Star Force: Melee (SF20) Read online

  With Paul covering the area Morgan began unpacking several large explosives from her bag of goodies and positioning them around the room for maximum effect, most of which went along the wall that butted up against the reactor. She didn’t use all of her stores, for the idea was to knock it offline rather than trigger an overload, seeing as how they were still inside the ship. The lizards might not have a problem going kamikaze, but for any and all Star Force troops that was one of the few taboos they had.

  Killing yourself might serve a purpose today, but you wouldn’t be around for the battles to come tomorrow…and given how long Archons lived, ‘tomorrow’ could be hundreds, if not thousands of engagements. With that in mind, passing up a kill or victory to stay alive made much more tactical sense when you considered the long term implications.

  With their battlemap functional on the cruiser, and everywhere else in the city now that they’d hit and eliminated the other jamming sites, the two groups met up again in the lower aft section of the ship, well away from the explosives they’d just planted. It felt odd to Paul to be running around an almost empty ship, as far as crew were concerned, but he wasn’t about to complain about their good fortune…though he was double checking every turn they took, waiting for some nasty surprise that seemed to be lurking at the edge of his senses.

  Morgan pulled out her detonator and held it in the air until Rafa did the same, then both triggered their charges simultaneously as Paul mentally crossed his fingers.

  A sharp jerk shook the ship, knocking Paul into Jason and Jason into the wall, but that was the worst of it. Several vibrations followed, probably resulting from secondary explosions, but power to the section of the ship they were in remained steady and the four Archons looked around for a few seconds, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.

  “Next?” Morgan asked.

  “Propulsion and comms,” Jason answered, “but let’s hold off detonation and see if we can’t take control of the ship. There don’t seem to be very many onboard,” he said, glancing at Paul who nodded back, thinking the same.

  “I’ll go with Morgan,” Rafa offered. “You two go do your thing.”

  With barely a nod of recognition Paul and Jason headed off to the right while Rafa and Morgan went left, both knowing that the faster they got control of/disabled the ship the better it would be for their assault forces fighting outside.

  Cora fired off both plasma cannons from her Neo’s forearms sending two streaks of blue into a lizard anti-vehicle hovering tank as she darted across an intersection, popping into view for a couple of seconds then passing behind another building on the other side. Both shots hit true and took down its shields, kissing the hull beneath with a warm bath of air but doing no damage. As Cora slowed her running mech to a halt a madcat walked out across the intersection from behind her, torso twisted to the left, and fired off its larger plasma cannons, one of which missed high but the other hit dead center on the plasma turret up top and decapitated the machine.

  It didn’t explode or drop to the ground, but its primary weapon was gone making it no real threat to the mechs unless it tried to ram them in the legs.

  “Cora, I think the cruiser’s shields are down,” Jasmine said as her mech also finished crossing the intersection into cover. “One of my shots missed high and I could have swore it hit the hull.”

  “Did you take a hit?” Cora asked, passing the raggedy mech as she turned around and headed back to the intersection.

  “Just some spit from the small ones,” she said, referencing the pair of anti-personnel vehicles that had what amounted to a pair of plasma gatling guns on top sitting side by side giving it the appearance of an old fashioned police car. The plasma shards were very small, smaller than the anti-air vehicles they had roaming around and barely bigger than the lizards’ rifles…except that these could fire nonstop, pumping out 5 shots per second, and with two of them per vehicle they made for quite the killer of infantry when they were stupid enough to come out of cover. Fortunately Star Force infantry wasn’t stupid, and the Canderians had gotten quite adept a taking out the dangerous vehicles with shoulder firing rocket launchers.

  Cora poked the left side of her mech out into the intersection and raised her arm up, aiming above the lizard blockade and fired off a quick plasma lance into the cruiser…which did in fact bypass the shields and hit the hull.

  “They are down,” Cora said, pulling back behind cover for a moment as the ‘coppers’ hit the building with dozens of rounds of plasma fire, putting a trio of scratches on her mech’s arm. “Jason, what’s your status?”

  There was a long pause, during which Cora got set up with Jasmine at her back for another attack, this one of a more direct variety.

  “Bridge secure,” Jason finally responded.

  “Good,” Cora said, flexing her hands that were now free of motor control since the plasma cannons in her forearms were active. “Did you take the shields down?”

  “Yeah, long time ago.”

  “What…give a girl a heads up next time, jeez.”

  “I thought it would be rather obvious…hold on, how’s this for a heads up. Paul thinks he’s got their helm control worked out.”

  “Copy that,” Cora said, walking forward and turning the corner. “Let’s go,” she told Jasmine over the comm, then started firing at the rightmost copper with both cannons while holding to the right side of the street so Jasmine could have a firing line down the left.

  The mechs were more than 250 meters away from the blockade, but Cora’s neo crossed that space rather quickly. Jasmine’s madcat caught up soon enough after she negotiated the turn and got up to a cant legged run, hopping with each step as she fired off both her plasma cannons and the few missiles she had left. Both of the coppers were taken out before Cora got up to the blockade and started pounding the infantry stupid enough to remain out in the street…then a bolt of green plasma flashed by her mech’s head and hit the madcat in one of the missile boxes, sheering it off with an internal explosion, courtesy of the remaining missiles inside.

  Cora kicked one of the vehicular barricades aside and made room for the less agile madcat to pull up behind cover at the next intersection as the second lizard blockade down the street started to punish the mechs for their frontal assault. It was located halfway down the road to the next intersection where there was a third blockade standing guard over a longer stretch of road that led to the cruiser, which was sitting on several crushed buildings with a narrow gap underneath for infantry traffic and the coppers to get through…the rest of their vehicles were too tall, apparently, and had to skirt around the perimeter of the ship to get to the other side.

  As Cora ducked to the left side of the intersection, firing back and hitting the shields on the ‘shade’ that was firing at them, for the vehicle’s design gave a fair imitation of a sundial, there was a mild earthquake that she heard rather than felt rumble across the area. When she ducked her neo back out and fired off another volley of plasma she could see daylight expanding beneath the cruiser as it very slowly lifted off from the buildings it had been sitting on.

  “Aim for the pyro behind the shade,” Cora told Jasmine.

  “Which one?”

  “I only saw one…hit whichever you can. I think we’re about to get some air support.”

  “Copy,” Jasmine said, walking her mech out and kicking the smoking remains of one of the dead coppers aside as she fired simultaneously with Cora as her Neo came out and crossed behind her larger mech. Their combined plasma salvo hit the pyro on the left and got at least something through its shields, but Jasmine couldn’t be sure if it was out of commission or not.

  Another green orb flashed by, nicking the madcat’s left arm but not cutting all the way through the armor. One good thing about the shades was the fact that they were slow firing and didn’t track well when rotating, designed more like a mobile artillery unit than a tank, but made all the more deadly by the confined streets they were fighting in. They’d
already lost two mechs in Cora’s unofficial unit, leaving only the pair of Archons left to probe this side of the cruiser’s defenses while the main mech assault was occurring on the far side.

  By now the lizard cruiser was well up into the air and climbing higher by the second, lifting straight up, Cora thought, because Paul probably hadn’t figured out where the throttle was yet. That part didn’t matter, so long as the ship was out of the way, and as predicted a squadron of fast moving skeets flashed over their mechs and took out the shade with a hail of plasma fire and at least one bomb being dropped. She didn’t know what they were loaded with, but whatever it was did the trick nicely and even took out the pair of pyros and the infantry around them.

  Her sensors did spot one of the skeets pull up damaged, so apparently the pyros had gotten off some return fire. That skeet crisscrossed with dozens of others coming from the far side after making strafing runs there. The immediate area was filled with aircraft for a few moments then they dispersed out to the fringes before circling back around to begin a second wave of support strikes.

  “Let’s push on,” Cora insisted, seeing that the blockade ahead of them had partial damage, but at least one copper there was still active.

  “Right behind you,” Jasmine confirmed, slowly kicking the wreck of the shade out of her way before bounding off down the street again. “They are so toast now.”

  10

  August 13, 2266

  Epsilon Eridani System

  Corneria

  Paul watched from a command nexus in his Clan Saber colony as the rail gun rounds fell from orbit onto the last lizard base on Corneria, pummeling through its already breached shields and laying waste to their infrastructure. A ground team was standing by to insert after the deadly rain ceased, waiting in a fleet of dropships and mantises that Paul had given the go ahead signal to launch ten minutes ago. By the time they arrived the majority of the base’s defenses would be down, as nearly all the buildings would be, but there was always something left intact after bombardment and Star Force had gotten lots of practice over the past months executing just this sort of a cleanup operation.

  With the Bounty captured and this last base being taken out the lizard invasion was grinding to a halt. No new reinforcements had entered the system, as far as they could tell. They did now have access to the jumpship’s sensors so they weren’t completely blind to lizard naval incursions, but its sensors were still line of sight and limited in range, which Paul had thoroughly tested using their captured cruiser once they’d patched up the hull and made other repairs.

  The jumpship now sat in a lazy orbit far above Corneria where it could watch over all but a small approach vector as an army of techs worked to repair the extensive damage to the ship while learning more about the enemy’s technology…especially their seed-like industrial capability, which allowed them to produce, Paul had discovered, and entire tech tree all the way up to building new jumpships if their inserted colonies were allowed to grow to a sufficient level.

  Already Paul had built several of their ground vehicles and aircraft using just that technology in his own lizard base situated a few hundred miles north of Clan Saber. Disassembling and reverse engineering the tech was proving to be much harder, so for the sake of study Paul was following the lizard’s path and using the intact pieces they’d recovered to build new ones, both to give the techs more samples to tear apart and to give him and the other Archons pieces to field test new weaponry and tactics against.

  Next to their lizard colony was a large section of forest that had been cleared out and designated the ‘battle range’ where they could conduct their weapon tests. Thanks to some handiwork on Jason’s part all the lizard vehicles could be remote piloted by a dummy mechanism placed inside each vehicle and aircraft that would relay control prompts in Star Force terminals to mechanical arms and button depressors that would act as if they were a lizard sitting at the controls.

  Rigging up Star Force tech to remote control their own craft was much easier, and once they had the kinks worked out Jason, Paul, Greg, and every other trailblazer on the planet began devoting a portion of their time to the war games, feeling out weaknesses in the enemy’s and their own tech, prompting redesigns and altogether new models as they prepared for the day when the lizards would return in what everyone mutually agreed would be much greater force.

  That’s why they hadn’t waited to begin experimenting until all the lizards were gone from the planet. Taking down and cleaning out the remaining lizard bases was time consuming and costly in terms of manpower and hours, all the while the rest of the planet was still on alert but had nothing else to do. Multi-tasking was one thing Star Force, and especially the trailblazers, were good at so even as the last lizard base fell another one was growing on the other side of the planet under Star Force’s control.

  Today’s orbital bombardment was going as expected. Though they never did get a full count of how many cruisers were in play, none had been seen over the past 2 months. The damage done to those remaining had rendered them visible on short range sensors, at minimum, and Star Force had made a point of hunting them down across the vast tracks of the planet’s forest as they tried to escape and lay low rather than returning to base to effect repairs.

  Oddly enough none made a run for space, even though Paul figured that was probably their best alternative. It was true that they had nowhere to go, for the gravity drives in the cruisers were too weak for all but a very slow retreat across the stars without the aid of a jumpship, during which it’d take them dozens, if not hundreds of years to return to their homeworld. If one or more had escaped the system by that means Paul was willing to let them go, knowing that by the time they whistled up any support Star Force would be ready to fight the war they’d be bringing back with them.

  “How we doing?”

  Paul half turned around inside the nexus, glancing behind him even though he recognized the voice.

  “I didn’t realize you were here. They’re showing almost no signs of movement at all.”

  Jason walked inside the holographic barrier and suddenly the sensor scans from orbit became visible, along with several side views from scout craft they had flying around the perimeter over the forest.

  “Think we exhausted their reverses or they scurried off elsewhere?”

  “A few vehicles escaped into the tree line,” Paul said, pointing at the virtual screen in front of them. “But I haven’t spotted a single kirby, gunship, or fighter taking to the air.”

  “Burrowing again?”

  Paul shrugged. “We’ll find out shortly. I’d like to think this is the end of their rope, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the game again.”

  “Who’s to say the Hycre found them all?”

  “Exactly. I’ll concede this is probably the last of their major bases, but if I was them I’d have created a few subterranean ones elsewhere after it became evident that we could target and take their shields down from orbit.”

  Jason rubbed his chin distractedly. “I don’t think they were ever playing defensive, and while you might consider that to be a long term offensive strategy, I doubt they’d agree. They’re too aggressive. Cagey, I’ll give them, but their general mindset seems to be hit rather than cower.”

  “They’re adaptable,” Paul differed. “They may prefer to bust in through the front door, but take that option away and they’ll go in through a window.”

  “As far as subterranean bases go…”

  “Clan Saber is holding off construction until we eliminate this base. I’ve got three sites tagged but I don’t want to give away their location to prying eyes. You?”

  “Clan Sangheili is expanding underneath our current facilities and will branch out from there, but we’re not establishing any separate sites. I want the option of reinforcement and evacuation retained for all our bases, including camouflaged bolt holes on the surface. The lizards are too good at frontal assaults for us not to have a means of flanking them.”
r />   That they were good at their initial, mass strikes. Paul had personally headed up numerous hunter teams scouring the remains of Corneria Prime for lingering lizard presence, getting much more widespread view of the battle damage in the process. Most of the city’s buildings still stood, but two thirds of them had received significant damage, the worst of which was the area where the cruiser had landed, crushing several underneath.

  The insides were another story, for the lizards and trashed and gutted every building they came across, funneling the raw materials they desired to their onsite factories to produce the barricades and turrets that they had quickly spread out across the city, while leaving other materials strewn about in a very untidy fashion.

  Jason’s assertion was correct. The lizards did favor the frontal, ‘we will dominate’ assault profile he referenced, but it was their secondary tactics that were the more impressive. Paul didn’t doubt that they’d had many long centuries, if not millennia, to iron out their battle regimen and tweak it against dozens of races. They were a formidable enemy, more so than he thought Jason gave them credit for, though he would never suggest that his friend was taking them lightly. He knew better than that, but from a purely strategic perspective Paul was growing more and more convinced that there was additional levels of depth to their cunning that weren’t made readily apparent, hidden beneath their often distracting aggression.

  “How long do you think we have?” Paul asked.

  “I would hope decades, but I get the feeling you think it’ll be sooner than that.”

  “I think we just earned ourselves a breather…and that we have far too few jumpships to feed us the reinforcements we need to shore up the planet before they come back.”

  “Can’t argue with you there. What are the techs saying about getting the Bounty jumping again?”