Star Force: Marauders (SF63) Read online

  With their attention drawn that way Mason stepped out on the left and held position, firing multiple blasts from his rifle into the pair of guards before they had a chance to readjust their aim. His shots were precise, and he nailed one of them with three hits to the abdomen, burning through the armor and hitting flesh. That militant went down, but Mason had to duck below the wall and out of the wide window as the other shot towards him, holding his ground for a moment while the doorway into the second room of the station opened up and more guards flooded out.

  Mason rolled to his left, making room for Zaeb to crawl up next to him, then when Frank came back into view on the other side and drew a flurry of plasma lances through the opposite set of windows, the pair popped up and scattered the militants as they fired into the group of 6.

  Frank didn’t stop to snipe, rather heading directly for the doorless entryway and barreling inside. The auxiliary shield generator deployed around him, cutting off his own return fire while creating a bubble-shield that had been scaled down to minimum distance. It absorbed the hailstorm of blue streaks all the way up to the group, where Frank jumped into their midst and went at them hand to hand.

  Mason and Zaeb moved in then, firing through the window and knocking down the militants with clean shots while their opponents were distracted. Their armor gave them longevity, but the three Marauders knew what they were doing and cut them down so fast it seemed like they hadn’t been wearing any at all.

  “Clear,” Frank reported after ducking into the back room.

  Mason picked up two of their weapons and tossed them behind a counter to start making a pile as Zaeb dragged the bodies outside. They didn’t have time to take prisoners, and the pair that weren’t dead were soon going to be from their wounds, so Mason didn’t pay any attention to them other than to keep them away from their weapons while Frank began moving a desk aside and exposing a panel on the floor that the dumb militants hadn’t even realized was there.

  The Marauder shot the attachments off in lieu of the tools to remove them that he didn’t have, then he pried the panel up with his armored fingers, exposing the maintenance walkway that traveled all the way into the facility along with the power and sewage lines…directly under the defenses the militants had set up on the exterior.

  Mason commed the others and the trio held the guard station until they arrived, coming up the road in a tank of their own and parking it just on the outside of the bridge. It was wheeled, for the design was far cheaper and more useful for the Marauders than buying the anti-grav variety, though they did have a few of them in their inventory for special occasions. This one was preceding a line of infantry equipped in the same Reen-manufactured armor, all of whom clustered inside the guard station and waited to see if the militants would come out to them.

  They didn’t, sitting back behind their turrets and in their tanks waiting for the Marauders to come to them where they were strongest. Mason didn’t intend for their tank to be used yet, for it was just a visual distraction at this point, but eventually they’d need it to deal with the militant versions, which were little more than dangerous toys in comparison.

  The 18 other infantry he took with him down into the maintenance walkway, which was barely wide enough for one of them to slip through with all the piping and technical accoutrements dangling in the way. Moving single file they jogged as best they could through it for more than 3 kilometers before they got to where the schematics said was the junction with the outermost buildings in the facility.

  They didn’t come up there, but rather moved further through the network of underground tunnels until they came to the nexus point that branched off in three directions. They split up there and set a countdown timer, giving them all 6 minutes to get in position. Mason took Frank and Zaeb with him, while Le’han’trel led one of the other teams. The Protovic had the hardest assignment in this assault, that being hitting the barracks, or rather what the militants had converted into one.

  Mason’s trio had picked up Navo and Willis, and the five of them moved through the tunnel until they came up underneath another sealed panel. They waited until the countdown expired, then blew the panel latches off with plasma fire before pushing the stubborn thing up a few inches, finding that there was something on top of it.

  Using his well-trained muscle, Mason wedged himself between it and Frank’s backpack, stepping on the fellow Marauder to use him as a stool and prying the panel up enough to get an arm out, seeing nothing but boxes around him.

  He pushed his head and torso through, then used the rim of the depression for the leverage he needed and dumped whatever was on top of him aside, allowing him to crawl out and get his weapon back from below as Navo handed it to him coming up. Mason took it and pushed another box stack to the side, making walking room and moving through a forest of supplies until they got into the clear, with no one else in what appeared to be a storage room.

  He waited until the other four caught up, then he blew apart the lock on the door and the squad got moving through the facility enroute to one of the fortified buildings they’d scouted from afar earlier. They had to cross out into the open once, hopping from building to building whereas most of the other structures were all interconnected, but they did so fast enough either not to get noticed or to draw any return fire as they busted their way into a populated building that held a number of prisoners/slaves draw from the local population.

  There were only two guards on them, which were taken down quickly enough, but by that time the cat was out of the bag and the militants knew they had infiltrators in the base. Not taking any chances, Mason and the others stunned every unarmored person they came across, whether they be militant or not, intending to sort it out later and to keep those they were here to rescue from running about wildly and getting shot in the crossfire.

  One pair they found in an isolated room appeared to be mating, and as Mason stunned them both he cursed the stupidity of it. The alarm had already gone up, and this idiot was busy getting laid. He didn’t know if the other was a victim or not, but the one had half a militant uniform on and Mason didn’t really want to look any closer. He grabbed the rifle from nearby and carried it with him out of the room, disposing of it by chucking it behind a potted plant that had since died due to lack of watering.

  He and the others worked their way through the large building, finding only one more guard stationed at the opposite entrance. After taking him down with ease, they pulled back and moved to an adjacent building through a connective walkway, hearing the first sounds of a distant firefight that should have been Jarod’s team.

  Mason sprinted ahead, and now that their prisoner camp had been ‘rescued’ the rest of this mission was just hunting down the army of militants and taking them out in one form or another, with most of these guys going to have to be killed given their armament and the fact that there were only 19 of his men here to work through well over 1,500 of them. How many Mason didn’t know for sure, but the numbers didn’t intimidate him. These were scum and had the skills to match, and he’d fought far harder training simulations than this.

  So long as his people kept their heads and watched each other’s backs they’d be fine. Between their equipment and experience advantage, not to mention their unit coordination, they could take out as many of the enemy as needed so long as they didn’t let them draw them out into the open.

  Mason wasn’t green enough to let that happen, and he knew the faster they made kills the less chance there would be of the militants mounting any type of cohesive counterattack, which was why he and the other four ran into the next firefight without bothering to find cover, coming out into a foyer behind a group of 20+ targets that were firing the opposite direction.

  The Lieutenant barreled in first, knowing his job was to disrupt and set up shots for the others, so he didn’t shoot more than one initial shot, then used his rifle along with his arms and legs to batter the militants aside, knocking some down and others out of their cover for the opposite team to
shoot while his own squad pounded the armor of those on the ground trying to get up until they stayed down.

  It took more than a minute to kill them all, and some of his men took glancing armor hits, but their personal shields, coupled with Frank using his auxiliary to block a lot more shots, had kept the militant plasma off them long enough for the firefight to snowball in their favor, leaving the 11 of them standing over the bodies and kicking aside the enemy’s weapons just in case they weren’t fully dead yet.

  “Anyone hit?” Mason asked, just in case.

  “Nice flank,” Jarod said in thanks.

  “Take that way,” the Lieutenant said, thumbing to the right indicating the next adjacent building. “Running sweeps, don’t slow down and give these guys a chance to think.”

  “On it,” Jarod acknowledged, taking his team that way while Mason moved on to the left with his squad.

  8

  Mason ran in tight formation with the other four Marauders, all tucked around Frank in the center with his auxiliary shield extended to cover them as they charged the militant bunker on the exterior of the facility. It had only been made recently, more piled dirt than anything, but it held a pair of plasma turrets and a fair amount of infantry, with open tarmac surrounding it in a sea that very easily could become a kill zone.

  Most of the militants in the rest of the base were dead or incapacitated, but there were plenty of holdouts that had found some type of advantage and they were camping out there. Mason would have offered a call to surrender, except that he didn’t want to give away their position to this group before starting their run, for even a single second of invulnerability could make the difference between them getting to the bunker or not.

  So far this one had been sitting totally uninvolved in the fighting, and the Lieutenant wanted to hit it before they could go on full alert…and he didn’t want to wait for the tank to work its way around to this side of the base. Currently it was on its way in and blasting the crap out of the militant versions, and more importantly keeping them off his infantry.

  Picking their spot early on in what they thought might be a blind spot, the five Marauders started running behind cover so they hit the open area on the move and headed straight towards the bunker on an angle that put them directly in line with one of the window slats.

  They’d made it nearly a third of the way across before someone bothered to notice them, firing a rifle shot that hit and splashed against the bubble shield before the main turret on that side swiveled to the right and took aim.

  Mason and the others held tight, knowing that the shield could take at least two good hits before popping, then they’d be down to their weak armor shields, all of which were at full power, but none of them could take a square hit from the tripod turret and remain intact. Their armor would protect them from whatever plasma made it through, but a second hit would almost certainly breach through the dark blue plates.

  But the ex-commandos were quick, and before the turret could fire off a second blast they were on the bunker and the five of them broke apart, running out from under the energy shield and jumping through the window holes as Frank slid underneath the turret barrel, running into the short wall below and reaching up to grab the weapon. As he did so, locking it in place where it couldn’t shoot anyone, he reached up his left hand with a pistol and fired a shot inside where he had a clean line of sight between the other Marauders.

  Mason had dove through head first, barreling into two of the infantry stacked inside that were just now getting to the open-air windows. Playing bowling ball, he knocked them down and tripped a third while Zaeb followed him through, staying on his feet with a more gentle leg slide, and shot one of the standing militants beyond him twice in the gut before turning his rifle on those the Lieutenant had knocked down.

  A shot from Frank finished off the standing militant while Navo and Willis entered through a different side of the bunker, with the Critel taking Mason’s roll of cannonball and diving through, further messing up any cohesion the defenders might have had. Both Marauder’s shields went down, either from plasma shots or the physical impacts, but their armor underneath was sturdy enough to take a few more hits while they fought a quick, pitched battle inside the small bunker with the four of them going hand to hand and getting in what shots they could, while Frank stayed on the outside firing in from the window wall.

  Between their quicker reflexes, better equipment, and familiarity of fighting with one another, the Marauders came out on top in the fight, taking down all 13 of the militants with only a shoulder wound to Willis to show for it. The plasma damage had burned through and seriously incapacitated his right arm, but he was still able to stay on his feet and fight one-handed, finishing off one of the last militants with an overhead smash of his fist followed by an angry uppercut from his knee that knocked the helmet clear off the red-skinned alien.

  Mason shot his exposed cranium with a stun blast, then began policing the bodies as Willis groaned and sat down on a nearby gunnery chair.

  “You hit?” Zaeb asked.

  “Oh…yeah,” Willis said. “I think I’m done for today.”

  Mason circled around behind the man, flinching when he saw the charred hole in his shoulder that was only starting to seep with blood. Everything else within the inch-deep cavity had been cauterized on contact with the plasma. He pointed the others away, with them dealing with the dead and wounded while keeping an eye on the outside as Mason pulled open a small pocket on his armor’s thin backpack and took out a tube of healing gel.

  “Hold still,” he said, popping the cap open and spraying the sticky foam into his shoulder. Star Force might not sell weapons, but they were good about making their top line healing technology available for public purchase, and he would have lost several people in past years had the Marauders not stocked up loads of it. They valued their personnel as much as Star Force did, though the same couldn’t be said of other mercenary units operating in the region.

  “Thanks,” Willis said as the pain number kicked in, reducing his agony to an uncomfortable ache in his now invisible shoulder, as far as his senses were concerned.

  “You’ve got to head back now. This is bad.”

  “How the hell did they hit the same spot three or four times?” he complained, knowing the statistical improbability of that in a chaotic firefight.

  “It happened,” Mason said, getting on the comm.

  “I’ll get him out,” Zaeb offered. “Go finish off these bastards.”

  Mason clapped the Marauder on the shoulder as he passed him by, heading for the windows since there were no doors on the crude structure. “Tank’s on its way.”

  Navo slid out ahead of him, with the pair joining Frank as they ran off back into the buildings, checking with the other strike teams and seeing what targets were left, as well as the external spotters they’d left on the perimeter. If any of the militants tried to get away they’d run them down, one way or another. This mission had to be a clean sweep, and Mason wasn’t about to have to report back to their client that they’d gotten almost all of the militants.

  With the primary bunker covering the access road now out of commission, all that remained were small barricades that held a few militants hoping to hold out or just clinging to whatever cover they could. Mason headed for the nearest one of those, with the trio immediately taking fire down a long hall that led to a park-like lounge.

  “Not that way,” he said, backtracking and quickly consulting what passed for a battlemap on his helmet’s HUD, which had the facility’s blueprints on hand for easy reference but with no active position markers for the rest of his troops. Without the secure comm tech that Star Force possessed, and didn’t sell, an enemy could pick out the locator beacons and cause considerable trouble for any units using such a system, hence the Reen and other suppliers didn’t bother to manufacture them. Nor did anyone outside the ADZ, as far as the Marauders knew, though they were looking for such a system to use against technologically primitive o
pponents.

  “Stay here and get their attention,” he told Navo as he thumbed Frank a different direction. They looped around to another approach, a shorter one, then with Navo taking badly aimed shots down the hall the pair rushed the barricades from the side, again getting a few steps of invulnerability thanks to the distraction, with Frank’s auxiliary shield soaking up the rest of the damage.

  Mason jump-kicked over the barricade and knocked down one of the four militants while Frank simply ran up and began shooting, again using the cover to his advantage while Mason went hand to hand. The combination worked well, with them downing two of the militants before Mason took a shot to his chest that melted the top layer of his armor.

  A blue streak past his right arm hit the enemy as Navo sprinted up to them, then another from Frank in the exact same spot on the militant dropped him, leaving only one for the three of them to deal with.

  That militant immediately dropped its weapon and sunk to its knees, yelling something in a language that none of them could understand, but it was obvious that he was surrendering.

  Mason kicked aside its rifle and pulled out another set of easy-snap restraints, securing the militant’s hands behind its back then yanking its helmet off. A quick stun shot from Frank sent it into dreamland and Mason dropped the body back to the ground. They couldn’t play babysitters right now, but they’d be back for him later and the cuffs would be an easy clue that this one wasn’t dead.

  They checked the others, finding one still alive but unconscious, so they pulled his helmet off and stunned him too before they got moving again, hunting down the last bits of resistance they could find and coordinating with the other teams until the militant facility was theirs.

  “Tell him no,” Mason said to Le’han’trel, who was working through one of their hired translators as the Marauders were having a discussion with the Batarank security teams that they’d called in to help search the complex. Any possessions of the militants that they’d brought to the planet and not stolen from the locals were, by contract, the rightful claim of the Marauders, so the mercs had been escorting the search teams around for that reason in addition to their own protection, just in case a militant or two had been hiding out somewhere and chose to make a last stand of defiance.