Star Force: Internecine (SF55) (10 page)

Paul created a plate shield over the exposed
connective tissue on his segment’s backside and closed his eyes for a moment,
reaching out to the surviving crew in the damaged section and trying to access
one of them…but it was no good, for those in the control pit had died in an
explosion and those in other sections didn’t have access to the missile
control.

Oh well, he’d have to go after the others then.

Taking the pilot station and having to use a lot of
skill and telekinesis to operate the controls meant for a quadruped with four
arms, he walked his enormous segment around the other into a wave of plasma
coming from the 5 segments that were in the process of turning their flank
towards him so they could all fire simultaneously. Knowing his armor would hold
up for a while he didn’t bother to try and shoot back, for that would have
required a different control console. Instead he focused on accelerating the
sluggish mass towards them, with it stutter stepping across the bad footing and
him almost tripping it up three different times.

Piloting the walker wasn’t a point and click endeavor,
but he had practiced before on captured machines and simulators for just this
type of situation and managed a half decent walk over to the middle segment of
the remainder of the Type-1 and rammed it.

Though by ‘ram’ it was more of a slow moving kiss as
armor hit armor and the shield covering his backside began to weaken. With the
range now being as close as it was going to get Paul reached out with his Ikrid
and tried to access the minds in the segment ahead of him…with success.

About a minute later a huge plume of missiles shot out
from that segment and nailed the Type-2 that was getting near to plasma range.
Paul sent all of them into it, consuming it in a black-smoked billowing
fireball that eventually dissipated into the remains of a crippled walker with
its leg segments having collapsed and its previous flank wound having been
expanded upon into massive internal damage.

Paul tried to reach out to the crews in the other
segments but they were too far away, so he kept control over a mind or two in
the middle one and made them lock down their legs so the whole walker couldn’t
move without disconnecting from them. Then, like a student driver backing out
of a minor crash, he pulled his plasma-eaten segment away and walked it to the
side, losing more plasma cannons by the minute as the hull was ravaged by fire
coming in from multiple angles.

Now in front of the segment to the left he walked it
forward and kissed it with an impact, bringing it within his Ikrid range so he
could hijack the minds within. Knowing that his time was nearly up, he didn’t
bother sending missiles at the other mechs, but instead programmed them to fire
straight up…and come back down on the other segments from above.

10

“That’s it, let’s go,”
Yavi
Soloson
said, lifting her neo up out of the crouch it was
in and climbing the side of a steep hill when Paul signaled. It took several
seconds to get to the top, but then she had a clear view of the distant Type-1
now broken up into pieces and clouded with missile impacts. That walker wasn’t
her target, but the other smaller ones nearby were, with a Type-4 less than
half a mile down the far side of the hill.

She popped up both mauler cannons and ran forward,
dodging the outcroppings and other rocky tripwires the terrain had for her as
other mechs came up and over the hill along with her, two being neos and a pair
of starbrights that opened fire immediately with their plasma streamers.
Yavi
held off on her maulers until she got down the hill
and on relatively flat ground, then she began trading fire with the tick-like
walker as the rest of her star collapsed on it, not giving it a real chance to
do anything more than weaker her shields.

Her maulers ate through the plasma-resistant armor
after the starbrights took down its shields from behind, then the other neos
ran on by leaving her to finish it off as they headed for a more distant Type-3
as other stars were popping up at various places and jumping on the walkers
that were redirecting themselves towards the messed up Type-1 at the behest of
the crews in the loyal segments.

With
Yavi’s
attention on the
walker before her she didn’t see the carnage taking place on the disloyal
segment until after she’d finished off the Type-4 and began to move to back up
the others as they tackled the Type-3. Plasma from a dozen walkers was pouring
into the thick armored hull of Paul’s segment, with it blasting apart the
interior when the shield plate finally went down and exposed the unarmored
linkage.

Even as it did another section of the Type-1 sprouted
missiles that traveled up and came back down on the adjacent segment, covering
it with so many explosions that the dust and debris even swallowed up Paul’s
piece, with his ID signature coming through clearly as he declared his location
via battlemap.
Yavi
didn’t know how he was going to
get out of that mess but he was thoroughly trashing the Type-1, leaving the
smaller ones for her and the other mechwarriors to handle. There were a lot of
them, but with the jump they’d got from coming out of concealment the enemy was
situated all wrong to bunch up and fight them, leaving a few easy first kills
before the real slugging match began.

Yavi
pulsed her
neo’s
weak jump jets and added momentum to a jump up a
steep but short cliff, getting her mechanical foot on the rim and traveling
over before sprinting some 150 meters up to another Type-4 that had two buddies
not far off that began throwing plasma spit her way. Ignoring their weak
attacks she charged directly for the closer walker without support and began
blasting away with her maulers at pointblank range.

Her shields went down fairly quick, given the amount
of plasma coming back at her from the taller walker, but her maulers ate
through the forward section with an appetite for armor, melting it off after
punching through the shields and letting her deliver a kill shot to the
interior before the enemy plasma did more than kiss her hull. Rather than
collapse the Type-4 locked up, becoming a dead statue on the rocky battlefield
that she took a moment to reposition and hide behind while her shields started
to recharge.

As she did that a distant madcat threw some missiles
into the side of one of the walker’s near her as another neo came in from the
same angle. She waited to coordinate with it then jumped out of cover as both
assaulted the closer of the walkers, doubling up their mauler damage and taking
it down quickly given that its shields were weakened from the missile strike.

That left one more, which the pair of the mechs took
down with only minor armor damage to hers and none to the other. After that it
was on to the interior and closer to the broken up Type-1 where the hard
fighting was going on and the rest of the walkers were grouping up, meaning
heavier plasma fire coming their way when they headed after them, needing to
make the most of Paul’s disruption while it lasted.

Paul tucked himself into a corner of the control pit,
wedged in between a bulkhead and a bit of computer panel that wouldn’t stop
much in the way of shrapnel but it was the best location he had available as
the explosions around him blew plasma gouts into the chamber as his walker segment
got hammered by the others. He’d managed to take out their missile launchers up
top and do some damage beyond that, but the lower sections of the Type-1
segments were still intact and bathing his captured piece with plasma, blasting
through the armor while the other walkers hammered the exposed backside that
was now
shieldless
.

He’d long since given up on using his segment as an
offensive weapon, now focused on surviving the destruction while reaching out
with his Ikrid to any Skarrons within range, of which there were only a few in
the segment directly touching his as it leaned into the other, now that its
legs were not fully powered. Paul took control of a few of their gunners and
turned plasma cannons on the far side against their own walkers in that
direction, causing more chaos as the Star Force mechs came out of concealment
at distant positions and began fighting their way in.

He couldn’t get a whole lot from the battlemap given
the amount of walker around him interfering with the signals, but every now and
then he’d get a surge of update and could see his people doing well and chewing
through the isolated walkers on the edge of the engagement with no losses of
their own.

The wall ahead and to the right of him blew out in a
wave of shrapnel that danced over his
padawan
armor’s
shields, failing to penetrate but scattering debris all over the chamber as he
kept tucked in next to the rib-like bulkhead. He could feel the nearby crews
trying to get the Type-1 moving, but he kept his foot on the brake with the
control of the crew directly ahead refusing to move their legs in conjunction
with the others.

Eventually the other segments saw they had no choice
but to detach, and when they did Paul knew they had them if he could goose the
damage rate up a bit. Using the gunners within reach he targeted the exposed
sections where the connections were broken and threw plasma into them before
shield plates formed, knocking out some of their functionality and actually
preventing the shields from forming over one of them that had already been
partially damaged into the connective tissue from the missile strikes.

Paul continued throwing plasma into it as his remotely
controlled segment began taking fire itself, meaning he was now getting the
Skarrons to shoot at two of their own segments. He kept up the chaos until a
much larger explosion breached the control pit and knocked him against the wall
so hard that he lost his mental link…then a wash of machinery rushed over him
and he was buried in debris as his segment finally lost all power to its legs
and came crashing down to the ground.

It took Paul a long time to crawl his way out of that
mess, and by the time he finally got a clear view of the outside sky most of
the other walkers were down, along with most of his mechs according to the
battlemap. The few that remained were harassing one intact segment of the
Type-1 that was showing heavy damage but still throwing off some 30% of the
plasma fire it was normally capable of.

Paul spotted a pair of mechs finishing off a Type-4
nearby and signaled to them, with the madcat making a quick jump his way before
walking around the debris from another Type-1 segment and into view as Paul
ran/climbed towards it. Like a tick he crawled up the back of the armor-damaged
walker and clung there as the mechwarrior turned to face the nearest enemies
and walked forward.

The one-armed neo that was pairing with it fell into
step and the damaged duo approached one of the three remaining ‘small’ walkers
and began trading fire until it came within Paul’s psionic range, with the crew
taking repetitive Fornax blasts that kept them unable to operate the controls.
The return fire ceased and the damaged mechs pounded the Skarron walker until
it crashed to the ground, then the neo ran ahead of the madcat and the two
headed for the Type-1 piece as four other mechs were engaging it and getting
pounded in the process.

The neo didn’t last long, going down before it could
get anywhere near the spindly legs, but it bought enough time for the madcat to
get Paul close enough to start Fornaxing at extreme range, with a chunk of the
plasma fire dying out immediately. Eventually the madcat made its way up to the
legs and walked underneath the teetering segment, allowing Paul to
Ikrid
link with the crew, turning their remaining plasma
cannons against the other remaining half-dead walkers and assisting the mechs
in finishing them off…as well as sparing them the defeat that was heading their
way, for even a partially intact piece of a Type-1 had enough plasma to eat
away the shields and armor on tier 1 mechs quite easily, and there were no
larger Star Force models on planet at the moment.

Eventually only the Type-1 segment was left, which
then opened up and extended its boarding ramp down to the madcat where Paul
hopped off and ran up inside, shooting the crew dead in a short-lived killing
spree as he ran about to hunt them all down. Once he returned to the boarding
ramp and got back within battlemap signal range and saw that all of the enemy
were truly down and out of the fight did he sit down on the top of the alien
stairs and take a breather, feeling his head about to cave in from the
excessive psionic usage.

But that didn’t matter. He’d recover and the Skarrons
wouldn’t, for this was their last major offensive. They had only a handful of
walkers left on the planet guarding their remaining bases, five Paul knew as of
last count, and each was isolated from the others. He could take them himself
if needed, meaning the planet was all but back in ADZ hands.

As he rested his aching head he got on the
comm
and organized infantry search parties to come out and
search the debris. Whether they shot them on sight or took them prisoner they
had to account for all the Skarrons, including those probably still alive in
the hulks of the Type-1.

But that was cleanup work, important and occasionally
dangerous, but nothing that would jeopardize the fate of the planet. So long as
the Skarrons didn’t get more reinforcements the Dvapp were about to get their
world back, broken and busted up as it was, but it would be theirs again.

Paul stuck around on the ground to help with the
searches, using his Ikrid to spot the location of minds, before grabbing a
dropship and heading up to orbit. There were still Skarron warships up here,
but Admiral Caster was doing a good job of keeping them at bay. As they
approached the
Excalibur
Paul
cringed, seeing that the chunks missing from the hull had expanded a bit in his
absence, but then he realized the outlines were nice and straight, not the
ragged cuts from weaponsfire, meaning it was the work of the crew disassembling
surrounding components in order to repair them properly…or at least as much as
they could outside of a shipyard.

The damage had been a necessary tradeoff earlier,
taking hits that he knew the big ship could take and survive instead of wasting
valuable drones that he needed for multiple, simultaneous hits. As powerful as
the command ship was, it could only be in one place at one time, and as much as
he didn’t like doing it he’d used it to beat down the Skarron fleet multiple
times while holding his drones back.

The results were still visible, making it look like a
wounded ship that was a sitting duck, but it had so much bulk and redundant
weapons systems that it was still quite lethal, especially when its shields
were up. Some of the generators had been lost, along with two gravity drives.
One was supposed to be repairable but the other had been
slagged
.
That would slow the ship a bit, but not stop it from making decent jumps, for
the command ships had multiple gravity drives in order to achieve the insane
speeds they were able to travel.

Fortunately the sanctum wasn’t anywhere near the
damaged areas, with the crew sections being located towards the interior. That
was where Paul was heading next, and even as the dropship came in close to the
massive ship he saw the central plug disconnect and head down to the surface to
pick up the damaged mechs and other equipment as they continued the cleanup
rather than send repetitive dropship flights.

It was empty of troops, unfortunately, but with luck
they wouldn’t need any more here. Paul wasn’t counting on that, but he did have
his fingers crossed.

When the dropship landed he walked off and found
Caster waiting for him on the deck.

“Bad news?” he guessed.

“Yes and no,” the Admiral said, falling into step with
him as the trailblazer headed out of the landing bay. “We got word that a
Sentinel is on its way here and should be operational within 18 days.”

“That’s good news,” Paul said happily. This world had had
none to begin with, making the naval situation even
more
tricky
. Putting one up wouldn’t stop the Skarrons from getting to the
ground, but it would give what was left of the Dvapp fleet a safe haven to run
to if/when the Skarrons came
back.

“I also got word that
Veernad
finally fell. They’re finishing up evacuations before they get completely
overrun, but they’re conceding the planet and system.”