Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) (6 page)

But that hadn’t occurred, for no other illnesses had
been reported in the ADZ to date. Only here, on
Leerbot
,
was there an outbreak following the highly visible ship self-destruction in the
atmosphere.

That told Donn one thing…this was a field test set up
for a third party to witness. It was meant to impress someone in a way that
could not be anything other than a deliberate attack.

Which made Donn suspect an
independent faction, possibly selling bioweapons and using this attack as their
advertising campaign.

There were other possibilities, but as the striker
considered them he kept coming back to this one. His instincts told him this
was just the beginning, and they were dealing with someone with considerable
biotech capability, based on what his own medtechs were telling him.
A level far beyond that which they knew any of the other races to
possess.

Fortunately Star Force had already risen to a level
above and beyond the others and would be able to counter whoever’s handiwork
this was, but it meant there was a significant threat out there that had to be
tracked down and neutralized…and Donn thought he had the first clue where to
look.

The binder that held the bacteria and toxin-laden gel
together had been identified, giving him one item on the shopping list to track
down. Fortunately it wasn’t commonly used, so the list of potential suppliers
wasn’t impossibly long. He also had the itinerary for the ship that had been
destroyed to compare with and was planning on following that lead up first, but
with the list of suppliers added to that thought process and the huge amount of
gel necessary to have spread out so fast across the local region of the planet,
his list of potential worlds shrunk rapidly.

He admitted there could be a great deal of diversion
capable, but if he assumed the attackers to not have expected someone to be
able to analyze the binder after the explosion, or at all, then they wouldn’t
have gone far to get their materials. He put in a data mine request along with
the information packet they were going to send back to Earth, looking for
supply shipments of the binder and the other items that the medtechs suspected
were used in its construction. Keeping the bacteria alive and, apparently,
producing toxin required a number of nutrients in the gel, for otherwise the
explosion wouldn’t have coated the debris with it.

It had been saturated, which with the concentration
levels being guessed at and the production rate determined from the bacteria
analysis gave Donn a loose timetable as to how long the gel had sat prior to
detonation…which was in months. That gave a data range to search, but such a
search was best left to analysts that did this stuff regularly. They’d scour
the information grids on every available world and track down what he needed,
if it was there to find.

That left Donn to go after the ship lead while he
waited to see if they would find anything. First port of call then was the last
world the ship had passed through enroute to
Leerbot
,
with the rover lifting off from the infected world inside of three days and
taking a close pass near to the star with its shields down where it sunbathed a
bit to kill any bacteria caught on the outer hull before making a jump
following what Donn hoped would be a trail of bread crumbs…if he could find a
solid one to start with.

6

December 22, 2552

Weema
System (ADZ
border)

Weemstra

Morgan jumped from the cliff edge, pulling her legs up
underneath her as she passed through the apex of the leap and fell like a rock
out of view and down into the valley below, letting her speed build before
finally goosing her jump pack to slow her descent. She didn’t bleed all of it
off and let the remainder punch her through the treetops as she straightened
out her legs and made herself into a needle that pierced the blue below.

Small branches snapped as she passed through, but the
bush-like trees had no thick or firm supports, being a mass of flexible straws
that ended with puffy blue leaves. The impact felt more like hitting a pillow
than the sound of crunching branches attested, with her brown padawan armor
taking the minor blows as she finally got down to the swampy ground below. Her
boots sunk in two inches on landing,
then
she was off
running through the thin puddles that dominated the very wet planet that the
Skarrons had conquered 14 years ago.

The native
Jenfor
had been
evacuated into the ADZ long ago, those that survived anyway, and the planet had
remained just outside the ADZ on the upper edge of Beta Region. It was
technically beyond the border but so close as to be within the contentious
region, yet the Skarrons had never heavily colonized it. Star Force had never
fought here, nor had the Protovic or Hycre. It was one of many small, single
planet civilizations that had been run over by the Skarron advance. There were
many still out there, hoping not to become the next victims or completely
unaware of what was happening around them.

There were so many star systems in the galaxy that no
one claimed them all. Races chose the ones they wanted and ignored the rest,
with many people living in the ‘fly over’ systems and not attracting notice of
the giants passing through them. The
Jenfor
hadn’t
been so lucky, but the system was a lower ranking Skarron outpost, still
thoroughly defended, but never having gained much notice. The ADZ had always
been too busy elsewhere to do anything about the Skarron presence there, but
now with some breathing room thanks to the Voku, Morgan was leading a coalition
of ADZ troops to remove the enemy from this tiny piece of the border,
regardless of whether or not the
Jenfor
would ever
return.

Running at high speed and weaving through the clumps
of shoots that led up to the canopy some 4 meters over her head, Morgan
navigated via her battlemap as her ‘agile’ armor amplified her speed with its
powered setting. One of two variants to the ‘standard’ version of Archon armor,
the agile version was slightly less bulky due to some 46% less material, making
up for it with double shield generators. That worked well in short, quick
engagements but lacked the staying power of the standard or ‘heavy’ versions
that had additional armor plating.

Paul favored the heavy for some reason, but Morgan had
picked up the agile as soon as it came out of prototype stage and right now she
was glad she had, because between the looseness of the feel and the power
amplification she was doing some 39 mph through the vegetation enroute to a
Skarron battery she had to take offline before a contingent of ground troops
dropped directly into the center of one of the Skarrons’ highest populated
areas…as far as military troops were concerned.

Those ships were operating on a countdown clock,
meaning Morgan had to get to and disable the primary anti-air defenses before
they landed while some 6 other engagements were already taking place across the
planet plus two more in orbit. The ADZ didn’t have many troops to spare, but
Morgan had brought just enough to take care of business…if she could do some of
the heavy lifting on the ground personally, which is how she always preferred
it.

The Archon had already covered some 20+ kilometers
from her drop point, having been run in close by
a skeet
and dumped off in a way that the enemy wouldn’t notice. She’d essentially been
scrapped off the Star Force fighter as it dove towards the surface and clipped
the treetops, making sure there wasn’t a falling silhouette that could be
picked up on sensors.

The recent fall she’d just made had been unavoidable,
for she was approaching on the blind side of a mountain ridge that was really
more of a mesa edge. The rocky wall hopefully would cover her fall against the
outpost’s sensors, but regardless she was on the clock and had to keep moving
as fast as she could manage over the squishy ground.

True to her word, Morgan got to the outpost perimeter
with 16 minutes to spare and crossed into the buildings with another hefty
jump, moving up through the foliage again and popping out onto the rooftops
that the forest was encroaching on. The Skarrons hadn’t burnt it back, or
rather not recently for the growth near the edge was all fresh and faint blue,
suggesting they’d just gotten lazy and hadn’t kept it ‘mowed’ down.

Once up top she leapt from building to building until
she was finally noticed, then she dropped down and killed some two dozen
Hobbits and a pair of Skarrons before running a bit to keep them guessing as to
where she was, then she leapt back up to the rooftops and moved towards her
primary target…not the big anti-air lachar battery, but the power source for
it. It was located in a special building that was mostly equipment and storage
overtop
the actual power source that was buried below
ground.

She fought her way into the building with little
resistance that could stop her, though the streets were sprouting more enemies
by the second. Watching the countdown in her opaque helmet she worked her way
down to the generator and killed the staff there before taking a moment to look
around and find the sweet spot, finally crossing to a particular bank of
equipment and lighting it up with her plasma rifle to get through the casing.

She stepped forward, latching her rifle on her back
after shooting one more Hobbit that scurried in and took a shot at her. Her
shields caught it as the Archon dropped the enemy and dug her hands into the
melted holes to get grip points, then with a foot put forward for support she
yanked hard, using the power setting in her armor to enhance her own insane
strength. It took three pulls, each of which warped the material further,
before it popped off and exposed the interior.

Digging a hand into her thin satchel located
underneath the jump pack near the small of her back, she pulled out three explosives
and armed them, set to a detonation trigger in her helmet as well as a
countdown that she programmed for 6 minutes just in case she couldn’t get a
transmission through. Morgan buried them in the exposed equipment then ran out,
brandishing her rifle and shooting all those she came across up until she hit a
group of 20 or so pouring down after her.

She didn’t have time to kill them all so she just
Fornaxed
and ran over their twitching bodies, needing to
get to the surface now rather than later.

Eventually she broke through into the outside air,
running into a wall of white plasma orbs as soon as she exited the door.
Jerking to the right she ran, getting a few steps into her sprint before
mentally triggering the detonation signal. Her shields dipped significantly,
then there was a huge earthquake that nearly knocked her off her feet but she
managed to maintain her balance while the Skarron troops couldn’t. Their aim
knocked askew she disappeared into a side street and kept running, now enroute
to her secondary objectives.

The outpost had no missiles, but the lachar battery
would have been enough to kill several of the incoming transports, beefy as it
was. The two main defensive towers should also have been down, now without any
primary power source, but there were smaller ones that had their own
generators. Those were now her targets as she could see in the sky above, with
some help from the ID tags on her HUD, the escorting drone warships dropping
first to draw any potential fire as the bigger transports came down to an LZ a
few kilometers away.

They were ahead of schedule by a good 2 minutes and it
had nearly cost them, but fortunately Morgan had been ahead of schedule too and
it looked like the battery hadn’t got a single shot off for the ships were showing
no damage or shield depletion, though there were a swarm of fighters moving
about picking at them where they could. An Axius squadron was up there was
well, eating through them with regularity but still outnumbered. This was going
to be a tough fight, but so long as there were no Skarron surprises in store
they should own them…if there weren’t any more snafus like this timing issue.

Morgan would deal with that later, if she remembered.
Right now she had a million things to kill and not enough ammo for all of them,
for the enemy barracks were emptying in a nearby facility in light of the
incoming attack and she wanted to get to and whittle them down before they met
the Scionate and Canderous troops on the ground.

There was a turtle coming down with them to handle the
single Type-5 walker nearby, with everything else being infantry…but a lot of
infantry. The other walkers were engaged in other locations on the planet,
leaving the door open for this main strike if one was bold enough, for there
really was
a lot
of infantry present,
plus a horde of workers that probably weren’t going to up and surrender.

But for a trailblazer ‘infantry’ was basically free
kills, especially one with Jumat. Morgan stayed in the outpost for a while,
killing as many as she could come across as she zigzagged her way from turret
to turret and over to the main barracks, then crunched an ambrosia senzu beam
that she telekinetically pulled out of a rack of the potent doses inside her
helmet. There were 12 different concealed slots tucked away wherever there was
room and Morgan had 12 beans there for future use. It took some wiggling to get
it around to her mouth, but when she did it went in and the trailblazer started
the mental countdown to overdose, making sure she’d get to the mass of troops
pouring out and heading towards the LZ before the negative effects began to hit
her.

She was still in the Skarron infrastructure, now
working her way across the lower rooftops with several long jumps across the
streets when she saw the first elements of the enemy infantry begin to engage
the Canderous scouts in the forest on her battlemap. She couldn’t visually see
them because they were below the canopy, but she could see the carpet of
Hobbits sprinkled with Skarrons disappearing underneath it like a line of rabid
fans bunched up to get the first copies of Halo on release day.

Morgan couldn’t get ahead of them, so she opted for a
rear attack, maybe make them hesitate a bit and buy her troops more time to
unload and get into position. She knew the Canderians had rocket launchers that
could pop the Skarrons in one hit, so it was just a matter of them chewing up
the Hobbits and that would come down to numbers, position, and patience…for
they were each worth at least 5 of the little jerks in a firefight. Trouble was
,
there were literally tens of thousands of them coming out
of the barracks, which wasn’t a building but an entire complex.

That didn’t discourage Morgan, rather it enhanced her
determination as she came to the last building and did as big of a jump as she
could off it, maxing out the jump pack to send her several hundred meters ahead
where she dropped down like a bomb into the edge of their swarm in the
gathering plaza outside the barracks.

She crunched one Hobbit on landing then sent out a
Fornax pulse that toppled more than a hundred of them around her like bowling
pins with her shooting as fast as she could pull the trigger on her rifle and
not aiming at any specific one. There
were so many that
so long as she aimed level to the ground she would hit someone, so she fired
over the heads of the downed ones and killed/wounded those beyond the circle of
disoriented enemies…who then began standing back up and blocking the return
shots starting to come at her.

Those shots hit and missed, with the misses in turn
hitting other enemies as an added bonus. Morgan turned the shields on her arms
and legs off and began punching/kicking the Hobbits around her as they stood
up, pausing for split seconds to fire plasma shots before she was back to hand
to hand. She did that for some twenty seconds, getting adjusted to the combat
situation and smiling inside her helmet as she began to work up a bit of a
sweat and the first twinges of ambrosia overload began to hit her.

She let it build a bit more then ran through the mass
of Hobbits, knocking several aside to get her further into the midst of the
group but nowhere near to the center, then she dropped her rifle and extended
both hands out to her sides, summoning the Jumat into her limbs then throwing
it out like invisible punches that knocked two or three enemies down with each
rapid fire blast.

White plasma was
everywhere,
and the more Morgan batted the Hobbits around the more friendly fire hit
them…and those that didn’t were usually shell-shocked enough that they didn’t
immediately get up. Others were injured or sometimes killed if they were close
enough to Morgan when she released the concussive energy, with it hitting them
like a brick wall and snapping their small bones in some cases.

When she got to one of the Skarrons she paused a brief
moment to get a larger concentration, then in theatrical mode pulled both hands
back and did a Kamehameha as she took several plasma blasts to her shields…with
one of them not making it all the way to her, for the plasma orb actually was
thrown backwards as she released the Jumat. It dissipated before it hit
anything, but the residue washed over a Hobbit near the Skarron that she
knocked upside down, flipping it backwards and onto its arms with its thick
legs kicking around like a crab trying to right itself.