Star Force: Benefactor (SF19) Read online

  That area of the ship had also become the lizards’ holdout. From the outside it was still shielded, and the mass attacks against the Archons had stopped completely, switching over to defensive efforts in which they pulled back and fortified that third of the jumpship with most of their remaining crew, though the lizards had their own hunter teams roaming about, probing Star Force’s defensive perimeter. What had initially been a panicked and clumsy repulsive effort had evolved into a theatre of war inside the gigantic ship, one that Paul didn’t think could come to conclusion for several more weeks at the earliest.

  All the more reason he wanted to get inside and relieve the others. He was fresh and itching for action…but if the lizard cruisers did attack and he wasn’t here to deal with it, it was possible that they could defeat their fleet and put the boarding parties in a world of hurt, himself included, and that was simply too great a risk to take.

  After running some of his frustration out on the treadmill Paul returned to the bridge and relieved the Captain, who left to begin his sleep cycle after giving the Archon a brief update. Paul replaced him in the command nexus and pulled up the holographic display of the war taking place inside the jumpship.

  The view started outside the ship, then zoomed inside with chunks of the ship glowing blue, grey, and red. Some of them had detailed schematics, others were dead zones that hadn’t been mapped out yet. The blue areas had been secured by Star Force troops and either blocked off or guarded against lizard reprisals. They had been adding deck after deck to the blue for the past few days, earning each with a high lizard body count, so many in fact that they’d had to repurpose some of their construction bays as morgues, filling them with stacks of bodies and then drained of atmosphere to keep them from decomposing.

  They were also gaining so much ground that their numbers were getting thin. The hunter teams weren’t affected, but those Archons and Knights on guard duty were having to protect more and more territory, thinning them out where they couldn’t afford to physically block off connective hallways…though they couldn’t be sure that anything was completely blocked off, given the alien architecture, so they had to keep patrols roaming the safe zone in case any incursions occurred.

  The security personnel that had arrived with the supply ships had freed up most of them, allowing for a much larger push earlier this morning. Paul had stayed online during the campaign, coordinating directly with the Archon teams and essentially commanding the assault, then he’d caught six hours of sleep, hit the treadmill, and come back at it. Not being physically active as he normally would be during training allowed him to get by with less sleep, and as long as he had to play watch guard he was going to observe and coordinate as much as possible.

  Several things about the lizard response to the boarding parties didn’t make sense to him…and he was the one Archon on site that had the luxury of considering the overall strategy while the others focused on winning the smaller, hand to hand engagements.

  First off, there had been no det pack attacks. That had been his primary concern with mounting the attack in the first place. Given the confines of the ship their troops wouldn’t be able to spot and snipe them from range, and he hated the idea of losing an Archon to some stupid suicide bomber. Jason had been confident they could mount an effective defense, and Paul had wanted to be with him to help them do it. Not only had they not lost a man over the past 5 days, though several had been badly wounded by plasma burns, they’d not even come across a det pack laying in a storage area.

  They had to have some onboard, and given their lack of concern for the wellbeing of their own troops he was confident the lizards wouldn’t care about wrecking small pieces of their huge ship if they saw that they were losing. They’d wrecked the shield tower in the northern base on Corneria before retreating, denying the use of it to Star Force, so their reluctance to use their suicide troops against the boarding parties didn’t add up.

  Second, upon arriving the lizards should have moved away. Even with limited gravity drives operational they should have been able to slowly build up speed and make it hard for Star Force to catch them. He conceded the fact that if their inertial dampening fields didn’t extend through the entire ship anymore that any acceleration they undertook would have to be limited, but the fact that the ship hadn’t so much as budged a meter during their approach concerned him.

  He could partially have overlooked that fact if the lizards knew they couldn’t outrun his fleet, but when they had intact weapons on the front…now starboard side of the ship…why hadn’t they used the gravity drives in that section to swing it around and at least attack the Excalibur, who’d kept its distance while the smaller warships came up close.

  The third point that bothered him was the lack of response from their surface bases. He assumed that they knew of the attack on the jumpship by the Hycre, and if they were watching the position of the Star Force warships in orbit, which they had to be, then they would have seen him syphoning off ships from their defensive assignments and sending them out from the planet.

  Had he been the lizards he would have mounted some kind of attack against their facilities, either on the planet or in orbit. There were several orbital stations that no longer had warship guards, just automated defenses. A pair of cruisers could take one out if they were smart about it and used their anti-air weaponry to knocked down the missile salvos which would have to be split between the two ships, or if they weren’t then one could cover for the other, survive the onslaught, then tear the station apart.

  An even easier attack would have been to use one of the cruisers for a surface assault on one of their smaller outposts, or even to start picking off the defense turrets they’d been spreading across the forests of Corneria anywhere and everywhere they could. A lot of them didn’t have overlapping fields of fire yet, so why not just start picking off some of them while losing nothing but some shield energy?

  Paul didn’t have answers for these questions, but he knew the lizards could have been causing them more trouble than they were. He wanted to put it down to some psychological or tactical quirk, but he didn’t have enough information to make that assumption just yet. Bottom line was they were making slow but significant progress in taking over the jumpship while the lizards seemed determined, yet unable to stop them.

  How many more of them were on the ship was also a lingering question. They’d already killed 8,000 of them, but given the size of the jumpship there could be a great deal more than that holed up in the starboard section. The center region was mostly an unknown, though the hunter teams they had probing that section weren’t encountering high populations, so Paul figured that most of them had to be cowering behind the shielded section of the ship in case Star Force resumed its bombardment of the hull.

  “Paul?” Jason’s voice cut into the silence of the command nexus.

  “I’m here.”

  “We’ve got a situation. I’m out with one of the expeditionary teams…”

  “I’ve got your position marked on the battlemap.”

  “Then you can see that we’re pushing into some of the unknown territory. We just got finished with a nasty fight. A group of lizards were defending a set of doors that they really didn’t want to give up. When we’d fought through about half of them the chamber opened up and some heavy troops came out to stop us. They weren’t much taller than the others, but they massed probably twice as much and had an armored carapace. They came out unarmed and tried to claw at us with some nasty retractable…well they looked like short swords coming out of their wrists. They didn’t do anything but scratch our armor, but they survived a few plasma hits long enough to engage us hand to hand before we took them down.”

  “Same race?”

  “A variant, I’d guess.”

  “What was inside the chamber?”

  “A lot of tech I can’t identify.”

  “What’s ‘a lot?’”

  “An interconnected complex, twelve large rooms in total. Stuff is built into
the walls and partitions.”

  Paul studied his location on the map. “You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got the position marked. Do you want to hold or come back for it later?”

  “Tough call, we’re pretty far out. Record my telemetry and see if you can make anything out of it.”

  Paul isolated Jason’s signal and pulled up the camera view from his helmet. “I’m on, give me a tour.”

  Jason walked further in from the door where he was standing with several other Archons and began a lazy circle around the perimeter of the nearest section of the complex, making sure to look at each of the wall-like banks of vertical equipment cutting across the floor as if they were scratch marks. There were four rows, each of different length, with similar equipment embedded into the walls, making the entire area appear like a giant puzzle piece. Further on it connected to another chamber that was of different shape, but still with the puzzle piece feel to it.

  “Any clue?” Jason asked, walking into the third section.

  “No chairs or cubicles,” he commented, “but I get the feeling those are workstations.”

  “Feels like a library to me.”

  “Was anyone in it?”

  “After they came out to fight, no, but there are several exits they could have scurried out of.”

  As Paul watched, Jason passed closer to one of the banks of equipment, giving him a close up of the interface controls. There were more of the glowing nubs that they’d come to recognize as the lizard version of buttons, but they still hadn’t been able to identify any sort of keyboard pattern, nor were there any marking on or nearby the nubs to identify their function.

  There were some display screens, flowing with unintelligible lizard script, as well as geometric protrusions coming out a few inches into the walkways at random points. Paul thought some of them might have been containers, but he couldn’t see any latches or seams.

  “Are they all like this?”

  “Pretty much, though we only did a quick look to make sure the area was clear.”

  “Hold up…what’s that to the right?”

  “The arch?”

  “Yes. What’s on the other side?”

  “Just another chamber, but it is a bit larger. Same stuff inside,” Jason said, walking over and into one of the center rooms in the complex. There were three situated in a rough triangle with the others forming chains radiating out in ones and twos.

  “Ceiling’s higher too,” Paul commented.

  “If these are workstations, they’re too tall for the lizards,” Jason said, looking up at the top of the ‘bookshelves’ that were a meter over his head.

  “You’re right. I’m back to no ideas.”

  Jason walked around the corner of one of the banks, which were cut shorter in length and set perpendicular to each other in sections, and stopped short when he almost tripped over a piece of equipment the size of a trashcan sitting on the floor.

  Paul saw a display on top with flashing script that altered with each blink. “Jason…”

  “Fall back!” he ordered over the comm as Paul saw his helmet jerk around and move out of the chamber, backtracking towards the entrance. “Run!”

  The other Archons didn’t need to hear any more than that and began lazily walking out of the entryway with weapons raised, heading back down the hall that they’d fought their way through just minutes before, looking around for incoming enemies as they stepped over the fallen lizards.

  They were about halfway down the corridor when Jason came sprinting out of the doorway and turned hard right towards them, his momentum smashing him into the far wall. He ricocheted off it and jumped into the air over a pair of bodies at his feet, quick as a startled cat. The jump didn’t go very high, due to the heavy gravity, but Jason never came back down. Just past the apex of his jump the entire wall on his right blew out and into the other side of the hallway, taking Jason and the Archon team with it as the bomb the lizards had planted shredded the tech-laden complex.

  6

  “Jason’s team is down. A bomb went off. Get to them now,” Paul said from Morgan’s helmet as it sat on a crate beside her as she was gnawing on a ration bar in the middle of their field base. She laid the half-eaten chocolate covered bar on a crate and pulled her helmet back on, hearing the tell-tale clicks as it locked into her collar armor.

  “I’m not getting a hit on his position.”

  “Go here,” Paul said, giving her a waypoint. Nearby it were two other Archon tags. “I lost his signal when the bomb blew, but he wasn’t right on top of it. I can’t reach any of his team on comms.”

  “Isn’t anyone closer?” she asked, grabbing her rifle and running across the makeshift camp, tagging a couple others on the shoulders to get them to follow.

  “I’ve got two other teams headed that way, but I think you can get there the fastest. If they’re still alive I don’t want any lizards stumbling over them and finishing the job.”

  “On my way,” she said, adjusting comm channels. “Jason’s team is down, get to the waypoint as soon as you can,” she told those Archons following her a few steps back before she accelerated and soon lost them in the maze of the jumpship.

  Paul followed her progress from the Excalibur, wanting to head down to the shuttle bay and go over himself but knowing that he wouldn’t get there as soon as the others could. As expected, her dot on the battlemap was traveling faster than all the others and made it to the waypoint a good 3 minutes ahead of the other teams, with those Archons trailing her still 8 minutes back. Her dot merged with one of the two Archons’ from Jason’s team then his comm activated.

  “David’s down and out cold, but alive,” she said, pulling off the adept’s red helmet and finding a blood-soaked patch of sandy blonde hair beneath it, though it took on a ghostly hue in her helmet lights. A small rivulet of the dark liquid ran out of the helmet as she set it aside, but the injury wasn’t nearly as bad as his helmet looked with a puncture through the far left temple where a piece of metallic debris had imbedded and poked superficially into his head.

  Morgan stepped over and lifted a section of wall off his legs then dragged his unconscious body back down what was left of the hallway as her eyes scanned the area, looking for more signs of Jason’s team or lizard incursions, which could have been hiding anywhere in the debris piles. Walls and ceiling were gone, replaced by a cluttered cave of broken ship with the upper decks having fallen down in pieces to the lower ones. She was on the edge of a large crater that stretched at least two levels down and into which most of the debris had fallen, but there were still piles around the edge blocking her view and making her very cautious as she set David aside for others to deal with while she continued looking for the rest of the team.

  One more signal was still active on her battlemap, supposedly a dozen meters to her left, but all she saw was debris stacked up to her shoulders. Following the signal to the closest point she began prying off heavy components and tossing them aside like toys, frantically digging down to find the buried man.

  “Damn,” Rafa commented when he and his team arrived and dove into the recovery effort. They weren’t as strong as Morgan, but they more than made up for it with the extra hands. One of them attended to David while the others helped Morgan dig out Olsen, with one staying back and standing guard as he walked about looking for signs of other survivors.

  After a few minutes a bit of silver elbow appeared, trapped beneath a large severed beam that was itself pinned beneath a pile of debris that would take more than an hour to remove.

  “Clear me some footholds,” Morgan said, yanking yet another piece of lizard ship aside.

  “It’s going to take more than you to move that,” Rafa told her, brushing some smaller debris off the broken floor tiles that Olsen was laying on.

  “I don’t have to move it far,” she said determinedly, wiggling her back underneath it in a crouch so low it looked painful. “Be ready to pull him out.”

 
; Rafa stepped over and grabbed one arm while another of his team took hold of the other, then they waited for Morgan as the others continued to pull pieces off both the downed Archon and the beam.

  The ranger’s green armor was motionless for a long moment, then with a small grunt of effort the beam moved fractionally, shifting the debris around in a cascade of scrapes and whines.

  “Pull,” Rafa ordered, getting a couple of inches of movement out of the downed man. “His left leg is caught at the knee.”

  The beam shifted again, this time dumping a large piece off the top that fell down towards Olsen before one of the Archons caught and tossed it aside.

  “Got him,” Rafa said as the man’s leg came free and the pair pulled him out of harm’s way in a matter of seconds, allowing Morgan to drop the beam back down and crawl out of the cavity she’d been standing in.

  “There are more here,” she said, walking around intently, “but they’re not showing up on sensors.”

  “How many?”

  “Five more,” Paul’s voice answered. “They were all together save for Jason, who was further to the starboard in the same hallway.”

  “Not much of a hallway left,” Rafa told him. “Best guess on range from my position?”

  “The others should be right where you’re standing…Jason should be about 20 meters further down.”

  Rafa looked across three separate piles of debris in that direction, along with a lot of hanging, half severed components from the ceiling coming down to rest on top of them making for a navigational hazard, but one that he thought he could squeeze through.

  “I’ll look for Jason,” he told Morgan as he climbed up and over the first pile, ducking under a bulkhead set at an angle blocking his path. He slid down a meter from there, then had to climb up two more to get past more obstructions, constantly on the lookout for more bits of red or silver armor.

  “Found one!” he heard Morgan yell out behind him, but he couldn’t take time to worry about that. Jason, if he was still alive, might need every second he could give him.