturia without a credit to her name and only a small, basic quarters module to live in and now she was touring the ADZ in her own private jumpship.

  Mina took a couple gulps, knowing it would help her slightly sore throat from getting any worse and looking forward to a day of travel so she could get some sleep. This was the 18th concert on this planet in the past 10 days and her voice was nearly spent, but she’d made it through and would have a bit of respite until her next concert series on Priot, including two on the new tier 3 continent. She’d never performed for the ‘elite’ before and had actually thought they just worked round the day without any entertainment facilities but apparently she’d been wrong. The professional concert circuits were starting to go through the new regions now that they were getting established and that meant there were credits to be made, else they wouldn’t have bothered.

  Mina’s team escorted her through the stage facilities with lots of workers pausing to take a few seconds of awe at seeing her naked. Nudity wasn’t banned in Axius or Star Force, but most people still chose to wear clothes enough that going in the buff got a lot of attention…then again she was also in insanely good shape and that never hurt. The floors were clean, as was the rest of the facility, so she didn’t mind walking around nude and did so as much for her reputation as for herself. She’d been sexually shy in the beginning, but now reveled in just being herself and not hiding anything.

  She didn’t get a buzz anymore, just a sense of freedom that felt refreshing. The bath she’d just had helped too, washing off the concert’s sweaty sheen and leaving her with dripping blonde hair that she didn’t bother to ring out. It left a trail on the floor but there were no carpets so it didn’t matter. It’d dry, she’d dry, all was good.

  After sucking down half the mug she was led to an exclusive autograph signing for 500 lucky individuals. She smiled and engaged in a brief bit of chit chat with them and the press as she speedily got through all of the signings then bid them and the planet farewell as she was taken out onto a nearby private landing pad that had thousands of fans standing on nearby rooftops to see her depart. They roared in the brightly lit night sky when she emerged, shocking her for a moment at how many of them had found vantage points.

  Mina waved at them and blew a few kisses before walking up the ramp and into her dropship. Once inside she retreated up to the third level while her people finished loading up. There were two other dropships on the pad that would be packing up their gear and following them up to orbit but Mina’s left right away. Before it lifted off she was able to walk onto the clear upper deck and slide into her private jacuzzi that was not so much right now for most of the high placed onlookers could see down into that exposed part of her ship through the glass bubble covering it.

  She settled in, smiling but not interacting with them anymo
re as the warm water soothed her sore feet. The shoes she had to wear in order to make the dissolve possible didn’t fit well and always left her toes a bit raw, and that was one small reason why she didn’t put any shoes on afterward until she got back to this blissful tub. She looked out the bubble at the surrounding buildings as they finally began to lift off. Her fans disappeared from view leaving nothing but the tall spires that probably held a few more with telescopic lenses.

  Those last bits of cityscape finally vanished and she was left with just the stars above her as the dropship headed up through the atmosphere and into space, giving her a bit of much needed privacy. Her team knew not to disturb her after a show and would stay away until she called for them, which wouldn’t be for some time. Per her usual instructions the dropship took its time climbing to orbit and then over to the position where her jumpship was waiting, giving her a good two and a half hours to soak and relax with nothing but starlight and the occasional passing ship or station to keep her company…and those were too far away for anyone to snoop on her, not that they were going to see anything new. That was one advantage of getting exposed on a regular basis. You had nothing to hide, and when you had nothing to hide there was no need to worry.

  It was a kind of freedom that she’d discovered after her first nervous nude show. She’d done a short one completely in the buff her first year, which had ironically put her in the spotlight and sent her career off at a sprint once people finally got a chance to hear her music en mass. A hot body wasn’t enough to get ADZ-wide recognition, for there were many of them and most of the races didn’t find Humans attractive anyway, but they did like good songs and that was what she was good at. The nudity was just an extra and something she did more for herself than the fans…but if it made their day so much the better. She didn’t mind sharing her sexuality, visually anyway.