Star Force: Melee (SF20) Read online

  The shields on the cruiser eventually went down and the plasma lances cut into its hull just as a large glob of green plasma found one of the cutters and broke through its Herculium armor, resulting in multiple internal explosions that dropped the ‘brick’ out of the sky and down into the forest where it dug up and sprayed a massive plume of vegetation into the air. The cruiser didn’t stick around, however, and began to retreat to the left but both cutters stayed with it, pounding its aft arc with plasma and then launching a huge missile salvo from both ships that completely obscured Paul’s view for a moment with all the smoke and impact debris fouling the air.

  Then all of a sudden the back end of the cruiser dipped below the cloud and hit the forest canopy, sinking down in with its front end still suspended up in the air. Paul knew instantly that the rear gravity drives had been knocked out, meaning that the ship was all but doomed. Unless they could get enough power to the forward units for it to limp up off into space, or at least up higher into the atmosphere, it was going to be a sitting duck for the cutters to finish off or, if they couldn’t, would be an applicable candidate for orbital bombardment, given its distance from the edge of the city.

  As Paul watched he saw more and more flocks of dropships skirting the top of the forest as they zipped into the outer edges of the city. They were merely dots from his perspective, but he knew they contained dozens of fresh mechs that would at minimum help them clear the streets of the lizard ground vehicles, and if they got enough mechs clustered together they might even have a chance of downing or driving off the cruisers bringing in additional lizard troops.

  Paul didn’t know what Clan had pulled this off but he was proud of them, especially for that bit of naval strategy. He watched a bit longer until he saw the rest of the lizard ship crash into the ground and the two remaining cutters swarm over it, firing their plasma barrages directly down on top of it with maximum cohesion and intensity. From his perspective they were just flashes of blue, but he could imagine the carnage they were unleashing on that ship and he was more than glad to have it eliminated from the engagement.

  Remembering why he was here Paul deactivated his scope and carried his satchel over to the southwest corner of the building and began unloading its contents onto the rooftop a few meters in from the railing that was the only divider between flat roof and sheer drop off on the other side. He pulled out the varying components and reassembled his rocket launcher, along with adding on the guiding matrix and scope before loading the first of four smart missiles into the wide barrel.

  He hefted the heavy tube up onto his shoulder, feeling the appropriately placed padding mold to fit his body and provide stability for the weapon. It was so heavy that only an Archon or Knight could wield it, and Paul had had it shipped in from Clan Saber specifically for this mission, knowing that he was going to need the heavier firepower and range compared to the launchers the Canderians were using to great effect on the city streets.

  Bracing against the weight Paul slowly took a knee and steadied himself as he looked through the scope across several lower height buildings until he found the one he wanted. It was a bit higher than those immediately around it, but lower still than the building Paul was on. Unlike his, however, the target had a large apparatus on top looking like an elongated version of one of the Archons’ personal shields. It was suspended above the rooftop several meters and beveled at the edges while the interior was completely flat with a long center swipe having been cut out.

  Paul could just make out the roof below through that swipe and chose to aim further to the side in case he accidentally hit the gap and missed the orbital transmitter that was his target. He pushed a small button on the side of the launcher near the trigger and a laser shot out, marking the spot he intended to hit. Paul aligned it exactly where he wanted and activated the missile’s navigational system, getting receipt of laser recognition as a small icon on the launcher’s scope HUD.

  The Archon pulled the trigger and the thick missile shot out in a cloud of smoke that covered him from all angles to reduce the recoil of the launch, save for the front of the launcher where the scope and laser ended. Paul kept his concentration on the target as well as the laser dot as the missile swooped across the rooftops at a shallow angle, crossing to the target and ramming into the topside of the transmitter where it detonated.

  Paul waited for the debris to clear, glancing up at his still inactive battlemap, then back down at the hole the weapon had torn in the transmitter…but the array was so big that it was going to take more than one to knock it out.

  Pulling his head back from the scope Paul set the launcher down on the ground and loaded a second missile into it, checking again to make sure that the roof was clear of lizards behind him. Being patient enough to forestall any mistakes he hefted the launcher back up onto his shoulder and repositioned on his knee to get the correct angle before dipping the tip of the long tube over the top of the railing and sighting in on a different segment of the transmission ‘table’ covering the other building’s rooftop.

  Another trigger pull and the second missile fired off, streaking over to the target and blasting another hole into the opposite side, but still it wasn’t enough to knock it out. Paul had wondered if two would do it, but had brought four along just in case not wanting to come up short, but now he was starting to get worried. He loaded up the third missile and aimed for the biggest section of intact transmitter that he could and fired it off…then a split second after it hit his battlemap lit up with new data, showing all but three areas of the city with a huge number of Star Force unit signals.

  Paul smiled, not having realized how much progress the others had been making. The three remaining dead zones had to be from smaller jamming transmitters, but from the looks of it most of their defensive forces were now in communications range…included a large number of mechs assembling in five locations out in the grassy perimeter zone.

  Paul adjusted his comm to the trailblazer only teamcomm. “Anyone online?”

  “Paul, I hear you,” Jason’s voice answered back. “My battlemap just lit up. Did someone take out a jammer?”

  “Guilty as charged, but it looks like there are still three smaller ones in play.”

  “Nice work,” Morgan commented. “I especially like the little naval engagement you’ve got going on.”

  “That wasn’t my handiwork. I’ve been with Canderous working out of the command building and incommunicado aside from courier runs. Whoever arranged that, I’m glad we’re finally getting more mechs into play.”

  “What? No, I meant the engagement in space.”

  “What engagement?” Paul asked, frowning.

  “I thought that was you too,” Jason added.

  “What engagement?” Paul repeated.

  “It’s still going on, but we’ve downed two cruisers that tried to hit our shipyard,” Jason explained. “Another pair are still going at it with our fleet, but they’re losing badly.”

  “Where are you getting that feed from?”

  “A mantis laser relay back to colony 4. I thought you’d hooked into the link and were organizing things upstairs.”

  “I’ve been blind for days…and at the moment I’m behind enemy lines,” he said as a small flashing icon indicated that he was receiving a signal on another frequency. “I’ll get back to you later.”

  Paul dumped the missile launcher onto the rooftop as he adjusted his comm. “Paul here.”

  “It appears you were successful,” Raines said. “Our comms are no longer jammed and we’re getting requests from new mechs on the field to link up with our ground units.”

  “Organize and secure a conduit straight in to the safe zone. We’re sticking to the plan and pushing out, sector by sector. Add them into the fold until I get back.”

  “Same extraction point?”

  “Negative. I’ll call for pickup when I get in range. I’m not heading back by the same route I came in on. I might as well scout out the enemy positions a bit while
I’m here.”

  “I’ll leave a shuttle standing by with pilot and extraction team onboard.”

  “Copy that,” Paul said, ending the conversation and walking up to the railing so he could see the streets below that made an ‘X’ directly underneath his position. Three of the directions were clear, but there was another patrol coming his way from the upper left portion of the ‘X’ so Paul loaded up his last missile and sighted in on the anti-air vehicle trailing the anti-personnel vehicle a few meters in front of it. Both were hovering less than a meter off the street as they moved down the wide lane between buildings with ground troops flanking them on the sidewalks.

  Paul pulled the trigger and held the launcher steady until there was a small ‘puff’ of an explosion in the distance, then he stood up and chucked the launcher over the edge of the railing, hoping it might hit a passing lizard on the way down. He pulled out his plasma rifle from the rack on his back and headed over to the stairwell entrance, then disappeared inside the building and lizard territory, slowly making his way back to Star Force-controlled streets.

  9

  April 3, 2266

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Paul stood side by side with Jason in the back of the mantis as its boarding ramp lowered into open air. Behind him stood Morgan and Rafa, each loaded up with weapons, explosives, and ammo, especially Morgan who was carrying an insanely large pack. As soon as the ramp locked into place Paul walked off the edge and dropped half a step ahead of Jason and fell to the upper hull of the lizard cruiser a few meters below.

  He caught himself as his feet hit damaged armor plates and tried to roll over, then he walked out of his stumble and clear of the drop point while the other two trailblazers came down, then the mantis roared off into the city skyline, taking a bit of anti-air fire from the ground as it left, but it wasn’t enough to take the transport down.

  All around the downed cruiser the lizards were making their final stand. Dozens of assault vehicles were battling it out with mechs as thousands of lizards dug in to the surrounding buildings, but the Archons didn’t have time to look around. As soon as they were boots down on the hull Paul ran over a few meters and hopped into a hot and recently cut breach point and dropped inside. Jason followed quickly, a few steps ahead of the trailing pair. Two seconds after Morgan slipped through last in line the cruiser’s shields reformed a meter and a half above the hull in a brief shimmer, then disappeared into their standard invisibility.

  Over the past week Star Force had systematically swept through the city sector by sector as the lizards continued to land more troops, but with the mech reinforcements coming in they hadn’t been able to hold the streets and had been forced to either retreat or stand their ground and fight it out in a long, losing campaign, making the Humans earn every block and building they retook. Then 3 days into the mech-backed counteroffensive one of the lizards’ remaining cruisers had landed within the city, crushing several small buildings underneath it as it sank down into the cityscape and out of targeting range of the remaining defense towers.

  Its shields had then been reconfigured to cover not only the ship but several surrounding buildings as well, all the way down to ground level in some cases. In addition, some of the cruiser’s weaponry was still intact, which made mech assault problematic. They could whether brief exposure to their strong anti-air batteries, but one square hit from a main cannon was all it would take to knock a mech down, and given the narrow confines of the streets they were fighting on several of the approaches were all but death traps, which forced the mechs to attack through a limited number of approaches that the lizard ground troops had heavily reinforced.

  The other remaining cruisers were now dropping reinforcements directly onto the downed cruiser and pushing back forcefully to carve out a niche within the city that they could hold against the mechs. Meanwhile, they’d discovered the underground network of tunnels and chambers that ran beneath the city and beyond and had been fighting desperately to push down into those areas, knowing that they stood their best chance underground where Star Force air and orbital power couldn’t get to them.

  The mechs still could, however, and had been stalling their subterranean advance, but with more and more lizards being poured into the effort it was only a matter of time before they broke through, especially given the amount of anti-mech equipment being brought in. Larger and larger portable turrets were popping up on the streets, almost as if the lizards were custom designing them to meet the needs of the battle.

  Booby traps were also beginning to pop up on the defensive lines and had forced the ground teams to move cautiously around the perimeter, buying even more times for the lizards to press underground. Paul knew they were pushing the enemy to the breaking point, but their adaptability and industrial resourcefulness still posed a significant threat should they be able to establish a secure base of operations to work out of…and if they did manage to get set up underground it would all but disable their primary weapon against the lizards, that being their orbital bombardment.

  Taking the grounded cruiser out of the equation was critical, so Paul and the other three trailblazers had opted to try something a bit reckless. Skeet and gunship assaults on the shield had successfully brought it down, but only after a massive salvo of missiles…something they couldn’t maintain indefinitely. While the skeets then tried to disable as many shield generators as they could the mantis had sped them down to the hull and into one of the newest breach points, intent on getting them into the ship before the shields regenerated and closed over the hole.

  “Well we went nowhere fast,” Morgan commented as the four of them were crammed into a deep, but unopen crater in the hull, the bottom of which Paul and Jason were standing on as they dug through melted and sheered components, pulling out what they could pry loose with their armored hands.

  “Patience, young Jedi,” Jason said, ripping out a long section of pipe and seeing it catch on fire as the contents spilled out onto a hot piece of metal. “Whoa,” he commented as the entire section became a flame thrower until the pressure ran out a few seconds later.

  “There,” Paul said, ignoring the bits of burning liquid that were dripping down onto his armor as he pulled and pried his way through more bits of the ship until he got to a solid, flat panel. “Morgan?”

  The ranger set her pack down and reached inside, moving various contents around until her hand came up with a small explosive bar which she tossed to him.

  Paul set it into the position he wanted then smooshed it down into a flatter ‘pancake’ to give them a wider breach point rather than a deeper one…or so he hoped. He also didn’t know what was below them, exactly, but there should have been a series of rooms based off the schematics they’d recovered from the Bounty, and he was fairly sure that the flat section below him was the ceiling of one of them.

  Paul set the timer chip imbedded into the explosive playdoh for five seconds then backed away from the spot a couple of meters, pushing Jason a bit farther away until he bumped up against Rafa’s leg. Both of the higher situated Archons on the sloped crater covered their packs with their armored bodies and waited for the blast.

  When it blew several pieces flew out and hit Paul and Jason in the armor, scratching and bouncing off randomly, but most of the blast was directed upwards into the shield. It flared into a cascade of tiny bright speckles then returned to invisible as if it were nothing more than a bug zapper that had just caught a gnat. The pieces of that ‘gnat’ rained back down on the Archons, covering them in a wash of dust and smoke.

  “We through?” Rafa asked as Paul moved back over to check the blast point.

  To answer his question both Paul and Jason pulled their rifles off their backs and fired down at a lizard looking up through the newly formed hole. A moment later Paul dropped through the tight fit, followed by a pair of rifle shots, then everything went silent as Jason followed him through.

  “Clear,” Paul reported, then Rafa and Morgan
began to wedge their packs through the breach.

  Jason headed for the nearest door in what looked like a service area with tables full of partially assembled components and bins of replacement parts and took up guard duty. Apparently there had only been one lizard in the room, which made sense if most of them were fighting down below the ship, but there was no way of knowing how many more were nearby.

  Jason held position while Paul found another entrance on the other side as the other two Archons hauled their cargo through the blast point, which in Morgan’s case had to be partially unloaded and passed down to make it small enough to squeeze through. After her pack came down the ranger followed and quickly repacked everything she’d taken out, then moved up behind Paul and tapped him on the shoulder.

  He lead her and Rafa out into a smaller hallway than those they’d encountered on the jumpship as Jason ran to catch up, abandoning his position at the other doorway. The foursome traveled together down a third of the length of the ship, only seeing and shooting seven lizards on the way before they split up into pairs with Jason and Rafa heading for the primary shield power generator and Paul and Morgan headed over to the twin reactor that powered the main weapons.

  The third major power generator on the ship fed the propulsion systems while other smaller ones serviced support systems, essentially giving the cruiser three ‘hearts’ as opposed to the single power sources that fed all Star Force ships, save for backups. It was yet another design variation that Paul was interested in studying after all this was over, along with several other ingenious designs he intended to steal from the enemy.

  When he and Morgan got to the power core they had to fight through several guards…or engineers, he couldn’t be sure which because they were all armed. A lot of lizards on the jumpship hadn’t been, so he wasn’t sure exactly what these had been positioned here for, but they were all the ‘standard issue’ variety.