Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) Read online

  “Try to match me closer. I’ll increase slowly,” Kleeva said, walking back to the start.

  “I feel like a youngling,” he complained, glancing around at the other identical courses being used nearby. Those Protovic weren’t going anywhere near this slow, and most of them were hitting scores that he hadn’t even come close to.

  “You are one,” she said pithily before giving him a countdown with her left hand, dropping it as she took off. This time he held to her pace better and they both impacted the wall at nearly the same time, then they reset and began to repeat the binary attack on multiple run-throughs, increasing their speed gradually as they progressed and per Kleeva’s choice…which was a much slower rate than Jenran preferred.

  They were up to their 21st repetition when he hit and bounced the wrong way, slamming into her left elbow as she rolled across the wall. He dropped to the ground and didn’t get up while she did, recovering and transitioning over to the pedestal. When Kleeva tapped it and turned around she saw him still lying on the ground clutching his crotch.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you think?” he groaned.

  Kleeva’s hand rose to cover her mouth as she laughed. “You weren’t closed up?”

  “Apparently not,” he said, embarrassed.

  “Why the hell not? You know I didn’t do that on purpose.”

  “Doesn’t really matter at this point,” he said, getting to a knee but rising no further.

  “But why weren’t you closed up?” she asked, referencing the pelvic plates on the males that covered their genitalia when not in use. Females had internal organs and merely an aperture that was not protected, but very hard to hit. If a male got caught with his plates spread and hit there with even the slightest bump it was said to be extremely painful.

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “I wasn’t concentrating when I hit the wall and I guess I…spread on accident.”

  “Because of me?”

  “You are one of the hottest girls here,” he said in mild defense.

  “Oh…really? You never mentioned you had a thing for me before…”

  “I didn’t plan to,” he said, wincing as he got up, then trying to stand still and let the unbearable pain bleed off. “I’m here to fight…not mate.”

  “You can’t do either right now,” she said, still smirking. “Wow. Never realized I had that effect on guys.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he asked, still in considerable pain that didn’t want to go away.

  “I’m sorry…but yeah. A bit.”

  “This is why you don’t do tandem runs.”

  “No, this is why you keep yourself closed up,” she argued, still not quite believing that he’d been caught off guard because of her.

  “I’ll remember that,” he said stiffly.

  “It really hurts, doesn’t it?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “How long before you start feeling…normal?”

  “Depends how hard you’re hit, and you stuck me good with your elbow.”

  “Actually, it was you that rolled into me, remember? At least we found your speed limit. Now you can work on gradually increasing it without losing control.”

  “I really hate you right now.”

  “What happened?” another commando trainee asked, coming over to where Jenran was standing with an awkward lean forward.

  “Don’t ask.”

  “He got caught open,” Kleeva told him.

  The other male tried to suppress a smirk, then looked at him with genuine concern. “How bad?”

  “Elbow.”

  “Ouch,” he said empathetically. “Been there before. Nothing you can do but wait it out.”

  “I know.”

  “My condolences,” the other male said, heading back to his own training drills.

  “I’m sorry,” Kleeva said after he’d left.

  “Not your fault…but I still hate you.”

  “At least that’s one thing girls don’t have to worry about in combat.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Do you want me to find you a medic?”

  “No.”

  “How about a stun gun?”

  Jenran didn’t answer vocally, but gave her a look that said ‘maybe.’

  “Tell you what. You rest and I’ll get back to my own training. Later on today, or whenever you fully recover, I’ll make it up to you,” she said, leaning in close to his head and whispering. “Pain now, pleasure later, all even?”

  “No need,” he said, mentally kicking himself for turning her down but he was in so much residual pain that his subconscious didn’t argue much. “Just an accident, and my fault. Forget about it.”

  “And what if I insist?” she said, gently licking his forehead.

  “Not really in the flirting mood right now,” he said honestly.

  “Oh…right. Sorry. I owe you, though. Guess we’ll continue this later then,” she said, stepping away and hesitating. “If you don’t find me, I’ll find you. I want to even up.”

  “Fine…later,” he said, sitting back down on the ground.

  Kleeva cringed and walked away.

  Jenran looked down at his crotch, then up at the wall where the misfortune had occurred. “Can’t get any worse,” he told himself, standing up and walking to the start position. If he was going to be in pain he might as well be getting something out of these minutes than just sitting and wallowing in discomfort…that and he didn’t want to attract any more attention.

  Making sure he was tightly closed up he jogged forward and very lightly hit the wall head on, rolling to the left and over to the pedestal. He didn’t even look at the score, resetting it and going back to try again. With each repetition the pain got less and less to the point where he was able to start processing what Kleeva had been saying pre-flirt.

  Right now he had to go slow, and that restriction made him realize she was right. He was worrying too much about his appearance and needed to work this from the slow end up. Now that he literally had no pride left there was no shame in taking these runs slow and trying to work on his impact deflection angles.

  Turning his brain off to everything else he just repeated the drill more times than he knew until he accidentally set a new personal best combined score…and at a lower speed than he had been attempting before. Frowning, he reset the drill and did it again, getting almost the exact same score, only 1 point lower. Jenran did it four more times the exact same way, ruling out the possibility that it was just an accident, then he hit the reset again and took his start position, the pain of his collision now almost entirely gone.

  He took off at full speed and tried to apply the same technique he’d been using to this attempt, not expecting to succeed but hoping to see that something had changed. When he hit the wall he bounced off randomly again, but he flopped onto the ground and got to his feet well enough and tagged the pedestal, seeing that the kinetic impact was decent, but more importantly he’d been able to feel his error on contact. There was no way he could have controlled it, but he wasn’t numbing up for that moment of impact like he had been before.

  Now that he could ‘see’ what was occurring he knew he could learn to do it like the others. In retrospect he realized he’d just been trying for too much and hadn’t allowed his senses to calibrate to the hard impacts. He’d been mentally flinching with each but now, having let his mind gradually adjust to harder and harder impacts, he could go through it ‘eyes open,’ which he tested with several more runs before slowing down again and picking up from where he’d left off on his gradual improvement, now confident that he’d be able to get this within the next few days.

  When he eventually quit he realized he’d spend the past 4 hours in the gym. He’d expected to be there half an hour and had to rush several other training elements before reporting for mandatory scripted sessions. He didn’t like having screwed up his morning’s workouts, but realized that the tradeoff was more than
worth it. He’d made a huge rookie mistake and now was wise to it, with the ironic part being that he probably wouldn’t have gained that insight if Kleeva hadn’t embarrassed him with that accidental collision.

  He’d heard stories of accidental training insights from others, and now it seemed he had one of his own to tell. He liked that, but more so he liked the increased capability it would give him, for he could apply the same insight to other areas even after he mastered the head ram. It was one of the unique combat tactics to the Protovic and he’d been feeling inadequate for not being able to do it up to requirements. His scores weren’t high enough to meet them yet, but it was just a matter of time now that he knew his mistake had been countered.

  Regardless of any sexual liaison with Kleeva that would result from this, his crotch knock had been worth it. He knew he’d never say that in the moment of pain, but it was now past and he still had his training insight going forward. It had sucked, and he wouldn’t be living down that stigma anytime soon, but on the battlefield things like that didn’t matter. Skill and ability did, and he’d just increased his slightly, however accidental it might have been.

  7

  July 5, 2888

  Ventrol System (lizard territory)

  Treymit

  Nephit took cover behind a boulder, tucking his appendages in behind as much of it as he could as his fellow Bsidd did likewise in four other spots. The lizards they were facing were being more stubborn than normal and weren’t walking out to their deaths like normal. They had numbers on the Star Force troops but not enough to really press the issue. Instead the lizards were operating in hit teams that were carrying one of their newest toys…a rocket launcher that did more concussive damage than shrapnel. Even a direct hit wouldn’t take down Nephit or his fellow Betas if their shields and armor were full, but that’s not what the lizards were going for.

  The stupid explosives would physically move the Bsidd they hit, knocking them over or even flinging them through the air when the lizards shot at their feet. If they got a good bounce the lizards would rush them when they were out of position, and the little bastards were getting good with combos, making it necessary for the Bsidd to not group up too much and keep to cover whenever possible. His team had two snipers in the back that were working through the enemy ranks, so right now they just needed to buy time.

  They had two Archons with their unit of some 500 Bsidd, and they’d ordered them into a defensive position, telling them to turtle up and hold ground. Ahead of them was a lizard stronghold they were trying to knock out, one that still had anti-air cover to keep the aerial division back, so they were going to take it down the hard way. It hadn’t occurred to Nephit unit a few minutes ago that the lizards had flanked them with reinforcements and now surrounded them on all sides…hence the turtle maneuver.

  He’d fought in a few of these situations before, knowing they were dangerous if they screwed up, but more often than not the lizards would overcommit and turn their advantage into defeat. That wasn’t happening here, for the little green vermin were fighting smart and chucking rockets into them whenever they could. His armor had taken a gash on two of his appendages, but his shields had reformed over it before it could get worse. Others had also taken some armor damage, but everyone was still combat capable so he wasn’t worried too much. If they were in trouble the Archons would tell them what to do, and right now they were just holding ground as they’d done so many times in the past.

  A phaser shot skipped across the boulder’s surface, blowing up a spray of molten dust as it passed and partially hit him in the helmet. His shield caught it but he ducked down a bit further, having thought he was too low to be shot already. He got a ‘hand’ signal from another Bsidd across a gap and hiding behind a dead tree on the otherwise rocky terrain, prompting him to curl up his appendages and roll like a ball out into the open. When he took fire, as expected, he just kept rolling like a tumbleweed as four others stepped out and returned fire. He didn’t see how many of the lizards were hit, but when he got to the other side and took cover behind a rock near the tree those there gave him a nod of respect, meaning that the maneuver had been worth it.

  Nephit checked his shield gage, noting it had dropped under 25%. He needed to stay down and recharge, but the lizards weren’t going to cooperate. A rocket zipped by his head and hit a boulder behind him, blasting it apart and turning the pieces into light shrapnel that bounced off the twenty some Bsidd in the area. Those that were now denied cover ran multiple ways as two more rocket shots came in and physically moved three of them out of position with hits to the ground nearby.

  Nephit got slammed up against his cover rock by the concussion wave, then a sea of green rushed into view to his right as the lizards came forward and tried to take advantage of the situation, firing dozens of phaser shots into the downed and disoriented Bsidd that were out in the open. He and the others rushed out and engaged them hand to hand, with a few getting there first and interposing themselves between the attackers and their targets. Nephit came out into the flank of the group and took a shot to the helmet as two of them turned on him just as he saw a sammy sniper shot come down and hit a lizard to his right in the head.

  It fell to the ground dead, with Nephit seeing the det pack on its back. He cursed and kept fighting, realizing how he and the others had stupidly been baited into a trap…one that their sniper had just saved them from.

  Thirty seconds later half the lizards there were dead and the others fell back to the horde that was waiting further up the plain. They’d just been poked, not fully engaged, but he and others had taken a lot of shield depletion and some bad armor hits. He was ok for the moment, ducking back into cover as long range phaser blasts peppered the area, breaking up the short-lived melee.

  After a few seconds of cover and him seeing his shield strength bar begin to creep back up his comm broke open with some type of music he wasn’t familiar with. It was loud and obviously a battle song, but he didn’t know what it was for until he zoomed out his battlemap and saw a host of new icons approaching.

  “Yes,” one of the Bsidd next to him said with eagerness as orders from the Archons began to come through in the form of waypoints and target beacons. The unfamiliar song kept repeating the phrase ‘back off, I’ll take you on” and Nephit liked it immediately, especially because the orders were indicating that they were abandoning their turtle formation and pressing the attack. He and the others waited as instructed until their standard bearers came up in the form of an Archon striker that was not assigned to them, but was probably one belonging to the Protovic that were reinforcing them.

  The battle song kept playing for several minutes as they approach, with that lead Archon running out into the open where Nephit and the others had just fought that brief scrap and setting his feet into the dry dirt and holding position as the lizards peppered him with pink phaser strikes. The next thing the Bsidd saw was a blur of red/grey armor flying through the air past the Archon on what was probably a telekinetic grip, for the Human’s arm went in the same direction as if he was flinging the mass forward.

  Immediately Nephit got the order to push and he jumped out of cover as the Archon beat them to the front by two steps, following the Protovic he’d just threw into the group of lizards ahead that had been bowled down from the physical impact. A red energy shield burst out from that Protovic into a flat wall blocking most of the firing coming in at him. Those lizards nearest him on the ‘friendly’ side turned and shot him multiple times but he just held still, carrying a large shield emitter backpack as the Archon telekinetically ripped two of them off him and the Bsidd shot the others dead.

  Behind Nephit more Bsidd followed along with a column of Protovic. They looked like Humans and wore almost identical armor to their commandos, with the coloration being the only major difference. A specialized icon flashed directly over top the Bsidd on the battlemap, with it materializing on his HUD as an area of blue sparkles surrounding him. He knew that meant to make gaps to let
the Protovic through, with the smaller allies sprinting up between them and running directly towards the lizards as the shield carrier either lost his charge or deliberately dropped the energy matrix.

  Half a dozen of the Protovic ran by or jumped over him, then weathered a storm of phaser hits before diving and ramming the lizard groups head first and knocking several over per hit. Nephit and the Bsidd weren’t far behind and used the disruption to shoot down some at range then jump in on top of the others and fight them hand to hand using their plasma rods. What looked like a sea of blue lightsaber blades lit up, six per Bsidd, and began lashing the lizards with pointblank plasma hits.

  As was expected, the lizards didn’t back down like the song suggested. Those hidden nearby emerged and swarmed the Star Force troops in what looked to be an even battle for the moment Nephit had to glance around, then he was too occupied with the lizards on top of him to pay attention to anything else. He fought them as he normally did, but there were rockets flying everything disrupting their formations…though they had the Protovic doing the same to the lizards with their own bodies. He’d never seen a Human fight like that before, but these troops were and taking a hell of a physical beating doing it. More than once he saw an Archon pick one up and throw them like a rock at the lizards, and not all of them had shield packs.

  Some of those ramming tactics paid off for Nephit, because they set up kills for him. The Kamikaze-like behavior was something the lizards hadn’t seen Star Force use before and it seemed to shake them up even as they were chucking rockets and pouncing on anyone they caught out. More Protovic were grouped up into fireteams and were assisting hunting the lizards like typical Human commandos.

  With me, an Archon said telepathically as it passed Nephit and tapped him on one of his appendages.

  A bit shocked by the voice appearing in his head rather than his helmet, Nephit did as instructed and followed the Archon through the melee and up to the front with two Protovic flanking him. They didn’t stay there long, having to divert to knock down groups of lizards coming towards him but the Archon didn’t stop moving and neither did Nephit until they ran up on a crevice that ran between two monoliths of rock that stood 6 meters high.