Star Force: Survivor (SF52) (4 page)

He disconnected the emergency latches, for the torso
usually stayed together as a single piece when he put it on, and pulled the
damaged section off. The rest he categorized and organized into
piles,
then took a shower and got the grime off of him
before heading over to the local armory and trading out the damaged pieces for
new ones and getting some quick ‘putty’ work on the small holes in the rest.

That sealed them off and hardened into a good armor of
its own, slightly weaker but much better than throwing out nearly good pieces
in exchange for new ones…and in an long campaign like this you never knew how
many new suits were going to be available, so you needed to make do with what you
had whenever possible.

With his armor back up to snuff Victor headed to the
cafeteria and grabbed a bite to eat before heading off to bed. When he woke up
the next morning new orders still hadn’t come through so he hit the training
facilities and got in a good few workouts until four days later when an
underwater transport finally arrived to take him and the others off to another
engagement zone.

The same type of transport deposited them on another
shore some 1000+ miles away from where they’d been
evaced
.
There they boarded land vehicles and sped off to a nearby city where they
supplemented the defense forces prepping for a Skarron attack that looked to be
two days out, judging by the pace their walkers were making heading towards it.

This city did have mech and aerial support, which gave
Victor hope that they could hold out this time. There were a lot of walkers
headed their way, with ample infantry support, but he didn’t think they were
unmanageable numbers…so long as an enemy transport didn’t swoop in and add to
them, which was always a possibility. That said
,
fresh
troops were in short supply on both sides, so he hoped the enemy had better
places to send them. He wanted a victory to counteract the bad taste in his
mouth from so many retreats and maybe, just maybe, this upcoming battle had the
look of being one.

With ample motivation, Victor armored up and headed
for his combat deployment post, supporting a group of commandos waiting inside
the outer wall for when/if the enemy penetrated into the city…with the mechs
outside already starting to snipe at Skarron units on approach.

4

January 18, 2549

Reesi
System

Metropolis

With the initial attack successfully repulsed, Victor
was reassigned to a unit that was headed into what was now Skarron territory.
Glad to be going on the offensive, he joined up with a group of 60 commandos
and four other Knights and boarded a single
Falcon
-class
dropship that took off from the city several hours into night and flew across
the horizon, gaining more minutes of dark as they moved opposite to the spin of
the planet.

Their dropship had a full squadron of skeets in escort
as it flew an evasive path up and around the main Skarron strongholds, avoiding
their walkers and their anti-air, and traveling a very long route up to a
captured outpost. They set down in the trees barely a kilometer off as the
fighters strafed the small defensive emplacements the Skarrons had set up.

Victor offloaded with the others and ran in formation
with four commandos attached to him, his physical shield held at ready in front
of him on his left arm and his massive stun sword held in his right hand. The
nightvision in his helmet showed them the way through the trees until they
eventually came out into a light skirmish, with Victor sprinting ahead and
bashing a hobbit with the front of his shield, sending it flying back a couple
of meters while he turned and whacked another with his sword as the commandos
followed up closely and gunned the others down.

There wasn’t much more to do than that, for the rest
of the troops were mowing over the light guard the Skarrons had on the place.
It was a relatively minor outpost, barely 20 buildings in total. They had no
illusions about retaining possession of it, but what it did possess was an
entrance to an underground tunnel network…and that was where they were
ultimately going.

With the initial attack a success, Victor saw the
dropship lift off and fly away with the skeets in escort, leaving the ground
troops on their own.

That was the plan, and the sooner they got underground
the better…take the mechs and fighters out of the equation entirely. That left
head on head infantry fighting, which Victor highly preferred.

Not wasting any time the commandos found the
entrance,
still sealed up and apparently undiscovered by the
Skarrons. They descended down a lengthy staircase into a small terminal that
held a number of parked pod-cars. Victor and the others boarded them and
quickly set off through the binary tunnels, all traveling down one side and
leaving the other free for passing traffic…if there was any. This network was
already shut down for the most part, and the Skarrons hadn’t seen fit to use it
given the thousands of miles it spanned and the limited number of troops able
to be moved around.

Their actual target was a small city that had been
overrun by the Skarrons near the ocean’s edge, and one that was about to come
back into Star Force possession given that the enemy had sent most of its
walkers off to other targets. They were getting sloppy in their rollover of the
continent, assuming that the Humans were simply going to keep pulling back in
retreat, and now was the time to make them pay for that arrogance. Victor’s
team was going to come up inside the city just as the attack on the exterior
mounted. With the defenses down the Skarrons wouldn’t have much to work with
other than infantry and a handful of walkers plus whatever fighter support they
had in the
area.

That meant they’d all be headed for the perimeter to
fight the enemy coming in…leaving the backdoor unguarded or maybe even
unnoticed for the surprise team to come up out of and do a lot of damage. That
was the plan anyway, and Victor was anxious to get to it.

It took hours for the pod-cars to move across the
underground of the continent, and it was fortunate that Star Force had taken
the time to establish these subsurface links instead of relying on surface
traffic and hover trains, for those routes were now shut down by the Skarron
invasion. Their air cover was thick, and anything heading out without proper
escorts was just begging to get hit. Victor was glad that Star Force prepped
its worlds with multiple layers of infrastructure and battle planning, for
right now it made all the difference. He didn’t care for tunnels, but having
ground over his head meant no big weaponsfire coming down on him...and he was
once again the dominant force on the battlefield.

The Skarron elites would argue otherwise, but he could
take one hand to hand if he had to. They were easier to take down as a group,
but he’d wager on a Knight any day in that confrontation.

When they finally arrived and the exterior assault
begin in coordination with their placement on the battlemap, he got his chance
coming up from below in the lead and running into a pair of unarmored Skarron
guards with Hobbits surrounding them. They weren’t guarding the entrance to the
tunnel, but rather running past enroute to somewhere on the perimeter. Victor
dashed out from the side and ran directly into one of the Skarrons, knocking it
askew but not
down,
and whacking one of its legs with
his stun sword…which immediate collapsed numb.

He blocked
a plasma
shot from
one of the overhead arms on his shield as the commandos followed him out and
took aim at the hobbits who were starting to pepper him with smaller plasma
blasts. Victor ignored them and focused on the Skarron, numb-hitting its other
leg and collapsing the left side of its body. He quickly hit the arms before
jumping up on top and pulling out his pistol,
then
fired down into the top of its back between the arm sockets multiple times
until it finally crashed down on its right side as its other arms fell limp.

Victor walked off the top of the headless creature and
sprinted into a Hobbit, bouncing him off his shield and rolling him across the
ground like a ball before a commando shot and killed him while still on the
tumble. After that Victor resumed the lead and pushed on, following the
waypoints set down by their commander and heading towards the nearest enemy
units tagged on the battlemap.

Sally Hendricks was approaching the outside of the
city, just having been dropped off by dropship with the other mechs in her
drone star. She was seated in a chair control station half a meter behind
Dravis
, who was operating their
Morpheus
-class command mech and appropriately strapped into his
control harness. Meanwhile she operated her control board piloting the four
other drone mechs like she was playing a videogame…only one that she was in the
middle of.

The morpheus was the largest of the five mechs, with
two slightly shorter brawlers, a madcat, and a rifleman…all without pilots or
even cockpits, having been designed with enhanced weaponry given the extra
interior space, as well as armor, making them pound for pound more potent
mechs. She had the brawlers situated on either side of the morpheus and
slightly ahead while the madcat brought up the rear and the rifleman was slung
out to the left, giving its longer range weaponry a clear line of sight on the
city.

She triggered it to attack one of the walkers ahead, a
Type-5, by placing a reticle on the enemy golf ball. In response the rifleman
opened up with continual lachars, making four bright beams of the
energy/particle cocktail that connected with and held on contact for some 12
seconds before recycling. That drained away a large chunk of the walker’s
shields before the other mechs even got within firing range.

Sally had the madcat hold off on its missiles, saving
those for when the shields were down. Meanwhile other mech stars were operating
at various points, coming in from the north and west sides of the city, while
her group was coming in from the southeast. There was one other star with her,
all with pilots, and they were pacing her
morpheus
about 400 meters to starboard, with their starbright just now beginning to open
up with its plasma cannons now that they were coming into range.

A little while later they began to take hits from
several Skarron mechs’ plasma fire, then the mauler cannons came into play…and
from there on it was a slaughter. The
morpheus
she
rode in closed range and put the finishing touches on a Type-4 while she
watched from her control board, having to mentally disconnect from the fact
that she was in one of her chess pieces and let her pilot handle that part
while she played coordinator.

And as coordinator she was the first to see incoming
transports on the battlemap…two of them, both of which appeared to be carrying
additional walkers from an encampment not too far away.

She keyed open the comm to all the mechs in play.
“Heads up.
Transports coming in.
Let’s see if we can get a few pokes in before they get too close,” she said,
suiting action to words as she ordered the drone madcat to get a target lock on
one of them and fire off
all
of its
missiles at the distant target.

Both shoulder-mounted missile boxes exploded into a
wash of fire and smoke as two darts of exhaust stretched out towards the
horizon, traveling at high speed past the range of all the other mechs’
weapons. When they got close to the first transport some of them were taken
down by anti-air fire, but enough got through to weaken the shields…then when
more missiles hit from the mechs on the outer side of the city the transport
started to take hull damage and stopped its advance, moving down to the surface
and deploying its four Type-4 walkers immediately.

Well, at least they’d made it put them down further
out. The other transport came in closer, fending off some lachar fire from a
pair of
riflemans
and deposited a pair of Type-3s
before landing all the way on the ground and disgorging infantry…but not as
many as it could have carried, which Sally guessed meant they had rounded up
everyone on hand to send them out as quickly as possible without enough prep
time to counter this attack.

Problem was they were coming in together. They’d just
jumped the defense walkers because they’d been spread out and all Type-4s and
5s. The pair of incoming 3s
were
going to be a
handful, but right now those would have to wait, and not just because they were
out of weapons range. Their mission right now was to take down the walkers and
get the infantry into the city. The first half of that was complete, but the
enemy had barricaded the entrances where they’d blown them apart previously,
meaning they now needed to blast back inside.

Dravis
took care of that
personally on their side, moving the
morpheus
right up
next to an intact city gate and pounding on it with its plasma streamers,
literally melting through the metal like a squirt gun into a snowbank. It took
a while to carve out an entry hole big enough to get a mech through, but as
soon as he did the neo in the star next to theirs went through and started
chewing up the infantry on the other side as a wave of commandos and Knights
followed it in.

Rio followed the Knight ahead of him as the backside
of the neo functioned as their tracking beacon. When he got up to the burnt-out
gate he stepped lightly, knowing the metallic rim was still hot and not wanting
the softer armor of his boot tread to melt. He took one step onto it and jumped
the rest of the way, glad his foot didn’t melt/stick. Most of the color had
faded from the metal, but had he been wearing normal shoes he was sure that
there would have been enough residual heat to damage them.

Now inside the city and somewhat pinned between
buildings, he and two other commandos broke off into the door of a factory and
cut through to the other side, finding it uninhabited, and exiting on another
street. While the battle was going on they had a side mission. Apparently there
were a handful of survivors that somehow had never gotten evacuated during the
initial assault. Just less than 10 minutes ago they had made contact via comm
and Rio’s trio was tasked with getting to and protecting them.

Their tracking signal, now active and potentially
traceable by the Skarrons, though he doubted they would bother noticing with
everything else going on up top, was coming from the subsurface section of the
city. Rio’s team got to a descending stairwell and headed down multiple levels
before finally coming out into what was essentially a maintenance area that
allowed access to the major infrastructure from underneath.

It was a network of tunnels, tunnels, and more
tunnels…no real rooms or sections, just a forest of machinery that the tracking
beacon led Rio through. When they eventually came up on it they found…no one,
just a small comm device sitting in the middle of the walkway, with Rio
immediately going on guard and raising his plasma rifle just a tad higher,
searching for trouble.

“Over here,” a voice said, walking out halfway and
raising a hand into view from several meters down. Rio ran up and turned the
corner where the man was standing.

“We have wounded,” the very thin man said, leading him
through several twists and turns to some place well away from the beacon…which
Rio realized had been done in case the Skarrons came looking for it. Smart
move, especially if you had
people
that couldn’t easily
be moved around.

“Why didn’t you evacuate with the others?” one of the
commandos with Rio asked.

“We tried, but got cut off in an explosion. The comm
device I had I lost, and the other one was damaged. I had to search the city
for that one, and by then everyone was already gone,” he said as he pointed to
a crate set up next to a wall. “Push this aside.”