Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) Read online

  With that thought bringing her fully awake she checked the battlemap, seeing that nobody was around save for a swath of red dots…indicating the position of other suits of armor with suspected deceased individuals inside. The dots had to be manually added after the fact, so that transmitters that wouldn’t be turned off wouldn’t cause nearby active troops to think reinforcements were nearby.

  Ella saw that her own dot was tagged as red as well. She bit back a scream of pain as she twisted when her arm slipped on the mud beneath her, falling face first back down to the ground and remaining there as she adjusted the battlemap to take the red off her dot.

  She didn’t know how bad her injury was, but it wasn’t going to let her do more than maybe walk. She couldn’t fight, and didn’t know how much blood she’d lost, but she obviously couldn’t stay here. The Canderian resolved herself to finding a way to move, but first she needed to figure out where exactly she was and what the situation was.

  Readying herself for another flare of pain, she clenched up her muscles and pushed herself up to her knees with her head still on the ground.

  The tears in her eyes attested to the lack of disappointment in her body’s response, but she somehow managed another transition, rolling backwards so she sat on her heels and got her torso upright so she could look around, but her first glance was down at her gut…which was missing a huge chunk of armor. Beneath it was missing skin and muscle, with charred flesh mauled up in a mess so bad that she made herself stop looking.

  Knowing that she wasn’t going anywhere on her own, she searched on her battlemap for any nearby units, extending the range out as far as she could. There were still several contacts in orbit transmitting their locations, but nothing on the ground aside from more red dots. There was nothing for her to flee to, so she did the only thing she could, knowing she wasn’t going to survive very long with this wound. She unsafed her primary transmitter and activated the emergency beacon setting, transmitting in the open and with a signal strong enough to reach orbit.

  It wasn’t stealthed like the battlemap signals were, so the Skarrons could pick it up too if they were looking. Hopefully that wasn’t the case, but there was nothing else she could do. Looking around she saw dead everywhere, both Canderians and Hobbits, along with a good number of Skarrons too but the distribution was all wrong. Normally the Canderians would make the enemy pay for a defeat like this with 10/1 kills, but they’d been blindsided by not one, but two infantry surges that caught them in the flanks as they’d been executing a hasty, but controlled retreat.

  Ella had been hit early, but even she knew the numbers they were facing were all wrong. Someone had screwed up badly for that many enemy troops to be that close nearby. And with so many Canderians dead around her they had to have either been hit by heavy weapons or so many infantry that there literally was no way to shoot them all.

  But that didn’t matter right now, survival did. Looking around for somewhere to drag herself, all she saw was bodies and scorch marks on the plain they’d been running across. The forest edge was too far away to get to and the narrow ravine in the center didn’t have enough terrain to hide in, so she picked the biggest thing around, that being a Skarron body, and started dragging herself towards it.

  She crawled half a meter before having to stop, biting back the pain, then resigned herself to moving only a few inches at a time so her abdomen didn’t have to flex too much.

  Bit by bit she moved herself over some 35 meters, finding a plasma rifle on the way and dragging it with her up to the side of the dead thing that was missing one of its arms. It lay a couple meters to her right, with the plasma gun still attached to its ‘wrist.’

  She poked it with the rifle several times, wanting to make sure it was dead, then moved herself up alongside the elephant-sized corpse and lay down on her side, curling up in a ball and trying to hold as still as possible without putting tension on her abdominal muscles that weren’t fully there anymore.

  It was hours before anyone got to her, but eventually a shadow crossed over her helmet and she lifted her head slightly to get a better view…but there was no one there.

  The shadow moved, and only then did she realize it was coming from further away. Despair flowing in her as the last hope of survival was dashed, she replaced it with spite and summoned up as much anger as she could to push back against the pain. Grabbing her rifle she got to her knees and saw the Skarron walking nearby that had cast the shadow, then the scattering of Hobbits around it, none of which had seen her yet.

  The big one wouldn’t go down easily, but she wanted to get at least one of the small ones. With her back obscured by the corpse she stayed put, not thinking that she had enough abdominals left to stand, and leaned back against it, giving her torso some stability as she raised the rifle and took aim at the closest Hobbit.

  The Canderian hit it with the second shot, then put two more in it before switching to the targets that suddenly began swarming into her vision. Plasma orbs popped all around her, including one that hit her leg, but it caught on the intact armor there and she kept shooting, not knowing how much ammo was in the rifle and just pumping the trigger as fast as she could.

  More plasma began to hit her, with her armor melting off in various places. Her helmet took a hit and her battlemap went out, with either the transmitter or receiver having been slagged. At the very least that made the red dots disappear.

  The Canderian killed/wounded four more Hobbits before one of their little fiery white orbs hit her exposed gut, burning through what remained of her muscles and tearing apart her internal organs in a splash of charred tissue.

  Her arms sagged and her rifle dropped out of her hand, with her being dead before it even hit the ground.

  8

  December 30, 2552

  Weema System (ADZ border)

  Weemstra

  With a thought Morgan rendered the Hobbit scout unconscious, dropping him to the ground a few seconds before she broke from cover and scurried across the remains of one of Star Force’s firebases. It had been wrecked from fighter bombardment with nasty blast marks of melted material everywhere but was more or less intact and abandoned. The Skarrons had been here and gone, leaving only a few roaming troops doing what Morgan didn’t know, but if she wanted to stay alive she had to keep scrounging supplies from what was left behind, and this was the best place to look.

  She’d come down to the planet with nothing other than the senzu beans in her helmet, but the orbiting fleet had managed to send a supply pack down to her through hot drop…several actually, with a cluster of little meteors raining down in the region she was in. She’d gotten to one before the Skarrons had gotten to the others, grabbing as much equipment as possible, including foodstuffs, but it had already been a week since then and the supplies weren’t going to last her forever.

  With those stashed a few kilometers away in a place marked on her battlemap, she’d come across what had been a battlefield but with the bodies having been removed. The Skarrons had picked up their own dead first, then it seemed the Hobbits had scavenged the others and ate them, for the armor pieces were laying everywhere without any occupants. There were a few tree clumps but otherwise the location the firebase had been put up in was an empty, squishy plain that was just on the dry side of being a swamp.

  Those troops in the firebase had evacuated long ago, the lucky ones anyway, and those ships in orbit had long since left. So far Morgan hadn’t come across any other battlemap signals from surviving troops, though given how spread out they were across the planet that didn’t mean much. The nearby LZ was the only one she was within range of, and it had sprouted three different firebases that had been left behind in the rushed evacuation…not to mention the equipment packs on the Star Force troops.

  Those were strewn about with the armor pieces, and Morgan stopped next to one to look inside. Keeping her Ikrid senses alert for more roaming scouts she opened the pack and found it half empty, with some ammo and other useful items but no food
stuffs. Morgan plucked a few clips out and moved on, searching another two packs and likewise finding no foodstuffs, only a wrapper in one, suggesting that the Hobbits had eaten them too. After that she abandoned the battlefield and moved inside the remains of the firebase, finding it similarly looted.

  At least all the cargo crates were, having been opened and emptied of everything edible, but when Morgan checked the emergency supplies in the walls she let out a sigh of relief when the hidden panels were still in place. She opened one and found both foodstuffs and water, plus medical supplies and other useful stuff once she opened up all of them throughout the base, giving her enough survival gems to stay alive a good while longer…if she had a way of carrying it all.

  The trailblazer made the snap decision to leave most of it in place, resealing the panels that the enemy obviously didn’t know were there and deciding to come back for it later as needed. Taking a single satchel with her she left the firebase and headed across the chewed up ground dotted with disconnected armor segments and came up on the Hobbit she’d rendered unconscious. She knelt next to it, accessing its mind and making a few memory wipes so it wouldn’t remember falling, then she moved its body around into a sleeping position and input the idea that it’d decided to take a quick nap.

  That way when it woke it wouldn’t raise an alarm. She needed to be a ghost here, both to keep the troops off her and to keep her stash in the firebase safe. Anonymity was how she was going to survive, and even one missing scout could betray her position if she made this one ‘disappear.’

  Morgan got across the plain without incident, then headed back into the blue-leafed trees and took an evasive route back to her stash to make sure she wasn’t being followed, coming up on the car-sized boulder in the riverbed that had a small nook on the far side up next to a small cliff wall. She stomped her way across the water and circled around the rock, with her footprints being erased by the water.

  Once out of sight she came up on a small patch of dry land pinched in between the boulder and the cliff wall with enough foliage over top to make a roof that would keep her invisible to any fighters passing overhead. Taking a moment to search the area with her senses she waited for nearly a minute before sitting down and pulling her helmet off. She swiped several beads of sweat onto her armored fingertips then flipped them off into the pool of water nearby, sending small ripples out in the otherwise calm puddle around the boulder base.

  She tossed the satchel aside and began unlatching the armor on her chest, eventually undoing all the connected segments and crawling out of it and leaving the open shell on the ground like a carapace. Making another check of the area with a mental sweep, Morgan pulled off her sweat-soaked clothes one piece at a time and moved into the shallow pool, submerging her body as much as she could in the slightly cool water and trying to pull some of the persistent heat out of her chest. The weather had gotten insanely hot two days ago, and her armor only had so much heat dissipation capability built into it.

  Part of those systems were now offline, having been damaged by plasma the second day, so her internal ‘air-conditioner’ was only minimally active and these cross country treks were causing her to sweat out way too much water. Fortunately the drop kit she’d recovered had a device that allowed her to drink the river water or collect moisture out of the air and she was using it a lot, but her internal heat levels were still too high and she guessed she had a fever.

  It was odd, because Archons almost never got sick. Their immune systems were so buff with all the training that the worst they ever got was a little sniffle, but new planets had new biological problems to contend with and she was pretty sure she’d picked up something here that her body was fighting off well, but leaving her a bit heat sick in combination with the temperature and the oppressive humidity.

  She spent several minutes in the water naked before crawling over and grabbing her sweat soaked shirt. Still kneeling in the pool she wrung it out then dipped it underneath the surface and tried to hand scrub as much of the grime out of it as she could. Morgan repeated the process with the rest of her one set of clothes and laid them out to partially dry as she stayed in the water trying to get her temperature down while mentally scanning the area every few minutes.

  So far her hideout had remained secure, but there was more than Skarrons and Hobbits about and three days ago she’d been jumped during the night. Fortunately she slept with armor on so the cat-like beast’s claws only scrapped her plates before she woke up and none too gently sent it packing. Since then she’d been on the lookout for more critters, both on land and in the water, not wanting to pick up any leeches or other nasty stuff while skinny dipping, but there was no way she was going to stay in her armor and roast if she could help it.

  Morgan dipped and washed her hair in the water then swam out around the rock and into the river where she could feel the current and relieved herself with her body mostly below the surface to keep her little pond clear. She looked around in the bright daylight as she did so, with the blue foliage everywhere along the water’s edge on both sides. Chirps and squeaks were audible everywhere, making for a quiet din that made her even more nervous about enemies sneaking up on her. If she hadn’t had psionics to give her a definitive answer as to what was out there she would have driven herself crazy with worry.

  She didn’t have a watch on, for it would interfere with her armor, so she didn’t know how long she spent in the water, coming back in and almost sleeping in the puddle for a long time before walking out and drip drying…which was difficult in the humid air. She wrung out her hair and put it back into the ponytail she’d had since she’d began basic training then grabbed her mostly dry clothes and put them back on before getting something to eat and stashing away the new supplies with the rest that she had hid until a bush that she’d uprooted outside and brought into the nook to cover the hole she’d hand dug.

  After that she waited a long time, sitting down on the ground and pulling her knees up to her chest and thinking. She didn’t have anything else to do and she needed to reduce her calorie expenditure down from her Archon high metabolism. Her body didn’t like doing that, but she gave it at least a short run in armor each day to help and keep her from going totally stagnant, but she really didn’t like just sitting and waiting…though given the circumstances that was what she had to do.

  And given that her body was used to a lot of activity she couldn’t sleep much, which left a lot of time to just sit and think…and she really would have killed for a video game right now, even if only played in her helmet’s HUD. When she got off planet that was one of the to-do items going on the techs’ list.

  After she’d had too much staying in place she got back into her armor and took a walk around, scouting out the immediate area. Moving slowly she didn’t burn many calories and spent the rest of the day tracing a circle around her hideaway several kilometers in diameter looking for scouts and just getting a better feel for the topography, which was varied and vegetation covered. Underneath the trees were ravines, switchbacks, and all other kinds of things that made navigation difficult. A good place to hide in, but also to get cornered in, especially if the fighters returned.

  Ever since she’d switched her shields off they’d been absent, which was something else she needed to get back to the others to tell them sooner rather than later, though right now there was nothing she could do other than try and commandeer a Skarron ship…and if this forced inactivity lasted much longer she might start to get ideas in that direction, despite the impossibility of it. Even if she could manage to fly it she’d never get past the ships in orbit.

  No, she had to wait for rescue, meaning her fate was now in someone else’s hands…and that was something that Morgan absolutely hated.

  Two days later, after another cooling session in her private pond, she put her armor back on and saw a recorded message waiting for her. Cursing herself for not having put it on sooner she played the transmission, which as it turned out was intended to be one way.
>
  They were going to try a hot extraction for her and had come down into orbit on a trial run to get within broadcast range, giving her the message that included coordinates and a timestamp…indicating that her ride was coming in a little over 2 days from now at a point 52 kilometers away.

  That was a decent hike, but given that they didn’t know exactly where she was they’d just had to pick one that looked favorable in the general vicinity of her last known position. The 2 days was to give her time to get there, and potentially for orbital concerns. A ‘hot’ extraction meant it wasn’t going to be secretive and the enemy was going see them doing it. That meant the retrieval team had to get to the LZ ahead of the bad guys, grab her, then get out again before they got blown away.

  Morgan had organized such things numerous times and knew they were tricky, but the news led to a surge of energy in her, for now she had something to do…get to the LZ and secure it in a way that they could pick her up in a manner of seconds.

  With that goal now before her, her mind set itself to the task at hand and the heat no longer seemed the dire threat it had been previously. She had a countdown and knew she could put up with it for that long.

  Morgan pulled out one of the emergency satchels and put enough foodstuffs in it for 3 days then hid the rest back in the hole on the off case that the extraction went bad and she was still stuck here. Taking it all with her would make her too awkward, like a combat-ready Santa with sack and that just wouldn’t do. She needed to be mobile and intended to make the LZ ready to go…with a slim backup plan and a place to retreat to if needed rather than potentially having to drop her stash and leave it behind in order to run if the Skarrons got to her.