Star Force: Bloodlust (SF54) (8 page)

It was hours before anyone got to her, but eventually
a shadow crossed over her helmet and she lifted her head slightly to get a
better view…but there was no one there.

The shadow moved, and only then did she realize it was
coming from further away. Despair flowing in her as the last hope of survival
was
dashed,
she replaced it with spite and summoned up
as much anger as she could to push back against the pain. Grabbing her rifle
she got to her knees and saw the Skarron walking nearby that had cast the
shadow, then the scattering of Hobbits around it, none of which had seen her
yet.

The big one wouldn’t go down easily, but she wanted to
get at least one of the small ones. With her back obscured by the corpse she
stayed put, not thinking that she had enough abdominals left to stand, and
leaned back against it, giving her torso some stability as she raised the rifle
and took aim at the closest Hobbit.

The Canderian hit it with the second shot,
then
put two more in it before switching to the targets that
suddenly began swarming into her vision. Plasma orbs popped all around her,
including one that hit her leg, but it caught on the intact armor there and she
kept shooting, not knowing how much ammo was in the rifle and just pumping the
trigger as fast as she could.

More plasma began to hit her, with her armor melting
off in various places. Her helmet took a hit and her battlemap went out, with
either the transmitter or receiver having been slagged. At the very least
that made the red dots disappear
.

The Canderian killed/wounded four more Hobbits before
one of their little fiery white orbs hit her exposed gut, burning through what
remained of her muscles and tearing apart her internal organs in a splash of
charred tissue.

Her arms sagged and her rifle dropped out of her hand,
with her being dead before it even hit the ground.

8

December 30, 2552

Weema
System (ADZ
border)

Weemstra

With a thought Morgan rendered the Hobbit scout
unconscious, dropping him to the ground a few seconds before she broke from cover
and scurried across the remains of one of Star Force’s firebases. It had been
wrecked from fighter bombardment with nasty blast marks of melted material
everywhere but was more or less intact and abandoned. The Skarrons had been
here and gone, leaving only a few roaming troops doing what Morgan didn’t know,
but if she wanted to stay alive she had to keep scrounging supplies from what
was left behind, and this was the best place to look.

She’d come down to the planet with nothing other than
the senzu beans in her helmet, but the orbiting fleet had managed to send a
supply pack down to her through hot drop…several actually, with a cluster of
little meteors raining down in the region she was in. She’d gotten to one
before the Skarrons had gotten to the others, grabbing as much equipment as
possible, including foodstuffs, but it had already been a week since then and
the supplies weren’t going to last her forever.

With those stashed a few kilometers away in a place
marked on her battlemap, she’d come across what had been a battlefield but with
the bodies having been removed. The Skarrons had picked up their own dead
first, then it seemed the Hobbits had scavenged the others and ate them, for
the armor pieces were laying everywhere without any occupants. There were a few
tree clumps but otherwise the location the firebase had been put up in was an
empty, squishy plain that was just on the dry side of being a swamp.

Those troops in the firebase had evacuated long ago,
the lucky ones anyway, and those ships in orbit had long since left. So far
Morgan hadn’t come across any other battlemap signals from surviving troops,
though given how spread out they were across the planet that didn’t mean much.
The nearby LZ was the only one she was within range of, and it had sprouted
three different firebases that had been left behind in the rushed
evacuation…not to mention the equipment packs on the Star Force troops.

Those were strewn about with the armor pieces, and
Morgan stopped next to one to look inside. Keeping her Ikrid senses alert for
more roaming scouts she opened the pack and found it half empty, with some ammo
and other useful items but no foodstuffs. Morgan plucked a few clips out and
moved on, searching another two packs and likewise finding no foodstuffs, only
a wrapper in one, suggesting that the Hobbits had eaten them too. After that
she abandoned the battlefield and moved inside the remains of the firebase,
finding it similarly looted.

At least all the cargo crates were, having been opened
and emptied of everything edible, but when Morgan checked the emergency
supplies in the walls she let out a sigh of relief when the hidden panels were
still in place. She opened one and found both foodstuffs and water, plus
medical supplies and other useful stuff once she opened up all of them
throughout the base, giving her enough survival gems to stay alive a good while
longer…if she had a way of carrying it all.

The trailblazer made the snap decision to leave most
of it in place, resealing the panels that the enemy obviously didn’t know were
there and deciding to come back for it later as needed. Taking a single satchel
with her she left the firebase and headed across the chewed up ground dotted
with disconnected armor segments and came up on the Hobbit she’d rendered
unconscious. She knelt next to it, accessing its mind and making a few memory
wipes so it wouldn’t remember falling, then she moved its body around into a
sleeping position and input the idea that it’d decided to take a quick nap.

That way when it woke it wouldn’t raise an alarm. She
needed to be a ghost here, both to keep the troops off her and to keep her
stash in the firebase safe. Anonymity was how she was going to survive, and
even one missing scout could betray her position if she made this one
‘disappear.’

Morgan got across the plain without incident, then
headed back into the blue-leafed trees and took an evasive route back to her
stash to make sure she wasn’t being followed, coming up on the car-sized
boulder in the riverbed that had a small nook on the far side up next to a
small cliff wall. She stomped her way across the water and circled around the
rock, with her footprints being erased by the water.

Once out of sight she came up on a small patch of dry
land pinched in between the boulder and the cliff wall with enough foliage over
top to make a roof that would keep her invisible to any fighters passing
overhead. Taking a moment to search the area with her senses she waited for
nearly a minute before sitting down and pulling her helmet off. She swiped
several beads of sweat onto her armored fingertips then flipped them off into
the pool of water nearby, sending small ripples out in the otherwise calm
puddle around the boulder base.

She tossed the satchel aside and began unlatching the
armor on her chest, eventually undoing all the connected segments and crawling
out of it and leaving the open shell on the ground like a carapace. Making
another check of the area with a mental sweep, Morgan pulled off her sweat-soaked
clothes one piece at a time and moved into the shallow pool, submerging her
body as much as she could in the slightly cool water and trying to pull some of
the persistent heat out of her chest. The weather had gotten insanely hot two
days ago, and her armor only had so much heat dissipation capability built into
it.

Part of those systems were now offline, having been
damaged by plasma the second day, so her internal ‘air-conditioner’ was only
minimally active and these cross country treks were causing her to sweat out
way too much water. Fortunately the drop kit she’d recovered had a device that
allowed her to drink the river water or collect moisture out of the air and she
was using it a lot, but her internal heat levels were still too high and she
guessed she had a fever.

It was odd, because Archons almost never got sick.
Their immune systems were so buff with all the training that the worst they
ever got was a little sniffle, but new planets had new biological problems to
contend with and she was pretty sure she’d picked up something here that her
body was fighting off well, but leaving her a bit heat sick in combination with
the temperature and the oppressive humidity.

She spent several minutes in the water naked before
crawling over and grabbing her sweat soaked shirt. Still kneeling in the pool
she wrung it out then dipped it underneath the surface and tried to hand scrub
as much of the grime out of it as she could. Morgan repeated the process with
the rest of her one set of clothes and laid them out to partially dry as she
stayed in the water trying to get her temperature down while mentally scanning
the area every few minutes.

So far her hideout had remained secure, but there was
more than Skarrons and Hobbits about and three days ago she’d been jumped
during the night. Fortunately she slept with armor on so the cat-like beast’s
claws only scrapped her plates before she woke up and none too gently sent it
packing. Since then she’d been on the lookout for more critters, both on land
and in the water, not wanting to pick up any leeches or other nasty stuff while
skinny dipping, but there was no way she was going to stay in her armor and
roast if she could help it.

Morgan dipped and washed her hair in the water then
swam out around the rock and into the river where she could feel the current
and relieved herself with her body mostly below the surface to keep her little
pond clear. She looked around in the bright daylight as she did so, with the
blue foliage everywhere along the water’s edge on both sides. Chirps and
squeaks were audible everywhere, making for a quiet din that made her even more
nervous about enemies sneaking up on her. If she hadn’t had psionics to give
her a definitive answer as to what was out there she would have driven herself
crazy with worry.

She didn’t have a watch on, for it would interfere
with her armor, so she didn’t know how long she spent in the water, coming back
in and almost sleeping in the puddle for a long time before walking out and
drip drying…which was difficult in the humid air. She wrung out her hair and
put it back into the ponytail she’d had since she’d began basic training then
grabbed her mostly dry clothes and put them back on before getting something to
eat and stashing away the new supplies with the rest that she had hid until a
bush that she’d uprooted outside and brought into the nook to cover the hole
she’d hand dug.

After that she waited a long time, sitting down on the
ground and pulling her knees up to her chest and thinking. She didn’t have
anything else to do and she needed to reduce her calorie expenditure down from
her Archon high metabolism. Her body didn’t like doing that, but she gave it at
least a short run in armor each day to help and keep her from going totally
stagnant, but she really didn’t like just sitting and waiting…though given the
circumstances that was
what she had to do.

And given that her body was used to a lot of activity
she couldn’t sleep much, which left a lot of time to just sit and think…and she
really would have killed for a video game right now, even if only played in her
helmet’s HUD. When she got off planet that was one of the to-do items going on
the techs’ list.

After she’d had too much staying in place she got back
into her armor and took a walk around, scouting out the immediate area. Moving
slowly she didn’t burn many calories and spent the rest of the day tracing a
circle around her hideaway several kilometers in diameter looking for scouts
and just getting a better feel for the topography, which was varied and
vegetation covered. Underneath the trees were ravines, switchbacks, and all
other kinds of things that made navigation difficult.
A good
place to hide in, but also to get cornered in, especially if the fighters
returned.

Ever since she’d switched her shields off they’d been
absent, which was something else she needed to get back to the others to tell
them sooner rather than later, though right now there was nothing she could do
other than try and commandeer a Skarron ship…and if this forced inactivity
lasted much longer she might start to get ideas in that direction, despite the
impossibility of it. Even if she could manage to fly it she’d never get past
the ships in orbit.

No, she had to wait for rescue, meaning her fate was
now in someone else’s hands…and that was something that Morgan absolutely
hated.

Two days later, after another cooling session in her
private pond, she put her armor back on and saw a recorded message waiting for
her. Cursing herself for not having put it on sooner she played the
transmission, which as it turned out was intended to be one way.

They were going to try a hot extraction for her and
had come down into orbit on a trial run to get within broadcast range, giving
her the message that included coordinates and a timestamp…indicating that her
ride was coming in a little over 2 days from now at a point 52 kilometers away.

That was a decent hike, but given that they didn’t
know exactly where she was they’d just had to pick one that looked favorable in
the general vicinity of her last known position. The 2 days was to give her
time to get
there,
and potentially for orbital
concerns. A ‘hot’ extraction meant it wasn’t going to be secretive and the
enemy was going see them doing it. That meant the retrieval team had to get to
the LZ ahead of the bad guys, grab her, then get out again before they got
blown away.

Morgan had organized such things numerous times and
knew they were tricky, but the news led to a surge of energy in her, for now
she had something to do…get to the LZ and secure it in a way that they could
pick her up in a manner of seconds.

With that goal now before her, her mind set itself to
the task at hand and the heat no longer seemed the dire threat it had been
previously. She had a countdown and knew she could put up with it for that
long.

Morgan pulled out one of the emergency satchels and
put enough foodstuffs in it for 3 days then hid the rest back in the hole on
the off case that the extraction went bad and she was still stuck here. Taking
it all with her would make her too awkward, like a combat-ready Santa with sack
and that just wouldn’t do. She needed to be mobile and intended to make the LZ
ready to go…with a slim backup plan and a place to retreat to if needed rather
than potentially having to drop her stash and leave it behind in order to run
if the Skarrons got to her.

Putting the now shriveling shrub back over the hole,
she left the nook and stomped back out into the water, crossing the river and
moving up the far bank and into the trees as she accelerated up into an easy
jog headed towards her distant extraction point.

Morgan watched from the treetops where she had climbed
up to get a view of the sky as the dropship made its way down to the surface at
a breakneck pace. At first she could only see it on battlemap sensors, for it
was broadcasting its arrival in no weak terms, making her aware of where it was
so that she could be ready…and ready she was. She was standing on the highest
leaves of the trees, scanning the skies looking for Skarron fighters as she
watched the dropship come down like a distant meteor with her helmet’s zoom.

When it got within a couple of kilometers overhead she
let go her awkward hold on a cluster of straw-like stalks and slid down through
the leaves, falling through the massive plant and eventually hitting the ground
on her side, smacking the wet soil then rolling over and onto her feet before
running out onto the gravel wash on a U-shaped bend in another river. The wash
had no trees or vegetation of any kind, making for a small clearing for the
dropship to come down in.