Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) (2 page)

Jamka brought his six ships into orbit around
Leerbot
, one of the two Lacvamat planets, where he had a
private space station. He might be an independent shipper, but he wasn’t one of
the smaller ones. The station they were about to dock with held over 50,000 of
his people and serviced a fleet of some 178 ships of varying sizes. Most of
those were out on business runs at the moment, with only a pair of warships and
3 cargo ships accompanying the station in its lazy orbit some 2,200 kilometers
above the thick-
atmosphered
planet.

The Lacvamat were an aerial race, with four wings and
a very private mentality. Only a few locations on the surface were accessible
to outsiders, but where visitors were allowed they were welcomed warmly. The
Lacvamat were heavily invested in the power grab going on within the ADZ and
sought to maximize the advantage they had in possessing their own systems. Star
Force had granted them that based on their previous relationship and their
willingness to evacuate their entire population into the ADZ prior to their
systems falling…something that many other races had refused to do, resulting in
a lot of people dying who otherwise could have been saved.

The Lacvamat had chosen not to take part in the
frontline defense of the ADZ, but they maintained their own sizeable warfleet
and patrolled several systems outside their own, essentially holding a bit of
turf and keeping their eyes and ears open for incursions by the lizards or
anyone else. Their territory wasn’t on the edge of the ADZ, so their position
was fairly stable, with many other races complaining about them being given
preferable treatment then refusing to help out with the common defense.

They weren’t alone in that position, for there were
many races living off of Star Force, the Hycre, and the Protovic’s superior
military forces. Rather than try to find ways to assist them as some of the
lesser races did, the Lacvamat kept to their own business with their eventual
aims being anyone’s guess. Jamka had based his operations here because of the
business opportunities and the
Lacvamat’s
willingness
to work with outsiders, in orbit at least. They’d allowed an independent
contractor to build the station for Jamka, as well as giving him cover to
operate his business and ship throughout their system in return for a few
favors here and there.

And Jamka wasn’t the only one set up here, for the
system was a central hub of the ‘shadow’ sector within the ADZ. The Scionate
also operated in a similar manner, but ever since the recent Star Force coup
there had been a subtle shift away from the quadrupeds’ independence push. The
Scionate were now more in line with the ‘proper’ Star Force backers, though
they still maintained a significant chunk of the shadow business opportunities.

The Lacvamat had gained from their newfound
respectability, recruiting more of the unsavory elements into their territory
along with the legit who simply wanted to get away from Star Force’s choking
presence. Jamka serviced both factions, making inroads where he could and
expanding his business and fleet whenever possible.

Always on the lookout for trouble, Jamka kept an eye
on the public warning system the Lacvamat had in place and as he brought his
new warship in last to dock with his base and begin getting the full overhaul
that it would need to be brought up to proper ‘shipper’ specs…meaning a lot of
concealed compartments and other scoundrel gems…he noticed a small warning
flashing up, with location coordinates of a new no-go zone within the planet’s
atmosphere.

He pulled the warning up, wanting to know ahead of
time of any trouble going on anywhere in the system, and saw a report of a ship
having gone off course and entering a restricted zone of the planet…then
according to the report it had exploded while on descent through the
atmosphere. The immediate area was being locked down by Lacvamat security,
heavily, and there was an unnecessary reminder to everyone else not to go
anywhere close to the explosion zone where they were now beginning to recover
debris.

That made no sense to Jamka, for if the Lacvamat had
shot it down there would be no need for such a lockdown. Something about this
didn’t feel right, and the Critel made sure to keep up to date on the news
reports and official warnings coming in…as well as the unofficial word that
began spreading around, for within a week all hell began breaking loose down on
the planet and the Lacvamat fleet came down to low orbit and put a planetary
lockdown in place with no one being allowed to come or go.

A day later a similar freeze was put on all orbital
traffic, stranding Jamka and his ships at his station, but he knew better than
to defy the warnings. The Lacvamat were not to be trifled with, and whatever
was going on had brought them out of their normal seclusion into full militant
mode.

Jamka knew his best bet was to simply stay still and
silent and hope whatever was going on would sort itself out without him or any
of his people getting caught in the middle of it.

2

August 12, 2552

Plenx
System (Dvapp
Territory)

Rvitx

“
Where are they?
”
Donn-1001 asked in the trade language, leaning over the holo table in his
striker armor as the wind whipped across the open air outpost.

One of the four Dvapp with him extended a tendril from
its column-like mass and pointed to a nearby area on the battlefield map.

“
Here. There are
several subsurface caverns that the Aronsic appear to be moving through
.”

“
Do you have
them charted?
”

“
No
.”

“
Then we do this
the hard way. Heavy scout team, formed on me. We’ll go in and flush them out,
but you have to keep them away from here
,” Donn emphasized, pointing to a
relatively flat section of the barren, rocky landscape on the map that held the
entrance to one of the
Dvapp’s
mining stations. It
was mostly below ground with only a small surface facility, but it held
subsurface tunnel links to 5 nearby facilities…and similar tunnel links were
allowing the Skarrons to assault many other Dvapp facilities in the area. If
they broke through here, they were practically inviting them to spread further.

“
I do not know
if we can
,” the Dvapp said honestly. The Skarrons had no walkers in play,
but they were flooding the area with infantry while the big toys from both
sides were off playing elsewhere on the planet.

“
Slow them down
when they’re crossing terrain, but do not let them mass out in the open. Buy me
time to plug a few holes
.”

“
We will try
.”

Donn nodded and left the
holotable
,
walking across the small prefab Star Force outpost and electronically tagging
two other Archons nearby to follow him. He picked up a half dozen Dvapp on the
way and the 9 of them ran out through the entrance and onto the orange/brown
cracked ground that made up the majority of the planet. A few meters out and
they ran up a hillside before sliding in between boulders and making their way
over the varied terrain towards the caverns the Dvapp had indicated.

It was more than 8 kilometers away straight shot, but
with so many ravines and other topography a straight
anything
wasn’t going to happen. Donn didn’t have a jump pack,
which would have helped him greatly, because his Dvapp troops didn’t have any.
He only had a few Archons and commandos assigned to what was a low priority
region on the planet that had been basically left up for grabs while the heavy
fighting was occurring elsewhere.

Only some local ‘troops’ were available, but Paul had
sent him to the region to do what he could while he and the others fought the
heavy opposition in orbit and some 6 different ground sites, two of which the
Skarrons had already secured and built into fortified anti-air havens. With the
Voku disrupting Skarron reinforcements the enemy had abandoned all but six
invaded systems, choosing to throw everything they had at them while leaving
the ground troops on the other worlds to do what damage they could before being
wiped out.

Donn had come from one such Protovic world that they’d
just finished cleaning up, and it hadn’t been an easy affair. With so much
anti-air fire capable of coming from the ground troops most of them had to be
taken out down low else risk losing a sizeable chunk of your navy to do it from
orbit or the air…and right now Star Force couldn’t waste drones taking the easy
route, leaving the dirty work up to the ground troops.

That hadn’t entirely been true here, with several
naval strikes supplementing the Star Force troops before a warfleet had arrived
to reinforce the Skarrons’ hold over orbit. Their blockade of the planet had
only grown in number as fleets from neighboring systems had redeployed here to
help secure the ground gains they’d made. Two small Star Force fleets had come
as well, with Paul commanding
one, that
had kept the
Skarrons from attempting a forced overrun of the 6 Sentinels around the planet.

That no longer looked to be in the cards, but an
enormous number of ground troops were being escorted down to the surface en
mass and a huge surface campaign was underway. While that was happening the
Skarrons were pushing out to secondary and tertiary regions with infantry alone
and taking most of them almost by default. Donn had been sent to try and secure
one of the regions now coming under assault by taking command of the Dvapp
there and adding a little Archon magic to the mix...though it was questionable
as to whether that would make enough of a difference.

He’d already reorganized their shoddy defense, for
most of these Dvapp were not soldiers. They were essentially militia rounded up
from workers and denizens that were otherwise simply going to be killed as the
Skarrons came through. Under his direction the past 3 days they had begun to
offer more resistance, but the Skarrons kept progressing forward despite the
many ambushes Donn was organizing against them.

Recently enemy infantry had been popping up into
locations they had no business being in, with the newly revealed subsurface
caverns giving the Skarrons an underground route to bypass some of the
surprises the Archon had been laying out for them.

It was to the nearest of those confirmed locations
that he was now running, with two acolytes in tow trying to keep pace with the
much faster Archon. He slowed enough not to lose them while the Dvapp scurried
across the ground like bouncy snakes, moving in a mix of a crawl and leaping
stride as the giant, crystal worms moved as fast as they could. A lot of the
time they’d simply fall on the rocks rather than try and step around them,
melting into the crevices and moving past in a partially liquid fashion, but
over flat ground they couldn’t keep up with Donn and were just barely managing
over the varied terrain.

Inside their bodies they carried their weapons,
suspended in the midst of the crystalline goo as if they’d ate them. Each was a
hard shard about the size of the Archon’s forearm that made up their version of
a rifle that fired a yellow energy beam about 3 times as intense as a lachar.
The beams were long in duration, requiring them to be held on target as opposed
to a quick flash that
Donn’s
plasma rifle wielded,
but given that the Dvapp didn’t move that fast to begin with they fit their
physiology well and could burn through the Skarrons’ thick skin quickly when
given the opportunity.

About halfway to the waypoint he’d put on the
battlemap for him and the other two Archons to track towards they met up with a
few Hobbit scouts. Donn broke left and began to flank them as the line moved
forward, then another Archon moved out to the right giving them flankers on
both sides. The striker accelerated on his zigzaggy path now that he had no one
following him and got up to within 10 meters of the first Hobbit, gunning him down
with a quick pair of plasma streaks before he noticed the four more nearby via
Ikrid.

Heading straight for them he rounded a car-sized
boulder and mowed down the two nearest him with
plasma,
then kicked another aside before telekinetically yanking the rifle out of the
hand of the fourth. He killed those two within a pair of seconds and moved on,
eventually coming back up to the line of Dvapp that had continued moving
forward at pace, knowing they had to get to those caverns sooner rather than
later.

Donn eventually got back into the lead position, with
the acolyte coming back as well after dealing with a pair of scouts on his side
of the line. After a lot more running the Archon brought the full scouting
group to a halt, with the Dvapp literally melting into the rocks around them to
get out of sight while Donn cautiously walked ahead as far as he dared, using
his Ikrid and Pefbar to scout ahead.

On the other side of the hill he was kneeling against
was a large group…too many to hit, but at the moment they weren’t moving. Donn
plucked a few recent memories from the closest of them and confirmed another
cavern exit nearby with more infantry coming up through it and assembling for a
new push on the Dvapp infrastructure further to the south.

Getting an approximate size on the deployment, Donn
got his scouts moving laterally and worked his way around it, eventually
getting back to their original path on the far side while logging the position
of the enemy troops on the battlemap so those back in the outpost would know
where they were. What little aerial surveillance they had was complicated by
the rocky terrain, and it was possible that the intermittent cloud cover could
block it entirely.

He didn’t know if this group had been spotted or not,
but it was better that he log it just in case and sent the data back with a
pulse transmission, knowing that if the Skarrons tracked it back to their
location they wouldn’t find them, given that they were staying on the move.

It took a while and some more dodging/killing of
scouting groups until they eventually got to the entrance that he’d been made
aware of back in the outpost. It too had troops pooling around it, but less
than a minute after the scout team arrived the enemy infantry began to move
out, sneaking their way through the house-sized rocks and cracks within the
ravines and traveling in several strands across to where Donn didn’t know, but
they were heading in a generally west direction.

He logged that too,
then
brought his team down into the hollow that the troops had just left, finding
several overhangs cut out by wind or water a long time ago that had the ground
chewed up with footprints. Nearby was a narrow crack in the rock that led to
the subsurface caverns, with Donn heading in without hesitation given that his
Pefbar gave him a limited heads up to what was ahead, though too much rock
would block his ‘x-ray’ vision as well.

The two acolytes followed him in, then the Dvapp after
that, taking them out of transmission range and into the planet’s crust in
search of more enemies and where they were moving about.

As soon as he got inside Donn began recording a new
map, placing waypoints for himself and the other two and having them move off
down every branch they came across with their armor emitting a low level signal
that essentially measured the shape of the hollows and added a crude schematic
to the map on his HUD, though several times it would update in chunks when one
of the acolytes came back into normal battlemap transmission range, which in
this case was line of sight of only a few meters given the rock that was
everywhere was blocking all standard signals.

The Archons tried to run to save time, but the
chambers were so narrow and jagged that the best they could manage was a slow
jog most of the time until one of the acolytes finally found a route out of the
maze that led to a much larger chasm some 215 meters below the surface.

Donn followed the others down there, with the acolyte
signaling for silence as they approached. When the striker came through he got
down on his belly and crawled across the small slope down to a large boulder
where his fellow Archon was crouching…and on the other side of which was a dry
creek bed with hundreds of Hobbits milling about.

His armor sensors were mapping out only part of the
chamber, which was more than a football field wide and stretched off both to
the left and right in a ragged U-shape that had them currently on the peak. The
Hobbits were scattered, apparently waiting while more came in, for Donn could
hear movement to the left in the extreme distance as well as sense some of the
closer minds. There were more
coming
this way, not in
great numbers but enough that he knew this scattered group was going to
grow…and there were a few Skarrons with them.

The Hobbits could see well in the dark, he knew, but
the Skarrons less so. The chamber was pitch black, without a single light to
see by and the Dvapp moving around mostly by feel, though knowing they were
going underground they’d ‘ingested’ a small nightvision device that gave them
some sight capability when used, though at the moment none of them were for
they didn’t want to give away their location with the little pings of lights
that they emitted.

“More on the way?” the acolyte next to Donn asked via
the comm, with the other holding back in the narrow tunnels with the Dvapp.

“Yeah, with most outside my range I’d guess,” he said,
crouching down behind the rock and ‘looking’ with his psionics.

“Map or fight?”

“I don’t think we have the option of just mapping, but
we can’t engage them head on either. Fight and run, but without knowing where
we’re going that’s going to be tricky.”

“Send me out to map the right side,” the acolyte
suggested. “If I get into trouble you can ambush, and at least you’ll have some
idea of what the layout is.”

“Nice to have a volunteer,” he commented. “Go quietly
as far as you can.”

The acolyte crawled off to another rock without a word
and disappeared around the far side, with Donn tracking him via Ikrid when the
battlemap signals eventually cut out from so much rock in between and no lateral
transmitters to relay. A quick telepathic signal brought the other acolyte down
out of cover, crawling up beside him to the spot the other had just left.

“What’s up?”

“Hold the fort and keep the Dvapp here. I’m going left
and getting a better read on the layout.”

“Kind of crowded that way.”

“I know,” Donn said, leaving the group behind and
moving off. There were Hobbits some 20 meters ahead of him that he had to
avoid, but with a few Jedi mind tricks it wasn’t difficult. Finding the proper
rocks and crevices to move through was, and Donn forced himself to go slow and
be as invisible as he could while his armor automatically updated the battlemap
for every meter that he crossed.