Star Force: Backdoor (SF53) (5 page)

He caught a few more Hobbits off on their own then
went back at the others, making sure to give himself escape routes so the enemy
couldn’t pin him down and hammer him with shots, for as small as the Hobbit
blasts were they still posed a risk and he wasn’t going to be arrogant and
think he could just run in there with impunity. He had to earn these kills like
all others, and the best way to do that was by being smart and quick on his
feet.

Eventually the Skarron infantry had had enough and
they began to flee back the way they’d come, though it was more than 8
kilometers to their closest forest outpost and none ended up making it back.
When they turned and ran Randy knew he had them, pursuing and taking them down
with ease as there was little unit cohesion left in them, nor were they
interested in firing at him…merely wanting to get away from the single enemy
that they just couldn’t manage to kill.

Randy couldn’t be sure he got them all, and in truth
he probably didn’t if some of them had ran off in a different direction, but he
was sure that none had made it clear of those that had retraced their path. He
stuck around a while and roamed the area, now having to use Hobbit weapons
given the fact that he’d run dry on plasma rounds for his rifle, despite the
excessive amount he’d brought with.

He found and killed some 13 more stragglers then,
finding no more nearby on his Ikrid radar, took to the trees again and climbed
up high, moving into the dark green leaves that were, in most cases, larger
than his body and looking like thick, giant surf boards. They were so firm in
fact that he could stand on them and got to actually ‘walk’ on top of the
canopy, looking up into the blue sky and seeing the twin suns overhead as they
poured radiation down onto the moon.

The gas giant was also visible overhead and much
larger, giving the view an epic sense but he hadn’t come up here for the
scenery, rather to get better range on his armor’s transmitter. He called for a
pickup, and within 20 minutes a small mantis flew out to his location and spun
about over the treetops, opening its rear hatch and allowing him to walk inside
the armed personnel transport. There were still Skarron fighters in the area
that could have harassed a dropship, but given the wide spacing of their
patrols he’d decided to risk calling for the tough little craft and was able to
evac without incident rather than take the long hike back over land.

But he wasn’t heading back to base, rather he reloaded
with ammunition onboard the mantis and had it take him over to another
engagement zone and drop him off on the treetops there before it had to fight
off a rogue fighter. Randy watched for a moment as he stood on a giant leaf,
then saw the anti-air lachars on the mantis take the Skarron fighter’s shields
down and scare it off, allowing his ride to get away and head back to base.

Checking his battlemap and getting some troop
locations nearby, Randy ran across the thick canopy until he found a spot where
his boots fell through and he disappeared from the bright sunlight. Moving
through various layers of leaves he eventually broke through into the empty
middle zone of the forest and used his jump pack to cushion his landing, coming
down on the shin-high grasses that covered a lot of the forest floor and seeing
his battlemap update as the sharing signals got better reception.

He picked the closest units currently engage in battle
and ran off, intending to add to his 4 digit kill count on the day.

5

May 31, 2549

Twensa
System (Protovic
territory)

Naden

Kip stood in the cockpit of the Voltron Mk. 3 as its
center piece flew across the landscape with the other four segments following
in formation and surrounded by a squadron of starscreams as he headed for an
engagement zone that had literally just broken out minutes ago. The Skarrons
had managed to slip a few transports through the Protovic orbital defense fleet
and landed a Type-1 and a handful of Type-4s in a very bad spot on the map.

Bad because Star Force had no units nearby, leaving
only the limited Protovic defenders incapable of defending themselves against a
walker of that size. It was locking down the local airspace and keeping the
Protovic Valeries out of the area while the Skarrons’ own fighters pounded the
local populations. All that was in play were the cleansing beam defense turrets
in some of the cities, but the Type-1 was put down out of range but still
popping missiles at anything of size that came into the area.

That also included the Valeries, which Kip found disturbing
that the walker would waste its missiles on them at extreme range. To the
trailblazer that meant the Skarrons were buying time for some other play,
possibly bringing in more troops to the area once the Type-1 locked it down. He
couldn’t be sure, but his spidey senses were tingling and he knew he needed to
knock that walker out as soon as he could.

One voltron wasn’t going to do much under normal
circumstances, but this was Mk. 3 and in addition to the flight capability of
the individual segments it was also a tad bigger and much better armed. He
didn’t have a physical shield with him, due to the fact that he couldn’t carry
it out to the engagement zone while the mech was in separate pieces, but the
speed increase in the Mk. 3 had made it much more maneuverable, now like a
stiff neo, so he figured he could at least do some damage to the Type-1 and
eliminate its escorts with some fancy maneuvering. His plasma-resistant shield
setting would protect him for a short period of time, enough to get in and out
he hoped, but at the moment all he wanted to do was slow down whatever plans
the Skarrons had and maybe get a poke at their grounded transports…if not scare
them off.

Flying low to the ground to try and avoid missile fire
as long as they could, Kip’s mech segments and the starscreams eventually saw
launch warnings on their battlemap. When they did they went to ground
immediately, with Kip throwing all power to the shields on each of the five
pieces while the starscreams landed and transformed into mech mode and readied
their anti-air weapons.

A few seconds later they lit up the incoming missiles
with high frequency lachar bursts and plasma shards, reducing the number of
hits greatly but not stopping them all. Their shields took the brunt of the
attack then suddenly it was over, with the dust cloud drifting away in the
stiff winds.

Kip saw two starscreams with light armor damage and
suppressed a curse. The Protovic were supposed to have gotten the Type-1’s
attention but they were nowhere to be seen. Checking his battlemap log he
queried for those units and quickly found the problem…they were all dead.

Not understanding what had just happened he issued
hold orders to the starscreams and replayed the last known location time log,
essentially rewinding the battlemap data until he saw something entirely new
from the Skarrons. The transports that were sitting nearby the Type-1 had
deployed infantry, Kip knew, but along with that infantry had come some type of
assault sleds. A quick look indicated that they were small, about the length of
5 or 6 Skarrons lined up in a row, and barely 4 meters high. They looked like
small trucks carrying supplies for the ground troops, but Kip nor anyone else
had ever seen them before, for there was no mention of them in the Skarron
intel
log.

What they were, Kip quickly realized, was something he
should have expected from their anti-air obsessed enemy. They were fire and
forget missile launchers for the infantry…and the large Valerie force the
Protovic were sending to distract the Type-1’s missile fire had flown over the
Skarron infantry, intending to harass them later if Kip’s group ended up
drawing the attention instead, forcing the Skarrons to make a choice, but when
they had the little sleds popped like fireworks, sending up a one shot shower
of missiles that had caught the Valeries off guard.

Nearly all of the aircraft had went down, with the few
survivors retreating low to the ground and trying to play tank to avoid
attention.

“Damn it,” Kip said, triggering the voltron’s assembly
procedure and activating his comm. “Looks like we’re going over ground from
here guys. Our distraction got roasted by infantry missile launchers. If you
see any vehicles with them knock them out quick. They’re pretty much an
anti-air mine for any fighters crossing overhead.”

“What the hell?” one of the starscream pilots asked.

“I know, I’ve never heard of it before either, but it
fits with their MO.”

“That Type-1 is going to light us up over ground.”

“I’ll help with the voltron’s anti-air. At minimum we
can get it to waste some of its ammo on us.”

“And when the transports nearby reload it?”

“I’m open to any better ideas,” Kip floated.

Another mechwarrior broke in. “I’m onboard with
trading plasma for missiles.
Costlier for them.”

“And our armor,” another added.

“These guys are up to something,” Kip reminded them.
“We need to interfere however we can.”

“Alright, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“You and me
both,
buddy,” Kip
agreed as his five mech segments finished linking together as they floated
above the ground. He flipped it upright when the legs fully formed and set it
down,
then
transferred the energy going to the anti-
grav
into the other systems. The mech was so heavy and the
anti-
grav
units so small that it took nearly all the
power generation it had to move the individual pieces around, then when it
transformed into the bipedal mech the internal components reconfigured into
jump jets that operated off a capacitor that was even now beginning to fill.

All the other systems came online, drawing power from
the five generators and taking away its full flight capability. Sensors,
weapons, shields, and muscle fibers all began drawing from the active energy
supply as Kip stood the mech on the ground and began walking it forward,
choosing the anti-missile shield variety and getting its matrix forming,
knowing that it would be many kilometers before they’d come within range of the
plasma hurricane the Type-1 was capable of producing.

The starscreams did the same, shifting from standard
shields to the variant and giving them a chance of pulling this off. With the
one big mech and its ten flankers they began running across the ground,
diverting to the right slightly to work their way around a small Protovic city
enroute to the walker that was clearly visible on the horizon behind it.

Another round of missiles popped up from the Type-1
and Kip readied the anti-air units on the Voltron’s shoulders as he chose a
deployment configuration and sent it out to the starscreams…with them heading
forward and spreading out to give the Skarrons wider spaced targets so they
couldn’t get double hits on missile strikes. He assumed they’d be shooting at
the voltron, and this way the starscreams could knock down a few more missiles
as they flew overhead.

“Looks like you could use a hand,” a very familiar
voice broke through the comm as the missiles were halfway to him.

“Cora?” he asked, confused and a bit distracted.

“Who else?”

“I’m a little busy at the moment.”

“Noticed.
Got
a couple Easter eggs here if you want them.”

“Seriously?” he asked, surprised, as the missiles
continued to accelerate and his anti-air systems began tracking them.

“Got two Mk. 3s ready for hot drop if you’ll let me
come down and play.”

“You see the bastard shooting at me?”

“Yep.”

“Go say hi.”

“With pleasure,” Cora said as she saw the missiles
beginning to hit Kip’s group of mechs. She cut the comm and sent a message to
the transport in orbit to go ahead and detach, with Kip’s coordinates already
preprogramed into the navigational program.

The big transport released two spherical pods of
considerable size from berths on the underside, with them coming out of racks
in a specialized bay. The specialized dropships accelerated towards the planet,
coming down into the upper atmosphere within minutes and heading on an angled
trajectory to get to Kip’s location. Cora watched her fellow trailblazer fend
off round after round of missiles as she fell towards the planet, hoping they
didn’t get too much through their shields but also hoping that he kept the
Type-1 distracted.

The two pods passed into missile range of the Type-1
but didn’t get any response fire for another thirty seconds…then missile
streaks began to come out towards them en mass, with some still heading towards
Kip.

“Looks like they noticed us,” Jarvan-1381 commented
from the other enormous pod.

“The shells can take it…but we may need another lift
afterwards.”

“Understatement of the year,” the fellow Clan Scorpion
mechwarrior specialist said dryly.

A few moments later the pods began to take hits, with
their thick armor absorbing the impacts after the limited shields went down.
That hurt their insertion angle a bit, now that they didn’t have the invisible
wings to navigate with, but such a situation had been anticipated and built
into the design with the anti-
gravs
still capable of
keeping them on course, though without the shield the front of the giant sphere
began to sprout an ablative fireball of reentry friction in addition to the
missile impacts assaulting it.

Watching the status telemetry, Cora rode in the shell
down all the way to the surface, then braked hard allowing the damaged pod to
set down on the surface with only a tiny thump as its landing legs sunk in and
stabilized the giant egg as it continued to take missile hits, some nearly
getting all the way through.

“We’re down,” she told Kip as she powered up the mech
inside.

“We’ll get there as soon as we can,” her fellow
trailblazer reported, with her seeing his group now running at top speed since
the Type-1 was no longer shooting at them.

“We’ve got this,” she promised, triggering the pod
release.

“Damn straight,”
Jarvan
agreed as his pod also began to crack apart along a single seam. The two halves
rotated out exposing one side of the protective cocoon and the Archon walked
his giant mech out, but Cora’s shell had been damaged enough that that pivot
function wasn’t working so she triggered a secondary release and the two pieces
flower-petalled out, with her hitting the jump jets and shooting her Mk. 3
madcat into the sky in a giant hop that got her outside the pod.

It took a couple of moments but the missile streaks
hitting the pod eventually switched targets to the big mechs that had landed
about a kilometer apart from one another. As soon as they did the ‘missile
boxes’ on the mechs returned fire, save for the Mk. 3s didn’t have missiles.
They were prototypes that Kip had been working on in conjunction with Cora and
designed specifically to fight the Skarron walkers. They were slightly taller
and massed more than a Mk. 2 Hoth, with both shoulder boxes containing all
anti-air weaponry.

When those boxes came online the missile plumes
disappeared in a torrent of topaz light as the rapid-fire Sammies ate up the
missiles and began to push the explosive collision point back further up the
stream given the anti-air’s exceptional range and firing speed. Cora and
Jarvan
both began walking their enormous mechs forward,
with nothing but an occasional missile or two getting through to hit their
shields.

“How’s that?”
Cora asked as
the Skarron walker continued to fire relentlessly.

“I want one,” Kip said seriously.

“We’ve got four more upstairs for you.”

“Sweet.
How’s
it handle
?”

“Like a fat turret, but straight line speed is good.
And it can run rings around their walkers. Everything looks good, but this is
the first battle test so feel free to criticize,” she said as the Type-1
finally stopped firing and wasting its missiles now that it saw that they
weren’t getting through.

“Show me some fireworks.”

“Not quite in range yet,” she said as she and
Jarvan
lightly ran the big, backwards-canted leg mechs across
the ground with a touch of a hop in their strides. That was as much as they
could manage given their weight, but in future years Cora knew they’d work on
that and get them more speed. Right now though what they needed was a slugger
to take on the big enemy walkers…and that’s exactly what Cora had given Kip
using his basic designs and adding her own special touch.

“Do you want the starscreams to move up with you?”

Cora frowned. “Not yet. Let’s just see how we handle
solo.”

Jarvan
tagged one of the
Type-4s that was closest to them and Cora saw the icon flash on her battlemap.
“He’s all yours,” she told him, adjusting her line a bit more to starboard and
tagging another for herself.

The two fat madcats trotted off towards their targets
with Cora stitching hers with Sammie fire before her weapons came into range
and was pleased to see she was able to whittle its shields down some 7% with
those alone. That wasn’t something that she could have done with lachars, which
was why all Star Force anti-air was eventually going Sammie once they worked
out the conversion issues.