Star Force: Paladin (SF94) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

He landed on all fours and crawled away from the sprinkling of white goo coming down with a few drops hitting his shields and rolling off. When he got clear he ran up onto the part of the crashed shuriken that was visible and hopped from piece to piece that wasn’t showing residue, for it looked like most of it had been thrown off during the sudden impact. The area around the half buried hull was sizzling with leftover acid, but he was able to step through it and around the still smoking patches of the hull as he was talking on his comm with the pilot inside.

  He started cutting or bending various components out of the way and making sure to avoid any acid remaining inside the breached hull plates. It took a very long time to expose the inner protective cocoon with him periodically watching the battlemap as the reavers got closer and closer despite the fighter cover thinning them down. With the main hatch buried, he eventually got an emergency route cut through to the bottom as the Paladin inside did the same thing and released emergency locks that allowed the cocoon to be opened from any direction if needed, though the process wasn’t a quick one.

  “Be cautious,” AVN-449218 said as he offered his fellow pilot a thin hand. “Acid residue is everywhere.”

  “How is your shuriken?”

  “No full breaches,” he said as he pulled the other Paladin clear of the cocoon and they both carefully tiptoed their way back over the acid spots on the surrounding ground.

  They got underneath his fighter as he jumped up, with the higher gravity field catching him and pulling him inside the upside down floating shuriken. He pressed a few buttons but they failed to work.

  “Extension is disabled,” he said, offering his hand and yanking the other pilot up to him as he let the gravity pull him to the ride side of the already cramped cockpit. “We’re going to have to ride open air.”

  “Thank you for coming for me,” he said as the approaching carpet of reavers was trailing behind a rain of blue lachar blasts that were getting very loud and near.

  “What Paladin wouldn’t?” he asked as he awkwardly reached his arms into the controls and the other pilot just as awkwardly tried to scrunch his body out of the way without touching the acid residue on the outer hull.

  They made it work and soon the shuriken was flipping over again and the two pilots were staring at the sight of the other fighter and the rescue attempt there. Rather than leaving they moved in front of that crashed ship and began to fire on the approaching reavers like a turret, seeing no acid spitters within the group. They held position until the ground suddenly opened up nearby and a new tunnel entrance was formed.

  They had a few seconds to react before the material was cleared and the pilot spun his shuriken around and shot the mound of dirt pushing up, killing the burrowing unit and momentarily plugging the hole, but the reavers behind it just pushed it out of the way and began spilling out as the other 6 fighters suddenly realized what was happening and turned around to assist, flying the short distance up to the location and pouring all their lachars onto the single exit and vaporizing anything that came up.

  As they redirected their sensors down into the ground they saw two more tendrils rising up nearby, then one of the other pilots made a rash decision. He warned off the rescuing one before opening fire on the downed shuriken, blasting through the damaged craft and exposing the cocoon. Had this been a Type-1 shuriken the tiny tractor beam would have come in handy, but given the lack of necessary components the Type-2s weren’t built to hold them, meaning the Paladin were going to have to improvise.

  The pilot continued to blast away until the now melty cocoon was free of the rest of the craft, then he flew one of the shuriken’s four wing-like blades underneath the cocoon and expertly popped it free. The sphere rolled a bit then came to rest against a bit of debris with the hatch popping almost immediately as it stopped. The surviving pilot climbed out and ran to the other on the ground as the lachar fire continued to fall nearby and the second tunnel pushed a dirt mushroom up above the surface.

  The two pilots climbed back onboard and got some elevation immediately as a few acid spitters came out and were missed by the lachars that now had to target two locations. A few random shots flew out before they were eventually destroyed, but the flow of reavers was getting to be too much to handle and the main wave was less than a minute away. The fighters without open cockpits flew in to give shield cover as the two doubled-occupied ones gained altitude and flew up over the mountains, narrowly escaping yet another diversionary tactic. That main body had been meant to pull the fighter cover off while the tunnelers did their thing and got right up on them.

  But even as the fighters fled the reavers could be seen swarming the remains of the two downed shurikens…and pulling bits and pieces of it apart and carrying them back down the tunnels.

  Upon return to base the damaged fighters were sent back out immediately save for one, and that one ended up in the hands of the Alchemists. There were very few produced on the planet to date, but the 2nd Triad Paladin were the ones responsible for studying the reaver corpses. Their interest here was the acid residue and hopefully any droplets of the pure form they could recover as the battle with the acid spitters who had done the damage still continued on and those corpses weren’t yet available for study.

  The thin lizards were identical to the pilots, but had a distinctive trio of bars tattooed on their heads that wasn’t visible through the protective suits they wore while dissecting the fighter. The alchemists would take and analyze whatever samples they found, but unlike their kin they were more focused on developing a countermeasure than simply identifying and cataloging what it was.

  Fortunately Star Force knowledge was so advanced that the fix was relatively simple. A shield matrix alteration was needed, but it was something that could be altered without having to build new equipment. The new specs for that were completed within 2 days of the alchemists getting their hands on the samples, and by the end of the third day all shurikens, tanks, and mechs had been suitably reset, though doing the same with each suit of armor was going to take a lot more time.

  The pilots though could now return to aerial bombardment with impunity, and coupled with constant subterranean sensor scans beneath major fortifications and cities, Star Force had now almost completely stopped the reaver advance with only a few exceptions across the planet. They hadn’t won this fight, not by far, but the Vittis that were behind the defense lines were more or less safe now, though the reavers disagreed. They continued to launch constant assaults and force the defenders to bleed them dry…all the while weakening them via attrition.

  And that attrition was primarily suffered by the Vitti forces. There were enough Paladin now to support them on all fronts, but not enough to replace them. Until that happened there were going to be more Vitti losses in combat troops, but at least the wholesale slaughter of their civilian population had been stopped and those incursions that were still succeeding were seeing quick evacuation efforts.

  It had been a quarter of a century in the making, but the Archons and Paladin had been able to save an estimated 42% of the Vitti population. The losses that number implied were disgustingly huge, but had Star Force not come it would have reached 100% by now, and everyone on the planet knew it.

  But the fight was still ongoing and the number of reavers wasn’t diminishing. It was still increasing and making this fight harder and harder, but the Paladin had so many tech advantages and now a return to total air superiority that the reavers didn’t really stand a chance in the long run. The Paladin would continue to grow in numbers as well, and when a tipping point was reached they’d go on the offensive and start hunting down and clearing out the reavers on the surface that the drones hadn’t smoked yet, then they’d start the much harder battle underground where air power would do them no good.

  The Viceroy knew that was going to be the real war to come, but saving as many of the Vitti as possible had been their primary goal and that was nearly wrapped up. Taking full possession of this planet and exacting vengeance on behalf
of the locals was the second part of this mission, but the lingering fact that the reavers had actively collected and spirited away samples of Star Force tech was disturbing. What could they possibly use it for? Or were they a lot more advanced than they appeared to be.

  7

  January 31, 3531

  Tekin System (Rim Region)

  Plataro

  The Viceroy watched numerous holograms around his command center simultaneously as Paladin armies were invading the subterranean geodomes that the reavers lived in beneath sensor range. It’d taken a long time to finally construct a sophisticated enough sensor array to be able to penetrate that far down, and had involved decommissioning and tearing apart three naval drones to get the necessary solari to do it, but now he had a single aerial platform with which he had been meticulously scanning the planet and identifying where these geodomes were.

  And they were everywhere. Literally, they were spread across the entire planet like a network of roadways with connecting tunnels between them, but it was the heavy clusters that truly surprised the Viceroy. For not having access to any technology, these reavers had managed to carve out some 62,000 geodomes in the piece of the northern hemisphere that had been scanned to date, and there was more than twice that amount of territory left to investigate.

  Winning the surface war had been easy in comparison, but now he had to send the Paladin down inside the planet to these geodomes that may or may not be all that stable. Rather than use the reaver’s own tunnels the Paladin were drilling and building their own access shafts directly into the top of the geodomes where the melee minions couldn’t reach, then they were bombing the hell out of those stupid enough to congregate below before sending in the ground troops to start cleaning up and pushing out through the surrounding tunnels.

  Fortunately the Viceroy had enough personnel to leave behind in each geodome so it couldn’t be reoccupied, and one in particular had been taken intact. Archon Myra had led that assault personally and now the Viceroy’s alchemists were swarming the place and feeding him a lot of interesting information, first of which was how they were feeding so many reavers when the surface wasn’t supplying them any more victims or vegetation to scavenge.

  They had farms down here with high volume vegetation that could be both eaten and used to bear dense and high calorie fruit. He assumed eating the vegetation was a backup plan, but the growth rate was apparently enough to allow for it since some geodomes they were assaulting had patches that were clear cut. He suspected those were where massive birthing swarms were held before being sent up to the surface to fight and die as expendable ammunition, but in order for them to grow to maturity they needed a lot of foodstuffs and it looked like these fields were meant to both sustain a stable population as well as to be consumed by a surge of population when needed.

  And they’d come across some of those surges in the making. They were being grown in adjacent chambers carved into hot rock and consisted of gelatinous sacks that had larvae inside that ate the gel until partially mature, then they’d be released to feast on the fields in a geodome until they were full grown…at which point the swarm would be released, for they couldn’t sustain that amount of population down here for long.

  So the massive reaver population was a ‘fire and forget’ weapon being led by a telepathic hive mind hinged on several elusive points that the Archons had managed to identify using their own telepathy, but those points never allowed them to get close. They were always moved out well before Paladin arrived and would have been kept safety anonymous if not for the Archons’ abilities and the strategic fingerprint they left behind.

  But the Viceroy still hadn’t been able to pin them down and the number of Paladin needed to secure just the geodomes that had been detected thus far was still years away. The operation here was already in snowball mode, but he wasn’t going to produce more population than he had food and equipment for and both of those were lagging behind hatchery potential…which was deliberate. He always wanted the ability to produce more population than needed rather than facing the reverse, but his legions of factories, bioharvest facilities, and mining sites across the planet were still insufficient to give him the numbers needed to quickly eradicate the reavers.

  It was coming though, and in the meantime his current Paladin were getting part of the job done while gaining a lot of badly needed experience. When they left this world they would all be classified as Arbiters, himself included, and with victory seemingly all but ensured the Viceroy was worried. Something wasn’t adding up here. There were too many instances of actions that did not fit the reaver profile. Stealing bits of Star Force technology, for one. So far none of it had been recovered in raids and where it had gone to was unable to be determined.

  The Archons had told him that trying to get information out of the hive mind itself was useless. They could interrogate individual reavers but they didn’t have access through them to the others in any useful way. Whoever these mystery overlords were they were playing a very good, clandestine game and the Viceroy didn’t think it was over yet. He kept waiting for an ambush to occur, but so far nothing had gone down.

  There were a scattering of casualties continuing to dribble in, but rarely any deaths now that the Paladin had learned how to handle the reavers. Keep them from getting into too large a group and they were easy to kill, and within the tunnels they were always confined to few dozen reavers against a handful of Paladin at the front of whatever columns of troops either side had…and that basic engagement was not a fair fight for the reavers so long as the Paladin continued playing tag team and didn’t let themselves get worn down.

  Tunnel breaches were a greater concern and had happened on 9 occasions to date, 6 of which had seen magma flows come surging in. The shields and armor on his troops would only protect them from so much heat, and if they got caught in one of those molten rivers they wouldn’t last long. Fortunately no one had suffered that fate yet, but it was always a constant on his mind. Why the reavers burrowed down so far he wasn’t sure, for how could they even begin to guess at what sensor range was?

  And Star Force sensor range was far superior to other races’, meaning that if they were doing it intentionally they were going extra deep. While the reavers were impervious to most of the heat they didn’t actually need it. The alchemists said they could survive in a cold weather environment just as easily, so why burrow down so far you put yourselves at risk of magma leakage or compression cave-ins when you didn’t have the ability to construct retainment walls?

  Furthermore was the planetary history. According to Vitti records and lore the reavers had attacked multiple times in the past but never on a scale this large. Why was now different? He was certain the limited military the Vittis had would have been enough to easily defeat one of the earlier swarms in their history, and if they were following some cyclical event why was this one so much bigger?

  Something wasn’t right here and it was bugging the Viceroy thoroughly. They appeared to be on the path to inevitable victory against an opponent that made no sense and was fighting above their means, and down in the confines of the planet’s crust where naval power couldn’t reach without a lot of shoveling first…

  Well, if he was going to ambush himself, he’d do it down there. He just hoped these reavers weren’t that capable.

  It took a lot of guesswork and preplanning, but eventually John and Tia were able to find one of the reaver overlords. They’d had to determine the approximate range of their telepathy, then find and study the lines of reavers they used as relays to stay in communication, guestimate their preferred transmission range and margins of safety, then ring the probable location with assaults on distant geodomes slowly isolating a pocket of them in the center and cutting off their lines of retreat save for a few…

  The two Archons had hidden themselves in the tunnels, passing through reaver-held areas using their psionics to avoid detection. They spent days down there alone, studying the movement patterns and bouncing from tunnel
to tunnel as a surge of evacuees began to be funneled through their area. They weren’t a massive army, for those were staying to fight the incursions, but rather these were workers carrying plants and other forms of cargo. When troops finally showed themselves it was a telltale sign of an escort, and before long a powerful mind came within the Archons’ Ikrid range.

  They were in the wrong tunnel, however, so they just observed from a distance where the mind was and what direction it was moving while trying to pull what bits of information from it that they could. It was too large to take full control of, and neither of them wanted to try for fear of giving away their advantage. This far down their comms wouldn’t work, meaning they were literally on their own against the entire reaver army. They could fight through it, but the idea of the reavers blowing out certain tunnels to isolate and trap them wasn’t appealing so they were going to stay as stealthy as possible and that meant not running out into view of the moving convoys.

  Fortunately they’d mapped out this area beforehand and they had a few routes around the overlord’s procession to take, but they were a long detour and the rate at which these guys were moving meant they might lose them entirely, and if they tried to push through a crowded tunnel they’d be spotted and the hive mind would send out an alarm so fast that everything within miles would be instantly warned.

  With the escort this overlord had there was no way to get to it unless it came directly to them…and it wasn’t. It was missing them by several tunnels and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it, so the master/apprentice pair decided to shadow the group as well as they could, following the flow after it had passed and staying with the rearmost units even when the overlord’s mind got out of range to follow itself.

  Then they observed a changing of the guard when they got to a particular geodome. The convoy stopped briefly, taking several hours rest presumably, for the military escort and even the workers seemed to change out with the tired ones taking up duties in this geodome while replacements formed a new convoy and headed out after the respite…which they assumed was for the overlord, else there would have been no need to delay.