Star Force: Headstrong (SF72) (9 page)

“Kind of looks like you lost,” Taryn commented.

“Took more damage than I planned, but I had a limited
opportunity to do some significant damage and I took it. The lizards didn’t
know what to do with the ravagers.”

“Define significant damage?” she asked curiously.

Paul smiled. “Kill count…232,721 cruisers.”

Taryn’s eyes went wide. “What the hell?!”

“I told you the Dre’mo’dons would be worth the
effort.”

“No way,” she said disbelievingly. “I’ve seen the
numbers. They shouldn’t be that effective. What else did you do?”

“I admit, we’re not going to get that kind of a
landslide going forward, but they didn’t know how many ships were necessary to
mass against the ravagers for longer than I expected. In their moment of
uncertainty they didn’t retreat and I made them pay for it.”

“How many ships did you leave them with?”

Paul cringed. “They had well over a million insystem.
We got a decent scouting survey, but never got a complete ship count.”

“Damn, they are serious about holding that trade
route. Mostly cruisers?”

“All cruisers. I think they know using bigger ships is
just making it easier for us. And now that we can pretty much kill one with a
single hit I doubt we’ll see any larger varieties used, save for chess pieces
if and when they think there’s a need.”

“Don’t you think they’ll keep those far away now?”

“It’s possible, but they now have data on the defenses
the ravagers had and they can see they’re nothing special. If I was stupid enough
to hold position, they could run an invoker up on one and take it down before
the Dre’mo’dons could do enough damage to disable it. That much mass has its
advantages. The capital ship tonnage is their liability, with us anyway.
Skarrons are a different story.”

“Yeah, they just keep hemorrhaging territory,” Taryn
said, referencing an intelligence report passed on by the Preema, who were now
officially allies with the Skarrons and assisting them in a few engagements
past the Star Force coreward no-go line in an attempt to slow or stop the
lizard advance in some key sectors. They knew they needed the Skarrons on the
offensive, not the defensive, but so far the lizards were owning them…though
the Skarrons had so much territory that their empire hadn’t been seriously
weakened thus far, though it did have an ever expanding chunk bitten out of it
on the map.

“Where are you headed?” Paul asked.

“
Yechmo
then
Deerma
. Should be able to clear out both fairly easy. The
lizards never put down serious roots, and I’m curious as to why.”

“How’s the new padawan working out?”

“He’s no Ginsi, but we gel well. No arguments or
bristling like with
Supergirl
, and he’s actually
interested in more than just level upgrades.”

“Couldn’t talk Ginsi into becoming a builder?”

“Nope. She’s choosing to go straight-up weapon. Useful
in her niche, but she’s no trailblazer. Take away our training notes and her
progression will tank, I’ll guarantee it. Might happen anyway now that I’m not
around to hold her hand. She’s very quick when something is explained to her,
but her adaptational skills aside from hand to hand suck. Well, that’s not
fair. She’s slightly below average for Archons. Compared to us, she sucks.”

“And the new guy?”

“He’s a grinder, but intelligent. He’ll make a solid
mage when I get finished with him. Are you out of the padawan business?”

“For now. The stronger I get the more of a hindrance
they become.”

“I felt the same way too until I started looking on
them as a tool rather than a ward. I give them more space than I did before and
I’ve found a useful balance.”

“How soon you leaving?”

“Got another task force I’m waiting on. Probably a
week at the earliest.”

“Then get your butt over here and we’ll discuss
padawans during a long run, and I promise
I
won’t slow you down.”

“Heading over,” she said with a smirk. “And have the
holos
of your battle handy. I want to see how your new toys
earned those beauty marks.”

9

October 2, 2888

Unnamed System
(Backwater Region)

Unnamed planet

Jack-809506 stopped walking suddenly, pausing in the
forest underneath the partial canopy as rays of sunlight came down onto the
ground like strobe lights.

“What’s wrong?”
Ikra
asked
as she sat perched on the Archon’s back rack. The Hepcha had been riding there
for several hours as the scouting pair had been quietly pushing their way north
over hilly terrain in search of the bandits that had been ambushing convoys
coming though the region. The planet’s population was primitive in that they
hadn’t mastered anti-
grav
tech yet, but they were
part of a small alliance that had and their trading partners had set up a
number of spaceports on the planet to facilitate the economic interlinking.

One of those spaceports was 230 miles to the south and
had been getting its cargo shipments hijacked, both those coming into the
spaceport over ground and those flowing out from it. The local
Venats
hadn’t been able to find those responsible, but a
handful of investigators from the
Uframon
Alliance
suspected
Groms
and they’d asked Star Force to
confirm it if possible.

Jack was out in the middle of nowhere as far as Star
Force was concerned. He was in the Backwater Region, which was a loose term
referring to all the territory beyond Epsilon, Gamma, and Delta Regions that
the lizards had not gotten into yet. Most of where Star Force had outposts was
between the ADZ and the original Voku territory, but even at that those were
single systems out of thousands of others…and Jack was far beyond those
bastions of civilization.

Per Director Davis’s wishes Star Force had been making
diplomatic contact with as many races as it could and establishing some level
of relations with them. The
Uframon
Alliance was on
the very fringe of Star Force’s reach and was on good terms with them, with a
single enclave having been positioned on their capitol. It was the most heavily
defended world
Uframon
had, but it was weak by ADZ
standards. The idea of having Star Force put a tiny foothold down there was
centered around trying to prop up
Uframon
and give
them both legitimacy and military threat, for if someone invaded the planet
they’d also have to attack Star Force as well…and word of their almost magical
technology had gotten around the region despite the lack of interstellar
communications.

That Star Force outpost was where Jack and a few hundred
other personnel were stationed. The ranger was one of 7 Archons there and split
most of his time between solitary training and going out on simple missions to
aid
Uframon
. Some of them involved helping to teach
their military new tricks, evaluating weaknesses in their security, or often
tackling the unknown that they couldn’t. This current mission fell into the
latter category, and as a courtesy he had volunteered to check it out.

The planet he was on was so primitive that it didn’t
even have an official name yet, nor did the system as far as Star Force was
concerned. The native’s had a name for it, but their language was so bizarre
that it couldn’t be used. Assigning one to it and others in the region was
still on the to-do list, as were many other systems that were being scouted
out, but for now it simply had the identification number of TX-7839, with the
planet having the same designation with a ‘-04’ being added. It had been a
small member of the
Uframon
for the past 43 years and
had benefited enormously from the economic activity, but it was still legitimately
backwater as far as Jack was concerned.

Apparently someone else thought so as well, for they’d
been launching convoy ambushes and getting away with it. Enough supplies and
personnel had been lost that
Uframon
command had
taken notice and sent their investigators…who could find nothing. A lull in the
raids occurred during their arrival then they began again after they left. A
second trip had found, again, nothing, so
Uframon
had
asked Star Force if they could discovery who was conducting these raids and
Jack had been sent with his scouting partner here to find out.

He’d come via an
Explorer
-class
starship/jumpship hybrid. It was small, but given Star Force’s engine tech it
could travel faster than most other races’ jumpships and was sufficient to hop
around the local star systems. It was approximately the size of a heavy cruiser
but could be operated by a crew of 1 if needed. Jack had brought two more
crewers, one for the starship and one for the dropship that had brought them
down to the planet and was parked a good ways back, leaving him and
Ikra
on their own as they hiked through the forest headed
nowhere in particular.

“Something’s wrong. I can’t sense anyone, but the
wildlife is behaving different over there,” the Archon said, raising his left
arm and pointing to the northwest. “Check it out.”

“On it,” the Hepcha said, spreading its four wings out
across the ranger’s back and lifting off her travel perch with a flurry of
alternating wing beats that gave her race a snakelike appearance in the air as
her head and hind quarters bobbed up and down alternate of each other. The
cat-sized avian flew up through a gap in the treetops and hovered in place,
letting Jack pull camera feeds from her armor so he could see what she saw.

The Hepcha saw the rolling terrain covered in trees
but nothing out of the ordinary, then when she started to angle in the
direction Jack had indicated and gain some altitude, a line in the greenery
became visible.
Ikra
flew lower as she approached it,
searching for any anti-air turrets or ships in the sky that could spot her.
When she found nothing she eased into a hummingbird-like hover that had her
feathered wings stoking the air unbound while the rest of her body was covered
in very thin, but still strong light blue armor that looked like scales. Those
scales scraped over top of one another, preserving her flexibility while still
protecting her body from all angles.

“See it?” she asked through the
comm
in her tiny helmet that covered her round head and long beak.

“Yeah,” Jack replied, watching via his helmet’s HUD.
“Sneaky bastards. They cut into the trees to make a landing pad underneath the
canopy. The hillside to your right will block view of it from the ground save
for the nearest half mile, and all the orbital scans will show is untouched
forest.”

“Ships should still be visible from the sky?”

“Not when there’s cloud cover, and most of the raids
have occurred in bad weather.”

“This isn’t that well hidden,” the Hepcha argued as
she flew around in casual circles, keeping her distance but giving the Archon
multiple angles to work with. There wasn’t any infrastructure visible, just a
flat piece of ground with a few trunks missing and an intact canopy above
stretching from the nearby trees.

“You have to remember we’re playing in a very low
league here. They don’t think about hiding things the way we do. The locals
have very bad sensors, so I can imagine these guys operating out of this
location with ease. Hold position, I’m coming to you.”

“No sign of activity yet.”

“Lay low just in case.”

“How low?”

“Stretch your wings if you like, but don’t get any
altitude.”

“Buzzing as ordered,” she said as the Archon began to
run, visible on her battlemap as a speedy dot moving through the forest. He was
fast for a ground pounder, but couldn’t match her flight speed even on his best
day and her worst. They’d been working as a scouting pair for the past 3 years,
and even though she’d wanted to be posted to the front lines where the heavy
action was,
Ikra
had come to realize that out here in
the ‘safe’ territories there were still all kinds of dangers, but most of them
were well within Star Force’s ability to dominate, leaving her and Jack as a
very powerful pairing that she’d come to relish. Had they been fighting against
the lizards that would have been another story altogether.

“Contact,”
Ikra
warned,
seeing movement near the pad.

“I know, I can feel them now,” Jack said, heading in
that direction on the battlemap. “They’re definitely
Groms
.”

“What do you want to do?”

“The locals can’t handle them, so we are.”

“How?”

Jack hesitated, knowing what
Ikra
meant even without her having to say it. This wasn’t a defensive mission, it
was offense. Different standards applied and even if these guys were going to
have to be killed he couldn’t get too over the top. When an enemy attacked you
it was obvious how to respond, but when you were attacking them there were a
lot of unknowns as to who you were shooting at and whether or not they deserved
it. When they shot at you that was clear enough.

“They aren’t conducting these raids on foot, so we’re
depriving them of their toys. If they make a big fuss over it we take them down
as well, but their deaths aren’t the mission.”

“Gotcha,” the Hepcha said as she swooped down low to
the treetops as Jack was nearing the clearing, making a big looping turn as she
activated her shields and triggered her armor to extend out over her wings,
taking away her main lifting capability but replacing it with light anti-
grav
.
Ikra
flew across the
treetops, a blue scaled four-winged bird floating on her technology as she
timed her arrival to coincide with Jack’s as he put up four waypoints on the
map for her, marking the location of the hostiles.

When she flew over the last of the treetops she came
up on an incline that put the clearing partially above the rest of the forest,
allowing lateral access while still being covered by the branches. This left a
bit of cover for her to emerge from, but as the
Groms
finally noticed Jack she coasted into the clear and underneath the higher set
trees and dove down a couple of meters onto the nearest of them.

The bulky biped was wearing a bandoleer of ammunition
and boots, but little else. Its grey hide was thick and it had a pair of short
horns protruding from the top of its head that she centered on. With her right
talon she trigged a charge just before she landed on its head for a split
second, delivering the stun energy on contact for she didn’t have the weight
luxury of carrying ranged weapons.

Ikra
bounced off its head as
it fell to the ground and got a couple of meters of altitude back as Jack shot
the other three with ease, leaving the pair momentarily alone.

“Where now?” she asked, coasting on an anti-
grav
cushion but keeping moving. She wasn’t heavily armored
enough to soak up a lot of damage and staying put was a good way to become an
easy target. Jack, however, held still and silent for a moment, with
Ikra
knowing that meant he was focusing on his slowing
growing psionic abilities.

“These are sentries. There’s a group of minds down that
trail,” he said, pointing to a lightly mashed bit of brush. “They’re not moving
yet.”

“No vehicles?”

Jack chewed on his lip. “No,” he said, taking his
right gauntlet off and walking over to one of the unconscious
Groms
.

“Got your back,”
Ikra
said,
beginning to fly a small circle around him to keep an eye on the area while he
did his mind to mind thing. This wasn’t the first time they’d dealt with
Groms
, and she knew it’d take several minutes at least if
he was able to get anything from them. They were aggressive and pack minded,
but apparently their mental structure was very different from what Jack was
used to, plus he didn’t know their language. There were so many different ones
out here there was no way they could hope to learn them all, so he was going to
have to wing it and hope to pick up on something.

Even the locals they were here to protect couldn’t be
communicated with. They had to use an intermediary from the
Uframon
that could speak the language, and then communicate with him through a
translation program only a few years old. It was a mess, so when the pair had
come here they hadn’t bothered to inform anyone about it. They didn’t expect to
coordinate with anyone, and even if they did the raiders might get tipped off
and disappear.

So as usual they’d just dropped in where they wanted,
for no one could stop them anyway and it was better to keep away from the
locals
altogether.

“They’re waiting on something,” Jack finally said,
standing up and taking a step away from the
Grom
that
massed twice what he did…in armor. “I think we’re going to stick around and see
what shows up.”

“How long?”

“Soon.”

“Stay here or go after the others down the trail?”

“Trail…after I get them out of sight,” Jack said,
walking over to and grabbing one of the
Groms
to drag
off the crude dirt landing pad. “I get the feeling we’ve stumbled onto a
network, and the more links we can smoke out the better.”

“So not a one day mission?”
Ikra
asked, still circling above him on the invisible cushion beneath her wings. She
cocked her head, twisting her helmeted beak to the side and pausing her flight.

“I hear it too,” Jack said, noting the telltale whine
of inefficient anti-
grav
approaching from a distance.
“Go take a look.”

Ikra
flexed her wings, mentally
triggering them to increase propulsion in combination with a talon button
press. She flew up out of the partial gap and into the open air, immediately
dipping back down again and surfing the low gaps between the uneven treetops to
keep out of sight. She flew wide of the direction the sound was coming from and
spied one of the taller trees in the area.
Ikra
approached it from the opposite side and grabbed hold of the upper branches,
pushing herself inside the leaves and then climbing through it far enough to
look out but still conceal her. A few blue patches in the sea of green would
most likely go unnoticed.